Over at the Conversion Room Blog, Google announced a couple of ways for both end users and website owners can increase privacy of website analytic and statistic data from Google Analytics, a robust and widely popular web analytics tool to show how visitors engage with their website.

For website visitors, Google developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, to opt-out of their website visits being tracked by Google Analytics.

For website owners, Google is providing on their Code site, some methods to anonymise the IP address information sent to Google for geographic reports. The website owner can now set their data collection to only send a portion of this IP address information. This may have an impact on the accuracy of geographic data reports.

Should this worry marketers and those using stats?

You could say on one hand that this should worry marketers and product managers relying upon Google Analytics for decision making website analytic data, and on the other hand that the impact could be minimal. The average end user is not going to rush out and install the browser add-on, however, it is guaranteed that many will. While this may affect the ability to use their visits as a part of the analytic data from Google Analytics, other server tracking methods and systems are available. In fact, this may open up some additional business for other vendors that provide website statistics and analytic services, due to the possible concern of lack of insight into website data.

What to do next

I wouldn’t recommend giving up on Google Analytics. With the plethora of available information, the usefulness of the service, it is justifiable to keep it in your tool set.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

If you continue using Google Analytics, there are some alternatives that are a worthy look:

• Coremetrics
• Omniture
• ClearSaleing

The list goes on, but these are a few of the most worthy mentions.

Inbound marketing is key

Continue focusing on inbound marketing and driving more leads to conversions through call to action, simplified usable design. Analytics are important, drive business decision, and should never put your website visitors at risk, or in a tizzy.

It’s probably time to take another good look at your privacy policy too, by the way.

(Photo credit: Karsten Schmidt)

Google just announced that the new asynchronous tracking tag is ready for prime time.

It doesn’t take much to change the code, as you may or may not know, however, they have provided a guide to do so here.

Benefits of the new snippet of code:

The latest version of the Analytics tracking code offers an improved way to track website visitors with Google Analytics. It takes advantage of browser support for asynchronous JavaScript to enhance the speed in which the tracking code is loaded. With this version of the tracking code, you can also place the Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering. (info from Google Analytics team)

As always, establishing a baseline and measuring against it is key for Internet marketing. Knowledge truly is power in this respect. Google Analytics is a great, free, resource to help you in this regard.

One of the things I’ve observed in the realm of social media marketing is that many marketing experts debate where you should focus your marketing efforts.  This stems from a variety of opinions, experiences, and where their target market’s “hang out”.

Social media marketing puts businesses where consumers hang out. As marketers we love the plethora of information available from status updates, profile information, and other pools of data. Our society has become adept to weeding out the crap, and shoveling in the good, high quality information. Cream rises to the top.

If you look at the following chart comparing traffic metrics of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the light of sheer volume of people to market to you might right off the bat say, lets jump on Facebook! They have massive amounts of traffic, wahoo!

Now of course there are many other social networks that deserve attention, but for sake of making a point, those three are the ones chosen.

Go where your people are

Taking a holistic approach to Internet marketing and social media marketing is key to success for any business or individual. But taking the time to find out where your target market “hangs out” is critical.

Take a look at the following world map of social networks, courtesy of vincos.it:

You probably see at least some social networks on the map that you’ve never heard of, I know I did. The key is to find out where your market is and to listen, participate and act upon where they are.

The business case and ROI regarding social media has been made time and time over again. Consumers, individuals, businesses, government, and organizations communicate daily using social media and social networking. It is becoming mandatory that customer service monitoring, response and action take place via social media as so many opportunities to build loyalty and solve real problems now exist.

As you whittle together your effort to leverage this communication mechanism for the greater good of your business and customers, it is imperative that you take some time, now, to put together a social media marketing strategy. The following is a guide to get you started on the right path, and give you some food for thought.

Key points in developing a social media marketing strategy

The purpose of a social media marketing strategy is to outline the goals and objectives of an online presence and campaign. Three basic getting started steps to developing your strategy:

Gather information

• Do you currently have social networking accounts? If so, how effective are they currently being utilized?
• If you do not have social network accounts set up, what are the goals and objectives in having them? Have you chosen target networks?

Market research

• What social networks is your target market using?
• Conduct a survey of your own, or use available resources on the Internet that may have the demographic information you are looking for. Often social networks themselves will release information in press releases and reports to the public.
• What is your market using the social networks and community for?
• Are they currently engaging with brands, or using it purely for pleasure? Is there room for your message, and are they ready to receive it?
• Listen and the message will come
• Have an open listening ear to the conversations happening in real-time about your brand and/or industry. Use real-time search functionality of major search engines such as Google or Bing. Fine tune by using niche real-time search engines such as Topsy.
• Set up Google Alerts. If you need advanced functionality, look at using services like Trackur or Radian 6

Make sure you have the ability to measure your results

• Leverage freely available tools such as URL shorteners like bit.ly to track clicks
• See social engagement and audience reach of your content by using BackType
• Don’t consider follower count to be a tell tale of your social media success. Always weigh engagement and response to your activity high.

Use available talent

• Social media and networking is all about participating, listening, and adding value. The best way to do this is to simply just get started! Iron out the kinks as you go along, and with some basic thought and foresight your campaign will be solid.

Free getting started download

This post summarizes the key points, however, sometimes having it in a downloadable format is convenient. Download the key points in getting started in building your social media marketing strategy.

(Photo credit: Intersection Consulting)