Google Analytics Product Update: Social Measurement, Content Tracking, Attribution & New Sharing Tools

 

Measure the value of social media with Google Analytics

A new set of Social reports help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on your Goals and Ecommerce activities. The 4 new reports aggregate key data points to help you see the complete picture of how social marketing and media affect your business. You'll find the Social Value Overview, Social Sources, Social Plugins, and Conversion Reports in the Traffic Sources section of your account.

Export and share reports

Exporting and sharing reports is now possible in the new version of Google Analytics. From the Export tab, download or email any report directly from your account. You even have the option to automate sharing. Set up your account to email reports daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Learn More

Google also added a share button to Custom Dashboards, Reports, and Advanced Segments. The share button creates a link to the custom template you created, and not your actual account data. When someone clicks this link, they'll land in their own Analytics account and see the custom schema you created populated with their own data.

Track paths from one event to the next

Welcome the Events Flow Report to the Flow Visualization family! If you're already tracking content like videos, downloads, and embedded gadgets as Events, use this report to see the order in which visitors trigger Events and the popular paths taken from one Event to the next. Google has also added the Date Comparison feature to all Flow reports, so you can see at a glance how visitor engagement changes over time. Try it out in any of these reports: Visitor Flow, Goal Flow, and the new Events Flow.

Make your marketing accountable with digital marketing attribution

The Attribution Modeling tool lets you assign credit across your whole digital marketing campaign -- so you can set values for all of the elements that led to online sales and other business goals. By building and comparing customized attribution models, you can determine the impact of different channels, referral sources, campaigns, and keywords. Learn more about using attribution to improve your marketing in our Attribution Playbook, or check out industry trends in Google's Attribution Whitepaper.

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So, What Happens Every Minute on the Internet? Intel InfoGraphic

So, what happens every single minute, of every single day on the internet? Check out Intel's InfoGraphic.. Pretty staggering. Today, the number of networked devices is equal to the global population.

But don't use these numbers for very long in your presentations. By 2015, the number of networked devices will be twice the global population.It won't take long for these numbers to not mean much. What it does mean is that if you haven't fully engaged internet and mobile based media your marketing plans, you will soon be left in the dust.. wondering what happened to your bottom line.

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Google Play Replaces Android Market

The Android Market is dead -- long live Google Play. In a surprise move, the big G has renamed its app store to encompass books, movies and music, on computers as well as smart phones and tablets.
Google Play has a streamlined new look to make it easier to wade through the vast range of apps in the Android Market. It's available from today on phones rocking Android 2.2 and above.

The Music, Videos and Books apps will change to Play Music, Play Movies and Play Books. Head to the current Market to update your apps, and look out for the new 'play button' icon instead of the famous Android.

Buy an ebook, film or song on one device, and you can read, watch or listen to it on any other device. That's similar to iTunes Cloud, which lets you download apps and media to your different Apple devices.
As well as the Android smart phones and tablets we're used to using to shop in the Android Market, Google Play works on computers, laptops and Chromebooks. That echoes the blurring of desktop and mobile in iTunes -- which was a desktop store before it went mobile on the iPhone and iPad -- and Microsoft's Windows 8, which has an app store for apps that can work on Windows 8 computers and tablets, and Windows Phone smart phones.

This took me by surprise, but it's a smart move. As enormously popular as Android phones are, Google is still a word that's far more recognisable to ordinary folk. You and I, as tech-savvy phone fans, may grasp the concept of Android, but that doesn't mean our friends, family and other muggles do. Mobile phones are as mainstream as it gets these days, so anything Google can do to brand its offerings as simple and unified and understandable, in words of one syllable, is going to help its cause.

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Inbound Marketing Stats to Share for 2012

Some really good digital marketing info and stats published at HubSpot. HubSpot's 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report is now available! The report is based on a survey conducted in January 2012 of 972 marketing professionals. The study includes data and insights about marketers' costs, budgets, lead quality, and priorities.

This is the fourth consecutive year HubSpot has conducted this study, so the latest report includes not only current data, but also trends from 2009 to 2012

The stats speak for themselves. If your ready to take your company to the next level in digital marketing, contact me to get started or visit nadicreative.com for more info.

Cost and Budget Statistics

1) Inbound leads cost per lead 61% less than outbound leads. Tweet This!
2) The average cost-per-lead for outbound-dominated businesses is $346. Tweet This!
3) The average cost-per-lead for inbound-dominated businesses is $135. Tweet This!
4) 89% of businesses are either maintaining or increasing their inbound marketing budgets. Tweet This!
5) The average budget spent on company blogs and social media increased from 9% in 2009 to 21% in 2012. Tweet This!
6) The average budget spent on telemarketing decreased from 10% to 5% in 2012. Tweet This!
7) In 2012, small businesses plan to spend 43% of their budgets on inbound marketing, while large businesses plan to spend 21%. Tweet This!
8) In 2012, small businesses are only giving 14% of their budget to outbound, while large businesses are allocating 33%. Tweet This!
9) In 2012, small businesses plan to spend dramatically more of their budgets on social media and blogs than large businesses. Tweet This!

Lead Quality and Sales Statistics

10) 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog. Tweet This!
11) 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog. Tweet This!

12) 62% of companies using LinkedIn have acquired a customer from the network. Tweet This!
13) 70% of marketers indicate that they blog at least weekly. Tweet This!
14) 77% of B2C companies report that they have acquired a customer through Facebook. Tweet This!
15) 65% of B2B companies report that they have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. Tweet This!

