Google has just announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search… The entire story can be found on Techcrunch web site:
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For those who were talking about this last week. Here is the official video from Google. It’s been a while I haven’t posted, enjoying the summer. But finally, something newsworthy. Google Analytics is measuring the impact of social media efforts. Read it on Mashable: http://mashable.com/2011/06/30/google-analytics-social-plugin/ The funnel is the first step your customers go through as they decide to use your product.It’s like a first date! It models only a small part of the overall experience, which lasts months, or years. I discovered a nifty tool this weekend. I want to share this great new tool with you. It’s called optimizely, it will help you excute a/b tests on the fly. It is also good to test multivariate tests. You will surely appreciate this. Best of all it does not require a webmaster to use. Just paste one line of JavaScript into every page you want to test or measure and then test all you want. You’ll never have to change that snippet again! Check it out: https://optimizely.appspot.com/ Why does A/B testing work? Time over time, organizations that make data-driven decisions with controlled Why so many companies reportedly gain KPI’s they are targeting when they implement A/B testing. Even when the company has exhausted other ways of “improving” their design work such as Q4 Survey and using test panels. It begs to answer the question. Why does A/B testing work with such consistency? Do we not know everything there is to know about design? Is there some kind of methodology error or bias that ensures we get positive results from a starting point or any given point in testing? Here are just some of my observations. First of all, it’s a matter of perspective. Sometimes it works because you have replaced your idea of a good design or copy to what average user is more comfortable with. For example, you changed the It is also common that the expert panel or survey reported is not capturing the same variation of customer segments that land on that page. Here the fallacy is believing that talking to customers or other knowledgeable resources takes less time and money than A/B testing. Interviewing people and evaluating notes/data carefully takes time. Sometimes reaching people by phone can be difficult, further extending the time period needed to move from draft to final design. Be patient! Other times you violate someone’s expectations because they have come to the site often and expected to see a link or button in a certain colour. The memory is a fascinating thing. That can trigger a lower CTR for example. In such a case, the A/B test itself is causing a bias and is not as conclusive and insightful as we may believe it is. Another important thing to note is that A/B testing works best for projects with an all-important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that can be measured by counting simple user actions. Examples include registering for a product or making a purchase on an e-commerce site. Unfortunately, things are rarely that simple. We often falsely believe that A/B testing alone will assure that you end up with the best design. In fact, one may just end up with the less-bad one, instead. You need to live with that possibility. A/B testing will tell you which variant is better, and by how much, but not why. I am not saying there is no value in testing, but we need to verify our most pompous assumptions as Web Analysts. We tend to believe in our ability to draw insight that is helpful to marketing. That would be our own bias I guess that’s why A/B testing is a process, not just an event – if carried out enough times, and with a plan, it should narrow down the possible reasons why. The value derived from this process is very valuable to companies, particularly in segments of intense competition. Herman Tumurcuoglu infographic about bounce rate: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/?wide=1 Keep in your mind that not always high bounce rate is bad! some times it is a good sign, depending on the nature of your website/landing page and the service you provide. Best practice is to track users via goals which is about the quality of visits. /Hossein Further to our class discussions last night about privacy in Google Analytics. There are fresh new allegations today about an engineer at google looking into kids private information. The engineer, David Barksdale, was accused of accessing information about teenagers he had met in a Washington state technology group, according to gossip website Gawker.com Google is not confirming these details but this breach, if true, comes at a time when Google is being scrutinized by various government agencies for its collection of unsecured personal data on Wi-Fi networks. Government bodies are calling for an opt out form going beyond web analytics. Interesting article on how Google Instant might change keyword strategy for search engine marketers both on the SEO and SEM side. http://210consulting.com/2010/09/09/google-instant-and-how-it-will-change-your-keywords/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4 Google Instant brings a new definition to speedy web searches but what does this mean to users, publishers and marketers? http://www.doshdosh.com/ways-to-influence-people-online/ hey guys, I was reading about psychology and online marketing and for those of you who are in marketing or enterprising, this is a great article. 