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.

Integrated Marketing Communications

I have always been a fan of integrated marketing and the joined up approach, and have seen as a marketer and customer the benefits of a joined up consistent message.

It is all about delivery of a cohesive message across all sales and marketing media, rather than them operating on there own. Having this consistent message enables the marketing campaigns to work harder towards a common set of measurable results.

It is surprising through that many industry leaders are not following this practice. I have just Googled a few companies who have an obvious strapline – finding out that these straplines are not presented to me in paid or natural search ads, sometimes the message isn’t even present on the main website home page. Strange !

I just Googled Halifax – they have another repetitive ad on the TV at the moment all using their common term “Extra”.

Good news is that they are following the practice as shown in search in their natural and paid search ad – both of which mention – “extra”. Great. See below:

Halifax Online Banking - UK Banks, Finance, Personal, Telephone ...Halifax Online Bank UK - Our online banking service always giving you extra with your finance and money - mortgages, savings, current accounts, credit cards ...

Unfortunate news is that the strap line isn’t doing them much favours, with people in forums and review sites using the “Who gives you extra” term – as a way to highlight what they believe to be their limitations. Should Halifax read this then suggest that they should put the story straight on these forums, it can only build trust in the long term with the current or ex customer and potential prospects finding your response.

The negative feedback on these review sites is a good example of why you should give consideration to your multi channel behaviour of your customers. For example, it is estimated that a finance customer will touch 14 sites before committing to registering with a new finance product, it is also likely that they will visit the comparison and review sites for advice before this commitment (especially with Credit cards).

Putting a positive spin is that the ads that Halifax produced, have gone Viral, with Howard (from the ads) receiving his own fan base. However how many You Tube video pass ons will lead to a new customer is limited. You Tube.

Another good example of integrated message is:

Car insurance and home insurance - Sheilas' WheelsSheilas' Wheels - Cheaper car insurance and home insurance online for women.

On arriving a their site – the heavily advertised on TV “Car insurance for women” product, is more prominent than what they also offer (home insurance) – even the Get Quote sign is bigger. They have given consideration to their brand name and that most people will arrive looking for the ‘car insurance’. Also as they have stuck to the name and not advertised “we have the best deals ever” they have (maybe without thought) stopped the possible critique in forums.

I came across quite a good process for measuring and thinking about customer behaviour in a multi channel environment from the book Web Analytics and hour a day by Avinash Kaushik, 2007. The diagram which can be also found in a section called non line here: It’s a flash site ! So quite contradictory as this section 'non line' which I wanted to find, will not appear in search, spiders have trouble reading flash.

Below paragraph explains the diagram quite clearly taken from Avinash’s book as quoted above:

“The diagram provides a simple representation of customer behaviour on two different channels. The physical acts are different but it is essentially the same process of moving from research to selection to qualification to purchase”.

The diagram highlights how customers move at their own pace across on and offline mediums before making their decision. The process can work for both services and products, it is one that I will be revisiting again, when highlighting the importance of the intergrated message, so thanks to David Hughes of Non Line Markeing for producing and apologies for the ‘quite contradictory’ point, but it is true.

As I find good examples of the integrated message, will revisit and post them here.

The importance of product descriptions

“Product descriptions are very important on retail sites” Sarah G July 20th 08

Wouldn’t it be great, if you could web cam in one of your in-store sales representatives and place them right inside you website. There are developments for this – Woopra – however it is slightly scary for someone to pop up and say “Hi, have you chosen yet” – but as we get more involved with the interactive internet – sure this could be a possibility. Find out more about real time features here.

Before we move onto Web 4.0 and lets assume that the sales rep is currently on leave from the site.

Here are my thoughts on optimising product descriptions using an example of a fashion site.

Something that many fashion and retail websites currently lack is the persuasive sales representatives together with the tangibility of “feeling the garmet” to help the customer make their decision. (Think about how M&S describe their food, "these are not just fish fingers, these are M&S fish fingers, made with the finest cod, crumbled breadcrumbs etc etc).

Giving attention to your product descriptions can help let the potential customer know that they must have “this” designer piece, how glorious it is, the fit, the style, the feel, the experience of wearing it and buying it.

Another important thing about product descriptions, is that you can use them to include the key terms that a potential customer may use when searching for the product.

So by optimising your product descriptions, you can not only benefit your search engine rankings for key phrases relating to your brand, but you could also potentially increase your sales too.

An eloquent description talking in the brands natural voice should offer the customer confidence and amusement when browsing through the selections.

