First, let’s discuss the term marketing, and start by defining what it is not (or at least, what it shouldn’t be). Real marketing is not manipulative. Real marketing is not the slick used car salesman trying to rip you off. Real marketing is not trying to make a trash product look better than it really is. Real marketing is not deceitful.

Real marketing means bringing valuable products and services to the people who need, want, and are able to purchase them. Assuming you have a product or service that is valuable to other people, you already have a market. The trick for you now is finding that market, educating about your product or service, and building trust so that the market will purchase. When this occurs, both parties win – you make the sale, and your market gets your valuable product or service.

It sounds like a simple idea, and in theory, it is. It’s when we need to apply this theory to real world situations and make marketing work that the problems occur. There are many questions to be answered, such as: Who is my market (who needs my product or service)? What will resonate with them? How do I best educate them about my product or service? What are the best channels to reach them? How do I communicate with them in a way that they will understand? What are the ways I build trust with them?

Analytics

Because there are so many variables involved in marketing, it’s not possible to have exact answers to these questions. What’s more, the variables always seem to be in flux and we never have complete control over them, making it hard to find concrete, sure answers. Despite these difficulties, however, it still remains that we need marketing to work.

This is where the analytics enter the picture. Analytics, in practical terms, can be defined as the investigation of available data and facts (be it qualitative or quantitative) to arrive at an optimal decision. The analyst seeks to find true, valuable insight from the investigation of the data and circumstances.

Marketing Analytics

Combining the two terms, we arrive at marketing analytics, or the practice of investigating data and facts to make optimal and functional marketing decisions. The marketing analytics practitioner, then, must not only be able to do this type of analysis and see the data in context to get real insight, but he must also be able to translate this insight into action.

To be successful at marketing analytics, one must draw from a large base of knowledge and skills. An understanding of sociology, human relationships, psychology, communications, and statistics is necessary. Being able to write, educate, make an idea sticky, manipulate data, see data in context, and break down complexity into simplicity is essential. Marketing analytics can span from doing web analytics, search engine optimization, good website or advertisement design, social media, traditional PR channels, content creation, television and radio campaigns, to a myriad of other activities.

In short, it is not something you master in a day. It is a multi-faceted discipline that requires study, practice, and dedication. The purpose of this blog is to help you understand and effectively use marketing analytics. We hope that by covering various aspects of marketing analytics on a daily basis, we can all come to a greater understanding and gain the ability to have success in the discipline.

The Context of the Situation

As always, understanding the context of a situation is extremely important if we are to understand the analytics. Let’s look at a study recently done about the current click-through rate of online ads. The study shows that in the past two years, the percentage of internet users that actually click on online ads has dropped from 32% to just 16%. What’s more, if you look at the total amount of clicks on ads across the entire population internet users, the study finds that just 4% of them account for 50% if all clicks.

What the Context Tells Us

So, if you decide to track click-throughs like everyone else does, you are probably only tracking about 4% of the internet population. Further, the trend shows that the percentage of internet users who click on ads is decreasing, so the amount of people you are able to track will only decrease with time. Once we see this context, we realize that click-throughs are not such an effective metric to use if we want to discover the effectiveness of an ad campaign. (Unless, of course, you are targeting the 4% of internet clickers.)

What to Do About It

Instead of using this conventional and less useful metric, why not try and connect your online ad campaigns with real measures of success? Track increased visitors to specific portions of your website the ad was aimed at promoting, and better, increased goal conversion in those sections. Track increased search volume for your product or brand you where promoting to show if there is greater awareness. Launch the campaign only in certain geographical regions so that you can test those against a control group not exposed to the ads.

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about more effective ways to measure your online ad campaigns. What has been successful for you?

This post seeks to summarize what has already been discussed in this series, and to help you put it all into an actionable, executable plan that will bring more business benefits by using Twitter. The post has been summarized into three steps.

Create a specific action plan

A sound plan is created as you answer the following questions:

How much time do I have to spend on Twitter?
What are the business outcomes I want to achieve from Twitter?

Once you know your time constraints and your purpose, set up the plan by asking the next set of questions:

Who should I follow to accomplish my outcomes?
Who do I need in my community to accomplish my outcomes?
What do I need to Tweet about in order to be helpful to my audience?
What types of questions am I able to answer?
What are the problems I can help solve?

Once you have this outlined, you can set to work using the tools and methods previously outlined in this series.

