All posts by Richard Fergie

On Tuesday I was at SES London. I was also at SES for a day last year and I thought that this year was much better in terms of the quality of the presentations and speakers. Hats off to the organising team for making these improvements.

The Keynote

The keynote was by Jeff Hayzlett, the former CMO of Kodak. He was an amazing speaker. In fact he was so good that he could have been talking rubbish and I would have sat there amazed. If Jeff had said “what organisations need to do these days is throw money down a big hole”, I would have been thinking “have we got room in the office for a money pit?”.

I think the content was pretty good but, as I’ve said, I was so overawed that I’m not really in a position to judge.

I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.

Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Last year I made 10 predictions for PPC in 2010. I got a few of the more obvious things right, and few things wrong and I completely failed to predict some quite important changes. Here’s how I did:

Rasmus Himmelstrup (@rasmusgi) tweeted a link to a post on Web Analytics Island about how to track the Google Site Preview bot in SiteCatalyst. The tracking relies on the face that Google site preview shows a rendered image of the page so it must execute any javascript on the page. If Google are executing the Site Catalyst code then maybe they are also running the Google Analytics code. I want to track this thing. Let’s get to work!

Kevin at Web Analytics Island uses the user agent string

Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) ApplewebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; google web preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13

to identify the Google bot, but this information (as a complete string) is not available in Google Analytics. But I could check that visits using the Google bot version of safari increased after the introduction of Site Preview:

This is kind of what I wanted to see.

I made an advanced segment to contain this data:

Looking at the “Service Providers” report shows that this segment is definitely interesting, even if it is not tracking the Google Site Preview Bot:

Everyone is talking about Google Instant; the new way for Google to display results.

Image from Zenera on Flickr

On July 19th I noticed that I could us the AdWords Bid Simulator tool at the ad group level rather than at the keyword level as is normal. I thought this was a very useful feature so I tweeted:

Ooo, bid simulator at the ad group level. Thank you #AdWords
July 19, 2010 2:37 pm via AdaReplyRetweetFavorite
@RichardFergie
Richard Fergie

It is quite easy for people in this industry to obsess about things which don’t matter to people who aren’t up to their eyebrows in the online marketing world. One recent example of this was the furore over changes to the facebook privacy settings. I was one of the first in the UK to join facebook (in February 2005) but I know people who joined even earlier than that. Rather than give you my opinions about what has changed I messaged old university friends to get the views of long term facebook users who do not work in the online marketing bubble.

In my last post I talked about a method for testing the value of using AdWords on your brand.

The results are now in:

  • Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords when Running AdWords: £3471
  • Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords without AdWords: £3278
  • Average Hourly Cost of brand keywords: £0.86

WIN!

Methodology

Traffic in this account varies quite a lot depending on the day of the week so I chose to segment by hour rather than day of the week. I wanted to keep the slices as fine as possible to reduce the variation caused by the time of day so I used the following day parting scheme:

I waited a month before analysing the data; for this account a month is plenty of time for the result to be statistically significant.

To get the information I needed I opened the Total Revenue part of the Ecommerce Report in Google Analytics.

After exporting the information to Excel I could easily find the averages that I needed. To make the test as fair as possible I only looked at the hours between 1600 and midnight. This may mean that my results are invalid during the rest of the day

Are your PPC campaigns eating your organic traffic? Google love for you to bid on your brand name in AdWords, but how to you know if you are wasting money on traffic you could have got for free? Of course, to find this out you need to run some sort of test.

This blog post is a bit of fun that might give you some idea of the sorts of  thing that cannot be tracked by your web analytics system…

1. Odysseus Off-Site

Image from Litmuse on Flickr

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