To that end I want to provide a few simple things that I feel are essential for any campaign you want to track, online or offline.

Unique URLs

It doesn’t matter which analytics tool you use, unique URLs are bottom-line the most important way to track any campaign. With online campaigns this is fairly simple – just add a unique ID to the URL from the banner ad, PPC campaign, etc. A common way to do this is:

http://www.yoursite.com/landing.html?uid=google_ppc_july2011

The unique string after the ?uid= can be anything, and can even be as cryptic as “40z782osp” if you want. This can always be deciphered later by your analytics tool.

If you are running an offline campaign (print, radio, TV), you really don’t want to use such an awkward URL, but you do want to track any traffic that comes in from the ad so you can measure the effectiveness and the ROI from your campaign. The best way to do this is either through a unique domain name (www.yourcampaignsite.com), or a subdomain (campaignsite.yoursite.com).

Your offline campaigns need a URL, that while unique, is easy for your target audience to remember. If not they may use search to find the company, product or service you were advertising about instead.

Landing Pages

When you are running a campaign, you may be tempted to send people to your site’s home page or another existing page on your site. This is not necessarily a bad practice, but I would recommend designing a special landing page for your campaign visitors to go to. The landing page will be relevant to the ad and include a single call-to-action. The call-to-action should be to send the customer to the primary goal of the campaign (print a coupon, buy a book, download a whitepaper, contact a sales agent, etc.).

This will help focus your customer on the conversion you wish to achieve with the campaign. If they just go to a normal page on your site they can easily be distracted by all the other content and navigation, and never make it to the part of the site you really wanted to drive them to.

There are many more theories and best practices that can be employed to make your campaigns a success, but these are the top things I always make sure are part of any campaign I’m helping to set up and/or analyze.

Differentiating Campaign from Organic Traffic

Naturally there will always be some customers who will be driven to the site by the campaign, but opt to use search instead anyway. During an on-going campaign you should see if there is any increase in organic search or direct traffic to your site. The percentage of increase there may also be considered part of your campaign traffic.

Tracking from your unique URL should also have been set up ahead of time to go into it’s own campaign report. The way this is set up differs between each analytics tool, but they can all recognize any of the mentioned unique URL methods.

A Brief Introduction to IRC

IRC is made up of a variety of different networks, like EFnet, Undernet, DALnet and Freenode, to name a few. Each network is then also made up of a variety of interconnected servers within that network. Generally people volunteer to host one of these servers (back in the day they were even hosted at universities). This set-up creates the a mini-internet, if you will, of interconnected servers from which users can access.

Accessing a network can be done through a variety of means – there are dedicated tools like mIRC for Windows, Irssi, ChatZilla or Xchat for Linux/Unix. Some networks, like Freenode, allow you to connect via a web interface. Personally my favorite is using Pidgin – which allows me to chat from IRC, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and many others at the same time.

Within an IRC network you need to have a “nick” (nickname) and join a channel (chat room). Most networks also let you register your “nick” so that other folks cannot use it when you are not logged in.

#Measure on Freenode

I have recently created and registered the channel #measure on the Freenode IRC network. I chose Freenode because it is an IRC network filled with knowledgeable professionals and students, and has fewer attacks from malicious bots and such than other networks. I invite the entire #measure (and #analytics, #waa, #waw) community on Twitter to join me on IRC for real-time chat and discussions regarding web analytics, online marketing, social media marketing and any related topics. Twitter is a great venue, but can be filled with noise and the 140 character limit can sometimes be limiting when asking questions. The Yahoo group is awesome but sometimes more immediate feedback is needed. I’ve had a channel in IRC for years now and I figured why not extend #measure to IRC as well?

Are you new to IRC? Easiest way to check us out is this:

• Go to http://webchat.freenode.net/
• Type in the “nickname” you want – it can be anything. If it has been taken you’ll be informed and will have a chance to change it.
• For the “channels” type in #measure
• Ignore the “Auth to Services”
• Type in the Captcha and click Connect

Once you have connected you should see the list of folks available in the channel in a list on the right. To chat with them, type in a message in the field at the bottom of your browser and hit “enter.” Anyone with a @ in front of their name is a channel moderator (with the exception of @ChanServ, that is a service bot used to protect the channel and provided by Freenode).

