Analytics Expert

1.  Do not mess with your onsite metrics:

Offsite visits or page views should not be mixed with your onsite page views or onsite sessions. Let’s say your site gets 2,000 sessions for the day and if there are 500 visits to your Facebook fan page on the same day, do not count the number of sessions as 2,500. Instead clearly differentiate the offsite traffic with onsite traffic and correlate the influences as needed. Coremetrics has an impression tag for this very reason – we do not create sessions, we do not mix traffic.

Here’s a simple impression tag that will fire an impression tag when a Facebook page that contains this img tag is loaded.

<img height=”1” border=”1” width=”1” alt=”” src=”http://data.cmcore.com/imp?tid=17&vn1=4.1.1&vn2=e4.0&ec=ISO-8859-1&ci=9999999&cm_mmc=Facebook-_-FanPage-_-Wall-_-SpringPromotions”>

If you are a Coremetrics customer click here and search for ‘facebook’ under the “download” section to download the Facebook Solution Brief from our support site.

2.  Correlate offsite behavior with onsite behavior:

We introduced Impression Attribution as a generic application framework which can measure offsite behavior without any sessions. We didn’t stop right there; we also added the capability to measure the click-through and view-through influence. Now you will ask, “What is view-through influence?” Let me use an example to explain.

On January 5^th 2010, John Doe visited the Facebook fan page of a premier retailer, mynotsofavoriteshoes.com.

On January 7^th 2010, John Doe visited a Myspace page where an ad from mynotsofavoriteshoes.com was served.

On January 10^th 2010, John Doe decides to go to mynotsofavoriteshoes.com by directly visiting the site.

On January 12^th 2010, John Doe is searching for socks and sees a natural search landing page from mynotsofavoriteshoes.com and clicks through and browses through many products, and purchases socks.

With our unique Impression Attribution technology, we can measure all impression influences on John Doe for the past 90 days before he visited the site or purchased. You can see the influences based on the first impression on John Doe, last impression, or all impressions with equal or custom weight. Impression Attribution applies to different types of conversions including whitepaper downloads, video views, article views, enrollment/registration, purchases, etc.

Here are two reports showing the Offsite Behavior correlated with Onsite Metrics. The first report is reported with simple impression tags without passing Facebook user details, and     the second one is with Facebook user details, where you can apply demographic categorization

3. Collect and semantically categorize the social networking noise to information:

Plan on capturing as much information as possible for analysis. For instance, if you capture tweets, Facebook wall entries, etc., pass those in a marketing attribute like cm_mmca3 and see the patterns of sentences and apply semantic filters to cut through the clutter. Remember, there can be 1000s of messages on Facebook or Twitter; it is not useful to just collect. You need to be able to categorize, report, and observe the trends to gain better insight about how your customers are being influenced in the social media world.

Here’s a report with Semantic Categorization of Social Media. The semantic categorization is done using wild card expressions to scan through the sentences (MMC attributes as an example). For instance, if I see ‘crap’, ‘bad’, etc., mixed with your brand terms and doesn’t contain ‘not’, this can be loosely categorized as negative comments.

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Thank you for reading my thoughts on this subject. Would love to hear from you if you are tracking Facebook as a effective Marketing channel or planning to do so in the near future.

As you may have seen, we announced our Facebook ROI measurement capabilities yesterday.  Our approach is tailored to marketers who really want to understand the impact of their Facebook engagement, whether it’s a campaign, a tab, a specific promotion, or all of the above.

For our purposes, and the purposes of our customers, we see the core value of Facebook as a place to share the brand, get consumers to engage, and persuade those consumers to have a more positive inclination toward the brand and the company it represents.  Ultimately, the CFO, CEO and CMO will be looking to see how much the Facebook investment is contributing to the top line.

Of course, we realize that some brands may be using Facebook as a customer lab, or for other purposes. So it sparked a conversation internally about how different brands are currently using and evaluating Facebook, and a curiosity about what YOU would say if you were in the room with us.

So we’re asking you — how do YOU use Facebook for your brand?

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Today, we announced ROI measurement capabilities for Facebook. We’re very excited about how Seton Hall University and other Coremetrics clients deploy Coremetrics Impression Attribution on their Facebook fan pages, ads and applications. The solution helps clients attribute credit to the role Facebook plays in influencing subsequent website visits, behaviors and conversions.

