At Find and Convert we’re all about measuring. We provide our SEO clients detailed metrics. You know, the usual stuff including unique visits, page-views, time on site, conversions, bounce rates, keywords, referral sources, yada, yada, yada. I’m not trivializing it by any means. The metrics we track for SEO and PPC are very important.
But, as more of our clients enter the brave new Web 2.0 world the question is how do we measure results? Great question! Not a simple answer….But, there are ways to measure results from your Web 2.0 campaigns.
If you’re blogging, you can measure RSS subscriptions. You can measure how many others link to your blog. Who are they?
You can measure how many social bookmarks you receive from popular sites like DIGG and StumbleUpon and how easily your social media content is found in Technorati and Del.icio.us.
You can certainly monitor and measure the comments on your blog. You can see the tone of comments and the trends in the comments. In fact, you may find comments to be invaluable “research.”
Don’t overlook your web stats reports. You can track referral sources from social media sites. When you see social media referrals increase, that’s a trend to watch. If you run campaigns in social media sites, track your web stats carefully to observe traffic from these sites and time spent on your site. Make sure to have conversion strategies in place for these referral strategies so you can track them easily.
Don’t overlook tools such as Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts. In Google Webmaster you can track links from social sites.
If you manage a large brand, or multiple brands there are more advance social media tracking tools. Some of them include Andiamo, Website-Watcher, WathThatPage and Visual Sciences.
Internet Marketing strategies require planning, measuring and revising. The methods and tools used to measure Web 2.0 results vary somewhat from measuring SEO and PPC, but not drastically. The web analytics field is evolving. Keep up to date and profit from the results you can measure.
