Website Optimization

Google Panda Explained [Infographic]

February 10, 2012 By Brian Kane 1 Comment

Since its release in Feb 2011, Google set Internet marketers into a spin trying to figure the new algorithm changes. While the premise of the update was to hit the spammy and poorer quality sites on the web the reality was not that straight forward. There have been league tables published listing ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and many of the large poor quality content farms have been hit but controversially not all of them.

As I said things are never clear cut or straight forward with Google’s Algorithm but I guess being the worlds smartest search engine gives it the right to be fickle.

Ignoring the nuances, quirks, and way too technical stuff that SEO’s argue about, the main premise of the update around more quality content and link relevance still stand. The infographic below does a nice job of summarising some of the milestones in the Panda Roll out as well as highlighting things like potential site penalties, new link building rules and advice on what to do if your site got penalised.

Oh and it has some cute pictures of Pandas in it as well!

Single Grain – A Digital Marketing Agency

Filed Under: Google, Google Analytics, Google Panda, SEO, Website Optimization

New Video Tutorials – Using Google Analytics to track on-site campaigns

January 17, 2012 By Angela Wilkinson Leave a Comment

We learn so much by reading, but humans are visual creatures, and there are times when a video makes learning a new point easier to understand. In essence you’re watching over someone’s shoulder, albeit remotely, as they walk you through the information and explain how it works.

So we are delighted to advise that two videos have been added to the series on
Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics

1. Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics: The pros and cons of In-Page Analytics

Lukas explains what is meant by on-site campaigns and how to work out what links on your site (your on-site campaign) are clicked on by visitors. The three most common methods are In-Page Analytics, Event Tracking and URL Parameters and this first video is looking at In-Page Analytics.

In-Page Analytics are built in as part of Google analytics, you don’t have to set up anything once you’ve got your Analytics sorted. Accessing and understanding the data is not hard, they are very user friendly with the data shown as an overlay ontop of your actual web page.

This user friendliness does come at a price and it is important that you are aware of the limitations before deciding to use this as your tracking method. The second part of this video will explain each of the limitations and why it is a limitation so you can make an informed decision on whether this tool is suitable for your needs.

2. Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics: The pros and cons of Event Tracking

This method does require some preparation work. You need to add so-called “event tracking calls” to each of your on-site campaign links. You can do that manually or use a ready-to-use script that does this automatically. Lukas explains the steps you need to take to get this script working.

However, once you have completed the preparation you have access to more functionality than with In-Page Analytics. These include filtering the campaign clicks links, eg by outgoing and destination page, retaining historical data and being able to export the data. Also, it is no problem to track links to outbound or subdomains. As you would expect, with more powerful functionality there are more complicated cons to be aware of relating to the preparation/set up and how the functionality works. Having said that, it is a very manageable way to analyze your on-site campaigns and can be used as an alternative or addition to In-Page Analytics.

Filed Under: Google Analytics, Website Optimization

Tracking On-Site Campaigns with Google Analytics, Part III: 4 pros and cons of Internal URL Referral Parameters

December 20, 2011 By Lukas Oldenburg Leave a Comment

Facebook used to have them, Amazon still has them – parameters in the URL that show through which on-site campaign link the visitor has reached the current page. But unless you really have a thoroughly thought-through system in place, you should think twice about using them.

Internal Referral Parameters are not Campaign Parameters

First of all, let me clarify what I mean by “Internal Referral Parameters” (IRPs): Those are not to be confused with (external) Campaign Parameters (for Google Analytics, read “utm_campaign” and the like). As stated in the first article of this series, you should never use Campaign Parameters in the links of your on-site campaign because they will override the external source of the visitor.

To give you an example for an IRP: If you visit Amazon.com’s homepage and click on “Books” in the left-hand navigation, you get to a page with the URL:

http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sa_menu_bo8?ie=UTF8&node=283155

See the “ref=sa_menu_bo8”? That is the IRP. It helps Amazon.com determine which links (=on-site campaigns) on its homepage, category pages, and so on are the most effective.

