Addthis Analytics: New Features 2011

AddThis just launched a couple of new features for their Analytics.

What is AddThis?
AddThis is one of those services that can be implemented on your site or blog which publish your page or site in social networking sites. These services (there are various providers and they tend to be free), invite you to ‘Share This Page’ and when you click on the logos of your favourite social networking site, the page is published on your wall in Facebook or as a tweet on twitter, so your friends can see what pages you are reading, what you like,...

Analytics for AddThis

Recently I compared the data and analytics provided by AddThis with some other services. AddThis has a very good analytics section on their page, in which you can see how many times people share your pages on different social media platforms, how much traffic this sharing brought back, what content was mostly shared,...

New Features
Just before Christmas, AddThis launched some new features for their analytics section, which are pretty cool, I must say.

The improvements are based on 2 characteristics of this service:

1. AddThis is used on various sites. This means that AddThis has the power to cross-track shares and visits of people on different sites: for instance, if I share content from a Sports site using AddThis and afterwards I share content from a Music site using AddThis, AddThis knows that I’m the same person who shares (and hence most likely ‘like’) both topics of Sports and Music. Considerations about privacy aside (maybe we don’t like/want AddThis to know all this about us), all this represents great Insights for website owners who use AddThis: visitors who share the content of my site – what other content do they like/share?

2. AddThis is an external provider. This means that if you use it on your site, you need to implement a little code on your site, which is external. By doing this, you actually give access to AddThis to obtain data of your site. AddThis can track how many people come to your site, how they got to your site, what they do on the site… This is all very valuable information, and you when you implement AddThis, you give this information to an external party for free. So it might just be good that AddThis uses this information to give value back to the websites who give free data to them.

Important parenthesis:

Other services, like ShareThis, also have these characteristics and are also able to cross-track visitors who share on different sites, and they can also track all the analytics of your page. ShareThis already started in the summer of 2010 to use both ways to give cross-track and competative data to the users. I discussed this information in this post.

Back to AddThis:

In my opinion, the 2 most important new features are the following:

Audience:

AddThis uses the information it has from shares via AddThis on other sites to report on the Audience's interests: what the people who come to your site ‘also like’. So you can see if ‘Sharers’ of your content also like Sports, or Music.
It's important to note that if you have very few shares or your visitors don't share much on sites which use AddThis, maybe you won't have enough data to get something usefull from this. 

Searches & Referrers: AddThis starts using the information of where the visitors who share content of your site come from. It gives 2 reports: First the 'Searches', which represents the keywords people use in search engines to come to your site and which visits resulted in shares of your pages. Second there is the  Referrers report, which represent the sites people visited before coming to your site and sharing a page.

Of course, it would be massive to see these Searches & Referrers crossed also with the click-backs, not only with the Shares: what searches resulted in people sharing and did those shares also resulted in people coming back to your site? This might be a something useful for a future launch.

More new features of AddThis Analytics

There are some other new features which are also pretty cool:

First AddThis introduces a metric called ‘Influencers’: AddThis used to report on the visitors who came to your site and shared content, and those visitors who came back after somebody shared content. Now there is a new metric, which is the number of the sharers who actually drive traffic back.

Then there is the new metric ‘Lift’: it represents the percentage of visits that the shares drive back: for instance, 100 Shares which bring back 20 visits represent 20% of Lift (=20/100).

AddThis also includes mentions and comments on Twitter and Facebook. This is a form of Social Monitoring, which is not new. Though it is nice that it comes integrated in another Analytics platform, so you have both the ‘Social Bookmarking’ data from AddThis and the Social Monitoring in 1 application.

Another improvement is the Countries report, which shows in which country your content is shared and click-backed. Before these new features, AddThis only showed continents, which wasn’t a particularly enlightening way of representing where people were sharing your content.

Feedback

When launching all these new features, AddThis asked about feedback. First of all, I'd like to say AddThis has done a great job with these new features. Some comments:

My first comment would be an obvious one: it would be nice if all these features were integrated in Google Analytics and other Web Analytics tools. I know this is not easy and will take time, but still.

Second, ShareThis has a competitive feature, where it compares how many people share content on your site with how many people share on similar sites. Such a report is very actionable: it gives a great idea whether you can improve shares or not. So it would be great if AddThis also worked on this.

Third: it would be nice to start include ‘Site goals’ in the analytics of AddThis. I've discussed this before when comparing the Analytics of various sharing providers, and I don’t think it can be that difficult to develop an integrated method (with some kind of pixel or tracking which can be implemented in the ThankYou – pages) to see what all this sharing and clicking-back helps with achieving the goals for your site.

