Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Posted on August 5, 2010 by Jim
As a search analyst, I’m often obsessed concerned with how many visits a website has received from search engine traffic. It’s one way to measure the success of an SEO project. Even better, I like to measure how many visits came from non-branded keywords (because those are the people who don’t already know you – new blood!).
But there’s one thing I want need to know and track on an ongoing basis that GA just doesn’t do. I need to see how many keywords send traffic and whether the number of keywords (NOK) is increasing or decreasing. Fortunately, GA does at least tell us how many keywords sent visits for a specified period, it just doesn’t let us see how that number changes over time.
Why are number of keywords important?
There are a couple reasons why I need to know whether the NOK sending traffic to a site is increasing or decreasing over time. Generally, it helps to measure progress during an SEO project. It’s one more indicator of success, especially if a main piece of the project involves creating content.
Indexation
If the NOK is increasing, that’s a good indication that the number of pages of the site being indexed and/or ranking highly is increasing. If you’re creating a lot of new content (blog posts, video, recipes, articles, etc.) it’s good to see if your efforts are paying off.
Of course, other factors can affect your NOK. Maybe you’ve changed your navigation menu or site architecture, or maybe you’ve been doing a good job of getting links to deep pages within your site. The effects of those endeavors will likely be seen in your NOK.
Early Alert
Monitoring your NOK also gives you a heads-up on site issues. If you see your NOK suddenly decrease, you can quickly look into any site changes that were made that may have caused a drop in rankings or indexation. No changes? Maybe your site’s been hacked (check Google Webmaster Tools for your site and Fetch as Googlebot).
Variety
Is your blog like a broken record? Do you keep talking about the same thing over and over again? Check your NOK – is it stagnant? Maybe you need to talk about something different, or at least from a different perspective. By introducing more variety to the content on your site or blog, you’ll be able to target different keywords. Even if your blog or site is very narrowly focused, I’m sure you can find some aspect of your niche that you haven’t discussed before.
How to Monitor Your NOK
Like I said before, GA doesn’t make it easy to monitor your NOK over time. To do that, you’ll have to do some manual labor in Excel. It’s nothing fancy – no macros or formulas involved – just some simple data entry and charts and graphs. Here’s a sample chart of what you can get, followed by the step-by-step instructions:
1. Open Excel and create a new spreadsheet. In the first column, label the first row “Date” and the second row “NOK” (or Number of Keywords, if that’s easier to remember).
2. Determine how often you want to monitor your NOK. I recommend at least once a month, but if you are actively engaged in link building or if you’re making some significant site changes, you may want to check this more often. Of course, you can go back in your analytics data as far back as you have it, so in addition to keeping track of it moving forward, you can back fill previous months. At this point, you can fill in the specific dates in the columns of your spreadsheet.
3. Find in the numbers. The only thing left to fill in on our spreadsheet is the number of keywords that sent traffic for each month. This is easy enough to find in Google Analytics. Go to the Traffic Sources > Keywords report. Set the date range to the month (or week or day) you’re interested in, and you’ll find the NOK right beneath the graph, like below:
(click to enlarge)
4. Fill in the numbers. Take the NOK from that report and enter it in your spreadsheet. Then wash, rinse and repeat. In a few minutes, your spreadsheet should look similar to this:
5. Create a chart. You’re almost done! Now all you have to do is create a chart based on that data, which is easy enough to do in Excel. From the “Insert” tab, click on Line chart:
6. Select your chart data by clicking on Select Data. In the pop up menu, for “chart data range” just click on the cell with the first month’s number (1,578 in the example below) and drag to the last month’s number (or you can hold “shift” and click on the last number).
7. Fill in the details. You can pretty-up the chart by editing the labels for the horizontal axis and series name, and in no time, you have the chart that I showed you at the beginning.
Now, if someone could create a Firefox plugin or web app using the GA API that would do this automatically, I’d be a happy man. Any takers?
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Posted on June 24, 2010 by John
In the right sidebar of our blog is a form that can be used to submit questions.
Mostly it is just used to spam us, but we do occasionally get a legitimate question or two:
Question 1 concerned exporting more rows. The official GA blog posted an article on this topic not long ago. The trick is to use a query parameter in the URL:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/08/back-to-basics-tip-for-exporting-rows.html
Question 2 was about image files showing up in Top Content reports when they shouldn’t.
Normally an image file would not appear at all in your Top Content reports, unless you add special implementation. I’m not sure how to answer this question without actually looking at the case in question, but one thing you might check, if you feel the item in question is no longer on your site is to create an Advanced Segment for visits that include that item. Then check the hostnames report and see if the visits are occurring on your domain. It might be that the views for that item is being sent to GA from a cached or copied version of an old page on another domain.
