A Guide to Metrics and Digital Analytics Tools to help communicators with their web/social media communication strategies
For those of you who are familiar with the movie Mean Girls you may remember one of the main characters Gretchen Weiners, played by actress Lacey Chabert, using the term “fetch” an alternative way to say cool or awesome in conversion with her group of friends. Despite her efforts to make the term catch on among her peers, she is told to “stop trying to make fetch happen, it is not going to happen.”
You may not be able to make fetch happen either, but there are a variety of tools to help you and your organization have a better shot of making your message, your company’s version of “Fetch” stick with your desired audience. We can definitely do better than Gretchen with today’s online tools.
In fact, there are so many Digital Analytics tools out there these days it can be overwhelming even for the most seasoned digital analytics manager let along marketing or public relations specialists.
The purpose of analytics is to give you or your company an understanding of what is working and what is not on your digital platforms. Having an understanding and knowing if your marketing or communication efforts are bringing in traffic and engagement online is vital. Analytics gives us as the professional communicator/marketer the insight we need such as who is our audience, key demographic information such as locations, device used, behavior on the website or app, and referral sources.
As a Graduate student in Public Relations and Corporate Communications at Georgetown University, I will admit I had very limited knowledge in how to measure digital data and then turning that data into insights. After taking a digital analytics class with Professor Mia Vallo, I now have a much better understand of how to use these tools and leverage the information to help my organization, and I hope this information helps you too.
Before I begin with the various tools out there for use, it is important to understand the language or speak that is metrics. Many may not be familiar with them and that is ok. Here is a quick metrics breakdown when using Google Analyics or other tools to understand the language:
Pageviews- The number of pages viewed on a website.
Sessions or visits- The period of time a user is active on your site or app.
Users or unique visitors- The number of unique people ( broken down by device-specific information) visiting a website.
Pages per session- The average number of pages viewed in a given session
Impressions- The number of times an image is displayed
Clicks- The number of times an ad/picture is clicked
Clickthrough rate (CTR)- Clicks divided by impressions
Conversions- The number of times a conversion (i.e., an order placed, an email subscription) happens
Click to conversion rate- Conversions divided by clicks
Cost per acquisition (CPA)- Cost of the marketing campaign divided by the number of conversions
Bounce Rate- the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
Engagement Rate- percentage of people who saw a post that reacted to, shared, clicked or commented on it.
A Key Performance Indicator or KPI is like a car dashboard. These metrics help you as a marketing/PR professional understand actual performance against present business/communication objectives. Here are some examples of KPI:
Objective- Increase efficiency of a landing page
KPI- Conversion Rate
Objective- Generate website traffic from a photo contest campaign
KPI- Clickthrough rate (CTR) of the photo campaign
Objective- Improve engagement of Facebook fans
KPI- Facebook page engagement rate
As a PR manager, you can use analytics to:
Generate more visits to our site by focusing on media types (i.e., news, entertainment, portal sites) that drive traffic referrals. -Improve my company’s reputation by understanding specific messages that generate positive sentiments. -Increase brand awareness by customizing messages based on audience interests. -Increase brand awareness by customizing messages based on customers’ locations.
Now that you have a better understanding of the language, here are four tools that can be useful to help improve your website.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. Google Analytics provides the website manager with data to see where website visitors come from and understand how they maneuver through your site.
Metrics in Google Analytics includes:
Audience- Users, Sessions, pages, duration, demographics, locations devices used
Acquisiton- Where users come from (traffic sources), Adword, SEO (social engine optimization), Socail Media, Campaigns
Behavior- pages viewed, landing pages, page user exits from, how users search for your site
Conversions- lead generation, purchase funnel
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is an online application that provides you with eye tracking tool such as a Heat Map, Scroll Map, Overlay, and Confetti to track a website’s operation. This tool is great to help you to understand your audience’s interests and behavior. This site gives a 30-day free trail to check out its service.
Crazy Egg features breakdown:
- Heat map — A picture of where people clicked on your site. This lets you see what’s hot and what’s not, so you can make changes that increase conversions.
- Scroll map — The scrollmap shows how far down the page people are scrolling and helps determine where visitors abandon the page.
- Overlay — When you look at the overlay report, you’ll be able to see the number of clicks on each element of your page.
- Confetti — With confetti you will be able to distinguish all the clicks you get on your site segmented by referral sources, search terms & more.
