Cross-Domain Tracking

A default setup of Google Analytics is designed to track content and visitor data for a single domain, such as dogs.example.com or www.example.com.

However, suppose you want to use Analytics for more complex situations, such as tracking

• all visitors to both dogs.example.com and www.example.com, with data for both showing in the same report profile
• only visitors to the www.example.com/dogs subdirectory in a separate report as if it were a single site
• all visitors to two domains that you own, such as www.example.com and www.example2.com, with data for both showing in the same report profile
• visitor and pageview data for content in an iFrame of another domain.

In any of these cases, you’ll need to do some customization to the tracking code in order to correctly track visitors. Before doing this, it’s a good idea to read about Domains and Directories as they are defined in a default Analytics installation.

Use the following table to view sections in the rest of this document, and as a reference for the tracking code modifications suggest for each method. Once you have decided on a tracking method, be sure to also read the Site Linking Considerations at the end of this document.

_setCookiePath("/myStore/");

_setCookiePath("/first/Path/");
_cookiePathCopy("/new/Path/");

_setDomainName("none");
_setAllowLinker(enable);
_setAllowHash(false);
_link();
_linkByPost();

_setDomainName(".example-petstore.com");
_setAllowHash(false);

_setDomainName("none");
_setAllowLinker(enable);
_setAllowHash("false");
_link();
_linkByPost();

iframe.src = pageTracker._getLinkerUrl("http://www.my-example-content.com");

Restricting Tracking to a Single Subdirectory

There are two common cases for restricting Analytics tracking to a single sub-directory of a larger domain:

• You have access only to a sub-directory of a larger website, such as when you use an ecommerce hosting service
• You want to limit tracking to a sub-directory of a larger website, such as when you launch a project on your company’s website, which also uses Analytics tracking

Suppose you have a profile in your Analytics account where you track visitor data to your online store. The store itself is hosted on www.example.com/myStore/. You only want to record visitor and campaign data for the /myStore subdirectory, and not for any other page on the example.com domain. In this case, you also only have access to those web pages included in that sub-directory.

In order to set up tracking for your store, you will need to use the _setCookiePath() function in your tracking code, like this:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
pageTracker._setCookiePath("/myStore/");
pageTracker._trackPageview();  

Once this is set up, your reports will correctly display visitor and campaign data only for your sub-directory. This is because the cookie path is set to your sub-directory rather than to the root directory of www.example.com and your profile will read and write to a unique set of cookies for your store only.

It is considered a best practice to use the _setCookiePath() function in this scenario. If you do not, there are two possible impacts to your reports:

• Other Analytics account cookies set on www.example.com can be shared by your account.This means that visitor statistics like new vs returning, time on site, and number of visits might be incorrect, since your visitors’ session cookies might also reflect activity on other parts of www.example.com.
• Your reports might reflect campaign details from another store.For example, suppose a visitor clicks on an email campaign that goes to another store on the same domain: www.example.com/shoeStore. In this case, the referral information in the visitor’s cookie is set to the campaign named Fall Shoe Sale. Later, that same visitor searches on Google for pet supplies and clicks on a search result to your store and purchases a dog collar. Since ad and email campaign referrals persist over search results, you will see the campaign Fall Shoe Sale generating sales for dog collars. This is because the _utmz cookie for your online store was not set uniquely for your path.

If you restrict visitor cookies to only your path, campaign and session data for another part of www.example.com will not be included in your reports, since the cookie path is restricted. (Read about Cookies for more background info on how cookies are read by web browsers.)

If you are tracking visitor and referral traffic for a sub-directory, you might also want to set up an Include filter to the sub-directory to ensure that only content for that sub-directory shows up in your report. See the pre-defined filter article in the Help Center for more information.

Tracking Across Two Sub-directories on the Same Domain

You might want to track multiple subdirectories on a domain where you do not have access to the pages for the larger domain. For example, suppose you have both an online store and a shopping cart on a service provider’s site:

• www.example-commerce-host.com/myStore/
• www.example-commerce-host.com/myCart/

If you want to track user sessions and campaign data from your store to the shopping cart, you can use the _cookieCopyPath() method to copy the cookie information to another directory on the same domain. In this case, the key parts of the tracking code snippet for all pages would look like:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
pageTracker._setCookiePath("/myStore/");
pageTracker._cookiePathCopy("/myCart/");
pageTracker._trackPageview();  

In this case, a unique cookie is set for the domain, limited to the first directory provided, and the same cookie data is also copied over to the second directory provided.

Tracking Across a Domain and a Sub-directory of Another Domain

Another common tracking scenario is to track visitor and traffic data between a single domain and a sub-directory of a different domain. This typically occurs when you have your online store on one domain, but you use a 3rd-party website for your shopping cart, where you are limited to a sub-directory of that site. The follow example URLs each contain recommended customizations for the tracking code on their pages.

• Primary: www.example-petstore.com

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);

• Secondary: www.example-commerce-host.com/petStoreCart

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
  pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);

For any form submission from www.example-petstore.com to the shopping cart website, you would use the _linkByPost() method to copy traffic and visitor cookie data via HTTP POST to the shopping cart site. The _setAllowLinker() method directs the target site to read cookie data from the POST data rather than from the regular user session information. In this way, you can pass cookie data set on one domain to another and thereby retain the visitor session from your online store to your shopping cart.

onSubmit="pageTracker._linkByPost('www.example-commerce-host.com/petStoreCart/begin.php');"

Similarly, use the _link() function to transfer visitor data on any links going from the online store to the shopping cart.

