Archive for February, 2010
Posted on February 23, 2010 by Christina Keffer
If you own a nail factory, your competitors are other people who make nails right? They make nails to build buildings with and supply contractors who build houses. And they also sell five different shades of green metallic polish and have more sizes of acrylic applications than you. Oh, and how could I forget hoof nippers? How many hoof nippers for farriers do you have, Nail Factory Owner Guy(or Girl)? Did that stop making sense to you? To clarify the issue, here’s the Google search result page for the key phrase “Nail Supplier”
Clearly, the owners of that nail factory had no idea what they were up against online. If they came to me and asked me to tell them why they weren’t ranking higher than their industry competitors even though their websites stunk, I would tell them that their competitor for that term is really EZNails Beauty Supply. After they finished laughing at me, I would try to explain that it’s true because — wait for it — online competitors are not always industry competitors!
But Beauty Supplies? Really?
Yes, really. Online competition transcends the boundaries of industry competition and falls messily into the world of words. Online, a nail factory is not competing against EZnails for market share… they’re not even competing with them for customers. A contractor looking for wholesale 10 penny nails is not going to spend his money buying 10 inch long acrylic claws instead. He’s going to take one look at that results page, sigh in resignation, and refine his search using industry specific terms. What that nail company is REALLY competing for is high rankings for the key phrase “Nail Supplier.” (Incidentally, here is the search results page for the keyphrse “10 penny nail supplier.” Way more reasonable.)
There are other less hilarious instances of industries competing with sites that do not belong to industry competitors. It happens in the medical industry all the time. In a search for “Pediatricians, PA” there is not a single actual pediatric practice until the very bottom of the page.
Pediatricians are competing with these directories for the attention of potential patients. Several of these directories have paid ads so they even make money off the leads.
Now that I know who my online competitors are, what do I do?
There are two options here.
- Beat these sites at their own game. Now that you know what you’re up against, it might be the time for that redesign, or forking over the money for SEO.
- The other, less costly, less time intensive solution is to redefine your online competitive space. Remember that contractor who sighed in disgust and searched for a more industry-specific term? Find those long-tail terms and optimize for them instead of bashing your head against a wall of acrylic nail-selling beauty supply stores.
Both of these solutions involve redefining your web presence to a certain extent. Look at it this way. If you were a mom and pop cake bakery in Pittsburgh and there was another cake bakery across the street, wouldn’t you constantly strive to outstrip them by making sure your window display was better, more artistic, and with more icing in hopes of catching that fickle bridezilla’s attention? Though you’re competing for (and with) words in the online arena, the idea is the same.
Polish your content the way you would polish the glass windows of your store front, since it’s through these portals that your potential customers see who you really are and what you have to offer.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability, Writing for the web
Posted on February 12, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
Bit.ly Education – Part 2
This is the second of a 2-part post on using bit.ly. Part 1 – Bit.ly for Beginners – explained the basics of Bit.ly.
In the comments of the first post, Tim Wilson astutely observed the transparent nature of Bit.ly. Namely, you can get information (traffic, referrers, locations, conversations) about any Bit.ly link simply by taking the short URL and adding a “+” at the end (minus the quotes). For example – I shared yesterday’s post via Twitter using the shortened version of the URL – http://bit.ly/dwSQo4
Just for fun, you can see how many clicks that Bit.ly link received by going to http://bit.ly/dwSQo4+ (notice the plus sign at the end).
Are your wheels spinning yet?
Competitive Intelligence
You have a competitor that you keep tabs on, right? Maybe you have a Google Alert set up for their name, or maybe you follow them on Twitter (and monitor social media mentions of their name or product). Now you can track how effective they are at leveraging social media and see if specific campaigns they are running are having success. Or you can compare your own campaigns to theirs to see how you stack up.
