Search

'Personalised Search' and the New Search Metric

2010-05-27T11:42:38Z

A couple of weeks ago I found the ranking positions of a website I'm working on drastically fluctuating from position 1 to 4. I was intrigued with how ranking positions were fluctuating that much on Google in a very short space of time.

I quickly found out that Google recently released a very exciting new feature in Webmaster Tool that enables us to see the number of impressions and clicks for our most popular keywords, together with the rankings of keywords for a defined period. This was interesting, since it was now possible to analyse how the number of impressions and clicks differed based on the different positions of a website in Google search results. In fact, this new Webmaster Tool feature is quite close to the Click-Through-Rate data provided in Google Adwords.

Ranking Report in Google Webmaster Tool

I was delighted to find such detailed and useful information. However, I quickly realised that what Google might be indirectly telling us is quite exceptional and could drastically change the way the 'search industry' reports on results.

The most interesting thing I discovered is the fact that Google is now showing data on rankings across a range of results: detailed information from position 1 to position 5, and combined data for position 6-10 and then combined data for the 2nd page and 3rd page on the Search Engine Results (SERPs). With the recent advent of Google Personalised Search, rankings are no longer the same for every visitor and never before had there been a good way of tracking the impact of this.

Personalised search is, in reality, customised search results for users based on their previous search activity. This being possible by an anonymous cookie in their browsers and which Google says is completely separated from Google Accounts. But with this new Google webmaster tool feature, we are now capable of analysing the rankings of websites on both personalised results and general organic results.

What Google is trying to make us understand here is that a website will no longer have a particular ranking for a specific keyword, but will have a range of rankings determined by various personalisation factors.

So, I believe search experts will now have to analyse, optimise and report on website rankings differently. Whilst in the past an agency or in-house Search Specialist might have reported on exact website rankings based on targeted keywords, reports would make more sense if they now provide the complete range of ranking positions that a website has for a keyword together with its related traffic. Below is an example on how a section of a search report might look:

Organic Search Ranking Report

Furthermore, goals in SEO campaigns will most probably change from delivering a particular ranking to giving a site a higher probability of ranking in a certain range of positions. For example: increasing the probability that a site will rank in the top 3 positions from 15% to 60%, rather than looking and reporting on a website's ranking at a given day and time. A report showing that a website was in the top 3 rankings 60% of the time for a particular month will be a lot more valuable than just saying that a website ranked 1st at the last ranking report.

It will also not be a surprise to find results being bounced around every week, every day or even every hour (depending on the specific time of day, for instance).
It is most probable that the new rule would be 'ranking' being just a probability rather than an exact number.

It seems that more than ever Google is telling us to stop worrying about exact rankings and to focus on targeted traffic generated by a range of ranking positions. Because in the end it's all about targeted traffic and conversions.

Is your website fast enough for Google?

2010-03-12T10:21:33Z

Google recently came up with its netbook-centric operating system 'Chromium' but at the same time released its source 'openly' to the public. Therefore it is available to anyone to download free and furthermore allowing developers to play around and tweak the system as they like.

I cannot stop thinking that we are going back to the times where the mainframe was actually the computer. Much like Sun's old assumption that the network is the computer. With the release of Chromium, Google is putting more emphasis on the initiative that browser-based applications are the future and is coming up with their first true cloud-based operating system.

Several tests have already been performed by leaders in the information technology industry and results were interesting. One of the main results was that Chromium is a very fast operating system. At a recent press conference Google claimed that Chrome OS had a boot-time of 7 seconds and this isn't an exaggeration at all.

Performance of applications running on Chromium browser essentially comes down to the speed of the Chromium browser. That makes us realise that the new rule of thumb for Google could be 'speed'.

Google certainly have the power to simulate and estimate the amount of time it takes to connect to a page, the way and amount of time a page renders in a browser, and how people react to those times to influence how a page is ranked, classified, and how much of the page is crawled and indexed. This will also include embedded material on a page such as javascript or flash content.

Therefore pages that are loaded quicker have a better chance to get crawled frequently, indexed and have a better search visibility compared to pages that are loaded more slowly.

Below is a short list of page-loading tips that I thought might be helpful:

Avoid overloading a website with images since large files take longer to load.

Javascript has some advantages over Flash. Flash is overdone and takes longer to load and sometimes makes websites over-complicated. However, it is recommended to place Javascript files in an external file.

In case videos are hosted on the website, it is better to host the videos on YouTube and provide a link from your website than hosting it directly on the website. YouTube is so big that it has the ability to load videos quickly.

Avoid "Enter Site" introduction pages, they have a high load-in-time and are so 'old-school'. It's better to let visitors go straight to the information.

