Complete Web Monitoring - Community 2.0

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Notes on slide 1


This presentation is also happening online - we’re going to use Twitter throughout. I’m @seanpower and Alistair is @acroll
if you want to get our attention and discuss stuff, use the #cwm tag and we’ll catch it.
feel free to ask us questions, comment, discuss.

you’ll see alot of ravens during the presentation
We wrote a book for O’Reilly that we’ll get to in a minute
and O’Reilly books generally have an animal on the front cover - we were given the Raven.
We didn’t know what to make of it initially but it grew on us.
We decided to crack open Edgar Allen’s Poe the Raven and found some eeriely appropriate sentences in it like: “I betook myself to linking”

and “tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door”.

{ explain what the book is }

As we were researching it, we found patterns and similarities within the growth of particular types of monitoring, which leads us to believe that Adam Smith was right.

before we get into monitoring:

we believe that there are four types of sites

media sites (like blogs, search engines and adwords based sites)

Transaction sites (like ecommerce, lead generation or enrollment sites)

collaboration sites (like wikis, news aggregators, user groups, classified ads, or anything where the value of the site is largely determined by the content users generate)

software as a service sites where subscribers expect reliability after paying a monthly fee for a service.

the types of things you want to know on a website largely determine the toolset and methodology you’ll choose to approach them

What i mean by that is your intention should determine the tool and not the other way around. So often, we say “let’s install Google Analytics and see what it gives us” which, in our opinion, is the wrong way to look at things.

ex, if you wanted to know how your visitors benefited your business, you’d take a look at internal analytics, which is usually governed by some web analytics tool.

if you wanted to see what was working best and worst on your site, you would want to set up some sort of WIA tool.

all of these questions tie into 6 fundamental questions


we’re going to spend the day today with a birds eye view approach at what the bigger picture is and how communities tie into this bigger picture.

the big picture splits neatly into 6 major questions:

the first one looks at user behaviors - what a user did on your site.

the next quantifies design and user experience and helps you understand if design changes that you’ve made are actually working, or if your site is usable

but some visitor motivations are impossible to determine unless you go out and ask them. Voice of the customer gives you the ability to reach out to your customer base to understand why they’re doing certain things

but all of these things are moot if the site isn’t up. and if it’s not up, users aren’t going to be impressed.

next, we talk about the minefield of buzzwords. Things like Social Media, Community Management, Community Listening Platforms and so on.

ultimately, it’s really about understanding what people are saying about you.

there’s also a smaller group of people that are likely doing something similar to what you’re doing. it’s important to understand where they’re at and what they’re plotting.

all of these questions are often handled by different people in different departments. In the end, you need to realize that you’re part of a much larger machine:

communities are just a means of interaction and a small component of the big picture. Folks in marketing in charge of analytics are proving their worth already by giving answers to management looking to better direct the company.

If you want to remain relevant, you’re going to need to do the same thing for your turf first, and then learn how it meshes with all the other components before someone else does it in your place.

understanding what users did is the topic of web analytics.

the gauges, pages views, metrics and KPIs all exist for one purpose alone - to prove that your business goals are being achieved.
Basic web analytics looks at three major areas

first, web analysts look at entrances.

understanding who is sending you traffic helps you optimize channels already giving you traffic, or new ones that you didn’t know of

the next step is understanding what people are doing on your site. This is the activation step of Dave McClure’s AARRR model (see pirate metrics if you haven’t already seen it before)

instead of letting an analytics platform walk you through a site that it doesn’t understand, you should already know before hand what the most important business priorities are and optimize those paths that lead to its success.

in other words, you should begin by concentrating only on the places and tasks that users do to achieve your business goal.

a place is a page where a user is going to pause for a second to consume information, like reading a blog entry, voting on relevant content, reading technical information and so on.

tasks are a series of steps that a user needs to accomplish in order to achieve something, like a sign up process, a shopping cart experience, adding a contact in a SaaS portal and so on.

by mapping out your most important places and tasks in your website, it forces you to concentrate on the things that drive the most value of your business instead of analyzing whatever happens to catch your eye.

