Social media measurement presents some interesting challenges compared to the more typical site or page metrics. The most direct measures, such as traffic and conversion on your website, are only part of the picture. By the very nature though, much of your social media efforts will take place off your website. But let’s make it easy and start internally before we move to the more challenging external measurements.

Like site optimization, it is helpful to identify or create a landing page target on your website for your social media campaigns as well. Not all of the traffic and gains from social media will flow into your target page, but it will help your efforts to have a defined target to build your efforts around. This is especially true when focusing on link baiting efforts as an intersection of social media and SEO.

Some of your social media efforts will be indirect, just interacting with others and building your social media rapport and authority, and that is okay, even required. However without some focused targeting, you may find you’re spending a lot of energy on social media with no real purpose and fewer gains.

Target pages don’t have to be newly created or strictly for your campaigns, especially since they may generate inbound links over time as others (hopefully) link to them. What this will do though is to help sync and consolidate your social media efforts with all of your other SEO efforts. Then, as you mention target phrases in your social media campaigns, you’ll already know where it needs to link to, rather than having random linking to different pages. This is especially critical if you have a team working on your social media.

Global tracking, such as total traffic being sent to the site from each of the venues you are targeting, will provide a bigger picture view. Now with your target page, phrase and promotion combination, you can at least connect a page to your specific efforts. You’ll want to monitor your specific target pages for referring traffic from the venues you’ve targeted:

• record the dates you promoted your target (begin a timeline as you may re-promote over time)
• track referring traffic from each venue promoted in (also have benchmarks prior to promotion)
• also track ranking positions and traffic for targeted phrases

As you can see, much of this internal tracking isn’t all that different than what you should already be doing. Of course, things like rankings and targeted phrase traffic won’t be exclusive to your social media efforts.

Social media marketing measurements should also extend beyond your site though, which is where the measurements get a little more challenging. Depending on the venue, you may only have minimal or no visibility of the types of metrics you rely on for your own site. If the site allows you to embed an image, such as an avatar that could be hosted on your own site, you can get a rough idea on page views by tracking how often the image is served up. However, like any kind of “hits” reporting, this can be highly skewed.

So rather than focusing on the more traditional site metrics, your off-site social media metrics will be more focused on popularity and activity measures. Fortunately, these types of measures are often reported in some way by the social media venues.

Whether they are called friends, fans or followers, one of the core metrics you’ll want to track is how many of those you have. This however, is only part of the picture. Social media is about conversation and interaction. These counts are purely quantitative, but what you want to strive for is qualitative measures. Sorry to say, but some portion of your fans will be inactive. You’ll want to try to understand what level of quality you have achieved by establishing metrics for:

• how many fans actually interact with you
• average number of comments, votes, etc. for your individual efforts (posts, videos, etc.)
• mentions to your efforts
• how many of your fans cross over into other venues (while this may seem to lower your total reach counts, it improves your quality counts as it means you are reaching a greater level of involvement)

Like any reputation management efforts, social media measurement wouldn’t be complete without social media monitoring. You will want to employ the same types of tracking you do for your general reputation management, but look for mentions, links, etc. back to your social media campaigns or profiles. The further you move from your own analytics on your own site, the more challenging and less precise these metrics get. But, without any metrics, you are completely in the dark.

If all this sounds a bit complex, well, it can be. Moreover, these are just a few of the basics to get you started. Understand that real value will come from tracking over time, monitoring the ebb and flow of the various metrics in relation to your activities. Social media marketing can be a huge win or a giant resource black hole. Investing time and resources into social media without some level of measurement is simply irresponsible mismanagement.

Despite my griping, they rolled it out anyway with this feature unchanged, and they made it impossible to view the data through the old UI as of July 19th. They report adding more requested features, but how about adding back some of the functionality they destroyed? Perhaps they’re more involved in getting the daily data processing issues resolved, and admittedly I’d agree that would surely be a higher priority. I’m just still flummoxed because it seems so unnecessary to revoke good functionality in the first place.

I’ve found yet another irritating change that I consider to be even more serious: you apparently can’t view the data in monthly units – only daily:

(click to enlarge)

Why did they revoke the ability to visually compare monthly periods?!? Most search marketers I know like to compare overall figures from month to month since it tends to reduce some of the spikiness of short-term bursts, and lots of folks are using monthly billing cycles and such.

If I’m mistaken and there’s some where to set the period to display monthly, I hope someone will let me know. I hunted and hunted, and checked their help section to no avail. If they really did revoke monthly display, I can only reiterate further how bad this so-called “upgrade” really was! All glitz with little beneficial substance.

