measurement

Using the Google Analytics Trackbacks Feature to Create a Content Strategy

This morning, I noticed Google Analytics had added a Trackbacks section to their Social Analytics data. This, to me, is very big news.

While bloggers will know all about Trackbacks and why it’s nice to get them, businesses may not be aware of their importance. Yet as the social web in particular continues to be graded, Trackbacks could become even more important, especially in the eyes of Google, as they look to rank the Authority of content and that content’s creators.

So why is this new Trackbacks edition to Google Analytics important and, more importantly, how can you use them to build your content strategy?

The Validation Factor of Trackbacks

For anyone who doesn’t know what a Trackback is, its definition is:

TrackBack is a type of?peer-to-peer?communication system that was designed to send notification of updates between two?Web sites?via a Trackback Ping.?Ping?in reference to TrackBack refers to a small message sent from one?Web server?to another. TrackBacks are useful for informing a Web site that you have referenced its Web site within your own Web site, and is popular with?bloggers.?TrackBack was first released as an open specification in August 2002. – Webopedia.

So, if I write a post and reference content elsewhere, that’s me providing a Trackback to the article. The reason bloggers like Trackbacks is simple – it offers validation that your content is seen as informative enough that someone else wants to share with their readers too (click image to expand).

The potential results of that share, or Trackback, are numerous.

New readers or subscribers;
New potential customers;
Growth of influence;
Identified as a thought leader in your industry;
Search engine optimization (SEO) benefits.

These are just some of the immediate effects; however, by understanding what Trackbacks are and the potential they offer, you can begin to identify opportunities for your business to use this new feature in your content strategy.

Using Trackbacks in Your Content Strategy

As brands begin to understand the importance of content as part of their marketing strategy, using every tool in your toolbox becomes key when it comes to standing above your competitors and attracting eyeballs to your content.

There are a host of ways to do this currently. For example, being part of Google+ Communities or Linkedin Groups, where you can share your content with regards a topic of discussion (in a non-spammy, relevant way, of course).

You can also encourage social sharing via the likes of Twitter, Facebook, employee accounts, etc, or you could join a blog aggregator service like Triberr to increase your content’s visibility.

However, with the new data on Trackbacks available in your Google Analytics dashboard, you can use this additional information to build a content strategy into the bigger picture.

Head on over to the blog or article in question, and thank the author, giving you more visibility to their audience, and showing you appreciate these referrals. It gives a good impression of how you do business.
Identify the most popular content when it comes to Trackbacks, and use that data to build a series (or series of series’) around these topics.
Identify the type of blogs that are sending readers your way, and determine if there’s any kind of partnership opportunity.
Identify blogs that send a lot of new traffic via Trackbacks, and begin to link to them as opposed to their competitors, building a relationship that could turn into future business.
Offer a value-added service to clients by filtering where they could improve their content and what type of information they could start to produce.

Again, these are quick, simple changes you can make now to start improving your own content strategy (and that of your clients). As the new Trackbacks service solidifies, expect more examples to become clear.

And when you tie that into the information available from the Data Activity Hub (click image to expand), that shows where your content is creating conversations elsewhere across the web, you can see the advantages your brand could begin to exert over your competitors.

As I’ve written many times before on this blog, understanding your traffic and how you can utilize that is key, for bloggers and brands equally. Google understands this, and is giving you all the tools you need to make better judgement calls as well as strategic decisions.

Are you taking advantage of these tools enough?

The Question of Reach as a Viable Metric

Last week, I posted the following update across a couple of networks: “Please don’t use ‘Reach’ as a viable metric. It’s a BS number to get clients to pay more for data: don’t go down that road.”

The update resulted in some great discussion on both sides, with agreement and counterpoints on how viable reach is as a metric.

These included:

Let’s not be so quick to disregard Reach. After all, big companies buy Superbowl spots exactly for the Reach it gives them. – Dino Dogan.
Reach has 2 parts. How many people saw something (actual reach) and how many potentially could see something (fictitious reach). If I have a reach of 2 million but at the time I post every day only 3 people see the post what is the real reach? 3. – Howie Goldfarb.
Reach is definitely?ephemeral because reach doesn’t really matter. Action does. Click throughs, downloads, sticky site traffic, purchases, that kind of thing is what really matters. – Shelly Kramer.
But what about quantifiable reach? Meaning, reach is tracked against response & metrics? – Mitch Arno.

All good points – yet (for me personally, anyhoo), I’d disagree on Dino and Mitch’s points on when reach could be used as a viable metric. Here’s why.

