Pinterest has announced that they are improving what the site offers its business users. The content sharing website has released new business centered guides and tools to help these companies promote their brand across the social platform.
Pinterest has been steadily improving their system since moving into the public sphere from an invitation only policy last year. Recently security updates to the system include a website verification feature and user blocking.
Appealing to the Business Side of Social Media
By adapting a new set of tools Pinterest aims to make the website more appealing to businesses. According to a blog post from Cat Lee, Pinterest’s product manager, the company has instituted some new polices and tools that are geared towards improving their services.
Businesses who wish to use Pinterest merely have to sign up for a business account or convert their current account into a business one. By having a business account, Lee says that content on the website will be optimized to help improve the business customer experience, such as being able to verify their official website and adding key buttons and widgets to an account to improve customer traffic, such has the Pin It Button and the Board Widget.
As way to separate how the site works for the individual persons and businesses, Pinterest has also split their terms of service into one policy for the everyday user and one policy for businesses. Also, as way to ensure that businesses can use Pinterest successfully, the website offers a variety of help guides, which include:
Case Studies: Users such as AllRecipes and Etsy have provided information, tips and metrics, so that others businesses can learn from their success.
Best Practices: These guides show users how to properly navigate and engage customers through Pinterest.
How-to Guides: These guides include the basics of Pinterest, such as a how to use Pin It, to more in depth reports, such as how to properly use Pinterest as a marketing tool.
It’s All About Analytics
The introduction of a more business friendly Pinterest isn't the only business centred news for the content sharing website. Science today has launched HelloInsights, a Pinterest analytics platform that helps users track their company's growth and interactions with customers. This tool joins other Pinterest-centered analytics tools, such as Pinfluencer and Curalate.
A free, leader board based platform, HelloInsights can either be used from Pinterest or the HelloInsights website. Some of the key factors that it tracks for businesses include:
Tracking the must influential pinners and ranking pinners based on their overall influence on others.
Moderating pin virality.
Companies can see their real-time presence through a “Live Pin Stream.”
Companies can schedule automatized pins.
Companies can create custom charts to see how their company compares to its competitors.
Both presidential candidates say they can slice the budget and make better use of national resources. So who is smarter and more efficient on the Web?
A political campaign website has a singular purpose: vacuum up personal information and donations. How they do it is a matter of priorities. Content-heavy sites are slow to load and expensive to operate; running one in a cost-conscious manner means eliminating unnecessary server requests, tracking user behavior, optimizing every interaction and shaving kilobytes off pages. So who does it better, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? The answer could provide yet another clue into how effect each man would be leading the country's economic recovery. A side-by-side comparison reveals that neither site is perfect--and that they are not very similar.
To measure up the candidates’ online properties, FastCompany tapped Daniel Lacy, lead front-end engineer at the dating site HowAboutWe in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, and an expert on website minification and accessibility. To examine the candidates’ websites, he’ll be using the Safari Web Inspector in Mac OS X, a Javascript performance tool called DOM Monster, Yahoo's Yslow speed diagnostic tool, and the Web development utility Firebug.
At first blush, Lacy isn’t impressed. “Romney’s using Typekit for custom fonts to get a typeface that looks exactly like Arial,” a font you don’t need Typekit to get. “There’s also a lot of boilerplate geo-location stuff which the site doesn't seem to use much of. And for some reason, he’s using a version of J-query which came out in 2009.”
Deeper under the hood, things get better. The code is pretty clean, if a little disorganized, and most of it is appropriately commented, or annotated by the developer, to make it easy for other engineers to understand. Load times are a little long, and both the landing pages and the homepage are fairly heavy at 706k and 1.4MB respectively. They could also stand to make fewer server requests.
Romney’s site relies largely on a personal site-library stocked with a whopping 8,000 lines of custom code. Some of it is minified, making it leaner and faster-loading, but that’s still a ton of code. Smartly, the landing page caches all the stuff for the Index page, making it load faster, and it performs its loading asynchronously, in a nice non-blocking way.
“This site is competently made, but there's a little engineering bloat,” says Lacy. “It looks like it was built by a standard IT firm that hasn't been creative in a while.”
Romney’s site does have some cutting-edge components. For one, he’s using CommonJS, a modularization system built for using Javascript libraries outside the browser. The way Romney's site uses it, CommonJS helps streamline packages, requiring less work for the server to load the page. It also uses scripting to discover data dependencies in the code, which can help the page load faster. Storage is on an NginX server, a flexible and high-performance open source server solution developed first in Russia. It’s badass compared to Obama’s more old-fashioned server.
The Republican candidate’s site is not thoroughly optimized, but not half-bad for a site this size with this much content. “Romney’s site is well planned out and fairly well packaged--much better than Obama's site in that way,” says Lacy.
Romney’s site also improves the user experience by setting a far future Expires header: this means the page will cache on your machine, so it can re-load faster the next time you visit. However, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily seeing the same version of MittRomney.com as your neighbor; the site contains analytics code for Optimizely, an A/B testing platform that lets you compare different versions of your site, and rollout the one people like the best.
For the most-part, Lacy says, Obama’s site uses more modern components than Romney’s, but it also seems to forget some of the basics.
Moustache.js is a library popular with front-end developers right now because it provides sites like Obama’s with visual templates that require less coding to implement. It also uses Modernizr, a component which detects support for modern browsers and lets the site load conditional Javascript and CSS based on the capability and vintage of your particular computer. Another friendly addition is wide use of Polyfills, which allow older browsers to run newer site features. Obama's site also features a more recent version of J-query.
