On Tuesday the Google Analytics Blog tried to tackle using web analytics to create an optimization plan. I don’t think they really address the type of optimization that each example really needs.

Top Landing Page Analysis

One of their examples of performance indicators that indicate an opportunity is Top Landing Page. They point out that a high bounce rate on a top landing page is a loss of business. Yes, but you need to figure out why these people don’t engage your content. If you are optimizing a page that has high entrance value and high bounce rate the first thing that you should check are your referral stats. Social Media is notorious for serving low quality leads, look for Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. in your referrals. The other possibility is a slightly off search result. When you achieve ranking for a phrase that you don’t really fulfill you can get and influx less engaged users. Often this is the result of a nebulous concept, something that can be taken in multiple ways, like the word modern or bass.

If you are getting a lot of social media traffic you have two choices: add a special message for the refer or look for a link opportunity to capitalize on the reason the the social media portal is referring to you. Either way this is an occurrence that is largely outside of your control (you can steer it) but, for the most part, it is self-correcting or short lived.

If you are getting mis-targeted search traffic you should be either clarifying your content or providing a link to more appropriate content to the alternative definition. This may increase your exit percentage from the page, but it will also increase your search indicators by not bouncing back to the search engine, and if you support the alternative it can be an opportunity to drive a visitor deeper into your site.

Conversion Path Analysis

Google’s second example of a red-flag is a frequent exit point from the conversion path. In the specific example that is given in the Google post the exit point is the final step of a three step process. The likely culprit is a loss of trust. Any test should start with possible miscommunication on the page or elements that may introduce friction to completing the conversion.

The example they give is e-commerce 95% of people Login/Register –> 96% Fill Out Payment Information –> 61% Confirm. Clearly the people are well qualified at conversion start, but something breaks drastically. That usually indicates a loss of trust. The solution for this problem could simply be removing the third step– and replacing it with a user prompt.

High Exits

There are two types of exits: satisfied exits and unsatisfied exits. A satisfied exit is the result of a visitor finding what they want and leaving, an unsatisfied exit means they gave up. If we stick with the e-commerce example here are three reasons you may have a high exit rate from a popular item: low stock, back-stock, high price. The author of the Google post posits that your copy may not be persuasive, that is true, but it could be that your total offer isn’t persuasive– not in their size or not a competitive price. If you are in this situation check to see where your competitors are on price and stock of the offending item.

Pair Your Metrics

In each of the examples you can use a paired metric to get some more insight into your problem and choose a test that is in the right neighborhood of you potential problem– e.g. Bounces and Referrer, Exits and Time on Page, or Exits and New vs. Return Customers. Taking a little broader view on the problem will let you test more efficiently.

There is a ‘recent’ trend in user driven content as main content for sites where you might least expect it these days. Sure, iGoogle sorta got in early on this by allowing users to customize their Google page by adding widgets for things like gmail, YouTube, RSS feeds, etc. YouTube itself is mostly a user generated site; users upload their video and other users search and watch.

Sites like Digg and del.icio.us allow users to post news links, etc. from anywhere about anything you can possibly think of and thus created a constantly updating content page for these sites. (As well as leave an unlimited amount open air comments that could either be accepted or rejected by the general user population.)

Myspace and Facebook are ‘user generated’ pages as well.  However, for this blog, I’m considering that these sites are mostly used for ‘personal use’ and to find and convey information to a mass audience. Twitter is a better example of user driven content that many “non-friend” people can see.  I can’t remember where I read this (possibly scobleizer’s blog), but just recently I also read a very interesting idea about twittering out a question and then using the responding answers to create a blog. Thus even blogging has become user/reader generated.

I’ve also recently stumbled upon a sports site http://www.rootzoo.com/ .   Here users can actually get paid for writing an article if the reach a certain readership level. Recently Skittles.com came up with the idea to have twitter / facebook takeover their landing page. As you can see, user generated content is everywhere today.

I’m sure many companies cringe at the idea of allowing users to rule their website. In many ways, the idea of allowing user generated content goes against what web analytics is used to. Sure we preach that you should make changes based off of user data, but the website ‘owner’/ designer should still have complete control over what is actually published on the site. Right?

On the other hand, if more and more companies shift toward a ‘user generated’ model will this become the norm or the bar for all other websites? What does (or would) user generated content do for your customer base?

You might have the ‘group think effect’. For example, the Digg community (no offense to you Digg’ers) is highly critical of anything that is not deemed cool by the Digg power users. Ok maybe this is a harsh observation, but you get my point. I love the idea of Digg and still get many stories and links from this site (or other similar sites). But the commentary on many stories is juvenile in my opinion. It calls into question of whether the truly good stories are being passed.

