Foursquare, a location-based micro-blogging service that launched in 2009 seems to be on the verge of relevance. In preparation for their marketing push at SXSW they announced that they have added 500,000 new members bringing their total to somewhere in the 1 million area. Additionally, they are launching a free analytics service for business owners so that could create interesting marketing opportunities for businesses that are based on foot traffic. I’m rooting for them because this could become a very interesting marketing medium. This recent article in the NYTimes explains the new analytics service in some detail with examples of how some of the beta-testing businesses have been using it.Foursquare users use mobile apps to tell the foursquare community where they are and what they are doing.  However, from the business perspective, users are checking in when they come to your location which gives you some information that you can leverage.  For instance, some businesses have found that is interesting to be able to message formally frequent visitors to get them back.  Others have been able to learn more about what messages have been driving their customers to them.  In a nutshell, any business can see the registered customers and prospects around them and look for ways to reel them in or make their experience more enjoyable.

Here’s a screenshot of the kind of stats that they are planning to share with businesses:

Foursquare recently beta-tested this tool with 30 businesses and is planning to expand the beta round to 500 in the coming weeks.  If the user-base grows, this could become useful resource for marketers.  As it is right now, it’s just on the verge of  earning our attention.  Stay tuned and share any information you learn about this service or any of its near-competitors.

I hate the click.  We obsess about clicks.  We track clicks.  We pay for clicks.  We want more and more clicks.  We are click-absorbed and it is time to make online marketing about more than this.  This week marked the 15th anniversary of the first online banner ad so I have chosen this time to launch a revolt against the single-minded click-only metrics that prevail today.I recently read this great article by Scott Severensen that suggests 5 things you can do today to start moving beyond clicks.  Here’s why I think this is important:

• If you track online marketing conversions back to the nearest click that precedes them it will always make things like search and email marketing campaigns look like they are tactics driving revenue.  They may be but they are more likely to be just the only thing you are tracking.  Many steps usually lead up to that precious moment wherein a user types your name into a search engine, finds you and buys your thing.  Be careful not to over-attribute revenue generating actions to just the nearest measurable click.
• Benchmarking is forgotten yet it is a very valid method of tracking.  “My metric was X before I did these three things and now it is X+25%.  That means these three things are likely to be good things to keep doing…and doing them together.”  Maybe one of those three things was a search marketing campaign that got a lot of clicks.  If you had not done it in concert with the overall campaign might not have worked so well.
• Display ads (banners) don’t get many clicks.  That does not mean that they have no value.  You have to develop other ways of monitoring their impact on awareness, intent to purchase and the impact that they may have on overall site visitorship outside of the direct clicks they generate.
• Each click is actually a person..not a click.  Each non-click is also a person.  We are interested in engaging all people within our audience.  Clicking does not qualify you or disqualify from my consideration as a marketer.

I hate the click.

But I got this great click-through-rate on one of my PPC campaigns by making some changes to the offer and ad copy.  Let me tell you about it.

If you publish a blog or any site with an RSS feed you have probably been frustrated by the lack of information that you get from the click activity in the feed.  Though there are certainly ways around it Google has just announced an integration with Feedburner that makes RSS analytics easily accessible.  This article from the Google Analytics blog explains it in detail but here are some of the highlights and a screenshot of what to expect.

• count the clicks from your feed to your site
• what kind of reader generated the click
• count those that come from email
• see the geography and reach fof your feed audience
• breakdown of click activity by piece of content

Here is an image showing what the data might look like in your Google Analytics account:

I’d be interested in hearing from those of you who have implemented this.  It looks a little awkward in the sense that you have to bounce between your Google Analytics account and your Feedburner account depending upon the kind of data you are looking for.  Also, if you have been using tracking URLs in your RSS feeds then you might find this data to be redundant at best.  However, for the lion’s share of site operators who have not had the tools to track their RSS feed activity this could be big help.

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 site and pages per visit.  By tracking time on site you can choose to set a certain minimum threshold and track visits that exceed that. Similarly, by setting a goal around page views per visit you can set a threshold of visits that exceed a certain minimum number of views.  These features will greatly increase the ROI tracking capability of Google analyics for non-ecommerce sites.

We also love the new advanced analysis feature that allows you to filter data within a table without having to generate custom reports and perform the analysis in as separate database or spreadsheet.   For instance, what if you are viewing a list of referring keywords and you would like to see which have a bounce of less than 30% and meet a certain number of page views?  In the past you would have had to export the data and do your filtering on the desktop.  Now you can filter for these results within the keywords table itself.  That’s a handy time saver and will encourage more people to delve deeper into their data.

In addition, Google has rolled out a new features that allows you to createa wider variety of custom variables to track more details about your users and your content while also offering the ability to create repprt sharing rules that allow to share specific reports with specific audiences in your company.  If you want to create a report just for your sales team this is your solution.

One other favorite new addition is the ability to create custom alerts whenever a certain metric shows a noteworthy change.  If you wanted to know whether you got a sudden spike in traffic from that website you just formed a partnership with or that video you placed on YouTube this could be a handy method of staying informed.

