A large number of websites have a chat feature to interact with their visitors. This allows them to

   - Offer real time assistance and advice

   - Promote a service/product to the visitor

Some chat applications offer integration with web analytics tools. The Google Analytics blog gives an example of such a tool here.

We tracked some chat conversations for a client using Google Analytics and analyzed the data obtained. Here is what we found.

Visitors to a site (xyz.com) can discuss their technical problems by chatting online with a support executive. The goal of this chat application is to solve technical queries as well as persuade the visitor to sign up for an annual service package.

Why is tracking important?: We recommended tracking ‘chats’ to analyze

1. Paid/Organic keywords resulting in chat
2. Locations from where people initiate conversations
3. Contributions of chat to conversions (sign ups)

Implementation: Clicking on a chat button on the website opened a new window, on a third party domain. This domain did not allow placing the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) thereby ruling out cross domain tracking.

We recommended putting virtual pageview code linked to the ‘on click’ event of the “Chat Now” button. “Virtual pageview” was suggested instead of “event tracking” as we wanted to carry out a funnel analysis on the conversations.

Analysis: A funnel was set up in Google Analytics which tracked clicks on the chat button – from initiating a chat conversation to signing up for the annual service package. A majority of the conversations originated from a particular segment of the visitors, for which this analysis was done.

On analyzing this funnel we realized that the first step itself was a bottleneck in this funnel as only 9% of visitors proceeded to the next step (Registration Page) after the chat session. (First two steps Shown in Fig 1)


Fig 1: Funnel Report – Pre Analysis

A high drop rate could also indicate a technical issue with the chat application like,

1. Long loading time.
2. Long response times while chatting due to issues with the chat server.

Both the possibilities were evaluated and discarded after conducting several dummy chats from our side.

We investigated this matter and it was concluded that an inefficient sales process at the client’s end (during the chat) was causing the visitor drop off.

We recommended better sales training to the online support staff so that chat visitors could be converted at a better rate. Here are some of the inputs shared with the client:

• Asking for a phone number does ensure that the visitor initiating the chat is genuine, but this information should be asked only after a certain level of trust has been built during the chat session. The visitor needs to be assured of company credentials, only then he/she will be comfortable in providing their phone number. Building trust with a visitor could be a time consuming process.
• Analyze the chat scripts of all successful sales and then build a “model script” based on that.
• Identify the best chat representative (in terms of conversions) for managing shifts.

Results: Here is the funnel report after implementing our suggestions. (The duration of the funnel is same as Fig 1)


Fig 2: Funnel Report – Post Analysis

The results are tabulated below:

Supporting results

The average time spent on chat increased by 30% after implementing our suggestions. It indicates a better engagement with visitors (as building trust takes time).

The above experiment demonstrates the use of web analytics for finding and fixing issues in the chat conversion process. Here the issue is not related to website design or usability but can be addressed using insights from web analytics.

The analysis helped the client to increase their ROI. We look forward to sharing similar experiments in the future.

Contributed by Ravi Shukla, Analytics Team

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We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Integrated Twitter Client

You can now tweet, reply, retweet, follow and unfollow right from the Brand Monitor™ interface! Sharing posts and creating new conversations is now easier and more convenient.

• Multiple Twitter Accounts!: You can add all your Twitter accounts into Brand Monitor™. Each Twitter account added gets a separate search bucket with graphs that show volume, sentiment, top influencers and “most talked about” topics.
  
  
• Never miss a single tweet: All tweets are tracked in one place and tagged with sentiment and influencer scores, even when you are not logged in!
• Clearly demarcated read and unread tweets help keep the information stream manageable – you can easily identiy new tweets, and the system works better than your exising Twitter client as it works 24/7 and not just when you are logged in.

More Customization for Email Alerts

You now have more control over your email alerts – you can choose which search buckets you want to get emails for, and you see the top posts for the day in your alerts.



Aggregation of Similar Posts

Too many posts on the same topic clogging up your information stream? Not any more! Brand Monitor™ identifies duplicate posts and tags them as one – you can expand the post to see duplicate entries.