There’s more code bloat here than in Romney’s site, but some parts are well-compressed. The bloat in Obama’s code owes itself to Facebook and Twitter integration; code for connecting to those networks accounts for about half of all the code on Obama’s site. Still, the results speak for themselves: his page has earned over 31 million Facebook Likes, to Romney’s 11 million. (At right, Obama's sharing menu.)
The caching setup isn't as good as Romney's; no future expires on most components means your browser has to load it fresh, even if you just loaded the page a little while before.
“This looks like it was built by more modern people, but not using traditional optimization,” says Lacy. “They've forgotten basic optimization stuff: caching, minimizing requests.” His Javascript isn't packaged up well and his Index page needs three times as many server requests as Romney’s to a page that’s 40% smaller. The CSS page is a little sloppily written, too: the typical layout is styles at top, then a Javascript footer, then dynamic content written below. Obama’s code appears out of order.
Still, the Democratic candidate has a superior mobile site, if a little too clever. An initial login screen makes you think you need to be signed up for an account on BarackObama.com just to see the site, but a little clicking around and you can eschew it.
Like Romney, Obama uses a content delivery network to make the user experience on the site better; CDNs disperse your site’s resources to servers in various geographical locations, so the data takes less time to reach people’s computers. The components of Obama’s CDN setup are better organized, with one host server for each of the components, whereas Romney is loading it all from the same server.
Another category Obama wins: analytics. His site is kitted out with ChartBeat and New Relic for analytics. New Relic lets you pinpoint and solve performance issues with web apps, so each user has an ideal experience. Chartbeat lets you see peek at detailed metrics about how people are using your site, like how far they scroll down a page.
Lastly, where Romney's site looks like commercial code, Obama's site has a handcrafted touch: the ASCII art in the source code.
Do you have an e-Commerce website? If you do, you're most likely using a web analytics tool to gather actionable insight from your current customers. Beyond straight sales numbers, I use the various e-Commerce reports within the Google Analytics interface to determine where our customers are coming from and what marketing campaigns are paying off. I'm going to go through a method I use to help track these items.
But, first, if you are brand new to the idea of tracking Ecommerce on your website, I highly recommend using Google Analytics. It's free and pretty easy to navigate. The setup can be a little confusing, but Google provides a great help article with all of your instructions.
Campaign Tracking
The first step in successful tracking of what marketing campaigns are driving the most sales is setting up a custom campaign. Basically, you want to tag your links so that we can see which campaigns are bringing your site visitors, and in turn, sales. Google has developed their URL builder, which makes this pretty easy. For example, here is what a URL might look like for a newsletter we're sending out: http://www.webucator.com/go/course-of-the-month/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=webuNewsOct12
Of important note, look at the campaign variable, webuNewsOct12. Now, we can track how many sales were a result of this campaign.
e-Commerce Overview Report
Once logged into your Google Analytics account, you can navigate over to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview > Source/Medium. As seen on the attached screenshot, you can see that our newsletter campaigns were our fifth biggest source of sales in the given time period. (Please note that most of the information is blurred out for privacy reasons, but you can still see the main point.)
This general report will give you that high-level perspective of which sources/mediums are helping your business grow. And again, tied back to the campaign variables you determined in the step above. Maybe you also see a source/medium you didn't know about? :)
e-Commerce Product Performance
After viewing the Overview report, you might want to tie specific product sales to specific campaigns you are running. Right underneath that Overview report, you'll see the Product Performance report. Now this report will be tied to how you setup your initial e-Commerce tracking code on your site, and will show specific products that were purchased.
To add in a level of campaigns, head over to the specific category group you're interested in, and then click on the Secondary dimension tab. Under the Advertising group, you'll see your Campaign option. Take a look at the screenshot below:
I sorted the campaigns in alphabetical order and now I can see exactly what products visitors purchased from exactly which campaigns I started. This is a great avenue to see if there are any ways to either optimize current campaigns or start focusing your product messaging on different campaigns!
Campaign Tracking
Lastly, one very quick note on campaigns. If you are ever curious to which campaigns are simply bringing you the most traffic (after you've tagged your links), navigate over to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns. This will give you a combined report of any AdWords campaigns you might be running coupled with any manual campaigns you setup with the URL builder.
And that's a wrap for this article! I hope you learned a few, new actionable steps for your Google Analytics account. If you have any questions on these steps, please leave them in the comments below and I'll get to them. And stay tuned for another Google Analytics blog coming up next month! Happy Analytics!
Editor's Note: Bob provides a great foundation for getting started with Google Analytics in his Google Analytics series.
About the Author
Bob Clary has over eight years of marketing experience. He is currently the Marketing Manager and Google Analytics Trainer at Webucator and is a Google Analytics Qualified Individual. Bob has also created Webucator's online Google Analytics courses.
A report on an Israeli website claims that Amazon is in serious negotiations to buy Texas Instruments' mobile chip division. The firm announced last month that it was doing away with its chip operations and instead focusing on embedded platforms. It's a logical step forward for the online retail giant with a sideline in hardware, as it means that Amazon will have direct influence on what goes into its Kindles, and, perhaps, its future smartphones.
This general report will give you that high-level perspective of which sources/mediums are helping your business grow. And again, tied back to the campaign variables you determined in the step above. Maybe you also see a source/medium you didn't know about? :) 
I sorted the campaigns in alphabetical order and now I can see exactly what products visitors purchased from exactly which campaigns I started. This is a great avenue to see if there are any ways to either optimize current campaigns or start focusing your product messaging on different campaigns!