Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Advertising

What photography can teach you about marketing focus

Take a look at this photo of the coffee stand here at the office:

It’s bland. It’s boring. It tries to cram everything relevant into one picture so that customers don’t miss anything. It’s taken by someone who knows little to nothing about photographic composition, so it’s shot square on with no sense of depth, perspective, or anything. It is, in other words, a typical photo.

That photo is your standard, typical marketing campaign. This is what most marketing is – a long feature list of stuff, much of which may not even be helpful if you don’t already know what the product is. There’s no clear benefit to prospective customers, much of it is confusing, and because it’s so boring and bland to look at, your customers’ mental ad blocking software bounces your campaign out before they even get a chance to investigate.

Here’s the same coffee stand, the same location, with a slightly different look:

Look how much is missing. All of the extraneous features are gone from the photo. In place of “cram everything into one photo”, we see an intense focus from a radically different perspective. The lens blurs out all the details that aren’t really helpful anyway, and leaves just one or two things in focus. The change in perspective lets you see the coffee stand in a different perspective that you normally would, and makes for a more compelling photo.

This is what your marketing can become. Look at that photo. What’s the central focus – the features of the coffee stand and all the different things you can do at it? No. The central focus is the benefit to the prospective customer – a cup of coffee. The background hints at all your different options, but doesn’t overwhelm you with long lists of stuff.

What could your marketing become if you took away the endless feature lists, if you stripped down your campaigns to focus on just one benefit, if you went at that one benefit from a different perspective than what the committee of marketers usually comes up with? What if you took the risk of focusing only on what was essential – the benefit to the customer – and put away everything else?

It’s not easy, either in photography or in marketing, to take away until only the essence is left. It’s counterintuitive, especially when you have a great product or service that has tons of features and really cool aspects, to want to exclude most of them from the customer’s first look. The rewards, however, make it worthwhile – a much more compelling photo that draws in the eye, and a much more compelling marketing campaign that draws in the customer.

What will your focus be in your next marketing campaign? Whatever it is, I hope you take the risk, take your shot, and show the world just the essence of what you have to offer.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

March 10, 2010
Friday fun: what's on my iPod for productivity

It’s Friday. Let’s have a little bit of fun. One of the things that makes me productive during the workday? The right audio. Sometimes the audio is training, most of the time it’s good tunes. Here’s some of what’s on my iPod while the day is flying by. You’ll notice that for the most part, I avoid anything with words in it – instrumental rules the day for cognitive psychology reasons. Few people can effectively process more than one language stream at a time, so listening to words in a song can conflict with trying to write words on the page. Hence, most of the music is instrumental.

Full disclosure: Of course everything is affiliate-linked for commissions. Did you expect otherwise?

Music to work by

The Epic Score folks have some of the best music in iTunes for coding, drafting, and writing. If you need to boost your own sense of urgency, Action & Adventure is the recipe for you. If you need dramatic copy, Epic Drama fits the bill.

If you’re a Blizzard fan (i.e. Warcraft player) one of the best albums to get, hands down, is the Echoes of War symphonic set. Echoes of War are all the familiar Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo themes you know and love, arranged and performed by a full symphony orchestra.

Volume 1:

Volume 2:

The soundtrack to Wrath of the Lich King is pretty good by itself, btw.

Looking for something a little slower paced and different? The Tibetan Master Chants album with Lama Tashi puts karmically useful sounds in your head, as various sutras and mantras are chanted. If you like that chanting kind of background ambience, this will deliver.

Finally, if you need a hefty dose of heroism, John Ottman’s Superman Returns delivers.

Brain Food

If you’re in any kind of organization that sells something, I consider Tom Hopkins training to be Sales 101. Yeah, some of it comes across as cheesy, but for a novice salesperson who needs any kind of framework to start being minimally effective, Hopkins’ system is as good as any. Way back in the day when I was a technical recruiter, my firm sent me to his Boot Camp at the price of $3,750. Nowadays, you can get pretty much the same content for$ 18. Listen and learn.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around new media and social media still, there are very, very few books as good as Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. He narrates his own audiobook (which I view favorably – I’d rather hear the author unless they have a terribad voice) and it’s worth it if you don’t have the time to read the book.

