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TwitterCounter – Stats for Your Tweets

twittercounterEver wish you could get stats on your Twitter feed like you can with Google Analytics for your website and RSS feed? TwitterCounter shows you your number of followers by day for the previous week, month or 3 months, including average growth and future growth estimations.  By installing their TwitterRemote widget on your blog or website you can see which Twitter users recently visited.  The widget is fully customizable and is very similar to widgets such as MyBlogLog. A little badge which updates with your number of followers on Twitter is also available.

TwitterCounter has thought a lot about promoting its own services – just about everything has a link so you can tweet the results.  Also available is a paid featured spot as the example account on the homepage and linked to throughout the site.

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Statistics are Vital to Marketing

measurechantrybeeLast week I posted about attaching dollars to statistics in order to make sense of them (and to relate them to how your business is doing).  During a discussion about the article, someone mentioned that it was a great non-marketing post.  I didn’t really respond at the time, but the statement has bothered me since.  Statistics are vital to marketing.  Without statistics, marketing is just a hit-or-miss blanket approach without a strategy and end-goal.  Statistics are how you know what is working and what should be improved (or dropped) and figuring out the next step to achieving your business goals.

Using statistics properly will show how various marketing efforts are affecting your bottom line (return on investment – ROI) so you can figure out how much to spend – and on what.  You’ll also learn more about your customers, your product, and your business. Statistics can give you information about how to improve your product, how to increase customer satisfaction and what your business is doing well.

Many people think of marketing as a soft, touchy-feely pseudo-science, but done properly, marketing should be just as measureable as other business processes and should provide vital information to run your business.

(photo by chantrybee @ FlickrCC)

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Want Your Statistics To Make Sense? Attach Dollars

dollartherittersImpressions, page views, hits, visits, unique visitors, clicks, CTR, conversions… what do they all mean? Unless you can translate them into how you’re doing business, they’re just numbers… and pretty useless ones at that.  While using the Internet to help your business may be relatively cheap, you still should understand what efforts are working and which are not.  Most Internet strategies require iterative improvements to get the most out of them – and that means knowing where you’re making money and where you’re not.

Every statistic should be related to the money you’re making.  If you’re selling things online, this is a bit easier, since you can track how many sales you’re making and how much per sale versus how many page views, visits, clicks, etc.  If you’re using the Internet to advertise your products or services, hopefully you have some way to collect leads online – or at least track that they came from online.  Then you should be able to figure out how many leads you get for how many actual sales (your $), which you then can relate to how many page views, clicks, etc. it took to get those.

As an example, many clients think they are doing really well with Internet advertising, but when we take a look at how much money they’re getting per conversion, click, etc., we often find that they’re spending more per conversion than they’re selling their product for.  It’s often hard to see this at first glance because people tend to look at overall spending when deciding what’s working.  If I spend $500 per month on Google ads, but I make $5000 per month, I might not think that’s a bad return.  But if you take a closer look, you may be getting most of your sales from other places, and you’re spending $500/month and not actually making anything from that traffic (if you’re spending more than you’re getting).

We all have a limited amount of time in our day.  If you can attach dollars to your Internet statistics, it will help you understand where you need to make changes, what’s working, and how to move forward.

(photo by theritters @ Flickr CC)

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