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The Real Cost of Buying Links for SEO: $4 Million

Written on September 1, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo

I was reading a copy of the Inc. 500 issue on my flight back from Dallas this weekend and came across an article about a seasonal online retailer that was “penalized” right before the Holidays for paid links. He estimated the revenue loss due to plummeting organic search visibility at $4 million in sales.  Now he’s “thanking” Google for the spanking because he’s mended his ways and is reborn as a social media enthusiast.

I’m not sure I buy the “social media has turned things around” story exactly, but I do wonder how many companies and consultants roll the dice and take shortcuts and loopholes to get ahead only to find out later it’s worthless? The notion of paid links is an old story (Paid Links Evil? Dec 2005) but many of the tactics used to shortcut results for SEO will always be a fresh topic of discussion.

It turns out the retailer in the Inc. story was doing SEO internally then hired two SEO companies to help out. The story goes on to say that a SEO company was to “reach out to relevant sites and ask them for links. Instead, one of the companies admitted it was paying for links.”  That’s worded in a way that makes you think maybe the retailer didn’t know the SEO company was buying links.

We don’t buy links at TopRank Marketing.

We never have. Not ever in 10 years of being in the search marketing business. As far as the retailer in the Inc. article, it’s surprising because buying links isn’t cheap.  If a company didn’t know the SEO consultant was buying links, it’s peculiar any way you look at it. Where did the money come from to buy the links? How did the SEO company not report what it was doing? How did the company owner not know what the SEO company was doing?

I polled followers of @leeodden on Twitter whether they or someone they knew knew had ever been penalized for buying links. Almost all of them said yes. When I’ve mentioned that we never buy links to other search marketers, the disbelief was like I told them I didn’t need to breathe air.

The point of relating this story to you isn’t so much about the risks and rewards of paid links, defining exactly what “paid means” (what about a 3 way barter?) or even judging those that sell and buy links. The point is that the online retailer in the story says social media tactics were largely ignored and now they’re committed to blogging, Tweeting and being active on Facebook. He claims all is now well in their SEO world. “We’re back on top.”

The point:  Why didn’t the online retailer commit to a better online marketing strategy in the first place?

It’s been promoted for years that paid links can carry consequences.  People like Google’s Anti-Spam Czar Matt Cutts make their perspective clear and make it easy to report paid links. Right or wrong, it’s the way search engines want to play.  Obviously, paid links with the right anchor text from very authoritative and relevant websites have a positive impact, or SEOs and website owners wouldn’t participate.  It’s important to note that Google doesn’t have a problem with paid links per se, but with paid links that pass PageRank.

The question I have for companies that rely too much on shortcuts and loopholes is, “Why not suspend the “free money now” attitude and invest in a smart and competitive online marketing program that can get results AND stand the test of scrutiny?”  Won’t a customer focused marketing effort that provides optimized and linkable content to a growing social network earn more links, more traffic and more revenue anyway?

I don’t think there’s much reason to put your brand and revenue at risk if you have a long term view of how the search and social web works. The investment in understanding and engaging customers plus the staff, software and time to implement content, analyze performance data and ongoing content marketing is well worth the cost and there’s virtually no risk.

“Don’t bring a sword to a gun fight”

Years ago at a search conference discussion about black hat and white hat tactics, Tim Mayer, ex head of Search at Yahoo! made the comment “”If you’re being entirely organic and going after ‘Viagra,’ it’s like taking a sword to a gunfight. You just aren’t going to rank” when discussing acceptable tactics in really aggressive industries like “PPC” (pills pron casino).

The temptation and pressures to profitability are great in industries that are flush with heavily optimized and marketed web sites.  However, most companies don’t fall in that category and I think smarter and more creative marketing can still win for the vast majority of websites, especially in the long run. We’ve seen it happen with our own clients nearly 10 years.

Why rent when you can own?