Gear

There isn’t a day when I don’t use my Bose headphones. They’re awesome for travel, sure, especially on noisy airplanes, but they’re also awesome in the office for filtering out all the background crap that is subtly taking a toll on your brain via your ears. Air conditioning, fax machines, noisy coworkers and hallway conversations, laptop fans, all that ambient noise – it takes its toll. Using these headphones rocks, plain and simple. They’ll cost you an arm and a leg but if you do any kind of work that pays you more for more productivity (via bonuses, commissions, etc.) then these headphones will pay for themselves easily and quickly.

Hopefully this set of resources will help you squeeze more juice from your day too!

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

March 5, 2010
How to tell if you are a doomed marketer
Once upon a time, marketing was just marketing. It was a fabulous era of big brands, big launches, big parties. Martinis were de rigueur, agencies ruled the world, and three piece suits (that looked MAHHH-velous) were the signs of the professional marketer.

Once upon a time, technology was just technology. If you were in IT or development, you slung code all day, making the cool new thing (whether or not anyone wanted it). You plugged your earbuds in, cranked your music to 11, and reformatted servers, made objects and classes, hit up the LAN parties, and stared into the Matrix.

Along the way to today, something funny happened. The very best technology became marketing. Social networks suddenly transformed from cool technologies to cool marketing tools, and the reach of marketers went from whatever the ad spend budget was to whatever they have that was worth paying attention to. The very best marketing became technology. Brand mindshare became followers, fans, and friends. Direct mail became email marketing, which in turn fueled social marketing.

So here we are. Marketing is technology is marketing. It’s a crazy new world where someone like me with an MS in information systems who has never set foot in a marketing class is suddenly a professor of marketing at a reputable university because marketing is technology, technology is marketing. It’s a crazy world where the first ubernerd becomes the richest man on the planet and his successors start stupid picture-based web sites in college that turn into the largest communications platform in the world.

What does this mean for you? Here’s how to tell if your company is going to thrive or be doomed in the next few years.
- If marketing and technology aren’t having lunch together once a week, you’re doomed.
- If marketing and technology aren’t working together all the time, you’re doomed.
- If marketing has no technology capabilities and technology has no marketing focus, you’re doomed.
- If you as a marketer don’t know at least a high-level explanation of these three marketing-related technology terms, you’re doomed: FQL, SEO, API. Bonus points if you know what federated identity is and what it means for the future.
At my previous company, the Student Loan Network (the best student loan company) business thrived even in a hostile, highly competitive environment because marketing and technology were often one and the same. This gave an incredible competitive advantage over slower moving, slower thinking competitors.

At my current company, Blue Sky Factory (the best email marketing company), marketing suddenly has more technology capabilities, and it shows. While the specific detailed numbers are under NDA, newly-aligned marketing and technology initiatives have boosted marketing’s lead generation results by over 3,000% year-to-date. (there may eventually be a case study on this, though!)

Marketers, especially social media marketers, like to say that content is king, content is everything, and that’s partly true. Great products, great services, great content are vital to the long term success of your business. However, even the best content is useless if you don’t have the platforms and technologies in place to distribute them. Put another way, you might have the best pizza in the world, but if you have a drunk, highly unreliable delivery guy, your customers may never know about your pizza because it’ll never get to them.

As I’ve said many times on Marketing Over Coffee (the best marketing podcast), the way to get started fixing things, regardless of where you are in the corporate hierarchy, is to find someone in technology – at your company, preferably – and start having lunch with them once a week. Find out what those technology terms mean. Find out what technology is capable of, because once you know, your ability to market using technology will give you an incredible advantage over everyone else in your vertical space.

Plus, technology folks like lunch. Believe me, I know.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.
March 2, 2010
How do you know where to pay per click?

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a great way to juice up a campaign in the short term. It’s also a really great way to lose a metric crapton of money in a hurry if you don’t know what you’re doing, especially if you’re a small, local business with a limited budget. Let’s look at one very small sliver of the PPC world and how to make more of the few advertising dollars you have.

This is Google’s AdWords PPC manager. Virtually everyone who has dabbled in PPC has seen this.

Look carefully in campaign settings, locations. You can edit this. Clicking edit brings up… Google Maps. Now here’s where it gets cool. You can draw right on the map the area you want your ads shown in.

