The Maine SEO Blog

Chris Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status

What should you track?

• Traditional metrics
• Micro conversions (non traditional)
  - Outgoing clicks
  - RSS subscribers
• Indirect results (aftermath)
  - ROI

Traditional metrics

• Referring traffic
• Conversions
• Brand and search type
• Google Analytics
  - Visits and page views
  - Compare to average traffic for day/week/month previous
  - Visitor loyalty/time on site
• Referring sites/sources
  - quantity?
  - quality?
  - new? (leveraging future campaigns)
• Conversions occurring more?
• Identify top referring sources
• Surge in brand queries
• Increases in direct traffic

Micro Conversions

• Outgoing link clicks (RSS subscribers, Twitter, Facebook fans)
• Newsletters, opt-in list
• Google Analytics > Profiles settings> Goal settings > Head match, put onclick: java code in WordPress code

Indirect Results

• Backlinks
• Total search traffic
• Search keywords
• Conversions that come with search
• Keyword vitals – tool to keep track of stats

David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i

David’s got a lot of great pictures and case studies, so here’s the presentation.

Augustin Vasquez, Analytics specialist, NVI

Case Study: Client Description

• Major men’s magazine, Cosmo for women
• Received over 10 million visits/month
• Target men 18-35

Goals

• Increase page view visits
• Increase incoming links

Other client info

• Multi-page articles= 3 x more average page views per visit
• Multi-page articles containing 2-11 pges

Problem? The social mob: negative comments on longer multi-page articles

Luckily, backlinks weren’t harmed because of negative comments.

Social Traffic vs. All Traffic

• All traffic drops off after 2nd page of article
• Social traffic to articles is much more steady than the rest of the traffic

Long term success threatened?

• Recruitement of new readers
• Brand perception and promotion of site: seen of drop of natural submissions to social plaforms

To calm the mob

• Find a reasonable length without compromising page views (3-4 pages for a normally 10 page article)
• Introduce existing fans to social media sites

Be creative with metrics

• Vertical of the article: sports, finance, science, etc. Benchmark with each other
• If pushed on a particular platform, try segmenting by submitter
• Effects on different platforms

Questions

• Helpful tools for social analytics? Twitalyzer, URL shorteners, Twitter metrics on followers, Omniture Twitter monitoring tool, Social Media Firefox plugin, Scout Labs, Radiant 6, People Browsr
• Determine sentiment on blogs? Very subjective, best done manually.
• Watch live what’s going on with Analytics if you’re in the middle of a campaign.
• Reddit likes business, world news, finance; Digg likes sports, science, health; StumbleUpon anything works in a moderate way

Rob Jackson, Head of Conversion Analytics, Latitude Group

Conversion Analytics

• Web Analytics
• Conversion Attribution
• Website Usability
• Landing Page Optimization

Web Analytics

• $1 billion industry by 2014 – Forrester
• Growth area in digital marketing
• Some companies still aren’t getting the basic right

Top Tips – Web Analytics

1. Get your setup right (e-commerce, goal funnels, campaigns by channel, test conversions, have the right people in place)
2. Look beyond conversions (some keywords are at the beginning of the purchase funnel, If you are using last click CPA model, look at bounce rates and time on site)
3. Monitor site performance (scenario analysis and content reports show when pages are under performing; again, look at bounce rate and time on site)

Conversion Attribution

• Go beyond the last click metric (ways to create rudimentary cookies to track first click)
• Stop the keyword rot
• Remove keywords that never convert

Top Tips – Attribution

1. Report with last click (but analyze other weightings and share these with your clients)
2. Pull what doesn’t work (keep it simple and avoid over analysis)

Usability Software

• “Real-time customer research”
• You know where – now see why
• Link & form analytics
• Heat mapping
• Site issue resolution

Top Tips – Usability Software

1. Be proactive (the remit of a PPC manager is now beyond the click, look at what your users are telling you)
2. Segment if possible (use tools like Click Tale, Tea leaf)

Top Tips – Landing Page Optimization

1. Use Data not Intuition (Take opinion out of optimization by using analytics and usability)
2. Star over and repeat… (Continuous improvement yields better results than one off tests)

Allisa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, Apogee Search

Favorite Things

• Advanced Segments
  - Default segments
  - Custom segments
• Looking deeper into GWO tests
• Custom reporting

Advanced Segments

• Like filters, but better!
• Easy to create
• Apply to past data
• Some are conveniently created for you
  - Paid traffic
  - Search traffic
  - New visits
  - Returning visits

Custom Advanced Segments

• Drag and drop functions
• Filter and segment by things like:
  - Hour of the day
  - Language
  - City
  - E-Commerce
  - Traffic Sources

Analyzing time periods – making dayparting decisions!