This attribution happens whether visitors directly click from Facebook to the website (click-through traffic) or indirectly via a different channel (view-through traffic), such as paid or natural search.

Coremetrics Impression Attribution attributes credit to Facebook for both generating clicks and for increasing brand awareness and customer loyalty. And clients can apply this attribution to business-impacting metrics, such as sales, orders, conversion events, page views, and so on – not only to impressions and clicks.

I hope you’d agree that this is pretty awesome!

The ease at which clients can leverage Impression Attribution is amazing too. Simply add the Facebook Static FBML application to your fan page, add in the Coremetrics impression tag with the information you wish to report on, and voila! Let the Facebook attribution begin.

Advertisers with several Facebook assets can deploy several impression tags and get granular data about how each asset influences subsequent website behaviors and conversions.

More informing data can be captured and reported on by dynamically constructing the impression tag on custom Facebook tabs and applications. Advertisers can pull Facebook profile and activity data using the Facebook API and pass that data as tag attributes. Marketers can then group, filter, segment and report on these data attributes to understand what roles content preferences and user demographics play in influencing website conversions.

I hope to share more of how our clients leverage Facebook ROI reporting in future blog posts. In the meantime, please share your thoughts about these capabilities in the comments section.

Last Sunday, I watched the New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl. It was a terrific game – well deserved for a team and a city that have experienced so much grief. Of course, part of the national attention was reserved for the super bowl TV ads. And of course, this year – just like in years past – ads were nothing more than okay. Nothing to get excited about.

Except for one ad. A Google ad. No, it was not about a new Android phone or Google Wave or anything like that. It was about the good old Google search engine. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first search engine ad from Google, ever.

The ad (available here) was nice. It was well made and had a nice tone. But it was sad, terribly sad, if only because it… existed. I mean, here was Google – one of the most innovative companies of all times, with the highest trafficked website on the planet, the leading search engine, and one of the most recognizable brands the world over-using a weakening medium to promote its online search. What was that if not sad?

The ad, I thought, had to be a defensive move. But is Google concerned that Microsoft or Yahoo! will come out with something super exciting? Is it about a new search startup with radically different technology? Is it WolframAlpha?

I don’t think so. I think that the Google Super Bowl ad is about Facebook and other social networks. It’s about stories like this that show how Facebook is gaining in terms of traffic and usage. It’s about the reality that more and more people rely on their social networks to answer real-life problems.

When you think about it makes complete sense. While search engines do a terrific job indexing content and matching it against user queries, the process lacks social context. Put it another way, the content is created and indexed first. Then our queries follow. We hope that what appears on the search engine result page (SERP) is relevant to us, but the content was not created for us. We don’t know the content writers. We don’t know if they have hidden agendas.

Consequently, more people reach out to their social networks first. They ask a direct question and get a direct answer. The answer is relevant (occasionally) because it has social context. We know our friends, we know their thought process and we know how to interpret what they say. We share similar preferences of like-minded fans. Could it be, then, that fans and friends are becoming the new local search?

The Google Super Bowl ad tried to combat this new mindset. It showed use cases where a search engine can be trusted to engender big improvements in our lives, simply by aggregating diverse content in a convenient medium and format.

It’s tough to predict what the future will bring. It’s safe to assume that Google will deal with this trend the way it knows how – through innovation. But it’s also safe to assume that more and more companies will seek to invest in social media, fearing that by waiting for customers on SERPs, they will lose out to competitors who will acquire and convert visitors from social networking sites.

Does that mean that advertisers should stop all their search and content network campaigns and pull that money into social media? Of course not. But it does mean that companies must embrace social media in a more profound way and explore everything that social media has to offer, such as significant social network advertising, video syndication, widgets and rich Internet application development, engaging micro-site production and so on.

In order to succeed in social media, companies must have a solid foundation of web analytics with which they can track, analyze, and understand the performance of their social media investments and their contribution to the bottom line.

Companies need to measure accurately the incremental uplift gained from social media investments, by attributing credit to interactions and exposures to social assets, whether people click directly from the asset to the website, or indirectly in subsequent website visits.

