Tag: facebook

Track Our Startup: We Survived Dreamforce + On To Q4 Growth

September 22, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Even though about 6 of us were rotating around a booth schedule and a bunch of meetings at Dreamforce we still managed to work on some serious new features.

Dreamforce ’15

We had a great Dreamforce event here in San Francisco, thanks to everyone who stopped by and said hey! Josh and I had an 8am speaking gig in the Marriott Marquis. We thought there would be crickets at that hour but it was standing room only, great job, Josh!

Four days just “might” be a bit long for a trade show but we tried to make sure we got the best of our spend on this show. For those of you who don’t know, we built a “component” for Dasheroo dashboards using Lightning App builder so you can get your Dasheroo dashboards right in your Salesforce account. Right now it’s only for mobile, but hopefully soon you’ll be able to get them right on your desktop instance of Salesforce.com.

Feedback from the show attendees to Dasheroo? People were pretty happy that there was an easy, lower-cost alternative to Domo, Tableau and Wave which was cool. Some businesses even said they use us alongside those more expensive products to get a quick snapshot of how the business is really doing, then they use those tools to drill into an issue in more detail. Nice, huh?

Bonus? James came up from our Austin office so it was awesome to see him. Since we’re a distributed company we don’t get to see our peeps face to face as often as we’d like, so it was great to all who came out for it. AND everyone donned their fancy new Chucks so we were pretty happy about that. Sorry about your blisters, Jenny!

Newbie on Board

It’s been a while since we hired a new person, so now meet Alvaro Tijero our newest addition to the team here in the Bay Area. He’s no stranger to this group, he used to work with us in sales a lllloooonnnngggg time ago at VerticalResponse. You and Mimi will be a fierce sales team!

On To Q4 growth

We’re going to focus pretty hard on growth for our business and that means rapid integrations, going deeper on some existing integrations and figuring out any triggers to get ya’ll happy about paying. We’re pretty jazzed to give the service for free but when you can get the value you need out of what we provide we hope you’ll pay a modest amount for your business dashboard.

We plan on getting the team together for a day in Austin next month. It’s going to be great to see everyone and get us all on the same page as far as the milestones we really need to be hitting. Can’t wait.

If you haven’t read my Startup Lessons Learned for last week it’s pretty cool: Your Weekly Ops Meeting, you might need to revisit it! I’ve also got an article on Business.com entitled: Help is On The Way: 5 Easy Things To Automate in Your Business.

We’ve got our monthly board meeting to get ready for next week and a ton of catching up this week so I’ve gotta run!

Track Our Startup: Dreamforce ’15 Countdown is ON

September 1, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We’re in release heaven here in Dasheroo. In just a month we’ve released PayPal, Stripe, an iOS app plus a TON of under-the-hood much needed stuff that you don’t see but it makes the expectation you have the things should just work, happen.

15 Days to Dreamforce 15 (#DF15)

We selected our booth (ok “pod”) right next to MixPanel and VistaPrint at Salesforce.com’s annual event here in San Francisco! And you can bet we’re wearing our orange! We’ll be demoing something pretty nifty at DF15 so stop by if you’re there. You can get free expo hall passes here we’re told.

Upcoming Dashboards and Insights

We’re hoping to add to our ecommerce-billing-payments dashboards with a Shopify dashboard in the coming weeks. So those of you selling stuff and using this great tool for your shopping cart will be able to see your metrics.

We’re diving back into our Google Analytics Dashboards and coming up with insights for Google Analytics E-commerce Insights. We’re sticking with the question “how much am I making off of my marketing” dashboards. Following onto that will be Google Analytics Campaigns and Goals insights. Now you’ll be able to see right from Dasheroo if all of those efforts you’ve been working on are paying off in terms of sign ups or cold hard cash!

My new scintillating business.com article is out entitled Who Are You? Why Ignoring Your About Page is a Terrible Idea and Janine wrote her new Inc.com article, 3 Ways to Move Your SEO Needle.

Talk to you in a week for more of your business analytics updates!

What’s Really Important in a Google Analytics Dashboard

July 29, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

At Dasheroo we’re all about looking at our Google Analytics dashboards when we get up in the morning, multiple times during the day and before we go to bed at night. Why? We’re a growing online business and we want a quick snapshot of what’s working and more importantly what isn’t.

