What this means for marketers is that their analytics data is incomplete and leads may be attributed to branding activity rather than the investment in online marketing that they’re making. The solution to maximizing returns on the marketing dollar may lie in call-tracking that allows you to pin point the exact digital route that customers take to reach their point of sale.

There are a couple ways to implement call tracking. One simple way is to change the phone number based on the referring source of the page. We actually posted the script we developed to do this. To start, we just recommend clients get a phone number for search, one for social, and one for referring sites so that they can begin quantifying their efforts by category. The other way is to subscribe and integrate a professional service – many of which will actually log the events in your conventional analytics application.

Call-tracking services collate information from a wide range of sources, including search engine marketing, AdWords campaigns and others and link it to phone call data to trace the route a potential customer takes. This provides a wealth of information on the demographical background of the customers, including how they found out about the product or the business. With such information, targeted marketing, which would allow maximizing the returns per every dollar invested in marketing, becomes a piece of cake.

IfbyPhone is one such service, with integrations for Hubspot, Google Analytics, and a host of other platforms. They have quite a robust API.

When a prospect calls a business, the call-tracking service collates the available data to determine whether the caller called after viewing a paid digital ad, an organic search engine listing, or from Facebook. They take analysis down to the minutest level of detail, including the specific keywords typed into a search engine, the time when the caller viewed the ad, whether the call was from a landline or mobile, and so on. That data is even ported to Analytics in some cases. That data provides a clear picture of the effectiveness of each marketing dollar invested, and allows you to fine-tune your marketing budgets and strategy accordingly.

Kuno Creative recently took the Facebook IPO numbers and crunched them with the newest Pew Internet Research data on Facebook to determine The Real Value of a Facebook Friend.

From the Pagemodo infographic, Unmeasurable Success: In the last few years, both small and large businesses have increasingly turned their marketing efforts toward social media, convinced that joining the social ranks will deliver a measurable monetary Return on Investment (ROI). In truth, the ROI of social media – unlike other marketing techniques – is measured by the impact it creates, instead of a monetary return. This year, marketers promise to deliver both. We find out if the era of a truly measurable ROI in social media is here.

I believe that ROI in social media can already be measured, but is accomplished in several tiers. There can be immediate conversions, indirect conversions from fans and followers of brands, in addition to conversions from the long-term influence and authority generated over time. It’s not easy to capture every dollar gained with a social media strategy, but you can track enough to show a positive return on the investment.

Mindjet Connect V4 continues the product evolution to provide a single user experience that connects ideas and plans with execution of those plans.

Mindjet Connect users now get

• Top level navigation between the Vision and Action elements of Connect, creating a single, seamless web experience that joins collaboration to create ideas, strategies and plans, with the ability to assign and track initiatives through execution and completion.
• A simple single sign on via Google and Facebook for quick and easy access to the product
• In-product connections to interactive videos
• Increased available storage to 2GB for Basic/5 GB for Business
• Coming soon! Mindjet Connect integration with Android

Mindjet for Enterprise Overview

As part of Mindjet’s evolution the company is announcing new offerings specifically designed for enterprises, teams and individuals that more accurately reflect how businesses use Mindjet for collaboration. These new offerings are focused to better meet customer needs. All offerings include MindManager, Mindjet’s legendary desktop software, and Mindjet mobile applications.

• Mindjet for Enterprise is designed for organizations that need to collaborate with multiple internal teams and external partners, offering both cloud-based and on-premise collaboration and professional services and support.
• Employees can now quickly move from concept to planning and then immediately execute on those plans and tasks either in the public cloud (through Connect) or in a secure SharePoint environment (through Connect SP).
• Mindjet for Enterprise also includes solution templates and consulting with additional training, professional services, and priority customer service and support.

Mindjet for Teams is for departments and groups that want to quickly move from concept to planning to execution. Employees get Mindjet’s powerful MindManager with its robust brainstorming and planning features, Mindjet Connect’s Vision and Action modules, and Mindjet’s popular mobile applications so they can collaborate and share work regardless from any location, platform or device.

Mindjet for Individuals is the perfect product for information workers who need to create ideas, manage information and share that work with others. Professionals get Mindjet’s powerful MindManager with its robust brainstorming and planning features, along with Mindjet Connect and Mobile to share work regardless from any location, platform or device.

Sign up for Mindjet now… a basic account is free!

