We’re seeing a trend of blog posts that overpromise and under deliver.  For example, say the title of the blog is: What you need to know about Web Analytics in 2010; but when you read it the gist is – you need to figure out your KPI’s and your traffic sources and decide what analytics provider is best for you (and we can tell you how to do all of this if you contact us now).  Rubbish!  Tell me something!

I challenge you to go through any and all of our blogs and find where we leave you hanging on a point and tell you that the only way to find out more is to buy something.  I feel slighted when I think I’m going to read something interesting and it turns out to just give me a bland answer and then tell me if I really want to know the answer I have to pay for it. In this day and age, knowledge and information can only get better if we share our ideas with one another.

I’m not saying its wrong to ask for subscribers or leads or even to ask for money for your services.  But even the most established thought leaders will give you something that you can learn from and keep you coming back to our website to learn more.  We all have to get paid, I get that.  But if you really want me to read something that you wrote and further trust you enough to devote a subscription to you or pay for your services, you’ve got to at least give me something tangible that I can say, “Ok, that is an interesting point, tell me more.”

It is entirely possible that I may take for granted some of the elementary stuff that certain bloggers write about and pass it off as negligible information.  But I think for the most part I can smell I sucker blog when I read one.  It is my pure hope that our blog NEVER becomes this.  We strive to give you enough detail that you either want more information, or you challenge our thoughts and give us something to think about.

We can’t build a community if we don’t openly share our real thoughts and ideas; whether it be web analytics, SEO, online marketing, offline marketing, social media whatever, just give us a real, tangible sniff of what your thinking and I can guarantee your end results will be better.  Continue writing drivel that we essentially can say, “No, duh” to and then ask us to subscribe or pay for more information and we’re just going to look elsewhere.  We’re in an interesting time where information is more readily at our fingertips than ever. Whether we like it or not we’re becoming more intellectual because of the internet.

You might think that I’m crazy because I am the blogger and you are the reader.  But I’m also a reader, a consumer of information.  I am an expert in what the customer wants (at least I think I am, please correct me if I’m wrong!), thus I’m trying to write this from your point of you.

You might say, “Jeff, you haven’t really said anything other than, other blogs suck, so what are you gonna do about it?”  Our goal is to try to find 1  blog a week that we feel are inadequate and don’t live up to their billing and try to answer whatever is they failed to answer.  That said, we fully welcome you to help hunt down blogs that you feel were unsatisfactory to you.  Send them to us and we’ll see if we can give you a more detailed answer.  FOR FREE!

Shocking right?

For a look at what we feel is an unsatisfying blog: click here

Carlos wrote a brief follow up which he posed in our question of the week on this blog which you can read here.

For a look at what we feel is a pretty satisfying blog: click here

We’ll start our more thorough reviews next week!

This is an excerpt taken from Making the Most of Twitter: Search, Tools and Analytics. Visit our download page to buy the whole 25-page article.

This post covers in-depth how to use the search function to monitor Twitter. This will help you to find the people that you want to talk to and to understand the fast moving torrent of information and thought that Twitter provides.

One of your primary opportunities for leveraging Twitter is their own site search (search.twitter.com). Once you are familiar with this feature you will have better understanding of what third party tools are working with, why there are limitations and a clearer sense of what Twitter is building toward.

Twitter Search works very much like the search engines you are used to (Google, Bing, etc.); it employs 16 operators, or additives that affect the search’s meaning.