So here’s what a portion of our GA Dashboard looks like:

Here’s what we like to look at:

Since we do a ton of social media marketing (there’s a dashboard for that) we like to keep an eye on the Social Sources insight to track traffic to the website from our social channels. If you look at the pie chart above you’ll see that Facebook drives a ton of traffic for us which is great but every now and then we get a boost from Twitter, then we can go to ourTwitter Dashboard to see what’s driving the goodness.

We like to see our New and Returning Users insight. We always want to have newbies coming to our site more than returning users. The returning ones we love ALOT but they’re probably coming back to log in. A spike like the one you see just above is even better because that means a whole host of new users came to the site.

The Top Sources By Medium is a great way to track Google’s Channels to see how traffic is coming to your site. The Direct channel is people typing in your URL into the browser while the Organic channel is people searching on a keyword (not paid) and coming to your site. You can see here that there was a huge spike in Organic traffic on July 13. We like to closely monitor that especially since we don’t pay for it!

We also track our internal metrics in a Custom Insight [ SHORT VIDEO]. In this case it’s the total number of people who register for a free business dashboard. We like to put it smack dab in the middle of our Google Analytics Dashboard right next to our Sessions insight. Why? We like to make sure we’re getting around a 10% conversion rate and we are, phew.

If we see that there might be something going on with traffic, like maybe we got a new traffic source (or lost an existing one) we compare date ranges on the All Traffic insight. We select a date range or “Last Week” vs. a “30-Day” range and compare where traffic is coming from. In this one you’ll see we got a new source of traffic because LaunchingNext linked to us and included us in an email. Awesome!

So there’s a quick overview of how we use our own Google Analytics dashboards. When we need to dive deeper we go directly into our Google Analytics native account, but this gives us a great starting point to ask questions.

Oh, we’ll be adding even more insights to Dasheroo so check back frequently but don’t worry, we’ll tell ya!

I’m John Hingley and This is Dasheroo’s Startup Story

May 5, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

That’s me, John Hingley, one of 4 very proud Dasheroo co-founders today.

John Hingley here, I’ve been around the marketing, e-commerce and sales business for quite a while both full-time and consulting with great businesses. In one of these businesses I was brought in to fill a huge gap the company had, a sales and marketing leader. Although the business ran pretty sophisticated marketing programs - email marketing, Google AdWords, all forms of social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, trade shows, you name it - at this particular time, they weren’t growing as fast as they needed to.

I observed that most of the weekly meetings were those typical ‘status updates’ that often devolve into, well, a waste of time! So I initiated a weekly meeting called the Triple-S. People around the office asked me what it meant. It was simple; Sell Some Sh*t. If you weren’t talking about the metrics driving the business, you weren’t in the meeting.

The format of SSS was a metrics-driven meeting driven off a Google doc. I wanted a place where everyone could put their data in a shared, collaborative environment. A ‘unified view’ of the data if you will. And you know what? It worked! Our lead generation folks got a better understanding of what the landing page optimization people were doing, and the content marketing people started to create content that was more relevant based on the keywords people were coming to the site from. And so on.

But after a few of these, I noticed some faults. About 2 hours before each meeting, I noticed the team scurrying around, gathering the charts and graphs to place in the Google doc. Time suck! Next, there was little transparency in many of the numbers as some of the team would create their own Excel charts from the data of the native app, like Facebook. How did I know if it was accurate? And last, WTF do we all have to wait until Tuesday at 1p to look at all this great stuff?! It should be updated and available to any of us, any time, from anywhere.

So I took a step back, looked at it and asked, why the hell isn’t there a solution for any business that automatically gathers all of this data up to the minute (or hour even!), eliminate human error and display what’s going with the biz RIGHT NOW, not what happened 6 days ago? RIGHT NOW we can affect change, we can’t make up the 5 days we lost if we could have seen the reports now.

We’ve got Dashboards for all kinds, free!

When I stopped my consulting gig I decided to toy with the idea of starting this new company we lovingly call Dasheroo, and create the best product for businesses that need business dashboards. (Did I mention every business needs a business dashboard?)

Luckily our idea of bringing data together in an easy-to-read format was met with smiling faces of people around me. After a few months James Ryan our amazing VP of Engineering (sold his last company to Get Satisfaction) came on, set up shop in Austin, TX, and we worked to get an alpha version of our product out with 800 users.

