Social Graph Data and Web Analytics

So in my previous post I briefly talked about the integration of Social Data with Web Analytics platforms. Here are some more details on the data integration with Gigya.

3rd-party Analytics Integration (Gigya Documentation)
User profile objects that you can call on custom basis

This object represents the current user in the system. The User object may be retrieved with updated information upon a request to a particular method. As you can see, different social platforms provide different kinds of profile info (only when consumers opt-in), so you won’t be getting everything even if users share. Facebook seems to provide the most useful attributes.

What I’ve done is using profile information that are useful and potentially insightful. For example integration some photo thumbnails or photos are less insightful when integrated with Web Analytics. Make sure you plan on what you want to bring in and analyze first.

Some of the interesting things I have in mind to support marketers are…

  • Traffic Sources or marketing channels segmented by social profile. It will answer rather your marketing effort reached audiences by how much (%), and how that compares to a segmented that didn’t come through your marketing efforts.
  • Buyer visitors social profile breakdown. When people social sign-on and buy products, what are these social profile tells you about your buyers.
  • Engaged audience’s social profile Vs. Non-Engaged social profile. Engage could be defined in many ways, but if you want to segment your audience by different engagement behaviors and see how they compare, maybe the data can tell to make a better efforts around reaching or optimizing the experience for your target audience.

    • There are many other application of the data with web analytics, but I’m gonna stop here.

    What will be interesting is, if you’re able to export these data into CRM database, and cater your marketing efforts that speaks to the exact audience and their profile, it may lead to a better conversions. Meaning, if consumers give you permission to send email, and they’ve shared their profiel info, you can create email/tweet messages that is customized just for them. That is a very powerful marketing based on data.

    Every web analytics tool is unique in how it could be set up to track the events value, so I recommend consulting with your vendor. In Google Analytics Custom Event category and actions could be the part to capture social graph info, but be careful not to pass personal information as it goes against Google’s terms.

    On enterprise level analytics platform, it is worth exploring how much additional events you’re expecting to get and the best custom report view to achieve optimal reporting for integrated social graph for insights. As a Webtrends customer, I’m planning to use Webtrends Segments.

    Since we can identify unlimited custom events, I’ll apply a standard custom parameters with convention naming that could easily identify the social graph parameters. I would definitely love to hear how other experts were able to leverage social graph and integrate with Web Analytics.