Category Archives: Analytics

The new Google Algorithm will whoop your non-mobile behind!

November 26, 2016 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics | Leave a comment

I was one of the first people to have a mobile page for my site to get search results. However, if you found city or state search results directly on Google it would not go to a mobile page. So, now I realize that I was ahead of my time a few years ago, but I haven’t been paying attention.

Mobile is where it’s at, and if you don’t have mobile pages for your site, you are not catering to roughly 50% of the traffic out there. Why do people like using their mobile devices so much? I don’t know. I use mobile for checking Twitter and Facebook stats, reading leisure blogs, but nothing more. I use a desktop for serious work.

Google’s new algorithm will penalize your site if it is not mobile friendly. And your blog needs to be mobile friendly too. But, the good news is, the minute I got my blog mobile friendly, my stats went shooting up the same day. My Google visits are up 40% the day I got the mobile plugin. I’m just hoping my site traffic will go up equally much when I adjust the pages to be mobile friendly as well.

The bottom line here is that you could lose 30% of your traffic by not being mobile friendly on the new Google algorithm, but once you fix your pages to be mobile friendly, the traffic will go shooting up within hours.

What does your company’s click stat mean on 123outsource?

October 6, 2016 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

123outsource.net keeps stats on BPO companies. After all, we need information that can help us decide who should be high in the search results and who should be removed completely from the list. At first we saw who answered their phone. Then, we tried to see how easy it was to talk to a manager. After that, we assessed the quality of the conversation with the manager.

Phone Stats
I found that these stats were helpful, however, it is unpredictable whether you will call on a holiday as I don’t know when Indian holidays are. It seems every other day is a holiday. No wonder nothing gets done. It is also unpredictable if the manager will be in. Usually the BPO workers don’t communicate well, so if you can’t speak to a manager, the conversation will be horrible. Another thing I noticed is that some companies had horrible phone lines, so that they can’t even hear you properly unless you repeat everything several times. So, phone stats were helpful, but I found even better analytics which were easy to get.

Email Stats
A month ago, I emailed most of the people on our outsourcing directory asking them for basic rates. Some ignored my email altogether and got kicked off the directory. While others, answered the email, but didn’t give me rates. A few asked for more information instead of answering my question which really was a headache. But, a few answered my questions within minutes and I was very happy about that. Those that mean business rise to the top of the search results and will get more business as a result!

Click Stats
However, click stats were very much more interesting. Since BPO companies are placed at different levels on our search results, their click stats will really vary. I wanted to even the score and create an AB testing environment. So, I moved a few listings from the middle of the list to near the top of the list and compared their clicks to others near the top of the list. The result was that those who were originally near the middle of the list performed horribly on the top of the list. I learned that the public didn’t like these listings enough to click on them which meant that the companies were horrible.

One of the reason I like click stats is that I don’t have to do any work to test companies out. I just put them in a placement, take notes, and get a result that is very accurate. Click stats can really vary too. A good company will perform six times as well on click stats than a bad company. We had companies getting six clicks a day while others got less than one click — talk about unpopular.

The problem is that it is time consuming to get click stats on every single company on my site. So, I’ll just stick to the popular categories like call center, bpo, and data entry. Wish me luck. But, the bottom line is that click stats are the most cut and dry method of analyzing the quality of a company. Call stats are unreliable since you don’t know who will answer. Email stats are good, but only distinguish the speed of the result. Click stats tell me if the public likes an outsourcing company enough to click on them which is much better than me deciding how I feel about a BPO company.

Doing some Twitter analytics. Click rates per 100,000 impressions.

November 15, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

In the old days, I would just tweet my blog posts. I would write multiple tweets for popular posts. But, I would retweet posts that got more attention on Twitter. This turned out to be a good idea and a bad idea. After inspecting my analytics, I learned that we weren’t getting many clicks from Twitter.

My recent experiment was to post all of my blog entries. There are about 800 of them, so I posted them one by one. The ones that got clicked on were ones that I did some testing on. I tested a few dozen posts to see how well they would do if I published them multiple times to attain 100,000 impressions. I have 9000 followers on one of my business Twitter accounts and 19000 on the marketing account. I posted tweets on the smaller one, and then retweeted them each five times on the larger account over the course of 30 hours. The total number of impressions would be slightly above 100,000. I learned that some of the posts I had been ignoring for years did very well on Twitter. A few posts got two or three clicks when published with 100,000 impressions while many only got one.

I also learned that the average click rate for blogs published once on Twitter (instead of five times in a day) was roughly 1 in 98,000 impressions which is an interesting stat to know. Now I know what to expect when my Twitter followers grow to a few hundred thousand hopefully in a few years.

