'Net Features : wm-analytics

Twitter Analytics Fails to Impress at Launch

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:19:00 GMT

Twitter is making its Analytics products free to the general social media public.

The information it’s making available however is failing to impress much of anyone (at least me), as most of the data is likely already included in whichever social media listening/management tool that you’re currently using today. There are some bright spots however.

In addition to showing mentions, follows/unfollows, and the click performance of recent tweets (along with how many favorites, retweets and replies it received) it also reveals which tweets had the broadest reach when compared to normal tweets. For example, we were able to tell at a glance that one of our recent tweets had 3x the normal reach. That’s not a game changer, but it is certainly a nice feature.

The inclusion of advertising related analytics, or perhaps even real-time trending topics from a specific following in the future could certainly add some value to social media marketers. Twitter users can access their Twitter Analytics by visiting ads.twitter.com, and logging in with their username and password. Just clicks the ‘Analytics’ link to see the growth of a particular Twitter following, as well as some general statistics on the performance of individual tweets, or the ‘Timeline Activity’ option to dig into the individual tweet performance.

Plug-in Customer Feedback Surveys with iPerceptions

Allison Howen — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:30:00 GMT

Obtaining customer feedback just got easier, because iPerceptions has launched new CMS plug-ins for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

These plug-ins use iPerception’s 4Q and iPSI research frameworks to provide marketers with a one-step process to start collecting, measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction. Marketers can choose to place a Voice of Customer (VOC) survey on their company’s homepage in order to gain insights into overall visitor satisfaction over time. Additionally, if the company wants feedback on a particular product or customer support, they can place targeted surveys on specific pages. It is also important to note that multiple surveys with different objectives can run simultaneously.

“As more companies rely on websites directly or indirectly for revenue generation, it is paramount for them to understand how real customers experience their digital property,” said Marc Tremblay, chief technology officer, iPerceptions. “Every company should have at least one VOC survey on their website, which is why we offer a free, entry level plan. With these plug-ins, we’ve simplified the installation process into a single step – so even novice users can easily install surveys and benefit from expert VOC analytics.”

Predict and Bring Back Straying Subscribers

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:10:00 GMT

The subscription business model is taking off. For companies, it’s a stable business model that appeases investors and stakeholders. From the customer side, there’s a value of paying only for what they actually consume.

Companies, however, haven’t been able to take advantage of the in-depth customer data that the subscription business provides. Enterprises that measure and monitor usage data, for example, can gain a wealth of insight they need to manage their businesses and monetize their products according to Denis Pombriant, managing principle of Beagle Research Group, LLC. By understanding usage data, companies can align their pricing and renewal efforts.

Scout Analytics’ newest product, a closed-loop Renewal Performance Mangement solution, can help. It actually predicts renewal opportunities and then tracks the resolution to improve revenue yield.

“Unlike financial reporting systems that focus on aggregate reporting of monthly recurring revenue, Scout’s new Renewal Performance Calculator is the only technology to transform historical renewal data into actionable predictive analytics,” said Matthew Shanahan, senior vice president of strategy at Scout Analytics. “Scout’s solution enables real-time tracking, source analysis and predictive analytics so subscription businesses can maximize customer lifetime value.”

Let’s explore a mock example. If Website Magazine used Scout’s new Renewal Performance Calculator, we could look at a subscriber’s usage and predict if they will renew or not. Did they read Website Magazine's July issue or interact with the Website Magazine apps? The dashboard will then send us a recommended action based on that usage, e.g. send that reader an email campaign or put them in touch with our subscription services department. Then, Website Magazine can track how that prediction actually performed. We can then change our “rules” based on the outcome and work with a Scout revenue advisor to adjust our tactics based on best practices and other analytics.

Scout Analytics isn’t just for media publishers though. Scout boasts more than 100 customers including those in the software-as-a-service and information services realm.

A free trial of the Renewal Performance Management solution is available at www.scoutanalytics.com.

