Archive for the 'Metrics' Category

Yes To A Stronger Venture Capital Foundation By Building On Success Stories

Published
by
Isabelle Poirier
on October 30, 2009
in Author-Isabelle Poirier, Economic Development and Metrics
. 1 Comment

No one will dispute the fact that in Canada, “small companies die due to lack of funding”.  In the article, “Canada needs a stronger venture capital foundation to build on” in yesterday’s edition of The Montreal Gazette, David Crane raises our attention on weaknesses identified in a recent study on venture capital conducted by The Impact Group. The study is based on a sample size of 18-high tech firms and it does raise a good question, “Do venture capital investors do enough to mentor the companies?  Do they do enough to help build the companies?”

It’s certainly a question that should be examined in the near future. Innovation is nothing that you can stop and it can take place when times are difficult.  It’s common wisdom that, when times are tough, innovative companies can continue to invest in new products or services, explore new market opportunities to break new ground and differentiate themselves from the competition when the good times return.

Nothing is always as bad as it looks :-). I would like to share with you some interesting information on the impact of the venture capital on the Canadian economy. Last year, E&B DATA conducted an impact study for Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association. To bring an optimistic outlook to your day on this issue, please note the following :

  • In 2007, venture capital-backed technology companies generate close to 150,000 jobs in Canada (1.3% of all private sector employees) and 1% of Canadian GDP.
  • Between 1996 and 2007, venture capital investors financed 2,175 technology companies in Canada. 1,740 of those were operating in Canada in 2008. In addition, prior to 1996, venture capital investors financed 15 companies that are still operating and have sales larger than $50 million in 2008.
  • On average, these 1,740 companies had sales of $10.5 million and employment of 47 direct jobs each. They are a mix of small, medium and large companies.

In aggregate, they generated sales of $18.3 billion.

  • $15.4 billion in ICT
  • $1.9 billion in Life Sciences
  • $1.0 billion in Other Technologies

It is good and it is a sample of performance indicators that the venture capital community (VC) can continue to improve on.

The lesson to be learned is that when times are difficult, it’s even more important for the VC community the be responsive to the needs of innovative companies (start-up and maturing companies).

Are Canadian venture capitalists proactively seeking new deals? In this unperfect world, well some actually do. Just last week, Celtic House Venture Partners and Ventures West led a financing round of $10 M for Fresco Microchip. Established in 2004 and active in Canada and in the US, Fresco’s manufactures mixed-signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits (ICs).

We certainly do need more good news to convey us that Canadian venture capitalists can secure sustainable development in the high tech sector and I hope to read more and more press releases in the near future. Can Canadian venture capitalists take on this challenge? Are you confident that they will ?

Tapping into competitive behavior on the web via search data

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on March 16, 2009
in Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Metrics and Web Analytics
. 2 Comments

While perusing Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics – One Hour A Day (you can visit Avinash’s blog here on visit our blogroll), I stumbled upon a cool tool that I had used before, but had not touched for a while. I must admit that although I am rather refractory when it comes to using Microsoft products beyond the bearable minimum, its adCenter Labs is a pretty cool tool worth mentioning. If you are in search for intelligence in the field of competitive web usage behavior, Microsoft adCenter Labs may be something you should be looking into.  Although it has been around for quite some time now, this powerful tool is pretty underutilized and therefore worth being put on the front burner, especially in tough times where the optimization of existing business processes is king.

Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs - the intelligence layer

AdCenter Labs uses search data to retrieve competitive and demographic information related to keywords. Imagine just for a second the huge amount of information collected in the process of people entering keywords into Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. You will certainly agree that each of these keywords represents an intention. For example, when you enter the keyword ‘Dell’ into Microsoft’s Live Search, chances are you are looking to buy a computer. You may be interested in learning more about the models that Dell has available, interested in learning more about the features of a specific model or may even be looking into comparing prices but in the end, your search for ‘Dell’ indicates a clear intention to buy a computer.

On the other hand, Microsoft collects a huge amount of personal data through its Microsoft Live ID network and is therefore able to link search queries to demographic data such as your age, sex, location, etc. If you have a Hotmail account, use Messenger or regularly visit MSNBC for example, your search Live Search queries are linked to your demographic data and therefore provide valuable insights into your preferences and web search behavior. What more is the search engine knows what keywords you have been entering before the Dell keyword and it knows what you will be entering afterward… doesn’t that provide for a nice potential to predict web behavior? Now don’t think that you are immune of this kind of data logging if you don’t use any of the aforementioned Microsoft websites or other tools.  Ever been to Expedia? Bingo! Expedia is part of Microsoft’s Live ID network and so are other web services.

Don’t you think for a second that Microsoft is alone in collecting search data and matching it with demographic data. Biig brother in search land actually is… well you guessed it: Google!  Google uses a similar  approach.

How you can benefit for FREE

But what does this mean to you as an organization maintaining a website, doing business on the web or analyzing competition? Well, it would be of no use at all if the data was stored on Microsoft or Google servers and was being used  for internal purposes only, yet here is the scoop: Google and Microsoft both provide FREE ACCESS to the intelligence buried in the matching between search data and demographic data, completely legally!  Let me give you a couple of examples:

MS - Demographics prediction tool:

Would the following intelligence be of interest to you if you wanted to gather some basic demographics about who is looking up ‘Quebec investment’ on the web? What if you were an organization with a goal to attract investment? What if you were to launch an Internet marketing campaign and were looking for the right keywords to target your audience?

