Twitter Grader - Do You Know Your Twitter Rank or Score?

April 4th, 2009

by Laura Thieme

I attended SMX Analytics Toronto this past week. The guys from Hubspot.com gave a presentation on competitive intelligence. The tool featured by Dharmesh, in his presentation, is http://twitter.grader.com . They checked out Vanessa Fox’s Twitter rank and compared it to Danny Sullivan, the former of which scored a 99.8, and the latter - a 100.

So what’s your Twitter grade, rank or score? Check it out.

I reviewed my Twitter.com/bizresearchlmt grade - a 94 - an A. Yay! The rank - not so good - 102,000 something. Hmmm. Might need to work on that. Now what I really like - you can see my Tweet cloud - or the topics that are trending. Very cool. According to Twitter.Grader.com - my trending topics include Toronto, SMX, Analytics, MattCutts, and Danny Sullivan. You can also post your Twitter grade on Twitter, through a link on the page.

So, I wanted to check some others’ scores:

@Romeothecat - cool cat trying to raise money for animal rescue: uh - oh - a crash on the site. May have to add to this later??

Okay, back online Saturday night, early Sunday morning:

Checked out the grade for Guy Kawasaki - a 100 score @guykawasaki - note his Tweet cloud - nothing that sounds of interest. Guy has recently been criticized despite most of us liking the “guy” - for his use of spamming Twitter. He has nearly 100,000 followers.

@randfish - 99.9 grade score - Tweet cloud shows reference to SMX Sydney
I’m fascinated with his number of updates and number of follows - so about the same number of updates that I’ve had, but over 5,000 followers. Impressive. He also just keynoted the conference, which could have sig impact on followers.

@leeodden - 99.7 - nice tweet cloud

@carolethieme - my mom - who just started the other day - so I was beginning to wonder if anyone had a bad grade. Yes, my mom does. She needs to Tweet more often, but pretty cool that my 65-year old Mom, who is a techy graphic designer, is on Twitter.com and now Facebook.com, not to mention Linkedin. She’s going to have to find time for Twitter if she wants to improve her grade. It just goes to show that what you put into it, you get out of it - like any other class in school.

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ClickTracks Training - Key Observations

November 16th, 2007

ClickTracks Training - Key Observations
by Gilbert Velasquez

We’re sitting in on a live ClickTracks training seminar with a new client who sells health related products. We find it important to work closely with our new search marketing clients on web analytics and the tools they are going to use.

Agenda: Discussing business goals, mapping them to web goals and KPIs and segmentation with labels.

We began with a series of questions that focus on why it is that we have a site and what our site’s goals are. After a few minutes, we learned the client has many different goals, not just in sales but in moving toward providing content to the user.

As we moved past the questions and started looking at ClickTracks, we begin to see how it works to track our client’s goals. We started with the search report to see how people were getting into the website in the first place. In a single view we were able to see what major keywords people were coming in on and through what search engine. The navigation report allowed us to see what people are doing on a page level basis when visiting the site. This is great information to see what elements in the navigation the visitors find useful and what they never use.

The campaign tracking report was up next. A great feature we came across in this report was the ability to input your Google AdWords information so that ClickTracks would automatically pull that information into their reports. The what’s changed report followed and displayed significant changes that occurred between two user-defined time frames. The funnel report and the click fraud reports were not yet configured, but they did show promise.

The final report was the data dissection report. It allowed us to look at various different aspects of the site. We have access to both quality and quantity metrics. On this report we also took some time to look at the graph options. We were able to choose from various metrics, such as unique page visits, and different time displays, such as daily or monthly. On the same graph we were able to chart up to four different KPIs, such as number of visitors, unique visitors, etc. These KPIs were related to a particular label, such as ‘All Visitors’. These labels can be created to segment particular visitors so that you can watch these KPIs on a segmented basis.

How to create a quick label:

In opening the label wizard, an array of options comes up to let you begin choosing what kind of label you want, such as ‘Compare Search Engines’, ‘New vs Returning Visitors’, ‘Ad Campaign Tracking’ or ‘Search vs Content Targeted’. If you’re in ClickTracks and you forget what the labels mean, there is a nice windows below the options that explains what they are used for.

We went with a Page Goal label. The label applies to any user who reached the page specified by the user. So the first step in creation was to click on the label’s button. We then saw a list of pages from which to select to choose as the page goal. Once we chose the page, we clicked ok, clicked go and that was it. The label was created and we were able to use that label throughout the whole analytics package immediately.

An issue that came up was that our goal page was listed multiple times with different parameters. As a solution, we could use parameter masking to allow us to view all those pages with parameters as one page in the reports. There was a distinction made between page-defining and non page-defining parameters to allow a page where the parameters actual define the content to appear as two separate pages. So it masks parameters, but in a smarter way to allow 2 different pages to remain that way in the reports even with the same file name.

Advanced Labels:

This is where the ClickTracks really shines. Advanced labeling gives you much more granularity than the quick label. You can label based on a page visited, if the user has a specific cookie, by the ad campaign the user entered on, date visited, user’s ip address, how long the user stayed, search engine keyword, certain time of day, the country the user is from, if the user generated a certain amount of revenue, and many, many more. Up to 50 different labels can be created. So one can create a label for all people from the U.S. who stayed for over 2 minutes and viewed a particular product page. Then use that label to group those users together and view data specific to that group throughout all reports in the ClickTracks system.

We created a label for visitors who stayed for over ten minutes, then another label for users who stayed short term. It was a simple process of choosing a label for length of time, input the desired time, the reports we wanted the label to appear in, and gave the labels a name. As soon as ClickTracks was done calculating, which was all of twenty seconds, the metrics were available in our reports. It was almost instantaneous.

We were then able to compare the two labels by keyword. So on one side we saw the keywords that brought our long term visitors in, and on the right a list of keywords that brought the short term visitors in. It was great to see that quickly what keywords were able to keep people on the site and which ones were only keeping them around for a few seconds.

We then created another label for those users who came in on a keyword that contained a particular string. Afterwards we went to the search report and were able to see all the keywords that contained the string and how many users came to the site and from what engine they came from. This would be very useful to create labels that track users who come in on all your branded terms. Then you can view, in one report, all users who came in on branded terms, how long they were on the site, how much they bought, and all other KPIs that ClickTracks offers.

Labels can also be shared across different users with different accounts in ClickTracks. When editing a label, you can just hit a button that says share and it puts the label on the server and not just in the account. Then everyone can use it. If you want to allow just a specific user to use the label, you can export it to your computer, email it to that person and then they can upload it to their ClickTracks.

The label feature in ClickTracks is a huge asset. The ability to group users together to see their data as a whole at once is huge. You can group all kinds of things together. You could take a set of keywords that may represent a larger category and put them together in one label. Then you could view metrics on what is happening to that category as a whole and not to just one individual keyword. ClickTracks seems like a great system that has a lot of value added. It does more that just show you raw data, it allows you to manipulate it in such a way that makes it much more valuable. You don’t have to spend time putting data together manually because the label will segment and group the data for you. And the labels seem varied and flexible enough to meet all kinds of demands. If you’re really looking for that just data, more of an in-depth analysis of you site, ClickTracks may be for you.

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