Do you use Pidgin? You can also connect to our channel that way:

• Go to Accounts > Manage Accounts
• Click “Add”
• For the Protocol, select “IRC”
• Select a “Username” (same as the “Nickname” mentioned above)
• Server should be “irc.freenode.net”
• Leave the password field blank (unless you know you have a registered “nick” on Freenode).

Once connected to IRC you will recieve a message from “NickServ,” which is the other services bot on IRC. Ignore any warnings it may have if you are using an unregistered “nick” – this can be changed later. In the “NickServ” window at the bottom type “/join #measure” to join our channel.

If you have any questions at all on how to chat on IRC, register a nickname, etc. and there is no one currently responding in the #measure channel, you can also refer to the Freenode FAQs online.

Here is hoping to see you on IRC!

• World of Warcraft has 12 million subscribers
• Second Life had 1.5 million users log in the past 60 days

Sony/BMG Media Island in Second Life

Now of course marketing to folks inside games like World of Warcraft isn’t always feasible, although there are other ways to reach that market. However in a virtual community like Second Life there are definitely more marketing opportunities. In fact Second Life even gives advertisers advice on how to advertise within Second Life. Some large companies like Sony/BMG even collaborate with Second Life and sponsor areas within the virtual world as a form of marketing.

So how can we analyze the marketing campaigns in these virtual spaces? As far as I know there are no metrics tools that currently measure marketing campaigns within virtual worlds like Second Life, but that doesn’t mean you can’t measure at all. Second Life allows you to post YouTube content so that certainly allows you to measure and track any video content you use in your campaign in Second Life. If you advertise using banners and such then making sure to include a unique URL for tracking purposes would go a long way to measuring and assessing how your campaigns within Second Life perform.

In this age of Social Media of course, having someone actively engaging with potential customers within Second Life (much like engaging with folks in Facebook and Twitter), goes a lot farther than the more traditional advertising media. Building relationships and trust while keeping your brand “top of mind” in people’s consciousness will help build customer loyalty. While this is not as easy to track and measure, it’s certainly not impossible to do.

Definitely when you engage with your customers within Second Life, you can gauge their sentiment first hand. And if you want to send them off to your site make sure it’s a trackable URL you are giving them. We may not yet be to the level of virtual communities like you see depicted on the TV series “Caprica”, but the technology continues to improve and evolve and you too may one day enter “V-Club”, and as this particular medium continues to grow, make sure your marketing and metrics keep up.

However I have wondered about who we’re marketing to on Facebook. Yes, people over the age of 35 are now a growing demographic and so it’s no longer just for the college set anymore. But when I think of my own Facebook usage I have to wonder how effective all this marketing on Facebook is. My friends and I use Facebook to keep up with each other in our busy lives and most of us use ad blockers. So who are companies targeting?

Some of the smart companies on Facebook have tied together Twitter and their Facebook pages, and have started giving free customer support this way. That’s a fabulous way to gain and retain customer loyalty. Tracking marketing initiatives on Facebook really has to go beyond the ads now because so many folks are becoming savvy about ad blockers. However having a fun and engaging Facebook page, or building an app, gives you a greater chance at reaching a wider audience. And of course all these different initiatives need to be tracked and analyzed in order to both understand the ROI and improve performance.

Many enterprise class vendors are throwing their hats in the ring and providing solutions for tracking in Facebook – with Omniture seeming to have the most complete solution so far (see Eric Peterson’s article “Facebook Analytics: Part II – Vendor Solutions“). A web development company in London called Webdigi also offers a solution for tracking Facebook fan pages through Google Analytics. I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before Google comes out with their own integrated offering as well.

Bottom line Facebook right now is hot – with the amount of traffic it gets these days, you can’t help but want to get in on some of the action. However where Google the best model was ads, with Facebook you need a different approach. Don’t get me wrong, ads should be part of your marketing mix on Facebook, but they cannot be your only marketing vehicle. Having a dedicated team to manage a Facebook page that is both engaging, informative and helpful for your target audience is key, and if you can also develop a fun app to throw into the mix more power to you!

These days online marketing and analytics go hand-in-hand and with Facebook quickly becoming the hottest place to market online, it should be no surprise it should also be the hottest place folks want to get metrics and data. You can’t have a successful campaign without understanding how well it’s performing, and constantly improving it over time as you gain insights through your data.

