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3 Must-Reads: Measuring ROI for Social Media

June 1, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We are freaks about data here at Dasheroo and that’s no joke. So this week we scoured our favs and here are 3 articles we think are great about how to measure your ROI (return on investment) for your social media efforts!

5 Steps for Successfully Measuring Social Media ROI

Higher Visibility wrote this great article for Small Business Trends on measuring social media ROI and being that Dasheroo is in the biz of delivering your data from most social networks to you we thought this one was one point! We love that they’re looking at conversions with monetary value!

The Delightfully Short Guide to Social Media ROI

We love the folks at Buffer. They did a great job at telling you to calculate your time, the money you spend on social media tools and any advertising money you spend on social. Then they walk you through how this gets you to your return on investment with a wonderful infographic! Check it out!

A 3-Step Process to Measuring Social Media ROI

Brian Zeng, a Moz community member, did a great job of talking us through a great and easy process of looking at the ROI we nee to assess as we’re spending time and money on social media. We only think you should replace step 1, where you calculate your traffic using Dasheroo!

You need to be aware of how much your spending on social, so calculating your ROI for social media marketing is important!

Small Business Computing Product Review of Dasheroo

May 27, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Dasheroo is very, very proud to be reviewed by the fine folks over at Small Business Computing! We gotta tell you, we were a bit nervous being that we’ve been in development with our business dashboards for a year with our business dashboards. But with the help of our beta users telling us what they want and with the amazing team building the product that adds huge value to business, we were super excited to have our first review be pretty darn amazing.

One of our favorite quotes:

“If Dasheroo stopped at that aggregation of data, it would certainly be worth signing up for that handy convenience. But the system goes a couple steps further. Most notable are the custom “Mashup” matchups. These let you pair metrics from different services to see if there’s a correlation between the data and to spot trends you might otherwise have missed.”

Do we have work to do? You bet! But we’ll always have work to do depending on what our users want.

So here’s our review, check it out.

Trade Show Marketing: Are You Asking The Golden Question

May 25, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Pre “mob scene” at the Dasheroo booth at Market New York!

From time to time we like to share things we learn along the way with our readers, and this one is a great one; some valuable trade show marketing advice.

We sponsored our very first trade show this past week in NYC, Market New York. We really wanted to get in front of businesses and watch them look at our product, ask questions and understand what we’re all about. People who attend this show are anyone from business novices, all the way to small business owners who are savvy with their social media metrics and all metrics that drive the business.

Attendees are faced with sensory overload at these shows. They’ve got a limited time to try to understand all of the vendors, what they provide and how they’ll all help their business, whatever business category they may be in. And vendors have the same issue, they’ve paid for a prime spot and they want their prospects to be qualified. So how do you weed through who might be a true prospect vs. who might be a looky-loo, or worse someone who just wants your free swag.

The golden question: “What does your business do?”

This is THE golden question to ask anyone who comes to your booth. Why? You’re not just spraying your sales information all over their business persona, you’re taking the time to understand their business and if they’re even a candidate for what you do.

Dasherooer: “What does your business do?”

Booth Visitor: “We have a solar company where we install solar panels for large buildings.”

Dasherooer: “Do you have a website or are you active on social media?”

Booth Visitor: “Yes and yes, very!”

Dasherooer: “Great, let me tell you how Dasheroo can work for you!”

There actually have been times in the past where we’ve just told visitors they’re probably not a fit for our solution. It saved both parties a ton of very expensive time so that we could just move on, trade show marketing 101.

We employed this valuable technique at Market New York and in just 8 hours spoke to over 400 people and captured over 120 leads. One person actually said “I just wanna hug you guys right now I feel like I just won the lottery!”

So the next show you sponsor make sure you make the most of it and ask the golden question!

Which Test Won? A/B Testing Video vs. Datasheet

May 18, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We always love the folks over at Which Test Won, they geek out on data like we do. So when Continuum, a company that offers remote monitoring and management services, networking solutions, and backup/recovery assistance, did a test on lead capture for an offer for a data sheet vs. a video, you would never believe which one won. See for yourself…

Version A won! Can you believe it? It created a 63% increase in clickthroughs compared to the video offer.

What does Continuum say? Know your visitors! Figuring out how to appeal to them is crucial. Part of the a/b testing challenge is identifying the best format to serve them content.

Continuum wanted to test whether its partners wanted to get an email offering informational content in the form of a data sheet or a video.

