Thursday, December 27th, 2012

Introducing SEO Bootcamp Princeton, A Hands-On SEO Training Course in Princeton NJ

SEO Training Topics

I absolutely love getting in front of a group of people to speak about SEO (and always have). Over the past several years, I’ve led SEO training classes for clients covering a wide range of topics, from technical SEO to keyword research to content optimization to linkbuilding strategy. Although I’ve really enjoyed leading classes like this, I’ve always wanted to launch a training program that anyone could sign up for, and not just clients. Well, I finally put the program together, and it’s called SEO Bootcamp Princeton.

SEO Bootcamp Princeton is a three hour, in-person training course being held at the Johnson Education Center (at D&R Greenway) on January 17^th, from 9AM to 12PM. You can register online via EventBrite, and there’s a 20% off, early registration discount running through 12/31/12. If you register by then, tickets are $145 versus the standard price of $179.

The Target Audience for SEO Bootcamp Princeton
So, what will you learn at SEO Bootcamp Princeton? Put simply, you’ll learn a lot. My goal is to make sure attendees can leave the training ready to make changes to their websites. I’ve crafted the training so it can be valuable for any person marketing a business, from small business owners to corporate marketers. SMB’s will learn the tactical knowledge necessary to build a solid SEO foundation, while corporate marketers can learn SEO best practices and techniques.

In addition, the training will be extremely valuable for creative professionals, including designers, programmers, copywriters, etc. I used to work for a large agency in New York City, and I led a similar type of training there. I can tell you that every creative professional left the training with a stronger understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Actually, I know the training changed how some people performed their jobs on a regular basis…

For example, designers and programmers learned about search engine friendly ways to design and code sites, while copywriters learned how to perform keyword research and properly optimize content. Professionals involved with information architecture (IA) learned how to best structure a navigation, while also learning the best ways to build an internal linking structure. And everyone in the training learned about the risks of redesigning a website without taking SEO into account.

Those are just a few of the SEO topics you’ll learn more about at SEO Bootcamp Princeton. Again, my goal is that you leave with a much deeper knowledge of SEO, that you can make changes immediately, and that you take SEO into account whenever working on a website, campaign, or redesign. You can learn more about the topics I’m going to cover on the SEO Bootcamp Princeton webpage.

SEO Bootcamp Princeton is Job-Agnostic – All Levels and Positions Will Benefit

Technical and Creative Job Titles

Tools and Plugins
SEO is definitely a mix of art and science. And in order to assist SEO professionals with several core tasks, there are many tools and plugins one can use. During the training, I will highlight several of the tools and plugins that can make your job easier SEO-wise. I’ve always said that when you combine the right tools with the right SEO knowledge, great things can happen. And I’ll make sure to explain some of my favorites along the way. From Firefox plugins to Chrome extensions to standalone software applications, you’ll leave the training with a list of tools that can help you on a regular basis.

SEO Tools Training

Major Algorithm Updates
I can’t leave this post without touching on a very important topic in SEO that’s affecting many business owners. Google has launched several important algorithm updates since early 2011, including both Panda and Penguin. As you can imagine, I receive calls every month from business owners that have gotten hammered by these updates. During SEO Bootcamp Princeton, I will introduce each major algorithm update, and cover important insights based on helping a range of businesses deal with the aftermath of getting hit. And more importantly, I can explain the best ways to avoid getting hit in the first place. You can read several of my case studies about Panda recovery and Penguin recovery if you are interested in learning more.

Panda and Penguin Algorithm Updates

Next Steps, Register Today
In closing, I’m ultra-excited about SEO Bootcamp Princeton. If you are interested in registering, you can sign up via the EventBrite page. Again, there’s a 20% off, early registration discount running through 12/31. After 12/31, the standard pricing will be $179 per seat. If you have any questions about the training, don’t hesitate to contact me. It would be great to see you there!

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 10:18 am in google, seo, tools

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Monday, December 17th, 2012

Trackbacks in Google Analytics – How To Analyze Inbound Links in GA’s Social Reports

In May of 2012, Google Analytics introduced trackbacks in its social reporting. If you’re not familiar with trackbacks, they enable you to understand when another website links to your content. So, using Google Analytics, and the new trackbacks reporting, you could start to track inbound links you are building from across the web.

Note, if you want to perform advanced-level analysis of your links, you should still use more robust tools like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO. But, trackbacks reporting is a quick and easy way to identify backlinks, and right within Google Analytics. It can definitely supplement your link analysis efforts.

If you’re in charge of content strategy for your company, or if you are publishing content on a regular basis, then checking trackbacks reporting in GA can quickly help you understand the fruits of your labor. But since trackbacks reporting isn’t immediately visible, I’ve written this post to explain how you can find trackbacks, and then what you can do with the data once you access the reporting.

Social Reports and Trackbacks
First, if you’re not familiar with social reporting in Google Analytics, you should check out my post from March where I cover how to use the new social reports to analyze content. Social reports are a great addition to GA, but I still find many marketers either don’t know about them, or don’t know how to use them. And that’s a shame, since they provide some great insights about the traffic coming from social networks, and the conversations going on there (at least for data hub partners).

Below, I’m going to walk you step by step through the process of finding links to your content via trackbacks reporting. Once we find them, I’ll explain what you can do with your newly-found link data.

How To Find Trackbacks (Step by Step)
1. Access your Google Analytics reporting, and click “Traffic Sources”, “Social”, and then “Network Referrals”.

2. Next, click a network referral in the list like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Note, “Network Referral” is new language used by Google Analytics for “Social Network” or “Source”.

3. Once you click through a source, you should click the “Activity Stream” tab located near the top of the screen (right above the trending graph).

4. Once you click the activity stream tab, you’ll need to click the dropdown arrow next to the “Social Network” label at the very top of the screen. Once you do, you’ll see a link in that list for “Trackbacks”. Click that link.

5. Once you click the “Trackbacks” link, you will see the links to your content that Google Analytics picked up.

Congratulations, you found the hidden treasure of trackbacks in Google Analytics! Not the easiest report to find, is it? Now let’s find out what you can do with the data.

What You Can Do Once You Find Trackbacks
First, I’ll quickly cover the data provided in the trackbacks reporting. Google Analytics provides the following information for each trackback it picks up:

The date the trackback was picked up.
The title and URL of the page linking to your content.
The ability to launch and view your content that’s receiving the link.
And a quick way to isolate that content in your social reports (to view all social activity for that specific page).

Next, I’ll cover four ways you can benefit from analyzing trackbacks data in Google Analytics, including a bonus at the end. Let’s jump in.

1. Understand the source of the trackback (Who is linking to you.)
Linkbuilding is hard. So when your content builds links naturally, you definitely want to understand the source of those links. Trackbacks in Google Analytics provides an easy and quick way to identify links to your content. But once you build some links, you shouldn’t stop and have a tropical drink with a fancy umbrella as you admire your results. You should analyze your newly-found inbound links.

For example, you should determine if the links are strong, relevant, and how much will those links help with your SEO efforts. You should also determine which authors decided to link to you, what’s their background, and where else do they write?m

One of the first things you’ll see in trackbacks reporting is the title and URL of the page linking to your content. At this point, you can click the small arrow icon next to the URL to open the referring page in a new window. You can also click the “More” button on the right side of the page, and then click “View Activity” to be taken to the page linking to your content.

At this point, you can check out the article or post linking to you, understand who wrote the content, what they focus on, link to their social accounts, find their contact information, etc. Building relationships with quality authors in your niche is a great way to earn links down the line. Therefore, analyzing the people who already link to your content is low-hanging fruit. Trackbacks in GA make it easy to find them.

2. Understand Your Content That’s Building Links
When I’m working with content teams, I always get the question, “what should we write about?” I’m a big believer that a content generation plan should be based on data, and not intuition. And trackbacks provide another piece of data to analyze. Let’s face it, the proof is in the pudding from a linkbuilding standpoint. Either your content builds links or it doesn’t. If it does, you need to find out why that content built the links it did. And if it didn’t build links, you need to document that and make sure you don’t make the same mistake again.

As I mentioned earlier, there are some outstanding link analysis tools on the market, like Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, and I’m not saying that trackbacks in Google Analytics are the end-all. But, you can definitely use the reporting to quickly understand which content is building links.

Once you find trackbacks and identify the content that built those links, you can start to analyze and understand what drove interest. Was it breaking news, evergreen content, how-to’s, industry analysis, etc? Which topics were hot from a linkbuilding standpoint, and were those the topics you expected to build links? If you find a subject that worked well in the past, you can build a plan for expanding on that topic. Also, are the pages linking to you providing ideas for new posts? Do the comments on the page provide ideas, what did the author mention, etc? Trackbacks provide a mechanism for supplementing your analysis.

3. Join the conversation, Engage Influencers
I explained above how you can find the people (and websites) linking to your content. That’s great, but you shouldn’t stop there. If there’s a conversation happening on that referring page, then you should join the conversation. If someone went to the extent to mention and link to your content, the least you can do is thank them, and provide value to the conversation.