What information should you write:

Consider this example: Shopping for Vivienne Westwood Dress

One site says: “Vivienne Westwood Sweety Dress”

Another says:

“This stunning dress, encompasses everything this British designer set out to accomplish. The corset style front with the drawstring bust gives the edge to the dress through fantastic tailoring, making this a Vivienne Westwood classic. The clean lines and shape give a timeless look and appeal to be in everyone’s designer ladies wardrobe. Team this with the Vivienne Westwood XY bag to create a style which says “I have arrived”

Even better would be to have a link to more information: ie: “History of Vivienne Westwood Fashion” “New collections from Vivienne Westwood designer clothing range”

It is clear that the second example will have more appeal to the style hungry shopper, and helps persuade consumer to buy (everyone wants a classic!). Remember that unlike shops (the bricks and mortor) online you do not have the support from your sales representatives, thus your product description will become your most valued friend.

Few more points

You can also add some key points to your description:

Key points
1: 96% Cotton
2: 4% lyocell
3. Contrast Fabric 100% cotton.

Other points could mention, other product:
1: Logo on front lower left side
2: Double Collar
3: Three button round collar shirt
4: Reversible shirt (Yes Reversible)

Some people do have problems writing the product descriptions, finding it hard to expand further on “it’s a pair of jeans” however it is likely that the people in store are experts in the designer clothing field, so use them, how they talk about products in the shop can echo online.

The Social Web is here or should I say is working !

If you can just search what your friends think and prioritize this over every other social network online, then I am predicting that Friend Feed could become a very powerful recommendation engine.

I am strangely attracted to this new search engine/social network "Friend Feed", it is all about “easily searching content created by people you trust”. Could this be the new search engine of the future, going to find sites that your friends are making recommendations on?

It certainly could be powerful, if advertised right. (See link below from Venture Beat).

Great feature is that you can create your own room to discuss, comment on sites or news stories that your friends have found note worthy. Personally would find this useful.

I really love it, however not sure how many people I know will sign up right now, maybe with a few more years on Facebook, or maybe a year, they will then move over to friend feed – when become aware of ads interrupting their social browsing.

First things first, I have my preferred log in name, so will revisit in the future. Find me and my currently limited online connections here:

Interesting times…..

For more information on the recent use and future uses of Friend Feed see the article here from Venture Beat titled FriendFeed imports more usefulness into rooms

For more information on the future of the social web from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management see here: he was quoted as saying “Social is the new black”, so wish I had said that first… oh wait I can, off to Twitter it now.

Managing redirects notes & links

Managing Redirects

When designing landing pages with new unique marketing URLS, alerts need to set up a redirect to the correct page. If the site is indexed by search engines, the traffic needs to redirect seamlessly and correctly to avoid any problems with crawling and indexing.

The way to achieve the above is to implement a permanent re-direction (HTTP status code 301) to the pages which need to be moved.

Important to remember that 301 redirects – are server side redirects which are generally set up in the .htaccess file (Apache server) or in the control panel (IIS server).

Process being to use either the PermanentRedirect or mod-rewrite to redirect the page.

If on a Linus or Unix – system then placing redirects into a .htaccess file will be the best and easiest way.

The.htaccess file is just a text file which can be created in with a plain text editor (ie: Notepad). When uploaded to the root level of the website with the main index page, it will work alongside the server and handle everything.

It can even redirect from htm to asp – see below:

Redirect 301 /old-file-name.htm http://www.yourdomain.com/new-page.asp

Important to note that meta refresh or javascript redirects are not best practice when it comes to SEO – to find out more I recommend the below links:
Useful links for more information

IIS Redirects – 301 & 302

Apache Domain Redirects for SEO

301 Parking and Other Redirects for SEO

Draw backs and options

Setting up the redirects does mean that for every incorrect URL request, you will in turn be asking the browser to go and fetch a new URL (in effect 2 requests). However it is enabling you to not show to the search engines 2 URLs of the same content, which is bad practice.

Another option with regards to marketing landing pages, is that if all landing pages are set up in a separate directory - you can inform spiders not to index the pages, by disallowing that area for all spiders in the robots.txt file.

Setting up an internal 302 redirect will cause the original URL to be indexed, but the content found will be that of the destination URL – not the previous URL.

Duplicate content revisited

Redirects are also used to help solve duplicate content issues. It is important to make sure that 1 page can’t be reached by more than 1 URL. You can sometimes see sites with more than one URL for the same content example being:

Such as:

• mysite.com/products
• mysite.com/products/
• mysite.com/products/defaults.aspx

Should people (bookmarks) sites (Href) link into these pages then by having 3 separate URLS will mean that you will fail to maximise on all your incoming links.

The number of incoming links is very important for SEO – and if you fail to get control on how people could link to your site – then you are immediately reducing ability to appear higher in the natural search results.

Multiple Domains there not big or clever !

I had a query recently from a friend – who was hosting 2/3/4 domains of the same content. They had noted that Google was now mainly indexing one URL and not the other. They had also seen shifts in the search results, this is my advice….site names have been deleted to protect the innocent! And it was an innocent mistake.

Although written on here about Duplicate content penalties before, thought to share my comments here (in a different tone) and could be useful for others to refer to in the future – as the duplicate content issue will never change on Search Engines.

