Those of you using promoted products from Twitter, such as Promoted Accounts or Promoted Tweets might have already spotted the analytics section in their Twitter Ads dashboard (if you don’t intend to use promoted products then register at http://analytics.twitter.com/ for the sake of getting access to the analytics tool).

At the moment, native Twitter analytics tool is split into three sections:

• Timeline Activity: metrics on the number of mentions, follows and unfollows on the account level, as well as other engagement metrics (favorites, retweets, replies) on individual tweet level
• Followers: a comprehensive insight into the demographics of your followers, such as gender, location and interests, as well as the the overview of the follower growth over time
• Websites: an insight into content sharing (meaning people tweeting links to your website by clicking “Tweet This” button) such as the number and content of tweets, as well as clicks the shared links generated.

Out of the above, we find the “Followers” section as the most compelling. There are plenty of third-party tools for tracking engagement metrics, such as the number of followers and mentons; however, most of them lacked a comprehensive insights into the demographics of your followers. Let’s take a quick look at this section:

As mentioned above, you can see a breakdown of your followers by location, gender and interests. Additionally, you can click on any of the metrics to filter the view. For instance, if you’re interested in the demographics of US followers, click on “USA” area in the “Location” chart and the whole dashboard will provide the metrics for US followers only:

Similar filtering can be applied to any gender and interests metrics. Pretty cool, right?

Hope this was helpful and let us know in the comments if you want a deeper insights into Twitter Analytics.

The dashboard, which you can add to any of your Google Analytics accounts, will help you track visits, unique visitors, average time on page and bounce rate for the major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. Here’s how it looks for our own website:

If you find this dashboard useful, fee free to add it to your Google Analytics setup, by logging in to your Google Analytics and pasting the below URL into the web browser.

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=__BqhtIkSCG7XCZuZ1iLmQ

Following that you will be asked for the Google Analytics profile that you want to add this dashboard to:

That’s it! Now you should be able to access this dashboard from the left hand side menu (section “Dashboards”). The dashboard will be configured exactly as ours, but will be populated with your data.

The trick about this dashboard is that we created a custom filter to include only the traffic metrics for the social networks rather than all referring sources. Thus, you can customize or add widgets to this dashboard using the following dialog and the below filter (don’t forget to chose “Regular Expression” when writing the filter condition).

(^facebook.com|^m.facebook.com|^t.co|^twitter.com|^linkedin.com|^pinterest.com|^youtube.com|^plus.google.com)

Hope you find this dashboard useful in your daily work, and let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more tips on custom dashboards for Google Analytics!

Each message in the Inbox, has an “Assign to” drop down menu:

Expanding the drop down will show the list of all your colleagues with the “Community Manager” or “Group Owner” role:

Select the name of the person you want to assign the Inbox item to and that’s it! Simple, right? Now, the person to whom the Inbox item was assigned to will see it under the “Tasks” section accessible from the left hand side menu.

You can also access your Tasks directly from My Groups section:

Hope this will help you collaborate better and sell more through social media! Don’t forget, you can always request product demo, if you’re not a Campalyst user yet.

Sincerely,

Campalyst Team

Now we are happy to present you with the Q3 update! Spoiler: those were two incredible quarters for Pinterest! Amazing growth in terms of the number of brands building their presence on Pinterest and the size of their communities!

Social Media evolves as a marketing medium and so do the performance metrics. If a year ago it was OK to measure the success in the number of “Likes” a Facebook page has, then nowadays marketers put more rigorous measurement practices into evaluating the performance of their social media efforts.

One of the most common efforts is tagging the links that are published to social media. Tagging links allows tracking traffic and conversions from social media that are taking place on advertisers’ websites, but requires a lot of manual input. Moreover, the process of tagging links is a subject to human error, so we decided to highlight 5 most common mistakes marketers make.

Mistake #1: Not tagging links at all
That’s an obvious one, right? However, if you take a look at the Facebook pages of even the largest retailers, you will notice that very few are consistently tagging the links. Why is that a problem? Facebook (apparently due to privacy protection considerations) parses all outgoing traffic, which leaves a web analytics suite with very limited data about the source of traffic. Hence, if you use, for instance, Google Analytics, without tagging all traffic from Facebook (traffic from your fan page, ads, people sharing your content, etc.) will be put into one basket leaving you with little data for performance analysis.

Mistake #2: Limiting tagging to Bit.ly wrapper
Some of the marketers take a step further and shorten the links with a Bit.ly wrapper. Bit.ly is an amazing service that allows tracking clicks, get some insights into the demographics and sources of clicks. However, besides limited metrics, there is one more problem: Bit.ly, by default, reuses the same short link for each unique URL. Thus, if you use a campaign site and multiple channels (i.e. email and social), then all the data will be aggregated. It is very common to see 99% of the clicks on a given Bit.ly short link coming from an email distribution and only 1% coming from social media.

