Tracking Customers and Their Conversations

I’ve just come out of my Google Analytics account and moved away (briefly) from Twitter to write this article up. My Google Analytics gives me some great information and insight into the way that my customers, potential customer and even competitors behave. For instance, the stats today have just told me that the presentation slides and additional information that I uploaded for last month’s eMarketing Award course have been viewed by three of the six people this week. Let’s hope they’re using it to get their reports done!

Google Analytics can also tell me which potential organisations are interested in my courses. It’ll tell me how often they have come on the site and how long they spent looking at the content. The problem here lies with knowing what you are going to do with the information. I know that someone from Halifax Bank (not true, obviously!) came on the site, I know the keyword they used to find my site but I don’t know why they are there or who exactly they are. It is only when the enquiry comes through that I can act on it – but at least I will have some information regarding their viewing habits on my site when I speak to them.

Speaking of customers, I had an interesting experience recently on Twitter. I have been using Twitter quite extensively over the past few weeks and come to appreciate what a cool tool it is for researching, discussing and even for promoting your own website/business/products. Last week, I was experiencing some problems with my TypePad account and decided to Tweet about it (post on Twitter). Here’s what I said:

Within an hour or so the good people at TypePad had not only responded to me through a Direct Message but they also added me to their list of people to follow. This means that they can follow (if they want) my conversations on Twitter and identify any issues that I may have with their software straight away. They may also be using Twitter Search (formerly Summize) to set up RSS alerts:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=typepad

From a marketing perspective, it’s wonderful that all of these tools are free and can offer us boundless opportunities to listen to, and act on, client conversations that are going on out there.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, head over to my profile page: twitter.com/alunjohn and start following.