For this post, we wanted to provide a recap of eMetrics in San Jose.

First,  hats off to Jim Sterne and the folks at eMetrics for putting together another great show, this time at the beautiful Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. The event was well attended and it was great to see some of the top talent in the industry including Bryan Eisenberg, Eric Peterson, Avinash Kaushik, Bob Page, Anil Batra, and others.

One of the first impressions at the event is the change in mood from eMetrics DC in October 2008. While the theme at the previous event was “Do More with Less”, this show’s primary theme was “A Time to Shine”. Hopefully this is sign of improvement in the marketplace. While 6 months ago businesses were bracing for cuts, many today are preparing for a rebound and we’re hopeful that the theme at eMetrics is a reflection of the oversall economy.

The show was well attended and featured some great presentations and panels from Bryan Eisenberg, Jim Novo, Tim Ash, Danny Sullivan and more. As usual, Google introduced some new features and functionalities in Google Analytics, including Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions, two features that provide yet more advanced capabilities to Google Analytics.

However, the primary take-away from the show is that social media marketing has arrived. More companies are inquiring about social media marketing and measurement best practices than ever before, and there was a great presentation by Erik Bratt from Engage Social Media about the use of measurement to monetize social media. This of course, was welcome news for Tealium Social Media.

Again, congratulations to Jim Sterne for a great event. He proved once again, why eMetrics is the premiere show in the field of web analytics.

One of the best presentations that we’ve seen using this technology doesn’t even involve web analytics. Instead, it’s a presentation by Hans Rosling, the statistics guru about trends in developing countries.

This is not a new presentation, but the concepts presented and lessons about the use of data are still very relevant even in our industry.

For those who read this blog, I would like to explain briefly the reasons behind my nomination and why I’m asking you to vote for me (weird feeling now… requesting your vote! I feel like I’m entering into politics).

Anyway, I have presented my candidacy because I feel that our industry needs as much help and support as we can provide. And having been in the Web Analytics and Online Optimization space for more than 10 years now, I felt it was time for me to give back to this industry that has given me so much. My objective with the WAA if I have the chance to be elected is to put much effort in helping web analytics and online marketers solve the challenges of spending more time on what matters. For the past 10 years, and everywhere I go, it’s the same challenge.

What matters is the analysis, the interpretation, and more importantly the actions/recommendations/changes we can make base on the data that has been collected. Testing new marketing or web design ideas, improving the user experience, watching the online conversion rates increase, that’s what is fun and rewarding.

But unfortunately, most people are bugged down with data accuracy, implementation challenges, best practice measurements, etc. Too many individuals are spending their time trying to reconcile numbers, understanding and explaining why A and B don’t match as they should, figuring out the best way to measure specific web content (i.e.. flash, video, Social Media, mobile, offline data, etc.), and finally coordinating efforts with IT to implement (or re-implement) their web analytics tags for the 10th times to capture all this. There’s got to be a better way. And that’s the challenge I would like to tackle with all the players in this industry if I’m elected.

I really think that the WAA could be more proactive as an organization. Look at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and how they create web standards ahead of time for everyone, especially for technology vendors to follow. As a WAA director, I would love to list all the key challenges expressed by the WAA members (some of them listed above) and figure out proactive standards and best practices for measurement and implementation with all the key players in this industry so that WE (all of us) get to spend more time on what matters.

For more information about my candidacy, you can visit the WAA site.

I appreciate everyone’s support, and I wish you all a successful 2009.

What’s so special about Top Sites? Besides the fact that it provides a nice graphical view of your favorite sites, it lets you know if they’ve also been updated since your last visit. That’s right. Safari automatically fetches for new site content in the background and lets you know (using the blue stars in the right corner) that your top sites have been updated.

While this is very convenient for the user, it introduces new challenges for web analytics practitioners. Primarily, the inclusion of your site in your visitors’ top sites means an increasing amount of artificial traffic. Primarily, if you’re in a situation where users of Safari place your site in one of their top sites and don’t end up visiting your site, the traffic will likely show as bouncing traffic. This results in an increase in your bounce rate even though the visitor never entered your site.

