Monitoring

Module 3 - Instructor Blog Post

What can be accomplished through Google Analytics?

Take a brief tour of Google Analytics via this video: 



- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keZAQZ1nkoc

There are four main components of Google Analytics:

1. Configuration - track which of your promotions or campaigns are generating the most traffic/conversions. 

2. Data collection – user interaction data collected through multiple channels.

Web JavaScript data: tracking code placed on every page view of website to show how users engage with websites such as URL viewing, language used, browser, device used, referring source.

Mobile app data: tracking is specific to operating system on the device – collects data after each activity. You need to add a code to each activity you want to track. The data not always sent in real-time but instead stored and collected when reconnected.

3. Processing – transformation of data (categorize devices as mobile/non-mobile and add filters to include/exclude data).

4. Reporting – google.com/analytics or you can access data from your account using api.

There are two types of data available through Google Analytics:

1. Dimensions – describe characteristics of users, their sessions and actions

2. Metrics – quantitative measurements that describe user behaviours to help you understand your users

Some of the key insights that can be gleamed from Google Analytics include, but are not limited to:

• Visitors: how many overall?
• Content: what resonates?
• Traffic: where are they going?
• Time spent: bounce rate, overall time
• Referral sources: is social media working?
• Metrics – are they doing what we want them to?

Example of the Insights Admin Panel.

What be accomplished through Facebook Insights?

Take a tour of Facebook Insights via this link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixmkJRnQB0g

• Content: What’s engaging & why?
• Receptivity: What audience is the content resonating with?
• Traffic sources: How are people finding you?
• Engagement: People taking about this (PTAT) is interaction
• Likes: Who are you fans and friends of fans?
• Demographics – Likes & PTAT

As the boundaries between marketing and customer service become increasingly blurred by “social”, measuring trust and influence (instead of quantitative ROI) becomes more important.

This is especially true for brands wanting to measure the impact of social media, but who are not able to directly link social activity to sales.

Waite (2011) explores the concept of NPS – Net Promoter Score: 

The metric is measurement of customer satisfaction in order to calculate brand loyalty. This is usually done in social media via a survey. Consumers are usually rated on a scale of 1-10 and ranked as promoters, passive or detractors. Users are incentivized to take a Facebook or Twitter survey (often anonymously), asking customers, fans and non-customers of certain brands, how likely they would be to recommend those brands to their friends. This is how some companies try to understand how satisfied people are with their product or service. Often they assign labels to help differentiate between the followers or fans.

Detractors – people who complain or share information but attach a negative experience to the product or service.

Passives – people who simply follow or are a fan of the company but passively consume any messages or information. They don’t share or comment or “like” or “retweet” for example.

Promoters – these are your influencers. They share your information, invite people to follow or be a fan, and they provide context to their promotion by sharing experiences with your company that are positive to encourage others to be a part of the group.

Waite (2011) suggests that the measurement of Net Promoter Score is based on the “word-of-mouth” process. Social media multiplies ‘word-of-mouth’ both in velocity and reach. It is through social media that both influence and scale are amplified in a way that traditional media could not achieve given its one-directional focus of communicating (push marketing).

And word-of- mouth, in order to be effective suggests Waite (2011), must be relationship-based: Influence and trust within peer-to-peer networks are earned not bought. The chief currencies of peer-to-peer networks are trust and relevance.

Compare the cost of reaching one million people just once through traditional (bought) media to the cost of touching one million people once through earned social media, where the public spreads your content and message for free because they want to and because they can, very easily.

This is why companies are integrating social media into their businesses. Social media enables companies to build relationships through influence and trust that is achieved through peer-to-peer networks.

One social media tool that offers its own version of the Net Promoter Score is Klout. 

Klout

Take a look at this video file-  http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/10/26/video-the-measured-life-whats-your-klout-score/

Klout offers what it calls an influence score.  When you sign-up for Klout, you receive an influence score that represents your ability to influence others online.  Klout takes a broad look at how you engage online through a variety of platforms, although Klout is the entity that determines which social media tools are worth including or excluding from its ranking.  

What are the strengths and weaknesses of a tool like Klout?