Adding value to the conversation and engaging a targeted audience can help you build more credibility and connect with targeted people in your niche. And as I mentioned above, you can connect with the author of the post via email or via their social accounts.

4. Understand Linkbuilding Over Time
Using the trending graph in Google Analytics, you can visually understand linkbuilding over time. The graph at the top of the screen will show you the number of trackbacks earned over the time period you have selected in GA. I’m not saying that it’s better than using other, dedicated link analysis tools, but this is a quick way to find link data right within Google Analytics.

In addition, if you click the “More” button for any specific trackback, and then click “Page Analytics”, you can isolate specific pieces of content receiving links. Note, I’ve been seeing a test in Google Analytics where “Page Analytics” is replaced by “Filter on this Page”. Personally, I like “Filter on this Page” since it’s more intuitive. Regardless, after clicking the link you can trend linkbuilding over time for a specific piece of content.

In addition, you can always compare timeframe to see how links were built during one timeframe versus another. You might find some interesting things, like a piece of content that built more inbound links months later versus when the content was first published. Then you can dig into the links to find out why…

Bonus: Export The Data!
As with any report in Google Analytics, you can easily export trackbacks data. If you are viewing any trackbacks report, you can click “Export” at the top of the screen, and then choose a format to quickly export the data for further analysis in Excel. Then you can slice and dice the data, combine data from other reports, etc. What you do with the data depends on your own Excel skills. :)

Summary – Quick Link Analysis in Google Analytics
I hope after reading this post you’re ready to jump into Google Analytics to hunt down trackbacks. Again, Google didn’t necessarily make it super-easy to find trackbacks, but they are there. Once you do find them, you can analyze those links to glean important insights that can help your future content and linkbuilding efforts. Although there are more robust link analysis solutions on the market, trackbacks reporting is a quick and easy way to identify and then analyze inbound links. I recommend checking out the reporting today. You never know what you’ll find. :)

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 9:37 am in google-analytics, social-media, tools, web-analytics

1 Comment »

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

How Google Analytics Really Handles Referring Traffic Sources [Experiment] – Why Clicks and Visits Might Not Match Up

Google Analytics Referrals

Let me walk you through a common scenario in web marketing. You have a website, and some people visit your site by clicking through links on other websites. In your web analytics reporting, those visits are categorized as referring visits. In Google Analytics specifically, those visits show up in your “Referrals” report under “Traffic Sources”. And when visitors click on an outbound link on your site (a link to another website), your site shows up as a referring source in that website’s referrals report.

That’s pretty straight forward, but what I’m about to cover isn’t. I find many marketers and webmasters don’t understand how Google Analytics handles that referring traffic during future visits to their websites. For example, if someone clicks through to your site from sampledomain.com, leaves your site, and then returns the next day.

Do you know how that visit will be categorized in Google Analytics? There’s a good chance you don’t, and I’m going to cover the topic in detail in this post.

Understanding Referring Visits is Important When Revenue and Cost Are Involved
I believe one of the reasons this topic isn’t understood very well is because it often doesn’t directly impact revenue or cost for many webmasters. Sure, you definitely want to know how many people are coming from each referring site, but for many webmasters, the exact number doesn’t impact revenue, or payments to other webmasters.

But, for websites that need to track the monetary value of inbound visits and outbound clicks, accurately determining referring visits is extremely important. For example, imagine you were charging certain partners for traffic you were sending from your site to theirs, or vice versa. The fact of the matter is that checking referring sources could show different numbers than you think, and could be much different than the outbound clicks you see. And depending on your own situation, the numbers could be way off…

The Core Disconnect – How Google Analytics Calculates Visits from Referring Sources (or any campaign, search visit, etc.)
Here’s the core disconnect. When someone clicks through to your site via a referring source, the utm_z cookie is updated with traffic source information. That cookie will not be overwritten unless another referring source or campaign takes it place. Direct Traffic will not overwrite this value. Let me say that again. Direct Traffic will not overwrite the utm_z cookie value. That means the utm_z value will remain the referring source of traffic when those visitors return to the site.

Google Analytics utm_z Cookie

What This Means To You
I know what you’re thinking. This guy is telling me about utm_z cookies?? What the heck does that mean to me? OK, stick with me for a second. Let’s say you had a partnership set up where another website pays you for traffic. Maybe you’re both in the same niche and want to leverage each other’s traffic for more exposure. You check your stats for the previous month and notice that you sent 500 visits to partner A. Cool, so you contact them to check how the partnership is going and to make sure they are seeing the same number of visits. They come back and say they’ve seen 700 visits from your site and thank you for the traffic. The check will be cut soon.

Google Analytics Clicks and Visits Could Be Off

But that 200 visit discrepancy is bothering you. Why is there a big difference between your partner’s reporting and the numbers you are seeing? And let’s assume you have a solid setup for tracking clicks out of your website. For example, maybe you are running outbound clicks to partners through a redirect that captures a number of important metrics. The redirect then sends the visitor off to the correct URL on the partner site. Basically, you know you are capturing all outbound clicks to the partner website.

This is where the native handling of referring sources in Google Analytics comes into play. Sure, you are tracking clicks off your site, but your partner’s analytics package is capturing those clicks plus any return visits that are direct visits. So, if someone clicks through to your partner’s site, then that’s one visit. If they leave that site, and return directly (by typing the url directly in their browser or via a bookmark), then the visit will show up as a visit from the original referring source (your website). That’s now two visits. And if they do it again, that will be three visits. That’s until another referring source or campaign overwrites the utm_z cookie. In this example, there were 3 visits to your 1 outbound click!

An Example of How Google Analytics Handles Referrals

Based on this simple example, you can easily see how over a month’s time, some people would click through to your partner’s site and then revisit their site directly (and possibly a few times). That would lead to more than one visit per user, and could sway the visit count from your website.

Still confused? Let me clear this up via an experiment below.

Experiment – Calculating Referring Visits in Google Analytics
In the following simple example, I set up a webpage on a second domain that links to a landing page I set up on my website just for this experiment. I didn’t want to skew the reporting by using an existing page on my site that gets a lot of visits. Then I used several computers I have here with clean browsers to first visit the referring page that links to my new landing page, and then I clicked through. The referring source should show up as the domain name of the referring site. That would be visit #1.

Next, I would leave the new landing page on my site and revisit my website later by typing the exact URL into my browser (what most people would think is a Direct Traffic visit). In theory, the referring site should show up as the traffic source, even though I’m entering the site as “Direct Traffic”. Remember, the utm_z cookie will only be overwritten by another referring source or campaign.

Last, I would search for a keyword that my site ranks for, and then click through to the site. And since this visit was from a search engine, the utm_z cookie would be updated with this new value, and my reporting would show Google as the referring source (along with the keyword I entered). Let’s find out the results of the experiment below.

The Results
1. First Visit
First, I visited the second domain and clicked through to my website. Here is the first referring visit showing up in my analytics package:
Referring Sites Experiment - First Visit

2. Second Visit (Directly Visiting the Site)
Next, I left the site and returned via Direct Traffic. Google Analytics shows the referring site as the source for this traffic, even though I entered via “Direct Traffic”. Also notice it accurately categorizes me as a “return visitor”:
Google Analytics Referral Experiment - Second Visit

3. Third Visit (Again Directly Visiting the Site, but the Next Day)
Just to underscore my point, I left and revisited the site the next day (again via Direct Traffic). Google Analytics again shows the visit is from the initial referring source:
Google Analytics Referral Experiment - Third Visit

4. Fourth Visit, This Time From Search
Finally, I searched for my name on Google and visited my website. Now Google Analytics shows the keyword that led to the site (from the traffic source “Google”). Remember, the utm_z cookie will only be updated when another referring source is identified (versus Direct Traffic).

So there you have it. Proof that your visit count by source may not be what you think it is. Now, if you’re reading this post and are either generating revenue from referring visits, or you have to pay partners based on visits, then you might be frantically running to Google Analytics to rerun your reports. Yes, this could impact things quite a bit. I’ll leave it up to you how you handle the situation. :)

What You Can Do – The Importance of Clarity
If you do have a partnership where you are either generating revenue by driving traffic, or you are paying for traffic from other websites, then each party needs to clearly understand the arrangement. Each website involved needs to be clear on the definitions of “traffic”, “clicks”, “visits”, etc. For example, think about AdWords for a second. You pay Google for clicks on ads, but don’t pay Google for direct visits back to your site (even though those visits will show up as campaign visits). And by the way, most partners will not give you access to their reporting anyway… Therefore, you will only know the clicks out from your site.

If you are tracking outbound clicks, you can use event tracking in Google Analytics to track those clicks, including the pages or links where those clicks are originating. If you don’t want to use event tracking, then you can run outbound clicks through a 302 redirect and capture the information you need to accurately track clicks. If you are receiving traffic, then you can make sure the referring links contain querystring parameters so you can understand which partner the traffic is coming from (and that it’s not a standard referral from the site). There are other ways to handle this, and those are just a few ideas.

Summary – Understanding Visits in Google Analytics
I hope you found this post explaining how Google Analytics handles referring visits helpful. I know this topic can be confusing, and experiments always help clear up some of the confusion. So now you know why visits might be higher or lower than you think, and how the utm_z cookie controls what shows up in your reporting. I bet you’ll never look at referring sources the same again.