Once you’ve gotten a handle of places and tasks, the last thing you’ll want to look at are exits.

exits are important and help you determine two things.

sometimes, you want people to leave your site as fast as possible. That’s the case for search engines, for instance. As long as a user is clicking on an ad, you’ve potentially made money.

but sometimes users leave because they’re sad. they weren’t able to achieve whatever goal they wanted to, or even if they did, they weren’t interested enough to stick around.

web analytics is important, because it helps you understand what your community is doing once they reach your site.

the next measure of success is by using web interaction analytics.

users do four things when they get on your site.
they consume data,
they follow links,
they try and give you data
or they interact with data served on your site

at each step along the way, something can go wrong

some users may never read content that happens below the fold.

web interaction analytics tools help you measure if people actually ever make it to the bottom on your site.

WIA tools also help you figure out where people are clicking (and at what volume). this can have some suprising effects. For instance, in this graph, there are a couple of areas where you see color that aren’t clickable. The design shows otherwise.

you might also be interested in figuring out where people are abandoning within forms.

or more importantly, what users actually saw when they interacted with your page. by replaying data, you can see things from the users point of view, removing the need for your users to send you screenshots or explain what they did to find errors or issues that prevented them from doing something.

web interaction analytics is also really important because it helps you understand if the design changes that you’re making on your website is impacting your business goals in a positive or negative way.

you might not be able to figure out what your users did by stats alone - and that’s where voice of the customer tools come in.

by asking your users to share their opinions about something - whether on your blog, site or through social media channels, you can get a much deeper understanding of your visitor motivations.

for example, a leading travel site that we were talking to was trying in vain to figure out why their visitors would come to their site, check rates and availability then leave.

discounts, changing layouts, modifying text - nothing helped changed the high abandonment rate. but by asking their visitors open ended questions like “why did you come to the site”, they were quickly able to determine that for most of us, it was all about seeing if things were available. once we were ready to purchase, we’d simply compare brands to those that matched our loyalty programs.

in other words, the reason why they though thought people visited their site were wrong. so, the site changed - they decided to offer deep discounts on hotels, but instead hid the name of the hotel until you’d purchased, which drastically increased conversion rates.

by asking your users open ended questions about their motivations and using a voice of the customer survey tool like Foresee, iPerceptions or Kampyle, you can understand your visitors intent (like why they joined your twitter feed, or why they’re interested in you).


but sometimes things can go wrong. if a user can’t achieve what they want to do on your site because it’s too slow or they have errors, then they’re likely to go elsewhere.

for example, you can create a simple graph that shows how fast your pages load over time against the amount of conversions you have. In this case, we can see a drastic reduction in conversion rates over the weekend because the delay in page loading topped 10 seconds.

page load time really matters! this graph is awesome!

{explain graph}

by working with your operation team, this graph alone can set the tone for the type of page load time

free tools exist, like mon.itor.us, pingdom and so on. as you’d expect, you get a little bit of data (and ironically enough, lots of downtime) with free tools.

enterprise tools give you much more data and granularity, but you have to be careful so you don’t drown in data.

in the end, someone in your company is looking at this type of data, and it’s important for you to understand if the performance of your website is impacting you in any way.

understanding what people are saying about you is a step that many of you are very familiar with, so we won’t spend much time here.

ideally though, the first thing you’ll want to do (especially if you’re just launching a community monitoring initiative) is to find interesting places that matter to you.

you can use tools that return relevant terms based on ones that you feed it (like google sets)

or use trending tools to understand what matters to members of geographical regions

you can use your analytics programs to understand the search terms that people are most often finding you with

and use external tools like spyfu to find synonymous tools based on the internal ones you’ve found.

you’ll also find a wealth of information in the referring sites report in your analytics program - such as prominent blogs that may be linking to you.

of course, you’ll also want to find interesting people that may be interested in your content as well.

you can do this in many creative ways. in this example, we take an article whose viral spread we want to understand

we pass it through a URL shortening service

and google the result.

