During the Trav­el­ing Geeks trip to the UK I had the good for­tune of hav­ing a Flip Ultra HD recorder in my pocket when I bumped into Jim Sterne. Jim runs the Emet­rics Mar­ket­ing Opti­miza­tion Sum­mit and is also chair­man of the Web Ana­lyt­ics Asso­ci­a­tion.

Our inter­view took place on the third story of the his­toric Globe The­atre over­look­ing the Thames dur­ing the Econ­sul­tancy Round­table on our last day in Lon­don, and the 5-minute video came out fairly well, con­sid­er­ing the lack of fill light­ing, the lack of a tri­pod and some audio arti­facts from the Flip.

Sterne, head of Tar­get Mar­ket­ing of Santa Bar­bara, breaks down ana­lyt­ics into three main buckets:

1Web­site rat­ings: What’s hap­pen­ing on the Inter­net in gen­eral? Which web­sites are the most pop­u­lar? Pop­u­lar ser­vices include com­Score, Nielsen/Netratings, Hit­wise as well other tools like Quant­cast and Alexa.

2Adver­tis­ing: The ad indus­try needs to know how many ads are being served and whether they’re being clicked. Dou­bleclick is the giant of the field; the Atlas Net­work, 24/7 Real Media and Right Media are other players.

3Web ana­lyt­ics: At each web­site, what is the user’s behav­ior? Are they arriv­ing on the land­ing page? Do they bounce off (hit one page and go no fur­ther)? Can I tweak the per­sua­sion process to improve the con­ver­sion rate? What’s their demo­graphic and behav­ioral makeup? Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and track­ing social media traf­fic also tie into this. Mea­sure­ment tools and firms include Google Ana­lyt­ics, Omni­ture, Web Trends and Core­Met­rics.

Mea­sur­ing social media

Sterne said social media can be mea­sured in a num­ber of ways: How often am I (or my com­pany) men­tioned? Is that men­tion pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive? Does it drive traf­fic to my site? Is it qual­i­fied, valu­able traffic?

Social media play a valu­able role in gaug­ing cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, he added. Peo­ple are talk­ing about my brand in pos­i­tive ways and neg­a­tive ways, in which case I need to respond by fix­ing the prob­lem and thank­ing them for mak­ing me aware of it.

Watch or embed the video on Blip.tv
Watch video on Ourmedia.org
Down­load video from Archive.org

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JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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