Co-authored by Yuval Zukerman, Sr. Consultant, Emerging Interactions, Molecular

Social media has come to play a key role in brand messaging, with the strong two-year climb of microblogging service Twitter adding a new twist: a 140-character limit. This restriction has pushed adoption of a few common ways to cram more message into less space. Apart from heavily leveraging the new language of texting shorthand born of the mobile SMS, the biggest trend in use is employing short URLs to save space while linking to other online content.

Short URLs are hinged on service providers like tr.im and TinyURL that allow people to generate unique links, usually formed of a small domain name followed by a hash and a series of apparently random characters that the service provider responds to with a redirect to the longer target link. For example, the provider tr.im may provide a link of the form http://tr.im/zpBD that points visitors to http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/category/data-and-analytics/, saving us 48 characters to talk about how insightful the latest blog post is.

The advantages to end users are clear enough, but the disadvantages to content providers are not. Cautionary tales of short URL service collapse have been floating around for years, but the message doesn’t mean much to the people socializing those millions of YouTube videos and Flickr photos. The people contributing all that traffic to your site aren’t as concerned as the marketing department with how long the link stays around; the internet zeitgeist waits for no one. As marketing professionals, here are a few things you should know to help you better understand short URLs and why you should consider owning your own short URLs to power your brand.

1. Find short domains that evoke your brand
Your brand is your company’s face in the market, and the more exposure it gets, the bigger your potential audience. With social media, you’re focusing on name recognition for you and your offerings. Much the same way you may come up with a smaller version of your logo for different ads to fit the space and medium, URL shortening provides you with a short link that drives users to the page with the full, long URL. For example, instead of using long URLs with user-friendly information, like http://www.amazon.com/User-Always-Right-Practical-Creating/dp/0321434536, you will be providing a short link such as http://amzn.com/0321434536

If you’re familiar with traditional vanity URLs, the concept should ring a bell. In many cases, the domain will be your only branding opportunity, so you want a link that contains or reminds people of your brand. Readers will see it in tweets, blog posts, wall comments, you name it, so your short URLs should provide something that both connects users to the original brand, and is short enough for them to re-use. For example, Flickr has set up http://flic.kr/, a shorter alias that still evokes the brand.

Tips: First, find a good, as-short-as-possible URL. Make use of the long list of new generic and country-specific top-level domains. A good starting point is iWantMyName.com. The site searches dozens of domain providers worldwide. (While .com is global, .es for example is controlled by Spain.) Costs vary from country to country, and almost all are in the sub-$300 range, with the majority being around $50. Get creative. Think initials, stock tickers, you name it. Leverage domain name suggestion tools like Domainr. Set up the software to create short URLS automatically (those auto-generated random-looking bits at the end like http://tr.im/zpBD). Make your own short URLs readily available on every page of your site. Get them out there, and they’ll be used. Every time they’re republished as the content spreads, your exposure grows.

2. Third-party short URLs can short-change your measurement efforts
The problem with attributing traffic from third-party short URLs is that most take away the referrer — the part of the request that tells your metric platform how the visitor got to your site. Depending on the vendor, you’ll see either the redirection service or where they clicked the short URL, but not both, providing an incomplete picture. While they may offer the ability for you to view several measurements on their own websites, you do not have access to raw incoming traffic information, and aggregating the data from the mass of vendors out there can prove to be a challenge. What does this all mean? You can’t tell where the bulk of your social organic traffic is coming from. For example, a report showing you top referring blogs is far more actionable than a report showing you the top short URL sites people used. The visitor paths — that piece of the web analytics puzzle that shows traffic sources and behavior — is too valuable to lose.

Tips: Consider implementing your own short URL feature on your site. This approach ensures you get that referrer information back. Once the feature is added, extend your analytics implementation to capture traffic on your short URLs. Although some third-party short URL providers share this data, you will have a more complete picture of user behavior on your site when you start tracking them at first contact (when they click the short URL), through to when they leave your site.

