9 Facebook Post Engagement Killers

Have you wondered why you are getting a very low engagement on your Facebook posts?  Here are nine common reasons that result in low Facebook post engagement and tips on how to fix them.

1. You are posting on wrong day and time – You should time your posts according to your audience’s (fans/targets) most active time on social media. If you are posting your messages when majority of your audience is not active then you are not achieving the maximum benefit from your posts. Below is an infograph that is based on analysis conducted by Bridge.com,  which provides general information about the best time for Facebook posts.
   However, rather than blindly accepting these suggestions, you should use your own data to figure out the best day and time to posts. There are several tools that will allow you to see when your audience is most active. For example, simply Measured provides you stats such as “Top Day For Comments” and “Top Time For Comments”.
   
2. You are posting too many or too few posts – As shown by the Track Social (image below), the more you post in a day the lower is the engagement. According to SocialBakers.com, if you post fewer then 2 posts a week, you will not engage your audience enough and you will lose engagement. If you post more then 2 per day (as a brand) you also will typically lose engagement. That means the ideal number is between 5 – 10 posts per week as a brand, and as a media company, this is typically 4 – 10× higher, as news are information people engage with all day long. However, you should not just rely on industry data, instead try to look at your own data to figure out the best frequency for your posts.
   
3. You are not posting engaging messages – Before preparing your post, think about who are you trying to reach and why will they care about what you are posting. Give them a reason to engage with your posts. If you a grocery store and promote a can of beans at regular price, then do you think you will get any engagement? Give them something to engage about. Give them more than just an image of the product. May be show some urgency on why they should click on the image, watch the video, click on the link, share or comment. Think about other ways to prompt then to take actions – Is there a limited time offer? Is this a limited edition product? Is this fresh crop? Here is an example of two post by PCC Market in Redmond:
   

This post had just 22 likes even tough the page has 45,800 fans. Why is that? Likely because there is nothing for fans to get engaged with?




This post on the other hand a lot higher engagement (though it can still be improved). There is a sense of urgency here “Seasons First Catch of fresh halibut” and there is link to halibut recipes (a call to action, see below).  Also, it is possible that PCC has more halibut lovers than mushroom lovers. The key is to understand your audience and give them something relevant and engaging.

4. There is no call to action or links – Call to actions prompts audience to engage. Ask and you shall receive. Ask them to click on a link, like a photo, participate in the giveaway are some of the examples to get you fans/followers to take action. The post of mushrooms above has no call to action. What is PCC expecting from the fans? Just posting a picture is not going to work, provide a call to action.
5. You don’t have the right fans/followers – This generally happens when you pay to acquire fans. People who do not like your page organically are less like to be engaged with your posts. Also, paid Fans not always genuine, according to Huffington Post, you might be getting fake users to like your pages.
6. You are relying on organic reach – Organic reach has been declining in Facebook. According to Oglvy report, the organic reach was about 6% for pages less than 500K fans and 2% for pages with over 500K fans. This reach is a lot lower today. Lower reach results in lower engagement. This means that if you want your fans to see your post then you will have to pay Facebook to put your post in front of them.
7. You are targeting the wrong people – As you decide to promote your post by using paid ads on Facebook, you might be trying to maximize reach (within you budget) and in doing so might be reaching people who are not likely interested in your brand/product/post. In this case the impressions of your paid post are increasing but you are not getting any clicks/like/comments/share.
8. Your content looks too much like an “Ad” – You are pushing ads for your brand and products and your posts look too much like advertisements. People are ad blind, according to Techcrunch article,  6 in 10 people totally ignore the ads. Do not just push ads, follow tip on this page and make people engage with your post.
9. You are not using video – Photos used to be the king of engagement on Facebook, now pretty much everybody is using them. According to analysis done by Quintly, videos generate more engagement followed by photos.
   

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• Sentiment Indicator: Social Media KPI
• Social Media Sentiment: Don’t Get Caught Up In Raw Counts
• Value of Social Shares
• 3 Tools for Measuring the Virality of Your Content
• Free Social Media Monitoring Tools for Small Businesses
• Social Media Analytics Part I
• Do Number of Likes and Followers Matter?

5 Tips For Great Customer Service On Twitter

Picture from CNET.com

Twitter has grown leaps and bound in last 4 years and now has over 190 Million members worldwide. Many companies have now jumped into using twitter as a means to provide customer support. Why? Well because more and more people are getting on twitter and it is way less expensive then phone support.

Recently I turned to twitter for help with one my services. There were two main reasons for me to turn to twitter 1. publicly complain about the company because I was not happy with the service and phone customer support 2. I was hoping that someone at the company will pay attention and get back to me. I achieved both. I was pleasantly surprised to find that these guys were paying attention and immediately responded.

So how was my experience? Well not much better than phone support. Though the twitter support agent tried her best but she was limited by the process and to some extent the technology. I think twitter could be a great customer support tool. However, we have a lot to learn. If companies want to use twitter as a viable customer support channel then they should be willing to pay attention to what is being talked about their customer support and brand and learn from their mistakes.

Based on my experience, I have outlined 5 tips that can help companies provide better customer support on twitter.

