Analytics Happenings

I’ve been entrenched in web analytics for the past few months, and I’ll tell you, a lot is going on. A few months ago, Google rolled out an updated to Google Analytics which uses an updated code base for performance improvements. Unfortunately it looks like they didn’t put it through the wringer before launch because a ton of people are having problems. The problems specifically target e-commerce tracking, and you can read more here: Action Needed: ga.js is broken!

Meanwhile, Microsoft is about to launch it’s own analytics product. Code-named Gatineau, the real name was revealed yesterday: Microsoft Adcenter Analytics. I know…doesn’t that just get your blood pumping. Ian Thomas revealed more of the details at his blog this week. It looks like MSAA will have some interesting features, as well as an automatic code installer, which I’m skeptical about at this point. Will MSAA have enough distinct features to pry marketshare away from Google Analytics. Frankly, I doubt it, but the competition is always good for the consumer.

Anyways, I could go on and on about this…the bottom line is, there are adequate tools available for no charge that allow businesses to know exactly what how their website and online marketing is performing. Use them to your advantage!

SEO is the Milk and Cream, not the Chocolate Syrup

Jessica Bowman wrote a good piece today at SearchEngineLand detailing good ways to get SEO involved early on in the web development process. Folks that I work with know that I like to say “SEO is not some kind of chocolate syrup that you can pour on one day before a website launch.” It’s so true. The most successful websites I have developed or worked with have had SEO plans from the beginning. Because content and internal structure are so much a part of SEO success, they must be planned intentionally from the outset.

If I see a site plan that has pages 5 and 6 levels deep, I’m going to propose making the site more flat and explain exactly why. It’s a lot easier to do this on paper than it is once the site has been built, even if it’s still in early construction stages. Of course content is critically important, and should be considered for SEO purposes well in advance. I’m also always very concerned about the site’s navigation and URL structure. These all need to be planned before any design work starts.

There are also items that will be taken care of shortly before launch. My checklist always includes setting up the necessaril redirects, getting the robots.txt ready, and ensuring a page to URL ratio of 1:1 (no duplicate content).

Next time you consider an extreme website makeover, do yourself a favor and hire an SEO consultant to join the process. Your boss will thank you later.

New Year’s Resolutions

A few 2008 goals for my little business:

1. Show more gratitude to my clients. I’m straight up terrible at this – I didn’t even send Christmas cards this year. I’m really not a grinch, and next year I’m going to aim to be more thankful and communicate that better.
2. Attract two medium-to-large web projects (e-com, real estate, etc.) in the course of the year.
3. Finally find a reliable web design contractor. I really don’t like web design, although with enough blood, sweat and tears, I can usually put something together that doesn’t seer the iris. I’d much rather concentrate on functionality, marketing and analytics. That requires outside help, but so far my attemps to partner with designers have failed miserably.
4. Blog more! Ahhh….!!!

There…only four – that’s not intimidating. Here’s comes 2008!

Using Google Analytics Cookies in Web Forms

Justin from EpikOne wrote a great piece earlier this week explaining how to extract source, medium and campaign information from Google Analytics to insert in contact or lead forms. Essentially, it takes the data already stored about the visitor, and adds those values to hidden fields in the form. This means when your form submission comes through, it will contain valuable info about the visitor. Wouldn’t it be cool to get a lead email that looks like this:

Name: Joe Smith
Phone: 555-555-5555
email: joe@email.com
Notes: I’m interested in your product or service, please call me ASAP.
Visitor Source: Google search for ‘dallas widget maker’

Sure, you can always tell from the Google Analytics reports the conversion rate of each medium and source, but this allows to you tie each individual lead or contact form to a source. Why is this better? Well, all leads are not equal in value. If you do high volume on the Internet, you should probably know that 30% of your PPC leads turn into customers, but only 15% of your email leads do. Attaching this kind of tracking will enable you to make this next step calculation that would have otherwise been impossible.

So again, great job Justin! We went back and forth a few times in the comments about some ideas for improving the code (incidently, I had written the exact same program for my employer last week, but hadn’t published it). I definitely suggest implementing this on your lead forms if you use Google Analytics.

Going to PubCon Vegas!

I’m glad to be able to go to PubCon this December in Las Vegas! It should be a great conference, with plenty to learn from the sessions, speakers, keynotes and after conference chats. Last year I got to attend, but was only sent for about 16 hours. The sole purpose for my attendance was to join the Meet the Google Engineers session, where my employer thought I would learn some grand secret to the Google algorithm (yeah, right). It was fun nevertheless, but I’m glad to get to go all week this year. I haven’t really been to a search conference since SES NY in 2005.

I think several of my former co-workers will be there as well, like Tony Wright and maybe Jeff Martin of cardsdirect.com. Maybe I can steal some of their money to gamble.

