Aug

28

Google Analytics Advanced Segment and Custom Report Sharing Going Live…soon

Filed Under Web Analytics News | Leave a Comment

So, the fabled sharing of custom reports and advanced segments is live for select logins in Google Analytics.  Guessing this means that we’re going to see this feature released live very soon!

Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments are a powerful way of defining just the cross-section of information that you’d like to see a report for.  That might be looking at your Google PPC search campaign, or it might be something as complex as looking at repeat visitors who came in through email referrers and have more than 6 page views.  Pretty cool.

Google Analytics Advanced Segments Sharing

As you can see in the screenshots, the new options for “Hide from profile”, “copy”, and “share” are up and running.  Also, the same options exist for Custom reports.

Custom Reports, if you’re curious, are a great way to get the exact metrics you seek, when a comparable report isn’t already available in Google Analytics or when you’re too lazy to find it.  These are a killer way to see whole numbers for goal completion or get geographic and campaign data mashed up.  In fact, they’re a great shortcut for buried reports that already do exist, but a word of caution: the data in custom reports may be sampled and therefore not match exactly to the same built-in report.

Looking forward to seeing these in everyone’s profiles!  Not sure how long this has been going, but it’s the first time we’ve noticed it.  Kudos to @whitneyhannan for the find.

Aug

18

The New Search Engine Optimization – SEO 2.0

Filed Under Web Analytics and Search Engines | 7 Comments

Specialists.  They are wonderful, smart, and talented people who can push boundaries and solve complicated problems.  They are also the people who invented lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, and solved our toxic waste disposal issue by sinking leaky barrels down to the ocean floor.

When specialists solve a problem, they often create other, unforeseen problems because they tend to look through their own self-imposed keyholes.  Over time, these specialists broaden their horizons after realizing that the materials they use and methods they employ matter just as much as the predicted outcome.  Turns out copper won’t make poison of your drinking water.

So you’re probably asking me to get to the point – what does this have to do with SEO?

I’ve been fortunate to have worked with many professional SEOs over the years who understand that the point of SEO is not to gather a trophy collection of high rankings in Google, but to have those trophies produce traffic, interaction, and ultimately revenue (or some other comparable value).  To this end, they understand that ranking number 1 for “women’s fashion” and sending users to a page that looks like this is a failure:

Women’s Fashion – Fashion for Women who like Fashion

Women’s fashion is a fashionable, womanly way of being a woman with style (commonly referred to as Fashion, or Women’s fashion).  Check out this link to women’s fashion (it comes right back to this page! surprise! FASHION).  Maybe you’re looking for fashion BY women, or fashiony women.

Whatever you want in the world of women’s fashion, we have fashion for the woman in your life (unless you are a woman, and want fashion).  Let’s say hooray for fashion, fashion, fashion! Go women! Fashion!

Let’s do some math:

Fashion + women = women’s fashion.

by,

Women McFashionton

Of course, that’s a bit of an extreme example, but we’ve all seen it.

Unfortunately, I’ve also had the displeasure of working with some SEOs who have a total disregard for usability (although truthfully, I’ve seen this problem much more frequently the other way around: usability engineers who pretend that search isn’t a top-5 use case, when it’s usually #1).  They literally say, “Our job is to get rankings, and it’s someone else’s job to make the conversions happen.”  That attitude is the lead pipe with mercury strychnine lining of the internet.  Since SEO involves the modification of the very pages that will need to produce conversion post-click, this is an incredibly irresponsible, naive, and downright ridiculous way of going about search engine optimization, but I’d say that 3 out of 4 SEO engagements end up more or less this way.

This notion of unaccountability is the age-old plague of specialists who have not yet matured (or learned) enough to realize the value of synthesizing efforts into a single fabric, rather than loosely stitching together a hideous quilt of specialist’s favorite patterns.

How to pick a good SEO

So with all of that specialist ragging behind me, let’s break it down into how you can prevent this disaster on your site (or your company’s).

1.  Get a reporting sample. You’re looking for a report that talks about what’s happening with rankings, and WHY.  If your SEO doesn’t have an opinion on why movement is happening, what are the chances they’ll come up with a tactic to change it?  You’re also looking for post-click actions in the report, and again WHY.  Your SEO should be trying to drive good traffic to your site, and either diagnosing or doing their best to help your usability / analytics resources diagnose any issues with on-site performance.  Let’s not forget, you’re investing in SEO for a return, not a trophy case.

2.  Talk to the SEOs, both the ones who do the selling and the ones who will do the actual work.  Larger agencies may put less-experienced staff on the busy work of keyword buildouts and title + meta creation, but guess what?  Those are arguably the most important tasks.  Make sure that their process includes a review and some sort of feedback from analytics and usability folks (or a savvy businessperson) to validate that these phrases will work on these pages.  Refine keyword lists, even if you have to give up search frequency, to best fit the purpose of the target page and ensure a positive experience for visitors if engines choose that page as the best for that key phrase (and of course, there’s no guarantee of that).  Also, try to get a general feel for the value they place on the return of the program.  If it “feels” like all they care about is rankings, they aren’t going to be a true partner.