Operator	Meaning
No Operator –> user driven	Containing both “user” AND “driven”
Quotation Marks –> “user driven“	Containing the exact phrase “user driven”.
OR –> user OR driven	Containing either “user” or “driven” (or both).
Minus –> user -driven	Containing “user” but not “driven”.
Hash –> #measure	Containing the hashtag “meaure”.
From: –> from:UserDriven	Sent from username “UserDriven”.
To: –> to:UserDriven	Sent to username “UserDriven”.
@ –> @UserDriven	Containing the username “UserDriven”
Near: –> Sale near:seattle	Containing “sale” and was sent near “Seattle”.
Within: –> near:98122 within:2.5km	Sent with in “2.5 km” of “98122”.
Since: –> sale since:2009-10-04	Containing “sale” and sent since the date “2009-10-04”.
Until: –> sale until:2009-10-04	Containing “sale” and sent up till the date “2009-10-04”.
–> delivery	Containing “delivery” and positive sentiment.
–> delivery	Containing “delivery” and negative sentiment.
? –> sale ?	Containing “sale” and a question.
Filter:links –> funny filter:links	Containing “funny” and includes a link.
Source: –> funny source:tweetdeck	Containing “funny” and entered via “TweetDeck”.

Several of the operators are old favorites Quotation Marks, OR, and Minus are available in most popular search engines. The new tools are the user, location, temporality (time) and sentiment (feeling).

User and Hashtags

To: and From: are most powerful once you have identified key influencers for your customer group. From: will allow you to section out all of the tweets sent by the specific user and can be paired with search terms to identify the specific issues that you need to address. To: is used to identify who is speaking to, or dialoguing with, a specific account. The to: operator returns all tweets that start with the selected username.

Example:

@userdriven where is the meet up?

This will show up for to:userdriven.

I am going to the meetup @userdriven is sponsoring.

This will not show up for to:userdriven

If you want to return all mentions of a username then you use “@username” so @userdriven will return all tweets to the account and all uses of the username in tweets.

The hashtag # is used to tie together tweets on the same subject. One of the best examples of hashtag use is #journchat. Journchat has a large group of participants and a regular time each week when they hold a discussion, and everyone who wishes to participate can employ the hashtag to take part and follow the action. The hash is what allows Twitter to accomplish limited multi-person dialogue.

User and hashtags are the only operators that function as stand alone queries.

Location

Near: and within: will allow you to find out what people are saying in the vicinity of a specific location. For near: you can use a large area like City (Seattle), a smaller area like a Zip Code (98122), or extremely specific Longitudinal/Latitudinal values (47.625193,-122.3574).

Within: requires the near: operator and works best when paired with kilometers (km). Currently the dropdown that is found under the map on Twitter Search is in kilometers so you will do better to maintain consistency. Also, open Google Maps to verify that Twitter is correctly assessing your near: operator in the way you expect.

If you have both online and brick and mortar locations leveraging near: and within: will be especially valuable to you. Consider running vicinity searches around real world locations in tandem with online campaigns to drive awareness of your physical location and to expedite customer service resolution.

Temporality

Knowing when people react to your account, brand or product can be very useful. Unfortunately, Twitter has very finite server capacity. The result is that it does not hold data for very long. For the operators since: and until: Twitter only returns results going back 72-hours. This means that if it takes you more than three days to recognize that Twitter has spiked you won’t be able find the issue directly through Twitter Search. This means that even though you can use these operators to segment a single day (sale since:2009-10-04 until:2009-10-04) you have to do it very close to that date. The technical limit for the operator is seven days, but most phrases are purged more frequently than that.

For example:

If today is October 6, 2009 then you can use since: and until: for October 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th.

This means that Monday is extremely important for your Twitter campaigns. This is the only day that you can assess the run into a weekend spike.

Sentiment

One of the major concerns of social media marketing and brand PR is sentiment–how people feel about your product, service or company. Twitter addresses this with  and . These operators, signified by a smile and a frown emoticon, pull back tweets with positive or negative buzzwords (or the actual emoticon).

While great in concept the execution of these searches can be spotty. Both operators will return a set of emoticons that are essentially neutral, causing overlap in the returned search. Also, you will see a variety of results where you are not the subject of the sentiment. The sentiment operators are a good way to take a snapshot of the Twitter’s feelings.

The last operator that relates to sentiment is ? . It doesn’t actually affect sentiment, but it does allow you to find actionable issues. Appending ? to your queries allows you to see tweets that ask a question. So if you pair it with or you are more likely to find a tweet that has a clear solution you can bring to the author.

