First, let me start by introducing myself. My name is Christina Keffer, and I’m the newest addition to the team at LunaMetrics. I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to write my first blog post here about a topic that is quite near and dear to my heart: Copywriting.
You have to be a really colossal word nerd to get all hot and bothered by the thought of dissecting web copy in order to find out what sells and why. Lucky for you, dear readers, I am that word nerd, and I’ve come up with a brief tutorial about writing for the web with one eye on user experience and the other on the needs of the search engines.
Most of the time, you can see straight because the user’s needs and those of the search engines are so closely related. Occasionally, however, you’ll become dizzy while trying to keep an eye on diverging necessities. Now before I trip and fall over my own metaphors, here goes nothing.
How can I Use Copy Writing to Increase Conversion?
Wouldn’t you like to know! Actually, all snottiness aside, asking a question that you KNOW your audience will want the answer to is one of the best ways to draw and keep their interest.
On one hand, it’s catchy and brings in a focused audience of webmasters who want to convert traffic to sales. On the other hand, it has the focal keyword “conversion” in it. Do you see that word anywhere else? Cast your eyes to the page title! There it is again.
This is a primary example of how web copy writing can take the users and the search engines into consideration simultaneously.
By providing a catchy hook, I’ve roped you in and you’re still (hopefully) reading.
By using a focal keyword in the title and header, I’ve raised the relevance of the page a few notches so that when someone searches for "conversion" the search engines will have a better chance of realizing that this page would be a great addition to their top five results.
By including the word “conversion” in the body copy, I’m continuing to raise the relevance of the page for that search term.
Am I cheating a little by sprinkling the word conversion around more liberally than sugar in my coffee? You bet. However, as long as my usage doesn’t compromise the user’s experience, cheating a little is OK. Just don’t go overboard with the keyword to content ratio or else you run the risk of getting the site penalized.
The golden rule for using keywords to raise the relevance of your page is including them in the following places:
Title Tag
Headers
Body Copy
URL
How do I Convert Users Once They Arrive?
Using copy intelligently to increase the relevancy (and rankings) of your site is all well and good. However, once you are ranking highly and traffic starts streaming in, how do you encourage those users to buy your product or fill out your survey or whatever whatever your particular form of conversion is? After all, you know you only have a few seconds (if that ) to catch the user’s attention and draw them in deeper. Here are a few copy writing tricks that will help you.
Don’t Make Them Think! I can’t stress enough how little patience online users actually have. Keep pages short and simple with the form/ checkout button, etc. very accessible. Use language that is easy to understand and in most cases, avoid technical jargon or corporate-speak
Be Yourself: Except in specific cases, formal writing comes off extremely stuffy and boring online. Don’t be afraid to insert a bit of your personality into your copy. You’re trying to establish a rapport with your user, and that’s hard enough to do online without raising all manner of linguistic barriers.
Break Up the Text: In the event that you find yourself forced to include a huge chunk of text for any reason, try to break it up as much as possible. Adding a bullet-pointed list, or a numbered list where you would otherwise have a paragraph is an effective method. Lists draw the eye down the page. Using pictures or graphics is another way to break up text. Using Headers liberally helps as well.
Hopefully these tips will help you on your way to creating dynamic text that will help your users on their way to conversion. Good luck and happy writing!
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about Google’s announcement at eMetrics of the new features to Google Analytics (if you were away from your computer for the past 24 hours, read our post about the new features in Google Analytics).
A lot has been written about these new features. Of course, we’ll be spending the next couple weeks going over each new feature in detail, letting you know how to use it, why it’s important, and what it means for your analytics. In the meantime, here’s a look at what other people are saying:
Daniel Waisberg on Search Engine Land goes over the basics and adds his own analysis. Be sure to read the last paragraph about the importance of human analysis in conjunction with analytics tools.
Stéphane Hamel at immeria goes beyond just rehashing the new features by offering his take on them and what this announcement means for the web analytics industry.
Justin Cutroni over at EpikOne goes into detail on one of the new features – expanded and engagement goals. Your goal should be to read this (cue rimshot and tomato throwing).
