If you’re unfamiliar with Umbel check them out here, especially if you host ads on your websites. They have smart technology that analyzes almost every data point you could imagine across your users and properties. Umbel’s segmentation capabilities identifies audience groups based on these data points, including social data, and delivers an interactive dashboard giving clients the ability to easily visualize this information. Umbel customers are able to take this insight and increase ad sales across their properties.

One of our first joint customers to leverage this new partnership and integrated solution is the Daily Beast. For the Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, truly understanding their readers and building the most compelling audience stories for advertisers backed by real data is a critical part of their transition into the 100% digital NewsBeast news organization. We are excited to be working with Umbel to give joint customers the ability to analyze their audience like never before.

Check out Umbel’s announcement on our new partnership here.

In sports, there is a reason why we keep score – to see how we’re doing and make improvements.  Marketing and technology are the same way.  Analytics provide the insights necessary to optimize web technology implementations and maximize return on investment.  As with other technologies you already use, your user management platform solution should include a rich set of analytics to make you much smarter about measuring the effectiveness of your user acquisition and intelligence programs.

Social Login Analytics

If you plan to let people log in to your site with their choice of social identities, it’s helpful to know which ones they ultimately choose.  Social login analytics help you track the most popular social providers over time and adjust your supported networks to cater toward your audience’s preference and maximize the likelihood of conversion.

Social Sharing Analytics

It’s a two-way street – marketers want to know where their site content is syndicated, and where their site traffic comes from.  Social sharing analytics provide both, enabling you to drive on both sides of the proverbial road, so to speak.  You will want to view reports on shared content by preferred social channel and measure referral traffic generated to your site from each social network.  These insights can be used to determine the effectiveness of refer-a-friend programs, and provide a clue into which social networks are most receptive to your content as you refine your broader social media strategy.

User Composition Reports

Successful marketing strategies are predicated on an understanding of your target audience.  To develop that understanding, your profile data storage solution should provide aggregate snapshots of the composition of your user database.  It should help you contrast geographic, gender and age breakdowns and determine the most prominent interests or favorite books, music and movies shared by your site users.

Behavioral Analytics

While traditional web analytics platforms are very good at telling you, on aggregate, how people are using your site, they often fall short at telling you who is actually on it, and what an individual person is doing.  Effective behavioral analytics should close the gap between user identity and site usage by reporting defined behaviors such as purchases, comments, reviews or specific page views on an individual user basis.  In short, they should augment your existing site analytics by providing the intelligence needed to identify influencers and create rewards programs that generate maximum ROI.

Integration with Dedicated Analytics Platforms

Detailed data about registration and login events, shares, or user profile attributes are most valuable when combined with insights from your dedicated analytics platform.  Whether you are using Adobe SiteCatalyst (Omniture), Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Webtrends or other software, it is crucial to pass registration events from social logins into your existing analytics funnels to test, iterate and optimize site conversion rates.  For example, how do site registration conversion rates differ for social login versus those users who sign-up the traditional way?  In addition, your social profile storage solution should enable you to pass user data attributes into your analytics data stream to drive deeper insights.  For example, are males or females more likely to complete a product purchase flow on your site?  Do older or younger audiences tend to prefer certain types of content on your site?  Event and data-layer integrations with analytics platforms make these types of insights achievable.

To learn more about single sign-on as well as other social and identity management technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

The role of A/B testing and optimization is not often discussed in social media. With so much focus on content, timeliness, and channel management, it’s often difficult to articulate a clear testing strategy, and most of the time, social media managers don’t have any ability to test messaging because they don’t control the channel – it’s impossible to measure the impact when you can’t see behind the curtain to understand what’s going on.

But, the social elements of your website are an area where multivariate testing is possible. And the results can be applied across your entire social media strategy. Testing should be a fundamental part of the on-site social media plan.

Of course, there are a number of best practices that we already know about social login and other social interactions. However, the specific ways in which your users interact with your brand and the experiences you have created on your website will vary dramatically. Best practices help deployments go smoothly and efficiently, but they can’t maximize performance – only your users can tell you what works best for them. That means that testing and optimization of the social elements on your site is critical.