Question 3 involved configuration of automatic emails in GA.
Above the graph in most reports is a grey bar. On the left hand side of the bar is a button that is labeled “email”. Go to the report you wish to email and click that button. After clicking on that button you are taken to a screen where emails can be set up. Click on the tab that is labeled “Schedule” and select the recipients, the delivery schedule, etc. When the options are set up as you prefer, click the “schedule” button at the bottom of the form.
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Posted on June 21, 2010 by Jim
Our Pittsburgh SEO Training Workshop is in less than two days, and seats are filling up quickly. So if you’ve been on the fence about whether or not to come, let me sweeten the pot a little. Raven Internet Marketing Tools has given us a one-year Pro-level membership ($1,188 value!) to give away to one lucky attendee. Shouldn’t that be you?
Raven’s suite of tools make it easy for you to manage your SEO and social media efforts, research and track keywords and competitors and create custom reports. They save you time by integrating all the tools you need in one place, so you can focus on what matters.
We’ll also be giving away a fantastic book “Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment” by Jim Sterne, along with various other pieces of swag. But that’s not why you should attend this workshop. You should come because you want to learn more about SEO and how to increase traffic to your website. You should come because you want to be surrounded by other smart people in the same position as you. You should come because you can ask the experts your questions and get one-on-one face time with us.
Whatever your reasons are for coming, we promise you’ll walk away with some actionable advice (otherwise, the training’s on us). If you want to find out more, check out the scheduled sessions, or you can register here.
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Posted on June 15, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Otherwise known as How to Get Your Own Website Ranking!
Have you ever been to one of those seminars that throw a lot of theory at you but no actual usable information? So have we, and we’re tired of them.
We’re doing something different: We’ve created an SEO Workshop where everyone will actually get down in the trenches and find out how to do things like keyword research, on-page optimization and link building.
The Course Schedule is intensive, but we’ve tailored the classes to be accessible to a wide variety of skill levels. Both experienced webmasters and less tech savvy business owners will get insightful, actionable information that they can take home and apply to websites right after the SEO training workshop is over.
Example Tip:
Find out who is linking to your competitors. Go to Yahoo.com and type Link:www.competitor’s-URL.com into the search bar.
We’ll show you what tools to use, where to use them, how to get links, and so forth. So bring your sharpened pencil and notebook … er, laptop. You’re going to need it.
Click for more information about the Pittsburgh SEO Training Workshop. Hope to see you there!
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Posted on June 4, 2010 by John
What is a Funnel?
Your goal funnel is the set of required pages leading up to your final goal, such as a purchase. You may be familiar with the Funnel Visualization report in Google Analytics (GA). It shows you how many visitors go to each step and how many leave the funnel at that step. You can spot trouble points with your funnel and take steps to correct the issue. Here’s what the report looks like:
The Problem:
While you can segment goal metrics such as goal completions, starts and values in GA, you can’t segment the Funnel Visualization report. You can’t see how different types of visitors may leave the funnel at different steps. For example, you may just want to see where new visitors abandon your goal funnel, compared to returning visitors. When you look up at Advanced Segments in the top right of the Funnel Visualization report, here’s what you see:
The Horizontal, Segmentable Funnel
I want to show you a method that will allow you to see your goal conversion funnels in any report, segmented however you want. I’m going to name it the “Horizontal Funnel” since we’ll be viewing it left to right, instead of top to bottom.
Let’s start with what you’ll get, using this method.
The traditional GA Goal Funnel report shows
- Number of visits to each step in the funnel
- The percentage of visits that continued to the next step
- Where exiting visits went.
With the Horizontal Funnel method you’ll see
- Number of visits to each step in the funnel.
- The percentage of visits that did not continue to the next step
You don’t get to see where exiting visitors went. . .but you WILL be able to:
- Apply Advanced Segments
- See the funnel for multiple segments in the same report
Let’s look at an example of what a traditional e-commerce funnel that looks like:
Shopping Cart –> Address Info –> Payment Info –> Review Order –> Thank You
In the image below, the values outlined in blue are the visits to each step, and the values outlined in orange are the exit rate between steps.
It’s like a regular funnel, just flipped on it’s side, using goals, first steps in funnels, and custom reports – more detail below. As you can see, this is in a keyword report. So, the funnel can be seen in-line in the report, for whatever segments you want; in this case for individual keyword phrases. And you can apply Advanced Segments or Secondary Dimensions to the report.
That’s the “what”. Now for the “how”.