Five Tips for Great Customer Service on Twitter

• Knowledge - Have similar knowledge of your products and offers as your phone counterparts have. It is frustrating to hear different answers from two different channels. Not knowing who is wrong and who is right adds to the customer dissatisfaction. Whatever you say or mention on Twitter is going to be indexed by twitter, search engines and many 3rd party tools and will be there forever. So if you give wrong information via twitter it can and will be used against you. So you don’t want interns to run you Twitter customer support.
• Expectations - Answer tweets promptly or set clear expectation about when the customer can expect a reply back. Every second a customer has to wait adds to the customer’s anxiety because he/she is not sure if you got their tweet or not. With phone support you know that there is a live person at the other end. With email there is an expectation that it will take a day for someone to respond or you can send an auto response. With twitter customer expect immediate answers. Live up to those expectations or set them properly upfront else twitter customer service can backfire.
• Resolution - If you can’t resolve an issue in 5 tweets then have a customer support agent follow up by phone or offer to send a DM when the issue is resolved. You get thousands of tweets in a day and it is hard for you to respond each of those and resolve them in 140 characters. Remember not everything can be solved and should be solved via twitter. Set up a proper escalation process. At least for now, twitter cannot replace the live conversation or in person resolution experience and satisfaction for every single issue.
• Timeliness - Do not leave anything to the next day. You cannot go home without solving an open issue. Pass those issues to the next rep or hand them over to phone support. Since tweets are most likely not getting tracked in a CRM system as your phone or email support is, it is hard for you to remember the previous conversation and it is really annoying for the customer to explain everything again the next day. Ideal solution will be to track all your tweets in your CRM system. I personally had to explain my case 3 times to the same customer support agent because it was not resolved on time and each time I had to start over again.
• Information – Do not ask anything that is not required. You are dealing with 140 characters so limit the information that customer has to provide. If a customer provides you with her phone number/account number etc. you don’t need to ask her details about the products she has bought or the service she is subscribed to. All that information should already be in your CRM system. Most of the customers don’t know what products or services they have bought all they know is that something is not working when it should. Use your CRM system to find detailed information about that customer and the products/services they have.

(You can rearrange the above 5 tips to form a TIKER, Timeliness, Information, Knowledge, Expectations and Resolution, solution for Twitter Customer Support)

Remember, twitter (or any social media) is a new platform for customer support and it will take time before you can have a proper process and everything worked out. You should be prepared to take criticism and learn from the criticism because there were will be people who will write blog posts and tweet if your twitter customer support does not meet their standards.

Hope this helps. If you have a customer support story then leave it as a comment.

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Free Tools for Web Analytics, Search, Social Media & Competitive Analysis

Last week I was on a “Measuring Success” panel at PR+MKTG camp in Seattle. Someone from the audience asked if there were any tools for a newbie to start measuring PR & Marketing efforts and learning. I uttered the names a few tools that came to my mind.

Considering that there might be many others in the same situation I decided to write this blog post. In this post I am listing some of the tools that you can start using for free. Please note that this is not the most comprehensive list of the free tools.

Side Note: All the panelists unanimously agreed that you need to first figure out your measurement needs based on your business requirements and KPIs and then find the tools that meet your needs. One of the biggest mistakes most companies make is that they pick the tools first and then try to modify their measurement needs according to the tools they have in place.

However, I recognize that someone who is not familiar with the various measurement tools needs some exposure to the tools to really think about the questions they might want to ask before making an investment in a paid tools.

With that, here is the list of tools that you can start using today for free:

Web Analytics

For monitoring the on-site behaviors of your users and the performance of your site, use the following free tools

1. Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
2. Yahoo Web Analytics – http://analytics.yahoo.com/

Search

Use the following search tools to learn what keywords your customer/potential customers are searching for so that you can optimize your site accordingly.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. SEOMOZ has set of Free tools - http://www.seomoz.org/tools
3. Google Webmaster Central – Provides you data on how your sites in crawled and indexed by Google.
4. Bing Webmaster Center - Provides you data on how your sites in crawled and indexed by Bing.
5. Google Trends - http://www.google.com/trends
6. Google Insight for Search - http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Social Media

I already mentioned two tools in my blog post titled “Free Social Media Monitoring Tools for Small Businesses”, here they are again (and two new ones) :

1. Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
2. SM2 by Techrigy – http://sm2.techrigy.com/
3. Twitter Search – http://search.twitter.com/
4. Yelp.com – Good for small and medium size businesses. Find out what customers are saying about you and your competitors.

Here are some more but I have not used all of them, http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/

Competitive Analysis

Want to know how your competitors are doing compared to you? Use some of the tools listed below. Keep in mind that all of these tools use different ways to collect the data and hence the actual data you get from one tool will differ from the other but overall it should provide you good competitive information.

1. Search and Social Media Tools – Many of the tools listed above can provide you competitive information as well. E.g. Set SM2 to monitor the keywords that describes your competitor and you can start to see what customers are saying about your competitors
2. Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
3. Compete - http://www.compete.com/
4. Quantcast - http://www.quantcast.com/
5. Google Trends for Websites - http://trends.google.com/websites
6. Google Ad Planner - http://www.google.com/adplanner. Here is my review of Google Ad Planner

Like, I mentioned above this is not the most comprehensive list but it should get you started. Do you have a favorite free tool that is not on this list? Leave a comment on this blog post or send me an email with the name of the tool.