The reason I’ve never participated in link purchases or endorsed the practice isn’t as much about Google’s rules on paid links that pass PageRank. It’s because I could never understand why anyone would “buy” something with such risk associated with it when they could “earn it and own it”?   With roots in Public Relations, our online marketing agency has been accustomed to earning media placements and often times highly desirable links since we started the business in 2001. It can take more time to see aggressive results, but when you focus on making creative content and doing the hard work of promotion to earn traffic and links, the cost is one of investment vs. the often higher cost of advertising with no equity in what you’ve purchased. Then there’s the cost if the links are devalued by the search engines and subsequent lost revenue. I’d rather build, promote and earn those links that will be in place indefinitely.

Using that strategy, Online Marketing Blog has accumulated a substantial number and quality of links (according to Majestic SEO). The devil is in the details with this sort of thing of course, since it matters very much what the topic, anchor text and PageRank are of the link sources. But suffice it to say, we experience very good results in each of those areas as evidenced by over 21,000 different keyword phrases that sent organic traffic each month and top visibility for important and challenging keyword queries.

What’s your experience with managing risk with SEO tactics? Have you experienced what the online retailer above went through and focused anew on a sustainable and longer term online marketing strategy?

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OpenCamp Blackhat SEO with Social Media

Written on August 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: blackhat, book, marketing, seo

The first content session I’m attending at OpenCamp is by Gio, aka Giovanni Gallucci, a longtime search and social media marketer based in Dallas. The topic is “Blackhat SEO” and the room is packed!
The session was cut a bit short due to technical difficulties with getting the conference started and Gio took it in stride and was both entertaining and informative – the right mix for a morning tech crowd.

Gio says “Black hat is simply another way to automate a time-consuming process. In other areas of marketing and life in general we encourage automation in order to maximize efficiency and get a leg up on our competitors”.

According to the conference session description, the nature of this session doesn’t allow liveblogging or tweeting, which i think is a load of crap, so I’ll liveblog it anyway.

Speaking of liveblogging, I am writing this on an iPad and the brilliant WordPress app deleted the first version, so I am writing now from memory on a notepad app.

The session is basically about what Gio does on a daily basis for his SEO clients. Based on insights from Woopra analyticz Gio says these are 5-6 social media sites you need to focus on to drive traffic and affect your search visibility:

- Media sharing: YouTube and Flickr
- Social Bookmarking: StumbleUpon
- Social Networks: Facebook & Twitter

When you undertake your social media marketing efforts, don’t let “little people” and naysayers hold you back. Gio gives Cali Lewis as an example with her growth of online shows and current success with GeekBeat.TV

As far as as Geolocation services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrrl, etc Gio says these are cute and fun, but that there’s not much measurable social media marketing value to them. (If you don’t buy that, check out Mashable.com for FourSquare case studies)

We’re 15 min into the presentation and thee’s no black hat SEO yet

YouTube lists are unreal for driving search traffic. Organize your individual videos into lists and optimize them. Find other videos that are highly trafficked and add them to lists that include your own videos. If you’re not creating video, you’ve got to get started.

Tools: tubetoolbox.com (Now we’re getting into the automation and almost black hat stuff). With YouTube ToolBox, Gio says you create a message in 2-3 sentences, mail merge their username and then create multiple versions of the message with different content and the same call to action. Then you can schedule the sending of messages to YouTube users that have been harvested at the rate of about 20 messages per hour. Something like: Hey “username” I saw that you commented on a video about XYZ and wanted to let you know about another similar video and would love your opinion.”.

I have to note, using automation tools like this must be done by someone that REALLY knows what they’re doing or you will suffer consequences. Managing risk vs. reward is important and for the record, my agency doesn’t use automation in this way.

The key to getting YouTube videos ranked high is activity on YouTube. with Flickr, you can add comments with a link back to your content.

Take advantage of current events. Gio shows a video of ComicCon geeks talking about how comic are not geeky anymore. Thee’s some irony to a code geek making fun of comic book geeks.

When going somewhere offline to get photos or video for content, blend in. Gio tells a story of buying a cowboy getup to blend in at a rodeo or maybe it was somewhere else like that where there was a concentration of cowboy types.

Keep it fresh. For example, make a presentation the day you give it.

