Archive for the ‘Measurement/Metrics’ Category
eriksr on July 28th, 2008
Dear Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb,
Thank you so much for your article about bit.ly. If I ever meet you in person I’m going to give you cookies and maybe flowers.
And you might want to do the same. Let me explain.
What is Bit.ly?
Bit.ly is a URL shortener similar to TinyURL. Unlike TinyURL however, bit.ly gives you access to metrics.
Why should I care?
Let me answer this with a common scenario.
Let’s say your client or company is about to launch a new site, or has created a new sub-page, and you want to let people know about it.
A shortened URL is a lot easier for people to read and understand.
Now let’s say you want to make this URL a link. And you want to track how many people click your link.
Traditionally you would use a unique referral ID appended to a link. So you end up with something like this:
- http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=1
- http://mydomain.com/tracking.php?ref=abc&destination=2
Looks simple enough, doesn’t it? But in my experience, co-ordinating with your client’s (or own) IT/webmasters to get a referral ID process set up is painful and time-consuming.
And that’s where Bit.ly really shines. Because, with Bit.ly, you can track how many people click your link without involving IT.
Bit.ly has a long memory
The first time you use Bit.ly for a pitch, you do so to shorten your URL. The second time you use it — after the pitch has been sent — you simply enter that shortened URL to see how many people have clicked your link.
Easy, eh?
But, even better, bit.ly remembers the last 15 times you used the service. So if you are putting together a report for a release that went out last month, say, and you want to know the number of clicks your link generated, all you have to do is surf over to Bit.ly.
Of course (and life just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?) you can forego the surfing and access this information via an RSS feed.
So where can I use Bit.ly?
Of course, since you’re using Bit.ly’s shortened URL and not the actual URL, you wouldn’t want to use this in a press release, for example (just think of the library of dead links you would have if Bit.ly were to fail). So save it for items with a short life span. Like a pitch. Or an email campaign. And any short effort where you want to know how many people are clicking your link(s).
Pitfall: Privacy and cookie cleaning
But great as Bit.ly is, there are two pitfalls.
First, the metrics about your shortened URL are not private. Anyone can replace the unique part of the info screen URL (the bolded part — http://bit.ly/info.php?id=ikWtm) with a code from someone else to see their click-through rates. So be aware of this if you don’t want to share metrics (or if you want to see someone else’s).
Second, if you don’t accept cookies, or if you clear your cache, then you won’t get historical information from bit.ly. Be aware of that if you are relying on them to generate client reports complete with click through metrics.
eriksr on July 21st, 2008
Hot on the heels of my rant about Technorati…okay, not on the heels at all, but let’s pretend, yeah? Comes word from Kristen Nicole at Mashable that Blogged.com has added blog article search to its repertoire.
This excited me. I recently gave up on using Technorati to identify influential bloggers and thought, yay, a potential replacement. Alas, it’s not meant to be. Read the rest of this entry »
eriksr on July 14th, 2008
I’ve covered this in other places before, but I want to expose this to as wide a group of people as possible, because it isn’t taken seriously enough.
Jakob Nielsen wrote awhile back about how much of the copy on a page readers actually digest. His post was based on research from “ACM Transactions on the Web“, a report from the Association for Computing Machinery (you can register for free to get access to reports, including this one). It was the first time I’d ever seen anything like it backed up by numbers, and I was stunned.
The finding that blew me away: People read a whole lot less than you think, and you may be wasting your time crafting much of your copy.
Read the rest of this entry »
eriksr on July 12th, 2008
In this new post I cover ways bloggers can work with PR people to build traffic for their sites. Pretty easy stuff — asking for product, information, or even setting up interviews. PR people are good sources of content, and content rules supreme!
My original post over at ProBlogger can be found here. It attempts to explain to bloggers why PR people do the things they do…with an eye towards easing tensions between these two communities. Think before you spam!
eriksr on July 7th, 2008
I’ve had it. Technorati, you need a reboot and you need one yesterday. You’re slow. You time out constantly. Your search results make no sense whatsoever! Your authority …algorithm? Is that what it is? I have no idea, because whatever it is, it seems to have no basis in reality. And can we talk about the spam that shows up in results?
