How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional <img> tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2
2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc. You can use our tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages.
3) Add the entire custom image html tag from step 2 to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you need to track.

That is all there is to it! Google Analytics is not real-time, so you will need to give it some time. Approximately a day before you see the fruits of your “hard” work.

How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2
2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc. You can use our tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages.
3) Add the entire custom image html tag from step 2 to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you need to track.

That is all there is to it! Google Analytics is not real-time, so you will need to give it some time. Approximately a day before you see the fruits of your “hard” work.

As brands try to foster loyalty with Facebook pages, show innovation on blogs and address customer concerns on Twitter, social media is threading its way through the marketing and sales, research and development, customer-service departments and more. All of which gives rise to the question: Just whose job is it anyway? Answer: everyone's -- so it's important to get all those disciplines working together.

Take Ford Motor Co. for example. The automaker saw $2.7 billion in profit for 2009 -- a huge turnaround from a record loss the prior year -- and it smartly used social media to help disassociate it from the bankruptcies and bailouts of its rivals. But that required breaking with custom at Ford and pooling the resources of marketing and corporate communications.

"We've been living this for the past year," said Scott Kelly, Ford's digital-marketing manager. "Historically, we had very little interaction with public affairs, but ever since the congressional bailout for the other two automakers, we needed to combine marketing and public-affairs forces to get the right message out around Ford so we didn't get dragged down by GM and Chrysler."

Gettin in early
In late 2008, Ford brought together the teams from what was then called public affairs (now corporate communications) and marketing to plan all efforts simultaneously. That means Ford's Global Digital and Multimedia Communications Director Scott Monty is now involved in marketing's launch-planning meetings. "In the past, public affairs were brought in at the end," said Alex Hultgren, Ford's digital-media manager. Now, Mr. Kelly said, "I talk to people in public affairs daily, where it used to be monthly."

Couldn't agree more -- social media is sth. that needs to be taken throughout the company.

Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete's director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion's share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook.

Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent.

Surprise gain

The numbers proved eye-opening because Google used to dominate most Web-referral categories. "I was surprised to see Facebook has become No. 1," Ong said.

In other categories, Compete's data showed Mountain View's Google still on top, but Palo Alto's Facebook was not far behind. For example, Google accounted for 21.3 percent of referrals to sites catering to movie fans, but Facebook was second with 12.4 percent. And in a video category, Google - which owns YouTube - was first with 22.9 percent, but Facebook was next at 12.7 percent.

Facebook's meteoric growth as a Web destination was a factor. Facebook says it has 400 million active members, including about 225 million added in just the past 12 months. Its size now rivals that of major Web portals and its demographics mirror those of the Internet in general, Ong said.

"Putting all this information together, we can say that Facebook has become an integral part of the consumer Web experience, similar to how portals like Yahoo and MSN are part of most consumers' online sessions," Ong said. "So the message for the advertising industry is that more serious attention needs to be paid to social-networking sites like Facebook, and advertisers need to figure out how to leverage this traffic."

nothing really new here, but the pace in which FB is growing and shifting more and more traffic is impressive. okay, one little surprise: Even only at 2% I wouldn't have thought to find Myspace in this list at all.

Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That's because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.

Well, it worked. Despite the rapid pace of technology adoption, the rungs on the ladder have shown steady growth, with some (like Joiners) growing faster than others (like Creators). We have analyzed data for 13 countries, for business buyers, and even for voters. My colleagues and I have done profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors.

In all that time, only one thing has been bugging me: there was no place for Twitter.

We fixed that today.

As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, "Conversationalists". Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn't much of a conversation.

Conversationalists intrigue me. They're 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they're among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The data from this survey continues the trends from the last two years -- Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

more data in the full article, but esp. the facebook "stickiness" is amazing.

[A List of Goals and their Measurement Strategies]

(1) Sales - Goal conversions, some identifiable increase in conversions through social media. In the Boston AMA we've seen increased retention rates among members involved in social media.

