Google Analytics continues to become an even more powerful tool with some recent additions that are outlined in this article on the Google Analytics blog. In the past we have only been able to set specific urls as goals which works well for ecommerce sites.  However, what if you have a shopping or booking engine that is hosted externally or you have a content site where engagement is a primary goal?  The most interesting new feature is that they now allow two new kinds of goals to track:  time on …

Much is discussed about how to track the ROI of social media marketing efforts and it seems that in the space of time it will take me to type this that 3 new Twitter software tools will launch that claim to do this. However, most of us have some tools are our disposal right now that do a darn good job of getting us very detailed information if we are prepared to take an extra step or two. By combining tracking urls like those generated by Google analytics with a URL shortener like bit.ly you can not only get information on the clikc activity of your inbound links from social media posts but you can filter your analytics to create reports on what the traffic is doing once they enter your site.

I saw this interesting case study from MarketingProfs that details how a social media monitoring software company called Techrigy is using Twitter as the primary lead generation tool.  The presentaion includes their impressive case study plus basic tips in how to monitor conversations on Twitter to find users with whom to engage.  The only shortcoming of it is that they do not place much emhasis on the content of their Tweets.  I find that it can be challenging for a business to walk the line between being informational and promotional …