ChartBeat
ChartBeat helps provide actionable insights to websites and blogs in real-time about the content published and promoted to sites. ChartBeat also offers a free trail for its services. Check out the demo video below:
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a great tool that provides services in Market Intelligence, web analytics, data mining and business intelligence for international corporations. The site uses big data technologies to collect, measure, analyze and provide user engagement statistics for websites and mobile apps.
The site also features tools such as:
Measures Traffic & Engagement Metrics
See overall visits, time on site, bounce rate and page views per visit on your site.
SEO & PPC Keywords
Find trending keywords, see how much traffic they generate and discover the search ads associated with them.
Audience Interests
Discover new audiences, potential retargeting lists, affiliates and publishers.
Traffic Sources
Gain insight on the sources that generate traffic to your website — referrals, search, social and display.
Social Media Analytics Tools
Much like Web analytics tools, social tools can be valuable to help measure and analyze your organization’s social platforms. Here are five great third party sites to help you improve your social media communications strategy.
LikeAlyzer
likealyzer.com/
LikeAlyzer helps social media mangers analyze the potential and success rate of their Facebook Pages. The site reviews Facebook pages and generates an overall score with recommendations on where to make improvements. The site is simple to use. Just enter your Facebook page URL (no Facebook authorization needed), and Likealyzer will return blocks of easy-to-read data and advice on the health of your page. (See screenshot example below)
Simply Measured
simplymeasured.com/
This tool is a great social media analytics tool that provides in-depth measurement and reporting across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more. The tool is free tool for Facebook pages with fewer than 250K likes.
MyTopTweet
Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information.
This allows social media managers to measure what people are saying about you, your company, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
True Social Metrics
True Social Metrics is a social media analytics tool that solves the problem of Social Media ROI. It also provides insights how to improve your social media presence. The site does have a free 30-day trail but then you must pay for membership. Here is a demo video of how to use True Social Metrics:
The site’s features include:
Trends analytics
Analyze how the activity of users on your social media pages changes over time and instantly compare the % of decrease or increase for each metric by days/weeks/months.
Engagement rate
Engagement and Interaction rates analytics will help you to instantly compare several accounts performance using compound Engagement or Interaction values for all social interaction summarized.
Industry standards
Compare your social media performance with industry standards: Average industry values; Maximum industry values; and Share of voice — your share of engagement in the industry.
Other tips outside of using tools:
Social media has become a vital aspect in the overall Internet marketing arena. Hub Spot states that 92% of marketers acknowledge that social networking sites are important for their business. However, the most important statistic within this report is that 80% of marketers indicted social media efforts did in fact increase traffic to their website.
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provide companies a way to attract a larger audience to its products and services. Google and other search engines have also recalculating their rankings based on brands and organizations that have a strong and active social media presence.
Social media has also changed the entire SEO approach. The days of having an updated blog, optimized keywords and detailed meta descriptions are simply not enough. Brands who are active on social media provide “social links” to search engines which allows increased traffic to its channels and websites.
Social media now allows users to get the information they need on search engines with less clutter. This helps communications and marketing managers reach their audience better and more effectively. Brands who ingrate social media into their SEO strategies can be more successful in attracting new visitors.
A 2011 study from Social Bakers, another great analytics tool, found that the sweet spot for posting on Facebook is five to 10 posts per week.
Here the Social Bakers piece here: http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/147-how-often-should-you-post-on-your-facebook-pages
For video posts on Facebook, please understand that the videos auto play when a user is scrolling by them on their feed in both desktop and mobile devices. The video is counted as a “view” after three seconds. If you are presenting these figures to your boss or CEO as a “successful” post, please be aware that the numbers may be inflated. It may suit you better to present engagement rate figures as oppose to views.
In order to get engagement rate, you can use this formula. The formula is Engagement score = (# likes x 1) + (# comments x 2) + (# shares x 3)) / # reach) x 10,000.
This gives social media team a Qualitative number when assessing each social post. There are other formulas for other social platforms that can be found here: https://unmetric.com/engagement/
I have really only scratched the surface on how many analytics tools are out there to help you and your organization with its online journey. Always keep in mind that analytics data may vary from tool to tool, and it is not a perfect science.
Now that your web and social media toolkit is full, go out there and make “Fetch” happen!
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