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Over 294 billion emails are sent each day. It would take the U.S. Postal Service 2 years to process that many pieces of mail.

Just looking at the amount of activity on social networking sites is enough to make anyone’s head spin. How large of a role does social media play in our society? I can say right now, it’s pretty sizable.

Read on for 10 of the most astonishing facts about social media activity in 2012.

1. Over 2 million blog posts are written each day, enough to fill Time Magazine for 770 years. (MBA Online)

2. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. (Search Engine Journal)

3. Two new members join LinkedIn every second; over 170,000 per day. (LinkedIn)

4. There are over 2 billion more “likes” on Facebook per day than the total amount of species on the planet. (JeffBullas)

5. Over $270,000 is spent online every minute. (SocialSkinny)

6. Over 750 million social networkers follow a brand online, more than double the population of the United States. (Social Skinny)

7. More than 1.5 billion online users say they want rewards programs from social brands (approximately 20% of the total population on Earth). (PivotConference)

8. 79% of Twitter users are more likely to recommend brands they follow online. That’s more potential referrals than the entire population of the U.S. (HubSpot)

9. In total each day, users spend over 20,000 years on Facebook. (AllTwitter)

10. Within 5 years, sales via social commerce are expected to reach $30 billion. (Social Skinny)

The world seems a lot busier now doesn’t it? But look on the bright side: the more time people spend online, the more opportunities you have to engage them in your brand.

The post 10 Astonishing Facts About Social Media Activity appeared first on Ambassador.

The post 4 Metrics Critical to B2B Success—and How Referrals Can Help Get You There appeared first on Ambassador.

Need more proof? Here are six more statistics that prove the effectiveness of word of mouth advertising:

• 85% of fans of brands on Facebook recommend brands to others. (Syncapse)
• 43% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it on social media. (Nielsen)
• 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family. (Nielsen)
• 81% of U.S. online consumers’ purchase decisions are influenced by their friends’ social media posts versus 78% who are influenced by the posts of the brands they follow on social media. (Market Force)
• 79% of U.S. consumers who’ve “Liked” a brand on Facebook did so in order to receive discounts or other incentives. (Market Force)
• 49% of U.S. consumers say friends and family are their top sources of brand awareness, up from 43% in 2009. (Jack Morton)

What are the takeaways?

The ways in which brands engage with their customers are quickly changing in both tone and strategy. As trust in paid advertising declines, word-of-mouth marketing via social networks has become the most effective means of building a loyal base of brand ambassadors, meaning more engagement and more revenue for your brand.

Nevertheless, even in the face of empirical evidence that proves the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing, 72% of marketers still don’t recognize and leverage the value of customer referrals.

There’s no question that word-of-mouth marketing is the best way to engage customers and drive more sales to your online business today. The real question that online marketers must answer is why haven’t you started already?

Do you want to learn how to turn more of your customers, partners, affiliates, and fans into revenue generators? Request a custom demo from one of our referral software experts today.

The post The Word-of-Mouth Marketing Benefits That Matter appeared first on Ambassador.

What’s our problem with FOMO?

It causes a loss of focus and spreads marketers too thin — rather than focusing on everything, marketers should select channels where their audience is and test their brand against those channels.

Stay Updated on Your Target Market’s Preferences

First, you might figure out if you know the answers to some basic questions about the consumer behavior habits of your current and potential customers. Are they watching your videos on YouTube or Facebook? Which platform is mostly likely to lead to conversions or shares? Alternatively, is your target market slowly moving over to another video site like Instagram? Maybe your target audience doesn’t even like videos and prefers articles or graphics. They could even still be just watching TV.

Set Hard KPIs to Determine Efficacy

We can’t be too hard on FOMO: wanting to try new techniques and tactics is important, and savvy CMOs know that part of their marketing spend should go towards outside-the-box, experiential channels. But when it comes down to spreading spend too thin, nothing alleviates fear of missing out like hard numbers. In this digital age, successful marketing without marketing metrics is like trying to guess a checking account balance when you have an online banking app on your phone. In other words, guessing is both ineffective and unnecessary.

Of course, lots of companies have never even established marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). Laura Lake outlines the characteristics of this particular kind of performance metric:

• Quantifiable: You have to be able to measure them somehow.
• Directional. They have to tell you if you are getting better or not.
• Sensible: They must integrate with your brand.
• Actionable: You can do something to improve them.

