The Connection Between High Search Engine Rankings, The Latest Google Heatmap Study, and The Long Tail of SEO: My Guest Post on Search Engine Journal

I’ve been a big fan of Search Engine Journal for a number of years now. They provide excellent search-related posts and information, as well as outstanding coverage of the Search industry. So, as you can imagine, I was extremely excited after speaking with them about becoming a contributor. My first guest post went live yesterday and it details an experiment that I recently ran across a number of websites I manage.

A Custom Google Analytics Filter for SEO
Based on a great blog post by Andre Scholten, I set up a custom filter in Google Analytics to track where each keyword ranked in Google when people clicked through to the websites I tracked for the experiment. This enabled me to view all of the keywords (head, torso, and long tail keywords) leading to the websites I tracked, but also let me quickly see where those keywords ranked in Google when people clicked through. Yes, I could use a number of search tools to run a position analysis on target keywords, but that’s not realistic when you include all of your long tail keywords, since you might be analyzing thousands of keywords at a time.

The Results Were Pretty Darn Compelling…
So I set up a custom filter on a number of websites I manage and waited for the data to stream in. It only took a few hours before keywords started showing up in my reports (along with their rankings). And, I picked up an interesting trend pretty darn quickly... I started to see a strong connection between page one rankings and the long tail of SEO. I’ve written about the powerful long tail of SEO before on my blog, and I believe it’s often overlooked by many people outside of the Search industry. You can start to connect the dots if you add the latest Google heat map study, which found that people are quickly scanning the first few organic results in Google, and if they don’t find what they need, they are refining their searches. My experiment definitely started to connect the dots...

Eager to see the results? Well, you’ll have to check out my guest post on Search Engine Journal to find out more about my experiment and to view the results! It’s a thorough post, and if you have enjoyed the rest of my posts on the Internet Marketing Driver, I think you’ll really dig this one. :)

My guest post: The Long Tail of Page 1 Rankings

Also, definitely feel free to post your comments after reading my guest post. I’d love to hear your own experiences with the long tail of SEO.

GG

Flash Tutorial, How to Track Flash in Google Analytics Using the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component (GAforFlash) Part 2 of 2

In part 1 of this series I introduced the concept of tracking flash applications, why flash has been hard to track for many marketers, and I introduced the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component. To quickly review, the GA for flash component enables you to easily make calls directly from your ActionScript code in order to track pageviews, events, conversions, etc. in flash. It’s an important step for understanding how your flash elements contribute to the success of your website, and not just because you think it’s a killer flash app. ;-) In part 2 of my series, I will walk you through how to actually set up flash tracking using the gaforflash component (step by step in the flash authoring environment.) By the end of this tutorial, you should have a solid understanding of using the flash component and making calls to Google Analytics from within your ActionScript code. I will reference the flash movie that I created during my own testing and show the resulting Google Analytics reporting to tie it all together. So without further ado, let’s start coding. :)

Quick Disclaimer, Code Ahead:
As I mentioned in my first post, if you have some knowledge of developing flash movies and writing ActionScript code, then you should be able to follow along. If you aren’t familiar with developing in flash, grab your flash developer and possibly your web analyst and set up a working lunch. By the end of the tutorial, I’m confident you will see the power of using this technique to track your flash elements.

Visit the Google Code Project and Download the Components
First, visit the Google Code Project for Google Analytics for Flash (gaforflash). http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/ Click the downloads tab at the top of the page and download the zipfile listed. The current version as of this blog post was v1.0.1. Once you download the zipfile, unzip the contents to a directory on your hard drive. Open the readme textfile and follow the instructions for copying the components to the proper directory in your Adobe flash folder. This will differ depending on if you are running a pc or a mac and you will be creating a new folder within the components directory where you will copy the files (the instructions tell you to create a Google folder and drop the components there). Once you copy the components into the new directory, then go ahead and launch flash. Again, make sure you follow the readme before launching flash.

The Google Code Project for GaforFlash:


Determine What You Are going To Track:
To me, this is the most important step (and I bet the web analysts reading this post agree!) Mapping out what you want to track is essential to having clean reporting and a structured hierarchy. You can really have some messy reporting without working through this step… We’ll keep this example very simple to keep the amount of coding down, so here’s the scenario.

You will be adding a new flash element to a category page on your website and want to track how visitors engage the flash movie and how that flash element contributes to the success of the website. In our sample flash movie, there will be a start button, which launches the rest of the flash movie. The start button is there for a reason and you’ll learn why in a second. Once someone clicks the start button, they will be presented with two product thumbnails. The goal of our sample flash movie is to get visitors to learn more about each product and then click an email button at the bottom of the flash movie to get in touch with sales. Again, this is completely made up and simple, but we need to map this out in order to know what to track. Also, we'll track when users hover over each thumbnail and then when they click each one to reveal more information. In addition, they obviously want to track the email link at the bottom of the flash movie, since clicking the button will be a conversion in GA.

To summarize the key pageviews, events and conversions we will track:
1. A start button will trigger a pageview so you know how many people engaged the flash movie. This is so you know that the flash movie was triggered (and not just sitting on the page).
2. The two product thumbnails will trigger events when someone hovers over the thumbnail and when someone clicks them.
3. The email link at the bottom of the flash movie will trigger a pageview for when someone clicks the button. That pageview will also trigger a conversion.
4. Note: you will need to set up a conversion goal in Google Analytics for the email pageview that we trigger when visitors click the email button. This is easy to do and then will start showing up within your Goals tab in GA. You can read more about tracking goals in the GA help center. http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55515

Open Up Flash and Create the Necessary Assets
In order to work though this tutorial, you will need to create some simple flash assets (buttons). Don’t worry about how they look. The core point of this tutorial is that you learn how to use the flash component to make calls to Google Analytics and not to win design awards. ;) You will need to create a start button, a product thumbnail button, and an email button (which can be simply text if you want). Once you have quickly created each button, proceed with the rest of the tutorial.

Import the Tracking Libraries
First, make sure your current flash movie is targeting ActionScript 3. Open up the publish settings dialog box (control shift F12), click the flash tab, and use the dropdown to select an ActionScript version to target. Choose ActionScript 3. Next, you need to drag an instance of the AnalyticsLibrary Component to the stage in order to import the code libraries. Create a new layer in flash and open the components panel (control F7). You should see a category named Google (which you created earlier in this tutorial). If you don’t see the Google category, then go back to the beginning of this tutorial and follow the directions again in the readme text file that was part of the download. Click the plus sign (+) next to Google and drag the AnalyticsLibrary component to the stage. Don’t worry where you place it on the stage. It should now be present in your project library (you should also see it listed in your library. Click Control L to see your project library.) Keep in mind I’m referring to your project library, which holds all of the assets you create in your flash movie (buttons, movie clips, images, components, etc.) I’m not referring to code libraries, which we will discuss shortly.

Finding the AnalyticsLibrary Component in Flash:


Next, create an Actions layer and select frame 1 of the timeline in that layer. Click F9 to open the Actions window (which is where you write ActionScript code). Since we are using the Analytics Library Component to make calls directly from our ActionScript 3 code, you will need to import the libraries that you will use to instantiate a tracking object and make calls to Google Analytics. If you don’t import the libraries, you will not be able to make calls to GA.