Keep the mark-up simple. Most HTML tags can be styled via an external CSS so there is no need for them to be placed in a nested table for example.

It is recommended to use XHTML and CSS to start out a website, using tables for layout is not recommended since they can cause a big mess in the mark-up language and finally slows down the loading times. Storing CSS information in an external file keeps your website neat and ensures a fast page-load time.

Server side compression software are also very useful, they ensure files are at their optimum size prior to being sent to the client browser, this works particularly well for script (e.g. PHP) and CSS files where the focus is not on semantics.

Images must be optimised at the correct seize/weight. This is important because large image files will take a much longer time to load than a lighter image that has already been processed by an image editing software. However this may implies some compromises on the picture quality.

Images should ideally be used only for headers or logos and never for large bodies of text. Static text takes only a few bytes as compared to images that consume thousands of bytes.

The new Google race is now opened, is your website fast enough?

Thierry's Trial by Tweet

2009-11-30T11:17:29Z

"The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools" John Dewey (American Philosopher, Psychologist and Educator, 1859-1952)

I've been with Base One for a few weeks now and was told that my settling in period had come to an end, the kid gloves were off and I was "asked" to produce my first post for the company.

I was racking my brains about what to post about when, over 200 miles from my home an incident occurred. A single action; followed by a difficult decision, leading to an outcome that has seen a man's reputation destroyed and talk of economic consequences to the countries involved.

I speak of Thierry Henry and what is now being dubbed "La main de Dieu" (Hand of God). For those that don't know what happened, France progressed to the World Cup at the expense of the Republic of Ireland. The decisive goal, scored by William Gallas was set up by Thierry Henry who handled the ball before crossing to his team mate.

Now I won't be discussing the incident itself, instead I am looking at the part played by Social Media in the syndication and resulting emotional outpouring from large numbers of individuals across the globe.

The power of the press is Waning, yielding to the Power of the People. Nowadays anyone with a link to the Internet and an opinion can affect the views of the masses, and generally steal a march on the larger press by publishing instantly. This news is swiftly syndicated through the various bookmarking and newswire websites and then Social Networking is utilised to provide a platform to discuss, debate and in some cases "vent;" like a child wielding his dads' rifle.

It was through this medium that I watched Thierry Henry's fall from grace. People from different countries and different walks of life fuelled a relentless wave of different opinions and different emotions, the overwhelming emotion being anger.

Taking Twitter as my first example, within minutes of the incident, whilst the match was still playing in fact, the torrent had begun. By the full-time whistle Tweets appeared to be coming in at around 195 every 30 seconds. Within the hour after the final whistle "Thierry Henry" and "Henry" had become trending topics. At 10am, on the 20th of November (Over 36 Hours after the event) the tweets continue although flow has calmed to a handful a minute.

Where Twitter quickly built to a deafening crescendo and dissipated in much the same way, Facebook built quickly and seemed to maintain some momentum. Immediately after the incident my "Live News" was full of related comments which continued into the night and the following morning,

I also came across the Facebook Page - "We Irish hate Thierry Henry (The Cheat)" which was created after the match. By Midday on 19th November, the page had 30,000 fans then by 10am on 20th November the number of fans had swelled to over 80,000 and was then removed Facebook due to the nature of the group and the offensive nature of the comments being posted.

YouTube was also pounced upon with multiple videos posted, commanding views numbering in the tens of thousands. Replaying, berating, and making fun of Thierry Henry including a depiction of Adolf Hitler's reaction to the goal.

A man made a choice; that choice was instantly scrutinized worldwide, and brought to the attention of millions by angered voices without hesitation, or thought to the possible fallout. This led to threats of violence, unchecked widespread racism and other ugly human traits in true "Angry Mob" style.

The beauty of Social Media is that it provides total freedom of expression, but that total freedom can also show its dark side; when it is used to personally attack someone or something.

Social Media can be an extremely effective weapon, with the power to change lives.

Is it too easy to wield?

Is there anything we can do about it?

If there is, do we want to?

Americans Say No to Customised Adds via Online Tracking

2009-10-26T14:34:36Z

A quick post regarding news from my native land - the majority of Americans do not like advertisements, discounts, and news tailored to their interests via online tracking, reports NY Times. The poll, backed by professors at UPenn and UC Berkley, is "the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioural advertising."

I wonder if it's this simple - that Americans dislike targeted media, or if the fear of privacy invasion what preoccupies their minds? Either way, targeted advertising via tracking isn't going away so they better get used to it. Looks like the youth are slightly more open minded to it.

I can't imagine not wanting things tailored to my interests. I'm not as bored when exposed to advertising, I dare suggest I'm even, on occasion, informed! Except for that spotify advertisement about killing motorcyclists while I drive (complete with splat noise), b/c I don't even have a license.

