New survey says 'Affordable Pricing Clears the Cloud of Uncertainty'

Survey reveals cost plays a key role when it comes to Cloud uptake!

Uncertainty around the current economic climate is forcing organizations to look at alternatives to on-site IT infrastructures and resources with one-in-three organizations citing managed services as a more affordable option, according to a survey conducted by hosted services provider Rise.

The research carried out at a recent event, surveyed over 100 IT industry representatives, regarding their willingness to embrace Cloud computing.

The results revealed that over one-third of the respondents stated that 'affordability' was a key driver when looking to move from on-premise to managed services. Cost was also referenced when it came to the demands of end users considering a migration to the Cloud. The potentially huge cost savings that can be realized by such a move was ranked second highest in a list of various demands.

The results also suggest that while firms are starting to gain a better understanding of Cloud computing, there still exists a level of uncertainty when it comes to the actual adoption. Over 50 per cent of respondents highlighted issues such as a lack of understanding, as well as security and complexity concerns as reasons for not migrating.

The results from the survey also include:

• Almost two-third’s of participants are looking to migrate to the Cloud within the next two years
• 63 per cent of participants identified cost and maintenance as the biggest challenge when it comes to managing existing IT systems
• Over 50 per cent of interviewees stated loss of control and security and storage as barriers to Cloud entry

According to Steve Holford, director at Rise, the results suggest that while uncertainty still exists around Cloud uptake, the cost benefits are forcing organizations to take a more serious look at managed services. "The uncertainty hovering over the financial markets has acted as a bit of a wake up call, forcing people to actively go out and see where savings can be made, and Cloud is most certainly one of those areas."

"The financial commitment that goes with maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure is huge, and Cloud computing represents an opportunity to do away with expensive upgrades and maintenance costs."

Steve continued: “The low cost adoption of Cloud can potentially lead to enormous cost savings for a business, and in the current climate these can’t be ignored. Instead of buying additional servers and storage devices that are used only a fraction of the time, employees can have access to Cloud applications and only pay for the amount of time actually used. Also, by outsourcing your IT needs you’ll be able to realign and focus on core business activities. We appreciate that a lot uncertainty still exists, and that us why a hybrid Cloud model offering the benefits of a hosted service while keeping sensitive data on site might also be an attractive option."

For further info: http://uk.rise.co/latest-news/

Google Analytics for Effective Market Research

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics about the visitors to a website. A premium version is also available for a fee which will majorly helps for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account. Google bought Urchin Software Corporation in April 2005 and used that company’s Urchin on Demand product as the basis for its current service.

Google Analytics is a powerful web page tracking tool that will give you enormous amounts of information regarding who is visiting your site.

Google analytics reports will tell you …

-> How many visits you had.

-> How many were new visitors.-> How many were returning visitors.

-> How many were absolute unique visitors.

-> Which pages were the most popular.

-> The average length of time on a page.

-> How many folks bounced off a page. (Visitor stayed only a few seconds.)

-> The average number of pages people visited.

-> Where your visitors came from. (country, state, city)

-> How people found your website. (direct / search engine / referring site)

-> What kind of browsers they used.

-> Their connection speed.

->Their service provider (Internet service provider).

-> Which keywords they used in search boxes.

-> Which pages they entered your site on. (It’s not always the home page.)

-> Which days of the week you received the most traffic.

-> If you’re getting significant traffic on days you ran other promotions?

-> And, a lot more cool data.

To get started simply type in Google Analytics in your search bar and get going. When signing up, you can add as many other users to your account as you like so long as they have a Google account. This means that other key people can access your data as well.

Google Analytics for Market Research

Google analytics Real-Time is all set to hit the globe with its newest promises.

Assess the effect of social medias- Estimating the immediate effect of social medias can be really easy with this new Analytics, according to some market research experts. Either you update a new blog entry or tweet your new launch, your real-time Analytics will show immediate results against these social media updates.

Evaluate campaign- This is another big advantage of this real-time Analytics. You can get a good idea about the site statistics without any extra need to do any market research. Now, no need to do a thorough keyword research every time you want to launch a new campaign. Just check out the Analytics and find all the details instantly.

