I’ve been writing a lot lately about web-based apps, including ones that you can use to automate social tasks (ifttt) or just save time and batch your updates (Buffer). Each of these apps can help save you time while still allowing you to participate in social media. One of the apps I haven’t talked about yet is an app I use every single day. Dropbox is a free app that allows you to sync files (through the cloud) and access them anywhere you can connect to the internet. In today’s world, work no longer lives 100% at the office and personal matters no longer live 100% at home. That’s where Dropbox comes into play.

You can easily access all of your files at Dropbox.com, through their intuitive web interface but one of Dropbox‘s strengths is installing it to your computer. A quick install and you can either create a new Dropbox folder on your computer that Dropbox will always keep synced or you can specify which folders you want to be synced anywhere on your computer. For example, you can sync your My Documents folder to ensure that all of your docs are synced.

I have created a separate Dropbox folder to keep my important files synced and within that folder, I’ve created a folder of portable applications, so I can access programs I use frequently on any computer where I have Dropbox installed, like my desktop computer at home (that’s little more than a glorified home server now) or my laptop, wherever I bring it.

You can also create shared folders with Dropbox. So, when my whole family is in town, I’ll take a bunch of pictures, then share that folder with everyone so they can download the pictures to their own computer. They can also upload their own pictures to the folder so we can have a private space that allows us to exchange files that might be too big (or too numerous) for email.

In addition to private folder sharing, you can also post files up that can be publicly downloaded. Do you have a whitepaper you want to post on your website? Store it in Dropbox and share the link for people to download.

Dropbox is a free download available for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – click here to download the iOS app) as well as Android devices (click here to download the Android app from the Google Play Store), so in addition to being able to access your files on your computer and via the web interface, you can also have your most important files wherever you are by accessing the Dropbox app via your mobile device. Another nice feature about the Dropbox mobile apps is that you can set it up to automatically upload any photos or videos you take directly to a folder in Dropbox. Doing so makes sure you have all your photos and videos conveniently synced across multiple platforms. You also get free additional storage space by signing up for Instant Upload.

If you’re interested in trying out Dropbox, be sure to sign up through this link. It’s a referral link and it means that once you create an account and install it on your computer, we’ll both get an extra 500MB of free storage space.

You can create a Dropbox account for free and get 2GB of space, but you can quickly add more free storage to that by sharing links via Twitter and Facebook or by downloading the mobile app and hooking up Instant Upload. You can actually get up to 16GB of storage space for free through various referral links. If you need more storage, you can upgrade to their Pro 50 account (50 GB – $10/mo) or Pro 100 (100 GB – $20/mo) accounts. If you’re looking to use Dropbox for your office, they even have corporate plans available as well. Find out more about the various plans they offer here.

*Note: I’ve used referral links to Dropbox throughout this post. If you sign up and install the desktop app to your computer through this link, we both get 500MB extra*

No related posts.

For the past few weeks, Scotty’s Brewhouse, a local restaurant chain (I hate using the word “chain” to refer to a place like Scotty’s, but there are 5 locations, so I’m sticking with chain) has been running the Scotty’s Burger Bracket Challenge. In short, the contest allowed people to submit new burger recipes that would then be voted on in a bracket-style until the top burger was chosen. For the final two burgers, the Fit to Be Thai’d Burger and the Confused Buffalo Burger (read about them here), Scotty’s has been serving both burgers at their restaurants and the winning burger will be the one with the most orders as of Sunday, April 1 at 10:00 PM EDT. The winning burger will then become a permanent addition to the menu at Scotty’s Brewhouse.

Owner Scott Wise is no stranger to customer service or social media – in fact, I interviewed Scott a couple years ago to talk with him about his fantastic use of social media in the restaurant industry. I’ve always been impressed with Scott’s grasp of social media and how important it is for customer service today. I actually mention Scott as an example of how to use social media for customer service whenever I present to organizations.

Since Scott knows what he’s doing by using social media for great customer service I shouldn’t be surprised by what he did today, but it’s a great case study in customer retention:

I’ve been craving one of the final two burgers for a few days now and I sent out at tweet around lunchtime asking if anyone wanted to join me at Scotty’s Brewhouse downtown for lunch. A few friends replied and we went back and forth talking about @brewhouse for a few minutes, but weren’t able to find a time that worked for everyone so we scratched it.

