Yogi Land

November was a busy time in Google Analytics. In particular, the Mobile App Tracking Team has a few things to announce.

• EasyTracking Library - automatic session management, better integration with Google Analytics SDK
• Updated Google Analytics SDK - More reliable method for sending hits, Android Market referral issue fixed, available via the Android SDK manager
• More samples - new open source application aimed to help reduce the ramp up time for new developers who want to track their apps

EasyTracker Library
We’ve created EasyTracker libraries for both iOS and Android.  The EasyTracker library will enable tracking of your application down to the Activity (or UIViewController for iOS) level with almost no coding required on your part.  See the ReadMe file and source code for details. These Libraries are intended for use with the standard Google Analytics SDKs and should make it very easy to add standard tracking to your applications.

Another advantage to using the EasyTracker library is session management.  As many developers know, it’s not always easy to determine whether your application is active and when to start a new session.  The EasyTracker library handles this for you.  It will determine when your application has been put into the background and will start a new session automatically.

The Android version of the Library not only provides for easy tracking, but also ensures that all calls to GoogleAnalyticsTracker are done off the main UI Thread.  Using this library should address responsiveness issues some Android developers have seen using the Google Analytics SDK.

We’ve adapted the Android Notepad sample application to use the EasyTracker library, just to show you how easy it can be.

You can find the libraries and sample applications at
http://code.google.com/p/analytics-api-samples/.  Check the downloads section for the libraries.  The source for the libraries is available in subversion as well.  Drill down into trunk/src/tracking/mobile/android/EasyTracker for Android and trunk/src/tracking/mobile/ios/EasyTracker for iOS.  The Notepad sample application is there as well.  We’ve released them as open source and contributions to making them better are welcome.

Check the ReadMe files in the libraries themselves for more information on how to use them.

New Versions of Google Analytics SDK for Android and iOS
We’ve released version 1.4 for iOS and version 1.4.2 for Android.  The iOS version of the SDK has one new feature.  Both versions contain several bug fixes as well.  Read on for details.

iOS
We’ve added a new method, dispatchSynchronously, that blocks while it dispatches hits.  It won’t return until the hits sent have either been acknowledged by the Google Analytics servers or the specified timeout period has elapsed.  This provides a more reliable method for sending hits before your application terminates or goes into the background.

We’ve also addressed several memory leaks and crashes reported against the SDK.

More details on the new version of the SDK can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/ios.html.

Android
The Android SDK will now handle referrals from the Android Market properly.  This applies to autotagging as well.

We’ve fixed several other bugs in the Android SDK.  Check out the details at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/android.html.

Google Analytics SDK now available via the Android SDK Manager
We’ve added the Google Analytics SDK to the Android SDK Manager.  You can download the latest versions using the Android SDK Manager instead of checking the website for updates.

Of course, this only applies to the Android version of the SDK.

MobilePlayground
We’ve released an open source application for both iOS and Android that exercises all the APIs for Google Analytics that are available to Mobile Application developers.  You can find them at trunk/src/tracking/mobile.

New Home for the Mobile Tracking Documentation
The Mobile Tracking documentation has moved.  It now resides with the rest of the Google Analytics tracking documentation.  Check it out at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/overview.html.

Reporting Problems and Feature Requests
We really value your feedback. If you are having problems with the SDKs, let us know by posting them on the Google Analytics issues website at http://code.google.com/p/analytics-issues/issues/list.  Use the component MobileTracking when entering an issue or looking through the list for issues already reported against the Mobile App SDKs.

Please stay tuned for more exciting news regarding Mobile Application Tracking with Google Analytics.

Jim Cotugno, Mobile Application Tracking Rockstar

Jeff Widman co-founded PageLever to provide better Facebook analytics for marketers. PageLever measures more than 650 million Facebook fans across sites like YouTube and MTV. Jeff has been cited as an expert in Facebook analytics by Mashable, AdAge, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, InsideFacebook, AllFacebook, etc.

I get asked all the time, “How frequently should I post on my Facebook page? When is the best time to post?”

Answer: Post whenever the most recent status update for your page stops showing up in your fans’ News Feeds.

If you post often, you will see an immediate spike in News Feed impressions, but it’s generally not worth the cost in lost fans. When your fans see two status updates from you in their News Feeds, they’ll likely get annoyed, and will consequently unsubscribe or un-fan. There are few exceptions to this rule.

If you post too infrequently, you’re missing out on opportunities to reach your fans. Over the course of a year, a page with 10,000 fans that posts only half as often as they could misses more than 1 million chances to get their content in front of a hyper-targeted Facebook audience. The larger your fan page, the more often you should be posting — without annoying your fans.

The kicker: Each post performs differently. Some posts last ten hours, and some posts last thirty hours.

Calculate the average post lifetime by using the method below, but remember it’s just that — an average. To get really in-depth, figure the average post lifetime for photos vs. articles, or the average lifetime when you post Thursdays at 3 p.m. vs. Saturdays at 10 a.m. However, it’s still just an average; each post is unique, so you can never exactly predict how it will perform.

How do you know when a post stops appearing in your fans’ News Feeds?

The good news is that when you track your posts’ performance, you’ll be able to see, in real-time, when that post drops out of the News Feed. If it flops five hours sooner than you expected, then immediately stick up a new post.

Each status update drops out of different fans’ News Feeds at different times, depending on how long Facebook’s algorithm EdgeRank calculates that particular fan will be interested in that particular status update. Then, the best we can do is look at how each status update performs across all your fans’ News Feeds.

