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Analytics Posts

Web Analytics Increasingly Important to Music Industry

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Access to accurate web analytics is important for any flavor of internet marketing, but it’s becoming increasingly so for one market in particular…digital music distribution. BillboardNielsen, and Digitalmusic.org have come together to announce the first ever “On-Demand Songs” chart which tracks the top on-demand, or streaming, music aggregated from MOG, Muve Music, Rdio, Rhapsody, Slacker and Spotify. (Data from Zune and Sony Music Unlimited is expected to be added in the coming weeks.)

You may already be familiar with popular web analytics platforms like Google Analytics and ChartBeat, but music specific analytics platforms have begun to emerge recently. Companies like Next Big SoundBuzzdeck, and Rockdex are among the top players providing artists and record execs with streaming music metrics.

The New Google Analytics: Dashboards

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Google Analytics has proven itself to be a popular and powerful tool over the past few years. This free service is currently in use at over half of the most popular 10,000 websites, generating massive amounts of statistical data. On March 23, Google announced on its Analytics blog that the new version of Google Analytics will soon be available in beta to more users.

As the first in a series intended to highlight the new features of Google Analytics, the March 23 post concentrated on the changes the user is likely to notice first – changes in the Dashboard itself. Users will soon find that the entire Dashboard has been completely redesigned and features customizable widgets. In addition to this added power, up to 20 customized dashboards can be created per profile.

Google Analytics WidgetsThe new Dashboard in Analytics will be completely based on widgets from categories including Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. These distinct visualizations of the raw data can be arranged via a drag-and-drop customizing interface to present users with the information most relevant to them.

Using this flexibility across multiple Dashboards will give users the power to craft tools personalized for their specific reporting needs. Suggested options mentioned by Google in their post include a Dashboard dedicated to website content and a Dashboard focusing on search engine optimization efforts.

These changes to Google Analytics will provide users with more streamlined access to visitor data and the tools to creatively view this data in the form that it will be most useful to their efforts. This promising upgrade to an already powerful tool for online marketing research is already available to a small segment of Google Analytics users and will gradually be rolled out to more users as new functionality is added.

New AdWords PPC Reports In Google Analytics

Monday, May 17th, 2010

There are a number of ways to track the performance and ROI of a Google AdWords campaign. Now there’s another channel for AdWords PPC analytics….Google Analytics. No brainer, huh?! AdWords campaign data has previously been accessible in Google Analytics, but now there is extended metrics on what happens AFTER the customer clicks on your ad. This can be critical in optimizing your PPC campaigns and your website for increased conversions and overall ROI.

Check out this brief video for an overview:

Google Analytics: Expanded Goals and Engagement Goals

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Google Analytics has always done an excellent job of helping to evaluate success or failure based on certain information that users have come to identify with. One of the most exciting new features of those recently introduced to the Google Analytics platform is that of Expanded Goals (tracking and depth).

Long story short, you’ve been able to track a few goals before via certain metrics– but now, you have 20 goal metrics by which to trigger activity within goal tracking (a very good thing). No longer just simple ‘did the user navigate to this page or not’ goals, but robust conditions such as elements within pages in script being interacted with, or even one of the new types of goals: Engagement Goals.

These new goal metrics are based on thresholds that a user may meet or exceed, such as time on site ≥x amount of time, or user has viewed ≥x amount of pages. It can quickly be seen how useful these types of goals can be, especially if you’re running an ad hosting site– quite marketable to suggest that a significant percentage of the visitors to the site not only idle, but navigate numerous pages of the site’s architecture, being exposed to more and more of your sponsored messages. It also is indicative of page build that works well; lackluster results can spur improvement, and of course variations on a theme that allow the designer to ascertain what constitues more or less advantageous elements of their layout and presentation.

New tools to track success are always welcome, particularly when they are this flexible and powerful. Being able to derive insight from the implementation of routine analysis is one of the practices that can set one apart from the rest in a world where information enables advantage over competition.

Google Analytics: Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts

Monday, December 21st, 2009

The first of seven new features rolled out in Google Analytics recently is known as Analytics Intelligence. Long story short, a newly automated system has been implemented that parses the data related to your Google Analytics account(s) and will report when and if anything anomalous occurs. This can be something like the bounce rate abruptly rising, traffic flow to a landing page suddenly dropping, or any other system-wide ‘red flag’ that might otherwise not be caught without the aid of a meticulous eye and some degree of effort in reviewing analytic data, and even then– Analytics Intelligence is on the job 24 hours a day. Alerts come in the form of messages sent to the controlling account’s registered email address, making worries about awareness regarding internet traffic a thing of the past.

Another wonderful aspect of Analytics Intelligence is that the end user doesn’t need to set any kind of sensitivity or threshold for normal functionality. There is an advanced algorithm at work that interprets not only daily/weekly/monthly data when determining whether an event is exceptional, but also historic and cyclical data that allows AI to better ascertain the significance of movements and changes in traffic flow. Even better is that, if an end user did so desire, they can create custom metrics that can alert them if any number of conditions take place.

Custom Alerts can be set up to notify you if, for example, you wanted to know when you’ve reached x number of visitors from a specific geographic location. Or, to know when and if the percentage of traffic from a specific advertising campaign comprises a certain amount of total visits from all sources. Information such as this allows you to more quickly determine the effectiveness of advertising in a number of media and more effectively budget your internet marketing dollars, among other insights.

Check out the wonderfully produced Google video on this feature @ Google Analytics Intelligence. In the next installment, more hands-on with new Google Analytics features!

Google Analytics: Seven New Tools

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Google has recently announced an update to their robust web analysis tool, Google Analytics, that brings with it seven new and powerful features: Analytics Intelligence (with Custom Alerts), Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals, Expanded Mobile Reporting (for non-JavaScript enabled phone traffic and usage), Unique Visitors Metric, Multiple Custom Variables, the ability to share Advanced Segements and Custom Report Templates, and new Advanced Analysis Features (Pivoting, Secondary Dimensions, and Advanced Table Filtering).

Over the next few installments, I’ll cover what each of these new and exciting features has to offer in terms of improving search engine optimization intelligence and how it can enable improved decisionmaking that in turn prompts actionable change. Using the additional data provided by (or better identified by) the use of the new features to improve marketing throughput can result in quicker reaction to market changes and user preferences and the ability to seize opportunities that might not have otherwise been apparent. One other wonderful benefit provided by a number of the new tools is the ability to dig deeper into data already collected to discover areas for improvement in future cycles, particularly for businesses or entities that operate with great fluctuation from season to season.

Knowledge is power, as it always has been. These new additions to an already powerful tool for divining insight from the site(s) surveyed are nothing short of excitingly intriguing, and will lead to higher yields, less overhead, and more sound decisionmaking for those that can effectively take advantage of them and what they have to offer.