A couple hours later, we were all mentioned in a tweet by Scott thanking us for talking about the restaurant and offering us all $10 gift certificates to use at the restaurant (see screenshot below for some of the conversation and resulting tweet from Scott):

Wow! We were all just talking about Scotty’s Brewhouse and we didn’t even end up eating there today, but Scott still recognized us by gifting all five of us a $10 gift certificate to spend at the restaurant.If you look at face value of the gift cards, Scott is now out $50 by giving us these cards, but think of what our potential lifetime spending will be at his restaurant. Does this free $10 gift card make me want to go back to eat at Scotty’s again? You bet. Spend more than the face value of the gift card? Probably. Would this blog post have even been written if he hadn’t rewarded his customers?

The simple act of rewarding customers for their loyalty (or, in this case, just for talking about the restaurant) ensures an even more fervent fanbase for his restaurant. Scott will see that $50 investment returned many times over because he was listening to his customers.

Thank you Scott for your tremendous generosity.

Here’s a video I put together with the help of 12 Stars Media. Erik Deckers and I went to Scotty’s last week to try out the two burgers remaining in the 2012 Scotty’s Burger Bracket Challenge.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Case Study: OK Go
2. Motrin – A Case Study on the Power of Social Media
3. Interview: Scotty Wise of Scotty’s Brewhouse

Quite simply, ifttt (short for If This Then That) is an app that lets you create automated Tasks or Recipes (tasks created and shared by others). For example, I have a task set up so every time I post a photo to Instagram, ifttt will automatically save a copy to a folder in my Dropbox account. I also have another task set up so when I star an article in my Google Reader, it will automatically add that article to my Buffer account to be posted to my social profiles.

You can create an account at ifttt.com and you’ll get up to 10 tasks for free. ifttt currently offers 41 different channels like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Buffer, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Readability, SMS and many more. With all the channels they offer, the number of tasks you could possibly create are nearly endless.

ifttt continually adds new channels, so if one that you frequently use isn’t yet supported, chances are they’ll add it once enough people start using it. Below, I’ll explain how to go about setting up a Task on ifttt.

Each ifttt task starts having you answer a simple question: if this then that. For each stage in the process you’ll select a channel. For example, let’s say I wanted to create a task that would tweet out any picture on Instagram that I liked. Here’s how I would do that.

• Select the Instagram channel in the task creation section of ifttt.
• Click on New liked photo within the Instagram triggers menu

• Select the Twitter channel
• Select Post a tweet with image from the Twitter triggers menu
• Fill out any additional information (I added “Great photo on #instagram: ” to the beginning of each tweet)

• Click on Complete action and you’re done.

The screenshot at right is a tweet that was created by ifttt when I liked a photo on Instagram. If you’re just getting started on ifttt, it can be a bit overwhelming with so many options, but here are a few of my favorite Recipes for you to get started with:

• When Facebook Profile picture changes, change Twitter Profile picture
• Every time you’re tagged in a Facebook photo, save it to Dropbox
• When I star an item in Google Reader, send it to my Readability account
• When I favorite a video on YouTube, send it to Buffer
• Send any tweets I favorite to Evernote

Related posts:

1. Save Time and Get Active on Social Media with Buffer
2. Google Plus – Is the Third Time the Charm?

Unlike robust social media management tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck (both excellent tools), Buffer does one thing and it does it exceptionally well. Buffer is a status update scheduling tool, but unlike a more full-fledged social media management tool, Buffer doesn’t ask you when to post your updates. Buffer initially selects four times throught the day when your posts will go out (but you can add, subtract or edit any of those times). Each time you add a new post to Buffer, it simply throws it into the buffer queue behind your other scheduled posts. In the screenshot below, you can see that there are several posts scheduled to go out over the next 24 hours. This is how Buffer works.

Now, I can spend 20 or 30 minutes over lunch or in the evening reading news updates from my Google Reader account or (some of my new favorites) Flipboard (iOS app link), Zite (iOS app link) or even the Bloomburg BusinessWeek (iPad app link) apps on my iPad. Then, when I read interesting articles, I can add them to my Buffer knowing they’ll post later and not inundate my followers as I read each article.