What do you think? Are these Americans simply naivete to the benefits of target marketing which results from online tracking? Are they justified to be flipping out about privacy concerns - that marketers are "spying" on them when they visit the marketer's sites? Let me know!

AdWords Ad Scheduling + Google Analytics Custom Reporting = Better Target Your B2B Audience!

2009-10-02T14:36:56Z

Google AdWords ad scheduling setting lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your PPC ads to appear. Ad scheduling can give your PPC campaign a better 'bang for the buck' by improving your ROI by making sure that your ads only run when it makes the most sense for your business.

If you are from a B2B context you might schedule your ads to run only on business hours - let's assume only weekdays say from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. targeting business hours when you think your audience is looking for your products/services. Setting up the ad scheduling is easy as ABC - or B2B! Simply log in to your AdWords account, go to the settings tab, then advanced settings and there you find the ad scheduling settings.

But how can you be certain your scheduled ads actually target your audience effectively, that you are spending your cost per click on your desired audience? This is very your Google Analytics account come into play. Google Analytics Custom Reporting can help you take out the guesswork in ad scheduling when your audience is looking for your products/services. Let your website visitors, who are your audience determine when to target your PPC audience.

By setting up a custom report you can find out how visitors are behaving on your website at what hours of the day, at what days, pages per visit and bounce rate. With this information you can adjust the PPC ad scheduling and budget accordingly.

To set up custom reporting simply login to your Analytics account, click on custom reporting in the left menu and in the top right corner click on "create a new custom report". Nothing needs to be installed or verified.

In the left menu called 'Metrics' click on 'Site Usage' and drag-and-drop 'Entrances' (along with good traffic quality indicators 'Time on Site', 'Pages per Visit', and 'Bounce Rate') one by one across to the 'Metric' boxes. Then do the same thing with 'Dimensions', click on 'Visitors' and drag-and-drop 'Day' over to the 'Dimension' box and 'Hour of the Day' over to the 'Sub-Dimension' box.

Then rename your custom report to whatever you want to call it by editing the title. Click the 'Preview' button to see your custom report and if you are happy with the report then finally click on 'Create Report'. Now you have created your custom report!

With these metrics in your custom report you can now in more detail find out how visitors behave on your website, during what hours of the day and at what days. Based on the information you get from the report you might want to refine the PPC ad scheduling.

In the example above the majority of entrances to the website happened in late afternoons between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm and the majority of entrances happened on Mondays and Fridays. From this example scheduling the PPC ads to run only on 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on only weekdays would be advisable.

Set aside a couple of hours to learn Google Analytics custom reporting. Apart from creating a custom report in Google Analytics to refine PPC spend and strategy you can create a custom report to help you optimise your online leads and conversions. More about that in another blog post.

Why Microsoft's Windows 7 Launch is a Marketing FAIL

2009-09-25T10:37:36Z

Microsoft's Windows 7 home operating system comes out on 22 October 2009, less than three years after the launch of Vista. In order to get people "buzzed" about their new product, they are encouraging Windows 7 House Parties!

Doesn't that sound like fun!? Naturally, I want to use my Saturday preparing to encourage my neighbors to use an overpriced Microsoft product (I vote Linux). Don't forget - Microsoft wants pictures!

I was laughing really hard this morning, as I learned how to host my Windows 7 party (yes, they are serious):

What's the incentive? Why would anyone do this? The answer: a party pack which includes...

* One limited Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate (32 bit)
* One Deck of Playing Cards with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* One Puzzle with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* One Poster with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* Ten Tote Bags with Windows 7® Desktop Design for hosts and guests
* One table top centerpiece for decoration
* One package of Windows 7® napkins

I didn't even add in those little R's! They came straight from the responder at Yahoo Answers!

Excuse me??? You want me to host a party in exchange for Windows themed napkins? And playing cards!? There are no streamers or balloons involved because those extras are only shipped in America. For a keg and some meat to put on the BBQ I may be tempted.

So I've applied to be a host. I'm not sure why, because I don't need ten Windows 7 tote bags and I have a Mac at home. Maybe my roommate could use the "Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate" for work.

Two parts of the application process made me chuckle - and it made the whole experience so PC-ish. First, I had to go on a duck hunt running tests and confirming my PC here in the office is capable of running Windows 7. Okay, fine, no, I didn't actually do this, but I could have...
Secondly, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to receive emails about Microsoft products. Oh wait - did I say "decide"? Microsoft actually made the choice for me, kind of like when my Windows XP decides to restart at 11am to do some random updates I will never need.

