CES 2012 is likely to be remembered as the most social trade show yet. The products themselves have had a huge focus on connectedness while social chatter around the event has increased significantly since last year.
For Intel, a social conversation tracker was a natural fit for the company’s booth this year. Dubbed “the Social Cockpit,” Intel’s tool is an Adobe-Air based desktop application that collects CES buzz on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and forums.
Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content – on and off their site – and so we’re working hard to make this happen.
To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier. So today we’re inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. Through these integrations, marketers and publishers will be able to discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment.
Any network can integrate their streams – like +1, votes, and comments – into the Google Analytics social reports, which will be fully available next year to the many marketers, publishers, and websites that are using Google Analytics for free.
To make integration easy for social networks and platforms we’ve created a social data hub – it’s based on widely deployed, open web standards such as ActivityStreams and PubsubHubbub. A number of partners are already working with us to improve measurement of social actions – including Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, and of course, Google+, Blogger and Google Groups.
via Google Analytics Blog: An invitation to social sites to integrate with Google Analytics.
traffic sourcesYour website is the hub of your inbound marketing efforts. Every piece of content you create or campaign you run should be designed to drive traffic to your website and landing pages, giving you the chance to convert visitors into leads and customers. It makes sense, then, to start by looking at insights from your web analytics platform, such as Google’s free Google Analytics, or a paid platform like HubSpot. Let’s review the 8 essential metrics you should be tracking on your website and its landing pages, and how you can use these metrics to optimize and improve your website’s performance.
via The Only Metrics You Need to Optimize Website Performance.
Below is an adapted version of my presentation at the 2011 HOW Interactive Design Conference in San Francisco. It covers my basic philosophy of web measurement, a simple approach to using Google Analytics, as well as two types of user testing that you can do easily and quickly on your own. It gets a bit mathy in the middle, so find a comfortable and quiet place to dig into this one.
Everyone knows you have to measure things correctly to manage a business well. But the converse of this axiom is that you can get into a lot of trouble if you measure the wrong things.
Unfortunately, this has happened in the newspaper industry with respect to the digital media. Now, it has got to stop.
In a misguided effort to apply the historically successful print business model to the digital media, publishers have spent nearly two decades trying to assemble the biggest audiences they can on their websites and, of late, their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
via Reflections of a Newsosaur: Engagement: The new digital metric.