domingo, 18 de julio de 2010

Herramientas para monitoriar Twitter

No vasta con saber manejar adecuadamente la plataforma de Twitter para alcanzar interesantes resultados, también es necesario medir y analizar la actividad que se desarrolla en nuestra cuenta.

Toda acción en Internet debe ser medida para sacar conclusiones y tomar decisiones acordes al objetivo de marketing que nos hemos marcado, y las redes sociales no son la excepción.

Existen numerosas herramientas para monitorear Twitter. A continuación enumero las que considero más relevantes para ser aplicadas en estrategias de marketing online:

Twitter Grader

Proporciona el porcentaje en el que está tu usuario de importancia. Cuanto mayor es el número más importante será respecto al total de usuarios evaluados. El porcentaje de importancia se calcula con el número de followers, la importancia de los mismos, el ritmo con el que envías tweets, lo completo que esté tu perfil entre otros factores.

Twitter Analyzer

Proporciona datos sobre las costumbres y perfiles de los lectores de nuestras cuentas. Es simple de utilizar, los datos que ofrece están divididos en cuatro grandes grupos de usuarios, amigos, menciones y grupos. Para cada una de estas categorías Twitter Analyzer da información mediante gráficos y listas de datos.

TweetEffect

Es una herramienta gratuita, que no requiere registro, ni tampoco el ingreso de tu contraseña de Twitter. Solo necesitas ingresar el nombre de tu cuenta y luego de unos minutos de procesar la información, la aplicación mostrará una especie de línea de tiempo en donde podrás ver la forma en que has perdido o ganado followers (seguidores).

Tweetbuzzer

Permite ver qué marcas son las más discutidas en Twitter, pudiendo filtrarlas por periodo de tiempo. En un primer paso debes solicitar el seguimiento de la marca y esperar a que sea aprobada.

Klout

Te permite descubrir el grado de influencia de tus opiniones, enlaces y recomendaciones a través de Twitter. Podrás saber como se distribuye la información por la red, como pasa de Twitter a Facebook, a blogs, periódicos en papel, etc.

Twittercounter

Proporciona el número de seguidores de una o varias cuentas.

Tweettronics

Permite conocer la opinión de la gente sobre varios productos y marcas.

Monitter

Otorga la posibilidad de rastrear conjuntos de palabras clave.

TwiBuzz

Es ideal para medir la frecuencia de actualización de textos relacionados con cualquier palabra.

Emotionstream

Facilita obtener el estado de ánimo de los usuarios en función de lo que escriben en Twitter.

Xefer

Xefer permite analizar la frecuencia de actualización y la repercusión de lo que escribimos en Twitter.

Cheaptweet

Básicamente es un buscador de ofertas y descuentos en Twitter.

ObjectiveMarketer

Social Media Channels permite gestionar campañas de marketing en Twitter, analizando los datos de su base de datos.

Retweetradar

Su función es rastrear lo más recomendado, mostrando la información en forma de nube de etiquetas.

MicroPlaza

MicroPlaza muestra los enlaces compartidos por nuestra comunidad de contactos.

Tweetply

Tweetply muestra lo más popular en función de las respuestas realizadas.

Quickrate.thummit

Es ideal para analizar lo más y lo menos popular en Twitter en función del tono de la conversación.

TweetPsych

Permite construir un perfil psicológico de los usuarios en función de lo que escriben en Twitter.

Tweetburner

Es interesante para ver estadísticas de los links que compartimos.

spy

Para ver las conversaciones en Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blogs y otras redes sociales.

Fuente: improntaonline

miércoles, 14 de julio de 2010

Nine Key Marketing Metrics every company should be measuring

When organizations begin to standardize marketing measurements across their sales channels, business units and media, the closer they will come to the more complex process of tracking corporate Brand Equity, Market Share, Marketing ROI, and Product and Customer Profitability.