Feedback

Firstly I see your site is built in asp now this was designed and released before SEO became the talk of the town. However it is performing well for some key terms, well done on that, and it certainly does the job at converting visitors with great help areas and calls to action.

Should you be building the site right now, the first bit of advice I would give you to plan early for SEO, considering how your sites architecture is going to be laid out. Building relevant link paths of relevant content – good thing about the fact it is a “Holiday site” is that you can dig down deeper from UK to South East to Berkshire to Reading to Reading East. You could look at adding content as appropriate ie: events in area, places to see, restaurants etc – lots of lovely content for spiders and most importantly the site visitors. Your site has a community feel too, you could build on that, get others to send you the information (information on this blog on building communities).

Hopeful that you will already be using Google Webmaster tools to help you with SEO really useful, especially the ranking information plus suggestions on how to improve your site for indexing.

If you are not using it, start today. With digesting & implementing data from Google, the comments below and keeping your current internal linking, headers and content, will put you on the right path.

First step

Before beginning to develop new key word rich content (density of around 3% for 250 words) and implementing tools as required. You need to tackle a pretty big issue of duplicate content.

Firstly I am unsure why you thought parking more than one domain was a good idea ! If you think it would increase your presence in search engine result pages, you would be mistaken.

To be even more blunt this is Pretty Old School !

By having more than one website – showing the same content on multiple domains you are taking away the uniqueness & richness of your content – Google want to supply searches with unique and relevant data. Check out the Google Rules in Webmaster help, it tells you clearly there that duplicate content is a no go.

Several site owners actually use Copyscape.com, to check if people are using their content – which can some times happen and decrease their relevance quality in Google.

Google only want to present one website, not a big list of similar websites.

It makes sense

Imagine what a dull place a search engine would be if that happened all the time, ie: presented you with the same site, over and over again. After while (the big G) will work out which one/site it prefers – there are lots of algos (rules) to determine this, however the main one would probably be links into the site from external sources. Another option is to think you are up to something dodgy and ban you (it does happen!).

It is likely that the site that remains has more external links (links in) than the other site – it could be bookmarked by more people.

As this site does mirror another site, your quality score of relevance is diluted this is why you are seeing a shift in search results as Google struggle to make up its mind.

You are making the spiders job difficult. Don’t.

Another thing is that the spider won’t come back as often if you make its life difficult, think customer service, give it what it wants and it will come back. (as mentioned earlier see Webmaster help).

Second step

I do hope that you don’t have a link from one site (of same content) to another as if Google doesn’t see it, a competitor may, and they can very easily submit a spam report across the 3 major search engines. Outcome being as above, you will be banned from search results.

In effect by having multiple sites you are cheating the system as you are putting out more relevant words…… Google is highly focused, clever, and getting clevererererer so beware.

Third step

Query: Is it 3 domains you are supporting or more ?

Most people don’t realise that the below URLS are not the same:

www.mysite.com/villas
mysite.com/villas
www.mysite.com/villas/
mysite.com/villas/default.asp

Search engines would view these as 4 different sites – and this isn’t even counting your other domains. (However note - if your site has history, Google does work out in the end that mysite.com is the same as www.mysite.com - takes about a year).

So if you create content which the search engines can get to with or without the www you are decreasing your uniqueness and duplicating the content.

On a positive – it is pretty easy to resolve your issue of having a number of domains with same content.

Finally: Sorting it all out

Lucky for you, your IIS server does have a built in ability to sort this out.

You will need to create a permanent redirect in IIS. In the Virtual Directory – it will say when connecting to this resource content should come from - …Tick ‘A redirection to a URL’ – and then place in Redirect to: http://www.mybestrankingsiteblahblah.com/ Make sure you also tick ‘ Permanent redirection’. So when requests are put in for your other domains – the server will issue a Permanent redirect.

You will want to check who is linking to you too, you could request for some sites which have wrong link, to change it to the correct one.

You can but ask !

It will be OK not to change the URLS though, the only downfall is that your server will have to work a bit harder as it is having pull 2 pages (the first one and the correct one).

With regards to links, IMO the best place to check links is Yahoo Site Explorer UK, rather than Google (using inlinks:) obtain the little snippet of code in Site Explorer and keep check of those links in – and keep building them (good links, not link farms, and don’t submit to more than 25 link directories a day – Google have eyes and see this too). I have spent quite a while sourcing those good directories, think about 3 yrs in total.

With regards to which URL you should pick, first thought, which has the most external links pointing to it and also consider the name.

Note although Google doesn’t have URL name/wording in their algos/rules – (some people think they do, as appear highlighted in search results, this is just conditional formatting) – a positive about having two main keywords in your URL is useful in link building exercises – as Spiders do read the link text. Positive move for you was using a hypen, between two keywords relating to your brand, reason being is Google read underscores as continuation of a word (due to historical codey stuff) – hypens separate the word.

More information on SEOing your site for visitors and search engines on the blog.

END

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.