We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)
• SMM = Social Media Measurement (2)
• #Nestle’s PR & Crisis Management Nightmare (0)

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Brand Monitor™ with exciting new features and a whole lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

Twitter Influencer Analysis and Display

Now, next to each tweet, you will see an “Influencer Score” (out of 100) that our algorithm has rated for the author. Also, if you hover over the twitter author’s username, you get to see more information about the author: Full Name, Influencer Score, Bio, Location, Website, Total Tweets, Followers and Following.

• How do we arrive at an Influencer Score?
  
  We identify 10 key sets of information on each Twitter author, and apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final score. The final score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging his/her audience and how large the impact of their opinion is.
• New Tweet Display
  
  We have redesigned the way a tweet is displayed, for a closer resemblance to how it looks on Twitter.

Post Title and Summary Redesigned, Media Logos Added

Earlier, our system used to remove special characters from a post title; this would make “AT&T” look like “ATT”. Posts now display special characters, and summaries end in a complete sentence.

• Media Logos
  
  Based on the media source, each post has a logo associated to it. This enables you to quickly identify the source of a post. These logos are also in the “Filter” section for media.

Preview Search Bucket Results



While creating a search bucket you now have the option to preview a sample set of results.

This ensures that your search is getting the desired results before you actually submit it, saving you time and effort.

Date Range for Comparison Reports



You now have the option to compare data based on a time range in the comparison report section.

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. If you’d like to try out Brand Monitor™, let us know!

• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
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• #Nestle’s PR & Crisis Management Nightmare (0)

Position² will be showcasing its cloud based social media monitoring product, “Positon² Brand Monitor™” at the Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced Seattle conference: June 8-9, 2010. Visit our booth and win exciting prizes!

Position² Brand Monitor™ is a cloud based platform developed to help companies track and monitor conversations across millions of blogs, social media, forum, news, video and photo sharing sites on a real-time basis.

Position² Brand Monitor™ Overview:

• Listen: Understand your customer needs and expectations. Listen to the buzz about your brand across millions of sites, blogs and tweets in real-time.
• Discover: Analyze customer perception and sentiment of your brand and those of your competitors. Identify key influencers and fans.
• Engage: Converse with your customers and collaborate with them to be your brand ambassadors. Share positive news about your brand using social media.

About the Event:

SMX Advanced is the only search marketing conference designed exclusively for experienced internet marketers. Sessions are fast-paced, Q&A-packed, frequently controversial, always informative…and don’t stop to cover the basics. The most accomplished search marketers in the world will present cutting edge tips for driving traffic and increasing conversions from paid search advertising, SEO, social media marketing, search analytics and more.

Read more…

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• Position² Brand Monitor™ @ the Web 2.0 Expo, May 2010 (0)
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Nestle, the world’s largest food conglomerate took successive hits to its brand image recently in an issue related to the company’s apparent disregard for the environment. It all happened in just about three days, and the damage was fueled by activity in social media.

The Issue:

Environmental group Greenpeace said the palm oil used in the Nestle Kit Kat bars was a threat to the endangered Orangutan. Nestle sourced palm oil from Sinar Mas, the single largest producer of palm oil in Indonesia. Activists claimed that the rising demand for palm oil is one of the main reasons for the depletion of rain forests, which are being leveled to make way for palm oil plantations.

To get their message across, Greenpeace created a bizarre video spoof of a Kit Kat commercial. It portrayed a man at work eating the finger of an orangutan out of a Kit Kat wrapper. Environment enthusiasts across the world immediately spread the word, which created a public embarrassment for Nestle.

And why did Greenpeace zero in on Nestle alone? Simple – targeting a giant corporation would attract the most attention. Nestle is the largest food and drinks conglomerate in the world, and is a major consumer of palm oil with its use of this commodity doubling in just a span of three years.

Position² tracked the story and analyzed the social media buzz around it.

The Sequence:

Greenpeace launched their campaign against Nestle on March 17th, 2010, with a ‘Killer’ logo, and a tagline that said ‘Ask Nestle to give rain forests a break’. They posted their spoof video on YouTube first, which Nestle got removed due to breach of copyright.

The video was then posted on vimeo.com, and received over 78,000 views in the span of a few hours.

The attack then moved to the Nestle Facebook page, where posts from fans got angry retorts from the company’s moderator.

