With the announcement of Twitter’s plan to launch analytics for their platform, it got me thinking about the progression of analytics in terms of all social media. As a business owner, it’s important to define benchmarks and analyze whether these benchmarks are being met.
Programs like Google Analytics offer an in-depth insight into your company’s targeted conversions, whether that’s selling a certain number of boots per month or having a certain amount of visitors download a PDF. However, the data supplied by GA and similar analytics solutions are necessarily limited to things happening on the site already.
Since the explosion of social media there’s become a need to quickly and effectively monitor success rates, and this must often be done off-site.
Free Social Media Analytics Resources
Many free and easy to use tools have been developed because of the need to measure engagement in the social media stratosphere. For instance, socialmention is a real-time social media search and analysis tool that offers you feedback about your mentions on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google and more. Highlighting sentiments, keywords, top users, hash tags and sources of conversation, socialmention helps to gain some insights as to where your brand stands on various networks.
The usefulness of tools like this are determined by what benchmarks you’re measuring. If you wish to measure sentiment of the consumers talking about your brand overall or a particular product, socialmention is a helpful means to do so. You can then take this information and determine whether a majority of the conversation about a specific product is positive or negative in nature. Understanding what data you need to fulfill a particular benchmark will help determine the usefulness of these tools. However, some of these free tools only offer basic analytics. If you’re looking for data reports to the level of detail as Google Analytics than you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Paid Social Media Measurement Programs
Radian6, Raven Internet Marketing Tools and other paid social analytics services provide in-depth third party analysis of your brand’s position in the the social media landscape. These services allow you to view who is having conversation about your brand and which voices are having an impact on your industry through various social media channels. Radian6 allows business owners to listen, contribute, and set future goals from the detailed data and feedback they’re receiving directly from their customers. The only downside to these more complex social analytics programs is that they aren’t free. This often deters many business owners from being able to afford the insights these programs provide.
Facebook Insights And Soon To Be Twitter Analytics
An alternative to current free and paid social analytics programs is utilizing the in-house analytics different social media channels provide. Facebook Insights provides a Facebook Page owners with free limited metrics about the visitors to their pages. These insights are helpful on a basic level, allowing you to track monthly active users, daily new likes, total likes and interactions on your page. Insights is an extremely basic service, providing only minimal information about your page’s traffic. Most of the information is about the demographics of users like gender and age. This information is important to take into account, but because the data you’re provided is so limited, it is difficult to truly track extensive benchmarks for your company through Facebook Insights.
Twitter Analytics is still in its beginning stages of development and testing, so there’s no way to tell if it will be as unhelpful to users as Facebook Insights or if it will truly provide concise and detailed data about your brand’s place on Twitter. The development of this program will hurt some third-party vendors of Twitter analytics ,but nevertheless, let’s hope this program allows for comprehensive metrics and ways to set benchmarks for your company.
Last time we talked about tracking Flash videos in Google Analytics, using either the Flash tracking libraries for Google Analytics and building the tracking by hand, or using a Flash player that already has Google Analytics tracking baked in like FlowPlayer.
I want to discuss one other specific scenario with Flash movies, and that’s YouTube. Now, there are two things we might be interested in:
Our own videos, posted on YouTube.
Videos from YouTube (either our own, or other people’s), embedded on our own site
Our own videos, posted on YouTube
There are two things we can do here, depending on what level of fanciness you have on YouTube.
First, everyone can use YouTube Insight to get some information about your channel. You get information such as:
Total views and how the video was found (from YouTube or YouTube search, from external links, from Google search)
Geographic areas
Some demographics (gender, age ranges)
Some engagement data (comments, ratings, favorites)
Second, if you have (read: pay for) a YouTube brand channel, you can install Google Analytics on your YouTube pages. You get all the power of Google Analytics, but what you don’t get is any ability to customize the tracking code, so it’s a mixed blessing.
Videos from YouTube embedded on our own site
YouTube lets us embed videos on our own site (our own videos, or anyone else’s as long as they have enabled embedding). Like this (shameless self-plug):
YouTube uses a Flash player to display these videos on your site, and you have basically no access to get inside that Flash Player and recompile it with Google Analytics Flash tracking like we talked about in the last post.