<a href="pageTracker._linkByPost('www.example-commerce-host.com/petStoreCart/legalTerms.php');"

Tracking Across a Domain and Its Sub-domains

As mentioned above, a default installation of the tracking code automatically tracks visitor data to a specific domain or sub-domain. This means that even if you manage both a domain and a sub-domain, you must make modifications to the tracking code in order to share visitor data across both of them.

Suppose you have the following URLs that you want to track as a single entity:

• www.example-petstore.com
• dogs.example-petstore.com
• cats.example-petstore.com

For this setup, you would use the following key customizations for the tracking code on all pages.

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName(".example-petstore.com");
  pageTracker._trackPageview(); 

In this example, notice the use of the leading “.” in the declaration of the domain. Since the Analytics tracking code creates a hash value from the string that you provide in the _setDomainName() method, it’s recommended that you follow standard conventions and use the leading “.” when setting your domain name in this way. See the documentation on _setDomainName() for more details.

Tracking Across Multiple Domains and Sub-domains

In this scenario, you might want to enable tracking across a given domain and its sub-domains, and include a separate domain in the mix. For example, suppose you have an online store and you also want to track visitor and campaign data to your blog. The following shows key tracking code customizations for three example URLs.

• Primary: www.example-petstore.com

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName(".example-petstore.com");
  pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);

  In addition, you would use the _link() and _linkByPost() for any form or links to www.my-example-blogsite.com. This is not required for links to the sub-domain of this site, since the _setDomainName() function defined .example-petstore.com as the domain to enable cookie access for any other subdomains.

• Secondary: dogs.example-petstore.com

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName(".example-petstore.com");
  pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);

  In addition, you would use the _link() and _linkByPost() for any form or links to www.my-example-blogsite.com. as well as to the primary domain.

• Terciary: www.my-example-blogsite.com

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
  pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);

Tracking Across iFrames

In a site where the transfer between domains is done by opening a new window or by including content in an iFrame, you will need to to use the _getLinkerUrl() method to transfer visitor and campaign cookies from one domain to another. For example, suppose you a form in an iFrame hosted on www.my-example-iframecontent.com and you want to transfer visitor information from the parent page that hosts the iFrame on www.example-parent.com.

You would use JavaScript to load the iFrame and pass in the cookie information using the _getLinkerURL() method.

var iframe = document.getElementById("myIFrame");
iframe.src = pageTracker._getLinkerUrl("http://www.my-example-iframecontent.com/");

Site Linking Considerations

When setting up tracking in the various scenarios described above, keep in mind the following:

• A session from one domain can only be transferred to another domain via a click, a form submission, or via _getLinkerURL.The passing of the cookie data via these three methods links two page views under a single session. If a user independently visits two sites that are tracking in the same profile, such as through a bookmark, these visits will still be counted under separate sessions. In this scenario, the linking methods are not invoked, and thus there is no way to determine the initiating session for a given user.
• Choose a primary profile for multi-domain tracking.Enable multi-domain tracking by first establishing a profile for your primary domain. After you have set up a profile and retrieved the tracking code for your primary domain, use the same tracking code for all other installations and configure the necessary linking functions. In this way, your configuration will be set up correctly before data is recorded, and you will have all data historically located in one profile.

  If you have already established separate profiles for each website installation, you can still enable linking of the separate web properties, but you will need to choose one existing profile to act as the primary one for aggregating the data from both sites. The data collected in each profile prior to linking cannot be merged into a primary profile, so the historical data for the secondary profile will remain separate.

• Content reports always show the request URIFinally, once you have domain linking established, you will see only the request URI in the content reports, and not the top-level or sub-domain for a given page. So for example, if you have a page on http://www.example.com/index.php and another page on http://www.example2.com/index.php, you will see listings in the reports for two distinct index.php pages, and will not be able to distinguish which page is from which domain. You can include the referring domain in the page reports by setting a filter that will include all components of the page URL in the content reports, as follows:
  1. In the Profile Settings page, click the Add Filter link.
  2. Choose Add New Filter and provide the filter a name.
  3. Choose Custom Filter and select Advanced on the Filter type settings.
  4. Under Advanced settings, choose Hostname for FieldA and Request URI for FieldB.
  5. Set the values for each of these fields to (.*), which is an expression that captures all characters.
  6. Set the Output To –> Constructor option to Request URI and provide $A1$B1 as the value for that choice.

  This will capture the www.example.com portion of your URL and include that at the beginning of your page URL in the content reports section.

These tips, tools and metrics for analyzing your website, on page and off page ranking factors alike, are all levers to pull and lenses to measure your website by. Understanding what sensors the search engines take into account will help you ascertain the ranking potential, indexing and positioning problems of your web site for search engines and their spiders.

Are you analyzing your website architecture and site structure?  Looking for broken links? Have you looked at your  image optimization, both image size and alt text tag attributions? Are there search engine penalties you should be aware of?

The list I have compiled is by no means the end to the analysis or even begin to touch upon the continuing efforts that go into optimizing a site. Your website analysis needs to start somewhere though, right? So lets start at the root of the analysis by looking at the domain name itself .

