The other week, Brian Clifton wrote a very neat article on his well-known blog about tracking social networks by using filters. The data I got from the implementations he recommended in that article made me want to obtain even more “actionable data”.

So I went a little deeper into it and, after some tricks and implementations, I decided to share the findings with you. So here goes my second article for the series: 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about your visitors. If you missed the first one about visitors that lost their way, check it now.

This post tries to answer the following questions:

• What’s wrong with the data I already have?
• How to tweak it?
• How to use the new reports?
• What actions to take?… at least a couple of examples :)

What’s wrong with the data I already have?

First of all, referring sites are of all kinds and sorts. It just isn’t fair to put all of them together. Imagine if you couldn’t get paid keywords differentiated from organic searches keywords. How happy would you be then? Brian Clifton’s implementations are just about great as long as you are interested in the major trend, but it just isn’t right to put Twitter (haven’t tried twitter yet?)and LinkedIn in the same pot. Users coming from these 2 social networks can be segmented and therefore treated differently.

What we need is a way to get both trends, therefore, see how you are doing lately on social networks and which social network gets you better value: should you spend more time on Facebook or Twitter?

And here is even more: Google Analytics now allows you to compare up to 4 segments between them. Here’s something cool to compare: Social networks vs All Visits vs Paid visits. I did that and the results I got were amazing. In my case, the Bounce rate for Social Networks was under 40% and way lower than the global bounce rate. However, only 4 conversions occurred from social networks. At least I know what needs to be improved. :)

How to tweak it?

For the tweaking some technical implementations are needed, but that’s why I am here.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Get into the Analytics Dashboard of any of your websites or profiles. In the right upper corner you will see the Advanced Segments Beta button. Press it and click on the Create New Advanced Segment link.
2. Once you get in the Advanced Segment Creator, fill it up just like in the following image.

Here is what I added in the first Source Value Box:
linkedin\.com|facebook\.com|twitter\.com|forums.digitalpoint\.com|delicious\.com|en\.wikipedia\.org|discuss\.joelonsoftware\.com|digg\.com|stumbleupon\.com
I created the second and the third source segmentation settings in order to cover all blogs and forums.

Just before you save the settings click on the Test Segment button to see if everything looks good. Remember, red is for errors! :)

That’s it. Just follow the above 2 steps and you get a great new report. Let’s take it even further (I like this cause it gives me a good insight even without looking at the data). Check out the following image:

Just clicking on the test segment on the above setting I see that only 8 users got to start a registration form. None of them finished it. I heard many industry people saying that social networking traffic doesn’t convert much, that social networks just provide booms of traffic for short times and so on.

I am not actually going to buy that and I’ll do my best to provide great experiences for all of these users coming from the social networks. What one needs to do is to figure out a neat way to approach this type of traffic. They might not be your buyers, but they surely might be the Sneezers (people voicing out about your products or company).

How to use the new reports?

For a start, don’t look at the data just as it is. Compare it with all your traffic and, why not, with the paid traffic. Organic searches are a good alternative just as well. It’s less than 3 seconds to get really cool data: just choose the segments to compare and this is what the Site Usage dashboard section will provide:

It’s not very difficult to spot that the paid traffic the websites get is around 20% higher than the traffic coming from social networks. However, all the other numbers look much better. More time spent on site, lower bounce rate, more returning visitors for social networks. I know for a fact that this website has invested similar time on both paid traffic as well as article and blog posts writing.

Looking only at this, one would advise to quit on the paid traffic and focus all your efforts on good quality content distribution. You mustn’t hurry. Don’t forget to check out the conversions as well. In this case, while it has a high bounce rate, paid traffic brings also a pretty good conversion rate. Actually a very good conversion rate, as the ROI is quite good.

What I would suggest to this website is to try to benefit from the results it got from the social networks and use similar strategies to lure in the users coming from paid traffic. They might not be buyers, but you should give them the means and reasons to remember you.

The next thing I suggest is to go and look into how every social network contributes to your numbers. Check out the following report:

In the above case, stumbleupon.com proves to be the best friend for the selected website. So, how come you get so many visits from Stumbleupon? This social network doesn’t have a neat tool to discover how a certain domain is doing on it (Twitter has this) so I just go to google.com and search for the following query if I want to discover all the users sharing pages about my company:

site:stumbleupon.com inurl:yourbrandname

Take the top 10 communities that bring traffic towards your website. Login to your account and start interacting with the users already creating buzz around your blog, products or services.

I’d stop here but there is only one more thing I would like to show you. I can’t help it.

So far, we studied the trend of social networks traffic, what social network is of best value for you, but we didn’t talk about content. Content is king, especially when talking about social networks.

Going to the Content Overview, you will be able to see what pages are most visited by users coming from social networks. In other words – what users consider hot on your website. Besides giving you an idea of which article topics work and which don’t, with a little Greasemonkey hack you can get to see exactly who loves you and who doesn’t.

Clicking on all the links above will get you directly to the social network you are interested in and see all the reviews or votes and the users that gave them to you. If this isn’t actionable data, then what is?