And let’s hope you’re not on the short end of the stick. :)

Happy Reporting.

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 11:14 am in google, google-analytics, web-analytics

9 Comments »

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

Hunting False Negatives – How To Avoid False Negatives When Checking Redirects After a Website Redesign or Migration [Screaming Frog Tutorial]

How To Check Redirects Using Screaming Frog

Every webmaster has to deal with a website redesign or migration at some point. And redesigns and migrations often mean that your URL structure will be impacted. From an SEO perspective, when URL’s need to change, it’s critically important that you have a solid 301 redirection plan in place. If you don’t, you can pay dearly SEO-wise.

I wrote a post for my Search Engine Journal column last spring titled “How to Avoid SEO Disaster During a Website Redesign” and implementing a 301 redirection plan was one of the most important topics I covered. I find many webmasters and marketers don’t understand how SEO power is built URL by URL. As your URL’s build up inbound links and search equity, it’s important that those URL’s maintain those links and equity. If you change those URL’s, you must notify the search engines where the old content moved to, and that’s where 301 redirects come into play.

So, when you change URL’s, you run the risk of losing all of the links pointing to the older URL’s, and the search power that the URL’s contained. That’s unless you 301 redirect the old URL’s to the new ones. A 301 redirect safely passes PageRank from an old URL to a new one (essentially maintaining its search equity).

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many companies either not set up a redirection plan at all, or botch the plan. That’s when they end up with a catastrophic SEO problem. Rankings drop quickly, traffic drops off a cliff, sales drop, and nobody is happy at the company (especially the CMO, CFO, and CEO).

Traffic Drop After Website Redesign

Meet the False Negative Redirect Problem, A Silent Killer During Redesigns or Migrations:
Needless to say, properly setting up your redirects is one of the most important things you can do when redesigning or migrating your website. That said, even if you address redirects and launch the new site, how do you know that the redirects are in fact working? Sure, you could manually check some of those URL’s, but that’s not scalable. In addition, just because an older URL 301 redirects to a new URL doesn’t mean it redirects to the correct URL. If you don’t follow through and check the destination URL (where the redirect is pointing), then you really don’t know if everything is set up properly.

This is what I like to call the False Negative Redirect Problem. For SEO’s, a false negative occurs when your test incorrectly shows that the redirects are working properly (they don’t test positive for errors), when in fact, the destination URL’s might not be resolving properly. Basically, your test shows that the redirects are ok, when they really aren’t. Incorrectly thinking that 301 redirects are working properly by only checking the header response code for the old URL can trick webmasters into believing the redesign or migration has gone well SEO-wise, when in reality, the destination URL’s could be 404’ing or throwing application errors. It’s a silent killer of SEO.

False Negatives can be a Silent SEO Killer

How To Avoid the Silent SEO Killer When Changing Implementing Redirects
The false negative problem I mentioned above is especially dangerous when changing domain names (where you will often implement one directive in .htaccess or ISAPI_Rewrite that takes any request for a URL at one domain and redirects it to the same URL at another domain). Just because it 301’s doesn’t mean the correct URL resolves. Think about it, that one directive will 301 every request… but you need to check the destination URL to truly know if the redirects are working the way you need them to. Unfortunately, many SEO’s only check that the old URL’s 301, but they don’t check the destination URL. Again, that could be a silent killer of SEO.

Screaming Frog Hops to the Rescue
I mentioned “scalable” solutions earlier. Well, Screaming Frog provides a scalable solution for checking redirects during a migration or website redesign. Note, Screaming Frog is a paid solution, but well worth the $157 annual fee. Using Screaming Frog, you can import a list of old URL’s from your analytics package or CMS and have it crawl those URL’s and provide reporting. Running a two-step process for checking redirects and destination URL’s can help you understand if your redirects are truly working. For example, you might find redirects that lead to 404’s, application errors, etc. Once you find those errors, you can quickly change them to retain search equity.

Below, I’m going to walk you through the process of exporting your top landing pages from Google Analytics and checking them via Screaming Frog to ensure both the redirects are working and that the destination URL’s are resolving correctly. Let’s get started.

What You’ll Need and What We’ll Be Doing

First, we are going to export our top landing pages from Google Analytics.
Second, we’ll use the CONCATENATE function in Excel to build complete URL’s.
Next, we’ll add the URL’s to a text file that we can import into Screaming Frog.
Then we’ll fire up Screaming Frog and import the text file for crawling.
Screaming Frog will crawl and test those URL’s and provide reporting on what it finds.
Then we can export the destination URL’s we find so we can make sure they resolve correctly. Remember, just because the old URL’s 301 redirect doesn’t mean the destination URL’s resolve properly. We are hunting for false negatives.
Last, and most importantly, you can fix any problematic redirects to ensure you maintain search equity.

How To Use Screaming Frog to Hunt Down False Negatives:

Export Top Landing Pages from Google Analytics
Access your Google Analytics reporting and click the “Content” tab, “Site Content”, and then “Landing Pages”. Click the dropdown for “Show rows” at the bottom of the report and select the number of rows you want to view.

Tip: If you have greater than 500 pages, then you can edit the URL in Google Analytics to display greater than 500 URL’s. After first selecting a row count from the dropdown, find the parameter named table.rowCount= in the URL. Simply change the number after the equals sign to 1000, 5000, 10000, or whatever number you need to capture all of the rows. When you export your report, all of the rows will be included.
Export the Report from Google Analytics
Click the Export button at the top of the report and choose “CSV”. The file should be exported and then open in Excel once it downloads.
Use Excel’s CONCATENATE Function to Build a Complete URL
When the URL’s are exported from Google Analytics, they will not include the protocol or domain name. That’s the beginning of a URL with http://www.yourdomain.com. Therefore, you need to add this to your URL’s before you use them in Screaming Frog. Excel has a powerful function called CONCATENATE, which lets you combine text and cell contents to form a new text string. We’ll use this function to combine the protocol and domain name with the URL that Google Analytics exported.

Create a new column next to the “Landing Page” column in Excel. Click the cell next to the first landing page URL and start entering the following: =CONCATENATE(“http://www.yourdomain.com”, A8). Note, change “yourdomain.com” to your actual domain name. Also, A8 is the cell that contains the first URL that was exported from Google Analytics (in my spreadsheet). If your spreadsheet is different, make sure to change A8 to whichever cell contains the first URL in your sheet. The resulting text should be the complete URL (combining protocol, domain name, and URL exported from Google Analytics). Then you can simply copy and paste the contents of that cell (which contains the formula) to the rest of the cells in that column. The formula will automatically adjust to use the right landing page URL for that row. Now you have a list of all complete URL’s that you can import into Screaming Frog.
Copy all URL’s to a Text File
Since all we want are the URL’s for Screaming Frog, you can select the entire new column you just created (with the complete URL’s) and copy those URL’s. Then open a text file and paste the URL’s in the file. You can use Notepad, Textpad, or whatever text editor you work with. Save the file.
Fire Up Screaming Frog
After launching Screaming Frog, let’s change the mode to “list” so we can upload a list of URL’s. Under the “Mode” menu at the top of the application, click “List”, which enables you to use a text file of URL’s to crawl. Then click “Select File” and choose the text file we just created. Then you can click “Start” and Screaming Frog will begin to crawl those URL’s.
Review Header Response Codes From the Crawl
At this point, you will see a list of the URL’s crawled, the status codes, and the status messages. Remember, all of the URL’s should be 301 redirecting to new URL’s. So, you should see a lot of 301’s and “moved permanently” messages. If you see 404’s at this point, those URL’s didn’t redirect properly. Yes, you just found some bad URL’s, and you should address those 404’s quickly. But that’s not a false negative. It’s good to catch low-hanging fruit, but we’re after more sinister problems.
Find the Destination URL’s for Your Redirects
Now, just because you see 301 redirects showing up in the main reporting doesn’t mean the destination URL’s resolve correctly. If you click the “Response Codes” tab, you’ll see the redirect URI (where the 301 actually sends the crawler). THOSE ARE THE URL’S YOU NEED TO CHECK. Click the “Export” button at the top of the screen to export the “Response Code” report. This will include all of the destination URL’s.
Copy All Destination URL’s to a Text File
In Excel, copy the destination URL’s and add them to a text file (similar to what we did earlier). Make sure you save the new file. We are now going to crawl the destination URL’s just like we crawled the original ones. But, this process will close the loop for us, and ensure the destination URL’s resolve correctly. This is where we could find false negatives.
Import Your New Text File and Crawl the Destination URL’s
Go back through the process of selecting “List Mode” in Screaming Frog and then import the new text file we just created (the file that contains the destination URL’s). Click “Start” to crawl the URL’s, and then check the reporting.
Analyze the Report and Find False Negatives
You should see a lot of 200 codes (which is good), but you might find some 404’s, application errors, etc. Those are your false negatives. At this point, you can address the errors and ensure your old URL’s in fact redirect to the proper destination URL’s. Disaster avoided. :)

Screaming Frog and Actionable Data: Beat False Negatives
Going through the process I listed above will ensure you accurately check redirects and destination URL’s during a website redesign or migration. The resulting reports can identify bad redirects, 404’s, application errors, etc. And those errors could destroy your search power if the problems are widespread. I highly recommend performing this analysis several times during the redesign or migration to make sure every problem is caught.