There are two ways to do this. The first way is if you can find Bit.ly shortened links to your competitor’s pages. You might find these in their Twitter stream or on their Facebook fan page, or maybe you see someone else mention your competitor’s site with a Bit.ly link. Just take that Bit.ly URL and add the “+” (like mentioned above). Instant gratification! You can see how many clicks they’ve received, how many people have retweeted or shared the short URL and the conversations surrounding the link. If your competitor has a Twitter account, you can also go to Bit.ly Twitter search and do a search for from:twitterusername – here’s an example. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
If your competitor doesn’t Tweet or you can’t find any Bit.ly links to their pages, you just have to do some more reconnaissance. Find out which pages on your competitor’s site are the most popular. You can use a tool like Top Pages from SEOmoz (Pro Membership required) or search Google for site:yourcompetitor.com – along with the SEO for Firefox plugin (to quickly see the most linked to pages). Take the pages that are the most popular (i.e. most linked to) and shorten them yourself using Bit.ly. You’ll quickly see if anyone else has shortened that same URL, and if so, all the traffic information along with it.
Link Building
Let’s visit Bit.ly Twitter search again, this time with our link building hats on. This nice Bit.ly feature, although somewhat hidden, lets you search Twitter for Bit.ly links about anything and compare their click through and traffic data. For example you can do a search for a topic like Google Analytics and get a quick glimpse at what Google Analytics-related content has been popular recently.
Once you see what’s popular (I hate to use the term viral) you can decide on a similar topic for a future blog post. After you’ve written and published this post, finding people to spread the word is simple. All you have to do is go back to that Bit.ly search you did for Google Analytics, find a popular post (one that has received a lot of clicks) and click on “Info.”
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Now just scroll down a bit and look at the “Conversations.” You should find plenty of Twitterers who have shared a post on a similar topic as yours. Chances are, they’ll be willing to share yours too, if it’s good. All you have to do is let them know about it.
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Finding Influencers
Don’t believe the numbers you see on Twitter. Just because someone has 10,000 followers doesn’t mean that they’re popular or that anyone is listening to them. In a lot of cases, they’re just using shady techniques to get a lot of followers to make themselves look good. These are not the people you want to target to help spread the word about that awesome article you just wrote.
But how do you find those people with influence? These are people that, regardless of the number of Twitter followers they have, can get a lot of people to click on links that they tweet and retweet. I’d rather have someone with 500 followers tweet a link to my post (if 10% of their followers regularly click through and retweet) than someone with 5,000 followers, who can only get a 0.1% click through rate and no retweets. Here’s a good example – you’d think that with nearly 7,000 followers, this twitterer would be able to get more than a handful of people clicking on his links. C’est la vie!
So how do you find these influencers? There are some tools out there to guage a twitterer’s influence, like TweetStats and Twitalyzer, that arguably do a better job of this type of analysis. However, Bit.ly can give you a more detailed look at which posts/tweets a person was able to attract a lot of attention to.
For example, let’s say I wanted to know if Danny Sullivan would be able to attract a lot of eyes to this post if he tweeted about it (hint-hint, nudge-nudge). I can see he has a lot of followers (about 30,613) but does anyone read his tweets or click through on his links? Let’s find out by going back into the Bit.ly Twitter search and doing the following search – from:dannysullivan. (You can do this for anyone by searching for from:twitterusername, remember?)
Here’s a few of his recent tweets that include Bit.ly links:
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This is good, but we can do better. If you click “info” on one of the results to get the details, you’ll see that Danny is a registered user of Bit.ly.
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If you click on the user name, you’ll get all of the Bit.ly shortening history. So we can see that Danny does have a lot of influence, which is no real surprise.
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Problems
All of the above information is great, but it’s limited to the people who use Bit.ly it to shorten their links. Although Bit.ly is on of the most used shorteners, there’s certainly no shortage of options – is.gd, kl.am, tinyurl, cli.gs, ow.ly, goo.gl, etc.
