All posts in website analytics

One of the most interesting topics talked about at SES London was the problem of conversion attribution. The easiest way to describe it is with an example. Suppose you sell widgets over the internet and that you use AdWords rank well for some organic terms and are also running a radio advert. A customer’s path to conversion might look something like this:

  1. They hear your radio advert
  2. They search on Google and click your PPC advert
  3. At a later date they arrive at your site organically
  4. They buy something from you
From Tobo on Flickr

From Tobo on Flickr

77 SES London Takeaway Tips & Tricks
Image Credit: Search Cowboys

Last week, as you probably know, was the Search Engine Strategies conference in London. Personally I found the event very useful and because of the wide-range of topics covered during the 3-days I’ve decided to list some of the nuggets of information I took away, rather than look into this in more detail which is already available from much quicker bloggers than myself anyway!

Recently Google have added an option in the campaign settings menu which allows you to choose not to show your ads on mobile phones running standard browsers. This is different to the mobile format ads; it is to do with modern phones (like the iPhone) that can view web pages with a normal internet browser.

On Monday, like most of the rest of the search world, I was reading the seomoz blog and marvelling at their amazing accomplishment. For those of you who don’t keep up with what’s going on, Rand and the seomoz team have built an database of 30 billion web pages including a link map with information about which links are nofollowed and the anchor text used. All this is available for only $79/month.

An Index for Everyone
On Sphinn MarkeD commented “I can see this being the next trend, private indexes for each SEO agency.” Which got me thinking about the best way to go about collecting a similar sort of data to the seomoz index whilst minimising costs. Crawling the whole web is never going to be cheap; bandwidth and storage requirements are too big, but I think that for most applications a crawl of the whole web is not necessary. Ask uses a “hubs and authorities” model of the web and Google is believed to use something similar to calculate rankings called hilltop so I believe a crawl around the main players in a site’s vertical will give most of the relevant data.

Anyone can Crawl
So how would I accomplish this? The open source search engine Nutch (used by wikipedia) has a web crawler that can gather all the data used by the linkscape tool. Nutch uses the Apache License so, if you know java you can modify the whole thing to suit your needs. Most of the Nutch documentation goes straight over my head, but there is an easier to understand review of the crawler on java.net.

The official Nutch site has a simple tutorial on how to set up a whole web crawl. By using a list of seeds that are appropriate to your vertical and a smaller crawl depth a smaller link map can be made that only considers sites in your target community. You can then apply your own metrics to this data and decide on your strategy.

Sharing the Load
But what if you don’t agree with the hubs and authorities model, or what if you think that hilltop doesn’t have much influence on most rankings? These opinions are justified; pre-hilltop Google massively outperformed Ask so the value of a search model based on web communities is debatable. What is a small SEO company to do? A single small company can’t really do very much, but many small companies can utilise the java distributed computing service hadoop (inspired by Google’s MapReduce and File System) which is well supported by Nutch. This means that as a community, SEO companies could have a comprehensive index of the web, including pretty much any information we’d like with a cost dependent on the number of participants.

$79/month? This could work out cheaper but the initial investment of time would be large; it took seomoz 12 months to set up their database and they were all working for the same company with a clearly defined goal. I don’t think my idea will survive in the wild; Rand, your investment is safe.

How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.

  • Why measure rankings when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?
  • Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?
  • Why brag about traffic when you can get hundreds of thousands of people visit you via Digg and the likes just to make’em run away in an instant?

The good old days of primitive measurement of website success are finally over. Business people demand more than just traffic and rankings, marketing professionals get more web-savvy than 12 year old kids who almost were born on the Web and new web analytics tools finally make it possible to consider far more and specific metrics than ever before. So check out these 33 website success metrics instead of rankings, Google PageRank and traffic:

Business Metrics

People doing business online, be it with eCommerce sites like Shops, publishing companies, consulting firms etc. do want to see results in Dollars, which in most cases makes sense although blogs for instance do offer ROI which is not easily measurable though. Often it’s more brand recognition, reputation building etc. For most commercial websites measuring revenue is the best possible was of determining success.