Buffer also makes it VERY easy to add content, whether you’re sharing links of articles you’re reading or whether you just want to schedule a post without a link. Buffer has created more than a dozen different ways to add content to your account. In addition to being able to update from the website, you can also update with an Android app, iPhone app, Firefox and Chrome extensions and (one of my favorites) a way to add to your Buffer via email, it’s easy to keep your Buffer full wherever you are. Below is a screenshot that shows how to add an update to Buffer via email. You’ll receive your own exclusive @to.bufferapp.com email address and everything you send to that address will automatically get added to your Buffer. Just add the email address to your contacts and you can add to your Buffer from anywhere.

Buffer is a free service, but there is also a couple paid versions available. For free, you can have up to 10 updates in your queue, and you can have one account each of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. For $10/month you get up to 50 updates at a time, six social networks and up to two team members per account. There’s also a $99/month plan that gives you lots more.

I’ve been using Buffer for about six months now and it has become an indispensable part of my day and my social media routine. If you’re interested in checking out Buffer, click here (referral). If you sign up through my referral link, we’ll both get one extra space added to our Buffer queue.

**Update Thanks to Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0, you can use Tweriod (a free service) to find out the best times to tweet. Simply connect Tweriod with your Twitter account and it will let you know the historically best times to post content to get the most interaction from your followers. Tweriod is included as part of the paid Buffer subscription, but you can look up the times on your own for free as well. **

Related posts:

1. Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Hootsuite
2. Social Media Case Study: OK Go
3. Four On Friday: Social Media Recap

At its core, Pinterest is a social bookmarking site similar to Delicious or SpringPad, but where Pinterest differs (and where they really shine) is how their bookmarks are organized. Rather than saving a list of text links, Pinterest is 100% image-based. The visual nature of Pinterest creates a clean and easily browsable interface that can be extremely addicting.

So, how does Pinterest describe itself?

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

- Pinterest.com

Pinterest Wall - Places I'd Like to Visit

You’re likely to find boards and pins full of decorating ideas and recipes as well as just about anything else you could think of, but Pinterest has a really unique opportunity to be a great place for Tourism entities to set up shop. In fact, I set up an account for Visit Indiana a couple months ago and have received a pretty good response so far. I’ve created boards for Favorite Indiana Destinations, Indiana Artisan Products, Indiana Beer and Wine, Indiana Arts and Crafts and Indiana Experiences. Each time I come across a great picture of somewhere in Indiana or something Indiana-related on Etsy, I pin it and share it with everyone who follows Visit Indiana.

You can browse Pinterest in several different ways. You can view just pins from your friends or you can search for and browns pins in countless topics (travel, decorating, recipes, etc.). One of the coolest features on pinterest is the ability to “repin” other people’s pins. Just like sharing on Facebook or retweeting on Twitter repinning posts the pin on your board so your friends can see it. It’s a great way to catalog pictures or links you want to keep handy.

Regardless of what kind of tourism organization you work for (State, County or City DMO or individual attraction or lodging facility) Pinterest offers you the ability to share great photos of places in your area, locally-made products or hidden destinations for visitors and residents alike.

Note that Pinterest is only available on iPhone/iPod Touch right now.

Are you already using Pinterest? If not, do you think its a good fit for your organization?

Related posts:

1. New Niche App for Sharing Love of Food: Foodspotting (#Tourism)
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. Hoosier Tourism in Social Media

Also, similar to the way Gowalla allows users to create Guides, Foodspotting also lets users to create Guides like Taste the Vintage in Bucks County - created by the Bucks County Conference and Visitors Bureau. This particular guide looks great on both the mobile app and on the website and it details some great wineries throughout the county. As a bonus, you earn a badge once you visit all the wineries within the Guide.

As a tourism office, you’re in the unique position to be the curator for great food in your area. Like Bucks County did, you could created Guides for great wine, great burgers, great ethnic food or anything else food-related for visitors and residents to complete and add to. The more people that jump on the platform and add their favorite foods, the more useful and robust the app will become.

