What you can find out from Google Analytics?

For most of the people it will be just rows of numbers and graphs, but for some it might be key information which allow to track trends in group of people visiting your website or blog. If it’s not for some of you, it should be important part of your Online PR, or Online Reputation or Presence building process. This is actual report which will give you hint where which areas you should improve.

From wide range of stats offered by Google Analytics I would like to highlight only one of them which is reflecting behavior of your site visitors. It is something what  Google named appropriately Visitor Loyalty.

Well as you might guess both are related to same subject of encouraging online customer engagement or rather related subject of measuring its KPI.

Just to add (apology for copy/paste job here) what is whole online customer engagement (CE). Online customer engagement refers to:

1. A social phenomenon enabled by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and taking off with the technical developments in connection speed (broadband) in the decade that followed. Online CE is qualitatively different from the engagement of consumers offline.

2. The behaviour of customers that engage in online communities revolving, directly or indirectly, around product categories (cycling, sailing) and other consumption topics. It details the process that leads to a customer’s positive engagement with the company or offering, as well as the behaviours associated with different degrees of customer engagement.

3. Marketing practices that aim to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour. Although CE-marketing efforts must be consistent both online and offline, the internet is the basis of CE-marketing.(Eisenberg & Eisenberg 2006:72,81)

4. Metrics that measure the effectiveness of the marketing practices which seek to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour.

The CE metric is useful for:
a) Planning
b) Measuring Effectiveness
Just to name few of components of a CE-metrics:
* Duration of visit
* Frequency of visit
* % repeat visits
* Recency of visit
* Depth of visit (% of site visited)
* Click-through rate
* RSS feed subscriptions
* Inquiries
* Customer reviews

As I was presenting in one of my previews publications, building online presence it’s not only build website and put it in search engines. In that publication I was trying to motivate or encourage if you would like even small and medium businesses to develop maybe not even process but habit to check those few simple but crucial points. I have proposed simple diagram (presented below) just to keep track of what you doing.

Each point of this diagram is of course separate subject which we could talk hours.  But lets just focus on point 7, as that is where Google Analytics is coming with help.

What is Google Analytics ?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.

Click on the image to view full panel breakdown.

If you refer to CE metric mentioned above and options available on Google Analytics Panel you will be able to see where and for whom this is the tool most spot-on (aka accurate).

Now when we know where this numbers are relevant in development process and what is the tool you could use to measure it, we can talk examples.

I don’t want to copy and paste another samples here so I am going to support this article by stats from my own blog (this one you are reading right now, or rather very briefly according to  my numbers from G-Analytics ).

Now going into the details we can find out that our average visitor is:

from US or ireland, using most likely broadband connection with Firefox or IE browser which found my blog on images.google page and spend about 1 min reading my blog.

What is more interesting you can see actually people reading blog are from direct traffic (they typed www.gargasz.info in the address bar in their browser) with 19% of returning visitors where average each of them is spending about 7 min reading the blog. But only 11% have viewed more then 2 pages on my blog.

So you are looking on two results here, how search engine is bringing traffic to your website, and percentage of people being actually interested in your website. So two crucial points here, to get people interested in less then30 seconds of page view, easy to memorize domain name (I have parked/pointed several easy to memorize domain names to this blog)  so they can easily come back and then actual content to keep people interested.

But it would be mistake to ignore any of those numbers, of course those 11% are your fans, but don’t forget long-term off-line efects of your website or rather online presence.  Even if visitor didn’t spend much time on your site, doesn’t mean he will not come back, or talk about it maybe with his/her friends. That is why online presence is rather long-term process opposite for direct sales marketing processes. I would bravely compare it to social media, where most likely is not being used to generate direct sales, but to build brand image and product awareness. And that is why measurement of those online marketing techniques is so argumentative and so many publications can be found in this subject. Of course you can see current trends, try to predict the future based on historic data, but on the end its always experience and knowledge of human behavior which wins the gold.