The Analytics team should borrow some of the members of the Google Maps team, since comparatively the Maps team seems to get it right a lot more lately.

Being somewhat familiar with comScore’s data gathering and audience share estimation methods, I can easily see how Domainers’ sites could get drastically under-represented in comScore’s figures. Read on for details…

Now, lots of other folx have criticised comScore’s methods for arriving at their figures, so this isn’t anything new. But, I can see reasons why domaining companies’ portfolio traffic could be particularly skewed and under-represented compared to most other major company websites.

comScore monitors a sample set (“panel�) of online users, and from that usage bases their audience share projections. (See the comScore methodology description.) They state that they have over 2 million participants in their panel, and that their users are representative of internet user demographics.

Unfortunately, their demographics may not be sufficiently representative to fairly compare traffic across all types of internet sites, and small amounts of incremental traffic to sites could easily end up being zeroed out through their statistical methods.

Here’s some reasons why domaining company traffic could be undercounted by comScore:

• The 2 million-plus member panel sounds impressive, until you divide it down by the continents, countries, provinces/states, and cities in each country — once you break it down, the sample set for each country/state/city, the sample set then becomes quite small, and arguably likely to not represent all demographics sufficiently. According to CIA estimates for this month, the global population is 6,602,224,175 so, the panel would only represent one-three-thousandth of the population, or one one-thousandth of the estimated total worldwide internet users.
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• The panel likely is undercounting internet usage from work versus home. It’s improbable that most major companies would be willing to allow comScore’s monitoring software on the desktops of all of their employees, since corporations dislike spyware of this sort. Internet usage from work is a huge component of online traffic, so if this segment is under-represented, it would make sites with more workday traffic show lower amounts of usage than sites with greater nighttime traffic. I just cannot see that very many of the larger, publicly-owned companies would allow this sort of external monitoring of their employees.
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• I’ve seen cases in comScore data wherein if a site receives less than a minimum number of visits during a month, comScore will not count it for ranking purposes. Since many domainers have thousands of sites on domain names of varying popularity, the small amount of panel traffic going to a portion of their sites during the sample period may get zeroed out. Domainer company traffic is impressive in the total combined usage from their entire portfolio — the small amounts from many sites can add up to a substantial amount in total.
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• The biggest reason that a domainer’s total traffic could be under-counted is that new, wet-behind-the-ears internet users might be far more likely to navigate through typing guessed domain names directly into their browser window, and I suspect that those new internet users would be far less likely to be comScore panel members. The lack of the new-internet-user demographic in their panel could result in significant skewing of the comScore report tracking of domainer sites.

So, what’s the take-away in all of this? comScore would likely need to count even the smallest amount of traffic they get for sites as being statistically significant, instead of “correcting” it out, if they wish to enable fair inclusion of domainer company sites in their reports. Also, they would need to find the way to include more new user traffic, and traffic from inside companies.

Alternatively, domainers would likely be much better represented by companies that use figures from traffic actuals. IPRO can provide independent auditing of a site’s usage, by monitoring a site’s traffic, or through processing a site’s logfiles.

Also partnering with a company that absorbs data from a number of major ISPs might provide more representative traffic tracking for domainers. There are some metrics companies who get actual usage data from a number of ISPs, and these sources would be far less likely to under-represent the newbie internet user demographic.

One of the main things that I’m pleased about was my effort to be as objective as possible in writing the article — not only did I want to report on what is going on in local-oriented domaining, and who’s involved, but also to provide some concrete conclusions and recommendations which people could take away. I was upfront in disclosing my past negative bias about domaining, and in the course of writing the article I found that I had to revise my assumptions a few times over – in favor of Domaining, actually. Working off and on, I wrote the article over the course of about two months.

While doing the research, I became aware that the Domaining industry seems to have a bit of “younger sibling complex” — as an industry, they wish to be considered a respectable, bona fide line of business. Unfortunately, they have a few things which have been hampering that aim to some degree:

1. Many people have been exposed to cybersquatting, typosquatting, and trojan-horse sites which have damaged the public’s perception of domainers. While a number of companies have been springing up which have highly ethical practices and do only high-quality domaining, the industry’s been sand-bagged by the past sins of a lot of anonymous individuals who have exploited domain names for a fast buck.
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2. The industry has been disrespected by a degree due to the perception that domaining isn’t very sophisticated. This isn’t really accurate, since the top domaining companies frequently have very sophisticated tools and processes for selecting domains, registering domains, hosting and deploying content on domains, and algorithms for estimating the traffic potential of domain names. Further, on the face of it, that bias isn’t really fair — someone who’s developed an elegant, simpler method for making money should be admired so long as it’s not a criminal method.
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3. There’s little independent reporting of domain industry traffic figures. This is a case where there are significant challenges to independent reporting agencies in identifying “domaining” traffic from other types of traffic, since one has to assume varying amounts of user motivations in going to domains directly — this is something that Danny Sullivan mentioned in my article’s comments in reference to the Visual Sciences statistics — and, there are tech reasons why traffic sometimes has referrers stripped out — so, the few figures currently published on direct domain traffic are not clearly all attributable to domaining. In addition, a number of the top domaining companies have valid reasons for avoiding the disclosure of all the domain names in their portfolios since that could reveal some competitive intelligence about their strategies and proprietary processes.

Since the domaining industry is a bit defensive/insecure about how the public perceives them, it wasn’t really a surprise that my article immediately attracted some criticism from folks. Frank Schilling, in his Seven Mile blog, posted a write up about my article called “Search Engine Land of Make Believe“. In it, he mentions a number of positive figures about direct navigation traffic, but none of the figures are very reliable.

He mentions one figure about large amounts of Yahoo ad usage coming in from domain name traffic, though it’s apparently from an analyst’s estimate — and Wall Street analysts typically do not understand how internet metrics are computed, and particularly don’t understand the issues involved in lumping all types of apparent direct navigation traffic in together (no independent traffic reporting agency I know of can differentiate between traffic coming in from a user typing in a domain name versus clicking on one of their favorited bookmarks, and we won’t even go into all the situations where referrers are not being passed due to browser/platform security settings).

Another figure he cites is an Efficient Frontier report on direct navigation, though others have already pointed out a number of issues with accepting that report at face value. The graph I see in the report actually shows a pretty sharp degradation in conversions after a few months of the ads running — a normal enough progression since CTRs typically drop off as users become more familiar with the ads, though not not a progression that I would expect if the majority of the traffic on those sites were from new users visiting them for the first time through directly typing in assumed domain names.

Finally, he cites an anecdotal mention from someone within Google quoted on how AdSense was seeing 5 million unique visits per day from the domain distribution channel, but if we assume that number is still accurate today and compare it with comScore’s estimated number of Unique Visitors to Google for May (120,010,000), it’s not all that significant. It’s also not all that interesting if you compare it to the total estimated number of worldwide internet users. So, Frank doesn’t really convince us that things are fantastic with these figures.

So, the reason why I or any other informed analyst or tech reporter would write a cautious and conservative article about domaining is that there’s just a lack of independent validation of the traffic figures, along with something of an inability for collective assessment of true conversion quality. As Danny noted in his comment on Frank’s posting, advertisers can’t opt out of this subset of Google’s nonsearch traffic, and parked domains are not segmented out in reporting stats.

My conservative assessment is merely based on the amount of independent data at-hand, and not on a bias in favor of search traffic. For all of us who lived through all the hype associated with the radical new business models that were promoted during the dot-com boom some years ago, we remember all too well the implosion of the dot-com bubble. The lesson we learned was to focus on the business model and on good statistical evidence from objective sources.

Frank’s hope that:

“Perhaps one day I will visit ‘Search Engine Land’ (the website) and read a less cautious piece that accurately portrays the domain name traffic industry and gives it much deserved respect….”

isn’t all that likely to happen until there is a greater degree of transparency and more solid, independent reporting on traffic and collective conversion rates.

I conclude in the article that there’s significant traffic in domaining networks of sites, and that there’s good money to be made from it for local business companies. But, I suggest caution in monitoring of the quality of that traffic and its associated conversion rate (real conversion rates – not just CTR). I should have also suggested that not all domainer companies should be considered the same — some are great, while others have portfolios full of scummier sites that publicly-traded companies would want to avoid. I actually am impressed with some of the businesses in the industry such as SEDO (who were quite admirable in their recent efforts to police the domaining of names purchased by the unscrupulous in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings), and REIT impresses me as well. In any case, I didn’t beat anyone up in the article, and I gave the whole thing as fair a shake as I could.

The domainer industry doesn’t need unqualified, glowing reports from analysts and reporters like me — they can continue to laugh all the way to the bank with the money they’re likely generating. But, if they do wish to get more approval and admiration as an industry, there is a way to accomplish it.

Independent traffic reporting companies are currently unable to assess and report on the traffic for the overall industry, or for particular large companies within domaining.