And for you videophiles out there, here are three videos from Google showing off some of the new features:
Expanded and Engagment Goals
Create up to 20 goals per profile and group them into for different Goal Sets. Track your conversions and site engagement with URL, average time on site, and pages per visit based goals.
Advanced Table Filters
Advanced Filtering simplifies narrowing down data in the reports table by allowing threshold filters to be created. Instead of creating standard profile filters or weeding through rows and rows of data, Advanced Filters can be created on the fly for any report.
Analytics Intelligence and Custom Alerts
Google Analytics helps you make faster, smarter decisions with the new Intelligence reports and Custom Alerts. The algorithmic driven Intelligence engine monitors your traffic and provides automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.
Google Analytics has just introduced a gaggle of new features at eMetrics today. Some you’ll already find in your account, and some are being rolled out over the next couple of weeks.
Analytics Intelligence & Custom Alerts
The most exciting of these new features is a set of reports called “Analytics Intelligence”. They look for patterns in your daily, weekly, and monthly data and call out significant changes and anomalies. This makes it a lot easier to separate what’s really new and interesting from the mountain of data you have about your site.
Here’s an example Intelligence report:
You can see it calls out alerts for changes in the patterns of your traffic. (You can adjust the sensitivity level with which these show up.) The specific alerts look like this:
You can see here that referral traffic was up from what’s expected (visits up 66%, pageviews up 54%) These really help call out changes in your traffic that might otherwise be hard to see without digging through lots of reports.
In addition to all of this happening automatically, you can also create custom alerts. Say I want to know when my organic search traffic is up 10% from last week:
And, you can even have GA email you when that happens.
But Wait, There’s More!
There are a slew of other features, too. We’ll be covering all of these in more depth in the coming weeks.
Goals:
If you’ve ever created yet another profile to have four more goals, you’ll be relieved to hear that profiles will now be allowed 20 goals each.
You can now set goals based on Pages/Visit and Time on Site!
Advanced Analysis Features:
New, easier-to-use filters for reports. In addition to the existing “contains/excludes” filter you can use a nice interface to build multiple conditions for filtering, and also allow you to filter based on metrics.
The unique visitors metric will now be available in custom reports.
New Tracking Features:
Multiple custom variables. Previously, you could use the user-defined variable, but you only got one and had to resort to workarounds to get multiple values. Now you get multiple values out of the box, and you can specify whether to track them at the page, visit, or visitor level.
Expanded mobile tracking, including tracking for iPhone and Android apps and tracking websites for mobile devices that do not run JavaScript.
You’ll hear lots more about these in blog posts coming soon, and you should see the features rolled out into your accounts over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
A website test can often involve a lot of people, IT staff, Designers, Content Owners, etc. While the technicals are fairly straight-forward, the process involved to get everyone working together can be really hard. And people *will* make mistakes.
Are you going to wait to make those mistakes while everyone is focused on you for that massive Home Page test that you just barely got approval to run after months of trying ??
Why not make those mistakes before anyone cares?
Start with a test page. Have your designer create alternate content for it, your IT staff put in the code, etc. This gives you an opportunity to talk to everyone about what you’re doing and where you’re going and why it is in their best interest to get the kinks worked out beforehand. It’s not a real page on the site so if the code is put in wrong, it’s no big deal — noone cares.
Move on to an actual page on the website that is not important to anyone. This is a slightly bigger deal than the test page, but if you screw it up, noone will probably notice. Just test something minor that noone will notice. Decide on a conversion page and look at real data. Try presenting the results.
This practice is beneficial to everyone involved, so that when the real test comes around, you’ve already made your mistakes, and hopefully, worked them out. Remember that the point of the practice is to work out the process and make sure everyone looks good when it is time to do the real first test.
Everyone works hard at their sites and then throws up a form that “seems to cover it.” But shouldn’t we work harder at our forms? After all, it is the last point the potential lead has to bail out of the conversion process.
A million years ago, when I first started LunaMetrics, I felt like there were three kinds of lead generation forms:
Very long forms. Marketing often likes to do these kinds of forms so that the sales people will feel the leads are well-qualified (and so that Marketing knows which salesperson to send them to.)
