Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category
Posted on September 3, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
Twitter recently announced a couple of updates that caught my eye. The first one deals with new authorization rules for Twitter applications. Although this one is less interesting to me, it does explain why Twitterrific stopped working on my iPhone this past Monday. (They may have fixed it by now, I don’t know. I already switched to Twitter’s own Twitter iPhone app, which I actually like better anyway.)
The second update that potentially has more impact, from an SEO and analytics perspective, is regarding their link service. Here’s the section of the e-mail they sent out that explains this update:
Update 2: t.co URL wrapping
In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant.
You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; we expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.
What does this mean for me?
This raises some questions.
They say “when you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service…” Does this mean a series of redirects? How will this effect the referral data and any potential link juice or other social signals the search engines may take into account?
Also, that third bullet point at the end got me excited. So Twitter will be collecting click-through data on links (if they weren’t already). Unfortunately, they won’t be sharing that data with just anyone. You’ll have to be signed up for one of their “eventual commercial accounts service,” according to their blog post on this topic.
Where does this leave URL shortening services like Bit.ly?
Take a look at the second bullet point above, where Twitter talks about removing the obscurity of shortened links. That certainly doesn’t sound too friendly toward Bit.ly, ow.ly, tinyurl or any other link shortening services. Twitter does make mention of this in more depth on their help center page about the link service. Specifically, they state:
You can still use a URL shortener (like bit.ly) to shorten links.
If you’re wanting to shorten links to share with others, please see this help page on using URL Shorteners. You can continue to use a URL shortener to shorten links, and any tracking metrics (like those from bit.ly) will continue working as before.
The link service at http://t.co is only used on links posted on Twitter and is not available as a general shortening service.
Confused yet? I sure am. Will my bit.ly link be wrapped in a t.co link (whatever “wrapped” means)? Will the t.co link redirect to the bit.ly link which will redirect to the actual page? That doesn’t seem very efficient. Will link juice pass through the t.co service? Too many questions and not enough answers.
Not to be all negative, I have to give Twitter credit for trying to make the web a safer place. The primary purpose of this link service is to “protect users from malicious site that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks and other harmful activity.” That’s a noble directive and one that I can support.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Industry News, Miscellaneous
Posted on August 31, 2010 by Robbin Steif
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.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on August 3, 2010 by Robbin Steif
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: Industry News
Posted on July 12, 2010 by Robbin Steif
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 Steif
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 (5 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!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Robbin Steif
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
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News
Posted on January 6, 2010 by Robbin Steif
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 Steif
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
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