NEW PRODUCT: Real-Time Campaign Analytics

Among the many things the social web has brought to our attention, it’s the impact of “real-time”.  Now more than ever, thoughts and actions are communicated and distributed at near the speed of light, and being in the know on what’s happening ‘now’ has taken on new importance.  It’s in that light that we’re excited to introduce Real-Time Campaign Analytics to our clients.  In fact, we feel strongly about democratizing access to real-time information, so we’ve enabled this capability to all accounts on the Wildfire platform.  What’s the fuss all about? Let us give you a quick tour of the features of our analytics package.

On the surface, we’ve created a new user interface for every published campaign that provides at-a-glance access to vital campaign stats.  Under the hood, we put a lot of effort into building the robust analytics engine that powers the data in real-time. We’re proud of the scalability this affords us, as we’ll be able to provide the most up-to-date information even as the number of campaigns we support grows dramatically.

The tool that our clients can use to view their campaign data is aptly named the Campaign Analytics Dashboard, and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for many clients.  In fact, this image was taken from our very own promotion! It’s cliché, I know, but we’re eating our own dog food.

When you first visit the dashboard, the entire lifetime of the campaign is displayed by default, giving you the entire picture of what’s been going on.  At the top of the dashboard are the key performance metrics including visits, entries, and entry rate, accompanied by useful reference statistics like daily average or best-to-date.  Below that, we provide an interactive time chart that lets you see the activity on your campaign day-by-day.

Beneath the graph we display the key metrics broken out by whatever channels the campaign is published to.  As you probably know, a Wildfire campaign can be hosted on Facebook, on a microsite, or even as a widget on a client’s website.  In all cases, we provide visibility into user participation on each channel.

For our most sophisticated clients, we also offer the ability to create custom referral sources, a powerful tool that allows you to identify where engagement is coming from down to the narrowest segments.  Using referral sources, clients can effectively optimize their campaigns by discovering and nurturing the most efficient distribution channels.

For example, you could A/B test different marketing copy for your email newsletters to see which version drives the most entries.  Similarly, you can optimize ad spend on a campaign by associating each ad creative with a different referral source.  All the tools of the trade for online marketing are now available for social.  We think that’s pretty powerful.

We’re determined to offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date reporting platform for social media marketing.  Analytics Dashboard is a great step forward, but it’s only the beginning.  Stay tuned for more improvements.