Archive for October, 2010
Posted on October 28, 2010 by John Henson
Each time a page is viewed on a website with GA implemented, one of the pieces of information that is passed back to Google is the domain of the site on which the page was viewed.
This seems pretty straight foward.
If visitors view http://lunametrics.com/index.html the hostname is lunametrics.com
If visitors view http://lunametrics.com/training.html the hostname is lunametrics.com
If visitors view http://lunametrics.com/blog.html the hostname is lunametrics.com
If visitors view http://lunametrics.com/sexytimes.html the hostname is lunametrics.com
See a pattern?
So a report that lists all the traffic to the lunametrics.com site should be pretty damn boring.
We might expect it to look something like this:
And that would be the end of this post.
Except that, in fact though, our hostnames report looks like this:
Okay, so let’s take a quick look at some of these other hostnames.
webcache.googleusercontent.com
This one is easy. When Google crawls websites, they also save the pages in their own cache. This is people who have viewed our LunaMetrics webpages from that cache instead of at LunaMetrics.
translate.googleusercontent.com
Also easy. People who view our website through Google’s translate service. Looks like we may have a few readers who don’t want to, or aren’t able to, read the english version.
Bonus Tip (from Jonathan Weber): If you look at the pages from translate.googleusercontent.com (using an Advanced Segment, for example), you can see which pages people translated, and the URLs also include a query parameter that tells you which language the page was translated into.
www.google.com
Not sure, maybe the cached pages sometimes come up as google.com instead of googleusercontent.com? Something I’ll have to look into because now I’m curious.
web.com
This is a website hosting service. Did someone post a copy of one of our webpages here? Maybe someone at LunaMetrics was playing with their service? I don’t know.
72.22.16.69
Our IP address, instead of ‘lunametrics.com’
lunametrics.presslift.com
A press release service that hosts your press release. Going here shows one of our Training pages. Maybe someone here was trying out their service?
checkout.google.com
If you use Google Checkout, part of the process happens on checkout.google.com. There’s an integration with GA that lets you measure visits to those pages directly to your GA account, allowing you to set up a complete funnel for your checkout goal. This hostname is due to those pages.
mail.lunametrics.com
Our web-mail service. Maybe someone emailed themselves one of our webpages?
2.hidemyass.com
This is a proxy service. Looks like someone didn’t want their boss to know they were checking out our site!!
74.6.239.185
This is a Yahoo.com IP address. Maybe used for Yahoo’s page caching.
cc.bingj.com
Bing’s page caching domain.
edit.optimizely.com
This is a Website Testing tool. Looks like someone here uploaded some of our website content to optimizely to test out their service?
lunametrics.com
Usually, lunametrics.com gets re-written to www.lunametrics.com. Looks like there is at least one case where it doesn’t get re-written correctly.
Besides seeing your domain without any prefix, you may also see your own subdomains listed here, such as blog.lunametrics.com or store.lunametrics.com. This is a great guide to what subdomains you should doublecheck tracking for to make sure you have the same GA code on each subdomain.
web.archive.org
Another webpage caching service.
www.anon.me
Another proxy service like hidemyass.com
Well, that’s it. That’s the hostnames report and some of the information you can get from it.
View Comments (9 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on October 26, 2010 by Robbin Steif
About five months ago, I decided (as did lots of other people) that social media is powerful, but it had to be used well.
So our company — led by one very interested analyst — learned all the nuances of great and no-so-great Facebook company pages. Before we started to put together a “real” facebook presence (as opposed to just a page), we thought a lot about strategy.
What did we want our Facebook page to do for us? Sure, it would be great to do giveaways and prizes and contests there — that’s what we do with lots of our customers — but that doesn’t work as well for a B2B site. Plus, we already have this blog. Hmm.
Ultimately, we decided that our blog was the place that people were going to get more in-depth, technical, cutting edge (do I need more adjectives?) advice about Google Analytics, SEO, PPC and other web marketing. But Internet users comprise an incredible spectrum of knowledge. So we decided to create a Tips and Tricks tab on our Facebook page, where we have basic advice for those who are in the ultraviolet part of that spectrum.
Enjoy.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media
Posted on October 21, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
NO.
As tempted as I am to end the blog post after that first word/sentence, I owe it to you to explain. It seems recently (in the past year) I’ve run across a number of sites that use custom built content management systems (CMS). Two in particular are client sites. Although they each have varying degrees of awfulness, it got me thinking about why web designers and developers feel the need to create custom CMSs for sites that would be better off using an opensource CMS, like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.
Although I could speculate about why I think developers create custom CMSs, it would be just that – speculation (and it would most likely just anger the designer/developer community). Instead, I asked a web designer I know to help me understand why custom CMSs are even considered anymore, given the easy access to numerous free alternatives. He helped me come up with the following list of reasons for a custom CMS:
- Security through obscurity – hackers are writing scripts for popular CMSs, not custom CMSs.