You’ll all forgive me for complaining about something that comes to me for free, but if you’re going to do something, you may as well do it right. Ever since Technorati made that major update (or was it the executives fleeing a sinking ship?) to its site — what, one year ago? one and a half? — performance and reliability has gone down the toilet and stayed there.
Read the rest of this entry »
eriksr on March 8th, 2007
Quick Note: Today’s entry is courtesy of Cece Salomon-Lee, marketing communications manager for ON24.
Aside from a couple of side ventures, I’ve been in PR for nearly 10 years now. Until early 2006, most of my time has been at an agency. During my tenure, one of our challenges was demonstrating our value with hard measurements — 
the Holy Grail for PR. It wasn’t until I went in-house, and most recently with my current company, that I discovered some neat tips and tricks to measure PR’s impact. The following tips are based on measuring traditional formats of print and online coverage.
URL Links: How do you know that someone came to your site based on a newspaper article? One thing I just learned is tracking URLs. Our marketing folks use unique identifiers in URLs to measure different marketing promotions. For example, we can determine if you came from an e-newsletter or specific Website ad because we use different URLs for each. If leveraged for releases or media outreach, I could determine if a specific reporter reviewed the online demo or if people came to the site from Dr. Dobbs vs. The Wall Street Journal. The key is to work with the marketing department to see if they have a tracking system in place for marketing promotions.
Unique pages: Alternatively, you can create separate landing pages for press releases and news coverage on your Website. In practice, you would give WSJ one page to track vs. another for Dr. Dobbs. Though this requires a lot of time and coordination to pull off, the pay-off is providing personalized content based on your target audience
Combining 1 & 2: You’ve sent an email and you want to know what captured the reporter’s eye. Was it the first paragraph or the last? Taking a page from email marketing promotions, try putting links to company information at the top and bottom of the email. These links would either be unique Web pages or contain unique identifiers in the URL so you can track what is resonating with reporters.
Blog Traffic: For those seeking to measure site traffic to a blog, I started using alexa.com to determine audience size. The difficulty is that these stats are based on who downloads their tool bar so that Alexa can track their viewing habits online. Nonetheless, I’ve come to rely on them as a way to determine a site’s influence and get some numbers when unavailable elsewhere.
Web Analytics: Ever wonder if site traffic increases with an announcement or article? For us, we leverage Google Analytics to track traffic, most popular pages and other data for our website. By working closely with your client’s marketing department, you can track numbers on the day of and after an announcement. See if you create traffic spikes with announcements or when coverage appears in the media.
Continuing on the tracking theme. If you then give each media outlet a unique landing page or tracking-enabled URL, you can further pinpoint which outlet is driving the most traffic to your site. This is also key as this can drive sales leads. For example, we closely monitor our sales lead source via our salesforce backend. We then track the progress of that sales lead to eventual sale, which means…. we can actually put a monetary amount to the value of PR as it impacted the sales lead generation process!
The key lies in understanding how your client is tracking site traffic, their sales lead generation tracking process and if media coverage is indicated as a lead source in their system.
Blogosphere Buzz: There are several tools out there for this and I found BlogPulse’s (a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics) trend search () to be the best. Tracking the “buzz” over the past few months (up to 6 months), this trend line gives you a sense of how your PR efforts are impacting your client’s image in the blogosphere and relative noise about your company. You can also track against competitors, which is a great way to determine your momentum. Blogpulse also has a for-pay service that provides more detailed information.
The February 12th issue of PR Week highlighted some of these points in an article titled “Many factors involved in measuring PR’s online impact” (http://www.prweek.com/us/search/article/631416/factors-involved-measuring-PRs-online-impact/) by Tonya Garcia.
Though some of the above may be familiar to you, the key point is working with marketing. The next post is how to make your client’s marketing department your friend.
Cece Salomon-Lee is the marketing communications manager for ON24 Inc. She can be reached at cece dot lee at on24 dot com.
