StayOnSearch » Analytics

How to Use PostRank for Social Media Analytics

Kristi Hines — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:00:15 +0000

PostRank offers real time social media data and analysis on almost every topic or trend that is relevant to your blog, business, niche, and industry that goes beyond other analytics programs. Let’s look at how to use PostRank, search for blogs, see top blogs on particular topics, the stats you can find, and what you can learn from them.

Free PostRank Social Sharing Statistics

The best thing about PostRank is that you can see basic social sharing stats of any blog without paying for a monthly membership – this includes stats for your own site.

Registration

Although you don’t have to register for an account at PostRank to get social sharing stats, it might be a good idea to do so if you are going to regularly check up on one or more sites. I use my account, for example, to keep an eye on the stats for my my own blog as well as others to which I contribute.

Also, I don’t know what determines the “tags” that go along with your blog, but I’m sure that the tags that subscribers enter influences the categorization, so subsribing to your own blog in PostRank and adding detailed tags would be a plus.

Searching for Blogs

Most popular blogs are already listed on their site. You can search in PostRank Topics section by entering either a topic or blog name. The search box will give you suggestions.

You can select a topic and see the top ranked blogs that are tagged in that topic.

If you are looking for a specific blog that doesn’t come up because it is not listed, PostRank will go out and start pulling data for that site.

You can check back later or have them send you an email when the data is ready.

Social Sharing Stats

So what can you learn about a blog from PostRank? When you are looking at the top blogs on a particular topic, you can click on the dropdown arrow by one of the blogs to get a quick view of their top posts.

By click on the customize button (or, alternatively, if you clicked on a blog from the search box), you will be taken directly to their blog feed to see ratings on their latest posts, which you can sort by All, Good, Great, or Best. By hovering over the PostRank rating for a post, you can see the number of shares it has on a variety of social networks (including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, FriendFeed, and more) plus the number of comments the post has.

What Do These Stats Tell You

So what can you learn from the free social stats on PostRank? If you are interested in writing a post that will be popular on a particular social network or get a lot of comments, you can search the stats for your own blog or other blogs on that topic and see what topics have done historically on social networks or in their comments.

Tracking Social Engagement with PostRank Analytics

If you want to know more about the social engagement on your own blog, you can setup the premium version of PostRank Analytics on your own site. For $9USD a month (after a ~~30 day free trial~~ three month free trial with discount code offered by PostRank in the comments), you can add five sites to your analytics account and see the following.

Engagement Overview

The overview section of your blog’s analytics will show a graph for the last week, month, or 3 months including days when you have the most engagement vs. the most pageviews.

By clicking on the posts in the graph, or going to the Analyze section, you can see social engagement statistics for each post.

A Way to Measure Social Media ROI?

If you connect your PostRank Analytics to Google Analytics (which I have sadly not setup on my own site yet), you can see the value of your social engagement points which could be a great way to measure social media ROI.

Social Engagement Trends

One area I find most interesting is the Trends section of the Analytics. Here, you will see where your readers are most engaging with your content.

This could come in quite handy in figuring out where your content does the best so you know what social networks to ramp up your promotion in, as well as which networks may not be worth your time.

Social Engagement Optimization

Another highly important area is the Optimize section in which you can get some valuable information about the major social networks. It covers Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Google Reader, Myspace, Reddit, and Twitter. Under each, it gives you some demographics, a short summary, key points, how the network ranks your content, how to utilize the network to get more engagement, and who are the top users in each network that are loving your content.

Some nice tidbits of information from this section include:

The only thing that matters on Delicious is the number of bookmarks a story receives in the last 60 minutes which means any story (no matter how old it is) could end up on the Delicious homepage.
Digg sends tens of thousands of viewers to a popular link in less than an hour. Popularity is determined by how quickly a story gets votes after it is submitted. (This may be modified when the new Digg comes along.)
Not all posts that you make on Facebook are seen by all your friends – it is dependent on the strength of your connection to your friends as well as the amount of interest in the post (comments are weighted higher than likes, for example).
On Friendfeed, the more votes and discussion that happens on a post, the more likely it is to get on the “hot” list.
Your performance on Google Buzz is directly connected to the amount of enagement with your post (likes and comments).
Reddit places a premium on the velocity of votes with more consideration given to votes received within a few minutes of the submission and more weight is given to votes from users with higher karma.
The busiest hour of the day for tweets is 8pm EST, and the busiest days are Wednesday and Thursday. Probably the best time to catch influential Twitterers.

Your Experience with PostRank

Do you use PostRank for free or premium analytics information about social engagement? What other valuable information can you learn about your own site (or others) and have you used it to track social media ROI?

Formulating an Internet Marketing Strategy: Asking the Right Questions?

Mark Thompson — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:00:02 +0000

It doesn’t matter if you are building a new website, conducting search engine optimization, PPC advertising, or a social media strategy, there are always going to be important questions that need to be answered by the client. Having detailed answers to these questions will help you formulate a much better strategy.

