Quick Response code

QR CODES

         QR codes have started to pop-up in lot of places such as store display, business cards, online ads, postcards etc. Whether QR codes are here to stay or not but from the measurement perspective they do present a huge opportunity in measuring advertising's (particularly offline) effectiveness.

If you are one of those marketers who have embraced QR code or are thinking about it or just curious to know how QR code measurement works then this post is for you.

Measuring URLs in QR Codes

   We won’t be able to measure the number of impressions of the QR codes if they are distributed offline. What you can measure is how much traffic those QR codes are driving to your site or to your pages on 3rd party sites like facebook page, twitter account etc.

• Measuring QR code links to your site
  
           Measuring QR codes that sends user to your site is as simple as campaign tracking. Just add the campaign tracking variable to the URLs that you have in your QR Codes and treat it like any other campaign. Then you can use your campaign reports to see how much traffic QR codes are bringing and how valuable that traffic is.
  
  (Note: The tracking code, that you should append, depends on your Web Analytics tool.
  
           For Google Analytics, you need to append add at least 3 variables, Source, Medium and Campaign Name. to the URL for it to be tracked in the Google Analytics (Check out URL Shortner, http://clop.in as it’s URL builder let’s you append the variables for tracking in Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrend and Unica NetInsights )
• Tracking Phone Numbers in QR Code
  
           To Track phone numbers, that get dialed when someone scans a QR code, use a unique phone number that you have tracking for. If you don't have unique phone number then you can use 3rd party services likes Marchex to get a unique phone number for each QR code that you publish.
  Review:
         We  think QR codes are cool, but they actually have a few important limitations compared to text-based codes, like O-Codes (disclaimer: I am the CEO of O-Codes). We have been enamored by the technology behind QR codes, but created something we think is simpler for our clients to use, and allow them to follow up with interested customers via SMS. So they not only get the analytics but they get captive leads for people who are specifically interested in particular products. O-Codes also work well in settings that are trickier to use QR codes (TV, radio, billboards, magazines in the context of product mentions inline in text, catalogs where there is not enough to room to use a QR code with every product). In the end, we love the fact that marketers and smart bloggers are educating the public about ways to connect the offline and online worlds together, and extend analytics to traditional media
  

Recent news about GOOGLE

Google Acquires Apture, Katango!!!

 

         So far this year, Google has acquired 23 companies...and the year isn't over yet. Its two latest acquisitions, Apture and Katango, just might be game-changing. At the very least, they could put a serious crimp in the plans of the search engine's competitors. One assists the search engine with its powerful yet still new social network, while the other could take its ability to monetize search to a whole new level.

Katango is a company which released an iPhone application in July that generates a list of Facebook friends. The science and algorithms behind it is a bit complicated. Here's a video of Robert Scoble interviewing Katango co-founder/chairman Yoav Shoham on how their product works.

      To protect their intellectual property, Shoham in the interview can hardly be more specific than “magic” when asked how it works. He does, however, explain that it took them a year to figure out how to work this particular brand of magic, and that it uses much more than comments, contacts, and “likes” to find and pull together appropriate clusters of friends.

    Not long after Katango rolled out its application, Facebook revamped, adding more features and service – in part, some believe, in response to Google+ allowing users to join without requiring an invitation from someone who was already a Google+ member. The overhaul included a new Smart Lists feature that gave Katango serious competition. The social network's new feature can autogenerate lists based on location or how people know each other.

     While this Facebook update jeopardized Katango's future as a third-party app for Facebook, there are other big social networks online – and many of them really appreciate a scrappy innovator. Indeed, Google's founders and Katango's founders share a school. Larry Page and Sergy Brin went to Stanford, where Yoav Shoham teaches computer science, and Katango co-founders Thuc Vu and Michael Munie received their PhDs.

   Google acquired Katango for an undisclosed sum. How soon Google+ users will see benefits from the purchase (and the technology) is also unknown. But with Google making regular changes and tweaks to its social network, anything that will help its users find, sort and organize their friends will no doubt be very welcome. That's especially true if the search engine can make it easier and more intuitive than similar features on Facebook.

    But it's the search engine's latest acquisition that could really revolutionize their revenue stream. As Miranda Miller, writing for Search Engine Watch puts it, Google's purchase of Apture “may give them the ability to monetize every page on the Web.” It sounds like an insane overstatement, but given Apture's technology, it might not be.