Make sure you don’t lose any URL’s, which can result in lost search equity. And lost search equity translates to lower rankings, less targeted traffic, and lower sales. Don’t let that happen. Perform the analysis, quickly fix problems you encounter, and retain your search power. Redesigns or migrations don’t have to result in disaster. You just need to look out for the silent SEO killer. :)

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 9:07 am in google, seo, tools, web-analytics

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Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in Google AdWords – How Your Technical SEO Problems Just Impacted Your SEM Campaigns

In October of 2011, Google began testing Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in AdWords. It was a bold move and signaled a change in how paid search could operate in the future. Using dynamic search ads, advertisers could greatly expand their reach by enabling AdWords to match queries with content in Google’s organic index. Instead of simply setting up keyword-based campaigns, you could dynamically provide relevant ads to users searching for content residing on your site.

Last week AdWords released Dynamic Search Ads to all users, so now everyone can expand their reach using DSA’s. But before you run and set up your campaigns, there’s a catch you need to be aware of. Your content must be indexed in Google’s organic search index in order for it to be eligible for dynamic search ads. Yes, your SEO just impacted your SEM, and that’s what my post is about today. Read on.

Targeting Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)
Targeting-wise, you can set up dynamic ad targets based on the content that’s been indexed on your site. For example, you can target all webpages on your site, categories of content, pages by URL, content by page title, or simply by content residing on a page. Depending on the dynamic ad targets you set up, AdWords will match up queries with your content that’s been indexed. I bolded those last few words, since thorough indexation can be a big problem for some companies. More on that soon.

You can target DSA’s by Category, URL, Page Title, or Page Content:

Dynamic Ad Targets in Google AdWords

Dynamic Search Ads Example
Imagine you sold shoes and had AdWords campaigns already set up for sneakers and boots. I’m sure you would have more, but let’s keep this simple. Now, let’s say you have 150 specific products that fall into these categories, but aren’t set up in your AdWords campaigns (you just have categories set up). These products are essentially left out in the paid search cold… until now. Using dynamic search ads, you could target those specific products that don’t have campaigns set up and let AdWords match up your content with targeted queries automatically (based on what’s indexed in Google’s organic index). AdWords could dynamically build the ad title, include ad text written by you, and then determine the destination URL based on what’s indexed in Google. Hence the “dynamic” part of Dynamic Search Ads. :)

An example of creating a dynamic search ad in AdWords:

Yes, it’s paid search less the keywords. As you can imagine, this can have a major impact on how paid search is managed, optimized, and enhanced by AdWords advertisers. But more importantly, now technical SEO issues can negatively impact your DSA’s, since they leverage Google’s organic search index. That’s a good segue to the next section of my post.

DSA’s are based on Google’s Organic Search Index (Meet Your New SEO Problem)
As I mentioned earlier, in order for dynamic search ads to work, your content needs to be indexed. Although that sounds trivial, it’s not for some companies. And that’s especially true for large-scale sites with hundreds of thousands of pages (or more). And if you add CMS problems to the mix, a site could very well have tens of thousands of pages not getting indexed properly. And that could be a serious problem for advertisers trying to leverage DSA’s to expand their reach.

If your site has a crawlability problem, or other technical SEO problems, then those problems can now affect your SEM campaigns. In addition, if your competitors don’t have those SEO problems, then they are at a big advantage with regard to dynamic search ads. If they set up their DSA campaigns intelligently, then they can potentially reach a much wider audience than you can, since they have a much deeper set of content indexed.

Indexation Issues Impacting DSA's

Uh Oh, The Holidays Are Here
Did you just start to sweat? Right, the holidays are just around the corner… That’s perfect timing for some companies to boost sales, while others with technical SEO problems falter. In the past, SEM was separate from SEO. But now, SEO has crept into SEM. Let’s take a look at some problems that could cause issues with your DSA campaigns.

7 SEO Problems That Could Affect Your DSA’s

1. Make it Clean and Crawlable, or No DSA’s For You
First, your content needs to be crawled and indexed. I never thought I would be saying that in an SEM-focused post, but there’s a first for everything. :) If your content cannot be easily crawled and indexed, you will be at a major disadvantage with dynamic search ads. Again, AdWords will leverage Google’s organic search index to match content and queries, and then use that content to build dynamic ads. If your content isn’t in the organic index, ads cannot be generated. No DSA’s for you.

Ensure Googlebot can easily crawl your website:

Googlebot Encountering Errors While Crawling a Website

2. Poor Navigation and Internal Linking Structure
An important aspect to getting all of your content crawled is having a strong internal linking structure. There are still many sites that don’t provide a robust drilldown into their content using text links. If you simply provide a top-level navigation and don’t provide additional links to deeper content, then you could easily run into a situation where that additional content isn’t crawled or indexed.

If that’s the case, then that additional content cannot be used for dynamic search ads. I highly recommend reviewing your navigation and internal linking structure to ensure you are providing a descriptive drilldown into your categories, products, articles, blog posts, etc.

Provide a robust drilldown into your content versus hiding it:

Navigation Causing Indexation Problems

3. Gremlins in Your Content Management System (CMS)
In my experience, I’ve witnessed CMS packages hide content, provide serious crawlability issues, and create serious duplicate content problems. And all of this won’t be good for your DSA efforts. If your CMS hides content, then those pages will not be available for DSA’s. If the CMS provides crawlability issues, then it can hide content from Googlebot, which means the content can’t be included in DSA campaigns. And if your CMS generates massive duplicate content problems, then who knows what AdWords will match up with targeted queries (if it will match up any content at all).

Let’s face it, a great CMS can make your life a lot easier. But a poor CMS can wreak havoc on both your SEO and SEM efforts. And now with dynamic search ads, you can combine the two… I highly recommend having your CMS audited to ensure it’s not hampering your search campaigns. I provide more recommendations later in the post.

Understand if your CMS is causing crawlability or indexation issues:

CMS Packages Causing SEO Problems

4. XML Sitemaps
During SEO audits, I still find sites that aren’t providing xml sitemaps that contain all of their content. For example, I recently audited a site with 300K+ pages, but its xml sitemaps only contained 10K. XML sitemaps are a great supplement to a traditional web crawl. You don’t want to rely on them for getting all of your content indexed, but they can help Google identify new content and understand the canonical URL’s for your content. In addition, you can view sitemap errors in Google Webmaster Tools, which can help you understand problems Google is having trying to access or index your content.

For dynamic search ads, XML sitemaps can help more of your content get crawled and indexed by Google. And that can help you target more content via DSA’s. Again, you shouldn’t rely on XML sitemaps to fix crawlability and indexation problems, but it’s a smart move to set them up.

Monitor xml sitemap errors in Google Webmaster Tools:

XML Sitemaps Should Contain All Canonical URL's

5. Poor URL Structure
As mentioned above, you can target content by all web pages, category, URL, page title, or page content. If you want to logically launch DSA’s by URL, then your URL structure needs to be strong. For example, you can target any page with /category/sneakers to target sneakers or /category/boots to target boots. If you have something like /?nid=2343jieejd&sot=23jjdjdj and you are going to try and find some common thread, good luck. Chances are you won’t be able to target by URL. Try and use clean and descriptive URL’s if possible. Stay away from complex URL’s with a lot of querystring parameters.

Complex URL’s can cause crawlability, canonical, and indexation issues:

Complex URL's and Poor URL Structure Can Cause SEO Problems

6. Canonical URL Tag Issues
When used properly, the canonical URL tag can be a great way to address duplicate content issues. You can tell the search engines which pages are the canonical url’s for the content at hand. But when used improperly, it can be extremely destructive to your SEO efforts. I wrote about this in my Search Engine Journal column titled, “Two Examples of How One Line of Code Could Kill Your SEO.” You should read the post when you get a chance. It’s fitting that I’m referencing that post on Halloween, since it’s horrifying. :)

So, if you implemented the canonical URL tag incorrectly across your site, Google may only have a small percentage of your content indexed and available for DSA’s. In a worst case scenario, you could be using the canonical URL tag to attribute all search power to just one page on your site. Don’t laugh, I’ve seen this happen several times. If that’s the case, then you might only have one page available for DSA’s. And you might be looking at your AdWords reporting wondering why there are no impressions or clicks.

7. Poor On-Page Optimization
If you choose to target by page title, then you need to ensure pages are well-optimized. I’ve completed SEO Audits on some larger sites that have thousands of pages with the same exact title tag. If that’s the case, then AdWords might not be able to figure out what the page is about, and might not be able to match the content up with targeted queries. If this is the case, then make sure you uniquely optimize each page, based on the content at hand. If you do, then you can target DSA’s by page title and be in good shape.