You’ll actually see a slowdown in new impressions, clicks, likes and comments as a post starts dropping out of News Feeds. The following graphs show cumulative numbers, so when the graph flattens, the post has dropped out of News Feeds.

Each of these metrics has pros and cons.

1. Impressions per-post: Impressions per-post is a single aggregate count of how many times a particular status update has been viewed. Facebook updates this number as more and more people view the post; however, it often won’t update for several hours at a time when Facebook’s computers are calculating for millions of posts across millions of fan pages. On the bright side, when it works, it’s great — you can literally watch as your post gets viewed by fans.

2. Comments per-post: All the comments on any status update are time-stamped, so you can measure on a minute-by-minute basis exactly when a fan saw the status update. Unfortunately, most status updates receive so few comments that there aren’t enough data points to determine whether your fans are choosing not to comment or simply aren’t seeing the post in their News Feeds.

3. Likes per-post: In general, this is the most accurate way to see when your status update starts dropping out of News Feeds. Facebook updates the post’s like count in near real time, so it’s more reliable than the post impression count. And because posts tend to get more likes than comments, the data presents an accurate picture of how long a post stayed in News Feeds. On the other hand, likes aren’t time-stamped, so you have to check the like count regularly to see when new likes are added.

So how do I actually measure?

Post a status update. Every hour, record the number of impressions, likes and comments. Figure out when the rate of new impressions or likes slows down.

Try recording all the raw data in Excel, then graph the data just like you see above. Visually estimate the post lifetime based on when the graph flattens out.

After you calculate the post lifetime for 10-20 posts, you’ll start to generate an average post lifetime unique to your fan page.

What’s the average post lifetime?

I don’t know.

However, I surveyed 20 posts across five fan pages that had 2 million+ fans, and calculated an average post lifetime of 22 hours, 51 minutes. Theoretically, this implies most fan pages shouldn’t post more than once a day.

I strongly recommend keeping track of your posts in real-time because post lifetimes vary widely, even across the same fan page. In my sample of twenty posts, the shortest post lasted only 10 hours, while the longest post lasted a full 50 hours!

If you weren’t tracking those posts, you would have been invisible in the News Feed for 13 hours when the post flopped at the 10-hour mark. Similarly, you could have delayed your next post when the high-performing post showed no sign of slowing down.

Lastly, feel free to experiment and break the rules.

You won’t know if your fans respond better to a different posting strategy until you try it. Use these analytics to augment your intelligence, not replace it.

Happy posting!

Image courtesy of Flickr, kaysha

More About: analytics, contributor, Facebook, features, Marketing, Social Media

A few months ago at the Google I/O conference, we were approached by Zach Steindler, a co-founder at Olark (a way to gain customer insight and sale better through live chat) who was raving about Google Analytics Annotations. He had such a great business case, we decided to let him rave here. Enjoy, and thanks Zach.

Making good business decisions is hard, and making the right one is even harder. At Google I/O I realized many people use Google Analytics but they aren’t familiar with the recent annotations feature that has helped us make smarter business decisions.

When we look at our Google Analytics, we don’t really care if our numbers are up or down; what we really want to know is why. This means asking a lot of questions, particularly questions about what happened when, like:

“How long has that ad trial been running?”
“When did we release that update to the website?”
“What happened after that last blog post?”

To answer these questions I might have to dig through e-mails, commit logs, and probably end up pestering my teammates for an hour while we try to figure out what happened when. But this is serious stuff; if our numbers went up 50% in a week, you better believe we want to know why so we can do more of it!

Annotations are exactly the tool we needed to answer these questions without having to pester teammates and dig through the past. If you don't know, basically, they allow you to add notes of what events happened on a particular day. These notes are then visible for the different views in Google Analytics, so you can see how the events impacted your page views, goals, or whatever else you are tracking.

According to Google’s AdPlanner stats, Facebook is the #1 most-visited destination on the web. Weighing in at an unfathomably heavy 570 billion page views and 540 million users, the ubiquitous social network outranks every other non-Google site, taking more than 35% of all web traffic measured.

The stats, which do not include data from Google.com and YouTube, detail the categories, users and page views for each of the top 1,000 sites on the Internet. They also tell which sites have advertising. Wikipedia and Mozilla.com are the only two sites in the top 10 that remain ad-free.

Destinations such as Mozilla.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com and Live.com sit high in the rankings due in large part to their status as default landing pages for various browsers.

When it comes to non-Facebook social media properties, Twitter ranks 18th with 5.4 billion page views, Flickr is 31st with 1.8 billion views and LinkedIn sits in 56th place at 1.7 billion views.

And the usual blogging sites make appearances, too. Blogspot is in 7th place, WordPress in 12th and Blogger in 53rd.

Other popular destinations, according to Google’s report, are international web portals such as Baidu, Sina, 163.com and Sohu. Though relatively unheard of in American tech press, these sites are the online equivalent of our solar system’s Jupiter: enormous and a bit out of our reach.

Bank of America and PayPal also made the list, coming in at 93rd and 39th, respectively. And in the news category we find the BBC, which was ranked 43rd with 2.5 billion hits, followed by the New York Times’ website, ranked 83rd with 600 million views.

We think it’s pretty spectacular and surprising that Facebook has come to dominate global web traffic in just a few short years. Are any of these stats eyebrow-raising to you?

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Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Google, Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia, WordPress, YouTube, blogger

Tags: analytics, doubleclick, Google, stats, traffic

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

The Search Engine Strategies conference is next week in New York, and googlers from search, AdWords, AdSense, YouTube, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer will be there in force. We'll have a large booth where we'll be demoing the coolest new features from any and all of our products. Come by and say hello, and also be sure to attend some of the Google sessions.

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.