So, it used to be that your only option was basically to build your own player. You used what’s called the “chromeless player” which didn’t have any Play or Pause buttons or anything, and you supplied your own. At the same time, you tracked whether people clicked on these.
Fortunately, the YouTube player’s API has improved since then, and you can now take advantage of the regular embedded player (with its Play and Pause controls and whatnot), but easily add Google Analytics Event Tracking using only JavaScript.
Basically, the YouTube player broadcasts an event when it changes state (when it starts playing, or ends, for example). Then we can use JavaScript to add an event listener to monitor for when that state changes and send a _trackEvent call to Google Analytics.
Fortunately, others have already been down this path as well, so you don’t even have to write your own code. There’s a project on Google Code with a library that packages all this up for you. Just like with FlowPlayer, it’s not all exactly the way you might like things labeled for your own site, but again, you have something to build from. Check it out.
In my last post, I talked about why we’d want to track interactions with video in Google Analytics. Here’s the first example of how to actually do that.
Flash video players have been the ubiquitous way of embedding video in web pages for a long time. HTML5’s media elements are beginning to erode the use of Flash for video, but it’s still very common, and it’s really the only way to ensure compatibility with older browsers.
Flash video in a nutshell
The way Flash video works is this: there’s the video file itself (maybe an MPEG or something like that), and there’s a Flash wrapper around the video that handles the playback controls, seeking and streaming, volume control, full-screen view, etc. Ultimately, it’s a .swf file, a Flash file that you can embed in a web page. The browser’s Flash plugin interprets the file and displays it to you.
Tracking Flash in Google Analytics
Flash files are basically self-contained. They have all the content and code inside them to do whatever it is they do (in this case, play a video). So what happens if we want to track this video with Google Analytics?
Adobe actually provides a semi-official code library for doing this; it’s hosted on the Google Code site for Google Analytics. It basically works by bridging between ActionScript (which is the scripting language inside the Flash file) and JavaScript (which is the scripting language on the HTML page on which the Flash file is embedded and how our Google Analytics code is executed).
It basically works like this:
Something happens in ActionScript -> Tell the Google Analytics JavaScript to send some information (_trackEvent or _trackPageview)
For example:
The Play button is clicked -> Google Analytics _trackEvent("Video","Play")
So actually getting this to work involves working in the Flash source file and putting in some ActionScript.
What’s that you say? You don’t know ActionScript? You don’t have a dedicated Flash developer? You maybe don’t even have access to the Flash source file? Yeah, I hear you; me neither. So let’s look at an easier alternative that takes care of some of this stuff for you.
FlowPlayer
FlowPlayer is an open-source Flash video player. Basically, it’s the “wrapper” I described above that handles playback controls for a video, and you simply supply your video. (The free version is FlowPlayer-branded, but for a reasonable price you can also use your own branding on the player.)
So, two things already going for it: it’s free, and it’s attractive and configurable. But best of all for our purposes, the contributors to FlowPlayer have already created a plugin that does Google Analytics event tracking for us, automatically. (FlowPlayer is just one example that I’ve used before, but there may be other good, free, GA-supporting Flash video players out there. Leave suggestions in the comments if you’ve used one.)
You can find the details of the setup for the Google Analytics plugin on the FlowPlayer site. You want the “Bridge mode”, assuming you’re embedding videos in your own site with GA tracking code already on the pages. (There’s also “AS3 mode”, which is completely self-contained; you could track your videos embedded on other people’s websites.)
Category: URL of page in which the video is embedded
Action: various things that happen such as Play, Pause, Finish, Mute, Full Screen, etc.
Label: filename of the video
Value: timestamp of the video at which the event occurred (in seconds)
You have some control over the Actions: which events are tracked (do you really want to know if people Mute?) and how they are labeled. You can change these with a simple configuration method right in the code.
Category, Label, and Value can’t be changed in the same way, so you get what you get. However, remember that this is open source, so if you want to alter one of those values (perhaps, especially, the Category value) to better fit in which other Events you might be tracking on your site, you can do that. It’s way easier to start with someone else’s code and make a small change than it is to build it all from scratch yourself.
Example
This is one example of the source code you might use. Consult the FlowPlayer documentation for more detailed information.