(2) Higher SEO Rankings - Build a list of keywords and monitor the rankings as you develop content and an outreach program around those keywords.

(3) Crisis Communications - Conduct sentiment analysis to determine the overall opinion of your brand in the community, and how it moves up and down. Dell discovered in 2006 that they had a negative sentiment rating of 49% in the blogosphere, over an 18 month period they managed to get that down to 18%.

(4) Thought Leadership - Here's a combination of metrics, sales, higher seo rankings, and sentiment rankings.

(5) Customer Service - Does social media reduce your expenses in customer support? Typically in a forum community members will support other community members. Outsource your customer support to the community. Intuit has done this with their online products, reduced expenses, and increased product innovation by building a customer advisory board.

Just because the tools of social media are free doesn’t mean they come without their own barrier to entry. The barrier is the knowledge of how to use them. Before you get started with using social media, you need to understand the tools you’ll be using. When we work with clients on their social media strategy for their business, here’s a bit of what we’re always sure to discuss with them.

Secure Your Brand

Set Your Metrics

Know Who You Are

Determine Where to Build Satellite Communities

Create Rules for Engagement

Engage. Genuinely.

Assess Your Success.

Great article with a basic list that touches all areas and outlines the relevant points.

Step 1: Define your measures of success. “Many PR people are not clear about their goals for social media,” says Paine. “They’re doing a blog or a podcast because someone told them it’s a good idea.” Without clear objectives, Paine says, you have nothing to measure against.

“If your goal in getting into social media is to get your feet wet, then the outcome is wet feet,” Paine says. Pick an objective like, “Generate sales leads,” or “Increase customer newsletter subscriptions” for a measurable starting point.

Step 2: Define your audiences. “People think the blogosphere is one happy—or unhappy—group of people,” Paine says. Not only is it daunting to think of your audience as the trillions of blogs in the blogosphere, it’s simply incorrect. Figure out who will care about the social media content you are creating—and only measure that audience.

Step 3: Define the benefits. Determine the benefits that you want to quantify when you measure social media, advises Paine. For instance: increase sales, reduce turnover, or improve reputation. Then be clear about how communications contributes to those outcomes.

Step 4: Define your benchmarks. “We don’t have reliable numbers on how many people read a specific blog,” says Paine. “So your benchmarks have to be something like your past performance, or your reputation versus that of your competition.”

Step 5: Select a measurement tool. Paine suggests using Web sites like Technorati and Sphere or Radian 6 to keep an eye on conversations about your organization, and methods for measuring “engagement” of your audiences. You also will need some good Web analytics—Google Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture to figure out what actions your audience is taking.

Step 6: Analyze. “Research without analysis is just trivia,” says Paine. Figure out what actions you should take based on your social media conversations, and which tools (blogs, podcasts, YouTube, social networking sites, virtual communities) work better than others in generating conversations about your organization.

Joseph Jaffe – President of Crayon and best selling author of multiple books on advertising and new media.

Can you share 3-5 tips for companies trying to make sense out of defining a social media strategy?

1. Don’t cede control completely to your consumers. They don’t want it. Meet them halfway. Partner with them. Work with them
2. Marketing is not a campaign; it’s a commitment. If you want lifetime relationships with your consumers, you need to invest in them…genuinely…for life. Begin with investing in what we call at crayon, “commitment to conversation” (monitoring, optimization, response, outreach etc.)
3. Learn to deal with negativity. You want the love, but can’t deal with the hate. Criticism is not your enemy; apathy and indifference are. Any negative response from consumers (whether by blog, e-mail or customer service inquiry) is a cry for help AND an acknowledgement that they care (enough to reach out to you…)
4. As per my earlier point, think strategically. We’re currently working with some of our clients to define a social networking strategy BEFORE cart before the horse deploying a “Facebook App” for example
5. That said, we also advise companies to invest in “well-structured experimentation”. We distill this into a very real and workable number – 4: 4 experiments over a calendar year. Is 1 experiment per quarter that unrealistic or irrationally exuberant? I think not.