Tool: tweetaddr 3.0. Using this tool makes it appear as if you’re communicating with Twitter via a web browser (when you’re not and actually using an automated follow tool).

“Can’t is not an option”. Gio gave an example of a how a school with only 200 kids earned 68,000 votes on a list of top schools.

“Show up and just get it done”. If you look like you’re supposed to be there, no one will bother you. (Regarding collecting content or promoting online content in the offline world).

Tool: Bookmarking Daemon – Put in your social boomarking accounts and it will randomly pick your content and promote it.

According to the room monitor, that’s all the time we have. You can find out more about Giovanni on his blog: Blog.gallucci.net and get a copy of his social media manifesto at: gallucci.net/smm

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Jumping Army Strong on Social Media & the Golden Knights

Written on August 27, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Army Strong Stories is a program to draw attention to the real life and experience of being in the Army through soldier stories communicated via media socially. Recently Greg Swan of the Minneapolis Public Relations firm, Weber Shandwick, that is behind the Army Strong Stories campaign contacted me with a compelling opportunity to create my own Army story: “Would you like to go skydiving with the US Army Golden Knights?”

Who are the Golden Knights? In 1959 13 men joined together to form the Strategic Army Corps Sport Parachute Team, to compete in the communist dominated sport of skydiving. The team performed so well that on June 1, 1961 the Army maded them an official parachute team and the Knights (men and women) have been wowing audiences at air shows ever since.

Greg is a well known “social media guy” and works with the Army account for his agency. At first I was uncertain about the jump, but after looking at the competitive skydiving team’s website, YouTube channel and blog, I decided it was worth checking out.

One thing Greg didn’t know when he invited me was that I spent several years on active duty in the military. We later discovered I was stationed on the same base in Alaska as his Grandfather. My experience as a small town kid from Minnesota being exposed to a completely different world of the military allowed me to grow and mature in new ways.

My short experience with the Army exposed me to structure, challenge and reward in combination with raising my awareness of teamwork and a sense of purpose that was instrumental in the development of  things like character, integrity and confidence – All essential for success as an entrepreneur and business owner.

Also, without the Army college fund program, I would not have been able to afford a University education. So, while it was by no means a career for me, my personal experience with the Army left me a different person, better in many ways, than before I joined. It is with that backround and my interest in the Army Golden Knights’ use of social media that I accepted the offer to jump from an airplane for the first time in my life yesterday.

Disclosure: The U.S. Army paid for my transportation and accomodations in Addison, Texas where the jump occurred and I agreed to write a blog post however I wanted.

Meet the Army Golden Knights

The competitive skydiving team of men and women that make up the Golden Knights are the best of the best skydivers in the world.  These men and women have many thousands of jumps under their belts and participate in competitions all over the world, making them truly unique individuals and part of a very elite group.

I watched videos on YouTube of the Knights in competition as well as the tandem jumps I would be taking. These videos included VIPs like President George W. Bush, celebrities like Vince Vaughn and well known Digerati like John Pozadzides, CEO of Woopra. This gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect. As a marketer, I’m fully aware of how effective video can be at telling a story, but being able to watch videos of the Golden Knights do what they do was equally impressive as it was confidence building in that I would be in good hands.

The Golden Knights Use of Social Media

The Golden Knights have an official website as well as a blog, YouTube Channel, Flickr, Facebook & Twitter. Several of the Knights also maintain their own Twitter accounts and blogs.  The content published on these social channels gives potential candidates great insight into the life of a competitive skydiver.

• Official site
• Blog
• YouTube Channel
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Facebook

The Knights are a publishing entity like no other I’ve seen. On the day of our jump, nearly every Army Golden Knight had still and/or video cameras on their helmets. SFC Dave Herwig was busy all day editing videos as they came in for uploading to YouTube and posting online.  The Knights clearly see content and engagement as the key to getting the word out and social media channels are a perfect distribution and community building platform to that end.

