SEOptimise » website analytics

Why SEOs should be conducting user testing research

Rachel McCombie — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:07:35 +0000

‘Build websites for users, not search engines’ is the advice continually propounded by insiders at Google. As SEOs, we’re used to looking at websites and analysing how they would be viewed by a search engine. In actual fact, though, there’s a fairly big overlap between what’s helpful for a user and what’s helpful for a search engine, and the user and search engine experiences can often mirror each other. That means that it’s often worth carrying out user testing research in the initial stages of your SEO project to gain valuable insights into how real visitors view and use your site.

User testing isn’t just about usability for humans or identifying bugs; parts of your website that are difficult to use can hide potential SEO problems that you may not have spotted. User testing can help shed light on the user behaviour behind the dry metrics you see in Google Analytics, and its benefits in conversion rate optimisation are obvious. It’s also worth noting that if your client is taking some convincing that they should make a change to their website for SEO reasons, having concrete evidence from the word of users’ mouths might prove more persuasive.

User testing research takes people from your website’s demographic and gives you the benefit of several fresh pairs of eyes to enable you to see your website (or your client’s) as your target audience sees it. Sure, it can only ever be a small sample size, but the insights you can gain from user testing can nevertheless be valuable. Here are just a few of the issues and insights we’ve uncovered with user testing for some of our clients…

High bounce rate
The reason for a high bounce rate isn’t always immediately obvious – particularly if you’ve viewed that site many times and have become, as it were, ‘immune’ to it. I conducted user testing research for one of my clients and it transpired that, upon viewing the homepage for the first time, users weren’t immediately sure what that my client’s site was actually about. This was mainly because the imagery on the homepage was misleading, and the headings on the page weren’t obvious either. If users are having problems figuring out what a site is about, the chances are that Google spiders are too. We’d spotted the lack of optimised headings, but the wider issue of the imagery was only identified by getting real users’ first impressions. Whether bounce rate has any meaningful impact on rankings is beyond the scope of this post, but I’m sure you catch my drift.

High time on site
Similarly, if people are spending a lot of time on your site, you can only really speculate as to why. Is it because they’re are engaging more with your content? Or is it actually because they can’t find what they’re looking for? User testing may be able to help you find out.

Keywords are friendly to users, not just search engines…
…Otherwise why would people type them in? Keywords are revealing about user behaviour, and search volumes for differently worded search terms are revealing about how people think. We’re obviously used to optimising header tags to target keywords, but this can often have benefits to users, too – because keywords can give them a clearer idea of what each section of a site will be about (e.g. “our products” versus “shoes for sale”). Within reason, using keywords to help your users find their way around your site makes sense, and helps avoid confusion over the purpose of the site (which was something user testing highlighted for one of our clients).

Hiding content behind registration
A lengthy registration process for one client highlighted the issues surrounding hiding content behind a log-in. During user testing, users were frustrated by the number of details they had to provide to get at the full-length content, and one even said that if he hadn’t been paid to look at the site, he’d have given up long before he got to the end of the process. So the issue of content being hidden went beyond an SEO issue and it became a possible conversion rate problem. In an ideal world, we’d have liked to have seen all that content immediately in the public domain, for both users and search engines; this not being possible for legal reasons, we recommended a simplified sign-up process and optimisation of the visible content instead.

So how does one conduct user testing research? We’ve used http://www.usertesting.com/, which costs $39 per user and allows you to set your target demographic and specific instructions/tasks that you want users to accomplish (e.g. find a particular product or page). You get a video of the user’s screen as they navigate your site, and a soundtrack of their voice commenting on what they see. This sort of insight obviously delves deeper than dry metrics, user journeys and even heatmaps, because you get explanations rather than straightforward identification of patterns.

Have you conducted user testing research? Did you find it helpful, and did it uncover anything you’d not spotted?

Image credit – mastrobiggo on Flickr.

30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Tad Chef — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:50:40 +0000

It’s this time of year again! In the previous years my web trends lists were very successful, both as predictions and by traffic or number of shares.

People working in the web industries want to know what’s ahead.

So for 2012 I want to tell you again what’s coming up. Basically I’m not predicting anything here; instead I just list trends you can already see and measure, but which will be obvious next year.

SEO

Good bye PageRank and links – links and PageRank matter less and less. In 2012 more ranking factors will probably be about other signals than conventional a href links. Google will use all kinds of other data including feedback human quality raters to overcome the big decade long link buying spree.

Freshness – the latest Google update is perhaps more important than the high quality update dubbed Panda. Nobody cries about it because it wasn’t about penalties for sites but about improvements for searchers this time. This is good news for big news sites and bad news for brands with questionable business practices. The bad news will show up on top.

Quality – the Panda update wasn’t really about pandas, as I hope you know: it was about ”high quality” sites. Thus focusing on quality metrics that entail usability, readability and overall usefulness is key in 2012. Underpaid quality raters are out there to get you, sometimes even without a look on your actual site.

SEO is just a part – SEO isn’t dead in 2012, but it’s more and more part of bigger ideas and concepts. This year it seems it’s not SEO 2.0 or findability anymore. The new en vogue terms are content marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing or Internet/online marketing (again). SEO practitioners do just stuff meta tags, but their tasks now encompass much more.

SEO marries CRO – The two disciplines, SEO and CRO or conversion optimisation are just two sides of one coin. While SEO focused on getting traffic, CRO concentrates on making this traffic work for you. I’ve watched these two disciplines converge more and more. In 2012 you will rarely have one without the other. I know I predicted this for 2011, but many people still tried to divide the two sides of the same coin.

Search

Google does it again – Google has quickly reacted to competition from small contenders like Blekko, Ixquick and DuckDuckGo. It has appropriated all improvements and features by these faster competitors – be it the removal of content farms by Blekko or the introduction of SSL search by Ixquick or referral blocking by DuckDuckGo, Google offers it all now as well.

Even more confusion – last year I predicted more clutter in Google results and was nevertheless unprepared for the wide range of changes leading to portal-like search results. In particular, many changes on local searches lead to even more information stuffed in the SERPs. Furthermore, the manifold social enhancements such as who +1′ed, shared or authored a post make the SERPs look like a collection of gif clip art. I’m afraid this won’t be the end of this trend of more confusion.

Search without clicking – in 2011 several small moves by Google showed a tendency to show search results as content directly on Google, thus making a click to the actual page not necessary anymore. We will see more of it until people start suing Google for stealing their content.

Google does it already on Google News, Google Places and Google Images. It also owns YouTube, where most video searches end up. They want the same thing for text search as well. They don’t want people to leave Google properties at all. Google+ brand pages just add to it.

Google reads your mind – we already got used to the sometimes annoying instant search results that appear even before you type something meaningful. Google works on more ways to find out what you need and give it to you even before you ask. Just consider the multiple data sources Google now has about you: Google toolbar, Chrome, Profiles, Plus, search history…

Speech recognition – Siri, the speech recognition ”assistant” on the latest iPhone, makes people talk with their phones and it’s extremely popular already. In 2012 we will see Apple’s competitors come up with similar tools so that we don’t need to talk to people or type in search queries anymore. Is this the end of SEO as some journalists assume (just like some suggest after every other major change in the search industry)?

No, it just means different kinds of queries, maybe more colloquial or clumsy ones. Maybe more dialogue with your search engine, for example ”I want something to eat”. I can’t imagine people just saying one, two or three word queries in public without looking silly. So they will talk as they do with other people.

Mobile grows – no surprise here. Mobile search will grow in 2012 again. How big it will become? Some pundits suggest that more than 1/5 of all searches will be conducted via mobile devices.

Social media

Google+ stays tiny – Google+ is being heralded and pushed by Google in search results because it’s still tiny – it hasn’t even reached a social networking market share of 0.5%, while Facebook owns approximately 65% of it.

Facebook losing ground – despite its almost monopolistic position, Facebook is already losing ground. In 2011 Facebook lost 6 million users in the US. The various privacy scandals and annoyances, along with alternatives like Diaspora, Google+ or Tumblr, will accelerate this process in 2012.

Oversaturation – it has been evident for a while already, but in 2011 most people noticed it: people can’t join more social media sites and spend even more time there without spending 24h on social networking and creating user generated content. We witnessed this when Quora appeared and demanded constant attention and production of high quality content.

Also, the emergence of Google+ has shown that most average people already have enough to do with Facebook and the likes. In 2012 it will finally become obvious that the social networking and UGC market is saturated and that creating another site that demands time and effort is not a valid business model anymore.

Social bookmarking vs social saving – last time I predicted the death of social bookmarking. In a way I was right, though luckily Delicious, the original social bookmarking site, has survived. Nonetheless it moved on to a different model of sharing links. Other social bookmarking sites or their competitors have created something that has no name but that I’d like to call social saving.

People are saving snippets or whole webpages using tools like Diigo, Evernote or bo.lt to collect, edit and share them. The future is bright for these type of tools in 2012 as webpages, articles or blog posts you want to bookmark vanish faster than you can look.

