aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Organic landing page conversion measuring is a time tested after-deployment technique which, though highly effective, can take days, weeks, or months to fully tune.

As optimized pages gradually rise in the SERPs, conversion is measured and pages modified to achieve better conversion ratios. However we’d rather definitively test and tweak landing page concepts to focus conversion, prior to deploying them for organic indexing, using “fixed length short burst paid search.”Read the rest of this entry »

Avinash Kaushik is an author, blogger, and respected analytics evangelist. With over 7000 inbound links from other bloggers his web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, is on many a serious SEMs’ blogroll. Avinash recently published his new book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. Avinash speaks here at SES San Jose Thursday @ 9AM on the “Analyzing the Analytics Players” panel.”

An independent consultant who has a holistic focus on helping companies unlock the power of Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash uses data to strategic advantage and is the official Analytics Evangelist for Google. He’s a frequent speaker at industry conferences in the US and Europe, such as eMetrics summits, Ad-Tech, Web 2.0 Expo and SES. We had a chance to sit down and chat here at SES San Jose.Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes when  new search marketing clients realize the awesome power of modern analytics they ask us for guidance regarding learning resources. With a little hunting you can find useful (and totally free) blog-resource reading materials. Here’s a list of Analytics blogs whose feeds we’ve bookmarked.

A Universe to Discover
This is just a starting point for your journey. Though the links below represent a wide variety of free analytics information, don’t forget to check out each site’s technorati profile to see other which blogs have linked in. Read the rest of this entry »

Lot’s of our favorite blogs use WordPress. This very useful little list of URL exclusions is used to exclude non-marketing WordPress traffic from analytics reports, whatever package you use.

For those uninitiated readers (future-analytics-warriors): by default modern analytics packages exclude requests for graphics and robots. (Remember the difference between hits and unique visitors ). Well, there are other types of “hits” which also do not qualify as marketing traffic-file types, like flash elements and admin pages which comprise WordPress back end and plug calls. Tuning the exclusion list can mean the difference between self-congratulatory, inflated, and less accurate analytics…and getting an actual read of your true marketing traffic.Read the rest of this entry »

We treat every analytics installation as a pilot, especially ecommerce apps’ which span a marketing domain and secure ecommerce sub-domain (or third party ecommerce domain server we don’t control). It’s in this analytics pilot process that we sometimes encounter site structures and applications SO nasty that they’re hilarious/depressing SEM sitcoms. Point blank: some web 1.0 file hierarchy and directory structures make for less effective analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

You get what you pay for. It doesn’t matter a fig whether the analytics service provider is a multi-billion dollar global empire corporation or a guerilla search marketing firm in Minneapolis. Serious SEM Clients don’t care if the hosted analytics service is Google-free-with-a-promise or cost thousands each month. When cash money is on the line and analytics disappear our clients are freaked out and pissed off.

In the Real World People Don’t Trust Free Things with Good Reason.
What kind of never-never land do we live in anyway? Have we been lulled into star-crossed stupidity by accepting mission critical hosted analytics services for free with no quality of service promise, little customer service, and spin doctors spinning social CYA laden sound bytes?

Sure Google’s a great company but would any business ever trust free van repairs for morning milk delivery vehicles in exchange for allowing the repair shop access to their bank account information? Would you ever trust an unlimited supply of free hard drives for your server in exchange for log files? How safe would you feel your child’s 33 year old full time school bus driver worked for free just because he loves to be around kids? Little in life is free.Read the rest of this entry »

Organic prominence is important because it’s an indicator that website content is right on the money. However we’ve long since transitioned from measuring Google keyword rankings to analyzing where traffic comes from, how visitors behave within content, and whether key performance indicators (KPI) are met along with tracking associated revenue.

We don’t play “beat the algorithm” anymore; rather the focus is on creating terrific content, relevant to the end user, and published on competent and discoverable content management systems (CMS).

Setting up Analytics.
Some analytic setups are really easy to set up, especially for single domains using script to interact with a hosted analytics server. Just drop a line of Javascript in the header of each page (include files work great) and off you go. Google Analytics, WebTrends, ClickTracks (Hosted), HBX and SiteCatalyst rely on tagging schemes. ClickTracks Pro is a log analysis tool which offers a number of benefits and can be a bit more complex to set up.