Quebec Investment - demographics prediction tool

What if you were a private consultant selling life insurances? Would the following information help you in the design of an online marketing campaign? What if you could repeat your query with this tool, entering additional keywords and combination to find out more? Useful, not useful?

Demographics prediction - Life insurance

MS - Search funnels tool:

If you are a company using the internet to sell products or to generate leads, would you be interested in knowing what people were thinking before they entered your product in the search engine? What about gaining insights into their intentions after they entered a keyword that relates to your product?  What about knowing what names pops up in their heads when searching for a specific product or service? Valuable intelligence when it comes to determine keywords for your own online campaigns or to adapting your ad copy to what you know goes through the heads of your target groups:

Microsoft adLabs Search Funnel tool

Top 5 sources to measure the success of your corporate blog

Published
by
Stephan Becker
on August 16, 2007
in Corporate Blogging, Metrics, Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 Strategy
. 0 Comments

The question arises inevitably sooner or later: How do you measure the success of your corporate blog activity?

Now that you have a corporate blog up and running and your head of department is regularly dropping by asking “And, ? Are those reader numbers going up already?” - what are the tools that you have at your disposal to help you measure the success of your blogging, podcasting and videocasting activities that compose your “Online Media Center”?

In answer to this question, I have drafted here some of the most effective tools that will help you in measuring the success of your online media activities:

1. GOOGLE Analytics

There seems to be no way to avoid the might of search engine giant GOOGLE. Among the various diversifications, we find in the GOOGLE shopping basket, its website analytics tool certainly is a heaven-sent gift for any Internet marketer - and blog-and podcast editor! Here are some of the metrics that GOOGLE Analytics provides you with:

  • Visitors stats (Visits, Unique Visits, Pageviews, Time on site, New Visits, Page Views, Bounce Rates, Average Visitor and Browser Profiles)
  • Traffic Sources (Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines)
  • Content stats (Page Views of Top Content)
  • Goals (Measuring business objectives after specific actions such as a purchase, a download or a registration)

The map overlay in the visitors section for example allows you to access a graphical representation of the origin of your readership:

Google Map Overlay

2. RSS Analytics tools

There is a great array of RSS feeds analytics tools that you may use to measure the success of your corporate blog activities. I invite you to type “RSS analytics” or “RSS metrics” (quotation marks included please!) into your preferred search engine to find the one you are most comfortable with. For reasons of simplicity, I will present Feedburner - one of the market leaders which does a good job for me.

Feedburner stats

Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) provides a great service that allows you to track the number of people that have subscribed to your feeds. Any blog installation comes with a feed address - usually an ‘Entries feeds’ address (your blog entries) and a ‘Comments feeds’ address (comments left to your articles). Have at look at the right menu bar of this blog, and you will see these, together with their orange RSS logos. By opening a (free) account with Feedburner, you will gain access toi nformation in regards to the readership of your blog. Feedburner also offers a variety of paid services that increase the pertinence of your tracking efforts.

3. Podcast and video download numbers

The success of your media platform can also be measured by the number of downloads you achieve per month. Although this ratio does not provide you with detailed information such as return visits, new visits and time spent viewing or listening to your podcast or videocast , the overall volume of files downloaded provides you nevertheless with some valuable information about the interest your blog is generating. Be aware though that this number does not provide you with any information in regards to how ‘high’ the quality of your podcast or videocast really is - increased download rates are affected by a variety of factors such as improved search engine ranking - especially in the initial phases of your new online media platform installation.

Top25 URL’s of Beautiful OCeans
This screenshot comes out of a “Webtrends” web statistics page of www.blogs.beautifuloceans.com - one of my clients - and shows the top 25 links and the respective access numbers to individual media files. As you can see, some mp3 (podcast) files of the Beautiful Oceans blog & podcast media center are right on top of weekly access - and growing numbers form one week to the other are an indicator of success of a particularly successful article and media file (podcast, videocast). For example, the podcast with the title, “Great White Sharks - Top Predators” has been accessed 64 times during the time interval for which the table above has been generated.

4. Links pointing to your corporate blog

If someone links back to your corporate blog there is fair chance that your work has caught the attention of someone - otherwise, why would he want to share your entry with his readership? There is a straightforward way to know not only how many websites link to your corporate blog but also who exactly that is! Go to GOOGLE and enter the following operator for your search:

link:mycorporateblog.com

The result being a list of all websites containing a link to your corporate blog. Isn’t this convenient?..:-)

5. Number of comments on your postings

The number of visitors, the number of downloads of your media files and traffic numbers are all metrics that allow you to track the success of your blogging and podcasting activities - but it does not necessarily provide you with a clear picture whether your entries are as much appreciated by your readers as you would like to believe. Numerous factors enter the ‘quality metrics’ of your blog & podcast activities, to name just a few: finding a catchy title for your blog (but don’t make the mistake to mislead your public for the sake of getting hits!), the fit between your topic and your readership, your writing style, the way you entice readers to take part in a discussion (to leave comments) and many more. Knowing some writing strategies is tentamount and you are best off to know where you are going before you start - although you will be able to adapt the way you write and to learn more blogging techniques while being on your way. The best metric in terms of the quality of your blog and podcasts are feedbacks left in the form of comments. Controversial or ‘hot’ topics are more likely to generate feedbacks just as much as well thought through and professionally written blogs.

I am sure that I left some good sources out here - so please feel free to add any source I may have forgotten.

Cheers, Stephan