3. Keep your earned media
I doubt you have a service level agreement with a hundred different short URL providers. When the next one goes bust, there’s a strong chance its redirects will stop working entirely, and all of that earned media will evaporate. According to Carat, earned media assets are “consumer driven. They include all word of mouth communications, social media, viral, organic search, fan sites and shared content. To some extent, these communications are Earned through doing Bought and Owned well, but they reflect on the brand’s entire behavior.”

The recent news about tr.im, a service initially slated to disappear, has taken a happy turn, and it is giving the service to the community to maintain and develop. I’d like to think the service’s spirit was universal, but I doubt it. The service Cligs is currently dealing with similar business woes. Why find out how much of your traffic was coming through the next service to go bust?

Tips: Utilize your new branded short URLs in every social media channel. Make them so easy to use that it’d be more work to go elsewhere to generate them. Add an element to your site where users can copy a page’s short URL to their clipboards with one click. For product or campaign pages, try out vanity short URLs like http://molecu.lr/Analytics to increase recognition.

4. Do it yourself
The most straightforward way to reap the benefits and data from URL shortening is to set up such a service yourself. Technically, URL shortening is a low-hanging fruit; it will take an average lone developer about a week to get a basic service programmed from scratch. Simpler yet, there is a variety of off-the-shelf open-source applications that can get you up and running even quicker. Free applications like Yourls, Shorty, or lilurl can be set up in a couple of hours on your server. There are also software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors who can use your domain and give you, for a fee, a variety of statistics and logs. One example is budurl.com’s enterprise edition.

Tips: When setting up a URL shortening services yourself, there are several factors you will need to consider:

1. Think of your audience. Is it going to be used company-wide, by specific team members, or provided as a service to anyone on the web? Normally, smaller audiences will require a simpler and thus cheaper setup, while larger audiences may require multiple servers and continuous feature development. Workflow is another aspect you might wish to explore. Think of how often the tool will be used and whether there will be a need to provision its use and associated approval chains. Also, be aware that it is critical for URL shortening services to act as a springboard to the destination page, imposing minimal delay. Test how well the server performs on your expected load levels.
2. Create a bookmarklet. To simplify the creation of short URLs and increase the adoption of your service, the creation of a bookmarklet is recommended. Bookmarklets are browser bookmarks that will send the URL of the page currently being viewed in the browser and open a window and tab to your URL-shortening service. The page that will open will present you with the shortened URL. This way, a single click of a button can generate the shortened URL. You can also add a “Copy to Clipboard” widget on your pages (check out the lower left side: http://is.gd/4fPnx). Make it so easy to use your short URLs that it’d actually be more work to use a third-party provider.
3. Redirect broken links. One more elegant feature offered by some services that could be of special value to marketers is the ability to edit and monitor the content that you are linking to. If a page on your website is removed, you can point an existing shortened URL to a new version of the content or to an alternative page  . If the shortened URL points to an external site where the page is no longer available, you can detect that and react. Be sure to provide alternative content or present messaging to explain what happened. When you own your short URLs, you have a variety of ways to retain your earned media.

One organization that is already taking this approach is Coca-Cola, which set up a hosted short URL service called CokeURL.com. The service is at marketers’ disposal and gives them the ability to share content on or off Coca-Cola web assets using short URLs. The URLs can be short (CokeURL.com/s) or descriptive (CokeURL.com/fizzyVideo).

We hope the choice here is an easy one. Providing your own short URLs that tell readers your brand is awaiting them after the click increases your visibility. Implementing a short URL service on your own site increases your web analytics value and guards your earned media against third-party failure. Social media is a deep and fast moving channel, so keep your head up.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

Over the past couple of years, the digital world has transformed the way companies need to measure the return on their marketing and technology investments. Companies, especially marketers, have had to reevaluate their traditional methods for calculating return on investment (ROI) due to several factors:

• The economy has forced many companies to strictly track the “return” on every dollar they spen.
• Traditional ROI models do not reflect the value generated from new types of digital interactions consumers are using (e.g., social, mobile) to engage companies and their brands.
• Consumer behaviors are changing so rapidly that current ROI models are becoming more and more irrelevant as time goes on.