Summarize all data metrics into actionable insights

Although many people can come up with a good action plan, many people falter in the analysis aspect that goes along with that plan. There are two dangers: not doing any analysis, and doing too much analysis.

Not doing any analysis (flying blind)

Some people will tell you that looking at the numbers and focusing on the analytics is a waste of time, and that it would be better to put your effort into actually running your business and being present more often on Twitter. This is true to an extent, but if you never look at the data you are missing valuable, actionable insights that help you use Twitter to connect with your audience.

Doing too much analysis (analysis paralysis)

On the other end of the spectrum, some focus so much on the numbers and ratios that they forget that we are dealing with human beings when we talk about Twitter. The most important part of Twitter is the human relationships that are developed that allow business to flourish. Focusing solely on getting your Twitter metrics to raise means you are missing the point.

The Happy Medium

The right amount of analysis is the amount that gives you valuable, actionable, human insights in a minimal amount of time. That way you can spend your time implementing the insights that you find. In order to accomplish this, choose two are three metrics that will give you the most valuable insight, and continually track these two or three. Here are a few suggestions:

Retweet Ratio: This tells you how valuable your tweets are to your community – the higher the ratio, the more helpful you are being. The more valuable you are to your Twitter community, the more business you will receive from them. Take it a step further and look specifically at what is being retweeted so you get an idea of how your community operates, and what they find useful. (This can be found under the ‘content’ tab in Klout)

Link Clicks: Same idea as the suggestion above; if you share a lot of links with your community, look to see which links people are clicking and therefore which ones catch their attention and are helpful to them. This can also be found under the content tab in Klout.

Unique @ Senders: This is a better metric to track than just ‘followers’. This metric looks at those followers that find your tweets engaging enough that they will tweet to you directly or mention you in their tweets. This number shows you how many people truly find your Twitter presence useful, and with whom you can form valuable relationships. This is also found in Klout.

Hopefully you get the idea – track metrics that reflect real human engagement, help you understand how your community operates and what they find useful, and that help you tailor your tweets for your community.

Execute your plan

In order to execute your plan for using Twitter strategically, it’s the simple things that matter. Write down the answers to the questions above when you create your plan. Write down how much time per day you can use Twitter actively and stick to it. Track your metrics, and write down any changes you are making to your strategy according to the insights you get from the metrics.

The main point – write down what you will do, how long you have to do it, what you change as you go, and what works and what doesn’t. Keep this document updated as you use Twitter, refer to it, and follow it.

What are your thoughts on a successful Twitter action plan?

This post seeks to answer two Twitter questions: How to improve the quality of tweets for better ROI, and how to track the improvement?

Improving Tweet Quality

Following a few simple guidelines will help the reader improve the quality of their tweets:

Define Your Objectives – First you must ask yourself, why are you using Twitter? What do you want the result to be from using your time to post tweets? Are you trying to increase awareness of your product or service? Increase the trust that potential customers or clients have in you? Increase your ability to handle customer service issues? Become a thought leader in your industry? All of these things can affect your bottom line in various ways. So before you try to improve the effectiveness of your tweets, do some thinking and decide what exactly an ‘effective’ tweet will bring to you or your organization.

Keep Tweets Relevant – Whatever you decide for your objectives, keep your tweets in line with that objective. With each tweet, ask yourself if that specific tweet will help you realize one of your goals, and how it will do that. If you can’t answer the how, then you might want to rethink the tweet.

Help Others Be Successful – Whatever your objectives may be, this is one thing that will always help your tweet quality increase. Here are a few suggestions on how to help others be successful through Twitter:

Search for people posting questions you can answer, and answer them.
Post links to interesting and useful content for audience you are targeting.
Post events or event reminders that will be useful to your target audience.
Be specific in your tweet about why the link or event will be useful to your audience.

Tracking Twitter Quality

This is the most important part of improving your Twitter quality, because here you discover what works for your target audience and what doesn’t. Using Tweeteffect you can see what posts gained you more followers, and what posts lost you followers. Using Google Analytics, you can see which posts brought in the most traffic to your website. Looking at retweet numbers, you can see which posts your followers particularly enjoyed. These are three good ways to see what types of posts are working for your audience, so that you can tweet more of them in the future.

In the next post, we will focus on how to combine all the data you can gather on Twitter into a dashboard so that it’s easy to see and take action on.