The blogosphere and Twitter were next, with Tweets followed by almost 18,000 people by March 20th. After this, messages were posted using Google AdWords, and the issue was picked up gradually by traditional media as well. This caused significant damage to the brand image of Nestle.

Eventually, Nestle responded to the campaign and announced that it was cutting its contract with Sinar Mars. Nestle also promised to use only certified sustainable palm oil by 2015.

Social Media Buzz

The issue generated an overwhelming buzz in social media. An analysis on Twitter from 13th March to 22nd March 2010 showed us that there were over 215,000 tweets. In fact, Nestle’s policies and customer service were driven in huge numbers due to Nestle becoming a “trending topic” on Twitter.

A share of voice analysis (graph below) shows us the break up of mentions across forums, blogs and traditional media. With over 100k mentions across these sources, the Nestle incident became a major social media controversy.



We also noticed that the overall popularity of Nestle (primarily for the wrong reasons) increase considerably during the Nestle-Greenpeace social media furor.



It remains to be seen if the issue was blown out of proportion due to the Greenpeace video or the Fan page blunder.

Facebook Crisis Management Blunder

In the midst of this, Nestle’s Facebook moderator took an aggressive stance and threatened to delete posts from fans that were protesting Nestle’s lack of care for the environment. This enraged Facebook users who didn’t back down until an apology was posted. The impact of this on the Nestle brand is presented in the chart below.



Impact On the Nestle Brand – Negative Buzz Analysis

The graph below highlights the negative mentions of Nestle between Feb and Jun, 2010. Negative buzz spiked during the 2nd week of March to the 1st week of April. The increase in negative posts could also be attributed to the Facebook Fan page fiasco.



Lessons Learned

• Brand Monitoring is indispensable in social media – This applies even to a large company like Nestle that could assume they are in control of the situation
• Practice and plan for the worst case scenario – Develop a social media crisis plan and anticipate what can happen, to be prepared for it.
• Respond to negative feedback – An offer to make good the bad is usually well received. A defensive response only adds fuel to the fire.
• Plan ahead for onslaughts through social media – Think of worst case scenarios. For instance, measures that can be taken when a coordinated attack is launched that could turn into a PR disaster…
• Hire seasoned community managers – Even a Facebook fan page needs experienced managers to deal with angry members, foster relationships with advocates, and handle crises without stress.

• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)
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By “Stickiness” we mean:

• Someone visits your site for the first time
• Stays there to explore the content
• Returns later to look for more.

For most web sites, attracting quality traffic is the major goal. Stickiness provides information about visitors’ interest in your site and quality of your site’s content.

Measuring stickiness is important to a website with online advertising, as visitors are exposed to ads if they navigate through the site. For an ecommerce site, stickiness indicates that visitors navigate through the pages of the site and are more likely to purchase. The stickiness of a blog is a measure of the quality of its articles. But for a lead generation site, where the aim is to get the visitors to fill in a contact form, download a white paper or register, the measurement of stickiness is not as important as conversion data.

So, in order to know the quality of your site, the measurement of its stickiness is important. Google Analytics helps in measuring the stickiness of your site with the help of some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

KPIs play a significant role in web analytics. Analytics throw up a bunch of data, some of which may not be relevant for your site. To get the best out of any analytics tool, the first step is to define a set of KPIs for your site. Without proper KPI definition it is easy to get lost in a lot of irrelevant data. Once you define what you want to measure, finding the data relevant to your work becomes easy.

On the basis of the defined KPIs, it is possible to conduct a historical analysis of existing data to establish baseline measures. These baseline measures can be used to evaluate the future success of the website, business goals and marketing campaigns.

Listed here are some basic but important KPIs to measure the stickiness of your web site:

1. Average Pageviews per Visit
2. Percentage of New vs. Returning Visitors
3. Visitor Loyalty
4. Bounce Rate

1. Average pageviews per visit (Pageviews/Total visits):

This is a good indicator of site navigation as a visitor usually leaves your site early on if it’s difficult to navigate. It also indicates the quality of your content as a visitor reads more and visits more pages if it is well written. For a site with a CPM business model, high average pageviews per visit means an increase in the average value of each visit. Conversely some sites like support sites that want users to find information quickly would like this value to be lower.