What Apture exactly does??? This short video provides some tips. Basically, if you're on a web page enabled with Apture's technology, you can highlight a word and click to get more information about that topic – and here's the important part – without leaving the page you're on. When you click, a small window pops up with the information. And if you find something in THAT window on which you want more information, you can highlight and click again, and you still haven't left your original page. At last, it's a practical use for pop-ups!
        Apture is perhaps best known for its Highlights plug-in showcasing this technology. The browser plug-in works in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Best of all, for those who want more than text, the kinds of search results it brings up in its little pop-up window include videos, news, and images. Apture also makes a white-label version of Highlights, used on such respected sites as Economist.com and The Financial Times. Miller notes that publishers use this version “to create an HTML-based overlay for readers to explore topics without leaving the page, using a single line of JavaScript.”
        Apture is a slightly older start-up; founders Tristan Harris and Can Sar note that the company has been around since 2007. And they've been busy; in their announcement stating that they're joining Google, the company notes that they've enhanced more than a billion pages with their products. Apture's founders and employees will join the Google Chrome team, as indicated by the former noting in their announcement that “The modern web is an amazing platform, so stay tuned for even more enhancements to your Chrome browsing experience.”
         Not surprisingly, this has led to some changes. Apture's Highlights browser plug-in has already been taken out of the Chrome store. Miller reports that “All Apture plug-ins will shut down over the next month.” So what exactly will Google do with Apture's technology now?
         Miller envisions the search engine incorporating AdWords into this Highlights technology. Imagine the power of putting ads into every single one of those pop-up search bubbles. These ads would not be like those annoying pop-ups many of us have encountered on the web before; those ads often came unbidden. In this case, the ad would accompany an answer to a request for information, thus following the same pattern we've all become accustomed to when using a search engine in the conventional way.
         “The potential for Google is huge,” Miller notes, as the search engine could start “effectively monetizing every single page viewed by Chrome users.” Is that more than a billion pages? Quite a bit more, as Chrome boasts 200 million monthly active users. There's no telling what the click-through rate is likely to be, but given how precisely contextual the searches are, appropriately targeted ads could do very well indeed. My own personal guess is that you can expect to start seeing Google offer this kind of advertising in Chrome, in beta, as an AdWords option sometime in the first or second quarter of 2012. I'd rather not speculate on when or whether Microsoft will offer something similar with Internet Explorer.
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web analytics and seo

    HAVE A LOOK OVER THIS!!!!

Web analytics

Hai! This post is about the various Web analytics tools…I have not worked in any of these tools but as I was searching for both paid and free tools for web analytics  and the only difference between free and paid is that the paid services provide enhanced/advanced analytics options and can even calculate the success of your marketing campaigns.

Some of them are listed below

Clicktale web analytics

Piwik analytics

Omniture analytics

Webtrends analytics

Google web analytics

Yahoo web analytics

Statcounter web analytics

            But in one discussion ,they stated that Clicktale web analytics is the best because it provides tremendous options, amazing reports and incredible tools that you can use to enhance your web presence and deliver great results by simply optimizing your website. Then there are advanced reports that help you increase traffic on your website by means of investing in only those campaigns that result in greater profits.

Web analytics

Now we can see mobile ad performance in Google Analytics!!

     All AdWords metrics available in Google Analytics can be segmented by these new mobile and tablet dimensions.As many consumers begin to make use of tablets or high-end mobile devices, businesses need to understand this shift towards mobile and adapt our marketing mix. This mobile ads reporting enhancement in Google Analytics is one of many steps that they have taken towards helping ous make more sense of how mobile advertising interacts with our business.

WEB ANALYTICS

WEB ANALYTICS ADVANCED UNITS OF MEASURE

Users

Unique hosts

Visits or sessions

Visit tracking with cookies

WEB ANALYTICS

WEB ANALYTICS BASIC MEASUREMENT UNITS

HITS AND IMPRESSION

‘Hit’ is defined as a single request for any item on your website. This can include images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the components referenced by that page. This means that it requests all the images often including ‘roll over’ images for mouse effects and, perhaps, stylesheets, JavaScript files or other external references. A single page load can result in many hits.

The term ‘impression’ has been adopted into web analytics lingo from traditional advertising. In advertising, a count of impressions is the number of times an advertisement has been seen or heard. With websites, we have logs to tell us the number of hits the server has registered for the ad. When requests for a particular item, such as a page or advertisement are counted, these hits can nominally indicate how many times the item was seen and are therefore sometimes counted as impressions. It can be indicative of the user experience. If a single visit to your home page generates 75 hits, that means the new visitor has to wait through loading 75 items before she gets the full experience. Most browsers will only load four or five items at a time, so loading the home page will take a while. It might be a good idea to rethink the design of that site to reduce the number of items on the pages so they load faster.

PAGE VIEWS

   Page hits are a much more useful metric than hits for analyzing user experience. Web sites are organized into pages, and users (and designers) think of them in pages, so counting page hits makes more sense. Now that you have loaded your home page, wander around your site a bit. Keep track of the number of times a new page loads. This is the number of page hits your visit is registering. The more time you spend on the site, exploring, the more page hits you register. So page hits represents the navigational experience of the visitor.

GRAPHICS HITS

   Other types of hits are important too. “Graphics Hits,”, are the number of requests for images, animations or other graphics. Graphics are often larger than the content of a page and take up a good portion of bandwidth as well as requiring the visitor to wait while the page loads. Looking at Figure 1, you can see there were 19,493 Graphics Hits. If the number of graphics hits for your site is significantly larger than that of page hits, then there are probably a lot of graphics on some or all of your pages. You might consider redesigning the site to make it load faster.

DOWNLOADS

   Finally, Summary counts “Downloads.” This can be programs, archives, zip files, or PDF documents that users download from your site. If you distribute software or documents from the site, it is helpful to have a quick count of the number of downloads in each period.

ERRORS

One of the great features of Summary is that these metrics are counted in the context of many of the reports. So, for example, every period in the time reports contains columns of Hits and Pages, as well as other useful information. Errors are simply a count of the number of requests for items that did not complete – either because they were not there or could not be produced. It is a quick measurement of your site’s diagnostics.

BYTES

The count of bytes in a period is very useful for tracking the bandwidth usage on your network. If you are billed for bandwidth usage on a monthly basis you can see an estimate of the amount of bandwidth your website used in the Summary Monthly Report Bytes column .You can also use bytes to assist in improving the design of the site. Individual pages can take a long time to load if the graphics they reference are large. You can look at the ratio of Bytes to Pages in a report and determine the load-average for each page on your site.