Are You Ready For A Web Analytics Grilling?

The CEO’s administrative assistant just called. The CEO wants to see you in an hour to answer some questions about your company's Web analytics.

(Just go with me on this. You can be certain that the CEO of Zappos or Apple or eTrade is intimately familiar with their business’ Web analytics. Inevitably, CEOs of asset management companies are going to take an interest, too. After all, especially over the last 12 months, there's been other fish to fry.)

You accept the “invitation” and gather up last month’s reports. But, someone other than you—in other words, someone other than who’s responsible for Web analytics—has prepped the CEO and she (please, go with me on this) fires off the following questions:

1. Which sites send the most traffic to us? Which firms? What’s been the trend lately?
2. What are the top keyword phrases people use when they come to us through search engines?
3. Are we getting much Bing traffic…what about from Twitter?
4. How are our new videos doing; are people hanging in there until the end?
5. Which of the outbound marketing tactics we use send us the “best” traffic? Substantiate your answer, with volume and conversion data.
6. We’re thinking about introducing a product that provides exposure to XXX, do users of our on-site search ever look for XXX?
7. Which customer segments are the heaviest users of the site?
8. What's our most viral content?
9. What’s our busiest time of the year? Day of the week? Time of day? What kind of a day was yesterday for us? How are we doing today?
10. What's the benefit when our investment strategists appear on CNBC? More email newsletter sign-ups? RSS feed subscriptions?

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Read All About It: 2 More Twitter Accounts Created

Elsewhere the big news this past week was the death and burial of Michael Jackson, the king of pop. In our corner of the world, the big news was what some consider relatively small developments.

In the space of 24 hours, I'd sent three tweets:

#1 linking to a kasina blog post about Robert Reynolds, CEO of Putnam Investments, joining Twitter (@robertlreynolds).

 

#2 pointing to the launch of Putnam's PutnamToday Twitter account.

#3 linking to an Investment News article explaining that Putnam's Twitter accounts were related to an upcoming ad campaign.

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Mind The Keywords—'Unfortunate Market Anomaly' Won't Help Search Traffic Find You

Song selection. One of the maddening things about the American Idol competition is what consistently trips up the final 12. Their raw talent or personality gets them just so far but those who “go home early” fail to read the judges’ minds about the songs they should be singing.

Word selection. That’s the ground on which Web sites compete for search traffic. But unlike with the Idol wanna-bes, there’s no need to guess. There are ways to know which keywords drive traffic. The challenge for the leader of digital strategy at mutual fund, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other asset management companies is in persuading colleagues to use the more commonly used terms when they create content.

Amateur performers on Idol have youth and inexperience as their excuse for ignoring the judges' cues. But professional communications today need to cede to the easy-to-track "wisdom of the crowds.”

Journalists years ago agreed to follow the Associated Press style, and book publishers mostly conformed to the Chicago Manual of Style. But even companies that adopted either the AP or Chicago style tended to produce their own addendums documenting the instances when they wanted to deviate from common practice. Words are invented, hyphens are attached with abandon, spelling reflects individual manager’s preferences and then gets institutionalized. Nobody picks this bit of muscle-flexing as a battle that’s worth fighting.

But there’s a price to be paid for spelling and word idiosyncrasies, and your Web site traffic, your content, pays it. This is inadvertent, of course, and that’s why it’s up to you to point it out. Asset managers are publishers now and need to think of their readers.

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Video-sharers Have Puppy Love For SPDRs Commercial

It’s been fun this week watching the growing social media success of State Street Global Advisors's exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. A SPDRS commercial introduced in June is getting uploaded to YouTube, as well as to other video-sharing sites, and commenters love, love, LOVE “the video.” (Note how the commercial aspect shrinks when the message is sufficiently appealing.)

Reviewers like the dogs, they like the accompanying song so much they want to buy it…and guess what else? According to their comments, some say they might even give State Street a look.

Watch the commercial for yourself and then let’s bat around some thoughts.

 

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Hurry Up! Others’ Real-Time Pace Is Making You Look Slower

Not so long ago, an overworked Marketing Communications writer would record the CNBC appearances of her portfolio managers, watch them at home that night and write summaries to be routed and eventually published on the Web later that week.

OK, that’s not going to work anymore.

The rest of the world is going real-time, and mutual fund, ETF and other investment communicators are going to have to hustle even more than they already do to catch up.

Exhibit 1 is from the world of entertainment. As the Tony Awards were underway a few Sundays ago, the media was reporting the results as they were happening, and bloggers were at it, too. But even the show content at the end of the show was fluid enough to reflect what happened earlier in the show. This video of host Neil Patrick Harris can say it better than I just did. 

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