Web stats

Statcounter – A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time.
HiStats – Real time stats and online user count/list, Hourly, daily and monthly stats – with forecast and comparison charts to help you understand visitor trends, Referrer stats archived by day and month. We never clear your referrer stats, nor do we limit your log file size. Stats. for every page, and group of pages on your site You can track stats of your photo section or the article section. Such statistics enable you concentrate development to the most visited pages on your site. Detailed information about visitors (language, Operating Systen, screen size, internet provider,DSL speed, etc.) Detailed information about visitors location (city, region, country) Fully detailed statistics of the last 20,000 visits With referrer, complete page URLs and IP geolocation info. Your visitor data is aggregated into a downloadable APACHE-type log on a remotely hosted system. Our best competitor offers a log of 500 visits (others usually have just 20/100/200 ) Click counter service You can count how many people downloaded files from your website. You may also use this information for your link exchanges. Search engine trends, Advanced functions like ROI and visitors conversion, Visitor path tracking, Hidden tracker available for free. Different counter code formats; and can track users with either embedded flash code or javascript.
Addfreestats – You can select invisible or visible button. Entire profile of the latest 1000 visitors.Where your visitors go after they leave your website.Google Adsense tracking exit clicks. All pages of your web site are tracked.No website traffic or stats limitation.Password protection for your web stats reports.History of your website statistics and traffic.Unique visitors, visits, page views.Referrer, Search engine, Keywords.
Unique Statistics Report for each page.Statistics for search engines, referrers report.View the countries, regions and cities of your website visitors.You’ll see which website pages are the most popular.How much time your visitors spent on your website?View the listing of your visitors with their profile.View stats about the operating systems and browsers used.View stats about the key words used by your visitors.Daily stats estimate of visits.Daily estimate referrers and search engines stats.Statistics with percentages and graphics.

SEO METRICS and data points for site analysis

Links

Total Incoming Links:

Total Incoming Links to Home Page:

Total Incoming Links to Specified URL:

Deep link ratio:

.EDU Links:

.GOV Links:

DMOZ Links:

I use Google’s copy of DMOZ over at dirhp to check for a listing, in the rare cases where Yahoo has not yet spidered the DMOZ page.

Yahoo Directory Links:

Links from Unique Domains:

Google PageRank:

Google Cache Date:

Technorati Inbound Blog Links:

del.icio.us bookmarks:

Digg.com Submissions:

ZoomInfo listing:

RSS Feed:

Site Map:

Metadata:

Page Title

Meta Description

Meta Keywords

Total number of HTML files on a page

Total objects on a page

Total number of images on a page

Total size of a page

Total size of all the images on a given page

Total number of external script files

Total size of external  scripts

Total size of your external CSS

The total size of the HTML file

Total number of external CSS files

Total size of all external multimedia files

Robot.txt file

Sub Domains

Server and Site Data
Ping Test - Check the presence of an active connection
Reverse IP/Look-up – Resolve a host to an IP address
Server Status – Check if your website is online or offline
Website Speed Test – Find out how fast your website loads
What Is My IP Address – shows your ip address
IP to City – determine the Country, City, Latitude and Longitude of an IP Address
Website to Country – determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted

Unique analysis and representation of a sites elemental structure is provided by Wolfram Alpha. I point out this insight into website HTML elements hierarchy mapping as a potential guide to Google rankings.  Elements may represent headings, paragraphs, hypertext links, lists, embedded media, and a variety of other structures.

Links related

Reciprocal Link Check – check whether your link partners are linking back to your website
Link Checker – check your links to see if it’s still valid or not
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer – check link text used by your backlinks to Link to your wesbite

Search Engines

Google Analytics – tells you everything about your visitors
Google Banned Checker – check whether a site is banned by Google or not
Search Engine Bot Simulator – SEO Tool to simulate search engine parsing of webpages and display discovered links.
Indexed pages – check the no. of indexed pages for your blog
Spider Simulator – simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a web page
Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker – checks the exact HTTP headers that a web server is sending with an HTTP response.
Search Engine Position – Locate your search listings on Google and Yahoo!
Search Listings Preview – Preview your website on Google, MSN and Yahoo! Search

HTML related

HTML Encrypt – Hide your HTML source code
HTML Optimize – Optimize and clean your HTML source code
HTTP Headers – Extract the HTTP Headers of a web page
HTTP Headers Viewer – check HTTP headers for any specific URL
Meta-tags Extractor – Extract meta-tags information from a web page
Meta-tags Generator – Generate and configure your meta-tags
META Analyzer – analyze a website’s meta tags
Meta Tag Generator – help you to generate meta tags
Source Code Viewer – View the source code of a page

Miscellaneous

FEED Validator – for Atom and RSS
W3C Markup Validation Service – check for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards
Kontera Ads Preview – preview Kontera Ads on your website
Online spell checker – simple online spell checking tools
Browser Screen Resolution Checker – shows what your site looks like with different screen resolutions
Your Browser Details – View your IP address and your browser details
Anonymous Emailer – Send e-mails to users anonymously
md5 Encrypt – Encrypt text to MD5
Online Calculator – A simple online calculator

ALink Reciprocal Link Checker
AMeta Meta Tag Editor
XML Sitemap Maker
RSS Feed Maker
Webpage Size Checker

Photo by pdxdiverGoogle recently added powerful new features to your Google Analytics account. With these seven new features you’ll be able to get quicker insights, create deeper customizations, do more advanced analysis and track more mobile marketing!

1) Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts
Using an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine, Analytics Intelligence monitors data patterns over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Significant changes in data trends and insights you may not have noticed are surfaced directly in your account. You can also create your own Custom Alerts that monitor your selection of dimensions and metrics that can be sent by email or displayed in the Intelligence reports.

2) Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals
You can now track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile. Measure user engagement and branding success on your site with Time on Site and Pages per Visit goals. Set up your first Engagement goal in minutes.

3) Expanded Mobile Reporting
Google Analytics has expanded support for mobile websites and tracking for iPhone and Android mobile applications tracking. Adding server side code to your PHP, JSP, PERL, or ASPX mobile websites enables you to track non-Java-Script enabled phones. For mobile application developers, access the SDK and technical implementation details here. You’ll also be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section.

4) Unique Visitors Metric
Include the Unique Visitors metric in your Custom Report or Advanced Segments to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) visit your website. You can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.

5) Advanced Analysis Features
Dive deeper into your data with Pivoting, Secondary Dimensions, and Advanced Table Filtering. These combined features enable you to perform in-depth, on the fly data analysis within your account.

6) Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates
Share the URL link for an Advanced Segment or Custom Report with anyone who has an Analytics account. Sharing the link will automatically import the pre-formatted template into the person’s account. Also available now is the ability to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports by profile.

7) Multiple Custom Variables
Custom variables provide the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics to collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. Define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (member vs. non-member), session attributes (signed in or signed out), and by page-level attributes (viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. Start learning more about them now.

Web statistics, Web metrics, web analytics, web stats and site stats.

What are all these site metrics, and why measure them?

Web metrics refers to measurement, the science of measuring websites. Specifically, measuring website events, defining goals and extracting trends.

Analytics is the act of distinguishing categories within recorded stats, and analyzing for any patterns and trends. The process of analytics means, literally, taking apart the whole of something in order to study its component parts.

Statistics are a scientific application. The goal is to form actions and initiatives based on the data recorded.

What should your website stats tell you? The number of (returning) visitors to your site, how visitors interact with your pages. Information about the content of your site and how visitors use it. Your traffic statistics are an indicator of website performance.

There are many different web analytics solutions available, there are both free analytic tools such as Analog, AWStats, Webalizer and Google analytics and more advanced and in-depth paid / subscription tools like Omnitu re.

Google analytics (previously Urchin) provides a high quality free service, with a quick, clean user interface and clearly displayed default and customized reporting.

Free Website Stat Packages

• Hitslink A very effective web tracking solution and easy to implement, simply paste a small tracking script on your site’s pages and start viewing reports within seconds. There are two versions available, HitsLink Enterprise and Professional.
• Statcounter – Free web tracker. Detailed stats are provided for the last 100 pageloads only.
• Addfreestats – provide free website statistics
• GoStats: Provides real-time web statistics and analytics which can give you immediate insights into your website’s performance. Started in 1999, GoStats provides a wealth of data which most free stats systems cannot provide.
• Google Analytics: Google rolled out this analytics platform out in 2005. Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free web stat tools currently available and definitely worth a look.
• ClickTracks: Known as one of the higher end web analytics solutions, great for search marketers and search engine optimizers alike. Click tracks gives the user a deep insight in to campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI stats instantly.
• HiStats – Free, real time updated web stats service
• WebTrends: The high end corporate web site statistics / web analytics package. WebTrends have been around for some time now and demand a great deal of respect in the analytics market. A very powerful solution demanding a high price.
• Webalizer: 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.

Server and Site Data
Ping Test – Check the presence of an active connection
Reverse IP/Look-up – Resolve a host to an IP address
Server Status – Check if your website is online or offline
Website Speed Test – Find out how fast your website loads
What Is My IP Address – shows your ip address
IP to City – determine the Country, City, Latitude and Longitude of an IP Address
Website to Country – determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted

Social Media Dashboards

Listening, Learning, Engaging and Integrating—The Four Keys to Successfully Leveraging the Social Channel

Are you listening to your market?

People are engaged in conversations with each other about your company, your brands, your products and your services. They are also reaching out to you with insights, suggestions, stories, and sometimes, important issues and major complaints.
There conversations are all happening online, right now. Are you listening?

The trick is to  find, manage and respond to mentions of your company, your brand, your products, your service and your people online. How can you be effective and more organized way to keep up to date and engage with bloggers and social networks users?

Conversation leaders and shapers exist within social web communities, where they weigh in on the public agenda and the fashion the tone of conversations. There are no at large influential bloggers. However, many bloggers yield qualified influence within the different communities of the social web.

A site may enjoy a high level of visibility with the main stream media and yield influence with their peers online. Still, all of these opinions and views may remain unknown to communities interested in trends unrelated to their core and be deprived of any form of influence therein.

Beyond a website’s structural influence within its community, the dynamic nature of the social web, where millions of opinions are exchanged everyday, has led us to evaluate and seize the moment of influence with each message using its viral level (number of comments, trackbacks, partial or complete quotations without links).

The end goal; determine who the most influential bloggers are in your industry and devise a strategy for communicating with them and engaging; quickly and easily access and sort through content from all relevant social media sites, chart the results and generate user- friendly documents into actionable activities in real time.