And the "legal jargon" section - was FOUR PAGES LONG - single spaced size 12 font! I feel bad about the internet trees, so I wont publish the whole thing but it's over 1,500 words.

In short, dear Microsoft, you're not providing the right types of incentive - and that video of 4 "friends" isn't helping your cause. The last time I saw those 4 different types of people together one was clutching her purse tightly.

This whole house party campaign is a sin against marketing. Essentially Microsoft is asking random people to market to their friends for them, and they don't have that type of pull. People don't LOVE Microsoft and Windows the way they might LOVE twitter, Digg, Macs, a sports team, other-community-building-group. The enthusiasm just isn't there.

But alas, if I am selected to host a Windows 7 House Party - I assure you it will be rocking. So if you live in SW London, please keep October 22 - October 29 free, it's gonna be a Windows 7 blast!

The Importance of Internal Linking Structure

2009-09-11T13:16:17Z

Having gone through a series of SEO evaluations those last few weeks, I was shocked to come across so many cases of websites with bad internal linking structure. I now think it's essential to stress on good internal linking since I have the impression that web designers often overlook the importance of having a well structured site in terms of internal linking. The current situation is very sad since a lot of websites are not benefitting of the power of internal linking. I therefore compiled a short list of factors that one should consider while building the website structure.

Good Navigation - The most important issue here is to make sure that the site navigation is correctly spidered by the search engines. We can ensure this by either use of anchor text and text based navigation, or an image-based navigation type with significant 'alt attributes' attached to every image link in the navigation. Avoid Javascript and Flash navigations because they are still not well crawlable and spidered by the search engines. If you still want to keep your 'flashy' navigation then I'll suggest you include an alternative navigation that would be spidered by major search engines. For example, you could have a text based navigation at the bottom of your page, this will help you inner pages be more spiderable.

XML Sitemap - I cannot stress enough on having a good XML sitemap on your website. Sitemaps provide an overview of the site at a single glance but at the same time they help search engines crawl the website. Submitting a XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool for example can be very useful since it gives the search engines a concise format that provides spiders with a super-fast blueprint for indexing a website. Furthermore, sitemaps also improve web usability as they are an alternative form of a site specific search, which brings users to the information they need quicker.

Breadcrumbs - I believe breadcrumbs are excellent internal linking tools. Being 'links' by nature, they aid with internal linking and consequently increase the search engine visibility. In addition to anchor text differentiation, breadcrumbs are very useful since they increase the general usability of the website by allowing users to know exactly where they are on the website.

Links in Content - I had the chance to analyse different kind of websites in different industries but it was quite common to see a lack of links in their copy. It's essential to have in-content links, since not only they are more likely to have higher click through rates (increased confidence path), but they are also capable to add more significance to a link because of the neighbouring text. Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to have links with anchor text with targeted keywords in the copy of the website.

Links to Important Pages - It's essential to always ensure that all important pages are well linked to other pages on the website. I sometimes found it amazing how some of the most important pages of a website are not properly linked to other pages. It is better to link them directly to the homepage so that they can benefit from the power of link juice passing from the homepage. But time and again I see websites with important pages buried too deep and ending up with no page-rank at all. And it's not uncommon to find those pages not indexed by the search engines.

Cross-check Robot.txt - This may look stupid, but I came across cases where I found important pages of a website not being crawled and spidered because they were found in a section where the robot.txt was preventing spiders to crawl. This mainly happen by mistake or when new pages are added to the website. Sometimes webmasters tend to forget to go back to their robot.txt and check whether all crawlable/non-crawlable sections are up-to-date. In brief, your important pages need to be findable, if not there's no way they'll get crawled and indexed.

Linking Policy - It is very important to be extremely consistent in your linking behaviour. What I mean is that while linking pages we need to be meticulous about how we are building the links. I once had to re-build the links of a whole website since links to the homepage were very inconsistent. Some links were pointing to the .com page whereas others were pointing to the .com/index.php page. The website also had some major canonicalisation issues where several links were pointing to identical pages but with different URLs. Cases like this actually decrease all the power of internal linking since the link juice is diluted around the site instead of being intelligently focused on the essential pages. In brief a link policy should be setup so that everyone building links knows exactly how and where to link them.

Just to remind, good internal linking ensures that all pages on your website get properly spidered and indexed on search engines. It increases the relevancy of a page to the targeted keyword phrase. Allows proper link juice passing to internal pages hence increasing their page-rank. That's it, hope that this helps tuning and enhancing your internal link structure.

A lesson from an unexpected source

2009-08-26T17:17:56Z

Earlier this month, Seth Godin wrote a blog post entitled 'Lessons from very tiny businesses'. This piece outlined 5 different things we can learn from small businesses, using examples of companies he has encountered. His second point was 'Be micro focused and the search engines will find you'.