- Custom functionality – sometimes the purpose or function of a site is specialized enough that a custom CMS doesn’t address the site requirements in the most efficient manner.
- Cleaner code – sometimes a site may be so simple and focused that you don’t need all the bells and whistles of WordPress or Drupal, and the code can be cleaner and less bloated.
- Any other reasons? Let me know in the comments.
Those are all valid reasons, but to how many sites across the web would they apply? Not many, I think. The kinds of sites that I do see getting custom CMS treatment tend to be of the garden variety business web sites. You know the kind, less than 100 pages, typical online brochures with a home page, about us, products/services, contact, TOS/privacy policy page and not much more.
These are the sites that clearly do NOT need a custom CMS. Yet time and time again, I see business owners that don’t know any better, and they end up with a poorly performing site (especially from an SEO perspective). To give an example, one custom CMS I worked with didn’t even provide the ability to change title tags, meta descriptions, or URLs (all things that are easily done in WordPress, for example).
So, if you’re redesigning your site, here are some things to keep in mind if your design company is pushing a custom CMS:
- They lock you in – anytime you need an update to the system, you have to go to them. Those updates can get pretty expensive (good for your design company, bad for you).
- Bugs – if they’re building the CMS from scratch, there will be bugs. Are they willing to fix those? For free? For how long?
- Fit and Finish – your brand new custom CMS will not be as polished in terms of look and feel or usability, because it hasn’t undergone multiple updates that pass through hundreds of developers with feedback from thousands.
- Functionality – they may not include critical functionality (like the ability to write custom title tags and meta descriptions for each page, custom URLs, etc.). Even worse, they may charge you extra for this functionality and call it an “SEO package.” Don’t get me started on that one.
- Documentation – there may not be any well written documentation on how to use it, make changes, etc.
- Migration – once you realize how much better you would be with an opensource CMS, it can be a nightmare to migrate your site from a custom CMS. (see reason #1)
Here’s some more food for thought. WordPress has five lead developers, three designers, nine contributing developers, two documentation and support specialists, eight developer emeriti and countless testers. It was first released on May 27, 2003 and has since been updated 59 times, averaging a major release every six months or so. That’s nearly 7 ½ years of development (for free). Can your web developer offer that?
Additionally, if you need custom functionality for your web site, or you don’t want it to look like a cookie-cutter site, there are endless possibilities for customization. Instead of creating a custom CMS, your designer could create a custom theme, or your developer could write a custom plugin. But even that is often unnecessary when you consider the number of plugins already created for popular opensource CMSs:
- WordPress: 11,704 plugins
- Drupal: 6,739 modules
- Joomla: 6,002 extensions
So, do you need a custom CMS? I think I answered that in the first sentence.
Am I wrong or missing a side of the story? Please tell me so in the comments.
View Comments (20 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Search Engine Optimization
Posted on October 19, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Well, it’s been one week since our last Pittsburgh SEO training workshop, and I’m here to report that it was great success. 
We changed the format slightly to better suit the needs of both beginner and advanced attendees by splitting the day in half. During the morning, we covered basic topics for SEO newbies like how the search engines work, defining the importance of links, and local SEO. During the afternoon, we covered these subjects from a more advanced level and included presentations about SEO friendly site structure, SEO for multimedia and specific advanced link building and social media strategies.
The success of the new shone through in the reviews we got on our post-event evaluation forms:
“Very informative. Best SEO/Social Media presentation I’ve attended.”
“The [sessions] were just right, especially the advanced. They taught me new things but weren’t too hard to follow.”
We had a blast (as aways!) Stay tuned for more info on future training!
PS. There was a question asked by one of our attendees: How do you avoid mobile versions of a site causing duplicate content issues. We wanted to cover that in more depth afterwards, but never got the chance so here’s one possible answer, if you’re out there reading this:
Code the site normally, but create CSS that will be triggered when a mobile device accesses the site. That way, you’ll just be presenting the same info but formatted nicely for mobile devices. No dupe content necessary!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on October 11, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Last week, I was at Big Picture Communications , a marketing and research agency here in Pittsburgh. We talked about their Google Analytics, their SEO and their website in general. And then I showed them one of my favorite tools, usertesting.com.
They *loved* it. (And who wouldn’t?) Fast, inexpensive, great results if you ask great questions. The Big Picture Communications thought process, though, was so interesting.
Thought #1: “We could do this for our own site.”
Thought #2: “We could do this for customer sites.”
Thought #3: “We could do this for our (and our customers’) competitors’ sites.”
That last thought is so powerful. SEOs are so smart about gleaning insight into their craft from competitive sites, I wonder why conversion artists don’t do the same? (OK, you do. So go ahead and comment. Would love to hear from you.) Instead of listening to real users say, “I love that widget,” or, “I’ll click, but that’s way too expensive for me,” we rely on our instincts.