Related post:

Comparing Analytics of AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny and SocialTwitst

How to track visits after sharing in Facebook

How to track visits after sharing in Twitter

To see all the features, you can watch this video of AddThis:

My Tag Cloud of SEO in 2010

In 2010 I managed to write some posts which found an audience in Search Engines.
I've done a little Tag-Cloud using Wordl to see what Searches drove more traffic to my blog: it looks like the audience that found me was looking for information on tracking shares in Facebook using AddThis, ShareThis and AddToAny.

Related Post (August 2010): Use Wordl Tag-Cloud to Improve SEM/SEO Strategy 

Track click-backs from 'Share this in Twitter'

In this previous post I've explained how you can track the visits to your site, generated after someone shared the link of your page in Facebook. 

In this post, I'll explain the same thing for Twitter: say you have a link or a button on on your site or in an email, asking to people to share your site or offer with their friends in twitter. It's nice to know how many times your site is shared using this system. But it's even better to know how many new visits this sharing has generated. And if you can find out how many of these visits come to your site, it's easy to find out how many it added to your site goals like registration or downloading a demo.

I'll use Link Tracking for Google Analytics, but if you're using another Web Analytics tool, I'm sure you can 'translate' the campaign tracking for your own tool.

Twitter has a URL which let you share a link. The URL is the following: 

http://twitter.com/share?url=http://yourpagecomeshere

After the parameter 'url=' you insert the URL of the page you want to share. 

When publishing a link, Facebook actually publishes 4 things: the page title, the description meta-tag, the url and an image (in case it can find one on the page).

Twitter is more basic: it lets you share a URL and you can include some text, in case you want.

It's important to note that you can share any URL you like, it doesn't have to be the URL of the page the share button is on. This gives you obviously the opportunity to make a specific landing page for people who come to your site from twitter.

Let's see how we can track the click-backs from twitter campaigns:

Step 1. Define the page that you want to use as landing pages

Like mentioned above, you can use a specific landing page. This gives you the possibility to use a specific promotion or a graphic or content reference to twitter.

Say we want to share the URL of my previous blogpost:

http://stefvanef.blogspot.com/2010/11/analytics-for-sharethis-addthis.html

Step 2. Add Campaign tracking to the URL

To track the click-back, we're using the link tracking of Google Analytics. 

The UTM's we're going to use are these:

utm_source=Twitter

utm_medium=SocialBookmarking

utm_camapaign=ClickBackOfferX

So the URL we want to share is the following:

http://stefvanef.blogspot.com/2010/11/analytics-for-sharethis-addthis.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialbookmarking&utm_campaign=clickBackOfferX

Step 3. Use a URL shortener

It's important to use a URL shortener for Twitter. You can only share 140 characters on twitter, and URL shorteners are a handy way to cut your tagged URL's short. The URL we want to share, as stated in number 2, is 151 characters, which is already 11 characters too long for twitter. Using bit.ly for this example, we shorten the 151-character URL to  just 20 characters:  

http://bit.ly/aRYLZT

So if we want to share this URL in twitter we're going to use this URL:

http://twitter.com/share?url=http://bit.ly/aRYLZT

Step 4. Add text to the message

A nice thing we can do with the Share-URL of twitter, is including a piece of text. 

You just need to include an extra parameter in the query string. A query string is the part of the URL which comes after the '?' of the URL. TO include text, which will be published on twitter, you need to use the text= parameter. After the parameter you can include the text you want. Black spaces are indicated with '+'.

http://twitter.com/share?text=Here+comes+the+text+you+want+to+include+in+the+tweet&url=http://bit.ly/aRYLZT

When you paste this URL into your browser you get to see this:

Step 5. Publish the URL on your page or in an email

Easy, right? Here you have a button to share this post in twitter, and of course it's tracked to see how many people come back to visit this post after you've shared it on twitter. 

Related posts:

Track Click-Backs for Facebook:

http://stefvanef.blogspot.com/2010/10/track-click-backs-from-share-this-in.html

Comparing Analytics for ShareThis, AddThis, AddToAny and SocialTwist

http://stefvanef.blogspot.com/2010/11/analytics-for-sharethis-addthis.html

Analytics for ShareThis, AddThis, AddToAny and SocialTwist

You recognize the services offering Social Bookmarking and Sharing by the buttons you see announcing 'Share this in facebook' on many websites nowadays. When you use these services, you share a URL of a page on your favourite social network or email service. There are a lot of free services which cover an amazing number of services and in this post, I compare the Analytics features they offer.