For sites based on new technologies like AJAX and Ruby a low value of Average Pageviews per visits does not indicate poor quality of content because interaction on them can occur without any change in the URL. For a product site a high value of this KPI may indicate difficulty in navigating it.

This metric can be extracted from Visitors Overview report under Average Pageviews.

2. Percentage of new vs. returning visitors (New visitors/Total visitors):

This is a good indicator of your web site’s stickiness, as a high percentage of returning visitors means that your content is relevant and interesting to them. A high percentage of new visitors shows that you are successful in driving traffic to your site (through PPC, SEO, and referrals). For an e- commerce site returning visitors are important – they may have come back after some research and are now ready to buy, or they liked what they bought previously. This metric can be used to further explore the source of your visitors, as well as the keywords with most visits.

This metric is available in the Visitors report under New vs. Returning.

3. Visitor Loyalty:

For a pure content site like a blog or a site that features whitepapers, visitor loyalty gives an indication of stickiness of your site. This is measured by numbers for the following::

• Loyalty
• Recency
• Length of visit
• Depth of visit

Loyalty is how often visitors visit your web site within a given period of time. If this number is high, it means a large number of visitors are visiting your site repeatedly, and proves strong site engagement.

Recency is the time gap between two subsequent visits of a visitor to your site. For a content rich site, repeat visitors on the same day indicate quality, and relevance of your site’s content to their needs.

Length of visit is the time spent by a visitor in one session in your site, during a given period of time. It indicates the quality of a visit to your site in terms of time spent; how long visitors spend exploring your content. If the length of a visit is long, it means your content is engaging them.

Depth of visit is the number of pages navigated by a visitor on your web site, in one session in a given period of time.

Visitor’s loyalty data is provided in absolute numbers instead of averages. This helps you set a benchmark for your web site’s ‘stickiness’ goals.

This metric is available in the Visitors Overview under Visitors Loyalty.

4. Bounce Rate:

The bounce rate is the percentage of instances where visitors left your site right at the landing page – people that exited the web site soon as they entered it. It is the percentage of single page visits, or of visitors that stay on a site for a very short duration. A high bounce rate means your site’s content is not of relevance to visitors, or that it does not engage them.

This metric can be used to measure traffic quality , and can be analyzed across different data segments and across landing pages to identify poor performers. The definition of a high or low bounce rate depends on the purpose and type of web site. In an e-commerce site, a bounce rate of over 60% may indicate low interest in items for sale. However, a high bounce rate for a blog likely means visitors read the latest post and leave; they still find the content engaging.

This metric can be found in the Visitors Trending report of Visitors under Bounce Rate.

Contributed by Sasthi Sarma, Analytics Team, Position²

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A recent phenomenon, tag clouds are commonly seen on blogs, ecommerce sites and several ‘Web 2.’ portals. Other than their visual appearance and ‘coolness’ factor there are benefits for your web site, especially for SEO.

What is a Tag Cloud?

A tag cloud or word cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags. Sometimes, they are just the word content of your site, typically used to describe what it is about. They are usually single words and are listed alphabetically. The importance of a tag is shown with its font size or color, and they are hyperlinks that lead to a collection of pages associated with the word.

Because of their role in search engine optimization of web pages, tag clouds have become even more popular. When properly implemented tag clouds make your web site appear more interlinked to search engine spiders, and this improves search engine ranking

How Are Tag Clouds Used?

There are two common ways of using tag clouds – by popularity and by relevance.

• In the popularity model, the most frequently used keywords used are displayed as tags on a web site In this method, the most commonly used tags or keywords are displayed in larger font sizes in the tag cloud. Less frequently used tags or keywords are displayed in smaller font sizes.
• The other method to use tag clouds is by relevance. When a user lands on your web page, the tag cloud displays related tags or terms. Clicking on a tag in this cloud would list all the pages or articles associated with that term. This acts as a search-assist, and helps visitors find other relevant pages in the site.

How Do Tag Clouds Impact SEO?