Curation – Curation is the collection of resources by an editor or a user who acts as an ad-hoc editor. Search engines like Blekko or Rollyo use curation but also third party services that create “Twitter newspapers”. With the relaunch of Delicious as a curation site for compiling small lists (aka stacks of links), the idea has been given another push. Adding +1 votes to search results is another kind of curation.

Social CRM goes prime time – customer relationship management (CRM) and social media converged for a few years now but there was no perfect solution to merge those two. In 2011 Nimble CRM appeared. This tool is so simple to use and flawlessly combines CRM, email and social media sites Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place, so that you can save lots of time and effort when trying to generate leads right on there on social media sites.

Blogging

Quantity vs quality – in 2011 people blogged less often, but when they blogged they wrote long articles. With the new freshness algorithm Google just introduced, the process might get reversed, as now the latest articles are more likely to show up on top in the top 10.

Tumblr – miniblogging is still growing, at least the market leader Tumblr. Why is Tumblr such a success? It’s a bit like Facebook, a bit like blogging and a bit like Twitter, but it combines the best of all of them. You can like or “heart” postings, you can reblog them and you can use a pseudonym like on Twitter. In 2011 many high level bloggers even moved their blogs from WordPress to Tumblr for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. Also, never underestimate the huge Tumblr audience.

Corporate blogging fails – businesses dump blogging in order to invest in Facebook marketing some statistics suggest. This is like giving up your office and doing business from Starbucks. Despite logic, this seems to be an appealing business model both in real life and online. Why host your own website and practice SEO, networking and advertising to get people to visit it when you can rent a “table” at Facebook. This is quite a short-sighted and risky move but business people tend to follow this trend.

Line breaks – for the sake of readability bloggers use more text-decoration, lists and breaks. Some overdo it though it seems. Not every line needs a break after it, not every post has to be a list and every second word has to be bold.

Web development

No more Flash – there will be no Flash on Android and RIM tablets and smartphones anymore. Thus the original Flash will die finally. Adobe is already working on a HTML5 implementation instead. So Flash will be probably resurrected based on Web Standards.

UX surpasses usability – if you believe Google Insights for search is a reliable statistic, you can see that in 2011 the interest in UX or user experience design has outgrown the dwindling popularity of the keyword usability. Fewer and fewer people are satisfied with usability because it’s too limited. The overall user experience, which includes emotional states of the user in its ideas, is the more important discipline of both.

@font-face usage - I remember it as if it was yesterday, when I first heard about the @font-face CSS method to embedding web-safe fonts to websites around 2004; I couldn’t wait until web browsers started supporting them. It took almost a decade and half a dozen font replacement techniques to make this CSS3 method work in most modern browsers. Now most browsers support it and we already see an abundance of websites using beautiful and readable typography. In 2012 we will probably see this going mainstream.

HTML5 innovation – when HTML5 came up, the hype was huge but I rarely ever noticed some HTML5 that wowed me. Most websites still seemed to look boring. Yes they were readable, usable, maybe even findable but what about the 21st century design I’d expect in 2011? Well, now the sites that really use HTML5 to create a design beyond a few boxes start appearing in larger numbers.

Analytics

Referral keywords - Google proprietary SSL search kills the Google keyword referrer. You can’t even see it on an SSL site, as Google removes the keyword using a script. Thus people will finally look at conversions not keywords.

Klout – no other metric has been so obsessed about both in a positive and a negative way recently. People love and hate Klout as if it was a nation or a religion. Whether you like Klout or not, it’s the elephant in the room. The social media influence measurement may be flawed at the moment, but it’s still the best there is. Also, Google has similar metrics for authors or might acquire Klout in the near future, maybe even in 2012. What’s safe to say is that in 2012 you won’t just measure websites but also people.

Rankings, traffic – simple SEO metrics such as rankings and traffic die a slow death. The search referrer blocking by Google may be only the last nail in the coffin of simplistic SEO metrics. When you can’t even see what keywords people use and thus can’t segment your search traffic properly, this metrics becomes useless.

Real time analytics – Google finally caught up with the competition this year, adding real time features to Google Analytics. At least a dozen of other vendors have been offering real time data for a while, and even better than Google Analytics if you ask me.

ROI – business people finally seem to overcome the ROI frenzy. ROI is important for both SEO and social media campaigns, but you can’t quantify everything by chasing after Return On Investment. It seems that in 2011 this simple truth has dawned on marketers and analysts all over the place so that we can sit back and watch other metrics in the coming year.

Feel free to add more trends you want to get noticed in the comment section or on social media.

* Creative Commons image by Express Monorail.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change

Why is (not provided) My Most Popular Keyword in Google Analytics and How Can I Fix it?

Tad Chef — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:08:32 +0000

While the search industry has been all abuzz with the bad news of Google SSL search, most average people might not even understand what happened. They may wonder “why is (not provided) my most popular keyword in Google Analytics?” (Other analytics solutions might not even show up this data at all). Also: how can you fix it?

First off, I want to explain in simple terms what happened. I tried to explain it to my wife recently and she didn’t understand at once. So this is the version she could fathom easily: Google hides the keywords people use to find your site from now on, or at least a significant part of them. All these hidden keywords are tagged as ‘(not provided)’ in Google Analytics.

On SEOptimise currently (the first week of November) 14,7% of Google search visitors had no keyword sent with its referrer.

The referrer is the page address where they came from. On my own blog, SEO 2.0, the number was even higher, with 16,27% of Google visitors. Also, (not provided) is the most popular “keyword” on both blogs.

Whose referral data gets hidden? All users logged in to Google services get redirected to SSL search now by default.

So all these people hide the keywords they use from the sites they visit. Google and thus the CIA, MI5 or any other secret service can still access these data for at least 18 months.

SSL search isn’t bad – it might be secure for some purposes. As a privacy advocate I can understand that someone would want to use SSL search. I don’t see why Google would force everyone logged in to one of the multiple Google services to use it though. Also, the only way to “opt out” of this forced security measure is to log out of all Google tools, including:

Gmail
Google+
Google Reader
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools

When you log in again, Google automatically forces you to use SSL search again on its https//google.com site. Advertisers who use Google ads will see the hidden data as well, by the way. So if you use SSL search to cover your tracks, at least from the website owners of the sites you click in Google, you have to refrain from clicking Google ads. So what can we actually do about this (not provided) issue?

Updated:

To ask your web hoster whether they offer SSL for your hosting package or otherwise upgrade to one where SSL would seem an option.

Usually sites that use SSL will still see complete referrers from other SSL sites.

Can’t you use SSL on your site to see Google keywords used by logged in searchers to find you? No, you can’t! Google does not use the same traditional SSL solution it used for SSL search before. Now, according to our colleague Mark Edmondson of Guava it doesn’t work anymore as Google uses a proprietary “hack” to remove the keywords from the referrer. Otherwise you wouldn’t get even the (not provided) notice. Instead there would be no referrer at all. Thank you for pointing this out Mark! Also many thanks to our reader Matt Curry for bringing it to our attention first.

Also, on the other hand, many sites may not notice from then on that you have sent them valuable traffic as long as they don’t use SSL for their sites. You may wonder how that affects you. In the SEO industry at least, people monitor their analytics for incoming traffic and thus find out who links to them. Based on that, relationships between webmasters and bloggers sometimes get forged to the mutual benefit of the two parties. This “SEO technique” will not work most of the time in future unless most webmasters embrace SSL.

Google’s business model is to sell ads on search results and third party pages. More than 95% of their revenue stems from these ads. So they compete against webmasters and SEOs to get the attention of web users.

Advertisers buying Google ads will have access to the referral data. So in a way Google is blackmailing webmasters either to buy ads or lose a truly important and meaningful metric. They have presented the change as a move to protect privacy, but we all know that Google doesn’t care about privacy in many other cases. Just think Google Street View.

I won’t let Google force me to buy ads. I don’t need them as I do SEO myself. It’s like having a car and still using a taxi regularly. We can only hope that lawmakers throughout the world will make Google stop anti-competitive measures like this one. It may take a few years before the authorities can sort out this issue, and until then we have to deal with it ourselves.

Going SSL yourself is the best option as of now. It doesn’t work with the new Google SSL search.

Google removes the keywords using a script so that even SSL sites can’t see them.

So soon 1/5 or 1/4 of your Google search visitors may not provide you with the full referral data. You won’t know for sure which keywords have the biggest impact on your site. The number one keyword will be “not provided” as more and more people start using Google services where they actually stayed logged in throughout the day.

Unless of course you’re in an industry where most people are not Internet-savvy and thus do not use Google services much. There are many people, if not the majority, who do not even know what RSS is and thus do not use Google Reader, for example. Only webmasters use Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools and Google+ has still a market share below 1% of social networking. So in many cases the impact might be far smaller than in the technology-driven search marketing space.