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URL Shortener: What and Why

About two months ago I got involved in developing a URL shortener called Clop.in. This service was inspired by the Twitter Google Analytics URL Builder that I had on my site.

Since then few people have asked me about the URL Shortner and the benefit of using them. This blog post is to answer those two questions.

What is a URL Shortener

URL shortener is a service/tool that takes any URL (long version) and converts into a short version with fewer characters compared to the original version. When someone clicks on the short version they are redirected to the actual URL (long version).

Example:
Long Version of URL:
http://sfindian.com/bay-area?utm_source=anilblogpostt&utm_campaign=urlshortener&utm_medium=blog
Short URL:
http://clop.in/JHErZM

Anyone clicking on http://clop.in/JHErZM will be redirected to http://sfindian.com/bay-area?utm_source=anilblogpostt&utm_campaign=urlshortener&utm_medium=blog

Why do you need a URL Shortener

There are several reasons why you might want to use a URL shortener, some of which are:

1. Twitter – On Twitter you get only 40 characters to write your message. If you have to post a link in your message then you might need a short URL to maximize the use of those140 characters. Either you shorten it up with your choice of URL shortener or Twitter will do it for you with it’s choice of URL shortener.


2. Emails – When you paste a very long URLs in the email, they are likely to be wrapped within email body leading them to break. Anyone clicking on those broken links will likely get an error. In order to avoid such mishap you might want to shorten the URL so that it does not break in the emails.


3. Phone Call – Every now and then customer service reps need to give out URLs to customer, prospects etc. on the other end of the line. It is not an easy task to spell out a very long URLs. This is where a short urls might come in very handy. It is much easier to give the short version shown above over the phone than the long version.


4. Adding Campaign Tracking Variables – If you want to append few query strings to the URLs so that you can track them as campaigns then it is much easier to hide them in a short url. For example, you might want to track the user who called the call center and got a link from customer support. In this case append the campaign variables to the URL, shorten them and then provide it to the customer support for their use. When the user views the url , you will be able to track the onsite behavior of people who called the call center.

Challenges with URL Shorteners

1. Service - URL Shortener services are generally free and do not have any SLA (service level agreement) with the end users. If the service goes down then anybody clicking on the short URLs created by that URL shortening service will get an error message. Your only option at that point might be to just wait and hope that the service comes back up soon.


2. Branding – Since the URL Shorteners have their domain name in the URL you loose any branding impact of posting the URLs. The user will not see your domain until they have clicked on the short url. e.g in the example above user will see clop.in instead of SFIndian.com as the URL domain, they won’t know that the URL belongs to SFIndian.com unless they click on it. (Note http://clop.in does allow you to have your own domain in the shortened urls, contact support@clop.in if you need more information or need to get it setup for your domain).


3. SEO – Depending on how the URL shortening service redirects to your site, you might loose the Search Engine Optimization benefits when someone links to your site but uses a short URL instead of the full URL. In the example above someone might link to http://clop.in/JHErZM instead of http://sfindian.com/bay-area?utm_source=anilblogpostt&utm_campaign=urlshortener&utm_medium=blog.


4. SPAM – As spammers start using the short URLs to hide the actual URLs the user and applications will start distrusting the short URLs (a lot of them already are very wary of short URLs, some sites have even banned the posting of Short URLs). To combat such issues many URL shorteners such as http://clop.in let user preview a link before redirecting them to the actual URL.

There are over 100 URL shorteners today. Mashable has a list of several of the URL shorteners (Note: This list is old and does not list several newcomers such as http://clop.in)

The two most common URL shorteners are http://bit.ly/ and http://tinyurl.com/. My personal favorite is http://ukliq.me/.

More on Clop.in

clop.in make it easy for you to append campaign tracking variables within the shortened urls. It also provides a dashboard which shows the total clicks by date, referrers, twitter mentions (delayed by 30 mins) and geo locations of the clicks. Now clop.in also allows you to have your own domain for the short URLs.





Questions/Comments?

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Free Social Media Monitoring Tools for Small Businesses

One of my blog reader sent me the following question in response to my blog post, Social Media Analytics Part I

Anil, are there any free tools for social media monitoring (twitter) that you can recommend? Tools, that a small business can use until they can justify the budget for one of the mainstream tools?

Short answer is "Yes, there are free tools for Social Media Monitoring". Below are two of the tools that I suggest.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the best free tool for monitoring the social media. Google Alert is an email alert service from Google that monitors news, blogs, twitter, sites, youtube etc. and sends you an email whenever a keyword, specified by you, appears in those places.

You can access Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts provides 6 types of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'. According to Google Alerts FAQ

A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on
the topic of your choice.
A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

I always use comprehensive so that it can cover all the sources. (Note: Recently Google has also started to cover Twitter feeds)




Alert Signup Page

An alert in my inbox


Google Alerts allows you to set the frequency of the alert notifications. There are three options
1. "once a day"
2. "once a week",
3. "as it happens"

I suggest starting with “as-it-happens” option and if you find yourself drowning in too many emails then scale it down to “once a day” or “once a week”.

