Monday, February 28, 2011

Value of Social Shares

Adding a widget such as AddThis , ShareThis and Facebook Like button on your site makes it very easy for your site visitors to share your site and content with their friends and followers via email or social media. Even though these are small widgets, that your developers/designers might not have paid much attention to, they add a tremendous value to your business.

According to a recent report by eMarketer 47.5% of the people trust the recommendations of their social media contacts. In order to leverage social sharers you have to make it easy for them to share you content and widgets like these do a good job in making your site shareable.

A small widget like this can save you thousands of dollars in customer acquisition and even retaining the customers via either direct conversions from the traffic driven by shared links or by the brand awareness that those links create.

Monetary value of Social Shares

Most of the sharing widgets have built in analytics to measure the virality of your site/content. Use the analytics report to understand how valuable those shares are. Make share analytics reporting part of your web analytics reporting so that other stakeholders can see the value too. If you need to convince your boss on why they should pay attention to these social shares, tie the value of shares to something more tangible i.e. Dollars/Pound/Euro/Rupee. Here are some of the ways you can tie the value of social shares to money:
  • Direct revenue
  • Life-time value of customer gained via social share
  • Advertising cost savings from the shares
Let’s do a simple calculation to see the value of social shares. In this example I tied the value of “Social Share” to the amount saved in paid search advertising

Example Calculation

Data that you will need:
  1. Clicks Generated– The number of click/visit/visitors generated from Social shares shares. (You might only get clicks/share from the widget analytics but you can easily estimate visits or visitors based on the data from your web analytics tool)
  2. Cost of a visit – You can estimate this from either a blended cost of all your online advertising or simply from paid search.
That’s all. Using the above information you will be able to calculate the “Cost Savings”, the cost you would have paid to drive those visits that you got for free from social shares.
Note: If you are able to tie the social sharing with your web analytics tool then you can not only get accurate count of visits (or visitors) instead of just clicks but also can get the conversions and revenue generated from those shares.


A/B Testing & Optimization
The location of you share widget will have an impact on the number of social shares you get. Social shares present a great opportunity to drive lots of valuable traffic. A/B test different locations of share widget to see how it impacts your bottom line and find the best location for those widgets.



I have attached a spreadsheet that will allow you to calculate the value of those shares and the opportunities optimization present. Just plug in some basic numbers and see the results. Download the spreadsheet from http://anilbatra.com/digitalmarketing/downloads/socialshares.xlsx

Related post: 3 Tools for Measuring the Virality of Your Content


Follow me on twitter @anilbatra

Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Anil-Batra-Page/130050670343547


Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?  Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board.

Current Open Positions


  • Web Analytics Senior Implementation Consultants (Contractor)  at Acceleration Emarketing (New York, NY)



  • Web Analytics Analyst at Designory. (formerly Agency.com) (Chicago, IL)



  • Web Games Analyst at Arkadium (New York, NY)



  • Online Performance Data Analyst at Announce Media (St Louis, MO)



  • Web Data Analyst at Genworth Financial (Richmond, VA)



  • Web Games Analyst at Arkadium (New York, NY)



  • Web Metrics Analyst at Omnitec Solutions (Alexandria, VA)



  • Thursday, February 24, 2011

    3 Tools for Measuring the Virality of Your Content

    Several studies have shown that people trust the link and site recommendation they receive from their friends or experts in the field. To capitalize on this opportunity websites have long used features like “Recommend to a Friend” or “Email this” kind of functionality. Recently we have seen a rise in usage of tools/widgets that make it easy for the visitors to share links via email and social media.

    Measuring Virality
    Many of the tools/widget that allow you to add easy sharing now also have built in analytics to help you track things such as which content is getting shared, how many people like to share etc, what methods do they use to share etc.

    3 tools that you should look into are:
    Tool Comparison

    ShareThis and AddThis

    ShareThis and AddThis are very similar in functionality with some minor differences but they look more like each other.
    Both this widgets have very similar reporting and tell you
    • How many links were shared
    • How many people shared them
    • What content was shared
    • Number of clicks back to you site from those shares
    • Sharer’s interest
    • Geo locations of the sharers


    AddThis and ShareThis only capture the information if a user uses the widget provided by these companies. However, these widgets won’t’ track the content shared by old fashioned copy and paste of either the URL or the actual content of the page. This is where Tynt comes into picture.