We have tested the inclusion of a number of sites in Top Sites and have seen the traffic registered in web analytics even though we never visited the sites.

Safari 4 is currently in beta, so only a small percentage of your audience is exposed to “Top Sites”. Once generally available, this is sure to cause an increase in bounce rates for some popular sites. More importantly, the Safari market share has been on the rise, according to the figure below by Market Share. The latest figures show the market share at 8%. This means that as Safari continues to gain traction, this problem is bound to get bigger.

So as you’re analyzing your data, keep this trend into consideration as it could impact your overall bounce rates.

The finding: Online PR has a long tail.

Here’s the analysis. At first glance, online PR has a short lifespan. Consider the figure below, which shows the traffic as a result of PR and blog coverage associated with the release. We can see that as expected, the site gets the majority of its traffic immediately after release, with residual traffic afterward.

However, the one thing that you don’t want to do is to stop the analysis shortly after the release. Based on our findings, the long tail of online PR matters. In this specific example, over a 30-day period, the PR traffic during the peak period accounts for 41% of the PR traffic. This means that the long tail accounts for 59% of the PR traffic.

Now let’s take this to the next level and look at the KPIs for the PR campaign. More specifically, we’re interested in cost per lead associated with the online PR campaign. For benchmark purposes, we’re going to compare these numbers with our PPC programs in place. This is shown in the figure below.

In this graph, we also see the impact of the long tail on this KPI. By looking at the data for a short period of time, we see that initially online PR is not as effective as PPC advertising. However, over time, online PR turns out to be a more cost-efficient method for lead generation than PPC advertising.

The conclusion is that online PR has a residual life that when taken into account makes it as cost effective a medium as PPC advertising. So when it comes to PR measurement, make sure that you take the long tail into consideration.

The first instinct is to use Google’s campaign functionality to track their effectiveness. The problem with the approach though is that you’ll be overriding your external campaigns. Consider this scenario: the visitor comes from an email campaign that’s being tracked through Google Analytics and once on site, he/she clicks on the internal campaign, overriding the email campaign. When the conversion occurs, the campaign that takes credit is the internal one, falsely leading you to think that your email campaign is not performing.

So what to do in this case? The solution is to use another Google Analytics feature for internal campaign tracking to make sure your internal campaigns do not override your acquisition programs. Additionally, consider the scenario where you may have several internal campaigns or promotions that are displayed on the page at random. For example, in one impression the visitor may get exposed to promotions A and B, and upon refreshing the page the same visitor may get exposed to promotions B and C. An example of this can be seen at the bottom of the Wells Fargo home page shown below (note: not a client). In this case, it’s not only critical to track the clicks, but also impressions because the combined data points will give you the campaign click-through rates.

In this solution, we’ve developed a script that lets you track the effectiveness of your internal campaigns using Google Analytics’ new Event Tracking feature. The reason we selected Event Tracking is because we wanted an easy way to track both impressions (for rotating banners and offers) and clicks.

So how does this work? First, download the toolkit, which consists of the script and the instructions. This solution will let you tag the links for which you want to track impressions and clicks with a query parameter. By adding the query parameter onto the destination URLs, the script will track both impressions and clicks automatically.

Here’s an example: consider you have a total of 5 promotions on your home page that rotate randomly (like the Wells Fargo home page). The destination URLs for these five promotions are:
http://www.site.com/promotion1.html
http://www.site.com/promotion2.html
http://www.site.com/promotion3.html
http://www.site.com/promotion4.html
http://www.site.com/promotion5.html

By adding the parameter “promo_id” to each one of these destination URLs, the script will automatically track impressions for each of the links and also the clicks on the click through event. The only thing that you’ll have to do is to add the provided script to the page and add user-friendly parameters to the destination URLs. The following is a sample of what the resulting destination URLs would look like:
http://www.site.com/promotion1.html?promo_id=promo1_home
http://www.site.com/promotion2.html?promo_id=promo2_home
http://www.site.com/promotion3.html?promo_id=promo3_home
http://www.site.com/promotion4.html?promo_id=promo4_home
http://www.site.com/promotion5.html?promo_id=promo5_home

