You may even be thinking, “My website doesn’t sell anything, so I can’t measure conversions.” I beg to differ.

Every website is selling something.

And therefore:

Every website can measure conversions.

Figure out what you’re selling, and you’ll move from counting to optimizing, from recording history to creating opportunity – by collecting and taking advantage of conversion data.

What are you selling?

If you have an e-commerce website, or a site designed to generate leads for sales, you already know what you’re selling. The easiest conversion to track is one tied to revenue… or donations, for non-profit sites.

But what do other sites sell? What about university sites or hospital sites, blogs or content-heavy sites, tech support or help forum sites, government agency sites – what are they selling? And if you have an e-commerce or lead gen site, isn’t there more to what you’re selling beyond the obvious products or services?

To answer the question “what are you selling”, let’s consider an even more basic question.

When I go to a client’s offices to do analytics training with their team, I begin with a big slide that bluntly asks: Why do you have a website? After some nervous laughter, they realize I’m not going to give them the answer. Then a couple folks get the ball rolling, and we’ll end up filling a whiteboard (or two or three).

The point of the exercise is that there are many ways to think about the value of your website. And when it comes right down to it, they all involve “selling something”… whether it’s directly related to revenue or not.

Measure the value of your website

Think about selling as “persuading” or “convincing” your website visitors of the value you have to offer. Then think about the ways your visitors demonstrate that you’ve convinced them. Those are your conversions!

Visitors who’ve been convinced of the value of a blog will subscribe, become regular commenters, share your content on social media. If you have other types of content, visitors may interact with your site by viewing videos or downloading files or using custom tools or widgets you’ve created.

Similarly, a high level of user interaction shows that visitors are finding value in tech support or help forum sites. Is there evidence of a user community, i.e., are visitors returning to ask more questions or search for answers? Are they rating articles as helpful? Do they regularly contribute answers?

University websites serve diverse audiences from prospective students to alumni, from university staff to the surrounding community. Visitors may show they value your university site by making use of the online application process, participating in the alumni career center, or reading and sharing university news, to name just a few examples.

Hospital sites may offer everything from patient services to community health information to news about academic research. If your hospital site has integrated resources for managing appointments, or insurance and account payment, or even creating personal diet and exercise plans, are visitors taking advantage of those resources? Are visitors in the academic and medical communities, or the community at large, accessing and sharing your news content?

And think of all the things you might do on a government website: pay your taxes, apply for licenses or benefits, look up real estate assessments, read pending legislation, contact your representative… the list goes on and on.

When you’ve “sold” a visitor the value of your website, “conversions” like the above activities happen. They all demonstrate the value of your website and they’re all behaviors you can measure.

Steps for getting started

The next step is collecting conversion data so you can start to take full advantage of goal-related features like multi-channel funnels and attribution modeling. In future posts, I’m going to show you how to set up goals and measure these “not e-commerce” conversions in Google Analytics.

Which types of goals are you most interested in setting up for your website? Are there others you’ve considered that I didn’t mention? Let me know in the comments.

This is a topic that a lot of you are interested in, judging by the amount of traffic and shares that post got. So I decided build on Robbin’s post by creating a template that you can all use for your own attribution modeling needs. The Attribution Modeling Tool is a Google Doc spreadsheet that has all the formulas you need built right in. It will do the following types of modeling:

• First touch
• Last touch
• First and last touch
• Linear

(Click to enlarge)

Get your copy of the Attribution Modeling Tool here. Once it’s open, go to File > Make a copy so you can edit it.

The second sheet (MCF Data) is where you paste in the data that you export from the Top Conversion Paths report in GA (refer back to Robbin’s post if you need more details). Specifically, you’ll need to copy the first three columns of data, starting at row 8 (the first row of actual data below the headings Basic Channel Grouping Path, Conversions, and Conversion Value). Don’t copy the last row of data, which is just the totals.

* TIP: Before you export your Top Conversion Paths report from GA, make sure to show 500 rows, or as many rows as you need to get all of the paths and data. The Attribution Modeling Tool can accommodate up to 500 rows of data.

