Track Word-of-Mouth Advertising

Meteor Solutions claims to be able to effectively track word-of-mouth advertising with the precision of paid media. This solution for advertisers, publishers and agencies can help you evaluate your social networking campaigns.

The Meteor platform monitors web pages, bookmarks, email messages, instant messages and mobile devices. Scripts track content that is shared between friends, blogs and within communities.

Other site analytics track how many people visit your site, but Meteor’s tracking technology shows you where, when and how word-of-mouth activity happens. Meteor enables users to measure, buy and amplify word-of-mouth advertising with the same precision as paid media.

Hollis Thomases further elaborates on how this technology could be useful to media planners.

Reasons to Utilize Analytics in a Down Economy

Okay, I stole these talking points from Leveraging the Weak Economy, a ClickZ article, but assumed it was relevant for organizations that may not want to spend more money right now, but are looking for ways to be effective online.

As resources and budgets continue to tighten, there will be a need for greater accountability – companies will need to justify why they are spending money online.

Jason Burby suggests focusing on analytics and site optimization to increase a web channel’s ROI and outlines how marketing executives can position the argument for analytics to the stakeholders in their organization:

» Define site goals by outlining desired behaviors

» Assign a dollar value to the different behaviors

» Determine the potential impact that each initiative can return

» Start testing – especially for different ways to solve the highest potential ROI opportunity

So, if you have a limited budget, but want to make an impact with the dollars they invest – turn to analytics. Assess your current activity and potential on future initiatives.