11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action 1. Show ratings and reviews by other users 2. Provide instant gratification and a quick fix 3. Put the most important action to be done first ….. According to a study by Edison Group, Twitter might not be for everyone! By controlling its products from OS to storefront, Apple has built a model its competitors are scrambling to replicate. Each has parts, but none has the total package yet. http://money.ca.msn.com/investing/jim-jubak/article.aspx?cp-documentid=24167820 Maria Bartiromo (CNBC Original) takes viewers Inside The Mind of Google for a rare look at the world’s most powerful technology company and its crown jewel, the Google Internet search engine. This is the show that we talked about it in the last class and Herman shared the video with us. Here is the link to CNBC page for this show: http://www.cnbc.com/id/33831099?source=vty|insidegoogle|&par=vty And here is where to wach the full show: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1409844721&play=1 /Hossein Google Analytics with its robust traffic source tracker provides an excellent tool to analyze traffic from various sources across the internet. Most of the traffic comes from 3 main sources (Direct, Referral, Search Engines). Apart from providing basic stuff like visits, visitors, pageviews, unique visitors you have a lot of facility to perform robust / insightful analysis. Lets discuss on few important things that GA offers for understanding traffic related data: A) Search Keywords Organic / Paid B) Tracking Referral campaigns (Email and other campaigns) A) Search Keywords Analysis: GA provides separate segmentation on Keywords from Paid search traffic and Organic search traffic from Google.com, provided you integrate Adwords Search campaigns in Google analytics. This is simple nowadays, with ability to simple add a new code directly to your conversion campaigns and activate GA tracking in Adwords interface system However, for other Search Engines like Yahoo, MSN & smaller search engines you need to specifically differentiate the Paid / Organic separately. The URLs for ad campaigns in other search engines need to be modified to include the source, campaign, term, content, name. This can be done via the URL builder over here http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 . The url then passess the information to the analytics system for effective differentiation of the traffic metrics. This data will be shown along with other paid traffic in your GA console. For example you need to create URLs for the Yahoo, MSN campaigns. you can do it easily.
This is how you create unique URLs for each of the keywords and place them in the campaigns. The keyword data from urls will be read by the Analytics engine and stores them accordingly for display of the reports. Yahoo also now provides Auto tagging IDs. Using this you do not have to individually create unique URLs for each keyword, but create a single URL for the campaign and the using the IDs, Yahoo system automatically places them directly into the URLs. Before this you need to activate the Auto tagging feature in the Yahoo dashboard.
Similarly this can be done for MSN campaigns and other smaller search engine campaigns. Comparing Organic & Paid traffic Filter Type: Custom Filter Filter Type: Custom Filter Once you have a profile with SEO traffic, you can track the position of the SEO ranking keyword in the google results. Yes, you can with the help of advance filters and custom filters. Adwords Search Keywords in Google Analytics (Paid Keywords) Filter1: Filter Type –> Custom Type –> Advanced Field A -> Extract A Field B -> Extract B Output To -> Constructor Make sure all fields are required and they do not need to be case sensitive, then click Finish: Filter 2
Field A -> Extract A, choose Custom Field 1 <– (.*) You should now be able to see Keywords in brackets against the Adwords keywords. This is the actual keyword searched by the user. Based on this study you can improve your targeting by including some of them in negative list or add more keywords to your existing list. How can you use this data: 1) Finding Negative Keywords: There could be users who are using some keywords to find your site, however those keywords may be irrelevant. These can provide ideas for negative keywords in Paid Campaigns 2) Keyword research: You can find more keywords which can added directly into Paid campaigns or gain Organic rankings for higher positions. 3) Better Understanding of your Users’ intention. These keywords will give you an idea of what the user expects from your site. 4) Better Optimization of your Organic / Paid Campaigns for increasing relevance and lower costs. You can groups your Ads better and structure campaigns properly. 5) Create unique Ads with targeted messages for each set of common theme keywords with separate campaign and destination URL(page) 6) Combining this data with revenue and ecommerce transaction data you can get data about profitability of the keywords which will help you optimize campaigns for higher profitability by focusing attention on high performance keywords and purging non-profitable keywords. B) Tracking Referral Campaigns / Email Campaigns in GA Create a new Source: ExampleEmailContent We use this information for identifying a particular email campaign in the Traffic Sources report. It gives a detailed information about the source page, landing page, for each Email. This way you can now track Email Exit rate, Email Conversion Rate, Email Open Rate, Email Views, Email Click Through, Action After Email Clicks. Using Email campaign data you can segment the data to view pageviews of your website’s pages. Navigation