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Google Analytics is the world’s most widely used web analytics service. Because Google Analytics is free (unless you need the enterprise level of service), constantly evolving, and backed by one of the technology industries’ largest companies, the service has become the industry standard for measuring website performance.
But like most industries, the web analytics industry has a number of other options you may want to consider when deciding which technology to use to track the performance of your website. Below we’ve compiled a list of 10 top Google Analytics alternatives you may want to consider when making this choice, each with a different approach to how Google tracks the performance of your pages. If you’re looking for a different viewpoint or set of metrics around how and why your website is performing at the level it currently is, and what you can do to improve those metrics, each of these Analytics alternatives can help out....
Jonah Berger wants to be the next Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to the making of a guru 2013 edition.Jonah Berger has descended to the lowest common denominator: breasts. "It's more difficult than you think to find a fully clothed picture of Kim Kardashian,"
Berger teases a lecture hall full of Wharton MBA students.The reality star's Cinemascopic cleavage is hovering behind Berger, who at 32 could easily be mistaken for one of his students. Berger then makes the big reveal: Companies pay Kardashian some $10,000 for every tweet about a product.
"Today we're going to ask," he says, striking a Dead Poets Society pose, a sneakered foot hanging off the table, "Is she worth it?" That is to say, is she an "influential"--a term thrust into the spotlight by Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 best seller, The Tipping Point. Then Berger pushes it one step further: Do influentials even exist?...
... Engagement marketing involves more than understanding computer and mobile technologies, apps, software, and computer language, just as traditional advertising is more than simply visual technology, music, video creation, and printing. Engagement marketing is not merely a simple combination of traditional advertising and public relations, with elements of customer service thrown in, as suggested by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group. Engagement in social media is a distinctly different type of communication supporting true relationships and requiring an approach with deep consumer understanding, support, and value extending beyond the exchange of commercial communication. Engagement in social media looks more like a commercial friendship, using authenticity, transparency, empathy, and celebrating the value of the network, not the firm....
In his new book, PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now (Current; March 15, 2013), Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism, or – since most of us are finding it hard to adapt – present shock. Alvin Toffler’s radical 1970 book, Future Shock, theorized that things were changing so fast we would soon lose the ability to cope. Rushkoff argues that the future is now and we’re contending with a fundamentally new challenge. Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was careening toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.... Rushkoff identifies the five main ways we’re struggling, as well as how the best of us are thriving in the now...
When it comes to getting general news and information, consumers worldwide put as much trust in search engines as they do in traditional media — and more in both than they do in social media. But, the numbers don’t portray any single source as highly trusted, which suggests that consumers are at least trying to vet the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find in today’s information-saturated world. The data comes from the recently released 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, the 13th annual global survey that uses data from “informed publics” — college-educated individuals in upper income brackets that follow public policy issues and are active media users....
Are you wondering how consumers are using social media? Would you like some insights to help your business better understand people’s social habits? In this article, I examine a report published by Edison Research focused on people’s latest social habits. These findings provide useful insights about consumer behavior and how your business can respond. Here are 9 of the most interesting findings from the study....
Most likely you are working to reduce your bounce rate and may have even performed some split testing to improve your conversion ratio. But do you know the deeply rich and valuable wealth of data available through Google analytics if you just have the necessary knowledge to tease it out? Is the keyword you are spending money on SEO giving you the highest possible return? Perhaps you think your head term is bringing in a large portion of your revenue. Is that true? How are your long tail visitors performing? If you quantify the ROI for each, are you allocating your resources properly? Are there long tail keywords that are at the bottom of the funnel that have a greater ROI than your head terms? These, and other similar answers, await you in your Google Analytics account....
There aren’t many companies in the world that generate 1 million visitors and over 60,000 leads through their website each month. Especially B2B. HubSpot does.... HubSpot has figured out that Google wants great content, and lots of it. So rather than gaming the system with lots of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, (which I rant about in my #1 Forbes article ‘The Death of SEO, The Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content) they do the obvious… They generate lots of really good content....