Doing well on Twitter takes a lot of work and there are a lot of things to measure and a lot of ways to measure various analytics and metrics. So, try to think about ways you can measure what is going on with your Twitter account.

Learning to profile the accounts you follow on Twitter can triple your growth!

July 12, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

I used to have a simplistic following strategy
I just experienced something of a miracle. It was actually an example of the effective use of simple analytics for Twitter. In the past, my strategy was to follow people on accounts that typically got me a high follow-back rate. Since my main Twitter account focuses on marketing, my best “follow” accounts were mostly business, marketing, and one guy who did business, social media marketing and travel all in one. He had some very interesting and lively followers as you can guess. After a while, I wanted to pump up the volume a bit and follow even more people per day. Twitter allows a single account to follow up to 1000 people per day. I was getting about 500 people a day to follow from my best accounts and followed some less than optimal accounts for the remaining 500. The results were not very efficient. I was getting only 50-80 new followers per day after a lot of work!

I crunched some numbers
My number crunching was very unsophisticated and very ball park in many ways. I wanted to take a closer look at who was following me back on Twitter and who was retweeting me. I learned that marketers showed the highest rate of following me. Now, I did not take a close count of how many percent of the people I was following were in marketing. I estimated that perhaps 10-20% of those I followed mentioned marketing while about 25% of my new follow-backs were in marketing. I also noticed that CEO‘s represented about 3-6% of those I was following but about 7% of my follow-backs. I also learned that Entrepreneurs liked to follow me and accounts that were business profiles of various types of businesses liked to follow me.

Entrepreneneurs
The other day I had an argument with a friend about what an entrepreneur is. He claimed that an entrepreneur has to invent some new methodology or technology and learn to market it as a sole proprietor. I disagreed and insisted that any sole business person is an entrepreneur, although perhaps in pop culture, his definition might be more glamorous. My stats told me that entrepreneurs were fast to follow me, but didn’t retweet my content hardly at all. After seeing the dismal underachievement in the entrepreneur sector of my followers I began to doubt the way the word was used. I began to associate entrepreneurs as “wanna-be’s,” failures, or pretenders. People who were real business men portrayed themselves as founders, co-founders, CEO’s, or had other more formal titles. I also learned that those who followed Entrepreneur Magazine were not as “deep” in many ways as the followers of some of the other more serious business publications such as Bloomberg or Harvard Business Review. My bottom line is that I want people to retweet my content and entrepreneurs were not doing this. So, now I stopped following entrepreneurs altogether even though my biggest passion in life is entrepreneurship!

I tripled my growth rate
Now, I am getting 150-200 new followers after an active day of tweeting and following others. I am much more selective about who I follow. I follow business accounts as they tend to be more active. Business accounts are recognizable because they have a business name as their twitter handle account name. I am not sure which type of business favors me most, but I do know that the Real Estate crowd is the most dormant even on content that is specific to their industry!

How can you analyze your followers?
There are various ways to profile your followers. You have to break them into groups somehow. You also have to assess them in a kind of a level playing field. If you notice that 50% of your followers are web designers, but 80% of those you follow are web designers, then web designers might be a reasonable profession to follow, but not the most efficient. However, if you notice that managers of Flash programmers represent 20% of those who follow you, yet represent only 3% of those you follow, they would be a group to pay attention to. Identify your best segments for following you and retweeting or favoriting your content. You can triple your growth rate for obtaining Twitter followers too! You might be surprized.

How good are your analytics for your BPO company?

January 28, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, BPO | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Many companies specialize in analytics while others don’t know what that means. But, how good are your analytics for running your own business?

Call centers have many metrics and analytics to keep track of how long people wait on hold, how long calls take, if disputes can be resolved in one call, and more.

Large companies have analytics for inventory, systems integration, testing, and more. The result is more streamlined manufacturing at lower costs which translates into increased productivity.

But, what can your company do to use analytics? There are many things to keep track of at a BPO. Here are some that I thought of.

1. How long did you know a client before they became a client?
2. How many times did you interact with someone before they became a client?
3. How many people you interact with by email, phone or otherwise become clients?
4. How many clients who stopped using your service did so because service was slow or mistakes were made?
5. What are the fluctuations in labor use at your company week by week over a period of time?
That will help you determine how much extra labor you need.

6. What is your typical employee turnover rate.
7. How much training do you need to give an employee to get them to a particular level of competency?
8. What “special” requests do clients have? (or do you ignore this like most other BPO’s?)
9. Which of your employees have repeat clients and which lose you clients repeatedly?
10. What do the employees who stay say about your company vs. the ones who quit?