Sounds simple enough? Well it is. Now on to the reports. Upon the page load, the links tagged with a “promo_id” parameter will send an event tracking request to Google Analytics with the category: “promotions”, action: “impressions”, and label being whatever you’ve entered in the “promo_id” parameter. On the click event, the script will send another Event Tracking request with the category: “promotions”, action: “clicks” and label being the value passed in the “promo_id” parameter. The result is that you get true link impression and click tracking inside Google Analytics. The reports can then be viewed in the Event Tracking section of the interface, with categories showing “promotions”, Actions reporting on the number of impressions and clicks and Labels showing you the actual links being tracked.

Of course this comes with its limitations. First, Event Tracking is still in beta and not everyone has access to this feature yet. Next, you do not want to get carried away and use this for every link on your site. Google Analytics limits you to 10 events per page and no more than 500 total events for the entire session. So we recommend that you only use this for a handful of critical onsite promotions, mainly rotating promotions. The default script has a limit of 5 links to be tracked per page, which can be configured. Finally, it is imprtant to note that if you use this on your landing pages, it will impact your bounce rates. The extra event created via the impression tracking will eliminate any potential for a bounce, reducing your bounce rate. There is a mechanism to delay the impression tracking that is detailed in the distribution. This will allow you to only track promotion impressions for users spending X number of seconds on the page in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the bounce rate metric.

To assess this, we’ve used our own press release campaign as a case study. More specifically, we were interested in knowing the overlap between the PR and PPC audiences. The results: the two are very complementary.

First the background: the press release was launched on January 21 and can be found here. The release was also picked by a number of bloggers covering the social media and online PR measurement landscape. Simultaneously, we ran a series of PPC campaigns around social media and PR measurement as shown below. The question to ask is whether these two campaigns are reaching the same audience or are different ones.

In order to analyze the results, we’re using web analytics solutions (Google Analytics and NetInsight in our case). The results inside the web analytics solutions reveal no overlap whatsoever between the two campaigns. In other words, those who came to our site as a result of PPC did not have any exposure to either our press release or the blogger coverage of it. This is done thanks to the Tealium Social Media product. Let’s look at some of the analysis.

First, we’re going to look at the AdWords report inside Google Analytics. This is shown in the figure below. However, we need to also look at the overlap of the report with the social media segment. The social media segment is an additional segment that clients of our social media measurement service get access to. It allows you to compare what percentage of your traffic has been previously exposed to your social media and online PR (examples are PR stories and blog coverages).

We expected very little overlap between the two campaigns. In other words, we expected that our press release and blogger coverage targets a different audience than AdWords. But we did not expect the two to be mutually exclusive. Out of the 107 visits generated to the site as a result of PPC advertising, not a single one previously viewed our press release or read any of the blogs covering the release. This even holds true for the contextual advertising portion of our PPC campaign.

Now let’s take a closer look at the effectiveness of these two campaigns. For this, we’re going to look at the key performance indicators of the two campaigns, which is shown below. We can see surprisingly strong performance by the PR campaign. For example, the site conversion rate of the social media campaign is at 11.5%, only slightly lower than search advertising. At the same time, the cost per visit for the PR campaign is just slightly lower than search advertising.

The benefits of search advertising have long been known: you reach an audience that’s ready to buy at the most critical stage. But the fact that PR campaigns enjoy a similar performance means that online PR can be as effective as search advertising.

To reiterate, this study is for one site only and other sites may not experience the same effect, so you should take this into consideration. But marketers are well served adding online PR and social media marketing into their marketing mix. Not only does it target an audience that’s complementary to search advertising, but it also enjoys a level of success that’s in tune with PPC advertising, with similar cost per visit, cost per conversion and conversion rates. So go ahead - start experimenting.

