More analytics mavens are becoming aware of Woopra, a relatively inexpensive software package, available on the web and as a desktop application.  Woopra is best known for its gorgeous daily dashboard (pictured above) and extremely useful real-time analytics features (below).  For this post, we’ll use the desktop application.

What’s less known are Woopra’s killer KPI reporting capabilities, using custom segmentation features Woopra calls “Filters.”  This post extrapolates on my previous SearchEngineWatch article, “Google Analytics, Conversion Tracking & Single Segment Reporting Power,” bringing the powerful conversion tracking technique to Woopra, one of the most intuitive analytics UIs in the world.  Let’s get started building our KPI dashboard.

Creating KPI Segmentation “Filters” in Woopra
Start by clicking on the analytics link on the left-hand column.

Then choose “Create a new filter.”

Choose from the standard suite of analytics segmenting criteria, including search query, platform, browser, full referral URL that includes any URL variables and referrer types, among others.  Note that various engagement metrics are unique to Woopra, including an intriguing capacity to track segments flagging specific users you’ve tagged in the course of day-to-day real-time analysis.

For this demo we’ll track progress of our recent Google Keyword Tool article.

While we’ll keep this segment simple, note that it’s possible to stack complex segmenting criteria, just like when using Google Analytics Advanced Segments.  After returning to the analytics link on the left-hand column, select the segment just created.

Then specify a date range. The link is in the UI’s upper right.

Great! Now we’re focusing all the power of Woopra analytics screens solely on our conversion segment.  Our KPI, again, is traffic to a specific page.  This certainly could be a “Thank You” page with a confirmation URL variable for a form submission or an e-commerce purchase.  Actionable insights gained, whilst perusing single conversion segments, can be dramatic, colorful and super easy to read.  Here are some reports we’re fond of.

Conversion by Daily Visitors & Time On Page
This cool report highlights time-on-page each day that converting visitors invested in our content. Note that by clicking on Friday the 8^th, the purple graph shows our page views for the selected day.

Conversion By Country
This über pretty report rarely fails to wow clients. Click on any line graph to expand the graph.

Search Engine Conversion
Wondering if keyword referrals from search engines around the world result in conversions? This report is crystal clear.

KPI Conversion Calendar
We love this one, and it’s truly one of the coolest features of Woopra.  The upper left-hand corner shows KPI performance for month-to-date.  Moving across the top row, we see conversion for the average Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. Then KPI success is tracked by the day for the rest of the month.  This report kicks ass.

Conversion by Browser Type
Sometimes conversion problems are associated with issues sites have with certain browsers and platforms.  Perhaps a key page in the funnel is not parsing correctly for some reason.  This report flags conversion by browser.

KPI Conversion by Referring Site
It’s easy to see that Sphinn.com has sent some visitors. We’ve clicked on Sphinn in the Woopra UI, graphing referrals to our KPI page by day. If a picture speaks a thousand words, this report offers 2000.

Conversion by Referral Type
Woopra has preset referral buckets, sorted by a basic subdivision of site-types that send traffic.  The sort is by social networks, search engines, social bookmarks, feed readers, etc.

Exportable reports are uninspiring, but useful nonetheless.

Using Woopra as a KPI Dashboard
We suggest that those serious about reporting with Woopra build a macro that screen scrapes or otherwise documents reports for clients.  It’s very cool to do a narrated screen cast and email the file to clients, giving a weekly 60-second overview of KPI progress from the previous week or other time interval.  Also, clients can install their own local version on a computer to track KPI progress. It’s quite simple to teach anyone to choose between various KPI segments that we set up for them.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think of Woopra for KPI reporting.

Nan Dawkins, Founder and CEO of Serengeti Communication, started the Serengeti sponsored segment by introducing a few statistics:

40% of searches are for what’s going on right now. By the end of 2009 31% of SERPs will be blended.

3 out of 4 Americans use social media, but where should companies start?

Stop thinking about “Social Media.” We tend to think about destination when we should be thinking about people. We are creating the web 2.0 world in which we live. Take a step back. Don’t think about the places people are, think about how to make friends and serve the users and customers.

You’re not going to manipulate people into doing something they don’t want to do.

Reality check. You have to be measurable. But when it comes to measurement it’s not even close to perfection. Not PR, not TV/Radio, not even search.

But does social media have enough to demonstrate value? YES!

Up first was Liana Evans:

We all started off with: We need a facebook page! A Twitter account! and these too… (the slide fills up ominously with dozens of social media chicklets… dun dun duuuuunnn).

STOP. You can’t just jump in. Think about if it’s going to benefit you. A Plumber doesn’t need to be on Twitter. (They should be on YouTube, telling people how to prevent problems)

Is your strategy just a laundry list of social media applications? There are no cookie cutter solutions, every business is different.

Ask yourself: why should I be in social media? How am I going to engage? Do your research and understand where your audience is.