The services I'm comparing in this post are:

1. SocialTwist
2. AddToAny
3. AddThis
4. ShareThis

All these 4 services offer all of the following features:

• They include a huge list (some 300+) of social networks where the page can be shared.
• They all do bookmarking and emailing.
• They all come in a lot of languages.
• The are all free.

One of the main differences is their approach to Analytics. When used the right way, these services can provide very good social media metrics: you can see how many times your site or page is shared and in which social media. You can track how many people click these shared links and how many visits your site gets back.
A lot has been discussed on social media metrics. Consider this a solid and important first metric when defining your KPIs for Social Media: how do people share your content and does it drive traffic to your site. It's not yet a metric which tells you qualitatively how people value your brand or site, but it's a first useful step.

Here are my findings of how the above mentioned 4 services offer Analytics.

1. SocialTwist
You can find the analytics for Social Twist ('Te!! a Friend') within their own site: you create a login to get the service and the stats are found within the platform. For the free subscription, you just get to see the times your page or site was shared in 'Social', 'Bookmark' or 'Email', without any breakdown. And you get to see what is the most used service, but not more. You can upgrade to a 'Pro' account (100$ each 1000 referrals) and you can get more detailed analytics. Social Twist doesn't offer integration with Google Analytics or any other Web Analytics platform. You can't measure traffic coming back from the times your page was 'shared'.

2. AddToAny
AddToAny doesn't have any statistics on their own platform, but they do have an integration with Google Anlytics. The integration is automatic: as soon as you have a Google Analytics script on your page, you get the 'Shares' tracked as events. AddToAny doesn't offer a way to track if people get back to your site after it was shared.

Little parentesis: AddToAny is the only one of the 4 who let's you share on Tuenti. Tuenti is a ver important social network in Spain, and it's quite amazing that the other services just doesn't offer this option on their platform. Why?

3. AddThis
AddThis is good on analytics. You have a very nice interface on the AddThis site using your login. You get different features: top shared content, tops services used, geography.
You also get to see Click-backs: the number of visits who come from people clicked a shared URL of your site.
There is a pretty easy integration with Google Analytics, and you can also integrate it with Omniture.

On top of that, there is a freely accessible application which shows the most used services over the world, you can breakdown and compare countries, and every service has a little 'resume' which shows you where it is popular. A lot of data, which you can access here. Do you know what services are mostly used in your country?

4. ShareThis
Social Twist and AddThis give you some data, AddThis is better since it offers some analysis. But ShareThis is the one who goes all the way and provides real insights based on 'Shareing' behaviour.
First of all, ShareThis does everything that AddThis does: their own site has an analytics dashboard, and you have integrations with Google Analytics and Omniture.
They have something called 'Social Reach', which is very similar to what AddThis calls 'Click-Back': it measures how many people click on the links which are shared via ShareThis.
But the really BIG thing is this: ShareThis is the most used service of sharing, and is now starting to use all this data to give something as precious as competative analysis. You can actually compare the data from your site with data from similar websites: for instance, I can see how my blog is doing compared to other small blogs.
Second, I can check how my site performs versus other sites from my catagory (for example, you can compare against 'Automotive'). And ShareThis is even working on a 'know-your-audience' feature, which indicated that your site is popular for sharing for people interested in, say, 'Music' and 'Family'.

2 Important Remarks

1. Data integration is important, so I completely understand that some people will argue that another analytics interface might not be what is needed right now.
2. Note that all 4 features are external services. So when using them, you are giving access to your site to an external provider to obtain data. The competative analysis features from ShareThis can work in your advantage, since you can compare your data with competitors. But it is important to think about provacy and sensative data you are actually giving away for free.

So what's next?
If you'd ask me, we're missing a feature which measures Click-backs or Social Reach crossed with the conversion of our site goals, like brochure downloads, access to a demo, or buying a product. It's nice to know your site is shared in social media, it's better to know that people click on the shared link to come back to your site. But no doubt, it will be massive to see how many of the people coming back to your site via facebook convert in prospects. Since the sharing scripts are implemented on almost all pages, and they track which pages are shared, it can't be too difficult to let site-owners define what the goals on their site are and integrate them on the analytics dashboards.

¿Who will be the first to provide this feature?