I found this guy John on MyBlogLog that seemed to really be interested in the type of stuff I was tweeting out to him. So i stalked john for a little bit then out of the blue one day told him “Hey John, thanks for spreading that article that i wrote a while ago”. He was like “wtf? where’d you come from!”

so it’s important to avoid being creepy at the same time - especially when you’re drilling down from the aggregate user trends to the individual users themselves.

in the end, we found that there are really 8 major types of communities today with four levels of engagements to each.

you’re familiar with all of these technologies, so we won’t spend alot of time on each. In no particular orders, there are:

mailing lists, where users share mail with each other in a group setting

forums where users can talk with each other - but not in real time

irc communities, where users connect with each other in real time

social networks, where users can connect with each other and build their social graph

blogs where you state an opinion and can interact with your users through comment systems

wikis, where users share searchable information with each other

micromessaging platforms like twitter

and news aggregation sites where communities vote on popular content.

within each of these communities, you can interact with them through various levels of engagement

first, you can search each community

by setting up google alerts

or by setting up page level alerts to tell you if a particular site has changed. This is especially useful if you want to be told of an update on a particular site that might not be indexed by google often and doesn’t have an RSS feed for the area you want to follow.

you can also roll out your own search engine to find and be alerted on content on a particular group or type of site.

you can use forum crawlers like bigboards to forum mentions

and do the same on IRC using search engines like searchirc.

in walled gardens, you can get rudimentary aggregate keyword information through programs like Lexicon for Facebook.

twitter has a powerful search functionality

and you can compare your share of voice on different networks using tools like site volume.

you can also join communities too. In some cases, this gives you a bit more information and flexibility.

some mailing lists require you to join so that you can search them

and many forums won’t allow you to read the content until you actually become a member as well.

walled gardens like facebook only gives you searchable information once you’ve joined, and even then - will only give you information on your own social graph - not beyond it.

by joining certain blog comment communities, you can get more insight into the types of comments and blogs certain users visit.

if you moderate platforms, you gain even more visibility, understanding and metrics.

for example, moderating a mailing list might mean that you have the power to decide if a particular message can get published to the list or not.

and moderating a facebook group may mean that you can reach out to members, delete and invite them as well.

finally, running a platform gives you the ultimate visibility at the expense of the time and effort it takes to run it.

you can run a social media platform

and take advantage of the built in stats that the platform offers you. This is the case for ones like Lithium, Jive, Teligent and so on.

you can run IRC servers which can give you a much broader set of metrics like channel names, user names and so on.

you can run your own blogs, which means that you’re free to run any analytics service you want on it.

running a wiki means that you can track all sorts of information such as incipient links, number of posts per day and so on.

if you run your own micro-blogging platform, you’re free to integrate it in whatever application you own, and run any analytics in the back end. This can give you powerful information such as social graphing information.

community listening platforms exist to help automate this whole process - but like all tools, they’re not perfect and many are starting to emerge (so they’ll be going through some growing pains).

first, they automate the process of finding conversations for you.

instead of spending time setting up the prospective searches to find content, the community listening platforms will do it for you

but much more importantly, community listening platforms aggregate content in meaningful ways. it’s extremely time consuming to go through multiple websites to find relevant content. having it organized in a centralized dashboard helps you save lots of time and money.

the information is presented to you in a concise fashion, allowing you to drill down only to articles that may be of importance to you.

even better, listening platforms graph all of this information over time, allowing you to trend the data to see if your community efforts are having any effect on your audiences.

they also allow you to drill down to individual users to help you understand who they are and what they do.


they’ll also measure the sentiment of articles -

- helping you to determine if people are reacting positively, neutrally or negatively to a particular search term.

finally, community listening platforms manage your responses so that you don’t trip over each others feet in a team setting.

comment

the last leg in a complete web monitoring strategy is figuring out what your competitors are up to.

the first thing that you’ll want to determine is who your competitors are, and you can largely use the tools and search techniques that we talked about earlier to do this.

once you’ve found some competitors, one of the things you can do is determine their relative popularity -

using services like compete.com. While it doesn’t give you much detail, it’s a starting point.

you can also judge their relative reputation -

by figuring figuring out how many links or mentions they have to a particular area within their site and comparing that to yours. In this case, we can see that watchingwebsites.com has 491 links whereas Dave Fleet’s blog has 8,400.

you can also use referral analytics tools to figure out what keywords and referrers send traffic to competing sites, in order to build a strategy to raise your prominence with those keywords.

you can use sites like technorati to judge how well these efforts are doing

and google trends will help you figure out how well you’re doing geographically.

Let’s see some concrete examples of how you can use all of this technology.

