Competitive Intelligence Tools

One of my friends has asked me this morning about what resources I use in my reporting to clients. Sharing what I dispatched below, interesting that majority are Google products.

I use Wordtracker for keyword research, and have done now for a number of years. I never just presume a phrase to be correct for a client with their Search Marketing plans and seek to uncover the competitiveness of that phrase and the popularity. This helps me brief expectations and meet them. Otherwise your SEM campaign is based on "just a finger in the wind" ie: not accurate or linked to strategy.

Although only approximate figures, Google Trends is a useful tool to enable you to compare search volume patterns of websites across regions, countries. I also like the fact that when viewing data on the site it will let you know, people who visited this site "also visited" and "also searched for". Trends is pretty addictive so set a good amount of time to really dig into the data and set yourself up with a cup of coffee and a couple of biscuits.

Googles Insights for Search is pretty cool tool and like the rest, once you delve in you can be in there for hours (trust me). The tool is similar to Google Trends, but more focused on words over sites. You can review a keyword trend over time, start with your main keywords (that bring in the most traffic) and then view your performance (against) your competition. The data you find will help raise questions and potentially help you get sign off for search marketing campaign budgets. It is useful to throw a few brand names into Google Insights and see which one performs best and check keyword trends in a number of regions too to highlight interest, which could assist with International expansion. Basically Google Insights can provide you with a whole heap of new opportunities. I saw this post a couple of days ago in the New Scientist: Can Google searches predict Oscar Winners, go check it out.

For paid search keyword reporting, you can get an idea of the volume, cost per clicks of keywords using Google's Adwords Keyword Tool. In all honestly I have never really found this to be very accurate and that the numbers are often inflated. However it does give you some indication of budget that needs to be set to targeted campaign. I rarely use it.

Another place in which you can use a whole heap of time (you have been forewarned!!) is the DoubleClick AdPlanner, similar to Google trends this little portal is pretty addictive and can help you refine your online advertising. It is useful to obtain demographic and psychographic analysis (age, gender, income, education) of a sites audience. I have used this to find new advertising portals and to capture information on bloggers reach to convince clients to run competitions with them, as unfortunately with large businesses, the top table generally what to know about the potential reach numbers. Another handy thing about the Adplanner is that it will let you know "people who visited this website also visited this", which is a really handy feature and can lead you to find a whole heap of new advertising opportunities for your clients.

There is also Hitwise too, which is expensive, but invaluble if you have the resource to make the most of the data, I highly recommend it, very easy to use and the information that you receive on competitors, market share (online) can lead to one thing, progression - which is what we all need.

Before Google existed we had "Brad", these guys are still around and their website states that they provide: "Effective planning with in-depth media intellegence at your fingertips", so if you have the budget you know who to call.

And finally for a bit of fun to compare the results of two competing keywords, opt for Google Fight where an animation helps decide the winner.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Web Analytics for you

Help with Web Analytics

We can help you verify, analyse and interpret your web site data in line with your business goals.
At the first stage, we will help you define who your customers are, reviewing what they are searching for; what's important to them (voice of customers online community). This process helps us work with you to idenfity your key areas for growth, which will help set your overall goals and a clearer understanding on how to deliver to your online customer base.

Analytic implementation

Correct implementation of your web analytics will help you answer critical business questions of your websites effectiveness and highlight to you how your website is interacting with your customers.

Hint: The structure of the website should be driven by both the company and the customers.

Establishing a successful Web Analytics Framework

Clever use of your web analytics can help you and your company release the insight from the numbers. It will assist with future site design, architecture and indicate clear product / service drivers which will lead to development of a more profitable company site.

Analytics makes your site changes more meaningful and in line with customer habits.

Where to start

Pretty simply, start by defining your business goals and the goals for your website. Should you have separate product-managers speak to them, as each product-group will potentially have different targets / outcome & audience groups. Working with the project managers or solely, it is important to make sure you document and prioritise your goals and that the metrics being focused on can be actionable.

For example if you find an issue in your shopping cart, make sure you have the necessary back up / help to correct this.

Make use of the features in your web analytics package to assist you in reporting. For example; custom reporting and tracking via the use of tags on and off site.Consider how the analytics package can report on both high and medium level goals.

This may involve you setting up separate profiles in your analytics utilising use of filters –ie: you may just want to track success of organic traffic to the site.

Time to Analyse

The general rule is that you should spend 80% of your time on analysis and only 20% on reporting. Hint; make sure you keep a project list of all developments on your site ie: new banner, new page, new tracking – this will help clearly identify results.

Some areas of particular interest to me in analytics is reviewing the paths visitors took around the site, reviewing how they reached the product page and what creative on or off the site led to a purchase.

If you find that a high % are visiting a particular product page and leaving straight away, then, this may be due to your pricing strategy or they could have arrived by accident (see you organic keyword report).