The first sheet (Attribution Models) gives you the numbers and graphs of the value of each channel using each of the above models. The remaining sheets (which are hidden) do all the heavy lifting. There are around 14,000 formulas in this spreadsheet, so it may take a few seconds or longer to fully load or update.

Insights from attribution modeling

Remember, attribution modeling let’s us divvy up the conversion value to various channels that led up to that conversion. For example, look again at the graph above (click to enlarge). This shows us that Direct visits are worth nearly $85,000 with a last touch model, with Organic Search and Paid Search being worth about $26,000. But look at how things change with the first click model. Now Direct, Organic Search and Paid Search are each worth around $44,000.

If you’re only looking at the last touch attribution, you may be tempted to put less money into your search marketing and SEO efforts. You may be foolishly thinking that the people who purchase all come to you directly, so why should you pay? But as you can see above, a lot of people who come to you directly and buy were introduced to your site from a paid or organic search. Otherwise, they may have never come back directly and purchased.

 Your Turn

Go get the Attribution Modeling Tool and play around with it. Do you find it useful or a waste of time? Anything surprise you? Bugs or other unusual quirks (Google Docs are know for those)? Let us know in the comments!

- What are the best tools for SEO?

- How do you deal with and segment (not provided) data?

- What to do with canonical hostnames (www.example.com vs. example.com)?

- If I have multiple domains, but one is doing really well in organic search, should I make the others subdomains of the successful domain?

LunaTV is a weekly segment where LunaMetrics team members answer your questions from across the web. Got a question you want answered? Tweet at us at @LunaMetrics with #lunaTV and we’ll answer your question!

Christina’s Recommended Add-on’s:

• All-in-One SEO Pack
• Redirection
• Blogger.com Tool
• SpyFu
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Feedburner

Christina’s (not provided) tools:

• LunaMetrics Extrapolating Not Provided Tool
• Claye Stokes Importing Google Webmaster Data using Python

Christina:
Hi my names Christina Keffer, I’m the head of the SEO department at LunaMetrics. Welcome to this week’s installment of LunaTV where we answer your questions from around the web.

This week we’ll focus on search engine optimization specifically a couple questions that came to our attention. This is my partner in crime Reid Bandremer.

The first questions that well address is one we got from Quora,

“What are the best SEO tools for a personal website?”

The question was sort of phrased in a way that made me think that somebody was taking a preexisting blog and perhaps adding a little more to it and creating a little more of an online presence for a small business and so I’m phrasing my answer accordingly.

There are a lot of free tools out there. With regards to CMS’s I would definitely choose WordPress over any other one, especially if you’re not used to web development and things like that.  WordPress is a really simple way to set up a website on a variety of different hosting platforms. It’s also one of the most search engine-friendly CMS’s out there and one of the easiest to deal with. The set up itself is fairly quick you basically just pop it up on a serve wherever you choose to host. There are some things you might have to do to allow WordPress to write to the serve files but there’s tutorials everywhere, that’s the thing about WordPress, it’s so well supported and that support is largely free. Occasionally there are some security concerns. I wouldn’t be using WordPress if you were going to have a checkout system on the site and were receiving payments of any kind. That would cause a little bit of an issue in which case I would go with Joomla or Drupal or another open source option for CMS.

Sticking with the WordPress situation, there are a couple really great SEO friendly tools out there that make the site even more SEO friendly. For instance there’s All-in-One SEO pack that lets you add titles and Meta descriptions and things like that to your posts, which may be different than the post or page names. It also offers enhanced permalink customization so that you can make really search engine friendly URLs that are sort of static appearing. The default for WordPress is actually not that great, so you’d actually have to go into the settings and change it to be more keyword rich URLs.