Another website that uses IRPs is YouTube. There, you often encounter URLs like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx&feature=related

Here, the “feature” parameter is telling YouTube which link you used to get to the current video (in that case, I clicked on a “related video” on the right-hand side.

We stopped using them, and so did Facebook
My company used internal referral parameters for some months, but we stopped using them for the reasons I will explain in the full article. So has Facebook, which had used them extensively until a couple of months ago. They now seem to have dropped almost all URL parameters. Apart from the challenges those can cause for web analysts, they had other negative side effects: It was not easy, for example, to get a clean or “canonical” URL of your profile or fanpage because there always was “parameter clutter” attached to it, and every page existed in the form of countless URLs. You’d even see websites linking to the “wrong” (non-canonical) version of their fanpage.

In the full article, I will look at four pros and cons of Internal Referral Parameters. Although they are easily combinable with conversion metrics and make some basic reporting easier, there are hefty issues like SEO problems, cluttered advanced reports and more work up-front if you want to avoid these problems.

Filed Under: Google Analytics, SEO, Web Analytics, web analytics tools, Website Optimization

How To ‘Excel’ At Search Marketing

December 16, 2011 By David Fothergill 6 Comments

I love Excel. There you go, I’ve said it. It’s not even a love/hate type thing – I genuinely find that my life is a better place because of this wonderful, agile, willing gem of a piece of software.

Excel Mug

Gushing, maybe, but in the 7 years I’ve worked in search engine marketing (SEM), I have almost certainly used Excel every day for one purpose or another. So what I really wanted to do in over the course of a couple of posts was share some of the key formulas that are most useful in this line of work and then expand these into examples of how I would use them on a daily basis to analyse and optimise campaigns.

Formulas With Specific Benefits For SEM

LEN(text)

What does it do?

Counts the number of characters used in a given piece of text

Why is this useful for SEM?

Whether writing advert copy for PPC or meta descriptions/titles etc for SEO getting a visual aid within Excel can really help you make the most of these characters available in these situations (especially combined with conditional formatting): AdWords Using Len Formula

VLOOKUP()

What does it do?

Uses a given text or numeric input to reference related information, grabbing it out of a table or list.

Why is this useful for SEM?

There are endless instances when you will be given data from two sources which need matched up. As an example, it could be your web analytics tool data and customer details from your offline sales team. This is probably the formula that’s given me the most satisfaction, and is probably one of the most useful single formulas in the toolbox:

2 Semi-Useful Data Sets:

Using VLOOKUP

One Even More Useful Data Set:

Tables without vlookup

SUMIF(), SUMIFS()

What does it do?

Allows you to specify conditions on which to add data from a specific range or array of data. For example, turning it spoken word logic you could have:

“Sum values from the specified column IF they match criteria 1 AND they match criteria 2”

Why is this useful for SEM?

With so many sources, mediums and keywords we will often find ourselves with raw data sets which are no use to man nor beast and are left thinking “If only there was a quick way to tidy this up into some meaningful order”. There are often many ways to tidy up data, such as creatimg subtotals, but I find SUMIFS to be the quickest and most flexible way:

Example of using the SUMIFS function

The Real Magic

Now, all these formulas are well and good, but the real power comes in learning to combine them in the right way, at the right time, to get actionable insights. I’ll go into this further with some walkthroughs of sheets which I regularly use for SEM analysis, but here’s a quick example which illustrates what I mean:

My ‘Keyword Category Potential’ Analysis Sheet:

For this report, we take data from our Google Analytics account, regarding current traffic levels and a success metrics, such as the ecommerce conversion rate, and match it against traffic estimate data pulled from the Google Keyword Tool.

