Free vs. Paid: Moz Analytics and Google Anayltics

Gone are the days of creating a campaign and placing a 1-page ad in the most read magazines and a 30-second commercial on one of the most watched TV shows.  With technology, a modern marketer can track pretty much anything on the web.  Analytics platforms are commonly used and allow marketers and CEOs to understand how to continuously optimize websites, content, and social outreach (Hilhorst, 2014). 

If we were creating an Internet marketing campaign and two of our strategies were creating an SEO strategy and perhaps a PPC campaign, then we would want to measure the results through an analytics tool.  Getting Internet marketing right is tricky, and it’s nearly impossible to get it all right the first time (Cummings, 2014).   Search engines like Google are constantly making changes to their algorithm, which means something that worked before, may not work this time around.  Tracking your results will help you identify what is and what is not working, and helps you improve and customize your marketing efforts to best fit your needs, and the need of your target audience (Cummings, 2014). 

This week, I needed to identify another tool in the marketplace that wasn’t Google Analytics.  First thing that came to my mind, thanks to me following their blog, was Moz.  If you aren’t familiar with Moz, they are one of the Internet’s leading search engine marketing companies, and offer a complete web analytics package (Sparks, 2014).   Their analytics can help you track your search marketing, social media marketing, brand activity, links, and content marketing efforts all in one convenient location (Sparks, 2014).  In 2008, Moz launched their own crawl (now called Mozscape) so they could provide online marketers with insights they can’t get anywhere else (Moz, n.d.).  Their most recent Mozscape Index has over 189 Billion URls (Moz, n.d.).   

For comparison purposes, we will look at the pro version of Moz Analytics.  With their tools, you can measure and improve your search, social, brand, and content marketing with Moz Analytics.  Perform in-depth research on your site – and your competitors – with their research tools (Moz, n.d.).  Moz Pro subscriber’s benefits include educational resources, answers to tough technical questions from their community of professional marketers, and more. 

·      All your data in one place - You can track the performance of all your inbound marketing efforts on one platform, then shows you the relationships between your content, SEO, social activity, brand mentions, and inbound links (Moz, n.d.) 

·      Beautiful visualizations of your data over time - Moz Analytics gives you a picture of how your efforts have performed over time. Watch the trend lines of your growth and momentum, and highlight factors that have caused shifts in performance (n.d.).

·      Competitive Analysis – Moz shows you all of your data in a comparative view with your competitors.  Scope out their link profiles, traffic, social activity, mentions of their brand online, trending content pieces, and more.

·      Actionable Insights for Your Next Steps – Moz Analytics gives you insights you can act on – and data to help you prioritize your next move.  Learn what keywords can optimize for to boost traffic, discover missing meta-tags, delete duplicate page content, and optimize your site for quick wins.

·      (Source: Moz, n.d.).

Moz Pro’s and Con’s of Moz Analytics

The biggest pro for Moz analytics is they offer some of the best tools on the market for link management and analysis.  You can really get a lot of information about how to improve your SEO campaigns (Sparks, 2014).

The biggest con for Moz analytics, they don’t actually measure your traffic.  As a result, you would need to be familiar with both Moz Analytics and Google Analytics in order to get data about your traffic patterns (Sparks, 2014).

Google Analytics and Moz Analytics

While I haven’t used Moz Analytics, I would like to offer what I see as the comparisons and differences, between Moz and Google Analytics.  Moz first started as an SEO tool, but has transformed into an analytics tool, with a focus on empowering inbound marketers.  First, it’s important to note that the Moz platform syncs with Google Analytics and pulls data on your site’s inbound channels to provide different insights than what you might be accustomed to from Google Analytics (Wallace, 2014).  The biggest difference with Moz, is the beautiful data visualization over time with custom reporting, competitive insights to help with research, and actionable recommendations to improve your performance (Wallace, 2014).  With Moz Analytics, it’s not an either Moz Analytics or Google Analytics, cause it relies heavily on Google Analytics to do its job.  While Google provides you with the data from your marketing efforts, Moz takes that data and creates data visualization graphs, along with insights that you can act on.  Under their On-Page Optimizations, they have an On-Page Grader tool that evaluates any page on your website, or even your competitor’s, and assigns a letter grade A-F. The grade is based on on-page optimizations related to a specified keyword (Wallace, 2014).