According to Continuum many of their customers are: “…former IT employees from larger organizations who’ve left to start their own managed IT services business. These people are technicians at heart, but want to become better business owners.” They also thought that their “viewers wouldn’t take the time to watch a video, especially during business hours. However, the data sheet could be quickly scanned or printed out for later review.”

Continuum says that you should test your call to action; if your visitors prefer to quickly scan a sheet, send a data sheet. If they want to look at something more engaging, send them a link to your video. Then see what works best.

Great test!

Raising Money For Your Startup? Our Series A Funding; Lessons Learned

May 14, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

As you may have heard, just over a week ago (on Cinco de Mayo!) we officially launched and announced our $3,250,000 Series A funding. Woo hoo! Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s a boatload of money. Sure, uber just announced an additional $1.6 BILLION (debt) raise on top of a recent $1.2 billion round, so $3.25MM could get lost under their couch cushions. Good luck, uber!

But back to ‘lil ‘ole Dasheroo, raising money for your startup and the lessons learned. Thanks to you, our awesome users, we got the vote of confidence for our very first round of funding. Here’s some things I learned from the process:

Bootstrap it for a while: At Dasheroo, we kept our day jobs for the first several months, working nights & weekends for free. Then working full time for very reduced pay. We squeezed a dime outta every nickel in the process. Why is this a good plan? First, it instills a sense of financial responsibility in everyone. Second, it should allow you to show some progress, prior to asking for money which just about anyone who will give you money will want to see. At Dasheroo, we have investors that love what they call our ‘blue collar’ approach, meaning the ability to get a lot done with a little, and roll with ‘surprises’ in the form of macro economic issues or potential pivots.
Put skin in the game: Similar to above, if you and your founders can invest even a little of your own money it gives investors a lot more confidence in your conviction. At Dasheroo, each of the 4 co-founders invested, as did our parents. Talk about pressure!
Make sure you need it: And really want It. This is my 3rd start-up. For the first 2, we raised just over $1MM total for each. That’s great. It vastly reduces ‘dilution’ but may also mean slower growth depending on your business. A lot of founders grapple with this dilemma, fearing the dilution quandary and the pressure by taking ‘VC money’. So unless you feel very strongly about your near-term ability to execute, think twice! At Dasheroo, we see a large window of opportunity to own a big chunk of the global business dashboard market, so we jumped on the opportunity to grow fast.
Develop a great story: I know, duh! But seriously, you need a concise and compelling pitch deck, and you need to rehearse it like crazy. We were fortunate to raise the first $2MM of our round without a pitch deck, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a ‘pitch’, it just wasn’t in the form of slides. But I needed a pitch deck for the last $1MM, and spent several weeks on it prior to having it be ready for prime time. Need some examples? Check out SlideShare, they have tons of actual pitch decks from companies like Square and LinkedIn.
Don’t B.S.: Investors can smell it a mile away, and you will lose respect immediately. No one expects you to know everything, and if you get stumped during a pitch…well, you probably will freak out a little bit! So prepare all you can, make sure you hit the big notes and also prepare that you may get asked a question or two you can’t answer completely. Cop to it and stop the panic jig.
Focus on metrics: Especially if this is your first rodeo, your potential investors want to be comfortable that you understand the metrics that will drive your business. So even if you don’t have all the metrics you’d like early on, and/or the metrics aren’t as strong as you’d like them to be, your understanding of your KPIs is key to establishing trust.
Don’t take money from a-holes: Just like the adage “Don’t hire assholes”, why take money from folks you don’t feel good about? Please do not underestimate this suggestion. At Dasheroo, we are fortunate that our lead investors, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, are not just brilliant folks, they understand our business freemium model as well as anyone and they are like family. A very functional, business-focused family
Don’t blow it all in one place! You may feel extreme pressure to ‘put that money to work’ ASAP. And sure, your investors want to see rapid progress. But keep your head on your shoulders and keep some $ in the tank for opportunities that you may not have anticipated or problems like economic downturns or just plain screw-ups you make. Bottom line, have a solid financial plan, and it usually makes sense to spend the biggest % of your early stage funding on hiring exceptional people. At Dasheroo, less than 10% of our series A will be spent on conventional marketing, and about 80% is budgeted for hiring awesome folks.
Don’t give up! Hey, we were very fortunate for our first outside investment (thank you Cloud Apps) to be significant. But that didn’t mean we didn’t get a lot of passes after that. We did. Even when we were within $250,000 of our $3,000,000 goal. I almost closed the round early, and then within 72 hours had 2 initial meetings with 2 incredibly influential investors who each came in at $250,000. I never would have imagined that, but we hung in there, and it happened.

