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Starting today, it’s easier to track the performance of mobile marketing right alongside your other marketing channels. Use awe.sm to create unique QR codes, and measure how many site visitors come to your site from scanning mobile ads in the same way you track clicks & conversions for social networks.

Creating QR codes is easy. When you use the awe.sm publisher or the awe.sm bookmarklet to share a link, click the new QR code channel icon. We’ll generate a unique tracking link with the channel “mobile”, and a downloadable PNG QR code, too.

Pro tip: You can also retrieve the QR code for a link by viewing its details in the awe.sm Stats Explorer. Click “Download QR Code” for a full-sized file.

That’s it! Happy scanning…

PS: Want to learn more neat tricks, or a refresher on how awe.sm can help you measure & optimize social media marketing? Check out our free weekly webinars!…

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Over the last few weeks, TechCrunch has run a couple posts using their own referrer logs to measure how sharing on various social services drives traffic. In these and other analyses based solely on referrer information, Twitter performs surprisingly poorly relative to expectations many of us have based on our own observations of the volume of link sharing on Twitter.

Does that mean the people you follow on Twitter who share links all the time are that atypical? Do most normal people just not click on links in Tweets? Is LinkedIn far more popular with the rest of the world than it seems to be with the people you know?

No, no, and no. There is a much simpler answer behind this disparity: referrers are a poor way to attribute traffic from social sharing.

Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers. Today’s web is built around social streams and other APIs that are consumed via dynamic web applications, desktop clients, mobile apps, and even other web services, all of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism.

awe.sm was built for the modern web — a network of people, not pages — to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities no matter what path they follow. So our system knows with certainty where each link was originally shared in addition to all the places where it was ultimately clicked (i.e. referrers). This approach gives us a unique set of data that demonstrates just how misleading referrer information can be.

And in the case of links shared on Twitter, it’s very misleading: the referral traffic one sees from Twitter.com is less than 25% of the traffic actually driven by Twitter.

Twitter is the perfect storm for referral traffic

We looked at awe.sm data from the first 6 months of 2011 spanning links to over 33,000 sites, and the numbers were astounding:

• only 24.4% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer;
• 62.6% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all (i.e. they would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics);
• and 13.0% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (e.g. facebook.com, linkedin.com).

Twitter is the quintessential modern web service — all the ways to consume Twitter, even Twitter.com, are just clients for the Twitter API — so the failure to effectively track it using such an outmoded methodology as referrer analysis should come as little surprise. Twitter’s openness and the many resulting ways users interact with it are what have made it so successful, but they are also the things that have made its value largely invisible to publishers.

‘Direct Traffic’ explained

When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket. The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is — if a visit didn’t come from another webpage (i.e. no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.

If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile. And since 2/3 of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients*, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.

How Twitter sends traffic through other sites

While the incredible growth of mobile apps and desktop clients and their importance in the Twitter ecosystem is news to no one, the value Twitter drives through content syndication is a bit more surprising: more than 1 in 8 visits driven by Twitter sharing are actually referred from other sites. Many other sites use Twitter’s API to pull in Tweets that they display on their own sites, where links in those Tweets are then clicked. For example, look at this screenshot of my LinkedIn activity stream. Notice that every update says ‘via Twitter.’ Yet when someone clicks on one of those links, the referrer will be linkedin.com, even though it only got to LinkedIn because someone shared it on Twitter first.

The same is true of Tweets syndicated to Facebook, About.Me, and myriad other websites that allow users to connect your Twitter feed directly. And because Twitter’s API is open and most Tweets are public by default, there are also many applications and sites that display Tweets based on hashtags, search terms, and other criteria without a user ever needing to connect their own feed.

In addition to the programmatic syndication of Tweets through Twitter’s API, sharing is fundamentally social and the human element is responsible for much of the serendipity that makes social media so powerful. A great example of that is this Tweet by @zeyneparsel, who only had 144 followers at the time. However, she happens to be a self-proclaimed “veteran hipsterologist” and this Tweet was on the subject of hipsterism (?!). As a result, the link contained in her Tweet ended up being included in a Psychology Today blog post on hipsterism (see UPDATE 3), which drove a significant amount of traffic.

In these cases, which showcase the amplification effect that makes Twitter so uniquely valuable to publishers and marketers, analyzing referrer data alone would attribute traffic to a variety of other sites, even though it all originated with sharing on Twitter.

