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 :)

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.

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.

One of the favorite’s expressions between us, analytics ninja wannabees, is “Actionable Data”. Yes, we like this phrase a lot and we use it every time we have the occasion. It gives meaning to our work and it’s a great hook to get CEOs, CTOs and marketing departments to listen to what we might have to say.

What is “Actionable Data” and how do you track it?

Unfortunately, the answer is not as easy as I would like it to be. With the help of Avinash Kaushik I got access the other week to the new Segmentation feature in Google Analytics (GA). I played with it a full weekend, doing advanced segments, but when I got to show it to my colleagues on Monday, all I was able to share were very neat tips and tricks. And I got the following remark from: “Wow, really cool… but how does it help us”?

So, this is what Actionable Data is for me: data that helps me improve my website. Before looking at data, I first ask myself: What do I need help with? Is the conversion number to small? Am I spending too much money on AdWords? Should I invite more bloggers to try our products and if yes, which ones?