Inspired by User Generated Content, Web Analytics, and Wine…
This past Thursday evening I went to an event at Mistral in Boston hosted by an Internet consultancy named Molecular. Molecular began its web business in the mid-1990’s. They “did” Fidelity’s first website. That’s cool stuff in my book. Since then, they’ve done so much, and are now linked by Isobar.
My favorite part of a Molecular event is the opportunity to listen to smart people speaking about Internet innovation. Not to mention the fine food, good wine, and bright sommelier (who digs the first growth)… From a semiotic perspective, such a well-planned and engaging evening tells me a lot about Molecular as a company: focused, creative, organized, smart, connected, and successful.
So why I am telling you this on an analytics blog? Well, the evening’s topic was “user generated content”:
- Today, technology has given customers control to determine what messages they will listen to and when they will listen – as well as a means to let their own voice be heard. This may be difficult, as it is much different than what we are accustomed, but denial of the customer voice will not make it go away - it’s only getting louder. Only marketers who can learn to adapt will remain successful in the jungles of untamable content.
- Effective marketers must learn to utilize user-generated content to their benefit by creating authentic, positive, and valuable ways to engage customers in a “conversation” and incorporate their voice. During this provocative discussion, panelists will share their insight on this concept, its challenges, and benefits. These marketing experts will share their real world experiences and insight into such issues as managing, surviving, and spinning negative content, as well as maximizing the advantages of the positive.
UGC is powerful stuff. The mainstream internet and media meshing has made it unavoidable. Has what I said influenced your opinion about Molecular? Made you want to eat at Mistral the next time in Boston?
So how do you measure User Generated Content? That was the question I asked to the speakers from Reebok and TripAdvisor at Thursday’s party.
The good news is that both companies claim to use web analytics to measure UGC, and, like everyone it seems, looking to do it even better. That means making better use of existing data, deploying or upgrading technology, and/or extending their data model.
So I was thinking about making better use of existing data by working with and segmenting metrics and dimensions.
UGC dimensions could include:
- Event:
- Post
- Comment
- Interaction (with types: play, pan, zoom, edit)
- Contribution (with types: mashup and file)
- Visitor
- Persona
UGC metrics could include:
- Value scores.
- Counts of inbound/outbound links and new/return/repeat visitors.
- Search metrics, like organic search visits and visit rate.
- Time-based metrics, like total time online per visitor and average visit frequency and duration.
When the web analyst creates this type of mental model for measuring UGC, selecting new technology or working with your geeks to extend the data model becomes more a lucid, focused activity.
For example, I could take a look at some cool UGC and:
- Value score events subordinate to the page view.
- Value score an engagement level of those events.
- Multiply the two together to generate a type of engagement metric.
- Identify the “Event Path” with the highest engagement.
- Identify the “visitor” or “visit” with the highest engagement.
Then I could wield the extended data model in my analytics tool to identify the following online behavior and better understand my UGC during a period:
- Ratio of:
- events:visitors
- events:visits
- contributions:visitors
- contributions:cookies set
- visitors:personas
- comments:new posts
- comments:existing posts
- posts:visitors
- comments:visitors
- mashups:visitors
- Percent of:
- high/medium/low contributing visitors
- high/medium/low interacting visitors
- high/medium/low engaged visitors
- new posts
- new comments
- new mashups
- Number of:
- events per page
- interactions per contribution
- comments per post
- mashups created
- linked posts
- contributions per persona
- visitors per persona
- total events by post, comment, contribution, interaction
I know I could create other derivatives and use other metrics too. Events, like Interaction and Contribution, need more edification in future posts, but I think the beginnings of this model are clear.
The User Generated Content revolution doesn’t just affect Web business. It’s becoming part of modern capitalism whether you make sneakers or sell ads. This revolution is making web analytics an even more critical process in your value chain.
Jim Novo added the following ...
Good logic and thoughts on the metrics.
Question is, after you have the metrics and trends, what do you “do* with them, how do you *take action* against them to improve them?
Or are they just “nice to know”?
Todd added the following ...
Nice collection of UGC dimensions & metrics! I like Daniel’s mention of content relevancy/strength, it got me thinking about how relevancy/strength of content might be quantified through log data. Definitely one of the good cases for tracking spider activity, and most ideas are based around referrer parsing or even converting content into easier to munch weighted keywords.
In my most humble of opinions I’d say that these are nice to know, better to trend, and it would seem that this analysis could trigger any number of usability and marketing actions. From there, for the most part the usual suspects of web analytics apply.