Special note: sentiment modifiers can disrupt location modifiers.

Source and Filter:links

Source: returns all tweets that were delivered through a specific channel–like Tweetie, UberTwitter or the main site. This is useful for charting the value of advertising in third-party tools or web portals.

Filter:links return all tweets with links in them. At this time I am not aware of other valid filters, but Twitter does plan to add retweets and home timeline segmentation to the search function, which will likely be other filters.

The real power of these operators is in combining them together to find opportunities for visibility or service of your customers. Combining Location and Sentiment can help you overcome a localized issue. Combining Location ? can help you find a business opportunity (e.g. lunch near:98122 within:1km ?) like finding people looking for lunch in your neighborhood.

Now that you know how to construct your complicated advanced search let’s cover some methods for saving you some time retrieving the results.

If you use the search box in the right navigation of your profile page you will find a “Save this search” button under the “update” button of your profile.

This is a good way to respond to searches quickly. You have your update field available, but the interface is a little confusing. Be sure you aren’t typing your new searches into your updated field when you use this method.

The second tool Twitter offers for leveraging search in a persistent way is a search widget. You can find this widget in the Goodies section of Twitter. It will allow you to set up a widget with any search that you want and define how you want it to display. We have set up a simple reputation portal that lets you enter a query to see positive, negative, tweets with questions, tweets employing the #fail hashtag, tweets with links and retweets using via. You can download the page here: http://www.userdrivenchange.com/twitrep.php

To get the full 25-page PDF visit our downloads page

Branding.

It’s been the big buzzword whether you are talking about branding through social media or traditional media.  Your image is who you are right?  We ALL thought that about Tiger, and it turns out we thought wrong.  But that’s the power of branding. (I’m not slighting him, just using his image and branding as an example.)  But what does branding do for your company?  Or for yourself (if you are a public entity)?

In many ways branding is who you or who your company is.  For instance, Microsoft might be the more successful company, but Apple’s brand sentiment is stronger, especially in the social arena: (article).  Nike relies on its branding of the world’s most recognizable athletes wearing its shoes to dominate the saturated shoe market.  Geico uses about 18 different marketing campaigns to build their brand yet somehow, they are one of the most recognizable insurance companies.  So, branding builds a perception of what you think about a company.  For the longest time, traditional media was the only way to brand and build your perception.

In 2009 we saw corporations such as Gatorade, Radio Shack and Kentucky Fried Chicken continue to utilize traditional media to incorporate their new branding scheme. 

Gatorade failed miserably early on during the NFL playoffs when it began running commercials stating, “What’s G?”.  While the commercial was engaging and the viewer wanted to know, it failed to convey the message that G was the new Gatorade name.  Further, it took weeks for them to post search links to their site explaining the meaning behind “What’s G?”  Thus when a viewer Googled this question, the answer wasn’t  there.  A week after the first airing, finally someone had written a blog explaining his theory on it and it turns out his theory was right.  It wasn’t until about 2 weeks after the commercials started to air that Gatorade finally showed up in search results for “What’s G commercial”.  So while they attempted a great viral campaign they failed to deliver on the feasibility of delivering the customer into an actionable answer. (read more about this fiasco)

Radio Shack just flat out aired commercials stating that they were now to be called The Shack.  Easy breezy right?  Except for the fact that Shaquille O’Neal might have something to say about who is, “The Shack”.  He is of course @THE_REAL_SHAQ on Twitter.  Surprisingly, to my knowledge, he never did anything with it.  (too bad for both of them, could have been a fun little sparring campaign)  It’s not surprising that Radio Shack is changing their name, since radio is an outdated technology and implies that you can only get things for radio at said store.  The fact is Radio Shack today does a decent amount of business with wireless phones and other electronics.  Unfortunately for Radio Shack, both pieces of their name have a negative connotation.  We’ve discussed why radio is bad, but a shack is not really a place I want to go to buy electronics.  I want to go to a store.  Now all I can do is go to “The Shack” if I want to buy some crappy electronics that are overpriced (IMO).  I’m actually surprised Radio Shack has weathered the storm; they seem like one of those companies that should have faded out after 2000 or at least during the economic downturn of 2008/09.