ROI
ROI means Return on Investment. If you spend 1000$ on your website and earn 2000$ your ROI is 200%. So calculate the cost and the financial benefits and compare both. There are whole books about that.

sales
ROI sometimes gets difficult to define. What is the investment exactly, is the time spent on social media e.g. an investment or only the work on the site? Thus measuring sales, especially for shops, is much easier. Higher sales = good website optimization of course.

leads
You do not sell directly on your website? You do want users to contact you via your site insetad? Measure leads. A SEO campaign that brought 100 leads is better than one which brought a million page views but no new potential clients.

conversions
OK, you do not sell anything directly and you do not sell services either, but you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter? Measure conversions. You should do it for sales and leads too but even without these conversions make a very reliable website or marketing campaign success metric.

subscribers
While subscribers can be referred to as conversions you can count the sheer number every site should by now offer RSS and track RSS as well as email subscriptions like blogs do. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they do not buy anything. So if you don’t have an RSS/Atom or whatever kind of feed get one now.

Usability metrics

While not every site’s success can be measured in revenue, sales or leads you always can and should measure the sheer usability of your site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty, “having a bigger logo” and some special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While this might look good in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.

returning visitors
This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors (often the same people) are.

pageviews per visit
While measuring pageviews is sometimes futile as bad websites where you have to click more can have higher numbers of pageviews the number of pageviews per visit often will tell you a whole lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless they all click the buy button instantly.

time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in manifold ways but you can deduct from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.

time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or simply a blog.

bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics or Woopra easy to follow nowadays. 100k visitors with a bounce rate of 95% means that in the worst case only 5.000 actually visited your site while the others just fled. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is key for a successful site.

form/shopping cart abandonment rate
Forms are the most important parts of most websites in business terms, be it the contact form, or the shopping cart which technically in most cases is a form. Now imagine a super market where half or more of the customers abandon their cart in the middle of the checkout process or while perusing the market. Count these people and try to make them stay. The simplest way of checking the shopping cart abandonment rate is by sending a message to customer support each time a cart or other form gets abandoned. Sometimes you might be able to get back to the potential client with the incomplete data he entered.

next pages
To make people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow. Checking the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or wanted to see more of it. When on your home page the next page is in most cases the search or the sitemap page you’ve got a problem.

links clicked (heat maps)
Modern “Web 2.0″ web analytics solutions sometimes offer heat maps views or at least a site overlay way of checking clicks. This way you can determine where your visitors click or try to click (to no avail sometimes in cases of not linked logos or underlines words which are not links). Do people click where you want them to click or not?

eyetracking
Even better than heat maps of click behavior are heat maps of actual eye movements. You need more than a web analytics package to check that you need real people to take part in a study but if you are large company depending on your website you should check this for sure. Do people look at your main message at all? Do they actually see the “buy now” button?

internal searches
Are most of your visitors clueless or targeted? You’ll find out via the analyzing the internal searches. There is even a widget to do just that. Google Analytics also allows that.

SEO metrics

SEO experts love to measure. They loved measuring PageRank, rankings and traffic and they still need something to follow this urge. Well, there still is a lot to measure beyond strict business or usability metrics. Old school SEO still makes sense in lots of cases, especially with backlinks which still determine above all your success in Google search. I’d concentrate here on Google, but on the US market it still also make sense to check these with Yahoo and others. Also, checking backlinks with Google is not fun (only a fraction of data is released by Google unless you check your own site in Google Webmaster Tools) so you’re advised to measure them with Yahoo tools are tools that measure it using Yahoo data.

number of backlinks
You still need to know how many people or rather pages link to you. especially if this week more or less do it. The sheer number may be meaningless if you have 10.000 links from one site though. So focus also on domain popularity (links from one domain counted as one).

quality of backlinks
Getting a ton of links may mean nothing in comparison to one link from the NYT. So determine the quality of links: Has the linking page many other outgoing links? Has it PageRank? It it an old authority domain etc.?

Google cache date
Many SEO specialists resort to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality and success of a website in Google. If the cache date is older than one month the site is either dead (no fresh content) or has a very low authority with Google. Of course you always should check whether a site has a cache at all. Not cached sites probably get de-indexed (penalized) by Google.

Google bot visit frequency
Your cache might be one week old, but if Google bot visits daily it’s OK in most cases. You can check with most server side web analytics solutions, those relying on server logs or PHP.

