If you’re running a company website without an analytics dashboard, you may as well be stumbling around in the dark. Building a sustainable web presence in any industry is all about understanding the needs of your users and tailoring your service to fit those needs. How can you do that if you don’t even know what your users are looking at or how they got to your website?

The good news is that analytics dashboards are simple to implement, and they also come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit the needs and goals of your small business. While some people swear by Google Analytics or the tracking plug-ins found organically within their specific web hosting or content managing system (think WordPress analytics), there’s a lot of information you may not be getting from these sources. For example, while Google Analytics does a great job tracking individual page views, it doesn’t necessarily break down any meaningful social sharing or referrals. You may want to know why a specific webpage on your site garners major traffic, but Google Analytics will only note that the traffic comes from Facebook.

If you’d like to obtain a more tailored or granular look into your website, it’s best to make an investment in one of the following third-party analytics dashboards that offers exactly the data you need. You may find you’ll not only be able to target the audience interested in your website, but you’ll also be able to optimize the content and structure to bring in more potential consumers in the long run.

1. Analytics catch-all: Chartbeat

Do you maintain a website that has only a few pages of static content or delivers periodic (but not super-frequent) content updates? Then you may benefit from Chartbeat, a pumped-up analytics dashboard that offered real-time analytics before Google did.

The service’s dashboard is simple. Log in at any time and get a bird’s-eye view of every user on your site, including what page they’re on and where they came from. In addition to tracking key traffic flow, Chartbeat also keeps tabs on the engagement level of each user. Anyone controlling the dashboard can check the level of users who are reading or writing on or about a particular page, as well as how many users are considered “idle.” The combination of this data can give you the best idea of when, where and how users are reaching your site, allowing you to adjust your content or SEO strategy accordingly.

Interested in how it works? Chartbeat actually offers a free 30-day trial of its services, and from there pricing plans begin at $9.95 per month. If you have a small budget to spend on analytics, this tool could serve you well and help you grow your online business. And If you’re in e-commerce, be sure to keep an eye out for Chartbeat’s savvy, up-and-coming cousin, Shopbeat.

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With the launch of its official Pinterest page less than a week ago and a new social-media campaign targeting Pinterest users, Honda is one of a few auto brands to make a big marketing push on the platform.

“It’s such a fast-growing social-media network and seemed like a really good, different, creative outlet for us and a chance to use a visual medium to promote our cars,” Lauren Ebner, assistant manager of social media at American Honda Motor Co., told Ad Age.

Honda “wanted to have the opportunity to put images of our cars on there … as a way to drive people back to our website,” Ms. Ebner added. “Most of our images link back to Honda.com, and [users] can find out more about the car that way.”

Beyond making its foray onto the site, Honda has launched a Pinterest-focused campaign with the help of its longtime agency, Santa Monica-based RPA. They’ve identified top “pinners” and offered each one $500 to take a “Pintermission” (a 24-hour break from Pinterest) to get out and visit some of the places they’ve been pinning about or buy some of the products they’ve pinned. So far, one plans to use the money toward a trip to London, and another toward a trip to Hawaii, Ms. Ebner said.

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YouTube announced Monday that it is continuing to ramp up its rental titles, adding more than 600 movies to its list of available rentals.

Titles include films such as “West Side Story,” “Moonstruck,” “The Terminator,” “Robocop,” “Rain Man” and “Rocky,” according to a company blog post from Jonathan Zepp, the manager of TV and film content partnerships.

The films are available not only on YouTube but also on Google’s tablet and smartphone marketplace, Google Play.

The company also recently announced its partnership with Paramount, which added around 500 titles to the online store. The content partnerships are part of an aggressive strategy to compete with content stores such as Apple’s iTunes store and Amazon’s Prime marketplace, which offer thousands of titles for mobile devices. Google has deals with five of the six major studios — excluding 20th Century Fox — and at least 10 independent studios, including Miramax. Read Rest of Article

Online long-form video and ad insertions have begun to mirror TV viewing with higher rates of success, according to a study released Tuesday.

The 2012 Adobe Digital Video Advertising Report suggests that completion rates on mobile devices at 94% indicate higher engagement from viewers more open to watching ads on the go in exchange for content. In-stream video ads show higher completion rates when viewed in long-form, 76%; compared with short-form content, 63%, defined as five minutes.

The study also found that mid-roll ad formats at 87% completion rate in long-form video content perform nearly 30% better than pre-rolls. When it comes to post rolls, completion rates came in at 50%.

This TV-like ad experiences, only online, presents opportunities for brands looking for another way to reach consumers. Adobe continues to see an average of 5.5 video ads served as part of long-form, professional content. With a completion rate of 70%, viewers will watch and engage with ads online in exchange for premium video content.

The music was pumping and the finger food laid out in abundance one recent evening in a subterranean Manhattan bar, as executives of Pandora Media, the Internet radio service, mingled with some of their most prized new advertisers.