3.  Demand 6-month performance reviews. This is something that both you and your SEO should love.  One of the hardest parts of search engine optimization is deciding how to keep it going.  By having in-depth reviews of engine and site-side performance every 6 months, the strategy and tactics can be refined to continue boosting performance over time as the algorithm and competitive aggression changes.

Follow these three rules and I’m sure you’ll be shocked by how many candidates are weeded out.  Remember that the professions of SEO and analytics / usability are VERY different, so you shouldn’t expect to get one person that wears both hats: that would just be a waste of a specialist’s time.  What you’re looking for is a specialist who is aware of and cares about the collateral effects of their work.  This person/agency will apply their specialized knowledge responsibly so you don’t end up with mutant fish at the bottom of your sea.

Aug

11

What happens in the middle is what matters

Filed Under Web Analytics in Business | 3 Comments

Here’s an exercise that will make you a better analyst and a better businessperson.  Even if you’re not the “web analytics guy,” do this anyhow and translate it to how you think about your web site.

Go to the mall and prop yourself down on a bench in front of of a store (how about the Apple store, because it has glass windows and you can usually tell what someone bought. And if you get the hankering to buy something, as a shareholder, I’d appreciate it).  What do you see?  People walk in, mill about inside, and then walk out, some of whom are carrying boxes and bags full of their shiny new toys.

Visiting the Apple Store

If you were to measure the “engagement” of the Apple store, what would it look like? You’d have metrics for entries, metrics for exits, and metrics for conversion rates.  If you had particularly good eyesight, you might even be able to tell how many products people looked at, what those products were, how long they played with them, whether they talked to a salesperson, and infer whether that “touchy-feely” experience influenced (or was indicative of) purchase potential.  If someone was passing out bright orange flyers at the entrance of the mall, you could also see how successful that was at driving traffic to the store (they’d be carrying them).  And if you were to come up with a set of metrics to outline, “Apple Store Performance,” it would probably look like this:

Store Use:

  • Entries
  • Entries with flyers
  • Time in store

Interactions:

  • iPod views, duration
  • Laptop views, duration
  • Desktop views, duration
  • % Talked to salesperson, duration

Conversion:

  • iPod sales
  • Laptop sales
  • Desktop sales
  • Exits

So you get it – we have a bunch of simple metrics that we can start to tie together.  Were people with orange flyers more likely to buy? Were people who talked to a salesperson longer than 4 minutes more likely to buy?  Were people that used the iPod for longer than 1 minute more likely to buy? You get it.  What we’re trying to figure out is what’s happening in the middle, because we know that the middle determines whether people walk out with armfulls of shareholder value.

We also know that handing out those flyers is getting more people in the top of the funnel, which, if we can preserve conversion rates, means more buyers coming out of the bottom of the funnel.  We may even choose to have salespeople treat orange flyer holders differently.

So let’s start translating:

  • Entries = Visits
  • Flyers = Paid Search, Natural Search, Display, Email campaigns
  • Views, durations = Page Views, Product Views, “engagement” (whatever that means)
  • Sales = Conversions

So my question is this: once we do this translation, are we still looking at what happens in the middle? Or more importantly, are we still doing something about what we’re seeing in the middle?  The answer is usually no.

In a retail store, the employees polish the iPods, train employees how to better talk to customers, and physically re-arrange the store in an effort to make the middle more effective.  Online, we watch, objectively, as if we are a third party being.  We measure.  We say that the orange pamphlets aren’t working because they’re not walking out with bags, but we didn’t notice that the salesperson assigned to talk to the orange pamphlet holders has huge pit stans and smells like Taco Bell.  We’re seeing that he’s talking to people for over 3.5 minutes, the magic number that increases conversion rate, but we’re not seeing that for the first minute, he’s talking about how hung over he is.  We’re boiling qualitative things into quantitative metrics in an effort to understand what works, and we’re missing the whole point: we’re getting this information to change it, not just to know it.

In the store, this guy’s hygiene is obvious.  Online, we might not realize the qualitative aspects of a landing page make a keyword with a high click-through-rate a repulsive experience when the same page does great for another keyword.  What I’m talking about is especially true for your marketing efforts – paid search, SEO, display, email, social, etc.  If you’re not thinking of the middle (judging a media by its endpoints, cost and return), you’re not learning anything.  Your lowest performing media could be your best performing media if you changed a few things.  But to know what to change, you have to be looking at the middle.

When Avinash talks about the 90/10 rule, I believe this is where he’s going with it.  We’ve created huge, sophisticaed tools that can tell us wonderful things in the language of numbers, but we need people looking at why, telling the stories, understanding what can be done in the middle to get more bags out the door.