But, seriously which is better or which is stronger? It’s a tug of war which will go never ending. Therefore it’s best to know the strength and weakness of both and utilize them optimally. Lets look at the pros and cons of both:

SEO

Pros

1. Will bring high amount of easily estimated traffic per day.
2. Increase branding of your product.
3. Potential customers can find their way easily to your web-sites
4. The ranking is long lasting and dependable
5. Customizable for diverse audience
6. Many indicators are present to measure the effectiveness of SEO

Cons

1. Its take longer time to set up a good ranking in search engine.
2. Missing the target on some keywords can lead to waste of time.
3. No guarantee of the conversion of the traffic.
4. Dependent upon the random trend of the keywords.
5. Different Search engine has different criteria for page ranks.
6. Creates limitations to the website’s design for eg: flash based contents .

Social Media

Pros

1. It takes less time for the campaign to act on customer.
2. Can be targeted to the particular customer individually.
3. Real customers can directly interact with the management or developer team.
4. Allow users immediately share the service to other people creating a chain effect
5. You can build brand loyalty through blogs and other content generation and get connected to the customers.
6. You can learn more about the needs of the customer and implement them in your product.

Cons

1. A dedicated team needs to be assigned for continuous presence in the media
2. Continuous relevant content generation is required
3. There is a delay between the creation of the relationship with the customers and the actual ROI.
4. There is high risk of getting involved in the negative criticism of the customers.
5. Less number of indicators developed for tracking the success of the campaign.

Obliviously, these pros and cons are not going to mean that one is better than the other, or that one should chose one against the other. These facts points out the limitation of the both method of marketing. In today’s competition, both the method needs to applied with strategies plan. Both require your equal attentions.

I hope I didn’t miss out any points, but if I did do suggest them.

Analytics tools create a foundation for making rational actions and choices, but do rarely create actions on its own. Some CRM-tools do, but not many, yet. So what do we do with this new data from social media and web 2.0 applications?

There’s two ways to react, the reactive way and the proactive way.

The reactive way is the way of protecting your brand and your reputation. You want to monitor the web, so that you can identify mainly negative word of mouth about your brand. You need to understand when individual blow-outs are only that (most cases) and when they turn into massive network campaigns against you.

Time will be of essence to reduce the damage. And how can you do that?

Honesty and humility is usually the way to contruct the message, while press releases, contact with explicited bloggers and comments on blogs, in groups and forums are the resources to use to get your message out. The same media that spread the critique in the beginning. In other words the reactive method is a counter-measure.

This is a very important feature for large brand-driven corporations. Millions have been spent to strenghten the brand, but seconds and it could all be gone. Word of mouth is not new, but the new dynamics is in the speed of transfer of the message. Before word of mouth was one to one or one to a few. And that was it. Now it could be one to millions, in a chain of events, multiplying. Fast. Time will be of essence to reduce the damage.

This willn’t happen often, but when it does … you better be prepared
(If you have links to cases like this, please enlighten me with you comments).

So how can you be prepared? You need guidelines. Who is going to act on the company’s behalf? And you need good judgement. In large corporations it will most naturally be the communication department, the same people who are allowed to speak to traditional media. But are these people also geared towards how the new social media work? They need to be!

But the more exciting opportuinites, in my opinion, is the proactive possibilites this new data provides.

You can identify small communities, websites or networks where your products are being discussed. Then you can target them, with ads or through participating in the networks yourself. Perhaps can you even identify the most influential people, who can be invited to participate in your business concept; in research, interviews or with perks like early access to products. Be careful, good judgements is needed… you can’t just buy your way in, that could turn the whole network against you.

Proactive customer service would be to contact those who complain, preferably solving the problem and adding a bonus into the deal. Then there is competitor surveillance and the possibility to follow the scent of the game; is your word of mouth generally positive or negative, and are we seeing sudden changes?

And what about the opportunity to participate in forums where it is happening. Your things are beeing discussed, and you are present to “guide” the discussions in your favour. Of course, openly and with true colours. Web 2.0 is about honesty and transparency, break with that - and “they” will breake you.

Are you on the ball? or is this just Fantasy in your corporation?

Disclaimer:
The suggestions and conclusions in this posting are pure reflections, not experiences. Any insights from real life or links to real life cases will be greatly appreciated.  

It’s as simple as it is brilliant. Try it yourself at: http://4q.iperceptions.com

3 to 4 questions that give fantastic insights to the “WHY”.

Q1: Based on today’s visit, how would you rate your site experience overall?

This is the costumer satisfaction index. A cool feature to use to praise yourself, but more important a question (and answers) that over time will show if your efforts a reaping its benefits. It will also tell you very quickly if something bad happends to your site.

Q2:Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit?

This tells you about the essence of your site. The bery concept, but with the eyes of the user. Their perceptions may very well be different than your original plan.

Thes results of this qestion will be a very solid foundation if you are considering making personaes for your site. Personaes should always be task oriented, and here you’ll have all the important tasks, listend and ranked.

Q3: Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?

This question tell you if your site is working or not. Not the quality of your site, but if the concept and functionality is working according to the expectations of the users. In my case with astrolog.no the task completion is around 90%, which is very high… but Q1 only scores around 65. This tells me that the site works, but the content could be better.

