Twittering away - what should you measure

Seeing as lots of people suddenly seem to be picking up on Twitter recently, I thought that maybe I should be adding my two pence worth to the conversation (obviously you can pick me up @acochrane).  Why should I be talking about this sort of social media?  Well I've talked a lot about Social Bookmarking in the past, particularly along the lines of Digg and Slashdot and this is just an extension of the theme that I've been going through.  If ever you needed proof that something was becoming more important in society, it is the fact that the Guardian can't work out if it should still be in their technology section or their media section.

Anyway, lets go back to how we did it before:

The basic Premise:

You write a short (140 characters or fewer) message called a tweet.

People who 'follow' you see your message in their front page.

People who you 'follow' get their messages appearing on your front page.

That's it.

Ok, fine, that's not really it.  There are a few different types of people in the world and this is where it comes in as a different use for different people.

Peer to Peer:

You are a person and you follow other people.  These people are probably your friends, coworkers, etc.  You probably know them.  You're interested in what type of sandwich they had for lunch.  If they found a funny picture on the web (make sure you use tinyurls, or variations, because 140 characters isn't a lot).  That sort of thing.  The people who follow you are probably interested in the same thing - share the 'tweets' from the people who you are following with those that are following you.  Put your own ones up.  It's your call, your just there for a bit of fun anyway.

Professional to Professional

This is where it gets a bit more interesting.  You probably don't know the people you are following in the sense that their your mates.  They are almost certainly industry leaders.  You're there for their professional thoughts, help and advice.  What do you want out of this - you want to share industry insights, useful blogs, help and advice.  And you want them to do the same with you, if you're stuck at work, you can ask the question to the audience and then they'll respond.  You've found a good blog and you post a link so that everyone else can read it.  Someone you follow has posted a link, so you see what they are reading.  Someone you follow asks a question and you answer them with your help and advice.

How do you measure this?  Well down the right hand side there is a nice little @replies that allows you to see all the people who have replied to your message.  Clever. If you can keep a count of these, then you can find out how often people have helped you.  Not so easy to find out how many people you have helped though, which should also be a good metric. 

For your posts, don't forget that your tinyurl keeps a track of how many people click on the links - you should keep a hold of this to make sure that the people who follow you are enjoying the same content you are.  Make sure that you pick up anyone who does a 'Retweet' (a complete copy of your tweet, with 'RT @yourname' on the front).

Personally I think it isn't really about measurement in this case, you're just using it to benefit yourself and your personal career.

The other thing to remember here is the use of # tags.  If you tweet with a #, followed by a word, then you can get the twitter search to follow you.  Personally I have a couple of RSS feeds, one of people who tweet using #wa and one for people who tweet with #omniture, this way I can find out people who are tweeting about my subject, without actually following them.  Search for the ones that your industry may be using (or you can pick them up from what the people who you are following are doing or you could start doing it yourself and see if people follow suit).

Business to peer

Haha, this is the need to measure becomes much more important.  How do you prove that all the time that you are spending on twitter is producing the money for the business you work in.  This is where it has become tough.  Again though, there are a variety of different types of things people do here.

Brand management is one of the obvious ones.  If you don't get your brands twitter profile, someone else will.  In fact, someone else might get a variation of it anyway.  What you want to do here is to maintain your brand.  This doesn't work with all brands.  Why not?  Who wants to have a twitter mate called imperial leather who just goes on about what type of soap they are using (sorry for taking it out on imperial leather).  But that doesn't mean there isn't scope - you just need to create the niche (I'd come up with an idea here, but if I did, then I'd be doing that instead of this job).

If you are looking at brand management, then really you want to be measuring how many people are following you and Retweeting you.  If you can prove that enough people (and that number increases with the more time you spend) are following you, there is a legitimate claim that stopping doing this would have a detrimental effect on your brand.