Here is what you should add to frame 1 of the actions layer:
import com.google.analytics.AnalyticsTracker;
import com.google.analytics.GATracker;
var tracker:AnalyticsTracker = new GATracker( this, "UA-111-222", "AS3", true );

A Quick Explanation of the Code:
Note, you would obviously want to add your own GA account number so the data is sent to the correct profile. i.e. Don’t keep 111-222 as the web property ID. The first two lines import the necessary code libraries and the third line of code initializes the tracking object. Keep “this” as the first parameter, which references the current display object. Enter your own GA account number for the second parameter, you can keep AS3 as the third parameter for this tutorial, and keep “true” as the fourth parameter. That sets the debug mode. When true, you will see a trace of all tracking events occurring. When false, this will not be visible. Also, you can read the gaforflash documentation to learn more about each parameter.

Making Calls From ActionScript to GA:
Now, if you create a start button that visitors have to click in order to see anything in your flash movie, then we can logically target that click as a pageview. Then we can view in GA how many people started the flash movie. That would answer one of the first questions from your CMO, right? :) So create a new layer in your flash movie called Start Button and add your button to frame 1 of this layer. To stop the flash movie from playing before someone clicks the start button, simply add a stop action on frame 5 in your Actions layer. Create new keyframe on frame 5 and enter this.stop(); as the code. Again, the intent of this tutorial is not to teach you how to use flash, but I’ll add some tips as we move along. Select the start button on the stage by clicking it once and give it an instance name of start_btn in the properties panel. You can click Control F3 to bring up the properties panel if it’s not on screen. We need to give the button an instance name in order to target it in ActionScript. If you don’t give it an instance name, your code will not work.

Creating an Instance Name in the Properties Panel:


Now go back to frame 1 of your actions layer and open the actions window again (click F9). Below the code we first added (importing the libraries and initializing a tracking object), add the following lines of code. I will explain them in a second… You can give yourself some space by clicking enter a few times. Your code does not need to be lumped together!

//functionality for start button
start_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, startExample );

function startExample( event:Event):void {
//we know that the user engaged the flash movie (they clicked start)
tracker.trackPageview("/GAFlash/Start");
play();
}

The Code Explained:
The first line is a comment, which is good programming practice. You can simply describe the code that follows. This will not be visible to anyone but you as a programmer. The second line is an event handler for the start button. It targets the instance name start_btn, which we set up earlier. This is why we needed to create an instance name. Now our code will look for a mouse event (CLICK) for the start button and then trigger the function called startExample, which I will cover in a second. Event handlers enable you to react to events in your flash movies. They are critical to creating advanced functionality in your flash applications.

The function startExample() will be called when someone clicks the start button. This function uses our tracker object to trigger the trackPageview method and then plays the main timeline in your flash movie, using the play(); action. Remember, we want the visitor to see the rest of our flash movie after clicking the start button. The trackPageview method tells Google Analytics to track a specific pageview when something happens. The page will show up in GA reporting as /GAFlash/Start in your content tab, as if someone actually visited a page on the website. Pretty cool, right? So, you’ll be able to go into GA and click the content tab and see how many times this “page” was triggered. Nice. That wasn’t so bad, was it? That was all done in less than 15 lines of code.

Tracking the Product Thumbnails:
You will use the same methodology for tracking the two product thumbnails in your flash movie. Remember, we want to know when someone clicks each thumbnail, but we’ll be adding one more event…when someone hovers over the thumbnails. You might find that people were interested enough to hover over a product, but not trigger it. If you see enough of this behavior, you might want to dig deeper to find out what’s causing it. That’s just a simple example and you should work with your web analyst to determine what to track for your specific website and flash content.

A Screenshot of the 2 Product Thumbnails for this Example:


We used the trackPageview method for the start button, but we will use trackEvent for the thumbnails. Examples of events might be clicking a button, hovering over that button, visiting a specific area of a flash movie, etc. GA now provides an Event Tracking tab within your Content tab. Within the Event Tracking tab, you can view categories of events, the specific actions users took, the labels associated with those events, trending, etc. So, we’ll track two events with each product thumbnail in our flash movie. I will only cover the first thumbnail here and you can copy this process to apply event tracking to the second thumbnail.

After someone clicks the start button, you used the play(); action to play the main timeline. At frame 20 on your main timeline, create a new stop action in your actions layer. Add a new keyframe at frame 20 and open the Actions windows. Enter this.stop(); as the code. Then create a new layer for your product thumbnails and add the buttons that you created earlier in this tutorial. Note, for this example, add them to frame 1 so your code can target the button instances. You can place them off the stage (off-screen) in frame 1 so they aren't visible and then move them on-stage later in the flash movie when visitors need to see them. If they aren't on the stage in frame 1, the event handlers you create targeting these buttons won't work. Give each instance on the stage a unique instance name, like product1_btn and product2_btn. You do this by selecting each button and then entering an instance name in the properties panel. Again, we need to give them instance names in order to target them in our ActionScript code. Once you do this, go back to frame 1 of your Actions layer, click F9 to open the Actions window again and add the following code:

//functionality for product btn 1
product1_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, clickProduct1 );
product1_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, hoverProduct1 );

function hoverProduct1( event:Event):void {
tracker.trackEvent("Products", "HoverProduct1");
}

function clickProduct1( event:Event):void {
tracker.trackEvent("Products", "ClickProduct1");
gotoAndStop("product1");
}

So we have two event handlers for the product1_btn. The first event handler will handle the CLICK mouse event and the second will handle the MOUSE_OVER mouse event. MOUSE_OVER is when someone hovers over the button (as you probably guessed). Checking the clickProduct1 function, you see that we are using trackEvent to send an event tracking call to Google Analytics. The two parameters are Category and Action respectively. I lumped both product buttons under the same category called “Products” and then gave specific events to each click and hover (HoverProduct1 and ClickProduct1). You will be able to drill into event categories in your GA reporting and then see specific actions, along with trending.

Important: When you set up the code for the second product button, make sure your event handlers target product2_btn versus product1_btn and that you trigger specific functions, such as clickProduct2 and hoverProduct2 versus clickProduct1 and hoverProduct1. You definitely don’t want to call the wrong functions, as this will ultimately skew your reporting or throw errors in your flash movie. i.e. Someone might click the profile 2 button, but you triggered the profile 1 tracking.