Finally, there’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, or as they are trying to be known, Kentucky Grilled Chicken, ok technically they are still just KFC but they’ve definitely made a great attempt at rebranding who they are and what they sell.  I ask you, who seriously ever went to KFC because they wanted healthy food?  Not me.  So why the change?  Probably their numbers were dropping so they opted to go with the healthy fast food craze of the last few years (Subway, McDonalds, etc have all overly marketed fresh, healthy food recently).  I’ll admit, I’m on the bandwagon of healthy food.  If I go to a fast food place I look at the calorie chart and my decision is influenced by how many calories the Double Bacon Cheeseburger has.    The difference between a Subway/McDonald’s and KFC is that they have not had to change their name to convey their healthy connotation.  Subway found Jared and McDonald’s just bombarded us with their advertising.  I have to ask though, if companies continue to do this “healthy branding” trend, what’s a company like Burger King gonna do?  They’re screwed name wise.

On the flip side in 2009 we saw other corporations grasp at social media outlets to work on their brand (not necessarily trying to change their brand but to gain some market share and / or build their brand).

Skittles tried to grasp at social media branding when the term was young and hot in late spring early summer with their Twitter and Facebook page takeover of their site. The problem was that the Twitter takeover for Skittles backfired as the community started lots of negative tweets about Skittles.  Quickly Skittles changed the takeover to a Facebook takeover which eased the negativity.  Still the site was barely interactive and really didn’t do a whole lot to improve the Skittles brand.  Jack in the Box did a good job of utilizing traditional media to garner attention to their attempt at a social media brand.  Again though the site was fairly lame and didn’t do much to build their brand… seriously, a “dying CEO” campaign?  Might have been one of Jack’s worst ideas last year.

In contrast, Target used social media to increase brand awareness about their giving / donations and actually used social media to let their fans choose who to donate to (Bullseye Gives campaign).  As gruesome and morbid as this might be, Michael Jackson’s death might have turned out the biggest social media win of the year for TMZ and maybe for MJ himself.  TMZ earned a new reputation as “the first to break the story” and MJ’s legacy soared through Twitter, Blip.fm, imeem, Facebook, etc.  MJ was the top tweeted person of the year and his popularity possibly doubled through his death and resulting buzz.   Interestingly, Tiger made the list at #8, though his name probably popped up on Twitter during any of the major tournaments during the year and well before his “accident”.

Finally, and this stems into 2010, Pepsi announced that they would NOT air Superbowl Commercials during this year’s Superbowl.  Pepsi will instead utilize the money for its Project Refresh online cause marketing campaign. (article)  This is a huge coup for online / social media since the Superbowl has been the main stage for traditional media for the last 15-20 years.  As far as branding goes, it will be very interesting.  Pepsi has been one of the key participants in Superbowl ads so there will be buzz when their commercials are missed.  Hopefully they prep for this and utilize search links to their cause campaign and explain why they are devoted to this campaign over Superbowl ads.  They could become known as the company who changed how we advertise and brand ourselves. 

Social media has proven that it can definitely help or hurt your brand awareness, so use it wisely.  Traditional media is still the main outlet for getting viewership, but is definitely losing traction.  So whether you are building your personal brand or whether you are building your company’s brand, you will have to choose which outlet is more effective for you.  My best advice is that if you think your idea is “cute” you might want to rethink it.  Traditional media allows for cute since it’s much harder to have backlash against it (though not as hard as it used to be).  “Cute” will get you killed in social media if not done properly.  If you are building your brand, decide what you want to bring to the forefront.  Is it your causes; is it your workers; is it your product; are you better than your competition at something?  Figure it out, flesh it out, test it on a small group, re-do it, test again, perfect it, then go for it!

