Effective social media strategy and execution varies based on the type of business you’re in (B2B or B2C) as well as the particular business vertical.  Many marketers wonder if social media marketing is “right” for them, if they can be successful in social and how they’ll measure ROI.   These are important considerations for any marketer to ask before engaging in a new strategy or channel.

To help provide insight and answer some of these questions,  I want to share a couple of examples of real world Social Media Marketing cases with conversions and success metrics we’ve seen first hand.  And while these examples may not answer your particular strategic or tactical needs, they may provide  ideas on success metrics for different types of businesses as well as inspiration toward getting started in and measuring your social marketing efforts.

1. Internet Marketing Company - Business to Business (B2B)
Social Networking and Group Participation / Development on LinkedIn

This situation actually involves me in my role of business development at 10e20.  Recently I was on LinkedIn and a member of one of my professional groups posted the following message to group memebers: “looking to speak with companies with special focus on social news and bookmarking to help develop traffic to publisher website.” (Paraphrased) As soon as I saw this (about 2 hours after it was sent) I sent a private message to this member requesting a phone call.

The call was set up and several weeks later we were doing business together.  It’s likely that without participating in LinkedIn Groups, I would only have met this person offline at some date in the future, if at all.  And, because I was prompt in responding through the LinkedIn system, it gave me a leg up on competitors who may have only heard about this through second hand word of mouth.  The business lead was really quite targeted.

Conversion

• 1 new business relationship
• B2B Sale for ongoing consulting relationship
• Consulting revenue

ROI

By joining LinkedIn, joining several groups and being helpful to the community by answering some questions, this was one of the CHEAPEST new business leads I have on record.

2. Lifestyle Magazine Website - An online Lifestyle Magazine  + Blog Website, Publishing
Social News & Social Bookmarking

With a start up magazine/blog website that monetizes on traffic, impressions and cost per click (CPC) advertising, this publisher was working to develop new traffic and awareness of the website and its great content. Traffic was growing but with active participation in social bookmarking website StumbleUpon, and several other social news/bookmarking sites the new blog site accelerated its growth by having the content achieve rapid viral popularity.

The publisher has since built a sustainable ROI on time and investment in social marketing of content against advertising revenue.  Also, hundreds of new backlinks to the website have been developed as a result of social media content promotion.  The compounding effect of social news/bookmarking for this publisher is paying big dividends.

Conversion

• Traffic: 10’s of thousands of visitors as opposed to hundreds.
• Clicks on CPC advertisements: thousands of dollars worth as opposed to pennies.
• Impressions for CPM advertising
• Links for SEO and site authority: hundreds of natural links instead of one “here and there”.
• Advertising revenue

ROI

Creating content is part of the publisher/magazine business model so the cost that has gone into social really comes down to time spent bookmarking and submitting content.  The bookmarking efforts tally to a couple of hours per week.  Advertising revenue from CPC ads tied to social visits far outpaces the time invested for social bookmarking.  From this perspective the social media marketing is paying the business back many times over as most traffic is tracked to social media efforts.  This is not even counting the link equity (for search value) being built back to the publisher’s domain.

3. Consumer Fashion Brand - Major Women’s Fashion Brand 
Social Networking – Facebook, Twitter and more “profile” type sites.

A major national fashion brand with no social media presence worked over several months to establish a presence on social networking websites.  Organic growth of their audience on these sites surged to 10’s of thousands of fans and followers; over 75,000 between 2 brands and 4 social accounts in just a couple of months.

Public discussion on social networking websites provided direct consumer feedback to the brands about how to improve their products and customer service.  Additionally, social networking sites have provided a new channel to distribute deals messages increasing the foot traffic to key retail store locations for sales.

