The Maine SEO Blog

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Cross Channel Attribution

• Unified Tracking: track interaction of the user with all media channels at one place.
• Attribute and Analyze
  • Model how different factors contribute to conversion
  • Model how factors interact with each other
• Optimize: Allocate media spend based on cross-channel models

Unified Tracking

• On average, there are 4-6 touchpoints across before conversion
• Conversion Data (over 10,000) for several clients
• Identify key variables influencing conversions
• The more time it takes to convert, the less likely a conversion will take place.
• Relative importance of conversions
  • 70% time to convert
  • 20% first touch source
  • 7% search engine
  • 3% brand term

What is the chief limitation of revenue attribution?

Conclusions

• First prerequisite: unified tracking program
• Attribution is a partial solution
• Attribution + Algorithmic Optimization is the solution for answering the media mix question

Siddharth Shah, Efficient Frontier

Improving ROI through Web Analytics

Success means different things to different people.

Test A/B pages with bounce rate, but be sure to check conversion rates down the funnel!

3 Tips for Better Attribution

1. Look at the whole picture
2. Use a fair measure of success
3. Know your limits

1. Look at the whole picture

• Window shopping
• Entering the store
• Asking questions
• Trying it on
• Buying it

Look at the whole sales cycle

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Retention

Solution: create a weighted metric

Assigning value to behaviors for “assists”

Which is more valuable?

• Identify online behaviors that correlate with conversion
• Analyze trends to assign to corresponding value
  • Regression Analysis – built into MS Excel
• Optimize to align with weighted metric

When to use weighted metrics

• Long sales cycles
• Multiple “successes”
• Offline sales
• Efficient campaigns

2. Use a fair measure of success

The problem with “last click”

Tools that are starting to get the message

• Omniture Markeitng Channels
• Google Search Trends
• Google Analytics “first click” hack
• Interim solution: combine first + last click

3. Know your limits

• Correlation does not imply causation
• No crystal ball
• Review regularly

Always be testing!

David Sprinkle, ROI Labs

Demystifying Attribution: Two myths

Myth 1: We need to be perfect in order to do it

You don’t need to have a PhD in Math to get attribution right

The perfect is the enemy of the good. -Voltaire

Evolution of Attribution Management

• Last click
• Even
• Exclusions
• Rules based
• Algorithmic

Myth 2: Isn’t attribution just about moving money around?

Just because you have the same amount of money at the end of the month doesn’t mean you should attribute where it comes from so that next month you can optimize accordingly.

Adam Goldberg, ClearSaleing

Demystifying Attribution

Deep down:

• Consumers are constatntly moving around the purchase path
• Multiple touchpoints could all lead to a conversion

Early on looking at attribution:

• Lots of data, no clear takeaways
• Data would only show certain channels based on system redirects
• Or to get the whole picture, you were looking at a hefty price tag

First steps toward attribution:

• Attribution through an ad serving platform
• Able to track 2 channels and 10 touch points
• Found a 15% overlap in revenue attributed
• Proved the need for a deeper level of understanding

What they needed to make some impact:

• A solution built to track all digital activities
• Easy to implement with strong customer support
• Flexible in its attribution models and accommodated multiple views
• Ability to report back at an actual profit level

In action: affiliate valuation

• Ensure affiliates aren’t over inflating credit
• On last click model, affiliate was converting over 10%
• Affiliate was only ‘introducing’ the transaction 2% of the time
• Action: renegotiate pricing structure

In action: network valuation

• Better evaluate individual network performance (consumer path and strength of performance)
• Layer in segmentation (acquisition, LTV)
• Use data to make more targeted and efficient buys

Mixed Media Modeling

• Weight the incrementality of channel buys
• Assign credit in a conversion path against these findings
• Allows for real time ‘exclusion’ set
• Leads to more accurate judgement on each individual channel’s impact

Danielle Smith, Range Online Media

More coverage of this session

• Search Engine Roundtable

Last time we talked about dealing with negative reviews; today we’re going to finish this five-step series with Google Local Business measurement.

Last June, Google Local Business Center added a Dashboard and Analytics. To get started, log into your Local Business Account and click “View report”.