Ironically, the people who really care about privacy, such as Linux users for example, are also rather prone to browse the web anonymously than using Google services

and tell Google their real names each time when they search for some questionable sites. So in niches where real power users are the majority, the search referral issues might be a minor one. Everybody else has to consider buying ads at Google as encrypting their site won’t help to get proper referrer data again. Sad but true, Google can exert its monopoly here and there is no free way out as long as you care about analytics. It seems there is no way to fix it.

More resources on SSL search, (not provided) and analytics:

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Why is (not provided) My Most Popular Keyword in Google Analytics and How Can I Fix it?

SEO Metrics Everybody Can Use

Daniel Bianchini — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:53:59 +0000

As an SEO it is essential to report on the metrics that will show the progression of the project that you are working on.

These reports need to provide the client and yourself with actionable information, whilst also being able to outline your KPIs clearly. All reports should ideally include metrics from both on-site and off-site activity, providing the client with a clear understanding of what improvement has been made.

Image by seoinc

To ensure that you are reporting on the correct areas during the initial stages, you should arrange to have a meeting with your client.

Client Meeting

Before any SEO project can start you need to have a (kick-off) meeting with your client to understand everything about the project. This meeting should include, but not be limited to, knowing the objectives, system limitations, potential target keywords and reports required.

When it comes to discussing the reporting, there are a few areas that you should get the client’s feedback on before creating your report.

How often would you like reports?
What metrics do you (the client) want reporting on?
What search engines would you (the client) like to target?

The three points above are not the only areas you should be talking about when it comes to reporting, but you get the idea. In today’s market, the majority of clients tend to have a good idea of what they would like to see in their weekly/monthly/quarterly reports, but some are still unsure.

Below are some suggested metrics that you can report on for any website, whether it be ecommerce or informational, that you could discuss with the client.

Keyword Visibility

Keyword visibility is still a good indicator of how any SEO project is coming along, and is still a report that EVERY client wants to see.

Compare target keywords/phrases against identified competitors – this will allow you to see how you are comparing to your closest competitors and what needs to be done to improve.
Report month-on-month keyword/phrase movement – showing the progress of your target keywords on a monthly basis. You should also chart the report over time to show a visible representation of any improvement.
Run report against target search engines – make sure that you run all your target keywords against all target search engines so you know your visibility across the board.

Non-brand Metrics

Driving non-brand traffic to the website should be one of your main KPIs for any SEO project; therefore reporting on this is essential.

Split by non-brand visits by search engines – split the following metrics by search engines to give you a much more granular look across your non-brand SEO campaign.
Top non-brand keywords/phrases driving traffic – reporting on this metric will help identify which keywords are converting higher and will identify where improvements need to be made.
% of non-brand traffic vs organic traffic – with non-brand being the main target area, you can see what the organic split is and any movement over time.
% of non-brand traffic vs search traffic – seeing how non-brand traffic is compared to organic brand and PPC will identify the significance of the work being done.
% of non-brand traffic vs total traffic – this metric will show how much non-brand visits are contributing to the overall traffic received from the website in general.
Landing Pages – run a top landing page report to see which pages are receiving the most non-brand traffic. This report can also highlight any areas that might benefit from seasonality or yearly trends.
Non-brand Traffic Driving Keywords to Landing Page – once the top landing pages report has been compiled you can dive further into this metric by identifying the keywords/phrases that drove traffic to those pages. Understanding which keywords generate traffic to certain pages will help you improve the relevance of a specific page.
Time on Site – the time on site report will provide an average time each individual has spent on the website. This report should focus on the non-brand keywords, looking at which keywords/phrases are keeping the user on site for a large amount of time, whilst looking at the other end of the spectrum and seeing which keywords might need to improve.
Pageviews generated by non-brand traffic – for a website that does not offer a service or sell products, a pageviews report is a good metric to base a conversion on. Some websites also make money through advertising based on a pageview model. Knowing which non-brand keyword/phrase is generating the most pageviews will help you identify which keywords are more valuable.

Landing Pages Report - creating a second landing page report that includes brand terms will provide a better indication of how many pages are indexed within the SERPs. You can then compare this number to the number found within GWT and your CMS to see how much of your website has been indexed.

Top Referrers – the top referrers report is a great indication of which websites drive you traffic over a period of time. It also provides you with a source of links to analyse and potentially improve the anchor text that used to link.

Link Building Report - not many people seem to disclose their link building reports to the client, but for me it is an essential report that you should be providing. It is quite simple really; record EVERY link you create, with the date, URL where it is hosted, the anchor text and destination URL. If this is done every month you can show the client exactly what you have created, where you have created it and how many links have been created over a period of time. This is the minimum that the client should receive on a monthly basis, although a more thorough report can be time consuming.

The above SEO metrics are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be reported for any SEO project. This post only discusses metrics that can be used on every website; I haven’t even considered the complex reporting for eCommerce websites, which is an entirely different post altogether.

Do you agree or disagree with any of the metrics that I have mentioned above? What other metrics do you use across all your websites? I will be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter @danielbianchini.

How to Pass the Google Analytics Exam

Mike Browne — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:02:59 +0000

If you want to become qualified in Google Analytics, Google offer an online exam called the Google Analytics Individual Qualification. It’s a useful qualification to have when working with Google Analytics on your clients’ sites (and you should be using some analytics software!).

I passed the test last week and thought I’d put together a few tips for anyone else who may be thinking of taking the exam.

General Information

The exam is all done online in a multiple choice format, usually with four different options for each question. There are 70 questions in total and you have 90 minutes to complete these questions. If you think that doesn’t sound like enough time don’t worry, you’ll be able to answer most of the questions quickly and I found I had a lot of spare time when I finished.

Unlike the Google AdWords exam, the exam is “open book”, so you can look up resources during the test if you need to.

Once you’ve gained your qualification it will last for 18 months, so don’t forget that you will need to take it again in a year and a half if you want to stay qualified!

Resources for Preparing for the Exam

Easily the most useful thing to do is watch the video lessons at Conversion University. Watch as many of these as you can if you have the time, as they are all very useful, but the most important ones will be the videos on cookies, filters and regex.

Have a read through the help center on any topics you feel you aren’t confident on after watching the videos.

Also, experiment! Take what you’ve learnt and try it out in Google Analytics. Familiarise yourself with all parts of the interface, try applying filters, add users etc. Set up a new profile so you don’t affect any important profiles in your account, and once you’re confident with everything you’ve learnt, it’s time to take the exam!

Resources for When You’re Taking the Exam

That’s right, as I said earlier the exam is “open book”, so prepare yourself and have these links open on your browser before you start in case you need to refer to them:

Your Analytics account
While this might seem a bit obvious, it’s important to have in case you forget where something is located in the interface. You don’t want to be worrying about logging in while the timer is counting down, so log in and have a profile open before you start.

Analytics Help Center
This is useful for when you forget something. A quick search for the relevant topic should refresh your memory, so keep this open in the background.

IP Range Tool
You may get a question asking for a regular expression to cover a range of IP addresses. Luckily Google provides a tool to do just that. Just type in the two ranges and it gives you the regular expression to use.

Regex Tester
I found this tool quite useful for testing any regex rules. Type the rule in the top and enter the URL in the bottom and it will highlight it if it meets the rule.

URL Builder
Another useful tool from Google. This will add tracking parameters to a URL.

Google Analytics API
You may get asked about some of the functions in the Analytics API, so you can find descriptions of what each of them do here.

Of course this list isn’t exhaustive, so if there was anything else useful you came across when preparing be sure to have that open too.

After the exam

Hopefully if you follow these tips you too can pass the Analytics exam. Then it’s just a matter of showing off your new certificate!

* CC Image by Alberto G.

Google Webmaster Tools: A Beginner’s Guide to Installation

Daniel Bianchini — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:25:02 +0000

In recent weeks I have set up Google Webmaster Tools for a number of different clients, some of whom wanted some documentation on how this could be done.

Based on that document I have decided to publish this very basic beginner’s guide for those who are unfamiliar with the set up process of Google Webmaster Tools.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a free and easy way for webmasters to view their own website the way that Google sees it. GWT is a free tool that can be used for websites of all sizes, and features information such as:

Which of your pages are included in Google’s Index
Any errors encountered while crawling your site
Search queries that list your site as a result
Which sites link to yours
And more

This guide covers how to set up GWT in seven easy steps, from creating an account to adding and deleting users and associating your Google Analytics.

Step 1 – Google Account
To set up Google Webmaster Tools you will need to register for a Google account. If you have access to any of their other products such as Analytics, Gmail or Google Places then you will already have an account.

If you don’t have an account, you can associate your work email address with a Google account to take advantage of their products by clicking here.

Step 2 – Register for Google Webmaster Tools
Visit Google Webmaster Tools, and register for a Google Webmaster Tools Account, and sign in.