If you are doing it to make you more money directly (increase in visit, etc) then you need to be careful.  Nobody likes spam.  More importantly most of the people following you will already know about your brand and will therefore this is just a different way of providing them with an RSS feed.  Most importantly though - don't go from being a brand person to being a series of links to your site.  People will get annoyed and all the good work you did on your brand will be undone.

In these cases, you really want to look at how much traffic you are generating and how many people are buying (if applicable) or whatever your success criteria are.  To do this, look in your Web Analytics referrer reports. Just as a word of note - your tweets are 'nofollow' so you'll get no SEO benefit (but you could help fill up your search space - see BBC Sport's twitter being in the top 5 for Googling their brand).

In reality, you probably end up doing a bit of a combination of the two, especially if you are a media site.  Work out what the best options are by doing it for a while and seeing who responds the best.  Usually you want to just be a bit more personal here though.

Business to Business

Probably the least utilised area so far.  This follows the same principles as your professional to professional.  You want other businesses to help you and talk about what they are doing (ditto the other way around).  In our boom times this was seen as something that you shouldn't do because it would help your competitors.  In the time of recession, it probably is too.  But in some areas there will be a case where you just can't take all the business (especially in the service sector) and you want to pass on business to other people by giving them best practice.

I think there are lots of situations where this would be useful (I won't list them all) in the B2B world.  Maybe one of the big B2B magazines from my previous employer will write about it to encourage their readers to get in on the act.  We in the Web Analytics professional world do it because there aren't enough of us and we want to promote Web Analytics.  I'm sure this is the case in many businesses too.

Useful measurement tools:


Eric Peterson's tool
Twitterholic
Twinfluence

Learning to use SiteCatalyst

As you may (or may not) be aware, I have learnt how to use many different web analytics tools over the almost five years that I've been an analyst.  When I first started at the AA we used Redeye, where we mainly downloaded a load of stats into an internal database which we then queried.  At esure we started with WebTrends, but it wasn't set up well and we were moving to NetGenesis.  At RBI I used HBX, although again we had a version of WebTrends on Demand that I had to use.  Not to mention I've used Google Analytics and Microsoft Adcenter Analytics on this blog.  Now I've started working for BusinessLink (one week in), we use SiteCatalyst.

If you remember one of my previous posts (linked to just a second ago) I'd actually grabbed hold of SiteCatalyst before, but only for a dummy account.  This time around, I am learning it on a real site, so I thought this post could be on the things that I've been doing, so that if you have to learn how to use a new tool, then you'll be able to think about this.  I think there are three things that you need to think about when talking about new tools and (in no particular order):

• Mapping the standard reports and understanding the user interface
• Understanding the naming conventions for the tags on the pages
  
• Understanding how the metrics are calculated

Mapping the standard reports and understanding the user interface

The UI is the one that I always focus on first.  There is a reason for this - everyone else will know the tool based on the user interface and will ask you about reports based on their names.  This is easy if it is the 'visit' report, because that is fairly obvious what it is.  However if you're asked about a 'Correlation' report and you have no idea what they are on about, then you're going to be in trouble.

The real disadvantage of SiteCatalyst, unfortunately, is that they completely redesigned the UI recently.  So whilst learning one UI is fairly easy, really you have to learn two, because there is a whole group of people who are still using the old one.

 

As you can see from the pictures, these aren't just a little bit different, they have an entirely new navigation scheme, so the 'casual' users are not going to move to the new one if it means they have to learn a whole new nomenclature.

However Version 14 has some major advantages.  The main one of these is that when you select a report, whilst it may take time to load, it seems quicker, because it doesn't reload the whole page.  And because it doesn't reload the whole page, there is an opportunity for you to change your date ranges and general report requirements in your header for each report.

Whilst in version 13.5 you would have your report based on how they wanted you to set it up (or in fact, how you'd decided at the beginning).  If you wanted to change it by adding metrics or making it trended, for example, you'd have to do one, wait for it to reload, then the other and wait for it to reload.  In version 14, you can do each of these whilst the report is loading and it will reset the loading saving you a load of time.

