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.

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.

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.

In our latest book, User Driven Change: Targeted Social Engagement, we discuss the different types of emerging media and how you can use the data from social, mobile and geo-location to inform your marketing campaign decisions as well as changes to your website. A common problem that most people have, is how to classify tablets. Specifically, are they mobile devices, or are they considered on the same grounds as a pc/laptop? While our book addresses the larger picture, I wanted to give you a snapshot specific to tablets in this post.

Most tablets seem to perform somewhere in between a smartphones and “netbooks” (a light weight laptop). Tablets have the same challenges that smartphones do in regards to connection speed since they typically rely on a wi-fi or 3G connection. However, because their screen size is much larger than most smartphones they don’t have as many challenges when it comes to usability of your full website. Sure the iPad isn’t compatible with Flash, but if you’ve built most of your site using dhtml, Ajax, or some other architecture, chances are the visitors’ experience is no different than if they were browsing on a PC or laptop.Thus the reason that sales and conversion from tablets is much larger than smartphones for many companies.

That said, many people still don’t know what to make of tablets. Both from a business perspective and from a consumer’s point of view. As a business, I’m still evaluating whether I can increase my 2% conversion rate that I’m seeing from tablet visitors by paring my website down a bit. As a consumer, I struggle with the practicality of owning a tablet. I already own a laptop and I have a powerful smartphone that can play games and movies, so what benefit would I get from having a tablet.

I’ve noticed that in my office, some co-workers bring their tablets to meetings with them and some bring laptops. The tablet carriers manage to get around much easier, but most do nothing more than use the tablet to maybe browse a website that we may be evaluating. They don’t use the tablet for note taking, or any other project management capability that you might be able to do on your laptop, while in a meeting.

I think from a business professional / consumer perspective a tablet would make a lot of sense to have those types of capabilities. Basically some sort of lightweight project management system, or just an office suite that allows me the ability to utilize my tablet but at the same time not have something as cumbersome as a laptop that I have to carry around the office.

From a general consumer perspective, I often hesitate to use my laptop simply because unless in the “hibernate” state it takes 30+ seconds or so to load up the screen. A tablet is almost instantly turned on and ready, so I can see the benefit of browsing on my tablet. I also think that if I’m more comfortable with the experience, I’m more likely to buy, so if the tablet provides a better experience, I’d buy something online using the tablet. Admittedly, as of today, I’ve only bought “Groupons” from my smartphone, no tangible products have been purchased from my smartphone.

Google AdMob recently conducted a survey to find out what people are using their tablets for. 84% of respondents said that they used their tablets for gaming, while only 78% said they used it to research info and 71% said that they used it for email activity. I don’t think that there’s anything shocking about those numbers, since again I think consumers are still trying to figure out what to do with their tablet and as well, gaming on smartphones and tablets is a very hot trend right now. Additionally, when you look at the evolution of the smartphone or rather cell phones, they originally started out as an actual mobile phone, used to call someone. Then texting became the big thing. Then mobile internet became the predominant activity on a phone. Now, geo-social activities and apps are the latest hot trend for mobile phones. So, I’m confident that the tablet will evolve over time.

Some analytics companies roll tablet data into a “mobile” data set. I think this is a mistake, especially since according to the survey, 82% of all users said that they primarily use their tablet at home. While I find this number a bit shocking, I think it goes back to the evolution process and I think soon that number will drop as consumers begin to explore other uses for their tablet. Further, I’m sure the survey question was – Where do you predominantly use your tablet? – with a restricted single answer slot; if the word “predominantly” been taken out and had the answer been a multiple choice, it’s possible that this number may have been lower and that other choices such as work may have been more significant.

So, the question of how do you measure tablet data still remains. If you only have one site and are looking to determine if optimizing for smartphones/tablets is necessary, my recommendation is this: your full data set will give you an overall benchmark. Next create a segment that includes only PC/Desktop visitors; also create a segment that includes PC/Desktop and tablet visitors. Then create segments to show your tablet only visitors, and a segment to show your smartphone only visitors (I recommend not including feature phones in this segment).

Here is a good thought for how you might segment your data:

• Full Data Set
• Desktop and Laptop
• Laptop and Tablet
• Tablet
• Smartphone

I would also recommend knowing the breakout of technical properties of each group – browser size, browser type, connection speed. You will likely find that these segments give you a good thumbnail of how your business should treat tablets.