Could Facebook ever go the way of MySpace? Given its ubiquity and continued growth around the world, that may seem unlikely, but here’s an interesting fact to consider: more 10th graders are using Tumblr than Facebook, according to a survey of 1,038 teens and young adults conducted by blogger and techie Garry Tan. Tan used Survata to poll 546 teens ages 13-18 and 492 young adults ages 19-25 about their social media usage. Tan found that while 55% of the younger age group said they use Facebook, 61% said they use Tumblr. Meanwhile 22% said they use Twitter, 21% use Instagram, and 13% use Snapchat....
Here on AllTwitter we love to share interesting facts and figuresabout Twitter. For example, 11 accounts are created every second on Twitterand since the dawn of Twitter, there’s been a total of 163 billion tweets. But how about stats about the Twitter basics? The age range of the average tweeter, which gender tweets more, which country has the highest amount of Twitter users? Below, check out 14 Twitter statistics you may not know, in infographic form....
You see them all the time – outrageous tweets making outrageous claims. You know the work-from-home scams are just that, of course, but what about tweets that pop up during emergencies? If you use Twitter for the latest breaking news, or worse – depend on the information it provides during an emergency – you may be in trouble. Unless, that is, you could tell if a tweet was credible or not. Well, we have some tips from people who have been studying just that....
Social Media has had a terrific ride for the past several years, but the days of easy growth are gone. In fact, the days of easy anything in social are behind us. For many brands, 2013 will be a year of social media disappointment.
With so many consumers spending so much time in social media and expecting so much of brands, our investments in social will continue to grow, but that does not mean our results will grow, at least in easily measurable ways. Certainly, all of our brands will earn more fans, see more comments and collect more retweets, but we all know this is no longer enough--our bosses want to know the business results we are delivering, and fans simply are not a business benchmark.
Success in 2013, more than ever, will be measured in difficult metrics and not easy ones, and increasingly, it will come not just from the Marketing department but from every corner of the enterprise. To succeed in 2013 and beyond, organizations must recognize how social media is altering the way we live, work and conduct business and not just the way we kill time on Facebook.
Here is where (I believe) social will grow and where it will stumble and stagnate in 2013...
The founder of Alltop.com explains his social media strategy (and tells us why Google+ may overtake Facebook). ...What's your biggest SEO tip?
My recommendation for SEO is very simple. It’s Write Good Stuff. In my mind, Google is in the business of finding good stuff. It has thousands of the smartest people in the world, spending billions of dollars to find the good stuff. All you have to do is write the good stuff; you don't need to trick it. Let Google do its job and you do your job....
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It is easy to hop on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and every social network out there. It’s not so easy to answer the question WHY. Why do you want more fans? More likes? More shares? How is it going to help you meet your business goals? Most importantly how is it going to bring your audience value?
We consult with business owners and brand of all sizes, from entrepreneurs and startups to Fortune 100 brands. One of the first things we ask when conducting a social media audit or developing a social business strategy or marketing plan is WHY. It’s amazing how many brands can’t answer this simple question....
This is interesting. It turns out that something as simple as whether or not your tweet has an exclamation mark in it can determine how many retweets it gets. At least that’s according to research conducted by social media scientist Dan Zarella. The research, he says, was conducted in response to a tweeted question from search guru Rand Fishkin and looks at the relationship between exclamation points in tweets and retweets and clicks. Zarella used a dataset of more than two-million link-containing tweets sent by accounts with at least 1 000 followers. His findings suggest that tweets with exclamation marks got more retweets-per-follower, but fewer clicks-per-follower. That means it’s probably not a bad idea to include an exclamation mark if you’re looking to broadcast straightforward information. But if you want people clicking on your tweet, or are sharing a link in it then it’s probably best to exclude the exclamation mark, no matter how excited you are about it....
You only have so much time for social media sites, to create a business presence on them. So it’s important to pick and choose where to spend your limited time and resources. That said, where should you spend your time? Exactly which social media sites are hot?
Will the beautifully redesigned MySpace make a comeback with a mainstream business audience? Will Pinterest keep growing? Will Foursquare decline? What about Google+ and LinkedIn?
Recently a group of social media pros and marketers weighed in with their thoughts for the Dell Social Media Predictions eBook....