2. SM2 – SM2 from Techrigy

SM2 has a free version. It is limited to 5 keywords that you can search on and only shows 1000 results but that should be enough for a Small Business.

There are few other tools that are under $15 a month. I will write about them after I have reviewed them.



Screenshot of SM2


If you need help with setting up any of these services please feel free to email me.

Comments? Questions?
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Social Media Analytics Part I

What is Social Media?

There are so many ways people define social media and some even argue that it is not really media. According to Wikipedia, Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Simply put, social media refers to all the conversation and engagement that happen on networks and sites like facbook, myspace, twitter, blogspehere, youtube, flicke, messageboard, forums etc..

Since these conversations can have a big impact on your brand it becomes critical for a marketer to understand what people are talking about their brand/products etc. so that they can take appropriate actions and help in creating and fostering a positive chatter (conversation) about their brand. Social Media analytics is about measuring and analyzing Social media (content generated by people throughout the web).

Broadly, Social media measurements comes in two flavors

1. Measuring the conversation about your brand in social media


2. Measuring the impact your own social media efforts (e.g. the facebook widget that you spent tons of money on or links that you posted on twitter etc.)

In this post I will talk about the first point, "Measuring what conversation are happening about your brand". I will have second post to discuss about second post.

Challenge with Social Media Measurement

Social Media measurement is very different from measuring your own web site (this is what most of the web analytics tool measure). You own your own website. You can (should) measure interaction of your visitors with your website. Social Media happens with our without your active participation. It mostly happens outside the realms of your website such as conversation on twitter, blogs, forums, facebook etc. Since you don’t have any web analytics tool installed on these places it is hard to find out what’s happening. Even if you had a web analytics tool installed you won’t know what people are talking about. Which is what you would like to know? This sort of information is not available from traditional web analytics tools like Omniture Site Catalysts, WebTrends or Google Analytics.

Social Media Analytics Tools

There are new breed of tools that help you monitor the social buzz. These tools let you “listen” into the conversation about your brand
In these tools you specify a set of keywords that define your brand or are associated with your brand and then the tools do the rest. They crawl the social media networks/sites and find all the mentions of the specified keywords and bring them back to you in nicely formatted reports.
The setup in most of these tools is a very manual process. Once the data is back you will needs a human to go through and analyze the data (not any different from your web analytics tool).

What kind of information do these tools provide?

Most of these tools bring some flavor of the following information (and much more)

• Brand Mentions - Conversation about your brand/competitor/industry (as specified by keywords). You get total mentions by day/week/month and also the ability to drill down to a specific conversations.


• Brand Sentiment – What is the consumer sentiment towards your brand? Are they positive, negative, neutral on your brand?


• Influencers - Who is talking about you? How influential are they and how many times have they talked about your brand.

Some of the Social Media Analytics Tools

• Radian6


• WebTrends - Powered by Radian6


• Techrigy - SM2


• Omniture - Integration with Twitter


• Visible Technologies


• Nielsen BuzzMetrics


• Biz360 Community Insights


• Dow Jones Insights


• Sentiment Metrics


• JD Power Web Intelligence

Below are the screen shots from Radian6 and SM2. Representatives from both these companies were very helpful in responding to my tweet and providing me the screenshot of their tools (see below).


Radian6


SM2


In part II I will talk about how you can measure the impact your own social media efforts (e.g. the facebook widget that you spent tons of money on or links that you posted on twitter etc.).

I might also write reviews of some of the tools mentioned above, if you are a vendor of social media analytics tool and would like me to do a review please contact me.

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ReTweet Demystified

Last week I wrote a blog on Twitter Analytics. In this post I am going to talk about a ReTweet, a Twitter action and a KPI that I mentioned in my previous blog posts on Twitter.

ReTweet is when someone takes your tweet (a post on twitter) and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too. ReTweet is where the true power of a network like Twitter emerges.

For example if you have a network of 1000 followers then you are only reaching 1000 people. But if those 1000 (or subset of them) people take your message and ReTweet it so that it is broadcasted to their followers that’s when the message begins to extend beyond its original reach. If the message is compelling then it will be ReTweeted by your followers and their followers and their followers and it will go on.

ReTweet Best Practices

• How to ReTweet
  
  You like a tweet and decide to send it your followers. You generally do it using RT, R/T, ReTweet followed by a blank space, the symbol @ and the username of the person who tweeted it and then the tweet. Keeping up with spirit of Twitter, RT has the least amount of characters and is the best way (in my opinion) and the most common way to retweet.
  
  Example:
  
  RT @anilbatra Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of #twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover? #wa
  (I know this is more than 140 characters but that’s the not the point).
  
  Here again is the format of ReTweet RT @username [tweet]
  
  


• Proper ReTweet Attribution
  
  Since the real power of ReTweet is that it propogates the message byond direct followers so what is the right format of ReTweet when you get a message from JohnDoe that was a retweet of a message of JaneDoe? Should you ReTweet it as a message from JohnDoe or JaneDoe or both?
  