If you wanted to be picky, you could decide to optimize your full site to ensure that it fits on the smaller screen size of a tablet and reducing the page weight may help to increase page response time on all PC/Lapttop/Tablets, and that may prove to increase your numbers for that group. However, you may decide that the tablet group(s) prove to be efficient enough and thus you might want to focus on your smartphone optimization.

By creating a site that is optimized for a smartphone – reducing images, and content, creating easy to click links, and a streamlined navigation process, you will want to see your smartphone key metrics increase. You may not see significant changes to your overall benchmark but you will probably start to notice some small lift in those numbers as well. You’ll want to create a smart re-direct that sends smartphone visitors to your mobile optimized site and allows tablet visitors to continue viewing the main site. I would recommend adding a link that allows a tablet visitor the option to view the site in a mobile optimized format.

 

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.

If you haven’t heard, and more importantly if you haven’t yet voted for the WAA 2011 awards, you should do that today (since it’s the last day).

There are 5 Categories this year:

Client/Practitioner of the Year (individual or group)

Most Influential Agency / Vendor (group)

Most Influential Industry Contributor (individual)

Web Analytics Rising Star (individual)

Innovator/Technology of the Year (individual/group)

Here is a full list of each category and each nominee: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/?page=awards2011_nominees

Carlos was nominated for the Web Analytics Rising Star award and based on his competition, I think he’s truly as deserving of the award as anyone on the list. I apparently am not the only one who thinks that. April Wilson (whom I have never met) feels like Carlos is one of the top three individuals on the list of Rising Stars. Thank you April, for your voice of support!

To reiterate some of the main points of why Carlos is nominated for this award: he attended three major conferences in 2010. He also hosted a slew of smaller gathering Web Analytics events where participation ranged from 5-30. He’s also very active in many of the Analytics forums including: #CROchat on Twitter, and the Web Analytics forum on LinkedIN. Carlos also finds a way to publish whitepapers and maintain this blog, in addition to writing his second book, which is all on top of maintaining his daily consulting job. Finally Carlos is always open to mentoring and advising younger analysts and giving them his two-cents worth.

So if you have not voted go vote and if you like Carlos and/or think he’s deserving of this award, vote for him!

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.

credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

Here is a five step plan for kicking off your SEO campaigns. These are the processes that I go through in building an SEO Strategy for my clients:

Step 1 – Plan

• Create a list of your competitors and phrases that describe your business, product or services.
• Use web traffic analysis software (Google Analytics, Omtiture, WebTrends, etc.) to set benchmarks for search engine traffic and referring sites.
• Create a list of sites that rank for your desired starter keyword set and for your brand name.

Step 2 – Research

• Catalog the server set-up, language coding and site technologies used for the site.
• Investigate link profiles using tools like http://www.opensiteexplorer.com or http://www.majesticseo.com. Compile a list of sites that are linking to you and to your competitors.
• Create a benchmark of competitor performance with data from multiple sources like Compete.com, Quantcast, SEOmoz.org, SpyFu, SEMRush, etc. [These sites are going to give you a thumbnail. Most of these sites have incomplete data. Use their data on your site to get a sense of the difference between their estimates and reality.]
• Create a keyword list using WordTracker, Wordstream, AdWords and AdCenter tools etc. Create priorities using search volume and search result competition.
• Use tools like Webmaster Central and advanced search operators to benchmark search engine crawl frequency and depth.
• Catalog current usage of Titles, URLs, Image Tags, Internal Link Usage, and Site Architecture.

Step 3 – Define Success

• Choose goal keywords and phrases.
• Define traffic and link building goals based on link profile analysis and search volume of prized keywords.
• Define strategy for content creation and link building
• Choose tracking methods for search engine traffic, site ranking, and site indexation.
• Build segmentation of search traffic into your web analysis reports.
• Set review schedule.

Step 4 – Optimize

• Implement architecture, URL, and internal linking projects.
• Implement content changes (page-by-page changes).
• Begin link building.
• Begin social media linking and external content creation.

Step 5 – Track and Renovate (every 30-90 days)
Dependent on  the volume of traffic that you began with you should be setting your milestones at different places. If you have high traffic (>10,000 unique visitors per month) you may want to renovate your plan monthly. But if you are a low traffic site you may not have any value in change over the first 90-days. In either case you should be revisiting your keyword research every 90-days to make sure that you aren’t missing any new opportunities.

Occam’s razor states that “the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one.” As an analyst I’ve tried to live by that principle as often as possible. However I think it’s time to take it a step further.