In other words, marketers need to take actions that are in line with their company’s objectives. These actions must be measurable and have the potential to improve their objectives. Hard KPIs eliminate fear of missing out because they eliminate guesswork. You will know if you are missing out or not.

Use Marketing Automation to Increase Productivity

If your problem is the vast number of marketing platforms and a lack of time to properly implement campaigns and analytics, much less analyze or even establish marketing KPIs, marketing automation provides a solution. Not only do these automated platforms make it easier to implement campaigns, they make them easier to measure. If you think you are missing out on a new advertising platform, you can plan and implement tests. By relying upon automation, there should be more time to strategize, plan, report, and analyze.

Do Less with More Focus

If your brand’s audience uses social media, there is a good chance that a majority of them do experience FOMO. Just like their audience, marketers need to stop worrying about missing out and gain hard numbers to figure out which strategies are most effective for their own particular brand. Since the habits of Internet users can change abruptly, finding the best mix for a particular campaign, or even a specific day takes some testing. These tests must have measurable results. Guessing breeds fear and is not likely to lead to accurate conclusions. On the other hand, knowing relieves fear and leads to positive action. That way, you’ll be sure that you never miss a thing.

The post Cure Your Marketing FOMO: Do Less with More Focus appeared first on Ambassador.

These days, consumers are turning to the internet more than any other source to learn about brands and make purchasing decisions. In fact, according to a study by GE Capital, 81% of consumers say they turn to the web to do research before making a purchase. What if the information that’s floating around in cyberspace doesn’t necessarily paint your business in the best light? While you can’t completely control what’s said about you on the web, you can take measures to counteract and protect your online reputation. If you’ve had a few mishaps in the past and your online persona could use a bit of a makeover, here are a few tips to get you back on track.

Keep track of what’s being said.

You can’t correct a problem if you don’t know it exists. You need to stay on top of what’s being said about your business online – good or bad. Set up a Google alert that will send you a notification any time your brand is mentioned online. That way you can step in and take the appropriate measures right away.

Google alerts work with the same advanced search operators as a regular Google search. Add filters to exclude false positives. For example I would add negative keywords like “-Jake” and “-baseball” to eliminate results for the minor league baseball player Jake Skole from alerts for my name (Jordan Skole).

Looking to get more advanced? I recommend taking a look at Moz’ Fresh Web Explorer. Tools like Sprout Social can help monitor social media mentions of your brand terms as well.

Respond in a timely manner.

When it comes to online comments or complaints, timing is everything. If someone writes something about your business, product, service or employees and you fail to respond, it can give the impression that you don’t care. If you come across a compliment, say thank you and make it as personalized as possible. If it’s a complaint or negative comment, apologize, offer a solution and if necessary, offer to take the conversation offline before it gets out of hand.

Stay positive.

The manner in which you respond – especially to a complaint or negative review – can make or break how your business is perceived moving forward. 62% of consumers say they would stop doing business with a brand following a negative interaction while 29% say they’d increase their spending following a positive experience. Always focus on customer satisfaction and keep all responses as positive as possible.

Be active online.

If the only online activity associated with your brand is negative comments, what do you think will be at the top of the Google search the next time someone looks up your company? One of the best ways to combat a not-so-stellar reputation online is to establish a solid, active presence on the web. This will provide much more robust results when someone conducts a search for your brand. Be active on social media, blog frequently and join as many relevant groups and forums as you can manage.

Keep communications personal yet professional.

There is a fine line that businesses must skate when engaging with customers and prospects online. The ultimate goal is to develop relationships with your audience while also remaining professional. If you read negative reviews or comments, keep responses positive and respectful. Don’t take it personal. Just remember, once you put something on the web it’s there forever, so choose your words wisely.

Recruit passionate brand ambassadors.

You obviously can’t be everywhere at all times, so why not tap into your happy customer base to help spread the good word about your brand? Not only does this provide more credibility for your business, but it’s also a much more powerful way to reach more prospects. While 84% of consumers say they trust recommendations from people they know, 68% still place more trust in the opinions of other consumers that they don’t know over ads and other professional marketing efforts.

Use negative feedback to your advantage.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” – Ben Franklin

Nobody wants to see negative things written about the brand they’ve worked so hard to build, but since you can’t keep everyone happy all the time, it’s bound to happen. Take these negative comments as an opportunity to further improve and grow your business. Your online reputation will ultimately make or break your business. By staying on top of what’s being said about your brand, knowing how to respond and leveraging other ways to boost your image online, you’ll be able to overcome any negative info that may be out there and still come out on top.