Nifty, eh? If you know, for example, what ZIP codes around you have the demographic you want, you don’t have to spend money elsewhere. You can just draw out exactly the audience segments you want to attract.

How do you know what ZIP codes contain your demographics? Use the US Census Bureau Fact Finder. It’s free. What if you’re doing B2B instead of B2C? No problem! The Census Bureau also provides local business information in aggregate at its ZIP Business Patterns Index, also for free. Figure out who has your industries that you’re targeting.

Now, let’s say you want to kick it up another notch. What if you knew where interest already was? What if you could tell where interested people already lived? Wouldn’t that make your hyperlocal PPC advertising even more potent?

Lucky for you, you can do that, also for free. Sign up, register, and get plugged into Google’s Local Business Center. Once your listing is updated and is collecting data, you’ll get a nice dashboard of times your local business listing has appeared in Maps and local search. Even more powerful, though, is a nice map of where potential customers are requesting driving directions from:

Get it?

Take your local business center driving directions map and draw a big ol’ irregular polygon over that area in Google AdWords. You’re now targeting the geographic areas that people have already expressed interest in! This is incredibly powerful and just requires you to get your local business center listing up to scratch.

Maps. Local business center demographics. Census Bureau data. Adwords PPC. By binding all of these tools together, you can utterly crush your opponents or drive them out of business just on advertising costs alone. They’ll be spending like crazy in an unfocused way while you’ll be cherry-picking the best potential prospects. Try it!

Pro tip: make sure you bind your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account so that PPC cost data is passed through. That’s a topic for another time, though.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

February 25, 2010
The 3 Benefits We Care About
Tony Corinda, the famous magician and mentalist, wrote in his classic textbook 13 Steps to Mentalism that there are three general topics which nearly everyone wants psychic predictions on. Knowing these makes the job of a mentalist on stage incredibly easy, as just providing the hook into any of the topics gets people talking about what they really want.

The three things most people care about and want to know more about?
- Love/Relationships/Sex
- Health
- Money
You could have probably guessed that right off the bat. To no one’s surprise, business is no different. Decision-makers in business – including you, if for no other role than decision-maker of your career – want three general things, too.
- How can I save more money?
- How can I save more time?
- How can I make more money?
Again, no surprise, right?

So why is it that legions of salesmen and saleswomen never actually answer these questions? Take a look at any product spec sheet, from industrial toilets to iPhone apps, and you’ll see features listed by the dozen. This toilet uses 1.4 gallons per flush. This iPhone app can switch between 3G and WiFi seamlessly. This CRM offers RDBMS support for 8 of the most modern RDBMS systems.

So what?

When I talk to vendors, I’m exceptionally blunt. Some appreciate it, some get derailed from their carefully crafted pitch. How will your product save me money? How will your product save me time? How will your product make me more money? If a vendor can answer those questions quickly and intelligently, I’m very likely to just pull the trigger right then and there, as long as their math is sound. If a vendor tries to defer those three questions until later so they can finish their pitch, the phone gets hung up with a polite but curt “not interested but thanks”.

Classic sales books and training materials always advocate answering “What’s in it for me?” as the key question to answer in a sales presentation. Throw those books out, or at least put them back on the shelf. If you can prove a strong case for any one of the three questions – time, money saved, money earned – you’ve answered a core WIIFM question. If you can prove a strong case for more than one of the three questions, prospects will be buying YOU lunch. If you can prove a strong case for all three questions, you can pretty much retire your sales department and just replace them with order takers, because word of mouth alone will be flooding your call center.

Take a look at your own sales and marketing materials today.

Will you save me time?

Will you save me money?

Will you make me more money?

Prove it, and I’m yours.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.
February 10, 2010
What World of Warcraft can teach you about customer quality

One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is the in-game marketplace known as the Auction House. Inside the AH, you can see relatively free markets at work with minimal regulation by the game’s owners. You can especially see how market forces create supply and demand, and if you’re good at understanding human nature, you can make a fair bit of virtual money.

Right now, there’s an in-game Valentine’s Day event going on. Below is a picture of the Auction House and the price of a Buttermilk Cream chocolate. The current asking price in the marketplace is $54, and demand is so high that none are currently being sold – the marketplace is empty of this item.