A complete review will allow you to decipher:

1. How you can make your site better (navigation)
2. What customers particular like (engagement, page views, time in category)
3. How you can use the information to devise retention strategies
4. Whether you can make improvements to your calls to action
5. Look at particular market segments coming to your website, think about how the site
can be optimised for that segment. (ie: Review site traffic, build 'compare us' table)
6. etc, etc, etc – read Web Analytics an hour a day by Avinash Kaushik

Room to improve?

Remember analysis may not always indicate room for improvement, at these stages you could test things on the site to see if performance can be enhanced. This may mean moving a call to action button, or change creative (A/B testing), test different copy, give more prominence to certain benefits.

Hint; If there is a problem and you just can’t seem to fix it, speak to a usability company who can lead insight into the cause of the problem the web analytics has defined.

Analysis Paralysis

Don’t get carried away with the review, always consider how what you are finding will effect your overall business goals. If what you are reviewing is not related to overall business gain, then exclude this data. You don’t want to fall victim to a condition known as “analysis paralysis”.

Keep things focused

Develop scorecards of key business metrics, indicating where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow. These are also helpful when sharing the information with other members in your company. Ongoing review is critical, to obtain a clearer insight into the need and behaviour of your online customers and will help you identify business opportunities as your customers needs evolve.

Four step process

1. Outline your business metrics
2. Set up your reports in relation to business metrics
3. Analyse
4. Optimise the site / take action

Analytics installed what next?

My friend has just set up a small site, selling high end goods, asked me: "OK I have Google Analytics installed, what's next?".

I recommeded the book Web Analytics an hour a day by Avinash Kaushik.

While they wait for that to arrive, as a starter for 10 here are some key questions I proposed.

Along with what they should be recording to help plan for the future months and measure the success of their site and their on and offline Marketing efforts. Define and measure are key.

Key questions to ask of your Analytic Package

1. Firstly start to discover how people are using your site, where do they go (may need custom reports, filters set up), review words they use in search to find you, do they all relate to your offerings? Note the key entry points, can you fine tune online material to assist conversions, possible communication opportunities. Reviewing your popular exit pages, could these indicate that the shopper is comparison shopper and can see better offer elsewhere ie: Paid Search ad - review your competition on product pages where exits are quick and often.

2. Find out what volume of site traffic was unique, what was the source of this traffic, and on a individual source basis what is producing the most conversions or quality leads?

3. Import to keep track of your new and returning customers, should you enter a new content area and from launch of that find people keep coming back for more, do more of that.

4. Are you tracking every type of conversion, call us, sign up to a newsletter, what value do you give to those leads?

5. What are the current blockages in your customers online recruitment experience, reviewing conversion funnels, where do the customers get distracted or where are they engaged/staying longer?

6. Are customers buying what they searched for, or is the site leading to other purchases, can a colleration be seen between products purchased.

7. You have a sister site, consider how you can leverage off this?

8. What online creatives do the customers like, what offers lead to conversion?

9. What is the ratio between your PPC traffic and Organic traffic how can this be changed for improved ROI ?

10. Have a look at the Geographic report, any suprises there? anything you can do E-Marketing wise to increase reach to specific country or region ? Could understanding customer demographics assist in any way to fine tune creatives.

Writing Commentary Analytics

1. Executive Summary

Include your overall thoughts on performance based on insights in Analytics.

Inc: Key insights on the customer propositions

Section1: Visits here increased by X due to...
Section2: ""
Location1: Increase to visitors from France this month due to
Location 2: ""
Sales/Potentials:

2. Key Performance Indicators

New v Returning customers:
Visit to Sale/Lead ratio:
Target Ratio:

3. ROI

Marketing spend: Total spend per customer:Average spend per customer:

4 - 10 Overview of leading figures and ROI.

4. Website performance
5. Customer Journies
6. E-channel performance - on and offsite creative
7. Multi channel behaviour
8. Feedback on new creative
9. Feedback from shops / offices / branches as appropriate - top sellers or site content
10. Cross Sales (off plan/on plan)

Finally remember the 80/20 rule - 80% analytics/understanding - 20% reporting

Making sure tracking is Robust

I love the word Robust, remembering back to when I was at School we were tasked on Enterprise week with a Marketing project to name, design, package a new AfterShave, my group called our AfterShave "Robust". It seemed to sum up men at that time, who knows what the word would be now !!

It is important to make sure that your Web Analytics package is 'strong', to add weight to what you will be presenting at the top table. The below is something relatively simple, but often a formula that is overlooked, sharing with you now.

When comparing one months data to the previous months data for volume figures such as volume of traffic, conversion rates - make sure that you work out the percentage increase or decrease by taking into account the days of the month.