The Email Link, Our Conversion in Flash
Last, but not least, we want to track when people click the email button. We have decided that clicking this button will be a conversion for our flash movie. Create a new layer in your flash movie and add your email button to frame 1 of this layer. Select the email button on the stage by clicking it and give it an instance name of emailMe_btn. Then go back to frame 1 of your Actions layer and open the actions window (hit F9). Below the code we added earlier, add the following lines of code:

//functionality for email button, this is also our conversion
emailMe_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, onButtonClick );
function onButtonClick ( event:Event ):void
{
tracker.trackPageview("/GAFlash/EmailMe");
}

OK, so when visitors click the email button, we will trigger the trackPageview method to track that click as a pageview in Google Analytics. The page will show up as /GAFlash/EmailMe in your Content tab. In addition, since this is a conversion, you can set up a conversion goal in Google Analytics targeting that page. Then conversions will show up in your Goals tab within Google Analytics. Now you can tell your CMO how many visitors are converting within your flash movie. That’s not as generic as “Sorry, we don’t know”, right? ;-)

Quickly Test and Track Your Flash Movie
In the first piece of code we added in this tutorial, we included this line:
var tracker:AnalyticsTracker = new GATracker( this, "UA-111-222", "AS3", true );

As mentioned earlier, the “true” parameter tells flash whether you want to run debug mode. If you set this to true, then you can see a trace of your calls to Google Analytics. I recommend turning this on during your testing and then when you are ready to go live, you can turn if off by setting the parameter to “false”. Go ahead and test your movie and click the start button. You should see a message when the call is made to GA, and if it was successful. Then as you interact with your product thumbnails, you will also see the calls being made. Last, as you click the email button, you should also see the call being made. If all looks good, then you can add your published flash movie to an html page and then upload the files to your website. Remember to set debug to false as mentioned earlier or else everyone viewing with your flash movie will see the trace of your calls. Then click away and thoroughly test out your flash movie, try different browsers, platforms, etc. Make sure you trigger each of the elements enough and wait for GA to show you the results in your reporting.

Enabling Debug Mode to View a Trace of Your Calls:


My Working Example of Using GAforFlash
I uploaded my example of using the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component in case you wanted to see how it looked and worked. I know it's hard sometimes to follow along without seeing the final product.

Checking Your Google Analytics Reporting
I’m going to show you what the reporting looked like for my own example. The first thing I did was click the Content Tab in Google Analytics and then Event Tracking within that tab. I immediately could see the total number of events that took place, visits with an event, etc. {See screenshots below.} Clicking the Categories tab displayed the event categories we set up earlier, such as Products (Note, I used UserProfiles in my example versus Products so that's what you will see in the screenshots below). This category includes the actions of hovering and clicking the product thumbnails. This is why mapping out what you want to track is important. You want a clear hierarchy in your reporting. Drilling into each category, I could see the actions that took place like HoverProfile1, ClickProfile2, etc. Note, I used the word "profile" in my testing versus products. If you click the Actions tab (below categories), you will see all of your actions listed, regardless of category. We didn’t add the optional parameter for Labels so you won’t see anything there (in case you were wondering).

The Event Tracking Overview Report in Google Analytics:


The Events Category Page in Google Analytics:


The Event Actions Report in Google Analytics:


Pageviews and Conversions
Remember we wanted to know how many people started our flash movie (after clicking the start button)? Well if you go into the Content Tab and check top content, you will see the /GAFlash/Start page listed. The number of pageviews shows how many times visitors started the flash movie. In addition, you can view /GAFlash/EmailMe, which shows the number of times the email button was clicked. And since we set this up as a conversion, you can click the Goals tab and see your TrackFlash conversion listed. Drilling into that conversion goal will also reveal conversion rate. And since it’s a conversion goal, you can see conversion by traffic source, campaign, keyword, etc. That’s the benefit of setting up conversion goals… So, you might find that organic search traffic converted 10x as much as paid search, or that visitors arriving via your email marketing didn’t even trigger your flash movie, so on and so forth.

Viewing Flash Pageviews in the Top Content Report in Google Analytics:


Viewing a Flash Conversion in Google Analytics:

Summary
OK, we've definitely covered a lot in Part 2. Either your head is reeling or you're excited to use the gaforflash component in your own projects (or both!) Take your time and test our different scenarios. Work with your flash development team and your web analysts to map out how to best track your flash apps. You never know, it very well could lead to more flash application work… like if you told your CMO that 25% of the people interacting with your flash movie converted! :) Imagine if you could glean insights from your flash content versus it just being slick and pretty. And I’ll take data over pretty any day of the week. ;-)

GG

Read Part 1 of this Series on Tracking Flash in Google Analytics

How To Track Flash In Google Analytics (GA) Using The Google Analytics For Adobe Flash Component (GAforFlash), Part 1 of 2

I wanted to start this post with some quick points about flash:
* flash content can be extremely engaging.
* flash apps are a great way to create something viral.
* flash is currently used extensively on the web for everything from video to games to product demos.
* Creative Directors love flash.
* Brand Managers also love flash.
* But unfortunately, flash has been hard and confusing to track...

I apologize if you were feeling pretty good about flash until the last bullet! ;-) That is the reality, though.

Why Has Flash Been Confusing And Hard To Track?
Let’s take a quick look at why flash tracking has been an issue. First and most basic, there are many people that don’t know you can even track flash applications. That’s a tough obstacle to overcome, right? Second, the Analytics team is sometimes not involved during the planning of flash-based projects or campaigns. I’m sure some web analysts reading this post probably believe that’s an understatement! Third, you need to coordinate mechanisms for tracking flash with both flash developers and analysts. Fourth, there has been confusion about how to actually track flash even if you already have your flash developers and analysts in the same room. Last (at least for this initial list), some people will focus on the end result (conversions only) and not track the specific elements on the website that lead to the conversion. i.e. As long as people buy something or sign up, I don’t care what they do on the site. As you can probably guess, I’m not a big fan of the latter… I think the more information you can gather about how visitors interact with your website, the more you can optimize the website to increase conversion (whatever conversion is for your specific business).

Yes, You Can Track Flash
I’m here to tell you that you can track flash and you can see how visitors are interacting with your flash applications. The approach I am going to show you is a more elegant method for tracking flash than what's been used in the past. My hope is that this two part series can save you from a potentially embarrassing moment. You know, when your CMO asks how the 6 month flash development project that cost $75K, that looks incredible, is highly engaging, and wins awards is contributing to the success of the website. Unfortunately, many people run for the hills at that moment, or act like they didn’t hear the question (Chevy Chase-style). I’d hate for you to say, “We’re not actually sure Mr. CMO…” ,and I’d rather hear you say, “Absolutely, here’s detailed reporting of how visitors are engaging our flash content, as well as the tangible effects on conversion.” Yes, I want you to be the flash analytics rock star. :)

Introduction to the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component (GAforFlash)
The GA for flash tracking component enables you to track specific events and functionality in your flash movies and seamlessly communicate with Google Analytics for tracking. It gracefully handles any DOM issues that could cause problems in other types of flash tracking using GA. It’s an open source initiative between Google and Adobe Systems and you can find more information on the Google Code Project website. http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/

OK, But What Is It Exactly?
There are two components you can use in flash that enable you to track events, pageviews, conversions, etc. One is a simple flash component that you can customize in the component inspector in flash and the other component involves importing the tracking libraries into your project and then making calls to GA from within your ActionScript code (AS3). I’m going to cover the second approach, since it gives you the most flexibility. And don’t get scared with the way it was explained above. It’s actually straight forward if you are comfortable working in flash.

A Quick Tip For The Code-Averse:
I’m going to walk you through my example step by step in Part 2 of my series on tracking flash in google analytics. If you have worked in flash and written some ActionScript code, I’m confident you will be able to follow along. If not, grab your flash developer and your web analyst and then schedule a working lunch. You can all walk through my example together as a team. After going through my second post, I have a feeling you will collectively brainstorm several ways to use the GA for flash component to track your flash elements, websites, and applications.

So Are You Excited To Start?
Good, then you’re ready to read my second post, which covers how to track flash in Google Analytics using the GA for flash Tracking Component.

