According to eMarketer, Facebook will surpass MySpace in terms of ad revenue this year, with Facebook expected to bring in $605 million in ad revenue compared to $385 million that MySpace is expected to nab.  With such a phenomenal growth in audience and engagement metrics, there is no surprise many online marketers have their eye on Facebook.

Omniture and Facebook announced that they have teamed up to provide online marketers with tools that help them with media buying and optimization on Facebook making Facebook a stronger marketing channel.

The outcome of this partnership, which builds on the Facebook’s wealth of social media data and Omniture’s analytics capabilities, includes an automated media buying process as well as a single dashboard to plan, deliver, measure and optimize advertising campaigns. Utilizing Omniture’s toolset, marketers can compare Facebook Ad campaign metrics alongside their other media channels.

This tool empowers online marketers to better engage customers/prospects on Facebook and promote the most relevant content, marketing messages, products and services.

Omniture clients will also benefit from this new partnership as it helps them generate reports specifically designed to understand the effectiveness of their Ads for Facebook elements such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Pageviews might not be all you care to measure using Google Analytics.  You may like to measure the number of times your files (PDFs, AVI, WMV) are downloaded.  Google Analytics provides you with the capability to track clicks on file download links.  Because these links do not lead to a pageview on your site containing Google Analytics tracking code, you’ll need to tag the links with the _trackPageview() JavaScript to create a virtual pageview so that you can track these downloads.

For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.semseoexpert.com/files/tracking-downloads.pdf as a pageview for /downloads/tracking-downloads you would add the following attribute to the link’s <a> tag:

< a href= ” http:// www. semseoexpert .com /files/tracking-downloads.pdf”>

< a href= ” http:// www. semseoexpert .com /files/tracking-downloads.pdf” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/tracking-downloads’); “>

You can create a virtual pageview to represent any kind of activity or interaction in your site.   All you need to do is to call _trackPageview() and provide a user friendly name.   This will create a virtual pageview in GA interface (in the Top Content and Content Drilldown reports) even though no new page has actually been loaded.

Google Analytics Top Content Report - PDF Download

Since virtual pageviews appear along with standard pageviews in Google Analytics reports, you may wish to create a duplicate profile where you filter out the virtual pageviews.

Another point that is very important to consider is that even though virtual pageview is a great way for tracking PDF downloads, you should not use trackPageview JavaScript for tracking all kind of events (e.g., tracking menus) as it can potentially inflate your traffic reports in GA.

Web Analytics

To ensure that you run effective SEM campaigns, you should take advantage of Web Analytics applications to better understand and optimize the performance of your campaigns. If you use Google AdWords to run PPC ads, you can easily integrate Google AdWords and Google Analytics by linking the two applications. However, you may find some discrepancy between the stats reported by PPC vendors (e.g., Google AdWords, YSM, MSN adCenter) and Google Analytics. This can happen for various reasons such as:

• Missing Tracking URL – If you like Google AdWords and Analytics, GA automatically pulls the data from AdWords. However, if you run ads on other platforms, you need to tag the destination URLs so that the GA would differentiate between organic and paid traffic. Incorrect tagging or missing tags can result in inaccurate reports in Google Analytics.

• Clicks vs. Visits – PPC interfaces usually report on clicks whereas web analytics applications report on visits. The two numbers do not necessarily match and could cause GA to underreport because:

* Some visitors may have their cookies disabled
* JavaScript errors might happen
* Visitors might browse away too fast for the JavaScript to get rendered

• Invalid Clicks and Click Fraud – As I mentioned in my previous post on click fraud, search engines, in order to keep the integrity of their systems, try to eliminate invalid clicks when they suspect fraudulent clicks before they report on Click and Cost data. Nevertheless, web analytics applications report on the traffic generated by those clicks.

• Redirects – some redirects can strip out the tracking tags or gclid parameter.

There will always be a discrepancy between the data provided by web analytics applications and search engines platforms. What is important is not to be overly concerned about the data accuracy and instead focus on the trends to find the best way to optimize your marketing campaigns.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, Web Analytics Consultant

Cookies are small text data given to a web browser by a web server. The data is stored on a website visitors’ hard drive and is returned to the specific web server each time the browser requests a page from that server.

I have previously written some articles on Web Analytics on topics such as Web Analytics & Cookies, Introduction of Google Analytics, improvement of website usability utilizing Web Analytics, SEO KPIs, Branding KPIs, and benefits of Web Analytics.

Given the growing importance of web measurement and the fact that the aforementioned articles seem to be some of the most popular posts on my blog, I decided to focus on writing some more tactical posts on setting up and implementing Google Analytics.

If you have a small and static website, setting up Google Analytics can be very easy and straight forward and you may not need a Web Analytics consultant especially if you are relatively tech savvy. A little bit of training on GA and you are good to go. However, if your site is complex, dynamic, offers e-commerce transactions or you need to measure traffic across multiple domains, sub-domains or third party shopping carts, you might need the help from a Google Analytics consultant.

Before you choose Google Analytics as your Web Analytics application of choice, you may consider some of the features GA has to offer:

Language – Google Analytics interface currently supports over 24 languages.

Scalability – Google Analytics can support both small and large sites. However, there are some limitations in terms of number of goals you can set (currently limited to 4 goals per profile). In addition, in cases of high traffic websites, some of GA stats are shown based on data sampling.

Even though Google Analytics has made web analytics affordable for small businesses, GA also offers some sophisticated features helpful to enterprise level websites.

Integration with Google AdWords – in just few steps you can easily integrate your Google AdWords PPC campaign with your Google Analytics and start measuring your AdWords pay-per-click campaign performance without the need to tag every single keyword, ad copy, ad group an campaign.

Campaign Reporting – whether you would like to measure your Google AdWords performance, your PPC campaign on Yahoo or MSN adCenter, e-mail marketing, web advertising, your social media initiative or offline marketing campaigns, Google Analytics can.

Funnel Visualization – if your audience need to path a funnel to become a lead or customer, you need to monitor and optimize your funnel on an ongoing basis to increase your conversion rate. GA’s funnel visualization report just does that.

Customizable Dashboard – if you need a quick overview of some of the most important key performance indicators, you can set your dashboard up so that you can have a bird’s eye view of your site performance in a glance.

Cross-Segmentation – Google Analytics allows you segment your traffic by different criteria and compare the performance of different segments.

Measuring PDFs and Virtual Page Views – Google Analytics allows you to measure how many times your PDF files are being downloaded by creating virtual pageview and track back the downloads to the contributing campaigns.

Event Tracking – In some cases, you may need to track certain events and actions to see how your audience interact with your interactive elements of your site such as videos and flash files. GA makes this easy for you through its event tracking feature.

Internal Site Search Reporting – this is one of the most useful yet least utilized feature of Google Analytics. Internal site search reports give you insight into the mind of your audience and can help you optimize your website usability and product offerings.

Automated Reporting – Too busy to remember to login and check your website performance? Set up, schedule and share reports automatically.

I will try to cover some of these features as well as some more advanced Google Analytics set up techniques in the feature posts.

Nima Asrar Haghighi – Google Analytics Consultant, Toronto