1. Create the Goals
For each step in the funnel, we create a separate goal in GA. This provides the values in blue: how many visits touched each step. Now we want to be able to get the values in orange, the exit rate between steps. In each of the goals following the first step in the conversion process, we create a funnel. Each funnel contains a single step which is the Goal URL for the preceding goal. That’s the key. The preceding goal becomes the Funnel Step 1 URL for the next goal.
2. Create the custom report
Now that the goals are set up we can create the custom report we need to view the data. To set up the report we are going to use two different metrics, Goal Completions and Abandonment Rate.
The Goal Completion metric is the number of visits in which a particular Goal URL was visited at least once.
The Abandonment Rate metric is the percentage of visits that started the funnel (saw Step 1), but did not complete the goal.
In our Goal #17, we made the Funnel Step 1 = Goal #16 Completion. So, Goal #17 Abandonment Rate = percentage of visits that saw Goal#16 but did not complete Goal #17 = Exit Rate between the 2 goals. In this example the first step in the funnel is in Goal Slot #16, so Goal 16 Completions goes first. The second step was in Goal Slot #17, so we place Goal 17 Abandonment Ratenext, followed by Goal 17 Completions.
Then Goal 18 Abandonment Rate, followed by Goal 18 Completions.
And so on.
After you have all the goals in place in the Metrics section of the report, it’s time to move on to the Dimensions. In this case, we chose to dimension by Keyword. But you may wish to see your goal funnel report by City, State, Browser, Landing Page, or whatever is most appropriate for your situation.
That’s it. Happy Funnel Segmentation.
Small Update:
As Ophir Prusak helpfully pointed out in the comments section, it would be a good idea to note that the values you get using this method may be a little different from what the Funnel Visualization report shows.
One of the reasons for this is that the Funnel Visualization report makes the assumption that If a visit includes Step 3, for example, then it MUST include Step 2 and Step 1.
So if an actual visit sees Step 3, But DOESN’T see Step 2 or Step 1 — what does GA do? It adds a count to Step 1 and Step 2 ANYWAY.
This Horizontal Funnel method does not do this. So if you have a funnel with entrances into the middle of the funnel, numbers may be different.
There are probably other good reasons why they could be different as well, but that is the most obvious one and definately needed to be pointed out.
Thanks Ophir!
For more about tricksy funnel issues in GA try checking out this post on our blog:
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2008/06/25/funnel-problems-google-analytics/
-John
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Posted on May 17, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Hi all!
Here is the long-awaited continuation of my first post about driving traffic through social media links.
I had covered all this theory about the differences between social media link building and traditional link building, and now I’m going to move onto specific strategies!
Specific Social Media Link Building Strategies
Strategy #1: The Retweet
Ah, the Retweet, most coveted of all Twitter responses. Getting retweeted means that someone sees what you said and retweets it, sharing it with their list of followers, thus giving your tweet (and the link that you included in it) much more exposure.
The first step is finding those that are most likely to retweet your tweets. One way to do this is to go to twitter and type “rt + keyword” (where keyword is whatever it is that you’re promoting.) The result is that you see the abbreviation rt, short for retweet, as well as the keyword that you’re interested in which shows everyone who has retweeted tweets with the same keyword. Those who retweet your friends are your friends. You just don’t know them yet.
Another method that is useful to find retweeters is using Twitter Grader to find tweeters in your area. This is especially helpful if you’re a local store or chain promoting something that is geo-specific.
Keeping your tweets under 120 characters is important. “But the limit is 140 characters!” you say. Well, you’re right, it is. However, if you keep your tweet to less than 120 characters, it gives people a chance to retweet it without editing it. Remember, every time it gets retweeted, Twitter ads a few characters. Often, the first thing to get edited out of an interesting tweet is the link that you put in it. Bad deal.
You can use Bit.ly to help you find popular Tweeters. I could write an entire blog article about this step alone, but fortunately Jim did it for me. Check it out. He is the Bit.ly master.
Last but not least, do unto others as you would have them do unto you! If you want to be retweeted, retweet your target tweeters tweets! (If you REALLY want retweets, take a video of yourself trying to say that last sentence 5 times fast and post it to Youtube. Don’t forget to tweet the links.)
What To Do When You’ve Targeted Your Tweeter!
Now that you’ve targeted your Tweeter, here’s some tips on how to ensure they’ll actually want to retweet you:
Stalk the target: No, not in the creepy way. Just monitor them on Tweetdeck or Twhirl or your favorite Twitter app and pay attention to what they retweet. Is it funny stories? News articles? Products? Learn about their activities and their preferences so that you can figure out what it is that they’ll likely retweet.
Now, instead of bombarding them with links in an obvious ploy to hock your wares, start a conversation with them. Tell them how interested you were in their last retweet. Follow them (gasp!) Yes, I said follow them. If they’re retweeting stuff that is similar to what you have, they obviously are closely related enough to your interests to follow them.