Mistake #3: Cross-posting tagged link
Another common mistake is cross-posting a tagged link into multiple social media channels. For instance, a link that was tagged with “source=Facebook_Page” is wrapped with Bit.ly shortener and cross-posted to Twitter. Logically, web analytics suite will attribute all traffic to Facebook, and Twitter will get no credit. Might look like a mistake, but we see it happening all the time!

Mistake #4: Not tagging links in replies
It is also very common NOT to tag links published in Twitter replies (even if tagging is properly implemented in regular tweets). Tagging takes time and requires a certain knowledge, so in most cases links in replies would be left untagged. As the result, the traffic coming from such replies would most likely be attributed to “earned” media (meaning, people sharing the links; logically, not tagged links) rather than to the “owned” channel of the advertiser. The “quick and dirty” solution would be to agree on a common tag for all replies and copy paste them to all links.

Mistake #5: Calling Facebook “Twitter”
The last one is mostly related to a human error or miscommunication between social media and web analytics teams: we see many links published to Facebook that are tagged for Twitter. This mistake is similar to cross-posting tagged links, meaning that it results in incorrect attribution of the traffic and conversions. Solution: just pay attention!

Hope you find it useful and let us know in the comments if we missed something!

Have a great weekend!

Think about about it: you are constantly loged in to Facebook on your laptop and desktop computers, on your phone and on your tablet. Imagine if website owners could capture at least part of the data about Facebook users (that rarely log out) visiting their websites. It would allow identifying a given person despite her using multiple devices, and the demographics / interest profile would be much more complete! Guess what? Facebook Insights for Domains makes a huge step towards that direction!

Facebook Insights for Domains now allows you to estimate demographics of your website visitors based on the impressions of the “Like” buttons. How does it work? Not a surprise that by installing “Like” buttons and other social plugins, website owners allow Facebook capturing some data about their website visitors (especially about the ones that are loged in to Facebook while visiting a particular site), and apparently Facebook started revealing these data.

You can access the report by selecting “Like Button” -> “Demographics” -> “Like Button Impressions” in your Facebook Insights for Domains (see below).

Using this hidden (or not that hidden, but rarely advertised) feature you can now see the gender, the age, the language and the location of your website visitors (given you have “Like” button installed on each and single page of your website). For instance, in case of this blog, the majority of the visitors during the summer were 18-34 y.o women (38%) and men (39%).

In addition, you can see the language and the location (country) of your visitors. The data is available on a weekly or monthly basis, or for a specific timeframe. Finally, Facebook Insights for Domains can be installed for subdomains, such as this blog, which is available at blog.campalyst.com.

You might argue that not all your website visitors are Facebook users, and even fewer of them are loged in when visiting the web property. However, with 1 billion users and counting, Facebook can provide a way more comprehensive demographics data than many services out there!

So check your stats and let us know if you find this useful!

Top image source: kaspersky.com

We would all agree that the path to conversion is rarely as simple as “click on the link in a tweet -> website visit -> purchase”. In most cases, the path to conversion would represent as series of visits from social media, organic or paid search and direct visits, which is spread out over a period of time.

Therefore, in order to understand the total contribution of social media to online revenues, it is important to go beyond measuring the last click conversions. “Assisted” or “indirect” conversion represents a case where a social media channel was not the last referrer of the conversion, but nevertheless, participated in the conversion journey. For instance, a person followed a brand on Facebook and regularly visited the website, but never converted. However, after seeing a promotion on Twitter the person followed the link and made a purchase. In this case, both the Facebook Page and Twitter account should get a credit for the eventual conversion.

So let’s jump into the new report and see how Campalyst helps marketers understand the total contribution of their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts in generating revenue!

As you can see on the screenshot above, Campalyst now measures both “direct” or “last-click” revenue, as well as “assisted” revenue coming from Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. In the above case, the Facebook page directly generated (or was the last referrer) $32,196 in revenue, and “assisted” (or participated in the conversion journey) in generating additional $16,799. Thus, the Facebook page should be credited to generate $48,955 in online revenue.

Another important metric, is what we called “Conversion Multiplier” (see above). It represents the ratio between “assisted” and “last-click” revenue generated by a given Facebook page. In other words, this Facebook page participated in generating 52 cents for each dollar of the last-click revenue.

Finally, the new report allows comparing Conversion Multipliers across multiple channels. For instance, in the above case Paid Search, Twitter and Facebook drive most “assisted” revenue then any other channels. We believe it can serve in two cases: 1) understanding which role social media plays in the conversion journey (awareness, consideration or conversion), and 2) optimizing allocation of advertising dollars into the channels that have the highest combined revenue.