Skydiving with the Army Golden Knights

I was not jumping alone of course, there were several other digerati types like Chris Pirillo, Cali Lewis, Trey Ratcliff, Dave Curlee, Scott Ellis, Vi Kim Vu, Frederick Van Johnson, George Ruiz, Jay Batson, Pelpina Trip, John Pozadzides, and Giovanni Galluci jumping as well. Our itinerary called for us to get breakfast and meet early in the morning at the hotel and walk over to a soccer field area where the jump would occur.

This event never would have happened without Carolyn Sullivan from Weber Shandwick & SFC Dave Herwig from Army Golden Knights aka Army social media guy

SFC Mike Elliott starts off by giving a pre-jump briefing

This puts jumpers like Frederick Van Johnson, Vi Kim Vu & Pelpina Trip and the rest of us at ease.

Next we suited up as Scott Ellis has done here

Then we headed to the plane used specifically for tandem jumps

The Army Golden Knights showed their stuff

A perfect landing just 20 feet from the spectators. Amazing accuracy from 2 1/2 miles up.

Media savvy Army Golden Knights are well-equipped to document their jumps on video and photos

After the jump, off came the yellow jumpsuits, which were hot! Rachel, Pelpina & Cali

Major Smith & Lt Col Martin made sure everything ran smoothly.

For more photos, I’ve put some up on Flickr and Facebook. When the Army and Weber Shandwick share the video taken of my jump, I’ll post that here as well.

I have to say, this experience was a blast. The men and women of the Army Golden Knights are true professionals and it was a priveledge to have the opportunity to do a tandem jump with them as well as learn more about what they do.

Thank you to Greg Swan and Carolyn Sullivan from Weber Shandwick for making the offer. Thank you to the U.S. Army for having me along and for all that you do for our country. Thanks to the organizers of OpenCa.mp as well for such a great event.

Here’s a pre-jump interview Cali Lewis of GeekBeat.TV did with Mike and Dave of the Golden Knights that will give you even more info about the Knights and the event:

Next up: Speaking of which, OpenCa.mp and all the WordPress, Drupal, .NET and Joomla! education you can shake a stick at is where I’ll be this weekend. I’m presenting a session on Social SEO for Blogs after Brian Clark and Chris Pirillo give their presentations on blogging. It should be a great event and be sure to watch for a few liveblog posts on some of the sessions.

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SES San Francisco 2010 Wrap-Up

Written on August 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing, seo

QR code on the side of a building? Geek cool.

Last week the West Coast Search Engine Strategies conference moved from San Jose back to its roots in San Francisco. It was a well attended show (5,000+ in 2009 vs. 6,000 in 2010 registrations), despite the illusion created by the voluminous Moscone.

As part of Connected Marketing Week, SES included a great mix of sessions. In fact, there were quite a few new sessions and solo presentations such as the one by Andy Beal on Online Reputation Management and the one on Content Marketing Optimization by moi.

Networking events were popular, but of course anything with free booze and thirsty smart search marketers equals popular. Networking opportunities like the black hat / white hat brings an interesting mix of people together. There were specialized training sessions as well and a full exhibit hall. I thought the hall closed a bit early, 3pm, but hey – if the vendors want to go home, let them go home.

White Hat, Black Hat Who? - Mike Grehan & Matt McGowan

I talked to Mike Grehan, VP and Global Content Director for Search Engine Watch, ClickZ and Search Engine Strategies, who said the conference programming mix was well received. On the launch of Connected Marketing Week, Mike says,

“I’ll borrow the motto from the UK special air service: Who dares wins!”.

Mike’s partner in crime, Matt McGowan, who is Vice President and Publisher for Incisive Media’s Interactive Marketing Group, had a few things to say about the event:

“The Connected Marketing Week “test” has now been proven.  While all of us @ Incisive Media were pretty sure it would work out (remember, it was past and prospective attendees who asked us to do this) we never really did know how it was going to play out until now… the response from delegates, sponsors and speakers has been resoundingly positive.

Most of the partner events in their own right had strong attendance with @ 200 people registered for 140Conf,  100 for IAB, 100 for the E-mail and Search Marketing workshops, almost 100 for OMS and just about 6,000 for SES SF.  We plan to build on this year’s success and we hope to see you at the 2nd addition of Connected Marketing Week in SF in 2011 (with many of the same partners and a few surprises) if not before!”