Check out the screenshots below for examples of the Footspotting mobile app (Foodspotting is now available for iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile and Android devices right now – a Blackberry app is coming soon). Have you used Foodspotting before?

Related posts:

1. Hoosier Tourism Blogs
2. Hoosier Tourism in Social Media
3. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter

First things first: The Plus-1 Button

About a month ago, Google unveiled their +1 button in what seemed like an attempt to compete with Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button. I quickly added the +1 button to several blogs I manage so we could start taking advantage of people starting to use the +1 button. Google first launched +1 as a way to ‘bookmark’  search results that you’ve found helpful. For example, if I search for a Chinese restaurant in Indianapolis and one of my favorites comes up in the list, I can +1 it and it will come up at the top of the list next time I search for a Chinese restaurant in town. Pretty helpful stuff. Now, with the release of G+, the +1 becomes even more useful. Before G+ there wasn’t a way to catalog all the things you +1′ed (search results, blog posts, websites, etc.), but within G+, there’s a +1 tab on your profile page so you can go back through everything you’ve +1′ed in the past – making it a better place to store true bookmarks and pages you’d like to return to than simply liking a site/post/etc. through Facebook (since there’s no ultimate catalog of the things you’ve liked outside of Facebook.com).

Circles 

Circles are the foundation that G+ was built upon. While you can add friends to different lists within Facebook, it’s a feature that was added to Facebook after many people joined, so there isn’t a great adoption rate for the lists feature within Facebook.

G+: Add to Circle

Instead of friending people like you do on Facebook or just following them like on Twitter, you add people to your circles in G+. Unlike Facebook, you can add people to your circles without them having to add you back, but unlike Twitter, by clicking on the Incoming portion of your stream (which I’ll get to later) you can see the posts of people who have added you to their circles that aren’t yet a part of your own circles.

In addition to a simple drag and drop feature for adding people to different groups, Google also has a suggested users section to the right of your stream where you can hover over Add to Circles and easily add people to your circles.

You can also easily view content from and share content with specific circles very easily with G+. Say you want to share some photos with just people in your Family circle, it’s simple to do. If you want to share a link to an article with friends from work or share a photo with friends from college, you can do that as well.

Profile

If you had a Google Profile, it’s now your G+ Profile. You can fill in information like where you work, a bio, where you went to school, where you’ve lived as well as add photos and links to your social media profiles, websites and blogs. Just like on your Facebook profile page, you can add as little or as much information as you’d like. When people land on your profile page, they can view previous posts (but only ones that are either Public, Extended Circles or shared with a circle that they’re a part of), About, Photos, Videos +1′s and Buzz.

Stream

The G+ stream is just like the newsfeed on your Facebook wall. When you log in, you’ll see each of your Circles on the left side of the page. You can click on any circle to view updates from people in that specific circle if you don’t want updates from your circles mixing.

You can easily comment on, +1, and reshare posts within your stream. With every new post you create, whether it’s a photo, link, video or text update, you can select who you want to share the post with. You can specify any combination of circles, individuals and email addresses as well as with the Public, all your circles or (a really interesting option) Extended Circles. Extended Circles simply means that your post is viewable by everyone in your circles as well as everyone in their circles.

While G+ doesn’t have a direct messages feature like Twitter or a private messages feature like Facebook, you can post messages that can only be seen by one other person by making sure they’re the only person that you share the post with. If this feels a bit uncomfortable to use for private matters,  you can always default back to another medium to send that truly private message.

I’ve tried out sending a more personal message just to an individual and they truly are the only ones who can see the message.

Tip: If you’re sharing a private post with someone, make sure you disable sharing on the post so they can’t reshare your private message.

Photos

G+ allows you to connect directly with Picasa (which will soon be rebranded as Google Phot0s) and share photos on your profile. With the G+ Android App (and the soon to be released iOS app), you’ll be able to take pictures and share them immediately with your circles.

Hangouts

In my opinion, this is one of the best features on G+ and one of the greatest differentiation point over Facebook. In short, Hangouts are group video chats. While Facebook just announced Skype integration to allow video chats directly from Facebook, G+’s Hangout feature is several steps ahead of the Facebook/Skype integration.