Unfortunately, many companies are hesitant to invest in these new digital interactions despite their exponential growth with target consumers because they are unsure of how to measure their value to the organization. These companies run the risk of:

• Being bypassed by competitors willing to make these types of investments in their consumers, even if a standard measurement method is not available.
• Misappropriating their investments in consumer interactions and technologies that no longer meet the needs of their consumers.

So how should companies go about updating their traditional ROI models?

When reevaluating their current ROI models, companies need to remember four key points:

1. Incorporating engagement into the ROI calculation
Increasing consumer engagement is part of every company’s future success. So why haven’t companies already incorporated these metrics in their ROI calculations?

Some companies still track “return” simply in dollars and cents. Many companies in the retail banking industry have fallen into this trap. As functionality of Internet banking and 3rd party aggregation services (e.g., Mint.com) have vastly improved, retail banking consumers have lost nearly all personal engagement with their banks. By failing to incorporate engagement into their ROI or customer value models, a bank may not realize their ability to retain or increase the value of that customer relationship is extremely low. In some cases, a bank may think they have improved the value of the relationship because their cost of service has decreased as the consumer uses more online services.

Companies need to understand that “return” is no longer just about dollar and cents. The non-monetary value generated from consumer engagement is just as valuable (if not more in the digital world) than dollar value generated from these interactions. Engagement is also a great predictor of changes in financial contribution, customer acquisition and retention. Although, companies must remember to be patient as the correlation between engagement level and monetary value created or lost does not happen simultaneously. Companies must build positive engagement with consumers before they can expect to see increases in financial value or customer acquisition.

2. There is no standard method for measuring consumer engagement
There are many vendors in the market today that claim they have found the secret formula to measuring consumer engagement. Although the methods developed by these vendors have merit, there is no one method that is “one size fits all.” Companies needs to align the way they measure engagement and the interactions they track with their specific business objectives and the needs of it consumers.

3. New ROI models must be flexible
Consumer behaviors and the way they interact with a company are evolving more and more each day. Today, consumers use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to interact with a brand. Tomorrow, there may be a wave of new methods for interacting with consumers. Therefore, building flexibility into the ROI model is critical to its long-term value to the organization.

4. Follow your existing business processes
Whether you want to measure the level of engagement from an online initiative or an offline one, the process for creating that measurement model remains the same. Companies need to focus on the following tasks:

• Aligning its engagement objectives with its overall business objectives. These do not have to simply be monetary objectives.
• Understanding the needs and behaviors of its consumers to identify the appropriate engagement channels or interactions.
• Creating an engagement measurement and ROI model that aligns with the engagement objectives.
• Testing, validating and revising the model based on results.

It is important to remember that measuring engagement and incorporating it into your ROI models is not merely a one-time task. It is a continuous process of reevaluating the inputs, outputs and formulas to ensure companies are accurately accessing the value generated from its marketing and technology investments.

More than ever, hard numbers are necessary to demonstrate success; they are incontrovertible, easy to communicate, and can point out what is or is not working. For new media darling Twitter, marketers are finding more tools to help them understand how their efforts are performing.

There are five tools to consider, but first you have to know what to measure. Not all of the tools out there are going to be helpful. Some are introspective, looking at how the Twitter campaign is presented. Others are quantitative tools to analyze traffic, trends and follower count. First, make a measurement plan, noting what is important to the organization and how to justify the success of the campaign. What does success look like? What are the key things that need to happen? List these goals and then determine reliable tools to measure progress. 