  The correct way to RT, in my opinion, is to always credit the original tweeter and if you still have room left to add more characters in your tweet then credit the person who sent you the tweet.
  
  Example:
  
  AnilBatra Tweets: Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of #twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover? #wa
  
  JohnSong takes this message and RTs: RT@anilbatra Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover?
  
  Aaronlovelace gets this tweet from JohnSong, he should credit this tweet to anilbatra and if there is still space for more characters then he can RT with johnsong
  
  Aaronlovlace tweets: RT@anilbatra RT @johnsong Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover?
  
  The main thing to keep in mind is to credit the original Tweeter first and then the person who passed the tweet to you.
  
  According to a tweet from @agray, you should not add the hashtag (#) again if you are not adding any new insight in the RT. (see the example above, where a hashtag was removed from both twitter and wa).
  
  

Why Should You ReTweet?

RT also help you in gaining new friends and followers.
ReTweeting helps you propagate a message to your followers that is relevant to them but might have missed since they don’t follower the original tweeter. They might rely on you as an expert in certain area and it becomes your obligation to your followers to keep them updated on the tweets in your area of expertise.
If you take someone’s message and RT then you are sending a message to that person that you are an ethical ReTweeters and genuinely following that person (and BTW: pay attention to my tweets and return the favor by ReTweeting my messages).

ReTweet as a Measure of Success

As I wrote in my previous blog post, ReTweet is one of the KPIs you should use to measure your Success on Twitter. ReTweets is a measure of how good your tweets are. If you send a message and nobody ReTweets then possibility is that the message was not compelling enough for people to ReTweet or you have followers who really are not paying attention to your tweets. As I said before the ReTweet propagates your message beyond your direct followers. This allows you to reach people who might not have otherwise followed you.

For ReTweets to work we all need to follow the ReTweeting best practices I outlined in this post.

Comments? Questions?

Other Related Sources:

• What is RT(retweeting) by Kevin Rose


• Track your Retweets with ReTweetist

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5 Best Practices for any Campaign

Burger King recently launched a TV ad that directed visitors to WhopperVirgins.com. I learned about this on AdAge.com which wote:

“What if you don't remember the exact Web address and Google it? You still better remember the domain name. While WhopperVirgins.com ranks first in Google for "whopper virgins," it's invisible when you omit the plural. “

AdAge writes further:

”This is a major missed opportunity. Google Trends shows that recently, the volume of searches for the singular and plural versions have been nearly equal. "Whopper virgin" searchers must either go to an intermediary site or refine their search. Why can't consumers 'have it their way' and get to Burger King's site even if they're off by a letter? This multimillion-dollar branding campaign could have covered all its bases with a $10,000 search marketing investment. As it stands now, Burger King risks frustrating consumers instead of serving up one whopper of a video.”

AdAge listed following three areas of neglect:

• The domain: WhopperVirgin.com is a parked domain filled with ads for Burger King store listings, Virgin Mobile gifts, Virgin Atlantic flights, Virgin Islands vacations and Virgin Mary checks.


• Search engine optimization: The microsite doesn't appear on the first three pages of Google results for "whopper virgin" searches.


• Paid search: While reviewing Google's listings over several days, there hasn't been a search ad running on "whopper virgin" queries.

In addition to above another area which was partially neglected by Burger King was Web Analytics. I found two main issues with the web analytics

1. Web Analytics Tool Implementation - This site did not have any web analytics code implemented on the landing page. However the video does start as soon as user lands on the site which then fires WebTrends code. With this implementation I am not sure if they are getting an referring site or search engine information.


2. Data Analysis - Clearly Burger King is using web analytics tool. I am sure they were passing the web analytics reports around but I am assume that they were not doing any meaningful analysis. If they were doing any analysis at all they would have uncovered the SEO/SEM issues listed by AdAge.

Simple keyword analysis using their web analytics tool would have helped them uncover these issues. (Lesson: If you are spending millions of dollars on the campaign you should also keep aside few thousands for deeper analysis. Just passing the reports around is not enough).
It is very common to report on top 10 -20 keywords but these keywords alone don’t tell the whole story. Yes they can be good ego boosters but you have to look beyond top keywords and analyze the keyword that are either in the long tail or are not driving any traffic at all. Doing some basic analysis on search engine keywords would have shown them that they were not getting any traffic (or are getting very little traffic) from “Whopper Virgin” or “Burger King Virgin” keywords (I am sure there are more variations).

I hope Burger King learned its lesson and will be smarter next time they run campaign. (Note: All campaigns, offline or online end up having an impact on the site, search engines and online media)

Below are the 5 lessons that all marketers can learn from Burger King Campaign and apply to their own campaigns in the future:

1. Search Engine Optimization - Make SEO an Integral Part of your any micro-sites and campaigns (offline or online).


2. Paid Search - Plan to spend few thousand dollars from your campaign budget to SEM to augment or fill any gaps in SEO.


3. Web Analytics Tool Implementation - Plan to spend few thousand dollars from your campaign on Web analytics tools (which they did). Make sure the tool is properly configured to capture the accurate data. As I mentioned above, it appeared that the site did not have any code on the landing page, which means they were missing a lot of data and hence not getting the whole picture. Conduct an accuracy audit of the tool implementation; it can potentially save you millions of dollars by providing you data beyond click-throughs.