TopRank Online Marketing had a great experience at SES San Francisco with a mix of liveblogging, speaking and moderating 3 sessions as well as plenty of networking. I gave two new presentations: One for a long running session on Blog and Feed SEO and another for an all new session called Content Marketing Optimization that I gave solo. It was a full room and such great attendance was very much appreciated.

Here are a few of the blog posts published by other search engine marketing bloggers on the presentations given by TopRank plus one post from Yahoo.

• aimclear blog – Think Outside the Blog: Tasty Tips for Feed SEO
• PageTraffic – SEO Through Blogs and Feeds — SES San Francisco 2010
• Bruce Clay blog – Content Marketing Optimization SES San Francisco
• Search Engine Roundtable – SES SFO: Content Marketing Optimization
• Yahoo Advertising Blog – Lessons-from-ses-day-3

One of the great things about attending industry conferences is the opportunity to connect with our current clients and meet new companies to work with. Both PRWeb and Marketo exhibited at SES San Francisco:

TopRank Client Maria Pergolino and co-worker from Marketo

TopRank's Adam Singer & Client Meg Walker from PRWeb

Quite a few of the software and technology companies that exhibit at shows like SES are the kinds of companies we work with at TopRank Marketing, so spending time at the exhibit hall is very productive for multiple reasons.

TopRank's Mike Yanke diligently liveblogging SES

In the spirit of our conference liveblogging schedule post for SES San Francisco, check out the nifty Flash thingy below made by Thomas McMahon to navigate to all the liveblog posts Mike Yanke and Adam Singer put up during the week. Congrats to SES for a great show and to Mike and Adam who did a great job covering the event for Online Marketing Blog.

What’s up next? I’m looking forward to speaking at the next SES, which is in Hong Kong, on “The Business Value of Social Media”.

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Take Your Online Business to New Heights With the Display Network - Part 5

Written on August 22, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, Object, marketing, searchengineguide

by Mike Fleming

Google’s Display Network has two types of targeting options. The first, automatic placements, we’ve talked about already. This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group. Now, we’ll talk about the second - managed placements.

This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:

1. Targeting specific websites that you’ve already found have performed well for your ads in an automatic placement campaign to maximize your exposure on those sites.

2. Targeting specific websites that you’ve found through research.

With this campaign, you do not choose keywords because you are telling Google exactly which sites you want your ad to be eligible for auction, so they don’t need keywords to come up with a theme to match to websites. The way to create this campaign is to choose “relevant pages only on the placements and audiences I manage” under “Networks” in the “Network and Devices” option of your campaign settings.

The easiest way to pick some websites where you want your ad to be shown is to run and analyze a Placement Performance Report of your Automatic Placement Campaign once a significant amount of data has been collected. You can export the data in this report to Excel and find some websites that have historically met the marketing objectives you have set for your ads. Once you add them to your new Managed Placement Campaign, make sure you exclude them from your Automatic Placement Campaign by selecting the placement and hitting “Exclude Placement” above the list -

Then, you go in to the Networks tab of your new Managed Placement campaign, click on “show details” next to managed placements and then click “add placements.” This is where you enter and submit the sites where you want your ads to be shown.

If you are not as patient and/or you would rather not rely on Google’s imperfect algorithm to find some websites you’d like to test, once you hit “add placements” and choose an ad group, you can click on a link to take you to the Placement Tool. Here, you can look up sites by category, keyword, ad type or size, and URL and the tool will spit out all sorts of options for you to pick from to add to your ad group.

You’ll want to monitor these choices over time to weed out the bad and maximize the good. Remember, just because you think something in marketing will work doesn’t mean it will. It has to be proven with data.

Take a look at the sites that are suggested and decide on some that are locations where your target audience frequents, select them and add them to your campaign.

Once you start to find some websites that are working for you, you can start to develop themed ad groups with your managed placements and write more targeted ads for similar types of sites.

