Google Analytics for Facebook

I have just set up Google Analytics for my Facebook Fan page and it is working wonders! This is definitely something every business with a Facebook Fan Page needs to look into for enhanced statistical insights into what is actually happening on your Fan page and more importantly if all your hard work in the social media sphere is bearing any fruit!

What lies behind this is a little tool called FBGAT. FBGAT is a free and opensource tool created by Webdigi to work around Facebook’s Javascript restriction on Facebook fan pages which prevents Google Analytics from working correctly.  

The tool they created is comprised of two key parts:

1) The code generator that will help you generate a code for each individual area/page that has to be tracked on Google Analytics
2) The tracker, which instructs Google Analytics to log visits, IP address, browser,  country, etc on each page load.

But in order to get this going, we need to backtrack a bit and check if you have a Google Analytics account.. If you do not, then setup one! If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name or whatever you want as long as you can identify it. Once you have set this up, you will get your hands on a tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2

Secondly you need to create your custom img tag for each of your pages that you would like to track. This can be for any part of your page that you would like to track such as the wall, the info section etc. Use this tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages, remember, you will need your Google Analytics tracking code for this!

Once you are done with that, you need to add another excellent application to your facebook page, Static FBML. This application will give you the possibility to set up things such as Google Analytics on a page that normally does not support tags or other tracking features by basically using a box on your page as a platform to where you can add HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customisation.

Once you have Static FBML on your page you need to click on the FBML tab and edit it. Paste the custom img tag created earlier via the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages, save it and choose to place it on your “wall” for tracking your wall activities. And thats actually all there is to it! Just remember that you need to make the conscious choice of putting it on your wall rather than just keeping it on your tab.

Since Google Analytics is not real-time, you will need to give it some time to start tracking the traffic. But I promise you, you will not be disappointed!

Women Want More

The sellers of the first washing machines managed to get the marketing message out to women in a way that still strikes a chord. Their strategy was highlighting the benefits it would bring by listing various items that could be saved by the user; things such as time, labour, nerves, clothes and strenght…

Interstingly enough, these are all things that today’s woman is still desperately trying to find more of. Unfortunately this highly relevant marketing message has gone from being explicitly clear in the early 20th century, to becoming vague, irrelevant and pushy at worst in today’s world.

A new book from  Boston Consulting Group has now pinpointed what the washing machine salesmen of the 20th centrury were already on to. Their new book “Women Want More” looks at the new “female economy”, a massive economic force that will drive $5 trillion in incremental global spending during the next few years and simultaneously make any marketeer salivate at the possibilities of getting a share of that pie.

The book aims at providing marketeers with an overview of this massive female demographic out there, pointing out facts such as that 1 billion women are currently working worldwide, that more than half of college students are women, and that actually women control more than half of the wealth in the US.

But mainly, the book tries to point out what major challenges are currently affecting women and aims at providing marketing insights into how to go about appealing to women by providing solutions to their problems rather than pushing irrelevant products on them. Lack of time was stated as the biggest challenge by most women along with the feeling of being pressured to balance all necessary tasks in every day life. MarketingCharts summarises the problem with time into the following three segments:

1. Too many demands. Almost half of women surveyed felt there were too many demands on their time.
2. Too many conflicting priorities. Many of the demands felt by women directly conflict with one another.
3. Not enough time for me. Women have a lack of leisure time with the lack of “me time” coming out as the top time-related concern of 45% of women surveyed.

In addition to looking at challenges perceived by women, the Boston Consulting Group also categorized female consumers as broadly belonging to one of the following six broad archetypes, offering marketeers the opportunity to address the common problem of time, but from a point of view of each archetype. 

• Fast Tracker: A high-driven perfectionist who wants to make the most of everything she does.
• Relationship Focused: A woman who may live with a romantic partner and spends most of her free time with them.
• Managing on Her Own: A divorced professional who likes being independent but hopes to marry again someday.
• Pressure Cooker: A married mother with a full-time job who lacks the time to manage everything in her life and the resources to obtain help.
• Making Ends Meet: A low-income woman who may have health problems and struggles with frustration and debt.
• Fulfilled Empty Nester:A married homeowner with grown children who no longer live at home.

Following this interesting overview of various aspects that need to be taken into consideration when dealing with women from a marketing point of view, “Women Want More” also dives further into segmentations and what segments are actually serving the female target group properly. 

While most marketeers will jump at the chance to find out a bit more about how this is done, “Women Want More” emphasises the old but valuable lesson about the importance of having a relevant product with the right message going out to the right target group. Just like the waching machine sales men in the early 20th century managed to do, and mostly to great succes.

What Women are Watching Online

“More than 180 million US internet users watched 31.2 billion videos in March 2010, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.” Thats a LOT of video content being viewed online.. According to the same study, YouTube was the main sorce of video content, serving more than 135 million viewers during March 2010 and reaching 3 out of every 4 online video viewers, while Google was the source from where the videos were viewed both through number of unique viewers and average videos per viewer.  These massive figures boil down to an average of 96 videos per view on YouTube, and a lot of time spent online by the viewers.

Unfortunately the study does not differentiate between men and women, or any gender specific online video viewing habits, so, intrigued by the numbers and wondering where and what women are watching online, I decided to dwell further into the numbers and try to at least get an idea of where the virtual footpath of a female web browser leads me.

Traditionally reaching out to women through the means of TV was usually been done during the commercial breaks of programs such as soap operas or talk shows. But with the increasing popularity of online content, TV viewing and advertising is being reassessed as forms of marketing. Suddenly the most popular medium of mass communication had a serious competitor in portals such as YouTube and Hulu, offering online content, both traditional commercially created as well as privately uploaded user generated content. Whichever it is, it is today being uploaded in enormous amounts every second of the day by users all over the world.

Simultaneously as this switch was happening, the traditional view of marketing to women online and offline was shaken by a 2007 study by BIGresearch in which women were deemed less stereotypical than what many marketeers might have wanted them to be. (Funny how its always easier if you can put someone in a box..). According to the study, women were noted to be more likely to be regularly or occasionally watching sports than soap operas. From the women surveyed, 62% said they watch sports regularly or occasionally on TV while only 42% said they watch soap operas with the same frequency. Have you accounted for this in your marketing mix?

Before you revamp your whole marketing mix, The Nielsen Company and Microsoft did a highly interesting study on video ads shown during full-episode online TV shows. The study showed that a deeper brand impact was achieved online than through corresponding on-air TV ads. The study states that online video ads had a 65% general recall, compared to the lower 46% general recall for TV ads.

Whether its video content, blogs, social media portals or any other  form of user generated content online, the new formats and viewer behaviours are a blessing in disguise. The same study by Nielsen shows and encourages marketing efforts to look into Dual Platform marketing mixes where video content is not purely offered on air, but also online, hence going full circle and not excluding any possibilities.

So after all that, there is still a missing element in the story. Gender. Is there a difference between men and women and their viewing habits online? A study by SocialMediaExaminer digs a bit deeper and shows that men are significantly more likely to use YouTube or other video marketing than women (51.2% of all men compared to only 42.6% of women). Now we are getting somewhere! So fewer women watch YouTube than men, but that is still an impressive number of approximately 78million women using YouTube! In March! (If you use the figure stated in the beginning of this article as a base).

In 2007 Nielsen Online stated that men and women consume online video differently based on the findings from their latest VideoCensus study. While women lead online network TV viewing, men were drawn to consumer-generated media. Reading that and comparing the info to the above study by SocialMediaExaminer I cannot help but wonder if the question is not WHAT are women watching online, but rather, what content would women LIKE to see online. And who will actually act and generate it?