Conversion

• several hundred thousand dollars in new sales in three months of marketing
• new audience for the brand, reaching new, interested fans of the brand and engaging them
• more direct and effective Public Relations
• more direct and effective responses to customer service issues
• direct consumer feedback for product development. 1 new product is in development after only 3 months in social media

ROI

The equivelent of one mid-level employee’s salary to run a dedicated social media presence, strategy and management has yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars in return in positive online brand sentiment, consumer feedback for product development and actual product sales both online and offline.

These are 3 simple and real world examples of social media conversion and ROI.  One could go on and on with examples of positive social media marketing case studies.  It’s important to note too that for every success case there are likely an equal amount of social strategies that were fumbled and not properly executed.  With that, take stock of your current strategy by conducting regular audits, competitive analysis and measurement through analytics and benchmarking.  If not you can become part of the road kill and believe me, the road is littered with companies that fumbled their strategy.

We’re curious to know: what have been some of your experiences and cases with identifying, measuring and benchmarking social conversions and success metrics?

537219 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2010/02/17/3-examples-of-real-world-social-media-conversion-and-roi/3+Examples+of+Real+World+Social+Media+Conversion+%28and+ROI%29+2010-02-17+21%3A26%3A45Jake+Matthews

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A little over a year ago 10e20 covered the launch of BLVD Status over at Search Engine Land, and since then a few new features have been launched that really make this a powerhouse platform for Social Media analytics.  In case you haven’t heard of BLVD Status in the past, one of the best attributes is that it provides real time tracking, and it has been beefed up on steroids in this new version.  Here are a few of my favorite features for Social Media use:

Keyword Vitals

This is a really nice upgrade in my eyes because it really allows you to see and track the value of social media promotions on search engines in real time.  Talking about the intersection of search and social is always a hot topic, and BLVD can give you quantitative statistics on how your SMM promotions carry over to the SERPs.  Here is a quick sample of what you would see for a very long term keyword:

Basically, BLVD status allows you to view all search engine traffic from the entire domain and display by keyword.  This data can also be filtered by URL as well, which makes it really powerful.  The data provides the initial rankings of the page, the average rank for the time period, and the current rankings for that keyword and the overall conversions.  So tracking the time period after a social campaign vs. the time period before the campaign would easily give you data for how traffic, conversions and rankings increased from a search engine standpoint.  Pretty powerful stuff.

Here is a 1/4 day example (with today’s data!) for an article that Chris wrote earlier this year:

I could also see this feature executed down the road showing overall traffic from different social sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and the like to give you some real time social tracking vs historical data.

Alerts

Another new development with BLVD Status is to harness the power of the real-time reporting to kick out alerts to you and your client.  This new feature allows you to have reports generated based on traffic, referrals, campaigns or keywords.  Now any SEOs could see the power of having a real-time keyword alert for a drop in the SERPs:

…and how they could use this to be proactive (rather than reactive), but it can be leveraged for social media as well.  Having a real time traffic alert is crucial to see if a campaign has become popular or is getting social traffic.  You can see if you hit traffic levels that are abnormally high:

This will alert you to not only the traffic, but also help you find the location of this traffic.  So say you have a bit of success on Reddit that was unknown to you … well, these alerts will help you fan that fire and keep the momentum going.

Now referrer alerts can help you get more granular.   Right now there isn’t a particular alert that lets you know when you are getting pickup from a social site (ex. Digg) but with the right tweaks you can replicate this data!  Say you want to find out if you may have just been dugg – you can set up an alert that tracks traffic from a specific domain.  If you set up an alert to track 20 visits over a 10 minute period from Digg, you could have a great notifier for any stories that were dugg.  Or if you wanted to be alerted if a story reached the homepage of Digg so that you could watch the comments or monitor server health, you could implement the following parameters:

The alerts that have been updated in the newest version of BLVD status help notify you when something is happening to you or your client’s site, and the benefits for social media are numerous (and out of this world for SEO too).

When I was talking to Chris Bennett (owner of 97th Floor and one of the brainchilds behind the project) at SES San Jose and he was describing the changes, he kept calling them a “game-changer,” and after testing it out, I agree with him.  If you are still looking for more information about BLVD Status, there is an extremely detailed write up on all the new changes here, and you can also sign up at BLVD Status today!