Shortly after reading this, I was searching for a carpet cleaning service. I had used one earlier this year, but couldn't remember his number, so I went to his web site. Now bear in mind this is a one-man show, so what you would typically expect is at the most two pages - landing page and contact page. What you get is something else: 9 fully-optimised pages, a blog, and even a Twitter stream!

The thing that impressed me most, however, was the blog, 'My carpet cleaning blog'. Since November 2008, Chris (the carpet cleaner) has been diligently writing up many of his daily jobs as blog posts. Each one is titled with a variation on the phrases 'Carpet cleaning' or 'carpet cleaner', plus the location of the job, either as a postcode (W4, W14) or as the name of the location (Fulham, Wandsworth), and includes some detail on the job in question. In this way he is targeting relevant searches for carpet cleaning all over Greater London. Oh, and he follows these posts up with Tweets as well.

But that's not all. When he came to clean my carpets, Chris also explained how he has managed to get himself placed in Google Local Business ads for not one, but four different postcodes! By asking customers to write reviews, he is managing to come top of the list as well.

Ok, so not everything is rosy with his site from an SEO point of view. URLs need optimising, his blog is one of those 'wysiwyg' ones, and he has literally no incoming links at all. Still, with little technical background and knowledge, Chris has realised the importance of Google as a targeted traffic generator, learnt some of the basic rules of SEO, and applied them assiduously, and with great effect to one set of keyword combinations. Since last November, the site has been appearing on the front page of Google for many local London search related to carpet cleaning, and the number of contacts from his web site has literally doubled!

What's the lesson for me in all this? It's just as Mr Godin says - or as I interpret it anyway: sometimes, as we work on SEO for large organisations in highly competitive markets, we spread ourselves too wide, and look to achieve too much, making it far more difficult to deliver tangible results. Instead we need to identify where we can make a difference, and we need to focus on it. If an inexperienced one man band can do it, we have no excuses.

Organic SERPs showing Breadcrumbs

2009-08-25T15:32:21Z

Looks like Google is trying out some new ways of displaying SERP URLs. In this image (taken by @robhammond), Google is sharing the location of a results page within a site by including the page's breadcrumb string instead of just using the first 51 URL characters.

The Renault UK results page (#7) has matching breadcrumbs on the destination page:

Today, a search for mobility provides the same results with "normal" URLs:

So what does this mean? Should we all style out our sites with Hansel and Gretel in mind? Keeping Google's usability priorities in mind, I think bread crumbs should be a mainstay in any site anyways. Also, I do believe this is a feasible full time change we may see some time in the future.

Displaying breadcrumbs in SERPs clearly maps out for searchers what section of the site their query result is located within; this will enable searchers to better read those URLs and have a clearer idea of whether or not that result is appropriate for their query. Also, if this is a going to be a major SERPs change, it's important the breadcrumbs don't go too deep since as always, there is limited character space.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this alteration plays out - if you see any more examples shoot them to me @ChelseaBlacker or chelsea.blacker@baseonegroup.co.uk .

AdWords Display URLs

2009-08-25T14:31:07Z

Regarding display URLs in AdWords ads, Google states that the domain must be identical to the destination URL's domain. But besides this rule, advertisers are free to incorporate keywords at the end of the display domain to be read as subfolders. An example is this ad, which bolds the term for my query "sony laptop" at the end of the display URL:

The question begs to be asked, if we can add keywords to the end of a display URL why not incorporate those keywords before the domain via display URL subdomains? Just to clarify, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger root domain, they read like this in a URL:

http://subdomain.rootdomain.co.uk

To my surprise, not many advertisers are utilising keywords in display URL subdomains. It's a great opportunity to include an ad group's targeted term at the front of the display URL, so users read those relevant bolded keywords first. Take advantage of it!

The ad above with the subdomain "nokia-mobile-phones" goes to the page "www.top10co.uk" which clearly doesn't include such a subdomain:

Google's AdWords help section confirms that this is a legal technique which is acceptable by AdWords. However, when I phoned our Irish friends, the Adwords representative I spoke with told me this was not permitted - it's such a rarely used technique that even the Adwords rep's don't know about it!

So be sure to utilise this technique in your AdWords ads. Also, remember that you can delete the "www." in display URLs which means 4 more characters for optimising your display URL. Now go... re-optimise those ads!

