Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category
Posted on August 31, 2010 by Robbin
Just a quick note to tell those of you in the Boston area that we will be sold out on the Boston GA Seminars for Success Intermediate Analysis in that city soon, and the Webmaster day is also getting pretty full. (Dates: Sept. 21-23. I think we will sell out on the Intermediate day by Labor Day.) Also, we are having another SEO workshop here in our fair city of Pittsburgh, October 12.
You can see our Google Analytics Seminars for Success training here, where you can also register. On the other hand, if you are interested in our Pittsburgh SEO workshop, go to this link.
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Posted on August 3, 2010 by Robbin
You might already know that we’re doing a Google Analytics Seminar for Success in DC next week (August 10-12.) But you might not have heard that the second day, Intermediate/Advanced analysis (GA 201) sold out. So we’re going to have a free webinar with some of our favorite GA 201 topics (about 1.5 hours long) for anyone who signs up for the 101 or 301 after the date that we sold out (last Monday).
(sidenote: I just noticed that someone who wanted to do the 201 and 301 in DC registered to do them in Boston. See below)
We’ll also be training in Boston (Sept 21-23), Chicago (Nov. 2-4) and NYC (Dec 7-9.) All registrations can be done at the same page, http://www.lunametrics.com/google-analytics-training/seminars
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Announcements, Industry News
Posted on July 12, 2010 by Robbin
Just a quick note to tell you that we’ll be doing Google Analytics Seminars for Success in four cities during the second half of 2010:
Washington DC: August 10-12
Boston: Sept. 21-23
Chicago: Nov. 2-4
NYC: Dec. 7-9
You can check out all the details on our Google Analytics training page.
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Posted on May 3, 2010 by Robbin
We are going to be unveiling our new and improved Google Analytics Training in NYC, June 8-10.
Here is the problem that trainers have when they teach about any technical topic — different attendees are at different levels. We used to get this feedback in the evaluation forms all the time. Some attendees would write, “Over my head,” and others would write, “Too basic.” Then we started to segment the first day (marketing/analysis) by user level, and our ratings went sky high. (See, when they tell you that segmentation is the heart of web analytics, they don’t just mean the tool you are using….)
In NYC, we’ll be having three days of training: Google Analytics 101, 201 and 301. The first day is for beginning marketers (or those analysts who have never worked with GA before.) The second day is for advanced analysts. We get questions related to this problem all the time, “How do I take my analysis to a new level?” And the third day is for techies.
It’s $499/day, with a $50 discount when the same individual attends two days (and $100 off for three days of attendance by the same individual), with lots of Google goodies, lunch, etc.
Click here to learn more or to register.
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News
Posted on April 20, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Recently, I gave a presentation about this topic at SMX in Toronto. I’m going to get a little more mileage out of said presentation by posting the slides and detailed notes here on the LunaMetrics blog.
The difference between Traditional Link Building and Social Media Link Building
The biggest difference between a Social Media link building campaign and a traditional link building campaign is the type of links we’ll be going after.
With traditional link building campaigns, the focus is on links that will help your site RANK higher. Links that pass on link juice, enhance page rank and trust rank and generally improve the strength of your domain. If the links also drive traffic — great. The logic is Links lead to Rankings which in turn leads to Traffic.
Social media links are a horse of a different color. Our goal is to create links that will likely be tagged nofollow and therefore pass very little link juice or provide any benefit to rankings at all. The end result will be the same as ranking higher: Loads and loads of targeted traffic to the site. The logic here is Links lead directly to Traffic.
For the record, I am not saying that ranking is not important. Let me state my opinion here boldly so that I may never be misquoted: Rankings are important! Ranking high for targeted keywords drives lots of awesome traffic to your site! A social media link building campaign should augment your current link building efforts, not replace them.
A Quick Definition of Social Media Sites
The best definition of a Social Media site, or Social Media platform, as they’re sometimes called, is in the slide above. I stumbled across it one day and then totally forgot who said it so unfortunately I can’t cite the original. (If you said this contact me and I’ll link to you!) This definition covers a broad spectrum of sites: Sharing and Community sites are ones like Facebook and Myspace. Review Sites include Yelp and Citysearch. Popularity sites like Digg and Redit rank your content against other content.
Promo sites might be one of the most overlooked social media platforms EVER. They’re sites that post promo codes and deals. Thunderfap, though ineptly named, is one of the best examples of a promo site. Microblogging sites include Twitter and Tumblr. Blogs and Forums are self explanatory. The ones you’ll focus on depend on your industry.