Strengths:

• Looks at a variety of tools
• Offers a non-traditional measurement – influence is the ability to get others to take action relative to your online contributions
• Provides a quantitative means to measure someone’s standing in society
• Is based on the activity of others and not the personality themselves
• Relates directly to the personality associated with the account
• Shifts and changes over time – adaptable time (not just one snapshot in time)
• Inexpensive
• Easy to use

Weaknesses:

• Still a quantitative tool, doesn’t look at the type of messages that the influence is spreading
• Klout decides what type of activity is valued, not the company or person using the data
• Klout decides which social media tools are worth including in the score
• Klout is free but it would be very expensive to create this type of tool on one’s own
• Influence might not be a metric that is valuable to helping a company’s objectives along
• Doesn’t consider weak ties and strong ties in the relationship or even the reality of the quality of the relationship, just the online interactions

Considering your work on Assignment #1 what techniques would you apply to help monitor your organization's social media presence and goal progress? Use our course materials, Twitter interaction and Modules posts to support your position. Include references.

The social lens

Module 2 - Instructor Post

Return on Investment

While return on investment is traditionally associated with things like RRSPs and stock market investments, it has also found its way into social media metrics and, as applied to choices in marketing and communications, analytics.

There are many people who will argue that it is impossible to put a value on a relationship.  There are others who believe they have pinpointed the value of a Like on Facebook.  

The default position - quantitative measurement - still lives but with social media companies can’t ignore the network effect.

Metrics for ROI - Return on investment is a calculation. ROI = (Gain from investment minus the cost of the investment) divided by cost of investment.

ROI can be a helpful tool in that it helps you understand – from a historical perspective – how well your social media has preformed.  This can be valuable because it can help you make sense, in monetary terms, of how much you invested and how much value you received.

However, ROI has also some limitations that are important to share. Consider this concept from Weinberg & Pehlivan (2011).

Traditional Approach = Quantitative measures

Social Approach = Quantitative AND Qualitative

As you think about measures and ROI, Blanchard (2011) suggests it is important to draw a clear distinction between two types of “currency” – financial and human.

A good way to differentiate between the two: cost reductions and increased revenue are financial. Human currency is everything else.

Examples from Blanchard (2011) of human currency in online measurement :

• Increase in unique website visitors
• A change in positive mentions
• A change in negative mentions
• Net new Facebook fans
• Net new Twitter followers
• An increase in visits to a brick and mortar retail store
• Increased time spent on website
• A change in volume of impressions
• The number of times an article was liked or shared
• The number of comments on a blog post

Examples from Blanchard (2011) of financial currency in online measurement:

• A 16% reduction in cost by shifting a portion of customer service tickets on Twitter
• $1.2M increase in sales
• A 16% increase in online sales during a Facebook promotional campaign
• Decreased cost per impression from $2.62 to $0.76 by leveraging social media channels

Measurement of human currency tells the story by capturing changes in customer behavior. They give us snapshots of what happens between the time a program is assigned its budget and the time it yields a measureable return.

Three Cornerstones of Online Metrics

Social media is about content.  You create and curate content for people to relate to.  The relationships form around the content that you contribute. The social part is the relationships.  The media part is your contributions.

When you are evaluating, you are measuring people’s (the social part) reaction to the content (the media part).

So what constitutes a measurement of people’s reaction to the content?

• People's behaviour with content.
• People connecting with content.
• People connecting content with other people. 

In Measuring what matters: The best metrics for measuring social media effectiveness from comScore (2013) this is described as Content, Growth and Engagement, and Audience.

1. Content Metrics - What makes content shareable?

Measuring your content type:

• Photo
• Status
• Video
• Link

Measuring time of day and day of week combinations:

• Determine when are people most active on your website or social media channel

Measuring topics and calls to action:

• Call to comment, ‘like’, share, or website
• Ask a question

2. Growth and Engagement Metrics

• Unique engaged audience (not just fans or followers)
• Amplification (shares and retweets)
• Consistent activation (average post and tweet engagement with your business)

3. Audience Metrics

• Percentage of returning users
• Frequency of activity (share/like/retweet)
• Demographics
• Percentage of shares and retweets

The online metrics are things to measure.  There is an aspect of SO WHAT?  attached to this.  So what if you’ve measured content, growth and engagement or audience?  What does it mean to you?

There are a variety of methods of analysis that can be done on data that you collect to decide SO WHAT?  And to share it with other people, who will likely then ask you NOW WHAT? (As in, what decision should we make based on your analysis?)

