Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html

There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites. Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

This Article was originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/

The idea of this blog posts and future blog posts is to identify problems in web based business and how analytics can help solve it?

Blogging and Blogs

You have a small blog and spend considerable amount of time updating it, also have spent some money in creating and putting it up live. Measuring the success of a blog is not just pageviews, subscribers and unique visitors count.

ROI of a popular blog can be huge, if you have rich content and have active RSS subscribers. You don’t need a resume. Every popular blogger gets job offers regularly flowing into his email. Above this you have created a brand for yourself. This is a huge economical benefit considering the money and time you spend on make your blog active. If you have a great blog then you have separate brand and identity for yourself.

Small Scale Business Online

Concentrating on search engine marketing, seo, affiliate marketing to generate profitable visitors to site is fruitful. This is the cheapest form of advertising online. You have control over spends and will be able to monitor your ROI. Set up Google Analytics or any other analytics tool which will help you look at the visitor information.

Conversion University from google is very helpful in optimizing the website for higher conversions and sales (http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77123)

Small scale business must focus their marketing efforts cleverly around geo-locations to get maximum return from marketing & advertising. The site must clearly offer maximum benefit & response to their end users as promised in their USP. Most sites initially work on small set of customer base and keep them satisfied at all circumstances.

These companies are ecommerce sites, shopping sites, travel agent sites that are looking to sell products to their websites’ visitors. They should target at long term steady and consistent growth not looking to achieve instant traffic hoping to dramatically increase page-views and visitor count hoping make revenue quickly and grow faster.

Large Businesses Online

There are various large online website who advertise heavily online & offline for the purpose of promotion. The spend a big amount of money with an objective to increase visitors, page views hoping to increase brand value. It is unwise to spend money on marketing, advertising without looking at the actual value it adds to their users (customers).

Increase in page views and visitors may not proportionally be related to increase in revenue and profit. There are definitely smarter ways to reduce cost of marketing & advertising without impacting the bottomline.

I read about many large advertisers in US & worldwide who have decreased spends on search marketing as it has become unprofitable after a certain limit. They have found search engine optimization, social media marketing ways more effective to gain relevant traffic to their websites for increasing their sales.

Measuring ROI through every channel and making them profitable is very essential and must be the key factor

EXAMPLE:

The traffic to my blog has constant traffic from social media sites like stumbleupon and other social network sites. Few days it has huge spikes of about 2000 hits in a day from stumbleupon alone, totally free traffic.

Blog attracts about 16% of overall traffic from social media sites of which 48% contribution is from Stumbleupon alone.

The cost of promotion on stumbleupon is consuming few hours of time in writing rich useful content and building a network of bloggers, friends & general users. Comparing this with search marketing campaigns, same amount of traffic might have costed me few thousand dollars.

Never be afraid to use new format of media, content for promotions such as Videos, Apps, Images, podcast, audio files, flash files etc. It is just a new form of content by the underlining principle of promotion remains the same.

Reading:

Measuring ROI from SEO : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625973

Measuring ROI from Social Media Marketing: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/measuring-the-roi-from-social-media-marketing.html
This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/