37409 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2009/09/17/how-to-tracki-social-media-using-blvd-status/How+To+Track+Social+Media+Using+BLVD+Status2009-09-17+15%3A02%3A46Greg+Finn

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Video continues to be a powerful medium to work with online. YouTube recently eclipsed Yahoo as the 2^nd largest search engine. Participating in video for the purpose of promoting your business is becoming more important each day.  Whether it’s increasing brand exposure or simply getting across a “how-to” to your customer base, video communicates your message in a unique and lasting way.

In a post about video optimization and analytics last year, we discussed ways to gain more exposure for your videos and find ways to measure the successes of your efforts with YouTube Insight. Here we’d like to dig a big deeper to show that within YouTube Insight you can find where your videos are embedded on other websites, and it’s these websites that present further opportunity for marketing your business and content.

Knowing where your videos have been embedded provides the opportunity to find new, targeted communities and then possibly join or work in those communities where people have adopted your content. This is basically following the lead of your fans, a true “go with the flow” organic approach.

How do we do find where our videos are embedded?

In YouTube Insight go to > Discovery > Source of Views > Embedded Player

….and then you’ll be able to view the sites where your video has been embedded.

Oftentimes there will be video sharing websites that have picked up your content, but from time to time you find niche sites and communities that have picked up your video content as well.  Click on those links and you’ll find pretty targeted sites/communities where your content may resonate well in the future and where it may be worth joining to discuss content and share yours in the future.

It’s important to note that sometimes YouTube Insight shows websites where your video may not necessarily be embedded, but where your video received exposure through the “related videos” feature of another embedded video.  Additionally, Insight does not show the actual URL where your video may have been embedded; it only shows the domain name.  Nonetheless, the Embedded Player feature in Insight will provide you with leads on targeted websites.

With the above example of a video about a BMW car, we were able to discover the following new websites:

• E90post.com,
• bmwfans.net,
• bmwtuner.net,
• e30club.ru

These are very targeted websites covering the area of BMW cars and for BMW enthusiasts to gather.  Prior to working with YouTube Insight, we did not know of these four targeted websites nor did we know that the users would potentially be  interested in this video content.  Now there is an opportunity to “follow the lead” of your content.

There is a lot you can do once you know the websites and communities where your content is shared and adopted. Here are a couple of proactive examples:

• Find the page where your video is embedded and promote and tag that page in other social sites or link to it from a blog to increase exposure. Try using [site: domainname.com keyword] searches, which can help you locate your video since Insight only shows the domain and not the actual page where your video is.
• Join the new found website and be transparent about who you are (representing your brand) and become a contributing, helpful and friendly community member so that more users within that community will begin to look back at your site or YouTube account for more video embed opportunities.
• Reach out to the user who posted the original embed and offer them an opportunity at exclusive video looks in the future, where they may access your content before others to share first.  By befriending and empowering this user, you can begin to build real advocates for your video content.

There are many great software packages and websites to track your social and video campaigns and where your video has been picked up and embedded.  However, if you are running a small, targeted video campaign and you’re focused solely on YouTube as a channel, sometimes finding successes and other “rooms” to build awareness and impressions is as easy as digging through your YouTube Insights panel and checking out the “Embedded Player” feature in Discovery.  It can lead to a lot of great relationships and more exposure for your content.

Here’s a brief video recap of what’s discussed above

340213 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2009/08/19/youtube-insight-embedded-player-discovery/YouTube+Insight%3A+Embedded+Player+Discovery2009-08-19+18%3A42%3A49Jake+Matthews

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Have you ever wondered how videos show up in web search engine results? How do videos get hundreds of thousands to millions of views on YouTube? Who’s watching my videos? Well, with a little hard work on optimizing and networking your video content and a helpful tool called YouTube Insight, you can be on your way to working with video and optimizing it for real business results.

