'Net Features : wm-analytics

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.

Analytics Get a Makeover with Visual.ly

Allison Howen — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:45:00 GMT

For some Web workers, sorting through analytics can be a dull, yet necessary, task. But a new tool from Visual.ly aims to change that.

The data visualization and infographic platform has launched a tool that provides users with a free visual traffic summary of their site’s performance. The tool leverages data from a user’s Google Analytics account to automatically create a custom infographic based on a site’s weekly performance. This infographic displays basic site analytics, such as pageviews, new and returning visitor data, social engagement, SEO stats and bounce rate.

The provided metrics are certainly not enough information for analytics professionals who need to dive deep into a site’s performance, however, the tool can be used to send a site snapshot around to other team members. By doing this, all colleagues within an organization can stay up-to-date with their site’s performance, and be aware of what metrics can be improved upon.

Mobile App Data Comes to Quantcast

Allison Howen — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:30:00 GMT

Content is consumed everywhere nowadays – thanks to the growing popularity of mobile devices. Because of this, it can be difficult for publishers, developers and advertisers to keep track of their audience across channels; however, a new service from Quantcast aims to solve this problem.

The advertising and measurement company’s free new service, dubbed Quantcast Measure for Apps, provides users with mobile application traffic data, including unique visitors as well as information on installs, versions and devices the app is being used on. Moreover, the service offers return usage metrics, which can help brands track audience loyalty and implement strategies to better connect with these users.

It is also important to note that users can choose to showcase all of their app data on the Quantcast website, or keep it private. Additionally, all of the app data can be viewed in the same dashboard as the company’s desktop and mobile Web stats, which provides users with a unified view of digital audiences.

"Apps have become an everyday habit for billions of consumers, and publishers and advertisers need better tools to uncover this hidden audience in order to gain a unified view," said Konrad Feldman , CEO and co-founder of Quantcast. "By directly measuring mobile app consumption, publishers and advertisers can drill down beyond app installations to learn key insights including audience loyalty and usage. Measure for Apps offers free, direct audience measurement and insights across all platforms – online, mobile Web and mobile apps."

Monitor App Performance with New Relic for Mobile

Allison Howen — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:45:00 GMT

If you don’t want to wait for user reviews to find out how your app is performing, consider leveraging the new mobile app monitoring solution from New Relic.

The application performance management and monitoring company launched New Relic for Mobile Apps to allow developers to see what their mobile users are experiencing in real-time. The mobile solution can be used to monitor the performance of native apps on iOS and Android devices, and the insights can be used to help developers optimize their apps for better customer satisfaction.

The New Relic for Mobile Apps offering provides developers with visibility from the individual mobile device to backend Web services, insights and data from real app users, the ability to monitor HTTP app errors and performance problems and constant monitoring of external services that apps depend upon for success. It also offers performance data by geography, carrier, device type and app versions to prioritize, isolate and solve the most urgent problems.

"There are few transitions that are more game changing than the dynamic that is happening today with mobile devices and services,” said Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. “It's no secret that mobility is changing lifestyles and the way people do business. The expectation is high that these services and transactions will be responsive and fast. New Relic will provide the insight for mobile applications in the same simple approach that has been behind our success all along."

The mobile monitoring solution is offered as both a free service and a monthly subscription. Moreover, New Relic for Mobile Apps is integrated with the company’s Web app service, and shares the same single-screen view. To start leveraging this service, existing customers can sign up through the New Relic SaaS app and new customers can sign up for a new account. Additionally, customers who deploy their mobile apps through a New Relic partner cloud provider will find it available in their app marketplace.

SEO Performance Measurement Today

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:45:00 GMT

Search engine optimization has changed dramatically during the course of the past fifteen years.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when the sole measure of SEO success was where a site ranked on the popular search engines of the day. Websites were pleased that they ranked for a particular keyword in a particular position. Those days are gone however.

Keyword rankings are unstable, personalization makes reporting inconsistent at best, and it's increasingly difficult to understand what actual strategies are paying dividends in the form of traffic - particularly as the influence of social increases in importance.

So how do you (and others) measure SEO performance/success for your Websites and digital properties today? While the approach your enterprise will take depends on a variety of factors, here are the most common:

: Conversions/Sales :

The savviest enterprises (and their SEO's) know that the one ideal measurement of success when it comes to search engine optimization is conversions - sales, signups, however they are defined for a specific digital property. Search engine optimization agencies, at least the pure-play vendors (i.e. not integrated digital marketing agencies), tend to shy away from using conversions as the sole proof of performance because there are so many other variables that come into play - namely design, price, checkout, etc - that may interfere. That's really why there are so few performance-based SEO agencies in the market - because they need more control over the total experience, and many enterprises are simply unwilling to let that control go.

: Unique Visitor Traffic :

Since most SEO agencies are unwilling (or uninterested) in convincing their clients to adopt a conversion-centric SEO campaign, most opt to measure their SEO performance by the number of unique visitors that arrive on their website properties. It's a terrific measurement, of course, but it can't tell as deep a story as measuring by conversions. There's another problem too, a big one. While the "keyword not provided" issue is a rather significant issue for websites interested in knowing why users are arriving at their site, some SEO's love it - particularly if they are using longer tail search phrases to drive traffic which may or may not ultimately provide much in the way of conversions or sales. In essence, you can get all the traffic in the world, but if users aren't actually acting upon your unique selling proposition, efforts are for naught. Of course, that doesn't much matter if the only performance metric is unique visitors.

: Rankings/Placement :

Conversions and unique visitor traffic are clearly good indicators of SEO performance by themselves, but despite all the complexities of the modern search engine experience (which is both highly personalized and dynamic) the actual rank of a site still remains a pretty good measurement. You may be thinking, "No it's not - everyone's search results are different," and that's true but there is a way to get a good idea about where a site is ranking on average for a particular keyword/keyphrase. For example, it's quite easy to set up a campaign on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and pay a few cents on average to get one of their knowledge workers to fire up whatever search engine you are measuring results for and let them, in aggregate, determine the average placement which can in turn be used in reports to clients or yourself.

Website Magazine is running a poll today on its Facebook page about common ways to measure the success of search engine optimization efforts (those approaches listed above). Cast your vote now and we'll be sure to share the results.

Get Pushy and Track Results

Allison Howen — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Developers have been leveraging Parse to send a half billion push notifications per month to their application users, and now, the app development platform is launching an analytics solution to help its developers obtain insights into their messaging campaigns.

Following the launch of the Parse Push Console for advanced targeting and scheduling of notifications, Parse’s new solution, Push Analytics, enables developers to learn what happens to their messages after they are sent. In fact, the new SDKs allow users to track if their application was launched by a consumer tapping on a push notification, both in real-time and over time.

While existing push customers already have access to the number of users targeted per push as well as graphs that display an app’s pushes over time, the company states that these new tools expose even more detailed information and statistics per push. It is also important to note that the new analytics functionality is not only limited to push notifications, because it allows developers to monitor app opens from within the analytics dashboard too, even if their app isn’t using Parse Push.