GG

Check Your Search Engine Rankings, Why Your Competitors in Organic Search Might Not Always Be Who You Think They Are

When beginning a new SEO project, there are some questions that always come up during initial meetings. How does organic search work? Which keywords should we target? Do we need to redesign our entire website? And…how do we compare to our competition in natural search? I’m going to focus on the last question in this post, because there’s an important point I’d like to make. Whenever I ask someone who their competition is in natural search, I typically hear the names of their core competitors (business-wise). Although that’s true in a pure business sense, that’s not necessarily the case in natural search. So, I often run a competitive position analysis to determine where a site ranks in the search engines as compared to its competition. It helps you (and your client) understand who their actual competition is and then sets the stage for deeper competitive analysis.

Don’t drop names with Google…
Outside of search, you might be able to throw a big brand name around and get somewhere. Unfortunately, the search engines don’t necessarily care. That’s one of the reasons you’ll see all types of websites ranking for highly competitive keywords. Actually, I’d argue that some smaller online businesses can easily outmaneuver larger websites and companies in SEO. When it comes down to it, the engines care about quality content, a good user experience, relevancy, and popularity. In other words, create outstanding content that can be easily crawled and indexed, optimize that content based on keyword research, make it easy for your visitors to find and use your content, and if those visitors find that content valuable, you might gain important inbound links (AKA votes). If that happens, subsequent rankings can follow… BTW, you’ll notice I didn’t mention that you need to be a big brand or a multi-billion dollar company to do this. That’s part of the reason blogs have become so powerful. They give the small guy a voice…and that small guy can often outrank large companies in the SERPs. Empowering, yes? Scary to large businesses and big brands, you bet.

Seriously? That’s My Competition in Natural Search??
Yes, I hear this often (with a few other words that I cannot put on my blog!) Once you run a position analysis using competitive keywords (based on keyword research), you and your client can clearly see who owns the SERPs for those keywords. Sure, the rankings can change over time, but you have a snapshot of which sites are ranking at that point in time. Then, you can take the next step and perform a competitive analysis to help you determine what type of content ranks, how the websites structure their content, and which sites link to them. Remember, quality and relevant inbound links are the lifeblood of SEO.

Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Note, since search engine rankings change often, you might not see the same exact results that I did during my test.

Flatscreen TVs
HD TV’s are obviously hot, so let’s check out a competitive keyword like flatscreen tvs:



This is a great example. There are only 2 manufacturers in the top 10 (Samsung at #7 and Westinghouse Digital at #10, which isn't visible in the screenshot above). More on Samsung in a minute. The rest of the sites include reviews, news stories, a buying guide, an e-commerce website, etc. I’ll bet if you walked into LG, Panasonic or Samsung and asked who they compete with in natural search for a keyword like flatscreen tv's, you would hear the other big brands and not the sites in this list. Note, Samsung was pretty smart with creating the page that ranks on their website. Someone at Samsung (cough, cough, SEO guy), understood what people are searching for and provided that content on Samsung.com (Pagerank 8...) There are other good things about this page that I'd like to cover, but that’s for another post. :)

Cabernet Sauvignon
Any wine drinkers out there? Imagine you owned a winery and had an award winning cab? You would probably want to rank highly, right? Let’s see which sites rank for the keyword cabernet sauvignon:



Wow, I’m not exactly a wine connoisseur, but I don’t see any popular wine brands here (other than in the shopping results, which I'll tackle in a minute). You have Wikipedia (big surprise), about.com, an article about Obama, and then a spattering of other wine-related educational pages. Needless to say, this list of websites is probably not what a leading winery would expect to find ranking for cabernet sauvignon.

Enter Universal Search: Also, in the middle of the page you will see shopping results listed. This is Universal Search in action, where Google is mixing additional types of results within the organic rankings. More on this below, but you should start to think about all the different ways you can rank in organic search beyond traditional webpage content. For example, video, images, news, shopping, local, etc.

HD Video Camera
HD Video is all the rage, let’s take a look at the keyword HD Video Camera:



Very interesting. There’s only one big brand in the list (Canon at #4). The rest of the list includes reviews at cnet, an announcement from camcorderinfo.com, two YouTube videos (more on this in a minute), some news results, and then amazon.com. Again, if you walked into Sony, Panasonic, or Canon, do you think they would guess that they are competing against YouTube videos? Probably not. On that note, you can see Universal Search in action here again, with two video thumbnails in the organic results (at least at the time of my test). One is from Tiger Direct and the other is from Chris Pirillo! Great job Chris, you outrank major manufacturers of HD video cameras. :)

So, if you haven’t started thinking about Universal Search and the impact that it can have, just take a closer look at the screenshot above. I think you’ll change your mind. There's also a news result right under the video thumbnails. Both the video results and news results are powerful, especially since they have thumbnails associated with them. If you are interested in learning more about optimizing your video content, then check out my post about Video SEO.

Fuel Efficient Cars
Based on the spike in gasoline prices during 2008, let’s check out a search for fuel efficient cars:



Holy smokes, there’s not 1 car manufacturer in the list. Not 1. I highly doubt that Ford, Honda, Toyota, Chrysler, and GM would take me seriously if I walked in and said that they compete with a government agency, a green publication, and a newspaper in natural search! That said, you need content on your site in order to rank... I was shocked to see several car manufacturer websites without a single occurrence of the keyword fuel efficient cars. I had to check a few times to believe it...

You will also see another example of Universal Search in the screenshot above. Google is providing news results mixed in the organic rankings (in the middle of the page). This is just another reason to start thinking about all of the ways to rank in organic search (and the different types of content you can optimize). All of your digital assets come into play with universal search.

So, are you ready to conduct a position analysis?
OK, I think you get the point. Performing a position analysis is an important step in understanding your actual competition in natural search. I would begin the process by identifying your competitive keywords via extensive keyword research and then determine where you rank against your competition for those keywords. Then, once you know the competition, you should complete a thorough competitive analysis to see how you can strengthen your organic search power and increase your search engine rankings.

Good luck and be ready for some interesting looks as you tell people who they really compete with in natural search. :)

GG

Web Analytics and Tracking Your Online Marketing Campaigns, Why Starting With a Basic Analytics Foundation is a Smart Way to Go

You woke up earlier than usual this morning, eager to start the day. This is not your typical week... You’ve got a new product launching and you are having some final meetings to make sure everything is covered with your online marketing campaigns. In one of your last meetings before the launch, your CMO walks in and says, “Great work on developing the campaign and I’m excited to see the results. When can I expect to see some reporting detailing how each channel is performing?” Crickets chirp… {Since this is my blog post, I have the power to freeze time for 10 minutes so I can explain more about web analytics and help you craft your answer to your CMO. Please continue reading.}

There’s no reason that tracking online marketing campaigns should be an issue, although unfortunately, many times it is. There is a lot of talk about bleeding edge web analytics, and believe me, I’m excited about those advancements. But I would be careful with how you implement your web analytics package, or more importantly, how fast you move to an advanced tracking setup.