With Hangouts, you can have multiple people in the same video chat and you can also chat via text while you’re in the Hangout. This is a great way to share links or other information while you’re hanging out. Another unique feature is the ability to share YouTube videos with the Hangout. That way the entire group can watch a video together.

Tip: While you can specify groups or individuals who you invite to the Hangout, you can’t kick people out of the Hangout and anyone who is in the Hangout can invite anyone else. For that reason, if you want to have a private video chat, I’d recommend sticking with Skype or Facebook.

Sparks

The G+ Sparks feature is a combination of Google News and Google Reader. You can specify things you’re interested in and set them up as Sparks. G+ then feeds interesting news stories  each Spark that you can read through or share with your circles.

Measuring Traffic

All these features are great and they could lead to G+ becoming a legitimate player in the social media space, but when push comes to shove, you really need to know whether G+ is driving any traffic (and, in turn, any conversions) to your site. If you have a web analytics package like Google Analytics installed on your site, you can easily track the referring links coming to your site from G+. Just like how Facebook redirects all links shared on their site through http://www.facebook.com/l.php? to enable accurate clickthrough tracking, G+ redirects all links through http://plus.google.com/url? and that’s easily trackable through your analytics pacakge’s referring links section.

Side note: I’m not sure why Twitter hasn’t implemented something like this. Maybe that’s where they’re headed with their t.co shortener. Since Twitter is accessed through countless apps both on computers and mobile devices as well as through Twitter.com, it seems that by redirecting all links posted via Twitter through one standard redirector (t.co), it would make accurately tracking all Twitter traffic MUCH easier for everyone. Twitter, you can take this idea, I don’t even need credit for it.

GPlus: Early Verdict?

It’s still way to early to say that G+ is a boom or a bust, but I see a lot of potential and quite a few pitfalls at the same time.

Pitfalls:

• Numbers: With 750+ million people on Facebook and 200+ million on Twitter, Google really got to this party late and it’ll take more than just luck to siphon people from networks they’re already familiar and comfortable with.
• No Business Options – Yet: Google has announced that they’re working on a solution for businesses who want to get involved on G+ – they just don’t want businesses creating profiles just yet.
• Growth Beyond Early Adpoters: Several people have started wondering lately whether G+ can grow beyond the early adopters who are on the platform now. Mashable estimates that there are nearly 10 million people using G+ already, but I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of the updates I’ve seen so far on G+ have been related to G+. Part of that could be the novelty of the platform and everyone trying to figure it out together, but there have been other networks (like Friendfeed) that have languished with only early adopters.

Potential:

• Circles: Google has come up with an extremely intuitive and easy way to place people into groups. Facebook’s similar feature is clunky at best and if you haven’t already moved your friends into different groups by now, chances are you never will. It seems that Google started with Circles as the fundamental element behind G+ and it shows. It’s so easy to share anything with as many or as few people as you want.
• Hangouts: I think this is the killer feature in G+. I’ve tested it out a couple time with some colleagues and we’ve had as many as 5 people in the hangout at the same time.
• In addition to being able to have a quick video chat with one or several people, you can make the Hangouts as public or as private as you want to.
• The fact that I had already used G+’s Hangout feature made me yawn when Facebook announced last week that you could now (finally) video chat via Facebook. However, since you can only chat with one person at a time, this feature was out of date before it was even released.
• Integration with Google: This is another one of G+’s biggest strengths. Google already has a huge user base of people on Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Maps not to even mention Google Search, and the fact that your G+ menubar stays with you whenever your on a Google property just means that people can stay connected to their network and share with them even easier than they can through Twitter or Facebook.

Related posts:

1. Has Google Lost It’s Edge?
2. What’s the Buzz about Google Buzz?
3. Two Great New Features from Google Analytics

Report No. 8: The Social Breakup

The eighth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series focuses on the “social breakup” – how and why consumers “break up” with brands and stop following them via Facebook, Twitter and email. You might be surprised at how much similarity there is across all channels. Here are some of the highlights:

• Email
  • 67% of subscribers hit the unsubscribe button to end the email relationship rather than just deleting (17%), reporting as spam (8%), ignoring (6%) or setting up a filter to auto-archive the message(2%)
  • Top 3 reasons people unsubscribed from emails:
    • Too many emails from the company
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • Email overload – too many emails in general, cleaning out the clutter
• Facebook
  • When fans no longer want information from a brand they previously “liked”, 43% of them go to the brand’s page and click “unlike, 38% click the “X” in their newsfeed to remove them from the wall and 19% just ignore the posts.
  • Top 3 reasons people “unliked” a brand on Facebook:
    • Too many posts – too much frequency can overwhelm users walls
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • They only “liked” the brand because of a promotion, discount or deal offered to fans, and “unliked” once they got what they wanted.