The Analytics aren’t as powerful as Google Analytics, but you do get some interesting data. Get a complete look at all of the Dashboard components here.

What you get from the Dashboard

Google’s gone social

I just noticed this new section in the Dashboard (perhaps inspired by Buzz?). You can now post a 160-character status update; not unlike Twitter or Facebook.

And posts go live pretty quickly…

Local posts would be a great way to advertise a sale, a blogpost, whatever you’re looking to promote!

Is your profile complete?

Google will let you know if your profile is complete. Do you have pictures and video uploaded? Are all of your categories included? Are your business hours live?

Keywords

Activity, impressions, and driving directions are interesting – and might be more important depending on what industry your company is in. But I think one of the most valuable pieces of information the Dashboard gives are the top search queries. While I wish they would provide the geographic identifier (is it Portland, Maine or Scarborough, Maine the person was searching for?), the keywords will give you a good idea of whether or not people are finding you using the right keywords.

If the search queries are different than what you’re looking to rank for, start by changing your categories around a bit. If that doesn’t help, then there’s a problem with how your web site is optimized.

And that does it! You’ve just done everything you can to rank better at Google Maps.

See the entire guide here.

Nicki Hicks
Measure, measure, measure

Ever come home from a conference, start sorting through your notes and think I know I learned something, but what the heck was it? Closely following will often be: Now I remember what I learned, what can I use to help my business?

There’s a lot of information in the SMX live blog recaps, a lot of which involves quick note taking and scattered thoughts. So in an effort to consolidate (in an admittedly very long post) and walk away with something helpful, here are my takeaways:

(more…)

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

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

As a rule of thumb, I don’t pay attention to Alexa rankings. Primarily, it’s because we deal with mostly small business, so their rankings aren’t going to land them under the 100,000 range. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What does the Alexa ranking mean? Alexa measures your traffic (and popularity) by way of their toolbar (not unlike Keyword Discovery), and measures your site accordingly. The lower the number, the better. To give some perspective, the Maine SEO blog’s Alexa ranking is 1,051,645. Flyte has an Alexa rank of 140,350; CNN’s is 52, Google’s is 1.

Alexa also provides some Google Analytics-esque statistics which aren’t nearly as accurate, including: pageviews, bounce %, time on site, and incoming links.

I don’t suggest using Alexa because you can get more relevant statistics using tools like Google Analytics and Yahoo Site Explorer.

However, Alexa can be helpful if you’re comparing several large websites. Alexa makes it easy to compare popular websites to gain some quick insight on their differences:

And if you absolutely insist on using it…

• Remember that, like most search stat tools, these numbers are relative
• Realize that you can get far more accurate statistics using your Analytics
• Recognize Alexa rank is not unlike PageRank: where it’s easy to become too focused on where you are today compared to yesterday

Nicki Hicks
SEO Stat Scrutinizer – try saying that five times fast

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

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Keywords/Trends

1. Keyword Discovery – for all the keyword research you could ever care to know. It does require a subscription – this or Word Tracker (which I’ve never tried) are considered the best.
2. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – supplement keyword research; also gives better stats as to what people are actually searching for.
3. Webconfs.com Keyword Density Tool - there are a million keyword density tools out there, but I’ve found this one to be the most user friendly.
4. Google Insights/Google Trends – both give good insights as to what’s hot and what’s not.  Insights will also give you upcoming popular search terms.

Link Building

1. Marketleap’s Link Popularity Checker – gives you both Google and Yahoo!’s index of backlinks, plus others.

Plug-ins and Apps

1. SEO for Firefox – see nofollow links; look up PR, backlinks, meta-tags; plus much much more!
2. SeoQuake – many of the same benefits as SEO for Firefox, but you don’t necessarily have to have Firefox.  Plus, when activated, SeoQuake will give you a handy little toolbar with at-a-glance SEO stats.

Analytics (the one and only)

1. Google Analytics – it’s free and gives you everything you need.  Why go for something else??

I use quite a few more, but these are my favorite, and the ones I use the most often.  Do you have any favorites?

Nicki Hicks
I think I need a bigger toolbelt…