For a review of Tealium Social Media, please visit this blog posting by PR measurement guru, KDPaine.

How does it work? Consider this scenario:

A visitor is in the market for CRM software and comes across a blog comparing various CRM programs. The blog mentions a number of CRM applications that the visitor had no previous knowledge of, including SugarCRM and NetSuite. Because of the great feedback in the blog, the visitor decides to go to SugarCRM by doing a search for “sugar crm” on Google. This leads the visitor to sugarcrm.com, where the visitor requests a personal demo.

With traditional web analytics, this conversion would be attributed to Google. With Tealium Social Media, the conversion will also be attributed to the original blog that started everything.

Tealium Social Media is a web analytics plug-in that is integrated into popular web analytics solutions: Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, Unice NetInsight, WebTrends, Coremetrics, etc. This means you can get your social media ROI measurement directly inside your existing web analytics account.

Intrigued? Request a demo.

Myth: I don’t pay for social media traffic. Since I don’t pay for it, I don’t need to measure it.

Fact: This is only a perception. The fact that you’re spending your resources - time and labor - means that you’re paying for social media traffic. True, there’s no cost-per-click model, but the mere fact that you’re spending time writing blogs, creating Facebook pages, responding to people’s requests or questions on Twitter means that you’re spending valuable resources on social media. Like any other activity, there’s an opportunity cost associated with your efforts - time you could be spending doing other things.

For example, if an employee costing the company $80,000 per year spends 10% of his/her time responding to blogs, Twitter posts, etc., then the cost of social media associated with that employee alone is $8,000 per year.

Myth: There’s no measurement standard when it comes to social media measurement.

Fact: There has been no shortage of measurements introduced when it comes to social media marketing - video views, sentiment metrics, advertising equivalency, etc. What’s important to note is that the same standards that have applied to PR measurement apply to social media as well. For years, PR professionals have classified the measurement of their activities in one of three buckets:

• Outputs (who’s talking about you): this is the basic level of measurement needed. Mapping this to social media measurement, the metrics associated with this pillar are video views, number of RSS subscriptions, number of blog or news mentions, etc.
• Outtake (what are they saying about you): this is the qualitative side of PR and social media measurement. Many brand managers use social media measurement for this aspect. The metrics associated with this pillar include qualitative measures such as “thumbs up”, “thumbs down”, measuring influence on Twitter or within the blogosphere, etc.
• Outcome (what does it mean to your business): this is the ROI portion of the measurement. How much site traffic and conversions can be attributed to social media. Do visitors who viewed a YouTube video end up visiting the site? This is clearly the most critical aspect of social media measurement for online marketing professionals.

The same standards that have applied to PR measurement also apply to social media measurement.

Myth: You can’t measure the ROI of social media.

Fact: This is not true. This is exactly what Tealium Social Media has been designed to do. Whether you measure your results based on the amount of traffic generated on your site, number of leads generated and the online sales volume, social media can be measured accordingly. In fact, so far most of the interest from customers has been around using measurement to audit their social media and PR agencies. Yes, you can measure the ROI of your social media marketing.

Myth: I can’t compare social media to other online marketing channels.

Fact: Again, not true. By integrating data from Tealium Social Media into your web analytics tool you can measure the ROI of social media side by side with your other online marketing channels such as search, email and banner advertising. This means that you can in fact compare your social media traffic - traffic attributed to video sharing sites, bloggers and news coverages - to your paid marketing channels.

Yes, social media is measurable and because it’s still a new practice, this means less competition and therefore better ROI than other online channels. We are working on a number of case studies in this area and are looking forward to sharing our findings once completed. Stay tuned.

Certainly this is an unprecedented move in the auto industry. And marketing wise, it is a brilliant one. According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is defined as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers”. This program certainly provides value to customers in these economic times.

And after only two days, it looks like the program is so far getting a great deal of coverage through the press, blog community and social networks. Congratulations to the marketing folks at Hyundai for creating a relevant marketing program for the times.