The post How to Improve Your Online Reputation appeared first on Ambassador.

If you asked 20 marketing experts what the most important social media metrics are, chances are you’d get 20 different responses. The truth is, SMM is a very broad topic, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to measure success. Yet, it’s critically important to understand what is (and isn’t) working so you’re not wasting valuable marketing dollars heading in the wrong direction.

While there are dozens of ways to measure SMM, here are a handful of metrics that every marketer should be keeping track of.

Where is your traffic coming from?

This is one of the most powerful tools for determining what areas you should be focusing your marketing efforts. You should know which social media channel is referring traffic your way and what type of content performs the best for each channel. Once you have this information, you can shift toward those sites and optimize your efforts to increase traffic.

To track your traffic, login to your Google Analytics account, go to the Traffic Sources tab, click on the Referring Sites option and type in each social network address. The results will show you how much web traffic is being referred from each platform. Be sure to use utm tracking parameters on your social media links, which are invaluable for running these reports.

But adding utm tracking parameters to every single social media post can be a huge pain. Fortunately Buffer has the aspirin. (If you aren’t using Buffer to queue your posts then you are doing it wrong.) From within Buffer navigate to account settings –> link shortening and make sure that “Enable Campaign Tracking” is switched to “Yep.”

How many people are clicking on your social shares?

As of the last quarter of 2013, the click through rate on Facebook had increased by an incredible 275%. This means people are engaging with businesses on social media now more than ever. Measuring how many clicks your social shares receive is an important part of learning what content works best.

If you share external content (content to sites other than your own) in addition to your internal content, keep an eye on what resonates with your audience. For example, if your audience loves articles based on productivity hacks, then produce more in-house content around that category. Just don’t stray from your core messaging.

How many actual conversions are you getting from social media?

Conversions aren’t necessarily just visitors who complete the purchase process. A conversion may include a successful download of your eBook, or opting into your newsletter. Conversions are any event that are tied to the revenue process, and can happen even after a visitor has converted into a customer (if you are tracking referrals, duh).

It’s important to understand how many of these conversions are being driven by social media. Measuring your assisted social conversions can reveal how well you’re doing at building a rapport within your social communities.

First, set up events within Google Analytics. At Ambassador, we use Segment.io to keep all of our tracking events coordinated across our marketing dashboards. This allows you to track the traffic you’re getting from social media, and measure the conversion rate over time. Compare this data to your direct conversion rate to determine which channels are most effective in reaching and drawing in potential customers.

How many people are talking about my brand vs. my competitors?

A great offense begins with a solid defense, which – in marketing terms – means you should be closely monitoring how your competition is faring on social media. You should compare your stats to your competitors. This is also known as “share of voice”, or SOV. Calculating your SOV is simple. Just use the following formula:

SOV = Total Number of Mentions for YOUR Brand / Total Number of Mentions of Your Competitors

You can monitor the conversations on the web about your brand for free by using the web tool SocialMention, or you can invest in one of the more robust tools that are available on the market today. I’m personally a big fan of Moz’ suite of tools, specifically FollowerWonk and Fresh Web Explorer.

Segment the different conversations about your brand by platform to identify which social networks are producing the best results for you. Then, either beef up your focus there, or tweak your other strategies to get better results.

Is my content really relevant and of good quality?

The driving force behind any successful social media marketing campaign is quality content that matters to your audience. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time. The quality and relevance of your content can’t necessarily be tracked by measuring the number of times your blog post is shared or tweeted. To accurately analyze this metric, dive deeper and really get into the meat and potatoes of how your content is performing.

Use Google Analytics to measure the following three key factors for each piece of content you produce:

• Unique page views
• Time on page
• Total pages viewed

The goal is to see each of these things increasing over time. A higher number of unique page views indicates that you’re reaching more people, while time on page increase means your content is interesting enough to hold the attention of your visitors. Ideally your content will keep people reading for 7 minutes. Finally, if you see an increase in total pages viewed, that means people want to learn more about your brand and/or what you have to offer.

Of course, these are just a handful of the dozens of social media metrics you can use to track the return on your social media efforts. Ultimately, the total metrics you choose should make sense for your particular business, and they should help you to tie your online efforts back to your bottom line.