Though there is a metric to measure almost anything, the goal is to avoid analysis paralysis. As marketers, we want to focus on what is critical to our success and measure only those things. By tracking those metrics over time, we can see if we have moved the needle closer to our goal or not.

There are various programs out there claiming to have robust Twitter metrics, like the ones featured below. However, we fail to see how these apply to anything. They don’t tie into anything specific.

Tied Back to Goals
Critical success factors can generally be classified under three questions:
• Does it build revenue?
• Does it improve efficiency/reduce costs?
• Does it build brand loyalty?

Ask yourself why you tweet. Because all of your metrics need to tie back somehow to one of those overarching goals above. Otherwise, you will end up like these guys… Looking forward to Flutter Eyes, for sure.

Twitter Analytics
For the rest of us that are trying to get real value out of Twitter, it’s time to incorporate Twitter analytics. Twitter analytics takes the existing tools and uses them to track metrics that are tied back to your marketing goals.

Last time I listed several ways businesses are using Twitter. This post is going to create measurable metrics for those as much as possible.

Drive targeted website traffic
o Tweet Conversion Ratio = # Site Visits from Twitter / # of Twitter Followers (or new Twitter followers)

Build brand loyalty and buzz
o Twitter Friends = # of Twitter Followers over time (watch for upward trends)
o Retweet Ratio = # of Retweets / Total Tweets in a given period of time

Obtain opinion data from a diverse group, perform simple market research
o Reply Ratio = # Replies / Total Tweets in a given period of time

Direct people’s attention to good information or valuable content
o Clickthrough Ratio = (# Clickthroughs per link) / Total Tweets with Links

Track memes and trends
o # of Tweets in given period vs. Google Trends graph of specific subject/topic

Gather competitive intelligence
o Competitive Intelligence Ratio = # of Tweets about Competitors / Total Tweets about Industry
e.g. The number of mentions Avinash gets vs. Omniture vs. web analytics in general

Manage customer service, create a brand index
o (Positive Tweets – Negative Tweets) / Total Tweets

Create a tribe
o # of New Followers per Tweet

Each of these ratios will give you a percentage. The higher the percentage, the better. If percentages are low, it’s time to experiment and try something new. Perhaps posting more frequently, or maybe less frequently, or adjusting the content you share, or the way you present information, will help you improve your ratios.

Try some of these and let us know what you think. Do they work for you? Would you like to see other metrics developed? Do you have other metrics to contribute? We want your thoughts.

We’ll have more on these metrics tomorrow and more on the tools to track and visualize twitter analytics later this week.

This is the first post in a series of 7 focused on applying marketing analytics to Twitter. Using Twitter analytics can help businesses track brand advocates and detractors, follow conversation topics and trends, measure visitors to your site from Twitter, and improve ROI.

Much has been said about the business benefits of using Twitter. Some of the benefits include:
• Track memes and trends
• Perform simple market research (heck, we got started because we saw a need for marketing analytics while using Twitter)
• Obtain opinion data from a diverse group
• Find breaking news
• Direct people’s attention to good information or valuable content
• Bring people together
• Build brand awareness and buzz
• Manage customer service
• Use negative feedback to improve offerings without total brand destruction
• Create business opportunities or generate referrals
• Gather competitive intelligence
• Drive targeted website traffic
• Create a tribe (watch Seth’s podcast)

See Chris Brogan’s comprehensive list of Twitter uses and how-tos.

Despite the obvious benefits of using Twitter, without a way to track, measure and improve, Twitter can quickly become Fritter, the frivolous and unwise waste of one’s time. By incorporating twitter analytics into your strategy, you can maximize your time spent and marketing ROI. This is the kickoff post of another 7 part series of posts on our marketing analytics blog.

The next several posts will cover the following topics:
• Why Twitter Analytics? (this post)
• What Twitter Metrics Should I Use?
• How Do I Measure These Metrics?
• How Do I Measure and Improve my Twitter Marketing ROI with Analytics?
• How Do I Summarize All Information into an Actionable Dashboard?
• How Do I Create & Execute a Specific Action Plan for Improvement?

Tune in over the next few days for the next posts. Let us know if this series is valuable or if you would like to see other topics included. Thanks for reading!

(Part 6 of 6 on the Marketing Analytics Method)

We’re back with our last post of this series on quantitative marketing analytics. The last two blogs we posted were special entries to answer questions from our followers on Twitter. This returns to and concludes the marketing analytics series we’ve been working on.