Very short forms that result in both good leads and crummy leads.
Plain old stupid forms (like the kind that ask for your fax number as a required field.) I won’t even write about those today.
I made a very conscious decision to go with an extremely short form on the LunaMetrics site. It was the minimum amount of information that I needed: Name, email address and an optional place to include notes. We even pointed out how short our form was. So, it was a #2, a very short form that took good leads and bad ones.
But then we did the user testing (read about our experience with usertesting.com) that was just fascinating. One of the comments we heard from a handful of people went something like this, “What kind of a ridiculous form is that? Don’t they even need my company name? It makes me think that they are going to send me spam.”
There is no time like the present to fix easy problems. So we changed our form to include Company and Phone Number. Since the change, our conversion rate for “filled out a form,” is up 10%. And on top of that, we get much better data in our forms — people give us a link to their sites (making it way easier to check them out before calling) and willingly give out their phone numbers, too. The phone number part is the one I like the best, I can pick up the phone and call the prospect.
You can use GA to track visitors without any JavaScript on your pages. It’s called GA for Flash. It can be done entirely within a tiny Adobe Flash file embedded on every page of the site. This method uses “flash cookies” to persist data, so that even if visitors turn off or delete their browser cookies, these Flash Cookies will still exist. They can be deleted, but not with the same tools/settings used to control browser cookies — they are a separate thing.
Is this a privacy concern?
Why do some people feel that browser cookies are okay to track with, but not flash cookies?
What can we do and should we do to ease those concerns?
These were some of the questions brought up in a recent discussion. My take is that it is really all about one thing:
** It is about empowering visitors with the ability to control their own privacy. **
Browser cookies have 3 things that make this happen:
1. Sensible browser defaults to control cookies
2. General knowledge and awareness of what cookies are and what they do
3. Accessible tools with which to control the behavior of cookies
Think of it in terms of buying a new car.
Did you know, that if you don’t change the oil in your car, it will stop running?!?
Hey, wait a minute! Is that fair? Can they do that??
It is fair for the same 3 reasons:
1. Sensible Defaults: Oil gauge denoting low oil, light indicating oil change needed, prominent checklist in the manual
2. General Knowledge: (nearly) everyone knows they need to change their oil.
3. Accessible Tools: Oil change shop on every other block, prominent oil displays at Auto Zone, etc
But what if you bought a new car that also required you to change the Flash-Oil in your car or it will stop running? Huh? The dealer never told me about this new Flash-Oil stuff. They don’t do that at Jiffy Lube. It’s not part of the standard maintenance when I take in my car to the dealer.
Of course, the mechanics and car lovers all know about the Flash-Oil. They say, “It’s nearly as easy as changing your regular oil, we don’t see what the big deal is. You can buy it and change it yourself.” But for everyone else, it’s a huge WTF moment!
Sure, Flash-Oil might be in some obscure page of the user manual, and hidden on a back-shelf in AutoZone. But if your car stopped running because you didn’t change the Flash-Oil, would you be happy when the dealer said it was your fault, told you that you’d need to buy a new engine and pointed to a single paragraph on page 203 of the manual and said “see, it’s right there, you have to change the Flash-Oil or the engine locks up”. Would you sue? Maybe. Would you win? Possibly.
But would any car manufacturer do this? Absolutely not.
Once flash cookies have those 3 key things, it will be much harder to consider them “stealth” tracking, and the concern about them will be greatly lessened.
How do we get there?
Well, how did we get there with browser cookies?
It seems that early on, those 3 key things didn’t exist. Once cookies started to gain more widespread use to track people and persist information, people began speaking out, and raising concerns, this led to the general awareness. Pressure was put on browser makers to create sensible defaults, and individuals interested in privacy and control began to make tools and browser plugins to control cookie behavior.
We’re going down much the same path with flash cookies. We are at the early stages now. They are starting to be more widely used, and people are beginning to speak out about privacy concerns.