That’s all for now. Perhaps you can think of some other analytics.

Finding the right audience

January 24, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics | Leave a comment

I do a lot of social media to build my online presence. I also tell a lot of second rate jokes that I come up with. Sometimes I get a laugh, but sometimes my jokes backfire (like my joke on mufflers.) Knowing what to post on social media or knowing what joke to tell has a lot to do with who your audience is. You either publish content to please your audience, or you publish content to mold who your audience is to become.

My best example is of an unfortunate incident I had at Whole Foods. I was talking to a guy I bump into in the salmon section. I told him my friend drove from New York to Boston on 9-11-2015 while on 9-11-2001 they flew from Boston to New York. I said, “It was like 911 in reverse!” Then the guy told me his brother was killed in 911. Oh boy. I chose the wrong audience for my lame joke.

Then, a lady doing a Notary job told the lady she was notarizing how scary all of the black people were. The Notary didn’t know the lady was married to a black person (hopefully not a scary looking one.) The Notary didn’t proof her audience before she made her commentary.

I think in the future, before I make a joke, I’m going to have a check list.
Question #1. Did you or any of your relatives die in 911?
Question #2. Are you from Syria, have friends or family from Syria, or are ultra-sensitive to jokes about Syria.
Question #3. I think you see my point.

That way you can figure out who wants to opt-out of your commentary, jokes, or other materials. Finding the right audience can be hard. It is hard to figure out all of the subtleties of what your audience on Twitter or Facebook wants. As a group, they might react differently to posts with different main keywords. My group likes Steve Jobs, but doesn’t care about Beyonce. They like success posts, but not nitty gritty posts about how to be successful by not doing certain nit-picky things. There are dozens of points about my group that I found out about by crunching numbers. I now have a good sense of what my group will like and what they will ignore. So, now that I have figured it out. I’ll throw two expressions at you.

Tiffany says, “Kill them with kindness”
Bashir says, “Kill them with chlorine”

Find winning ideas for blogging by using good analytical methods

January 17, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Leave a comment

I have written thousands of blog articles in my career. I am by no means a professional or even close. But, if you write for a small blog, you need to be interesting, not professional. The other skill you need is analytics. If you can figure out which blog topics are popular, you are far ahead of the game. The next level of sophistication is figuring out which blog articles are popular on particular social networks and what tweet or post titles made them popular. Finally, you need to keep track of when a particular post’s popularity fades. There are many layers of sophistication in blogalytics, but they are not that hard to master. You just need to understand what is important to understand.

The rule of 1000 impressions
Some people feel that if you get retweeted on Twitter, then you are in good shape. Getting your content shared is helpful. However, the bottom line for me is if someone reads my article. A click is worth more than a retweet to me. Getting retweeted can help you grow your following on Twitter. But, a click helps to grow your blog following. Both analytics are important, but one seems more like a final result to me. The problem is that clicks on Twitter are not so easy to get. A click could be worth its weight in gold if it is from someone new who will become a regular follower. But, getting that click and figuring out where your best clicks come from involves some technique. If you post a blog entry on your Twitter account and nobody clicks on it, what did you learn? My best blog entries get clicked roughly once per 25,000 impressions. That means if your account has 6000 followers, and you post your blog entry four times during the day, and you get one click, you achieved something similar to my 1:25,000 impressions stat. I have another Twitter account with fewer followers which has a much better click ratio just because the followers are more engaged and much more connected to the industry I write about.

How do you establish a stat?
For each blog entry you write, you should have a “Twitter click stat.” You might need to publish each tweet multiple times to get an average. If you have 10,000 followers and publish each tweet ten times at intervals of twenty or more minutes apart, you will get a rate per 100,000. You might see that particular entries get five clicks per 100K while others don’t get clicked at all. If you waste every day of the week tweeting content that nobody wants to read, you are wasting your time. But, what if you spend your time identifying what they want to read and then post more of that, and write more of that. Then you are using your Twitter and blogging time more efficiently. You are finding winning ideas and you will win the game.

Geting more clickers on your site, a humorous look at analytics

January 14, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics | Tagged | Leave a comment

If you run a website, you want more clicks, or clickers. If lots of people visit your site every day, this is a positive state of affairs. It is good when you get new people visiting your site regularly, and keep the old ones coming back. Not all clicks are alike as some people spend a long time reading your content while others just come for a few seconds and then bounce along to their next destination. Ideally, a certain amount of clicks translates loosely into a conversion, so try to keep track of how many clicks results in a conversion and click on what pages, or from what social media channels. Putting conversions aside, if someone visits your site, spends a few minutes, and visits a handful of pages, that could translate into being considered a very high quality click, while clicks that only last a few seconds browsing might make your stats appealing to you, but are generally useless by Google’s standards and are almost completely useless in real life.