In part 1 of our series, we showed that most organizations work like this soccer team: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QPsL5oqwiA

Over the past several blog posts, we’ve endeavored to show how your organization can perform like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWFpPST94wU

That’s incredible coordination. What separates clip 1 from clip 2 is their level of understanding. The first team has only a rudimentary understanding of what they are supposed to be doing and how to act in sync. The second team acts like a well-oiled machine, because they have a common vision that they understand how to translate into results.

We’ve used the vinyl wall art industry as a case study, highlighting specifically www.ellemenopea.com. Each post developed in some detail each of the following steps in the marketing analytics cycle (the text next to the boxes is from the case study):

We proved that by communicating the corporate vision to all employees, and then linking that vision to measurable goals, and then executing the strategy and monitoring progress – again communicating to the organization – that Ellemenopea would be much more able to achieve what they wanted. By linking the high-level vision into daily operations, bottom-line improvements can be made.

As you do the same things in your organization, you can achieve similar results. However, we understand that the difficulty of the above process comes not in setting the vision or goals, but in measuring those and adjusting the strategy accordingly. Our next posts will dive deeper into how to become a company driven by analytics.

Let us know how you compete on marketing analytics and turn them into strategic advantages or share with us your questions. We appreciate your feedback!

A lot of our friends on Twitter have recently asked us several questions regarding Google Analytics problems. This post will walk you through the steps to solve the following common questions/problems with sharing or moving Google Analytics data/profiles:

• How do I install Google Analytics on my website?
• How do I share my site analytics with another user?
• I want to transfer my site profile to another account. How do I do that?
• When I try to transfer my Google Analytics profile to another account, the new account doesn’t have any of the historical data. Why?
• How do I install Google Analytics on my blog? (See our next post for this answer)

Step 1: Sign up for Google Analytics and Install Tracking Code

Sign up for GA:
• Go to the Google Analytics site: http://www.google.com/analytics
• Sign in with your Google account
• Follow the set-up instructions

Install tracking code:
• Google will give you the html text to paste before the body tag on your site
• If you are not the site administrator, email the code to the person who can update the site.

Step 2: Adding or Transferring Profile Data

After you have installed the tracking code, you will see the following table on your Google Analytics page:

Google Analytics account overview

Click the name of the account you wish to share with other users. In the picture above, I would click on the blue “My Web Site.” You are taken to a page with detailed information about your site. At the bottom of the page, there are three columns. Click on “User Managers.”

Adding Viewers to Google Analytics

Click the “Add User” button.

Add User Page

Enter the Google email address of the user you want to share access with. Specify the access type (viewer or administrator). If you just want to share the analytics with someone, give them “View Reports Only.” If you are transferring the site profile to a different Google account or want to give someone access to analyze your site data, give the new user “Account Administrator” status.

The next part is often overlooked, causing problems. Make sure you select the profile you wish to share and click “Add.”

Giving Viewers Access to Site Analytics

When the new user logs in, they will see the website on their Account Overview page.

Step 3: Removing the Site Profile from an Old Account

You must have first added the site profile to a new Google Analytics account. Next, you follow the instructions in step 2 to get to the User Manager page for the site profile you are managing. You will see the following table:

Delete a User Account

Simply click “delete” next to the user you wish to remove.

Following the steps above takes care of the last question: When I try to transfer my Google Analytics profile to another account, the new account doesn’t have any of the historical data. Why?

That error occurs when the new user isn’t added properly. It happens when you create a new Google Analytics account with a separate tracking code. By following the outlined steps above, you will maintain your historical data.

This answers the most common questions we have received on Twitter. If you have other questions, feel free to contact us or send an @ message on Twitter. We appreciate your feedback!

(Part 5 of 6)

Continuing with our case study, we have tackled one hypothetical goal of Ellemenopea.com. We decided they wanted to focus on search optimization to drive targeted website traffic to their site and become the leader in wall art. They chose several key terms that would help them rank at the top of the search engines (though several other factors are also necessary to rank highly) and have launched their initiative.

The next step now is to track the data and visualize it for rapid insights and action and communicate progress to all employees. Remember the purpose of this series is linking organizational vision all the way to the bottom-line. By creating a strategy that everyone understands and buys into, and then tracking progress and posting the results, the owners and employees of Ellemenopea.com are able to see exactly how their efforts are impacting the bottom-line.

First, the owners build a tracking spreadsheet of their key terms.

Search Engine Rank Tracking

This allows them to track how long it takes to improve search engine rankings as well as track their progress towards their goal.

