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 [1]  This might be a little outdated so you can always go to the Facebook help option as well to get more up to date information on your fan page.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

Search engines & privacy

The current Big 3

A brief search engine primer

Search engines have changed the computing world, become a mainstay of the Internet, and have changed the marketing landscape in ways never thought possible. Initially, a search engine was designed to find keywords in a manually created index of all websites, or information on the world wide web. In it's earliest state, a search engine was a simple query or a program. Today, a search engine is much more than just a simple query. Now they have evolved into complex systems that span data centers and are the bread and butter of global corporations. 

Universal Analytics - One Step Closer to Becoming Omniscient!

Universal Analytics

Google Analytics < Universal Analytics?

Over the past few weeks we have analyzed, examined, studied, pontificated, and expounded upon all of the benefits (and potential issues 1 ) of using Google Analytics. To add fuel to that fire Google released a new tool called Universal Analytics. With UA, we have at our finger tips a variety of new possibilities in the analytics space, specifically:

• Use the Measurement Protocol to integrate data across multiple devices and platforms.

• The Measurement Protocol introduced by UA lets you collect and send incoming data from any device to your Analytics account, so you can track more than just websites. Leverage the new analytics.js code and new developer reference libraries from the Measurement Protocol to see how users interact with all of your devices — smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and even digital appliances.

• Improve lead generation: Sync offline and online data.

• With UA, you can track data from all your online and offline customer contact points, like marketing campaigns, sales calls, and store visits, so you can discover relationships between the channels that drive conversions. Because UA is primarily an innovation in data collection methods, there are no new reports showing cross-device data.

• Define your own dimensions & custom metrics.

• Custom dimensions and custom metrics are like default dimensions and metrics in your Analytics account, except you create them yourself. Use them to collect data that Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track.

• Understand how well your mobile apps perform.  

• Mobile App Analytics captures mobile app-specific usage data and integrates it with your Google Analytics account, where you can reapply your knowledge of web analytics to dedicated app reports. (Currently in beta.) 2

How to use Google Analytics, A starters guide.

  

As a novice to the field, I have been thinking about what is an effective way to use web analytics and one of the obvious conclusions is data / information is only valuable if we can tell a meaningful story from the output and determine what we can do to improve our business.

In this blog, I want create a guide for readers at my level.

 

Before I start though, true beginners might find this article by Lynne Brehmer helpful to understand the basics of web analytics.

 

Having Google Analytics is a good starting point to set a baseline for the site but as Tom Ewer writes "we need to curve our addiction and there is no apparent benefit to look at these numbers on a daily basis" (1) . Basically, it is important but be should not be obsessed about it. The logical next step is to start thinking about how to increase traffic to the site, obviously this is easier said than done but since we have established a baseline we can easily track what is working

VISITOR COUNT

Probably the most basic measure for us is to monitor visitor count and understand the site's traffic, which is very easy with Google Analytics (below is the visitor data for the class blog as of 1/26) One of the items to focus on is the unique visitors to the site, even though this number might not be very meaningful for a class blog for an e-commerce site this figure could tell us the potential size of our customer base. However, just like everything else this is not a perfect measure and here is a detailed explanation of some of items we need to keep in mind when looking at these figures.

Another interesting stat is the new versus returning visitors. Obviously this number requires another level of analysis to understand whether return visits mean customers saw an item and coming back to purchase it or they had purchased an item and came back to review the FAQ page or buy something else. Obviously, new visitor count is also important as it shows something is working and driving traffic to the site, the question is whether it is working as good as it could. However, depending on cookie profiles new visitor count is usually overstated, Neil Mason has a good article explaining nuances around these numbers, however, as he also notes ""A trend is a friend." Assuming that there isn't a massive shift in the number of people deleting their cookies or using multiple devices or browsers, then it's probably safe to assume that any change in the numbers over time is reflecting a genuine trend." (2)

UNDERSTANDING OUR VISITORS

Having more information about our visitors will help us to make better decisions on how we need to use our limited resources. If most of our visitors are from Spain and using Android phones, we should make sure that our site is optimized for  Spanish and mobile check out. Google Analytics' demographics section allows us better dissect our visitor base by demographics, behaviour, technology and number of other custom reports. (3) Below is sample data set for the class blog, seems like some level of iOS and Chrome support would be the best way to utilize our funds if we were to improve the site.


VISITOR TRAFFIC

Besides the volume and technology, it is also key to understand how visitors came to our site. It may be a marketing campaign drove an increase in traffic and understanding this will help us to replicate what has worked. In Traffic Source of the Google Analytics there are number of useful tools such as: Search, Referral, Direct and Campaign driven traffic. It also provides the breakdown of the visitors based on our campaign or business model. Below is the traffic info for the class blog. Even though we are not getting much search traffic, referral traffic is substantial. Looks like we are on track to meet one of the objectives of the blog.

A detailed explanation of various traffic types can be found on Webopedia.com

One of more useful traffic monitoring in Google Analytics is the URL builder, we can use this to generate unique identifiers that we can be used in our ads, this information is available under Campaign Traffic section.

VISITOR TRACKING

Knowing visitor behavior once they get to the site enables us to see how engaged our clients are with the content. In Google Analytics, the Overview report (under Audience) we can see the page visit count, the average amount of time people spend on the site in addition to bounce rate and number of other useful information. This gives us a high level view of the experience people are having when they are on your site.

We can do even more detailed analysis under the Content - Overview section. Here we can find pages that were visited and the page views count. This is a good way to find out the most popular sections. It can also help us to see where visitors are leaving our site.

In addition to the transactional data that is available on Google Analytics there are also companies like TeaLeaf and ClickTale that provides behavioral information as well. This technology can lets us see everything a visitor does on our site; we can see recordings browsing sessions to find out how they use your site. As  Shmuli Goldberg, Director of Marketing and Communications at ClickTale, noted "It's as if you're looking over their shoulder!" (4)  There is an excellent discussion on this topic on the Episode 26 of Beyond Web Analytics.



REFERALS

(1) Ewer,Tom www.ManageWP.com | https://managewp.com/effectively-use-web-analytics-to-your-advantage

(2) Mason, Neil www.clikz.com | http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1703608/analytics-basics-unique-visitors-new-vs-returning-visitors

(3) Google Analytics Analysis Tools | http://www.google.com/analytics/features/analysis-tools.html

(4) Goldberg, Shmuli Beyond Web Analytics #26 | http://www.beyondwebanalytics.com/2010/07/25/episode-26/