A snapshot showing the value of a brand

Surprisingly there are still skeptics to the power of a brand to add significant value to a business. This usually comes from the operations and finance folks. Accounting practices don’t have a tidy place for things that exist more between the ears of consumers than within a company’s warehouses and bank accounts.

When I’m teaching the concept of brand building (versus business building), I define the former efforts as bolstering its “intellectual property value.” This is done partially by the folks in marketing and communications, but far more commonly it’s done by such things as innovations in product design, improved distribution and creative pricing.

Apple has certainly done two out of three. Their pricing is hardly “creative.” As a market leader, Apple’s prices are mostly set to convert this elevated brand value into lovely lucre. Lots of it.

Strong Brands Can Deliver Amazing Profits

Below is a case in point, taken from an Economist Magazine published earlier this month (a pay wall may block you from full content):

The story is about diminishing returns for most cell phone handset makers. Diminishing, that is, except for Apple. Comparing Apple’s handset share of market with the brand’s share of profits is a clear demonstration of how powerful a strong brand can be to maximize profits — even with relatively modest market share.

When Virtual Pageviews trump Events

There was much excitement when Google Analytics unveiled its Events metric. This meant web analytics could store several levels of information on a specific action, and associate that information with a unique web visit and visitor. Before that, if you wanted to — let’s say — record a download, you’d need to create a Virtual Page View.

So why did I recently blog on Jason Falls’ site about creating Virtual Pageviews when recording interest actions, such as “Send to a Printer,” or sharing actions, such as “Email a Friend?” or “Share on Facebook?” Why don’t I just create Events?

Using AddThis To Talk To Google Analytics

The answer is simple: If you consider sharing to be a goal of your site, you may want to set it as a Google Analytics (GA) Goal. Events, for all of their power, can’t be set as Goals.

Another action that Events are commonly used for is downloading white papers. Events seem perfect for this because you can set and capture a number of variables, such as title. In other words, you can set the Event Label as the title of the paper. But if you want to measure this as a Goal in GA, you’re out of luck.

Events don’t even “talk” to Goals. [This is no longer true – changes to GA allows any event to be used as a Goal – JL] Let’s say you want to generate a report showing how many people who downloaded a white paper remained on the site for three or more minutes. The time on site can be set as a GA Goal, but you can’t easily generate a report showing the percentage of those who downloaded that remained on the site for that time period.

You can do all of this with GA Virtual Pageviews.

My rule of thumb is this: If you need to identify more than one variable with an event (such as identifying various Actions and Labels), and you do not need to correlate these with GA Goals, used Events. For all else, stick with Virtual Pageviews.

How To Track Content Interest Index In GA Using AddThis

Here is that how-to post I was referring to:

How To Measure Interest Using Google Analytics and AddThis, posted on Social Media Explorer by Jason Falls.