Of course, down South, black people call us whites crackers as whites in the 1800’s used to crack the whip to get slaves to work faster. So, if you get clicks from down South, your clickers will be crackers. But, I apologize for my humor and am sorry to have made a crack about clicks.

But, I have a joke.

Did you hear about the boxing match between a South African Xhosa, and a Southern Redneck?

The match was entitled: The Cracker vs. the Clicker.

The plusses and minuses of Google+

September 11, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I have just started doing a lot on Google+. Yes, it has its pros and cons as well as its pluses and minuses. Should you use Google+? Here is what I think.

(+) If you use Google+ a lot, it will do miracles for your analytics and site traffic. Something magical happens when you hit the 1000 mark on Google+. Your site traffic will spike according to what word on the street is.

(+) Google+’s feature of having circles is so much better than Twitter. You can arrange your followers by category, interest or industry. You can also segment your favorite accounts by creating a favorite or VIP circle. It is amazing the quality of the material in my VIP circle while my industry specific circles are filled with cyber trash. Oh well… At least I can separate them. On Twitter, you would have to create a separate account where you could follow your favorite accounts. On Twitter you can favorite a post, but not an account. At least not as of today — things could change!

(+) Google+ has great communities where you can post content. This feature is very similar to Linked In’s feature where you can have discussion groups or communities. Linked In often has much larger and better groups for business topics, but they tend to be a little too oriented towards self-promoting content and job search while Google+ gets better quality interactions in many cases.

(+) Google+ is a fast way to get clicks to your blog if you use communities and post interesting and relevant content. Twitter and Facebook do not make it easy to get clicks until you have a huge following. You don’t need to have a single follower on Google+ to get a ton of clicks, and those clicks will boost your SEO rankings for your site a lot if they are “quality” clicks.

(-) Google+ doesn’t have that many accounts compared to Twitter or Facebook. I’m not sure what the growth rate is, but Google is going to be promoting Google+ less from now on as well. Maybe they should find a new way to promote it instead of slowing down? Additionally, communities on Google+ tend to be very small except for a few photography and travel groups. In general, Google+ seems to be very much more geared towards visuals than Twitter or Facebook. Google+ allows taller photographs, while Twitter has a one size fits all on your profile page until someone clicks on it.

(-) Google+ makes has a multi-step process to see what your followers posted. If it is that difficult to see what they are publishing, it will be difficult for others to see what you are publishing too!

All in all, Google+ seems like one of the better social media sites out there. There are a few areas that they need improvement and over the next few years, they might make a few renovations and become #1 in the social media industry. We’ll have to wait and see.

How many retweets do you need to get a new follower on Twitter?

July 15, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Popular on Twitter, Semi-Popular | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

On my notary twitter, we have accumulated more than 8000 followers. They seem to be very passive. We get some clicks on our links, but not that many. We get a handful of retweets per day, but nothing amazing. I figured if the number of followers kept growing, that our retweets might grow too. It sort of works that way, but not exactly.

Passive growth is anyone’s dream in social media. Imagine creating a Twitter or Linked In account that just grows on its own? Our Notary Linked In actually does just grow on its own and the discussions on it are fantastic too! What I learned from my new travel Twitter account, is that retweets only help you if you get a lot of them.

Our Notary Twitter gets one to eight retweets per day. We can’t measure how that helps us since we are doing PPC advertising and a lot of interaction. But, on my travel Twitter account which is new, we are not interacting with existing members. We are just getting new members, and there is no PPC. We follow others, interact, and retweet. There is a lot of activity on the account, but since there is no PPC, it is easier to guestimate the realities of the retweets.

On my travel Twitter we get retweeted generally 20 to 40 times per day. That is a lot of retweets. Our growth rate is 10-20 people per day. The growth comes partly from the retweets, but more from the following, retweeting, and interacting. I would estimate that we might get about four new followers per day from the thirty average retweets per day. But, it is more complicated than that. The size of the accounts that retweet you matters too. If you get retweeted by someone with ten followers, it really doesn’t help. But, if someone with half a million followers retweets you, then you are in business.

I actually did get a comment retweeted by a guy with 400,000 followers. I was curious to see if that would help. We got a generous amount of new followers during the following twenty-four hours, but not higher than we usually get in a way that I would measure.