I broke up the questions in different sections. The first four sections of questions are broad questions that you could ask any client to get a better understanding of what they do, who they are targeting and what their goals are. Then there are project specific questions, depending on what service you are providing the client. Some of these questions roll into one another, so I did the best I could to organize them appropriately.

Feel free to add any questions that I may have missed. I will do my best to keep adding to the list.

Introductory Questions

What are you trying to accomplish with this project?
1. What are your goals for this project?
What type of marketing programs have you carried out in the past?
1. Which has worked for you?
2. Which has not?
3. Which are you currently still doing
Are there any budget constraints for this project?
Who are some of your biggest competitors?
What differentiates you from your competition?
Have you ever used an internet marketing firm before?
1. If so, what have they done for you?
How often will you be able to meet to discuss our progress?
1. How involved would you like to be?
What are the major problems you have currently with your marketing strategy?
What do you expect out of an internet marketing firm?

Target Market Questions

Do you target B2B or B2C, or both?
1. If B2B, what types of businesses do you cater to?
What is your target demographic?
1. Age? Sex? Income Bracket? Ethnicity?
What geo-locations do you target?
1. Worldwide? Nationwide? State? City? Mile Radius?
Where does your target market go on the web?
1. Websites? Industry Blogs? Forums? Discussion Boards? Social Groups?

Content & Offer Questions

Do you have a breakdown of each of the product and services you offer?
1. Do you have product or service details for each?
2. Do you have features and benefits for each?
Is your website easy to navigate to find the products they are looking for?
Do you need search functionality on your site?
Is your website easy to read?
1. Do you use multiple elements (text, video, audio, images, photos)
2. How do people consume information in your industry?
Is your content interesting?
1. Does it provide value to the user?
What offers or promotions have you done in the past?
1. Have they had success?
Could we add a coupon or discount code to stimulate interest?
1. Have you testing different offers to see which get better responses?
How are your prices compared to similar competitors prices?

Goals & Analytics Questions

What type of analytics do you have in place currently?
1. Do you use more than one analytics package?
2. Can we use that data to use as a benchmark?
Are you satisfied with your analytics provider?
1. If not, what type of data are you looking to collect, that you are currently not collecting?
2. Do you need a professional web analytics solution?
Which KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) are important to you?
1. What is the most important action on your site?
What goals would you like to track on the site?
1. Sign-ups? Downloads? Specific Pages? Sales?
Do you use any type of phone tracking system to identify where the calls originate from?
Do you use a CMS do track your leads, opportunities, and accounts?
What is your average margin per sale?
1. What is your average sale price?

Project Specific

Web Design Specific Questions

Do you have your logo in a high resolution format?
What type of design style would you like? (traditional, contemporary, technical, playful)
Pick 3-5 websites that are similar to what you would like your site to look like.
1. Specify which elements of the site you liked and disliked
What color schemes would you like?
1. Do you have the RGB colors?
What pages would you like to have on your site? (Rough draft of a Site Map)
Do you have any marketing collateral we can look at?

Search Engine Optimization Specific Questions

Have you done any SEO before?
1. What type of SEO campaigns have you done?
2. On-site? Off-site? Testing? Social Media?
How important is it that you are on the first page of the major search engines for competitive keywords/phrases?
How important is SEO compared to your overall marketing strategy?
What type of resources do you have within the company to work on SEO?
What is a reasonable timeline to reach your SEO goals?

Search Engine Marketing Specific Questions

Provide an initial keyword list of how you think people would find your business.
Do specific products sell better than others?
Are there any niche or technical terms that people use in the industry?
Are there any words that people would search where you would not want your ad to show up? (Negative Keywords)
Should price be included in your ad copy?
Should an 800 number be used in the ad copy?
What incentives or offers can you give the user to entice them to click your ad?
Have you noticed that people visit your site at certain times during the day? The week?
Do you have specific landing pages for each offers, products or services?
Does your business have any seasonal growth?
1. Are there certain products that sell better during certain times of the year?

The Pros and Cons of 1st and 3rd Party Cookies

Mark Thompson — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:01:31 +0000

A Cookie is a pretty easy concept to understand. It is simply a tracking code that is stored on the user’s computer for a determined amount of time to track their ID session, navigation, and preferences. Where is can be a bit confusing is when you talk about the different types of cookies. There are two different types of cookies, dependent on what type of website sets them.

I wanted to give you an in-depth definition of what a cookie is and the pros and cons associated with each.

Definition of a Cookie?

Information created by a Web server and stored on a user’s computer. Some web sites use cookies to identify visitors to that site, enabling more personalized information to be served upon return to the site. A Cookie can contain information such as user ID, user preferences, archive shopping cart information, browser, operating system, etc. Users can prevent web sites from assigning cookies by adjusting options with the client’s browser.

A cookie can be stored on your computer for a minute, a day, a week, a month. It really just depends on the cookie. A typical analytics cookie will be stored for usually 30-60 days.

There are advantages and disadvantages for both 1^st party and 3^rd party cookies. Let me first explain what 1^st and 3^rd party cookies are and then show you the advantages and disadvantages of each.

1^st Party Cookies

1^st party cookies are set by the website that the user is visiting.