So is Facebook Analytics hot? I think it’s smokin’ … what are your thoughts?

Final day starts all too early. They had gourmet egg “mcmuffins” and plenty of coffee (I needed it). The first session started off with a bang in the general session with Seth Godin (the marketing guru as far as most folks there are concerned). He’s very insightful and entertaining. Bonus – everyone at the conference gets a copy of his latest book “Linchpin: Are you Indespensible?” (Thanks Omniture!). Here is my recap for my last day at the Summit:

General Session: Keynote by Seth Godin

• Ideas that spread, win.
• Genius is solving a problem in a way no one else thought of before – no need to be an Einstein to be a genius!
• Anxiety is experiencing anticipated failure in advance (response from your primitive “lizard brain”)
• Be an artist – find places to do work that is remarkable. Invent and create value. The factory model for marketing is now obsolete.

Breakout Session 1: Email and Social Engagement Practices

• 54% of companies plan to increase email marketing budgets in 2010
• Need a conversational strategy to both listen and engage customers
• Keep messaging relevant for your customers – use targeted messaging as much as possible.
• 66% of Fortune 100 companies are using Twitter
• 20% of all tweets mention brands
• Twitter users are more likely to engage with brands than other social media users
• Social media marketing will grow 34% year over year up to $3 billion by 2014

General Session Luncheon: Today we had a formal luncheon sponsored by Responsys. I sat at a table with folks from Reader’s Digest and had a great chat with a regional manager from ForeSee Results as well. Really had a chance to discuss my background in usability and compare notes over corporations reluctance to do proper usability testing.

Usability Test: Speaking of usability, I skipped the 2nd breakout session to take part in a usability test for Omniture. I was asked to complete several different scenarios using their new dashboard manager which is currently in beta. Looks pretty sweet although there were a couple of areas where I thought usability was a bit lacking. Hopefully they will get addressed before their final release.

Breakout Session 3: Best Practices for Measuring Social Media

• Funny joke from Conan O’Brien: By the year 3000 YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will merge into the ultimate time waster: YouTwitFace!
• Biggest challenge for measuring social media: getting the data. Ways to do it:
  • Web Beacon
    • Ability to get visitor ID
    • But … not always possible
    • Dynamic pages can pose a problem
  • API
    • No visitor ID – just aggregate data
    • However more content interactions available …
  • Is your social media strategy actionable?
  • Common Business Requirements for Measuring Social Media:
    • Awareness/Sentiment
    • R&D – developing the APIs
    • Customer Service

That is about all I got out of that last session – I was really tired by then! I skipped the final general session because I had to catch a ride to the airport and catch my flight back home. You never know how bad the line through security is going to be!

The last fun thing I did was while waiting for my flight, I was watching all the live tweets coming in from the last session – almost felt like I was there anyway (thanks to all you live tweeters!).

In summary I had a really great Summit. I met with a lot of great folks and exchanged info with them and added them all to my LinkedIn profile. Thanks Omniture for putting on another spectacular Summit!

For those of you who missed the Summit this year – Omniture has shared some great photos of the event (Thanks Omniture!).

The day started early – breakfast at 7:30am (I didn’t arrive until 8am). I took the time to go visit vendors in the Partner Showcase and get “stamped” (if you get a card stamped from each vendor and turn it in, you have a chance to win prizes – a great incentive to get more folks to chat with the vendors who pay good money to be there).

Keynote Session in the Grand Ballroom

Morning General Session: It was impressive as always with Josh James (former CEO of Omniture, now Senior Vice President of the Omniture Division) and Shantanu Narayen the CEO of Adobe both sharing insights and introducing speakers. Let me share some of the best nuggets I got from this session.

Josh James, SVP of the Omniture Division at Adobe and Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe

• The coming decade is the Decade of the CMO
• Successful CMOs will:
  • Create an engaging experience with customers
  • Unify and personalize consumer interactions across channels
• Social media is a new driving force in marketing.
  • One of Omniture’s customers makes $10 million / year in sales just from Twitter!
  • Currently 40% of all offline sales are driven by online marketing.
• Omniture announced the launch of Marking Suite 2.0
  • New features will include the ability to target customers who visited your site and did not purchase anything.
• Omniture announced a parternship with Facebook
  • The new Facebook integration will allow businesses advertising on Facebook to get the data directly in Omniture, including the demographic data of folks who opted to click on ads.

