Analytics – the Secret to Monitor Your Marketing

I am not sure how much you know about Google analytics, but it hit the market in 2005 as the premier tool to track detailed statistics about the visitors to your website. It is now currently the most widely used website statistics service, used on about 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites according to Builtwith.com. It tracks everything from the average time someone stays on a page, the origin of their IP address, down to the town that person lives in. Sound creepy? Don’t worry, it is about tracking who your customers are, and where traffic comes from, so new content can continue to be developed right for you.

In a perfect world this would be all you need to really understand your individual market. That was just fine until the major market shift in September 2006 when Facebook started allowing everyone with a valid email address, age 13 and older to create a page. It wasn’t long before Facebook let businesses and individual groups create their own pages. In June 2011 according to DoubleClick (a subsidiary of google), Facebook had reached one trillion page views in that month alone, making it the single most popular website in the world. Now why does this matter? Well if businesses can create pages, and the most popular website in the world allows you to make your own page, wouldn’t you want to know how much traffic your business gets from YOUR PAGE? Of course you do!

Well now you can. Webtrends.com allows you to finally access full demographics from your Facebook page, much like google for any other website. “Webtrends Analytics pulls data from your Facebook pages and apps using Facebook API. Additional conversion data is available with the Webtrends tag. Within a couple of clicks and less than 30 seconds, you start seeing ideas about what’s working and what’s not.” Sounds pretty perfect right?

Well what about other social media. It wasn’t like Facebook that was the only media source to sky rocket in the past 5 years. What about it’s obvious opponent Twitter? Well Tuesday, Twitter finally announced their solution. Twitter analytics currently in Beta is scheduled to roll out in the next couple of weeks. Get ready, your tracking is about to finally catch up with the rest of the world.

Don’t know anything about tracking, check out the following websites!
Google Analytics
Webtrends
Twitter Analytics

Get tracking today!!



Works Cited
Wikipedia
Builtwith.com
DoubleClick
Web Trends
Mashable

Design “Within” Brand

Sometimes I forget how fun it can be to design “within” a brand. When that look and feel has already been established, you have to reach out and find that perfect tweak that will continue to bring in sales while successfully communicating to new potential clients.

The last couple weeks have been all about Dymax. Pictures were edited to be used on Dymaxrail.com. Binders, folders and CDs were updated for their sales department. You can check out how my pictures fit into the new design on Dymaxrail.com, which was designed by Ben York at Imagemakers, Inc.