Pros

Remembers the user’s personal information once they have submitted it. Now whenever the user comes back to the site they will not have to re-enter all of their information again.

Less frequently blocked and deleted

Able to track what people do on your site. See how long they stayed, what keywords they used to find you, how they found you, how many pages they looked at, what pages they were on, track if they signed up or purchased something, etc…

Great for serving up personalized content that is geared towards that specific user’s preferences

Since the cookie can record what the user purchased it is great for cross selling and add-on items
- Amazon does a great job of this. They have recommended items that they list based on your previous searches and purchases.
Gain insight on which pages are performing better and which need improvement

Cons

Unable to see what user’s do once they leave your site
You are not able to track individual users on the same computer, unless they have their own login credentials

3^rd Party Cookies

3^rd party cookies are set by a 3^rd party domain, like a web analytics company or online campaign management solution. For example if someone visits yoursite.com, that information will be routed to webanalyticscompany.com. 3^rd party cookies can be used for banner ads, text ads, or any other 3^rd party website.

Pros

Able to track a user across multiple websites
Easier to identify what the user did after they visited your site
Great for marketing research and identifying which marketing campaigns were successful

Cons

Many 3^rd party cookies get blocked, recognizing them as spam
A cookies information can be stolen if the session in unencrypted
There could be other tracking options that a 3^rd party company add to the cookie that you are not aware of
Anti-Spyware programs will most likely delete the cookie

Jupiter Research conducted a study on how often users delete their cookies. From their study 58% of users delete their cookies regularly, with 40% of those deleting them every month. With that in mind, no analytics package will ever be 100%. With people deleting their cookies, it will record a visitor who visits more than once as a unique visitor. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do if user’s do not accept cookies or if they delete their cookies regularly.

Lowering Your Bounce Rate: What to Analyze

Mark Thompson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:30:05 +0000

Clients always seem to ask what bounce rate is. I wanted to explain what bounce rate is, the factors that determine bounce rate, how you should analyze it, and in what cases you should take action to lower your bounce rate.

Defining Bounce Rate

A Bounce is simply a visitor coming to your site or page and leaving immediately, without visiting any other pages on your site. So Bounce Rate is just giving you a percentage of those people who only went to one page of your site. In other words:

Bounce Rate = single page visit/total entries to the site through that page

Factors That Determine Bounce Rate

There are many factors that go into your bounce rate. They can range from numerous on-site and off-site factors. There is no industry standard as to what a good or bad bounce rate is. There are some trends and assumptions that can be made for specific industries, but it depends on many factors. Steve Jackson, CEO of Aboavista wrote a post talking about the bounce rate averages for specific industries.

Onsite Factors

Your pages are not engaging enough for the user to stay on your site
The content is not relevant to what the user was searching for
Your offer, headline, content is not compelling enough
You are optimizing your site for the wrong search terms
You page takes too long to load
Users came to your site looking for something else
The user hit the back or refresh button

Offsite Factors

The keywords you are bidding on in your PPC campaigns are too broad
You are marketing on sites that are not relevant to what you do
You are marketing to the wrong target audience

How to Analyze Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is a great way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. The data is great for determining how each page on your site is doing. There are a few different ways you want to look at the data.

Compare your bounce rate with each of your pages. This will give you an understanding of which pages users are more engaged with and which could need improvement.

Compare your bounce rate with your referring sites. This is especially useful if you are doing any other marketing programs online. You can get an idea of which websites are bringing you more qualified traffic. You may want to look at the average time on site as well. If you are seeing a low bounce rate and a high time on site, you may want to put more marketing dollars towards those sites.

Compare your bounce rate with your keywords, both organic and PPC. See which keywords are bringing you the most relevant traffic. Optimize your site for the keywords that are bringing you the most page views, lowest bounce rate, and highest time on site.

You may also want to look at the top exit pages. If you see a lot of people leaving on certain pages, maybe you need to focus on building better content for the user.

Taking Action

Luckily there are plenty of things you can do to fix your bounce rate.

PPC

For companies doing PPC campaigns it can be hard to improve your bounce rate if you are already bidding on qualified traffic. One argument against bounce rate for PPC campaigns is that you have the flexibility to land people on any page you would like, within your site. So technically you could say that because you are landing the people on the appropriate page, they can get everything they need from that one page. Overall, PPC campaigns generally have a higher bounce rate just because they are not trusted as much as the organic search results.

Make sure you are optimizing your campaigns for the long-tail keywords. These keywords are targeted towards consumers who know what they are looking for and are in most cases ready-to-buy.

Organically

If you do proper keyword research you will drive the most relevant traffic to your site, leading to more conversions.

Onsite

Implement some A/B or Multivariate testing to see which landing pages produce better results. Keep testing and refining to find the pages that bring you the best results. Test images, photos, content, videos, icons, buttons, colors, headlines, etc…

Create targeted landing pages for offers, products, and services.

Offsite

Try different third party website to see if they bring you more qualified traffic. Once you have found those sites, allocate more of your marketing dollars to those sites that bring you results.