More on Social Reporting in Enquisite »

February 10, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Yesterday, I posted about Enquisite adding a Social Tracking function to our reporting suite. I got quite a bit of email expressing interest in knowing more. In re-reading my post, I also felt a little egg on my face for making the beginner mistake of leaving a [LINK] comment in the post, and not making it live – sorry. Stupid mistakes are easy to make; when you mess up, clean it up!

Anyhow, most of the email & DM’s via twitter (@rzwicky) asked for more info, and screenshots. Beginner mistake #2 – always include screenshots whenever possible so readers know what you are describing. I do realize that none of you can look inside my head and see what I do, so why the heck would I assume that you could visualize what I’m writing about without a picture? When I used to do SEO full-time, I always explained to clients that a picture’s worth a thousand words to human visitors, but zero to the search engines. Why would I ignore such a basic tenet of providing meaningful information? Text is great, but a picture seals the deal. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is one lengthy document! :-)

So, this post is about correcting yesterday’s errors, and providing more insights into Enquisite Social Reports.

We created Enquisite Optimizer’s Social reports to help provide online marketers with perspective. Last year I spent a fair bit of time talking to all sorts of online marketers: search marketers, social search marketers, social marketers, video optimization specialists, etc., and also VP’s of marketing and CMO’s.

What struck me about social was everyone talked about social, but no one seemed to understand how it related to any of their other marketing activities, nor what conversions it really drove. We already were collecting all the user referral data, but didn’t display the social information. Looking at the information, I realized that while there are some apps which help you understand how many referrals you get from any one channel, there’s no holistic views. For example, when you do a post using bit.ly’s service, you can track how many click through you’re getting from the U.S., but you do have not context as to real geography. We already were reporting on search referrals down to the zip code, so why not do the same with Social? Why not make it possible to track a social push, show where the traffic spiked geographically, and then look at the search referral traffic to see how it compared? Did it follow a similar pattern? Did conversion rates go up? How does one benefit the other? This information was missing from the discussion.

Social marketing offers a huge potential of opportunities in branding, driving visitors, raising awareness, and delivering valued customers to a business. But it’s not a stand-alone channel; it’s a piece of the puzzle. We’ve added social reporting to offer businesses some perspective, so that you can start to understand how they really fit together. For example, take this series of screenshots from Enquisite Social Reports, and then compare it against our Longtail search analytics report.

First off, we have a Longtail type view into social referrals, using categories as a definition. Instead of just reporting on all the referring sites, we added a category layer, so that you can understand the traffic types at a higher layer. In this screenshot you can see that for the particular website being looked at, shopping and consumer review types of social networks deliver the best conversion rates relative to overall social traffic.

In the upper left corner of the screenshot, you should also be able to see the site-wide bounce rate, page view rate and average time on site for referrals from social marketing. Watch how this number changes, and compares against search referral traffic.

Next up, we segmented out just the shopping and consumer review types of social sites – note the segmentation panel. I’ve also dropped in Twitter, as I wanted to see how it related. Note how the traffic quality improves as shown by the increased time on site / pages viewed, and lowered bounce rate.

Now, in this next step, we’ve segmented out social referrals to just ones that came from within the U.S., and are showing this information on the map. Look at the distribution pattern of visitors from social search, and keep this in mind for the comparison to search referrals to come later.

Drilling in to the map view, we have two important perspectives: 1) where do the referrals come from, city by city, and 2) then the following screenshot shows us where visitors were really located when they purchased a product as a result of a referral from a social network or social marketing initiative.

Now let’s compare this against search referrals in Enquisite Optimizer’s Longtail reports. First off, the bounce rate is much lower from search, and the pages viewed and time on site are much higher. So a more engaged visitor from search.

At the present time, search is sending almost 100x the referral traffic that social is to this site. However, to be fair, the business in question hasn’t really engaged a full-on social campaign. More like dipping their toes so far. But, all of a sudden they are recognizing value where they couldn’t before, in that they can understand the conversion rates better, and also they can compare and understand how the two traffic sites overlap.

Finally, let’s look at the map of search referral traffic. First up are referral rates.

Obviously, unlike the social referrals, the search traffic to this business is very broadly dispersed. Looking at conversion rates however, a different trend emerges:

Interesting how the Pacific Northwest is over-represented for conversions, relative to search referrals.

Finally, let’s compare that against conversions that were generated from social marketing, and we can see similar patterns emerge, with certain locations better represented proportionally.

These screenshots were built using the same time range throughout. When tracking specific campaigns, you can get much more granular to understand time lag.

Additionally, for marketers and business operators who want to understand the financial contribution of any channel to the bottom line, we offer Enquisite Campaign, which was designed from the ground up to report on, and provide predictive analysis of opportunities across all online marketing channels, and let online marketers, VP’s, CMO’s and CFO’s understand how the various channels interact, and combine together to contribute to revenue.

Marketing via Social networks is still in the early days, and the impact is usually difficult to understand. But a combined perspective on Search and Social will continue to become ever more important to any online marketer. We recognize that marketers are having a hard time measuring the impact of both channels, independently and together, so we’re bringing some perspective to the marketplace.

Businesses need perspective to properly invest in worthwhile initiatives. We provide insights to act.

Posted under Analytics, Enquisite Search Metrics, Market Share, Search Analytics