• Create a segment for traffic that arrives during a time you’re worried about
  - Time of day is less than 6 OR time of day is great than 22
  - If you currently have enough PPC traffic during that time, limit segment to PPC (pay attention to sample size)
• Compare conversion rate of that segment, to your overall conversion rate for PPC or search

A few other uses

• Turning any report into a PPC-only report
• Running specialized reports in seconds
• Aggregating engagement and conversion metrics
• Studying geotargeting decisions
• analyzing GWO tests

Looking deeper into a GWO Test

• Care about more than just conversions?
  - Order value by test page?
  - Bounce rate for landing pages?
  - Other engagement metrics?
• For A/B test only
  - Create segment for each page version
  - Run the desired report with each segment (e.g. ecommmerce reporting)

Segment Tips

• Mind your “or”s and “and”s
• Look at segment size (test segment size)
• You can compare up to 3 segments at once
• Don’t tell you’re boss/CEO/client how easy it was

Tracking Multiple Attributions

• By default, GA gives you last click attribution
• You can see first click attribution (with a little extra java coding)
• Stay away from “no override”
• Set user defined value
  - Decide what to track (search engine_keyword_PPC/SEO
  - Add setVar java below GA code
  - Create script that checks for cookies

Is this the best way?

• No
  - you only have 1 free value
  - it’s difficult to see entire history
  - you have to do manual work
• Yes
  - maybe if Google hears enough from us, they’ll add it

Andrew Goodman, Founder & Principal, Page Zero Media

Can we really simplify this incredibly complex universe?

• Yes, and we must

Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer

Non-obvious takeaways

• If you don’t love marketing, you’ll “manage” to mediocrity
• How patient are you? Check the right date range.
• Is granularity a great way to go crazy?

Other takeaways

• Use Google Advanced Segments to make better choices, especially when you don’t have revenue information

Wister Walcott, Co-Founder & VP of Products, Marin Software

Paid Search – Analytics Myths

1. Google will pick the best creative for you.
2. Look at all prior clicks for accurate bidding.
3. “Portfolio Management” is really really hard.

Myth #1: Google will pick the best creative for you.

• Periodically evaluate conversions/revenue per 1000 impressions
• Compare each creative in an ad group vs. the average (below average = loser, near average = draw)

Myth #2: Need to look all prior clicks for accuracy.

• Evaluated “path to purchase” for well-known brand
• Goal: ensure proper credit to product keywords
• Only 26% of paid search conversions had more than one click

Myth #3: “Portfolio Management” is really really hard.

• Use something like Google Conversion Optimizer and this is not as hard as you think

Questions

• Omniture? Used for large campaigns, and worked well

Ben Seslija, Senior Director, Analytics, Clickable Inc.

5 Tips for Utilizing Market Differences

1. Geo-modified campaigns (national/larger area)
2. General search campaign (geo-targeted)
3. Create local ads
4. Custom local city and general landing pages
5. 25 mile radius (not overly precise; i.e. using IP addresses)

True impact of quality score

• Ad Rank  = Bid x quality score

The better your quality score, the less you pay…

• QS 10 = $5/CPC
• QS 1 = $27.50/CPC

Increase Quality Score

1. Split keywords into smaller ad groups
2. Create relevant ad copy for each ad group
3. Optimize creatives
4. Experiment with matching options
5. Build SEO
   - Link Building
   - Implement keywords
   - Don’t forget about essential site pages (About Us, etc.)
   - Make sure Google thinks you’re relevant

Negative keywords

• Don’t forget about them
• They might acquire higher CTR’s than positive keywords
• To find them:
  - Use keyword tools
  - Search query performance
  - Analytics
  - Competitive analysis tools (like compete.com) [this is the one point I personally disagree with]

Andrew Beckman, President, Location3Media

Important tools through Google Analytics:

• Site overlay reports
• Create funnels
• Blocking IPs

Google Analytics (background/why you should use it)

• Comprehensive data
• Easy-to-use interface
• Free!!!

Site Overlay Reports

• Shows redundant areas (links that should be removed)
• Shows successful areas (links whose real estate should be increased)
• Flaw: link click-throughs are a total of all click-throughs to that page (in other words, if you have multiple links to a certain page, the click through percentage is a total of all of them). Work around: add “&location=x” (x = 2, 3, 4, etc.)

Other important tools:

• Top pages (Google Analytics)
• Crazy Egg
• Google Website Optimizer

Crazy Egg Heat Map

• Might help you decide to make images links (that people are clicking on)
• Further verify what people are clicking on

Funnels

• On-click events
• Cant track links, videos, PDFs

IP Filtering

• Block your, your developer, designer, etc. IP addresses
• Look at “pure data”

Resources

• www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools

Jill Emerson, Search Marketing Manager, Allegis Group, Inc.

Social Media

• Be sure to add value, other than what you give through the .com website (e.g. adding RSS feed from blog, etc.)