After making a hit-or-miss joke about salary compensation I want to follow up with a more informative post on the Forum One survey. Also, Jeff and I invite anyone working in web marketing, design or social media to take a short survey (18 questions) that will help answer the salary question in a more robust fashion.

A follow up on data from Forum One Networks.

• 52% of respondents are female.
• 54% of the respondents spend 50% or less of their time interacting with social media.
• 70% of respondents work for companies with more than 25 people.
• 38% have more than 9 people in their department.
• 36% of respondents are not attached to a department.
• Respondent had between 1 and 120 subordinates.
• More women are satisfied with their jobs (rate 4 0r 5 out of 5)

The following groups had decreased year over year salaries:

• Under 25
• 31- 40 years of age
• Over 60

Community Managers,  the most common designation for women, are paid the least. This group includes; Community Lead, Community and Training Manager, Social Media Manager, Head of Community & Marketing, Sr. Manager Customer Success and Community, User Community Manager, Research Community Manager, Senior Community Relations Manager and Communities and Forum Manager. Their reported salaries range from $22,500 – $46,500.

The numbers for men and women:

As you can see women fare strong except at $95 k and over $150k.

Here are the issues that I still have with the reporting.

• They included volunteers and un-waged business owners in the calculations. I don’t think that unpaid should be included in salary calculations.
• They did show wage by education, but, they did not show education by gender (education had a surprising effect).
• They did not show position by gender.
• They did not show “unpaid” by gender.
• They do not show experience by gender.

There are a number of things that I find to be questionable about the reporting. So, I would love for Forum One to either disclose their data differently or for some of you that are actually working in the industry to answer a survey to help answer the questions better.

Please fill-out this short survey (Salary For Web Workers) it will take about 5-minutes. We will provide a free download of all data we collect both in its raw form (Excel Files) and as charts.  We also invite you to share this with anyone you know who works in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics or Web Design & Development (Click Here to take survey).

Thanks,

Carlos and Jeff

Hey [Social Media] ladies!

Apparently you will be payed about $11K less (on average) to do your job than a comparably qualified an average man. How can you compensate?

1.) Drinks

credit: Kyle May

And lots of them! At $10 a cocktail you need procure 1,100 of them. That is 22 cocktails a week (with two weeks vacation) that you should get someone else to buy. That is only 4 drinks a day to more than compensate. You can handle that, right?

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2.) Get a side job.

credit: aresauburnâ„¢

Maybe it is time capitalize on your other talents…like “dog haberdashery” (I’m not even sure what that is a euphemism for). But, clearly you can get a $75k a year day job, so, just stop sleeping to support a $11k side job.

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3.) Become a man.

credit: jc.westbrook

Caution don’t do this unless you are really serious about your job!

Becoming a man is very expensive about $77,000. If you aren’t staying in the business for 7+ years this doesn’t really pencil out. Especially considering women make up 52-55% of social media job holders and you probably like being a woman.

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4.) Sell a Kidney.

You can only do this once so make the most of it.

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All kidding aside. Regardless of your gender just be dedicated to your goals and don’t worry about the money–you’ll have more fun that way.

I have received a number of negative responses. I want to clarify that I don’t find salary inequity funny; I find organ sales and dog costumes funny. The article this is based on comes from a survey of 370 people. To be meaningful the compensation discussion has to normalize a number of issues that the quoted data fails to mention.

I think that the following information needs to be known to discuss salary in earnest:

1. Years in the industry split by gender
2. Years in work force split by gender
3. Organization level (manager, director, etc.) split by gender

Since the majority of respondents are women it can be greatly affected by their tenure. There are some strong trend in the online community jobs being more populated by women and that means that entry level positions are more likely filled by women–skewing the data. Separating out the average number of years for men and for women within the respondents should be considered. Salary differences are more than the question of dollar averages. Salaries in new job categories are very dependent on past experience. Knowing the average years in the work force and job position of respondents should also be considered. I don’t know if Forum One Networks disclosed this kind of information. Regardless the averages they put in their abstract are easily skewed by factors that they don’t even hinted at.

credit: eschipul

You may have a Twitter account, but you may not know how to leverage it for your business and personal branding. Given that social media continues to explode and become an important part of all marketing in any industry, as well as impacting how customers are learning about companies and researching purchases, now is the time for you to learn some of the tools at your disposal to understand what is happening on Twitter and measure your success in social media.

