This afternoon I gave a presentation on business blogging, as part of SOHObiztube.com’s The Draft, an all-day social media workshop.

The last part of the presentation was on my favorite tools for monitoring conversations, as well as the conversions that a business blog initiates. Here’s the list:

Google Analytics — This is still my favorite way to monitor all blog activity. It is fairly easy to configure, it provides a great way to measure conversation (Google calls them “Goals”) and offers benchmarking with other blogs. Price: Free

Technorati — This site provides simply but helpful ways to track the growth of your site, by comparing its “popularity” to others and showing all backlinks (also known as “pingbacks” to your blog from others. Price: Free

CrazyEgg — This is new to me, and admittedly untried. But I like their visualization tools. The one below is a heatmap showing likelihood to click (not to be mistaken for an eye-scanning heatmap). Price: Plans vary in cost

Feedburner — This service, which was acquired two years ago by Google, is an industry favorite for monitoring how many people subscribe to you. It even has a badge, showing the number of subscribers you currently have. If you are reading this near the day it was published, you’ll see that the current theme of my blog displays the badge near the top of the righthand column of every page. (As of this morning, I had 365 subscribers. Thank you one-and-all!) Price: Free

There. That’s my list. What’s yours?

I had a great time talking to the group today, and invited them to post their questions about business blogging here in the comments section. I’m also inviting all of you to let me know what your favorite blog measurement tools are. I’m especially curious if you’ve used the CrazyEgg product line-up. If so, what do you think of it?

Related posts:

• How to determine the ROI of traffic driven to your blog from Twitter posts
• How to extend the impact of your events through blogging and other social media
• Why social media followers won’t be your marketing panacea (Malcolm Gladwell was wrong!)

A week ago I was a co-speaker at a C2 Five Dollar Friday event. One of the last items I touched upon was how to measure traffic that comes from Twitter and other social media posts. I promised the group that I’d document the process.

Note: Get news on my expanded web design ROI workshops, to be held by C2 in Milwaukee and Madison.

Twitter As A Channel for Sales

It wasn’t too long ago that there were no definitive examples of strong positive ROI from Twitter. Since then several high-profile companies have publicized their successes. You might have read a recent account of how, according to Forbes and other sources, a division of Dell Computing has earned over $3 million from sales generated from its Twitter posts.

Here’s how your business can accurately measure direct sales — or track sales leads – generated by this powerful communication channel. All you need is a free Google Analytics (GA) account and the following new GA profiles (a special thanks to eConsultancy for their terrific post on this topic in May):

1.) Track all clicks from Twitter and major Twitter agents

a.) Add a new profile in Google Analytics

Name this new profile something like Twitter Traffic. If you’re creating this profile significantly later than the rest your Google Analytics set-up, you can add a date to the profile name. That will help you know how far back in time your results reach. In this case I haven’t:

Read more »

Digital marketing has always been a paradox. It is two things simultaneously: Extremely expensive and nearly free. It is pricey because the skills needed to stage digital campaigns and “collateral” are still rare compared to those needed to stage traditional media efforts. And it’s free because once you’ve published the material, every incremental interaction costs a fraction of a cent. So how in the world do you estimate a digital return on investment (ROI)?

Here are two trade secrets. In honor of the fast-approaching close of the summer vacation season, I’m going to use a road trip as a metaphor.

1.) Focus attention on the speed of your progress and not on whatever city is currently outside your window.

Web metrics are notoriously untrustworthy. They may be off by 11.5%, or -18%, but of one thing you can be sure: They are never exactly correct. Living with this imperfection requires both a diligent focus on precision and a resignation to the medium’s inevitable “slop.”

The solution is to chart metrics over time, using the last period as a benchmark for this one. A saving grace of web metrics is that as imperfect as they are, they’re always imperfect in perfectly identical ways, month after month (assuming nothing technically has changed).

2.) Remember the cost of the car as you calculate what you’ve spent.

Break the costs of your trip into two: Fixed and variable. With the car trip metaphor, you need to remember that part of your costs are sunk into an asset. Whereas the gas, oil and accelerated depreciation come from the variability of the trip, the expense of the car itself is fixed — something you would have to pay even if you left the car at home.

In the same way, every communication is a contribution to the maintenance of a crucial intellectual property: Your brand. Whether you did nothing this month to burnish that brand, it is still an asset — a source of wealth. (Consider this: You can’t sell a vacation you’ve just had, but you can sell the car you took it in!).

You spent dearly in the past to get your brand where it is today, and you should acknowledge that every investment in communication that mentions the brand is like the replacement of a radiator hose or car battery. It helps retain the brand’s value.

Don E. Schultz and Jeffrey S. Walters, in their book Measuring Brand Communication ROI, used a different metaphor. They compared a brand to a physical property (instead of the intellectual property that it actually is). Should you stop spending every year on its upkeep, it will begin to crumble, and will eventually fall to the ground. In digital marketing efforts, this spending is a portion of every PPC campaign, every email blast, every social media initiative.

What fraction of your digital spending should be put toward the “car” and not the “gas and oil?” That’s the subject of another day. But simply shifting to this paradigm is progress.

Take these two tips to heart and you’ll be well on your way to reporting reliable ROI.

Are you in the Milwaukee area? Then you can learn more when I speak at C2’s September Five Dollar Friday. On the afternoon of Friday, September 18, I will be a co-presenter there, as part of an exciting exploration of “crucial web acronyms: SEO, PPC, SEM,” and — ultimately — ROI!