Only if Q3 is “no”.

Q4: Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today?

The last question is the real gold mine. Here you get the real insight about the things you shold or could have done, and gives you the chance to change. If your site has enough traffic, you should see many great suggestions appear repedately, in which case you should take the suggestions very seriously and do something about it.

The tool now comes with a vast number of translations, so go see if your language is included. It most probably is.

• questionnaires from the web
• webstatistics
• user testing

That’s if you include sales and transaction data in your web statistics, otherwise that would be a neccecary 4th element.

The Monotoring and Surveillance of the web
But with the fantastic growth of the social web, a new method is emerging as a more common and neccecary tool. The Monotoring and Surveillance of the web. The talk of the town is now so widespread that only analysing the activity on your own sites are no longer adequate. At least not if you have a brand name to protect.

In the more advanced sense this could also result in a methodology to identify. Identify the power-structures and trendsetters that influence their communities. The same communities that talk about you.

As the name suggests it only takes 5 minutes and for that reason is easy to integrate into a live course. The test is about identifing specific pages, with an insight into what might be done better with this page. The basis for this test is the list of the most viewed pages on the site. A list that’s available in all the relevant web analytics tools.

From this point I will use Google Analytics and numbers from http://www.astrolog.no/ in my example.

The GA Top Pages List includes the following measures (variables):

Pageviews, unique pageviews, time, bounce rate, exit rate, value.

Pageviews or unique pageviews are used as the sorting variable to rank the pages after importance. A store could use the value index as an alternate sorting variable. It’s the time, bounce and exits that have the focus in the 5 minute test.

Generally if two of the three variables are outside the average/normal range, then this is a page to look at. Scan the list and find which pages that stand out.

This test does not hold ground to statistical significance, it’s only an indicator, so all pages highlighted by the test has to be viewed and scrutinized before a conclusion are reached. Especially the bounce rate can be an error because we use the top content pages.

(Bounce rate refers to how the page works as a landing page, but that might be only a fraction on the traffic for that page. E.g. the page might have 1.000 PV, but only 10 entries as landing page. The bounce rate will be based on the actions of the 10 entries that used the page as a landing page.)

Specifically, if these relationships are present, then you have an indication, an hypothesis to validate:

Time is too long, bounce is high, exit is ok:
The page is crowded with information, the information is not living up to the users expectation.

Time is too long, bounce is ok, exit is high:
The information is meaningless, or this is a page where users get their tasks completed - so it could be a completion.

Time is ok, bounce is high, exit is high:
Really not living up to expectations.

The values of bounce and exits can be compeared to the bounce rate of the whole site. If your site has a bounce rate of 20%, then 40-50% bounce or exit on a page is too high. If your bounce rate is 50%+ then you should look for rates over 70%.

Time is a more complex measure. If it’s a page used for navigation, then the time spent on the page should be minimized. More than one minute is too much. On a relevant content page you need to allow for more time. Usually I find that 3 minutes are a good max.limit, but some (science) sites could argue that you should use 5 minutes as the maximum time for one specific page.

Too short a time period could also mean that the content is not relevant. So if you have a high exit, high bounce and only a few seconds of view time, then people are not finding this page relevant. This is the case for the page that is identified in this example. The homepage is about astrology horoscope, while this one page that no one likes… is about chinese horoscope … something the auhor of this website know nothing about.

My recommendation… Delete this page!

We’ll focus this session on tools and will have few Business  Cases to illustrate.

Exceptionnaly, we will have a half-hour introduction on the Web Analytics for people not familiar with this field and willing to understand better what it is about.

You  are in Geneva area the 4th March? come and join us!

Register here.

See you there.

After Geneva in April and Zürich in June, the next WAW in Tour Edipresse will be the opportunity to share about KPIs for non-ecommerce websites (corporate website, non-profit organisations,…) and a big part of the session will be dedicated to discussion with and between attendees.

You will be in Lausanne area the 3rd of December, come and join us for great discussions around Web Analytics.
You can register on the official site.

Then while surfing with my new little darling… some pages did not look very good.

People it’s about time to test your websites from a PC with Firefox.

In his post Dennis explains that this re-branding […] also includes the launch of a new website and changes to the analytics product itself (sic) including support of Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Developers and Yahoo! Head Advertisers.

Unfortunately, as anticipated in April, this is not a free-for-all-come-and-get-it launch, but a carefully planned controlled access launch only for former IndexTools customers.

You can see few screenshots on the official Yahoo! Web Analytics  website.

Of course, crisis means recession, investments will be freezed or at least will slow down, non-necessary activities will see their budget aborted, probably very few companies (except the pure internet players) will spend money to improve their internet solutions and web analysts will be amongst the firsts to suffer from the situation.

But don’t you think this crisis can be a good opportunity to improve the internet presence of any company willing to have the best return on their online investments?
Times are difficult?
Budgets are smaller?

Let’s optimize the investments done in online marketing and communication!

It’s time to optimize (or put in place) the necessary mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of our web sites in order to better target our audience, to better understand our visitors and to refine our web sites to ultimately better serve (and satisfy) our customers.

The next months will be difficult for all of us, it is time to work on tools and process which will give us the necessary competitiveness and will help us to minimize the effects of the crisis.

Yes, definitely, times are not so bad for web analysts.