Here’s how you get from here to there:

Attensity research in the areas of search, natural language processing (NLP,) machine learning, artificial intelligence, and semantics. This research led to breakthrough software that allows computers to understand, process and analyze free-form text, offering government and commercial organizations the opportunity to leverage the vast amounts of information contained in non-structured formats.

Attentio By continuously monitoring what is written in online news press, blogs, discussion forums and other Web-based social media, Attentio aids customers to execute successful market campaigns, launch new products, gain consumer insight and maintain brand reputation. Automated daily reporting of buzz and demographics in relation to their own and competitor’s brands and products. This new online service uses charts to visualize buzz trends, share of buzz, detection of bursting events, and breakdown by source, topic and country. Industries that are strongly impacted by the online conversation in blogs, discussion forums and other social media includes automotive, computer & information technology, consumer electronics, higher education, financial services, food & nutrition, mobile phone & telecommunications, fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs), media & entertainment, pharmaceutical & healthcare, and public services.

Brandtology Online Conversation Audit, Buzz and Voices Tracking Services tracks the buzz and conversations happening in channels that relate to your company on an ongoing basis. Daily reports and summaries would be sent to you so that you are always in-the-know about your brand. We also identify the voices that are talking about you and to decipher the sentiment on what they are talking. Track sentiments on campaigns before, during and after it happened and provide timely information and intelligence for your strategic planning needs. Influencers Engagement Services, After understanding, who, where and what are online that concerns your organization, Brandtology and/or one of its agency partners can work with you to strategize an influecers engagement campaign. The goal is to build up your brand equity and thus financial value.

Brandwatch finds where a keyword is talked about on the web, it tracks the sentiment towards it as well as identifying the credibility of the author. Influence is often a subjective measure, as business and personal relationships (which cannot be measured) can come into play. Brandwatch Influence Analysis is extremely powerful – it has the ability to find people and sites which exert influence depending on your criteria.  Using measures such as sentiment (i.e. are they positive or negative towards you), credibility, citations, links and reach of audience, Brandwatch will suggest influencers for you to engage with.

Buzzcapture proprietary technology retrieves data from millions of social media sources and filters the data through its linguistic analysis technology. Product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, analysts, proponents and critics.Tracking and analysing campaigns and events nearly real time on overall perception, discussions and adoption of key messages. Campaigns could include discussions on online and offline campaigns, local or international events, product launches, management changes and more.

BuzzGain helps identify the previously hidden communities who are actively defining and shaping its future, including blogs, Flickr, youtube, Twitter, and traditional media. BuzzGain reveals influential voices and corresponding conversations so that companies can listen, learn, and engage in the connection of mutually beneficial relationships. Identify, learn, engage and cultivate early adopters and influencers.

Buzzienthas a set of tools for social media integration with enteprise applications, monitoring, deep analytics and engagement. Using patent pending technology, the platform automatically collects information from a huge number of online sources in real time and analyzes the content based on your specifications. The tool turns social media data into actionable information through integration with CRM packages such as Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com or SugarCRM. Fully automated data collection from millions of online sources, including historical data several years back Monitoring of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace Real-time analysis of Twitter conversations, Automatic lead and support case creation, Alarm and Notification Features, Identification of most important websites and high-impact advertising opportunities.

Digimind digital information provides the unique opportunity to get a better understanding of market dynamics, technological advancements and competitive actions. Because of limited resources, many competitive intelligence practitioners are struggling to identify important information on a timely basis. Digimind platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools to support the repetitive tasks of competitive intelligence – including data collection, information management, data analysis and publication – while supporting all Internet formats – web pages, invisible web, blogs, forums, RSS feeds, etc. By automatically monitoring a virtually infinite number of sources and key topics.

dna13 delivers visibility into news coverage and PR activities, so you can manage the corporate and brand reputation strategically and in-the-moment. A set of on-demand public relations applications such as media directories, editorial opportunities, media monitoring sources, and PR measurement tools; help PR teams align and collaborate in a secure setting, plan targeted communication strategies, and engage stakeholders through traditional and consumer-generated media channels. Delivers immediate and cost-effective results in today’s complex media environment. With on-demand monitoring, clip book wizards and analytical capabilities, it is a powerful dashboard tool that provides real-time visibility into your reputation, market trends and competitive activities.

Dow Jones Insight software monitors news and discussions about your company, newspapers, news wires, magazines, business publications and broadcast media outlets—in 23 languages available in a single offering. The ability to listen to consumer conversations from millions of blogs and sites like YouTube and Twitter. Analyze issues, trends and strategies, extract thousands of concepts—people, companies, brands, issues, events, messages, positive and negative words or phrases—and match them to the interests of our clients so they can quickly understand the impact of your efforts with results distilled into easy-to-read charts and graphs.

eCairn is a suite of on-demand applications that provides cost effective solution for Marketing and PR professionals who want to leverage social media to: Gain consumer insight, Increase customer satisfaction, Promote brand awareness, Build trust with key influencers. eCairn Conversatio provides the tools to define and implement an effective marketing strategy with the social media community.