YouTube Insight is a handy analytics tool that displays statistics for YouTube Videos. By using Insight you’ll discover statistics such as:

• how many views your video has over specific periods of time,
• the demographic and geographic breakouts of the views and
• how people are finding the video content (web search, YouTube search, embed, etc…)

Though Insight’s data is not always 100% accurate (YouTube states this when you are working with it) and can use some further development in features and functionality, it’s a great start to gaining “insight” to this ever so important media.

YouTube released the tool in March of 2008 and there was a certain amount of mention of the release, but it warrants a closer look. YouTube’s blog post about the release mentioned:

“Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.”

This tool along with a couple of pointers on optimizing your videos can really supercharge your YouTube videos.

Get started with Video Optimization:

Uploading and promoting video content can drive bottom line business results. Increased site traffic and brand impressions can be achieved from YouTube and other video websites. Video results are showing up in Google and other search engine results more and more as Universal search results are served on various queries. The more you leverage YouTube and it’s Insight program, the more key market research and data feedback can be derived. The more you optimize your video, the better results and more data input you’ll see. So how does one get started?

Open and Optimize your YouTube Account/Channel

Start by setting up a YouTube account. You’ll simply need to enter name, email, password, postal code/location, date of birth and gender. These last three datapoints are key inputs to YouTube Insight. Keep these simple tips in mind:

Account Name: Make it the name of your company or get it as close as possible to your domain name. For example, if the name of your company is Network Systems International, Inc., name the account something like NetworkSystems and you’ll end up with nice YouTube URL like www.youtube.com/user/networksystems.

Profile Information: Fill out as much of your profile information as is possible. You may even get into hobbies and interests. You may include in the profile information (in hobbies and interests) some keyword rich descriptors such as your company mission statement or core competencies. Most importantly, include a link back to your website in the website field. Viewers who are intrigued by your videos will explore further and click over to your website to see what you have available there. Suddenly you’re developing new traffic to your site!

Upload video content: A YouTube account and campaign is only going to be as successful as the input of the video content and how well optimized and networked the content is. If your videos are junk and you don’t spend time promoting them, chances are they are not going to be that popular, nor will you receive a lot of views which will in turn make your Insight data sample much smaller and not as useful for marketing insights. To maximize views on your videos, start with good content, but also optimize and network your videos. A couple of tips on optimizing video:

1. Optimize the Video File name. For example if the video is saved on your hard drive as VideoXYZ123, rename your video to something descriptive and keyword rich. So for example if the video is say a “how to video” about “How to fix a flat tire”, make sure you name the file something along those lines, like “how to fix flat car tire car repair” This will maximize the changes that your video will be picked up by search engine spiders. More and more, Google and other search engines will include the file name in the algorithms when ranking content. So your video vs another “how to” video (that is named with something generic rather than keyword rich) may perform better and get better search traffic.
2. Optimize the Title of your Video – Every video will have a title on YouTube, so use keywords that you’d want this video to be found for in search.
3. Optimize your tags. When setting uploading video be sure to fill out the tags line with very descriptive keywords of your video content. Think like your target audience to capture more searches, separate keywords and mash them together – use different combinations and try various spellings. Tags are important as this will help you video to be displayed more often next to other videos with similar content and increase your views/exposure within YouTube itself.
4. Identify your video with your brand. It is important to identify SOME of your video content with your brand by using logos or graphics- you may overlay your company name or domain name in your video. In some cases, this can be done in obnoxious ways, so don’t let it “obstruct” the message or usefulness of the video. You may also want to provide a certain amount of video content that has no brand labels in it, to let it live and breathe in the raw.
5. Network your profile and your video – Keyword search for similar content on YouTube and interact with those that have uploaded it and commented on it. How do you interact?
   1. Post Video Responses. Maximize your traffic through comments. Instead of commenting in text all the time, POST A VIDEO RESPONSE. A video response allows you to post your video in the comments section of other users video comments section. This will draw a targeted, direct view of your video by someone who viewed related content. Try posting your video response to the most popular videos (with 10’s or even hundreds of thousands of views) on YouTube in your content area ; chances are you’ll get more exposure from those popular comment sections.
   2. Comment on other similar videos and then invite / add the person who uploaded that video to be your friend. Also, if there are other viewers who commented “awesome”, go see their page to see if they have uploaded similar content as your subject area. If they have, perhaps they too would be interested in your content and you can add them as a friend as well. If anyone comments on your video, give them a thumbs up and invite them to be a friend. If they accept, be sure to go back and compliment if you see something on their profile that is of interest in your subject area.