Wouldn’t it be great to write a protocol for the target demographic that asks questions like,
- “What are the three things you love most about this [competitor's] site and why?”
- “What are the three aspects of this [competitor's] site that you dislike the most or that you found the most difficult to use?”
- “Would you recommend this site to your friends/colleagues, why or why not?”
Then, instead of Competitor Copy Condition, we’ll have something to test. We might even become Compassionate Contenders, as we learn that users don’t quite love the competition’s site.
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on October 7, 2010 by John Henson
With GA you can track custom information about a visitor, a specific visit, or a particular page with Custom Variables.
One of the things people often want to do is to know when the visit is a signed-in visit.
The GA JavaScript is pretty easy for this. Assuming you’re not using any other Custom Variables, it might look like this (Depending on whether you’re using the traditional or async syntax.):
pageTracker._setCustomVar(1,”Signed-in status”, “Signed-in”, 2);
OR
_gaq.push(["_setCustomVar", 1, "Signed-in status", "Signed-in", 2]);
(Here is the GA documentation for _setCustomVar and information on how to set a Custom Variable.)
The trick is to execute this JavaScript at the right time — right after the visitor does actually sign-in. And there are probably as many correct ways to do it as there are websites.
One of the easier ways to implement this is to include the JavaScript in an HTML element that only gets included in the webpage when the visitor is signed in.
For example, here are 2 screenshots of the aboutus.org website. The first is the signed-in version. The second is the signed-out version.
Notice how the block of HTML in the Top-Right Corner changes. This block would be a good candidate for where to execute the GA code. Just include the GA JavaScript from the example above in the “signed-in” block and you’re done.
The downside is that although this is simple and fast, it would execute the JavaScript for every page. This isn’t a problem from the reporting side, but since it is only required to execute once for tracking purposes, executing it every time is needless. Realistically, it executes pretty quickly and should not slow down the user experience.
Once you’ve set the custom variable for your signed-in visits, you can then look at that segment of visits and see how they stack up. Are they more likely to click on ads? Sign up for your newsletter? Purchase a product? Of course, you can get these insights by going to the Visitors > Custom Variables report in your GA, or by creating a Custom Report to pull in just the information you want to see for that segment.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Custom Variables, Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on October 5, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
When Google announced their new instant search results a few weeks ago (September 8, to be exact) a lot of search marketers made various hypotheses. There were the typical doom-and-gloom, SEO is dead posts from those seeking attention by using controversy as a link bait tactic. Then there were the more level headed responses questioning whether long-tail traffic would increase, decrease, or stay the more or less the same. Now that we’ve been living in a Google instant world for a few weeks, I wanted to take a look at the data to see if any trends were really starting to emerge.
The Details
Number of sites: I looked at 24 sites, ranging in size from small (900 monthly visits) to large (2.4 million monthly visits) and everything in between. The average monthly visits for all sites was 190,250.
Time Frame: I compared 23 days of pre-Google Instant (Wednesday, Aug. 11 – Thursday, Sept. 2) to 23 days post-Google Instant (Wednesday, Sept. 8 – Thursday Sept. 30).
Total number of visits and keywords: During that time frame, there were 3,182,487 visits from 1,197,374 keywords.
The Numbers
I looked at two main metrics, percentage of search visits from keywords of a given length and percentage of keywords of a given length. Then I segmented those metrics by total organic search and non-branded organic search. First up, the total organic search numbers:
So far, nothing too drastic seems to be happening. One-word searches (the head terms) and 5+ word searches (the tail terms) seem to be edging out the 2, 3, and 4-word searches (the chunky middle). But I’m not running for the hills just yet. Let’s change channels now to look at just the non-branded search visits and keywords.
Again, no clear conclusions that point to the death of the long-tail here. If anything, the data (as limited as it is after only three weeks) points to a very slight increase in the tail.
Aside: if you want to learn how to see visits in Google Analytics by keyword length, read John’s post on Keyword Analysis by Number of Terms (and the RegEx That Helps). In short, you can use the following regular expression in the keyword filter field: ^(\W*\w+\b\W*){1}$ where the number within the curly braces is the number of keywords in the search term.
One other thing that I looked at was the share of search of the top 3 search engines. Particularly, I wanted to see if Google’s share of search increased or decreased – did people hate it enough to switch to Bing/Yahoo? Here’s the aggregated data:
Google’s share of search increased by nearly 1%, but those numbers actually hide some of the nuances of particular sites and industries. For example, one site saw Google’s share of search increase from 71% to 80.39%, while another site saw it decrease from 72.04% to 68.1%. Although there were a few sites that saw those kinds of significant shifts, for most sites they remained relatively unchanged.
Your Turn…
Have you seen any changes since Google Instant? Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments!
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
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