Then we being tracking our marketing KPIs. We decided on two:
• Improve overall traffic share by increasing visits per month from 500 to 10,000 in six months
• Improve conversion rate by increases purchases per month from 2% of site visitors to 10% within six months

To track them, Ellemenopea taps into their web marketing analytics data. They run Google Analytics on their site for free. They pull a spreadsheet of raw data and run it through a graphing program to instantly see trends, data anomalies, outliers, or strengths and weaknesses. Visualizing marketing analytics data drastically reduces data crunching and error rates, and increases the number of insights that can be acted upon.

Daily Website Traffic per Day

As we can see, the data correlates with their efforts. As they strive for search optimization and a social media footprint on blogs and forums, as well as talk to friends, leave fliers around town, and perform other offline initiatives, they can see that their site traffic is increasing, bringing them closer to achieving their goal. This not only creates unity of purpose for all employees but also creates enthusiasm and brand evangelism, exactly what Ellemenopea needs to reach the top.

Next post, we will show a much more detailed analysis on analyzing variables to improve site conversion rate (browsers into purchasers). Let us know if these posts are helpful to you or if you would like to see more insight into certain topics or areas of marketing analytics.

Thanks for reading!

(Part 3 of 6)
In our quest to apply actionable marketing analytics to corporate visions, we’ve discussed creating visions and then linking them to objectives. Now, we are going to show how to tie the objectives into specific, measurable, key performance indicators (KPIs).

Ellemenopea logo

Defining KPIs

Those goals are made actionable by linking them to something measurable. That’s what marketing analytics is all about. A key performance indicator includes a goal statement, a metric, a target, and a timeframe. KPIs are tied to the factors that drive long-term business success. This post will focus on Ellemenopea’s first hypothetical goal of increasing targeted website traffic to their site.

Site Traffic Metrics

Ellemenopea first decides to look at the competitive landscape, seeing how much traffic their site generates in comparison to other sites. This is the site traffic report for Ellemenopea and its competitors, using Compete.com data.

Competition for Ellemenopea

• Rightonthewalls.com (green) ranks #2 in Google’s natural search when the phrase “vinyl wall art” is typed in

• They have traffic at 11,500 visitors per month

• Vinylattraction.com (orange) ranks at #3 on Google

• They have monthly site traffic at 8,300

• Wallsneedlove.com (red) ranks #4 on Google

• They have traffic at 7,600 visitors per month

•Vinylwallart.com (blue) surprisingly trails in traffic even though they rank at #1 on Google
•Ellemenopea (yellow) only has around 500 visits per month

• They do not rank at all on Google, either in the natural or paid searches

To achieve their goal of driving targeted website traffic, they decide on 2 KPIs:
• Improve overall traffic share by increasing visits per month from 500 to 10,000 in six months
• Improve conversion rate by increases purchases per month from 2% of site visitors to 10% within six months

Quantitative Marketing

Let’s assume the following scenario:

Price = $20
Total Cost = $7
Profit per sale = $13
Profit Margin = 65%

500 visitors/month * 2% conversion rate = 10 visitors who buy

10 visitors * $13 in profit = $130 per month

In six months, if they achieve their goal, the equation changes to this:

10,000 visitors/month * 10% conversion rate = 1,000 purchasers/month

1,000 * $13 profit = $13,000/month

This transforms their business from making a profit of $1,560 per year to $156,000 per year. Suddenly, what was once a part-time side business/hobby has turned into a full-time enterprise with plenty of opportunity for further growth and expansion.

As Ellemenopea drives targeted website traffic as well the number of visitors who actually make purchases, then they not only improve their bottom-line, they also improve their brand loyalty and market position. These two metrics not only quantify what success looks like, it also creates a timeframe for realizing such results.

Linking It Together: Vision to Bottomline

As the owners of the site understand this and communicate it to anyone else on their staff, every action is then evaluated in these terms: will this action help increase traffic to our website or convert more visitors into buyers? If it does, they will do it. If they do not, they will avoid this action in favor of something more focused. This is exactly why marketing analytics is so important. It can mean the difference between a hobby and a successful business.

Part 4 of this series will discuss how to actually achieve these goals. We chose to focus this post on only one goal so we could examine it in depth.

If you are interested in learning how to flesh out the KPIs, let us know. Also, if there is anything that is working or isn’t working for you, let us know. We want to make this blog as useful to you as possible.