Standard Google Analytics gives you a lot of basic data about how people are interacting with your web-site: visits, pageviews, bounce rates, it can even measure the time it takes to load your pages if you enable that option.

But what makes GA really flexible is a little feature called Event Tracking which allows you to report almost ANY type of information that’s  from your site back to Google and they will record it for you, and allow you to graph it alongside the other data you’re collecting.

Some possible metrics you could track using Event Tracking:

- How often do people click links that take them out of your site and which links are they
- Which PDFs are being downloaded the most
- How many people click the play button on your videos
- How many people start filling out a contact form and never finish/send it
- What percentage of your articles do people scroll through

The only thing you need is a bit of JavaScripting to catch the events when they happen, process them (if needed) and pass them along to GA.

Let your imagination run wild: what sorts of information would you like to collect from your website?

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Tom Hickey Categories: General, google

Not all of your online interactions with your customers happen on your website. Emails, social media, mobile – there are a plethora of ways you connect and more being invented all the time. Luckily, there are a wide range of analytics tools out there that make tracking

! Today, I’m going to cover two of these tools: one that is quick, easy and free and one that is full featured at a reasonable cost.

Bitly
Bitly is a URL shortener tool that also shows you excellent analytics about how your link is used. You can get a LOT of information from this awesome, free tool.

Let’s say you are having a sale or special on your website and you want to distribute a link via a regular email and on Facebook and on Twitter. But if you just start sending people to your homepage, you won’t know if they are coming because they were going to come anyway or because they saw you promoting your sale. Create a Bitly link using their URL shortener and always use the Bitly link when talking about your sale. Then after the sale is finished, you can log into Bitly and see how effective your promotions were!

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Using the Referrers Detail, you can see who came in from each website or social media platform you distributed the link on. The “direct” refers would be ones that came from emails. You can also see when people were clicking and where the people who clicked are located.

Bitly also plays nice with analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Webtrends, as well as social media management platforms such as…

Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a full bodied social media management tool with excellent built-in analytics that allow you to view your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Analytics from one, beautiful interface. They also offer additional social media management tools like integrated feeds from multiple accounts, smart search to find new customers, contact management to track communication history, and a powerful scheduler tool. Accounts start as low as $9/mo.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web

You might have heard about Google’s announcement to purchase Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion. On the surface this would seem to be a move to solidify the Android ecosystem and cult by starting to build and distribute their own mobile hardware (cell phones and tablets).

That’s part of it. Apple has demonstrated the market power and profitability that a proper cult following can generate and continues to demonstrate this commitment by practically giving away their newest operating system, Lion ($29), and actually giving away their upcoming iCloud service to all Lion users. Not a bad way to get people to buy the latest and greatest.

Not too far beneath Google’s surface brews a tempest that has significant implications for all mobile technology innovation in the years to come. Google’s main interest in Motorola is 17,000-plus patents that allow them to enter the patent wars currently underway. In this war, patents are conglomerated legal cards to be played as part of an ongoing legal strategy for each company vying for market share.

Patents were designed to fuel innovation by rewarding someone’s original idea, allowing him or her a specific period of time to capitalize monetarily on that idea. Technology moves much faster than the law, and we’re quickly seeing the limitations of copyright, trademark, and patent law as they currently stand.

On the heels of reports saying Android phones occupy nearly half the market, one might wonder how such a deal could get through anti-trust court. To Google’s credit, this does represent a new business sector for them as they wisely licensed the Android OS (classic Microsoft strategy) rather than building hardware (Apple). Now how do you think those dozens of hardware manufactures feel about competing directly with a company owned by their licensor?

While Larry Page states that the deal will “enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences,” I’m not convinced. The little guy doesn’t have the legal muscle to enter the patent wars, and is often only brought in unknowingly after he’s had some success.

Certainly Google has offered much innovation to the world, and some see as a defensive move. I have a limited amount of trust for any large corporation, and these days that includes Google and even Apple. If you’ve been watching this game awhile, it may seem somewhat ironic to see Apple and Microsoft banding together to sue Google. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

This situation makes me squirm the way much of our stock market does. What was created as an institution to allow anyone to invest in a company, hitching his or her star to the success and failure of that company, has become an abstraction that allows people to place bets on the success or failure of anything or nothing. We’ve seen how well that played out in recent years.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Technology

Planking, owling, and…well, let’s just say memes took over our Astek staff meeting this week. In fact, it got a little out of hand…

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

Have you ever been frustrated by websites that require you to create supposedly “strong” passwords that use at least one letter (and one of each case), one number, and one punctuation character? Especially if you are forced to periodically change such passwords, it can become maddening. And one way that many of us get around that is by using dictionary words, encoded to fit the password requirements. So sprinkle in some numbers that look like the letters you would use otherwise, some random upper case, and end it with a number and/or punctuation.

Well, it turns out that a smart algorithm could actually crack such passwords in a reasonably short amount of time. While a password composed of a string of seemingly random words, in all normal lower case letters, might take hundreds of years to crack. One of my favorite webcomics lays this out with a (somewhat glossed-over) mathmatical proof:

This is something that I had been wondering about for a while, and I’m glad to see my suspicions confirmed. Not that it does any good for the many “strong” passwords I’m made to remember. One improvement on XKCD’s easy to remember, hard to guess scheme: use misspellings of words that are familiar to your vernacular. “ur” for “your”, phonetic dialect spellings, etc.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Technology, Web

Social media was created by individuals for individuals. Let’s make that clear up front. As far as businesses are concerned, they have done some fantastic things with social media to connect with their client base via customer service, engagement, charity, or just seeming “cool”. The businesses who have done this well are looked upon as models to other businesses to the point of some saying, “We need to do what they did and we’ll be successful!” I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not necessarily true.

