Social media analytics – stats for social sites and widgets
By Jason Menayan June 16th, 2008One of the difficulties that publishers face when trying to take advantage of the growth in online social media is knowing what to measure. Sure, there’s always Google Analytics, ClickTracks, HitBox, WebTrends, and other more traditional Web analytics services, but social media ad campaigns and applications work a little differently because you often don’t host the content or have a whole lot of control over its distribution/syndication. But, tight integration with social networking platforms through opt-in information sharing often gives publishers much richer demographic data than site analytics, which could be valuable in growing the campaign and selling advertising. A growing set of companies are helping advertisers wade through the metrics meaningful in assessing campaign performance.
Sometrics
[Free] Billing itself as the first company to provide analytics for social networks, Sometrics provides its users (primarily application developers) with the traffic, conversion and demographic data necessary for campaign optimization. The service is free for the currently-available standard account, and it has focused on providing analytics to app developers for Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Requires tracking code installation; live chat support is available. Sometrics was launched at the end of 2007.
Tracked:
- Pageviews and unique visits
- Installs/uninstalls
- Age
- Gender
- Number of friends
- Geo (state-level for US)
Refresh Analytics
[Free for app developers] Running as a Facebook app itself, Refresh Analytics monitors the activity of developers’ apps, providing deep demographic and traffic information. The service is free.
Tracked:
- Geo
- Age
- Gender
- Political and religious views
- Marital status
- Education
- Number of friends
Developer Analytics
[Free] Much like Adonomics (below), dA offers rich traffic and demographic data across the network of Facebook applications. The service is also private beta testing a direct measurement analytic tool suite for Facebook developers (signup). Even without participation in the analytics tool beta, signup gives access to rich traffic & demographic data for popular Facebook apps.
Adonomics (formerly Appaholic)
[Free] Adonomics doesn’t provide individualized private statistical and analytical reporting for developers, but it does provide a leaderboard of popular and active apps, similar to dA (above), but with a twist: it estimates the value of an app, should the developer be interested in selling it.
In addition, the most popular widget development platforms provide their own tracking/analytics solutions. Here are some links to the biggest widget developers’ analytics offerings:
This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 15th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
These are good sources for monitoring social media sites and widgets. I had seen a large number of sites popping up over the Internet regarding social media and widget measurement. I have spent a great deal of time learning more about sites like Clearspring.com (http://www.clearspring.com/platform/analyze) where account users have the ability to create, distribute, and analyze widgets that have been promoted across a wide variety of social bookmarking and networking sites. You have the ability to track “Viral Analysis”, “Track Widget Engagement”, and lastly, “Establish and Track Custom Events”. The platform allows you to dig very deep regarding how well your widgets are making traction online. I haven’t found a solution of this magnitude online; the only other widget distribution and analysis service that can be compared to Clearsprings offering is Gigya (http://www.gigya.com/site/Content/Widget.aspx). They have an extremely robust distribution channel similar to Clearsprings. As of Sept. 30, 2008, Clearspring has acquired AddThis, the No. 1 bookmarking and content sharing service on the Internet. I believe this will give them a distinct advantage over Gigya because the now have the opportunity to tap into over 20 billion views per month and reach more than 200 million unique visitors. Talk about creating an extremely large opportunity for reaching people online through this acquisition. I’ll be sure to comment again when I come across more sites related to social media and widget distribution/analytics.