Takeaways

1. Answer the “so what”?
2. Translate for management (put it in lamen’s terms).
3. Clearly identify next steps.

Questions

Great book for GA: Measuring Success with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton

Have an outbound link you’re desperate to get traffic reports for? Maybe the affiliate reservations site you use? Well you can track it using your Google Analytics!

All you have to do is insert a piece of javascript into the href tag; in this example I track the link to flyte:

Then, you can track who clicks on the link by looking at your “Top Content” in Google Analytics.

In Top Content, look for the name you gave the page. In this example, it would be “flyte.biz”. That’s all there is to it – it’s really that simple!

Nicki Hicks
Tracking outbound links

I work with a lot of small businesses. As such, small businesses owners typically don’t have a) the budget or b) the time to deal with A/B (or split) testing. Google Analytics Site Overlay of course can’t do what a comprehensive A/B test could, but it can convince a client to place links or call-to-actions above the fold, change keywords or link language, and more.

Using Site Overlay you can see where people click and, more importantly for this little experiment, where they don’t.

The fact of the matter is Site Overlay is extremely helpful when it comes to usability…and that’s half the battle! How do you balance SEO and usability?

Design

• Is your design graphically enticing, while not too overpowering?
• Does your site architecture make sense to search bots and humans?
• Do you have more than 8 elements in your navigation? [We recommend 7-8, max.]

Content

• Do you have enough copy? Are you saying everything that needs to be said?
• Are you going overboard with copy and blabbing on and on?
• Is your copy set up to promote reading? (Is it in one black and white blob without spaces, bold and italicized words, bullets, or headers?)
• Are there links sprinkled throughout the copy? Are they helpful? Do they make sense?

Call-to-action

• Is your call-to-action hiding below the fold where few will see it?
• Is there a big, bold graphic that attracts attention?
• How about some enticing copy to get readers to sign up/buy/etc.?

These are just a few of many recognized usability guidelines; many of which GA site overlay can help with. I think the best tip is: think of yourself as the potential customer. What would you be looking for in the website? What would you expect?

Nicki Hicks
SEO for Usability

First of all, what does your bounce rate mean? The bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a particular page and then leave the website from that very same page. For instance, if I search for “maine seo”, land on my blog, decide that it wasn’t what I was looking for, and then go back and try my search again…that would count as apart of my bounce rate. At the same time, if I searched the very same query, find this blog, find what I’m looking for by reading a post or two, then leave…that again would count towards by bounce rate.

For this reason, bounce rates can be misleading. A person could spend 5 seconds or 5 minutes on the page before “bouncing”, you don’t know. They could very well have found what they’re looking for and decided to call you or email you. Google Analytics goals, in this case, wouldn’t help with this disconnect. Only by asking your customer with something like “How did you find us?” would you know they actually ever visited your site.

But I digress…the only additional information Google provides if you drill down into the bounce rate section is the bounce rate per day:

If you go into the Content section, you can see the bounce rate for individual pages. Typically, the pages with the most pageviews (or the top content pages) will also have the highest bounce rate. You can also see that the % Exiting is often similar to the bounce rate:

So, what’s a good bounce rate? It really depends on your industry. My blog has almost an 80% bounce rate. This is fairly typical for both my industry and for blogs in general. With blogs, searchers will read a post or check out the homepage and then move on – hence the higher rate.

In particular, I’ve notice that websites for hotels, inns, and motels tend to have a low bounce rate – something in the 30% range, since people searching for hotels know specifically what they’re looking for when they click on the result. Furthermore, when you’re perusing a hotel’s site, you want to check out more than one page. At a minimum, that includes something that resembles amenities and rates pages.

When are you in trouble? In general, the bounce rate isn’t the most important stat to pay attention to. But there a few things you should keep your eye on, including:

• If your bounce rate increases or decreases dramatically. Did you change something for the better – or worse?
• If the bounce rate on one particular page is significantly higher or lower. This might cause you to change that page (for a higher-than-average rate), or other pages on the site to replicate it (for a lower-than-average rate).
• If the % exiting far exceeds the bounce rate. This means that people have visited more than one page on the site, but something is causing them to leave the site from this point. Should they be?

Your bounce rate is heavily dependent on both your industry and your site architecture. But if you bare the above in mind, you can effectively manage it.

Nicki Hicks
Bouncing is what Tiggers do best

Strange GA Issue #1

Today, I recieved the following email from a client:

Hi Nicki,
When I look at the web site with IE8 built-in developer tools, it shows the error  ‘_gat’ is undefined  when viewing on the script tab.

After brainstorming with some of the developers here, we soon realized the problem was with Google Analytics.  The page, it seems, is loading too fast!  That seems to be the bulk of the issue, coupled with the fact that Internet Explorer 8 has been released.  It might be a good idea to start dropping IE 6 for good, with two other versions of IE available.