Yes, $54 for a single chocolate. Suddenly the real world holiday doesn’t look quite as expensive. My character here is about to sell 3 of them for $163.

Here’s the funny part: the in-game quests needed to obtain this item take about 5 minutes, total. (dropping off a charm bracelet to another character and offering 10 characters some perfume samples) So why does the price of this chocolate seem so very high compared to the relative amount of work needed to create it? This marketplace item can teach us a lot about customer quality and behavior.

Some players may not know how to obtain it besides the marketplace. They simply buy everything in the marketplace. These, however, are long-term poor customers, because the moment they get clued in, they will stop buying from marketers and start creating their own items. True, as the old gangster saying goes, you can’t wise up a chump, but that’s not the sort of customer you’d want to rely on or build a business on.

Some players like the convenience of one-stop shopping, and will pay a premium just to be able to buy everything in one place. These are better customers because they have a persistent need (convenience). This makes them a better long-term prospective customer as they have a need that will always need to be met. The downside is that these folks are usually very price-sensitive, so a competitor who prices the same goods at even a penny less will beat you to the sale. If supply is a greater issue than demand, unless you’re always the lowest price, you won’t sell anything.

Some players just don’t like questing, period. They pay a premium in the marketplace – sometimes a very high premium – to not spend a single minute in the game doing things that aren’t fun for them. If you can provide exactly what they need, when they need it, you’ll develop a reputation in-game for being a useful sort of marketer to have around, and the kind of person who they will approach directly whenever they need to buy something. These folks will even ignore marketplace prices and just pay you obscene premiums directly because they know you’re reliable and can get them exactly what they want. It almost goes without saying that these are your very best customers in the long-term.

We have, in short, three kinds of customers – the sucker who may or may not even buy, the customer who wants convenience but is super-sensitive to price, and the premium buyer who wants to outsource everything they don’t want to do.

Which do you want as a customer? Common sense should dictate that if it’s long-term maximum profitability you’re after, you want the premium buyer. It will require more work on your part to develop reputation in your community for being the go-to marketer that has exactly what someone needs, but if you put in the time and effort in your marketplace, you can escape the always-lowest-prices race and make a ton of money.

Now, would anyone like to buy a Buttermilk Cream? Only three left…

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

February 9, 2010
Your ACE in the hole: Energize!
We talked last time about what marketing, sales, and product & service groups are supposed to manufacture. Let’s talk about the verbs that go with them, so that you have an idea if what you’re doing is in alignment with those verbs, and one verb in particular. Quick review:
- Marketing takes audience and makes qualified leads
- Sales takes qualified leads and makes customers
- Product design and customer service takes customers and makes evangelists
So let’s take a look at the verbs of this funnel. In short: ACE.
- Attract.
- Convert.
- Energize.
Attract is what marketing does. Create demand for your ideas. Attract attention to what you have to offer. Assuming it’s good, people will pursue a line of inquiry and become a qualified lead. Attract also helps filter out some stuff – is what you are doing likely to attract leads? Billboards attract eyes, but unless they’re hyperlocal (Eat at Joe’s Next Exit), their value is questionable. Are you attracting the right people? You may be getting all the buzz in the world for your event, but if no one can afford to attend it, those thousands of visitors and millions of pageviews are worthless.

Convert is what sales does. Convert puts the emotional and rational values on the table with the qualified leads, the prospects, and helps them to convince themselves that your product or service meets or exceeds their needs. Again, convert is a useful verb. Is a sales practice converting? Do you know what converts and what doesn’t convert?

Energize is what product design and customer service do. We used to call this retention, but when you think about it, retention kind of implies that your customers are fleeing your products and services. It implies they want to run away as fast as they can, and you have to pull out all the stops to keep them from doing so. No, if your product doesn’t suck and your customer service actually cares about its customers to any degree, then you’re not talking about retention as much as you are talking about energizing your customers.
- Energizing them to use the product or service to its full potential.
- Energizing them to give you unsolicited suggestions about what would make it even more rave-worthy.
- Energizing them to tell everyone who will hold still long enough about your product or service as your unpaid word of mouth marketing department.
Energize is where all your profit is, long-term. If your product sucks, it will not energize customers to do anything more than pay the bills – if that. If your service sucks, it will only energize customers to hate you, very publicly and very loudly. Energize is what will destroy the other two departments, marketing and sales, because marketing will not be able to attract audience due to your stigma in the community. Sales will not be able to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt in what few prospects you have. Eventually, you’ll either have to make even more ethically questionable marketing and sales choices just to keep the lights on or go out of business.