Also, just because someone uses Bit.ly to shorten their links, doesn’t mean that they’re a registered Bit.ly user. A lot of apps (TweetDeck, twitterfeed, etc.) integrate Bit.ly to shorten links. This means you won’t be able to determine a person’s influence as easily through Bit.ly, like we saw above with Danny Sullivan.
http://bit.ly/app/search?q=google+analytics
View Comments (9 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous
Posted on February 10, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
Bit.ly Education – Part 1
This is the first of a 2-part post on using Bit.ly. Part 2 – Advanced Uses of Bit.ly – takes a deeper dive into this URL shortening service and shows how you can be Super Spy. Eat your heart out Bond.
I’ve talked previously about using Bit.ly to measure traffic from Twitter. Now let’s take a closer look at this URL shortening service. Bit.ly is an online service that allows you to take a long URL (http://www.example.com/blog/page/category/year/month/day/article/id=123456) and shorten it (to something like http://bit.ly/8FapX). Why would you want to do that? Simple. When you’re tweeting a link to your latest blog post, you have only 140 characters. Every character is precious, and if you can tweet a link that has 19 characters instead of 74 characters (like in the example URLs above) you have more space to craft a catchy line to get people to click through.
When someone clicks on the Bit.ly shortened version of your URL, they are then redirected to your original long URL. Bit.ly is kind enough to use a 301 redirect, which means that when search engines find links to the short URLs, they’ll credit those links to the long URL – your page. Don’t forget, links (quantity and quality) weigh heavily on how high your page and site rank in the search engines.
But wait, there’s more!
In addition to providing a short URL for your page, Bit.ly also gives some great information on traffic to that short URL (hence, your page). Here’s the rundown of what you can see:
- Number of times your shortened URL was clicked on
- Number of times other Bit.ly shortened versions of the same page were clicked on
- Watch in (near) real time as people click on your Bit.ly link
- Referring sites/applications from which your shortened URL was clicked
- Location (country) of the person clicking on your shortened URL
- Conversations – the tweets that include your Bit.ly link
(click to view larger)
When you create an account with Bit.ly (which takes about 30 seconds and only requires a user name, email and password) you also get access to these nice features:
History – Bit.ly keeps track of your shortened URLs and the data about them. They also show you how many clicks (across all shortened links) you’ve had in the past week and your most clicked Bit.ly links in the past hour.
Twitter Integration – You can tweet from straight from Bit.ly
Bit.ly Sidebar – A nice tool to quickly and easily shorten and share links from any web page
Stay tuned for Part 2 – Advanced Uses of Bit.ly – where I’ll show you how to use Bit.ly to spy on your competitors and find influential Twitterers.
BONUS: As a sneak peak into the next post, try this: find a tweet that interests you that includes a Bit.ly link. Click on the Bit.ly link. Copy the page’s URL and go to Bit.ly. Shorten the long URL. See how many people have clicked on that other person’s Bit.ly link? We’re just getting started…
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous
Posted on February 4, 2010 by John Henson
(Update: We have an automatic cross domain tracking script for the asynchronous version of Google Analytics. Check it out!)
Whenever a visitor crosses from one domain to another, the information contained in the cookies must be passed in the query string to the second domain. Google Analytics documentation recommends using the provided method of _link(). This looks like:
<a href=”http://www.newsite.com” onclick=”pageTracker._link(‘http://www.newsite.com’);return false;”>Go to our sister site</a>
Following this link will cause the visitor to arrive on the page http://www.newsite.com/?__utmb=. . . .&__utmv=. . . .&_utmk=123456789&__utma=1.1234567.1234567. . .&utmz=. . .
With the values of those query parameters used by the GA code on the new site to create the necessary tracking cookies.
But when you have a very large number of links that cross from one domain to the other, it is difficult to find and modify every one, and to continue to maintain and update new links as they are created in the site.
To manage a situation like this you can use JavaScript to automatically determine which links are cross-domain links. Once the script has determined which links are cross-domain links, it can create event listeners to wait for someone to click on that link. When they click, the event listener will trigger the GA code that adds the cookie information to the query parameters.