The key requirement of actionable data is that there is significant context created by the chosen metrics. This is achieved by combining the click and traffic estimate data to get a rough ‘share’ of potential traffic. Pulling this into the table below is done on the fly by typing a keyword into the ‘Category’ column, and relying on the SUMIFS in to pull the relevant pieces of information from other sheets which use VLOOKUPs (amongst other formulas) to tidy up raw output from the tools used: Example Table

The final piece of the puzzle is to make it even easier to get the actions to take away from the analysis. I like to do this by populating a 2-axis scatter chart. A quick glance at the below tells me that there are a few keyword areas that fit the bill of having both a high potential to get more traffic, and a higher than average conversion rate:

Chart showing category metrics across 2-axis

Quickly and easily we can take from this that there are 3 categories of good converting keywords which have potential to drive more traffic

—————–

Note: all data sets have been arbitrarily created for the purpose of the post, so no client information is included whatsoever

Filed Under: landing page optimization, SEM, SEM Training, Tips, Web Analytics, Web metrics, Website Optimization

Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics: Part 2 – The pros and cons of Event Tracking

November 17, 2011 By Lukas Oldenburg Leave a Comment

Welcome to part 2 of this series on how to track on-site campaigns, for example, teasers on your homepage. After taking a deeper look at In-Page Analytics in part 1, we are now going to dive into the world of Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews and offer you a script that will track all the clicks on your homepage by default.

One of the best things about In-Page Analytics was that you don’t need to add any code to your page or alter your links. With Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews though, there is no way around some additional coding.

Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews?
So what’s the difference between Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews again? To make a long story short: With Virtual Pageviews, you can track Pageviews for “virtual” URLs (you can decide their name), even though there is no real pageview. For example, anytime someone clicks a link on a teaser, you can tell Google Analytics to record a virtual pageview like “/teaser-click-to-url-x”.

Almost the same happens with Event Tracking. To stick with our example, when somebody clicks on a teaser link, you can tell Google Analytics to track this as an Event. The major difference is that Event Tracking doesn’t create fictional Pageviews and thus doesn’t inflate your Pageview-based data. Imagine that every click on every teaser on your homepage was tracked as an additional Pageview. That would skew your data a lot because it also has a major impact on other data like Bounce and Exit Rate, Pageviews per Visit etc…

I prefer Event Tracking
That is the main reason why I do not use Virtual Pageviews for this purpose. Be aware though that Event Tracking can also skew your bounce rate and Time on Site/Page metrics, for example when you use it to track outbound links (usually bounces). Luckily, Google Analytics has recently published a way to work around this with “Non-Interaction Events”.

In the full article, you will find advice on how to properly implement Event Tracking for on-site campaigns, including a javascript that automatically tracks all the teaser links on your homepage or category pages, and we will analyze 7 advantages and 5 disadvantages of Event Tracking as a means for tracking on-site campaigns.

Filed Under: analytics, Google Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics Implementation, web analytics tools, Website Optimization

Tracking on-site campaigns with Google Analytics: Part 1 – The pros and cons of In-Page Analytics

October 27, 2011 By Lukas Oldenburg Leave a Comment

Your homepage is usually your most important landing page. But it is not an easy task to find out how the page’s teasers or “on-site” or “internal campaigns” are performing, especially for content-heavy websites. In the first part of this series on how to track on-site campaigns, we will look at some general issues and then show you 5 pros and 9 cons for Google Analytics’ “In-Page Analytics”.

I work for a company that has a homepage clogged with teasers and links. It looks like this:

Image of e-fellows.net website

The teasers change once a week, so every week there’s the question: How well did each teaser perform?

If it were teaser links in an email campaign, the solution would be easy: Just tag all the links with your campaign parameters, and make sure your email service provider offers click tracking.

Why shouldn’t I use regular campaign tags?

Some people also use these normal campaign tags (utm_source etc.) in their on-site campaigns. That is not recommended because you lose the original source of the visitor as soon as she clicks on an on-site campaign link: The original source gets overridden by the parameters of that link.