One approach to SO WHAT is Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment = feelings (attitudes, emotions, opinions). They are subjective impressions, not facts. So while you might be tracking how many shares or “likes” you achieved without understanding the context or sentiment behind that share you lose some valuable data that happens in the comments people exchange.

Questions sentiment analysis might ask (European Masters Program, 2013):

• Is this product review positive or negative?
• Is this customer email satisfied or dissatisfied?
• Based on a sample of tweets, how are people responding to this ad campaign/product release/news item?
• How have bloggers' attitudes about the prime minister changed since the election?

It is used frequently to gain business intelligence. For example: “Why aren't consumers buying our laptop?”  (European Masters Program, 2013). We know the concrete data: price, specs, competition, etc. We want to know subjective data: “the design is tacky,” “customer service was condescending”. Misperceptions are also important, e.g. “updated drivers aren't available” (even though they are).

Humans are subjective creatures and opinions are important. Being able to interact with people on that level has many advantages for understanding your current and potential customers.

Challenges with Sentiment Analysis (European Masters Program, 2013):

• People express opinions in complex ways
• In opinion texts, content alone can be misleading without the accompany voice tone for example
• Topic change is common and hard to track
• Rhetorical such as sarcasm, irony, implication, etc. are difficult to determine

Ways to track sentiment include (European Masters Program, 2013):

• Key words
• Emoticons

Things to consider (European Masters Program, 2013):

• What elements do you want to classify, rank, or score?
• What classification/scale do you want to use?

References:

Blanchard, O. (2011) Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Pearson Education, Inc. Boston, MA.

comScore (2013). Measuring what matters: The best metrics for measuring social media effectiveness. Retrieved from https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2013/Measuring-What-Matters-in-Social-Media

European Masters Program (2013). Language and Communication Technologies.Introduction to Sentiment Analysis. Retrieved from http://lct-master.org/files/MullenSentimentCourseSlides.pdf

Weinburg, B. & Pehlivan, E. (2011). Social spending: Managing the social media mix. Business Horizons, Vol. 54, pp. 275-282. 

"You can't manage what you don't measure." - W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker

Module 1 - Instructor Blog Post

There’s much wisdom in this saying, which has been attributed to both W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker.

It explains why the recent explosion of digital DATA is so important. Simply put, because of digital data, managers can measure, and with some effort know, radically more about their businesses, and then directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance.

But metrics isn’t the same as evaluation or analytics.

Metrics – which provides the data that is fundamental to analytics – is imperative.  And analytics takes metrics one step (or many steps) further in order to make sense of data in the context of business objectives (Lapointe, 2014)

To understand social media evaluation and analytics more fully, let’s start with what it isn’t (Lapointe, 2014):

1. Social media evaluation and analytics doesn’t just measure something.  It isn’t just about extracting and aggregating data.  This is still data – and not analyzed and evaluated data.  
2. Social media analytics do not define success and determine if you’ve reached it.  This might sound really odd at first. However, if you think about it, the opposite is actually true.  It isn’t a social media analyst that defines success and even determines if success has been achieved.  The role of analytics is to translate success terms into social media-friendly terms and vice versa.  The strategic social media analyst may earn a seat at the strategic table, but their role is still to align the role of the web with the overarching business goals of the organization.
3. Social media analytics is not a tool.  Perhaps the most famous tool to measure and aggregate online data is Google Analytics.  Don’t let the name fool you.  You’re still the analyst.  It’s the tool.  An example that will help make this real:  A GPS is a tool.  Driving is not a tool, and the tool does not drive.  The driver drives and, even when using a tool like a GPS, still has to apply analytical skills.  You can ask Sabine Moreau, who left her home in Brussels to pick up a friend at the train station,  a stop NORTH and slightly out of the way of her home base (Hansen, 2013).  She followed her GPS straight through Germany (two gas stops and a nap) and into Croatia before questioning her data (Hansen, 2013).  Don’t let tools think – they can’t.

So what is social media evaluation and analytics?

The answer is very simple and highly loaded – pretty much everything to do with understanding social media in the context of your business objectives – whether those are highly social concepts (better quality of life for the community) or highly quantifiable concepts (increase sales by 3 per cent this quarter).

It is a multi-disciplinary practice that aims to understand (and, predominantly) attempts to quantify success and uncover the best practices associated with using social media to breed even more success.  And it’s not about better of the social media use, it’s about betterment of the business success by optimizing the use of social media in relationship to it.