Step 3 – Add Website URL
Once signed in, you’ll be able to add your website address by clicking on the “Add a Site” button, typing the address and clicking “Continue”. When entering your domain, you can either add the top level domain (www.example.com) or you are able to add folders if you would like to target a specific area of the site. This is particularly useful if your site is split into regions or country codes and to target different international markets (www.example.com/folder1/folder2/).

Once you have clicked “Continue”, you will automatically be taken to the verification screen to choose your verification method.

Step 4 – Verify Website
GWT provides you with four different methods of validating your website, including uploading an HTML to the root server, adding a meta tag to the homepage, linking to Google Analytics and using DNS. Choose the one that is most suitable to your needs.

Upload HTML File to Server
GWT can provide you with a blank HTML file with a specific code attached to it that associates with your account. You can easily download this by clicking the link “this HTML verification file”. Once you have downloaded this file, you need to upload it directly to the root file of your server then click “Verify” to confirm the placement has been made. Once verification has been made, you will start to see some data population and you can move on to step 6.

If you need to verify at a later date then you can move on to Step 5 when you are ready to verify the account.

Add a Meta Tag
GWT provides you with a meta tag that needs to be added to the tag as an alternative method to adding the HTML file to the website. This meta tag just needs to be copied from GWT (shown below) and added to the homepage of the chosen website. Once this has been implemented, click the “Verify” button to start catching data (move to step 6). If you are not in a position to verify the account, click “Not Now” and come back to Step 5 when you are ready.

Link to Google Analytics Account
GWT provides you with an easier way of verifying your site if you use Google Analytics through the same Google Account that you have set up. If you are using two different accounts, for GWT and Google Analytics, then this option will not work. SEOptimise recommend that you use the same account for all Google products and if it’s a business account, create a central account for the entire business. To verify the Google Analytics account, click “Verify”. Once verified move on to Step 6.

Add DNS Records to your Domain
This option is for those who can sign in to a domain registrar or hosting provider and add a new DNS record. When you choose from the drop down menu (as indicated below), GWT provides instructions. After following the instructions, you need to verify that this has been completed correctly by clicking the “Verify” button. If this works, move on to Step 6; otherwise repeat the instructions or choose another method of verification.

Step 5 – How to Verify Once Method has been Implemented
If you were unable to verify at the time of setting up GWT, then you can verify it at a later date. When logging in to GWT, you will be presented with the websites that you have set up and a link to “Verify the Site” underneath the Manage heading. Click the “Verify this Site” link.

You will be presented with a similar screen as discussed in Step 4, where you need to choose your validation method. The validation method that you choose on this occasion needs to be the same as what you had originally chosen when setting up GWT.

Example: If you had originally chosen to add a HTML file to the root, then you need to reselect the HTML file verification.

Step 6 – Manage Users
GWT allows the administrator of the account to provide access to multiple users by adding them to the Verification Details via the “Manage” link as you log in to the tool.

Once you have clicked the “Manage” link, you will be directed through to the Verification Details page, where you will be allowed to add/edit/delete the users who have access to the data via their own Google account.

To add a new user, click the “Add an owner” button and enter their email address. This will only work for users who have a registered Google Account, so if they do not currently have one please refer them to step 1.

If you would like to remove any users who have been previously added then just click the “Unverify” link.

Step 7 – Associate Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics
If you use Google Analytics to track your website, then GWT allows you to import some data into the Google Webmaster Tools interface to add extra value to your data. This option will only be available if your Google Analytics account is associated with the same account that GWT is set up on. To add Google Analytics to your profile, click “Manage” and select “Google Analytics Profile”.

After you select “Google Analytics Profile”, you will be redirected to the Google Analytics page within GWT, where you can select the Google Analytics account/profile that is relevant to the website. Using the tick box, select the profile relevant to your account and click the save button; this will begin to insert data direct from your analytics account. If you haven’t got Google Analytics but would like to create an account, click “Create Google Analytics Account”.

So if you followed all the steps correctly you should now have fully installed Google Webmaster Tools account that will have data about your website populating the dashboards soon.

I hope you found the Google Webmaster Tools: A Beginner’s Guide to Installation useful. If you have any comments on the guide I have provided or on Google Webmaster Tools in general I would love to hear from you, either below or on Twitter @danielbianchini.

Why Not All Shopping Search Engines Have Lost in the UK Google Panda/Quality Update

Tad Chef — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:36:51 +0000

Everybody is talking about content farms as if they were the only type of sites hit by the latest large Google update. That’s a very limited viewpoint.

One of the most striking effects of the UK version of Google’s quality update dubbed Panda has been the huge losses by shopping search engines and review sites that focus on price comparison. Not all such services have lost though.

Among the losers were international heavyweights like:

Ciao.co.uk
Shopping.com
Bizrate.com
Idealo.co.uk
Kelkoo.co.uk
Shopzilla.co.uk

They have felt the negative impact of the Panda update in the UK by losing at least half or in many cases most of their Google rankings. The press has been covering only Ciao.co.uk because it’s a Microsoft site which filed a complaint against Google prior to the update.

There is one obvious exception though, and nobody covers it. Pricerunner.co.uk hasn’t lost. Why? Just visit the site and then one or more of the others. Can you see it? You don’t have to be an SEO expert to find out what the difference is. I want to describe it anyway for those who don’t have the time to review the sites themselves in depth.

There are several quite obvious factors why Pricerunner has been spared as the only real price comparison site. They might be obvious to me but difficult to discern for you, so I will share my analysis of the positive aspects of Pricerunner that have made it stand out among the downranked shopping search industry:

Clean modern web design

It’s obvious that Pricerunner has a clean web design, with lots of white space and a clear focus. It has a central feature article on top of the homepage, whereas most other price comparison sites just overwhelm the user with a portal-like link list nobody can overlook easily.

Proper usability and readability

It’s not just the positive first impression you get from looking at the Pricerunner site. You won’t bounce after visiting the homepage, but then you will stay even longer due to well-structured site architecture and readable structure.

Valuable editorial content

Unlike the other classic shopping search engines, which only display auto-fed content from the shops they work with, you’ll find really valuable editorial content on Pricerunner. I’ve tested the price comparison sites by looking for vacuum cleaners. I’m by no means an expert on them (who is?), so I was glad to find some additional in-depth info, aka “buying advice“, on what to look for. Otherwise only brands, reviews and prices would remain there to judge. That’s OK if you already know what you are looking for, but otherwise you don’t even know whether the reviews are trustworthy or the products worth their money.

Healthy backlink profile

I’ve compared the backlink profiles of both losers and the winner, and guess what I found right on top of my Open Site Explorer query? Both Ciao.co.uk and Idealo.co.uk, two sites out of those with the biggest losses during the quality update, had spammy links, guess where, on Google.com itself! They were placed on autogenerated Google Notebook pages (they have been removed now it seems). Apart from that they had barely any quality links. Ciao had several from Techcrunch because they have sued Google but that’s almost all. Pricerunner has the likes of Opera, DMOZ, Mashable and Search Engine Watch linking to it in highly relevant contexts.

Now just look at the main generic keywords Pricerunner is currently ranking for in the UK:

price – #2
price comparison – #1
compare prices – #1
shopping – #5

Whoever is responsible for Pricerunner’s content and SEO strategy deserves a raise of at least 50%. For all the others: copy this strategy now.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Why Not All Shopping Search Engines Have Lost in the UK Google Panda/Quality Update

Simple Goal & Conversion Tracking with Piwik: the Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

Tad Chef — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:22:06 +0000

It’s not only the black hat and the paranoid who are increasingly wary of Google’s privacy issues. Google Analytics has come under attack repeatedly in Europe. Recently, German government officials even threatened to declare Google Analytics illegal.

While I consider Google Analytics a minor threat to privacy compared to other Google products and services (like Doubleclick, Google toolbar or Google Chrome), I think there is still room for improvement.

These and other reasons made me revisit Piwik, the open source, self-hosted Google Analytics alternative.

It’s a German project on top of that, so the solution is already there. I was testing Piwik two years ago in an early beta stage. Now it’s available in version 1.1.1 and already it’s quite a powerful web analytics solution.

Before we go on: Piwik can’t yet replace Google Analytics for most websites, either for entry level or professional users. On the other hand, it is an excellent tool for intermediate users – bloggers, for instance.

Once it’s installed, one of the truly outstanding advantages becomes apparent: the goal tracking and management, or in other words the conversion tracking. It’s very easy to implement, easier than in Google Analytics or other web analytics tools if you ask me. Today I want show you how it works. Let’s use an average blog as an example.

You don’t have any goals to track on your blog? You have no conversions? You don’t sell anything on your blog?

Well, think again. I’m with Avinash Kaushik here: you have to track so called micro-conversions. These are small things that show engagement or have some positive impact on your business. Typically on a blog you could track:

Comments (comment submissions)
Facebook likes
Retweets
Delicious saves
StumbleUpon shares
RSS clicks (as in people trying manually to subscribe to your blog)
Ad clicks
Contact form submissions
“About Us” or “Services” section visits
Downloads

So you see there are plenty of ways in which you want to convert people even on a blog. Watching traffic trends is one thing, but tracking goals is a completely different way to find out what’s popular on your site.

