University website designers, do you get the message?

Example of using Google Analytics Track Event to get a deeper look at which buttons are generating the most impact.

I recently created a site www.naoshiyamauchi.com to share my thoughts on online marketing analytics.  In July, [...]]]>

[This is a guest post from Naoshi Yamauchi. Follow him at @Yamalytics.]

What this post is about

Example of using Google Analytics Track Event to get a deeper look at which buttons are generating the most impact.

I recently created a site www.naoshiyamauchi.com to share my thoughts on online marketing analytics.  In July, 50% of my visits came from Twiter. 41% specifically from the ones I tweeted out.  How do I know this?  By tagging all the tweets I send out with Google Analytics tracking code, I can differentiate my own efforts from other traffic sources.

So let’s note that Twitter is the main driver of traffic to my site.  It’s clearly working better than the other channels so far, so if my goal is to generate more traffic I should focus on getting more followers.  I had a Twitter button on the sidebar, so at least that’s a start.

I thought about it some more and decided I should test to see if I add another Twitter button on the bottom of each post, if that will generate more followers.

After I added the new buttons, sure enough, I started getting some followers the next few days.

Cool… but which button are they coming from?  Are they from the newly added buttons on the bottom of each post, or the one from the sidebar?  I assume it’s the buttons on the bottom of each post, but I’d rather not guess.  Or are they even coming from the buttons at all?  Maybe a random person with a lot of followers happened to recommend following me and had nothing to do with the new buttons.

So how do I track to see 1) if the buttons are getting any actions and 2) which buttons are getting me the followers?

The key is to put in a “Track Event” into the buttons.  (Here is a link to Google’s site for more info: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html).  Since I use the latest Google Analytics async tracking, the code looks like below for event tracking.

The arrow indicates what is categorized as “Labels”.  With labels, I can add the same code as above into the post’s Twitter buttons with a different label name and see of the buttons on the posts, which one got the most.  The below shows an example of what I have in the Twitter button at the end of my “Old Spice parody video”.

This way, not only do I track whether an event was triggered from the button on the sidebar or the post, but also which post generated the event.

Now, let’s take a look into my Google Analytics account.

All the events shown are for users clicking on the Twitter buttons.

Sweet! What the heck happened on 7/21?  (Click for a larger image.) That’s when I put up my “Old Spice Parody” video.  Did it come from the button on the post or the sidebar?

To find out, go to Content and select the “Labels” under “Event Tracking.”

Wow. 91% of the events for clicking on the Twitter buttons have come from the button at the bottom of the post on the “Old Spice Parody” video.

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Bottom Line

The button on the bottom of the post killed the sidebar button.  I need to focus my call to action for Twitter events within the post and not depend on the sidebar Twitter button.  My next test might be changing up the icons.

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Takeaway

Find out your goal, figure out what is going to support the goal, track events, and think about next steps.

Track Event in Google Analytics is one of many useful google gadgets and is a great way to track where your successes and failures are and to use the data to further optimize your site.

Apple or Mac?

IE8 or Internet Explorer 8?

E-mail or email?

For online marketers and SEO experts, this World Cup 2010 the greatest question of all is:

Should I optimize my English language sports website or blog with soccer or football?

The answer is: it all depends.

Depends on what?

Here are some insights into this critical question [...]]]>

There are some good SEO questions:

Apple or Mac?

IE8 or Internet Explorer 8?

E-mail or email?

For online marketers and SEO experts, this World Cup 2010 the greatest question of all is:

Should I optimize my English language sports website or blog with soccer or football?

The answer is: it all depends.

Depends on what?

Here are some insights into this critical question for the period June 11 – July 11, 2010.

Soccer or Football Search Trends through Google Trends

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. The graph above shows the searches from the terms “soccer” and “football” from 2004 to 2010, ranked by “football”.

When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular search term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, there are 6 news that generated a spike in news stories (marked as A, B, C, D, E and F).

The 2 key years to observe are 2006 and 2010 because those are the years when the World Cup 2010 was held (2006: Germany and 2010: South Africa). However, this graph only provides 2 clear insights:

1. On years when the World Cup is celebrated, the number of searches of “soccer” and “football” on Google tends to be closer in number that in non-World Cup years.
2. The “soccer” news references volume is higher in 2010 that it was 2006.

Who is Searching for Football

The blue indicates the volume of “football” searches, while the red indicates the volume of “soccer” searches.

The U.K. clearly dominates the search of “football” in Google with 8 of the top 10 cities in the world searching for this term.

Who is Searching for Soccer

Football purists might jump to say the United States, however the actual results are surprising.