There are several examples of scripts like this, and sometimes the script will need to be modified slightly to suit a particular web site or particular needs.
iQ Content published an autotracking script in this blog post:
http://www.iqcontent.com/blog/2009/08/google-analytics-automatic-tracking-across-multiple-domains/
An example of a script that I used for a particular client:
http://lunametrics.com/autoTrack-crossdomain.js
You can also find script examples in the books:
* Advanced Web Metrics by Brian Clifton (http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/about-the-book/)
* GA Short Cuts by Justin Cutroni (http://gashortcut.com/)
If you have an example of an automatic tracking script for GA you’d like to share, link to it in the comments below.
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on February 2, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Looking at a website written in a foreign language is incredibly insightful. You may not get the immediate gratification of being able to easily find the location of a particular Prada shoe store, but you’ll find out a lot about yourself and how you use the site.
Let me preface this post by giving you all a little background about my recent activities. I recently went on a 10 day trip to Rome, Italy to visit my mother who has an apartment there for a month.
Rome, with its seemingly never-ending wealth of culture, beauty and delicious, delicious gelato and amazing boots kept me completely occupied about 16 hours of the day. But at the end of the day as it got dark and cold and damp, I would come home and indulge in a tiny cup of espresso and my internet addiction.
Though I was under strict orders from Robbin to avoid work at all costs, I still found myself dabbling around the web looking at where clients ranked in Google from Italy and paying attention to the differences in the types of results that came up when searching in Italy (for instance, the local 7 pack wasn’t as prevalent there even if I did searches for local shoe stores etc.) I must admit, I was also researching where to get fur/leather/boots and all the other things I’d made up my mind to purchase while in Rome.
I should also mention that I do not speak Italian at all. I took some Latin in high school, but that’s about as close to Italian as I’ve ever come. This profound lack of literacy made wandering around on Italian websites a somewhat confusing venture. It was only after three days of searching around for various things that I realized that what I was actually doing was usability testing.
Interesting Insights
It occurred to me that, in the nanoseconds of time that users give websites to prove their worth, the actual words on the page matter slightly less than the overall composition and clarity of the webpage. I realized what a unique experience it was to have to translate meaning from colors and shapes rather than actual words on the site.
Since all (yes all) of the Italian the shoe store sites I drooled over were flash sites I won’t use them for this usability blog post. However, I was on a few Italian travel sites trying to find good prices for tickets for inter-European travel (for funsies…I was just curious about how much Italians paid for their vacations) and quickly just how difficult it is to use the Italian versions of Orbitz, and Priceline. Then I stumbled upon Edenviaggi and was immediately impressed.
The first thing that struck me about this site was its clarity. I felt that my eye could rest somewhere and, before I even knew what the words on the page meant, I felt like I could stop there and figure it out. It lacked the overwhelming info-packed clutter that plague so many other travel sites. The call to action is clear and was visible even on my tiny little netbook. The form was quick and easy to fill out and the resulting information was exactly what I wanted. It was the perfect research site, and I could immediately understand it without knowing a single word of Italian.
Translate Your Own Site
Now, if you really want to screw with your head, take a look at your own baby: the website whose content you crafted so carefully and whose design you agonized over. Go to translate.google.com and enter in the URL. Make sure you’re translating into a language you don’t know. Then take some time to click around your site, or a competitor’s site. Without text to guide you, can you figure out what to do? Is the website set up in such a way that you intuitively know how to get where you’re going?
It’s likely that without directions and prompts it’s going to be really hard to figure out where to go and what to do. Try checking out or filling out a contact form. Ask yourself how you could make that process more intuitive
In conclusion, I want to make a few clarifications. I’m not trying to imply that if you can’t get through your site in another language you (and your site) fail. The actual words on the site are integral to the user, and can’t be discounted.
I guess I’m just offering a bit of a unique perspective here. It’s sort of like how some famous artist (I wish I could remember who!) used to draw faces from the bottom up instead of the top down in order to free himself from the preconceptions inherent in doing something in an entrenched pattern. By removing one part of the website, you can gain insights into how you view other things and maybe some flaws will jump out at you.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Usability
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