While you’re at it, why not show the data off to the public.
A dashboard can dramatically reduce support call volume and can increase your brand trust and awareness

In the end, this is what it should all look like.

there’s a much larger analytics ecosystem that exists. Yikes!

comment

This is a detailed model of what we’ve just covered, which we’ll stick on Watching Websites soon.

And yes, everyone needs complete web monitoring. That’s why they sell it at Target.

Thanks for the time. If you want to reach us or follow us online, here’s how. And if you want to pre-order our book (which would freak out our editors) we’d love it. We’re shameless self-promoters.

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Complete Web Monitoring - Community 2.0 - Presentation Transcript

  1. A report from the frontlines of the web w/ Sean Power (Alistair Croll wishes he could be here)
  2. #CWM
  3. I betook myself to linking...
  4. ...tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber doorcommu
  5. four types of sites
  6. Ye Olde Media Site
  7. Ye Old Transaction Site
  8. Ye Olde Collaboration Site
  9. Ye Olde SaaS Site
  10. What could we watch? What we’d like to know Tool set How much did visitors benefit my business? Internal analytics Where is my traffic coming from? External analytics What’s working best (and worst?) Usability testing How good’s my relationship with my market? Customer surveys, community How healthy is my infrastructure? Performance monitoring How am I doing against my competitors? Search, external testing Where are my risks? Search, alerting What are people saying about me? Search, community monitoring How is my content being used elsewhere? Search, external analytics
  11. what did they do
  12. how did they do it
  13. why did they do it
  14. could they do it
  15. http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrispearson72/2398350464/ mine field of buzz word
  16. what did they say about it
  17. what are they plotting
  18. http://www.flickr.com/photos/79561285@N00/201975334/
  19. what did they do
  20. http://www.flickr.com/photos/osvaldo_zoom/2549915581
  21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/3005588909/ places tasks
  22. http://www.flickr.com/photos/articnomad/241620406/sizes/l/
  23. how did they do it
  24. http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanlady/3118301118 consume http:// give data interact
  25. why did they do it
  26. how did they do it
  27. how did they do it
  28. could they do it
  29. what are they saying about you
  30. find interesting places
  31. find interesting people
  32. creepy!!
  33. the 8 types of communities
  34. four ways to interact
  35. #1 - search
  36. #2 - join
  37. #3 - moderate
  38. #4 - run
  39. community listening platforms
  40. find conversations
  41. aggregate content
  42. measure sentiment
  43. manage your responses
  44. what are they plotting
  45. do i have competitors
  46. are they popular
  47. do they have a better reputation
  48. http://www.gapingvoid.com/now%20what.jpg
  49. Putting it all together The Big Picture
  50. CWM maturity model Level 5: Level 1: Level 2: Level 3: Level 4: Web business Technical details Minding your Engaging the Building strategy own house Internet relationships Enterprise KPIs, User loyalty, Analytics How many hits Site conversion Referrals, traffic online/offline lifetime value integration Product What did they Segment actions Segment actions Learning curve WIA specialization by see/click? by outcome by demographic analysis usability groups “Contact us” & Onsite surveys & Chatroom Customer Sentiment tied to VOC email feedback; interception; feedback; Virality collaboration, KPIs, VOC used satisfaction loyalty and W.O.M. validation in product Basic availability Transactions; Testing third- Correlation with Procurement, Synth & performance testing multiple party, mashup, other analytics; tying outage to from many sites tiers community competitors revenue, KPIs Sniffer, network Aggregate Segmentation, Web tie-in to RUM flows for tactical measurement of visit tracking, User records ticketing, CRM IT pages diagnostics systems Are they listening Long funnel Am I being Do I have a Collaborative Community amplifying; analysis; lifetime discussed? presence? PM, CS, etc. sentiment engagement
  51. we’re available at Target!
  52. Thanks! alistair@bitcurrent.com sean@httpd.org @acroll @seanpower linkedin/in/alistaircroll linkedin/in/slpower bitcurrent.com www.watchingwebsites.com rednod.com gigaom.com/author/acroll www.watchingwebsites.com http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Web-Monitoring- Performance-Communities/dp/0596155131/

+ Alistair Croll and Sean Power Alistair Croll and Sean Power , 9 months ago

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