4. Data Analysis – Analysis is different from reporting. Web Analytics tools and SEM reports just provide you a view into the data. You have to conduct a full analysis to understand what the data means and what actions to take to generate a higher ROI from your campaigns. Plan to conduct an analysis on all the data you collect from various tools. Learn from this analysis, it will tell you where you are wasting your money and what’s working for you. Use the insights gained from the analysis and take appropriate actions to improve your campaigns.


5. Online Reputation Monitoring - Monitor news sites, Social Media (conversations/actions that happen away from your site) etc., look at what people are talking about your campaign and your brand. Learn from it and take appropriate actions. A simple tool like Google Alert can provide this to you this for free. I believe Burger King did pay attention to what was being talked about and as a result now you can see Burger King’s Paid Search campaign for “Whopper Virgin” and “Burger King Virgin” keywords.

Comments? Questions?

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

My View on Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

I heard about Twitter from few friends of mine who could not stop raving about it. After initial skepticism about how useful it would be, I joined the bandwagon and started twittering (Micro blogging on Twitter is called Twittering). I post about 1 tweet (post) per day on Twitter. There are some people who tweet all day long (I’m not sure if they do anything else).

From my experience so far I can tell you that it is a pretty good tool to learn things you normally would miss, things that you care about.

There are a number of people in the Web Analytics, Online Marketing and Advertising space that I follow and I’m always adding more people to follow. Following someone can provide you insight into what they are up to, what are the cool things they read or have come across, and what business challenges they are facing and trying to resolve. You can even learn how they solve these business issues.

Occasionally you will see people who tweet about their daily life. Their tweets looks like “I am sipping a cup of Starbucks mocha”, “I am walking into my apartment”, etc. But if you ignore such noise (unless you find it informative) you will find lots of useful information too.

Personally, here is how I have used Twitter so far:

1. Find new articles/blog posts : There are so many articles published every day and it is hard to keep track of everything. However, people I follow on Twitter bring that information directly to me via their tweets


2. Ideas for Blog Posts: Other people’s tweets have provided me with ideas for my own blog


3. Get Answers: I have asked questions and have gotten answers from people who follow me on twitter


4. Find new people to follow: I have found new thought leaders to follow, which in turn helps me with number 1 and 2

What does it mean to follow someone on Twitter?
Following: Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates.
Followers: Your followers are those who have elected to receive your tweets.

Someone mentioned awhile back about how to measure the success of your twittering. In his opinion the KPI for measuring the success of twittering is the number of followers/number of people you follow. The higher this number, the higher your success is on Twitter. What he was basically saying is that you should write great stuff so that people want to follow you but you should not follow anyone else because your KPI will drop. I don’t agree with this point of view, in my opinion, the KPIs for twittering success are :

1. The increase in number of followers


2. Number of Re-tweets/Tweet. Re-tweet is when someone takes your tweet and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too


3. New things you learn (hard to quantify but you know when you learn something new)

Other KPIs could be

1. Increase in your brand awareness (both personal and corporate)


2. Increase in any site side conversion (you will be driving users to your site/blogs etc.)

Who should you follow?

It really depends on your interest. I started with few people in the web analytics field and my coworkers. Now, I also look at the original tweeters of the re-teewts that come my way and if the person meets my interests, I start following them. I also follow people who are following me if they tweet about the stuff that interests me.

If at any point you don’t like what a person is tweeting about then you can just stop following them, it take one click to stop following them.

Here are some Web Analytics and Online Marketers that you might start following:

• Aaron Gray


• Alec Cochrane


• Alex Brasil


• Alex Cohen


• Adam Nenning


• Alan McGee


• Alistair Croll


• Andy Wang


• Angie Brown


• Anil Batra (me)