So, Domainers, if you want to prove to everyone the amount of traffic going through your industry, I suggest that you partner with comScores, Nielsen/Netratings, and Hitwise and talk to them about how they might be able to better identify and report upon your traffic. Most likely, this would require that a number of domaining companies would need to team up in order to report all of their domains to those metrics companies after which the traffic reporting firms would be able to group together usage data collectively. Perhaps the domainers could supply their domain portfolio lists to an independent agency, such as the Internet Commerce Association, which could then privately provide the collective list to the reporting agencies.

So, how about it, domainers?  If you want to really make the eyes of CEOs and investors shoot open everywhere, move out of the shadows and get some more independent reporting on what’s going on with all of your many sites!

So, how did this traffic happen?

This isn’t the only time I’ve seen something like this happen. Probably a number of people have had the experience of calling up a partner or colleague to talk about something they see in the Google search results, only to find that the person at the other end of the phone sees a very different thing when they commit the same search in Google. The listing could be shown 9 places down from the top of the page instead of 2 places down, or it isn’t showing up at all for them while it’s showing plain as day for you.

Unfortunately, this is going to become a more and more common experience for webmasters. Google’s diversity of search products and results sets are becoming more and more differentiated for different users, and as this happens, people searching for the very same keyword are going to be seeing completely different search results. Read on for more details.

Web analytics programs commonly report the top search engine keywords that bring users to a site. As the search results for different users become individualized, if you’re a webmaster looking at the analytics metrics you’ll begin noticing that your site may get traffic for search terms when you can’t even see one of your pages listed, or you may not get traffic for somewhat popular terms where you see yourself listed in the very first position in the results page. The lack of clarity in reporting is exacerbated because many of the analytics systems can lump all traffic coming from “something.google.something” or “something.google.com” as being from the Google Search engine. This wildcarding effect might lead you to erroneously assume that all your traffic comes from the US-centric web search results on Google, when in fact you may be receiving traffic from a variety of Google sites in a variety of ways.

Here’s a quick list of some top reasons why your Google search results may appear different from someone else’s:

• Personalization. Google has begun to customize your search results in order to bump up the sorts of stuff that you seem to want so you can find it more easily. This can seem cool in cases where you are clicking on your own company’s pages more frequently, since it may make your CEO think your site is ranking high on his prestige keywords. But, trouble may happen when he is telling his friends about this and they see something different. So, how would you see what most users would be seeing? One way would be to disable the personalization, explained in this helpful thread on the Search Engine Roundtable: Turning Off Google Personalized Results.
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• Different Google data centers/servers. Google is big – really big – so it doesn’t run on just one machine – it runs on a great many. Getting all of those machines to be in sync is an ongoing task, and as data trickles across all their machines it results in various servers displaying slightly different search results. So, you may see one set of results in the location where you’re viewing Google, while end users somewhere else may be seeing a different list of results – for the same keyword. There are a few tools out there for viewing the different data centers’ results – here’s one from SEO Chat.
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• Google for other countries. Google has individualized search engines for different countries, and keyword searches in them may be filtered down to sites identified with those countries. Ex: Google UK, Google Canada, Google France. Your site might show up higher/lower in some other country for a particular keyword search, and there may be a number of country-centric Googles handling your language. For English language sites, users could be finding you from a number of different Googles: UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.
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• Alternate types of Google searches. While most usage is going through the main Google web search, there are a number of other specialized search engines that web surfers are using: Google Image Search / News Search / Blog Search / Maps / Google Base, etc. Would your site’s content show up in some of these?
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• SafeSearch. Google automatically performs a bit of censoring of its search results in an effort to keep objectionable content away from minors and people who wish to avoid it. Google has Moderate filtering engaged by default, but users could be finding/not-finding your content depending on their settings. You can go into your Google Preferences and change the setting to be stricter or disabled. Don’t assume you know for sure if your site or page is flagged as potentially objectionable! For instance, there are perfectly respectable plastic surgery sites which appear/disappear from the SERPs, depending on the user’s SafeSearch setting.
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• Language preferences. One can also change the desired language returned in the SERPs in the Google Preferences. Changing this option will cause pages matching your desired tongue to show up much higher in the results order.
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• Gadgets / Widgets /Feeds in iGoogle. People who are using Google’s customizable homepage service, AKA “iGoogle“, can add all sorts of “gadgets” or widgets to their homepage, along with content feeds. So, if your site content is accessible through one of the many gadgets out there, or if you have RSS/Atom on your site, users who have subscribed to those services might be coming to you through those avenues.

I’ve probably neglected to add a few other routes which can result in differentiation in how users may come across your pages from Google, and this will continue to change as Google adds and alters their various products and features. But, these are some of the top ways that users may come to you from Google, and these are the primary places to look if you’re trying to figure out why some other people may be seeing different results from what you’re seeing when performing keyword searches, or when you’re trawling through your web analytic keyword referral reports.