I think everyone would agree that it's never a good thing when campaigns go live without the proper tracking and measurement in place. It actually pains me to see that occur…especially knowing how some basic reporting can provide powerful and actionable insights. That's right, I said basic reporting and actionable insights in one sentence. For example, wouldn’t you like to track each aspect of your campaign to see which ones perform best? You can use this data to help you determine how to proceed in future campaigns (or even how to tweak current campaigns that are live). Is paid search generating the most revenue, which categories of keywords within paid search are driving that success, is email marketing generating high click throughs, but low conversion? Are your product pages ranking in natural search, how much traffic is coming from Google, and what’s the conversion rate for specific categories of keywords from organic search? If you think that these questions are hard to answer, you are wrong. I’m here to tell you that with some relatively basic tracking in place, you can find out answers to all of these questions, and more importantly, you can pass those insights to senior management at intervals during the campaign. As you can imagine, having campaign data is extremely valuable (even when it's negative). And, that information is easily digestible by all levels of the organization.

Start with a stable and accurate web analytics foundation and build upon it…
Here’s a quick analogy. You just spent thousands of dollars buying state of the art windows for your home. In addition, you decided to put in hardwood floors throughout the house. That’s great, but you’ve got a small problem. Your foundation is badly cracked. Considering that you need to spend a lot of money trying to fix your foundation, now how do you feel about adding all of the extras? You suddenly don’t seem to care, right? Web Analytics is the same way. What good is jumping to advanced levels of tracking when you can't even get basic performance data?? That's why I always recommend starting with a relatively basic implementation. Then, make sure your reporting is accurate and providing you with actionable information. Once you have a solid web analytics foundation in place, you can enhance it and test the new functionality in bite size pieces. For example, advanced segmentation, event tracking, tracking visitor engagement, implementing an advanced testing platform, etc. I don’t recommend jumping into the most advanced analytics setup right out of the gates. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that you won’t be in a good place. There will be confusion, disappointment, frustration, and then you’ll probably revert to the basic setup like I recommended in the first place! By that time, you might have wasted countless hours, days, and months trying to get the advanced setup working. Even worse, there may be people in your company that have been using the reporting to make decisions... and decisions based on poor data is not good, to say the least.

What type of information can you get from relatively basic reporting?
Let’s go through a hypothetical campaign so you can see what I’m referring to. Maybe you have a new version of a product launching soon. You’ll be running paid search, display advertising, email marketing, and then optimizing the new section of the website for organic search. You’ve decided to use Google Analytics to track your campaigns and have installed the tracking code on each page of your website. For our example, there are two conversions, an e-commerce sale and an email list signup. You will be running paid search in Google and Yahoo, your display advertising is running on a number of industry-specific websites, you will be blasting out several email campaigns to your segmented in-house list, and you’ve optimized your new pages based on keyword research for natural search. With Google Analytics in place (a package I’ve written about often), you will be able to track each aspect of your campaign to determine the effectiveness of your efforts. With the proper tracking in place, you won't be surfing your web analytics reporting aimlessly for hours. Instead, you will be able to drill into GA and pull relevant information that can help you understand what worked and what didn't.

But Glenn, how do I track my campaigns?
That’s a good question and one I hear often. You’ve already added your GA code to your website, which is the first step. The next step (for our example) is to make sure GA tracks conversions and then revenue. You can learn how to set up conversion goals in Google Analytics here. After you learn how to set up conversion goals, you can read about how to set up e-Commerce tracking. It’s not hard to do and should take your developers a relatively short amount of time to set up. When that’s completed, you will be able to see conversions and revenue by channel (Paid Search, Natural Search, Email Marketing, Display Advertising, etc). Even better, you can drill into your campaigns to see which ad groups are driving the best performance, which keywords, which email creative, which creative elements are working best, etc. For example, you might find that one version of your email creative outperformed other email creative by 65%. That’s the type of powerful information you can glean from even a basic setup like this.

Now, GA natively tracks your AdWords campaigns so you are covered there without any additional tagging. For your other campaigns, you will need to tag your creative using GA’s tracking parameters. You can learn more about how to tag your links here. They are basically querystring parameters that enable GA to identify specific campaigns, and then will enable you to run reports on what those visitors do on your site. So for our example, you would want to tag your Yahoo paid search campaigns, your email marketing campaigns, and your display advertising so they can be uniquely identified by Google Analytics. BTW, I’ve written a post about how to tag your email marketing campaigns so you can track each element clicked in your emails. I’ve also written about tagging YSM campaigns using dynamic variables. Once you tag your campaigns, you can access your reporting within the Campaigns tab in Google Analytics (under Traffic Sources).

But can I really track valuable information with this setup?
You bet, but I’ll let you be the judge. Take a look at the bullets listed below and mark down how many you think would be valuable or important when tracking your campaigns:

*Visitors from each channel and then each campaign within that channel. i.e. Paid Search campaigns, email marketing campaigns, banners, etc.
*Conversions and conversion rate by channel, by campaign, search engine, keyword, email creative, banners, etc.
*e-Commerce revenue by channel, campaign, search engine, keyword, email creative, banner, etc.
*Bounce rate of all campaign landing pages.
*Exit rate of pages within your site and campaign section.
*Conversion Funnel analysis, or where people drop off when trying to complete a conversion.
*Trending over time per channel (and per campaign within each channel.)
*Top products and revenue during the campaign time period.
*Referring websites that are driving traffic to your campaign landing pages, including conversions and revenue from those traffic sources.
*Which geographic regions generate the most revenue or conversion.

I can keep going, but I’ll stop there.

How many bullets did you identify as valuable? I hope all of them (or at least most of them). Once you have this data, you can easily compare the reporting to previous campaigns, you can use it to refine the current campaign (on the fly), or use it to improve future campaigns. It’s actionable data. For example, you might find that display advertising cost you $50,000 and generated only $10,000 in revenue. Drilling into your display advertising, maybe two websites outperformed the others by a huge margin. Maybe you’ll find that paid search generated a 350% ROI. Drilling in further, your brand keywords accounted for most of the revenue and you already rank in natural search for those keywords, so do you need to run brand terms next time? Maybe your email marketing generated a lot of click throughs, but almost no conversion. You also notice a 90% bounce rate from email. Why?

OK, I think you get the picture. You will gain all of the information I listed above, and more, by using a fairly basic analytics setup with some minimal tagging. Can you see why it’s frustrating to some people in web marketing when campaigns go live without the proper analytics setup or tracking in place? Now, would I love to track even more than this by using an elaborate web analytics setup? You bet, but compared to having no tracking in place or unreliable tracking, I would be happy with this level of reporting! Wouldn’t you?

Back to your CMO for a second:
{Now I will unfreeze time so you can answer your CMO.} Earlier in the post, you were ready to answer a question from your CMO about campaign reporting by channel. Now instead of crickets chirping, I hope you’re chomping at the bit to answer his question. Maybe something like this will do, “Tracking? Absolutely, you’ll receive reporting 48 hours into the campaign and then twice per week for the life of the campaign. Then we’ll create a presentation detailing our findings once the campaign ends.” He smiles, and then walks out with a confident look in his eye. You turn around and open Outlook, create a task, and enter “Send Glenn a quick thank you.” ;-)

I’m going to leave you with one last question. If you were the CMO and had 2 senior marketing managers provide you their campaign reporting and one provides you the level of detail that I listed above (from a relatively basic analytics setup), and the other provides you with almost no reporting, or sketchy reporting at best, which one would you allocate more budget to next year?

