By Gary Angel (@garyangel)

We’ve been involved in measuring Paywall issues for several different media/publishing sites lately. It’s an interesting set of problems and highlights some common weaknesses in Web analytics solutions as well as a few interesting workarounds that are applicable to a surprising range of problems extending beyond Paywall analysis.

Paywalls on media sites have gotten much more sophisticated these days. In most cases, sites choose to expose their entire content to the public but limit the amount consumed in a given time-period; this strategy is designed to protect Search Engine traffic and create a rich pre-Paywall experience.

So if you’re thinking about, planning or rolling out a Paywall on a site, one of the fundamental questions you have to answer is where to put the wall. The location of a Paywall is a business decision not an analytics decision, of course, but to decide the location of a wall there are a few things decision-makers typically want to know.

First, and most importantly, they need to understand the actual distribution of walled content consumption by visitor in a given period of time. If a Paywall is going to limit visitors to X pages in a week, how many visitors will it actually impact? What’s the potential loss in advertising revenue if those pages don’t get served? And how many visitors will actually have a strong incentive to go through the wall?

Read on at Gary’s Blog

By June Dershewitz

It’s not difficult to track social media marketing efforts as campaigns, but I haven’t seen too many companies actually doing it yet. Before I lay out step-by-step instructions, here’s a story that gives me hope for the future:

At last month’s X Change conference I sat in on a very popular social media analytics discussion; there were about 20 Web analytics practitioners in the room from a variety of large enterprises. At a certain point our conversation turned toward measuring ROI. The room grew quiet except for one voice.

“I can tell you exactly how well social media is working for us,” said an individual – who shall remain nameless – representing a major consumer brand. He pulled up a Web analytics report on his smartphone and stated, “Here’s a Twitter campaign we ran last month that generated $23,000 in revenue.”

He was able to make this claim precisely because his company tracks their social media links as campaigns. If you want similar bragging rights for your own company, just follow this 4-step process:

Read on at June’s blog