When they mention something that relates to your site or your promotion or your sense of humor or whatever, THEN you plug your link. If you’ve already begun a relationship with them, they’ll be more likely to care enough about your tweet to retweet it to their followers.
When they do, make sure to thank them! Gratitude goes a long way to ensuring that you’ll have help from them in the future.
Strategy #2: The Scavenger Hunt!
This slide is really self explanatory, so I’m not going to go through it step by step. If you want good examples, check out ModCloth. They do a scavenger hunt on their site every Thursday. I know about it because of researching Social Media techniques. Not because I followed them as soon as I found out about them or because I sit on their site for hours on end deciding how to spend my paycheck. Really. Also, RavenSEO tools does an amazing job.
The secret behind this is to offer a prize worth having. Take Henne Jewelers for example. They’re about to run a real life scavenger hunt using Social Media and text messaging clues in Pittsburgh next weekend. Their prize? A $15,000 diamond ring. Totally worth the trouble and I’m sure it’s paid for itself in free advertising already.
Strategy#3: The Promotion
Couldn’t be easier. Figure out a promotion that’s worth having, create a promo code and then just syndicate the heck out of it over all platforms. Also, check out the handy list of promo sites. They are sites that basically just list promo codes, and are great for sending tons of short-term targeted traffic to your site.
Secondary Links
Secondary links, for the purposes of this post, are the links that you’d be going after during a traditional link building campaign: High PR trusted sites that will send a lot of targeted traffic your way. Even though garnering these types of links should not be the primary goal of a social media campaign (in my opinion) they are the icing on the cake when they happen. If the content that you’re promoting is viral enough, they will certainly happen. If you’re promoting a product page, it’s less likely, but still possible. You get the picture.
Social Media Tactics to Avoid
Would it be lazy of me to say “Don’t be annoying” and leave it at that? Probably. Seriously, though, anything that annoys you will probably annoy the people that you’re trying to reach out to. Not to mention ruin your social credibility (see item one on that list.)
Hopefully this has been helpful to you. I know it’s been helpful to me to write it all out. If anyone out there wants to share their favorite social media strategy, I’d love to see it!
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Posted on April 5, 2010 by Christina Keffer
LunaMetrics is hitting the road! In the next week, 3/5 of our office will be underway, speaking at various events.
Jonathan Weber will be speaking on a panel entitled “Data Data Everywhere: Drowning in a Sea of Analytics” at the NTen Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta, GA.
Robbin Steif will be gracing attendees of the Open Educational Resources summit with her presence. She’ll be leading conversations around Google Analytics. This open learning initiative summit is funded by the Hewlett Foundation and Yale.
I will be speaking on a panel at SMX Toronto on a panel entitled “Link Building Strategies and Ranking Tactics.” I’ll be presenting on increasing traffic through social media. I’ll also be attending several really interesting discussions and liveblogging them right here on LunaMetrics’ blog.
See you ’round!
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Posted on March 11, 2010 by John
If you’re not familiar with the Goal Copy Firefox extension, you can read the original post here.
The GoalCopy Firefox plugin has been updated (download here):
1. Updated to work with the most current version of Firefox
2. Fixed some pasting bugs when pasting goals. I hope 
3. Added a Find/Replace filter
Find/Replace
So, I added this when working with a client that wanted me to create a very large number of very similar filters. Each filter was for a different directory/hostname. I wanted a simple way to just replace the directory and hostname with the next values in the list without finding them in the long strings of text and selecting-pasting and hoping I didn’t create typos during the process.
There is now a second Toolbar, named “GA Goal Copy Find Replace”
If you enable this toolbar, you have acc
ess to 3 find/replace boxes.
It works pretty much just like any other find/replace functionality you’ll find in other programs.
1. Copy any Goal or Filter
2. In any “Find” box, type in the text from the copied goal that you want to find, for example, “mother.com”
3. In the corresponding “Replace” box, type in the text you want to replace it with, for example, “father.net”
4. Now when you paste a Goal or Filter, the plugin will look for all cases of “mother.com” and replace it with “father.net”
5. It will do this for each of the 3 pairs of Find/Replace text boxes
Then you can go to the next Goal and put in “brother.org” into the Replace box and Paste.
And go to the next Goal and put in “sister.org” into the Replace box and Paste.
I don’t use this feature very often, but when I do have a use for it, it is a big deal, and a big time saver, and helps me with consistency and tpyos.
Download the updated GoalCopy Firefox Plugin here.
** If you downloaded the plugin and didn’t see the extra toolbar. Please try downloading again.
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Posted on February 4, 2010 by John
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.
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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.
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