Determine which areas make the most sense for your business, set some specific goals, and then measure progress on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually basis. By doing so, you’ll be better able to hone your efforts to achieve continued success over time.

Interested in leveraging your social media marketing by expanding your marketing strategy? Learn how to drive more referrals and increase revenue using referral marketing software.

The post 5 Social Media Marketing Metrics You Should be Measuring appeared first on Ambassador.

Loss Aversion, Scarcity, & Customer Acquisition

Loss aversion is a human tendency to place a greater value on items that we already possess, compared to those that we stand to gain. Marketers can leverage this tendency by positioning incentives in terms of a loss instead of rewards:

1. Give something to your users.
2. Increase its value by making it scarce.
3. Threaten to take it away.

Understanding Loss Aversion

“Loss aversion” is a person’s tendency to value what they already have more than what they will gain. People are far less willing to part with objects that are already in their possession than to gain new items — even if the items gained are more valuable. People are also far more willing to exhibit risk-seeking behaviors to avoid a loss. Loss aversion is easiest to understand with a few examples:

Read next: Endowment effect (Wikipedia) and Loss aversion (Wikipedia)

Ex: Stock Traders

Even stock traders fall susceptible to the endowment effect. Stock traders consistently exhibit loss aversion behavior by keeping their worst performing stocks in their portfolio and selling their better performing stocks. Traders would rather “let it ride” with their poor performing stocks and take the risk that the stocks will bounce back, instead of cutting their losses on the under-performing stocks (and accepting a realized loss).

Over the long-term, this of course means that the trader’s portfolio is increasingly populated with under-performing stocks. The UC Berkeley economist Terrance Odean discovered that the stocks traders sold outperformed stocks in their portfolio by 3.4%.

Read next: What are the best kept secrets about investing? (Quora)

Ex: Outbreak Physicians

We typically assume physicians to be the most rational of professionals, yet they have proved to be just as likely to exhibit loss aversion as the rest of us muggles.

In a study by Nobel Prize economists Tversky and Kahneman, two samples of doctors were presented with two hypothetical scenarios. In each scenario, doctors were presented with a situation regarding a hypothetical outbreak.

Scenario A:

The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor?
Of the the large sample of doctors surveyed only 28% elected for the riskier program B. The large majority of doctors supported the risk-averse behavior of certainly saving 200 people.

Scenario B:

The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die. Which of the two programs would you favor?
The percentages were flipped, with 78% of physicians opting for the riskier behavior of program D.

In reality both scenarios are exactly the same. Saving only 1/3 of the population is the same as losing 2/3rds, and yet — when framed in terms of a loss, doctors were significantly more willing to take a risk and overwhelmingly chose Scenario B.

Scarcity and Value

What have diamond mines and nightclub lines figured out long ago? That an object’s value is increased with its scarcity.

Scarcity & Facebook Gifting Applications

Ankur Nagpal, Facebook polluter extraordinaire, leveraged scarcity to improve engagement with his Facebook gifting applications. Ankur adjusted the CTA copy in one of his gifting applications from “Send all your Friends a Hug” to,

“You Can Only Send 20 More Hugs Today.”

The simple change had a small effect on the number of users that would send their friends virtual gifts, but had a dramatic affect on the engagement rate of users that were already sending gifts to their friends. Ankur says that many even started hitting the artificial limit.

By creating an artificial scarcity of gifts, the users valued each virtual hug more than when they had an endless amount.

Marketing Applications & Customer Acquisition

So what does all of this behavioral economics have to do with marketing and customer acquisitions?

It tells us that customers are more willing to take action to prevent a loss than to gain something, even if ownership of the thing is implicitly granted.

It tells us that users value something more when there is less of it, and when they can’t get it back.

So how can you engineer your application to hack user behavior? Give your users something unique. Make it valuable by making it scarce. Threaten to take it away.

1) Think of Something to Give Your Users

Choosing a way to incentivize your users is one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to “growth hacking.” You want to provide value to your users, but you also want to make sure to increase the specific KPIs you are targeting. Think of the specific value that your product or service produces, and try and replicate that. Dropbox famously realized that their currency was cloud storage space, and offered more of it as an incentive to encourage their users to refer their friends. Try and figure out your currency and offer more of that to your customers.