The heart of the matter: Video Statistics and Data for Marketing information, research.

Once you’re familiar with posting videos and optimizing you can begin to dig into Insight. Think of YouTube insight as Google Analytics for Video, except it’s a bit more basic.

You can access YouTube insight from your profile page under > Performance Data & Tools > YouTube Insight. Also on this page you’ll see main datapoints.

- Views: How many times were videos accessed and watched:

- Popularity: A measure of your video’s strength as compared to other videos in a similar category.

- Discovery: HOW viewers found your videos.

• Related: Related videos in YouTube. After being played, YouTube shows yours as “related.

• YouTube Search: Keyword searches on YouTube.

• Embedded Player: An embed of your video on a website (other than YouTube).

• Google Search: Keyword searches on Google web search. For this video example, YouTube Insight shows over 25 keyword combinations for which my video has been found in Google Search. This is very exciting data and useful for keyword research and reoptimizing tags on this and other video content.

YouTube Insight indicates that one video in this account is showing up at position #6 on 1st page in Google web search for the keyword “BMW S50 Motor“. That’s productive keyword optimization and search result penetration:

- Geographic: Aside from the US, a fair amount of views have come from United Kingdom, France, and Poland. Indeed marketing your content in these countries may be of benefit to you in the future. With a handy drop down, you may view specific regions or states within countries. You can even see down the region and state level in the US.

Demographic: For this particular video, 40% of views are between ages 35-45. 88% of views are by males. For an early stage business this can help define who is the key market:

It is critical that businesses get involved in video optimization for reach, search results and branding. Video is not going away and is one of the most powerful mediums of communication in today’s day and age. By using video you can increase your brand’s reach through keyword search and social networking.

For marketers to measure video results, YouTube Insight is a decent tool to add to the analytics kit. And though it needs some more developement, it can certainly bring light to the effectiveness of videos and even empower you with new keyword, demographic and geographic information for your products and services.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the 10e20 RSS Feed for updates on search optimization tactics!

181930 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2008/07/15/video-optimization-and-analytics-a-closer-look-at-youtube-insight/Video+Optimization+and+Analytics%3A+A+closer+look+at+YouTube+Insight2008-07-15+20%3A06%3A27Jake+Matthews

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I get angry when I see companies buy pricey media such as print, television, radio or outdoor and they don’t take advantage to tie that media buy to the web in an effective way. What do I mean by this?

Take for example a large billboard on the side of the highway that has a message about a specific offer from a company, and the only web address displayed is the company’s main domain name eg, www.company.com I feel that this is a wasted advertising opportunity to have just your main domain name listed. Much in the same way Danielle pointed out when off-line link-bait is often not leveraged properly on-line, targeted messages, spaces, interactivity and landing pages should be created and matched on-line for off-line media buys.

I believe that every advertising buy should have a targeted message behind it and accordingly specific media creatives and goals to go along with it.