Well you can always use controversy to burst some traffic right? Like the latest campaign of crisp brand in Ireland…it depends of the product image you want to create, wouldn’t be just ‘cheap’ to do such ad for high range product? I am not saying it can’t be done, of course it can, but with lets say more delicate and subliminal way without controversy targeting areas which I was talking about in Controversy and sex in advertising post.

Marketing Trends 2010

First let me present word of Dr. Neil Hair » Marketing Trends 2010 and beyond.

Ive been presenting my ideas on Marketing Trends for 2010 for some time now to the great and good of Rochester. It’s proved a popular session that I’ve run at a number of local conferences and in the UK. One of the key issues I explore in this is the business case for online social networks, the role of virtual worlds in innovating the provision of service / customer experience, and how to build and maintain a personal brand in this new era. Towards the end of summer I will be presenting ‘Marketing Trends 2010′ to the Greater Rochester Area Partnership with the Elderly – looking specifically at how marketing trends affect the business of elderly care. As with my classes – one of the key outputs I use to judge the effectiveness of the presentation is the extent to which there are concrete take homes for participants to then act on. The benefits of experiential learning shouldn’t be the preserve of our students alone afterall. I also find it helps keep me honest – practitioners are always very quick to pick up on practical application, relevance and the measurement of the bottom line with my suggestions.

Well measuring trend from 2009 that seems to be correct. According to Nielson Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Meanwhile, Facebook continued to outpace MySpace. So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that’s my guess. But I wouldn’t go so far. 2010 yes, will keep those trends, but similiar to web and web 2.0 social media will be changing and we will be wintessing another internet evolution.

What are the near-term trends we could see as soon as next year 2010?

1) Value is the new black

Consumer spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a “reason-to-buy at all”. This spells trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.

2) Brands increasingly a surrogate for “value”

The value of goods and services will increasingly be defined what’s wrapped up in the brand and what the brand stands for. For example, why J Crew instead of The Gap? J Crew stands for a new era in careful chic – being smart and stylish. The first family’s [the Obamas'] support of the brand doesn’t hurt either.

3) Brand differentiation is brand value

The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to plague the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will
be critical for success –meaning sales and profitability.

4) “Because I Said So” is so over

Brand values can be established as a brand identity, but they must believably exist in the mind of the consumer. A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement.

5 ) Consumer expectations are growing

Brands are barely keeping up with consumer expectations now. Every day consumers adopt and devour the latest technologies and innovations and hunger for more. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalise on unmet expectations. Those brands that understand where the strongest expectations exist will be the brands that survive – and prosper.

6) Old tricks don’t work/won’t work anymore

In case your brand didn’t get the memo, here it is – consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit. In the wake of the financial debacle of this past year, people are more aware then ever of the hollowness of bank ads that claim “we’re all in this together” when those same banks have rescinded their credit and turned their retirement plan into case studies. The same is true for what are conceived to be insincere celebrity pairings: think Seinfeld & Microsoft or Tiger Woods & Buick. Celebrity values and brand values need to be in concert, like Tiger Woods & Accenture. That’s authenticity.

7) They won’t need to know you to love you

As the buying space becomes even more online-driven and international (and uncontrolled by brands and corporations), front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right street cred can go viral in days, with awareness following, not leading, the conversation. After all, everybody knows GM, but nobody’s buying their cars.

8 ) It’s not just buzz

Conversation and community is all; ebay thrives based on consumer feedback. If consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. Not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. This means the coming of a new era of customer care.

9) They’re talking to each other before talking to the brand

Social networking and exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase. Look for more websites using Facebook Connect to share information with the friends from those sites. More companies will become members of Linkedin. Twitter users will spend more money on the internet than those who don’t tweet.

10) Engagement is not a fad; It’s the way today’s consumers do business

Marketers will come to accept that there are four engagement methods including Platform (TV; online), Context (Programme; webpage), Message (Ad or Communication), and Experience (Store/Event). But there is only one objective for the future: Brand Engagement. Marketers will continue to realise that attaining real brand engagement is impossible using out-dated attitudinal models.

The three most popular social networks for business in 2009:
1.LinkedIn

2.Facebook

3.Twitter