There’s another plugin called Redirection, if you do have another site out there that you’re going to be transferring to WordPress, this plugin is an absolute must-have. You can go through all the pages in the previous site and redirect them in a very search engine friendly way using 301 redirect and you can do batch redirects.  Redirection will also scan the new site and make sure you have all those broken links taken care of, especially if you’re importing a blogger.com site to a WordPress site. There’s also a plugin for that, it’s called the Blogger.com plugin. That’s really great for importing blogs, but you’ll still need to change the links over as well through this Redirection tool.

Other tools concerning keyword research and things that aren’t really necessarily related to the setup of the site, SpyFu, which has a free version which offers you somewhat limited information but still useful. Basically it can be used to spy on your competitors, see what they’re doing and what keywords they’re using.  It’s no information you can’t find on your own but SpyFu tends to make the process a little more simplistic and answer your needs.

Obviously Google Keywords tool is still a viable option although use those metrics “with a grain of salt.”  They’re definitely very broad, sort of numbers that you shouldn’t take into consideration exactly as they appear there.

In addition to that, if you’re not already using FeedBurner to keep track of posts and things like that, it would be a really great addition to any improvement that you’re making to syndicate your content.

Another question we had that has absolutely nothing to do with tools or WordPress whatsoever, is something that’s come up quite recently; in October of last year Google announced that they were encrypting the search results pages, which basically means that keyword data from a variety users that are signed in to any Google product online, whether it be their Gmail account, Google Analytics, or just signing into Chrome, their keywords are becoming obfuscated under this great big ‘(not provided)’ keyword bucket, you can see it in Google Analytics and any other analytics program that you’re using. The question was,

“How to deal with that issue, where we’re not able to see the number of branded search terms versus non-branded search terms?”

which is a pretty big SEO KPI, the increasing quantity of non-branded search. We have a tool that we developed that can be found on our blog here.

Basically what it does is it overlays a ratio of branded to non-branded from the provided keyword segment, onto the non-provided keyword segment. We can do that on a specific date range. So basically we import the keywords into excel and go through calculations to provide a pretty good idea of the actual increase of non- branded keywords month over month, which is the way we’ve been dealing with it for the majority of our time.

There is also a really great spreadsheet on seo.com’s blog here. That provides enhanced information, in a little bit different perspective, but equally as awesome, developed by Clay Spokes. It’s a Google Document, it’s really great. So a combination of the two should take care of most peoples media needs where this is concerned. Unfortunately none of these solutions gives us granular insight into the keyword data that we’ve lost through this change. That’s just kind of our tough luck as SEOs.

Reid:
Hi! Our first question is from Neal from the Nodia India and he asks via LinkedIn,

“What is the difference between ‘www.XYZ.com’ and ‘XYZ.com’? Please tell me about this.”

So basically it appears that he has the same content one page but there are two different URLs, one has the “www.” prefix and one does not. They are considered by the search engines to be two totally different pages. This happens anytime you have different URLs, search engines consider them to be 2 different pages. So what happens is you have duplicate content issues, which you definitely want to fix. You’re going to have link juice divided between each version of the pages you want to consolidate that for maximum SEO benefit. You definitely want to force redirects from the non “www.” version of the URL to the “www.” version of the URL. That way you will always have one version of the URL indexed. Sometimes you may want to redirect the “www.” version to the non “www.” version, only if the non “www.” version has much higher authority already. But usually people tend to link to the “www.”  version more often. Also make sure you use the 301 redirect for maximum SEO benefit that is the permanent redirect.

Our next question comes from an anonymous user on Quora. The question is,

“Say I have many websites that do well in Google rankings, but one that does extremely well and has a lot of content should I put all the others as a subdomain of that major site?”

The answer is “Maybe.”

This definitely depends on a lot of factors that you want to consider including relevance, power of your brand and the overall user experience. If you move those websites to the main website, I would hope that the content on those sites is extremely relevant to the content that’s already on your existing main site.

Also, do you have a very strong brand, are people very familiar with the brand of the larger main site and will they be more likely to trust and view the content that currently exists on the smaller sites if you move it to the larger main site? Finally does it benefit the user experience, is it going to make things easier to find for people? Those are all factors you want to consider.