Tracking TWITTER using GOOGLE ANALYTICS

2009-06-08T11:12:41Z

At first I found it amazing how plenty of twitter applications are flooding over the web everyday, but looking at this phenomenon closer may be it's not so surprising. According to ComScore there has been an increase of Twitter traffic of up to 700 percent since last year and number of twitter users are growing everyday. Therefore it's not surprising to see so many twitter tools emerging everyday, and sometimes it can be difficult to find yourself in this tsunami of twitter applications.

I was mostly concerned about tools on tracking twitter traffic. For sure, there are a lot of 'cool' tools out there allowing us to track number of hits, geolocalisation and even do real-time traffic analysis but it was not always convenient to have data separated from my main web analytics software. My approach to web analytics is to have a consistent, reliable and integrated view of the traffic thus ensuring a clear vision on what is going on in my campaigns. Furthermore, after testing several twitter analytics applications I didn't find the statistics from the different tools meaningful enough. So I revert back tracking my tweets on Google Analytics (GA). It is much more powerful in my opinion when considering all the functions that we have on GA. It would be wiser to use them to track our twitter campaigns. For example, we can track and analyse goals and conversion rates knowing very well how conversion rate analysis is imperative today.

Google analytics by default shows traffic coming from twitter but wait.. it shows traffic coming from Twitter.com only and today most of the people using Twitter never even visit twitter.com! For that reason, I prefer to manually add some utm codes on my URLs and this allows me to track my tweets wherever they are, even if someone forward my tweets by email.

As you know, tweets that include a URL use some type of URL shortening service, like http://bit.ly or http://cli.gs, but we will be using the classic Tinyurl.com which shortens a URL by creating a redirect that is hosted on www.tinyurl.com. The trick is to add GA's campaign tracking parameters to our Tiny URL, thus encoding campaign info into the URL we use in our tweets:

?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

Of course you can change the utm_campaign and utm_medium names to anything you like but be sure they makes sense since you will be using them in your analyses later.

Example:
http://www.itjoblog.co.uk/?utm_campaign=itjoblogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

After adding this code to the URL, we shorten it using TinyURL and finally use the 'shortened' URL in our tweets which will be traceable by GA.

Below is a picture on how the data appear in 'All Traffic Sources' report in GA:

This is very cool, but it's even nicer to use all the power of Google Analytics in your web analyses, for example you could use Advanced Segments feature to subdivide your visitors based on operating systems they used to reach your tweets (Windows, Mac, Iphone, etc). Or if you like you could create your own segment that makes sense to your campaign.

As said by Gail Ennis, senior vice-president of marketing at Omniture: "Online marketers recognise the importance of brand reputation management in the social media environment," and I believe that accurate twitter tracking is fundamental and can help a lot in social media campaign analysis.

New Kid in the School of Digg

2009-04-22T15:30:38Z

I've been playing around with a Digg account lately, trying to figure out how to best incorporate our clients content into this fun social networking site. Digg is unique because it doesn't

1.An Ace Nickname: The Username. I'm a big fan of creating plausible usernames - in this case I used my real name. As a newbie, using a normal name like "Scott Osman" or "Miranda Mocco" helps sets the precedent that you're not a bot out to spam.

2.It's all About Looks: Your Avatar. This needs to be unique from other users and if possible, consistent across social networking sites. I threw a relatively ugly yellow border around my image, as an easy way for people to indicate it's me. Check out some successful avatars and get a little feedback on what people think of yours. http://avatarwall.com/toprated. Again, I found that as a newbie, people like seeing a face, it makes communicating more friendly, but as always different people like different things.

3.Hang Out in the Cool Places: Share Your Profiles! Digg permits members to share tons of profile links, be sure to take advantage of this so your future friends can easily contact you. Be sure to include your: Twitter, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gchat, last.fm, facebook, linked in, reddit, and stumble upon profiles.

4.Make friends with the popular crowd. Long ago Digg had a top users list (sometimes referred to as the "holy grail"), but it was deleted. I used an alternative list set up by SocialBlade to friend top active diggers.
By friending them, you will become their "fan" whereby you receive updates on their Digg activities; it is only when they accept you as a friend that your status is certified as "mutual friends" and your activity will be received by them.

5.Identify stylish trends: Pin Pointing Submissions with Front Page Potential. How do you find the high potential articles when the majority of submissions are spam with one or two Diggs? First and foremost, digg your friends submissions as they appear, especially if the friend sends a "shout" (like a facebook wall post) promoting a certain submission. You're allowed 200 diggs a day - depending on how much of a life you have, try to use all 200.
I'm a huge fan of the Digg Noise Filter, which pulls up articles with your requested number of diggs in it. Or try the Flash based Digg Watcher.

6. Back Stabbing: Talk about your Friends. I cannot stress this one enough. You must comment on submissions, and the more people who vote up your comment, the more recognition you get.

