Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don’t know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web.
Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics.
It’s about
among others. Continue Reading »
Getting targeted traffic for a website is just the first step in a thorough SEO process. What comes next? Landing page optimization or conversion (rate) optimization/CRO follows. After all you want the visitors you get to stay on your site and perform the desired action (like ordering or subscribing).
One of the foremost ways to optimize landing pages for more conversions is A/B split testing
sometimes also referred to as simply AB testing. The concept is pretty simple. In the most basic set up you show version A of a page to half of your visitors while in the other half will see version B.
Of course in reality it’s a bit more complex.
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Use Google Analytics custom segments to audit and improve search marketing
Anyone who has ever reviewed the keywords attracting visitors to a site will have seen that brand search terms usually dominate, often accounting for more than 50% of search related visits for well-known brands.
Every site has associated brands, but to paraphrase Morrisey, some brands are biggger than others. For these, isolating brand search is essential if you’re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.
It follows that it’s futile to try to review and improve search engine marketing without taking brand phrases into account, but that’s the default for the less than savvy. For marketers, reviewing their analytics it’s easy to understand since the analytics tool doesn’t readily isolate brand and non-brand phrases.
Ever since Google Webmaster Tools added the so called “search queries” data I’ve become a huge fan of them. I’ve listed the 10 Google SEO tools everybody should use in the past but to be honest I focus on three of them right now Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for SEO inspiration. The wealth of information GWB offers is like a goldmine.
The tool-set has grown over the years steadily but I was neglecting it. By now there are numerous ways to use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO. Again I will focus on three of them here and explain how to use GWB for
This list is not meant for the average small business owner. These 46 CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization resources require web design, SEO and social media experts to implement, use or even understand them.
How do you find out whether your web designer, SEO or social media consultant or company has enough expertise to deal with them?
These people won’t be able to make proper use of these resources.
In contrast highly skilled specialists of all the three industries, web design, SEO and social media speak about conversions and ROI all the time.
Typical Twitter user: Well educated, high income, uses it for marketing and business purposes. Source.
Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. This time I’ll tell you something about statistics. I love statistics. Statistics make business sense. So I’m eagerly studying all kinds of statistics, especially those dealing with social media and Twitter in particular.
This time a statistic mentioned in a respectable business publication made me cringe though. It says that 25% of [American] Twitter users are black while only 12% of the US population is black. So basically this statistic is saying:
A year ago we’ve published a list of 30+ Google Analytics tools and resources. It was one of our most successful posts ever. The list has been even nominated for a SEMMY award. I’m not sure I can top that but I can provide a new list of 30+ more Google Analytics tools, apps, tweaks and other resources. Continue Reading »
Google have announced this week at SES New York the introduction of AdWords Search Funnels. The conversion attribution problem has been heavily discussed during the last year and this led me to think of a quote which was on Twitter a while ago, (I think it was from Chris Lake – correct me if I’m wrong though): “Conversion Attribution is Like Selling Xabi Alonso & Hoping for the Same Result”.
Image credit: Flickr
Even if you don’t know anything about football, hopefully this will still make some sort of sense – but being a big Liverpool fan this quote really struck home with me as an excellent analogy. For those who don’t know, last season Xabi Alonso often provided the assist before an assist leading towards a goal. So if you’re looking at stats on goals scored and direct assists it may be difficult to understand the true value Alonso added to the team.
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Last week, Avinash Kaushik opened SES London with a superb keynote presentation about web analytics – see this video interview if you missed it.
There’s some good writeups following this, but one of the parts I found particularly interesting was the examples of how brands perform using search.
Marks & Spencer
One of Avinahs’s examples included an M&S paid search ad, where the landing page for a query on “Marks and Spencer underwear” produced a general Valentines Day landing page – no sign of a relevant product in sight! Here’s the landing page I now see for a query on the same term, the Valentines Day page has been replaced:
“They Came, They Puked, They Left” is how Avinash Kaushik described website’s with a high bounce rate, because users aren’t finding what they are looking for, so they very quickly leave. This is very true in the M&S example, where users are dumped onto the homepage, relying on users navigating to find what they want – instead of directing them straight to it. Continue Reading »
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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