Understanding the naming conventions for the tags on the pages

This is where Google Analytics has its main advantages over most of the other tools.  There is only one standard tag and that is enough for most websites.  For Sitecatalyst, you can do that if you want, but the suggestion is that you set it up slightly differently so that you have a custom page name.

However it isn't quite that simple in SiteCatalyst.  Whilst you have a page name, you also have a hierarchy (similar to the multi-level content in HBX) that allows you to group all of your pages in a hierarchial way.  On top of the hierarchy there are also a series of custom traffic reports (props) that you can set up on the page (basically a way of giving something lots of independent page names).  Then there are the custom events (which can be used for conversion points or however you see fit) plus a series of custom conversions (which can be cross referenced to your custom events for visit based metrics).  It seems to me like SiteCatalyst might have named those the wrong way around.

Anyway, now you can see why it is a good idea to work out the UI first.  You need to be able to work out where each thing is appearing, before looking at the site and seeing how it is tagged.  There are limitations to this - you can't work out how every tag is set up.  There are too many pages.  You need to get a general idea and then attempt to look at the exceptions.  This is easier if you can look back at the UI and attempt to make sense of your page names, hierarchy and custom options.

Understanding how the metrics are calculated

This is the more complicated bit of the whole thing.  SiteCatalyst has an advantage over HBX in that you can add your own metrics to a report, from a standard list and you can create your own using the standard list and a calculation.  However, there are some limitations.  The 'standard list' changes from report to report, depending on how the data is collected.

Most importantly in this is the referring domain, search engine and search term report.  This report lists 'instances' as opposed to referring visits.   Let's put this into context:  In HBX you had to use one of their two standards - 'Clicks' and 'Referring Clicks'.  'Clicks' related to someone getting to a page where the referrer wasn't a page from within the site.  'Referring Clicks' was the same, but only if it was the start of the user's visit.  Instances are similar to 'clicks'.  Without going into any great detail, this effectively means you end up over counting significantly. 

Anyway, that's all for now.  Tomorrow I am doing some 'basic' training with some Omniture trainers.  I'm hoping this is going ot fill in a few gaps (and if not, it'll be at least useful to find out what they are telling all the rest of the staff). 

Whencanistop - a year in numbers

Everyone does one.  So that means I can too.  That's all the justification I need.  No really - I don't need anything more, just the satisfaction of knowing that everyone else is going to write about their blog in this way.  Ok, I do it myself quite frequently (back in April and in October when I was on my 50th Post), so there is no reason why I shouldn't reflect on a year of posts on this blog in numbers and what sort of traffic they have.  I'll give you the top 5 posts and why they are the top 5.

Well here are the top line figures:

4,195 visits

6,332 page views

3,546 Unique Visitors

45 posts

92 different Countries

20 Comments

I'm impressed, because I didn't think we'd even be near this 12 months ago (86 visits in February, 597 visits in November).  What I've got to do now is keep it up though, although I think growth like that is unlikely, so lets just hope I can keep getting 600 odd visits a month and I'll be happy.  Actually, more importantly this blog has helped raise my profile a little bit in the industry and I'm about to start a new job next week.  I like to think that this blog helped me get the job if not by showing off my credentials, then by helping me further my knowledge to get those credentials.  Anyway, on to the list you want to see (well, the list that I am going to write) the top five visited posts:

1.  Omniture's SiteCatalyst HBX
450 visits, 420 entry pages, 76.9% bounce rate

Back in January when Omniture bought out HBX we were all intrigued as to what was going to happen to a tool that we all knew and loved (ok, we all knew).  What options did that give you if you wanted to move (or even should you move)?  This post told you.

The main reason this post got so much traffic, I think, was because it was right at the beginning of the year and it was really topical.  Did it get much traffic to start with?  Not really - it just generally performed well throughout the year (eg in January and February it got 17 visits and 51 visits, whereas in October it got another 60).  The other thing about this post is that most of its traffic has come from Google and it has been generated by an astonishing 243 unique keywords (talk about long tail on small volumes).  SiteCatalyst HBX is the most common keyword, but this is going to be going down in volume soon, because fewer people are going to be searching for that.