I will show you three of them to start with: comments, Delicious saves and “About” views. I chose these three for two reasons: almost everybody has comments and an About Us page on their blog, and Delicious saves say quite a bit about your content. Furthermore, Piwik allows basically three ways of setting up goals. Each example shows one of them.

To add or edit goals in Piwik:

1. Click the “Goals” tab in the top menu.

Look for “Goals management” in the content part below.

2. Click “Create a new Goal” below.

A “Create a Goal” dialog like the one pictured below should appear:

Tracking “About”

Let’s start with “About” as in “About Us”. Why track “About”? Well, people clicking the About page express genuine interest in who you are and what you do. They are those visitors who might trust you in future based on the information you provide. That’s why tracking “About Us” visits makes sense as a micro-conversion.

3. Enter a “goal name”. I’d suggest “about view” as we track how often the About page has actually been viewed.

4. Check whether the radio button “Visit a given URL (page or group of pages)” is already selected, or select it.

5. Check whether “contains” is already selected in the drop down menu, or select it manually.

6. Add the file name of your About page in the input field right beside it. In case it’s something like example.com/about you can add “/about”. In case you have more than one page or post starting with “/about” you can add a more exact part of the URL.

7. Click the button “Add goal”.

Tracking “Delicious saves”

Facebook likes and Twitter (re)tweets are great, but Delicious bookmarks are still the granddaddy of all social media engagement ways. Users who save your post on Delicious do it for their own sake; they want to read it later, save the resource for future reference or use it in some other way for themselves (I do it for publishing). Also, only an elite few use Delicious these days. Last but not least, Facebook and Twitter sharing does not mean much. People who share do so because they want to show it to others, not because they want to use a post for themselves.

3. Enter a “goal name”. I’d suggest “delicious save”, as we will track how many people have saved your site from a Delicious link on your site. Of course, you need a Delicious save link on your blog first. Most social media plugins provide one. Delicious itself offers tools to integrate it as well.

4. Select the radio button “Click on a Link to an external website” (the third one in the row).

5. Check whether “contains” is already selected in the drop down menu or select it manually.

6. Add the URL “delicious.com/save?” in the input field beside it, or check the actual URL your social media plugin links to and adapt it accordingly.

7. Click the button “Add goal”.

Tracking Comments

Why should you track comments? You can see them in the WordPress back end anyway, can’t you? Well, tracking comments with Piwik allows you to see which users engage with your blog, and thus which traffic is your most valuable based on measuring interaction. Hint: it’s not the search or social media traffic.

Tracking comments is a bit more tricky than the other goals, but if you can customise WordPress themes you can do that as well.

3. Enter a “goal name”. I’d suggest “comment”, as we track comment submissions here.

4. Select “manually” in the “Goal is triggered” drop down menu.

5. Copy the “piwikTracker.trackGoal()” JavaScript call.

6. Click the button “Add goal”.

7. To find out the goal number of your “comment” goal, click the “Goal” tab again.

8. Scroll down and roll over the “Goal ‘comment’ ” link.

9. You see the following JS link “javascript:broadcast.propagateAjax(‘module=Goals&action=goalReport&idGoal=3′)” where the idGoal parameter is your goal number. Remember the number.

10. Add the number in your JS call in your WordPress theme comments.php.

It can be found in Appearance -> Editor -> Comments (comments.php).

Search for the “submit” button. My form submit button looks like this:

11. Add onclick="piwikTracker.trackGoal(3);" at the end of it so that it looks likes this:

Done.

Piwik not only allows you to set up goals easily, but also to get a quick and useful overview of which traffic converts best. Make sure you check out the “Conversions overview by segment” table view in the Goals tab. You have to scroll a bit to see it. It shows you which traffic sources, countries etc. perform best:

Piwik also has advanced privacy options: you can both opt out of Piwik tracking if you want to enable the feature, and anonymise the last digits of the user IP. Google allegedly does this as well, but the data is sent to the US where, due to the patriot act, all kinds of government agencies can access it for a plethora of reasons. That’s why it’s basically already illegal in Germany. You are not allowed to send user data to another country. Furthermore, you’ll never now where your data is . Google has data centers all over the world, and I’m not sure it’s vulnerable to US secret services only.

With Piwik, which is self-hosted, you can decide yourself where your data is stored. It just depends on the location of your hosting. This big advantage is also a drawback. You need to install Piwik on your server or webhosting package. The process is largely automated, but nevertheless even I experienced some issues while installing it: my FTP client had problems copying the ca. 5MB to my server and thus some files ended up being crippled. Instead of the installation page, I only saw garbled code on the page and rather unhelpful error messages.

Piwik is a software package for intermediate users. Ask yourself: can I install a WordPress blog? If so, then you can install Piwik. Don’t know what your PHP and MySQL version is? Maybe you should stick with GA.

While Piwik is not yet a fully fledged Google Analytics alternative, it can compete quite well with popular entry level freemium or paid tools like Clicky, Woopra or Reinvigorate.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Simple Goal & Conversion Tracking with Piwik: the Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

Keyword Temperature and Other Exotic Metrics

Tad Chef — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:45:58 +0000

Do you measure keyword temperature to improve your SEO? You don’t? Well what about keyword density? Also there are other exotic metrics to fool you into believing you do something for your site’s SEO. Sounds weird? Then read on. The story starts like this:

In recent days I’ve been haunted by the ghastly specters of the past.

In several cases I’ve had to do with metrics long gone or which weren’t ever meaningful in the first place. There seems to be a need for simplistic metrics that can make complex issues appear straightforward and clear.

Such metrics are

Keyword Density

In the nineties of the last century some first generation search engines were easily tricked by repeating keywords on a page. So the more you repeated a keyword the higher you ranked. It may have worked back then and in some cases even later but it was always a SEO trick never a best practice for a legit business. Still the term keyword density appeared. It signified the number of keyword mentions in a text. Your keyword mentioned 10 times in a text with 100 words equaled a keyword density of 10%.

Google hasn’t counted keywords on page, instead it relied on links to a site or page to determine its worth. Thus the first generation search engines disappeared. Keyword density stayed with us though. to this day some people offer keyword density tools and advice on the best keyword density. It’s all nonsense. You’re better off measuring keyword temperature, really, at least it won’t affect your SEO. A keyword density beyond the common sense median will hurt your site. You will be treated as a spammer.

Google (Toolbar) PageRank

Until 2007 it was still quite common to obsess about the Google (Toolbar) PageRank aka the little green bar in your Google Toolbar. It was never an accurate representation of your actual PageRank and only in the early days was there a real correlation between TPR and actual rankings in Google but it was a good thing to brag about. Also people used it to sell links, the higher the TBR the higher the price for a paid link.

Sometime in early 2008 Google ended this madness by manually adjusting the TPR of link vendors. From then on nobody serious about SEO really cared for the little green bar. Still just recently a client of mine called me out that a blog of mine was a failure beacuse (it has a ranking of 0). He meant PageRank of course and he didn’t even consider that it was on a new domain and thus couldn’t display toolbar PageRank yet. Toolbar PageRank is not a metric you use in SEO. It hasn’t been used for years. In case you don’t know that or accept that I can’t really help you. You can buy some high PageRank links from a text link broker or from a spammer and then you might get more TBR. Your site might get banned in the process as well. Again you are better off measuring something else, for instance page radiation.

Google Backlinks

It has been said and written countless of times: Google doesn’t show an accurate number of backlinks with its “link:” operator. To say it’s inaccurate is like saying that an elephant is not as tiny as an ant. There is a huge difference between the real number and the few links Google shows you.

Just compare it to the number of links Google Webmaster Tools shows instead. for the client who complained that has only 9 backlinks in Google the number in GWT was something like 270k (thousand) links. There is a small difference don’t you think? So measuring SEO success by the Google backlinks number is as accurate as counting Matt Cutt’s hair to determine it. Especially when he’s.

Number of Links

OK, the number of links as offered by Google Webmaster Tools must be it then! Isn’t it? Nope. The sheer number of links says as much about your SEO success as the number of sex partners about your love life. One link from an authority site might by worth as much as 100k from scraper and other low quality sites. You don’t measure SEO efforts be the number of links. Each link has, depending on its anchor text, topical relevance, position on the page and a plethora of other factors, a wort of it’s own.

You can’t compare a Rolls Royce with a Tata Nano. Even in case you count 100 of them with one RR. Ultimately links are just a means or a tool to accomplish a task or even a series of tasks like getting attention, traffic, conversions and/or sales. So you have to determine lots of factors having impact on link quality and report them, don’t you? In case you get paid by the link or have to measure your link building efforts you might try this approach. Still, showing of quality or authority links doesn’t prove that you have doe your SEO properly. You might as well measure link anxiety to find out how afraid you are of losing each one of them. Counting or measuring links for reporting purposes is the road to excess not success. Measuring the quality of your sex partners doesn’t mean a healthy relationship either.

