Not the cookie you were looking for

A cookie is a file saved in the user’s system. Cookies are created when the user accesses a web page; the browser finds it easier to navigate within the site and any information the user may have given while visiting the website, such as email address. Cookies are absolutely necessary for sites having huge databases. The content of a cookie is mainly the URL of the website, the duration of the cookie’s abilities and a random number together called the ID. With such little information that the cookie contains, it is not really possible to reveal any confidential information of the user.

Session and Persistent Cookie

Without cookies, websites and their servers have no memory. Without a cookie, every time you open a new web page, the server where that page is stored will treat you like a completely new visitor. The main two categories of cookies are Session and Permanent Cookies. Web pages have no memory.  A user navigating between web pages will be treated by the website as a completely new visitor every time he visits the site. Session cookies enable the website to keep track of page visits so the user is not asked for the same information that’s already available with the site. Persistent cookie files remain in the browser’s sub folder and are activated once again once the user visits the website that created that particular cookie. Persistent cookies help websites remember the user’s information and settings when you visit them in the future. This results in faster and more convenient access. Thus, cookies allow us to proceed trough many pages of a site quickly and easily without having to authenticate or reprocess each new area of visit.

Cookie Profiling

When cookies are collected to create a certain idea about a user, it is called Cookie profiling. The information that people reveal to each site they visit can be used by system administrators to build extensive personal profiles of visitors. By automatically placing a cookie on visitor’s web browsers, servers register data on the cookie. This allows administrators to view the history of site’s users, the advertisements they have viewed and the type of online transactions they have conducted. What is important to note here is that sites can only access cookies from their own domain. While cookies can be useful in some situations, some people see this as invasion of privacy.

Ad-serving using cookies

Third-party ad serving cookies solve a lot of problems that normally arise in a situation where the website’s visitor loads content from the website but the ads come from another site. Cookies help the ad serving website. Cookies limit the number of times an ad is shown. This function comes in particularly handy when dealing with pop up ads. Cookies ensure that a pop up only shows up once per visit. Some ads are more effective when shown in a particular order or sequence. By helping the website you’re viewing remember the pages you’ve visited during your browsing session, cookies enable ads to show up in a particular order. Advertisers need to know how many times their ads were shown on publisher’s websites. Cookies allow the third party ad serving website to collect this information. Cookies allow advertisers to keep track of how many people visited the advertiser’s websites through a click or a response, on the ads shown by third party as serving companies on publisher’s websites. This feature helps both the ad serving company and the advertiser dertermine if a particular advertising campaign produced the desired results.

Drawbacks

Besides privacy concerns, cookies also have some technical drawbacks. They do not always accurately identify users and can be used for security tasks. If more than one browser is used on a computer. Each has a separate storage area for cookies. Hence, cookies do not identify a person, but  a combnation of a user account, a computer and a web browser. Thus, anyone who uses multiple accounts, computers or browsers has multiple sets of cookies.

The use of cookies may generate an incompatibility between the state of the client and the state as stored on the cookie. If the user aquires a cookie and then clicks the ‘back’ button of the browser, the state on the browser is generally not the same as before that acquisition. This can lead to confusion and bugs.

Removing Cookies

Although cookies are very useful to navigate the Internet, you definitely need to know the basics of removing your cookie files so you can protect your privacy online. There are two kinds of cookies-regular text browser cookies and flash cookies. To ensure maximum web browsing privacy, you have to delete both kinds of cookies. Too many Internet users delete cookies which are text-based and leave flash cookies intact. This doesn't protect your privacy. You have to know how to delete flash cookies, too. There is no one standardized way to remove cookies since different browsers clear cookies using different procedures. Here are the steps to disable cookies based on your browser.

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[1] http://www.allaboutcookies.org/

[2] http://www.mediabuzz.com/

[3] http://files.investis.com/

[4] http://www.londonstimes.us/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/

[6] http://www.wikipedia.org/ 

The Facebook Page: The Good, The Bad, The UGLY

Facebook. Everyone knows what it is and I’m pretty sure mostly everyone has an account.  You can post an update, message a friend, create an event, post photos, and read the news of everything posted.  Another part to it is where you can create a Facebook Page of whatever is of interest to you.  There are many different kinds of fan pages where mainly your goal is to get as many likes as you can.  Once they like it, they can read about it and see your posts on their news feed.  This allows you to get yourself out there and recognized by more people which in turn could help improve your business.  It’s one of the methods to advertising.  