Alan Rimmer – Senior VP from RIM

Alan discussed the importance of mobile in marketing campaigns, as well as announcing a partnership with Adobe (hmm a little “in-your-face” to Apple and their refusal to support Flash?).

• In 2014 smart phone sales will overtake PC/Notebooks.
• 35% of smart phone users surf the web daily.
• 25% of all Facebook traffic is from mobile.
• Twitter is accessed 2x as much via mobile than via the web.
• Mobile advertising projected to exceed $20 billion this year.

Dan Rose, VP of Business Development at Facebook

Dan came out to give more detail on the collaboration between Facebook and Omniture and to talk about social media in general.

• Real-time communication (like texting) is replacing email.
• Facebook currently has 400 million users worldwide.
• Facebook users have an average of 130 friends, and 50% log in every day.
• Fastest growing demographic on Facebook are folks 35 and older.

His primary message regarding adding your business to a social network, like Facebook:

• Go Real – don’t be fake or full of marketing slang in your social networks. Be real about your company and who you are with your customers.
• Go Fast – use social media to market in order to leverage the viral potential of social media.
• Go Small – target your ads to your individual customers as much as possible. For example, with Facebook you can specifically target wedding dress ads at women, age 25-30, who were recently engaged.
• Go Big – leverage word of mouth-to-really get your messaging out to a wide audience.

Break-out Session 1: I wanted to attend “Killer Analysis: Best Practices for Making Analytics Strategic” but when I got there the session was full (they wouldn’t let more people in). So instead I sat in on the session “Leveraging Analytics to Build Strategies and Tactics for your SEO Program”. The nuggets of insights I found valuable in this session:

• 95% of all organic search visits come from 1st page results
• What’s next for SEO?
  • Canonical tags – code you add into the header of pages that have the exact same content, but different URLs (pertains to dynamically generated sites).
  • Video SEO – using XML sitemaps and other techniques to get better search results for videos on your site.

Break-out Session 2: “Organizational Readiness for Optimizing Conversion.” Bill Gassman from the Gartner Group presented at this session and had some great little nuggets:

• Best practice for organizational success in optimization:
  • Put 1 person in charge of the effort to ensure consistency
  • Make use of tech support and IT whenever possible
• User Experience (UX) optimization is always a continuous process
• When designing the UX you need to understand:
  • Who your users are
    • Demographics
    • Psychographics
    • Connectivity
  • What your users want
    • Polls and Surveys
  • What your users really do on your site
    • Metrics and analytics
  • Try and match user actions with your business goals
• Taking your organization to the next level requires:
  • A strong C-level executive partner
  • A governance team
  • Use expert consultants during new initiatives
  • Iterative testing, so you can build on what you learned from previous tests
  • Use an optimization maturity model

Break-out Session 3: “Creating Social Media Advocates for your Brand.”

Social Media Myths:

• It’s free (not if you pay people to help manage your social media strategy – Intel has 40 people dedicated to monitoring and managing their social media presence online.)
• It can’t be measured (it can with the right tools – there are many tools both free and paid that help you measure every aspect of social media these days).

Social Media is like an “unpaid army” that can:

• Recruit new customers
• Provide customer support
• Give advice
• Create and share content

When analyzing your social media presence it’s good to keep a record of:

• Who is talking about you?
• Who are your evangelists and detractors?
• Who are potential influencers for your brand? Who do they trust?
• Continue to build your following and encourage interaction
• Don’t forget to update regularly! Don’t let your social media presence go stale.

Afternoon General Session: Keynote by John Battele

The Conversation Economy

• Fastest growing web sites today are ones that allow you to have a conversation with the site and with other customers
• Many brands are already having conversations with their customers – conversational media is real
• What’s important? Scale + Safety + Quality + Engagement + Measurement

Main Talking Points:

• Database of Intentions
  • Every search result is saved forever in databases
  • Search is getting muddy – too much data and sites than ever before
• The Social Graph
  • Who are you?
  • Who is connected to you?
  • Privacy will continue to be a front burner
• The Status Update
  • What’s happening?
  • Where Are You?
• MOLRS
  • Mobile=Local=Realtime=Social
  • Mobile is a social, real-time strategy
• War for the Web
  • Open vs. Closed
  • iPad vs. myPad
  • Google Buzz vs. Facebook
  • Data portability
  • If we allow closed systems to take over the web, it will begin to fracture
• All marketers are now also publishers
  • All consumers are now both

Evening reception was in the Partner Pavillion was nice with more drinks to be had, but this time no food. Ended up leaving early and going back to my room to relax and change into more casual clothes for the party/dinner. Headed out on the bus to the event venue around 8pm for dinner and to see “The Killers” perform in concert.