The Attraction of Reach

By definition, reach is simply a potential number. It can be broken down a few ways:

On social networks, reach can be the amount of people that may interact with your content, through either seeing it directly, or through one of their connections, or even a social ad;
On blogs, reach can be the amount of people that interacted with your post, through direct readership, a shared link, or a forwarded email;
On media, reach can be the amount of people that could see a TV show, a print ad, billboards, etc, through direct contact or shared discussion later.

Marketers like to use reach as a client metric because it sounds impressive. Instead of having to be restricted by real actionable data, reach can be used instead.

“Twitter User X has 1,000 followers, but a reach of 100,000. That’s 100,000 new customers just waiting for us.”
“Blogger Y has 10,000 subscribers as well as 1,000 followers. Even more new customers just waiting for us.”
Free Local Newspaper Z has a reach of 50,000 homes delivered to. That’s 50,000 new customers waiting for us.”

And so on, and so on. Which would all be great and dandy if reach was a viable metric, but it’s not.

The Problem With Reach

The reason reach isn’t truly viable as a metric is simple – it’s based on the hope that eyeballs are available.

On Twitter, for example, reach is defined by the potential audience of a user you’re connecting with. So, someone may have 1,000 followers, but the followers of these connections combined may equal 100,000 (at least).

When User X with the 1,000 followers tweets something, the hope is that person’s followers will see the tweet and reshare with their audience. If a follower has 100 followers themselves, that’s now another 100 eyeballs to potentially see the share. Potentially being the key word.

Because no-one is online all the time, just waiting for a tweet. And that’s just the live, organic stuff – when you add bots and fake followers into the equation, things become even less impressive, as we can see by the following example of the same Twitter power user.

In the image above (click to expand), I used TweetReach to gauge the potential reach and visibility a certain power user could offer. The user in question has over 217,000 followers.

As you can see from the image, the estimated reach is just short of 200,000, with potential exposure (followers of followers) at just over 2.6 million. Impressive, right?

But this is where reach as a metric falls down, as we can see in the next image.

Using the Fake Follower Check software from Status People, I entered the same user’s details, to see how many of his 217,000+ followers were real. The definition of “real” here is simple – active and not bots or fake accounts.

As you can see by the image above, there’s a huge disconnect between how many of this user’s 217,000 followers are classed as real, active followers.

Suddenly, instead of having access to a potential 2.6 million impressions (which is what the potential reach of the followers pre-fake check would give), you’re now down to 182,000. Still impressive, but a hell of a lot less than 2.6 million.

And that’s assuming that each of the 182,000 “real” numbers are around when this power user sends out a tweet.

This is why reach is such a crappy metric to be using – and yet many marketers use it to increase their rates when charging clients for audience size.

The Real “Reach” Metrics

To Dino and Mitch’s earlier points at the start of this post – I agree, to a small degree, where reach is used by the likes of the Super Bowl ad buy agencies, as well as quantifying the reach. But there’s still the overarching problem that it’s a hit-and-hope metric.

In the Super Bowl example, companies use data from Nielsen, one of the world’s leading audience measurement companies – but it’s aggregated data based on average audience behaviour, versus specific targeted individual behaviour. This means it doesn’t take into account people getting up during ads to grab more beer, food, etc.

With Mitch’s example of quantifying reach, this gets closer to viable metrics, but it’s still relying on the bigger number that can’t be quantified. If we move the conversation over to quantifiable metrics based on more in-depth filtering, then we can get more actionable insights.

Ignore the big number and target the demographic instead – male/female, locale, language, age;
Use search history to identify common keywords and themes relevant to your brand;
Use software like oneQube to identify when users are on Twitter, for instance, and who they’re talking to. Do the same with software relevant to the platform you’re interested in;
Collate this information with Google Analytics or similar to understand what content is attractive and what content was physically shared and acted upon;
Set goals based on real action (as Shelly mentioned in her examples) – click throughs, recommendations, downloads/purchases, referrals, etc;
Compare these actions to the target audience size to determine reach vs. actual ratio.

By doing this, you’re now beginning to bypass reach alone and get to the real nitty gritty – ?your true audience size, as well as the real numbers to filter and use as a proper business metric.

Reach itself can be a starting point when it comes to social proof and how many eyeballs could be reached – but only as a starting point. You need to then do the legwork to define your captive audience.

Otherwise you’re constantly just reaching for what could be – and few businesses, if any, can live on that alone.