Thanks again Judah for the detailed UGC post!
Judah added the following ...
Hi Daniel: Cool site. It does make sense, and what an interesting idea! Sounds like you are having a good time doing cutting edge work. Another idea to explore with your model is influence, which I think “linkability” is a one of the measures. For example, is the UGC influencing purchasing behavior or encouraging contributions? Are consumers directly responding to the UGC, and/or is it building brand awareness? In addition, by identifying common themes in contributed content, you could start to build tools for UGC creation, turning eSnips into a platform for UGC creation… Have fun!
Thanks Jim. As a fellow data junkie, I like to know as much as can (even if it’s just “nice” :). I also think the model speaks to actionability. Like I mentioned to Daniel above, by understanding the types of contributions and content, you can start to build the “platform” for UGC creation. By looking at the ratios of contributions, comments, or the impact of personas, you can promote key content creators and their output to prominent areas on the site, enabling them to have a stronger voice for driving your revenue model. One could tailor site effectiveness (persuasion architecture anyone?), and begin to identify content syndication networks and affiliate relationships. With value scoring, you also lay the groundwork for propensity modeling.
Thanks Todd! As a person who employees hybrid data collection (tag and logs), I think you bring up an excellent point that many web analytics vendors can’t accomplish: the detection and reporting of spider and bot activity. Certainly, a good SEO knows how the bots are (and are not) indexing the site. It seems logical to me to extend such non-human traffic metrics to UGC in context with how your site ranks in the SERP’s for keywords in the content of the pages with your UGC that crawled by bots. Thanks for sharing your ideas! And welcome to the blogosphere!
Inspired by User Generated Content, Web Analytics, and Wine… » SHARING IDEA WEBLOG added the following ...
[...] post by Judah Phillips at Web Analytics Demystified and software by Elliott Back « Tadigm Marketers. The Latter Combine The Discipli [...]
Daniel Waisberg added the following ...
Jim and Judah,
IMHO, one insightful and actionable information that can be extracted from UGC measurement is the crawlability of the website.
For example, I can track the number of comments-documents-folders created by users and see if they are affecting the crawlers’ rate in the website. It is known that the more content, the more crawlable the website (of course these are not the only parameters, but they are important ones). Moreover, I track if more people are coming from Search Engines as a result of higher indexing and analyze the performance of this additional people in the website.
How does it sound?
Daniel Waisberg added the following ...
Jim and Judah,
IMHO, one insightful and actionable information that can be extracted from UGC measurement is the crawlability of the website.
For example, I can track the number of comments-documents-folders created by users and see if they are affecting the crawlers’ rate in the website. It is known that the more content, the more crawlable the website (of course this is not the only parameter, but it is an important one). Moreover, I track if more people are coming from Search Engines as a result of higher indexing and analyze the performance of these additional people in the website.
How does it sound?
Judah Phillips at Web Analytics Demystified » Blog Archive » More Thoughts on Web Analytics and Social Networks…. added the following ...
[...] where visitors who have performed the most/least interactions and contributions ”go next” [...]
Judah Phillips at Web Analytics Demystified » Blog Archive » Web Analytics for Facebook: Applications, FBML, and Facebook Engagement!?… added the following ...
[...] agree with Jeremiah Owyang that Facebook may have their terms confused. These metrics measure Interaction. Where are the frequency and time measures necessary for [...]
Daniel Waisberg added the following ...
Hi Judah,
very interesting post, this is something that I have been studying a lot. I am the Web Analyst/SEO manager for http://www.esnips.com and UGC is our core business.
eSnips members can upload and share any file type from their profile, in folders representing different areas of interest, and can determine the audience for each folder. eSnips has approximately 7 million public pages divided in the following way: 2.2 million profiles (one for each registered user), 4 million public files, and 1 million public folders. All of this is UGC.
Three important categories of metrics that IMHO are really important to be measured are:
1- Quantity of content uploaded: be it in the form of files, folders, descriptions, or comments [increases traffic and overall content].
2- Content linkability: through comments, favorites, widgets, or bookmarks [increases ENGAGEMENT (this one is for Eric :-)].
3- Content strength: text that matches the business objectives and audience desired by the company (in other words, content containing targeted keywords that will be crawled by Google/Yahoo/… and indexed highly in their search).
All three categories above help increasing SEO and engagement of existing users. Does it make sense to you?