Related post:
Track click-backs from Facebook


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Track click-backs from 'Share this in Facebook'

On almost every web page today, there is some kind of 'Social Bookmarking' installed. Social Bookmarking is the method of posting a site or a page in a social network, like Twitter or LinkedIn. Every time you press a link which says 'Share this with your friends in Facebook' you are 'social bookmarking'.
What you actually do with social bookmarking is posting a link on your wall in facebook or on your twitter status. This is important for people managing a website. First of all, every link counts as an incoming link, which is good for Organic Search results (SEO).
But maybe more important: it means an extra links to your site, which can mean extra visitors and extra conversion/subscriptions/revenue for your site. And it's very probable that you get good quality visitors: a friend has recommended  to visit the page, and a friend's recommendation is always a good thing.

It's impressive, which so much links and external provider offering solutions for Social Bookmarking, that so few people actually bother with trying to measure how many people actually get back to your site from a Social Bookmark.

In this post, I'll explain how to measure the incoming traffic for visitors coming from social bookmarking on Facebook. This is: somebody shared a link of a site on Facebook, and one of his friends or connections sees the link and clicks on it to visit the site.

¿How does social bookmarking on facebook work?

Sharing a link on Facebook is very easy: you just need to use the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=here-comes-the-url-you-want-to-share

After the parameter 'u=' you insert the URL of the page you want to share. Say that I want to share the blog of my friend Michael Notté, Kaizen-Analytics, then I need to use the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.kaizen-analytics.com

It's interesting to note that you can include every page on a share this link or button. It doesn't have to be he page where you put on the link or button hat needs to be shared.

When you use this URL, say as a text link or a button on your site, you'll get to see this:

As you can see, there are 4 things published by facebook:

The title of the page

The URL of the page

A description of he page

An image found on the page

The title and the description are both taken from the so-called 'Meta Tags' of the page. For every page you can give a small title and a description. This is generally used for search engines: the 'title' is what you see in blue on a page of the search results and the 'description' is the little bit of text you see on the page of the search results.

This is good to know: you can make a separate 'landing page' for sharing in facebook. Like you've seen above: you can implement any URL in the facebook-share page so technically there is no problem using any URL you choose. So you can make a personalised landing page, in which you can personalize the Title and the Description as you please. This can be a nice way to make a special offer to somebody who comes 'recommended by a friend'.

It's not really clear on what basis facebook selects the images you get to share with the URL mentioned above. But it looks like it just takes all images from the body of the page and you can change to the one you like most.

The trick for measuring the incoming traffic from this link mentioned above is the URL. Instead of including just the link of the page we want people to share, we're going to add some parameters to the URL so that, when somebody clicks on the URL, we can track this.

How to measuring traffic from the 'Share his': Link Tracking

Link tracking is a pretty simple method to track visitors coming to your site. You simply add some parameters to your URL, and when somebody visits your page, with a URL that holds these parameters, we can pick this up in our Web Analytics tool and soon you'll see where your traffic is coming from.

In this example, I implement link tracking for Google Analytics. I think everybody who uses a Web Analytics tool which is not GA, knows the idea behind Google Analytics link tracking and I'm pretty convinced everybody will be able to translate this method to their own tool.

Step 1: Create the campaign parameters (UTM's)
Google Analytics gives you the possibility to include parameters in the URLs that you use to drive traffic to your site. These parameters are called UTM's and you can use a different number of parameters. As a standard, Google Analytics uses 3 basic parameters. If needed, you can add more.
The 3 are:
Source: where the traffic is coming from, like another the site or a search engine.
Medium: the method used for driving traffic, like 'email' or 'banner ad'.
Campaign: whatever you want to call your campaign, like '10€Offer' or 'ProductXLaunch'.

In the case of the click-backs for Social Bookmarking in facebook, I use the following UTMs:

utm_source=Facebook
utm_medium=SocialBookmarking
utm_camapaign=ClickBackOfferY

The campaign I've called ClickBackOfferY, since I need to know this is a click-back after sharing, and I've included the 'Offer Y', which can help you in case you have a special offer linked to the sharing of the page. You could also include this in an extra UTM, the UTM_content=OfferY.

Step 2 Add the UTM's to the URL
Now we add the parameters to the URL. Say that the page you want to share is 'http://myoffer.com', then the URL with Link Tracking will be:

http://myoffer.com?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialBookmarking&utm_campaign=ClickBackOfferY

Step 3 Implement the URL in the facebook URL

Once we've created this URL, which will be the URL we share in Facebook, we implement this into the URL for sharing

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://myoffer.com?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialBookmarking&utm_campaign=ClickBackOfferY

Easy, right? Why don't you just try to share this article with your facebook friends using this 'Share this' button below and you'll see how this works: I've implemented the system explained in this post!