Alright, for sure there is not ‘one’ formula for raising money for your startup. And we’ve all seen those crazy exciting exits like SnapChat and Instagram. But for most of us, it’ll be a bit more of a long haul. So hopefully the learnings above are helpful to you. Have some other ideas? Disagree with me? Let me know!

Our First Facebook Ads Test - Website Clicks

May 13, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

We’ve been advertising on Facebook since the start of Dasheroo, but really only a “Like” campaign. We tested a few ads but since we were in stealth mode, and didn’t have a product to really promote other than our Alpha and Beta version we wanted to get the word out about what we were doing and start to build our following.

Our Dasheroo Facebook Ad Creative.

But now we thought it would be great to test a different Facebook Objective on our Ads; clicks to our website. So we decided to get some creative together (one which Facebook REJECTED due to their dumb 80/20 rule) and go for it on the day of our launch.

Here is what we did:

Selected a very targeted audience of small business owners and people who were most likely to use an online app like ours.
Made sure people who would see the ad were over 24 and in the U.S. even though we have a ton of people who use us in over 70 other countries as of now. We wanted to restrict the test at this point.
Let it roll with a oCPM (optimized CPM) not a CPC since we thought to let Facebook help us with some targeting of people most likely to click.
Budgeted it for a whopping $100/day for 7 days to see what would happen.

Here’s what happened:

Image of a free Dasheroo business dashboard showing Facebook Ads metrics.

Dasheroo’s Facebook Ads dashboard for our first test.

We got a ton of clicks and a 13.2% conversion rate to new user!

We looked at the users who came in from Facebook Ads and looked at their activity. Did they connect an application? Where they viewing their dashboards? The answer was … they are but at a lower rate than we’d like. Are we quitters? No way.

We’ll be marketing to those who came in through Facebook to see if we can get them to be active or, learn why they’re not.

We’ll keep testing this channel out to drive some traffic but you know how we feel about spending tons of money on advertising 😉

3 Cool Must-Reads This Week: Social Media Marketing

May 11, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

In an effort to get you all that you need to track important metrics for your business we’re scouring the social media marketing sphere for articles we think are important. Here are our 3 must reads:

LinkedIn Unveils Analytics for publishing Long Forms on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is constantly changing the access they give companies like Dasheroo access to their API so we can get data for your business dashboards. They’ve actually made a recent change that’s going to affect some of the data we present for your personal stats. Either way, we love LinkedIn and think it’s important for you to know the data that you can get.

Image courtesy David Petherick.

++ In this article, David Petherick steps you through all of the nifty things you can see if you’re publishing long form posts to LinkedIn. Ask the folks at LI if Dasheroo can get access to this data for ya

++ In this article on Linked into Business, author John White takes us through how to get your LInkedIn long form posts to show up in Google Search.

10 Ways to Use One Piece of Content

Now we’re huge on content marketing. Why? We believe in developing relationships with our users and readers and we have some really great knowledge of what we do and what we’re passionate about. This builds trust with our followers. So John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing posted this beauty this week and we couldn’t agree more.

++ In this article it starts with a simple blog post as a lead generator, and he turns it in to 9 more ways to use that same piece of content to reach different audiences. Brilliant John, brilliant.

How to Clean Up Your Content for More Credibility

We love short easy-to-understand articles where we get sheer takeaways we can put to work quickly and this article does just that!

++ Thanks to Hillary Byers who wrote this gem for Convince & Convert, we’ll be taking a keen look at our own content for readability, SEO and overall quality.

Happy reading!

Facebook Ads Business Dashboards Launched!

May 7, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

When we had our launch (read the story here) we also snuck in a few great new applications to add to your business dashboards; Emma for email marketing and Facebook Ads so you can track some of your ad stats. If you want to see the press release for our launch here it is.

We’re pretty excited about it and even more excited about our board meeting yesterday, the day after we launched Dasheroo, with our buddy Matt Holleran from Cloud Apps Capital Partners. We also had a bunch of meetings to talk about what’s going to be happening next (can’t we just relish the moment?) so after we chat this week we’ll sure be informing you about the roadmap, keep the suggestions coming though!

