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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Twitter Analytics

There is a lot of discussion recently about how to measure authority, influence etc. on Twitter. There are a lot of tools popping up which claim to give some kind of score to help you measure you (or anyone else) against everybody else. This post is not about those tools and which ones I like (more on that later). This post is about things that we can track for sure.

There are millions of Twitter users who are tweeting every day, hoping and assuming that there tweets are being read by their followers. We can’t track all tweets and find out if they are being read but if you are one of those who post a link in your tweets then you are in luck. This post will show you how to track URLs posted in your tweets so that you can determine for sure if anybody is reading those tweets and also what kind of tweets from you are getting the most attention.

There are two types of URLs you post in Twitter

1. URL to your site
   
2. URLs to third party sites

1. URLs to you site – When you post a link to your site on twitter, you can treat it as a campaign just like a banner or search campaign. Add the campaign tracking codes compliant with your web analytics tool so that you can see the visits, page views, conversions and other web analytics data when a visitors clicks on your tweeted link and arrives on your site.
   
   Example:
   
   I use Google Analytics (GA) and you wanted to post a link to http://AnilBatra.com/, instead of just posting http://AnilBatra.com/ in my tweets, I add GA campaign parameters to the URL being posted.
   utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source are three query parameters that GA uses for campaign tracking.
   
   Link to Be Tweeted: http://AnilBatra.com
   
   Adding GA Parameters: http://AnilBatra.com/?utm_campaign=watweets&tum_medium=twitter&utm_source=011909tweet
   
   Now when I use WebTrends for Web Analytics then I use something like
   
   Adding WebTrends Paramater: http://AnilBatra.com/?wt.mc_id=011909tweet. Where WT.mc_id is the Webtrends campaign tracking paramter.
   You can use which ever web analytics tool you like, the key is adding the campaign tracking parameters the URL to be tweeted. It is that simple.
   



2. URLs to third party sites– Quite often tweeters post links to sites for which they don’t have access to the web analytics reports. For example, you posting a link to my blog http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/, you don’t have access to my Web Analytics Reports. As a results you have no idea how many people click though to the link that you tweeted.
   For such tracking I like a utility called CLIGS http://cli.gs (Note: I have no affiliate with this tool). This tool creates a short URL for any URL that you want to tweet. It than also provides you the clicks on that links as well as other stats such as
   
   • Geo Locations of visitors
   
   
   • Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too!
     

For the sites that I have access to the web analytics data, I create a tracking url as I showed above (1) and then use CLIGS to shorten the URL (2), this provides me both CLIGS and Web Analytics data for analysis.

Apart from tracking on links the other ways to determine if your tweets are getting attention is to see the number of Retweets you get, direct messages and @replies you get. I will cover those in my future blog post.

Comments/Questions?

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Search Pay Per Click Tip : A Simple Way to Increase Profit

Visitors go to search engines because they are looking for something. They enter their search query and want the search engine to provide relevant results.

Marketers buy Paid Search listings because they want to cash in on visitors searches by providing relevant product/services/offers etc. Remember, users are looking for results and not another set of search boxes or additional navigation to get to what they want. It is marketers’ responsibility to make sure the offers shown on their landing pages are relevant to the search keyword that the user searched for. DON’T make the visitors search again. Provide the user with relevant results right away. Don’t make people click more buttons or links to find what they are looking for.

You are wasting your money if you are doing PPC without thinking about the experience visitors will get once they click on the ad and land on your site. Landing pages are very critical to the success of any kind of advertising, but are even more critical in search advertising. Visitors don’t have patience. They need answers and if you can’t provide them with one immediately, they will go to a site that does. Your competitors are providing answers just a few clicks away. Here is an example to prove my point:

I searched for “hotels in Vancouver bc” on Google,



I clicked through three results,

1. Orbitz - Which is the top listing on the left hand side


2. Hotels.com – which is the 2ndd listing on left hand side


3. Expedia– Which is on the 1st spot on the top

Which one do you think will be most successful in getting visitor to book a hotel? See the screen shots below and you will know.



Orbitz takes me to a generic hotel search page and wants me to search again. It has “Ski Sale” listed in in-house banners on two prominent places. Where is ANYTHING related to Vancouver BC??? The site wants me to search again and does not provide offers or banners that are speaking to me. This site is pushing what it wants to sell and not what I want to buy. I don’t like it. I click back.



Hotels.com takes me to a generic hotel search page, just like Orbitz did. It shows Bora Bora, New York but Vancouver is nowhere to be found. What, you want me to search again??? Sorry, but I don’t have time. Check your bounce rate, you will see me there.


