Category Archives: Conversions

Using Web Analytics? You Don’t Count

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One of the most common web analytics mistakes I see people make is self-counting. This means that their analytics package counts visits and pageviews from their own internal traffic. This oversight can result in serious flaws in your metrics. Luckily for you, it can easily be fixed.

If your business relies on accurate measurement of website traffic and conversion metrics, internal traffic could be muddying the waters and making it harder to determine your site’s true performance. How? Consider the following scenarios. How many of these have you done in the past month?

  • Your staff directs customers to your website by visiting the site themselves to copy a page’s URL or piece of content.
  • You regularly visit your own website just to make sure it’s still working.
  • You load your website while talking to customers on the phone so you can look at the same screen they are.

Excluding Internal Traffic in Google Analytics

If you run Google Analytics on your site, you’ll want to set up a filter to exclude traffic from your company’s IP address (or series of IP addresses, known as an “IP Range”). Follow the steps listed on these pages to create a filter and exclude internal traffic data based on your IP range. There is even a handy regular expression builder if you are among the 99.9% of the population that is intimidated by them (myself included!)

Excluding Internal Traffic in Omniture Site Catalyst

If you use a high-end analytics suite such as Omniture Site Catalyst, you might find this blog entry on building segments useful. You can use this feature to create a custom segment for visitors from your IP range and exclude them from your reports.

Although more complex, in my experience this functionality is similar (but superior to) Google Analytics’ custom segments feature.

Now What?

The changes are not retroactive. Only traffic from that moment forward will be filtered. If you just set up your analytics filters to block your internal traffic, you can expect to see your overall web traffic decrease slightly. This may concern some people that focus solely on visit and pageview data.

If so, gently remind them that web analytics are most useful when tracking conversion events, whether that’s a sale, download, newsletter signup, lead, or any other trackable event. Because there’s less overall traffic but presumably the same number of conversions, your conversion rates may even go up!

Rationale for Prioritizing SEO in a Site Redesign

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A prospective client asked me for a few bullet points to show their VP of Sales why they should spend incremental money on an SEO consultant during their already expensive site redesign. I get that kind of question a lot, but had never formally created or documented a response.

My usual answer is to talk about their search engine referral analytics and compare their traffic volume and conversion data to actual search volume for the keywords that potential customers actually type in to search engines. Demonstrating this opportunity cost and potential ROI is typically enough to convince even the toughest marketer that SEO is a great investment and needs to be included in the site redesign.

However, in this case the client doesn’t have any analytics data so I promised I would follow up with a few high-level thoughts. Here’s what I came up with in just a few short minutes this morning. I’m sure this list could go on for many more pages, but I wanted to keep it simple. What would you add?

  • Opportunity – A new website will generally be “Search Engine Friendly”, meaning the content will be accessible to search engines. A truly “Search Engine Optimized” website will be accessible and highly relevant to the keywords and phrases that customers are actually searching for when looking for the types of products offered on the site.
  • Timing – Incorporating SEO into the site redesign process allows for greater collaboration and faster iterations with the content producers, designers, and developers.
  • Efficiency – The site content and structure can be reviewed at the time it is being developed and reduce or eliminate the need to retroactively update the new site after launch at an incremental cost.
  • Maintaining Equity – The current site has attained a certain level of “credibility” and “authority” with search engines, as measured by the quantity and quality of links pointing to it and the relevance of the content. A new site, when properly transitioned, can build off of the existing site equity. Without a seamless transition, the new site may have to start over with almost no foundation.
  • Scalability – Unlike other marketing channels, SEO is a relatively fixed cost with almost no limit on the potential return on investment because there is no cost per click or cost per impression associated with organic search traffic.
  • Qualified Audience – SEO is intended to capture the audience that has already stated they are looking for your products or services by typing those keywords into a search engine. Unlike traditional advertising models, there is no wasted spend to reach an uninterested audience.

What would you add to this list?

Would You Rather #1

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The ThinkerSituation: Would you rather have 10 of your targeted keywords rank at position #10 or 1 keyword ranked at position #1? Leave a comment with your answer. I’ve posted mine below.

Assumptions: All of the keywords in question receive the same search volume and have the same level of competition from other sites.

Via my @RichmondWiki account, I had an interesting twitter conversation with another wiki owner (@purplepopple) about this topic. She posited that the 10 keywords at position #10 weren’t as valuable as the single #1 ranked keyword and questioned why people would spend the time to optimize for higher rankings on keywords other than branded terms.  This was before she knew that I am an SEO consultant by day, RichmondWiki owner on the side.

My Answer: The single #1 ranking is tempting, but I would choose the ten keywords ranked at position #10. Obviously it would depend on the keywords in question, but based on our assumptions I think the 10 rankings are a better bet for these reasons:

  • More diversity: Your eggs are distributed in more than one basket. If you lose your rankings for one of the ten keywords you will still have the other nine to fall back on.
  • Easier to Improve: It’s relatively easy to improve from position #10 to a top 5 ranking. If you could move all ten of your keywords to position #5 or better, all of a sudden your site will be primed to receive more traffic than a single #1 ranking could generate.

So, would you rather have 10 of your targeted keywords rank at position #10 or 1 keyword ranked at position #1?