At Janrain, we have seen simple A/B testing improve performance of social elements by 2-3x in just a matter of weeks. The reason that testing is so effective is that it allows users to make the decisions, and sometimes the preferences of the user are a surprise, even to marketing teams who know their customers well.

In considering how to structure a series of multivariate tests for social components, it’s important to start with a clear vision of what metrics you are trying to impact. Frequently, we see that deploying Janrain Engage has an immediate impact on the number of registrations on a website. If driving registrations is a clear goal, testing variables in the registration process is a natural next step after deployment.

Consider testing elements in the social login process like:

Identity providers: This is one of the easiest elements to test. Consider both the identities you offer, and also the placement and prioritization of identity providers. You will want to align with your overall business goals, of course, so some identity providers may not be relevant, but you may be surprised where you find pockets of interest and activity with focused identity providers.

Here we see two typical setups of identity providers for different sites. The first is for a retail site, and the second is for a community site. Notice how the identity providers are prioritized differently.

Size and emphasis: Social login can be prioritized strongly, or weakly; it can sit alongside traditional registration, or it can roadblock access to traditional registration. These considerations can dramatically impact the number of users who log in through social means, and, perhaps surprisingly, the total number of logins. Placement and framing options can drive substantial lift in performance.

Data permissions: The data that you are requesting from the social network can also impact the usage of social login. While this is mostly at the margin, it is important to consider testing different levels of permissions, and also the messaging attached to the information request. Giving users a clear reason for requesting data can dramatically increase opt-in.

There are many other elements that could be tested, depending on your website and the experience associated with login. Testing should be part of every social media endeavor where possible, and having the ability to test and learn on your site is unique in the social media landscape. Janrain offers social media testing and optimization services for all of our solutions.

Have you had success testing in social media? Let us know in the comments.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by Kevin Long, Janrain Technical Product Manager, to introduce the new Janrain Engage social login widget and provide detail on how to use the new enhancements. Read other posts within the Janrain Technical series.

Previous posts covered the expanded support for mobile devices, new customization features, and performance. Today we’ll focus on using the client side javascript api and how to connect it to analytics engines.

The Event of the Season!

Analytics Integration with the Social Login Widget

Janrain Engage analytics provide a lot of insight and value with the hand dashboard trend graph, summaries and the click to drill in headings that reveal the details. If you are already tracking your website’s visitor traffic with an analytics tool like Google Analytics, or Omniture SiteCatalyst you will want to view the user login process right along side your existing analytics data.

The Janrain Engage social login widget’s client side JavaScript API fires events that you can listen to and trigger your own client side code. You can track these events using a product like Google Analytics or Omniture, or even your own in house analytics.

How to Track User Login Events

When we started this project, we held briefings with several Janrain customers across various verticals (Online Retail, News Media, Entertainment, Online Guides) to hear firsthand which metrics would help them measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts. There was a consistent theme in their responses:

• Social logins by new and returning users over 7- day and 30- day periods
• Drill down of login data by domain to measure the effectiveness of campaigns
• Ability to compare the percentage of logged in users who also shared content or site activities to social networks
• Data export so that they may compare and contrast it with other online marketing initiatives

Based on this feedback and our market assessment, we then went to work and built a new analytics dashboard and reporting system. Key highlights of Janrain Engage social analytics include:

• Trends & Provider Distribution: Track trends and popular providers used for social sign-ins, posts, and resulting referrals.
• User Intelligence: Measure recency (time between user visits to site), frequency of user visits, user’s social activity (measured by the number of posts) and influence (measured by referral traffic generated to site).
• Expanded Date Ranges: Monitor trends and run reports over various date ranges – 7, 30, 60 and 90.
• Drill Down Reporting and Data Export: Drill down on logins, posts and referrals by new vs. returning users, social networks and platforms used, and domains.

The screen shot below showcases the new analytics dashboard.

We hope our customers enjoy the new analytics and always look forward to hearing feedback. Please login to your Janrain Engage product dashboard and let us know what you think.