Recently I found a couple of examples of companies that are tying print and TV to web pretty well – Marathon Oil, Prudential, Fidelity, Chrysler and Burger King:

Marathon Oil print ad:

www.marathon.com/garyville

Prudential print ad:

www.prudential.com/retirementincome

Fidelity print ad:

www.fidelity.com/rolloverleader

Another company that’s doing it well from Television spots to the web is Chrysler with the Jeep brand. They have an interesting campaign which features singing animals having fun around the 2008 Jeep Liberty. The TV spot is very catchy and they use the web URL www.jeep.com/sessions to bring visitors into the site and have an interactive view of their Jeep Liberty. A truly great and targeted campaign.

A couple of reasons to have specific landing pages for these TV, print and off-line campaigns are as follows:

1. targeted messaging.
2. better interactivity and audience response.
3. higher conversion.
4. tighter tracking, analytics, and return on ad spend (ROAS) information.

When are some good times to use specific URL’s and landing pages for off-line advertising and marketing?

1. Trade show exhibitor – if you are spending thousands to go to a trade show and display as an Exhibitor, you want to make sure you can track and manage those leads. Create a specific landing page for booth visitors to follow up with your company and put that on your print at the show. For example, if I am a chemical company and I exhibit at a scientific show in Boston, why not create a campaign and page around www.chemicalcompany.com/bostontrade2008 and have targeted lead/follow up forms on that page so that you can channel and track leads. A special offer always works well.
2. New product launches – with a new product launching, take advantage of the internet’s great interactive media capability. Don’t just send the traffic to your company’s main homepage and let all the traffic from a targeted message be lost in the rest of your site.
3. PR campaigns – drive traffic to a specific message on your site and as above, leverage the web’s interactivity to track response from users.

In some cases a campaign is worth creating an entire micro-site. An example of this is Chrispin Porter + Bogusky’s creation of WhopperFreakout for Burger King.

When using off-line media, don’t be afraid to match the on-line component pound for pound. The results will astonish you, and your target audience will be that much more pleased and responsive!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the 10e20 RSS Feed!

14678 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2008/01/30/leveraging-the-web-for-off-line-media-buys/Leveraging+the+Web+for+Off-line+Media+Buys2008-01-30+19%3A49%3A42Jake+Matthews

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Many important decisions begin with analysis of website statistics. Statistics packages can give a website owner a different perspective and allow him/her to get more insight into visitors’ behaviors, habits, and the key terms that bring people to the website. Key marketing and business decisions can be founded on website statistics analysis. Once your website is up and you’re looking for traffic, all users should consider a statistics package.

Fortunately, in this day and age, you can find just about everything for a relatively cheap price or even free. There just so happens to be a plethora of statistics packages available, and while the free options aren’t necessarily as comprehensive as the paid statistics software applications, they are worth noting. With Gatineau around the corner (and we can still anticipate its launch), there are other free analytics applications that you should consider using on your site. Here are a list of six that you might want to look into if you are looking for statistics. I have written this guide with a basic overview of each.

1. StatCounter. This free analytics tool is fairly limited (logs up to 100 pageloads unless you upgrade), but in its free form, features a nice friendly graph with the number of visitors who have visited a particular site.

StatCounter also offers a keyword analysis tool, allowing you to see which keywords brought visitors to your site. From this data, you can get more information about which keywords are well optimized and which keywords you wish to convert but are not currently doing much for you.

Further information is available, including lists of the first pages a visitor went to, the page a visitor left from, a list of where the site’s users came from (with a full referral link!), the length of a user visit, which search engine dominated on search from the big four (see below), a list of most recent visitors as well as how they got there (especially useful to determine whether people are clicking through PPC campaigns), the length of a user’s visit, the number of returning visits, a list of operating systems and visitor screen resolutions, and a some other useful tools for a basic analysis.

Here’s an image of what StatCounter calls “Search Engine Wars,” allowing users to see which search engines the traffic came from:

You can also learn more about the users that visit your site with the following Google Maps implementation on the backend:

(Note: The images here reflect the 1000 log package, which was an upgrade to the original.)

StatCounter is an easy on-site script to install. It is simply a Javascript code snippet that you would put on the page(s) that you want to be analyzed.