For example: Pizza Hut was looking for an intern Twitter-er. They wanted to engage college students on Twitter. But college students aren’t there. They’re on Facebook (for now).

Who’s in your target audience? Where are they?

Forums and message boards aren’t dead! It’s the second highest social media activity, behind visiting video sites.

What is your end goal?

Do you want to sell your product, use as customer service or lift the buzz? If you go out on twitter and you don’t know what your goal is, how do you know if you’re successful?

Go where your audience is. What you do is just as important as where you go. Look at the communities and discover the nuances. In some communities you have to soft-sell or they’ll kick you out some communies you can be a bit more brash and hard-sell.

Understand conversations.

Where do you fit into THEIR world? And how can you add value? If you can’t give them value they will reject you as spam.

Applying marketing tactics in absence of strategy is no better than doing nothing at all.

Nathan Linnell, Director of analytics next presented ways to measure social media ROI.

Yes, Virginia, it is possible!

But, there are no plug-and-play solutions. It requires some elbow grease and data aggregation.

Where can impact be observed?

Internally:

• Corporate websites
• Company blogs
• Sponsored communities

External Online From:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Yelp

External Offline: focus groups and surveys to conduct before and after.

Internal web analytics:

Corporate website

Enterprise generated media (EGM)

• Company blogs
• Company forums
• Website’s analytics package

External sites.

What to measure:

• Direct traffic brand searches (Look at the correlations between the two. It’s not an exact science, but a good indicator.)
• Visits referred by key social media sites
• Social media referred visits attributed to company’s social media efforts
• Conversions generated from social media
• Other site behavior of social media referred traffic compared to other channels (engagement metrics)

Blogs and Communities:

• Subscribers (views and clicks)
• Comments/posts
• Incoming links
• Retweets of posts
• Unique visitors
• Members

Social sites such as:

Facebook:

• Fan page / active fans
• Media consumption
• Total interactions (Likes, comments, wall posts)

Twitter:

• Followers (unique/quality)
• Retweets
• Mentions (not just from your followers) compare this to your competitors!
• Brand mentions

YouTube:

Channel

• Page views
• Subscribers
• Friends
• Comments

Videos

• Views
• Ratings
• Comments
• Favorite

Sources of Data

Monitoring Tools:

Aggregated view of buzz across web:

• Volume of mentions
• Brand, competitors and topic
• Share voice(don’t just jump in when someone talks about you)
• Share by social media type
• Top sources/locations (what are top sources that have to most mention of my brand & how big are those communities. Look at alexa data)
• Sentiment
• Influencers

Not a single source solution:

-          “total volume” of buzz not true measure. Many need passwords

-          Still need specific metrics from ind

Research:

-          Offline focus groups etc.

Build Measurement Framework

Financial impact:

• Revenue generated
• Cost savings
• Cost avoidance (call center customer service)

Non-Financial Impact:

• Brand awareness
• Purchase intent
• Willingness to recommend product

Define what constitutes success:

• Branding goals
• Direct sales or lead gen?
• Both

Think about the buying process, it will keep you focused on most important metrics.

Map metrics to goals:

• Quality, not quantity
• It’s all in the combination
• What suggests action?

Figure out:

• Do I have the right tools?
• Who? (Stakeholders & data gatekeepers)
• How? (Integration & aggregation)

Never implement what you can’t measure because you’ll never know if you were successful. ROI measures are what management wants to see, and they write your checks.

Several hours after the Google Analytics change over occurred I received an email from Google announcing the upgrade. Umm, it would have been nice to receive it before I was forced to navigate the interface in front of a client! Read on for a summary of new Google Analytics features:

Email and export reports
Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.

Custom Dashboard
No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.

Trend and Over-time Graph
Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.

Contextual help tips
Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

I’ve been paging through one of our site’s metrics in the new Google Analytics now for a couple of hours. The interface is simple, elegant, and I see immediate improvements in defining goal funnels and the ability to cross segment different types of analytic data. This package seems like it will be very easy for the average non-tech person to use. The timeline allows you to toggle between views of visits, page views pages/visits, average time on site, bounce rate OR percentage of new visitors.

Still a Free Tool
New users will begin working with the new interface nearly immediately. It takes Google Analytics in the direction conceptually of packages like ClickTracks but does not seem nearly as deep in cross segmenting. At first gape the package still seems relatively bare bones but still (like Google Analytics Classic) is an extremely deep tool for free. One might say it is revolutionary at it’s price point.

The new interface offers the same analytic data as we’re used to and links within report data offer new views and opportunities to analyze data. Here are some resources Google has announced to help webmasters deal with the upgrade:

Report Finder Tool will help you see where data from the previous interface is located within the new version (it is also linked to from within your reports on the left navigation menu).

Product tour

FAQs for more details about the the version.

