Author Topic: How to measure marketing effort effectiveness and public facing traffic stats...  (Read 3042 times)

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Offline cass

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Offline teenagecheese

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DNS development is suspended until it can be re-started with a more focused effort. Right now all energy is being committed to bitUSD adoption.

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Great Plan! I like it. I hope DNS can one day exist either as a user issued asset or on a side chain that can use real bitshares bitUSD somehow. I never liked the idea of separate chains having to create, sustain, and peg their own versions of USD.

Offline eagleeye

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There's some great ideas in here for sure.  I'd like to see if Cass could add in that code once the "New BitShares" is ready for it's close up so we can have a better idea about our traffic.  To be very brief and to the point about what's next for our sites, it's this:

Take down bitshares-x.info site and redirect all traffic to bitshares.org
Retain only the one site (bitshares.org) as the official informational site
Redesign this site to reflect a MUCH simpler, easy to understand business model and value prop
Target all the benefits of BitShares in relation to "banking" and personal financial services
Target also "merchants" for business financial services
Make bitshares.org a source to download the new BitShares client
Make the message clear, simple, compelling, and did I say simple?

This is just an overview, but you get the idea.... all in progress now. 
B

The Brain your rocking!

Get on bitsapphires ass with the web wallet!

Offline xeroc

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wow .. even toast is now into bitUSD adoption .. that makes me confident .. +5%
seems to be pretty big!
« Last Edit: November 11, 2014, 09:45:55 am by xeroc »

Offline toast

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DNS development is suspended until it can be re-started with a more focused effort. Right now all energy is being committed to bitUSD adoption.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

Do not use this post as information for making any important decisions. The only agreements I ever make are informal and non-binding. Take the same precautions as when dealing with a compromised account, scammer, sockpuppet, etc.

Offline teenagecheese

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There's some great ideas in here for sure.  I'd like to see if Cass could add in that code once the "New BitShares" is ready for it's close up so we can have a better idea about our traffic.  To be very brief and to the point about what's next for our sites, it's this:

Take down bitshares-x.info site and redirect all traffic to bitshares.org
Retain only the one site (bitshares.org) as the official informational site
Redesign this site to reflect a MUCH simpler, easy to understand business model and value prop
Target all the benefits of BitShares in relation to "banking" and personal financial services
Target also "merchants" for business financial services
Make bitshares.org a source to download the new BitShares client
Make the message clear, simple, compelling, and did I say simple?

This is just an overview, but you get the idea.... all in progress now. 
B

I think this is great, but I am slightly confused when you say, target all benefits of BitShares to "banking."

What is the future DNS and the like? Will they be integrated later and are just too much for now? I thought that was part of the super DAC. Serious question, not meant to be rude.

Offline pseudoscops



Offline MktDirector

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There's some great ideas in here for sure.  I'd like to see if Cass could add in that code once the "New BitShares" is ready for it's close up so we can have a better idea about our traffic.  To be very brief and to the point about what's next for our sites, it's this:

Take down bitshares-x.info site and redirect all traffic to bitshares.org
Retain only the one site (bitshares.org) as the official informational site
Redesign this site to reflect a MUCH simpler, easy to understand business model and value prop
Target all the benefits of BitShares in relation to "banking" and personal financial services
Target also "merchants" for business financial services
Make bitshares.org a source to download the new BitShares client
Make the message clear, simple, compelling, and did I say simple?

This is just an overview, but you get the idea.... all in progress now. 
B




Offline gamey

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Something like this is needed.  I had been working on some text to funnel views from google that was suggested to me. I'd still like to revise it to the new rebranding and it still needs significant work. That type of writing is exceptionally hard, but I feel I've done a solid majority of the legwork for it.

There is a huge problem here and that is everyone has to rely on this marketing team. Great if they turn out to be rockstars, but no one outside the inner circle knows who they are. It is equally difficult to get feedback on what is going on. I've heard from multiple people that they feel they are being held back somewhat because of the marketing efforts.  Not just marketing people, but people who have no interest in marketing see this same thing.