The below outlines the forumula to use, and is based on visitor figures:

Step/Column 1:
Current month visitor figure 'divided by' days in current month (July)
1030/31

Step/ Column 2:
Previous month visitor figures 'divided by' days in previous month (June)
1000/30

Step 3/ Column 3:
Working out % change adjusted for days in the month
Current month 'take away' Previous month then divide by Previous month

Answer: Despite indications that visitor numbers have increased there is a % descrease in July in visitors to the site of around 0.32%.

Web Analytics – It’s simple really !

I learnt something new today when reviewing my analytics report. Not sure why the thought hadn't come to me previously, I will call it Analytic Evolution. Blogging about my experience to help me understand it further.

I noticed that my own domain was appearing in the ‘top referring sites’ and ‘top referring page’ in my Analytics reports.

Firstly considered what a referrer is:

“It is a site/page that refers a visitor to my site by linking to it”

Secondly looked for answers as to whether this is normal, good news it is. Great... but why is it good ? mainly becuase I understand the reasons, these are listed below:

The reason why my domain was appearing as a referrer can be due to a number of reasons, outlined some key findings below:

1. A user of your site may browse then leave to put the kettle on make a bit of lunch, leaving the browser open. On return they start to browse again and since the user session has timed out, the referrer to the site will be the page they were on before they left.

2. Could occur if IP switching occurs, which basically means the users IP address changes when browsing your website. As a new IP appears then the Analytics will treat this as a separate user and thus the referrer will be the previous page (of your site). However this only happens if tracking definition is set to use IP/User Agent.

Also would like to blog that I found out that ‘No referrers’ often appear in the analytics, typically due to the below reasons:

1. User accesses site directly
2. Site could be made home page by the user
3. User may access via a bookmark or favourite
4. Or they access via an email link
5. The event that started the visitor session was a hit to
something other than a page, such as an image.
6. User came to your Web site by way of a java-script-based
Redirect ie: a pop up.

Also some duplicate URLs, (same page different URL dependent on function on site) were appearing in my report, so off now to use a tool called URL search and replace to tidy up the log files.

Linking historic Google Analytics with new Adwords

Recently found out that - if you didn’t link you Analytics account to an Adwords Account with you signed up for Google Analytics you can still do it.

It is best practice to:Sign up for Adwords account under same name as Analytics account

If you didn’t then go to your Analytics account and add your Adwords account as a user with admin privileges. Then you go to your Adwords account and add your Analytics account as a user with admin privilages.

Once above is complete

Click the Analytics tab which is situated across top of your Adwords account portal
In the page that follows click the box that says I already have an Analytics account

You will then be presented with a drop down which lists the accessible accounts

Defaults will appear ticked to have auto tagging on and to apply cost data from Adwords to your Analytics account. Decision as to whether you want to use auto tagging will depend on whether you currently tag your own data. Keep ticked cost data which is the whole reason why you would want to link the two anyway. Next step is to click: Link Account and that’s it.

Google Analytics

Understanding Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to identify, measure and compare the performance of search engines, campaigns and mediums. It allows you to determine how profitable your keywords are across different search engines and to review performance of your online campaigns.

Online campaigns may include: email newsletter, affiliate network campaigns, referral sites, as well as paid for keywords and those found in natural search. Suprisingly Google Analytics will also let you track conversions from third party sites including Yahoo Stores and Ebay (see the Google Adwords conversion tracking guide).

Along with measuring the performance of your customers online journey, you can also identify where your best online customers come from and which target audiences are the most profitable.

Value of conversions

If you understand what value a conversion is to your business, and the percentage of pay per click customers who do convert (conversion ratio) this makes it easy to calculate your return on investment (ROI) for your Google Adwords campaigns.

For a positive ROI you are looking at the following equation:

Conversion amount * Conversion Ratio > than Average CPC

£10 * 3% = 0.30

If average CPC is 0.20 then this is a positive CPC.

Implementing Google Conversion tracking

Google supply a special tracking code that can be added to the result pages on your site.

To enable Conversion Tracking for your website, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Google AdWords account.
2. Click the link that says Conversion Tracking
3. On the page that follows, click the button that says Start Tracking Conversions.
4. Once Conversion Tracking is setup, you have to get the code to insert into your site.

How it works in Adwords

When a potential customer clicks on one of your Adwords ads, Google then places a cookie on their computer to track there customer journey.

When this potential customer arrives at a conversion page decided by you (ie: order confirmation) then a conversion is recorded and reported within Adwords.

As part of the tracking: Google notifies users that they are being tracked, this notification is supplied by the Google code you enter at the results page. The tracked user then sees a message titled Google Site Stats with a “send feedback” link when the results page is opened. This allows users to find out more about Google’s Privacy Policy. At this stage users can reject the Google tracking cookie if they wish (meaning you loose that conversion data).

