The Convergence of Online Marketing and Analytics — PubCon Vegas

As marketers, we spend a ton of time implementing stuff — but what are the important things to measure, and how do we measure them? That’s what we’re here to talk about in our first liveblog session on Day 3 of PubCon.

First up is Alan K’necht. He asks, what are we measuring now?

First, this is a big mistake:

• Heads, fans, etc. Are they engaged? Is anyone interacting with them?
• Paces: number of posts, updates, tweets (these are milestones only)

We should be measuring victory and success.

Tools of today (not recommendations, just some useful tools); the biggest mistake is when people don’t use these tools as intended.

• Klout
• Twittalyzer
• PeerIndex
• Webtrends

Measuring fuel:

• Fans, followers, etc. We can measure quantity and quality.
• Scoring tools: (see above). How big is your pond? If you’re using a scoring tool, does the size of the fish matter or is it the size of the pond?
• Are you growing your following base? Are they engaged?

Measuring oxygen (the people):

• Brand advocates (high Klout scores, for example). Use tools to help you find the right fish in the pond.

Measuring the spark/heat:

•  This is what is going to get people talking about you; good content. This gets the fire growing.

Measuring fire:

• Analytics uses ratios; which content is engaging, which gets spread? Likes and content shares per post, for example.
• Biggest mistake: posting links within Facebook and Twitter. Use URL shorteners in Twitter or else you won’t be able to track the link in analytics. Use the campaign code in it.

Bring it together:

• Look at increase in references; more talk about the brand (he uses radian6 for some clients).
• Is there a correlation in sales?

Measure attraction, not BTUs; Draw people in like a campfire. Be there with them and make it successful.

Up next is Tom Critchlow. He starts off by saying data is a marketing asset. He is saying to read the OK Cupid blog which has a ton of data, like sexual activity by phone brand. They gather the data and use it for marketing. You can’t get this data elsewhere; they are using as a technique for marketing.

Business Insider actually publishes its live analytics online for a marketing tool that anyone can see.

If you’re going to use data in marketing, he urges you to use data visualization instead of infographics. Data visualization is where infographics are headed. Bad infographics will die out.

There’s very few metrics you need to care about, and the ones you do need to care about, you should watch like a hawk. It’s not just a set of metrics you watch, they must be the key drivers of your success.

Measure things you have direct control of. Rather than measuring the number of people that come to your site, measure the pieces of content you’re doing. Measure the activity as well as the results.

Data should drive actions. If you want to get insight out of data, you should form hypotheses first and then use analytics to test that hypothesis. It’s less efficient that just wading through data.

The SEO community is heavily driven by page quality. He is showing an example of a page that has a lot of products, and one product has reviews compared to a similar product page with no reviews. How do you tell the difference between this product page in analytics? Use customer variables to help. You can also measure the number of people coming to your site that are Facebook fans by just using JavaScript.

User feedback is data, too. As marketers, we want to convince people and influence change but we don’t have great data to back it up. You can survey people and measure that way if you don’t have the number data.

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

See Jessica's author page for links to connect on social media.