I had an idea myself about affiliate codes being embedded into account creation.  Although I don't think you could track what value the account provides even if it was technically possible to know what landing page the person downloaded their client from.  There are a lot of privacy and security issues so I now think my idea is a non-starter.  Your solution is probably the best.
I speak for myself and only myself.

Offline pseudoscops

I agree, no harm in monitoring with GA too. But can we get some public access to these stats?

Can anyone shed some light on this? If there's a good reason why my OP is a bad idea or flawed in some way I'm all ears...

Offline monsterer

I take your point about the forum, but it still can't hurt to monitor both the landing page bitshares.com and this forum with google analytics. You can get real time stats using google, so that's not an issue.
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Offline pseudoscops

I was not talking about the forum - I'm was talking about the main http://bitshares.com site. The forum is not really the first place we should be sending people IMHO, that is unless we want to confuse them and give them information overload. If a person buys in to BitShares in a big way and becomes a true evangelist then they'll find the forum on their own and join in the discussions here. That's what I think the forum's main purpose should be, it shouldn't be used as a front-line marketing destination.

Also I think you're missing at least two of my major points. First one being that to improve our marketing effort we all need to be able to see live traffic to the site whenever we like. So everyone should be able to see some version of the traffic stats for the site in all their glorious detail. Apart from the insights it'll give us into inbound traffic (e.g. might show we're strong on Reddit but week on Twitter and Facebook), I should be able to see traffic to aid my decisions about how to get involved with BitShares. I should be able to check how the traffic on the mobile portion of traffic is split for instance. More Android users show up then maybe it influences me to start on an Android app before an iOS one.

My second point was that we need to be able to measure efficacy of individuals and teams who drive traffic and promote awareness in order to understand how they should best be rewarded for this effort.

Anyone else think my proposal makes sense?

Offline monsterer

Surely this forum already uses google analytics?

Just that traffic measure combined with the measure of registered client accounts / new accounts created over time would be enough?
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Offline pseudoscops

How will we measure the effectiveness of marketing and PR by members of the community?

Proposal - We need to set up a system that reports on and recognises success from individuals and teams that generate awareness about BitShares. That system needs to be open, transparent and accessible by all members of the BitShares community. I think this starts with the community having access to public facing web traffic stats, but over time it will need to become much more than this. Those that can demonstrate success in increasing awareness are then in a position to be rewarded (tips, donations, fund-raising etc). If they are particularity effective they may attract enough attention and goodwill in order to get voted in as a marketing delegate paid by the DAC.  I'd like to lead this initiative if people think it's a good idea. I've also already set up a public facing GetClicky traffic stats profile for http://bitshares.org - just need someone to post the tracking code on to the live site and we'd be golden. I've got a few more thoughts on the mechanics of how we could track things below.

In order to coordinate our marketing effort I think it's important that we try and funnel people/prospects to one place and one place only:

http://bitshares.org/

With the BitShares SuperDAC almost upon us it would seem sensible to have the re-branded BitShares SuperDAC client software downloadable from http://bitshares.org. In light of the re-brand I'm assuming we'll ditch http://bitshares-x.info in favour of the above and this would be a very good thing IMHO. Can someone in the know provide clarity on what the plan is here?  Later when there are other more specialised/focused software clients interfacing with the BitShares API I think it will become necessary to also have some form of client/app directory feature on http://bitshares.org.

This suggestion does not stop members of the community building their own websites or apps that drive traffic to http://bitshares.org (i.e. creating a marketing node higher up the funnel). MethodX and others have already been very successful at this whilst trying to market the old BitSharesX brand/DAC. I just want to highlight the need to focus energies and traffic towards one place - this will be important going forward.

