Where Can I Find a Solid Social Analytics Tool?

With all of this talk about big data and data visualization, there’s one issue that I keep hearing: I don’t have a way to integrate robust social media analytics into my reporting.

We all know the headache of Facebook’s horribly limited “analytics” offering. You can’t go back further than a week, and in that week they simply reiterate which posts you published and the likes you received. All information you could gain with cursory insight outside of their analytics.

My colleague Shannon just posted a great investigation into a solution for social media analytics.

SocialBakers suite of tools provides a holistic investigation into your engagement across social media channels. It includes a completely customizable dashboard-style interface that lets you focus on the channels and engagement that matters to your company most.

Beyond giving you invaluable insight into your social media engagement, SocialBakers provides a feature for competitive benchmarking. And this extends beyond regular posting - it includes in-depth data on paid social media ads.

And if that solution wasn’t enough of a selling point, SocialBakers also offers predictive intelligence. Although true recognition and action based on social trends is (for now) an unbeatably human set of analysis, if we’ve learned anything from the advent of digital marketing analytics it’s that human interpretation can only be improved through hard data.

Social media analytics is still one of the hardest data sets to crack into – even though it is one of the most important signals when it comes to fast public relations responses and forward-thinking marketing campaigns. Mastering social media analytics could be the one step-up you get over your competition that puts you over the top.

2 Data Visualization Tools You Need

We all know that the most effective data-based presentation is made by how it’s visualized. It comes down to aesthetics, and as probably the most famous aesthetic intellectual, Oscar Wilde, said: “Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.”

Your presentation should be based on simple visualizations of data, with your vocal presentation only serving as back up for the facts presented. Here are some of the best tools for presenting your data beautifully.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a heat-mapping tool that shows you where users are lingering and clicking on individual pages of your site. If you have a page with a high bounce or abandonment rate, Crazy Egg allows you to see where users are, or aren’t, clicking. These visuals can be produced in screen captures as a holistic and, more importantly, succinct, analysis of consumer engagement with a particular stage in the acquisition funnel.

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a recent addition to the ever-evolving Google suite of marketing analytics tools. It automatically integrates with your Analytics account, and enables you to pull data directly from Analytics and transform it into a dashboard of tables and diagrams about your web presence. If you get a last minute request for a report on your site’s health, this is a simple and attractive means of whipping up something convincing.  

Visual Storytelling with Data

With the exponential rise in data being used across every department of a company, the ability to translate data into sensible, bite-sized takeaways and actionable steps is more critical than ever before. And for digital marketers, this means becoming adept at communicating with two distinctly different audiences: Your target customers, of course, and also your co-workers. This post covers how to tell your co-workers a story with visualized data, and not just splash a pie chart on the screen while you talk numbers at them.

But so much data analysis went into making this plan, where do I begin?

All advertising is storytelling, all good data-based presentations should tell a story, and all great stories start with the same plot device: a problem.

If you’re recommending an actionable solution, then that means you’ve identified a problem. Present the data that infers what the problem is in a single diagram or chart, and rather than spending time reiterating the numbers on the screen, talk about what this problem means for the whole company’s bottom line.

For example, no executive cares about an 80% shopping cart abandonment rate amongst mobile users. But if you put that stat up against the 36% abandonment rate amongst desktop users, and tell them that they’re missing out on X amount of potential sales that are already at the last step in the purchasing funnel, that “missing out” number will make perfect sense.

Ok, I’ve told them we’ve got a problem. They’re agitated. Now what?

The beginning of your story has been set: we’ve got a problem. Now everyone in the room is on tenterhooks waiting for your solution. Now it’s time to connect the dots – which is covered in great detail in a post in Big (but not so bad) Data – and move on to the part of your data visualization story that will make you the hero.

Following the example above, you can now move on to presenting potential reasons why there is a significantly higher drop-off rate amongst mobile users. If you have access to heat mapping tools like Crazy Egg, you can identify where users are backing out or having second thoughts, and present screen captures that show exactly that. Otherwise, using Google Analytics, you can show the pages that users are leaving to. Are they going to the user log-in page? Force the user to log in earlier in the purchase funnel. Are they abandoning the site entirely? The user might have been turned off by the taxes and shipping costs, and maybe those costs should be put upfront or, if possible, minimized. Is your site just generally not mobile-friendly yet? Then shame on you, and that’s an entirely different conversation.

Knowing why you’re experiencing issues, although not a solution, is comforting. And it’s also the point in the presentation when you’re seen as the hero. So it’s time to deliver.

We all know we have a problem, we all know what the problem is, so how do we fix it?