Five Useful Tools for Tracking Twitter Success

• TwInfluence. Track not only how many listeners you have, but also how concentrated your audience is, and the rate at which your campaign is growing.
• TwitAlyzer. Measure your popularity, signal-to-noise ratio, and how many times you’re being cited. This is valuable if your aim is to become a thought leader. Twitalyzer also lets you tie into Google Analytics and collect information on site traffic coming from Twitter. This can provide insight into how the digital marketing channel is being influenced by a Twitter campaign.
• TwitterFriends. Get detailed insight on who you’re interacting with on Twitter. This includes everything from a map indicating where your followers are to the average length of a given tweet. This helps provide clarity on who is responding, how frequently and the nature of these interactions. This information can be useful in the planning stages of a Twitter campaign, as well as tracking once the work is in progress.
• Trendistic. Get an understanding of trends in Twitter. Enter a keyword and see how it is referenced in the space over time. It’s possible to see up to 180 days worth of information.
• TweetEffect. Find out how individuals are reacting to your posts. By entering the user ID and clicking search, you get a summary of recent changes, as well as adds or losses based on specific tweets. It’s an excellent way to see what is resonating with followers and what is not. 

As more users flock to Twitter, developers are coming up with tools that enable marketers to measure a multitude of interactions. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it is close enough to accurately capture trends in the space.

Isobar Global’s Dan Calladine is Molecular’s guest blogger.  If you have any questions for Dan, add a comment to any of his posts.  You can also follow Dan at http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/ or on Twitter @dancall.

I was at a media event in London recently when someone from the traditional media side (not my company, I should add) went into a big rant about ‘what is digital?’

I really don’t see where the confusion comes in. ‘Digital’ isn’t an abstract concept, like ‘Girl Power’; it’s pretty easy to define and visualise.

Are posters digital? Yes, if they’re digital posters
Is mobile digital? Yes, almost all mobile is through digital networks these days
Is press digital? Yes, if it’s online… & so on.

The main thing about ‘digital’ is that the content and data is transferred digitally, and this means that you can often collect it and count it. This is what I love about digital media – admittedly I’m a bit of a geek – we’re constantly finding new and unusual ways of measuring actual data, not just surveying people. (& that’s why Omniture, a digital measurement company was sold for $1.8bn last week.)

Some relatively random recent examples:

Video: Services like Visible Measures can track and aggregate the number of views of a video across all the major video platforms in the world – they were able to show that Thriller received 28m views across all sites in the week after Michael Jackson died.

Social Media: While the twitter user base is not demographically representative, the site provides lots of data that can be aggregated and analysed. At university we used to do content analysis on newspaper stories; content analysis on twitter can looks at hundreds of thousands of posts and return findings like 20% of tweets are related to brands or products, or 15% of tweets can be classified as ‘porn spam’.

Mobile: Mobile ad servers can show the direct response rates of mobile ads, and demonstrate that the average click rates on mobile ads are approximately half those of online ads. Of course the click is not the only reaction an ad is intended to create, but it does show that apps and content are likely to be more powerful communications devices with mobile, and luckily you can measure the popularity of different apps.

Finally, you can be very creative about what you measure, and get high-sample size results for the strangest things. The free dating site OkCupid did this last week with this study of the response rates to emails sent on their sites, based on the content of the emails.

“#1 – Be literate. Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. Our negative correlation list is a fool’s lexicon: ur, u, wat, wont, and so on. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit (and we do!) the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang.

Language like this is such a strong deal-breaker that correctly written but otherwise workaday words like don’t and won’t have nicely above average response rates (36% and 37%, respectively).

Interesting exceptions to the “no netspeak” rule are expressions of amusement. haha (45% reply rate) and lol (41%) both turned out to be quite good for the sender. This makes a certain sense: people like a sense of humor, and you need to be casual to convey genuine laughter. hehe was also a successful word, but much less so (33%).

Scientifically, this is because it’s a little evil sounding. So, in short, it’s okay to laugh, but keep the rest of your message grammatical and punctuated.”

That’s the thing about digital – so much is potentially measurable, and you can really start to have fun when you think about what to do with the data that you collect.