2. Google Analytics. The Google Analytics package, formerly Urchin, has a large number of features that would overburden an average user. Since this is just a basic overview of the functionality, I am not going to be discussing these features in depth.

Google Analytics offers some very nice graphs, such as the executive overview graph below:

Google Analytics presents data in three columns: Marketing Optimization, Content Optimization, and E-Commerce Analysis.

• Marketing Optimization: Shows the number of visitors total and how many new visitors have discovered the site (versus repeated visitors), the number of visits and pageviews per visit, the number of conversions per visit, the loyalty score of a visitor (have they visited the page more than once? how many times?), the referring source (search engine or site), the geographic location of the visitors, the ISP of the visitors, among other bits of interesting information (including user-defined data). You can also look at how your PPC campaigns are doing (how many page impressions, how many clicks, which keywords targeted the most clicks, etc.) and get keyword recommendations based on keywords present on your site combined with your PPC campaigns.
• Content Optimization: This section of Google Analytics provides additional information on the best-converting keywords and which of these drives traffic for both paid and organic search, in addition to the source of these keywords (such as the search engine that displayed the ads). You can view which pages people landed on by filename and by title tag and you can see how many pages were visited and the length of each visit. You can also track goal conversions to see which were successful and which were abandoned and where. Further, you can get additional information about your visitors: the browsers and operating systems used, the desktop resolution and number of colors displayed, the speed of the users’ connections, and you can find out a variety of browser-specific options (Java/Javascript/Flash enabled?)
• E-Commerce Analysis: For the purposes of this blog post, this section is not being covered. However, this section allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, how they are finding you, which products are being purchased, and which marketing campaigns are contributing to these successful conversions.

In the image below, you can get an idea of how Google displays the navigation in a graphical interface. By clicking on one of the small icons next to a filename, you can see where your visitors navigated from a particular entry page:

The Google Analytics package seems inundating (and it really is), so for a free package, this is a pretty comprehensive solution. It’s also relatively easy to configure; simply placing some JavaScript code on the pages that you wish to track will bring you these results.

3. AWStats. The AWStats statistics package is a server-side solution for those who are able to access and process server logs. Typically, AWStats is installed on the same server that the website is hosted on, but as long as the AWStats can access the web server logs, this should be relatively easy to set up. After it processes the logs, you’ll be able to see a page that looks much like this:

Further breakdowns allow you to see what kinds of visitors visited at certain points in the day, the countries the users visited from, the IP address of the visitors (reverse DNS is available), the robots that accessed the site, the length of the visit, the types of files that were accessed (and how much bandwidth was consumed), the most frequently-visited pages on the site, the operating systems and browsers used by visitors, the number of hits that came from a search engine (see below), the keywords used to access the site, and the HTTP server codes.

This neat functionality allows you to see which search engines have linked to the particular site.

AWStats is a pretty analytics package, and if you have the right permissions, one of the neat things about this is that you can actually update the statistics in real time through the browser. Of all on-server free analytics package, I think that I prefer AWStats above all the others.

4. Webalizer: Like AWStats, Webalizer needs to be installed on a host that is able to access the server logs. When it processes these logs, you get a view of the types of visitors that have come to the site and what they were specifically seeking.

When you click on the month link, you can get a bigger breakdown of the pages on your site that were accessed. For example, you can see the total hits, the response codes served by particular page accesses, the peak hours of website access, the most-accessed URLs (and how often they were accessed), the entry/exit pages, the referral pages, a list of keywords used to find the site, and where your users came from.

Webalizer is a nice package and displays the output in a friendly form. It is pretty self-explanatory as are many of these packages and is recommended.