The host country of the 2010 edition of the World Cup lead the pack in the search of “soccer” at Google. Surprisingly, the Canadians, Australians, and Irish are searching for “soccer” at Google more often than the Americans.

Despite its 5th position on the top countries looking for “soccer” at Google, still the U.S. has 5 out of the top 10 cities in the world.

What about Demand?

LinkWorth, a Dallas, Texas based company that specializes in search engine marketing, reports for the term “football” the following keywords that are currently (as of 06/18/2010) being bid for in their system:

football equipment

football memorabilia

football tickets

fantasy football

football odds

football jerseys

On the “soccer” side, there are only bids for: soccer goal.

While there is no guarantee that the presented football terms are strictly related to the FIFA sport and not to the NFL sport, it does appear that there is more SEO demand for football keywords than for soccer keywords.

Recommendations

So what is a SEO expert to do: soccer or football?

Here are some rules of thumb:

• If you are optimizing your website for SEO and SEM within the United States, you must clearly optimize for “soccer”.  Also, if you’re planning to purchase some keywords through Google Adwords, take a look at the prices in the following cities: Washington, D.C.; Richardson, TX; Seattle, WA; Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL. These are cities generating most searches for soccer in Google for the United States.
• If you are optimizing your website for SEO and SEM for any other country in the world (except Canada and South Africa), you should optimize for “football”. If you’re planning to purchase some keywords through Google Adwords, take a look at the British market because it offers the lion’s share of the search engine market looking for “football”. However, be aware that you will need a considerable budget in order to efficiently compete n Google Adwords for this region.
• In Canada, you need to optimize for both “soccer” and “football”.
• No matter whether you optimize for “soccer” or “football’, the term “soccer goal” is a keyword to always keep in mind. Owners of YouTube channels featuring highlight reels of goals, pay close attention to all the possible variations of this keyword when selecting the tags for your videos.

A couple brave organizations ventured into creating a Facebook Profile, Group or Page to manage its online presence on this social network.

However nowadays everybody and, even your mother, is present on Facebook.

On a daily basis, I receive questions [...]]]>

For a while organizations hesitated to jump on the Facebook bandwagon.

A couple brave organizations ventured into creating a Facebook Profile, Group or Page to manage its online presence on this social network.

However nowadays everybody and, even your mother, is present on Facebook.

On a daily basis, I receive questions at @idaconcpts, on whether or not a certain organization should have a presence on Facebook.  My answer is always the same, it depends.

It depends on:

1) Your objectives.

2) Your target audience.

On this post, we’ll address the second point: your target audience.

Know Your Target Audience

Before even thinking about spending marketing dollars on anything, you need to develop a clear idea of what are the traits and characteristics. At a very basic level, you need to know your audience’s:

• Geographic location
• Age
• Gender
• Race (if applicable)

If you don’t know these basic traits from your target audience, you’re in big trouble.

Yes, the stop-everything-and-fix-this-right-now kind of problem.

Even though you would love that every single person in the world buys your product or service, this is unrealistic. You need to develop a more clear idea of who is buying your product or service. The ultimate goal is to develop a couple of customer profiles, however this is a topic for another post. For now, we will work on the basis that you need to find these 4 basic traits of your target audience.

Let’s analyze each one of these traits, starting with geographic location.

1. Your Target Audience’s Geographic Location

From the map above, it becomes clear that at least 10.3% of the population of any state in the U.S. has a Facebook account. This already should give you an idea of what is the maximum of people that you can reach via Facebook.

From that number, you should be aware that on the average marketing campaigns have a success rate of 1 – 2% (gasp!). Just multiply your target audience’s Facebook presence by 2% and you have created a target number for your Facebook campaign.

For example, Hawaii has a 2008 population estimate of 1,288,198. I don’t have a specific percentage from the graph above, but I am going to be very conservative and will say that 17% of Hawaii’s population is on Facebook.

So, 1,288,198 x 17% x 2% = about 4,300 persons.

Don’t get caught on the exact number, rather on the repercussions of your target number.

However, this is just the beginning.

2. Your Target’s Audience Age

Remember that 4,300 number?

Well, here’s where that number starts getting smaller real fast.

From the bar graph above, we can see that most the Facebook population is in either the 18-25, 26-34, and 35-44.  This fact has a lot of repercusions for your business decision whether or not to use Facebook.

If your product is aimed to the 55+ crowd, then Facebook may not be a good channel. However, this might not be true, ONLY if you know your audience correctly. For example, consider the decision of choosing a fun gift for grandma, say a printed photostrip from Wink. Then your target audience is not grandma, but their granddaughters and grandsons on the 18-25, 26-34, and 35-44 age groups.