Ensure all of your content is uniquely optimized:

Poor Content Optimization Can Impact DSA's

What Can You Do? 3 Things You Can Do Now to Help Your DSA’s
If you are reading this post and determine that you might have some of the SEO problems I listed above, then here’s what you can do now.

1. SEO Audits
First, and this is something I have advocated for a long time, have a technical SEO audit conducted. Audits provide the most bang for your SEO buck. They can be completed relatively quickly and provide a remediation plan based on the findings. If you can implement the changes relatively quickly, then you very well could see some improvements in a short period of time. That obviously depends on your specific situation, but some changes will yield strong results in a short amount of time.

And with the holiday season upon us, time is of the essence. If you want dynamic search ads to help you this holiday season, then you need to make sure your content is being indexed, and that it’s optimized correctly.

2. Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools
Second, analyze Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools, which can help you identify the number of pages Google has indexed, as well as how many it counts as “not selected”. Index Status won’t give you the answers, but can let you know how well your site is being indexed. For example, if you have 10K pages on your site, but only 2K are indexed, you’ve got a problem. If you have 5K pages on your site, but Index Status shows 75K as “not selected”, then you also have a problem. I highly recommend reading my post about Index Status and analyzing your current situation.

Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools

3. Bypass DSA’s and Build Out More Campaigns Manually
Third, if you have indexation issues, but still want to gain additional targeted traffic via Paid Search, then you can focus your attention on fleshing out more campaigns and ad groups based on your own category and niche. Perform thorough keyword research, understand which keywords you need to target, analyze the competitive landscape, and then build out more campaigns and ad groups. Sure, this will take a lot of time and effort, but it provides the most control.

Summary – The End of Keywords in SEM?
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) can help advertisers reach a broader audience by automatically matching up advertiser content and targeted queries. Paid search without keywords could very well be the future of SEM, so it’s important to understand how DSA’s work now. But as I explained throughout this post, your content needs to be crawled and indexed in order to be eligible for dynamic search ads. And that means SEM will require strong SEO. Go figure. :)

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 8:54 am in adwords, google, sem, seo

2 Comments »

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

How To Find Keywords Triggering Product Listing Ads Using AdWords and Google Analytics [Includes a Custom Report for PLA’s]

If you’re an ecommerce retailer, then you have probably heard of Product Listing Ads in Google AdWords. Product Listing Ads (PLA’s) are powerful ad units that enable you to display image thumbnails in the search results for products you sell on your site. As you can imagine, the visual nature of the ads yield more ad real estate and can greatly help with click-through rate (since the ads are hard to overlook.) And with the holidays quickly approaching, standing out from your competitors is an important aspect to landing new customers.

Here is a screenshot of product listings ads in action:
Interested in a Keurig Coffee Maker? I bet the ads on the right will catch your eye.
Product Listing Ads for Keurig Coffee Makers

Are you looking for a new golf driver? Again, the PLA’s on the right will probably catch your attention:
Product Listing Ads for Golf Drivers

Google Shopping Goes Commercial
This past spring, Google announced that Google Product Search was moving to a full commercial model and would be called Google Shopping. No longer would you be able to have your product ads show up for free (blended in the organic search results). Google originally set a target deadline of October 1^st, 2012 for the transition so ecommerce retailers could get familiar with product listings ads (which would be the mechanism for displaying products in the search results). The ads would be cost per click-based (CPC), like PLA’s have always been.

This was a big move for Google, as many ecommerce retailers relied on shopping results to gain free clicks to their sites from prospective customers searching for products. Now, in order to have similar results, those ecommerce retailers would need to pay. Therefore, many ecommerce retailers jumped on board the product listing ads bandwagon (as they should).

Google Shopping Transitions to Commercial Model

Optimization is Important
When you run product listing ads, you don’t bid on keywords. Instead, Google reviews your merchant center feed and then matches your ads with queries that it believes are relevant. In my experience, there are times I see Google displaying product listing ads for queries that aren’t directly tied to the product at hand, or that are more category-driven. This can yield untargeted visitors, higher costs, and lower ROI. And that’s exactly what you don’t want in SEM. Therefore, it’s important to optimize your product listing ads campaigns over time in order to increase performance.

It’s Hard to Determine Out of the Box
Given what I listed above, where do you find the keywords triggering your product listing ads? Unfortunately, they aren’t so easy to find out of the box. In addition, finding the keywords triggering your ads also depends on how you set up and structured your product listing ads campaigns. For example, are you using product targets to segment your merchant feed, are you lumping all products in one ad group, etc?

Today, I’m here to help. I’m going to list two ways to find the keywords triggering your product listing ads and I’ll include a bonus custom report at the end of this post that provides even more information for you to analyze. Let’s get started.

Two Ways to Find Keywords Triggering Your Product Listing Ads
1. The AdWords UI
The first place you can find the keywords triggering your product listing ads is in the AdWords UI (managing your campaign on the web). First, click the campaign holding your product listing ads (which should be a campaign that’s separate from your other search or display network campaigns). Then click the “Keywords” tab.

Keywords Tab in Google AdWords

Next, click “Keyword Details”, and finally “All”. This will reveal all the raw search queries that have triggered your product listing ads and that drove traffic to your site (by ad group). Then you can adjust the columns in the report and export the report to Excel.

Matched Search Queries for Product Listing Ads in AdWords

2. AdWords Reporting in Google Analytics (Match Search Queries + Second Dimension)
The second way you can find the queries triggering your product listing ads is to access your AdWords reporting in Google Analytics. You can click the “AdWords” tab, and then the “Matched Search Queries” link to view all matched search queries for your campaigns. Then, you can add a second dimension for “Ad Group” to view a list of raw search queries by ad group. This is extremely powerful if you segmented your merchant feed using product targets (as mentioned earlier). For example, imagine viewing all raw search queries by major brand, product type, etc.

Next, you will need to filter this report based on your naming convention for product listings ads in AdWords. That’s because the report will initially contain all ad groups and matched search queries (and not just queries for your product listing ads). You can use the filter box in your reporting to filter your ad groups to isolate the ad groups for your product listing ads. For example, if your ad groups for product listing ads begin with “PLA”, then you can filter the report to select ad groups that contain “PLA” in the title. When you do this, you will be left with all of your ad groups for product listing ads and the matched search queries that have driven traffic to your site. Then you can export this report to Excel for further analysis.

Filtering Product Listing Ads in Google Analytics

Bonus: Product Listing Ads Custom Report in Google Analytics
All of what I listed above works well, and can be extremely useful, but there’s a quicker way to drill into this data. You can use custom reporting in Google Analytics to create a new report that enables you to drill into campaign, ad group, raw search query, and then landing page by query. Sounds awesome, right?

Well, I’ve built that report and provided a link to it below (so you can use it for your own campaigns). If you are logged into your Google Analytics account, then clicking the link will launch the report in your account (just the structure, not the data). Then you will need to tailor the report structure for your own campaigns. For example, I created the report to isolate a campaign with “PLA” in the name. You’ll need to identify your own product listing ads campaigns based on your own naming convention.

Once you do, you’ll be able to drill into your campaign, ad groups within that campaign, matched search queries per ad group, and then the landing page from each query. The report will enable you to quickly identify negatives to use per ad group, and will help you double check landing pages per query. Note, the landing page (destination URL) is based on your merchant center feed, and depending on the retailer, there can be thousands or tens of thousands of products in a feed. It’s always good to double check the destination URL’s to make sure the right queries lead to the right product listing ads, which lead to the right product detail pages. If not, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

Click the link to access the product listing ads custom report I built.

Summary – Make the Most of Your Product Listing Ads
As I mentioned earlier, product listing ads are a powerful ad unit for ecommerce retailers. And now with Google Shopping moving to a full commercial model, it’s critically important for retailers to get a handle on their PLA’s. You can use the methods I provided above to find the search queries triggering your ads and driving prospective customers to your site. In addition, you can use the custom report I provided to drill into your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and landing pages. Then it’s up to you to analyze your newly-found reporting in order to refine your efforts. And that’s the name of the game in SEM.

Have a killer holiday season.

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 7:43 am in adwords, ecommerce, google, google-analytics, sem

2 Comments »

Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

How To Share Budgets Across Google AdWords Campaigns Using The New Share Budget Feature [Tutorial]

Shared Budgets in Google AdWords

Google AdWords rolled out a new feature last week that will make the lives of some SEM’s easier. The new shared budget option enables marketers to apply one budget to multiple campaigns (versus having to manage budgets for each campaign separately). Shared budgets make it easier to maximize your total ad spend for paid search since you can let the AdWords system allocate budget across selected campaigns without having to specify a specific budget for each.

For example, a typical AdWords account has several campaigns set up, all targeting different audiences. You might have search campaigns, display network campaigns, remarketing campaigns, mobile campaigns, etc. In the past, you had to allocate budget for each. If you had $250 per day to spend, you would have to divvy up the budget across those campaigns. But, if you allocated $100 to your core search campaign and it only hit $60 on some days, then the additional $40/day was not used. Over time, that can lead to a lot of lost clicks, conversions, and revenue. Using this new feature, you can ensure that your budget doesn’t sit on the sidelines when it can be working for you across other campaigns in your account.