If you have access to past digital development costs, summarize a few in charts, including the problem that needed fixing and the end result. Try to select ones that were aesthetic or minor in consequence, but relatively exorbitant in cost.

Now put your proposed solution up with the accompanying cost analysis. Visualize for your audience the potential bottom line gains the company can expect to see if these fixes are made. Alongside most other development costs, this one will seem like a no-brainer to your audience – this will directly increase revenue, or prevent a trend of decreasing revenue.

Final takeaways

The most important aspect of data visualization in a presentation is to keep each visual concise:

·      There is a problem.

·      This is why the problem exists.

·      This is how we fix the problem.

·      This is what we can expect in returns for fixing this problem.

If you try to include anything more in your data story, the important points will be lost on the audience. All of those supporting data points and trends you know by heart? Keep them in mind and off of paper. If someone in the audience is savvy enough to ask you about them, you’ll be ready. But never presume the analytical intelligence of your audience.

Ethics and Marketing Analytics: Just be Upfront

The new era of digital marketing has ushered in a fresh wave of customer privacy concerns. It has become to accepted norm for your activity online to be tracked by someone, somewhere – whether it’s the site you’re on, a site you visited weeks ago, or any number of third party tools and apps you’ve downloaded. I dare you to find a website privacy policy that doesn’t say it collects and tracks some type of customer data.

What Kinds of Data are Marketers Collecting?

In a post by Greg McConnell, he explores how Humana, a health insurance provider, scraped thousands of Match.com profiles of people who fit their target demographic. They compiled all of the text-based data, and were able to develop a more nuanced profile of their target market.

At face value this sounds, at the least, invasive. Using your online dating profile to better market health insurance – two areas of peoples’ lives that they would definitely rather keep private.

But is this really an invasion of privacy? The laws and policies that do exist prevent companies like Humana from collecting or compiling data in any way that can create personally identifying information. They’ll know your age, where you live, what your ideal first date would be, and what you’re looking for in a partner. But they won’t know that data is from you.

Transparency as a Solution

We know how companies are supposed to handle sensitive, personally identifying data. But we don’t know that they are actually following procedure. This can cause further anxiety for customers who are already concerned.

My recommendation to online businesses is to be more upfront about data collection than just sticking a clause inside your privacy policy. Make more of an effort to say what data is collected, exactly how you will and will not use it, and make that a promise to your customer. Data collection is ubiquitous, and the lack of transparency exacerbates things for both sides. Businesses now have a unique opportunity to stand out from their competition by highlighting something in their privacy policy that everyone else also has, but is just too afraid of the grey area to publicize.

Using Social Data to Identify Opportunities

Whether you’re looking to start a new company, or want to launch a topical campaign for a product you already have, there is a wealth of data available to enable you to make informed, agile marketing decisions. And it all starts with a problem.

Be First in Line

There are innumerable tools available to help you track digital marketing performance. But as Courtney Patterson points out in her discussion on the future of analytics, the true power in analytics moves beyond adapting to customers in real-time, and begins when you can predict where trends are headed. Here are some easy ways to stay ahead of your competition.

Leverage Reddit

Reddit is called the “Front Page of the Internet” for a reason. It’s still the origin of a countless amount of viral content. Using tools like Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro, you can track your branded terms, your competitors’, and any and all topics, issues, and potential trends that could give you a jumpstart on new topical opportunities.

Google News & Alerts

Setting up Google email news alerts for you and your competitors’ branded terms is pretty mandatory. But you can take it a step further by adding all of the related queries you can think of. You can refine your interests and preferences in your Google account to receive even more targeted data.

It’s also a good idea to download the Google News app, refine your interests to align with your brand, and enable breaking news push notifications.

Social Media Trends

Using tools like Hootsuite or HubSpot can give you an overview of your brand’s performance across channels, but don’t neglect topical trends that surround your brand. It’s good to set aside some time every day to comb through what’s trending on Twitter, Instagram (via Discover) and Facebook. Search for popular posts around relevant search phrases on Twitter to see if anything is starting to gain buzz.

Act Fast, but Act Smart

It’s important to remember that, although there is a lot of incentive for brands to respond quickly to current trends, a topical blunder can be infinitely more damaging than a missed opportunity. We all remember Pepsi, don’t we? But collecting your own predictive social trend data can reveal some unparalleled opportunities to capitalize on organic buzz.

Case Study: Analytics Sparking the Idea and Driving Growth

The mobile application company WinShield, although now defunct, provides an interesting case study into how analytics data can not only build the basis for a product, but can also guide the evolution of a business model throughout a company’s maturation.