Sites will be highly subject to their users if they allow user generated content. Skittles already experienced this with the twitter version of their site and shut this down. It appears that at the time of post of this blog that they have also shut off the facebook version of their home page, however it appears they now have a YouTube version of their home page up.

If you have a very loyal customer base maybe you will have an easier time converting new customers if you have a strong user generated area on your website. I don’t have any examples of this, but would love to hear from your and your site if this has been a success.

I’ve recently seen that several analytics companies have been able to figure out a way to capture your branding terms being mentioned on platforms such as Twitter. I think this is a great first step in building a branding metric into your analytics tool. Sure there are the qualitative aggregators such as Nielson that give you a ‘poll result’ showing how recognizable your brand is. But in today’s analytics, I’d rather see a concrete number. If you could set up a report that would list out how many times a certain brand term was mentioned on a particular site, this would give you some sort of idea of your brand penetration for a particular social network. (For example: For Wednesday 3/25 “user driven change” was mentioned 140 times on Twitter, 1400 times on Facebook, and 125 times on LinkedIn). Further if you could compare this number to your competitors you’d get some sort of understanding of where your company rates in relation to a specific network.

Some of you got into Web Analytics because of your background in statistics, some may have come in from a marketing perspective, some from computing in general, but I would wager that most did not grow up thinking, “I want to be a web analyst when I grow up!” (Though the “Net Generation”  may have kids that say this) Nor do many of you have a degree or much less a certificate in ‘Web Analytics’. (Though you could get one if you so chose to do so: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/education/ for example)

This is by no fault of your own. Web Analytics, for as much as it has grown in the past few years, is really still in its infantile stages. Ok, maybe we’re in the pre-adolescent stages, but we’ve still got a long way to go and a lot to learn before we can be a revered discipline like physics, or algebra (IMO).

The exciting thing is that we can continue to build Web Analytics and to grow it into whatever we think/want it to be. However, if you are just getting started into Web Analytics, here is my cheat sheet for things that you can do to improve your understanding. You do not necessarily have to follow this list in sequential order.

1) Read some books

As Carlos mentioned in his previous post, there are a ton of books that you can read about Web Analytics, Website Optimization, Web Design, Search Engine Marketing, etc. So get out there and find some books about what you want to know about. If you are a beginner to intermediate analyst, try our book!

2) Read some blogs

Obviously if you are reading this you are probably already scavenging the web for blogs. My favorites include, but are not limited to: Occam’s Razor, Web Analytics Demystified , Google Blog, Mashable (for social media info) , Scobleizer (for the tech geek in me)  , and for my SEO fix: SEOmoz blog or Carlos’ $100 SEO blog. There are TONS of blogs and websites out there so don’t limit yourself to these. Google is your friend, so do some research! You also may want to utilize Google Reader to organize your reading.

3) Learn/Know your industry or client’s vertical

If you are an analyst for a company, you had better know what industry you are in. You should become a master of who your competition is and what they are doing. This will make #7 easier for you to accomplish. If you are at an agency, you may not have the time to become a master of each of your client’s industries (unless all of your clients are in the same industry) but you should know a little about each and be able to use this info as you make your recommendations.

4) Know your customer or your client’s customer

I cannot stress this enough. You cannot get Web Analytics unless you get your customer, bottom line. #3 works hand in hand with this. I do not mean that you should just know what the data tells you (though this is one key component). You need to be a customer yourself and navigate your website as if you were someone who has never been on the web before; someone who has been online but would not be considered a power user; and someone who is a power user. Think like a customer and you’ll be able to analyze your data better and make better recommendations.

5) Master your analytics platform

I hesitate to say that any one of these keys is more powerful than the other because I’m a big believer in all of these. However, I will say that if you can master your analytics platform, your job will be much easier. Too often for beginner and intermediate Web Analysts they spend hours figuring out what data they should use to analyze their site. Instead you should be able to quickly capture the data that you need and spend a good amount of time analyzing it and a large amount of time figuring out what it means. Mastering your analytics platform will allow you to spend more time analyzing and making recommendations and not just reporting data like the squirrel (love this metaphor from Avinash Kaushik). http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/04/the-action-dashboard-an-alternative-to-crappy-dashboards.html

6) Use dashboards to convey easily digestible data

The link in #5 applies to this point as well. When measuring your Key Performance Metrics, you can probably utilize a recurring dashboard that you can send out as self explanatory information (though questions from your audience are always a nice welcome!) I really like Avinash’s action dashboard examples and I break it down like this: Simplistic data, a graphic version, a text summary, and recommendations. You don’t have to specifically follow these rules, but make something that maybe even the receptionist can understand (not calling receptionists ignorant, just using an extremely unlikely person interested in your data). Keep it Simple Stupid!