This is a solid strategy. Analytics alone can’t provide you with everything you need because of all the applications that distribute links nowadays that don’t append referring data to the request. Analytics knows where you came from by web servers telling the next page where the last page was along with all the information on the client. Since apps don’t have a web server… they don’t pass data. As a result, you’ll want to append campaign code to your shortened URLs before distributing them. We just showed how to add Google Analytics campaign code tracking with Hootsuite recently.

All was well with the world until the Marketing Coordinator decided to dig into the Google URL shortener stats a bit more. He simply couldn’t get the numbers to come close with what Google Analytics was providing. There are several reasons for this… Google URL Shortener is a pass through service that measures every single click, while Google Analytics is a JavaScript based solution that provides the majority of the data.

However, he discovered something much more alarming… he found that Google had clicks occurring before the link was ever created! Here’s proof – directly in Goo.gl’s reporting engine:

And it didn’t happen just once… it’s all over the place!

It’s unfortunate that this data can’t be relied upon… but it simply can’t be. Through the interface, you can’t select date ranges, so Kevin has to manually drag his mouse across the charts to capture dates and clicks to fill out his reporting. I’m surprised that Google doesn’t simply incorporate their shortener in with their Analytics and automatically register the campaigns. I’m more surprised, in this day and age where we need to research our site performance, at what a blunder this error is!

Anyone know a product manager over at Goo.gl that can explain this?

At SurveyMonkey, we offer a number of tools to help you slice, dice, and make sense of your date. Two of the most useful are cross-tabs and filters. I’m going to give you a brief overview and use case for each, so you know how to implement them for your needs.

What are cross-tabs?

Cross-tabbing is a handy analysis tool that provides you with a side-by side comparison of two or more survey questions. When you apply the cross-tab filter, you can select the responses you’d like segmented out, and see how those segments responded to each question in your survey.

So if you’re curious how people of different genders responded to your various survey questions, for example, you would include a survey question asking about your respondents’ gender. Then, once you apply the cross-tab, you’ll be able to easily see how men responded, compared with women.

Women reported more interest in cats than men, so if you're selling a cat-product, you may want to target it towards women.

This can be really useful in your marketing strategy.The guidance of cross-tabs can tell you lot about those who may be interested in your idea or product — it can segment those who responded favorably to your proposal by age group, gender, color preference — any category that you include as a survey question can be used to further break down your responses using cross-tabs.

What is filtering?

Apply a filter to your results to see a segment of your respondents removed from the others. You can filter by response, by custom criteria, or by property (date, completed vs. partially completed responses, email address, name, IP address and custom values) to narrow down your results, so you’re just seeing responses from people who interest you.

So if you’re marketing a product to cat lovers, for example, and one of your survey questions asks if your respondents like cats, the responses of people who responded “no” to that question probably are not of much interest. Apply a filter which selects just for people who answered “yes,” or “maybe” (if that was an option), and you’ll be able to see just the results of potential customers.

Once we filter for cat people, we find that most respondents still are not interested in our cat perfume. We're considering investing in a new product.

 Combine Filters and Cross-Tabs for Better Survey Analysis

So, you may be wondering, can you apply filters and cross-tabs at the same time? The answer is yes! It’s a useful strategy for cutting down the noise and making sense of your responses.

First apply your filter. So people who are potential customers, based on our previous example. Then apply your cross-tab to find out just how different groups of potential customers feel. So, going back to our cat lover example, you would first apply the filter so you’re just looking at responses from people who may be interested in your product.

Then apply your cross-tab so you know the ages (gender, income level, and location can also be interesting factors here), and voila. You are left with a comprehensive view of your potential customers which can be broken up by age, gender, or anything you like.

75% of those who like cats and are interested in my cat perfume product are women.

Just remember to think ahead about the factors that will be interesting in your analysis, so you can plan for them in your survey design. There will be no way to cross-tab for income level, if you don’t ask for it in your original survey.

We hope this cross-tab and filter analysis overview was useful for you! Still have more survey analysis questions? How about an example of an insight you’ve gained using the cross-tab or filter features? Tell us about it in the comment section below. Thanks!

From the Infographic: The traditional cellphone is being overtaken by the far more capable ssmartphone. Equipped with high-speed Internet connections and lightning-fast processors, these devices have essentially put fully capable interactive billboards in our pockets. How are advertisers taking advantage of this huge potential, and are consumers paying attention? Below we explore the burgeoning world of mobile marketing.