Google Analytics is updating their user interface and report presentation, and just as I feared, some of it is a downgrade in usefulness. I’ve been using metrics/analytics packages for ages now. At my old company many years ago, I helped set up and use NetGenesis NetAnalysis product to generate reports from our log files. We later used SurfAid and Coremetrics and Omniture. We also built our own, in-house reporting system to supply stats that we couldn’t get via off-the-shelf packages, and I personally programmed some of those and managed other developers who worked on them as well. So, I’m pretty familiar with analytic reporting systems, and I know what’s possible in designing them. I don’t like some of Google’s changes to their service.

Google Analytics has done what I’ve seen so many other analytics companies do: they’ve dumbed down the reporting presentation capability of their service, apparently gearing it primarily toward less-technical marketers and people who run Google ads on their sites or who advertise through Google. The trend with all these analytics companies seems to be to evolve solely towards generating report charts for marketing departments, focusing mainly on conversion statistics and prettified reports that have extracted the ability to easily see quantitative amounts over timeperiods, lulling the brain with pretty colors and obsessing more over slick Ajax/browser interactions than delivering statistical content in a meaningful way.

In their blog, Google even highlights/links to a ClickZ article which says that the new version was built for Search Marketers.

There are other people who have other interests in the reports than just marketing! These reports are vital for usage analysis and usability research. How about just trying to gage the popularity of a given page? Why is there sometimes such devotion from divorcing people from the raw figures found in the usage tracking logs?!?

One immediate downgrade between the new system and the old is that you can’t view trendlines of Visits simultaneously with PageViews. I want to see the raw numbers of both, in conjunction with each other, not just PageViews per Visit! The new interface lets you only view one or the other, not at the same time.

They’ve messed up the labeling of Referrer metrics, too. In my opinion, it’s misleading to label a report “Referring Sites” and not have it include all. In this report, “Referring Sites” doesn’t include referrals from search engines – you have to go under “All Traffic Sources”. I see merit in having a separate report just for Search Engine Referrals, but not for “Referring Sites” with SEs extracted. Regardless, the label is misleading for anyone with any length of background in internet IT.

The listing of keywords which referred traffic through individual search engines is very cool!

In like vein, why not provide top keyword ranking numbers, similar (and expanded) to what is reported in Google Webmaster Tools?

The worst gaffe of the new UI is in the display of geographic visit data. In the old reports, you could glance at a world map and little dots would show how much traffic came from what areas in the world. Those dots could vary in size to give a quantitative indication of how much traffic came from each area. The new maps dumbed things down so that you can’t easily see how much traffic came from what area in the world without mousing over areas, nor can you tell how it was distributed in each area without zooming down to areas of the map. Compare:

Current Analytics Map UI

New Google Analytics Map UI

Using color scales is really hard on users to quickly scan and understand the geographic charts. Can you easily tell what each country’s shading goes with which color scale shade in the map key?!? No, most users wouldn’t be able to. Mousing over to get the number doesn’t help, either — the point is to be able to easily see amounts across the board and be able to compare them all at once — not one at a time. Can you remember the numbers from Oceana, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America — all at the same time?!? This isn’t a game of Concentration.

Check out this closeup map of the States:

Google Analytics Closeup Map – United States

By viewing this, can you easily view this and tell how many visits came to your site from the various cities throughout the country? No. This is an even worse game of concentration than the worldwide map. Instead of a few continents, try remembering the quantitative amounts for all 50 states at once! Not to mention, can you tell which shade goes with each scale box?

Over time, a user might be able to memorize the scale shades, except — the scale itself is variable, according to the site’s traffic! So, one week the second-to-lightest box MIGHT be representing 1,000 and another week it could represent 10,000. Oh, and it’s not set at even numbers. Oh, and I could just WISH that the scale fell into nice, even numbers! But noooooo! They tell you what the lowest and highest numbers on the scale are, but NOTHING in between! News flash: I’m a pretty clever/capable guy, but I cannot MENTALLY INTERPOLATE each of the numbers in a scale between say, 48 and 1,853! Who can?!? Why should I? The whole point of using charts is to make data readily understandable through visual presentation, so why should I have to work harder to comprehend the data?

I liked the early/current version of Google Analytics, and this new version comes up a bit short for me, particularly with the geographic charts, so I’m going to have to pan it.

I hope they’ll continue to support the legacy interfaces quite a while longer, until they improve some of these issues I’ve noted herein.