• Twitter
  • Nearly half of consumers who created a Twitter account no longer use it with 52% saying they found Twitter to be pointless, 38% saying it became boring and 23% thinking that Twitter was too chaotic.
  • Top 3 reasons people stopped following a brand on Twitter:
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • Tweet stream became overloaded with marketing posts, wanted to clean up
    • Too many posts – too much frequency can overwhelm users tweet streams

Notice the striking similarity between why people unsubscribe, unlike and unfollow brands? While there are different strategies to employ for brand to get the most out of email, Facebook and Twitter, online consumers – across the board – seem to all be saying the same thing when it comes to ending their relationship with a brand’s digital initiatives: don’t talk too much and keep the content interesting.

Report No. 9: Mobile Dependence Day

The ninth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series really focuses on our increasing dependence on our smartphones and other mobile devices. Even within the past year, the share of US consumers with smartphones (as opposed to feature phones) has grown dramatically. Here are some of the high points about what it means for interactive marketers:

• 89% of US consumers 15+ own a cell phone. 41% of those have smartphones
  • Android: 33%
  • iPhone: 25%
  • Blackberry: 19%
  • Other: 23%
• Smartphone’s Big 5 (the five most frequently used functions on today’s smartphones):
  • Phone Calls
  • Texting
  • Email
  • Internet
  • Facebook
• How important is the smartphone to people who own and use one? Here is the percentage of people who would (if forced to choose) rather keep their smartphone than the following items:
  • Game Console: 72%
  • Dishwasher: 46%
  • Laptop: 40%
  • Microwave: 34%
  • Refrigerator: 13%
  • Car: 8%

The rest of the report gives recommendations of ways you can integrate your marketing efforts across all three communications channels and is definitely worth a read.

Have you looked through ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers series? What do you think about their findings?

Related posts:

1. Subscribers, Fans and Followers – How are You Meeting Their Needs?
2. Subscribers, Fans and Followers: Facebook and the Collaborative Future
3. Connections 2010: Video Recaps (Part 1)

Here’s where Qdoba comes in. Not only are there two Qdoba locations within about 2 miles of my house, but Qdoba is constantly sending out coupons through their permission email channels. When they launched their Craft 2 menu item last spring, they sent several emails letting their subscribers know about their Qdoba Craft Your Life microsite, which allowed you to play a short game, and rewarded you with a coupon at the end. The coupon was anything from a free order of chips & queso with the purchase of an entrée to a free entrée with the purchase of a drink.

Last fall, Qdoba  launched a promotion, Food Lovers Fighting Burrito Boredom, which allowed customers to make their own entrée online – which they can spice up however they want – in order to help fight burrito boredom. Just like with the previous promotion, Qdoba allowed users to place once a day per email address and awarded them with a different coupon of varying worth. Though the coupon portion of the promotion is over now, Qdoba has kept the microsite alive to continue to educate their potential customers.

Although the US has started to see economic growth in the past few quarters, high gas prices threaten to dampen some of that growth for this summer. For a fast casual restaurant like Qdoba, they certainly don’t want to dilute their brand’s quality perception by focusing solely on coupons, but by creating innovate campaigns like this, Qdoba is showing that they understand the economy we’re in now and are trying to build up brand loyalty for when the economy rebounds and discounting isn’t as common.

In addition to their promotions, Qdoba is also doing a great job of creating real conversation and interacting with their customers (below is a tweet I sent out that they quickly replied to).

Related posts:

1. Permission Email Marketing Case Study: Qdoba
2. Four on Friday: Weekly Social Media Recap
3. 7 Ideas for Marketing in a Recession

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring traffic to and within your website, but it can also appear overwhelming at first glance. There’s such a wealth of information available through Google Analytics but unless you know what you’re looking for and how to access that data, you won’t get much out of implementing an analytics package like Google Analytics.