7) Make recommendations, don’t just spew back data

I may have beaten this topic to death by now. Data is great for analysts. I often  joke that when I look at websites it’s like The Matrix for me.  I don’t see links, I see how many people click on those links, or even what area is the ‘hottest area’ on the page, kinda like an internal heat map in my mind.  I will admit that I really live for the data…but your audience that you will present your analysis to probably don’t get that analytical. They want to see a number and then want to know what the number means.

8 ) Look for key trends and make note of them for benchmarking

As you grow in your analytics knowledge, you should keep a running log of commonalities and baseline metrics to benchmark new and / or specific project to. Obviously you can look at the week over week or month over month or year over year data and determine a positive or negative change, but you should always have some sort of idea of what the results should look like compared to what you’ve seen in the past.

9) Join a forum and participate

Web 2.0 and beyond is making great use of social networking. As an Analyst you need to understand what social networking is all about. While you might have a Facebook account or a personal Twitter that you share funny stories on, you should think about using these tools and others for learning more about Web Analytics or anything related to your job. There are Yahoo discussion groups, there are Meetup.com groups, there might be a Web Analytics Wednesday event in your area, or look for some other type of networking event. The point is you can only learn so much by reading and doing. When you start to share and talk with others you can learn new things that you may not have ever learned (and in a shorter amount of time probably).

10) Learn about “other tools”

Quantitative data should be backed up by Qualitative data such as customer feedback, opinions, customer forums, etc. As well, talk to your coworkers in your department and other departments. There might be books or websites that they use for their job that might help inform your analysis or you understanding of your company/clients/competitors. As well, #8 might help you discover some pretty great alternative tools.

11) Write a book!

Ok, maybe this is extreme and / or you don’t want that type of attention. Maybe just start with a personal blog that you send to your co-workers that gives ‘unofficial’ thoughts about your job and your findings. I can say that the research that I did to write a book and start this blog has helped me grow significantly in my understanding of web analytics (and of course I thought I already knew it all). If you would like to know more about how Carlos and I wrote our, book send an email through our contact page or leave a comment at http://www.udpublishing.com/

Fast Company recently posted the top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Web 2.0 . The simplified list is this:

10) Kayak
9) Yelp
8 ) Myspace
7) Ning
6) FriendFeed
5) Meebo
4) Twitter
3) Digg
2) Facebook
1) Google

Fast Company gives sound reasoning behind each selection and this blog is not going to debate the merits of these companies and their status in the top 10. But it got me thinking, what really is Web 2.0?

Let me back up for a second. I’ve been to many conferences, listened to many webinars and currently read several blog posts on Web 2.0. So as an “advanced” user I get what people are selling as Web 2.0. Its – making your site “more fancy” and more interactive and more getting your customer involved and using social media for marketing. Right?

But there’s more to it than that. The link above to Tim O’Reilly’s website is a great point of reference for a new or intermediate analyst or marketer who is just finding out about this “Web 2.0” business. The most amazing thing about what is said in Mr. O’Reilly’s document is that was written in 2005 and most of the concepts were developed in 2003 and 2004.
This guy literally wrote the book on how to build a Web 2.0 site. Now look through the below map/chart and compare what’s written to the above ten sites. I would say that all ten of these sites fit into what was written back in 2003-2005.

(Taken from: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html#mememap )

Further, O’Reilly breaks down Web 1.0 as what Netscape was and Web 2.0 what Google is (please read the text below the Meme Map in the linked article for a more robust description of this). So I guess it’s not surprising that Google is the #1 Innovative Web 2.0 company.

My favorite part of O’Reilly’s text is on page two section 2 where he talks about collective intelligence. As a web analyst, the most important piece of what he says Web 2.0 is… is the ability to collect and using the user information to inform your website.  Our book, User Driven Change, gives you four scenarios where you can apply user information to make improvements to your website, and as well collect post-change information to make sure that the changes you made are indeed improvements. While our book probably does not have the 3-5 year futuresense that Mr. O’Reilly had, several of our readers have said that there are lots of great nuggets of information in there and some moment of pure genius.  So check it out!