Planning your Social Media Campaign
- Research: The first step to planning your social media campaign is researching where your demographic hangs out online. Are your potential customers (readers, investors, contributors etc.) Tweeting their fingers off or are they lurking around a forum? Or a little of both with some Facebook thrown in. Narrowing down your target sites will go a long way to help you streamline your campaign and ensure that you’re not focusing your efforts on sites that are useless to you.
- Building Your Persona(s): The second step is creating your persona. For the purposes of this blog, a social media persona is a character you create to represent the brand you’re promoting. Unless you’re promoting yourself, you should create a social media persona around your brand and not mix business with pleasure as it were. If you are a vendor and have several clients, lump them into verticals and create a personal for each vertical. For instance, if you have a restaurateur, a kitchen goods retail store and a food blogger as clients, these can all be lumped together in one vertical since the subject matter overlaps. Trying to maintain a persona for each client is a huge mistake because there is no way you can ever do them all justice and still have enough time in the day to take care of other obligations.
- Identify Your Targets: Your targets in this case are the people on the social media platforms that are most likely to disseminate the links that you post. On Twitter, a great target would be a Tweeter who talks about similar things, has a large following and retweets or links often. On Facebook, a related page or group could be a target. On Yelp, people who are dissing your competition can be targets. (Or people talking you down, surprisingly enough.)
- Build Relationships: It all comes down to this. You can’t speak into a void and expect anyone to listen to you. One must build firm relationships online in order to be heard when they speak. If you just randomly @ someone on Twitter with a promo, and they’ve never heard of you before, there is a much smaller chance that they’ll retweet or even follow your link.
- Choose the Best Pages to Link To: If your goal is to bring traffic in and convert it into sales, engaging product pages are the best pages to link to in your Social Media campaign. If your goal is to encourage inbound links of the traditional sort, you need to link to viral pages on your site. Either way, choosing the page to link to is as important as choosing who your targets are.
- Start Plugging, but Stay Classy: It’s important to obey good social media etiquette when you do start linking to your site and encouraging others to pass those links along and drive traffic for you. Don’t just shout about yourself all day, and for Pete’s sake, don’t spam your targets with tons of links. It’s annoying and it will ruin your credibility and destroy any chance of success.
Specific Strategies
This is a Shameless Tease. Now that we have all the theory down, stay tuned for my next post when we’ll put it into practice with specific techniques you can take right from this very blog and apply to your own personal campaign.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Industry News, Writing for the web
Posted on April 9, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Measuring Online and Offline Conversions from Search.
Speakers
Andy Fisher
Ezra Silverton
Scott Duncan
Andy Fisher:
It’s almost impossible to map everything that people do before they get to your site. Most solutions don’t work.
There are many cases where being able to track site-side behavior is incredibly important. For instance deciding what kinds of products to sell.
Do you have a good SEM strategy? Do you have a good SEO strategy? Does everyone in your company agree on what a “conversion” is? Once you know these things, you’ll be able to start.
When you actually start to look at search sequences, you find that they’re more complicated, random and interesting than you thought.
Find out which offline/online things you can attribute sales to. Look at search sequences: i.e.
- saw and ad and typed search term in search bar
- get to site
It’s easy to attribute the sale to search even though it was the ad that originally triggered the search.
Some tools make attribution hard to judge attributions.
On site analytics are usually last click. Some are first click.
Conversion Attribution models:
- Last Click, Last view gets credit.
- First click gets credit.
- Equal Touch
Do search network attribution only.
TV had an effect on search traffic. In each silo, TV silo, network silo, ad silo, every click look like it should be attributed to them.
Ezra Silverton and Scott Duncan:
Ad campaign goes out across all media: Print, Radio, TV, Onilne. They’re pointed at
- Inbound calls (unique number)
- Website (unique url)
- Email (unique email address)
Every action online can be tracked, but what happens when someone calls you to convert?
ref:Code Analytics Product: Provides information on user’s online behavior including referral source, paths, keywords searched, pages viseted etc. in real time.
Case Study: George Brown College
They sell online technical training programs.
Multiple domains, print ads, SEO, SEM, Youtube TV Radio
Front door is lead generation which gets fed into the CRM tool MAximizer
Approximately 70% of people visit the website before contacting (calling, emailing or filling out web form.)
Campaigns push prospects to website address or phone to obtain info package or discuss with advisor.
Offline methods go to specific web pages on the site and a set of different 800# in order to track who comes in through which on or offline method.
Google Web Analytics to track website traffic.