Last time Google bot visited
This is almost the same as above but only almost. If you have a new content page and the bot visited yesterday and you’re still not in the Google index something might be wrong (like duplicate content problems)

Pages indexed
It’s seldom as simple as “the more pages indexed the better” but for small sites it often is. If you have 50 pages online but only 20 indexed your site is not successfully spidered by Google. A “site:yoursite.com” search in Google is enough to find out.

PageRank “pass rate”
While I argue that looking at the actual toolbar PageRank does not make much sense nowadays anymore you certainly want to take a look at the pass rate of PageRank. Google PageRank is passed via the links on your site. A home page with PR 5 should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise you have too many links or your internal link structure is broken.

Alexa Rank
While Alexa is not really reliable or never was many advertisers use it to check your traffic numbers. Also the Alexa traffic estimates can be compared to other sites, other time periods (more or less trafic this year than last?) and to other traffic estimation tools.

Compete Rank
While Compete is said to be more reliable than Alexa it only is for US traffic. This is both good and bad news but at the same time allows, e.g. compared with Alexa, to see where you’re heading. If you server the US market, take a close look at Compete.

Social Media metrics

In the age of social media, user generated content you can’t rely solely on bots and other automatically gathered numbers to collect data on your website success. You have to find out what your users like and what they actually say about you, or at least how often. There ale plenty of ways to find out, these are the most obvious:

bookmarks on delicious
A site or page with a few hundred or thousand of bookmarks on Delicious can’t be that bad, can it? On the other hand a site that has none can’t be that successful can it?

bookmarks elsewhere
While it is not that hard to pay some services to submit you to Delicious etc. It’s still far more likely that a site is a good one if it’s only popular on Delicious but also has bookmarks elsewhere. I’m sometimes surprised how many people bookmark my articles on sites I do not even think of.

social media shares
Do really think getting tens of thousands people visit your site is the ultimate proof of being popular? In contrast the number of submissions and shares tends to allow a better assessment unless of course the “SEO India” service is at work. When not, you can see that popular pages get shared all over the place. Every SEO knows that. The number of shares/votes by real people on Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr counts though.

tweets (Twitter mentions)
Being mentioned or recommended on Twitter is truly a success because here people communicate with their peers and fans and only links pages their truly recommend. Being linked more then 2 or 3 times means you are huge. It means 2 or 3 people telling 200 or maybe 200 other people that you rock. TweetBeep will send you email each time.

niche social sites’ votes
Being successful on niche social news site means recognition by several experts and traffic from a few hundred highly targeted visitors. Each niche has by now it’s own niche social news site, be it YCombinator for startups and tech, Design Float and Design Bump for, you guessed it design or DZone for web development and programming. Here you get visitors and readers who really care and their opinion really counts.

number of “thumbs up” on StumbleUpon
Other than the almost US only elitist crowds on Reddit social discovery site StumbleUpon is populated by the general public from all over the world. People voting for you on StumbleUpon “like you” if you can offer something for the John Does out there. Other than that you only get a limited number of votes. Whether you have “mass appeal” in the positive sense of it you will find out here. My own SEO blog has been very popular on StumbleUpon for years and still gets stumbled. Likewise does SEOptimise.

StumbleUpon reviews feedback
People who review you StumbleUpon really care for you, the StumbleUpon community or the subject. So listen closely. getting 10 or more “awesome” reviews on StumbleUpon means a lot if you want to determine the overall popularity of your website or particular page.

Technorati Blog mentions
A page often mentioned on Technorati is truly popular in the blogosphere. You are part of the conversation if you get linked often by other blogs. The Technorati authority is not reliable though as a metric. It’s based largely on Technorati bookmarks which bloggers can game easily.

Google BlogSearch Links
While the main Google search doe not show you many links the Google blog search is good at it. It’ll show you the legit links by other blogs, not the scraper blogs. Watch out for these, the simplest way to monitor them is by using Postrank.

Some of you might assume now that all this is far too complex for them but it isn’t. Freely available tools like Google Analytics allow every webmaster to find out much more about a website than just a few years ago where we were the obvious numbers of PageRank, rankings and traffic had to suffice. The real web metrics experts will laugh this list off probably as advanced SEO and web analytics starts in most cases beyond the ways mentioned here.