According to Wallace (2014), the report evaluates everything from title tags and keyword usage to canonicals and semantic markup.  It even displays a target keyword for that page and the recent change in rankings.  This is no doubt a tool that would come in very handy for the newer SEO pro and I would find this type of information very informative.

As someone who is very passionate about social media, Moz Analytics also offers you the ability to sync your social accounts.  This allows you to not only monitor interactions such as retweets and shares, but you can see traffic-driving retweets and shares (Wallace, 2014).  This level of detail simply isn’t available with Google Analytics.

In conclusion, Moz seems to have a very powerful tool, but it doesn’t come free like Google Analytics.  Moz will run you anywhere from $99/month, up to $599/month, a price that might not be available to businesses with small budgets.  I'm definitely intrigued by Moz Analytics, but see GA as the better choice.  With Google Analytics Academy and some invested time, GA would be also be the more fiscally sound choice too.  

Have you or do you currently use Moz Analytics, or do you mainly stick with Google Analytics? Is there another analytics tool that you find valuable?

References

Cummings, A. (2014). Top e-marketing metrics you should be monitoring [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.ispionage.com/top-e-marketing-metrics-monitoring.html

Hilhorst, A. (2014, October 8). Data, design and analytics: Is this the future of marketing? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.onalytica.com/blog/posts/data-design-and-analytics-is-this-the-future-of-marketing

Moz. (n.d.). Software for managing inbound marketing and local SEO. Retrieved from http://moz.com/products

Moz. (n.d.). Why choose Moz? We know marketing data. Retrieved from http://moz.com/products/why

Sparks, C. (2014, March 11). 10 Great social and web analytics tools. Retrieved from http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-great-social-web-analytics-tools/90629/

Wallace, S. (2014, June 12). Moz Analytics review: How it fits into your toolset [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.neboagency.com/blog/how-moz-analytics-fits-into-your-existing-toolset/

Social Media: Knowing Your Audience To Know Your Channels

In our personal lives, social media has become a way for you to connect with your friends, family, and maybe even your co-workers.  It seems like every year we have another platform popping up and giving marketers and businesses a way to reach an audience, hopefully their audience.  Larger companies may dedicate a group of 10-15 people to run social media, meanwhile the small business owner is left to fend for himself or herself.  So what is the right strategy for your company or business? While those small mom and pop-type stores might stick with Facebook as their website and “marketing” strategy, I would suggest spreading your wings.  Cause if you think Facebook and YouTube are your best bets because they are most popular, think again.  Just because a site is popular doesn’t mean it is a good fit for your business (Patel, 2014).  However, a handful of platforms would help with your business objectives, especially since social networking is now the number 1 activity on the web (Merchant Money, 2014)! According to Neil Patel (2014), 86% of marketers stated that social media is important for their business and 89% of marketers stated that increased exposure was the number one benefit of social media marketing.

So how do you decide what networks you should create a company profile for? For those with limited resources, you want to select those that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and broadcast the type of media you’ve decided is best suited for your company (Levy, 2013). The main idea is to not spread yourself too thin, but as a rule of thumb, have your presence on the “Big 4” sites:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Google+
4. LinkedIn (Lohana, 2014)

You should consider Pinterest and Instagram, depending on your target audience (Lohana, 2014).  Pinterest is one of the biggest drivers of web traffic and if your audience is there, then you should be also.  Just like creating objectives, strategies, and tactics for an integrated marketing campaign, Hootsuite recommends creating a mission statement by identifying a unique purpose for each.  The blanket statement looks like this: “We will use (social network) for (purpose of this social network) in order to help (business goal)” (Sorokina, 2014).