Number of Keywords

The more keywords you optimize for the better! Don’t you think? Still many potential clients approach me with huge keywords lists, often directly from Adwords. Then after a few hours of market and keyword research I come up with just a few, sometimes as few as three they have to go after and focus on. They are often not the most prominent ones like cars, SEO or hotel but the rather keyword phrases, combinations like [used cars uk], [local SEO services] or [hotel munich]. In the past often disappointment would set in: “What? Just a bunch of keywords? Not even the big cool ones among them? You must be a very bad SEO if you target just a few low level keywords at once.” Market and keyword research is not the process of compiling huge lists of keywords though. It’s the process of finding out the keyphrases that you can reach within a reasonable time frame on a realistic budget. You want to find the few “money keywords” that will bring the revenue.

You’re after the few terms where you can compete within your industry or area. Also you can’t compete for everything at the same time. Your business has just one home page and one description. You can’t keyword stuff it unless you want to scare off your potential customers. A few years ago some SEOs would just automatically generate pages for each of your keywords and redirect searchers to the home page. Were these guys the good SEOs? No, they failed. I’ve seen client sites dropped from the index for such “SEO tricks”. So it’s not the number of keywords you optimize for, it’s the choice of keywords. Treat your keywords like friends, better a few good ones than hundreds of fake ones you don’t really care for or even know. Instead of measuring the number of keywords you could also count the number of times you have to pee as a SEO metric.

I hope by now you understand what I tried to express. There are no simple SEO metrics. Even the metrics we still use or use more and more these days are always a compound of several aspects of SEO, web design, usability, pricing, product and service quality etc.

bounce rates
conversions
ROI

depend on numerous factors:

The industry
the time of year
general market trends
the economy
the geographic location.

Don’t blame SEO for everything.

Also don’t forget that you can’t measure everything: You can’t measure your image, trust, or brand loyalty. You can try to. You can’t depend on these metrics though. You have to think for yourself and not let simplified numbers decide for you. Keyword temperature is a great metric don’t you think?

* Image by Daniel Novta.

40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & Analytics Resources

Tad Chef — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:03:34 +0000

Image by Westside Shooter.

Google Instant is the talk of the town not only in the SEO industry. While some people still hope SEO will go away most experts agree that SEO is either just changing a bit or now more important than ever due to the recent changes. So I won’t list most of the usual “SEO is not dead” posts here as I expect you to know that. I’ll focus on what the instant search results will mean for SEO, SEM and analytics in reality.

Check out the following 40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & analytics resources list. Btw. The last item is probably the best one.

What is Google Instant all about

IMHO Google Instant is just Google Suggest on Speed. The first four suggestions from Google Suggest get shown in Google Instant now. As of now only registered and logged in users see it so its impact may be not yet that huge. Google wants to roll it out to all others though in future. Click the links below for more exact definitions and broader explanations.

What are the motivations behind Google Instant?

Speed is the official motivation behind the new search interface but some pundits including Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise suspect monetization as the key idea behind Google Instant.

What are the issues with Google Instant?

Is Google Instant really better? Many people encountered problems like distraction, censorship, or downright irrelevant results. Find out more about them. The owners of Naked Pizza will have to rethink their branding strategy it seems because NSFW results don’t show up.

What are the ramifications of Google Instant for SEO, SEM, analytics etc.

Most people seem to agree that the long tail, that is often exotic search queries with 3 or more keywords will get used less by searchers. On the flip side people will probably at least in some cases follow the trail laid out by Google Instant and click search results from partial queries. Sadly Google Analytics won’t show partial queries you ranked for. Instead Google will always send the “predicted query” as part of the referrer.

Google Instant SEO Techniques

How do we adapt to the new search interface? How do we explain the changes to clients?
Do we have to optimize for partial queries now? Do you have to try to rank for flow when you sell flowers? Questions like these arise and get answered already by some SEO practicioners. Apparently others already practice black hat SEO for Google Instant, make sure to click the last item for these techniques.

What else? Last time Google has introduced a big change to its search result interface it hasn’t worked out due to unnecessary complexity. Do you remember the Google SearchWiki (NOT the SideWiki)? You could add, remove, move and comment on search results. I really liked it but most people got annoyed by the new options. This time I expect many people to get annoyed as well. Some of the articles linked above already mention that.

So Google Instant might disappear within a year like Google SearchWiki did. So don’t panic and change your SEO strategy altogether. Keep in mind that you should try to act independently and not follow every whim of Google. Keep calm and add more content, promote it and get links. You should be fine with that, mo matter the search interface.

50+ Advanced Web Analytics Tools for Business Use [2010 Edition]

Tad Chef — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:30:43 +0000

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

usability
conversions
branding

among others.

Additionally, with the huge influence of social media, it’s more important than ever to monitor social media buzz. While some people still assume that there are no social media measurement tools there are already dozens out there.

So check out these 50+ advanced web analytics tools for business use. It’s the updated 2010 edition. Of course I assume that you know by now the industry standard solution Google Analytics.

This list has been first compiled in February, 2009 so I decided to update and republish it 18 months later. I’ve removed, added and changed numerous links.

Make sure not to miss the Social Media analytics solutions at the bottom of the list.

Free and/or Affordable Analytics Solutions

Search Analytics

Heat Maps and Usability Tracking

Enterprise Analytics

Hosted/Server Side Solutions

Twitter & Facebook Analytics

Social Media Analytics

Enterprise Social Media Monitoring Tools

Thanks to the colleagues of @GuavaUK for suggesting CoreMetrics and Unica on Twitter. Also thanks to SEMPlanning.com for providing a huge list of social media buzz tracking tools I used while researching.

This post was first published on February 26th, 2009. It was last updated on August 20th, 2010.

30 Multivariate & A/B Split Testing Tools, Tutorials & Resources

Tad Chef — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:10:29 +0000

Crossroads by Captain DJ.

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.

You will have more than two versions in many cases and you won’t split 50/50 but will choose a smaller portion of your overall traffic to test. Also you will probably only subject new visitors to your tests in some cases in order not to scare away your repeat visitors by frequent changes.

When you prepare more than two versions of your content (as in A, B, C etc.) it’s not necessarily called multivariate testing then. Multivariate testing rather refers to tests with multiple variables you check.

The most known tool for A/B split testing is Google Website Optimizer. Like with many free tools and similarly to Google Analytics it’s not the easiest to use tool though.

There are more user friendly tools out there by now. Over the course of the last year A/B split & multivariate testing has been booming. I discover new tools, tutorials and other resources every other day. Nonetheless it’s by now a best practice that has been around for years. So this is not about early adopting a methodology. AB testing is common sense by now on the Web.

Introductions to A/B Split Testing

Examples and Case Studies

A/B Testing for the Mathematically Disinclined
A simple multivariate testing strategy that produced a 367% increase in downloads
A/B test case study: how two magical words increased conversion rate by 28%
Twitter A/B testing sign-up button (at least 5 versions)
ABtests.com – Share A/B Testing Results.

Resources

Gathering Variables for A/B Split Testing
How to get proven ideas for your next A/B split test?
Significance of Statistically Significant Results in A/B Testing

Tools

Guides & Tutorials

The biggest problem with A/B and multivariate testing is the time and resources needed. Even a simple test for small website entails three different departments be it, SEO, analytics, web design.

How do you perform your A/B tests? I am still undecided which tools best suit my requirements.

Use Google Analytics custom segments to audit and improve search marketing

Dave Chaffey — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:20:06 +0000

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.

For the search agency, well maybe they’re being less than transparent with their clients since it’s even easy for the incompetent to attract branded site visitors to a site. Of course this won’t apply to most readers of this esteemed blog!

This short tutorial will show you how to use Google Analytics to quickly set up Advanced Segments to help you review your search performance.
Setting up custom segments for search keywords in Google Analytics
Custom Advanced Segments are what you need to set these up. If you haven’t come across these because they’re hidden in Google Analytics, then you’re missing out – see my Smart Insights post on “10 different types of advanced segments”: http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/web-analytics/google-analytics-web-analytics/segmenting-google-analytics/.

For search marketers, there are standard segments for paid and natural segments which I’m sure you’re all using already – if not that post gives and example.

To understand the interaction of paid and natural brand phrases, I recommend setting up 4 advanced segments. I advise setting them up and labelling them as follows:

1. Natural search visits including brand.

2. Natural search visits NOT including brand.

3. Paid search visits including brand name(s).

4. Paid search visits NOT including brand name(s).

It just takes a few seconds to set each one up. I’ll show you how for an advanced segment for natural search visits containing the brand name. I’ll use my “brand name” from my site since I can’t use client data to illustrate this…

Step 1. Select “Create a new advanced segment” from the Advanced segments box top right or click on the Advanced Segment menu option in the left sidebar and chose “Create a new custom segment”

Step 2. First, select Keyword as the dimension to segment on from the “Traffic sources” dimension group on the left of the screen. Drag across. Easy.