Real Time Reports- This new version of Analytics lets you enjoy real time reports anytime you want to check it out, though this facility is available only for the Administrators account or if the account has been given proper access. To get these privileges, you need to upgrade your market research tool, Analytics, to the New Version (look out for the notification at the right top corner). And in the left hand Dashboard tab, you will find the Real time reports.

Google Analytics features:

Analysis Tools

• Real-Time reporting: Measure activity as it happens
• Custom Reports: Define the information you want to analyze
• Custom Variables: Create and analyze your own custom segments
• Advanced Segmentation: Easily analyze specific sections of your traffic
• Dashboards: Organize, monitor, and share KPIs
• Visualization: Learn the path visitors take through your site
• Sharing: Now everyone in your organization can collaborate
• API and Customizations - it's your data, format it the way you want
• Analytics Intelligence which allows to create alerts and custom alerts.
• Annotations which allows users leave shared or private notes right on the graphs.
• Advanced Segments - Segmentation of visits

Content Analytics

• Site Search: Get visitors to their destinations faster
• In-Page Analytics: See how visitors move within your site
• Site Speed Analysis: Uncover problems before your customers do
• Event Tracking: Understand what visitors do on your site
• Make your AdSense program more effective

Mobile Analytics

• Mobile Device Reporting: know which mobile platforms work best
• See where mobile traffic comes from
• Measure mobile app performance

Conversion Suite

• Understand how visitor behavior leads to sales and conversions
• Improve your online sales with Ecommerce Reporting
• See the complete picture of campaign performance with Multi-Channel Funnels
• Follow the different paths that visitors take on your site
• Make better marketing decisions with Attribution Modeling
• Multi-Channel Funnels to see how your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions.

Social Reports

• Measure the impact of social media on metrics you care about
• Learn which social sources refer engaged visitors
• Discover what your visitors are sharing and where they're sharing it
• Social Conversions - The Conversions report enables social media marketing accountability - and clearly shows how social impacts your business.
• Social Sources - Social Sources reports help you refine where you spend time and move your social tactics from "gut feel" to data-driven.
• Social Sharing - Combining traffic with sharing bridges social and content, enabling informed decisions to build community and increase organic shares of content - on and off your site.

Advertising Analytics

• Make your search engine marketing more effective
• Understand how display advertising contributes to your programs
• Give mobile campaigns the attention they deserve
• See how your advertising campaigns work together with Multi-Channel Funnels
• Campaign measurement provides insights into what works, and what doesn’t

Google Analytics helps in measuring your market, understanding target interest, preference, and helps in determining changes for effective reach.   

Source: http://www.google.com/analytics; http://www.andesandassociates.com/Google_Analytics_Powerfu.html ; http://www.kaizen-digital.com.au/market-research-google-analytics-goes-real-time

Online Survey Tools – Market Research

Market research surveys are meant to gather any sort of market information. The aim is to gather information from a small sample of a market in order to be able to predict what the whole market wants. Surveys gives insights about market information and requirements. surveys generally examine the effects of people on particular business process (Product or Service).

Online surveys can be a huge help in understanding what constituents think and how successful the respective programs are, without breaking the budget. Online survey helps in this regards. Online survey tools can be a very cost-effective way for delivering surveys and collecting and analyzing results through one central system.

We have no of online tools for this purpose, Some are free and some are with basic subscription.

Online Survey Tolls

A number of free and low cost online tools provide easy interfaces for building surveys and viewing reports online. These packages can be a great fit for smaller surveys where advanced question types, survey logic and results analysis are not required.

• Kwik Surveys (kwiksurveys.com) - Kwik Surveys is a Free to use survey builder. Kwik Surveys to be easy to use for all experience levels so one will quickly be creating surveys.
• Smart-Survey (www.smart-survey.co.uk) - Smart-Survey is an Online Survey Software designed to help users to create a survey, publish it online and view results graphically in real time.
• FluidSurveys (fluidsurveys.com) - Create powerful surveys with logic, multimedia & tons of question types at a fraction of the cost.
• LimeSurvey (www.limesurvey.org) - LimeSurvey basically contains everything you need for doing nearly every survey with grace.

• SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) - SurveyMonkey offers a popular online hosted survey tool that works well for basic surveys. The free version might be useful for very small and informal surveys, but allows very little customization of the look of the survey, no downloads of reports or data, and can only collect 10 questions and 100 responses per survey.
• Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) - Zoomerang is similar to SurveyMonkey in many respects, but offers in general a somewhat more powerful package for somewhat more money.
• SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com) - SurveyGizmo offers an API for integrating survey functionality into websites, blogs and other applications, including integration with Salesforce.com.
• QuestionPro Online Survey Software (www.questionpro.com) - QuestionPro is web based software for creating and distributing surveys. It consists of an intuitive wizard interface for creating survey questions, tools for distributing survey via email or website, and tools for analyzing and viewing results.
• FreeOnlineSurveys (freeonlinesurveys.com) – Create your own Free online surveys. With FreeOnlineSurveys.com one can create online quiz , online survey, generate online polls, and generate forms by using the free form generator.

• KISSinsights (www.kissinsights.com) - KISSinsights gives your customers a way to Ask a question (or two) and customers will see it slide up from the bottom right-hand corner of respective site.
• SurveyWizz (surveywizz.com) – With SurveyWizz one can choose from a variety of different types of question, and arrange them in any order using simple drag-and-drop interface. Customise survey features, choose a colour scheme to suit website and see a live preview of survey at any time.
• SoGoSurvey (www.sogosurvey.com) - SoGoSurvey provides the most advanced step-by-step survey designing tool within a highly user-friendly environment. The key to obtaining good data through a survey is to design a survey with good survey questionnaires.

* Basic plan comes for free, Based on requirements the subscription plans applies. It differs among companies.

What Do Online Survey Tools Do?

Good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then send constituents a link to answer the survey online.

• Flexible survey look and feel. A survey that has prominent branding for a survey tool rather than your organization can be off-putting to constituents and decrease your response rate. A package that allows you to update colors, font and header graphics can help you match a survey to your website or organizational branding.
• Skip logic. As you design more complex surveys, it’s often useful to let respondents skip a whole section of questions that don’t apply to them. Survey skip logic lets you define, for instance, that those who answer “no” to question 10 should skip to question 15.
• Piping. Piping allows you to pull answers from one part of a survey into another. For instance, if someone says in one question that they live in Hyderabad, you can then ask them in a follow-up, “What’s the best thing about living in Hyderabad,” filling in the name of the city from the previous question. More sophisticated packages allow you to combine skip logic and piping to customize surveys even further.
• Randomization. The order of a set of questions, or the set of answers to a given question, can often affect survey responses and thus the quality of your data. Features that automatically randomize the order of particular questions or answers will help avoid this issue.
• Website integration. While many packages create surveys in their own web page, some let you embed them into your existing website. This can be a particularly useful way to do quick, one-question surveys (called polls), or to gather opinions from web visitors in a longer survey.
• Data analysis. One of the primary differentiators between inexpensive packages and their more expensive counterparts is their ability to help you to analyze the data and understand the meaning behind the results. Most packages provide simple reports summarizing the answers to each question, and many will let you download them into Excel or another tool for further analysis. More advanced packages allow cross-tabulation to see the data relationships between different sets of questions, or complex statistical analysis.

Sources used: Idealware.

Pinterest is hot!!

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, 're-pin' images to their own collections and/or 'like' photos. Pinterest's mission is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting" via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing. Pinterest allows its users to share 'pins' on both Twitter and Facebook, which allows users to share and interact with a broad community.

Pinterest is hot. In fact, in March 2012 the site served up 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day.

Could Pinterest be the silver bullet for retailers on social media? Pinterest is clearly resonating with online consumers in a big way. To put it simply, customers who find a product via Pinterest are more likely to purchase it than those who find the product via other social networks.

Who are these people? Why do Pinterest users respond so strongly to products that are pinned? This infographic from Tamba breaks down the stats, explaining why Pinterest is so powerful with its consumption-friendly audience. 

Source: Wikipedia, Mashable