Make a list of complimentary goods that your specific users would appreciate. Try and distill that down to a list of products or services that are unique — every trade-show kiosk on earth is offering an opportunity at a free iPad, but how many B2B companies are offering gift certificates to Indochino, or how many tech companies are offering a free year of Zapier or Evernote Pro. If you’re a cookie company, offer your users milk. Reach out to the members of your list and see if you can work out a custom special offer with your industry peers.

There are plenty of incentives that you can offer your customers that fit in well with your marketing funnel. Here are just a few more suggestions:

• Swag. Everybody loves t-shirts.
• Tickets to your next conference. Not hosting a conference? Tickets to the next conference you plan on sponsoring or speaking at.
• Books. Encourage your customers to consume the content that fits in best with your overall marketing strategy.

2) Make it Valuable

If you want to incentivize a specific type of behavior then it helps to offer a very specific type of incentive. If you have an e-commerce store, don’t just offer your customers any product that they can purchase on their own. Ambassadors, like early adopters, tend to be motivated by status and access. The reward can be just a token that gets them access to an elite group of their super-user peers. Consider producing a limited-edition item. If you’re an ecommerce store this is relatively easy, but if you are a SaaS company then try and think of a unique feature that you can add to your product.

• Swag. Create a custom limited-edition t-shirt, or give away one of your coveted early t-shirts from when you were still in the garage.
• Tickets to your next conference. Don’t just give tickets away, create a special “VIP Experience” that you can offer with unique dinners, meet the speakers and more!
• Books. Leverage your industry connections to try and get autographed or personalized copies.

3) Threaten to Take It Away

In order to take advantage of your users’ loss aversion, we need to frame the incentive in terms of a loss, not a reward. The incentive isn’t a gold star that your users’ will earn after completing the desired behavior. The incentive should be positioned as already belonging to the user, albeit in a risky position. If the user doesn’t complete the desired behavior in the given time frame, then they will lose it forever.

Gotchas

Loss aversion is a proven human tendency that savvy marketers have been tapping into since well before the tech industry. However, care should be given when incorporating such a tactic into your overall marketing strategy. Loss aversion means that a user will be more willing to take action to prevent a loss than to accept a gain, but it also means that actual losses have larger effects on user satisfaction than on gains.

The post Hacking the Endowment Effect appeared first on Ambassador.

Summary

On Jul 21, 2014 at 5:58 PM, I extracted 2,406 front-page post records from GrowthHackers.com. I then analyzed those posts to gain some additional insight about the ecosystem. This is that insight.

For this first analysis I only extracted front page posts, posts that received at least four votes, or were posted prior to March 1. It was in March that the GrowthHackers team upgraded the ecosystem, causing only posts recieving four or more votes to appear on the front page. This means there is some discrepancies in the data that I will attempt to mend in a future, more thorough, crawl.

Basic Stats:

• 2,406 front-page posts were created on GrowthHackers.com between January 5, 2014 and July 21 at 5:58 PM
• The average number of votes per post was seven. The median was five and the standard deviation was 6.7.
• The average number of comments per post was 3.1. The median was one and the standard deviation was 5.1.
• The highest rated post of all-time earned 55 votes (http://growthhackers.com/all-growth-hackers-should-learn-these-7-technical-skills/).
• The most discussed post of all time generated 54 comments (http://growthhackers.com/questions/ask-gh-whats-in-your-conversion-optimization-stack/).
• The most active user by post count (by a landslide) was Anuj Adhiya (http://growthhackers.com/member/anujadhiya/).

Category Analysis:

The most popular two categories by a landslide are “Growth Hacks” and “Optimization.” Between these two categories they account for over 33 percent of all GrowthHackers.com posts.

The high volume of posts for these two categories account for the correspondingly high proportion of the aggregate share of votes and comments. A lower portion of “Customer Growth (broad)” posts accounts for a larger portion of the sum of votes.

This jump is even more evident when we begin to look at the sum of all the comments. The “Customer Growth (broad)” category jumps up to the number two spot. “Customer Growth (broad)” generates 13 percent of the total number of comments, despite accounting for only 10 percent of the total number of posts.

The “Must Read” category generates the highest average vote count per post. This makes sense, since the “Must Read” category is the only category on the blog that earns its own spot in the left-hand menubar. The “Customer Growth (broad)” category earns the fourth highest average amount of votes per post. “Growth Hacks” and “Optimization” both dropped positions dramatically. This also makes sense, since the high volume of posts dilutes the average quality per post as measured by votes.

