Monday, July 11, 2016

Digital Measurement & Research Analytic Tools useful at no cost in the Diaspera and also in Zion


Digital Measurement  & Research Analytic Tools useful at no cost in the Diaspera and also in Zion


Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of tools available to the digital analyst: tools that are free, and tools that are good. There is very little overlap between the two.

That said, there are still a few free-to-use services that one could use in measurement and research. Here are five of the most useful free social media analytics tools.

Content Metrics: In-Platform Analytics


This one’s a given, but it bears repeating. If you have the login credentials or admin privileges to a profile or page, you have access to post-level and page-level data. Most major social media platforms provide easy access to relevant metrics via web dashboards.

The real value of in-platform analytics, however, lies in the ability to export raw data. (Facebook and Twitter make this easier than most other social networks.) Once you have your hands on the raw data, you can crunch the numbers however you like, which can be very powerful.

Web Metrics: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console

Google’s Web Analytics suite has become something of an industry standard, and for good reason: it is fast, free, and flexible. You might not be as familiar with Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console, two tools that increase the raw utility and flexibility of Google Analytics substantially.

Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) provides insight into the search behaviors surrounding your web property. Search Console identifies the keywords driving traffic to your website, provides valuable insight into how Googlebot sees your website when crawling the web, demonstrates how your site will appear in Google search results, and can even catalogue where your site is linked all across the web.

Google Tag Manager provides a flexible container for custom tracking elements. Essentially, it enables the user to drop bits of JavaScript or HTML into a webpage without needing to publish code via a CMS. This enables us to easily implement retargeting pixels, for instance, or to track file downloads and exit click destinations on your website (neither of which, incidentally, Google Analytics does by default.)

Search Metrics: Google Search Trends and Google AdWords Keyword Planner

Search data provide a window into the specific language used by regular folks when looking for information, and they are an invaluable indicator of relative interest in a topic, issue, brand or organization.

Google Search Trends provides data on “search interest” – relative search volume for specific keywords and aggregated topic groups – dating back to 2004. Included are relative interest levels by geography, related search terms, and even news items that correspond with spikes in search activity. You can also compare relative search volume among a set of topics or keywords. And if that weren’t enough, Google allows you to export the raw data in CSV format for further manipulation. If Search Trends has a weakness, it’s that search interest is not provided in raw search volume terms; instead, Google offers relative volume, normalized on a unit-less scale from 0 to 100. Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner fills this gap somewhat, enabling analysts to estimate monthly search volume, to understand bid prices on target keywords, and to suggest related terms that may be high-value targets for SEM.

Audience Metrics: Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is not the same as the Facebook Insights available to page administrators. Audience Insights was built to provide advertisers with deep insight into specific target audiences.

The tool allows users to define an audience by location, age and gender, interests and page likes, among other attributes. Once the audience is defined, Audience Insights provides data on demographics, lifestyle and purchase behaviors, device preference and activity level on-platform, geographic location, household income, spending patterns and more.

Perhaps the greatest added value of Audience Insights is that it presents data on a given audience – say, people who like your page – alongside points of comparison for Facebook as a whole. This enables communicators to understand how their audiences meaningfully differ from the norm.

Custom Analysis: Python, R, and Open APIs

There is an absolute glut of data freely available to the enterprising analyst. Facebook and Twitter make their data largely available to developers via open, well-documented APIs. Many other social networks and websites make their data available via APIs, though their documentation might not be as comprehensive. If you have a research question, it’s quite possible you can answer that question using public data, free tools and APIs.

For statistical analysis and data science, free tools do not get more flexible or capable than the combination of Python, a highly-readable general purpose programming language, and R, a programming language and software environment geared toward statistical analysis. There is a learning curve for each of these, of course, but the price is right and the payoff can be tremendous. Tutorials and sample code for both are widelyavailable on the web.

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