Using analytics to contest your staff

It’s no secret that most likely everyone in your office has (at least) a Facebook account. You’ll find a handful of them who even have twitter accounts. The last two companies I have worked with have been (and still are) very vocal about having their employees retweet (RT:) things they wanted viral. I guess that’s cool. I mean if you’re comfortable becoming a non-paid billboard, then yeah, it is cool.

Far be it for me to tell you how to run your office, I won’t. But we all know that putting a carrot at the end of the stick makes people do more and work harder. Especially when it’s money at the end of the stick. So lets say you have a campaign that needs to go viral. You have a handful of uber-popular (facebook/twitter) profiles at your disposal and really want to motivate them.

Why not incentivize them to help make your message viral? Why not run a contest and see who drives the most traffic to your page/campaign. In our office we run these contests regularly. We have two levels of winners:

1st prize (generally $100) for most traffic directed to the page/campaign.
2nd prize (generally $50) for either longest (average) time on site or highest (average) page view.

It’s actually very simple and for the sake of this tutorial, I’m using Google Analytics. I am certain this can also be accomplished with Omniture and I think WebTrends but don’t quote me on that one.

Google will allow you to URL encode variables into your URL. Specific variables that they You need to follow their format as far as variables (see below) they even supply an online tool that will help automate this process Google Analytics URL Builder. But the end results are fantastic.

Campaign Source (utm_source) – Required – Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example: utm_source=facebook
Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Required – Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click. Example: utm_medium=viral || utm_medium=ppc
Campaign Term (utm_term) – NOT Required - Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad. Example: utm_term=Long+Island+News
Campaign Content (utm_content) – NOT Required – Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL. Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Required – Used for keyword analysis. If you notice from the screen shot (above), this is the variable that I use to track employee names/initials.

As I mentioned though, they have a fantastic tool:

Once you “Generate URL” (Step 3) the new URL is generated:

http://www.somewebsite.com/thatpage.php?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=joeg

This URL will now allow you to track all incoming traffic from each of your employees.

Viewing the traffic is easy:

Log in to your Google Analytics account
On the left side click Traffic Sources to expand the sub-menu.
Select Campaigns from the list.

That’s it! Your information should be right there. Remember though, Google Analytics are not real time. I normally finalize my reports and numbers between 11am and 12am.

TIP: Click “Add to Dashboard” at the top of the page to add this to your dashboard.