Piwik: User Friendly, Free Online Analytics Too

Piwik is a free, Open Source Online Analytics Tool created in 2007. Currently, Piwik is used by almost 500,000 websites and upon my review, I think this number will only increase. As a true amateur in the online media space, I came across Piwik while doing a class project for a website we developed. I was looking for a user friendly, free tool to gain an understanding of our website’s traffic. Having never used an analytics tool before, I had very modest expectations. I was hoping to see how many people had visited our sight, when they visited, and where the visited from. Piwik far exceeded my expectations.

After a seamless and quick download, I was able to do see much more than I expected. Not only could I track the number of visitors and their geographical location, but I could see which Search Engines were used, how long they spent on the site, and if they visited again. This was insight I hadn’t expected, but was beneficial in terms of what specific future content we should post in order to reach our target audience. Even though I am not very technical, the Piwik’s layout is very intuitive and ridiculously easy to navigate. I’m looking forward to digging deeper into the tool and increasing our viewership!

 

 

 

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster.com is a social media analytic SAAS product offered by Conversely, Inc., a company formed by three Stanford graduates in 2010. Crowdbooster tracks, measures and reports the effectiveness of entries on multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. Comments, replies, retweets, shares – all can be tracked in real-time so that response and reach can be measured and quantified immediately through reports and charts. The reach and engagement of individual Facebook posts can be viewed, giving companies the ability to see which messages were well received by their followers. Using this information, companies can make future messages more engaging for their audience. Fans and followers can be ranked based on how often and how they engage with posts, allowing companies to notice and recognize this loyalty. Social media professionals can also use the software to schedule tweets and posts to be released at the historically optimal time of day to ensure maximum reach.

One of the best features of Crowdbooster for companies seeking to expand their reach is the list of “influencial” twitter follower engagement (Crowdbooster uses Klout scores to determine “influence”). Using this information companies can interact with their most influential followers.

Though Crowdbooster does not offer a freemium service anymore, a free 30-day trial is available. An excellent review of Crowdbooster tools, complete with videos, is available at http://www.michaelleander.me/blog/facebook-and-twitter-monitoring-tools-crowdbooster-review/

Bufferapp.com makes sharing what you find on the web easy

I discovered Bufferapp.com this week. Of all the social media tools I’ve tried, this is about the easiest to use. Buffer allows a simple plugin feature to your web browser.

From a single button you can share web pages, videos, and news out to your social media channels. There are also some easy to use analytics to help track your posts and activities.

Are Facebook Analytics “Creepy?

In a word, “yes.” Facebook Analytics are definitely creepy. 

A Facebook group can tell the age of the people that are visiting its site. These groups can tell not only what posts you comment on, but also the posts that you repost or even just the posts that you view. At a first glance, this would sound a little bit creepy to a facebook user. 

However, these analytics can be quite helpful to many of the involved parties. Once a Facebook group gets past the barrier of 30 “likes,” Facebook will start providing the group with free analytics. It calls these “Insights.” Facebook Insights tell the administrators more about the visitors to their pages than most facebook users would imagine. They can see reactions, audience reached, and audience demographics on a post by post basis. 

While some would argue that this is dipping into the realm of breaking personal privacy, I would argue that facebook does a relatively good job of what they call “anonymizing” the data. While “anonymizing” isn’t actually a word, facebook does do a good job of it, to the point where unless a customer “likes” a page, the group administrators cannot actually pick them out as an individual.

Also, these “insights” can do quite a bit to help improve facebook content at large. 

Facebook sees analytics as a good way for their customers to see how engaging different posts are and a tool that will help their customers hone their content to deliver more effective posts. In turn Facebook will benefit because with their feedback, groups start posting more interesting content. This free service is not just to help these groups, it is to improve their overall content and make Facebook more exciting.

clicky

Clicky.com provides a ton of data around what is going on with your site.  The nice part is that it can do this for any site, regardless of t.  It seems a bit overwhelming at times.  I’ve found that getting the information and stats is not a problem no matter what the tool is that you use but understanding it or making sense of the data is the hard work.

ViralHeat – Warmer than cold, but not hot.

Filtering through all the social media analytics tools can be very daunting.  There’s a ton of feature overlap, faux-free access, and UI’s that are all over the board.  Enter ViralHeat.  ViralHeat is not the perfect tool, but it wins on a couple of different fronts. First, the interface is extremely simple and straightforward.  Where others are cluttered with fancy dashboards and real-time updates, ViralHeat keeps it clean by allowing you to focus on exactly what you want to see, be it updates from a single source or an analytics dashboard.  It’s a no-nonsense UI approach.  ViralHeat also has a very clean publishing interface to push content to all of your social media channels.  This feature would have been very useful to have at the beginning of this class!  Why is it warm and not hot then?  There were a couple of glitches setting up sources that required me to go into Facebook and remove and then add their app and it still didn’t work quite right.  Other sources worked perfectly but a glitch with Facebook is almost a non-starter.  They also charge $100 per month, and for a product that’s been paired down to basics, the price seems too high.  If ViralHeat modified their pricing to match the product and smoothed out some of the source acquisition issues, they’d definitely warrant the “heat” in their name.

SocialSprout

SocialSprout is a powerful media monitoring tool for businesses to track all their social properties. It has tools for publishing, engagement, analytics and even integration with HelpDesk and CRM. One of the cool features is the Google Analytics integration.

They also have a cool “bookmarklet” thats a little icon that sits in your bookmarks and when you are on an interesting page, its one click to publish the link to all your channels. Installing this bookmarklet is just a simple drag and drop.

They also have a great blog here - http://sproutsocial.com/insights/

Check out  their social media engagement report #BePresent - http://sproutsocial.com/insights/2013/03/brand-engagement-reports/