Strange GA Issue #2

Last week, I met with another client to do some Google Analytics training.  One of my favorite GA tools is the site overlay: which shows how people behave on your website.

However, when showing the client just how cool site overlays are, GA decided against showing us the overlay.  All we could see was their website – no overlay.  Checking severall days later proved to bring up the overlay correctly.  I’ve seen this happen before with other sites – where GA is finnicky about what it shows.  What gives??

Nicki Hicks
GA Detective

Last time I talked about how image alt tags affect your traffic, and mentioned that you can block traffic from image searches through your analytics.

I would suggest blocking the image search domain only if you aren’t recieving qualified traffic, which would apply for almost every industry.  However, there may be some searches you wouldn’t want to block.  For example, if you run a destination wedding service and many customers find you by image searching for destination weddings, you might want to keep track of who finds you image searching.  (You could set up a special goal tracking this data.)

In order to block Image search engines, simply go to your Analytics Settings Dashboard and click “edit”.

Scroll down and choose the “add filter” button in the Filter section.Then simply enter the Filter information – a name that you’ll recognize, the filter type (from domain), and finally the domain (Google Images, in this case).

Nicki Hicks
Tracking Quality Traffic

Conversions are more important than rankings – they are the goal.  Sure, good rankings should lead to higher conversions; but being #1 should not be your first priority.  Using Google Analytics, you have the opportunity to set up a total of four goals for each website (should you have multiple sites) to track your conversions.

Click the edit button on the Dashboard page in your Analytics.  There, you’ll find all of the settings for your account.  What we’re interested in are the Conversion Goals and Funnels.

Again, you see you have four goals to choose from.  Pick “edit” for one of the goals.

1. Turn the goal “on”.
2. Choose Match Type. Exact Match requires the URL you enter to be exactly the one your users will land on – good for things like a Thank You page for email subscriptions.  Head Match is best for URLs with unique values – checkout pages, for example, where the content is dynamically generated.  Regular Expression Match is best for pages where the stem and/or URL is dynamic.  Google uses this example: “page=1 will match http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well as http://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119.”
3. Goal URL/Goal Name/Case Sensitivity.  All fairly self explanatory.  Insert the URL – or landing page – where your customer will complete the goal.  A thank you page for an email sign up or filling out a contact form.  For E-commerce sites, a checkout page for continuing to checkout or a receipt of payment for the actual sale.  The goal name should be specific – something other than “Goal 1″.  Case sensitivity is explained above.
4. Goal value is the dollar amount of what a single completed goal will mean to you.  For example, if you know that for every 10 people who fill out a contact form, 1 will do business with you; and the average person will spend $10,000 with you, then your goal is worth $1,000.  (NOTE: Be sure to leave the amount without $ sign; as in 1000, NOT $1000.)
5. If you would like to track your conversions through the steps your customers take to get there, use funnels.

Once GA starts collecting data, you can view it in the Goals section of your account.

Nicki Hicks
Happy Converting!

Finally, the (highly?) anticipated the new features on Google Analytics went live on Monday.  Among the improvements were changes to the User Interface and completely new tools: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting, and Motion Charts.  So here’s a quick run through of the new tools:

Advanced Segmentation

Until now, you’ve been able to segment your Analytics history in each category (number of visits, pageviews, etc.) according to the date.  In other words, you could compare this past month to the month before.  Now, though, you can compare almost everything using advanced segments.

It wouldn’t allow you to see it, but Conversion Goals are also on this list.  You can choose any number of segments you’d like to compare.  Here, I chose to compare All Visits and Referral Traffic from this blog:

The benefit?  I can see that my traffic depends directly on the number of referring links to my site.  Other trends should also show up by using this tool and comparing other advanced segments.

Custom Reporting

If, for some reason, the advanced segmenting misses a conversion you’d like to see, you can use custom reporting.

You can choose which metrics you’d like to measure, then which dimensions to cross reference them by.  While GA gives you the ability to measure almost every conversion possible, the custom reports are helpful if you’d like to see your goals convert for more than one metric or more than one dimension.

Motion Charts

Finally, motion charts.  The Google Analytics Blog did a full synopsis on this already, so here’s a quick recap.  With several of the GA tools, you can “Visualize” the data – you will be redirected to that particular motion chart.  Here is a snapshot of what my new vs. returning visitors for yesterday look like:

Motion charts play like a movie, so this shot is the last frame.  While motion charts cannot be made for every conversion, you can customize the axis, colors, and even size of the data points.  Then, you can save individual motion charts you create – as they return to their default settings when you leave the page.

So, overall, pretty cool stuff.  Helpful, too, for that matter.  I’m interested to see what Analytics will be able to tell us next…

Nicki Hicks
Geeking out at GA