To help show the difference between someone who works with metrics v.s. analytics and evaluation, consider the beagle v.s. the wolf.  Both are hunters.  They are both fast, sharp, and focused on the hunt.  However, one hunts in order to stop, point and bark.  You can think of this as pulling data and pointing out – quite simply – where social media data has increased, decreased, changed etc.  The other hunts in order to dine.  It has a clear outcome in mind, and it goes after it.  The wolf doesn’t stop at the metrics.  It looks for patterns, possibilities, opportunities, themes, etc and translates them into better hunting and, as a result, dinner on the table.

Let’s look at this analogy in the form of a case study in the business world.

Consider retailing.  Let’s say the goal of the seller is to increase sales.  The beagle tracks books.  He can tell which books sell and which do not.  In the online environment, the beagle can even track which books the customer looked at and did not buy.  The wolf also sees value in these measurements and then provides recommendations on how to strategically put them to use in the context of the goal of increasing sales.  The wolf wants to know how customers navigate through websites and then provides recommendations to enhance that experience.  The wolf wants to develop algorithms to predict the books that customers would like to read – algorithms that perform better every time that the customer responds to or ignores a recommendation.  The wolf recognizes that it is the individual customer experience that needs to be enhanced online and caters to ways to improve the individual, rather than mass, experience.  The wolf focuses on the numbers – the quantitative – and also creates opportunities to be influenced by qualitative data, even if the qualitative data tends to be mined in quantitative ways.

Amazon as a company has performed like a wolf – putting many brick-and-mortar bookstores, or beagles, out of business.

Social Measures

With the advent of social media, the nature of our online interactions begin to change.  The focus on mass media has already been shifting, especially with the ability to directly target individual consumers.  Now, for a few of years, companies have been focused on the one-on-one relationship between the marketer and the consumer.  They’ve been strictly measuring the nature of this relationship.  While more complex than the one to many nature of mass media, the one-to-one relationship provides substantially better data to the company.  It has helped them understand their consumers better and given them opportunities to focus on enhancing the relationship directly.

Social media changes this substantially.

While humans have always dealt with the complexity of many-to-many relationships in real life, they’ve never had to think about what many-to-many relationships look like online.  The same is true for organizations.  The nature of online interaction has now shifted so that the organization is no longer in an online relationship with its consumer but with many consumers, who are also in relationship with each other.  While these dynamics were taking place in a small way behind the scenes, they rarely factored into a companies strategic planning, marketing and communications, or measurement.  Now the many-to-many dynamic is happening around the company and, whether or not they have a strategy to leverage the opportunities, they are right in the midst of its impacts.

Online Metrics

In the early days of the internet, companies tried to apply traditional  advertising and traditional metrics online. The Display Ad was the first form of advertising on the internet initiated in 1994 (Waite, 2014). The way of measuring success online in 1994, was primarily to capture numbers and then to interpret or assign meaning to them (Waite, 2014). It was hugely quantitative thinking, and it was considered extremely valuable in the company boardroom. 

This linear way of thinking about advertising and measuring the impact of advertising became slightly more advanced but was still entirely within the same paradigm (Waite, 2014).  The Display Ad evolved into Google AdWords, which was launched in 2000. While more sophisticated in its thinking, the metrics work on a Cost Per Click (CPC) or CPM (Cost Per Mile) (Waite, 2014). CPC advertisers bid on key word phrases relevant to their target market and only pay when an ad is clicked on.

This clamoring for presence in a sea of information was well received by marketers. It is still a highly popular means for companies to raise brand awareness. By 2012 AdWords became Google’s main source of revenue proving that awareness is still a mainstay of all marketing efforts (Waite, 2014).

The limitation of course is that Google AdWords only sees value in the direct relationship between the company doing the advertising and the consumer.  It is the online version of direct mail – trying to minimize the cost to the advertising company to directly reach and impacts its end user.  The CPC and CPM are measureable ways to determine if the consumer took online action.  It focuses on the behaviour and not the quality of the relationship or quality of the behaviour.  Consumers could be clicking through out of curiosity, out of interest or even out of a reaction of disgust for the product, company or advertisement.  There is nothing in this approach that helps understand the beliefs the customer holds about the company or product, or his or her intentions related to the company or product.