5. Analog. Analog is a very simple stats package. Results generated by Analog are not as eye-catching as any of the aforementioned four statistics packages. For example, the general summary and month view do not look to be very extensive:

It’s possible that Analog used the graphs just to emulate other statistics packages, but it really doesn’t do much for the user. However, the written statistics are rather helpful, showing users the first two octets of an incoming IP address, a redirected referrer report, a failed referrer report, the list of sites that referred traffic to the particular site, the types of browsers that visitors were using, the operating system used in the particular visit, the list and number of failed and successful status codes returned by the server for a page access, the sizes and types of files accessed, the directories accessed, and a request report of files that have been accessed 20 times or more.

Analog is an on-server statistics package, and while helpful, doesn’t provide as detailed information as AWStats or Webalizer in an as-friendly format. Most hosting providers may provide an on-site statistics package but opt out of Analog due to it lacking some more detailed features.

6. MyBlogLog: The blogging widget software shows a lot different information than any aforementioned packages, and it is also an easy installation with a simple JavaScript snippet embedded onto the pages that wish to be tracked.

MyBlogLog has a basic and premium statistics package. In the basic package, MyBlogLog shows you a list of where users came from, what users viewed, and what they clicked. You can also see what other communities your visitors prefer and, most interestingly, get an idea of what other pages people are interested in.

Here’s what pages were popular on our blog today and the time spent at each:

This is a nice community statistics package which really has some nice and interesting information that is not provided by other statistics packages. The element of community beyond statistics has been discussed before, and despite MBL being under fire recently, it’s still a very valuable package.

Overall, these are some good packages that a user looking for statistics analysis should consider. In fact, you really could use all at once, as none are mutually exclusive of any other. You could then compare results to get an idea of the accuracy of these packages (especially because on-server packages will be as precise as they can be since they’re processing logs directly from the server).

Does anyone have any other statistic package recommendations? Why? What do you think is most accurate? What would you prefer?

22159 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2007/03/01/analytics-on-the-cheap-six-free-stats-packages-for-the-startup-or-small-business-owner/Analytics+on+the+Cheap%3A+Six+Free+Stats+Packages+for+the+Startup+or+Small-Business+Owner2007-03-01+21%3A41%3A33Tamar+Weinberg

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I love mashups. I love tools that combine two great things into one very cool thing. Widgets might be the defining technology in 2007, but mashups — despite their apparent prevalence in our Web 2.0 world — will continue to pop up and astound me.

With that, I introduce what I just discovered: Delexa. Delexa is a domain-ranking engine that allows you to see information on the top 50,000 websites (ranked by Alexa) and their topic tags (ranked by del.icio.us). The result is pretty cool:

If you search for the top SEO sites, you see 100 websites grouped into three columns: a Delexa ranking, the Alexa rating, and the number of tags that reference the particular website. For business research, this is a pretty neat tool to get an idea of where you should look (whether for competitors or for related resources) and how they are ranked in a very friendly and usable format.

I’m digging the clean look a lot and can see this to be a really good resource for people who want to find high-ranked sites on a similar subject matter as defined by tags.

1903 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2007/02/02/mashup-mania-delexa-is-a-combination-of-delicious-and-alexa/Mashup+Mania%3A+Delexa+is+a+Combination+of+del.icio.us+and+Alexa2007-02-02+20%3A06%3A14Tamar+Weinberg

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One of my biggest problems with Google Analytics has always been that you can’t get the full referring URL of where someone came from. For example – if you someone came from http://www.domain.com/referring-exact-page.php – it just shows up in Analytics as http://www.domain.com – which only gives you half the story. I want to be able to track down the exact place if neccessary – not have to hunt through a site to find the page.

Luckily Reuben Yau has come up with a hack that integrates the Urchin Tracker Script, which is usually used for tracking javascript or Flash events. It takes all of 1 minute to install and seems to be working great. If you’re a Google Analytics user and want full referring URLs – check out the fix at Reuben’s blog.

1705 Commentshttp://www.10e20.com/blog/2007/01/15/obtain-the-full-referring-url-in-google-analytics/Obtain+the+Full+Referring+URL+in+Google+Analytics2007-01-15+21%3A12%3A26Chris+Winfield

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