It’s all about knowing your true target audience.

Its geographic location, its age and it’s gender.

3. Your Target Audiences’ Gender

This is another key trait that you need to know about your audience.

If your whole staff are guys and you’re marketing entirely to women, then you need to put yourself in the shoes of the ladies more! There is no one-size fits all approach.

Knowing the gender of your target audience in advance, will allow you to prepare better on, for example, how to interact with them through Facebook wall post.

Least but not last, let’s discuss about your target audience’s race.

4. Your Target Audience’s Race

If your organization’s target audience has a specific race, such as the Voto Latino initiative for the 2010 U.S. Census, then it is very important to consider race as one of the factors to consider on your decision of whether or not to use Facebook as your marketing channel.

Conclusion: Set a Target and Evaluate

Let’s use the Voto Latino initiative as an example. This is a good example because theoritically speaking this organization would like to reach every single Latino in the United States, so that makes the calculation of a target number much easier. The Voto Latino initiative could have used the data presented here and determined that its target audience on Facebook (all Latinos in the U.S. using Facebook) is about 5 million.

From those 5 million, we would expect a 2% success rate, which means our number would be 100,000. If you take a look at their Facebook Page, as of 04/09/10, it only has 4,284.

Is this a success? Is this a failure?

The answer is that Voto Latino should have a more specific target audience: throw in geographic location into the equation. I don’t have the specific numbers of their Facebook Page fans, but I would focus on the states (cities, even better!) that have responded better to their campaign to refocus their Facebook marketing efforts.

From obsessed Facebook users to so called social media socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on this social networks.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced [...]]]>

What do Facebook users want?

From obsessed Facebook users to so called social media socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on this social networks.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Who is Chitika?

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 2 billion monthly impressions across more than 80,000 websites.

How did Chitika find out what Facebook users want?

For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is aplatform for earning daily ad revenue.  They performed a study based on a sample of 287,090 impressions across the Chitika advertising network.

What do Facebook users want?

At the end of February 2009, Facebook launched Facebook Pages as a way to allow businesses and brands to strengthen their online image on Facebook and increase their potential interaction with Facebook users.

A Facebook Page looks very much like a regular Facebook Profile and there are several organizations and business [...]]]>

At the end of February 2009, Facebook launched Facebook Pages as a way to allow businesses and brands to strengthen their online image on Facebook and increase their potential interaction with Facebook users.

A Facebook Page looks very much like a regular Facebook Profile and there are several organizations and business that have one such as AT&T.

According to official figures from Facebook, there are:

• More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
• Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month

No matter how impressive these figures are.

Apparently they are not enough for Facebook.  Here’s why.

Facebook Profile vs Facebook Page

First, let’s understand the difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page, and why would a marketer prefer to create a Facebook Page rather than a Facebook Profile.

The difference between a regular Facebook profile and a Facebook Page is that instead of becoming  a friend of a brand/organization/company, you become a fan.  A well-thought feature is that brand/organization/company CANNOT add friends.  This is a great practice of permission marketing because it forces users to really think whether they want to become a “fan” or not of a brand/organization/company.  Therefore, the “fan” gives permission to the brand/organization/company to contact him or her, making communications personal, relevant and anticipated (the 3 pillars of permission marketing).

Marketers really like Facebook Pages because they provide marketers key insights into the gender, age range, geographic location, and languages spoken of the fans of a Facebook Page. There are other nice features like number of pageviews, comments, video views and more, but the key insight is gender and age.  Below is a screen shot of sample Facebook Page’s Insight:

Having the age range and gender of fans from a Facebook Page allows the page owners to create more effective Facebook Ad campaigns.

So, what’s the problem?

Enter: Your Weekly Facebook Page Update

The problem is that admins from Facebook Pages appear not to be engaging in their Pages as much as Facebook would like.

A couple months ago, Facebook started asking permission to Facebook Page admins for their e-mails so that Facebook could start contacting directly, rather than through the Facebook back end.

On Wednesday March 17, 2010 Facebook sent out the first “Your Weekly Facebook Page Update” to the millions of admins around the world.