We piqued the interest of a venture firm, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, that believes in everything we’re about; delivering productive business apps in a ‘business freemium’ model. Matt Holleran and Judy Loehr have been amazing to work with, they’ve given all of the support we need and more, and the best part is, they’re really, really nice and are part of the Dasheroo family already.

Amazingly, to round out the team this past year we scored Josh Feinberg (VP Product) and Alf Brand (VP Customer Success and UX expert) to join. These guys all have the experience we need to make an awesome product even more awesome.

And now we have the best tool any business can have in their tool chest; all of the important business metrics in their own business dashboards, for free.

How can it be free, you ask? What’s the catch? We know a lot about how to make things for small & mid-size business owners, agencies and even enterprise businesses, being that we’ve always been one ourselves. And we know that you need a break, but you’ll pay for bells and whistles you really need. Plus, I used to run an agency, so I hope other agency types see value in Dasheroo too. So that’s the deal, it’s free, you’ll love all of the functionality you’ll get and when you grow, we grow. Can we shake on that?

So thanks to the 1,700+ amazing beta users who have been banging on Dasheroo for the past few months, telling us what you like and more importantly what you don’t. This product is yours, not ours. It grows with you.

We’ll keep being transparent with you, we’ve always told you 99% of what’s happening behind the scenes, there’s not a chance of stopping that now.

So take us for a spin, we’re ready to grow and grow fast. And if you like us tell your friends. We don’t want to spend our money on advertising, we’d rather give it to you in the form of a stellar product.

Cheers,

John, James, Josh, Alf, Court, Andrew

P.S. Special thanks to the following friends for helping us get to this point:

John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing), Viveka Von Rosen (Linked Into Business), Alex Theuma (SaaScribe), Matthew Toren (iSmallBusiness), Adam Toren (Kidpreneurs), Dave Kerpen (Likeable Local), Jay Baer (Convince & Convert), Lauren Simmonds (Small Business Computing), Bryan Eisenberg (Idealspot), Pratik Dholakiya, Tom Taulli, Mark Evans, Steve Strauss (The Self Employed), Carol McManus (LinkedIn Lady), Ken Herron, Emily Crume and Erik Fisher (Social Media Examiner), Anita Campbell (Small Biz Trends), Matt Mansfield (MattAboutBusiness), Ramon Ray (Smart Hustle Magazine) and last but certainly not least Janine Popick.

Our friends and family of amazing investors (who are literally our friends and our family

For the full press release, go here.

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’!

We Decided to Push Our Launch Out a Week…

April 23, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Using our Mashups you’ll be able to compare metrics across applications!

Hey there, Dasheroo here. As you can image we’ve been working our asses off trying to get our official company/product/everything launch out the door for the best business dashboards we can provide. But if you are familiar with all of the twists and turns that software development brings you, you run and run and run and find stuff you need to fix. Which is what happened.

Specifically we wanted to make sure for launch you could compare metrics across different applications. Like Facebook Reach and Google Analytics Sessions; maybe something really cool you did on Facebook had a direct affect on your website traffic resulting in sales. You’d want to see that right? So we’re QA-ing the hell out of it because we didn’t work this hard to launch with a sub-optimal feature for you.

So we’ll restart the countdown to launch and set it for now to 5/5/2015. BTW, did you know we have a countdown widget?

Growth in Facebook Video Views, a Marketer’s Dream

April 20, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

When Mark Zuckerberg told a group of folks in the beginning of the year that the Facebook video views would be their future he was serious. They had a blog post about it: What The Shift To Video Means to Creators. They talk about the surge in mobile use for viewing videos: MZ: “it’s also important to focus on posting videos that grab people from the first frame of video.”

According to Social Bakers, Facebook grew crazy last year with video posts catching up to YouTube!

The details:

Facebook bought QuickFire Networks, a company that enables them now to quickly convert different video formats enable playing that takes up less bandwidth and preserves the video quality.
When you add a YouTube Link your video doesn’t auto play and has lower quality compared to uploading direct to Facebook.
When you add a video to Facebook it auto-plays in a user’s feed when someone scrolls their feed which increases engagement in a huge way!
Viewing a video uploaded to Facebook is way easier on the eyes than if you use the YouTube link.
Facebook also posted that “more than 50 percent of people who come back to Facebook every day in the U.S. watch at least one video daily.”
According to eMarketer, “Time spent watching video on mobile devices will increase from 30 minutes daily among all US adults in 2014 to 39 minutes per day this year.”

