After two protracted debates on Twitter about keyword referrals and SERP tracking I want to make some more cohesive statements than is possible on Twitter.

Keyword Referrals

Today Google announced that the default login behavior for users will be secure and encrypted. They also announced that query data for logged in users will no longer be passed to Google Analytics unless the user clicks a paid link. I think that default to secure is fine and good, but not passing the query data unless you are paying is shady. Knowing what people are searching for is very helpful for businesses in choosing what they change about their site. Not just for optimizing for traffic, but also optimizing for online experience and usability of the site in general. The people that are most likely to be hurt by this are the small and medium sized business that are dependent on Google products, and industries that are heavily skewed toward users of Google products. As an example:

• People who use Gchat
• People who keep Gmail open
• People that use Google Analytics
• People that us Adwords
• People that use Google+
• People that connect to Google Labs Products
• People that comment on Blogger
• People that comment on YouTube

Many of the changes that Google has made over the last few years have been working toward making ”Google” a more embedded experience on the web and more individualized. The trend is toward more people being logged in, which means we will see a continuing degradation of data. This is particularly worrisome for countries where Google has over a 90% share and for business that have fewer than 100 search visits in a day. For small businesses making smart data-driven decisions was already hard, now it will be harder.

Search Engine Rank Page (SERP) Results

Search is becoming an amorphous term. Some people argue that Facebook and Twitter are search portals. Even if we restrict the conversation to just Google there are multiple separate, but interconnected, search channels: Web, Mobile, Local, News, Blogs, Image, etc. Many people are very focused on tracking rank. The problem with tracking rank is that it is not entirely connected to traffic. There are vast difference in traffic between phrases in the same conceptual space and a very different position in the buying cycle between search channels. For some people traffic is the only thing being monetized, so all visits are equal, but most people have a conversion to consider. In many competitive cases you are also triggering universal search that pulls in multiple search channels, which means #1 Organic result can be visually the 11th result.

(Click to see full size)

No Organic results show up above the fold for that search: Locksmith. Who is getting those clicks? Rank is NOT a performance indicator. Traffic is a performance indicator, money is a performance indicator, phone calls are a performance indicator. Rank is an interesting bauble that has interesting information at the beginning of a campaign to see your competition and a very steep curve once you are in the top ten. There is often much more to gain from focusing on getting traffic from phrases that aren’t getting traffic yet, particularly because of partial match links. Applying strategies that value diversity and monetization of traffic over SERP rank will win in the long term.

After a long wait and a slight re-write A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media is finally out and available on Amazon!

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On Tuesday September 6th we will randomly choose a 3 winners.

Back in March, and again last night, I presented on putting Regular Expressions (Regex) into Google Analytics Advanced Segments and Non-profile Filters.

Last Night I shared:

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

This Regex selects 2 & 3 word grouping. This makes it very useful when applied to Keywords. For many sites 2-3 word phrases are the bulk of the search engine traffic (in some cases 50-60%). This group also has the quality of being the first place where action intent starts to appear. Consider the difference in intent between ‘Dog Costume” and “Batman Dog Costume.” Who is most likely at the end of their buy cycle?

There are two places that applying this Regex in to Google Analytics can be fairly useful.

The filter at the bottom of the page:

This allows you 2 dimensions to filter on and a variety of metrics.

Advanced Segment:

This allows you a larger number and variety of dimensions and metrics that can be used simultaneously. Advance segments are my preferred method because they are added to your user account, making it easy to apply them to multiple profiles.

In either method if you export your data on Keywords and Landing Pages into your favorite database and order by landing page you will quickly see where your traffic is headed to the wrong place. You can save some time by separating anything that is landing on your home page this will reduce the number of entries you are sifting through by dealing with that set of data a later time.

And now for those of you that want to change the number of keywords this Regex selects:

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

 

^ start at the beginning of the line

\s* match zero or more white space characters

[^\s]+ match at least one or more non-white space character

( open unit

\s+ match at least one or more white space character

[^\s]+ match at least one or more non-white space character

) close unit

{1,2}    repeat once AND twice

\s* match zero or more white space characters

$ end of string

Changing the numbers changes your number of words; these values return n+1 words.

• {2} returns 3-word phrases
• {3} would return 4-word phrases

The comma indicates AND

• {1,} returns 2 or more words
• {4,9} returns 5 and 10 words

Thank you to SEMPDX for having me out last night. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments.

To be successful landing pages need to accomplish three things: Clear Relevance, Clear Value, and Clear Call to Action. Depending on your particular business and your visitors what that looks like may be different, but we have 10-points below that you should think about, check-off, when you put together landing pages.