So now that we know what Web 2.0 is, where do we go from here?  Some marketers and analysts would say that “Web 2.0” as a term is now dead.  This actualy spurred my thoughts on “what is Web 2.0″. While many say that it started with the web sites that survived the Dotcom bubble bust, others say it is the sites that sprung forth from these sites and / or any new sites that popped up after the bubble bust. I think this strays to a point I could make about whether the marketers or the designers control what is Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and beyond, but I will leave that for another discussion.

I do think that Web 2.0 is not dead or dying at least not in the design sense… mutating possibly; transforming – always. This is actually part of the definition of Web 2.0 according to O’Reilly. So will we ever get to Web 3.0 or beyond? Only if we get more Mr. O’Reilly’s to envision what’s next.

I do envision what Web 3.0 could look like, but I won’t reveal my secrets just yet.  You have to ponder though, if Google is Web 2.0 will they survive into 3.0, or will they go the way of Netscape (RIP)?
1 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
2 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/14/the-death-of-web-20/

credit: kainet

Over the last few months I have had a theme in my posts. Something that I have talked around– but not said directly. Successful search marketing campaigns are not built on tactics; they are built on strategy.

In Advanced SEO Tips & Techniques I made a tongue-in-cheek review of advanced SEO definitions and presented the case that any advice that is tactical doesn’t qualify as advanced. Many people struggle or get only temporary success because they have no strategy, only a few tactics (tricks) that they are throwing at their site.

Tactics

Copywriting, image use, external links, internal linking, social media participation, affiliates sites, etc

Strategy

The combination of tactics that you employ to accomplish your goal.

Putting your strategy together

Step 1) Establish your goal.

Your web analytics, revenue model, and value proposition all serve as the foundation for your strategy. Identifying the part of your marketing that is struggling helps you set your priorities and definition of success. Use this data to inform your keyword research.

Step 2) Assess your resources.

Do you have an advertising budget? Do you have a writer, a programmer, or a social butterfly?

Step 3) Choose your tactics.

Start with your strengths. It is fine to jump in with both feet, but start where you can make some headway.

Step 4) Identify your threats.

You will have to change course midstream. The search engines change, your competitors change, and the searchers change. Be prepared with what you will do down the road. It is important to keep adding to marketing, even if it is just revisiting your early steps.

Why is strategy important?

Search marketing in still a new competition. The tools, tactics, and landscape are changing quickly. Every year we get a new area to compete over on the web: Google, Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, ad nauseum. The factors that contribute to success are becoming so diverse that you need to be more concerned with the larger implications of your work. When one channel gets noisy you need to be prepared to shift focus into something different (even if it isn’t new).

Good marketing has more to do with game theory than with knowing about the new start-ups.

credit: Mareen Fischinger

No, PPC competitions is not the same as SEO competition.

Let’s use my name, Carlos del Rio, as example.

Organic Search Competition

Organic content is a relatively slow moving target. As time passes there is increasing competition, and even stale content continues to compete for placement. The mass of accumulated links can keep out-of-date information high in search queries.

Assessing your organic competition involves looking at the natural results for your phrase and assessing the strength of your competitors:

1.) How many results are there?

Google reports about 2,320,000 results for Carlos del Rio.

2.) What major sites are involved?

• Amazon
• Flikr
• Linked In
• Facebook
• Emory University
• Center for Disease Control
• Travel Sites
• CNN

3.) Identifiable competition

• Me
• An AIDS researcher
• A doctor in Massachusetts
• A real estate agent in Colorado
• A painter
• An author
• A photographer
• A mission in northern California

4.) What visible links do they have?

Sites range from 700 to 79,000,000 individual pages range from 0 to 482 visible links.

5.) How optimized are the titles?

Most of the titles in the broad search are clearly different. Many of the URLs contain only part of the phrase, or none of it.

6.) How much is anchor text affecting the results?

An inanchor: search finds only 73 results. This combined with the low visible links to pages means that links are not a major factor in this search.

Results are largely driven by content, and not links, means that entering the space is fairly easy. However, there are many directly competing entities and large amount of competing content — so your results will likely be volatile at first.

PPC Competion

1.) How many competitors show up in a manual search?

As of today there are 5 regular competitors for Carlos del Rio: Travel, Medical, Painting, Shoes, People Search. None of the results are show location; so they are probably not geo targeted.

2.) What competition does the advertising portal show?

Google rates Carlos del Rio as a very low competition phrase; this means there probably are not a large number of regonalized/geo-targeted competitors.

3.) What search volume is there?

Google reports an average of 1600 searches per month and an average cost of $1.42 for first place.