Between 1994 and 2012 we are still applying quantitative measurement, although now we have moved beyond impressions or online interaction and are able to measure whether the interactions translate into paying customers (Waite, 2014).The metric is known as CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or purchase) whereby the ad campaign cost is divided by impressions x click through rate x paying customers (Waite, 2014).

A publisher that only charges the advertiser when the publisher delivers an acquisition (or a conversion as mutually agreed between the publisher and advertiser.). CPA networks offer similar assets to CPC networks such as display banners, contextual advertising, mobile banners, leader boards and social media (Waite, 2014).

Three years after the internet begins, US Telecoms company AT&T places the first digital display ad (Waite, 2014).The metric is Cost Per Mile (CPM) (Waite, 2014). Advertisements are sold on a CPM basis by calculating the cost of an ad divided by the audience size (Waite, 2014). Analysts measure the amount of impressions served, even though a user may not have seen or clicked on it (Waite, 2014). By the year 2000, consumers are seeing up to 10,000 ads per day (Waite, 2014).

The advent of social media also started to make online metrics more credible in the boardroom because they could be calculated based on conversations – direct two-way feedback with people – rather than on leads (CPL – cost per lead is a variation on cost per acquisition, CPA) or just brand awareness or impressions (Waite, 2014). This is the start of the shift from the quantitative element of analytics to the qualitative.

The term “Cost Per Engagement” is trademarked in order to attempt to bring more credibility and accountability to ad units (Waite, 2014). Social advertising takes off in the year 2008 when Facebook launches engagement ads. Facebook user growth explodes from 150 million to 450 million during the next 12 months (Waite, 2014).

Unlike CPM or CPC, cost per engagement impressions are free (Waite, 2014). Advertisers bid and pay only for user engagement such as watching a video, leaving a comment, sharing information or posting a retweet.

Promoted Tweets – Starbucks produced the first Promoted Tweet (Waite, 2014) . This is a form of traditional push marketing but the difference is in the content.

Promoted Tweets are regular Tweets with the added bonus that they can reach more people who are interested in your business. They should be used to place your best content in front of the audience that matters to you at the right time. The promoted tweets appear at the top of relevant search results on Twitter.

If your goal is to drive a particular action via Twitter, Promoted Tweets are a great place to promote engaging content that includes a call to action to users.  Using Promoted Tweets you can:

• Drive website traffic by asking users to click on your best content
• Offer coupons and deals in the copy of your Tweets
• Drive leads using Lead Generation Cards
• Promote sales and giveaways

If your goal is to drive awareness for your business, Promoted Tweets can do this in a variety of ways:

• Expand the reach of your content like blog posts, white papers, and more
• Connect with influencers and brand advocates by ensuring they see your content
• Promote awareness around events and product launches
• Ask for retweets to gain an even broader audience for your messages

Measuring Social

Many believe modern technology has created “social” marketing but this concept has always been in existence because we are social beings that thrive on connectivity, belonging and interaction.  Instead, social media gave social marketing scale.

Today’s “social” marketing is a return to basics. It is how business was done hundreds of years ago: face-to-face, one handshake at a time. The difference now is that scale or reach is no longer a hurdle. Using social media companies can build loyalty, trust, preference and value with 140 characters or an image or a video, shaking hands from hundreds of miles away and having interactions with customers tens of thousands of miles away (Blanchard, 2011). More than this, social media companies can be confident (and this can be good or bad) that others, like in a village or community, are observing the nature of the relationship between a company and its target audience.  The interaction between a company and one customer can form an impression on many customers because it can easily be observed, shared and commented on by others, expanding the relationship in multiple directions (Blanchard, 2011).

The nature of relationships are no longer linear and simply about the relationship between the customer and the company (Blanchard, 2011).  One customer that spends a lot of money may not be as valuable as one individual that has a strong network to many potential customers.  This is a very different way to think about measures because it changes the types of things that organizations find valuable.

References:

Blanchard, O. (2011) Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Pearson Education, Inc. Boston, MA.

Hansen, L. (2013).  Eight drivers who blindly followed their GPS into disaster.  Retrieved from http://theweek.com/article/index/243813/8-drivers-who-blindly-followed-their-gps-into-disaster

Lapointe, E. (2014).  Web analytics. Retrieved from: http://www.atlantaanalytics.com/web-analytics/

Waite, J. (2014)  Twitter Help Centre. Retrieved  from http://support.twitter.com/articles/142101-what-are-promoted-tweets