Using Google Spreadsheets to combine Twitter and Google Analytics data to find your top content distributors JISC CETIS MASHe. When you share a link on Twitter there are a number of services, like bit.ly, which allow you to track the impact of the url in terms of the number of clicks it attracts from other users. At the same time there are a number of ways to monitor people sharing links to your site, the most basic being using a Twitter search like this one for hawksey.info. Using these search results you could start extracting the follower information from the person tweeting, workout potential reach and so on, but wouldn’t you like to know, as with your own bit.ly account, how many visits someone else's tweet generated to your site? Fortunately there is a way to do this and in this post I give you two tools to help you do it and look at why this information might be useful, but lets first look at how it is possible.
Referral Traffic In August 2011 Twitter started automatically wrapping links over 19 characters in it’s own shortening service t.co, later in October started wrapping all links in t.co. Why. 5 Steps to Calculate Social Media ROI Using Google Analytics. 10 Lessons Learned from Avinash Kaushik's Magnum Opus on Facebook Marketing. Date / / Category / Data, Marketing Earlier this week, Avinash Kaushik, who’s certainly among the most brilliant marketing minds of the generation, wrote an exceptional piece on Facebook Marketing.
It’s a lengthy read, but a worthwhile one, and I urge anyone who reads this site and uses Facebook to reach an audience to spend 30 minutes to fully parse what he’s put together. (from Avinash’s post) Given that I enjoyed the piece and felt it made some excellent points, I wanted to try to summarize those here, and provide some takeaways and perspectives of my own. Let’s start with the big lessons learned: Success (or failure) of a Given Campaign on Facebook Does Not Make the Platform Good (or Bad) – as Avinash wisely points out in his introduction, correlation is not causation, and hearing a great success story or a terrible failure shouldn’t swing your perspective. Facebook has undeniable reach, but the degree of value to marketers in the current state is debatable. PostRank and the Importance of Social Engagement Metrics to SEO.
There are many sites that curate content and links on the Web, including many blogs and a number of social sites that do it through submissions by their members, who can also vote upon those submissions. The inventors of PostRank came up with an algorithmic approach to rank articles and blog posts and other content on the Web, and present it to people based upon those rankings. I’ve found a patent application at the USPTO that provides some insights and details on how their approach worked.
Google acquired PostRank last June, as was announced on the PostRank blog on June 3, 2011. Given Google’s increasing move towards looking at more social signals for the potential ranking of content shared by others, it’s worth wondering how this technology might be used by Google, and what the PostRank team might be bringing to the effort. It would be a little disappointing if the only thing to come out of the PostRank acquisition would be some analytics reports in Google Analytics. Abstract. Content Is Not King: Key Takeaways from Amit Singhal.
Posted by Adam Audette | January 31, 2012 | 10 comments The King is Dead. Long Live the King. There’s an old adage online, by now so used up and tired I’m surprised how often it’s still envoked: content is king. I heard it whispered in 1996 by the pioneers, when it was still a fresh and novel concept, when it held promise and hope; when the web was still tiny. Content is king they said, when Google came on the scene with that clean, empty search box and bubble gum logo. They said it again when the web grew larger and noisier, when it got more difficult to get noticed. They said it before the content mills started to churn, turning out their feckless (and wreckless) acres of worthless words every hour. For the first time, I saw this axiom get turned on its head. “…it’s not just about content. Content WAS king. This marks a seminal change in the way Google (and the web in general) are moving: towards the social graph. More from Amit, “There’s a lot more.
I kid because I love. Key Takeaways. Content Analytics: Measuring Your Content Marketing Results. Remember how you had to define your content marketing goals when creating your content marketing plan for your business? Once you’ve started producing content, you need to make sure that your content is actually helping you achieve those goals. In order to find out, you will need to take some time to measure your content marketing results. The following are things to measure with your content marketing and the tools you will need to measure them. On-Site Content When it comes to on-site content (generally in the form of an on-site business blog), there are a few goals you can measure relatively easily with the right tools. Traffic & Conversions If you want to find out whether your content led to conversions such as product purchases through a shopping cart, lead generation form submissions, and mailing list opt-ins, you will need to set up Google Analytics to track conversions.
To see the most popular content on your website, you will need to visit Content > Site Content > All Pages. WordPress Social Plugin - Social Metrics Pro - Social Media Analytics. Manufacturing Serendipity. Date / / Category / Marketing, Startups I’m on the road ~100 days each year. When I’m in Seattle, I have at least 30% of my days filled with coffees, calls, and communication to folks outside the company from whom I’m seeking absolutely nothing and where my goal is merely to be helpful. I do most of this in the name of a process I now call manufacturing serendipity (though I didn’t actually think of it as an intentional thing until a couple years ago – the phrase was coined and told to me by my friend Dan Shapiro; Andrew wrote a bit about it on his blog)._ This manufacturing serendipity business breaks down pretty much like this: Go to places that are not your office (conferences, events, meetups, trains, etc)Participate in things, learn things, and be generally game for new experiencesMeet interesting people in the processBuild relationshipsBe generally awesome by helping the people you’ve met and doing good deeds with no expectation of a returnRepeat 1-5 hundreds of times.
Measuring Channels. Date / / Category / Marketing When companies consider which marketing channels to invest in, data is almost always cited as the primary driver. In reality, just like everything else human beings do, biases and irrationality prevails. via eMarketer (1 & 2) In 2010, businesses could see that US consumption of print was less than 1/3rd the consumption of Internet content. And yet, even by 2016, eMarketer’s predicting that advertising spend will still be tilted in favor of this dying medium (though at least it’s directionally improving). There’s probably a few biases happening here – the difference between the prestige of offline vs. online advertising, the long-term contracts and personal relationships of the print ad world, and the lag time it takes for marketing buyers to catch up with usage trends. Logically, the more measurable a channel is, the more investment it should have (up to its relative maximum output level).
Twitter drives 4 times as much traffic as you think it does | awe.sm: the blog. Over the last few weeks, TechCrunch has run a couple posts using their own referrer logs to measure how sharing on various social services drives traffic. In these and other analyses based solely on referrer information, Twitter performs surprisingly poorly relative to expectations many of us have based on our own observations of the volume of link sharing on Twitter. Does that mean the people you follow on Twitter who share links all the time are that atypical? Do most normal people just not click on links in Tweets? Is LinkedIn far more popular with the rest of the world than it seems to be with the people you know?
No, no, and no. Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers. Awe.sm was built for the modern web — a network of people, not pages — to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities no matter what path they follow. ‘Direct Traffic’ explained.