GG

YouTube Insight, How to Optimize and Enhance Your Online Videos Using Analytics

Today I get to write about two of my favorite things, Web Analytics and Online Video. Lucky me! Given that YouTube just surpassed Yahoo as the #2 search engine, I think it’s safe to say that many of you probably visit YouTube regularly to watch videos online. In addition, I know some of you are taking the next step and producing your own videos to share with the world. That covers watching, producing, and sharing, but there’s another concept I wanted to introduce today, and that’s optimization. Did you know that YouTube gives you access to a video analytics package free of charge, right in your YouTube account? It’s called YouTube Insight and it gives you the ability to constantly glean insights from your video clips and viewers. Video producers that use Insight already know its power, but I still think many people don’t know what to do with it, or more importantly, how to optimize their videos using the data provided by Insight. If you’ve read my blog before, then you know how I feel about the importance of web analytics. Well, this is simply an extension of web analytics, but specifically for your own YouTube video clips. Let’s dig in.

What is YouTube Insight?
YouTube Insight is a video analytics tool that provides you with valuable information about your video clips (and your viewers). Insight gives you several reports, including views, popularity, discovery (how people find your videos), and a new piece of functionality called hotspots. Insight Hotspots enable you see which parts of your video are hot (higher engagement) and which parts are cold (less interest and engagement). I will explain more about hotspots below.

Improving Your YouTube Videos with Insight
Let’s face it, producing videos is darn time consuming. I began shooting and editing video in 1995 and one thing I learned very quickly was that producing a video is not easy and takes a lot of time. So, if you are going to spend the time to brainstorm, script, shoot, edit, and publish videos for YouTube, then you are probably going to want to know what works and what doesn’t. For example, which videos are more engaging, which garner most of your views, how popular were they compared to other videos, which parts of the video were more engaging, etc. You want to know this information so you don’t waste valuable time in the future.

Accessing YouTube Insight
You can access Insight in a few different ways once you have logged in. First, you can access your Insight Dashboard by clicking the Account link in the top right of your screen. Then you can click YouTube Insight from the Performance and Data Tools section located near the bottom of the page (left side).

First Click Your Account Link, Then Click YouTube Insight on Your Account Page:




The second way to access Insight is by entering the My Videos Page (Uploaded Videos) and clicking the Insight button (for each video). The button for Insight is below the video information and is next to Audio Swap.

YouTube Insight Button Located on My Videos Page:


Insight Dashboard (a snapshot of all videos)
Your Insight Dashboard functions just like a dashboard in any web analytics package and gives you an aggregate view of your videos (your channel). For example, your dashboard will show you which videos are most popular, how many views your channel is getting, which geographic regions hold the most viewers, popularity of videos in your channel, demographics of your viewers, etc. It’s a great way to get an overall view of how your channel is performing. That said, you really should drill into each video to gain the most valuable information… Aggregate data at the channel level doesn’t really give you actionable information.

Tip: When you are ready to analyze a specific video, you can either click its name in the Views tab of your Insight Dashboard or you can go to your My Videos Page and click the Insight button under each video clip. If you always want to begin by analyzing specific videos, then you might start your visit by accessing the My Videos Page instead of the dashboard.

Visits
You can click the Visits tab to see the number of visits each video received in all countries, or in specific regions. You can change the timeframe on the graph and you can choose a specific country from the dropdown on the right. Then, let’s say you choose the United States, you can click on specific states to see your visits per state. To change the date range, you can click the Zoom links in the top of the graph for 1 day, 5 days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or Max. Or, you can use the slider below the graph to quickly change the date range of your report.


YouTube Insight Views:


Popularity
Insight also gives you the option of seeing how popular your videos are compared to other videos in the selected region during that timeframe. Just like with visits, you can click a country on the map to target that region, or you can drill into a region to get more granular. For example, you can click a state in the US to see the popularity within that state. You can also click specific countries within a region like Turkey within the Middle East or China within Asia.

YouTube Insight Popularity:


Discovery (or Traffic Sources)
OK, who else is addicted to checking traffic sources for their website in their web analytics package? It’s hard not be, right? The Discovery tab provides the traffic sources for your video clips. I love it. In a nutshell, it's how people found your video. There are five links within this section and they include:

YouTube Search, or which keywords people are entering to find your videos on YouTube.
Related Videos, or other videos on YouTube where your video thumbnail showed up as a related video and people clicked that thumbnail to get to your video.
Embedded Player, or which sites have embedded your video clip (using the embed code in YouTube).
External Links, or websites that link to your video clip (AKA referring sites).
Google Search, or keywords people are entering in Google to find your video clips.
Google Video, or keywords that people are entering on Google Video to find your video clips.
Other, or links to your video where there is no referring URL (AKA Direct Traffic). This might be a person emailing the link to someone else, IM’ing the link, etc.
YouTube Other, or other pages on YouTube that are linking to your video clips (not related videos).

YouTube Insight Discovery:


Demographics
Insight provides some basic data regarding the demographics of your viewers. For example, you can see the age range and gender for viewers. In addition, you can click on a specific gender to see the age range within that gender. So, you can click Female and see the age range of your female viewers. {Marketers, can you say Test Group?} More on this later.

YouTube Insight Demographics:


New Addition: Insight Hotspots (and Coldspots)
YouTube just recently made this feature available. Using Insight Hotspots, you can see which parts of your video are more engaging (or less engaging) as compared to other videos of similar length. As the video plays in Insight, there is a graph on the left side of the screen that displays whether that segment of video was hot or cold. If it’s hot, fewer people are leaving your video at that point, or even rewinding the video to see that part again. If it’s cold, more people are skipping that segment or leaving the video at that point. I’ll explain more below about how to use this feature to enhance your videos, but needless to say, it’s an outstanding addition.

YouTube Insight Hotspots:


This All Sounds Great Glenn, But How Do I Use Insight To Optimize My Videos?
Just like web analytics, having the data available is one thing, but using the data to enhance your efforts is another. Don’t fear! I’ll explain some basic things you can do in order to glean insights from your reporting to optimize your future videos.

1. Your Ad Hoc Focus Group
Companies spend a lot of money testing their creative to understand what will engage targeted viewers. Well, you can use Insight Hotspots to see what is working in your videos and what isn’t, and for free! You can see which parts of your video people like (rewind and watch again) versus don’t like (they skip through or exit the video). For example, you might find that physical stunts are extremely hot where dialogue is cold. Or you might test a few different versions of a video to see which angles yield the highest engagement. Does humor work, action, or a combination of both? Using Insight Hotspots, you can begin to take guesswork out of the equation and make decisions based on data (which is always a smart move!)

2. Using Insight For Keyword Research
I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of Keyword Research for SEO. It’s an incredibly important process to go through in order to optimize your website based on what people ACTUALLY search for (versus what you think they search for). With Insight, you have access to YouTube searches that lead to your videos, Google searches that lead to your videos, and Google Video searches that lead to your videos (and all for free). By analyzing these keywords, you can start to understand the ways in which people search for different types of content and then you can use that information to optimize future videos (and the text content you provide for those videos like your descriptions, tagging, titles, etc.) For example, are people searching for a category, a specific product, do they enter questions or is it by major keyword?