Dasheroo dog Dwight’s highest engagement posts are videos!

According to Brian Honigman, Marketing Consultant, who wrote an interesting article for Business2Community, “Armed with this distinction, it’s fairly clear where Facebook video’s true advantages lie and where YouTube still has an edge. Facebook video will really succeed with content that relies on social lift, whereas YouTube will still be the source for video content with staying power.”

It’s no secret that uploading videos directly to Facebook gives them control over this precious content and them getting the most from their advertising. After all people like to watch videos either of or recommended by people they know, right?

Are you preparing your video strategy for your business?

Why Your Inbox is Your Social Media Marketing Hub

April 1, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Our inbox is NUTS with social network emails!

We just got back from Social Media Marketing World #SMMW15, and it was great. We met a ton of people and learned a bunch. But we started to think about how old school email still plays a huge role in social media marketing even WITH all of the social media marketing we’ve got.

On LinkedIn, if you send an inMail or a connection request an email is sent to your personal inbox. You might not check LinkedIn but a few times a week but you’re checking your email all the time.
On Twitter if someone connects with you, favorites or RT’s one of your Tweets, guess what? You get an email! Then from that email you can follow that person back. One of the great ways to get in front of someone for just little work is just “favorite” their Tweet. They’ll also give you suggestions in your inbox for who to follow, thanks Twitter!
Pinterest lets you know if one of your Facebook friends joins Pinterest, they constantly mail you with suggestions of what your friends are pinning, or if any of your friends pins something to your board.
Instagram will give you email notifications if someone Likes or Comments on your photos if you set it up that way.
YouTube will email you when someone subscribes or when a channel you subscribe to uploaded a new video.
Google+ will tell you when someone has added you or remind you if you’ve been invited to an event.
Facebook, well, they just want to own the world don’t they 😉

Hey maybe we’re biased because we love email and founded and worked at VerticalResponse but hey, you can’t disregard that the medium is still rockin’.

Lessons Learned SMMW15: Don’t Bore Me

March 30, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

John on the U.S.S. Midway in San Diego at the SMMW15 show!

Team Dasheroo went to the infamous Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW15) conference with a BANG! We wanted to meet and learn from the pros and network with everyone who cared about social media since that’s what we decided to build business dashboards for first. Turns out it was about 3200 people that cared enough about it to spend a cool $1k per person. Fierce! Thanks to Michael Stelzner (amazing guy) and his awesome team for a fantastic show.

We went to a few sessions that really touted the fact that on social media you need to be real, you need to be fun and you need to be personable.

Be Real

Ann Handley, Marketing Profs, really drove this point home with dozens of examples of great companies that are being “real” on their websites and with their email marketing campaigns. It was all about being real as a business and people falling in love with who you are. Pretty powerful stuff and something we all take for granted. Thanks Ann!

Not more content, better content..get sassy! @annhandley #SMMW15

“Be fun!” says Sue B. Zimmerman!

Be Fun

Sue B. Zimmerman, The Instagram Expert, really drove this point home. Instagram as a medium is visual and should be fun but should always tie back to what you’re all about. If you’re an enterprise software company and you post pics of your kitty with no tie-in, it’s not good.

It’s all about a great bio and thoughtful content to be a success on Instagram! @SueBZimmerm an
Don’t overpost or underpost to Instagram, you’ll lose followers and engagement! @SueBZimmerman #SMMW15

Be Human

Ted Rubin who owns the hashtag #RonR, or return on relationship, had a fantastic session where he talked about how for him it’s personal with his content. He loves crazy socks, he takes pics of his crazy socks and posts them. People now come to expect images of his socks! Melonie Dodaro, LinkedIn expert, also had a few things to say about it as well.

Reach and frequency is great, but a community is power” well said @TedRubin #SMMW15
Interact, engage, look people in the eye, and build relationships. #RonR
Social has made marketing hard and tools make it look too easy. Don’t forget the people! Great session already with @TedRubin #SMMW15
Don’t worry about ur company LI page, focus on your personal profile. people want to deal with people, not a logo. @MelonieDodaro #SMMW15
Wanna rank high 4 ur profile on linkedin? Optimize keywords as a person not a ‘thing’ as u would on google. @MelonieDodaro #SMMW15

So bottom line? Don’t hide behind who you really are on social media and you’ll have a ton of fun with your followers!