Blosm Your Business Intelligence

Amberly Dressler — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:40:00 GMT

Businesses are constrained by budgets and the lack of resources to monitor their competitors adequately, which is why Thanx Media is thrilled with its upgrade to its data collection platform, Blosm.

Blosm automates the process of data collection and reduces the need for manual intervention. It provides a method for collecting product intelligence from multiple sources and presents the information in a format that helps businesses make the most of the information. Companies can then use this information to make solid strategic decisions around things like pricing, product presentation and SEO classification.

Specifically, Blosm looks at product comparison, catalog coverage, and SEO and classification strategies. Businesses can also use this information to discover how competitors are pricing and stocking products, to eliminate the manual effort associated with researching multiple websites to stay on top of industry trends, to automate the process of collecting and combining product data from multiple internet resources and more.

Gain Mobile Site Insights with ClickTale Touch

Allison Howen — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

A new solution from customer experience analytics provider ClickTale is helping businesses gain insights into the end-user experience of their mobile sites.

SaaS solution ClickTale Touch allows businesses to view their mobile customers’ “True-to-Life User Experience,” which includes a customer’s every tap, double tap, scroll, tilt and pinch on the touch interface. By leveraging these insights, businesses can optimize their mobile sites in order to grow and capitalize on mobile traffic.

“Visualizing user behavior inside the page has proven invaluable for perfecting Web usability, but the mobile Web requires a fresh approach – not only because it involves devices of various form factors, operating systems and input methods, but because mobile customers are much less forgiving of poor usability than traditional e-customers,” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of ClickTale. “ClickTale Touch is a powerful and effective way for companies to increase the conversions on mobile devices, an absolute necessity now that mobile commerce is really taking off.”

Businesses can leverage ClickTale Touch to increase profits by identifying and fixing issues that frustrate mobile users, like poor navigation or unclear calls to action. Plus, the platform can help businesses optimize their sites for the touch interface as well as improve customer engagement by learning what content receives the best response from mobile visitors.

Get User Experience Insights with YouEye

Allison Howen — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:40:00 GMT

YouEye is looking to make a splash in the testing industry.

The company, which was the winner of 2012’s Launch Conference Best Technology 2.0 Award, is an online user research platform that features remote usability testing with emotion recognition. As the company recently raised $3 million, it looks to disrupt costly and slow in-person user testing.

The platform features webcam and audio recording, which allows companies to view participants as they browse through sites and listen to spoken feedback. Since testing is remote, participants can take studies at any time and in any environment. Additionally, the Emotion Recognition functionality is trained on a dataset of 50,000 micro-expressions, which allows it to accurately identify when a user’s facial expression aligns with a variety of feelings, including happy, surprised, puzzled, disgusted, afraid and sad.

Furthermore, YouEye has its own participant pool, which chooses participants to complete studies based on the specific demographics that the tester desires. For example, companies can select the demographics of their ideal tester, including age range, gender, education level and income.

In addition to recent funding news, YouEye is launching Insite, which is a new product that delivers automated user experience insights. Companies can use this product to prompt site visitors to take a study, and capture full webcam video and audio from those who participate. To enable this feature, companies are required to insert a single line of code on their site. However, it is important to note that Insite is currently in Beta, and companies interested in trying out this tool must request an invite here.

Content Marketing Analytics Available at Informly

Allison Howen — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:47:00 GMT

A new analytics service from Informly is helping small business owners and bloggers optimize their content production.

The Content Marketing Analytics service expands on Informly’s analytics dashboard that was launched last year for small businesses. The service aims to help users build their audience and create content that generates leads.

“A lot of our customers are embracing content marketing and producing regular blog posts on their sites. They all use Google Analytics but it doesn’t really give them the actionable information they need,” said Dan Norris, founder of Informly. “For example they are trying to build and engage an audience but Analytics doesn’t tell them who their audience is. Informly tells them exactly who is converting on their site, what content they consumed and lists their site, Klout score and social profiles to enable them to connect further."

In addition to the people-tracking features, Informly connects to users’ blogs, brings in all of their posts and displays key stats such as views, tweets, likes, backlinks, conversions and more. Users can also sort by any of these metrics to find the posts that are having the most impact. However, Norris notes that onsite analytics is not Informly’s only offering.