My official guess, based on experience, is that — if you get retweeted in a way that reaches 15,000 Twitter accounts, you might get a single new follower. If what I call a “weak interaction” gets retweeted, you might need 50,000 people to get it in order to get a single follower. The quality of the tweet, and the relevance of the followers factor into the equation. Basically, to sum it up, if you want your Twitter account to grow from retweets, you had better get a ton of them daily.

I make it a practice to follow only those who either follow me, have top notch content, or those who retweet others regularly. If they retweet others, they are likely to retweet me, and that is exactly what is happening!

Good good, analytics are confusing!

You might also like:

Twitter analytics — click rates per 100,000 impressions
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/11/15/doing-some-twitter-analytics-click-rates-per-100000-impressions/

Learning to profile the accounts you follow on Twitter can triple your growth
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/07/12/learning-to-profile-the-accounts-you-follow-on-twitter-can-triple-your-growth/

9 ways to assess the quality of your Twitter account and/or social media agency
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/08/01/9-ways-to-assess-the-value-of-your-twitter-account-or-service-provider/

Your site is only as good as the weakest link?

January 16, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics | Tagged | 1 Comment

What does this really mean? What is your weakest link?

Does your site have great graphics, but broken links? Google will penalize you severely for this. Or perhaps your links all work well, but there are other problems. Maybe you have great content, but horrible graphics. Maybe your links are to irrelevant content or poorly organized. Or perhaps everything is perfect, but your server is so damn slow. In web business, to do well, your site has to be good in all respects. If there are 20 factors to consider and you are weak in even one, then you can lose a lot of traffic. Below are some considerations to what makes your site good.

Good content
This means that you have a lot of text on various pages about industry specific information. Not only do you display your projects, but you compare them honestly to other similar products and you give a lot of free related information. If your site is about lawn mowers, compare its features to your competitors lawn mowers. Have pages all about types of grass and the attributes of those species of grass. Have information about outdoor recreation. Write articles about what other people did with their lawns and show some nice pictures of the people and their lawns (and their pets of course too.) They key to good content is to grab your audience and make them want to stay on your site for a long time and come back go your site in the future. Those regular visitors are more likely to make a purchase from you than a short term visitor who thinks your site is useless due to limited or disorganized content

Good organization
If your site has one thousand pages, you need to keep them organized. A good navigation bar can organize your site in a very basic way. It might link to your home page, contact us, about us, articles, site map, and a few other pages. It can’t go beyond that. So, how do you organize your content after that? There can be links on the home page to the most popular content. Your site map or articles page can organize your additional content into sections.

Links
Google cares about links, and quality links. You need incoming links, but you also need outgoing links. You can barter for relevant links or just give them. Google respects you all the more if people click on the links you have on your pages, especially if the keywords on your page match the main keywords on the page you are linking to!

Graphics
If your site has good graphics and pics, people will gravitate towards your site. Some sites spend big bucks on fancy pictures. I wouldn’t do this until you are making the big bucks. But, quality photos and graphics go a long way, even if they are not the most expensive in town.

Speed
If your site is slow, then people will get frustrated waiting for pages to load. They might just forget about you.

SEO
Don’t hire the wrong company or you will get a bunch of links that Google will penalize you for. Then, you will be sorry. But, if you have a keyword structure for all of your main pages, having each main page focus on one or more keywords, then you are in good shape. For your secondary pages, they can focus on a single keyword per page, and repeat that keyword several times per page. That keyword could be in the URL, metatitle, and text, not to mention incoming and outgoing links from that page.

Internal link structure
Sure you need links from other sites. Those might come on their own if you offer quality content. But, if you have the right number of outbound links from each of your pages to other related pages on your site, you might find that Google is very nice to you! Finding the right number of links and the right types of links requires a lot of experimentation and use of Google Analytics, so learn these tools and good luck!

Fresh content
Good content is not enough, you need fresh content. The Google gods are not satisfied with your old content. You need to keep creating new content. Content writers are really in business as a result of this. A blog is a good way to have new content, but you can edit existing pages on your site and add new pages as well.

Layout
Part of a well organized site is layout. But, some layouts are more attractive than others. You need to space your information in an easy to digest way. There should be the right amount of space, the right amount of pictures in the right places, and the right amount of links. Finding a good layout is not easy, so spend some time on this.

There is a lot more to having a great site. But, if your site is lacking on any of these main points, you might lose a ton of traffic!

Tweets:
(1) Does your site look good, but have other things wrong with it? That can hurt you more than you think!

You might also like:

SEO is like acupuncture. There are so many energy channels!
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/03/22/seo-optimization-is-like-acupuncture-so-many-channels/

SEO and little keywords
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2012/03/02/seo-and-little-keywords/