Improving social attribution

Last week, MG Siegler noted that Google+ started rewriting all outbound clicks to come from plus.google.com. Facebook has rewritten outbound links for quite a while due to phishing/malware and privacy concerns. And both LinkedIn and StumbleUpon frame all external pageviews, which means you can see all the views they drive. As t.co rolls out to 100% of the links shared on Twitter (a topic we’ve previously covered in some depth), they may very well start rewriting all clicks on t.co links to show Twitter as the referrer. This would ensure Twitter gets the credit they deserve for traffic they send to publishers, but it would have the downside of obfuscating the diverse paths that a tweeted link can take.

Until then, it’s possible to correctly attribute visits driven from Twitter sharing by tagging your outgoing links using a solution like Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters. For example, the Tweet Buttons on Business Insider use links like this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/closing-bell-july-12-2011-7?utm_source=twbutton&utm_medium=social&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=moneygame

Google Analytics can then properly attribute traffic to those buttons. Google Analytics offers a handy URL Builder tool, and other analytics solutions, like Omniture, support similar campaign tracking parameters of their own.

Why awe.sm is, well, awesome

And if all you want is an accurate count of the aggregate traffic Twitter drives to your site, that should be enough. But our customers have found there’s a lot more value to be had in understanding the mechanics that drive successful sharing — who is tweeting, what they’re tweeting, where it’s being tweeted from, when it’s being tweeted, etc. So in addition to automatically building the outbound links to integrate our social attribution with Google Analytics, Omniture, and other web analytics solutions, awe.sm tracks the performance of each Tweet (and Like, etc) individually. By connecting the rich information we have about the context of each share with the visits, pageviews, conversions, and revenues it drives, we enables our customers to go beyond just looking at social data and to start acting on it (and to build cool stuff like this).

If you’re interested in learning more about how awe.sm can help your business harness the value of social, please drop us a line to questions@awe.sm or just click here to chat with someone from our team right here.

* The full list of sources of clicks with no referrer information (i.e. ‘Direct Traffic’) not only includes mobile and desktop clients, but also web-users who have https security enabled for their Twitter accounts (which strips out referrer information).

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Greg Shove, CEO of Halogen Media, had a great post yesterday on the paid, earned, owned (PEO) media model. This framework for integrated marketing campaigns isn’t new: I saw it mentioned on Darren Herman’s blog recently; Fred Wilson was the first I noticed applying the earned media term to social media back in 2009 (part 1, part 2); and in a former life in electoral politics, I was first introduced to “earned media” (then applied purely to press coverage) way back in 2003.

Greg does a great job of discussing how a large brand can apply this integrated model by reallocating their substantial marketing budgets in ways that take better advantage of the amplification effect of earned media (see below chart from his post). And we’re actually working with Halogen right now to comprehensively measure the impact of the various components of an integrated PEO media campaign they’re planning for one of their brand-name clients. But what about everyone else?

The PEO media model for the rest of us

What got big brands looking at social media to begin with were the early examples of exceptional success by independent marketers — Fred’s original earned media post was about @kogibbq, hardly a big brand. And what originally inspired us to tackle performance marketing for social media was its efficiency (what we call the word-of-mouth superconductor). We believe this efficiency is potentially even more disruptive than SEM in democratizing online marketing, because — at its best — social media enables small marketers to reach the right audience with the right message in the right way at minimal costs.

So, how does a smaller business that may not even have a robust website, let alone a microsite or a display advertising budget, take advantage of the potential power of the PEO media model? First, you have to redefine what each of the terms mean (in order of importance for smaller businesses):

• Owned Media: There are 3 basic components of your owned media presence: blogging; email; and social media. The blog should be the center of your online universe — email and social media are essential in syndicating your content to wherever your audience lives and interacting with them when they engage with your brand there, but you always want the source of the content to be on the site you control. And you should be trying to turn every new visitor to your blog into a subscriber (and ultimately an evangelist) with a prominent Twitter Follow Button, Facebook Like Box, and email subscribe form.
• Earned Media: This is basically how the ‘evangelist’ segment of your audience is sharing your message with their friends, and it’s the levelest part of the playing field because earned social media basically works the same regardless of the size of your brand or your budget. And the smaller your audience, the more intimate (and thus stronger) your relationships with your evangelists can be — they are helping their friends discover something new that they love, capitalize on their passion. The basic value of syndicating your content to Twitter and Facebook is not so people can see it (because of the real-time Twitter stream and automatic Facebook newsfeed optimization, an email or RSS subscriber is much more likely to see a given piece of new content than a Twitter follower or Facebook fan), it’s so the people who do see it there engage with and share it in those contexts (i.e. reply/retweet on Twitter and comment/like on Facebook). You also want to give every site visitor the opportunity to be an evangelist by adding appropriate sharing calls-to-action to your blog.
• Paid Media: For a lot of smaller marketers, this isn’t necessarily a must-have as long as you’re creative with your audience-building efforts through owned and earned media. Some relatively straightforward examples include: exclusive deals for Facebook fans; one-off contests and promotions to drive your existing audience to turn their friends into fans and followers; and adding more systematic recognition and rewards for your most effective evangelists (aka gamification). If you are going to buy ads, use Facebook’s engagement ad formats and experiment with their robust targeting to get the most bang for your buck. But keep in mind it’s not the quantity of fans that counts the most here, it’s the quality of fans you acquire. So don’t just optimize for acquiring the cheapest fans, try to figure out ways to quantify the LTV of the fans you acquire in terms of the effectiveness of their evangelism rather than just their own engagement.