“We built Informly originally as an aggregator that showed customers stats from a whole bunch of different places such as MailChimp, Xero etc,” said Norris. “These features are still available so content marketers and bloggers can get their onsite stats right alongside other charts like financial metrics, rank tracking and more. They can even get a daily HTML email that includes all of the charts directly in their emails with no attachments.”

How do Your Email Metrics Compare?

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:52:00 GMT

The reason that email marketing has remained a mainstay in the digital promotion toolbox is that, besides it working really well for almost every size enterprise, it is incredibly measureable. And when you can measure it, you can manage it (and monetize it, too).

When marketers have an opportunity to measure something (anything) they are going to compare their performance to that of the competition. So how do your email campaigns compare?

The latest study from email marketing automation provider Silverpop (the 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study) takes a deep look at key metrics including most notably open rate and click-through rate in multiple industries around the world.

OPEN RATES: As it relates to unique open rates, vendors of consumer products fared best with a median open rate of 25.4%, followed by Financial Services (20.9%) and Computer Software (20.4%). It's interesting to see how the best and worst (top quartile/bottom quartile) in each business category performed as well.

CLICK-THROUGH RATES: When it comes to the CTR metric, there's an almost disproportionate divide between the top and bottom performers. The median click-through rates for Consumer Products (3.3%), Education (2.8%), and Retail (2.7%) were the clear industry winners but again, it's important to take a close look at the top and bottom quartiles to see just how wide ranging the performance is among email marketers.

Universal Analytics for Merchants

Allison Howen — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:45:00 GMT

Nowadays people use a variety of devices, browsers and platforms to surf the Web and interact with businesses, which can make it difficult for merchants to keep track of consumers’ sales cycles. But a new set of features, which Google has dubbed Universal Analytics, aims to remedy this problem.

Learn more about how to use Universal Analytics to better track your e-commerce business's ROI here.

Google Rolls out Real-Time Widgets in Analytics Dashboard

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:50:00 GMT

Google announced it has expanded the functionality of its Dashboards feature and is now providing access to four new real-time widgets in Google Analytics.

GA users can select from one of four widgets – a counter, a timeline, a geomap and a table.

The counter widget enables users to show specific metrics (like active visitors), group the visitors by dimension, and set a filter (a feature available to all the widgets).

The timeline widget is a little different in that users can select to track a specific metric but then must choose a time period (30 minutes or the last 60 seconds).

The geomap real-time widget is where it gets really interesting. Users select the metric, and then choose whether to show the data on the country or the city level – they can also select a specific region.

The real-time table widget is also interesting in that after selecting the metric to track, the user can add multiple dimensions to display.

Can You Predict Social Behavior?

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:05:00 GMT

Monitoring trends and brand mentions is a key component of success in social media. The problem is that monitoring (and the subsequent management) is reactive as opposed to proactive like we really want and need it as brands; but it doesn't have to be that way - at least not any more.

"Too often, even the most aggressive brands are left chasing the conversation in social media, or hoping for that fortuitous alignment of real-time events and content they happen to have on hand," said Randy Browning, co-founder and chief executive officer of Blab, a newly launched platform for predicting social media conversations.

You didn't read that wrong - Blab's technology actually promises to apply its predictive analytics technologies to social data streams in order to show brands and social media managers what their audiences will be talking about in advance.

"With Blab, any brand, organization or cause can transform from a reactive stance to a proactive one; from followers to leaders, with a high degree of confidence in their strategy and their content," said Browning. "Since we started Blab, brands have been telling us that this changes the game for social media engagement. Now that our platform is released to the public, we embrace the challenge of proving them right."
Blab essentially is helping marketers know what their audience will be talking about in the future by capturing "lifestyle audiences" as opposed to demographic audiences in an effort to discover conversation context important to them. The result is details on relevant - but non obvious - commonalities in conversations from which insights can be gathered to inform business intelligence, content development and brand management.