For instance, if you sold guitars and you are finding that guitar lesson sites work well for you, group all of the sites about guitar lessons together and create targeted ads for those sites. You should see click-through and conversion rates improve significantly. This makes it easier to identify sites and themes that work best for your business.

Now, you’ve got one campaign that is going out to hunt down sites that will work for what you’re advertising (automatic placement) and one campaign that contains sites that work for you that you can optimize for the long-run (managed placement). As time passes and data is collected, continue to add keyword-themed ad groups to your Automatic Placement Campaign to replace themes that aren’t working for you while pulling the sites that work to place into your Managed Placement campaign. Frequently, you should go in and apply standard optimization techniques to your ad groups and placements similar to how you would optimize search campaigns with keywords.

Hopefully, my short introduction series to the Display Network will allow you to take your online business to new heights! Down the road, we’ll get into some more advanced Display Network strategies. Hope you’ll hang around.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Take Your Online Business to New Heights With the Display Network - Part 5

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 20, 2010

Written on August 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, marketing

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:

De-Mystifying Cost Per Action and Its Impact On Search Marketing: Webcast next Tuesday
Next Tuesday at Search Marketing Now, Jeremiah Andrick, Online Customer Acquisition Manager at Logitech will discuss Cost Per Acquisition (CPA — [...]



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SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 20, 2010

De-Mystifying Cost Per Action and Its Impact On Search Marketing: Webcast next Tuesday

Written on August 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, marketing, seo

Next Tuesday at Search Marketing Now, Jeremiah Andrick, Online Customer Acquisition Manager at Logitech will discuss Cost Per Acquisition (CPA — what it is, how to calculate it, and how it affects search marketing. This webcast will cover the relationship between CPA, SEO, PPC as well as how to calculate your CPA and how [...]



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De-Mystifying Cost Per Action and Its Impact On Search Marketing: Webcast next Tuesday

100 Million A Month Using Google Maps for Mobile

Written on August 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

It’s the “Year of Mobile” v. 2010 remember? Whether it is or isn’t officially is irrelevant. What is important is just how much mobile is continuing to influence the lives of many Internet users. While not as ubiquitous as many in the industry would like us to believe, it is still a very strong component of the online world and one that has seemingly limitless upside for years to come.

Evidence of just how influential the mobile world is comes from Google who announced that they have hit the 100 million users per month using Google Maps in some form. No matter who you are, that is a big number. From the Google Mobile Blog

Almost five years ago, we launched Google Maps for mobile to help you get where you needed to go from your phone instead of a paper map. Today, more than 100 million people a month are now using Google Maps for mobile to get from point A to point B, find nearby places, and more.

Below is an infographic (notice the use of the hottest Internet marketing buzzword) that shows the evolution of Google Maps for mobile until this point.

What is happening today with this Google service is even more important as the usage continues to rise. The trouble is that the vast majority of the businesses that could benefit from this service don’t even have a clue that it exists let alone how important it could be to promoting their business.

Lately, we’ve been especially focused on helping you find the right place at the right time. With recent additions such as Place Pages, you can now pick a nearby place by browsing information such as opening hours and review snippets for the places around you. It’s easier than ever to find those places with Search by voice or the new Places icon on Android. With this latest Android version, we’re happy to see that you’re now searching for places almost three times as often, doubling how many Place Pages are seen a day.

Place Pages are going to be more and more important to the local player and to the BtoB space as well because they will are a supplemental source of data that may actually be used before a web site or even, gulp, instead of one, by people looking for whatever it is they need.

I believe though that unless Google becomes a better marketer themselves this service will not be fully utilized in the way it could be. Google unfortunately just expects people to know this stuff then even puts the following at the end of this post

If you’re a business owner, help millions of people find you by claiming your free Place Page available in Google Maps and our most used mobile “app” — Google Search. Get started at places.google.com/businesses.

It’s a nice touch but the actual numbers of business owners reading any Google blog are likely to be pretty low. Most readers of Google’s blogs are the industry / tech geek type that can get the word out for sure, if that was their job. In most cases it’s not the business owner reading this so these ‘notifications’ are nice but they are not getting the word out……at all.