Filtrbox monitors mainstream news, blogs, and social media in once place. Consolidated results in one dashboard and you can eliminate the redundant searches and alerts that clog up your inbox. Customize account by adding your own sources via RSS. Import Google Alerts, add noise control, duplicate removal, and noise consolidation. FiltrRank looks at multiple dimensions of info to generate a score (1-10 scale) for each article, allows you to dial the noise way down,  you can pick the minimum score an article must have to be included in your Daily Briefing emails or FiltrFeeds

InfoNgen extracts relevant and timely information buried on the web, within emails, in desktop documents or on network drives. Identifies trends and connections between topics, companies or products that might not otherwise be apparent. The system ‘reads’ stories in eight languages and dynamically translates them into English. Users also have the ability to add sources that they deem important.

Lexalytics sentiment software and text analytic solutions, providing entity extraction, sentiment analysis, document summarization and thematic extraction. As unstructured content continues to accumulate online and within organizations, text analytics becomes increasingly important to corporations trying to make sense of it all. Lexalytics provides companies with the ability to extract important metadata from numerous data sources to get straight to the relevant information. Positive and negative sentiment about your products or company can be helpful or hurtful – it all depends on what you know and how quickly you are made aware of it. Brand or reputation management is a real concern in today’s market as more and more companies are scrutinized for their business decisions.

Linkfluence studies and offers solutions to map, monitor and analyze the social web, its media (blogs, mass media sites), its discussions (forums, micro-publications, …), its interaction and mobilization venues (social networks). linkfluence’s approach is based on social graph theories. Through a links and contents based analysis of social web sites, linkfluence draws the borders of conversational communities around your stakes, brands or products and assess their true impact on your image and your your reputation.

MediaMiser objective media analysis helps show the effectiveness and value of communications plans, media strategies and pr campaigns, while also providing intelligence on your industry, competitors and issues. Written reports supported by unique quantitative and qualitative analysis of data, driven by our industry-leading media analysis solution. Instantly generate updates and analysis of the most prominent blogs related to your industry and vertical, and track trending on your key issues.

Metrica Using the latest web technology this real-time evaluation platform provides complete control over the analysis process enabling clients to track developments, spot opportunities or threats, monitor and archive coverage as well as build reports and planning data They claim scoring systems do not work, so they do not use them. Complex evaluation reports with nifty scoring systems might look impressive but they are neither friendly and nor insightful. Metrica’s dashboard of metrics, unique to each client, clearly identifies required trends in media coverage enabling at a glance evaluation which delivers actionable information. The tailored reports, which summarize the findings, do so in a way that makes them meaningful to users outside of communications.

Netemic is constantly scouring social media for new sources via its content crawler. Discovered content is then filtered twice before it is displayed to the user. First, the most relevant content is aggregated in our database, ready to be re-interrogated for relevance by iFeed’s search technology (or analysis engine) and dispatched to the user’s iFeed interface. Secondly, the user then has the ability to filter these results by time, relevance and source by adjusting buttons and sliders on the iFeed interface (or interaction engine) to ensure the final clutch of content is as relevant as possible.

Netvibes For agencies and publishers, Netvibes’ universal widget technology (UWA), widget distribution services and Premium Dashboards help rapidly deliver brand observation rooms and user-personalized marketing campaigns. For companies, Netvibes Enterprise delivers secure, scalable personalized workspaces, portals and industry dashboards. They actually allows you to set up a pretty nifty dashboard using a combination of RSS feeds and widgets. There’s a great tutorial on how to do it.

Radian 6 Listening platform helps companies understand and participate in the conversations happening about their brand across the social web. As-It-Happens email and IM alerts, and powerful metrics and analytics, you can create and set up a comprehensive listening grid for your enterprise to manage your entire social media outreach strategy

ReputationHQ searches for your desired information and updates your reputation manager every 10 minutes. They search across millions of websites and available publications including: Social Networks, Online News Articles, Blogs, Message Boards, Photo Sharing Sites, Video Sharing Sites, Amazon Product Reviews, Wikipedia, Almanacs, Books, Encyclopedias, Magazines, Maps, News Wires, Newspapers, Press Releases, Thesauruses, Transcripts, White Papers, Dictionaries. “Socialprise.” It’s meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = “socialprise.”

Scout Labs helps your team find signals in the noise — what to pay attention to, what customers are ranting and raving about, what’s new and emerging. Take control, and social media can help you improve your products, marketing, sales and service. VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER Social networks, blogs, Twitter, images, video and more. REAL-TIME ANALYTICS Sentiment, trend spotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves. PLATFORM FOR ACTION Coordinate your response, assign tasks, add comments, share product and marketing ideas.

Sentiment Metrics social media measurement dashboard you can monitor and measure social media and gain actionable business intelligence, allowing you to develop more targeted marketing, improve products and increase profits. locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites.  SentimentMetrics then cleans and analyses the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs, for you to interrogate and glean actionable business intelligence. The insight you gain from SentimentMetrics allows you to grow customer satisfaction, increase market share and profits, and benefit from a real competitive advantage.

Smmart Arising from the crossed interests of the aeronautics, road and maritime transport sectors, the SMMART concept of integrated information system potentially addresses other activities requiring the monitoring of complex componants’ life-cycle functioning in a highly regulated environment (among others: rail transport, lift, machine tools, windmills, micropower stations…)

StartPR helps you find, manage and respond to mentions of your company, your brand, your products, your service and your people online. It searches all of the popular Web 2.0 hot spots for you, at one location.  It also sends alerts, daily digests, and so forth to keep you informed about how your keywords and brand are doing.