This white paper gives you a brief introduction to the essentials of Twitter; discusses Twitter search then jumps into advanced query modification; discusses some key Client applications for intermediate and advanced use of Twitter; defines some metrics that you can use to determine whether your efforts were successful or not; and finally wraps everything together with an implementation plan.

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This paper is a quick read (25-pages) and includes access to a simple to use portal for monitoring your reputation or gauging sentiment on Twitter. Download today to improve your Twitter campaigns.

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I want to share some of the interviews that Jeff and I have done this year.

You can find Jeff about two-minutes into this video. Also checkout Internmatch, the people who made the video.

I give some tips on engaging social media. I totally “borrowed” the 60 30 10 rule from @kevinurie

credit: knittingturnip

Thanks for reading our blog!

Jeff and I have been toiling away on a white paper on leveraging Twitter that will be available in the near future.

We cover:

1. Advanced Search Modifiers
2. Leveraging Third Party Tools
3. Performance Indicators for Social Media

We also created a simple reputation portal that leverages Twitter Search to accompany the white paper to help you understand the concepts that we cover.

Until then I am providing a download of the first chapter of User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want.

Typically Mom & Pop shops, or rather the one-off boutiques / local stores have a very high brand loyalty. They generally build a very close knit small community of shoppers, and typically provide that good old fashioned customer service that we’ve all grown to love.   However, it seems like every day another one of these small shops goes out of business.

Why? Many times they are too specialized, and thus they are a one-off experience, or maybe a once in a while type of experience.  Thus return / repeat business is seldom.  Second, while the community may be a strong one, it’s not necessarily a large community so the traffic funnel much smaller.  As well, these stores often rely on word of mouth marketing as their main source of generating traffic and orders. Thus, the well sometimes runs dry for any number of reasons.  (note: No, I don’t live in the 90′s. I know that many small businesses have websites and advertise through multiple channels. However, typically their ‘best’ customer base comes from word of mouth, and as well many these ‘websites’ are not ecommerce enabled)

Twitter and Facebook are very much a bunch of micro-communities where word of mouth is golden.  Thus, these forums are a golden opportunity for them to build their word of mouth marketing. Twitter and Facebook don’t drive a ton of traffic to major websites right now (although this rapidly changing, and I imagine that they will soon be great referral websites), however smaller sites typically deal with a lower amount of traffic. So, if you can generate 50-100 visitors a day to your website, you might double your exposure online.

Your contention might be that, as I’ve already stated, many of these boutiques do not have an ecommerce enabled site, so what’s the point?  Twitter and Facebook’s primary function isn’t creating orders right now, so ecommerce enablement is not entirely necessary for them to be helpful.  You can market your unique product; bullet point your company philosophy or maybe your lenient return policy; or even list some client testimonials.  All of these will be well accepted via Twitter and Facebook visitors.

At the very least, the small businesses can create a Facebook/Twitter page for their business.  I’m not an SEO professional, but it is my understanding that if, by chance the small business website only has contact information, and maybe an about us, these pages typically aren’t weighted as high as other web pages might be.  Twitter and Facebook pages seem to garner a lot of attention from crawlers. Thus, the small business’ Facebook or Twitter page might be more likely to be found in search than their own website (make sure you link to your site from Twitter/Facebook though).

More importantly is the power of the crowd to influence their peer group to take notice of said small company’s Twitter / Facebook page. They can tweet about happenings and will be retweeted by their followers and as well, their followers will mention them and this will be retweeted (and with Facebook, Fans will update status about their experience at small business, and or comment on Fan page of business).