This doesn’t mean that tracking visitors with flash cookies is wrong. We can’t wait until all these things are in place before we start using it to track . . .because those things are only going to happen if flash tracking gets used.
We just need to be aware of our responsibilities to our fellow internet users. We should encourage the support of flash cookie settings in browsers, aid in the general knowledge about Flash tracking and how to monitor/delete/control that data.
Sure, we can put it in our websites’ privacy policies, but doing that and saying “well, our job here is done” is equivalent to that single reference to Flash-Oil on page 203.
Much better is, as Jeremy Aube suggested, putting it in your privacy policy and then saying “. . .and here are the methods and tools you can use to manage these flash cookies . . .”
Part of the struggle is that, by ourselves, there isn’t a lot more we can do. I can’t force Firefox to add settings for Flash Cookies, for example.
Again, it all comes down to trying to make sure the visitor is in control of their own privacy.
Of course, whether or not there should be or can be privacy on the internet is another issue. And maybe the legitimate answer to all of this is that privacy can no more be expected on the internet than it can be expected walking down the streets of New York.
Finally, thanks to Brian Clifton, Jeremy Aube, and everyone else who got me thinking about about this issue.
One problem that we see on a lot of websites is the absence of canonical URLs – especially with the www version and non-www version of the URLs. Why is this important? Read this post about domain canonicalization – it explains in great gory detail. Putting it briefly, you don’t want to spread your link juice across two pages when those pages are the same (it’s better to have one page with 100 links pointing to it than 2 pages with 50 links each).
There are many solutions, from URL rewriting with an .htaccess file to using the canonical tag on your pages, but that’s not the focus of this post. I want to show you how to find out who is linking to your non-www URLs so you can contact them and ask them to change it. This is especially helpful if, for whatever reason, you can’t redirect your non-www to www.
* Note: it makes no difference if you prefer to use the www version or the non-www – as long as you’re consistent. For the sake of this example, we’ll assume that the www version is preferred.
He talks about identifying canonical issues using the Hostnames report in Google Analytics. This is a great report to see if people are visiting both your www pages and your non-www pages. But I want to take it a step further. Let me show you how to dig a bit deeper to find out which sites are linking to your non-www URL.
Go to the Hostnames report in your Google Analytics (Visitors > Network Properties > Hostnames). If you have canonicalization issues, you’ll see them showing up here as visits coming from multiple hostnames, like
www.example.com
example.com
Example.com
These numbers are real, but the client's identity has been shielded for the sake of this example.
Click on the non-www version. Now that you’re seeing data just about visits to the non-www URL, click on Advanced Segments and choose to see just Referral Traffic. These are visits that clicked on a link from a different site to yours. See where I’m going with this?
Now, in the Dimension drop down menu, choose Source. Bada bing, bada boom. A nice list of sites that link (and send traffic) to the non-www version of your site. Go visit those sites and find out where they link to you. Then contact the webmaster to ask kindly for them to change the link to include the www.
At the time I was working on some analysis and was incredibly frustrated because all I saw was a bunch of URLs that looked like this:
This was especially frustrating because up to the point that the URLs got cut off, they were exactly the same!
I had been frustrated by this before, but this time it was unbearable and I put things on pause to write some custom CSS that gave me something like this:
Now, I could see the URLs and actually learn what I needed to learn.
Using my Custom CSS, we can see what all these URLs are at the expense of a longer report:
To me, this is a lot better than trying to mouse-over each item and quickly look at the tool-tip.
In addition to getting ready for the Secondary Dimension release, this CSS also makes some modifications to some other areas of the GA Report Interface that I found annoying.
Many areas in the Interface ask you to input URLs or Regular Expressions into this Tiny, Tiny text box:
Look at all that room on the right side of the screen. Why aren’t we using that? That’s just crazy.
So now, the Henson-version:
Oh yea, that’s much better.
In this new version, you’ll find much longer form fields like this in most places.
1. Once Stylish is installed, download the overflow.css.
2. Right click on the Stylish Icon in your browser’s status bar.
3. Select Write New Style -> Blank Style
4. And paste in the contents of overflow.css into the text box.
5. Give this new style a Name, and click save.
If you don’t use Firefox or don’t want to use Stylish, there are additional instructions in the original article.