You are certainly much better off checking these 33 web metrics instead of Google rankings, PageRank and sheer website traffic.

 

Last updated: March 14th, 2011 – Fixed several links, changed the text in some cases.

New web tools appear daily. Often I don’t even manage to bookmark them all, let alone try them. Nonetheless I try as many Internet tools as I can, I’m just a serial early adopter. I can’t stop it. These are mostly 30+ free tools which are either web tools or tools for the web I discovered and bookmarked as useful.

I tested most of these tools and I use some of them regularly as a web professional. Most of these social media, web design & development, search, SEO and analytics, e-commerce, blogging and Internet tools are not yet widely known main stream tools. The average webmaster will hopefully find them useful. I selected the 30 most useful tools from the hundreds available out there.

Social Media

  • Topsy is a search-like interface showing the most popular links on Twitter
  • Trunk.ly collects all your links from Facebook, Twitter, Delicious etc. and also show those shared/saved by your friends
  • Browzmi is a real time social browsing and chatting tool, it’s like a more advanced StumbleUpon
  • Hellotxt lets you collect and organize social media activity or crosspost to several sites/networks

Web Design & Development

  • Cushy CMS makes any static site a CMS site, it’s so easy I’ll recommend it to my mother who already uses Jimdo
  • Pokform is a Jimdo-like Flash online CMS that allows you to create smooth websites with ease, currently it’s a nono for SEO though so you should only use it for an artists or photographers page
  • Pingdom allows you to test whether your site is up and how fast it is
  • Splashup is the real web based Photoshop, the Adobe online app can’t match
  • BricaBox allows you to create your own social site, be it a map mashup site, a wiki, or a voting site. They compare it to WordPress and Ning to underline the ease of use of creation of a site but it appears to be even easier than WordPress

Search

  • Blekko is a highly customizable search engine for power users (English only)
  • Grooveshark Lite is a music search engine that lets you listen to what you find
  • Tineye lets you search for images or rather their sources and appearances based on the image itself
  • Google GEO Search Tool allows you to see Google results from other locations as Google localizes your results based on your IP usually

SEO and Analytics

  • Piwik is the best open source Google Analytics alternative. Some aspects of it are already better than GA.
  • Rank Checker by SEOBook, been around for several months now but after more traditional ranking checker software has been crippled recently by Google a very good alternative
  • Raven SEO Tools, this a a whole web based suite of internet marketing tools which will also track your rankings over time among others
  • Woopra is an advanced web analytics suite which can compete with Google Analytics and in some cases offers better and more timely data
  • Google Insights for Search is a keyword research tool similar to Google Trends but much more exact

E-Commerce

  • Shopify is a very simple online shop application virtually anybody can set up a shop now, it’s been around since 2005 and nobody told me!
  • PPCalc is a “PayPal fee calculator”. As you know PayPal is very widely used but rather expensive and also not the most reliable solution. I’d recommend Moneybookers as alternative
  • ChipIn is a PayPal connected tool that facilitates so called crowdfunding. It’s like crowdsourcing but with money. You ask many people to fund your project

Blogging & Internet

  • BuySellAds does exactly that buy and sell banner ads taking 25% commission, it’s easy to use ideal for bloggers and worked fine for me
  • Proxify “is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely.”
  • xrl.us by Metamark is the better TinyURL, I use it daily
  • issuu is a YouTube like website for magazines and other print publications, you can upload them and allow people to read them only using a sleek Flash interface

Bonus

  • MagMyPic – You always wanted to get famous and end up on the cover of a magazine? Now you can! ;-)

You might know some of these web tools, especially if you’re a SEO expert you probably will know the SEO tools. I made sure that the list contains both the best tools currently available and those which not everybody outside a certain industry knows yet. Also these 30 tools can be used by anybody. You don’t need to be a full fledged web professional for most of these.

 

Last updated: April 21th, 2011 – Several defunct tools removed and new tools added.

Do you use Google Analytics? Well, a recent study shows that you’re not alone, roughly one third of the Alexa top 500 websites traffic wise use it. That surprised me a little. Anyways, I use Google Analytics myself and noticed before that some numbers are inaccurate or downright wrong. In May I discovered how wrong, completely wrong.