Facebook Page Metrics and Insights

To utilize the Facebook Page to your advantage, Facebook provides you with aggregated anonymous insights about people’s activity on your page.  This is where you can view the different Facebook metrics like how many people your post reached, how many people clicked it, how many people liked it, how many people commented on it or shared it.  If you don’t know how to utilize this Facebook fan page to your advantage, don’t worry there’s a breakdown on “6 Facebook Metrics Marketers Should Be Measuring”. [1]  This might be a little outdated so you can always go to the Facebook help option as well to get more up to date information on your fan page. [2]  With these metrics you can learn which posts are good, which posts aren’t as good, and how to improve your page based on what you see. 

Optimize Your Page Post Metrics

Once you know how to navigate throughout the page, you’ll find that there are many metrics for you to work with.  By knowing how each of these key metrics work, you should be able to analyze how effective your web page is and what needs to be done to boost the company sales. [3]  From the perspective of Facebook, there are also specific ways to promote your page and increase your likes.  Some methods - such as contests, promotional offers and promoting through other social media – won’t cost as much as others. [4] 

How NOT To Optimize Your Page

Now there are genuine ways to boost these Facebook metrics and then there are fictitious ways.  You want to be careful and make sure that your metrics are accurate because with all metrics, there’s always the possibility that they could be unreliable.  For instance, the Facebook Page Likes metric could be helpful or could not.  As I stated above, the more likes you have, the more detailed your metrics will be on your Facebook dashboard, but that’s if those people that have liked your page are actively participating in your posts.  On your Facebook page, there is an option to promote your page and get more likes.  The problem with paying to promote an ad is that there are businesses in other countries that get paid to like your page.  This technique, known as “click farming”, will definitely increase your likes, but it could even lessen your engagement metric. [5]  There’s more to this and I would love to discuss it, but since there are great links that describe it better and an even better video linked below about it all I’m pretty sure you’d rather read about the fraud and all those fake Facebook profiles there.[6] [7]  This video is a really good one about Facebook Fraud. 

Know Your Metrics

Overall, if you’re trying to increase your engagement and utilize the Facebook metrics to your advantage, you need to know how each one works and if they’re truly a good metric.  This also applies to all other metrics and how you analyze them.  Knowing how each one works and which ones are needed will allow you to use them to your advantage and analyze the data based on your company requirements as well as compare them to competitors and the industry.  Particularly, you would also want to make sure what you’re paying for is authentic and that you’re not getting ripped off.  If this is occurring on Facebook what happens to other social media that you pay for?  Are those authentic metrics that you're looking at?


References:

[1] Ernoult, E. (2013, March 18). 6 Facebook Metrics Marketers Should Be Measuring. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from Social Media Examiner: www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-page-metrics/

[2] What's new in Page Insights? (2013, November 18). Retrieved February 18, 2014, from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/247808452010769

[3] Tabita, J. (2014, February 11). Beyond Tracking: How to Improve Your Web Metrics. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from SitePoint: http://www.sitepoint.com/beyond-tracking-improve-web-metrics/

[4] Steeves, N. (n.d.). 7 Ways to Increase your Facebook Likes [Guide]. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from Wishpond: http://blog.wishpond.com/post/52815764009/7-ways-to-increase-your-facebook-likes-guide

[5] Schneider, J. (2014, January 23). Likes or lies? How perfectly honest businesses can be overrun by Facebook spammers . Retrieved February 18, 2014, from TNW: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/01/23/likes-lies-perfectly-honest-businesses-can-overrun-facebook-spammers/#!wgii9

[6] Cellan-Jones, R. (2012, July 12). Who 'likes' my Virtual Bagels? Retrieved February 18, 2014, from BBC News Technology: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18819338

[7] Hicks, J. (2013, July 3). IG report: State Department spent $630,000 to increase Facebook ‘likes’. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/07/03/ig-report-state-department-spent-630000-to-increase-facebook-likes/

[8] Facebook Fraud . (2014, February 10). Retrieved February 18, 2014, from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Metrics for Social Analytics

Due to the complexity of the structure and conversations going on the social networks, it's important to note the uniqueness of social analytics against web analytics in general sense.

1. What's the difference between social analytics and web analytics in general? What are the metrics usually used in the latter?