See What's New in Website Magazine's Social Media Mavens Channel

Terapeak Brings Sales Analytics to Magento Merchants

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT

Analytics platform provider Terapeak has released MySales, an application extension for Ebay's Magento solution.

Terapeak will provide Magento retailer insight into sales across across multiple channels in unified view, showing merchants just how well sales and merchandise are competing in popular marketplaces - including Ebay.

“We want our customers to have access to information and tools that will enable them to achieve greater visibility into their own sales performance," said Kevin North, President and CEO of Terapeak. "By having the ability to compare their activity across multiple channels, our customers can determine how and where they can diversify their business. MySales is a natural extension of the market intelligence that Terapeak currently provides to online merchants.”

The official launch of MySales will be at the Magento Imagine Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada from April 8 to April 11, 2013. Terapeak currently services more than 1.3 million online retailers.

Real-time Events Now in Google Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:45:00 GMT

Google's real-time reports are one of the far more engaging reporting features for digital marketers as they can provide immediate insights into the performance of campaigns. But now the Google Analytics feature iss even better thanks to greater support for Events.

Say for example that you want to track specific interactions on a page (or website) such as a link click and do so independently of pagevies. Google Analytics newly enhanced real-time reports not only shows the top events as they occur but provides the ability to filter on particular event categories (from link clicks to downloads). The depth of these intelligence reports could prove quite useful to both marketers and website managers. For example, say some news event occurs and there is an increase in a pageviews for an article/post that was previously written. In this scenario, the website manager might want to highlight the content in some manner on the homepage and the marketer may want to redistribute it through social media channels. As Google suggested, having access to this level of data is akin to being about to pour fuel on the social media fire.

Google introduced three other features worthy of note, including reports to understand whether real-time traffic is from desktops, tablets or mobile, create shortcuts to favorite real-time segments, and the ability to compare real-time filtered data again overall real-time data.

Below is a screenshot of the Realtime Events Report in Google Analytics

Google Universal Analytics – What to Know

Administrator — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:10:00 GMT

Google has officially released its Universal Analytics offering to the digital masses. While unlikely that there will be a virtual stampede to use the enhanced platform (at least right away), doing so could certainly position your enterprise for success in the future. The reason? You’ll know more (way more) about your users and the performance of your digital properties than with the classic version.

Launched in beta back in October 2012, Google’s Universal Analytics release enables firms to import their own datasets into its analytics system in order to understand how customers interact with a business across many devices (including mobile, tablets and PC’s) – and touch points (search, advertising, etc.). Why is this important? More control over the type and depth of information collected leads to more refined (and better) analysis. Ultimately that provides a more complete vision of the marketing funnel.

Universal Analytics exposes configuration options in the administration panel that were accessible previously only to developers through an API. Now, pretty much any user can customize and control reporting of traffic from organic search sources, have better handling of session and campaign timeouts, exclude referrals and search terms as needed, and even implement a broad range of custom dimensions and metrics (the new tracking code also works on subdomains).

Essentially, the Universal Analytics platform introduces a new set of features that change the way data is collected and ultimately organized. In addition to a name change for the actual tracking snippet – from ga.js to analytics.js – Google also reduced the number of cookies (from four to one) and extended the life of the tracking cookie to two years.

The offering has apparently been well received by some big brands. PriceGrabber VP of Marketing Rojeh Ananesian (in a video in Google’s official post – included below) discussed how using Universal Analytics help server users better by providing them with “more relevant content and shopping results.”

App Annie Comes to Amazon Appstore

Administrator — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Promoting applications need not be limited to Google Play and the iOS App store – Amazon Appstore also provides developers with a viable destination to showcase their digital wares.

As more apps hit that specific market however, it will prove increasingly necessary for developers to measure performance of just how well their apps are doing against the competition.

App Annie has just released a new beta feature which makes quick work of that challenge. Those using App Annie Analytics for their iOS and Google Play apps can now add Amazon apps to their dashboard.

Developers will be able to automatically gather app store data (sales, rankings, reviews), monitor and analyze trends (e.g. are sales increasing or decreasing, and store this sensitive data.