The flip side is the fun part. Products that are raveworthy and service that is insanely great means that marketing just has to get people to the web form to sign up. Marketing can clock in at 10 and clock out at 2 with an hour martini break in the middle of the day because existing customers are raving about what you’ve got and forcibly dragging friends into your showroom. Sales has to triple its manpower just to process the paperwork, and prospects need little guidance except perhaps what color ink to sign on the contract. All of this comes from energizing your product design to be great and your customer service to be the best thing anyone has ever experienced.

Unsurprisingly, energizing product design and customer service is really, really hard. You as a company must be committed at every level, in every way, to putting your customers first and foremost. Everyone from the janitor who answers the phone late at night while cleaning to the CEO must get it, must understand that the vast majority of your long-term focus must always be on doing right by the customer. The moment that you lose that focus, you lose your ACE in the hole, and until you get it back, you’re on the path of the corporate death spiral.

Attract. Convert. Energize.

Profit.

Photo credit: DotBenjamin

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

| More

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com
February 3, 2010
The only marketing metric that really matters

I’ve said in the past that marketing is the art of creating demand for your ideas, but in terms of something measurable and impactful, what does this mean? What does marketing make? Yes, it creates things like ads, Twitter accounts, email, etc. – but those are the tools to execute the mission of marketing. What does marketing actually do that’s measurable and meaningful?

Throw out all your other metrics. Followers on twitter, hits to your web site, mentions in the media. Toss them all.

The only metric that matters is this: qualified leads.

On the continuum of business, marketing (which includes marketing, advertising, and PR) takes media and audience as its raw materials and makes qualified leads.

Sales takes those raw materials, those leads, and makes them into customers.

Product design and customer service take those raw materials, those customers, and turns them into evangelists.

Everyone and everything that’s doing marketing makes qualified leads. We may not call them as such – we might call them volunteers for the non-profit, new members to the congregation, new players in the Warcraft guild – but they are.

I’m being a little facetious when I say toss out everything else – but not by much. Things like site traffic, media mentions, etc. are good diagnostic measures to tell you what’s happening with individual tools and processes, but at the end of the day, the only metric that shows you the results of your actions is the number of qualified leads that you pass on to sales to convert. For small businesses especially, marketing, sales, and service may be the same person, the same sole proprietor, but the count of qualified leads is an important number, not to be missed or glossed over.

Finally, metrics that are really trendy and popular, like ROI, are built on qualified leads. You can’t compute Return on Investment if you have no idea what the Return is, and you can’t get a Return on your Investment until you have some leads for Sales to turn into business. Worry later about ROI and worry more now about how many leads Sales has to work with.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

| More

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

January 29, 2010
More traffic is not the answer
Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to have some great conversations with companies, individuals, and groups looking for my help growing their businesses (as I’ll be leaving Edvisors at the end of the month). There’s been a common question among all of them:

How do we get more traffic to X?

This is the wrong question to be asking, folks. Yes, absolutely, more feet in the door is critical to long term growth, but you don’t start fixing or improving your business at the top of the funnel.

You start at the bottom.

Which would you rather have? A web site with 1 million visitors a year that converts 0.5% of them, or a web site with 20,000 visitors a year that converts 30% of them? Everyone clamoring for more traffic says “I want the million visitors!” but the answer is the latter, in case you’re mathematically disinclined.

Fix your funnel from the bottom up. Why? Two reasons – you make the conversion engine more efficient, so when it’s time to build traffic, you can make use of it, and the further down the funnel you go, the more control over its outcome you have.

If you don’t know what your funnel is, now’s a good time to map it out. I suggest this order:
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Leads
- Customers
- Evangelists
Start at the bottom, which is evangelists, the people who love you so much that they spread your message for free on your behalf. If your product or service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. If your customer service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. Put time and energy into making a killer product and helping people make use of it, and every referral you get from your evangelists will bring gold to your doorstep.