• Anil Umachigi


• Anjan Haalder


• Avinash Kaushik


• Bill Bruno


• Birger Friedrichs


• Bob Page


• Brad Bernstein-Reppen


• Brent Hieggelke


• Brian Au


• Brian Hawkins


• Bryan Cristina


• Bryan Eisenberg


• Chad Hollingsworth


• Chris Clapham


• Chris Grant


• Clint Ivy


• ComMetrics


• Connie Bensen


• Cortney Sellers


• Daniel Shields


• Dash Lavine


• Dave Barber



• Dean Burris


• Dennis Mortensen


• Doug Stewart


• Dustin Woodard


• Dylan Lewis


• Eric Hansen


• Eric T. Peterson


• Feroz Khan


• Fred Kuu


• Freddie Blicher


• Gahlord Dewald


• Greg Dowling


• Guliz Sicotte


• Ian Thomas


• Iya Chernyshova


• Jacques Warren


• Jason Egan


• Jason Wudip


• Jay Allen


• Jeff Jordan


• Jeff Leong


• Jennifer Day


• Jim Cain


• Jim Sterne


• Joanna Teo


• Jodi McDermott


• John Cole


• Judah Phillips


• Julie (jb) Booth


• Julien Coquet


• June Dershewitz


• Justin Metzl


• Kevin Rogers


• Kissmetrics


• Maigari Jinkiri


• Marshall Sponder


• Matthew Niederbergers


• Michael Feiner


• Michael Helbling


• Michael Summar


• Moritz Haberman


• Neil Minetto


• Nicole Rawski


• Oliver Schiffers


• Omniture


• Paul Smith


• Paul Trumble


• Paul Wille


• Peter Sanborn


• Rohan Kapoor


• Rich Page


• Ridder Manzanet
  
• Sean Carlos


• Sean Power


• Shannon Yelland


• Siegert Dierickx
  
• Stephane Hamel


• Steve Eisenberg


• Sunitha


• Terry Chadwick


• Thom Rogers


• Thomas Bosilevac


• Tim Leighton-Boyce


• Tim Wilson


• WDave Rhee


• Web Trends


• Zubin Kutar


• Zunaid Khan

I got this list from the Web Analytics Yahoo Group. Please let me know if I missed your name. If you would like your name to be added to this list then please leave your name and twitter username as a comment and I will update this list.

If you are already on Twitter I would like to hear your opinion about twitter. Do you think it has helped you personally or in business or is it a distraction?

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
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Latest Position: Director, Analytics at Resource Interactive (Columbus, OH)
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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Social Networking Sites and Advertising

Social Networking sites are used by millions of people around the work and thousands of new users are jumping on social networking sites every day. Almost all of these social networking sites and new entrants are dependent on the advertising to generate the revenue to keep them going. However, a study by BurstMedia shows that consumers have a very low tolerance for online ads.

52.6% of those surveyed accepted that advertising will appear on a web page but they had very low tolerance for more than 2 advertising units per web page. 29.9% of survey respondents said that they will leave the site immediately if they perceived it cluttered. Women are more likely than men to abandon the site. (Have lots of ads on the site and can’t figure out why people are abandoning, this might be a reason, time to do some testing)

It is not only the publishers who are negatively affected by the ad clutter but also are the advertiser’s products and services. 52.4% respondents has a less favorable opinion of an advertiser when their advertising appears on a web page they perceive as cluttered.

A study by IDC shows that the users are less tolerant of Social Networking Services (SNS) advertising than other forms of online advertising. Ads on SNS have lower click-through rates than traditional online ads (on the Web at large, 79% of all users clicked on at least one ad in the past year, whereas only 57% of SNS users did), and they also lead to fewer purchases (Web: 23%; SNS 11%).


Lack of ad effectiveness and slowing economy is making marketers cut their spending on Social Networking sites.

Market research firm eMarketer has cut Social Network ad spending estimate for 2009 to $1.3 billion down from $1.8 billion it projected earlier. It has also lowered 2008 estimated from $1.2 billion from $1.4 billion.



"As consumer usage of social networking sites continues to flourish, advertising has not kept pace," a release from eMarketer explained. "In 2008 and 2009, the recession will affect all forms of online ad spending, but experimental formats, such as the ones available on social networks, which cannot always demonstrate a proven return on investment, will be hit particularly hard."

So what should Social Networking sites do? Charge customers for the using the site? Nope, that is not going to work either. A recent AdAge study showed that no matter how much consumers hate advertising but they are not even going to pay for their favorite sites.

According to IDC Lower-than-average ad effectiveness on SNS will continue to contribute to slow ad sales unless publishers get users to do something beyond just communicating with others. If the major services succeed in doing so, they will become more like portals, such as Yahoo! or MSN, and they will come closer to the audience reach of the top services. If that happened, publishers would be better able to monetize their SNS.

Side Note:

eMarketer has also cut its overall online ad spending estimates

It reduced 2008 to $23.6 billion from its August estimate of $24.9 billion. The online ad growth is still increasing and is expected to be 11.3 percent higher than 2007. In 2009 this increase will be 8.9 percent over 2008.
Hardest hit is the display advertising, for which the growth rate estimate was cut from 16.9 percent to 3.9 percent. Search ads are expected to grow at 21.4 percent in 2008, its lowest level so far. Next year the search-ad growth rate should be at 14.9 percent, the company predicted, dropping to 10.4 percent in 2013.

Comments?

Site: AnilBatra.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

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Motrin Ad Controversy - Who Gained from it?

Last week there was a lot of uproar in the social media space about a Motrin Ad that caused Motrin to pull the ad within 2 days of launching it and post an apology on their site. Judging by this and the negative press it got, it seemed like a failure. However, in my last post I outlined few key measures to see if the ad was a success or a failure.

As I expected, Motrin site saw a huge increase in traffic on its site. According to Compete Pro Motrin’s site saw a 10X increase in its Daily Reach on the Web, jumping from .002% to .02% in one day. That is a huge. An ad without a controversy would have not generated that kind of traffic. Motrin should send a big thank you and some motrins to #motrinmoms , a twitter group that started this whole controversy.


Source: Compete Pro

Note: 15th evening is when the ad went live and by 17th evening they pulled the ad and posted an apology.

#motrinmoms, you were successful too because you got the ad pulled out and got an apology. Now go take some motrin to ease the pain caused by this ad, don’t forget to print a coupon at Motrin.