Most of the clients, however, were not representing big corporate accounts or multimillion-dollar national campaigns, but rather local businesses whose budget might top off at $20,000 a month. Yet they are the focus of one of Pandora’s most important new corporate strategies as it competes with terrestrial broadcasters for a chunk of radio’s $17 billion ad market.

Pandora’s pitch to advertisers is that its technology can cater to consumers with far greater precision than radio — it can pinpoint listeners by age and sex, ZIP code or even musical taste — and that as it grows, Pandora will effectively be the top station in many cities.

“A dollar spent on Pandora is better than a dollar spent on terrestrial radio,” said Tim Westergren, the company’s founder and chief strategy officer, nearly shouting at a corner table to be heard above the din of his party.

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Two-thirds of US consumers with smartphones have used the devices to aid shopping, according to a report by research firm Leo J. Shapiro and Associates. The February 2012 survey also found that 38% of respondents researched products on their smartphones while shopping at a physical store.

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LinkedIn will launch two new functions for companies who have followers on LinkedIn, both of which will be of interest to marketers and advertisers: “Targeted Updates” and “Follower Statistics.”

Targeted Updates will allow companies to segment their followers by a range of variables such as industry, seniority, job function, company size, non-company employees, and geography. Companies will be able to send different status updates to different groups of followers, LinkedIn vp/North American ad sales Jonathan Lister told us.

Follower Statistics will essentially be an analytics dashboard that will allow companies to see how effective their updates have been.

For decades, fans have been able to buy merchandise inspired by their favorite television shows, like posters, T-shirts, records, books, jigsaw puzzles and dolls. But now a TV series has generated products that are meant to be practical rather than trinkets and knickknacks.

The “Dirty Jobs” show on the Discovery Channel cable network is the inspiration for a line of cleaning products also named Dirty Jobs. The products, all labeled “heavy duty,” include a stain remover, carpet cleaners, a spot and stain remover, a degreaser and hand sanitizers.

“Get tough on your dirtiest jobs,” the package labels urge. (Fortunately for Dirty Jobs, Procter & Gamble long ago stopped selling its Top Job liquid cleaner.) The Dirty Jobs products are being marketed by a new company, called My Dirty Jobs, that is licensing the “Dirty Jobs” name from the Discovery Channel parent, Discovery Communications. Read Rest of Article

Endeavour Marketing & Media, LLC

For a generation, Gillette has been among the most profitable packaged-goods brands, with regular price hikes and market shares north of 80% in the lucrative replacement-blades market.

But as challenges mount from traditional and new rivals and share starts to drop, the Procter & Gamble brand has been shifting its focus toward value messaging.

One of the rivals is Schick Hydro, launched two years ago, about the same time as Gillette’s latest system, Fusion ProGlide. In recent months Hydro has added a sharper price edge to digital and direct-mail ads, and has made a superiority claim that would once have seemed unthinkable for a Schick brand heavily outsold by Gillette.

A mailer for Schick Hydro 5 states that it’s “Preferred over Fusion ProGlide at a better price,” a claim that according to the fine print is based on 52-week Nielsen scanner data and surveys of men considering overall performance and price. (A P&G spokesman said Gillette systems continue to win in numerous internal and external surveys and ratings of razor performance.)

That was followed by a guerrilla challenge from venture-capital-backed Dollar Shave Club, whose viral video drew more than 4 million views its first month. “Do you like spending $20 a month on brand-name razors?” club founder and co-CEO Michael Dubin asks in the video. He adds that “$19 goes to Roger Federer” — a swipe at the tennis great, who’s had viral-video fame himself as a Gillette pitchman. Read Rest of Article

Advertisers have been clamoring for years for a way to measure online audiences comparable to TV. After a process that’s taken more than a decade, they’re poised to get it, along with something they never had for TV ratings: competition.

Last year Nielsen got Media Rating Council accreditation for its Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) system, which uses anonymous Facebook data to deliver age and sex demographics and gross rating points similar to TV. That raises the prospect of another monopoly for Nielsen, which many advertisers already complain doesn’t accurately measure TV.

Enter ComScore. Five years into its own efforts to get MRC accreditation for online-audience measurement based on its panel of 2 million people worldwide, the company is closing in on its goal to rival Nielsen online ratings and creating a measurement arms race in the online space.

ComScore’s program, Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE), could one-up Nielsen by incorporating a “viewability” measure to ensure that ads are delivered in a way that allows people to see at least 50% of the pixels for at least one second. That’s a standard the advertising industry’s Making Measurement Make Sense initiative (3MS) has been seeking along with online GRPs.

VCE has gone through a pre-audit process with the MRC, with favorable results, said ComScore Chief Research Officer Josh Chasin. He expects a formal audit by mid-April, paving the way for an MRC vote on accreditation.

If accredited, VCE would seemingly provide everything the 3MS group (a joint project of the Association of National Advertisers, Interactive Advertising Bureau and 4A’s) has sought in online-audience measurement. Read Rest of Article