Making customers is a function of sales. If sales can’t take a qualified lead and turn it into a customer most of the time, your sales process is broken or your sales team sucks. Ask your leads why they didn’t become customers, and fix that. Sales force automation tools can give you more insights into aggregate info about who tends to convert or doesn’t convert, but nothing beats asking the folks who didn’t buy.

Making traffic into leads is a function of marketing. You want as many qualified leads as possible – so if you’re not turning your traffic into leads, chances are marketing’s not doing its job demonstrating the value of what you have for sale, or the mechanism for conversion to a lead is broken. Are your web site forms working at all? Have you tested using things like Google Optimizer? If your lead quality is poor, are you asking the right questions and filtering out the garbage before your sales force has to handle it?

Building awareness and getting traffic is what you handle last – as said earlier, the higher up the funnel, the less you have control over the outcome. This is where stuff like search engine optimization, social media, and the variety of traffic building mechanisms come into play, and this is where most folks think you should start, but it’s where you finish.

Make sure the engine is working before you start blinging the shell of your car. More traffic without a conversion engine is just wasting your bandwidth, your resources, and your time.

Photo credit: Chris Brogan

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

| More

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com
January 20, 2010
In the absence of other metrics

I had an interesting conversation last night with a photographer friend who said he faced a dichotomy in his work: on the one hand, he doesn’t overly care about others’ opinions, and on the other hand, he feels as though he should shoot for views as the best way of seeing how his work is being valued as he doesn’t sell his photos.

To me, there’s no dichotomy here. We focus on things like views of a photo, followers, retweets, fans on a fan page, etc. because these are the measures and metrics we know about. This is the best we have to work with, for the most part, and so valuing them isn’t wrong or crass. In the absence of other, better metrics, we value what we know.

To alleviate my friend’s dichotomy, I suggested he consider other metrics that would more accurately gauge his work – in essence, expanding what he knows about his work and how people perceive it. Sales, of course, is one such measure. It’s easy to click follow or subscribe or friend someone, but it’s much more of a commitment to open your wallet and purchase the work of an artist. You have to be much more invested in it to put up some money.

If you’re in it for the love and not the money – which is perfectly okay and good – dig deeper into your analytics. Last night in my USF Advanced Social Media course, I talked a bit about using Google Analytics to measure inflows and outflows to social networks as a way of better gauging what people are doing with your stuff. Here’s two examples.

1. Measuring outflows. Using Google Analytics’ virtual pageviews, you can tell whether that giant Twitter badge on your blog is worth keeping around. Set up links using an arbitrary virtual pageview, and every time someone clicks out to a social site or platform from your blog or destination site, you’ll know. That giant “BE MAH FRIEND” badge may be taking up valuable real estate for little value. Add a virtual page view to high value links or affiliate links as a sanity check for your affiliate reporting, too.

Example code – no virtual page view:

<a href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>

Example code with virtual page view:

<a onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/vpv-twitter-text-link’);” href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>

This will show up in your Google Analytics under Content. Filter for the virtual page name to see how popular it is. (/vpv-twitter-text-link in the example above, can be anything you want it to be, like /omg-im-linking-to-chris-brogan for example)

2. Measuring inflows. Nearly everyone on Twitter uses bit.ly or another URL shortener to make stuff easier to share. Go the extra step and use the Analytics URL Builder so that you can see traffic from individual social links you’ve shared – and how well they convert.

Take the link to your site, blog, or destination that you were going to share, feed it to the URL builder, append some useful data (did you share it on Twitter? Facebook? is it PPC? shared to a specific user? Customize as you like!), then feed the Google Analytics enhanced link to bit.ly.

Now, when you share that link, you’ll see exactly where your traffic is coming from and more importantly, you’ll see how your traffic does on your site. You can isolate, for example, how many people from an individual tweet bought something or downloaded an eBook. It’s laborious to do this with every single thing you share, but for high value stuff, this is the way to go.

For my photographer friend, every link he places to his photos (or embedded photo on his site) should have either an inflow or outflow, and if he had some engagement metric like a free eBook download, he’d begin to know more than just views about his photos. He could see how many people went from a tweet to his photo blog to subscribe to download, and if someday he chose to sell his photos, he’d need only add that to Google Analytics to deepen his understanding of his audience.

Try out these tools and see if you can make them work for you.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

| More

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

January 15, 2010

Pin It on Pinterest