Adobe Flash SEO Now Possible

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As reported on TechCrunch and ZDNet, Adobe has created a standardized format for its Flash development suite that will allow search engines to index dynamically generated content, which was not previously possible. What does this mean for the industry? Frankly, it means that “existing and future” Flash sites will be more accessible to search engine crawlers which will result in many previously invisible websites being indexed and ranked in search results. Google is already incorporating the new capabilities into their search platform, and Yahoo! reportedly still “has some work to do.”

This is good news for designers that prefer Flash for its flexibility and animation capabilities. However, it also opens up a whole new series of questions that will have to be explored and tested by the SEO community:

  • Will this newly indexable content start out with zero site history? As we know, the age of a domain plays a role in calculating its authority and credibility. If a Flash site has been around for years but is just now becoming “visible” to a crawler, can its age be accurately determined?
  • Without a hierarchical markup system, how will crawlers treat text and images of varying importance? For example, in HTML we can use the <h1> and <strong> tags to emphasize particular pieces of content. What is the Flash equivalent, and will those tactics be more or less impactful than their HTML counterparts?
  • How will crawlers treat Flash sites that have a properly optimized HTML framework? As an SEO, I know how to create a crawler-friendly HTML version of Flash content to aid with crawler accessibility. Will Google and Yahoo treat sites with both formats differently or prefer one over the other?
  • Will sites built entire of Flash be treated differently than HTML sites with Flash components? Good SEO and user experience (accessibility) dictate that Flash should not be used to create an entire site, but rather certain interactive elements within it. Will two sites with similar content be treated differently if one is built entirely in Flash and the other is a Flash element wrapped in standard HTML?
  • How will the use of Flash adjust to incorporate deep links? Most purely Flash sites have no unique URLs for each “page” because all of the content exists within one .swf file. Therefore, most inbound links would have to point to the top-level URL, regardless of where the desired content resides within the rich media application. This will help the domain-level rankings but not individual pages.
  • Will Flash designers adapt their use of analytics to properly measure the traffic and conversions from newfound organic search traffic? There is a little extra work required to properly track Flash site usage statistics using traditional site analytics packages. I’m guessing relatively few Flash sites have this capability built in, and even fewer are going to retrofit their sites with action tags.
  • How will non-text digital assets (images, video, audio, etc) be optimized within Flash? Will the same rules apply, and if so, will digital assets embedded in Flash be more, less, or equally weighted compared to their HTML counterparts?

I’m sure this list of questions will grow over time and many smart, talented SEOs and Flash designers will figure out the answers. It’s certainly a game changer for the industry because it expands the playing field significantly. We are now competing against millions of “new” sites that were once thought of as unfortunate victims of emerging SEO best practices.

The Future of Analytical Marketing, According to Google

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Golden RectangleAll marketers know that their jobs are part art, part science. Some companies lean more towards the analytical science of quantifiable marketing, and others are more comfortable with producing beautiful works of art. Is one necessarily better than the other? Not necessarily, depending on your target audience and your business objectives.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the marketing industry is heading down the path of producing and analyzing quantifiable metrics for as many aspects of a campaign as possible, similar to the financial industry’s transition in the 1970′s:

“There is every reason to believe marketing will go through a similar transition, but the principles of marketing–which are around storytelling, entertainment, targeting and selling–will be augmented by analytical tools,” Schmidt said.

This sounds good on paper. There are very few marketers who want to know less about how well their campaigns are working. But it is easy to fall victim to the hype and start thinking that all of our analytical problems will be solved by throwing more CPU cycles and clever code at the problem.

From my days as a Media Planner at a very analytical advertising agency and a Web Marketing Manager a very analytical automotive retailer, I can tell you that the current crop of advertising metrics and analytics packages are nowhere near where they need to be to replace a human being’s experience and strategic capabilities. As Schmidt said, analytical tools will only augment the principles of marketing, not replace them.

The Holy Grail of Marketing Analytics (doesn’t exist)

To really satisfy all the needs of all marketers, a full-fledged analytical marketing program would have to satisfy my newly-created (and partly tongue-in-cheek) tenets of the “Golden Rectangle“; balance the aesthetically pleasing with mathematical accountability.

Tenets of the Golden Rectangle of Marketing

  1. Analytical marketers must be able to correlate sales to marketing initiatives. Every sale must be attributed to one or more marketing channels for a period of time. This includes online-to-offline conversions and purchase decisions that involve multiple decision makers and/or long periods of time.
  2. Analytical marketers must take all known (and unknown) variables into account when drawing conclusions. This includes macroeconomic factors, competitive strategies, seasonality, media mix, creative execution, brand recognition, solar flares, word of mouth, personal beliefs, and customer’s internal thought processes among other things.
  3. Analytical marketers must drive real-time decisions about optimizing across every marketing campaign a client is running, regardless of medium. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it doesn’t tell advertisers what to do with their next marketing dollar when the variables change.
  4. Analytical marketers need to understand that some of the success of an advertising campaign will always depend on the human input, whether it is creative or strategic. Machines won’t be able to replicate those traits for a long time to come.

So while it’s great to think that one day all marketing will be entirely analytical and based on some algorithm somewhere in the computing cloud, we have to remember that we live and work in the real world of human wants, needs, desires, psychology, sociology and physiology. If Google can learn to manipulate those variables, they may very well create the next golden rectangle. Until then, people can still serve as the cogs in the marketing wheel.