Google Analytics Bug

The numbers of search engine referers, more specifically, are wrong. I’ve noticed that before but wasn’t panicking as no statistic tool is perfectly accurate, you always should use at least 2 of them and compare the numbers. Now this time I checked my stats over at SEO 2.0 I was unable to ignore it anymore.

SEO 2.0 is mostly about social media and blogging SEO and it relies on traffic from other sources than Google. I only get insignificant numbers of visitors from Google on my blog, mostly due to very specific “long tail” queries. The only really important keyphrase is “SEO 2.0″ itself. Now looking at my May stats I was very surprised that one of better performing keywords was “site seo vs blog seo” without quotes.

I looked deeper into that just to discover that all 60 visitors looking for this keyword is one person from Bucharest, Romania. Google Analytics counted her or him several times a day for more than 2 weeks.

Now I sometimes create returning visits just by launching my FireFox with my saved tabs but how can a person search for the same query every day several times and then click the search result each time? This one riddles me. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour with Google Analytics in the past but always thought it was due to myself or several developers from my client working on the same site.

Not this time, there is certainly no Romanian developer working on my site. Now try to multiply these numbers for one of the top 500 sites and you end up with completely worthless statistics.

I’m not here to bash Google for their great analytics solution. I love checking and comparing bounce rates etc. but it’s more than strange that a search engine gets the search referers wrong in its own analytics solution. So if they don’t want people to make up conspiracy theories about Google overstating their search referers numbers they better fix this quick.

What can you do about it? Look out for some alternatives and either use Google Analytics and at least another solution or even more. What alternatives are there?

Well, if you’re running a “top 500 website” you better rely on a solution used and recommended by leading search marketers. This is ClickTracks in most cases. Also Omniture has been recommended by many professionals. Many people outside of Germany probably don’t know it but some German marketers prefer Etracker. Just to name three of them. There are plenty of high end solutions out there you surely can afford if you run such a huge site.

For the average webmaster seeking a low cost or free solution there is no single alternative to rely on. There is Piwik, an open source alternative recently hailed by many, but it’s in alpha now and didn’t work for me, it produced SQL errors instead.

Another solution is to use Google Analytics along a specialized search analytics tool like:

Have you experienced similar issues with Google Analytics or am I the only one to discover this?

There have been a post at SEOmoz, by SEO theory blogger Micheal Martinez already in 2006 and a post in 2007 from AimClear focused on the reliability on Google Analytics with another topic, outages.

My conclusion right now is a grim one: Google Analytics is cheating you, I hope not on purpose. Unless you do not care about accurate search referers and visitor numbers you should use one of the solutions above or resort to log file analysis.

I know the Alexa stats are normally inaccurate anyway but today seems to be worse than usual!

All of the traffic seems to be missing for 17th September, here’s a graph to show the huge drops seen by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft:
Google's Traffic Drops to Zero According to Alexa!

Logging into my Google Analytics account this morning I noticed the following alert:

“Over the next several weeks, we will be migrating all existing Analytics accounts to the new Google Analytics interface. You will be notified by email once your account has been migrated. For an entire month you will be able to access both the original interface and the new interface. During the migration, you should experience no interruption in service and you will be able to see all of your data regardless of which interface you use.”

The Google Analytics blog announced the new version yesterday, which generally looks like a cleaner, easier to use system.

Here’s a list of the new improvements:

  • “Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
  • Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
  • Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
  • Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.”

So far my account has remained the same but the Analytics tour shows some of the new features, focusing quite strongly upon the integration with Google AdWords.

Alexa have added some new information to their traffic stats page. This now displays a percentage reach of internet users who visit this site, the country users come from and the sites traffic rank for an individual country.

Here’s a screenshot of the traffic rankings for seoptimise.com:
Alexa add geographical info to traffic stats

These rankings are only based upon users with the Alexa toolbar installed, so the higher the traffic/Alexa ranking the more accurate the information should be. I would recommend using Google Analytics (or similar website analysis program) to collect this information about your own site, but Alexa definitely gives a good idea about your competitors website stats, such as which countries their users are coming from.

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