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

As a smaller marketer, it’s all about performance — you can’t afford to waste your precious time and possibly money on anything that doesn’t have a positive ROI. I always find the best way to think about performance is a funnel, so let’s use the following funnel analogy to talk about the PEO media model in performance terms. You fill the top of your funnel with Visitors through interesting content on your blog (owned media), which helps with SEO, and is possibly augmented with some very targeted paid search (paid media). Your site is designed with clear calls-to-action and possibly incentives to become Subscribers in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and/or email subscribers (owned media), and you can potentially directly acquire Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans with ads (paid media). You activate those Subscribers to become Evangelists by syndicating your content to the places they share and through community management (owned media). And those Evangelists start helping you fill the funnel with new Visitors and Subscribers as they share your content and brand with their friends (earned media).

The key to all of this is obviously the earned media component. As Greg says in his post:

“Earned media isn’t new, but nowadays it’s scalable, sustainable, and influential. Maintaining this earned media presence requires budget allocation, but it’s more ‘management’ than buying: creating an editorial calendar, monitoring the conversation starters, and consistent measurement (over months, not days).”

If I can get 1,000 evangelists to share my message with the right 10 of their friends, that is the most effective way possible for me to reach those 10,000 people. The key for a smaller marketer is making sure it’s also an efficient way to do so. And that takes data.

As Greg says at the end of that quote, the PEO media model is a marathon not a sprint. It’s about ongoing optimization of chronic marketing efforts, not trying to maximize the impact of a single acute campaign. The narrative nature of the human mind means we love looking for that one tweet by an influencer that gets 100 retweets and 1,000 clicks, but the reality is much less glamorous — success is built from a broad base of passionate evangelists who are likely only influential with their core network. So, the challenge ends up being more like how do you go from an ongoing average of 10 clicks per tweet by 100 evangelists to an average of 12 clicks per tweet by 150 evangelists rather than how do you get someone with 10,000 followers to tweet your link once.

The most valuable ways we see performance-focused marketers using data to optimize their efforts within the PEO media model are:

• Optimizing your owned media: When it comes to producing and syndicating content on a regular basis, what your sharing, with whom you’re sharing it, and when you share it all combine to play a role in how it’s received and ultimately the results it drives. Only over time and repeated attempts will you be able to start seeing the patterns in the data that can distinguish the impact of each of those factors (think multi-variate testing). And because your fan and follower counts change over time (hopefully up ), we offer a metric we call ‘Efficacy’ that shows the results per 100 fans/followers at the time of the post so you can compare apples-to-apples. Other products that can help you with this specific use-case include Timely (powered by awe.sm ) and CrowdBooster.
• Motivating earned media: The steps to building good game mechanics are deceptively simple: design the rules to channel individual motivation into the common goal; make the rules clear to all the players; and publicize the leaderboard. Whatever metrics you’re trying to drive through earned media, whether they’re visits, pageviews, new fans/followers, or signups and sales, you need to tie any recognition and rewards as closely to those results as possible. That’s why we offer trackable share buttons (including FB Like buttons) tied to real conversion tracking.
• Quantifying the value of your earned media: If you really want to close the loop, you need to be able to measure your CPA, which could be in time as much or more than money, of an evangelist against their LTV, which has to include the referrals they drive not just direct purchases. So it is important to tie any programmatic sharing by your evangelists to their identities where possible. Many of our customers make use of the ability to tag the shares of their registered users to be able to see the aggregate results each user drives (for example, that’s how we built VIPLi.st on top of the data we track for Plancast).

Why the agencies get the big bucks

Unfortunately for smaller marketers, social media marketing in general and the online PEO media model specifically are still so young that there are no turn-key easy answers on how to put these concepts to work. There are so many emerging use-cases that coming up with the right strategy with optimal ROI for your business is a hard and often times iterative process (and that’s why the services agencies like Halogen provide are so valuable to the clients who can afford them). But we believe data is the great equalizer in marketing and we’ve built awe.sm as a platform that can be tailored to understand the effectiveness of a wide variety of social media use-cases in the terms that matter to your business.