<!-- Include the FlowPlayer JavaScript -->
<script src="flowplayer-3.2.4.min.js"></script>
<!-- Create the container for the video -->
<a
href="http://e1h13.simplecdn.net/flowplayer/flowplayer.flv"
style="display:block;width:425px;height:300px;"
id="player">
</a>
<!-- Configure the player and tell it to load the GA plugin in bridge mode -->
<script type="text/javascript">
flowplayer("player", "flowplayer-3.2.5.swf", {
plugins:{
gatracker: {
url: "flowplayer.analytics-3.2.1.swf",
trackingMode: "Bridge",
}
}
});
</script>
So far, we’ve covered Flash video players. I’m also going to talk specifically about the case of YouTube video embedded in your site. And I’ll come back to Flash video as a fallback for browsers that don’t support the HTML5 <video> element when we get to that as well.
One thing that is undeniable about social media is that it is a powerhouse. Other forms of media took much longer to gain the popularity that social media has gained in recent years. For instance, radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users and TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. In comparison, it took Facebook less than a year to reach 200 million users. The question is no longer whether a company should utilize social media, but how will they take part in this social media revolution correctly.
3 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business
Establish a direct connection – It’s important for your customers to be able to quickly and easily get from your websites and product pages to and from their own social media accounts. There are a few fundamental ways to connect your brand’s website to your social media presence and your customer’s profiles. One of these ways is by connecting through a plugin like the Twitter Retweet Plugin or the Facebook Like Button Plugin.
Levi’s used the Facebook Like Button as a means of forming that direct connection between a customer’s social media account and their individual products on their website. This allows the consumer to like a specific product on their Facebook profile without having to leave Levi’s site, thus sharing it with their entire network on Facebook. This helps spread awareness about Levi’s products and brings emphasis to Facebook users about what other people in their network are currently liking or recommending.
Improving interactivity and customer service – The point of social media from a business- to- consumer viewpoint is to increase dialogue between the buyer and seller. The seller understands what the consumer likes and doesn’t like by the feedback they receive from the buyer. Facebook and Twitter act as a forum for this conversation to occur. Businesses need to be sure they utilize this medium correctly by listening to their customers needs, regardless if the feedback is positive or negative.
One good example of how to properly contribute and listen to your customer’s conversations would have to be Comcast’s Twitter accounts. Comcast not only answers questions directed at them through their Twitter profiles, but they actively search for these conversations about their products, whether it’s complaints or praise. Comcast searches the Twitter universe for mentions of its various brand names and keywords in hopes of dealing with concerns as soon as possible. This helps keep the conversation going and customers happy to know they are being helped by a real person, not just a faceless brand.
Strengthening loyalty – Through various campaigns, many brands have been able to strengthen existing customer loyalty. Giveaways, special offers, and sweepstakes through social media have brought consumer excitement about their favorite brands to new levels because everyone loves free stuff. Brands like Pizza Hut, HSN, and Baskin-Robbins have all initiated giveaways and contests on Facebook to help spur interactivity on their social media accounts and company websites. By giving away free ice cream or exclusive deals delivered to your inbox, these brands and others are using social media to help continue life-long brand loyalty.
However, it is important to focus on your specific niche audiences for these giveaways and sweepstakes. If you don’t target your audience correctly you’ll run the danger of attracting of influx of people just looking for free stuff without potential for conversion into brand loyalty. I’ll come back to this point in the next section on how social media can hurt your business.
3 Ways Social Media Can Hurt Your Business
Original content is key – Whether you’re a car dealership or a fishing magazine with an online presence, having content that is original and relevant to your scope is vital. This rule is even more important in terms of social media because of how little time it takes to share content, whether it is good or bad. One instance where social media greatly hurt or killed the business was in the case of Cooks Source magazine.
The publication was found to have copied content from a blogger and initially refused to apologize or pull the plagiarized piece. The uproar over the plagiarism was soon spread across Facebook, Twitter, and various blogs all denouncing the magazine’s wrongdoing. Cooks Source magazine’s Facebook page was littered with hundreds of thousands of wall posts calling out the publication, poking fun at the editor, and calling all advertisers to pull their support for the magazine. When it comes to social media, the consumer can be your biggest advocate or your most animate contender.