Next filter by entering the brand name by choosing “contains” . Also, easy.

Tip: In many cases, you will want to include some variants of the brand. You do this using the pipe symbol and selecting “regular expression” rather than “contains”. For example, Starbucks|Star Bucks, although contains “bucks” would be easier…

Step 3 Next segment by natural search choosing a segment dimension as “and” as shown in the screengrab above. This will match “organic”. Paid is “cpc”

Step 4 Choose a name for your segment and press the “test” option to make sure you have it right.

Step 5 Finally you can apply your advanced segments to the report by selecting the segments you want from the Advanced Segments box on the top right as shown in the first screengrab.

This example shows a high level view of the breakdown of search traffic.

You can also use these segments within keyword reports to easily separate out brand and non brand keywords. For high volume phrases it can be worth setting up a contains “high volume keyword” so that you can analyse that in depth.

I hope that works for you. How do you use advanced segments for search analysis – I’d be interested to hear about the segments you use.

In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear how you use segments in Google Analytics.

How to Use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO Inspiration

Tad Chef — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:55:28 +0000

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

Keyword Research
Link Building
CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization

In case you haven’t used Google Webmaster Tools yet at all I strongly advise you to read this excellent intdroductory series by Search Engine Guide.

Keyword Research
While Google offer several outstanding keyword research tools, Google Webmaster Tools enable you to find out keywords that really matter for your actual site. Hugo Guzman has written a good post on how to find your most valuable keywords using it.

The idea is to seek out the low hanging fruit of keywords already ranking on the verge of top 5 and to push them higher via low level SEO to get a high ROI. This is a really neat concept. Usually I’d focus on the big earners, high traffic keywords and important queries. Probably everybody else does as well so by focusing on these “almost there” terms you save time an money not fighting that many competing websites.

Link Building
I’m often surprised at which of my pages get the links and where from when checking “Links to your site”. Even orphaned pages (that have no connection to my main website) get inbound links. Also it’s amazing to find out that sites you have never got any significant traffic from link to you. These are often crappy scraper sites and other automated set ups but sometimes you’ll find a gem.
Then you can target these sites to get even more links. For example you can discover who links to you on Tumblr and then follow these users. While repeat links from the same do not count as much as from new ones there is only a finite number of places in a given industry so there is no problem with getting links from the site again and again. Especially authority sites that link more that once to you are a great asset.
You’ll discover these links by using other link tools be it paid ones or Yahoo Site Explorer but often you get too many links, mostly nofollowed ones via these tools to find the good or great ones.

CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization
You can find out your best and worst converting keywords. The first step of a conversion is converting a searcher to a visitor. You fail already here in most cases and it’s quite surprising which keywords and phrases get the highest CTR (click through rates). For instance we have a 100% CTR on the query [rss meta]. The searchers end up on a tiny post from 2006.
In contrast our huge resources lists often get quite low CTR. Does it mean that we should write dozens of microblogging like posts instead of one gigantic list? The 100% CTR is no anomaly, it’s just the most striking example.

Also we rank high for [seo services uk] and similar queries but the CTR is disappointing. It seems that we need landing page optimization as our competitors target the query directly in their titles and have extra pages for it. At SEOptimise users land on the homepage and don’t find the term “SEO services” immediately.

How do you use Google Webmaster Tools? Does it inspire you to take concrete steps? Do you optimize your websites based on GWT data? I often check Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for SEO inspiration. Whenever I need some input on what to write about I check what’s popular already and don’t rely solely on my imagination. I can check popular items on Topsy, Delicious or elsewhere but Google offers me much more accurate data for my niche and particular site.

46 CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization Resources for Web Design, SEO & Social Media Experts

Tad Chef — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:58:14 +0000

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?

In case your web designer thinks web design is about fancy graphics, flashy animations and cool homepages s/he isn’t an expert.
In case your SEO consultant speaks about meta tags, PageRank and keyword density all the time s/he isn’t an expert.
In case your social media expert advises you to gain more Twitter followers using an autopilot tool, to submit your site to hundreds of social media sites or has no flagship blog s/he isn’t an expert either.

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.

Some talk too much, like I tend to sometimes and don’t practice what they preach but this time the list is directly related to my quest for improving conversions of this blog here.

So let me share what I have found out in the recent 10 months.

For starters: Read our two CRO resources we provided earlier:
12 Indispensable Readability Measures to Increase Conversions
30 Simple Ways of Improving Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate

I sorted the resources according to their main focus:

CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization

7 Steps to Improving Conversion Rates
How To Create High-Converting Landing Pages
Increasing Website Conversions: How Categorization, Personalization, and Choice Limitation Can Increase Sales
How to Increase Conversions on any Website in 45 Minutes
11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action
BruceClay – 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites
A simple multivariate testing strategy that produced a 367% increase in number of free software downloads
Landing Page Types
10 must-read scientific research papers on conversion rate optimization

SEO

Social Media

Web Design

Ecommerce

Average Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Stopping Shopping Cart Abandonment
10 Steps To A More Usable Ecommerce Website

Tools

Analytics

Of course several of these conversion optimization resources fit in more than one category. Also take note that the term CRO is still quite new and some people drop the “rate” and say conversion [rate] optimization instead. They refer to the same discipline though.

Do you know other CRO resources you can’t find on this list? Add them in the comment section. They can be your won as well. As always the best ones may end up in the post or in my next post. A5XD3SV6KA6X

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 46 CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization Resources for Web Design, SEO & Social Media Experts

Twitter Friday: Do We Really Need Racial Profiling?

Tad Chef — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:35:12 +0000

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:

Help!!! Twitter is full of black people!

Why the heck do you need racial profiling when it comes to Twitter? Is this Arizona or what? Is this useful is some way? Do I need such a statistic as a business person? To sell them different products? Do black people buy different products and services? Maybe they do. I guess the difference is bigger though when you compare the middle class to low income families. You could also compare rural and urban areas. You could even compare the south with the north. Or the West Coast with the East Coast.

In contrast racial profiling does not make sense. Even if African Americans are more often blue collar workers or live in the inner cities than the suburbs. You don’t need to profile them based on race. You can profile them based on income, household size or where they live.

The Business Insider even asks “Why Is Twitter More Popular With Black People Than White People?” As if something was wrong with it. On the Web there is no color. Heck, “on the Internet nobody knows that you’re a dog“! Does this statistic suggest that there is some kind of American type “white flight” from Twitter? Not yet. Racial profiling can lead to such a phenomenon.

Btw. Mr. Nick Saint, did you know? 100% of current US presidents are black while of 12% of Americans are. Also this black president has used Twitter in an inspiring way to connect with voters and fellow Americans. So he showed that Twitter may be empowering even for minorities.

What comes next? A statistic about how many Muslims or gay people use Twitter?

Racial profiling has nothing to do with business. Also the statistic you cite wasn’t mainly about race. It offers much more interesting insights. Such as:

“Marketing and Business use cases for Twitter far exceed similar usage for social networking Web sites in general.”
“Twitter Users are Well-Educated”
“Twitter Users Are More Likely to Live in Higher Income Households”

So why focus on race? You tell me Mr. Nick Saint. In case you don’t I tell you: It’s none of your ****** business. The only color that matters on the US market is green as in greenback.

30+ More Google Analytics Tools, Apps, Hacks, Tweaks and Other Resources

Tad Chef — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:54:30 +0000

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.

Google Analytics is still one of the most popular tools for SEO practicioners and webmasters alike.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in you either already use Google Analytics or you should in future.

There are many alternative web analytics providers for those who prefer non-Google products for privacy reasons but to be honest: I’d rather give up on Google search for privacy reasons than Google Analytics.

The links in this post are either new (published after the last years post went live) or they weren’t on the other list. Some of the links might have been indirectly included as it was also a meta-list with several resources’ lists. Also this time I’ve included apps for mobile phones and some paid software.

Google Analytics tools and software

Google Analytics how to articles, hacks and tweaks

Google Analytics apps for mobilephones

Firefox add ons and WordPress plugins

Google Analytics resources’ lists

Do you know any other Google Analytics resources worth to be added here? In case they are neither listed here nor on the old list make sure to add them in the comments.

Sadly I haven’t the time to test all of these tools and tweaks. So first hand accounts are appreciated as well.

Goal Involvement Analogy: “Conversion Attribution is Like Selling Xabi Alonso & Hoping for the Same Result”

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:17:29 +0000

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.

Take Alonso out of the equation and 12-months after Liverpool were comfortably beating the likes of Real Madrid and Man United, they’re now losing to Wigan and Lille. Clearly this doesn’t mean it’s all down to Alonso leaving (he didn’t even play in the Man United win), but if you look a bit deeper into his performances last season it becomes easier to see the contribution he had and how his departure contributed towards the teams winning momentum quickly turning into a miserable run in form.