Last week Google debuted an upgraded version of Google Analytics (v5), and anyone with a Google Analytics account can now view the old version or the new version. In order to access the new Google Analytics, simply click on new version next to your email address on the top right corner of the page. While Google is still in the process of pulling all the old features over to the new version of GA, the new version seems to be working just fine and there are even a few new features to go along with the redesign and reorganization.

You could spend months learning all the ins and outs of Google Analytics, but here are some of the most important things to look for when you’re tracking visitors on your website using Google Analytics.

The Basics

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

When you first log into Google Analytics you’ll see the Visitors Overview that includes stats like Visitors, Pageviews, Time on Site and Bounce Rate. The Visitors and Unique Visitors numbers are important because it lets you know how many people have come to your site during the time frame you’re looking at and you then know approximately how many of those visitors have been to your site before. Pages per Visit lets you know the average number of pages each visitor goes to while on your site. Don’t think that just because you have a high Pages per Visit number it means your visitors are happy with your site and they’re getting what they wanted from your site. I’ve seen instances where a campaign caused Pages per Visit and Time on Site to drop, but have dramatically increased conversion rates. As much information as Google Analytics provides you, it still requires old fashioned individual user research or surveys to find out users sentiments.

The term Bounce Rate can be confusing. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that only view one page (the page they landed on first) and then exit your blog. In general, you want as low a bounce rate as possible, but much like the Pages per Visit and Time on Site metrics, a bounced visitor isn’t necessarily an unsatisfied visitor. If your website is more informational in general (many Local, State and Federal Agencies have more informational than sales or conversion goals), a higher bounce rate might not be a bad thing. But for most organizations the goal of your website is likely to sell a product, ticket, room night, service or something along those lines. If you notice high bounce rates for pages where you’re specifically selling an item or asking the user to take an action (sign up for an email newsletter or download a whitepaper), you should make some modifications to the page that could help lower the bounce rate.

Traffic Sources

Tracking where your visitors are coming from is important for any organization. Under the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics, you’ll find detailed information about how visitors came to your site and you can determine which keywords, search engines, referring sites and even ad campaigns are driving the most traffic (and even which ones have the highest ROI, through more advanced Goals).

Keywords (Organic Search)

Most websites will see the plurality (if not the majority) of traffic come through search engines. Whether it’s paid traffic via search engine marketing or organic traffic from users typing search terms into Google or Bing, you’re likely to see a lot of visitors come to your site through search. Click on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Search –> Organic to see all the search terms that people used get to your website. Looking at the organic search terms can help you to know what kind of content you need to beef up on your website to increase traffic and conversion.

Referrals

Referrals are visitors that get to your website by way of someone else’s website, but not a search engine. For instance, if I have a link on my website to yours and someone clicks through to your site from mine, then SocialMediarology.com will appear as a referral on your website. Click on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Referrals to view all referral sources for your website. It’s great to see sites that are referring traffic to you, but the real benefit of referrals is when you dig down just a bit deeper to see exactly where those referrals are pushing the most traffic on your site.

To dig down to the Landing Page you can click on the image at the right for a more detailed view. Next to Secondary dimension: just below the graph, click on Select –> Traffic Sources –> Landing Page. This will then give you the great detail in the screen shot below. You can now see not only which referring sites sent you traffic, but which actual pages on your site those visitors were sent to and what their Pages Per Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate were for each specific landing page from each specific referral. See how much information you’re getting now?

Google Analytics - Referral & Landing Page Stats

Campaigns

The campaigns section is one of the most powerful features of Google Analytics. I won’t go into too much depth about campaign tracking, but check out this post if you want more detail about campaign tracking – specifically as it relates to tracking referrals from social media properties like Facebook and Twitter. You can view campaign tracking by clicking on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Campaigns. Campaigns are a great way to accurately track exactly how visitors are coming to your site.