Shared Budgets are a Great Idea (For Some Campaigns)
Shared budgets work well for companies that want to make sure their allocated budget is used each day across campaigns (no matter which selected campaigns use that budget). For example, if a company has refined its campaigns over time based on performance, then using sharing budgets should help them achieve stronger results. i.e. ROI is strong across campaigns, so feeding those campaigns more budget is a good thing.

If you don’t have a solid understanding of your ROI, then shared budgets can drive more wasted budget. Be careful if you are just starting out and need to keep a close eye on budgets. If you are in this situation, I recommend setting specific budgets per campaign and working on refining those campaigns based on performance. Then when you get your campaigns to a stage where performance is strong, then a shared budget could work well for you.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t just pull the trigger on a shared budget. You need to first set up, manage, refine, and optimize your campaigns before you do. That’s the only way to know that the additional money you spend will yield conversions.

How To Share Budgets, Step by Step
Setting up shared budgets is relatively straight forward. Below, I’ll cover the steps you must take to share a budget across your AdWords campaigns.

1. Log into AdWords and Access Your Campaigns

2. Click “Shared Library” in the left-side navigation.
Shared Library in AdWords

3. Click “Budgets” in the left-navigation.

4. Click “New Budget”, name your new budget, select campaigns to apply the budget to, and set a dollar amount for the budget.
Create a new shared budget in AdWords

4a. Note, you can choose specific campaigns to apply your shared budget to in the previous step. The shared budget doesn’t need to be applied to the entire account.
Apply Shared Budget to Selected Campaigns

5. Click “Save” and your new shared budget will be added to your shared library.
New Shared Budget in Shared Library

You’re done! You can check your campaigns in the AdWords UI to ensure the shared budget is being used for your selected campaigns.
Shared Budget in Action in AdWords UI

Next Steps for Shared Budgets in AdWords – Signals from Advertisers
Although this is a great move by AdWords, I hope they expand the shared budget functionality even more. For example, it would be great to give a priority to certain campaigns within a shared budget. For example, if you wanted to share a budget across campaigns A, B, and C, but B is the most important of the three, then it would be great to let AdWords know that. Then the system could prioritize budget during the day, based on that signal.

Also, maybe AdWords could provide a minimum threshold value per campaign within a shared budget. This would be another signal you could provide Google to make sure certain campaigns are given priority. For example, maybe you could tell Google AdWords to make sure Campaign B should be allocated a minimum of $100/day (if demand is there).

Until AdWords expands shared budget functionality, you’ll need to analyze your current campaigns that are sharing a budget. For example, if you share a budget across campaigns and notice a certain campaign isn’t receiving its fair share of the budget, then you should rethink your approach. In this situation, you could create multiple shared budgets based on campaign type. This approach would be better than setting a budget for each campaign, but wouldn’t be as easy as sharing one budget across campaigns. That said, you would ensure important campaigns are receiving the appropriate budget and not getting sidelined by the AdWords system. Again, this is why I mentioned that “signals from advertisers” would be a great addition by Google. :)

Bonus: Shared Budgets are a Great Fit for Google Grants
I do a lot of work with Google Grants, which is an incredible program from Google for non-profits. Google Grants provide $10K in free AdWords advertising for approved non-profits. I covered the program extensively in a post about maximizing a Google Grant account.

If you read my post, you’ll learn that there are some serious limitations with Google Grants that many marketers can’t easily overcome. One of those barriers is trying to drive visits with only a $1.00 max cpc. Based on the limited max cpc, I find many non-profits find it hard to drive a lot of traffic from target keywords via their Grants accounts. So, as non-profits set up several campaigns, it’s hard to allocate pieces of your $329/day daily budget limit. When auditing Grant accounts, I often find some campaigns not even coming close to hitting their daily budgets, while other campaigns could utilize that extra budget. This can severely impact the traffic levels being driven by Grant accounts.

Well, shared budgets are a great solution for Google Grant owners. You can set the $329/day shared budget and share it across all of your search campaigns. Then you don’t need to worry about trying to allocate budget across your campaigns (like I explained above). AdWords will make sure that if demand is there, your campaigns will be fed the appropriate budget.

Summary – Try Shared Budgets Today
As you can see, the new shared budget functionality can be extremely helpful for certain accounts. I recommend analyzing your campaigns to see if a shared budget is a good fit for your company. If it is, you can use the steps I listed above to set one up today. If your campaigns are performing well, then using a shared budget can drive more visits, conversions, and profit. And that’s exactly what SEM is all about. Good luck.

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 7:42 am in adwords, google, sem

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Monday, September 10th, 2012

SEM Competitive Analysis – The Power of Understanding Your Competition in Paid Search

SEM Competitive Analysis

There are a lot of moving parts to developing and managing SEM campaigns. First, you need to develop a strong paid search strategy, perform keyword research, map out a robust structure for your campaigns and ad groups, determine budgets, create effective ads, etc. After the setup phase, you will be neck deep in ongoing campaign management, which involves refining your campaigns and ad groups based on performance. That includes refining keywords, ads, creating new ad groups when necessary, pausing ad groups or campaigns that don’t perform well, split testing ads, etc. This includes managing both Search and Display Network campaigns. As you can guess, SEM is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Based on all that’s involved with paid search, I think it’s easy for SEM’s to keep driving campaigns forward without taking a step back to analyze the competitive landscape. For example, which companies are you competing against in SEM, which ads are they running, what types of landing pages are they using, how does their pricing stack up, etc. That’s where a thorough competitive analysis can pay huge dividends. There are so many important things you can learn from analyzing the competition that I’m surprised more companies aren’t doing it.

In this post, I’m going to explore five important insights you can learn from performing an SEM competitive analysis. My hope is that once you read through this post, you’ll be eager to get started on your own analysis. Let’s get started.

What’s an SEM Competitive Analysis?
Simply put, an SEM competitive analysis enables you to understand the companies also bidding on the same keywords and categories you are targeting in paid search. Let’s face it, if you are bidding on a set of keywords, it’s important to understand which competitors are targeting the same keywords, where they are driving visitors, how aggressively they are bidding, the pricing they are providing for similar products, etc. While performing the analysis, there are times you find incredible nuggets of information that can help enhance your own campaigns. You can also understand why certain competitors might be outperforming your own efforts.

Competitive Analysis Tools
This post isn’t meant to provide a tutorial on how to use the various competitive tools in the industry. There are many to choose from and you should test them out to determine which ones fit your needs. Pricing-wise, some are paid solutions while others are offered for free. For example, SEMRush and SpyFu are two paid solutions that enable you to view a wealth of competitive SEM data such as keywords, ads, cpc’s, volume of traffic, etc.

Competitive Analysis Tools

Google’s Ad Preview Tool is free and enables you to view an unpersonalized SERP, while also enabling you to specify geographic location, mobile vs. desktop, language, etc. In addition, AdWords recently released Auction Insights, which gives you a view of the companies you are competing with on a keyword level (if there is enough data). You can view a competitor’s impression share, their avg position, the overlap rate, the percentage of times they rank above your own ads, etc. Again, there are many tools on the market, and my recommendation is to figure out the right combination for your needs. Many of the paid solutions have free trials, so you can start using them immediately to gauge their effectiveness.

A screenshot from the Google Ad Preview Tool:

AdWords Ad Preview Tool

Analysis Scope
When determining the scope of your analysis, you can either start small and analyze a specific ad group, or you can analyze a larger campaign (or set of campaigns). If you are just starting out, you might want to start smaller and just focus on an important ad group. Once you determine the best process to use, along with the right tools, you can expand to other ad groups and larger campaigns. I recommend choosing an ad group that’s important to your business, but one that might not be performing very well. You never know, the competitive analysis could reveal why that is…

Let’s take a look at five things you can learn from an SEM competitive analysis that can greatly help your own SEM efforts:

1. Who Are Your *Real* Competitors (in Search)
Whenever I begin helping a new client, I always ask them who their top competitors are. It’s a trick question, since the standard set of competitors in the industry might not be the same competitors in SEM (or SEO). Understanding which companies are present in the SERPs for target keywords is extremely important. For consumers that don’t know which company to do business with, and start searching Google, the offline competition might not make a big difference. That’s why you need to understand your true competitors in SEM. That’s who prospective customers will be reviewing while researching online.

When I present my findings with regard to true competition, it’s not uncommon for my clients to fall out of their chairs. Sure, they might find some familiar faces, but they might find some additional companies or websites that surprise them. For example, say hello to Amazon.com, the biggest and baddest ecommerce retailer on the web. If you are selling online, Amazon very well could be a core competitor in SEM. If that’s the case, you better check out pricing on Amazon.com, how often they show up for your target keywords, which third party sellers are providing similar products, etc. Let’s face it, low pricing and Amazon Prime membership is a killer combination that you’ll have to face and deal with at some point. And you’re not alone.

You also might find comparison shopping sites, forums, answer-driven sites like Yahoo Answers, personal blogs, etc. If you do, you might need to form a strategy for monitoring those sites to ensure you are represented (the right ways). You might find manufacturer websites that provide links to online retailers that offer their products. Are you listed there? Should you be? I think you get the picture. Understand the real competition, dig deeper, and form a strategy for dealing with those “competitors”.