Cross channel conversion tracking

As well as measuring success from Google, the cross channel conversion tracking feature within Analytics allows you to see conversion traffic coming into your web properties from other advertising networks ie: Yahoo, MSN.

As well as tracking conversion to campaigns & keywords you can also get loyalty and engagement metrics. You can also determine which pages, categories on your website where you are loosing the most of your online customers – this feature is called Funnel Visualisation which tracks a users journey to the conversion page. This is useful feature in deciding whether improvements are needed to your site navigation.

For more information on Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Points to note

Inaccuracies

If inaccuracies do occur in tracking conversation via backend systems and analytics, it could be due to one of the below:

Obvious one: Tracking code is at the bottom of page, user gets bored clicks on another page and tracking code isn’t’ logged (as page not fully loaded)

There has been a restructure of the site navigation and conversion funnels not been updated (conversion tracking is broken in Analytics)

If "No Referrers" appears in the conversion/order confirmation page? This may be because people are book-marking the site from that page or they are using their History file which may show that as the most recent, so every-time they visit the page it is throwing off conversion data.

Routine quality checks

It is always worthwhile to conduct a few days' worth of extensive tests to ensure tracking properly installed.

Something new in Analytics

The "Big G", Google have announced that in the next coming weeks that they will be adding some new features for its users.

Including:

Site search: Find out what people search for on your site

Interaction: Allow you to find out how users on your site interact/engage with Ajax, Flash and Multimedia (to give clearer picture of page view metrics)

Where visitors go: Looking at whether they have clicked on any outbound links on your site – this is an interesting one !

Launched in Beta to review outgoing links.

For more information, see the blog post from Google themselves:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/10/exciting-announcements-at-emetrics.html

Reviewing Success of a Blog

Blog Analytics

In reviewing strengths & opportunities of a clients non commercial Blog (links into e-Commerce site), I identified that review should not be on traffic alone, and should be based on several other factors these are listed below:

Don’t review apples with bananas!

Links to the client’s Blog have been optimised via increased appearance in Blog directories and answer engines. The directories have been seen to have an impact on the rise in traffic. One Blog page in particular drives the most traffic to the site, and I seek to find out where this traffic comes from (organic, links, paid search, rss feeds).

The fact that one Blog post (new or old) can have a big impact on traffic to site, bothers me. In that it becomes difficult to state X happened because of Y. Possibly it could be something on the news previous evening that spurred an interest in a particular field. Due to the above influx, it is important to also identify other factors when reviewing Blog performance. Factors which I propose for Blog review outlined below:

Influential inbound links

In the Blog world quality comes from influence. A small group of the right people (Martini effect), reading and linking to your Blog can have a huge impact on your influential stakes, by web users and search engine spiders alike. The challenge will be finding a way to break into these groups and using analytics identifying who they are. Blog & site review sites will be of benefit to promote your site to the right people, publish your status, as a Blog that is here to stay.

One link on an influential Blog (with lots of links off page & in) is better than 30 odd links on random Blogs that no one links to, especially if the links on the influential Blog are centred around propositions similar to your brands. It will also be of benefit to increase the amount of links from key social networking sites including Dig it, Del.ici.ous.

At this present time I am unsure as to whether RSS feeds will be listed in analytics tracking as an RSS feed or whether we will see a website which has the RSS feed embedded as a referrer. Finding out (will report back here).

On the clients Blog, we currently have the opportunity for people to social bookmark, however is everyone aware of how to use these tools ?

Will be proposing that we provide advice area on social bookmarking to help increase these links in.

Reviewing Blog position

I have highlighted to client that for the Blog to appear on the first page of natural search results focus needs to be given to products and core proposition. At the same time it should be noted that the Blog is there to act as a companion to the e-Commerce site, so we don’t appear to have timeshare tactics and more of ‘fruit & veg first in the supermarket’ approach. Is the blog appearing for brand related terms, if not need to build further.

Appearing highly in natural listings will:

Provide the Blog with a status that your Blog is indeed influential

With influence and ranking status more people will link to you, from you.

Allow you to exploit your status by providing readers ways to advertise your site (link criteria and logos).

Reviewing Blog brand name position

As well as having a product focus it is also beneficial if your Blog ranks highly for keywords associated with you brand. Reviewing position with regards to company name, your tag line, your personal name. This will indicate how much search engines notice your Blog in general.

Tone of the Blog

Showing the readers your passion for your proposition is of great benefit. You should be speaking to your customers in a way in which they can gain respect from you and your business.
Propose that where possible build on advice aspect (place links to Blog in answer engines) and provide your readers with more timely information ie: Event dates.

Reputation Management

Consider sponsorship – publish in Blog.

Consider who else could contribute to your Blog – another influencial blogger?

Create posts on topical discussions that relate to your brand

Add links to brand related associations & express interest in these
Increase useful content: To link from Answer Engines