Using Data to Identify a Problem

According to the law firm Edgar Snyder & Associates, including data compiled by AAA, in 2012 about 421,000 people were injured in vehicular accidents that involved drivers being distracted by cellphones, and 3,328 of those people were killed.

Buzz around this growing epidemic gained and sustained worldwide attention through organizations such as End DD, MADD, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and even the Center for Disease for Control. When there is publicly accessible data and public furor over an issue, that issue becomes ripe for a disruptive solution.

Analyzing a Problem to Create a Socially-Conscious Solution

The creators of WinShield saw this rising trend in mobile phone-related traffic casualties and devised a way to combat it. WinShield was a mobile application that would initiate when a vehicle started driving, and the app would block all calls, texts, alerts, and push notifications to prevent drivers from becoming distracted.

But the largest demographic for these types of accidents, as cited by NHTSA data, was people from the ages of 16 to their late twenties – a demographic scientifically known for having under-developed risk-reward processes in their brains. Knowing their actions were dangerous was not incentive enough to use the WinShield app. So the creators used this information to add another twist to their app: incentivizing teen drivers with rewards.

Catering to Your Target Demographic

WinShield was then developed to keep track of total miles driven without distractions, and converted these miles into points. Points could then be redeemed for prizes directly through the WinShield application.

Data on popular products and brands for this demographic were used to target a selection of prizes that would entice young drivers into using the application. And because of the available analytics confirming the buzz around this social issue, many brands were eager to donate products in exchange for having their name associated with this social-minded endeavor.

Analytics-Based Growth and Monetization

WinShield now faced the problem most fledgling tech start-ups face: monetizing their otherwise free product. So they looked for ways to utilize the data they were able to gather to monetize WinShield without compromising their core mission of freely accessible safety.

Auto insurance companies base their models for determining premiums on generalized aggregated data with veritably no individualized adjustments (beyond “have you been in an accident, yes/no”). Variables such as gender, age, zip code, and even the color and make of the car, are still the norms for determining premiums for drivers, regardless of individuals’ specific circumstances.

WinShield approached several insurance companies to gauge their interest in a partnership that would yield them data on individual driver’s habits. The insurance companies were interested, but the data WinShield gathered wasn’t exact or expansive enough to alter their current models for determining premiums.

So WinShield investigated producing telematics devices – data gathering modems that are places into a car, and can track highly-specific data points such as average rate of acceleration on which types of roads, number of hard stops, hard, avoidant swerves, and even frequent unnecessary idling as a marker for environmental awareness. When combined with the WinShield app’s data points of average length of trips, times of day, and of course the novel proven lack of distraction while driving, a complete picture of an individual driver’s habits could now be formed.

In addition, an investor and advisor for WinShield identified a further opportunity for this new model – commercial trucking fleets. Rather than a “How’s my driving?” bumper sticker with a 1-800 number, trucking companies could monitor how safe drivers actually were, which could mean immense savings in insurance and costly accident prevention. And if trucking fleets had hard data on the driving records of their drivers, clients would feel more assured and potentially pay higher costs to hire their drivers over other companies.

Monetizing your data, when done strategically, can be an incredibly valuable component of your business model. You can visit Mojisola Odubela’s blog post for a deeper exploration into how to successfully monetize your data.

In Conclusion: Always Look to the Data

This case study illustrates how data can be used to identify a problem that needs solving, how likely markets are to want this solution and the best ways to market it to them, and also how to grow, monetize, and ultimately sell your business. This is why we collect all possible data on problems in the world today – with the proliferation of open information, someone is bound to use this data to propose win-win-win solutions for society at large.

Up Your Google Analytics Game with UTM Parameters

You know how customers interact with your site. You even know the sources that send customers to your site. But knowing that 1,043 customers found your site through Facebook is deeply limited in its usefulness. If only there was a way to identify which users came from which specific campaigns on which specific channels…

There is! And they’re called UTM parameters.

UTM parameters are extra tags added on to URLs, which allow Google Analytics to give you even more data on your customers. These extra tags include the Medium (email, social media, ad, etc.), the Source (newsletter, google-display-ad, etc.), and the Campaign Name (spring-sale, end-of-year-fundraising, etc.). And if you’re testing multiple pieces of content for a single campaign, you can dig deeper with the additional content tag so you can differentiate between your variations.

This extra data will populate in Google Analytics under the Acquisition section of your account. And there’s no additional work required on the platform side – Analytics automatically starts processing these links and populating their data in your analytics account.

Does this sound a bit complex? It’s not.

Google provides an incredibly user-friendly tool for creating your UTM parameters, called Campaign URL Builder. You simply fill out the tag fields that you need for your campaign, and a new URL complete with UTM parameters is provided for you. Then just copy and paste the link where you need it.