A list of competitors in AdWords for a target keyword:

Your True Competition in Search

2. Find the Keywords Your Competitors are Running
OK, so now you know which companies you are competing with in SEM. Your next question might focus on which keywords they are running. This is important for several reasons. First, you want to make sure you aren’t missing important keywords or categories that customers are searching for. Even if you performed keyword research, you might have missed something. Analyzing keywords your competitors are running could help close the gaps.

Analyzing the keywords a competitor is bidding on:

Competitive Keyword Analysis in SEM

Second, you can start to gauge how much traffic each keyword or keyword category is driving to your competitors’ websites. For example, if you see a larger percentage of traffic for certain categories, there might a good reason for that. Maybe they are seeing outstanding performance from those keywords or categories, and they are allocating more budget to those keywords.

Note: there are many companies not managing SEM correctly, so be careful here… If you see something stand out while analyzing the keywords that competitors are running, you can and should, test those yourself. As long as you have a strong analytics strategy in place, you can easily identify high quality traffic, strong performance, etc. I guess what I’m saying is that keyword intelligence is great to attain, but nothing compares to actual testing.

3. Competitor Landing Pages
Next on our list are the landing pages that competitors are using. Let’s say you were running an ad group for an important category. You are getting a lot of traffic, but not many conversions. You’re baffled why that is… Well, analyzing the landing pages that competitors are using can tell you a lot. Are they driving visitors to product detail pages, campaign landing pages, lead generation pages focused on gaining contact information, mobile landing pages (for mobile traffic), etc? All of this can help you better understand why your competitors might be outperforming you in SEM.

Understanding the landing page experience for prospective customers can help you form ideas for your own landing pages. If you are driving visitors to a product detail page and competitors have set up dedicated campaign landing pages with a wealth of information, images, video, reviews, live chat, etc., you might want to refine your efforts. Don’t pale in comparison to your competition. It could be the very reason you are seeing less conversion (or no conversion).

A sample SEM landing page:

Landing Page Analysis

4. Ads, Ad Extensions, and PLA’s
Using competitive tools, you can review the text ads that competitors are running. When prospective customers are facing a SERP filled with paid ads, it’s important to stand out (for the right reasons). Are your competitors punching sales, deals, special offers, etc? Are they providing actual pricing in their ads? Are competitor text ads aligned with the landing pages they are driving visitors to? All of this can help you understand why your own performance isn’t as strong as it should be.

Viewing competitor text ads:

Analyzing SEM Ads

And let’s not forget about ad extensions and product listing ads. Are your competitors using sitelinks extensions, product extensions, call extensions, local extensions, social extensions, etc? The extra information provided by ad extensions can be extremely valuable to prospective customers. For example, you can drive visitors deeper to certain sections of your site, to specific products pages, show social connections, click to call phone numbers, etc. And if you’re an ecommerce retailer, don’t overlook the power of seller rating extensions. Those little stars can bring a level of credibility that can mean the difference between revenue or just a click.

An example of sitelinks extensions in AdWords:

Analyzing Ad Extensions in Paid Search

In addition to what I mentioned above, I have to cover the power of product listing ads. Recently, Google transitioned Google Shopping to a pure paid model. Product listing ads are an important part of that model, and are extremely powerful. They are image-based ads for specific products, based on your merchant center feed. They are CPC-based and can help drive strong performance for ecommerce retailers. If your competitors are running PLA’s, and you aren’t, you better get in the game. There are times text ads just don’t compare to the image-based PLA’s competing for attention in the SERPs.

An example of product listings ads in action:

Analyzing Product Listing Ads

5. Pricing
The final insight I’m going to cover is probably the most important – pricing. Performing a competitive analysis will reveal the pricing your competition is providing for the same products you are selling. The power of the internet is a double edged sword for many sellers. You can now compete with the big boys, but you will also be compared with every other seller on the web. And this can happen in mere seconds as people research products via Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

I find this step in a competitive analysis provides incredibly important insights for my clients. They are sometimes floored by what they are seeing. Actually, it’s not unusual for some clients to start yelling as I’m presenting my findings. “How are they providing that pricing?” “That can’t be right.” “They are lowballing prospective customers!” I’ve heard every possible comment under the sun.

Regardless, unless a consumer knows and trusts your company, you are going to have a hard time comparing to a competitor selling the same product at 20% lower than your own pricing. Not every person will go with the lowest price (based on a number of credibility factors), but some will. And when you are paying for every click, it’s important to keep those visitors on your site with the hope of converting them.

Analyzing competitor pricing:

Analyzing Competitor Pricing

My recommendation is to analyze each of the competitors for a category, and break down the pricing for each. Try and determine if that’s the real pricing, how they are providing that pricing, understand their shipping costs, etc., and then form a strategy for dealing with the situation. By the way, that could mean pausing your ad groups for that category. If your ROI is pitiful, and your competitors are selling at pricing that makes no sense, then pause your ad groups. You can find other more profitable categories to drive…

Summary – Competitive Data is There. Go Analyze It
Are you ready to get rolling with your own competitive analysis? As I covered above, there’s a lot you can learn. It’s important that you don’t get so caught up in your own campaigns that you forget to learn what your competition is running, how much they are spending, where they are driving visitors, and what type of landing pages they are using. You never know, you might end up finding serious gaps in your own campaigns. And that can lead to more revenue, profit, and a stronger ROI. Good luck.

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 9:45 am in adcenter, adwords, bing-ads, google, sem, web-analytics

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Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

Adjusted Bounce Rate in Google Analytics – One Step Closer to Actual Bounce Rate

Adjusted Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

I’ve written extensively in the past about Bounce Rate both here on my blog and on Search Engine Journal. Bounce Rate is an incredibly powerful metric, and can help marketers better understand the quality of their traffic, and the quality of their content. If you’re not familiar with Bounce Rate, it’s the percentage of visits that view only one page on your site. They find your site, view one page, and leave. As you can guess, that’s usually not a good thing.

Traffic-wise, high bounce rates can raise red flags about the quality of traffic from a given source, campaign, or keyword. For example, imagine spending $1500 in AdWords driving visitors to your site for a certain category of keywords and seeing a 92% bounce rate. That should raise a red flag that either the visitor quality is poor or that your landing page is not providing what people are looking for. For example, maybe visitors are looking for A, B, and C, but are getting X, Y, and Z from your landing page. That could very well cause a bounce.

But, that’s not the full story for bounce rate. And I find many people don’t understand how analytics packages calculate the metric. Here’s a scenario that shows a serious flaw. What if someone visits your site, spends 15 minutes reading a blog post, and then leaves? If there’s that much engagement with your content, it probably shouldn’t be a bounce, right? But it is. Since the user viewed just one page, Google Analytics has no way to determine user engagement. Therefore, it’s counted as a bounce. Yes, it’s a huge problem, and could be tricking webmasters into making changes when they really don’t need to.

The Problem with Standard Bounce Rate

Actual Bounce Rate
Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about how Google and Bing use bounce rate as a ranking factor. For example, if the engines saw a page with a very high bounce rate, maybe they would use that against the page (which could result in lower rankings). Add the Panda update, which targets low quality content, and you can see why SEO’s became extremely concerned with bounce rate.

In August of last year, I wrote a post on Search Engine Journal about Actual Bounce Rate. The post explains some of the mechanisms that Google can use to determine actual bounce rate, and not just the standard bounce rate that Google Analytics provides. For example, dwell time, toolbar data, Chrome data, etc. The core point of the post is that Google has access to much more data than you think. Therefore, don’t focus solely on the standard bounce rate presented in Google Analytics, since the actual bounce rate is what Google could be using to impact rankings.

Actual Bounce Rate Factors

Google Introduces “Adjusted Bounce Rate”
So, given what I just explained, is there a way to gain a better view of actual bounce rate in Google Analytics? Until recently, the answer was no. But, I’m happy to announce that Google Analytics released an update in July that enables you to view “Adjusted Bounce Rate”. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely a step closer to understanding actual bounce rate.

The Definition of Adjusted Bounce Rate
By adding a new line of code to your Google Analytics snippet, you can trigger an event when users stay for a minimum amount of time. That amount of time is determined by you, based on your specific site and content. So, adjusted bounce rate will provide the percentage of visits that view only one page on your site and that stay on that page for less than your target timeframe. For example, you can set the required time to 20 seconds, and that time would be used to calculate the bounce rate numbers used in your reporting. If users stayed less than 20 seconds, then it’s a bounce. If they stayed longer than 20 seconds, it’s not a bounce (even if they visited just one page).

Changes Needed
As I mentioned above, you need to add one line of code to your Google Analytics snippet. Here is the revised snippet (from the Google Analytics blog post about adjusted bounce rate):

Google Analytics Snippet for Adjusted Bounce Rate

Note, that new line needs to be added to your Google Analytics snippet on every page of your site. Also, the piece of code that includes 15000 represents the time in milliseconds. 15000 equals 15 seconds. You can adjust that based on your own site and content. For some sites, you might set that to 30 seconds, 1 minute, or more. The minimum is 10 seconds.