The top measurements:

Multi-channel marketers are tracking the costs to generate traffic to their sites from all possible sources. These often include the costs to complete the transaction, which can include a call center or the technical support of the site itself.
Marketing Spending Metrics are often looked at to try to establish the ROI value of incremental spending. Some of the measurements in this area include cost per impression, reach, frequency, share of voice.
Visitor Acquisition KPIs are used to understand the health of the sales funnel. Definitions begin to get very important here – what is a visit, what is the source of the visitor, what is a return visitor, what is a unique, etc. Tracking sources often requires the integration of multiple reporting tools – the ad serving provider, the web tracking tools, the ad tracking tools, etc.
Site Effectiveness Measurements look at the conversion effectiveness of the site. The sales funnel is critical here – how efficiently can a visitor be turned into a customer?
Definitions are critical in conversion metrics – especially if the conversions of one channel are to be compared to others. What does a conversion mean? The problem of properly attributing conversions to their sources is common and must be consistent across each channel.
Buyer Metrics includes the frequency of purchases, or the retention rates of customers that can be rolled up to overall market share, brand equity and/or customer lifetime value. The most quoted Buyer Metric is typically the Average Order Value, or the AOV, which is used to understand and compare different groups of buyers.
Revenue — Multi-channel and e-commerce marketers track revenue carefully to compare the margin generated from each channel, to determine the value of incremental sales, and to guide pricing and promotion decisions.
Customer Loyalty and Customer Profitability Metrics — Companies use these metrics to understand the value of their individual customers, regardless of which sales outlet they have chosen. Again, this is an area where definitions are critical from one channel to the next. The methodology for the measurement of loyalty and customer-level profitability can vary considerably from company to company, depending upon the purchase dynamics of the product.
Profitability and ROI — Each of these categories of metrics can include components such as:
Channel margin – From each channel selling different products
Performance compared to a sales target – How close is the sales performance to a target that generates the profit requirements for the channel?
Net Profit – Sales revenue less total costs
Return on Sales – Net profit as a percentage of sales revenue
Return on Investment – Net profits over the investment needed to generate the profits
Net Present Value (NPV) – The value of a stream of future cash flows after accounting for the time value of money
Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) – Incremental revenue attributable to marketing over the marketing spending.
Any one of these metrics can be challenging to reach without integrated databases and marketing technology. Creating clear definitions across departments and channels is critical. As data and tools begin to converge, more and more marketers are building their ability to measure these key performance indicators and use them to make smarter decisions across the marketing organization.

Author:
Martha Bush

jueves, 8 de julio de 2010

Making Sense of the Alternative Payments Marketplace

A primary concern of most game publishers is monetizing their content. The current dominant paradigm is to collect payments for premium virtual items. An important question often asked by social game publishers is: “Should I run my own separate payment methods such as credit cards or PayPal, or should I use payment aggregators?”

Many publishers who opt to manage their own payment processes encounter a maze of payment roadblocks, including international contracts, complicated carrier fee structures, foreign currency issues, and chargebacks or reversals. With some fee structure set-ups, an earned payment of $1,000 can quickly diminish to less than $100 by the time it reaches the publisher and can take more than 90 from when the payment was made to actually reach the pocket of the publisher.

To help publishers decide what’s best for them, in order of priority and effectiveness, let’s examine the current core payment options and the costs and challenges associated with each:

1. Credit Card Payments – Credit Cards are, not surprisingly, the most dominant form of making payments online. One challenge: credit card processors mandate that chargebacks and reversal rates hover at a maximum of three percent, but to get preferred merchant rates, these rates need to be under one percent. It is not unusual to lose your account if the chargeback and reversal rates do not meet specific requirements. Expect to have someone on your team focused on dealing with these issues or risk losing your merchant account.

Fees: 3% to 8%

Implementation time: Weeks, if not months, to get a merchant account with your bank or merchant solution provider. Two weeks for a good developer to implement and test the transaction processing. You will often need to repeat this process for each county you accept payments in as most merchant accounts will only accept US, UK or CA based credit cards.

2. PayPal – While PayPal can be very simple to integrate, using this medium is not without glitches. After you have done a significant number of transactions, PayPal will sometimes either begin holding money back or place the account on “lockdown.” In addition, sometimes a person can reverse a payment transaction, in which case PayPal usually errs on the side of the customer, resulting in a lost payment. Reversal rates on virtual currencies can be very high. Just as it is easy to click-click and buy some pixels, it is also very easy to go click-click and reverse the charges. Buyer’s remorse on colorful pixels and virtual tractors can be high.