The e-mail said:

Hi -insert your name-,

Here is this week’s summary for the Facebook Page:  -insert your Facebook Page name-

+ or -  xxx Fans this week (xxx total Fans)
xxx Wall Posts, Comments, and Likes this week (xxx last week)
xxx Visits to your page this week (xxx Visits last week)

Update your Fans:
Link

Visit your Insights Page:
Link

Get more Fans with Facebook Ads:
Link

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

The e-mail is well developed because it is straight to the point. Facebook wants its Facebook Page admins:

1. Create more content!
2. Track their Facebook Pages more actively.
3. Spend money on Facebook Ads to get more fans.

Conclusion

No matter how impressive the growth of Facebook Pages are, Facebook needs to monetize on them. Facebook is trying to get its Facebook Page admins more active by communicating with them directly on their email inboxes with a list of objectives: more content, more fans, and more ads.

Let’s recap on the conclusions from the original article:

eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.

Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups and particularly [...]]]>

Ladies, grab your Wiimote!

eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.

Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups and particularly women. This fact is a wake-up call for video game developers, as they are now focusing more on casual gaming.  The leader in this trend is the Nintendo Wii and this strategy has paid off as  in a study of U.S. Next-Generation Video Game Console Usage, for the Nintendo Wii, the % of total minutes used by female gamers is higher than that of its male counterparts in the 25 – 34, 35 -44, 45 – 54, and 55+ age ranges.

According to eMarketer, in addition, 29% of total PC game players were women ages 25 to 54, the largest percentage of any group. Women ages 55 and up were 17% of the market, the third-largest behind men 25 to 54. Older women spent the second-highest number of minutes playing.

“Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year,” said Anita Frazier of The NPD Group.  Many of those new participants are women.

Although consoles such as the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have Internet playing capability, most game play (62%) is still offline.

Think the highly advertised World of Warcraft is the highest played PC game in the U.S.? Think again. Solitaire (yes, you heard right: Solitaire) is the highest played PC game in the U.S. with 7,750,623 unique players in December 2008, dwarfing the 1,104,334 unique players of World of Warcraft in the U.S. in the same month. In PC gaming, the games that come prepackaged with many PCs (Solitaire, FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Pinball) are the ones with the most players.

What implications has this on marketers?

Do your homework!

Learn from Nintendo and become aware of casual gaming and the increase of female video players.  2 good places to start are:

1. Meet the Digital Mom
2. Digital Mom: A two-part report from Razorfish and CafeMom

The first article provides some interesting [...]]]>

I’m a big fan of The e-Marketer Daily newsletter and on 06/26/09 I received two very interesting articles on the presence of U.S. Latinos on the web. The first one is titled Hispanics Online: No Mas E-Barrios and the second one is Looking at Hispanic Behavior Online.

The first article provides some interesting stats on Internet use in the U.S. by race/ethnicity.

Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013. The U.S. Hispanic presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.

Among marketing organizations, the competition to grab the U.S. Hispanic buck is intense.  Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans, 76% target African Americans, and 38% focus on Asian Americans, according to a survey released in November by the trade group Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and marketing agency Mkgt. That’s up from 86%, 60%, and 35%, respectively, in 2003, according to the research.

This has a lot of implications for online marketers who want to be culturally sensitive, while being cost-efficient at the same time. The main problem, as Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, states, is that:

Hispanics have a lot of commonalities, and it’s OK to talk about a group that has these sorts of common roots and interests. It doesn’t work well to try to segregate people. I don’t think it works to say, “This is a site for Hispanics and this is a site for others.”

Forcing Hispanic U.S. Internet users into Hi5 (the most popular social network in Latin America and no, it’s not Google’s Orkut, that’s in Brazil) and Myspace versions in Spanish is not the correct strategy.  It’s all about personal choice, let the user decide what’s best for him or her.

That is the reason why MySpace has both—I mean having people having two sites, one in Spanish and one in English—but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish-language site is for Hispanics only, or that the English-language site is for non-Hispanics only. There’s a lot of overlap.

Mixed context in English and Spanish that is triggered by contextual cues appears to be savvy strategy, according to Dr. Korzenny. The good news:  when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Hispanics do appear to consume more digital content.

However, making any generalizations about U.S. Hispanics is always a mistake. The easiest example: location, location, location.

If you use the same strategy in Miami, FL, that you used in Dallas, TX, you shouldn’t be surprised to get mixed results.  While U.S. Hispanics do share some commonalities, consider that Texas has a more predominant Mexican presence, while Florida has a more predominant Cuban and South American presence.  Put it this way: imagine if you were to use Canadian slang to target a British and Australian  audience, would it make sense? After all, they all speak English, right?  That’s the most common mistake of companies that purchase one-size-fits-all, prepackaged marketing solutions.

Marketers should never throw out the window marketing fundamentals when dealing with U.S. Hispanics.  There is no easy answer.  Only one thing is certain: do your homework, research, research, research.