Expedia shows me the Vancouver hotels right on the landing page, provides me ratings, rates etc. It makes it easy for me to book my hotel. Rather than making me search again, it is getting right to the business of selling.
Which one do you think will drive more conversions? Lesson: When it comes to buying paid search traffic, don’t make your potential customers search again or browse around your site to find what they need because they won’t. Give them a relevant landing page and get to the business of closing the deal.

One thing you might be worried about is how you will go about generating all of these relevant landing pages. There are several tools such as Optimost, Test&Target, Widemile etc. that will take care of this for you. Most of the time you might just setup a generic landing page template and fill-in the content on the fly based on the referring keyword (see Follow the Search blog post that I wrote). The increase in conversion will itself pay for the cost of setting up unique landing pages, so cost should not be an issue.

If you still can’t justify the cost of having a unique and relevant landing pages then keep in mind that if you bid without relevant landing pages, two things will happen; First, as we already discussed, your visitors will bounce off of your site and go elsewhere. Second, the ad network (Google AdWords, especially) will penalize your page by decreasing your quality score, thus making it increasingly expensive over time to buy clicks. Yes, Google does score your landing page and will increase your minimum keyword bid prices if it doesn’t think you are providing its users with what they are looking for. Long story short: make your landing pages relevant.
Having relevant landing page will result in increase in revenue, lower bid cost and increase in profit.

Questions? Comments?

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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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Are Consumers Paying Attention to your Ads?

eMartker reports the results of 2 surveys which show that users are multi-tasking when using the internet.

Few things to think about:

1. Are consumers watching your video ads when they are already watching TV?


2. Are consumers reading all the text in your ads when they are already reading bunch of other stuff?


3. Are consumer paying attention to TV and Print ads when they are surfing web as well?

Are consumers really watching any of your ads?

Marketers have to really work hard to cut though all the noise and make their ads stand out to grab consumers attention.

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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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Director, Analytics, Resource Interactive (Columbus, Ohio)

Resource Interactive is looking for a Director of Analytics.
Resource Interactive is an Adweek Top Twenty independent interactive agency that helps the world’s leading companies including: Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, L.L.Bean, Apple, Victoria’s Secret and Hewlett-Packard to plan, create, build, assess and optimize the digital experience of their customers. Selected by The Wall Street Journal in 2008 as one of the top 15 small workplaces in the country, we are committed to being an employer of choice and to recruiting, developing and maintaining a staff of outstanding associates. (www.resource.com)

The Director of Analytics is responsible for establishing and managing a digital marketing analytics practice focused on programs for national and international brands. The Director of Analytics will lead a multidisciplinary team to develop an integrated and scalable program to: understand, communicate and evangelize analytics requirements, ensure accurate capture of data for analysis, develop and manage analytics tool set, and conduct data analysis to measure the impact of interactive marketing initiatives.

The Director of Analytics will work closely with the RI Account Strategy team and directly with clients to understand and establish key business objectives in order to structure the appropriate measurement, reporting and information delivery strategies and mechanisms. The Director of Analytics must be able to adjust to varying timelines and budgets to maximize the impact of these insights and tools on clients business. The Director of Analytics must also be able to partner with clients to create efficiencies in process and delivery and show commitment to continual program process improvement and evolution.

Required Qualifications

• A degree in Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Market Research, Economics, Psychology/Sociology, Physics, Operations Research, or other discipline involving experimental design, statistical modeling and quantitative analysis of data
• 8 or more years experience with responsibility for reporting and analyzing data in fast-paced business environment
• Ability to define project objectives, develop shared goals and manage others
• Broad knowledge of reporting and query tools and practices, including proficiency with web metrics reporting packages (e.g. Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc.)
• Strong communication skills with the ability to present information in spoken, written or visual form to a variety of audiences, from internal team to client executives
• Exceptional capacity and tenacity to solve problems with the ability to be both rigorously analytical, as well as intuitively attentive
• Ability to create/design and adapt data capture and reporting processes
• Ability to learn quickly and adjust to new technology and business requirements
• Proficiency in MS Excel and business productivity tools
• 25% travel

Preferred Qualifications

• An MBA or Master’s degree in other related fields
• Both agency and client side experience
• Proficiency with MS Access, SQL and
• Hands-on experience with web site optimization, including site structure, page construction, content, keyword research, search marketing principles, and SEO principles
Apply by

Website: http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/a/jbb/job-details/51593
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