So lets have a look at how this relates to search and online marketing…

Website Lead/Sale = Goal

You’ve done the hard work, you’ve found a potential customer who is interested enough in your site that they return via a branded keyword (or direct visit) and complete a sale. It’s the same as giving Fernando Torres a free shot with just the keeper to beat. You won’t always get a 100% conversion rate – but in both cases there’s a very good chance it will end up with a goal.

Penultimate Visit = Direct Assist

Some players don’t always score enough goals, David Beckham for example, but if you take him away from taking freekicks, corners and crossing the ball into the box then you’re likely to see a noticeable drop in chances created and goals scored. This could be exactly the same with your online strategy, which is why it’s so important to find those advertising channels and keywords which are contributing to the end goal.

Mid-Level Visit = Midfield Pass

If Liverpool scored a goal last season, there’s a good chance Xabi Alonso was involved at some point during that move. This may not have a huge importance to the overall outcome, but if involved more often than not, then he’s clearly having a positive impact to the team. This could relate to an email marketing campaign or a keyword which may rarely convert, but is often involved in an assist. Take it away and those conversion chances may start to dry up.

Initial Visit = Defensive Build Up

What got the ball rolling in the first place? In the case of a football game, it may start with a move from the back by a goalkeeper or defender. When online, perhaps it was a search at the early stage of the buying cycle, something like “where to go on holiday”. You’ve still got a huge amount of work to do in order to grab that conversion, but you need to start somewhere – and unless Howard Webb is the ref, you don’t get free goals given to you on a plate!

Goal involvement – which is most important stage?

For football, in theory it’s easy – you need to put the ball in the back of the net so the scorer gets the most credit. But in actual-fact there’s far more to it. Paul Tomkins has devised an excellent system to track the goal involvement of each player, valuing how they contribute to the team over a number of games. Even if you have no interest in football this is worth a read to get your head around the conversion attribution problem we face online.

“When turning football into numbers, there will always be problems. And when it comes to ‘assists’, this is especially true. How can you reward someone who rolls the ball eight inches from an indirect free-kick as highly as someone who beats seven men and puts the ball in the striker’s path in the six-yard box?”

The same could be said for website conversions. For a branded search term or direct visit – which clinches a sale – you can almost certainly say they’ve either heard of the brand or have visited the site before. This keyword can’t possibly be as valuable in terms of attracting new business as a non-branded, competitive term.

You could take this analogy even further, what happens if performance drops?

Is the manager to blame? Perhaps there are other circumstances which affect the way a job is being done, for example client/management demands, bad luck, a steep learning curve or budget restrictions.
Is expectation unrealistic? Liverpool’s squad value is far less than Man City and Tottenham, yet if they finish below them in the league it would be a disaster to many people. Perhaps your client is the same, thinking they have the right to be number one for every relevant term in Google – maybe that’s based on a successul past which is largely the case for Liverpool.
Is it a level-playing field? Are you competing on a lower budget? For the last three transfer windows Liverpool have had to break even, often being outbid for targeted new players. This may be the same with your online campaigns, perhaps your competitors can afford to make a loss in some areas while you left to focus on cheaper alternatives.
Is the whole greater than the sum of all parts? For every expensive big name signing, most teams need a Darren Flecther, Lucas or Obi Mikel. These players often aren’t the fans favourites, but it helps make the team more balanced and effective. How does your online marketing strategy work together? Do you have an integrated campaign for SEO, PPC, analytics, web design, affiliate, conversion optimisation, email marketing, social media etc?
What’s your plan B? If your main striker gets injured, how do you replace them without seeing a major drop in form? What if your keywords are seasonal? Is there anything else you could be doing to try and maintain performance levels?
Are you continually improving? It can be easy to stick with what works and be short-sighted, while competitors may be innovating towards using new tactics which may get them to the top. Just look at how Arsene Wenger’s continental approach to football paid off when he was the first to introduce this to the Premiership.
Do you convert your chances? Is your website as appealing, or your brand as well respected as your competitors? Does your sales team clinch the sale once the lead is provided? Do your competitors have greater conversion rates? Does your striker need 8 or 9 good chances to score a goal, or is he a clinical finisher who can win you a game in an instant?

Ok, that’s probably enough football analogies for now, but by tracking the performance at all stages you can really get a strong idea about how every aspect of an online marketing campaign (or football team) is working. Then you can make a sensible decision based on the actual facts and figures, instead of gut feelings and opinions – which has to be a far more successful and long-term approach.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Goal Involvement Analogy: “Conversion Attribution is Like Selling Xabi Alonso & Hoping for the Same Result”

Avinash Kaushik shows HMV & M&S how “They Came, They Puked, They Left!”

Kevin Gibbons — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:41:45 +0000

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.

HMV
Avinash’s first example showed how despite having a very well-known and established brand, HMV appeared to be relying on this too heavily in the organic search listings. Obviously brand visibility is very important in the search engines, especially when your brand is as strong as HMV, but long-tail is where the real value of traffic comes from. Rather than attracting traffic at the head of the tail, it’s generally the longer-tail and specific queries which generate the bulk of a site’s traffic. Avinash calls these visitors “impression virgins”, these are users who are unlikely to have visited the site before and are attracted by a specific or unique keyword query.

The examples given were queries for branded terms, where HMV were almost always listed as both organic and paid search results. And when performing a product query with the brand name added to this, HMV still dominated these listings – see the example below for “Up DVD HMV“:

Yet when searching for more competitive queries, where the user still has the intent to buy – but they don’t have a preference of where from – HMV aren’t doing enough to attract these first time visitors/buyers into the site. Queries for a range of competitive product queries all failed to display HMV within Google’s top 10 organic listings – here’s an example of a query for the very popular query “Up DVD“:

You may notice that a paid search ad is appearing on the right-hand-side, but in the same way as M&S, this points users straight towards the homepage instead of taking them to the actual product. This has possibly been triggered from a “DVD” phrase matched AdWords keyword, as opposed to the individual product term producing the ad, explaining why a general ad description and landing page has been displayed. Same for the M&S ad being triggered from a “Marks and Spencer” phrase, instead of an underwear term.

Wireless Printers
Another example, although this time for a US site, was a query for “wireless printer” which produced PPC ads for general printers. The ones who actually did sell wireless printers only went as far as sending users to a general printer category page – instead of directing them towards the actual product they searched for. Avinash highlighted that this was a $500+ product – so they really need to be doing everything they can to clinch a sale, rather than hoping they find what they want by navigating and then complete a purchase.

So this goes to prove how important it is to maximise the value from the traffic you are currently generating. An increase in traffic isn’t always the answer, a few small changes in all of these cases is likely to see a big improvement in conversion rates and overall sales figures.

6 Personas that Google Analytics can’t Track

Richard Fergie — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:21:00 +0000

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

This intrepid traveller ranges far and wide across the internet but has so far resisted the siren call of your site. People like this are very interesting for online marketers especially if they represent your target demographic but you will not find out anything about them from your onsite analytics. Service like Hitwise or Google Ad Planner can give you information about where on the internet Odysseus is hanging out.
2. Henry In-a-Hurry

Image from boeke on Flickr

Henry decides very quickly if he wants to continue looking at a web page. If your analytics code hasn’t loaded by the time he clicks a link or presses the back button then his pageview will not be recorded. The new Google Analytics Asynchronous code will improve tracking of Henry In-a-Hurry.
3. Nadia No-Script

From notionscapital on Flickr. Also WTF?

For whatever reason Nadia browses the web without javascript. This could be for many reasons; paranoia, browser security settings, browser default settings or browser age. Nadia may be a competing SEO trying to view the web as Googlebot sees it or a geek browsing using only the command line.
4. Christopher Cookie-Eater

Image from zoetnet on flickr

Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Christopher just can’t bear to leave all those cookies just sitting on his hard drive so he eats/deletes them at the end of every browsing session. Chris will be tracked but he will seen as a new visitor even if he visits your site everyday.

5. Deborah Disabled-Cookies

Image from cmaccubbin on flickr

Unlike Christopher, Deborah doesn’t eat cookies at all. In fact, she won’t allow them anywhere near her browser. Some javascript based analytics systems will track Deb’s pageviews but there will be no persistance so every pageview will be seen as the start of a new visit. Google Analytics will not track Deborah at all (probably to prevent your own site appearing in your referrer stats).
6. Thomas Tin-Foil-Hat

Image by jeffhall2069 on flickr

Tom does not like the idea of you having any information about what he does online. He probably has javascripts and cookies disabled but what distinguishes him from Nadia and Deborah is that he has explicitally told his computer to never communicate with Google Analytics. This can be done by editing the hosts file. Thomas may also use a variety of (secure) proxies or Tor so his visits can not even be tracked in your server logs.