summary of the pages, Funnel tracking if you have set it up. How can you use the email campaign data in GA A) Effectiveness of the Email campaigns B) Identify which of the email campaigns has more conversions. Therefore focus more effort on similar theme and similar Geography. C) Behavior of the different users on the website, from different Email campaigns. Similarly there are many insights that can be derived from this, such as effectiveness of emails based on their engagement on the site for new visitors and returning visitors, based on Average Depth / Visit and many more. Following is the link to Google Analytics LAB which has some useful applications and plugins to enhance the usage of Analytics data. You can find plugins to Microsoft Excel to generate nicer reports as well as applications that allows you to embed Google Analytics reports into your web pages for the world to see. These are not Google apps and Google makes no promises or representations about their performance, quality, or content, but some of them look useful http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataGallery.html /Hossein Google has come long way from its early days of basic reporting on Visits, Visitors, Pageviews etc. The early GA users used to view basic site stats and did not aim to understand customer behavior and customer intent from GA reports. Now with advance features in GA, users can now be intelligently understand customer intent and track customer /user behavior with little bit of tweaks. GA now provides such sophisticated tools like Site Overlay, Custom/Advance Reports, Filters & Regex, Ajax Support, Outbound link tracking, event tracking and more. Additionally the product is designed with high usability & accessibility. Users can drill from inside any report across any dimension and can view reports they would like to view. More about advance features. A) Site Overlay: This is the most comprehensible way of displaying click stream data on webpages. It puts you in your users’ shoes. You can now view web pages the way users do view your site. The links they click, the pages they view etc. This information is extremely helpful if you can segment the click stream data for various type of users, such as users from Search Engines can be compared with Users coming Directly to your site. Similarly you can compare behavior of various segments of users such as Geography, Source of traffic, New / Returning Visitors etc. B) Custom / Advance Segment:- This is mainly for ad hoc analysis, GA provides all metrics and dimensions in 2 different sections. A template / custom report can be created by choosing any desired value as metrics against any desired dimension (Geo, Source, Keyword etc..). This becomes your custom report. This report can be scheduled at regular intervals or as alerts in your email Inboxes. C) Event Tracking & Outbound link tracking: GA provides facility with its new ga.jx code to track events, pageviews in Ajax powered web-pages and visits via outbound links. Suppose there are 10 links on the page, earlier we knew users were exiting from this page but not which link was clicked to exit the website. Now you can know if the user exited by closing the browser or by clicking external links. D) Advance filters & Searches: You can use advance analytics settings to filter users and display them in new Profiles. You can try and exclude users from certain IP address, segregate visitors visiting certain section of the website into a different profile. Alternatively you can choose to recognize users from different search engines which Google is not currently aware. There is unprecedented amount of the features and tools available for normal website owners to track almost everything desired about the user information through Google Analytics. Classssssssss Disssssmissssed! Always wanted to say that School might be out for summer but I have a very special post this week for those still following the blog. There has been so much controversy over the privacy of facebook traffic. These walls are about to come down. Yes, you lurkers are about to be uncovered!!!! This article is about how GA can work with your fan page. But I am sure the practise is about to be used on simple profile pages. As is the general rule with the Internet, never ever assume privacy! Big brother is watching your every move. So your fascinated by Facebook. You are particularly intrigued at the marketing power of this social media tool used by nearly half a billion people. You’ve created a Facebook fan page and people are frequenting your page. But do you really know how many people visit your page, what areas are popular and what parts of the world your visitors come from? Those of you who have a fan page on facebook probably already know about “Facebook Insights”. It shows some demographic and geographic information on your page, but is limited to information about interactions with your fans. What about those people who do not become a fan and land on your page (this is like a lurker or stalker on your profile page). The free Google Analytics tool offers more sophisticated and comprehensive data, it will track everything, down to the IP address of the visitor. Adding Google Analytics to your fan page can be done easily but requires some special steps. Those of you who are more advanced have probably already tried to integrate GA codes into your profile pages or fan pages. So like me, you will have come to the following conclusion. One of the limitations of Facebook is they can only run limited JavaScript. Google Analytics needs JavaScript code included on a page to correctly track visitors in the