Our clients often ask us about the difference between log analysis tools vs page tagging. This post is a lay person’s guide (not for tech gurus) to help think about this classic analytic technology decision.Read the rest of this entry »

Modern analytics are beautiful. Since the early 90’s Internet marketing folks from New York to

Modern Analytics
Now with modern log analysis and page tagging tools like ClickTracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Unica Affinium NetInsight, and WebSide Story HBX Analytics we measure conversion absolutely. It’s a brave new world. As an SEM client, demand absolute conversion metrics from your search marketing firm or in-house staff or you’re likely throwing money away needlessly in the form of waste-percentage.

Measure Absolute Conversion.
Conversion tracking is a simple and unbelievably powerful reality. Using modern analytics now we associate all referral sources (sites, organic search, social communities, PPC, etc…) at the keyword level to behavior within content (funnels) against KPI (key performance indicators) like sales, information requests, file download, or any other defined goal. Because there are many other metrics to cross segment the data with like time on site, average page view count, entry page, exit page, bounce rate, etc…extremely powerful profiles provide serious insights regarding the effectiveness of content, traffic, user behavior, profit, and loss. Here is a screen capture of the Advanced Visitor Labeling cross-segmenting tool we use in ClickTracks:

Expect Actionable Analytics
The term “actionable” means that reading analytic reports actually provides insight regarding what to do next. Do your analytics reports justify your company’s expense in developing organic content, PPC, or time spent blogging? What’s the profit for each keyword, adgroup segmented by search engine? Are visitors referred from partner sites or paid links truly valuable? What are the results of landing page rotation testing in terms of profit or loss? Is organic traffic from direct brand search more or less engaged than reciprocal direct brand PPC traffic? Does fancy design, flash, or video matter to conversion? How does social media matter to our efforts?Read the rest of this entry »

In early June, Google updated their webmaster guidelines and included specific intent to kill WebPosition as the poster child for Google’s disdain for automated queries. Since WebPosition has been best friend to many (including me) for years, it was a disappointing development.

However before we really get going here, it should be noted that organic prominence reporting, WebPosition’s forte, is dead anyway. The inevitable progression of personalized search, which returns customized SERPs based on individuals’ web history, codifies the deal. Bulletproof conversion and ROI metrics calculated by modern analytics are the only uncontested measures of SEM success.

Clients Understand the Web 1.0 Way.
Many of our search marketing clients still perceive organic keyword rankings as the singular measure. To an extent they are correct in their assessment of value: top rank for a keyword is still a great asset. However, true search marketing experts teach prospective clients the new reality during the sales process and lead existing clients through the adaptive process. Also, WebPosition has other features which remain useful like Link Defender and Page Critic AKA “Beat the Algorithm.”

WebPosition’s Organic Prominence Reporter: The Pathology of Demise
The announcement from Google was cryptic: “As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP Search API. Developers with existing SOAP Search API keys will not be affected.” SOAP was the Google API feature which allowed access to keyword rankings directly from the Google database infrastructure. On December 6th the SOAP API ceased to function in WebPostion, even for those of us in possession of API keys.

WebPosition blamed it on Google and advised users to turn off SOAP access in WP and switch back to the illegal screen-scraping mode. You see, in the past Google has officially discouraged screen-scraping the SERPs.Read the rest of this entry »

Modern Analytics packages offer a statistic (we hate to read) called the “Bounce Rate.” Bounce Rate is different than the “Exit Rate” measurement and speaks to how many visitors entire a site on a landing page only to leave from the same landing page without going any further within the site. It’s especially ugly to have a high Bounce Rate for a PPC landing page and a bummer for organic traffic.

To clarify, Exit Rate includes site visitors who may have entered other pages in the site as their initial landing page. Since visitors may have spent substantial time in the site prior to leaving, Exit Rate is not necessarily a good measure of how well content and design is engaging traffic. A high Bounce Rate, however, often means that the page or site is simply not stimulating or useful to visitors. Bounce Rate applies to individual pages and a site on average.

I take a positive outlook (even though it sometimes hurts to even look). Bounce Rate provides a great deal of actionable insight for search marketing types who are committed to using analytics for taking steps to actually improve user experiences on their site.

This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Improved user experience means lower Bounce Rates. Lower Bounce Rates mean web traffic is drilling down further into the site. Deep drilling means guests are more engaged. More engaged traffic has a greater likelihood of converting to key performance indicators like sales, qualified leads, and other KPIs.Read the rest of this entry »