Effectively used Web Analytics can help your organization in more areas than just marketing. Correctly deployed, they can help HR understand recruiting programs, operations to plan for shifts and material input issues and shipping for seasonal trends. In this vein, marketing should not be the only ones looking at your Web Analytics.

Web Analytics are real-time, in fact they are the most real-time indicator your company will ever have. And they impact all aspects of your organization to help you make strategic and tactical decisions. This applies to government, large and small businesses and non-profit organizations.

With any client I encourage them to assign the Analytics to an individual or team to review the numbers and interpret the findings on a regular basis. Get your business involved, a “team” can consist of representation from Marketing, Finance, HR and Operations. The process usually involves providing the reports 2-3 days before scheduled meetings, reviewing key cross-functional numbers and generating a subsequent report for senior management.

An added benefit to this approach is building inter-departmental relationships so that each area better understands the issues that are important to them. This fosters a more collaborative work environment and may lead to increased productivity.

Before you can really begin to “measure” Social Media, and let’s be clear, this is a whole new element of measuring. The metrics for measuring remain unclear to begin with. First though, an organization must “listen” to the market and to it’s key audiences. By acknowledging that you need to monitor Social Media (blogs, social networks etc.) there is a recognition that something important is going on there. So first is to listen, and a monitoring tool can help you to listen. Certainly if an organization plans on engaging in Social Media activities.

Once you’ve listened, you can begin to determine what are important measurements. These vary by your corporate objective. If you’re only interested in measuring product discussion, then those measurements are different than for monitoring analyst and market opinions about the company as a whole. Since a company is impacted beyond just product campaigns, we believe monitoring as a whole is better.

The types of measurements a company might consider tracking are;

Demographics: Who in terms of a vertical, professionals, regionality, economic, socioeconomic, age and gender segments.

Influential Ideas (memes): A “meme” is a single idea that gets turned into a discussion and commentary. Here you might look for what we term “Igniters” or “Key Influencers” who spark an idea or discussion and move from there to generate attention. Another part of this metric is seeing how memes evolve from your original communication to the social media stratum. This can help later in product positioning and messaging.

Velocity: How fast is the story you, or a Key Influencer has seeded, spreading? How fast is it spreading across various media? This ties into Media Segmentation. Speed can give an idea of uptake and infer a larger audience interest.

Media Segmentation: Many well established news organizations also have blogs, or cite blogs in their mainstream coverage. If your story started in mainstream news media, did it spread to Social Media in the non-professional category. This then ties into “memes” and how the story evolved and what it became as you look at opinion. Key in this measurement is understanding where the “spark point” was – did it cross from traditional media (i.e. a print magazine article) and go online or was it from a conference or trade show?

Particpants & Converters: Who are the “Influencers” and are they getting others to then act upon their discussion to turn into conversions by engaging with your product or service.

Reach: This measurement needs to be clearly defined as to what depth of reach you want. You may only need or want to reach 50 people, but those 50 people could be your entire market. Reaching beyond this may be for more consumer focused products.

Network Connectivity: If you’re reaching those Key Influencers or Igniters, then how deeply or how well are they connected? Some of these Igniters may be more broad in their audience, while others stay very focused. This measurement combines with Reach.

Depth of Relevance: Just how relevant is the overall coverage? This is a crucial, yet difficult measurement to gather, and one that means analysing the story, then looking at Reach, Network Connectivity and Media Segmentation to help determine relevance.

Sentiment: It’s one thing to know your message is being hear, and responded to, it’s another understand the tone in which it is being received. This is 3 main categories; Positive, Negative, Neutral

All of these only become measurable to any degree if the content is desired in the first place. If your content isn’t any good, no one will pick it up to begin with. Each measurement is dependent on the other in order to obtain the Big Picture.

Once this picture is obtained, which may take time, then you can start to formulate broader strategies and tactics to influence messages and communications activities. You can’t control the message, you can only manage it. Social Media metrics can then be tied into analytics as a whole, and that is another discussion.