Synthesio By using the many publication and discussion spaces available online (blogs, forums, video sharing, social networks, comments, online news websites), users now have the power to shape your brand’s global image and reputation.  Synthesio helps marketing and communication professionals to detect and analyze these conversations, and to identify trends and influencers, as well as brand detractors and advocates. A monitoring platform whose innovative capacities enable you to detect, analyze, and promulgate strategic information published about business activities online.

Sysomos uses the five Ws are a fundamental part of how we help companies get in-depth and comprehensive information and insight about what is happening within the social media eco-system. You’ve got lots of questions; Sysomos has the answers. What are people talking about?  What are the key conversations?  Monitor the conversations to see what is being said about your products and brands, and identify the major themes and issues being raised within the social media landscape. When did these conversations happen?  Was there a lot of activity?  Learn more about when these conversations happened – both historical and real-time. See, compare and contrast buzz generated over time.Where did these conversations happen?  Was there a lot of activity? Access geo-demographic information to see where around the world conversations are taking place – right down to the country or city.Who is doing the talking and what’s their influence? Quickly identify the key influencers, and then get detailed information about their gender, age industry and interests.Why are conversations happening?  Are they positive or negative?  Discover why conversations are happening. See whether what’s talked about is positive, negative or neutral, and determine the impact on your business.

Techrigy complete analysis tools including charting with comparisons, demographics, geo-location, sentiment and drill-down reports.Run tests on your brands to manage risk, track trends, understand market reach and manage reputation. Track conversations, reviews and positive/negative sentiment for your brands, clients, competitors and partners across the eco-system called social media: blogs, wikis, microblogs like Twitter, social networks, embedded video and more – in real time.

Visible Technologies keeps pace with the incredible speed and vast volume of social media conversations via an easy-to-use, RSS feed-based Web monitoring application. social media monitoring and analysis applications allows you to effectively tap into the vast sea of consumer conversations to gain real-time business insight. This actionable intelligence helps you execute more effective outreach and online campaigns, better target key audiences, assess your competition and market, improve product and services, maximize marketing spend, and ultimately grow revenue through increased sales and enhanced customer loyalty.  truVOICE application centrally manages online participation and responses making consumer engagement easy and efficient. You can identify posts needing response, comment and interact with thousands of authors without ever leaving the  system, assign conversations to subject matter experts within your organization, manage and track response workflow, and measure and assess engagement and outreach efforts.

Vocus provides the ability to leverage the ubiquity of the internet to interact with the media, publish their news online where it can be found by millions, monitor news and social media conversations from virtually any source and track their results to compare them with key competitors. On-demand modules that together address the communications life-cycle from identifying key contacts, to distributing information, to closing the loop with digitized feedback and management analytics.

Whitevector Chat Reports is a web-based service that provides marketing professionals a comprehensive picture of the social media discussions together with real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. Marketers can generate consumer insight on the chosen topics and measure the influence of their marketing efforts from the diversity of online discussions. The different analytics allow you to compare brand awareness to competitors, identify the most influential discussions shaping consumer opinions, conduct target group analysis and measure brand associations and buying intentions. You can monitor rising trends and detect which issues are on top of consumers’ mind at the moment. Provides a web-based dashboard that allows you to instantly see the most essential graphs, reports and discussions. The interactive dashboard updates constantly in real-time allowing you to react quickly when something important comes up in discussions. When needed, you can drill-into single blog or forum conversations.

Social Media Tools for the “do it yourself” crowd

• Twitter Search There are some fantastic advanced search commands you can use with Twitter’s search engine. From simple brand related searches to local phrases, Twitter Search can do it all.
• Good blog search engine.Technorati
• Another good blog search engine.Blogpulse
• Blog search from Nielsen.Google News
• Track news stories and more.BoardTracker
• Forum search engine, useful for tracking forum conversations.Facebook Lexicon
• See how often people are mentioning you or your brand.Google Analytics
• You may not think of Google Analytics when you think of social media, but you should be. With Google Analytics, you can track referrals to your website from the social media platforms you’re using.Google Trends
• See what’s trending on the web.Delicious Search
• See how many times pages from your site have been bookmarked by others.Digg Search
• Much like Delicious, you can see how many times pages have been Dugg by others.Google Blog Search
• Blog search engine from Google. (none of the blog search engines are perfect, so it’s a good idea to get a mix of data and parse it yourself)TwitterCounter
• Get a rough idea of your Twitter reach.User Name Check
• See if your brand’s username has been taken on major and minor social media networks.BackType
• Monitor blog comments.Social Mention
• Decent search aggregation for various sources, from blogs to social sites.Google Alerts
• Set up alerts for keyword or brand name mentions across the web.Google Reader What’s great about the tools mentioned below is that almost all of them offer RSS feeds for your searches. If you’re an agency, or just represent multiple clients, it’s real easy to aggregate a bunch of searches for one client into unique folders.

There are four commonly used terms when discussing site traffic: page views, visits, unique visitors and time on page/site

Photo by stallioA visit comprises the activity on a site caused by single computer within an arbitrary time-out period. The industry standard is 30 minutes. A combination of the IP address and a cookie helps identify and tracks the usage. This identifying information is also used to track unique visitors.

There are dozens of technical issues that muddy the waters – proxy servers, RSS feeds, AJAX page refreshing, etc. It’s a confusing mess. For me, the only reliable metric is page views, and that’s only valid if the raw data has been scrubbed.