    Tynt

    Unlike AddThis and ShareThis Tyne does not have any share widget. Instead it works by automatically appending a unique hash value (a number folder by #) to each URL and the copied content. It uses that hash value (sort of like unique cookie) to determine metrics such as how many times the links/content was copied from your site, the number of visits it brought back and various other metrics.

    Most of the reporting is very similar to AddThis and ShareThis widgets. Here is a list of some of the data that Tynt reports on:
    • How many times your content was shared
    • How many visitors you got back from those shares
    • What content was shared and how much
    • It even tells you how your sharing compares to others
    • Geo locations of the sharers and clickers

    However, There is one report that only Tynt provides and that is the keyword report. It shows you
    1. Inbound keywords - keywords that visitors searched to get to your site (AddThis has a different variation of keyword report)
    2. Outbound keyword - the keywords that visitors found on your sites but left your site to find out more about them. This is a really cool report because it tells me what else I can write more about on my site so that my visitors don’t have to leave the site to find out more about them. I will be using that report to add more content to my blog/site.

      I will cover some more details on these tools and how we use them for our clients in future but for now I suggest you look at these tools and let me know what you like or don’t like about them.

      Do you know of or use any other service? Send me the details.

      Note: In addition to above three there is “Facebook Like” button too.

      Tuesday, February 15, 2011

      The Curse of Knowledge: Creating a Culture of Web Analytics

      Presenting the data is what Web Analysts do majority of the time. It is critical for Web Analysts to present the data in a way that is easily understood by their intended audience. However, I have seen time and again that this simple rule is missed. Why? Because we all suffer from what is known as "The Curse of Knowledge".

      What is The Curse of Knowledge?

      Here is what 37Signals.com write on this subject:
      Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

      "Curse of Knowledge" becomes a big issue for Web Analysts and Managers who are trying to create a Culture of Web Analytics. We assume that people know what we know because it seems so simple, right? Think again. Even simple metrics such as Visits, Visitors and Page views that seem so simple and no-brainer to you are difficult for others to understand.

      If the numbers/data/reports that you present to the stakeholders do not provide them what they need in a simple and easy to understand format then you are in for a very though journey to building a Culture of Web Analytics.
      To further illustrate my point, let me tell you about a situation that I personally had to go through.

      I was approached by a mortgage agent who wanted me to refinance my mortgage and claimed that he had better rates than any other lender in the area. So I thought, sure let me see what this guy has to offer. So we met and I gave him my goals

      1. The amount that I wanted to refinance
      2. The interest rate range that I was comfortable with
      3. $0 closing fee

      I also asked him to tell me how much my monthly payment was going to be for those interest rates. We decided to watch the interest rates to see when they fall in my range and he promised to send me the daily interest rates.

      That’s all.

      Next day he sends me the following table with some explanation of the two columns. All this did not make sense to me, and I deal with numbers all day long. He also wrote that he will explain this to me over the phone.


      So he called and tried to explain me the above chart but he still did not answer my earlier questions. See the problem?


      If you have to call someone to explain your data that mean you have not done a good job of understanding him and his needs.

      You see how easily you can alienate someone by not presenting the information in the right way. That’s the issue you face when you are trying to sell value of analytics within your organization. People look at your reports few times, find it too complex to understand and move over to other things. If that happens then you are done.

      So do not fall a victim to “Curse of Knowledge”, step in your audiences’ shoes and make your reports really simple and actionable. Three key points to remember when presenting the data are
      1. Understand your audience and their goals
      2. Understand their level of understanding of the subject matter
      3. Customize the data presentation to meet your audience level of understanding of web analytics and needs. Make it a no-brainer to understand and tie everything back to the business goals
      Questions? Comments?


      Follow me on twitter @anilbatra

      Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Anil-Batra-Page/130050670343547



      Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?  Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board.

      Current Open Positions




    1. Web Analytics Analyst at Designory. (formerly Agency.com) (Chicago, IL)



    2. Web Games Analyst at Arkadium (New York, NY)



    3. Online Performance Data Analyst at Announce Media (St Louis, MO)



    4. Web Data Analyst at Genworth Financial (Richmond, VA)



    5. Web Games Analyst at Arkadium (New York, NY)



    6. Web Metrics Analyst at Omnitec Solutions (Alexandria, VA)



    7. Web Data Analyst at Alzheimer's Association (Chicago, IL)