3. See Which Videos Spike Quickly Versus Providing Sustained Visitors
You might find that an entertaining video has a spike in visitors and then fizzles out, where an educational video builds traffic over time and constantly drives viewers your way. Since you can view visits trended over time, then you can start to get a feel for the lifecycle of specific videos. The more you know about the different types of content you produce, the more you can tailor future content to meet your specific needs (or the needs of your clients).

4. Understand Related Videos That Drive Viewers To Your Video Clips
You can start to learn which types of videos are considered “related” and which videos drive the most viewers. The more you understand the videos that drive people to your own clips, the more you can target future content to that target audience. For example, maybe you had a lot of visitors from How-To videos. You might use this angle in the future to make sure you show up there again, or to capture that traffic from the start...

5. Learn Which Websites Link To Your Video (Referring Sites)
Checking your external links, you can see which websites are linking to your video clips on YouTube. From an SEO standpoint, this provides a great opportunity for link-building. For example, if a site in your industry is linking to your YouTube clips, then maybe they would want to link to your website as well. Links are the lifeblood of SEO and finding topical and relevant link opportunities is extremely important. Note, you can’t see specific URL’s in Insight…you only get domain information, which is a little frustrating. That said, you can probably track down the specific webpage by doing a site command in Google. :)

6. Find Out Which Video Clips Go Viral
If you see a lot of viewers from “Other” in your discovery report (direct traffic), then that’s probably from email, IM, etc. Basically, someone sent around the link for your video to their friends, coworkers, etc. If you had a high percentage of viewers from Direct Traffic, then you might have found something that gets people talking. You can follow this path and test out future videos using similar types of content.

7. See Which Geographic Regions Watch Your Videos (Countries And States)
Are your videos more popular within certain countries or regions? Why were they more popular? For example, did you get a lot of traffic from New York when you shot a video in Times Square? Did you get a lot of traffic from Massachusetts when you showcased Boston Baked Beans in your video about the Best Ideas for Sunday Dinner? On the flip side, did you get a lot of viewers from Hawaii to a video about Surfing the Web on Your Blackberry? Were they interested in surfing or a Blackberry??

Produce, Upload, Analyze, and Refine
Let’s face it, videos are not easy to create (good videos). They cost money, take a lot of time to produce, and a huge amount of effort to pull off. If an average blog post takes a few hours to brainstorm, write, edit, and publish, then a good video takes 4-5X that at least to brainstorm, script, shoot, edit, publish and share. Given the time commitment involved, I highly recommend using YouTube Insight as your video analytics package to glean insights from your viewers in order to optimize and enhance your future clips. If you don’t, then you’re just flying blind. As you can probably guess, I’m against flying blind and you should be too, especially when someone hands you a free analytics package like YouTube Insight!

GG

The Long Tail of SEO, How Long Tail Keywords Impact Natural Search Traffic, Bounce Rate and Conversion.

Imagine for a second that you are an SEO consultant and that you have a big presentation today. Your prospective client has an e-commerce store and a fledgling blog at this point. The first thing the CMO says to you is, “OK Mr. Hotshot SEO guy (or gal), tell me how you are going to help us rank for these 10 keywords?” You glance around the room and your heart starts to beat faster as you make eye contact with the CEO and COO both smirking at you. After a brief second, you turn to the CMO and say, “I’m not going to help you rank for those 10 keywords.” {There’s a collective gasp in the room.} You quickly follow with, “I’m going to help you rank for those 10 keywords plus the hundreds of long tail keywords that are associated with them!” Now you’ve got their attention. Did that sound a bit dramatic? It’s actually a common occurrence when speaking with people that aren’t heavily involved in Search Marketing. The common perception is that you should rank for a handful of competitive keywords and focus your attention on getting top rankings for them. I agree you should, but if you just focus on those top keywords, you would be missing a huge opportunity. Enter the long tail of SEO.

The Long Tail Explained
Let’s begin by defining the long tail. It’s a term that describes the strategy of selling a large number of unique items, although it may only be in small amounts per item. Think of a large e-commerce retailer and the amount of revenue generated from all of the items housed on the site (versus just the top 10 items). The “long tail” may generate more revenue than your top categories (when you combine all of the units sold). So, for our Search example, the long tail would be the hundreds (or thousands) of terms that derive from your competitive keywords. Here’s an example. Let’s say you sell HD TV’s. You might want to rank for the competitive keyword HD TV. However, you would also want to rank for 42 inch Samsung HD TV, how to choose the best HD TV, reviews for Plasma HD TV’s, etc. As you can see, the long tail keywords are simply more targeted search terms than your original keyword.

The Impact of The Long Tail on Natural Search Traffic, Bounce Rate and Conversion:
Now, you might be wondering what the impact of the long tail of SEO can be? In my experience, the long tail can be a powerful driver of targeted traffic to your website. Also, since long tail keywords tend to be more targeted (think “Samsung HD TV reviews”), you might find lower bounce rates per keyword (if you have content that matches what people are looking for of course). More on that later. If you have more overall SEO traffic and lower bounce rates, then you have a greater chance of converting visitors (which can mean more revenue, subscriptions, downloads, and other forms of conversion specific to your site). Yes, there is a connection to the success of your business! :-)

How Does This Translate To Your SEO Projects?
I ran some reports using KeywordDiscovery to give you a few tangible examples. Let’s say you sell men’s shoes (I’ll use a generic example without brand names). A quick report from KeywordDiscovery yields 2,143 keywords including the words men’s shoes. Now, you wouldn’t want to target all of these keywords since some don’t apply to someone buying men’s shoes, but there are a number of keywords that you might want to target. For example, men’s casual and dress shoes, men’s narrow shoes, men’s slip on shoes, or best men’s running shoes. You get the picture. Now, let’s say you don’t have an e-commerce store, but you target people looking for medical news (you might have an advertising model). Again using KeywordDiscovery, there are 490 keywords that include variations of medical news. Some of the keywords you might want to target include latest medical news, medical ethics in news, breaking medical news, controversial medical news, etc. For more information about finding the right keywords, please read my post about keyword research for SEO.

How does this affect what you do, SEO-wise?
Warning: I’m about to explain a very technical and important part of SEO. If you get confused based on my elaborate and technical response, please read this section again. {OK, I’ll cut the sarcasm…} In order to rank for specific keywords, you should actually have those keywords on your website. I know that’s a crazy concept, but it’s true. ;-) So, in order to target competitive keywords and their long tail counterparts, you should develop ways to include that text on your website, in your blog posts, in the tools you develop, etc. The actual content can take many forms and it’s one of the reasons I love SEO. You can be creative and develop ideas for new content and functionality for the site. Please read my blog post about SEO, the amazing multi-channel channel if you haven’t already. When you need to develop new content, you can take several routes, including developing new areas of your site, blogging, creating new functionality or tools on your site, writing whitepapers, issuing press releases, etc. You would just want to make sure that you target more terms than just the core competitive keywords I mentioned earlier in this post.

The Long Tail Summary:
Although this was just an introduction to the long tail of SEO, I hope you see the power of targeting more than just a few competitive keywords. SEO can be a robust marketing channel and can drive thousands of targeted visitors to your site via a multitude of search queries. Keyword research can help you determine those long tail keywords and then your web analytics package can help you determine which ones are generating quality traffic.