Here is our list of top ten tactics that a landing page should employ:

1. Clear path(s) for the visitor to follow to reach a desired goal.
2. Simple, effective navigation. Don’t crowd the important areas with
   secondary levels.
3. Utilize supplemental tools such as on site search and a Help links.
4. Color schemes and fonts—light background with dark text is the
   preferred method; utilizing your logo colors is advisable provided the
   color scheme makes the page easily readable.
5. Easy to find Customer service, account, site map links along with
   telephone contact information.
6. Personalization and empowerment terms such as “My Account,” “My
   Shopping Bag,” “My Itinerary,”  etc.
7. Use of cookies and caching—the ability to know the customer and
   add personalization will not only aid the customer in their initial visit, but may also encourage them to sign up to save time on future visits.
8. Appropriate use of Web 2.0 tools such as Flash and Ajax—be careful with these technologies. If you make your function dependent on technologies that not everyone has use of you WILL lose that customer base.
9. Make sure that your landing page is relevant to how the customer found you—don’t have a paid search link to a page of your site that doesn’t immediately offer the advertised value.
10. Connect to people—post your awards (such as Customer Service Industry Leader, or Best Use of Web 2.0 Technology), or even include a spot for great customer feedback.

Once you have vetted your landing page on this list you should be well on your way to the conversion trifecta: Clear Relevance, Clear Value, and Clear Call to Action.

You want to connect to your target audience. Your marketing team has probably already extrapolated demographics about your customer. Now you need to compare this data to usage data so you can decide which platforms you should use.

Your web analytics data will also give you some clues as to where your current visitor base is arriving from, but be aware that there are opportunities here that you won’t see, because you aren’t represented or linked to from that platform yet. You might find that organically, your users visit Facebook prior to visiting your website. Or you might find that while Twitter draws a much lower amount of traffic, these visitors are viewing product and converting at a higher rate than some other type of traffic. These insights will be useful for finding new opportunities and identifying what success will look like on new platforms.

Data on web usage, upstream and downstream traffic flow, and demographics can reliably be found from organizations like Pew Research, Nielsen Group, Google Trends, ComScore, and Quantcast. If you are working with a consultant or agency this is where they will be finding their data. All of these providers regularly update their data on time scales ranging from monthly to yearly cycles. Each has an area where they are fairly reliable or offer a unique perspective; you should take advantage of all of their free content. Regardless of your findings it will likely be advantageous to engage multiple platforms.

Some demographics about the major platforms[1]:

• Twitter – 55% female; 45% 18-34; 69% Caucasian; 60% make greater than $60,000/yr
• Facebook – 55% female; 42% 18-34; 75% Caucasian; 62% make greater than $60,000/yr
• LinkedIN – 52% male; 38% 35-49; 83% Caucasian; 69% make greater than $60,000/yr

Bringing this type of data together with consideration of how people access these portals results in Targeted Social Engagement. Once you know who you are talking to you need to consider how they like to be approached. If you enter a new social media platform in a way that breaks their rules of etiquette you will be in for some rough times.

Targeted Social Engagement utilizes demographic, location, and device factors to inform your social marketing strategy.

Individually, each factor represents an important way of looking at your social user data. By layering Device factors (e.g. Mobile, Desktop, or Game Console) with Demographic factors (e.g. Age, Income, and Gender) and Location factors (e.g. Self-report, GPS, or Location Agnostic) you can quickly filter down to the right strategy. When your strategy considers who you are talking to, how you are talking with them, and where they are you will achieve real engagement.

You will be most likely to find the future champions of your brand and the most people open to your message where the important factors overlap. You will also be cultivating your receptive pool for announcements and pointed questions about on site experience.

In May 2011 Jeff and I are releasing User Driven Change: Targeted Social Engagement. We will cover how we choose performance indicators and set-up both a large business and a small business to have an effective social media foundation.

Here are a few examples of websites where you may want to start your investigations. This is far from comprehensive, but this will give you a solid start.

Social Networks:
Facebook	http://www.facebook.com/
LinkedIN	http://www.linkedin.com/
Friendster	http://www.friendster.com/
MySpace	http://www.myspace.com/
Twitter	http://www.twitter.com/
Orkut	http://www.orkut.com/
Ning	http://www.ning.com/
Third Party Interface
TweetDeck	http://www.tweetdeck.com/
Ping.fm	http://www.ping.fm/
Hootsuite	http://www.hootsuite.com/
UberSocial	http://www.ubersocial.com/
Seesmic	http://www.seesmic.com
Geo-location Apps
Foursquare	http://www.foursquare.com
Gowalla	http://www.gowalla.com
Yelp	http://www.yelp.com
Video
YouTube	http://www.youtube.com
Vimeo	http://www.vimeo.com
UStream	http://www.ustream.tv
Photos
SmugMug	http://www.smugmug.com
Flickr	http://www.flickr.com/
Measurement Tools
Quantcast	http://www.quantcast.com
NielsonNetratings	http://www.nielsen.com/
Compare	http://www.compete.com/
Twitalyzer	http://www.twitalyzer.com
Klout	http://www.klout.com
Monitoring services
Rowfeeder	http://www.rowfeeder.com
Scoutlabs	http://www.lithium.com/
Google Alerts	http://www.google.com/alerts
Radian6	http://www.radian6.com/
Trakur	http://www.trakur.com
Social Aggregators
DIGG	http://www.digg.com
Reddit	http://www.reddit.com
Del.ic.io.us	http://www.delicious.com/
StumbleUpon	http://www.stumbleupon.com/
Technorati	http://www.technorati.com

Today almost all of our pre-readers have received a copy of the new book User Driven Change: Targeted Social Engagement. Last year we took a poll. We were overwhelmed by how emphatic the response was for Social Media and Geo-location.