The “Must Read” category is the most discussed post category, generating an more than 14 comments per post on average as Optimization continues to fall. This isn’t suprising since the “Must Read” category gets it’s own link in the left-hand navigation of the site. “Ecosystem” rises to the most discussed non-menu category, most likely due to the opinionated and abstract nature of the category itself.

Author Analysis:

So who’s curating all of this content?

The majority of the heavy lifting is done by a minority of the population. Growth Hackers take note; this is probably true of your customers as well (more on the Pareto principle). 63% of the GrowthHackers.com posts from Jan 5 to July 21 came from just 11 authors representing just 1.6% of the users that submitted posts that made it to the front page (650).

The largest aggregate number of votes and comments belongs to a small group of power users. The top 11 users earned 50 percent of all the votes dished out on GrowthHackers.com. The same group dominates the conversation, receiving 49 percent of all the comments on the site.

But quantity = quality. Ramon Cacho appears to be generating the highest number of votes per post, although he only posted one very popular post (http://growthhackers.com/facebook-ads-bidding-101-everything-you-need-to-know-supported-by-data/). Both KC and Charlie have posted at least two times, and Conrad has posted five times, making his high average even more impressive (but what would you expect from the founder of GrowHack).

The most contentious author award belongs to Ezra HaLevi, who is averaging 23 comments per post accross 3 front-page posts. It’s worth noting that Ezra has submitted five posts total. Two posts didn’t make it to the front page. It seems that when they do, they cause quite the discussion.

Post Title Analysis:

There are three primary types of posts on GrowthHackers. “Ask GH:,” “Show GH:,” and regular posts. “Ask GH:” is where the user posts a question to the community. These posts generally don’t link to an external site, but instead maintain the discussion inside of the GrowthHackers.com ecosystem. “Show GH:” posts are when the user shares something with the community, usually slides or a video. These posts are also typically hosted inside of the GrowthHackers ecosystem. Finally there are regular posts, which link out to an external article.

Since I just used some simple regex on the title, these posts could be skewed if a user decides to include the string “Show GH:” in their regular post title. Next time I’ll perform regex on the post URL to see if I can extract more detailed information.

But how does each post type do?

The GrowthHackers community is quite supportive and loves to give each other praise on their accomplishments. “Show GH:” garnished the highest average votes per post. Not surprisingly, “Ask GH:” posts generated the most discussion.

Numbers in post title increased the average vote count by a small amount, but significantly underperformed posts without numbers in the title at generating discussion.

I performed the same analysis for posts with the word “slide” (caps agnostic) in the title. Both comments and votes improved when the post title indicated that the post contained slides. Including the string “video” in the title had a less dramatic effect, and actually decreased the average votes per post. 

I took a quick look at whether or not the length of the post title had any effect on the community’s reaction. Post title length formed a pretty bell curve, predictably skewing out towards longer post titles (you can’t have a negative post title length).

I segmented each post into either “Really Short” (0-50 characters), “Short” (51-100), “Medium” (101-150), “Long” (151-200), and “Really Long” (201+). My conclusion was that there was a varied effect on post comments, but “Medium” and “Short” post title lengths seemed to perform the best in terms of average votes per post.

Date Analysis:

One of the interesting things I discovered when doing my date analysis was what appeared to be a major drop in the number of first page posts. After closer examination I was able to determine that there was a change in the criteria that qualified a post to be displayed on the front page. After March 1, GrowthHackers.com required that a post accumulate at least four votes to qualify it for front page. Prior to that posts with only one vote were able to appear on the front page.

I was interested in how the activity and discussion of non-authors was growing over time. If you look closely at the cumulative graph, it’s very difficult to tell if the new criteria for front page posts had any effect on the derivative of the sum of the votes/comments.

Filtering out the posts that only have four votes or more we can see that it does diversify the author submissions, but not too dramatically. 

Methodology:

I used three primary tools to create this analysis; the Kimono web crawler, Google Sheets for some data manipulation, and DataHero to produce the graphs and charts.

Kimono made the process of extracting structured information from the site relatively easily. With the Kimono Labs chrome plugin installed I was able to create an API in one click.