Even despite that, a lot of people are using Google Maps though, right? Imagine what it would be like if those people using it had even better information to retrieve because the people they were trying to find were there (and in control of their information) too.

One can dream, can’t one?

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100 Million A Month Using Google Maps for Mobile

SES SF Live Blogging Recap: Day Three

Written on August 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Below is the live blog coverage of the sessions given today at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco conference. If you are aware of other live blog coverage, feel free to link to them in the comments.

4 Ways To Build Instant & Sustainable Trust Online, AIM Clear Blog
Advanced Keyword Research — SES San Francisco, [...]



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SES SF Live Blogging Recap: Day Three

Website Analytics vs. The Myth of 100% Accuracy

Written on August 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

Let’s get this out of the way.  100% accuracy does not exist in website analytics.  Repeat. 100% accuracy does not exist in analytics.

What does exist in analytics is data – lots of it – and with this comes fear.

Fear of looking at the wrong data.  Fear of where to start.  Fear of analytics failure.

This fear will only dissipate with knowledge.  Knowing that analytics will never be perfect is a critical first step and a cornerstone shared during the session ‘Deep Dive Into Analytics’ at SES San Francisco.

Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board and NY Times bestselling author, moderated this session which included on its panel:

• Tami Dalley, Director, User Experience Optimization, ROI Labs
• Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
• Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing

The beauty of an analytics session at SES is that those on the panel may sometimes be analysts or they may sometimes be statisticians, but they are always marketers.  And a good marketing analyst knows that it’s the facts that tell and the stories that sell.

As such, Bailey shaped his presentation around four key points that make up the bulk head of the website analytics story:

1. Intent
   Every visitor that lands on your website is there for a reason.  Bailey offers the example of a jewelry store pulling traffic for ‘watch’ based keywords.  Within this segment, some will be looking to ‘buy a rolex’ while some will be looking to ‘fix a watch + san francisco.’  Based on the keywords this segment used to find your site, did content match intent?
2. Expectancy
   Similar to intent, but expanded to include referring sites ranging from forums to blogs.  Did the source that referred the segment, say a forum about watch repair stores in San Francisco, shape user segment expectations accurately in regards to what they found on your site?
3. Reaction
   What ultimately happened when the segment of users arrived on your site?  Did they bounce immediately? Convert?  Did they do what you intended them to do?
4. Behavior
   Whether the user bounced, exited or converted, what behavioral clues did they drop along the way? Did they bounce after a mere ten seconds? Exit after visiting multiple pages?  Convert directly from where they landed or within just one step?

Remove these items from a numbered list, and add context, and this becomes an actionable story:

Users arriving at my site using San Francisco watch repair related keywords, or coming from local websites geared towards watch repair services, are bouncing at a rate of 85% and converting at a rate of 4%.  However, those that land on my Rolex repair services page from this same segment bounce at a rate of 60% and convert at a rate of 10%.  If I optimize my Rolex repair page for ‘rolex repair + san francisco’, I may capture more conversions.

Of course, the answer is never quite so simple.  Dalley and Weintraub illustrate this as they share detailed real world case studies and conversion reports, respectively.

Dalley’s case studies detail how the slightest change, from a page’s design to a customer’s location, can drastically shape results.  The key to making an actionable change is to start with an educated hypothesis before backing it up with the right data for proof points.

And this means overcoming a fear of data and digging in, as repeated by Bailey.

Since Weintraub is sorely misrepresented in this post, primarily because nearly any written word would be a severe injustice to the energy level he brings to his presentation, below find potential conversion reports or data ‘dig-in points.’  These are reports that you can pull from your analytics to make a decision from today.  The list below was both leveraged from and inspired by a list of deeply ‘unsexy’ (Weintraub’s words, not mine) possible conversion reports shared during this session:

1. Conversion by time of day
2. Conversions by rural Pennsylvania city
3. Conversions by mobile device
4. Conversions by web browser
5. Conversions by keywords containing the keyword ‘green dress’

Please add your own unsexy, or even sexy, conversion reports or analytics stories via a comment below.

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