Online ads are tracked through normal ways: Google Analytics tags email software tracking tags.
Hard to get a good idea of attribution from asking the clients how they got to the site because half the time they don’t know how they REALLY got there.
The sum of the ad tactics is more than the total. If they kill the TV line, other parts will suffer etc.
Andrea Hadley chimes in:
She overlaid GA paid search trending with her call center trending. She knew that people who bought the clients product after calling, so it was important that these trends matched.
Great panel discussion!
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Posted on March 9, 2010 by Robbin
Just a quick note about our upcoming Google Analytics Training in New York City — we are going to have three days of training so that we can reach all the right levels. We’ll be having:
- Google Analytics 101, on June 8. This is for the true beginner (I get so many emails that read, “Robbin, no one knows less than me. Just teach me what I don’t even know how to ask.”) We’ll teach you how to log in, how to find your own profile, how to look at the various reports, find the data you need, and other basics for those of you who are either new to analytics or new to Goolge Analytics.
Google Analytics 201, on June 9. This is an all-day seminar for those who are pretty good with the reporting in GA, and really want to take their analytics capabilities and GA capabilities to the next level. This is another request we get a lot (“So much data, so little insight”) and so the focus will be on advanced usage and analysis. This day also includes a strong introduction to Google Website Optimizer.
Google Analytics 301, on June 10. This is a techie day. From filters and profiles to events and ecommerce, learn all the techie tricks and a few that you hadn’t even considered.
This will be our fourth training in NYC – we’ll be at the New York City Seminar and Conference Center again (map it) There will be free wi-fi for all (so if you can bring your laptop, do so, and if not, you’ll be ok.) We include breakfast and lunch and slides for all, plus Google goodies. You can read the agenda or register here.
Robbin
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Posted on January 6, 2010 by Robbin
Today, we got a phone call from a potential customer, who had been recommended by another customer. I took one look at his site and was fairly certain that he had paid no attention to SEO, had no analytics, and had no calls to action.
“So,” he challenged me, “Why should I use your company?” Well, I answered, maybe you shouldn’t use our company. I don’t recommend that everyone spend their money without having strong goals. Maybe you should start by telling me what your needs are.
The man on the other end of the phone said that all his company’s sales had been face-to-face or by referral up until now. They had a little site, but did they really need to spend money? Did I know if people really found his type of services through the internet? In fact, his needs weren’t so much SEO or PPC or GA or GWO. He needed to be persuaded that those alphabet soup of internet services and tools were worthy of his budget dollars.
It is one thing to sell someone on the value of, say, Google Analytics. It is something else entirely to take someone who doesn’t have a strategic or emotional commitment to the work we do and convince them to spend their money there. I guess that’s a game I don’t want to play. I feel like, you decide that you care on your own time, them come to us (or to another consulting company.) Consulting on the Internet is hard enough when your point of contact is committed (because s/he may have other priorities, may have to answer to his/her boss, may get moved around the organization.) Imagine how hard it would be if the person writing the checks really isn’t sure that the Internet matters.
Robbin
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on November 30, 2009 by Robbin
1) Just wanted to remind everyone that our Google Analytics Training is going to be on December 8 and 9 in DC (Analysis day on the 8th, techie day on the 9th.) Prices start at $199 to attend half a day on the 8th; some people need to attend both days in full, and that price is $650. You can see the Google Analytics training microsite and register here. Tuesday the 8th (analysis) is at the American Institute of Architects, and the 9th is at the Mathematical Association’s Carriage House (Dupont Circle.)
2) Separately, I just wrote an article on “How Bounce Rate can help you Pinpoint Site Problems.” It’s on Dr. Ralph Wilson’s website, Web Marketing Today. (In the course of writing the article, I found out that this is their 15th anniversary. Just think, to be at this for fifteen years, you had to start in 1994. ) Enjoy!
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News, Web Analytics
Posted on October 2, 2009 by Jim
First of all, for those that can’t keep up with all the latest and greatest features 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
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2007/08/08/regular-expressions-for-ga-bonus-iii-lookahead/&usd=1&usg=AFQjCNEJnC7BWykRg1GKn52tQTpdd0RmQw
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
google.com/sidewiki/entry/106935257806183022682/id/65RQs-s3d9nGKlxKN-7XTSvgaHI
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]
Here, I’ve made it easy for you – www.google.com/profiles/106935257806183022682
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.
/sidewiki/entry/106935257806183022682/id/65RQs-s3d9nGKlxKN-7XTSvgaHI
View Comments (10 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News, Miscellaneous, Web Analytics
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