Paid solutions: Mouse Movement and Click Heat Maps

So what is the solution? You can of course resort to full-scale click-tracking tools like CrazyEgg or PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking (both are paid solutions, PicNet offers a free trial on some pages). Be aware though that this means putting a lot more Javascript on your page which often needs IT buy-in (often hard to get), can impact the page loading time, and you have to use yet another tool. I also think it’s a little obtrusive to track each and every click and mouse movement of your visitor even if they are not (easily) individually identifiable.

Analyzing teaser performance with Google Analytics

You’re not lost if you just want to stick to Google Analytics. In my opinion, there are several proven methods to analyze on-site teaser performance:

In-Page Analytics (a.k.a. “Website Overlay”)
Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews (actually two methods, but they work similarly)
URL parameters that specify the referring link (like http:\\www.mydomain.com/article?ref=home)

All have their pros and cons. To spoil the show, I use In-Page Analytics for some purposes and Event Tracking for others. I used URL parameters for a while, but almost entirely stopped doing so because it makes reporting a lot more complex and causes other issues. But depending on your goals and your resources, all three solutions may be viable options for you.

In this series on how to track on-site campaigns, we’ll look at all three methods in detail. This first post will focus on In-Page Analytics – a powerful and often neglected tool that is available out of the box and can help tremendously on most websites, although it also has many downsides especially when you have dynamic content, outbound links or links to subdomains. To read the full article, visit “Tracking on-site campaigns” with Google Analytics in Web Analytics World’s guides pages.”

Filed Under: analytics, Google Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics Implementation, web analytics tools, Website Optimization

Persuasive Design and the Necessity of Web Analytics

November 18, 2009 By Matthias Postel 1 Comment

Last week’s World Usability Day in different locations around the world brought us a number of interesting lectures about usability and persuasive design and suggestions how to use them. But I was missing one thing: How to measure the success of different actions and changes which were taken to persuade the user to do something the company wants?

Usability is defined as “The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments” (ISO-Norm 9241-11).

But what does a company expect when it hires an usability expert? Would it be interested in the user reaching his goals more efficiently and effective? Or wouldn’t it rather want to reach its goals and increase the conversions – e.g. user actions like teaserclicks or registrations ? Wouldn’t it want to sell more products and to increase the revenue?

But how to spark a users interest in your products?
Dr. Eric Schaffer, CEO of Human Factors International, said “You still need good usability – if people can’t find something they can’t be persuaded by it – but soon usability will no longer be the key differentiator it has been. It’s often not enough to design a website that is easy to navigate, understand, and transact on. Just because people can do something doesn’t ensure that they will.”

In the future Persuasion, Emotion & Trust (PET) will get more and more important. Only websites which are able to convince the users on an emotional basis and to gain their trust will be successful.

What exactly is persuasive design?
B.J. Fogg, author of “Persuasive Technology”, defines persuasive design and technology as focusing on the design, research and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviour.“ For a website this would mean that design, pictures, headlines, text etc. will have an influence on the behaviour of the website user.

The necessity of web analytics
But even if you were following the usability experts suggestions closely and had changed the website, the processes etc. – how were you to know, which changes, action or combination of methods were resonsible for the uplift or subsidence of the conversion rate? There only is one solution: You will have to measure the different actions and the user’s behaviour.

And that is where web analytics comes in. For each of the actions you will need to measure which impact they will have. Is it only a single action that is causing the difference, is it the combination of them? What if you’d use another combination of actions? You will need to test and measure the different methods and see which ones turn out to be the best. Maybe you will also need to take different actions for different user groups. Will, for example, the users coming from Google first want to know something about the company while others would go to the shop without delay?

Conclusion
Persuasive design? Yes, of course, but to measure the success of different actions taken you also need web analytics. Combine both and you’ll get more out of it.

Filed Under: Persuasive Design, Web Analytics, Website Optimization