This enabled me to crawl the front-page posts. In order to gather data beyond the first page, I attempted to use Kimono’s pagination feature. I quickly discovered that the GrowthHackers “next page” link disappeared around page six, so I switched to Kimono’s manual targeting feature. I used a scratch sheet in Google Sheets to quickly concatenate the URL structure to create links for all 272 pages. Pasting them into Kimono’s targeted crawling detail page made the process easy.

From there it was just a matter of getting the targeting just right, and downloading a CSV of the information.

I imported the CSV to Google Sheets to perform a little bit of data manipulation, like categorizing the post-title lengths into five categories “Really Short,” “Short,” etc… I also used Sheets’ “REGEXMATCH()” function to determine if the post title contained “Ask GH:,” “Show GH:” etc… Finally I used the “REGEXEXTRACT()” function to extract the post date from the byline and convert into a “VALUE()” that Sheets prefered to work with.

After that it was just a matter of visualizing the most interesting information with DataHero.

Do you want to learn how to turn more of your customers, partners, affiliates, and fans into revenue generators?Request a custom demo from one of our referral marketing software experts today!

The post An Epic Analysis of Growth Hackers (Charts Galore!) appeared first on Ambassador.

Recognizing and Correcting the Top Three Marketing

Reporting Blunders

Blunder #1: Not Setting Proper Expectations with the C-Suite

The Problem: You’ve been consistently efficient with your spend in the past, but you’ve asked for a bigger budget and the rest of the C-Suite isn’t planning on granting you the request.

The Solution: The above marketing blunder occurred because expectations weren’t properly handled.

Oftentimes, the C-Suite is led to believe that all marketing channels will receive the same returns. This simply isn’t the case. Marketing channels receive different return — which is why strategic marketing plans cover a multitude of channels. When you present marketing plans to your C-Suite Executives, make sure that you properly manage expectations for each channel by leveraging the following guidelines:

• Present the entire marketing plan cohesively.
• Clearly show the capacities of each channel.
• Discuss how each channel will perform.
• Determine the forecasted Return On Investment (ROI) for each channel.
• Show how each channel works both individually and as a cohesive unit within the overarching marketing plan.

Blunder #2: Not Integrating Systems as Often as Possible

The Problem: Your email marketing system doesn’t integrate with your referral marketing solution, which doesn’t integrate with your CRM. In short, systems are operating as inefficient silos. And that affects your ability to demonstrate your effectiveness.

The Solution: If your marketing efforts must have point solutions (i.e. silo systems), then you must make sure that those systems will share data. If the systems fail to share data, then you will fail to gain a 360 degree view of your entire marketing efforts. A more cohesive overview will afford you the opportunity to accurately analyze how all of your marketing tactics and campaigns are performing. These insights will help you to make informed marketing decisions on future campaigns and help you demonstrate the efficiency of your spend.

Blunder #3: Not Effectively Utilizing Metrics.

The Problem: You’re afraid of using hard metrics or using incorrect data to back up your outcomes. Perhaps you’re not connecting the dots accurately: “400,000 people opened our monthly email; this means that the marketing department has contributed to the company’s bottom line,” isn’t a factual statement.

The Solution: To illustrate how to use the correct metrics, let’s revisit the aforementioned statement. 400,000 people opened the monthly email, which is a good starting metric. To use it properly, you will need to dig deeper into associated metrics. For example:

• 400,000 people opened our monthly email.
• 100,000 people clicked on the coupon link within our monthly email.
• 20,000 of those clicks led to assist conversions on our eCommerce site.
• These email conversions resulted in $10,000 in sales this month.
• The email marketing campaign cost $5,000 to produce.

By understanding the correct metrics you can draw the correct conclusions: $10,000 in sales were made from an email marketing campaign that cost $5,000 to produce. Analyzing the correct marketing metrics can help you to better understand the accurate ROI for your marketing efforts, which can lead to informed decisions and better future results.

Why Does it All Matter?

Recognizing the common marketing mistakes can help organizations resolve the internal blunders before they become too costly: not setting the proper expectations can result in a too-low marketing budget, failing to integrate the systems as often as possible can limit your insights into marketing results, and incorrectly analyzing marketing metrics can create misunderstandings and misrepresentations around your marketing ROI. Learning how to spot and resolve marketing blunders can help your organization improve marketing efforts, analysis, and ROI bolstering results.

The post The 3 Biggest Marketing Reporting Blunders You’re Making Right Now – And How to Solve Them appeared first on Ambassador.