Thanks to Google for continuing to develop these tools!  Let us know if you are finding any new ways to use them.

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.

This is not complicated or difficult to do but for some reason I have seen very little discussion of it.  The first step is to make sure you have an account with a URL shortening service that generates reports on the click activity of those links.  My personal fave is bit.ly.  Now let’s say that you are creating a Twitter post that links back to a landing page on your site.  If you use Google analytics you can use a tool called their URL builder to create tracking URLs that the analytics will recognize.  Enter in teh destination URL and a few other parameters that help describe the source of the click and the tool will give you long URL containing the tracking code.

Now that you have the long tracking URL you can jump over to bit.ly and shorten it.  If you use the resulting shortened URL in your posts you will have the ability to track the activity through that link in two ways.  Bit.ly will tell you how many people clicked on the link along with other information like when and where they clicked on it.  That’s fairly useful but even more helpful is to be able to go into your Google analytics account and create reports on the visitor activity that came through the tracking URL.  Now you can track the activity through whatever funnels you like to track on your website.

Someday soon, our web analytics tools will be integrated with social media tracking tools and there will be fewer steps for us.  But for now, there is quite a bit you can do to get down to the level of ROI tracking that you are used to having from oher online ad campaigns, email campaigns, and search campaigns.  Any other thoughts and ideas…let me know.

This is the kind of thing that I hesitate to admit getting excited about in fear of forever being branded as nerdy beyond salvation but in this case I had to risk it. The Google analytics blog has a great post about several free new Excel plugins that have come out that use the Google analytics APIs to allow you to generate your analytics reports right in Excel.  This is an interestting use of the API and a great time-saver for those of use to generating analytics reports and then crunching through them on our own in Excel.

Here are the tools:

• VBA Macros – The simplest solution of them all. Mikael Thuneberg’s page explains how to make API requests directly from Excel using VBA Scripts and includes a pre-built Excel worksheet to get you started.
• The Tatvic Excel Plugin – Another easy-to-use plugin for Windows users that supports both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007. To get started you download the plugin then register to use the tool. Its simple UI helps you build complex queries and get data from Analytics right into your Excel worksheet.
• Excellent Analytics – Is an open-source initiative by Mark Red and Dropit. This Excel 2007 plugin works on Vista/XP and comes with a query builder to help you create Google Analytics queries and pull data right into Excel. Webanalytics.info put together a great step by step tutorial to get started using this plugin.
• ShufflePoint – Works somewhat differently than the solutions above. ShufflePoint has developed a query language that works with the Google Analytics API to achieve common tasks, such as defining the last 30 days as a date range. One then uses this language to construct an Analytics Data Export API query either by navigating to a URL within Excel, or by using their web-based query builder, then importing this data into Excel. This process allows the ShufflePoint solution to work across most versions of Excel, as well as Powerpoint, and iGoogle gadgets.

Let me know what you think of these as you try them out.

Paul Knegten posted a simple little cost-per-acquisition (CPA) calculator that got picked up by ClickZ and is now here on their site.  If you would like to have the illusion of knowing how much a sale, sign-up, or conversion cost relative to the online advertising that “drove” it, use this tool.  I’ve used this stat many times and I find it helpful but it also poses pitfalls because it only takes into account the most proximate message that a visitor received before conversion and fails to account for any of the other factors that could have made that conversion possible.

Sometimes people see an ad for something that they were not previously aware of, they click on it, and they convert. Sometimes.

Most of the time people are touched by your marketing and PR in many ways before the moment that they actually convert. Perhaps on one occasion they read an article about you, then later a colleague who saw you a trade show recommended you, then they did a search and found your Google ad, then later they could not remember your url so they Googled you again and clicked on your organic search listing.

What if they converted after that last action? You, being a savvy marketer, would track that conversion in your analytics and you would see it as a validation of that keyword in your organic search marketing. You may even put a little check in the column in your mind for “conversions driven by organic search.” However, this customer had actually been driven by many factors that you would not be accounting for if you used this reasoning. In most cases, it is likely that similar variety of factors impacts most of your customers. In fact, if you only track conversions to the action most proximate to them, then you will most likely always find that search and email marketing are the two most productive channels at generating conversion activity…and you would be wrong in most cases.

So use your CPA data carefully. It can help you understand certain things about your online marketing strategy but it can also lead to mistaken assumptions that overlook other important awareness drivers and relationship builders that take place before the conversion moment actually happens.

Here is an interesting tool that analyzes the content of your website and reports back to you about what percentage of the content is self-focused or customer focused. It is not entirely accurate but is an intersting way of looking at your site that goes beyond typical SEO tools. I typed in two sites I know well and they both came back as 100% me-focused and 0% customer focussed.  Yikes!  That got my attention. How does yours turn out?

http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm

I just had a Homer Simpson moment when I realized that Google provides the following simple tool for building URLs that track custom variables in ad campaigns and I had not known about it until today. Check it out here.

You can enter the variables you want to track in an online form and Google will generate the link with query string in it.  Use that link in your ad and then Google analytics will pick up the traffic from that ad in your Google analytics account. And I’ve been using redirects on my servers all this time.

Doh.