I've certainly struggled to figure out what makes a popular comment; supporting Obama, comic book heroes, and protests all seem to be green lights. Whitty banter, sarcasm, and jokes are usually popular, and comments like "interesting submission" often get a thumbs down for being too obvious.
Being one of the first people to comment on an article that goes to the front page is a great way to build up your recognition. People who view the article will see your comment as it appears at the top of the page, hence more are likely to vote it a thumbs up, and hopefully friend you.
Check out where your popular friends are commenting and be sure to "reply" to their comments. This will call attention to yourself and hopefully be enough to convince them to friend you back.

Spend about 1 month following the above rules. In part II (which will also take me about 1 month to write!) I'll go over great strategies for submitting content that gets notable traffic. In the mean time, get commenting!

WHY YOU SHOULD SEGMENT YOUR VISITORS? (Google Analytics)

2009-03-23T16:19:18Z

Some time ago Avinash Kaushik the web analytics Guru said: "Analyzing data in aggregate is a crime against humanity". No we're not talking about the last episode of Dexter but about the visitors to your website. Segmentation has become one of the most important thing you should do to understand traffic to your website and hence your business.

So why is visitor segmentation so important?

It is simply the breaking of your site visitors into groups and examining traffic and conversion data for those specific groups. Actually, in Google Analytics, you can perform advanced visitor segmentation and see the number of visits, the average number of pages viewed per visit, and conversion rates for different groups of visitors (example analysis of visitors from different locations).

Google Analytics provides a number of default segments like New, Returning, Paid and Non-Paid Visitors, Search, Direct and Referral Traffic. But you can also create your own custom segments. For example you could find yourself segmenting branded search vs non-branded search terms for organic and paid traffic. Why segmenting all these? Because looking at 'all' your figures that in average does not mean a lot. Figures like 'Average Time on Site' does not mean a lot since it is too broad. To find the real actionable insights we need to break our analytics data and split the various sources, behaviour, goals and outcomes. In brief we need to focus on the details as far as possible. Because trying to make strategic decision based on global data can simply lead our business to failure.

Google Analytics Advanced Segments

Ok, let's now really ask why we should segment our visitors and customers and think about the 'real' reasons for these.

In today's, highly competitive world successful companies realise that the nurturing of high-value, faithful, recurring, pleased and lucrative customers is the key solution for having long lasting profits and help the business stay afloat. In fact, I totally believe that it is imperative for organisations to properly identify their customers. No company can afford to offer the premier level of service to all its customers without really knowing who they are.

Therefore calculating the visitors' and customers' value to the company enable us to know better the different types of customers we have and therefore put us in a better position to allocate valuable resources to different types of visitors/customers. After discovery of those different customer classes we can approach different type of customers differently, like proposing appropriate products at appropriate prices for a particular segment.

For exemple: Advanced segmentation could let you see what are the web pages that are most visited by visitors who came on your site by typing brand keywords. And also what are the products that they bought?

Another common term 'Customer Differentiation' is in fact the segmentation of the high-value and high-potential customers but also the identification and separation of the least cost-effective customers. This process is important to know who the company want to serve, it involves the effort to understand what the customer really wants, what are the customers worth or potential. After discovering valuable information about customers we are is in a better position to give priority to the most profitable ones. We can also decide what to do with the least cost-effective customers.

For exemple: It is useful to discover who are the customers that purchased more than one items on your website, and/or who are the ones that purchased again. Then based on these figures we could deploy more effort to a particular 'segment' of our customers.

One way of differentiating customers is by establishing a baseline for the servicing cost of all customers. The segmentation of all customers should then be done to represent them in figures. After that we evaluate actual and strategic value of all the different types of customers (segments) and finally compare the customer value figures to the baseline established before and consequently make appropriate strategic decisions accordingly. The following graph shows an example of how customer segmentation, customer value and the servicing cost baseline can be represented for decision-making purposes.

Customer Differentiation

Customers in the 'Tier 1' are actually the most valued customers with the highest actual and strategic value, they can be considered as the company's very important customers (VIP) and all effort must be made not to lose them.

Whereas the last group (tier 5) is well below the customer service cost baseline and has also a very low strategic value, appropriate decisions can then be made by managers concerning those customers classified under this group. For example: keep them with expectations that they can be more lucrative later or simply fire them?

As said by Brett Crosby, the Manager of Google Analytics : "Segmentation can help you perform better through an economic downturn and go with what works, find new ways to drive revenue, find the right segments, working for them and invest there to increase their conversions."