...Today I am surrendering my Facebook account, because my participation on the site is simply too inconsistent with the values I espouse in my work. In my upcoming book Present Shock, I chronicle some of what happens when we can no longer manage our many online presences. I argue - as I always have - for engaging with technology as conscious human beings, and dispensing with technologies that take that agency away. Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we're not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and - worse - misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others. To enable this dysfunctional situation -- I call it “digiphrenia” -- would be at the very least hypocritical. But to participate on Facebook as an author, in a way specifically intended to draw out the "likes" and resulting vulnerability of others, is untenable. Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences, and activities over time -- our "social graphs" -- into a commodity for others to exploit....
Google Authorship Markup, you've all heard of it if you follow SEO and Google's developments. Still wondering how to apply and enable the google authorship tag? Setting it up for your own website should be the easier part. After that, you will have to contact all the external websites where you already have submitted contnet and kindly ask them to include your rel author tag in your author bio. Read why it is so important to acquire and how to get it. Author Rank will be soon a massive Google Rankings Factor and setting up Google Authorship MarkUp for your authored content is the best you can do right now to start building your authority and credibility. Optimize your overall web presence and enjoy the advantages of doing so :)....
Researchers are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them. Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them. The new research is the latest in a number of similar initiatives that seek to mine web data to predict all kinds of events. Recorded Future, for instance, analyzes news, blogs and social media to “help identify predictive signals” for a variety of industries, including financial services and defense. Researchers are also using Twitter and Google to track flu outbreaks....
Web application performance monitoring company New Relic studied some 42 billion page views. Because many tech savvy sites use New Relic to improve performance, this data provides not just an indicator of where users are today, but where they’re going. Companies like Google and Facebook have had access to vast amounts of data on how consumers behave on the web for years. Now you can get access to this same kind of Big Data, even if you don’t have their scale. Here are four key insights from the Quarterly Web And Mobile Benchmark...
The Online Marketing Institute is please to honor 40 digital strategists in marketing, selected as the leaders that have lead the interactive marketing industry through innovation and education during the past year. This ‘Top 40′ list is compromised of OMI educators, authors, digital strategists and speakers, known for: Embracing the latest integrated digital strategies and technologiesAdvancing the industry through education — speaking, blogging, and teachingDriving game-changing results for their clients and organizations As marketers continue to shift offline budget to online channels, its critical that they stay on top of the latest changes, proven best practices, and newest opportunities. Through their speaking, blogging, and teaching, the leaders below are enabling marketers to do just that.... Here is our annual list of ‘Top 40 Digital Strategists in Marketing’, in alphabetical order...
In an increasingly noisy digital world, marketers can stand out by producing visual content that engages communities. Here's a quick look at the different types of visual content. Our customers are hungry for good content, but any more they expect it to be presented in a snackable and quickly-consumable format. So how should marketers engage their communities through the use of visuals? Here are four types of visual content that cut through the noise....
We’ve seen a lot of changes in media this year: from new devices and multiple screens driving responsive design, to the rise of native advertising, and the importance of imagery on social networks. The media is an industry that, for the most part, tends to innovate quickly, at the risk of dying. And most of the trends and disruptions that media face usually affect marketers shortly thereafter. So with that, here are three things the media has learned this year that marketers ought to pay attention to as they head into 2013....
Did you know that just over one quarter (27 percent) of organisations have a dedicated social media team, with almost two-thirds (65 percent) assigning social media tasks on top of existing job responsibilities, typically to employees working in marketing or PR? These findings come courtesy of a survey by Ragan, which also revealed that a combination of relevant education and experience is the most sought-after quality for a company looking to hire someone to work in their social media department, and that the vast majority of firms (86 percent) measure their social media ROI by standard metrics such as Likes and followers. 65 percent of organisations cite lack of time as their biggest stumbling block to social media success, and 87 percent say that increasing brand awareness is their number one goal....
Are you addicted to white papers, just as I am? Well, my friends at Awareness, Inc. have put together an epic list of the top 10 social media whitepapers of 2012. Enjoy the white paper goodness. To help you understand important shifts in the social media landscape and how they affect marketing, Awareness Inc combed through the juiciest research findings from 2012, pulling out 10 studies and 30 essential takeaways for any successful marketer and created a guide to help you with them. The ten white papers included are...
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If you're looking to gain some further insights into your website performance, consider these five Google Analytics alternatives.