If you are a business and say, “We need to be social.” I ask you this: “Why?” Granted, social media is fun. I would tweet all day if I wanted to! But so many businesses start with feeling they need to get on specific platforms – mainly Facebook and Twitter. However, as a business, you may not be appropriate for social media. In the financial sector, most companies only allow their personnel to be on LinkedIn. You may run a manufacturing facility – not sure if Facebook is really the best platform for you.

So before you get all platform-crazy and want to be on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Quora, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+…. take a step back and answer the question, why do you want to be on social media? What is the business goal here? Most of the time, it’s to gain more clients and increase business. Or it’s to engage with existing clients and maintain them. Or it’s to just know everything that’s being said about you and your competitors to gauge where the market is going so you can model marketing plans around the consumer voice. Whatever it is, figure it out. Then we can talk about platforms.

Now, the next huge debacle – do you have the resources to manage these presences? If you want to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you better make sure you have a plan on who is going to be creating that content and when. And whoever is responsible, make sure that person or group of people is knowledgeable on appropriate community management skills.

Does the person running your social media communication know that there should be a generic company Facebook profile (i.e. mine is Rachel at Astek) to manage your company Facebook page so his/her personal profile is kept personal? Does he/she know that the you should always have more people following you on Twitter than you following – and that you actually need to engage on Twitter at least 12-15 times a day (and those are in conversations, not just status updates)? And finally, whoever is managing your social media presence, does he/she call him/herself an expert? If so, find someone else!

The term “expert” in social media land is almost the equivalent of a four-letter word. Those of us who make our careers off of social media and innovative technologies know that whatever we do know, there is twice as much stuff that we don’t know. Pride is not a good feature in a community manager. Make sure this person is innovative, creative, and always reading and trying to learn on what’s going out there in that scary land many call a “cloud”. For example, Google+ brand pages are just around the corner. Do you have a plan in place for when that happens – whether that plan includes engaging in that platform or focusing on something else?

Now we enter into that precarious zone of agency management. Many businesses stat that they want to be active on social media but don’t have the time. So they want someone to do it for them. And no, don’t hire an intern to manage your social media. Going back the qualifications of a community manger, you need to make sure that a certain skill set is present in this individual – plus you need to make sure he/she knows your brand, is trustworthy in protecting and representing it, and if he/she leaves, you’re not left going, “Now what?”

Therefore, if you do hire an agency or someone externally to help you launch a social media presence, fantastic! Have at it! But I would strongly suggest that messaging and content creation come from someone internally, and just have the agency train you on appropriate messaging and to set expectation on what level of engagement is realist for the company to maintain. Because if the agency can send out 15 tweets a day, that’s great, but if your internal bandwidth is only 5 per day, then you have a problem. It is perfectly reasonable to hire an agency to take over social discussions on a one-off basis such as for an event, conference, Twitter chat, etc. But full-time ownership should be created internally unless that agency is almost grandfathered into your business or if they give you a clear exit strategy so you know how to keep up with the presence they created for you after they’ve left to go to the next client.

Social media is not a buzzword, and it is and will continue to grow into being vital for business successes. You should not ignore it, but just like any other business decision, make sure you have a plan on how to use it and why you are using it in the first place. Have questions? Do you have good examples/case studies? Please share as we easily could’ve missed it on our Twitter feed!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Entrepreneurship, How To, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

An old college friend who avoids social networks addressed an intriguing problem recently:

“I’ve just decided what it is I don’t like about Social Networking… it’s the idea that it, when push comes to shove, my people can bury your people… Please, tell me I’m wrong, that the end result doesn’t allow those with the most connections to dominate society further for their own benefit at the expense of those with the fewest connections. Much like the rich vs. the poor struggles of yesteryear, only now we can rise above money – look, it’s purely about fame and how well you’re liked.”

As an indirect middle finger to bullies of the past who gained advantage by physical body size, bullies in the social networking world are often the geeks! One of the reasons people are racing to Google+ is that it’s easier and more natural to organize friend groups based on the way humans naturally organize themselves rather than feeling like you’re a database admin trying to maximize the efficiency of a friend database.  

Somewhere deep within Facebook are the tools and settings to make sure the people you care about show up before the “bullies.” Also, perceptions are skewed when Facebook’s algorithm tends to give people exposure simply for talking more rather than saying something you’d necessarily care about. Google+ Circles seem to move this in the right direction by making it easier and more intuitive to share certain info with specific groups.

I’m not 100% sold on Google generally, as it often behaves as one of the biggest bullies out there. I think all of this is perhaps the greatest social experiments we’ve ever witnessed, certainly the most public. And like all things, once our fascination with the technology wears off we can just get back to being people. Until then, I agree that human nature seems only to fight against the true potential of this technology: to bring us together and make people more efficient and benevolent. It unfortunately tends to provoke paranoia, greed, and ego as well.

Humans and other primates are intoxicated by celebrity. Social media has elevated many of us to a level of semi-celebrity, but still lends power to those with means and connections above the masses. I’m not sure this will ever change, as I do believe it’s part of our very nature, for better or worse. I share the dream of technology enabling collective good, but feel that we are quite far from fully realizing it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web