When used correctly, tag clouds can improve the internal linking of your web site, the internal anchor text relevance of pages in your site, and by extension, its SEO. They also increase the keyword density of a page but are better left unused for this specific purpose. This is because of the risk of abuse; keywords stuffed in the page content would make search engines ignore your web site. .

How Are Tag Clouds Used for SEO?

You can either custom build your tag cloud or pick one from the internet – both free and paid versions are available. For the latter, select the tag cloud carefully because most off-the-shelf versions have built in JavaScript or AJAX, and a few even use Flash. These do not help your web site SEO, because search engines ignore content served by JavaScripts, AJAX and Flash.

The best way to use Tag Clouds would be to custom build them using tag micro-formats.

The Ideal Tag Cloud

It is better to have tag clouds that list tags by ‘relevance’ rather than by ‘popularity’. Tag clouds need to be useful to the your site’s visitors, help them find other relevant content, and aid their navigation. Do not use tag clouds that list “most popular searches” or “what others searched for” or “most commonly used terms”. Instead, build tags that list “you may also be interested in”, “other relevant searches”, and “related content”.

Do not compromise and pick a tag cloud for how ‘cool’ it looks. Build a cloud that helps navigation on your site, and it will aid your site’s SEO.

References include: Search Engine Land, Webtop, several other snippets of insight from the web and Position² internal analytics data.

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Software companies are using social media in their marketing efforts in some form today, and are looking to increase or expand their efforts in this space. Position² and Softletter are delighted to present the 2010 Social Media Marketing Survey for Software Companies which will help track and measure key trends, developments and metrics of social media marketing efforts.

The 2010 Softletter and Position² Social Marketing Survey for Software Companies covers:

• Types of social media usage
• Response rates to social marketing programs
• Usage of third party tools to manage and monitor your social marketing activities
• Lead and customer service metrics
• Brand management enhancement metrics
• Budgetary and marketing effectiveness metrics

Everyone who supplies data for this survey will receive a complimentary copy of the complete summary results in upcoming special issues of Softletter. Of course, all responses will be strictly confidential. We won’t disclose or identify data about any individuals or about participating companies.

Key results and highlights from this survey will be analyzed at Softletter’s SaaS University Conference in Washington, DC, July 20-22. (Use the promo code: P2SAVE100)

In addition, attendees at SaaS University in Washington, D.C. will receive a complimentary copy of the latest edition of the Softletter SaaS Report, a $599 value.

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For those who missed the Social Media Strategies Conference (or if you were there and would like a copy of the presentation), you can download the deck on “Generating Traffic via Social Media” by Rajiv Parikh, CEO of Position².

The presentation covers:

• How Social Media is helpful in increasing the visibility of your content
• Social Media Plan – a POST approach
• Executing the 4 ‘C’s
• Few useful resources
• Case study

Download:


Generating Traffic via Social Media

Let us know what you think!

• Position² is a Proud Sponsor of Social Media Strategies Conference, Santa Clara, CA – May 18 and 19, 2010 (0)

The Social Media Strategies Conference is focused on how companies can leverage Social Media to achieve their business goals. It is the event for CMOs, Social Media Managers, Online Community Managers, Corporate Communications, PR, Marketing, and Advertising professionals.

Position² CEO Rajiv Parikh (@rajivparikh) will be speaking at the conference on “Generating traffic via Social Media” .

Please join us at the conference and get Keynotes, Sessions and Workshops that will help you refine your Social Media strategy.

Register with the Promo Code position2 and you’ll get a $555 discount on the registration fee.

Position² will showcase Brand Monitor™ at the conference. Position² Brand Monitor™ is a cloud based platform developed to help companies track and monitor conversations across millions of blogs, social media, forum, news, video and photo sharing sites on a real-time basis.

About the Conference:



The Social Media Strategies Conference is the premier event for CMOs, Social Media Strategist, Managers, Marketers, Search Marketers, Online Community Managers, Corporate Communications, PR, Marketing, Advertising, and Recruiting Professionals.

This conference features experts in this cutting-edge space, sharing their knowledge and ideas on how social media impacts your business, and how you can leverage it. The conference feature a combination of hands-on workshops, interactive sessions, panel discussions, and keynotes from thought leaders. Don’t miss it!

Read more…

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