Listen to what’s being said – If you’re ignoring tweets, comments on your blog, wall posts on your Facebook, or other consumer feedback you’re really hurting your business. Social media is meant to bring the consumer and business together and help improve the consumer’s experience by giving direct feedback. To avoid this social media faux pas, address all comments, tweets, posts, and customer commentary in a timely manner with professional, helpful, and most importantly conversational responses.
Not targeting the right audience – Just like in any other marketing channel, knowing who your audience is essential to meeting your company’s goals. This is true for social media as well because mistakes and irrelevancy can be seen and discussed by all. Sending irrelevant messages through various social media channels can really turn off your audience, losing them forever. If you were a baby supply retailer on Facebook, you’re most likely not going to use hip lingo and flashy visuals because your main audience is probably mothers. You would more likely want to use copy and visuals highlighting the importance of family and the comfort of your baby. Know who you’re talking to or it’s just a waste of time.
Many sites have embedded video these days. I commonly hear requests from users of Google Analytics along these lines: “How can I measure whether my visitors are actually playing these videos? We spend a lot of money and effort producing them, so how do I tell if people even watch them? Or if they are more likely to become a customer if they do?”
Our approach: Event Tracking
We’re going to use the Event Tracking feature of Google Analytics to capture this stuff. If you’re not familiar, Event Tracking, in a nutshell, is designed to capture all of the non-pageview stuff that we might be interested in on a site. By default, Google Analytics captures just when pages load (through the regular tracking code on every page), but it doesn’t capture things that happen within pages, like clicks on downloads, or AJAX elements that bring in new content without a reload, or — in this case — plays of videos embedded in the page. Basically, anywhere someone clicks or otherwise interacts with the site, we can track.
Events get tabulated separately from the pages in a separate reporting section under Content. There are several parameters we can supply to describe an event:
Category (required): high-level groupings of the different kinds of events on our site
Action (required): within the category, what did the visitor actually do
Label (optional): further differentiate what happened
Value (optional): a numerical value that pertains to the event (no pre-assigned meaning, could be dollars or seconds or points or whatever)
Now, in the case of video, here is one example of how you might label the actions a visitor takes:
Category: Video
Action: Play, Pause, Stop, Finished
Label: The title or filename of the video (assuming you have more than one video on your site)
Now, it doesn’t always make sense to capture every single thing someone might do. We have to think about what actions are interesting to us to actually have data about so we don’t collect a bunch of useless information. For video, I tend to think the two most vital things are Play (did they start watching) and Finished (did they get all the way to the end). I don’t care so much whether they paused it in the middle to take a phone call, and I certainly don’t care if they adjusted the volume.
Once I have this data, I can see it all in the Event Tracking reports (and through Advanced Segments) and break it down however I like: how many visits played any video, which visits played (or finished) a particular video, whether they converted, and so on.
Types of video players
OK, so how do we actually start collecting this data? Well, it requires some additional tracking code on our site to measure the video player. Depending on where the video is hosted and how it is played on the site, there are a few different approaches. In a series of followup posts, I’m going to explore a few different scenarios and how to track them with Event Tracking:
Videos embedded with a Flash-based player, with special emphasis on FlowPlayer (an open-source player with a built-in capability for GA Event Tracking)
YouTube videos embedded in a page
Videos included in a page using the new HTML5 <video> element
Check back soon as we explore all the technical nitty-gritty to make the magic happen.
Some of you are devoted to your analytics and look at them hourly. You are more addicted to those numbers than to the one you ask the lottery man to give you every week. Certainly, you care more about them than you care about the number on the scale every morning.
But, not everyone is in that bucket. So this is a plea to the people who aren’t data junkies. Once a day (or more likely, once a week), your employees send you a dashboard of data, or a short report.
Look at it. Even if you don’t really understand the numbers. Once in a while, ask a question.
Of course, you could get really immersed in it, and that would be awesome. But if you aren’t ready to get really immersed in it, just … look at it for 10 seconds every week.
Eventually, without doing any work, you will start to notice trends, because you will have seen it so many times. You’ll find that you are asking, “Why did *that* happen?” It is the easiest way to use your data without having to deal with the big C (commitment.) It may take a while, but soon, you will be Married To Your Data.
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