I had been an active user of account aggregation services for years before switching to Mint.com several months ago. I could not have been happier with the services, ease of use and functionality provided by Mint. From my first login, I knew it would not be long before Mint.com was acquired. Their business model, the value of its customer information and the level of customer loyalty they have generated could not go unnoticed.  My only hope was that it was not acquired by a bank that would turn its services into its own marketing platform (you know there were several suitors).  My wish was granted when Intuit announced it would purchase Mint this week.  But what does this mean for how banks manage and measure customer relationships going forward?

The level of engagement banks have with their customers has been continuously decreasing. As in-branch transactions continue to diminish, banks try to engage customers through other channels such as online banking and mobile. Unfortunately, these channels are primarily transactional, which makes it difficult for banks to engage customers in higher value interactions (cross-selling, etc.). 

Mint.com and Quicken were already negatively impacting the banking industry’s level of customer engagement. With the merger, that impact will only grow. Once Mint utilizes Quicken’s technology and implements bill pay and transfer functionality, banks will begin to lose ALL direct contact with their customers.  Customers will no longer have to log into their institution’s online banking system. As customers get tired of paying for ATM fees, high interest rates, etc. they will use Mint’s “Ways to Save” feature to find a better solution or product. Banking products will become completely commoditized and banks will compete only on price.

Unfortunately, most banks won’t realize the extent of this impact until it is too late. “Engagement” is not a primary measurement for most banks.  They calculate success of a customer relationship based on the number of products owned, average balances, net interest income, tenure, satisfaction and cost to serve.  In some cases, Mint will actually increase the value of customer to a bank. As a customer reduces their use of their bank’s channels, the bank’s cost of service will decrease. Although that customer is more profitable, their propensity to attrite and switch banks increases because they longer have a relationship with their bank beyond fees, interest rates, etc.

Banks need to quickly realize the impact of the merger between Intuit and Mint and develop new and innovative ways to engage their customers (online and offline) or risk becoming a faceless institution that competes only on price.

To demonstrate social network success, savvy brand marketers must identify what success means, and then understand how it can be tracked.

To justify spending and ensure budget for future projects, it is crucial that marketers can demonstrably prove the success of a given campaign. As the economy sputters, and the struggle for budget becomes increasingly more challenging, it becomes even more important. While the majority of digital marketing can provide highly quantifiable results, social media can prove challenging. These networks are nebulous webs of people friending one another and sharing select information, and they frequently can’t be measured in clickthroughs or conversions. This article will explore how to create a metrics program to track the success of a campaign, using examples from major brands to illustrate different approaches.

1. Determine what to measure
The first step is determining what to measure. Start by considering why social media is being used in a particular campaign, and then look for ways to measure the results. It is important to set the campaign up for success. Don’t track data that is hard to gather, but do set your sights on the low-hanging fruit that will yield meaningful results. For example, many sites offer a tool enabling users to post content to their Facebook or MySpace pages. By using a tool such as Omniture, it is possible to track the frequency with which users are posting, and which networks they are using. By tracking this information, meaningful insights into the resonance and value of material on the site can be gauged.

2. Take advantage of existing tools
Social networking sites recognize that they live or die by their user base, and they understand that advertisers on these sites want specific insights into who they are talking to and how the message is being received. By using Facebook’s sophisticated tool kit, it is possible to track specifically who is engaging, and what they are doing there.

Even if the numbers aren’t hard, it is still possible to use social networking to track brand perception and better service the consumer. Twitter is a platform where users post 140 character updates on what they are doing, either through a mobile interface or via the web. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, it’s not a forum for emailing or playing games and, as such, provides fewer hooks to a brand marketer seeking to promote a message unless they have a decent amount of followers. Yet, there are ways to integrate the platform onto the site (take a look at the Betty Crocker clip below, as an example). Using tools like TweetScan, it is possible to see how frequently the brand name is being referenced on the site, and to react to any kind of coverage.