What's Important to Marketers

16) 62% of companies report that social media has become MORE important as a source of leads. Tweet This!
17) 51% of companies reported that direct mail has become LESS important as a source of leads. Tweet This!
18) 25% of marketers report that their company blog is “critical” to their business. Tweet This!
19) Over 40% of marketers report that Google+ is useful to critical for their business. Tweet This!
20) 81% of businesses reported that their company blog is useful to critical for their business. Tweet This!

10 Graphs from the 2012 State of Inbound Report

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New Twitter Look & Profile Pages to Roll Out Feb. 1

Twitter is set to roll out enhanced profile pages after Feb. 1, a source tells us, and those pages will give brands the ability to build platforms on their pages that could include iFrame environments, allowing users to play games or shop on a brand's site without actually leaving the Twitter environment.

In other words, Twitter's brand pages are going to start to function more like the way Facebook's brand pages do. Twitter declined to comment.

Coke's enhanced Twitter profile page. 

Enhanced profile pages launched quietly in December, with a few invitation-only companies such as Coca-Cola (pictured) and HP being given the opportunity to test them. The pages are splashier and more visually appealing than the one-dimensional column of tweets that the rest of us have.

Enhanced profile pages are part of Twitter's Q2 product rollout plan, according to a person who received a briefing on the topic from a senior Twitter executive.

Originally Published by Jim Edwards | Jan. 26, 2012, 5:44 PM


Read more:  http://www.businessinsider.com/source-twitter-will-start-to-function-more-like-facebook-on-feb-1-2012-1#ixzz1kmgkhvrz

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Facebook Cover Photo Photoshop PSD Template

Facebook Cover Photo Photoshop PSD Template

Are you designing a Facebook Cover for a business or just for yourself? Well we’ve build a handy little Photoshop PSD template that’ll help you out.

It includes all the basic layout areas, including profile picture, cover photo, and has editable text fields for the name of your user. Also included is the 851x315px slice you’ll need in order to export.

Download it now: CoversTemplate.psd (328KB, PSD)

Download it now: CoversTemplate.psd (328KB, PSD)

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Best 2012 Strategy for Digital Marketers

Here we go.. 2012!  The expanding digital industry is destined to affect what we discuss, buy and watch, who we friend, what we Like, and how we share — all year long.

Plus, eMarketer projects a 14.4% increase in U.S. online ad spending, and Google says that video ads improve offline campaign results. Digital will certainly take on added prominence in the new year.

Even so, let’s resolve to keep our heads on straight and stick close to the best practices that have been winners in the past – they’ll be the ones to see us through a stellar 2012. With input from my colleagues and other experts in the digital ad industry, I’ve come up with five “resolutions” for marketers in the new year.

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1. Own Your Voice, Don’t Share It.

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These days, we’re talking “word ownership” for online branding. Especially in hyper-competitive categories such as consumer electronics and auto, these emotive and topical keywords are the name of the game.
But you’d better get there first — key terms such as “football” and “Valentine’s Day” are sure to be hot tickets in the weeks to come. Act fast, and the keywords will do the work for you. Have a smart contextual plan at the core of your strategy, and you’ll help your brand gain ownership of its voice around the web.

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2. Resolve to Be Relevant.

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Relevance reigns in 2012. More than ever, people will be in the driver’s seat. Therefore, keep consumers’ desires, hopes and aspirations central to your marketing and you’ll stay on top. This is especially true of groups like Millennials, who are dominating the digital space. Matt Briton, CEO of social media agency Mr. Youth, says, brands must address five “need states:” utility, entertainment, information, rewards and recognition.

In 2011, we also saw consumers become more spending-conscious as opposed to simply price-conscious. So, now is the time to make the strongest possible case for your product’s value.

Finally, tune in to what kind of content engages your audience and create advertising that aligns with what they watch and read. Take advantage of technology that matches ad content to the context of the page and delivers hyper-relevant ads to people who actually want to see them.

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3. Context is King, and Content is Queen.

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Steve Jobs showed that to create value in the 21st century, you need to connect creativity with technology. With all the focus on the amazing tech that enables our new era of advertising, it’s easy to forget that what’s in the ads matters too. You can roll out a remarkable initiative to find consumers, but how will you engage them? Time and again, the most successful in-text, toolbar and display ads bring relevant content within the context of the page. This year, like the last, the best advertising will be dynamic, providing provide useful information from weather reports and traffic updates to recipes and sports scores.

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4. The Data is Smarter. Are You?

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As industry guru Peter Horan told us, “Counting clicks for branding is flawed. Marketers know TV works even though viewers can’t click on a commercial.” Beyond the click, the revolution in data will continue. Marketers can now look more closely at consumer behavior to get more mileage out of campaigns. As technology gives us a clearer view of reader engagement and retention, we see that all content is not created equal, and that despite the recent increase in content volume, quality is what drives results.

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5. They’ve Changed the Channel.

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An incredible 98% of 18- to 24-year-olds use social media. While debates continue to rage around ROI and how to quantify Likes, we’ve seen brands develop new ways to make their social media assets deliver, specifically, by bringing social content to new ad formats that push Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to the consumer in a relevant context. We can all learn from Best Buy, which connected consumers with its “Twelpforce,” Twitter-based help desk. And Axe is using an innovative social toolbar to push its clever content to consumers around the web.

Happy New Year! I hope that in 2012 you resolve to take your marketing to the next level of success.

-Publication: Mashable

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