So for Facebook Ads, you’ll be able to filter your insights at the Ad, Ad Set, Campaign and Account level for:

Overview - View all of the metrics below in one insight.
Impressions - View your ad impressions over time. Impression = total number of times your ad entered the screen for the first time.
Clicks - View the total number of clicks on your ad over time. Depending on what you’re promoting, this can include Page likes, event responses or app installs.
CTR - View your click-through rates over time. CTR is all clicks ÷ by impressions in the date range.
Actions - View the number of actions taken on your ad, Page, app or event after someone viewed your ad, even if they didn’t click on it. Actions include Page likes, app installs, conversions, event responses and more.
Action Rate - View your action rate for your ads over time. Action rate is all actions ÷ by impressions in the date range.
Cost - View your ad costs over time. Filter by Ad Account, Campaign, Ad Set or single Ad.
Cost Per Click (CPC) - View your cost per click over time. CPC = amount spent ÷ number of clicks for the ad.
Cost Per Action - View your cost per action over time. Cost Per Action = amount spent ÷ number of actions for the ad.

More excitement? We also give you insights for:

Highest Click Through Rate - View a list of the last 7 ads that had the highest click through rate
Highest Relevance Score - View a list of the last 7 ads that had the highest relevance score
Highest Action Rate - View a list of the last 7 ads that had the highest action rate

Log into your Dasheroo account now and check them out!

There are a few things we do know that are coming:

Campaign Monitor! - If you use this cool email marketing app (and we love Alex, Craig, Sean and Andrea over at Campaign Monitor) you’ll be able to see a snapshot of your last few campaigns and how they did, how your subscriber growth is going and the trending of your overall click, open, bounce and unsubscribe rates. We hear that Aweber might be next!

Market New York (@MarketNewYork or #MKTNY) - We’ll be showing our wares in NYC, the big Javits center for a day, May 21st! This show is great, our buddy Ramon Ray is going to be there with Infusionsoft (also Smart Hustle Magazine, we love Ramon!) and Dave Kerpen from Likeable Local. We’ll be front and center with our selling shoes on (how can you sell something that is free?) in our fancy new booth. Visit John at the booth, he can’t wait to see ya!

Go check out Facebook Ads and Emma insights.

Looking at Business Dashboards a New Way - Mashups

April 30, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We all naturally tend to look at our business metrics in a silo. “What are my website sessions like?” Better go look at Google Analytics. “How many Twitter Followers did I gain last week?” Hop on over to your Twitter account.

Well, as we’re sure you are well aware of, we’re aiming to change all that. First, our business dashboards allow you to look at all your data from your apps, all in one spot. Yup, no more logging into all those various apps, all those tabs to find your data. All your data in one spot. That’s Dasheroo! OK, enough of the self-serving banter. But we really do hope this helps you make more well informed, data driven decisions to grow your biz.

Now, wouldn’t it be cool if you could look at data points from different apps, like Twitter Followers and Facebook Fans, together? You could instantly compare audience growth between the two. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see if your Google Adwords campaigns are also driving not just reported clicks, but also growth in over website sessions? Reese’s! (like peanut butter and chocolate…)

Looking at things this way, you can compare performance between a couple channels, or even see if there’s correlation between them. But if you have to jump back and forth between the two applications, or combine them into a Google Sheet for a custom report, chances are you might not get around to it.

Think about these possibilities:

Twitter Followers vs. Facebook Fans - what a great way to compare audience growth!
Facebook Likes vs. Twitter ReTweets - this can show you engagement comparison.
Facebook Engagement Rate vs. LinkedIn Engagement Rate - instantly compare engagement rate across these two networks. Which one is performing better?
Google AdWords Impressions vs. Google Analytics Sessions - wow, maybe your Adwords spend, in addition to driving tracked clicks, is also driving untracked users to your site. That might make your investment in Adwords seem pretty good.
Twitter Re-Tweets vs. Google Analytics Social Sessions - See if you social efforts and engagement is driving users to your website.
Facebook Reach vs. Google Analytics Sessions - another cool way to see if your social efforts are driving sessions or users to your website.

Here’s a sneak peek (shhhhh;)

Our new business dashboards with mashups!

Our new business dashboard mashups! Coming soon to a screen near you

Now, we need to be careful about the ‘ol correlation vs. causation conundrum, since you may not be able to absolutely prove that one outcome affects the other. But it certainly does give you more insight into how your efforts in one area may complement or help out in another, or if your performance in one social channel is way better than it is in another. Sound good?

We hope so! Because when we officially launch Dasheroo (yup, ripping that ‘beta’ sticker off) on May 5, you’ll get a 1/2 dozen of what we call ‘mashups’, which will give you instant insight into just those metrics.

We hope ya like ’em, and as always you’ll get a chance to tell us about other multi-app Insights…we mean ‘mashups’!