Infographic from HighTable.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Onswipe had added quite a few more template designs… after a few minutes of testing each with different fonts, I’ve republished our blog using Onswipe. Here’s a category view of our Mobile Marketing category:

Some tips and tricks to using OnSwipe:

1. We publish our featured image on each of our single post pages and hide it using CSS. We did this so that people sharing our content with various site crawlers always had a nice image to display with the post details. This is done in addition to using OpenGraph and Schema microdata for generating rich snippets. This seems to help with OnSwipe as well – they’re finding images for every single post!
2. Rather than just use our main blog URL, I add each category as an independent WordPress blog within OnSwipe in the content section. This generates a nice list of categories within the OnSwipe interface when someone clicks on the sections button.
3. Since we also provide some great links via our Twitter account, I added that as a content source as well!

OnSwipe also allows you to add your Google Analytics account, customize your icons, and set fonts throughout the iPad version. I’m having a tough time getting it to update some settings and have an email in with their support team, but it’s starting to come together nicely.

If you’re reading this on an iPad and can’t see the iPad version, just click here to get there. We’re still working out some kinks with the site caching!

The integration extends the platform’s SuiteAnalytics with role-based analysis for historical trending of conversations, share of voice, key influencers, competitive insight, sentiment analysis, topics, and categories of interest and demographics. Companies can then use this information to build better products, tailor services, and fine tune campaigns to meet the specific desires of their targeted audiences, all within NetSuite’s integrated platform.

Social Radar is designed to leverage NetSuite’s fully integrated cloud-based business management suite to gain instantaneous, up-to-the-minute information on customer insight and to optimize business performance as follows:

• Advertising and marketing teams can monitor the social web to learn what consumers are saying about their products and the competition.
• Instantly identify topics driving about your brands.
• Real-time and historical sentiment data can be leveraged to drive marketing campaigns, protect brand loyalty, and company reputation.
• Product managers and market researchers can augment costly focus groups and surveys with media monitoring for new product development and planning product launches.
• Management can implement by gaining an understanding of and how correlates with sales performance data such as revenue, wallet share, number of transactions, and more.

Here’s a great look at the Facebook IPO and conversation volumes and sentiment leading up to it:

Social Radar Overview

We’re extremely excited about the opportunity to partner with NetSuite. By combining in-depth, immediate analytics from Social Radar with the wealth of data and extensive services within the SuiteAnalytics platform, we can provide NetSuite users with insight and analytics from the multitude of social media sources. Justin Graves, CEO of Infegy

Visit NetSuite’s SuiteApp for more information on the integrated solution.

The questions vary… so a few pages of great content just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Virtually every company needs to become a publisher nowadays if they hope to both build authority in their industry and take advantages of the variety of searches that people are making.

Why Content For SEO, explores how content is key to search engine visibility. You can also read more on Brafton’s related blog post.

Infographic by Brafton.

But I digress. There’s no doubt that, with 900 million members, that Facebook is the big boy on the block. Many companies poorly measure their social media influence by the number of fans they’ve accumulated. That count doesn’t matter one bit… what really matters is how many power users you have within their midst. Power users can have a massive impact on how your message spreads and significantly impact purchasing decisions.

Demandforce has developed this infographic with data from Pew Research and Facebook – providing some great data on Facebook Power Users.

Demandforce provides a consumer demand creation solution for small business. Their software-as-a-service application is used by customers to grow revenue, keep clients coming back, and manage operations more effectively.

Sitecore, a market leader in online content management system software, has rolled out a new technology that has the potential to revolutionize this process for print materials. Sitecore’s Adaptive Print Studio not only provides the organization with better control over the entire process, but can also cut the development life cycle time from an estimated two hundred days to less than twenty days, and that too using fewer resources than before!

Sitecore Adaptive Print Studio installs as a plug-in to Adobe InDesign and becomes a centralized hub for all Adobe InDesign content. It provides a web platform to bring together web designers, developers, product managers, marketers and all other stakeholders to the campaign, facilitating team collaboration, multi-lingual management, security and workflow control and dynamic document delivery.

Web designers upload their work, including document layout and settings. The suite also pulls content from Sitecore’s Content Management System (CMS) to InDesign directly, and provides online access to the work queue. Product managers update the catalog daily and undertake review cycles. Non-designers within the marketing, sales, service and other relevant departments customize PDF’s and print products from layout to publish, even without technical knowledge of how to create InDesign documents.

With the design and print production of marketing materials usually constituting about 30 percent of a marketer’s budget, the benefits of this technology need no mention. The time saved also allows marketers to roll out their campaign in near real-time, invaluable in today’s highly competitive and fluid environment where fast adaptability and maneuverability is the key to success.

Download the official brochure or register for a demonstration online.