What actions to take?

1. Make sure the buzz around you doesn’t get out of control. Bad reviews are really bad when you don’t know about them. If there is a community around your products, make sure you are part of it… no matter how many accounts you have to manage or what your rank inside the company is.
2. Always do better. Check out what is the most loved topic in social networks about you, see the comments it gets and, based on that, write even better and greater content. Listen to the community. Most of the times it really is loud and clear.
3. If social network traffic does not bring you customers, find a way to bring value to you. Give them a free and really cool tool and next time somebody asks them if they know somebody who sells a product like yours, rest assured they will talk about you. And if you come up with a neat tool, don’t forget to track it.
4. Google Analytics Data is only a hint of what is out there. It just provides the directions. Follow them. The real data you get from there not from Google Analytics.

So far, these are my 2 cents on social networks traffic tracking. How do you track social networks and what do you look for? Is there an action you took that really made a difference to the final results?

Stay tuned for the next thing that you (probably) didn’t know about your visitors.

Right around this time of year, you’re going to start seeing Predictions for 2009. Let me post mine: 2009 is the year you as the CEO of your microISV, startup or ISV get on Twitter.

For those of you who’ve managed to avoid Twitter, or dismissed it as some pointless flakey time waster, here’s a few current facts you should consider:

• Twitter usage is skyrocketing. In October alone, Twitter experienced a 25% climb in traffic, according to comScore, bringing the number of active Twitterers in the U.S. alone to 1.45; worldwide in September it was 5.6 million.
• Twitter has just about retired the “fail whale”. While in the first quarter of 2008 Twitter had more than a few crashes, those issues have been resolved, as this chart from the Royal Pingdom Blog shows:

• Companies - both micro and not - are being wildly successful using Twitter as a way of providing online customer service (read marketing). More about two examples of that next.

What’s going on here?

So how is it that a funky way to post 140 characters at a time has grown 16-fold in one year? It’s called the Cluetrain Manifesto. Way back in 1999, four really smart people decided it was time to nail what the new digital reality meant for marketing and advertising to Mainstream Advertising’s front door. Their 95 theses spell out why mainstream media right to interrupt every other human activity was eroding under Internet pressure.

Last Thursday, November 20th, Avangate hosted our first networking event for the software publishing community in Silicone Valley.  All-in-all the event was a success and proved to be a great opportunity for members of the community to meet each other and interact in a social environment.  The Tied House Brewery, in Mountain View, CA served some fine food and drink, something that, and you can trust me on this, is necessary to make any networking event a success!

Our goal was to cross organizational borders and introduce constituents from all sides of the software publishing world outside the constraints of day-to-day business.  We had people from major software publishing and technology firms such as Intuit, Symantec and Phoenix Technologies mixing with service providers such as Acutrack, TrialPay, Nalperion and Uniloc.  We even had a few new friends from Google, Yahoo! and Ernst and Young join us.

I recently did a research on what software vendors are doing in order to sell through affiliates. I looked on over 400 websites that sell software. After putting all the data together, the first thing that stands out is that most of the vendors haven’t implemented the minimum requirements in order to affiliate efficiently.

Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.

Here are the key findings of my personal research:

• most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
• just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
• very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
• more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.

Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?

Join us for an informal gathering in Mountain View!

If you’ve met with one of the Avangate guys or gals, then you probably know that this year we worked hard. We attended lots of conferences, had presentations, booths and wrote a lot of white papers and other articles. But you should also know that we also like to play hard and relax with our friends and partners.

That’s why I’m happy to invite you at the Casual Drinks with Avangate - Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at the Tied House in Mountain View. It’s the perfect time to come meet the Avangate US team and schmooze with other people from the software business. The event will be hosted by Casey Potenzone, VP Sales, and Daniel Nicolescu, Business Development Manager.

Discovering the fan part of your partners and mingle with software people seems like having a good time to me. Or at least because it’s easier to explain what you do to people that talk the same business language like you do, it should be a relaxed, informal schmooze. Of course I also happen to know that Daniel is an excellent wine expert so it’s always nice to be around him at parties ;)

If it sounds like fun to you too, register now here.

After so much work you’ve done redesigning your website, adding all those cool features and getting rid of all annoying bugs, it would be a pity to ruin everything because you forget the small but essential details.

You cannot afford to lose page rank, valuable links or loyal visitors, in a word, you should not lose more than you win with the new version of the website.

If you’re reading this, I know that you are in a hurry, because deadline is probably pretty short ahead of you, so make sure you go through this checklist before the commit of the new website:

1. No broken links, no 404 errors

Let XENU be your best friend today. Download it, install it, just enter the URL of your site and let Xenu do his job (it’s free). Fix all the 404 errors, do as many 301 redirects as you need to, and then do the checking again and again, until Xenu says it’s ok :). Also, the mod rewrite should be made in a user friendly manner, so as to generate readable URLs. Just to make sure, don’t forget to create a user friendly customized 404 page.