3. Track how social networking impacts other channels
Tracking the number of daily users is a no-brainer, but mapping in-network interaction to external behaviors becomes much harder. There are, however, a few ways to skin the cat, given creativity and tenacity. If a brand creates its own social network, using a pre-existing platform such as Ning, in conjunction with metrics tools, it’s possible to track entry and exit points on the site. If a clear destination has been identified as a project goal, it’s possible to drive the user there and track the volume. If a social networking campaign launches, look outside the web to see if there is a correlation between sales and the viral growth on the networks. Bacon Salt, a purveyor of foods, launched on Facebook and MySpace. Within a few days, it had sold out of product.

Conclusion
Social networking is more than just a profile page on Facebook. The power of the consumer’s voice can be harnessed in multiple ways, to serve many goals. The information can be incredibly valuable to judge the value of content, track user opinion, and propagate a brand message.

But in order to demonstrate success, the savvy brand marketer will create a thorough metrics campaign to measure the effort. The first key step is to identify what success means, and then understand how it can be tracked successfully.

Take advantage of the tools provided by the networks that are out there, see how the brand is fairing, and what can be done to get involved with the conversation. Try to track how the social networking campaign impacts other channels. Even if the numbers are not rock solid, there can be definite trends.

Thought this was a very interesting statistic even though it is not very surprising. The most popular camera on Flickr these days is being challenged by the simple photo abilities on the iPhone. I am sure it is a reflection of many things including mobility, and even audience type. It does in the end become the most versatile tool for capturing life’s moments and Flickr may be more popular now with casual photo enthusiasts and not serious hobbyists or pros.

Lot of other great information here as well. Check it out when you get a chance  -  http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

Isobar Interactive Agency Sees Data-Driven Insight and Measurement Taking Center Stage in 2009 and Beyond

Molecular has appointed Kevin Sardinha to lead its Data & Analytics Practice. He will lead the multi-disciplinary team of experts focused on driving data-led principles and practices in all aspects of the firm’s client work. Kevin moves into this role from his position as a Senior Strategist within Molecular’s Strategy team, where he led engagements for adidas, Nikon, Reebok and The Hartford.

“The ability to gather and act on intelligent customer data often spells the difference between success and failure in the online channel,” said Howard Kogan, president of Molecular. “We have always placed a strong emphasis on creating programs with data and analytics capabilities ‘built-in’, and we’re committed to investing more in this area to ensure we remain at the top of our industry for data-fueled, results-oriented interactive solutions.”

The Data & Analytics team helps Molecular clients optimize the value of their customer relationships by integrating and analyzing key data across all channels to deliver relevant and actionable insight. Its experts take clients from the creation of a performance measurement strategy, through the technical implementation of the project roadmap and finally to the delivery of insights and recommendations that drive value to the business and its constituents. Companies including Reebok, adidas, Nikon and The Hartford have been beneficiaries of the practice’s expertise. Reebok now has an integrated measurement platform that allows it to track and optimize its online campaign investments across cost-per-click, e-mail, search, and referral sites, as well as track key performance indicators regarding consumer behavior and brand recognition across multiple geographic regions.

As practice lead, Kevin brings more than 12 years of management consulting experience that spans the financial services, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, and government industries. Prior to Molecular, he was a Senior Business Analyst within Keane’s Architectural Service group. Previously, Kevin held several strategic and business analyst roles at companies such as One to One Interactive and Exchange Solutions. During his time at Exchange Solutions, he focused on developing customer management strategies and economic models for financial service clients such as Fifth Third Bank, State Street Bank, Sovereign Bank, Huntington Bank and TD Bank Financial Group.

Intro to Post Click performance tagging:
Post Click performance measures the actions a user takes after entering a site via paid placement such as a banner ad or paid search term. Evaluating the connection between user behavior and which ads or ad locations (such as a particular partner site) helps optimize ongoing marketing by assigning value to those visitors. We can determine value by setting up measurement campaigns surrounding those click-through visitors, watching their drop-out rates and comparing them to successful conversion. Post Click measurement allows effective performance evaluation on individual ad campaigns.