(Just use the css from overflow.css instead of what is in that article.)
Additional Reports modified:
Goal Funnel: Entrance and Exits use previously empty space.
Custom Reports: Overflow should work here
Content Detail: Content Pulldown menu is longer
And I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of others.
PLEASE NOTE: I am not a CSS expert. In fact, a lot of this was trial and error (mostly error). It displays well at the resolutions I generally use. Your results may vary.
As always, let me know if you find any problems, and thanks to everyone who helped me out by testing this and giving feedback.
First of all, for those that can’t keep up with all the latest and greatestfeatures that Google keeps rolling out, a brief explanation of Google Sidewiki is in order. Sidewiki is a new feature that lets users who have installed the latest version of the Google Toolbar add and view comments on any page on any website they visit. The comments show up right alongside the page. Here’s a quick look at what one of those cutting edge users will see if they visit the LunaMetrics Blog page:
A couple of things to note:
anybody can leave a comment on your website (can we say reputation management nightmare?)
the comments can include links (with the commenter’s choice of anchor text)
It’s that second point that piqued my curiosity – what would happen if someone clicked on a link in a Sidewiki comment to your website? Well, with some help from Analytics Ninja John Henson we dug deep to find out the details.
First of all, you’ll notice that links in the Sidewiki comments initially link to something like
I’m not sure what “usd” and “usg” represent exactly – bonus points to anyone in the audience with ideas on this in the comments.
So what happens when we click on the link and it takes us to that URL? Google is 302 redirecting to the actual page. “Interesting,” you say, “but how will it appear in my analytics?”
It appears that, along with the 302 redirect, Google is setting the referrer to
So, if you go into your Google Analytics, you can see visits from links within Sidewiki comments by digging into your Traffic Sources > Referring Sites, clicking on google.com and looking for /sidewiki/…
Bonus tip:
You can easily find out who left the comment with a link to your site. See that number after /sidewiki/entry/ (in the example above, it’s 106935257806183022682)? Take that number and add it to the end of www.google.com/profiles/[enter numbr here]
As you can see, the number is the ID for my Google Profile page (because I left the comment). In fact, if the person has created a “friendly URL” for their profile page (like www.google.com/profiles/jim.gianoglio) then instead of a number after /entry/ you’ll get their Google Profile page name. Pretty nifty, eh?
Other Observations
Google is indexing these Sidewiki pages. That’s right – when you leave a comment, it’s not just an addition to an already existing page – you’re actually creating a unique page. Need proof? Go to Google and do the following search: site:google.com/sidewiki/entry
So far, about 1,210 Sidewiki comments have been indexed. If you visit a sidewiki page with the Google Toolbar installed, you get redirected to the page on the actual website (with the Sidewiki comments opened up). But if you visit a Sidewiki page without the Google Toolbar installed, it takes you to the Sidewiki URL – you can still see the comment and the actual page, but you’re not on that website, you’re still on Google. They also prompt you to “Share your own insights as you browse the web. Download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.”
What does this all mean?
How can this information be used (aside from impressing all your friends at the next party)? For starters, you can use this as part of your online reputation monitoring. Granted, you’ll only see anything if someone links to you in their Sidewiki comment, and if someone actually clicks on that link. Nonetheless, if enough people start using Sidewiki, this is something you’ll want to monitor.
If someone is linking to you in a Sidewiki comment, maybe they’ll also link to you on their blog/website (link building opportunities, anyone?). Being able to see who’s leaving the comments (by tracking them back to their Google profile page) is a good start.
We’re still looking at ways that this data might be useful. What are your thoughts? How would you use this information? (Please share your expert opinion in the comments!)
Of course, it’s easy to see how spammers might try to use this to litter the web with links for viagra, porn and poker. It will be interesting to see how Google deals with this.
Go to the Hostnames report in your Google Analytics (Visitors > Network Properties > Hostnames). If you have canonicalization issues, you’ll see them showing up here as visits coming from multiple hostnames, like
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