traditional way. However, there is a new solution. Using free and opensource FBGAT (Facebook Google Analytics Tracker), you can get Google Analytics working on your Facebook fan page. When you generate your GA code enter it within your Facebook Fan page using an app like Static FBML. By simplify editing your Static FMBL pages and inserting the code, Google Analytics will track all visits to those pages. The tracking has begun. Google Analytics will now need about 24 hours to show you a report of your visitors. I was able to execute this tonight and wanted to share it with everyone… I already see my visits on GA. I will experiment more and write down any updates if any. If some of you have time on your hands, try it…Let me know if you were able to pull it off. For all of us newbies. http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/ Every business having presence online will need the help of analytics to measure its effectiveness for efficiently interacting with desired target audience (customers) for achieving its objectives. Google Analytics provides some really powerful features / tools for all kinds of businesses. There are some basic features and advance features, explained in detail later in the article. The basic features are mostly to track visits (sessions), visitors, page-views of your website across various dimensions like geo-locations, browser info, network info, time scale, source of traffic like (Search Engine, Direct, Referral) and more. Further articles will talk about advance details about these basic analytics metrics. The second part of the analytics is very interesting, mostly used by minority of the websites. These features concern ability to store business related information like product information (for ecommerce sites), user’s info like (Age, Income, Sex, Education etc.) for websites that capture these information and finally event tracking and tracking special user actions. These are some tools which are very available and every business should use them to fullest, because it’s free. Some of the tools like “_setvar()” functions are designed for the website owners to transfer users information from the forms designed onsite directly to Google servers. This information is user defined and stored as defined by user. Users’ can choose the variables to be stored GA system, name them with descriptive names. The huge advantage is these variables will appear alongside other pre-existing variables like visits, visitors, page-views, traffic & geo info. Now the GA system can help you view a cross tab or a slice dice cut of data with your custom User data along with standard data such as Visitors, Type, Geo, Traffic and more. Using this imagine a Ecommerce site will now be able to view if there are more Returning visitors from people with Age group > 40 years or Bounce rate of home page is more for Age group < 22 years, how useful will this be? Similarly a whole host of powerful insights can be obtained by combining the revenue information, user profile information and web analytics data. Few sample questions which you always wanted to know can be answered in a click of a mouse. A) The city that attracts the youngest population and are high paying online, do not view the movie section of your site because it’s simply not visible. They are probably landing on the wrong page. B) Exit Rates of pages in payment processing flow from users with low income. This will help us figure out many things like the price sensitivity of the users, navigational issues and so on.. C) Age group, Income status, Geo location of Returning users who pay up online. D) Average number of visits a user makes before making a purchase online. Split this data across Age groups, Income levels etc. E) User segments buying maximum number of products in one transaction. You can create separate pages for selecting multiple items. These insights along with many others help in segmentation of the user base based on revenue, activity & user information. Market Segmentation can help you create specific targeted campaigns. There are various ways of setting up Ecommerce system in GA A) This requires identifying the elements to be tracked and stored in GA You need to create a server side code to output the data in the format GA is looking for. Overall tracking business data can be very fruitful and useful for measuring success of your efforts online. External References: Such a short story.. http://www.instantshift.com/2010/03/26/the-history-of-online-shopping-in-nutshell/ Read this Conversion Rate Optimization Tutorial and use the same technics to convince them! http://www.seorabbit.com/conversion-rate-optimization-tutorial
Special thank to Avinash for sharing it. /Hossein Dr. Ralph Wilson , from Web Marketing Today interviewed Ayat Shukairy to talk about 5 ways to increase Your ecommerce conversion rate. It is a quick talk about optimization, analytics and testing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkyFcgqeKU /Hossein Intresting article about Brand, it is about brand being more than a logo
Read the article here (http://designinformer.com/whats-brand/) /Hossein A great read on SEOmoz case study. A/B testing, VOC and how they help to improve your performance and conversion rate. SEOmoz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools for search engine optimization (SEO). http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/ /Hossein Google, Intel and Sony looking at possible partnership in offering Web TV.. http://inventorspot.com/articles/google_tv_3rd_party_developers_anticipate_webtv_meld_38979 |
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