KPI’s rely on both Leading and Lagging Indicators. A lagging indicator is revenue results or inventories from past quarters that are compared to a Leading Indicator such as current gross sales. Over time, Leading Indicators can be used to look at the history of Lagging Indicators to get a sense of seasonality, production peaks and valleys and changes in the market position of the company. So how do Web Analytics play a part?

Few companies have a Web presence for the sake of a brochure, and if they do, they’re likely missing the point of what the Web has become, no matter the size of the organization. A good Web Analytics package such as Web Trends or ClickTrends and even the free and very usable Google Analytics can, over time become a vital part of your KPI’s. Analytics gives you a reliable, instant and trailing view of everything happening with your Web traffic. Not just in term of sales, but what people are doing when they visit your site, and how they even arrived there. Just a Pay-Per-Click campaign uses Analytics to measure conversion and ROI which translate into current sales as a KPI, so does how people use your site.

As an example, HR can look at the analytics to determine how many people looked at the Career section of the website, and where they went on the site after looking at current job postings. This can tell them the success of recruiting advertising as well as getting a sense of what content they need to keep relevant elsewhere on the site. Production might use visits to the product pages to obtain a sense of what products the market is most interested in, which can then help them work with marketing to push a certain product and thus prepare inventory levels accordingly. Senior management can use Web Analytics to get a “sense” of what is happening with interest in the market place.

Now combine your Web Analytics tool with a reputation management solution and you start to have a very powerful set of benchmarking tools to work with. Web analytics can play a vital role in managing your KPI program or as a part of it. It’s all in how you use them. Of course, intevix can help there.

Looking at organizations around here (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and the general opinion is no. There seems to be limited understanding in this space with a lot of companies learning about social media, testing the waters and learning from their mistakes (well, one hopes they learn anyways). Like Internet Marketing in this region companies are flocking to Social Media and adding it to their stable of offerings, it is the new bandwagon for the next few months and more jump on every day. 

How do you find a company or consultant that can effectivly lead you into the world of social media? Well there is nothing like seeing how these companies operate in the space, get the potential provider to go through their plan of action for their own business. If they can’t do it for their own business then they probably can’t do it for you.

Some areas of interest, targets and outcomes or really just something to think about. 

Community Outreach- Putting your business out there and talking with the Social media community to build awareness of your message through communities, bloggers and create relationships with the influencers in related social networks. Think about it, everyone online is involved in social media in one way or another.

Content optimization – Optimize existing web-pages and content-including video, press releases, inter-actives and web content- to maximize re-distribution and discussion. Keep people up to date, notified and give them the chance to be involved. An involved community could lead to product or service improvement, leading to increased revenue.

Monitoring and Reporting- Managing all campaigns takes diligent monitoring to maintain the quality of information and effectiveness. Its all about listening and reacting. One misstep could be costly, listening could be the difference in a good year and an amazing year!

What are the advantages?

Increased Revenue- The more eyeballs that see your message and the more often they see it, the more opportunity there is for them to hear you and get engaged. 

People are listening- Focused interest and increased user engagement returns in user loyalty and higher traffic as well as increased revenue.

This is just a basic overview, it gives a rough idea of the pitfalls and the benefits to social media if executed properly. Find a professional that can design and execute an effective social media strategy that works and will provide measurable benefit to your business.

For more info on what I do and the Social Media Consulting we offer visit our website.

What are hits? Well Wikipedia defines them as “A hit is a request to a web server for a file (web page, image, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheet, etc.). When a web page is uploaded from a server the number of “hits” or “page hits” is equal to the number of files requested, therefore one page load does not always equal one hit because often pages are made up of other images and other files which stack up the number of hits counted. Because one page load does not equal one hit it is an inaccurate measure of a websites popularity or web traffic.

A more accurate measure of web traffic is how many page views a web site has. Hits are useful when evaluating the requirements of your server, depending on the number and size of files which need to be transferred for one request. Servers should be tested to make sure they meet throughput targets (they should be capable of processing a certain amount of ‘hits’ per second).

Anyways it obvious some people are still behind the times and not keeping up.

Looking for another perspective on the Hits game, Visit Joel Kelly’s blog (Ad Pro @ Cosette). Great blog entry, Give it a read!