Fees: 4% to 10%. Expect a 10% to 15% revenue lift by adding PayPal to your existing credit card implementation, if credit cards are the only option you offer.

Implementation time: Short (a few hours for a good developer). But the follow-up with refunds, reversals, and payment disputes can be significant.

3. Offers – Offers are advertisements that provide players an opportunity to earn in-game points, currency, or other rewards in exchange for actions such as signing up for a service, responding to a survey, watching video ads, or shopping at online merchants. This revenue stream can be a good fit for users who want points but don’t want to make a direct payment, and are the most appealing when matched with advertisements that users would otherwise be interested in, anyway. Offers also get some users accustomed to getting virtual currency, prompting them to pay directly later. However, some users take offers with the intention of not following through — earning points in a game, while canceling the offer they completed. Offer providers have also faced severe criticism for running deceitful or low-quality advertisements, although the industry has worked to increase offer quality in recent months

Fees: None, besides a revenue share on the ads. Expect around a 20% lift in revenue by adding offers, although results can be significantly lower or higher, based on type of offer, implementation, and other factors.

Implementation time: 30 minutes to 4 hours, depending on the depth and customization of the integration.

4. Mobile Payments – Mobile phone payments allow consumers to pay for digital goods via a mobile phone. The costs are added to their monthly phone bill. Currently, there are several payment providers out there (Zong, Paymo, and a half-dozen others). Some options may accept payments in Norway and Sweden, but not in Mexico or Columbia. All will cover the big countries like the US and UK, but one may cover Sprint, but not AT&T. The solution is to integrate multiple providers.

Fees: 15% to 90% depending on country, carrier and provider. In countries such as the UK, mobile payments are common and the costs are low. In the US and Canada, the carriers take margins as high as 50%. Also expect payment terms in the net 90 range (some countries are net 365). Expect a 5% or so uptick in revenue by adding mobile payment options.

Implementation time: 5 to 10 days of development and testing per integration, also set aside a good amount of time to read thick contracts.

5. Landline Phone Payments – This type of payment, which allows users to charge payments to their home phone bill, shares the same issues as mobile payments.

Fees: 30% to 50% Expect a 1% to 2% uptick for this option.

Implementation time: Same as mobile payments. Risk: High reversal rates.

6. Stored Value Card –There are about 30 different cards available to consumers, everywhere from WalMart to 7-Eleven. Some cards are only available on the West Coast, while others are just on the East Coast. For true coverage, you should plan to integrate about eight of these cards.

Fees: 15% to 30%. Uptick in revenue depends on your demographics. If you have a young, US-based group of players, uptick can be as much as 10% or more. On average, however, it is much lower.

Implementation time: A couple of days for each. Also, allow about a week of back and forth for the contracts on each.

7. Debit from Bank Account Payments – Potential issues with debit: some types of bank accounts do not allow direct debits; different policies for different banks internationally; and the potential for direct debit fraud.

Fees: 5% to 20% Expect an uptick of 3% to 5%.

Implementation time: The challenge here is getting approved and completing the contract process, which can take months.

8. Mail-in Cash – This type of payment is not too popular with consumers, given the extra steps and waiting period required.

Fees: None. Expected uptick is less than 1%.

9. Wire payments – Many consider this not worth the hassle if you only make $1,000 per day and the expected uptick would only be a few dollars. But if you are generating $100,000 per day, this may be worth the trouble.

Fees: 5% to 15%

Now that we have reviewed the options, one question remains: What is the best course of action? Naturally I am slightly biased here, but the most important things to consider are speed to market and focusing on your core expertise. You can spend significant time building out all of these options. We highly recommend that you do as more is better.

Or you can pull a simple one stop, one implementation, one payment source from us, or one of my competitors for that matter. Our pitch is usually this: “Game developers focus on what they do best, building and growing highly engaging games, and have the monetization solution provider do what they do best, manages dozens of payment options from a hundred plus countries, across millions of users. Whichever avenue you choose, we hope this information will help you decide the best payment options for you.

Jason Bailey is the founder of online virtual currency monetization platform Super Rewards. He sold the company to Adknowledge in July of 2009 and became the advertising network’s general manager of virtual currencies.


Source: Inside Social Games