Entering a paid space with 6 competitors and only 53 searches per day is rather bleak. In general only 1 in 5 clicks are on a paid listing that means you have a total of 7 ads competing for 10 clicks a day.

A Different Phrase

Compare that to the search space for Stephen Fry:

There are 2 million results for Stephen Fry; 1.5 million of them show up of inanchor: searches. Stephen is an author, a comedian, and an actor. Content about him holds every spot in the top 20 of Google, every result has the full query in it. Site links range from 114,000 to 400,000,000+ visible links and individual pages range from 1,100 to 114,000 visible links. In spite of a lower amount of results the competition to appear in this particular search result is significantly higher than ranking for my own name.

Now for PPC. Manual search finds only one advertiser. Google reports high competition, 33,100 searches per day and an average cost of $0.40 for first place. In spite of AdWords claim your real competition for clicks is extremely low (considering more than 1000 searches per day and no visible competition) for this phrase and your cost per click is relatively low.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of what you are looking at and what it means when you are assessing your competion

credit: Hamama Hareb [ DaDooDa ]

There is a major group of on the web that has very strong opinions, unrestrained passion, and the willingness to plaster the web & your company headquarters with their disapproval.Who is this powerhouse of web savvy movers? New moms.

In November Motrin put out a video implying that baby-wearing is fashionable. The worlds moms were not amused. Try searching Twitter for #motrinmoms. Twitter, YouTube, and blogs galore blasted Motrin; calling them callous for portraying a mom who wants to carry her baby but gets back pain.

In December Facebook decided that breasts are breasts, even if they have a baby attached. And the moms went to the streets. Over 78,000 breastfeeds have joined a Facebook group to petition against Facebook’s no breast rules. The moms feel that there should be an exception to the terms of service on the web to consider breastfeeding to be different than other breast-baring activities.

I think the coverage of these issues has missed something very important point of these issues: Who you are sending the message to vs. Who you are writing your message about.

Motrin’s advertising is about anyone who will buy Motrin, in this case women, and is about women who want to be fashionable. Their choice of baby carrying because it is a more noble fashion choice than stiletto heels. But, no one wants to abide implications that a baby is a self-serving decision. These moms responded by filling the Internet with #motrinmoms,  #motingate, and numorous blogs etc. that took a brand that many people have low recognition with a put it in front of millions of eyes that probably found the advertisement more funny than offensive. The moms also filled the Internet with endorsements and reviews of baby carriers. Many of you are probably unaware that the makers of Motrin (Johnson & Johnson) were sued over possible side-effects of Childrens Motrin. Search Motrin Baby now. You probably won’t find the lawsuit. Creating a huge buzz and appologizing about a far less dire issue concerning babies has greatly deflated a former reputation issue while getting their brand out to a lot of people. Even though Motrin has offended the people their ad was about they have made a major accomplishiment in the column of general brand visibility.

When it comes to breastfeeding the it is not the big brand that is pushing a message, it is the niche community. Facebook is huge on the web; there are 1000′s of searches a day, and the news search for the last week is topped by breastfeeding. While the community is sending a message about Facebook they are sending a message to moms. Every article I have seen stresses the World Health Organization findings and recommendations about breastfeeding. For at least the near future the number of people exposed to breastfeeding are multiplied many-fold. Facebook, like most social media providers, is not obligated to police their content, but are well within their terms to ban and censor in anyway they see fit. They are not sending a message by enforcing their terms; still one group has turn a rather small act of a virtual breastfeed-in into a major social media win for their cause.

I urge you to think about who you are talking about and who you are talking to — relize one may be at the expense of the other. Also, don’t make mom jokes.

After hopping on as an early adopter of Friendster and MySpace I was dubious of Facebook. But after weeks and weeks of hearing everyone talk about it, and repeated “I’ll Facebook You. What YOU aren’t on Facebook.” I have given in and built a profile.

One of the very first thing that the system introduced to me was fliers — pay per click banner advertising. I am intrigued, to say the least, but I am also a bit skeptical. Of the large social network sites Facebook seems to be the most actively monetized — with the gifts, fliers, and apps — but also the most actively used in my experience. I am curious why the giving of credit card information to a type of site that is synonymous with hacked accounts doesn’t send off alarms in most people’s head.

I think that MySpace has sent me five Macy’s Gift Card in two weeks from hacked accounts. I don’t really care about that, unwanted advertising is to be expected on the Internet. But every person who has seen these ads, or a phishing scam posing as PayPal, should realize that having a Facebook account hacked will be far more devastating. The combination of credit card information and the feed of changes potentially could make major headaches for anyone who loses control of their account.