So if you’re interested in discussing your ideas on how to harness social media for your or your clients’ needs, drop us a line to questions@awe.sm or just click here to chat with someone from our team right now. And please follow @awesm on Twitter so we can practice what we preach .

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I am flattered to have been invited by Sean Power and Alistair Croll to participate in a panel during their Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (February 16). I honestly don’t know what I’m going to talk about, but the other folks on the panel (Jascha Kaykas-Wolff of WebTrends, Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, and Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics) are really impressive .

It looks like the bootcamp is sold out, so I’ll see you there if you’ve already booked. Otherwise, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet up at the show or in the city: I’m @jhstrauss on Twitter or jonathan [at] snowballfactory.com.

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We’ve mentioned awe.sm a couple of times on this blog, and now it’s finally time to pull back the curtain and tell you guys what it’s all about. awe.sm is an open sharing analytics platform — a way to instrument, track, and analyze how content and attention flow through the social web. Since February, we’ve been working with a select group of application developers, tools partners, and content publishers to test and refine awe.sm and help us get it ready for today: the launch of our private beta! While we’re not quite ready to take all comers, we are now officially opening up the invites beyond the group that’s been so helpful these last 3 months. If you’ve already been in contact with us, thanks for your patience and we’ll be reaching out to you directly over the next few weeks with your invite. If you want to know how to get an invite, read on…

awe.sm for Publishers
Our mission here at the Snowball Factory is to help connect creators of interesting content with the people who love it. And we believe social media provides an incredibly powerful infrastructure to do that. awe.sm is the centerpiece of our efforts to make social media a more efficient, effective, and measurable marketing channel for content publishers. awe.sm integrates with the tools you already use to make the whole of your social media self-promotion efforts (e.g. pimping your latest blog post on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc) greater than the sum of the parts by giving you a comprehensive view of the resulting traffic *right in Google Analytics*. awe.sm is currently supported in Twitterfeed, AddToAny, TweetFace (which we built too ), and our version of the Sociable WordPress Plugin. We’ve been working with TechCrunch as well as a number of smaller publishers during our alpha, and as of today we will be handing out invites to publishers who complete our survey. For more information on our publisher offering, please drop us a line to publishers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm for Developers
In building awe.sm, we realized that sharing analytics is a pain point felt by a broader group than just publishers and we wanted to make our solution available to others building applications with sharing components. To that end, awe.sm was built from the APIs up and developers can recreate any of our features (or build new ones of their own) entirely in their own apps. We like to think of it as analytics infrastructure-as-a-service. And we’re proud to already be powering features of Zentact, Famery, SimplyBox, and KISSmetrics. We’re still limiting access to our API documentation at this point. But if you’re a developer who would like to check it out, please send a brief description of your application and how you would like to use awe.sm to developers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm Partners
Each publisher’s approach to social media marketing is different, and we don’t believe there is (or should be) a one-size-fits-all solution. And while we will build some tools, like TweetFace, ourselves when we can’t find existing ones that do what we want, we’d much rather partner with folks who are totally focused on making a great tool to solve a particular publisher need. That’s why we’re very excited to announce awe.sm support in AddToAny, one of the most innovative share widgets out there, to go along with our previously announced Twittefeed integration. In addition to recommending partner tools to awe.sm publishers, we also plan to offer an affiliate model for partners who drive premium awe.sm signups. So if you’ve got a publisher tool that you’d like to integrate with awe.sm, please hit us up at partners [at] awe.sm.

Private-Label URL Shorteners (What you can get right now!)
One of the most notable features of awe.sm is that it can shorten long URLs, which we’ve been told is particularly useful for this thing called Twitter that everyone is talking about . It is such a notable feature that a bunch of people asked us if we could do it using domains other than http://awe.sm, which we can. In fact, we’re already powering URL shorteners for some of the above mentioned partners including TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), KISSmetrics (klck.me), Topspin (t.opsp.in), and AddToAny (a2a.me). So starting today, we’re officially offering *private-label URL shorteners running on your domain starting at just $99 per year*.

For $99/year, you get:

• a hassle-free hosted solution with no set-up costs
• 10k shortened URLs per month and no limit on redirections
• full clickstream stats and Google Analytics integration
• support in all awe.sm-enabled publisher tools
• 99% monthly uptime money-back guarantee

We also offer advanced features like the ability to build your own stats UI as well as dedicated servers and higher SLAs. You can get started now or ping us for more info at domains [at] awe.sm.