A growing number of people use NoScript as a security measure; the likely consequence is that more people will only allow javascript from the sites they’re interested in, defeating, by default, javascript as a method of third-party traffic analysis and user-monitoring.

Third Party Ranking  Data

Alexa Rank:

I don’t know of any (respected) professional search marketer that uses Alexa Rank as a measurement of ranking success. Data is pulled using the Alexa toolbar a user must install for Alexa to gather data. The database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages.  Alexa Traffic Rank – View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs

Quantcast Rank:

Not just traffic data but demographics of the traffic. After pixel-tagging your website, Quantcast turns your site’s activity into a mathematical model, revealing positive and negative affinity levels across selected groups.

Google AdPlanner Rank:

Google AdPlanner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.

Comscore

Measures worldwide consumer behavior through its proprietary panel design, patented data capture technology and online data retrieval network. Expensive and not really worth it having, I am speaking from first hand experience with their services.

Compete Rank:

Site profiles estimate how many people visit a web site from a diverse sample of people that is statistically normalized and projected to represent the size and demographic composition of the total active U.S. Internet population. Solutions include combined device-level data with user demographics and online behavioral insights to deliver a complete profile of technology usage.

Web stats

Statcounter – famous free web tracker
HiStats – Free, real time updated web stats service
Addfreestats – provide free website statistics

Photo by Jason MichaelWhat is Performance Marketing
Lets define Performance Marketing:  the practice of targeted marketing to generate consumer behavior. The behavior may be a purchase, registration, click, forward something to a friend, download a white paper,  click a chicklet, etc.. In this vision, the big difference in branding, is that it aims to generate a positive attitude toward the brand, and then moves the attitude/outlook to become a particular behavior.

Performance Internet Marketing,  is the most interactive and measurable marketing known today! The Performance component in the phrase is the measurement and then optimization to maximize the actions that the user will take, rooted within a campaign.

Long Term Vision
Performance Marketing is focused on clicks and conversions, all the attention, and performance evaluation deals with not just the immediate effects but long term outcome of a campaign and branding strategy as well. A good campaign is fully focused on the long term. In fact, if what is being promoted are records or leads, when calculating the maximum Cost Per Acquisition [CPA] thinking about the Lifetime Value or value of a customer for the lifetime of the product, service or upgrade path is crucial in evaluating the true value of a given campaign.

There are brands that have performance marketing campaigns with the concept of “always on” (always valid), those that manage to not only measure the outcome of each dollar they invest, but also create a permanent brand presence and achieve  indirectly the positioning or what you would understand as the mindset of the user. That’s thinking long term!

The brand-building work
The success of such campaigns rests largely on knowledge and attitude that the audience has towards the brand. How to achieve this? Through scheduled performance optimization and user experience enhancement through every step of the funnel. Brand positioning,  is the set of attributes with which the individual associates the target product/service, is the result of communication you do, whatever the medium.

Performance Marketing campaigns are a proposal for valuable content to consumers, giving the user increasing brand recognition and the marketer the methodological analysis of the users response and response time.

Let’s talk about metrics
When measuring conversions, usually attributed to the success of the medium that last sent the user to the site that generated the action we measure. If I do click on a banner of a newspaper, I interact with a brand of computers, and 7 days later recalling that experience decide to buy a netbook searching on Google. The analytics will show and attribute the sale to Google and not the newspaper. This is a problem called conversion attribution. How do you measure what actually triggered the users actions?

Photo by pangalactic gargleblasterI believe that the “last cookie wins” is the least worse of attributing results discovered so far. C3 Metrics is a media tracking system which claims to prevent over payment, corrects Google’s inherent tracking flaw and properly attributes credit beyond the last click. C3 uses what they call an Attribution Gateway. Maybe Engagement Mapping ends up being a proposal that surpasses the last click, as it suggests. It will not be easy to do in a uniform and comparable way among different media, we will know in time if they can implement their Gateway successfully.

Photo by Storm CryptI have hundred of websites and domain names in just about every vertical you could imagine, literally. The websites function as a test bed for my SEO and PPC experiments, a source of income in most instances and best of all, insight to many of the sensors search engines use as Ranking Factors for the  search engine result pages (SERP’s).

The key to my insight is running some form of website analytics on every site.  No one site really tells me what is brewing with any given engine, instead the birds eye view helps me see potential changes to the ever shifting ranking landscape.

After spending considerable time sifting through several dozen reports I noticed a change on or around the 8th of October. Albeit some of the changes were minor and insignificant but I have a bunch of steady Eddy sites that perform very consistently for traffic in some very niche keywords and search engine performance.  I have guidelines and flags set to alert me when something goes wonky and sure enough some of the indicators were off, both positive and negative.

On October 28th I posted to my twitter account the following message to see if anyone else saw something change.

Fully two days later the Google update hit across the board. From SEORoundtable.com  October 30, 2009 Google October 2009 Toolbar PageRank Update

“There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.

The last PageRank update prior to this one was in June 2009, which may have just been a technical quirk because the one prior to that was just a month before in May.

In any event, like I say every time:
Yes, a Toolbar PageRank update means nothing in terms of your ranking changing anytime soon. The PageRank scores shown in the toolbar are outdated and have zero direct impact on your Google rankings. That doesn’t mean that PageRank has no influence, but the toolbar score does not have any influence. Google shows us one thing, but yet uses another thing.”