2.  Conversion Funnel analysis: When, How and What
327 visits, 317 entry pages, 63.3% bounce rate

I think I may be a bit more proud of this post than number one.  Only a little bit though, if we are honest.  Whilst the first post pondered the future of the industry and what you should do because of it, this post was a bit more nitty gritty.  It told you how you should use conversion funnels to help improve your conversion rates and make more money.

For this post, whilst lots of traffic did come from Google again (more in a minute) I also got a fair bit of traffic from James Kelway's userpathways blog.  Links like this, whilst giving you a bit of extra traffic also provide the basis for search traffic (more links gives Google license to push your post up the rankings).  In this case, the phrase Funnel analysis was the one that got me a fair bit of traffic, but lots of other funnel related terms too.  I also got a bit of traffic from Google Image search (please, please, please Google, sort out how GA reports image searches).  It also helped that this post was written in February, so has had a long time throughout the year to generate traffic.

3. SiteCatalyst compared to HBX
203 visits, 192 entry pages, 83.3% bounce rate

More on those SiteCatalyst and HBX comparisons here.  Having finally got my hands on a SiteCatalyst account, I blogged about the positives and negatives of the system compared to HBX.  I also set up a few questions that needed to be answered before moving from HBX to SiteCatalyst.  Big question - How do you migrate 60 odd websites and 600 odd users of the tool to a new system smoothly?  No answers here.

This post took a long time to take off.  Given that it was written at the end of March, it only had 26 visits by the end of July.  This shows how successful it was at the end of the year.  Also of note is that this post is the most entered post from direct traffic.  I wonder if this was linked to in an email somewhere (somewhere in Omniture itself?).  Given 71 visits from direct traffic, it was only fifth highest traffic earner from search engines (again a host of keywords, none of them particularly high).

4. Setting up campaigns in HBX and Google Analytics
190 visits, 184 entry pages, 79.4% bounce rate

This is another one of those posts that bucks the trend a little bit.  This is another one of those helping people with their analytics projects.  Specifically this one was about not just setting up campaigns in HBX (which I'd mainly been talking about before), but also in Google Analytics - something I hadn't really ventured into before.

This was a June post, so it has only had half a years worth of traffic, compared to some of the others who were written in January.  Again, this is mainly a Google related post (virtually all of the traffic in fact).  This was probably written at the right time for Google to get in on the act, it was at a point where I was starting to generate more search traffic and this fit in quite well in terms of HBX key phrases.

5. Is HBX Active Viewing Awesome?
130 visits, 121 entry pages, 69.4% bounce rate

Well it seems to me that you have voted that yes it is.  HBX active viewing is the tool that you plonk on top of Internet Explorer and it tells you how many visits each of your pages has got and in fact most of the things you could ever want to know.  It would have made writing this post much, much easier, but alas I don't have HBX on this blog.

Of course it always helps if you rank highly in Google for HBX active Viewing (60 visits) and HBX active Viewer (28 visits).  This was one of the success stories of 2007 that encouraged me to continue writing.  I think if I had not been generating any traffic then I might have lost heart very easily, but the rest is history as they say.

6. (and honourable mentions)

Ok, I think there should also be a couple of honourable mentions in this post as well.  Number six in this list was Is Engagement a metric?  Remarkably this was a post written right at the end of October, but has done magnificently.  A couple of reasons for this was that it was picked up by a few people at work who used it to help drive their metrics for 2009.  It was also picked up by Eric Peterson on his web analytics demystified blog and by a couple of guys on twitter (Lotame and mpranikoff).

And finally - Social Bookmarking is about Brand was the only other post to generate over one hundred visits.  Why did this one particularly do well?  Well its because it got picked up by social bookmarking site stumbleupon.  Yes, yes, the person who nominated it was me, but then again, how am I meant to investigate these things unless I actually do it myself?