If you place several different banner ads on a website (let’s say you have IntAdA, IntAdB and IntAdC as your different ads), you can append special Google Analytics campaign tracking codes to each link on those banner ads so you know exactly who came from which ads and which ads performed best. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name (IntAdA, IntAdB, IntAdC in this example, but it could also be another campaign name or a date if you’re tracking an email send)
• utm_source: The source for the link (The site your ad is placed on for this example – we’ll call it AdSite.com – but it could also be Twitter, Facebook, HootSuite, TweetDeck)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (For this example, we’ll call it BannerAd, but it could also be email, search, social media, SEM, display ads, twitter, facebook, etc.)

If I were running an ad campaign to push people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, the page I’d push visitors to would be: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But, to more accurately track the entire campaign – including the different creative versions of my ad, I’d append the following to the end of the URL: ?utm_source=AdSite.com&utm_medium=BannerAd&utm_campaign=IntAdA So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=AdSite.com&utm_medium=BannerAd&utm_campaign=IntAdA

The easiest way to create trackable links like this is by using the Google Analytics URL Builder. Simply put in the link you want to append tracking code to and enter the campaign, source and medium names into their respective spaces and the site will generate your trackable link for you. Throw that long URL into a URL Shortener and you’ve got a short URL you can easily share via Facebook, Twitter and other social mediums. Within Google Analytics, you can now visit the Campaign section and you can filter sort and search for your campaign, source and medium names to see how much traffic you received from all your different campaigns.

Content

Google Analytic’s Content section features detailed information on individual pages, events (like outbound clicks) and in-site search metrics. Depending on how you’ve set up Google Analytics, your outbound clicks and in-site search may or may not work right off the bat, but the Site Content section will be a section you use quite a bit.

Site Content

Within the Site Content menu, you can look at Pages which sorts all the pages on your site by the number of pageviews. It’s a great quick way to check out what your most viewed pages are so you can know what your top content was for the time frame you’re looking at.

You can also look at the Content Drilldown section that allows you to drill down deep into your site architecture to see how many views a particular page or blog post got during the time period you’re looking at. This is where I spend most of my time, as you can add a secondary dimension like City, Region or Browser which can give you a much more granular look at who’s visiting which pages.

Google Analytics also lets you dig down into your Exit Pages. An exit page is the last page a visitor was on before leaving your domain altogether. In the end, the exit percentage for every website is 100, but by looking in depth at the Exit Pages section you can see which pages are particularly notorious for sending people away from your website.

If your top exit pages are confirmation pages that visitors receive after placing an order with you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – but couldn’t you offer them something on that page to convince them to stay at your site a little longer? If some of your top exit pages happen to be during the checkout process BEFORE visitors have purchased from you – then you’ve got a problem and need to figure out how to close the deal with those visitors before the exit your site completely.

Landing Pages is another section in the Site Content area of Google Analytics. Here you’re able to see your pages sorted by number of entrances. It’s a great way to look at your top few landing pages on your site and dig down into how people are finding those pages. In the screenshot below, I took a top landing page and segmented it by source – now I can see how many people are coming to into our site from that post through Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook and more.

Site Search

Google Analytics’ Site Search section allows you to dig down into how visitors are using your internal search to find what they’re looking for on your site. Setting up site search is something you’ll have to do (or have your IT department do) in addition to the basic Google Analytics setup, but it setting up your GA account to track your internal site search isn’t too difficult. In Google Analytics, you can modify the account settings and there’s a place under the Profile Settings tab where you can request that GA tracks Site Search. All you have to do is enter the parameter your site uses for search and GA will start tracking it.

Events

Events is  pretty flexible part of Google Analytics. you can set up the Events section to track all of your outbound links and any downloads you offer on your site. Events were added to Google Analytics relatively recently and they’re a great addition. Before Events, most outbound clicks were tracked as pageviews – which can seriously affect your webstats with inaccurate numbers.

Overview

There are many different analytics packages (including free packages like Yahoo Web Analytics and GoingUp or paid packages like Mint, Woopra and WebTrends) and Google Analytics may not be the best package for your business. However, as one of the most popular web analytics packages in use today, understanding Google Analytics and how you can use it for your business is extremely important.

Do you use Google Analytics or some other package for your blog or website?

Related posts:

1. Two Great New Features from Google Analytics
2. How To: Track All Your Traffic From Twitter
3. Has Google Lost It’s Edge?