I wrapped up my day by 1am – it was a long but fun and productive day!

To be continued …

Additional Omniture Summit Reviews:

• TopCWeb
• Beyond Web Analytics
• Fuel Interactive

It’s been a great conference and I am very glad I attended this year. I will recap my experience at this year’s Summit and I also plan to put together a presentation of all the “learnings” I took away from the conference this year which I will present at the next Northern Colorado Web Analytics Wednesday on March 24 (I will share it online after my presentation).

Tuesday March 2 (Day 1)

I arrived in Salt Lake City around 4pm and quickly found the Omniture bus which was taking folks from the airport to the hotel at regular intervals (Thanks Omniture!!!). As I was checking in I ran into one of my Twitter followers (@apbatten). We both flew in on the same flight but saw each other’s tweets before we recognized each other (hard to recognize folks in person from those tiny little twitter profile pics!).

"Basic" Room at Little America

After checking in I headed for registration and picked up my conference materials and swag (this year – a nice pen and a “Poken” – a social electronic business card). I then headed to my room to freshen up before heading over to the Web Analytics Wednesday being held prior to the Omniture Summit reception. The rooms at Little America are practically dripping with old-world European charm and it’s always a pleasure to stay here.

As I was heading towards the Web Analytics Wednesday I actually ran into Eric Peterson in the elevator. That was really cool! He even remembered me from Twitter and from helping me establish the Northern Colorado Web Analytics Wednesdays that I am now hosting. I met lots of other great folks there and many of them knew me from Twitter (ok I’ll admit it was cool to have a fleeting moment of feeling famous).

Around 7:30pm I headed over to the Omniture Summit reception where they once again had complimentary drinks (limit 2) and a really great spread of food set up in the Partner Pavillion. I managed to meet and talk with a variety of folks there and exchanged business cards and “Pokens” with several folks. By 9pm I was ready to crash and I headed back to my room and called it a night.

With as much as I experienced over the course of 3 days I felt it necessary to break my blog entry into 3 parts so this is to be continued …

This year I will be hopping between the conversion and analytics tracks. There are sessions in both that really interest me like:

• Rethinking the Landing Page’s Role in Conversion
• Killer Analytics: Best Practices for Making Analytics Strategic
• Organizational Readiness for Optimizing Conversion
• Creating Social Media Advocates for your Brand
• Integrating Offline Customer Data to Enhance Online Marketing
• Best Practices for Measuring Social Media
• Best Practices for KPI-Driven Recommendations
• And many more …

There are so many sessions I want to attend and some conflict with each other so I have to plan my days at the conference carefully to make the most of all of them.

Of course the other big reason for me to attend is the opportunity to network with other professionals and hopefully have a chance to make some good business connections. I really hope to grow Endress|Analytics this year.

Stay tuned – I’ll write a review of the Summit after I have attended, and I will share my presentation I am preparing for the next Web Analytics Wednesday reviewing the Summit as well!

The program follows a 60 week (just over 1 year) cyclical structure, because as they say on their site, “a linear approach does not support the dynamic nature of digital.” It’s no wonder they partnered with CP+B – there seems to be nothing linear about CP+B’s thinking. Also I can imagine that future graduates of this program may one day be lucky enough to intern with, and perhaps even work for CP+B.

Here is a listing of Digital Media topics that this program offers:

• Interaction Design
• Game Design
• Rapid Prototyping
• Mobile Technology
• Experience Design
• Interactive Strategy
• Digital Narrative
• Digital Production
• Creative Programming
• Digital Branding
• Social Networks
• Software Development
• Digital Networks
• Motion Design
• Digital Management
• Digital Media

So if you are at all interested in any of this Digital Media topics as a course of study, I’d recommend you check out this program.