Using LiveHTTPHeaders to Test Google Analytics

I’ve used many website analytics tools in the past 5 years, but lately I’ve been doing a lot with Google Analytics. It’s free, and typically provides 90% of everything you could every want. One compalint I have, though, is that because there is a 6-12 hour delay in the reporting, configuring complex applications is difficult. Instead of tinkering, waiting a day, tinkering some more, wait another day, etc., I’ve learned to read server header requests to confirm that GA is working as expected.

If you use the Firefox browser, this is fairly easy to do. Download a simple plugin called LiveHTTPHeaders, and install it in the browser. Now you can view the header information in the browser’s sidebar by choosing View -> Sidebar -> LiveHTTPHeaders (or press ALT + L). Load a URL and you’ll likely see many fast requests go through the list, including images, CSS, javascript, etc.

To verify that a Google Analytics tag has executed properly, look for a like that starts like this:

http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif…

This image request passes all of the necessary information on to Google’s servers, indicating that there was a page processed. There’s a ton of information on this line that you can decode if you so wish, including page URL, referrer, account ID, etc. If you scroll through the entire window and there is no mention of __utm.gif, guess what? The code didn’t exucute. That’s not good, but hey, at least you didn’t have to wait for 8 hours to find out, right?

Collaboration for Web Projects

A co-worker introduced me to ConceptShare yesterday, and I’m definitely going to be using for my next web project. It allows teams of people to organize, share, discuss and collaborate on ideas.

Obviously this could be used for many different projects, as you can see here, but for a web design contractor, this is dynamite. Anyone on the team can mark up and make notes alongside the comp, providing instant feedback without worrying about versions flying across the email wires.

Anybody need a website? I’m dying to use this now…

Search Engine Strategies

Search Engine Strategies has about 3-4 large conferences each year. I was fortunate enough to attend the New York conference back in 2005, but even when I can’t attend I love it because so much happens. Not only can you virtually attend almost all the sessions thanks to Barry’s awesome coverage of the show, but inevitably, search engines wait until SES to make big announcements. Here’s a few more reasons to follow the coverage:

1. Concentrated gathering of industry experts. The panelists are hand-picked very knowledgable.
2. Nuggets of gold in the Q/A time after each session
3. Sometimes search engine reps have a slip of the tongue and reveal too much!

I would encourage all of you small business owners to take a few minutes and read one or two of the sessions at seroundtable.com from this week’s show. Have some questions? Leave a comment, or email me and I’ll be happy to answer. I love working in the SEO / SEM industry, but maybe even more, I enjoy educated and training people to understand and utilize search engine marketing to benefit their business.

Click Fraud Update: Google & Yahoo Resources

For those of you who run PPC campaigns, Google and Yahoo have both recently launched click-quality microsites with information about PPC click fraud and what each is doing to combat it. I often get asked about click fraud, and whether someone should avoid PPC because of click fraud. What I believe, based on discussions with people “in the know”, is that click fraud exists but is much smaller a problem than the media would have you believe. Google and Yahoo both understand the gravity of the click fraud, and its in their best interest to make their PPC clicks as innocent as possible.

In the end, even if click fraud subtracts 5% of your total clicks, the overall ROI of your program should be relatively high. While it’s always hard to swallow a loss, the net gain of PPC advertising should more than make up for it.

Bounce Rate an Important Metric for Success

Avinash Kaushik wrote a great piece today about the usefulness of the bounce rate metric. As someone who analyzes web traffic for hours each day, I can honestly say that bounce rate is probably my favorite metric, and has been for some time. I’ve often been curious why more marketers and analysts didn’t utilize it, as I find it to be a great indiciation of the quality of traffic a website is receiving. So I’m encouraged that bounce rate is getting more positive press now!

One question I always get when training people with Web Analytics is “What is a good bounce rate?”. That’s kinda like asking “What is a good IQ score?”. Higher, obviously! Well, in the case of a bounce rate, the lower the better (you know, like golf). And while a 0-5% bounce rate is almost impossible, it’s not uncommon for well marketed sites to have bounce rates below 25%.

When evaluating bounce rate, it’s important to evaluate each segment of traffic differently. For instance, you want your bounce rate from PPC traffic to be lower than SEO, because you are paying for every PPC visitor. While a 45% bounce rate from organic traffic might be acceptable, the same percentage from PPC traffic could indicate a need for some negative keywords or ad refinement.

Finally, bounce rate can be used to discover e-commerce roadblocks. For instance, if you find that your bounce rate is very low, but your conversion rate is still poor, that might be an indication of price shopping. Consider lowering your prices, or hooking visitors in with a free shipping coupon or discount.

Bounce rate is a great metric that can be used to easily evaluate visitor quality. Almost every respectable analytics software has bounce rate metrics, including the free Google Analytics package. I would recommend you add it to your analytics dashboards and see how it can help improve your online business.