Here are some examples of what your business might create to understand how each of these main social networks might help your company reach its business objectives:

• Facebook – We will use Facebook for advertising to target a specific audience in order to help increase sales.
• Twitter – We will use Twitter for customer service in order to increase customer happiness and promote customer loyalty.
• LinkedIn – We will use LinkedIn for building our company’s professional network to help establish our brand as experts in the field.
• Instagram – We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee happiness.
• Google+ - We will use Google+ for boosting SEO value of our online content to help increase visibility.
• Pinterest – We will use Pinterest for sharing high-quality images to help promote our products and increase sales. (Sorokina, 2014)

As you may or may not know, the subscription-model has become the latest rage in shopping for niche categories.  One of the best is Birchbox/ Birchbox Man, who is the leading discovering commerce platform.  They are redefininy the retail process by offering consumers a unique and personalized way to discover, learn about, and shop the best beauty, grooming, and lifestyle products on the market (Birchbox, n.d.).  Birchbox Man currently has 5 social media accounts that they operate daily.  These five networks are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.  Birchbox Man has a content platform they call, “The Guide.” Each month has its own theme, which coincides with the box that gets mailed out to your home.  The guide will feature in-depth product reviews, lifestyle articles, and how-to’s articles and videos.  All of the content from the Guide is published across their various social channels and gets them a lot of interaction from fans and followers of these channels.  To build excitement around each monthly box, they will publish a sneak peak video on YouTube, but the only way they post the video, is by getting enough likes on their Facebook and Instagram channels.  Once that number is hit, they publish the video and you get the chance to see what products will be in your box. It’s like getting to peak behind Santa’s curtain, before Christmas day.  Aside from the monthly box of five samples, Birchbox Man sells the full-size products in their shop.  Featured products are also featured on their social channels as well.  Birchbox as a company does a great job with highly visual images, which is key for engagement.  Almost everyday, Birchbox will change the URL section on Instagram for that product. 

Social media doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just takes some pre-planning and then execution.  Once you know the networks your audience uses, you want to use an editorial content calendar to keep yourself on track.  Create content that your audience finds useful, helpful, and relevant to them.  As a rule of thumb, stick with the 80/20 rule, 80% sharing and helpful and 20% promotional. 

While your goal with social media should be gaining reach and awareness for your company, it should also be about building a community.  If you sell a product or service, it doesn’t end at the sale.  That should be the beginning of the customer lifecycle, not the end.  The brands who get it right, are the brands that admit fault and are quick to fix an issue, they are the brands that talk with their audience and not at their audience.  Social media is very much like the offline world, where tenacity and consistency are required qualities to see results in your social media efforts (Frances, 2014).  Brian Solis says to introduce value, insight, and direction with each engagement (2010).  As a model of effective communication, it is all the more important because it puts the personal into every transaction – and we all want to be treated like a person, and not just a “consumer” (of media or anything else), right (Novak, 2010)?

Let me leave you with this, your content should be what draws them in, but the conversation around your community should be what keeps them there.  Leverage your social channels to not only talk to, but listen to your consumers pain points.  This is your chance to help your customer go from Mario, to Super Mario! Listen, engage, and serve! 

References

Birchbox. (n.d.). What is Birchbox? Retrieved from http://birchbox.com/about

Frances, J. (2014, July 20). Choosing the right social media platform for your business. Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/social-media/choosing-right-social-media-platform-business-0949951

Levy, S. (2013, December 2). How to choose the best social media platform for your business. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230020

Lohana, P. (2014, November 4). 6 social media marketing tools to make your management quick and easy [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/11/04/6-social-media-marketing-tools-to-make-your-management-quick-and-easy/

Merchant Money. (n.d.). Social media & business [Infographic]. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/choosing-most-effective-social-media-platform-your-business-infographic

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/why-conversation-not-content-king

Patel, N. (2014, September 5). Which social media platforms are best suited for your business? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/

Solis, B. (2010, May 18). 21 Rules for social media engagement. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/

Sorokina, O. (2014, November 3). Save time on social media: One social media profile, one mission [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.hootsuite.com/the-purpose-of-each-social-media-profile/#pagetop