Help Center includes articles related to the new version.

Analytics Help Forum in English within Google Groups to discuss the new version or get tips from experienced users.

Kevin Cobourn, ClickTracks Sales Manager welcomed us into the ClickTracks family.

“On behalf of ClickTracks allow me to welcome aimClear. I look forward to watching you use our software to advance your business’ performance as well as increase your level of opportunity by including web analytics as part of your value proposition.”

Associate Paid Marketing, User Behavior, and Content to ROI.
ClickTracks measures web campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI statistics with unique simplicity, elegance, and depth. The software is used by leading edge companies like Nokia, Coke, Pfizer, Volvo, Verisign, Wells Fargo, Inuit, ING and tracks over 26,000 websites for more than 8,000 clients. Our new agency partnership with ClickTracks gives us the ability to deliver this wonderful analytics solution to qualified customers in an affordable client-center environment.

What Makes ClickTracks Different?
ClickTracks uses radically different analytics architecture which makes powerful data-mining available to marketers on their own desktop.  This analytics package has the capability to map areas of content and user behavior (funnels) to ROI and even calculate margin. We’ve used other commercial (and free) analytics programs for our clients and the options available in ClickTracks are difficult or impossible to implement using traditional web analysis tools.Valuable Insight
ClickTracks is a polished improvement of overly-complex web analytics tools and light years ahead of free packages. As a marketer you will gain incredible insight into the effectiveness and ROI of your organic and paid web marketing efforts.  Everyone knows that Google provides “free’” web analytics in exchange for use of your private data.  ClickTracks blows it away in it’s ability to segment and cross reference traffic by source and user behavior within your content.

Our partner agency status with ClickTracks means we can easily set up web analytics on your site to collect the right data.  We’ll use the software to help you formulate salient questions regarding the effectiveness of your paid and organic web marketing and turn the resulting analysis into answers and decisions. Then you act on the answers and decisions and measure the results of the efforts.

Link baiting can be a useful way to generate decent links in large numbers. Viral marketing is different and speaks to a longer term strategy which also generates links but is more prone to result in conversion to a website’s key performance indicators-like sales or information requests. In the continuum of traffic segments, viral marketing to interested communities often results in more engaged traffic which stays on the website longer because of a higher interest level.

First, it’s so good to be here. People who attend SES conferences are beautiful people. They have a seasoned and focused look about them. The marketing, advertising, and PR professionals who frequent search marketing conferences seemed measured and deep regardless of each person’s level of accomplishment. It’s so much fun to participate at SES. It’s clear from conferences like this that businesses are learning to adapt and survive the millennial transition of communities reflecting their physical world to online interactions.

People Share Information by Email.
Jennifer quoted a research project which concludes that 25% of people share business or personal financial information by email. 63% share content at least once a week and 25% share content daily. That’s right daily! 5% will not share branded content. Bummer…95% will.

The Session was Kicked off by Debra Mastaler who briefly commented on building links from relevant and authoritative sites to achieve link popularity. Writer of the Search Engine Land column Link and sensibilities, Debra focused on the importance of anchor text and the interconnectedness of SEO. She stressed remembering to do the basics to support your website by garnering links from traditional places like Chambers of Commerce and trade organizations. Don’t forget to get all of the obvious endorsements, do the basic things first. Always remember that links tell search engines that other people value your site. Links are the Internet roadmaps.

Protect yourself from Google.
Jennifer discussed diversifying to insure a website from the mythical Epic future Google Crash “If more than 25% of your site’s traffic is coming from Google you have to insure your business from Google crashing” she explained. “Links are that security. Diversify where your traffic is coming from so that you are not relying on the search engines.” It is clear that regardless of any future search and tag mechanisms, the people seeking information will not change.

Buzz Works
People don’t trust advertisements on the Internet. Yet somehow we’re willing to trust total strangers giving us information about products. By using creativity and choosing the channels carefully viral marketer plants viral seeds to grow and propagate. Unlike traditional paid media placement channels the cost of a viral marketing campaign is mostly in the creative. In fact the primary cost is in the development of the idea and determining where to plant the viral seeds.

Traffic generated by blogger-brand-evangelists and news-seekers is made up of site visitors who tend to be more engaged than segments of traffic generated from other channels like paid search. When I pointed out that “it’s all the same money” Jennifer responded by saying that even if you’re giving away free money (by couponing and such as part of a viral link baiting campaign) advertisers are finding they can get “a lot more bang for their buck then from traditional paid channels because the traffic is highly engaged and spends more time on the site than other segments.” Technorati offers an API call that queries a search string you specify. This can be used to keep you apprised anytime someone has just blogged about you about a topic which matters to you-including yourself or your client. 

i -poop
Jenifer quipped several times that “Steve Jobs could poop in a box and if he slapped an i in front of it (i-poop) people would buy the product in droves. However for the rest of us, not just any idea will do for viral marketing. The SES session on viral link baiting and viral marketing provided insight, tips, techniques, and perspective on creative link building.