Post Click performance tagging usually involves adding an image to your page. This image (1×1 pixel) uses the SRC attribute, a descriptor telling a visitor’s browser where to retrieve a file, to collect information about the users arriving to the site through an online advertisement. This is typically done by adding a string of campaign-specific identifiers in the space after the URL left for setting variable values (the stuff after the “?” in your browser’s location bar).

However, if there are numerous campaigns running through different timelines on your website, adding (and removing) the image code from the site is very tedious. The effort is exponential if the website is still under development and requires you to back up the production release code, add the image tracking code to each page and re-deploy!! The less dynamic your Post Click tagging scheme, the greater the effort to keep it current.

A great work around to the constant extra work to keep things current during deployments and post development is to use your content management system to store the tags (the image SRC and its URL variables) and use a general library to add an image node to the corresponding page document if a tag is configured to appear on that page.  This elegant solution eliminates the need for re-deployment every time new tags are added.

Anatomy of the image tag:
Post Click performance image code looks similar to this, in which we have a simple conversion funnel of visitors landing on index.html and successfully converting once they have visited StoreFront.html:

In index.html:
<img style=”border: 0pt none; height: 1px; width: 1px;” src=”serverName&amp;tagId=31354″ alt=”" />

In StoreFront.html
<img style=”border: 0pt none ; height: 1px; width: 1px;” src=”serverName&tagId=24395″/>

If you look closely only the tagId changes for each page and the rest of the image properties remain the same.

Content Management solution:
1) Using the CMS to store the tag Id. There are two ways this can be achieved:

a. Creating a page attribute (call it analyticsTagId) and assign it the tagId: This is better from the point of view of performance. It is however a bit more difficult to manage; the content owner has to remove the tags when the campaign is over. There is no central place to view all the current tags.

b. Create a separate CMS page, which maintains a Map of pages and their tagIds: This takes a bit of performance hit (which can be overcome by caching) and presents one central place to manage all of your tags.

Once the CMS has the tags, the business objects in the code will need to check for a tag on a given page and call a JavaScript function if that tag exists.

2) Write a JavaScript function that takes tagId as a parameter and adds an Image to the DOM. Using JQuery, this function can look like this:

function AddTags(tagId){

if(tagId!=”null”)

{

var source;

if(document.location.protocol == “http:”){

source = document.location.protocol +”//adserver &tagID=”+tagId;

}else{

source = document.location.protocol +”//adserver&tagID=”+tagId;

}


//create the image node and append it to body
$(‘<img/>’).css({height: ’1px’,width:’1px’,border:0}).attr(‘src’,source).appendTo(‘body’);
}
}

That’s it!

This will give you a very strong and adaptive framework to add/remove your Post Click performance campaign codes from your website without actually deploying your code.

Notes:
1) If your ad serving code is in an iframe format, it will still follow the same steps,but instead of creating an image node, create a div and place your iframe in it.

Sample js code:

function createIframeTag(src){

var axel = Math.random()+"";

var a = axel * 10000000000000;

Google announced the launch of its Google Analytics Data Export APIs (beta) today. It was anticipated for a long time. Analytics API is a Google data API (same as Google calender API). APIs currently support Java and JavaScript (details on the Google Analytics Blog).

So what does this mean to Google analytics users?

• You can access Google Analytics on your desktop (using Adobe AIR or Google Desktop). Desktop reporting is one such application.
• You can access specific reports on your iphone or Android powered phones. Few other cool applications can be found here.

• The most important impact is that you can mash-up your data. You can marry your web analytics data with your offline data (Sales, CRM), create custom dashboards or new visualizations. Web analytics reports can be combined with data from other sources to create even more accurate predictive models and study online-offline user behaviours. You can now track your multi-channel campaigns more effectively.

Other web analytics vendors (like Omniture) already provide this functionality but Google Analytics is the first big player to do it for free (a lot of $$$ savings). Piwik (open source web analytics solution) enables you to own your analytcs data by hosting it in-house, but with these new APIs, you can save yourself the hassle of maintaining the analytics server and import the data.