Generally speaking, web analytics can reflect the whole business process from product promotion to sales completion, whereas social analytics are more focused on the tunnel through which the product is propagated and customer acceptance.

According to Web Analytics 2.0, a metric is quantitative measurement of statistics describing events or trends on a website. However, as suggested by Paul. G Strupp, two types of metrics are commonly used in web analytics, one is MTC (Measure to Control), and the other is MTA (Measure to Analyze). The former is usually quantitative measurement providing answers to questions like "How many...?" " How much...?" "How often...?", while the latter could be both quantitative and qualitative that answers questions like "Why...?" "Who...?" "Where...?" "How are users...?"

Since the approach of web analytics has progressed into "outcome-based" era, the metrics adopted for each individual analysis case are very largely dependent on the objectives of the organization or individual that the analysis is serving. Below is some examples of objective-oriented metrics selection,

• Conversation Rate or Revenue Trends for eCommerce websites like Amazon.
• Depth of Visit for websites like Wonkblog.
• Visitor loyalty for websites like Facebook.

However, as diverse as the selections of metrics might be, web analytics in general serve the goal of discovering visitor browsing and purchasing behaviors. Being a very trendy part of this topic, social analytics place more emphasis on the effectiveness of the online propagation of certain product or brand, as well as the customer perspectives towards them.

2. Metrics chosen in social analytics

Each metric chosen is tightly associated with certain KPI. Differentiated by complexity of deriving from raw data and ease of interpreting into business sense, each KPI can be reflected by several basic metrics as well as advanced ones. 

Let's say your company is in industry IND, and you trying to promote or track you product PRO online. we'll see how it works on the platforms of social networks, and which metrics we want to look at.

• KPI: BRAND AWARENESS & REPUTATION

Basic Metric: SOV ( Figure 1.1)

Figure 1.1

Number of Conversations mentioning your product or brand out of the total number of industry conversations.

           

Advanced Metric:  SOV (Figure 1.2)

Figure 1.2

Number of brand or product mentions by influencers & vocal customers out of total number of relevant mentions.

• KPI: MARKETING PROGRAM EFFECTIVENESS

Basic Metrics: 

Social Reach: total # of followers across all social platforms (Figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1

Growth: Month-over-Month or Quarter-over-Quarter

Engagement = (likes+ shares+ retweets+ blog comments)/(# of published posts of pieces of comment) (Figure 2.2)

Figure 2.2

Advanced Metrics:

Engagement: by campaign; per specific social platform; per specific post.

Influencer Engagement = # of influencers aware of brand out of total # of industry influencer (Figure 2.3)

Figure 2.3

Cost/ Benefit Analysis = ROI of special campaigns/ ROI of traditional marketing campaign

• KPI: LEAD GENERATION EFFECTIVENESS

Basic Metric: Lead Generation Effectiveness (Figure 3.1)

Figure 3.1

Number of new leads from social channels out of number of total leads 

Advanced Metric: 

Lead Generation Effectiveness: Number of leads generated or influenced by social campaign out of number of total leads

• KPI: INCREASED SALES; SHORTER SALES CYCLES

Basic Metrics:

Social Sales Effectiveness = # of sales coming from social channels out of total sales;

Growth In Sales From Social Channels: Month-over-Month; Quarter-over-Quarter; Year-over-Year.

Advanced Metrics:

Repeat Purchases = # of customers buying more due to social engagement out of # of purchase

Overall Sales Effectiveness: Growth in average deal size; shorter sales cycles; more deals per sales person due to deeper customer insight

• KPI: CUSTOMER SATISFACTION; REDUCED CHURN

Basic Metric: Complaint Visibility/ Feedback (Figure 4.1)

Figure 4.1

Ability of customer service reps to post or comment on brands social channels

Advanced Metric: Social Comment Integration (Figure 4.2)

Figure 4.2

Ability to integrate social customer data & communication into voice of customer applications;

Proactive issue escalation (mining of social posts from customers to identify customer service issues or defection triggers);

Text & Sentiment analysis of social posts of customers.

Reference:

Kaushik, Avinash. Web Analytics 2.0. Indiana: Wiley Pubulishing, Inc., 2010.

http://www.libqual.org/documents/admin/arl_emetrics_workshop_june05.pdf

Actionable Social Analytics: From Social Media Metrics To Business Insight. April, 2012.