The simplest way to get the simplest answer is most likely the correct way to answer it.

I feel this is especially true in analytics. If your “analysis” time consists of this: 25% planning your research, 50% figuring out how to pull the data, 20% pulling the data and finally 5% analyzing it, then I feel that you are doing it wrong! However, this may not be your fault. Maybe you do not know any better. Maybe you have no choice because your analytics provider is inadequate. Either way, the time for change is now.

Do you know your analytics program like the back of your hand? You should. While I will contend that a Web Analytics certification should not consist solely of being an expert on using a platform, you should know your platform inside and out. In fact, it would do you some good to know a little about each of the major platforms out there. If you are an analyst at an agency, you probably have the luxury of at least occasionally using multiple analytics services. Most platforms offer some sort of certification program that will get you to at least an 85% understanding of their complete product, and should make you an “expert” of that platform.  If you are an employee at a company and only have access to one platform, you can very easily inquire about other platforms at a WAW or WAA event.

• Knowing your analytics package alone can help you determine the simplest way to find the simplest answer.
• Identifying what your analytics package lacks will help you figure out new ways of obtaining or slicing your data to get at your answers.
• Utilizing more than one resource for analyzing and conveying will help you to generate more thoughtful and useful recommendations

Is there a consistent problem that you run into where you have to perform special actions in the analytics platform to generate the right data? Consider downloading a raw data dump and write a macro in excel that will manipulate the data into the proper fashion that you need to answer your question. Further, if you import your analytics data into an in-house database, but get stuck on how to create a proper output there are plenty of data visualization reference guides that can help you create easy to understand, but comprehensive charts.

Does your boss require a power point presentation for every analysis? Templatize the PowerPoint and write macros so that the data is easily inserted from excel into PowerPoint. Further, try creating a robust excel document that will cater to the things that your boss typically requires in your analysis and present the analysis in excel to her or him. You might surprise her with how clean the report looks and how much more presentation can fit on the screen or sheet of paper through excel.

The point is, simplifying what you do so that you can focus on output rather than input will give you exponential amounts of time to drive the output home with the decision makers so that your insights lead to real and actual change in a shorter amount of time. Just because it’s a simplified approach does not make your output any less actionable. In fact if you start allowing your “analysis” time to be: 25% planning your research; 10% figuring out how to pull the data; 10% pulling the data; 30% analyzing the data and finally 25% creating your final output, you should have a much more profound and insightful analysis. I will admit that I don’t know if that is the exact formula for success but I believe it is better than my previous example above.

I’d love to hear more of your “simplification” tips for figuring out short cuts in your analytics program, easier ways to pull data, easier ways to massage the data, and easier ways to create an actionable output.

credit: Arvind

During today’s #CROchat one of the questions was about quality metrics:

Q3: Should all CRO/SEO objectives be quantifiable, or can we include quality objectives?

Yes, you can use qualitative objectives. However, you need to put some time into creating clear concepts and simple language in your communication with other departments or your client (stake holders). Defining quality often requires using synthesized performance indicators. These are pairs, or groups, of quantifiable metrics that indicate intent through their relation to one another.

Justin Alerico describes some of the metrics that can indicate quality:

Quantifiable measures of quality: via @inflatemouse time spent; pages/visit; average order value; average LTV [Lifetime Value]

The important factor in using these measures is properly tying them to your overall goals. Any one of the above metrics can be good or bad depending on context. This is why they need a partner to help illuminate their meaning.

Let’s use an example with Average Order Value (AOV). Most business units will hold to  AOV only being good if it is going up. But, if your goals are toward units sold, transactions, or customer satisfaction as a quality you might want AOV to go down.

If you have a goal of simplifying your purchase process you might want to see both AOV and Time to Purchase go down. This can indicate a qualitatively better experience for your visitors. Simplicity often encourages higher frequency of purchase, but smaller purchases. So, even though one of your monetary indicators is decreasing it is an indicator that your overall campaign goal is working.

If you have a goal of brand loyalty you might also look for decreasing AOV. Pairing a decreasing AOV with an increasing Return Visitor percentage and/or Conversion Starts can indicate a qualitative positive of growing your continual engagement. By building a new group of loyal customers you may be shifting buying patterns.

When you attempt to track qualities (loyalty, satisfaction, etc.) you need to go to greater lengths in defining your success and creating common language with stake holders to decenter the conversations from single metrics, or over-valuing changes in monetary metrics.