We started out trying to the write the book described in the poll, but over the last 6-months it evolved a bit. It had to. The social media space has seen a lot of changes over the last year. New laws are separating the wired and wireless infrastructures, making mobile a necessary chapter. And new laws are changing the way you are allowed to track.

What you will find in User Driven Change: Targeted Social Engagement:

• Social Media
  • A brief history of how we came from Bulletin Board Systems to  Modern Social Media.
  • Tagging, tracking, and choosing your social media platforms.
• Geo-location
  • How location can be captured.
  • How location can be used.
  • How location interacts with social media and mobile Internet
• Mobile Internet
  • A brief history of mobile growth; the laws and technology that support mobile; and the challenges that mobile creates for tracking.
  • How mobile can be leveraged for you business.
• Local Business Use Case – we layout what we would do with a single location, not yet e-commerce ready, business, including chosen platforms and tracking.
• National Brand Use Case – we layout what we would aim for in a multi-store chain that functions on separate profit-and-loss sheets.
• A Blank Framework - a section where you can fill in the pertinent information about your business.

While we seal up the final bits before publishing we would love to get your thoughts. Particularly, we want to know what portion of the above information would you like as separate digital assets? Would you like the Use Case? The blank framework? Let us know.

Pre-Order Targeted Social Engagement and get a FREE copy of Give Them What They Want

March 14th, 2011 – Pi(e) Day I spoke at Conversion Conference on how you can use the same piece of data for both search engine optimization (SEO) tasks and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

This regular expression, often called RegEx, can be used to separate out your 2 and 3 word phrases coming from search engines:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

That bit of code can be put directly in as a filter or advanced segment in Google Analytics, or used to filter your data in other programs. The import value is to look for 2 and 3 word phrases that drive traffic for your site. I generally use this on data that includes keywords and landing pages, and (when possible) conversion completion and conversion start data.

 

Why 2 and 3 Word Phrases?

They Can Produce Both Volume and Specificity

When you look at your data you will probably find that 50-60% of your organic search engine traffic is coming from 2 and 3 word phrases.

 

They Can Function as Roots for Other Long-tail Terms

Group your filtered data by keyword to find what phrases you can build on immediately.

 

Short Enough That Your Call To Action Can Be Included In The Headline

Think about what your calls to action are. Buy Now, Download Today, Learn More, etc. you want to have 10 to 15 characters (including spaces) to accommodate your CTA. Under filtered phrases that have fewer than 50-characters work well for Title elements for your landing pages and internal site pages, and filtered phrases with fewer that 35-characters will work well for PPC content lines.

 

I suggest that you filter your home page out from the this data set and look at what phrase you are driving traffic to that page. Unless you are a blog you should consider renovating, or creating, your site content for those pages. Phrases that land on your home page that do not include your brand name are often phrase that you lack compelling content for, but are acquiring links for.

You can download the PDF version of Combining SEO and CRO to see more of the ways I use this data.

The last quarter of 2010 held a number of interesting legal and marketplace occurrences that may be changing the Internet in a meaningful way.

• Net Neutrality -  in December 2010 the FCC passed a ruling that considers wired Internet access and wireless access separate entities. This opens the door to use charges and greater restrictions on bandwidth.
• Lawsuits over Local Shared Objects – the mainstream is becoming more savvy and realizing that business isn’t benevolent.
• Browser History Sniffing - browser to website communications need to be improved. Leaking history beyond the most recent, referral site, is problematic on almost every level.
• Do Not Track - a do not track list is bad business. Businesses do need a way to track fraud and bad actors. I think that browser technologies need to carry the burden of creating more effective and useful cookie and tracking scrubbing.

Those of us that work on the web (programmers, developers, analyst, marketers, etc.) need to get out in front of these issues. If we do not openly discuss what these legal breaches and looming legislation mean to our jobs we will have them dictated in a way that leaves us out of an equation that we are responsible for enacting.

Because the mainstream is talking about it now we need to stand up and speak. I like the concept of the WAA Code of Ethics, but I think that it has a wobbly wheel coming out of the gate. So, I proposed a Code of Ethics for Web Marketers and Analysts that is more action oriented and calls out specific genres of technology that threaten the goal of consumer control.

One of the major pressures toward questionable use of data is the fact that many of these pieces of information are very useful to help businesses run intelligently.  Since 2005 I have been working in Conversion Rate Optimization, SEO, and Pay-Per-Click. I have worked in-house, agency, and as business owner and consultant in these spaces. I have used Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Google Analytics, ClickTale, Website Optimizer etc. to analyze the way people act on the web and help businesses understand their customers and react in appropriate ways to better serve them.

I would like to see a greater depth of open dialogue across the halls to keep the Internet healthy and viable. So, I am going to be very public about my thoughts on Net Neutrality, Online Tracking and PII . You should be vocal too. You don’t have to agree with my code of ethics but please read it and consider what you think we should be working toward to keep the web valuable for the greatest variety of people.