The above functionality was made possible due to the release of Multi-Channel Funnels API by Google Analytics team and we are extremely thankful for all the support and guidance during the development process!

That’s all for today and stay tuned for the future updates! As always, you are welcome to try the new reports for yourself by login in to your existing Campalyst account or signing up for a free trial!

Inbox allows you to monitor and respond to Facebook comments, wall posts or direct messages, as well as Twitter mentions and DMs…all from a single message feed! Even more, you can monitor and respond to mentions using Project Inbox that aggregates social mentions for all social media accounts associated with a particular project.

In order to use the new functionality, login to Campalyst and proceed to “My Projects” page. You can access the Inbox for a particular social media account by clicking Inbox icon next to it, or you can access Project Inbox by clicking the respective icon on top right of the project summary.

“My Projects” page now also provides the information about the number of new messages in the Inbox for each connected social media account. This allows you to quickly scan through your projects and see, which accounts require your attention.

You can easily switch between Inboxes by selecting from the top left menu either a particular social media account or a particular project.

The main advantage of using the Inbox is that you can monitor and respond to all Facebook and Twitter mentions from a single feed. You can also select to see only a particular type of messages (i.e. wall posts on your Facebook Page).

Each message in the Inbox contains information about a) the type of message (i.e. Twitter mention) and the time when the message was received, as well as b) the social media account it was addressed to.

Finally, you can respond to the message (type of the response options depends on the type of the message, i.e. “reply” and “retweet” for Twitter mentions) or archive it to hide from the Inbox (not all messages need response, right?).

That’s it for today, but stay tuned for the new updates! You are welcome to try Inbox for yourself by login in to your existing Campalyst account or signing up for a free trial!

We have decided to conduct our own research on importance of Facebook usage on mobile devices in an attempt to drive conclusions on how this trend might affect fan page owners. For the first iteration of the study (more in-depth research will follow), we looked at the fan pages of 5 internet retailers, Aéropostale Inc., Abercrombie & Fitch Co., Hot Topic Inc., Coach Inc. and Foot Locker Inc. We took 5 recent status updates advertising a sale promotion and compiled a breakdown of clicks on the promotional links contained in those status updates using the stats of bit.ly service.

As the results in the table above suggest, 40-50% of the clicks occurred on mobile version of Facebook. This means that on average in 44.4% cases fans of the brands, included in this study, saw status updates on their mobile devices, reacted to calls to action and accessed their websites. It should be highlighted again, that we included only status updates that contained a sale promotion, meaning that by clicking people showed the intent to buy.

We do not have the data on conversion rates for the mobile traffic, but the click volume suggests that brands have a tremendous opportunity in the area of mobile commerce that would be fueled by social media, which gives a solid foundation for the new ad formats from Facebook.

The experiment turned out to be a great insight into how Internet retailers are trying to capture attention of their fans. Here are the highlights:

No weekend goes without a sale!

While social media experts debate about the role of Facebook in the marketing mix (brand awareness vs. direct-response), the brands don’t waste time and keep offering their fans all kinds of promotions (and of course, all of them end either today or this weekend!). Sales and discounts are by far the most popular way for Internet retailers to engage with their fans (disclaimer: according to this “totally-unacademic” study).

We are on Pinterest too!

Few months ago we published an infographic revealing that only 61% of Top 250 Internet Retailers have presence on Pinterest. Moreover, there were only 27 brands that had more than 1,000 followers on Pinterest (and 0, yes zero, had more than 100,000 followers). Apparently, the brands listened and now engaged in the race of building their Pinterest following by using Facebook pages. “Follow us on Pinterest” lands the second place in our study.

How could we miss the Olympics?! and the National Watermelon Day too!

Surprisingly, very few retailers used the topic of Olympics to engage with their users. Isn’t it a great opportunity to sell few plasma screens and some sports shoes? Apparently, not as the same number of retailers decided to go with the National Watermelon Day instead.

Who said iPad giveaways are dead?

Surprisingly enough, giveaways are still alive (and the engagement metrics suggest they are hugely successful; almost 3,000 clicks on the bit.ly link in Buy.com promotion!). So if you’re in that kind of thing, you will have a plenty of opportunities to enter a competition and win an iPad this weekend.

Playing it safe, the good all things everybody loves!

And finally, some brands decided to play it safe and bet on something everybody loves (and probably will love as long as Facebook exists). You just cannot go wrong with a steak (over 100,000 “likes” at the moment of writing) and a bra (over 50,000 “likes”)!

That’s it for today and have a great weekend!