My point is that these specialty boutiques rely upon a community for their business and social media is an ever expanding arena for marketing to new customers and at the very least getting the word out about your company. As well, users are using these forums to find out about unique places like these boutiques that they can visit or find out more about.  So, Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook, can not only service a branding and customer service perspective for large businesses, but they can also serve a more tangible need in driving highly qualified traffic into the small businesses and Mom and Pop can stay in business a little longer.

photo credit: manfrys

Google is powerful – possibly the most powerful website out there today. Its effect on the internet is tremendous. More importantly, it’s affect on how a person uses the internet has been quite interesting. Two key things that I’d like to point out about Google’s effect on the internet are: Direct Navigation (as defined by the most recent WAA standardized metrics report) channel shifts and a user’s onsite search usage.

Many Fortune 500 (established) sites today have seen drops in their Direct Navigation visitor channel vs. their previous year’s data as a percent to total (data taken from Coremetrics Benchmark Report August 2009 vs. 2008 – metric Direct Load % of total traffic). In many cases you can see a gradual decreasing trend line if you trend out this data over the last few years. This trend might perplex an analyst or forecaster mining this data. A major reason for concern over this is that there probably isn’t a direct correlation of an increase in another marketing channel such as paid search. However, here’s what is happening: people are lazy, and there are an increasing number of the tools that you can use to easily access a page however, these are possibly being mis-counted as something other than Direct Load. To avoid confusion, direct load (direct navigation per the WAA) means the user entered the URL or selected it from a list of bookmarks. If a user does anything else to enter your site they are not direct loading/navigating.

The Direct Load/Navigation channel is typically the largest marketing channel for your visitors, assuming you are an established website. As well, it typically has a better conversion than your paid marketing channels. Thus, it could be concerning for you if your largest channel is shifting downward as a percent to total traffic. As I noted above, many times there is not typically one corresponding marketing channel seeing an upshot as a percent to total. The reason for this is that there is an ever growing amount of tools that you can use to enter a site. RSS, blogs, social media sites, and even your navigation bar are all tools a user can use to “navigate” to your site, but are not necessarily paid links, nor natural search links, and while they might be considered a portal, they are probably not accurately defined in your Marketing report. (Aside: a user can type in a key term into their navigation bar instead of typing www and .com and the browser will redirect to that site if it is recognizable enough. This is a service provided by the default search engine for your browser. My question is, this is not typing in the URL, but rather using the navigation bar as a search engine, so is it a “Natural Search” click? Further, one out of every ten times the browser cannot redirect and thus takes you to a search page where you can choose the link you want from a list; again is this paid/natural search?)

What you will probably see in your data is upticks in Natural Search and Portals but they still may not match up exactly with the decrease in Direct Load/Navigation. The bigger question is: is your conversion suffering because of this phenomenon?

Onsite search is typically a very powerful tool on your website, if you utilize it properly. Meaning if you carefully monitor the words visitors are searching on and ensuring that results are provided for as many words possible you’ll keep visitors engaged with your site and probably increase your conversion and sales. Keeping up with the latest technology, such as predictive search tools, advanced search options and the fastest and best search servers, will also be a boon to your visitor’s experience. What you cannot control is how and when visitors utilize your onsite search box.

An interesting phenomenon I’ve heard about is spikes in search terms when said term is a featured item or brand, etc. For instance, maybe you have just released the latest Widget X10 line and it is featured on your Home Page. You might see a spike in sessions typing “Widget X10” into your search box. Again, my first thought is that users are inherently lazy. Further maybe Google has made them lazy because they are used to getting a quick result and a direct link to what they are looking for when they search on something. Thus even though, the user knows that they could click on a link on the Homepage and explore your Widget X10 display, they type in the keyword and go right to the product, or at least to a list of items to choose from. One might take away that maybe the navigation is too cumbersome, or maybe there are too many clicks to go through to get to a product page, and this could very well be the case. Again, there is merit in thinking this and as well, it may be worth exploring whether you should have a robust Home Page/Landing page, or whether you should take more of a “Google” approach. We discuss this option in our book.