Of particular interest are the differences in objectives between the two link-thinks. Link baiting is about the links themselves which are required to demonstrate authority to search engines like Google. Viral marketingis about a longer term approach to driving engaged folks who are candidates to become die-hard fans while your site attains links at the same time. If you ever get a chance to see Jennifer Laycock speak take advantage of it.

The effects are subtle so far, but will become more pronounced over time. As a result of this game-changing personalized SERP transition, next Gen organic prominence reporting tools must aggregate a URL’s presence for keywords (and topics) across major search engines and multiple social media channels in one reporting engine.

The reality is that personalized search engine results page (SERPS) turn traditional organic prominence reporting tools somewhat sideways.

We’re used to reaching for tools like WebPosition, WebCEO, or SEO Toolkit to report organic prominence to my clients. Those tools are growing less relevant by the minute. I also use tools like Cross Engine to look through lots of channels and have quick access to lots of specialty search services. The search is on. What is the upcoming killer app which aggregates “traditional” organic prominence with social media penetration for a URL and topic?

This means that SEO managers will need to get more aggressive with “beat the algorithm” page critic tools to compare technical and content SEO attributes in our clients’ pages to “average high ranking” or other successful pages more than we’ve needed to. We need to adjust our thinking and tactics when there is no true way to measure the success of organic optimization efforts.

The beautiful era where we could measure organic prominence with near absolute certainty was perfect training for these times. We’ve always measured organic prominence and correlated it with conversion of traffic on the site to sales, profit, and loss. Now that we won’t be able to totally measure the effect of our SEO tactics on individual SERPS we’ll need to “feel” our average prominence more by traffic and conversion and operate blind.

It is comforting to know at the end of the day, our clients will still measure our success by traffic, sales, and good clients will leave the rest to us. Education will play a big part in this transition. We’ve been telling our clients about personalized search and teaching them what to expect tomorrow.

How much was sold? Which specific keywords tend to result in sales? (Traffic in itself is not sexy.)

How many information requests were harvested-qualified by a prospective customer volunteering valid contact information?

How many information requests led to sales? What was the ROI [profit margin] against [media buy expense]?

Where is the missing data, which associates each [paid click-through or CPM ad] with [sales receipts or information requests]?

Tracking is Essential
Every one of your pay per click ads can be tagged with a unique URL making it possible to associate specific keywords and ads with specific sales. An application should be built on the website to track this data and associate the information with sales. Read more about URL tagging here. This makes it possible to calculate the margin for each sale to precisely determine return on investment for keyword purchases. Paid placement strategies should always include the association of individual keyword/ad click-through expenditures to individual sales or information requests. Regardless of the CTR or ad relevance (to your desired end result) ads can drive substantial traffic which you pay for whether the traffic results in sales or not. If products are not sold or other key performance indicators (KPI) not met there could be reasons for the disconnect:

Key performance indicator(s) are not defined or naïve for the landing page concept Traffic is not qualified at the ad level by the content of the ad

The ad makes promises not kept by the landing page content

Indulging in pure branding without sales-intent can drive aimless traffic enamored with the quality of the brand but having no intent to purchase anything or perform an action.

Mechanisms are not in place on landing pages to maximize the conversation of traffic to customer

Just Fix It
Each of these common problems can be addressed. Key performance indicators can be defined or redefined. Ads can be created which qualify potential (expensive) traffic by truly spelling out “what ya get” if you click on the ad-limiting worthless traffic. PPC ads should make promises which are kept by the available content and tools on the landing page. Mechanisms like information request forms, shopping carts, and other conversion tools must be relevant and obviously available.

The Two Headed Branding Monster
Indulging in pure branding can result in purely branded traffic. Too often though the branding objective is well-met without a KPI transaction taking place once the paid traffic hits the landing page. Branding is a good…no branding is GREAT. However ads and landing pages need to instill a pathway of intent to guide the traffic to the KPI.

Buyer Beware
It is also possible to accidentally cannibalize existing organic prominence with PPC. Therefore an understanding of your site’s organic prominence (where the search engines index you for free). We’ve seen clients (even working with SEO agencies) who drive substantial traffic at significant expense but do not raise the overall level of traffic to the site! The paid click replaced an organic click which would have taken place if not for the PPC ad! Ouch…Now that Google has ushered in the era of personalized search, exact organic prominence tracking is not fully possible. Still SEO’s can currently get a pretty good idea of how a site’s pages are indexed-or are likely to be indexed.

An Optimistic Thought
At the end of the day the reason Google and Yahoo make bezillions selling PPC is because it can work extremely well, driving highly focused and motivated traffic. Be sure to maximize the investment with strategic planning and focused conversion tactics.