About the Latest Google Update (aka "Vince update") - as well as a Brief History of some of the Google Updates

2009-03-18T14:55:42Z

Mid February this year people in the search industry spotted a change in how Google returned search results for certain types of keywords, a change giving "big brands" a push in Google search results. Following discussions on blogs and forums Matt Cutts (head of Google's Webspam team), on March 4th finally confirmed a change had been made. The update was dubbed the "Vince update" (no sorry, not a Vince Neil update)

More on the "Vince update" later on and now a brief history of important updates of Google's search algorithm.

The "Florida Update"

On November 16th 2003 Google made a major update on their search algorithm. Named the "Florida update", it had a major effect for a very large number of websites at the time and came to change the course of search engine optimisation.

Aaron Wall from SEObook says: "The Google Florida update was the first update that made SEO complicated enough to where most people could not figure out how to do it. Before that update all you needed to do was buy and/or trade links with your target keyword in the link anchor text, and after enough repetition you stood a good chance of ranking."

Pre-Florida update prominent search engine ranking could be quite easily achieved by doing basic reciprocal link-building, on-page keyword stuffing, and using repetitive inbound anchor text in links.

Post-Florida update a huge number of pages, many of which had ranked at or near the top of the results for a very long time, simply disappeared from the search engine results altogether.

The "rel=nofollow tag Update"

In January 2005 Google contributed to changing the structure of the Internet when Google proposed a link rel=nofollow tag. Originally it was introduced to only stop blog spamming but was shortly afterwards also affecting link buying. In the eyes of Google you are considered a spammer, and risk getting penalised, if you were buying links without using rel=nofollow on them.

In a URL the tag looks like this: Base One Search

Plenty of prominent websites have adopted the use of the nofollow tag, sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and most blog platforms support the tag in the comments section.

"By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines)." (http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow)

The "Universal Search Update"

In May 2007 Google launched their Universal search update. Universal search means that search engine results are blended with selected content from Google's "vertical search databases". The vertical search content is blended directly into the organic search results. Before the "Universal search" update Google gave a list of 10 text-based search engine results.

The "vertical search databases" Google blend into the organic search engine results are: News, Videos, Products, Maps, Images, Books & Blog posts

Today optimising your website for Universal search is important, (e.g. by adding alt-tags and keywords to your images, listing your business of Google Maps, creating videos and optimising title, description, tags etc.), you can increase your chances of achieving prominent search engine rankings.

The "Vince Update"

In October 2008 CEO of Google Eric Schmidt gave a hint of things to come, i.e. the "Vince update". In an interview he talked about "brands", he said:

"The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted." He continued: "Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=131569)

The "Vince update" has caused a bit of outcry in the search community because with the update it's believed (and proven) that Google is now favouring brands/corporations for core category keywords. Aaron Wall from SEObook in his blog post proved changes had been made in the search engine results, evidence big brands getting favoured. An example is in mid-January three major US airlines all of a sudden began getting top rankings for "airline tickets" (see below)

(http://www.rankpulse.com/airline-tickets)

Addressing it as a "minor change", Matt Cutts says the change is about factoring trust more into the algorithm for more generic queries rather than pushing major brands to top search engine results.

So does this latest Google "update" - "minor change" mean that big brands/corporations can take a back seat and receive top search engine rankings in Google by default? I think not, the "Vince update" may well be just a minor change. Google is continually tuning its algorithms to give most relevant results for users.

For navigational-type searches (aka research queries, "going through the front door in the shopping centre") such as cars, airline tickets etc. brand/corporation sites are maybe what searchers are looking for? In the above illustrated example, shouldn't there be a couple of airline companies in the results when you search for airline tickets?

You Walk Into A Bar (Social Media Style..)

2009-02-23T15:45:38Z

I went to SES London last week, and during the Social Media Optimisation seminar Krista Neher, CEO of the marketing solutions company Marketess, told this cute social media parable.

You walk into a bar and start talking to your friend. Suddenly, this jerk jumps in between you two and says "TRY MY NEW BEER! IT'S AMAZING!". You probably look at your friend with those "what the heck is this looser doing?" eyes and bee line for the door.

This is what happens when companies try to advertise on social networking sites, they shove their product in user's faces and are shocked when no one responds positively. "But we did a social media campaign!" they clamber, all gobbly eyed.

Don't ruin their night by screaming about your product.

Rewind: You walk into a bar and start talking to your friend. When you need a new drink the cute bartender asks "Would you like to try this new beer? It's quite good." You probably look at your friend and say "sure, why not?" and viola! You've been introduced to a new product. This is how social media should work.

The key in example #2 is it wasn't forced on you. Social media campaigns cannot work if the material is forced, the entire point is that users support the content because it's actually of interest to them. By offering a new beer when you were ready for a new drink, the beer company is providing a solution to your need when you (the consumer) wanted it.