Comments? Questions?

Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Technical Consultant for Internet Marketing and Web Analytics at Unica (Waltham, MA)

Was Motrin’s Baby Wearing Ad a Failure?

Last week, Johnson & Johnson’s video ad for Motrin caused a lot of uproar in the media. There were a few moms, dads and media upset with this ad and voiced their opinions on blogs, twitter and other social media. But there were also many who voiced their opinion on the social media and said they did not see any issue with the ad. It was amazing to see how the negative voice of few people carried such a huge weight (as it does most of the time) that Motrin was forced to remove the ad and post an apology on the home page of Motrin.com.



So should we say that this ad was a failure? It sure does seem like it, doesn’t it?
However, in my opinion, there are several ways to look at it. Let’s look at various KPIs and see if the Motrin ad was a success or failure.

1. Number of Video Views – I think this was huge, way more than Motrin or their agency ever imagined. If Motrin calculates the percentage increase in actual v/s anticipated video views of this Ad then I am pretty sure they will find it that this ad was a huge success. (Related Post, Video Analytics)




2. Buzz created – Huge. A lot of buzz was created. The blogosphere, Twitter, Social Media, TV, Newspapers - everybody was talking about it. Honestly, I never even considered Motrin when I was looking for pain killers, but now I know it is another option made by Johnson and Johnson. Also, some people have told me why Motrin might be better than the other pain killers I have been taking.




3. Buzz Sentiment – Yes, there was a lot of negative press about this ad that forced the ad out (there were a lot of positive sentiments as well) . I am not sure if opinions about an ad from Motrin would really impact Motrin’s brand image that much. A lot of people I talked to did not view this ad negatively, but also did not voice their opinion in any social media so their sentiments were not taken into account. Yes, all sentiment measures will show an issue, but is there really an issue with the product or was the issue just with an ad? If you just look at the buzz sentiment in isolation then this ad appears as a failure.




4. Brand Awareness – A lot of people, like me, who never even considered the Motrin brand before, became aware of it. I think this is a huge positive.




5. Change in visits to the site from pre-video launch- I am sure it was a great success. I am sure a lot of people went to the site to see what all the fuss was about and to read the apology by Motrin. The apology got the blogosphere and social media world buzzing again driving even more traffic to Motrin’s site.




6. Change in Motrin Sales – This will really tell us if the ad and this backlash had any negative (or positive) impact in Motrin or not. As I asked above, was the backlash against Motrin, or just against the ad? If it was the ad then they apologized and took the ad away. The product “Motrin” did not have any negatives attached to it. As mentioned above, a lot of people might have to gone to the site. If you look on Motrin’s site there is a link on the top called “Special Offers”. You click on that link and get a coupon with the option to forward the page to a friend. I am sure that this increase in traffic would have resulted in an increase in coupons being printed and forwarded to a friend. This in return will possibly drive more sales. This seems like a success for Motrin.

In the future when Motrin comes up with a new ad they’re automatically going to get some additional coverage. I think that also makes the Baby Wearing ad a success. Free publicity; what more can you ask for?

So what do you think was it a success or a failure?


Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Technical Consultant for Internet Marketing and Web Analytics at Unica (Waltham, MA)<

Increase in subscribers with longer gap between posts

Ryan Turner has a great post titled “Going Viral is not a Marketing Strategy” on his blog.

In this post, he says

“Anil Batra noted a while back that his number of subscribers increased when he had a longer gap between blog posts. Goodness gracious! What could that mean? Apparently Anil has a theory. Yo Anil, care to share?”

He is referring to the pattern that I had noticed in terms of posting frequency and number of subscribers to the blog. I observed that that when there was a longer gap between my postings the subscribers to my blog increased far more than when I was posting regularly. So why was it happening?

Here is my theory

Visitors see the blog, like the blog, bookmark it (they reason why they don’t subscribe are listed below) and come back to check it. Since I write regularly they come back directly or via bookmark. If I keep writing regularly, visitors make it a habit to come back and check for the new content. But if there is a break in writing, they still want to read what I have to say, they just don’t want to keep coming back only to find that there is no fresh content. So they resort to subscribing to the feed (via feedburner link and a form that is on the right hand side panel).

I think the reasons why some visitors don’t subscribe to the feed blog in the first place are

1. It is probably much easier to bookmark the blog and come back to check.


2. The location of the subscribe form and link are probably not highly visible (right panel), even though most blogs have them at similar locations. To overcome this problem I should have something like the following in every post.

“If you like this post, you might want to subscribe to my blog feed.

Click here to subscribe to Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Online Advertising

I will try above link in next few posts and see if that makes any difference.

Now I need your feedback:
Readers of this blog, I would like to hear your views on this theory.
1. If you are subscriber of this blog then when do you subscribe, first time when you visited, after few times when you got interested in what I was writing or when you saw that there was nothing new for few days?
2. If you read this blog regularly and have not subscribed then what have you not subscribed? Is the subscription link hard to find? Any other reason?

Bloggers, have you noticed similar pattern? What is your theory?

I will further explore the traffic patterns, subscriptions and gap in the postings. If I find anything interesting I will post them on this blog.