Impact, and a Real Example
You might be wondering how this actually impacts your reporting. Does changing that line of code really impact your bounce rate numbers? Well, it does, and it can radically change your bounce rate numbers. And that’s a good thing, since it will give you a closer look at actual bounce rate since time on page is now factored in. Remember my example above about a user spending 15 minutes on a post and it’s counted as a bounce? Well that wouldn’t be a bounce if you added this code. Let’s take a look at an example that demonstrates adjusted bounce rate.

Below, I’ve included the metrics for a page that was showing an 76.7% bounce rate. Clearly, that’s not a great bounce rate, and it could be driving the webmaster to make changes to the content. But, check out the bounce rate after we started calculating adjusted bounce rate. Yes, you are seeing that correctly. It’s now only 28.5%. That means 71.5% of users are either visiting other pages on the site or staying on the page for longer than 20 seconds (which is the time the company is using to calculate adjusted bounce rate). And by the way, the new bounce rate is 62.8% lower than the original bounce rate percentage. That’s a huge swing.

An example of adjusted bounce rate in Google Analytics

What This Means to You & How This Could Be Better
As a marketer, bounce rate is an extremely important metric. But, you need an accurate number to rely on if you plan to make changes. That’s why I wrote about actual bounce rate last summer. Adjusted bounce rate enables you to add another ingredient to the standard bounce rates calculated by Google Analytics. By understanding the minimum time spent on the page, you can gain intelligence about how users are engaging with your content. Are they hitting your page and immediately leaving, or are they at least spending 20 or 30 seconds reading the content? There’s a big difference between the two (especially for SEO).

Understanding adjusted bounce rate can help you:

Refine the right pages on your site, and not just ones that show a high standard bounce rates.
Better understand the quality of your top landing pages from organic search. Do you have a quality problem, or are users spending a good amount of time with that content? Adjusted bounce rate can help you understand that.
Better understand the quality of campaign traffic. Seeing a 95% bounce rate is a lot different than 25%. Sure, you want conversions from campaign traffic, but engagement is important to understand as well.
Troubleshoot SEO problems related to Panda. When a Panda update stomps on your site, you should analyze your content to determine what’s deemed “low quality”. Adjusted bounce rate is a much stronger metric than standard bounce rate for doing this.

How Adjusted Bounce Rate Could Be Improved – Revealing Dwell Time
I would love to see dwell time added to Google Analytics somehow. Dwell time is the amount of time someone spends on your page before hitting the back button to the search results. Duane Forrester from Bing explained that they use dwell time to understand low and high quality content. As an SEO, imagine you could understand which pages have high dwell time. That would be incredible intelligence to use when trying to enhance the content on your site.

Summary – Adjusted is Closer to Actual
Again, I believe this is a great addition by the Google Analytics team. Adjusted bounce rate can absolutely help you better understand the quality of content on your site, and the quality of traffic you are driving to your site. I recommend adding the line of code to your Google Analytics snippet today, and then analyze how your bounce rates change. I have a feeling you’ll be surprised.

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 9:08 am in google, google-analytics, seo, web-analytics

23 Comments »

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

How To Use Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools to Diagnose SEO Problems

Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools

In late July, Google added Index Status to Webmaster Tools to help site owners better understand how many pages are indexed on their websites. In addition, Index Status can also help webmasters diagnose indexation problems, which can be caused by redirects, canonicalization issues, duplicate content, or security problems. Until now, many webmasters relied on using less-than-optimal methods for determining true indexation. For example, running site: commands against a domain, subdomain, subdirectory, etc. This was a maddening exercise for many SEO’s, since the number shown could radically change (and quickly).

So, Google adding Index Status was a welcome addition to Webmaster Tools. That said, I’m getting a lot of questions about what the reports mean, how to analyze the data, and how to diagnose potential indexation problems. So that’s exactly what I’m going to address in this post. I’ll introduce the reports and then explain how to use that data to better understand your site’s indexation. Note, it’s important to understand that Index Status doesn’t necessarily answer questions. Instead, it might raise red flags and prompt more questions. Unfortunately, it won’t tell you where the indexation problems reside on your site. That’s up to you and your team to figure out.

Index Status
The Index Status reports are under the “Health” tab in Google Webmaster Tools. The default report (or “Basic” report) will show you a trending graph of total pages indexed for the past year. This report alone can signal potential problems. For most sites, you should see a steady increase in indexation over time. For example, this is a normal indexation graph:

Basic Index Status Report in Webmaster Tools

But what about a trending graph that shows spikes and valleys? If you see something like the graph below, it very well could mean you are experiencing indexation issues. Notice how the indexation graph spikes, then drops, only to spike again. There may be legitimate reasons why this is happening, based on changes you made to your site. But, you might have no idea why your indexation is spiking, and would require further site analysis to understand what’s going on. Once again, this is why SEO Audits are so powerful.

Trending Spikes in Index Status Basic Reporting

Advanced Report
Now it’s time to dig into the advanced report, which definitely provides more data. When you click the “Advanced” tab, you’ll see four trending lines in the graph. The data includes:

Total Indexed
Ever Crawled
Not Selected
Blocked by Robots

“Total indexed” is the same data we saw in the basic report. “Ever crawled” shows the total number of pages ever crawled by Google (the cumulative total). “Not selected” includes the total number of pages that have not been selected to be indexed, since they look extremely similar to other pages, or that redirect to other pages. I’ll cover “Not selected” in more detail below. And “Blocked by robots” is just that, pages that you are choosing to block. Note, those are pages you are hopefully choosing to block… More about that below.

Advanced Index Status Report in Google Webmaster Tools

What You Can Learn From Index Status
When you analyze the advanced report, you might notice some strange trending right off the bat. For example, if you see the number of pages blocked by robots.txt spike, then you know someone added new directives. For example, one of my clients had that number jump from 0 to 20,000+ URL’s in a short period of time. Again, if you want this to happen, then that’s totally fine. But if this surprises you, then you should dig deeper.

Depending on how you structure a robots.txt file, you can easily block important URL’s from being crawled and indexed. It would be smart to analyze your robots.txt directives to make sure they are accurate. Speak with your developers to better understand the changes that were made, and why. You never know what you are going to find.

The Red Flag of “Not Selected”
If you notice a large number of pages that fall under “Not selected”, then that could also signal potential problems. Note, depending on the type of website you have, it might be completely normal to see a larger number of “Not selected” than indexed. It’s natural for Google to run into some redirects and non-canonical URL’s while crawling your site. And that’s especially the case with ecommerce sites or large publishers.

But, that number should not be extreme… For example, if you see the number of pages flagged as “Not selected” suddenly spike to 100K pages, when you only have 1,500 pages indexed, then you might have a new technical issue on your hands. Maybe each page on your site is resolving at multiple URL’s based on a coding change. That would yield many “Not selected” pages. Or maybe you implemented thousands of redirects without realizing it. Those would fall under “Not selected” as well.

Security Breach
Index Status can also flag potential hacking scenarios. If you notice the number of pages indexed spike or drop significantly, then it could mean that someone (or some bot) is adding or deleting pages from your site. For example, someone might be adding pages to your site that link out a number of other websites delivering malware. Or maybe they are inserting rich anchor text links to other risky sites from newly-created pages on your site. You get the picture.

Again, these reports don’t answer your questions, they prompt you to ask more. Take the data and speak with your developers. Find out what has changed on the site, and why. If you are still baffled, then have an SEO audit completed. As you can guess, these reports would be much more useful if the problematic URL’s were listed. That would provide actionable data right within the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. My hope is that Google adds that data some day.

Bonus Tip: Use Annotations to Document Site Changes
For many websites, change is a constant occurrence. If you are rolling out new changes to your site on a regular basis, then you need a good way to document those changes. One way of doing this is by using annotations in Google Analytics. Using annotations, you can add notes for a specific date that are shared across users of the GA profile. I use them often when changes are made SEO-wise. Then it’s easier to identify why certain changes in your reporting are happening. So, if you see strange trending in Index Status, then double check your annotations. The answer may be sitting right in Google Analytics. :)

Adding Annotations in Google Analytics

Summary – Analyzing Your Index Status
I think the moral of the story here is that normal trending can indicate strong SEO health. You want to see gradual increases in indexation over time. That said, not every site will show that natural increase. There may be spikes and valleys as technical changes are made to a website. So, it’s important to analyze the data to better understand the number of pages that are indexed, how many are being blocked by robots.txt, and how many are not selected based on redirects or canonical issues. What you find might be completely expected, which would be good. But, you might be uncovering a serious issue that’s inhibiting important pages from being crawled and indexed. And that can be a killer SEO-wise.

Posted by Glenn Gabe @ 9:17 am in google, seo, tools, web-analytics

28 Comments »

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SEM Competitive Analysis – The Power of Understanding Your Competition in Paid Search

Adjusted Bounce Rate in Google Analytics – One Step Closer to Actual Bounce Rate

How To Use Index Status in Google Webmaster Tools to Diagnose SEO Problems

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