Last, but not least, my blog post has given you a great line for your next sales pitch! ;-)

GG

Web Analytics and Tracking Offline Conversions | Why I Wouldn’t Want to be the Email Marketing Manager at Toys R Us

Maybe that’s a bit harsh, so let me explain. I’m sure it’s a good job and that the person running email marketing enjoys what he/she does, but there is an inherent issue with that position that would drive me absolutely crazy... So, why wouldn’t I want to be the email marketing manager at Toys R Us? It has to do with sales attribution, tracking offline conversions, and what I’ve witnessed first hand over the past 6 months. Let’s start off with some background information.

Let’s Define Sales Attribution:
The definition of sales attribution is the process by which you assign credit (in this case revenue) to a particular sales channel. If you are using a web analytics package on your e-commerce website (and I hope you are), then sales attribution enables you to break down your revenue by channel (email marketing, paid search, organic search, banner advertising, etc.) to gauge how your marketing campaigns are performing.

Receiving the Email and Then Visiting the Store…
I receive email marketing from Toys R Us frequently (being a parent of 2 young children). If something piques my curiosity, I sometimes click through to the website and browse around. That’s good for Toys R Us and their email marketing manager. But…I almost always buy offline, and that’s not so good for the email marketing manager. Now, I’m sure the person running email marketing wants the best for the company and a sale is a sale, but that specific sale won’t be attributed to the email campaign that sparked the transaction. Do you see where I’m going with this? How would you like it if someone else (or department) always took credit for your hard work? Back to why I purchase toys offline. I think you have to be a parent to understand why I almost always buy offline at a Toys R Us store. You see, it’s actually a blast to visit the store with your kids. And, when weekends sometimes feel like a marathon for parents, it’s a much needed break. The only way I would buy from Toy R Us online is if the store near us didn’t have something I desperately needed in stock (and that’s not often). It’s ironic for me…since I buy everything online, but toys seem to be a different story.

Web Analytics and Sales Attribution
Typically, an email marketing campaign is tagged specifically to be tracked in a web analytics package. This is done via tracking parameters added to the links in the email marketing creative you receive. The tracking variables are appended to the URL in the querystring. To see what I’m talking about, check out the following link from an email I received from Lands End this past weekend.

An email link tagged with tracking variables:
http://www.landsend.com/ix/mens-clothing/index.html?tab=1&cm_mmc=usnews-_-usnews_060108_fs_core-_-topnav-_-menstab

Lands End is using Coremetrics (a web analytics package that I am extremely familiar with). The tagging you see in the querystring will enable the web analytics package to attribute the sale to the email marketing I received on Sunday. Based on what I just showed you, I’m sure you can see why tracking online campaigns is much easier to do than offline campaigns (and why it’s much faster to report). You can track each campaign at a granular level and obviously make decisions based on your reporting to improve campaign performance in the future. That said, you still have a problem with tracking offline conversions that started online (like I explained earlier with receiving an email and then visiting the store.) So, as the sales roll in at the store, the poor email marketing manager back at headquarters won’t really be able to attribute that revenue to his or her campaign. Sure, you can guess that the email drove a certain amount of revenue, but you can’t say for sure… Unfortunately, there aren’t many ways around this issue (for now). However, there are some ways to attempt to capture the sale and attribute it correctly and I’ve listed two ideas below.

Some Ideas for Attributing Sales for Offline Transactions That Originate Online:

1. Include a printable coupon in your email.
If you can provide a printable coupon in your email creative, then you might entice a customer to bring it to the store. If the coupon is used, then you can attribute the sale to your email marketing campaign (as long as your systems can communicate with one another). This is not a new technique and it requires a customer to take a few extra steps, but it can help you attribute the sale to your campaign. Hey, every dollar counts when you’re running that channel, right?

2. Have your cashiers ask the question at checkout.
Now, this is definitely not foolproof, since it’s based on human behavior, but it might work for you. Let’s list a few potential problems… The cashier may never ask the question or ask much less frequently than you want. The customer may not tell the truth or shrug off the question. Let’s face it, relying on people to track your sales is not optimal.

Let's Help The Email Marketing Manager at Toys R Us!
So, can you see why I wouldn’t want to be the email marketing manager at Toys R Us? I can’t imagine how many sales are attributed to other channels. That would drive me nuts! But, we can help... If you’ve received an email from Toys R Us, but visited the store to make your purchase, list the date and dollar amount below. Maybe the email marketing manger can import this data into his/her web analytics package and finally get credit for a job well done!

I’ll start:
May 25th, $72.10

GG

Google Analytics Benchmarking Data, Comparing Your Website Data to Industry Verticals

Earlier this month, Google Analytics added a new feature, the ability to view benchmarking data across verticals. The idea is to enable you as a website owner to compare your reporting to that of your industry as a whole or to other industries. You would obviously want to do this in order to glean insights about how your website compares in context (and not in a vacuum). Context is very important to have or your web metrics are just numbers. For example, your visitor level might be low or high compared to your niche, but you won’t know that unless you have context (or in this case other comparable data from your vertical.) Overall, I think Google providing benchmarking data is a good start and I’ll explain more below, but it really is just a start… Anyone that does competitive research for a living probably cracked a grin when they saw this very high level information.

How to View Benchmarking Data:
In order to view benchmarking data, you need to enable it in your analytics settings from within Google Analytics. The first page you see after logging in (which shows your various profiles) has a link that says “Edit Account and Data Sharing Services”. After clicking that link, check the box that says, “Share My Google Analytics Data… Anonymously with Google products and benchmarking service”. Then click “Save Changes”. Note that it could take several weeks for this data to show up. You will know if it shows up by clicking the Visitors Tab from within Google Analytics and then the “Benchmarking (BETA)” tab. Then you can dig in.


What Does Benchmarking Reporting Include?
The first thing you will see is a dashboard of reports, including Visits, Pageviews, Pages Per Visit (PPV), Bounce Rate (my favorite metric), Average Time on Site, and Percent of New Visits. Each graph will show you how your site compares with the industry you have selected. So how do you change the industry vertical to compare against? At the top of the report, you can click “Open Category List” to reveal all of the verticals you can select to compare your site’s data to. OK, I’ve revealed problem #1. If you want to compare apples to apples, you might not be thrilled with GA’s initial list of verticals. Again, this is a great start, but if you focus on a vertical that’s not directly reflected in one of the listings, is the process of analyzing the data worth it? Every vertical and type of site will have their nuances, so it’ll be hard to accurately compare data unless your vertical is listed.

Comparing Visits:
Everyone wants to know how their visitor counts stack up against their industry. This is actually one of the graphs that can help you. For example, if you see a dip in traffic during March, did your industry see the same dip? Did they see an increase instead? What does the trending look like for Q1 for your site versus your industry? Do you want to find partnerships based on seasonal traffic levels? Take a look at various verticals to note similar trending or inverse trending. Maybe you can help each other. You get the point…

Comparing Bounce Rate:
When I first found out that the benchmarking service would include bounce rate, my favorite web metric of all, I was psyched. I’ve written a series of blog posts about bounce rate, since I don’t think there’s