Fortunately solutions such as Coremetrics Impression Attribution help advertisers to accurately measure and optimize assets deployed on social networking websites. I invite you to review a webinar recording on social media analytics and learn more.

What do you think about the Google super bowl ad? Drop me a line in the comments section.

It’s rare that I read a press release and think, “Wow—that’s sad.” But that was exactly my reaction Wednesday when I saw the results of our study, “The Face of the New Marketer,” which was conducted by Bloomberg BusinessWeek Research Services.

Why is it sad?

The study shows just how untenable the lives of marketers have become, and how, despite the fact that nearly half measure their success in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs), most aren’t sure that they are using the right metrics to gauge their success in the first place.

Add to this the fact that two-thirds say that marketing is viewed as critical to their organizations, and that they are generally spending more than in years past, and you can see the squeeze they’re feeling. They’re spending more, being minutely measured, and flying blind.

Ouch.

So what’s do marketers see as their most important challenge? Forty-five percent report that it’s obtaining an integrated view of customers across online marketing touch points, while 41 percent say interpreting that data is the biggest issue.

So at the end of the day, it’s a very clear solution to a complex problem: marketers need to see all their customers, and they need to understand what they want.

The devil, as they say, is in the details.

The Social Media Analytics webinar I’ve had this week with the AMA was a great success, generating a lot of interesting questions (you can review the webinar recording here). As a follow up, I wanted to share ten key questions and answers from the event. I regard this as critical information that anyone venturing into social media analytics should have. So here goes:

1. What is an impression?

An impression is an exposure to a marketing campaign, such as when an end user views a display ad on a third-party website or opens an email message. We can count each occurrence like this as a single impression. Advertisers may compensate publishers for delivering campaign assets on a thousand-impressions basis (CPM).

2. What is attribution?

Attribution is the practice of assigning some credit to one or more marketing campaigns in return for their relative contribution to a subsequent user behavior. An example of attribution is identifying the portion of last month’s sales that were influenced by an email campaign within a 14-day window. Since web visitors today are exposed to multiple campaigns and interact with companies and brands over multiple website sessions, attribution informs businesses about how different marketing channels and campaigns influence subsequent behavior. Attribution can look both backward or forward in time, leverage different logic (first-click, last-click, average clicks, and custom weighting), and extend different time periods (same session, one day, one week, one month, etc.)

3. What is view-through traffic?

Typically, web analytics looks at click-through traffic. This traffic pattern involves end users who actively click on links embedded in marketing campaigns (such as display ads or links in email messages) and consequently land on the advertiser’s website. The advertiser then analyzes click-through traffic to determine the effectiveness of their referring sites. The click is the method by which the advertiser ties the marketing campaign to the user’s website behavior.

View-through traffic ties impressions (mere exposures to marketing campaigns) to website visits and behaviors, whether those visits occur within the same session of the impression or in subsequent sessions. View-through traffic allows advertisers to quantify the uplift gained by merely exposing users to the campaign, even when users do not click from the campaign on the advertiser’s website. An example of view-through traffic is a visitor who sees a display ad on a third-party website on day one and arrives at the advertiser’s website via a paid search campaign on day two. View-through credit should be then attributed to the display ad for engendering the visit.

4. What is Coremetrics Impression Attribution?

Coremetrics Impression Attribution is an ad-hoc reporting solution that helps optimize impression-based marketing initiatives and justify their budgets. Businesses can analyze and demonstrate how campaigns across the Internet influence website visitor acquisition, conversion and retention. The solution accompanies campaign assets, such as emails, display ads, widgets, rich internet applications, syndicated videos and more. It provides data that helps businesses determine the effectiveness of these assets, test different asset variations, justify their investment or discontinue their operations. More information about this solution is available here.

5. What is the impression tag and how is it used?

The impression tag is a lightweight direct image request tag that Coremetrics clients use to identify exposures to media assets served across the web and link them to subsequent website visits and behaviors. Marketers deploy the impression tag independently on their own properties (e.g. on a separate micro-site or in an email campaign), by working directly with publishers (e.g. deploying a tag on YouTube), or by requesting a behavioral targeting network to deploy the tag on the advertisers’ behalf. In either case, the impression tag is served alongside the media asset when a browser renders the  web page that contains the asset. Clients then build ad-hoc reports using Coremetrics Impression Attribution to attribute credit to those impression-based campaigns.