I haven't heard much suggestion of things being otherwise, but having one endpoint for all marketing activities has lots of obvious and practical benefits, perhaps SEO being the main one - don't dilute your Pagerank score across multiple domains. If the community agrees that this is the way to go then it would also allow us to quite quickly try to put in place some way of capturing and then measuring who is being the most effective at providing inbound traffic and thus awareness about BitShares. This could be measured by simply using your BitShares username as a referral ID whenever you are engaged in sending traffic to the BitShares site, whether that's just a simple signature on the forums or a full blown mini campaign (e.g. your referral link would look like this http://www.bitshares.com?citizen=psuedoscops). Further down the line, individuals could register domains that could also be picked up and associated with individual BitShares user IDs - thus negating some need for ugly params in the URL when doing bigger campaigns. I heard mentioned that someone was building a site that would allow delegates to register? Perhaps as part of the registration process they would be give a unique URL http://www.bitshares.com?citizen=delegate.xeroc)and maybe an embeddable html widget. Delegates and others could then use it when linking to the site and engaging in marketing activity related to BitShares. There's no need to set anything up or register though, in order for it to work you can just substitute your own BitShares ID in the link ans start sending traffic. More on how we can easily track this in the short term below.

In order to see if marketing efforts are being effective I think we need to have some public facing live web statistics for http://bitshares.org that we can access and use to measure success. I've used a number of services in the past Google Analytics, GetClicky, MixPanel and KissMetrics. Sometimes it's worth using a combination of them. GetClicky is probably the most accessible and therefore a good candidate for public facing stats for BitShares, it would also allow us to detect the referral ID mentioned above and have a league table of sorts that show who is generating the most awareness. GetClicky would also allow us to see where traffic is currently being referred from elsewhere on the web. They also provide heatmaps and a live view of current users to the site and where they are coming from is depicted on a nice world map. I think it would be really helpful for the DAC if those wanting to add to the marketing push had insight in to all of these kind of things, and some deeper stats stuff too, via a public facing BitShares traffic portal. It would allow us all to see what is currently driving the most traffic and those with the skills will be able to identify what is working and also identify where we might have some shortcomings. I recognise that GetClicky is not open source, I'd be happy to consider open source options providing it competes on features with GetClicky.

Assuming BM and the team approve of this it can be set up almost immediately by installing the following code I've pasted below on the main site. Just add it to the main WorPress template before the closing body tag. I understand if someone else wants to set this up, my post count is perhaps not high enough to be trusted yet, but I do already have a fairly dormant paid GetClicky account and so it would seem sensible to put it to good use. The code below is the asynchronous JavaScript ans so should not impact page load times at all. It has already been set to be public facing and the URL for access is here:

https://clicky.com/stats/?site_id=100787377

It would be great if the public stats could be collected from the day that the new BitShares SuperDAC was born. Just paste it in and public facing stats becomes live  :)

Code: [Select]
<script type="text/javascript">
var clicky_site_ids = clicky_site_ids || [];
clicky_site_ids.push(100787377);
(function() {
  var s = document.createElement('script');
  s.type = 'text/javascript';
  s.async = true;
  s.src = '//static.getclicky.com/js';
  ( document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0] ).appendChild( s );
})();
</script>
<noscript><p><img alt="Clicky" width="1" height="1" src="//in.getclicky.com/100787377ns.gif" /></p></noscript>

</body>
</html>

Going forward from this I think we need to focus on measurement and reporting of two things:

Awareness
Conversion Goals

My proposal above deals more with awareness. Conversion goal measurement might require some more definition, thought and would probably require a bit more implementation to implement. I'm guessing we could consider the download of the client software and creation of an account to be a successful conversion, but I think that it should be extended beyond that with multiple 'Stretch Goals' (i.e. how much BTSX/BitAsset is held in their account after one month etc etc, a $1m vs a $10 conversion may be given different weighting)
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 06:00:19 pm by pseudoscops »