6. What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics quantifies the role that social media initiatives play in influencing website visits, behaviors, and conversions. Ideally, social media analytics accurately attributes credit to social media initiatives for their impact on key performance indicators, such as sales, orders, conversion events, page views, sessions, and so on. The critical test of social media analytics is in its ability to expose complete and actionable data that facilitate budget allocation and marketing mix decision making and action.

Basic social media analysis looks at click-through traffic from social networking websites. While this analysis provides some value to marketers and advertisers, it does not account for view-through traffic; i.e. it does not attribute credit to social media initiatives that influenced indirect traffic. Coremetrics Impression Attribution offers both click-through and view-through traffic analysis.

7. What types of measurement do not constitute social media analytics? 

Brand monitoring – the quantitative and qualitative tracking of customer sentiment, communication and engagement with brands on social networking websites – does not constitute social media analytics. Similarly, overlaying social media activity data on web analytics data does not constitute social media analytics. In neither case is there direct and reliable attribution of website visits, behaviors and conversions to distinct social media activities. Such solutions, therefore, cannot expose complete and actionable data that facilitate budget allocation and marketing mix decision making and action.

8. What social media analytics solutions are currently available on the market?

Coremetrics Impression Attribution is the only true social media analytics solution currently available on the market. Integrated with the Coremetrics Continuous Optimization Platform and powered by Coremetrics Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience Profiles, it is the only solution that offers accurate attribution of visitor behaviors and conversions to impression-based assets and campaigns, using consistent, business-impacting metrics.

9. Can credit be attributed to social activities that include reading and writing user comments, such as on Facebook or via Twitter?

The short answer is no. Social media analytics aims to track, understand, and optimize social media initiatives by exposing complete and actionable data that facilitate budget allocation and marketing mix decision making and action. In support of this approach, Coremetrics Impression Attribution was designed to accompany specific campaign assets, such as emails, display ads, widgets, rich internet applications, syndicated videos and more. The solution provides data that helps marketers determine the effectiveness of these assets, test different asset variations, justify their investment or discontinue their operations. It was not designed to monitor brand sentiment or user comments on standard social networking websites. Clients developing widgets and rich internet applications that facilitate user feedback can embed impression tags to capture this type of data.

10. How can the impression tag be deployed on YouTube?

YouTube partners have several ways of deploying Coremetrics Impression Attribution:  they can incorporate the impression tag directly with the movie during the upload process, fire the impression tag when leveraging the YouTube API, or through YouTube Advertising.

Read this white paper for more information about social media analytics. And please drop me a line and let me know what you think about social media analytics in the comments section.

Yesterday, Alli Libb of the American Marketing Association and I hosted a webinar on Social Media Analytics (recording available here). The meeting drew over 1,400 marketing professionals who not only listened to the presentation, but also participated in a lively Twitter conversation about it (follow @coremetrics and join the discussion).

All of this excitement tells me a couple of things. Firstly, eMarketer’s assertion that social media is the top priority for senior marketers (and possibly for your manager) is spot on. Think about it: it used to be that search engines were the kings of the hill and we all killed ourselves to get the highest search rankings possible. But today, people have reduced some of their dependency on search engines. That is, people first talk to their network of friends and only then search. Friends make better search engines. And you should make note of this in your marketing mix.

And the second point is marketing is math. Marketing begs to be measured. Or at least, your CFO is going to ask you to measure it. It’s far better to be prepared when the inevitable question arises. Social media analytics needs to help marketing professionals make the right budget allocation and marketing mix decisions that will maximize the performance of your marketing and its ability to meet business objectives. That’s a mouthful, but the takeaway is simple: if your social media analytics don’t drive accountability, then it’s probably not effective. So, decide what your business objectives are, figure out how marketing will step up to the plate, choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to track your progress, and only then figure out if social media is the right channel to drive your KPIs and how.

I could go on and on about this topic. Read this white paper for more details on how to think about social media analytics. And send me questions or comments for future posts.