Now for SEO you need to remember that when you move something to a subdomain, the pages on the subdomain the authority and the link juice from those pages is not automatically passed on to pages on a different subdomain, even if it’s the same root domain. Authority is conferred via links. If you link from one subdomain to another separate subdomain then you’re passing authority and link juice but that’s occurring just as it would if you’re linking to a completely separate group domain.

So if you’re looking at it from an SEO perspective you might want to consider moving it to a subdirectory instead of a subdomain. For example it would be “www.subdomain.xyz.com” instead of moving it to that URL maybe use, “www.xyz.com/subdomain”. Again when moving things to a subdirectory from a completely different site make sure it benefits the user experience, it’s highly relevant to the content that already exist there and that hopefully helps you.

Christina:
Thanks for joining us for this week’s installment of LunaTV. Obviously if you have any questions you can contact us through Twitter “@LunaMetrics” we’d love to hear from you! See you next time.

1. Google Insights for Search

If I need a blog topic and I’m looking for inspiration, one of my favorite places to check out is Google’s Insights for Search tool. Remember that post about The Avengers as social media, or the one I wrote about Instagram mistakes to for brand to avoid in the wake of Instagram’s $1 billion buy-up? Yep, both were directly inspired by the then-trending searches on Google Insights for search. Right now, Maurice Sendak and Time Magazine are trending, along with a mess of Mother’s Day related searches. If I wasn’t already writing about post inspiration, I’d probably see if there was an appropriate ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ or ‘Mother’s Day and Social Media’ tie-in for a post today. Personally I try and exercise good taste when looking for topics – it would be inappropriate to try a to tie-in a natural disaster or national tragedy to social media. If you’re still not seeing something that you like, or you’re working on a more localized blog, try adjusting the settings for longer and shorter time periods and for more specific areas.

2. Twitter’s Trending Topics

Again, another pretty straightforward source is Twitter’s trending topics section. Granted, it can be something of a crap shoot – ‘Britney and Demi’ or ‘SkillsOnAThugsResume’ don’t really have much to offer social media-wise (unless the thug is @HologramTupac, of course), but you can also adjust your location settings and try and surface some content ideas with that tool as well. It goes without saying your Twitter Feed itself can be a great source of inspiration in-and-of itself.

3. Google Analytics

Probably one of the best sources for inspiration is the content that you’ve created yourself. Take a look at your Google Analytics and see what kinds of content have brought in a lot of traffic for your blog – for instance, Christina Keffer has written an excellent piece on creating and tracking QR codes that routinely gets us a ton of traffic. A follow-up post updating changes in the industry or reflecting on further best practices is a ripe topic for a new post.

4. User-generated posts

This is almost too obvious, but many blogs forget that the whole reason they exist is to help facilitate engagement with their customers and industry peers. If your blog is mature enough to regularly receive comments and contributions from followers, look to those for inspiration for a new post. For instance, another extremely popular post we have is a post written by Brian Honigman on how to manage a Facebook page with the then-newly updated Facebook App for iPhone. It’s a great piece, so good in fact that many people ask us questions peripheral to the post’s topic. After getting a ton of questions about problems with postings and bugs in the app, I realized it would be a great topic for a new post (and save me a lot of repeated answers) to quickly go over some ways to troubleshoot problems with the app. This can work for Facebook likes or comments, Google+ shares or interactions, and Twitter retweets or reactions too. Just find good content to build off of and make sure to let any contributors know about your new post.

5. Q&A Sites

Sites like Quora, LinkedIn Answers, Focus, and any other industry-related hubs like forums and popular blogs, can provide you with great inspiration for topics and posts and come with the added benefit of having a built in added audience member. At LunaMetrics, we do a weekly show centered around questions from these sources for precisely that reason – it helps us grow our audience and establish our authority on our respective specialties. Simply find a question, or group of questions, on any of the aforementioned sites, write out a thorough response, and post it as a link on the original question.

6. Check your Facebook Analytics

Probably one of my favorite places to get inspired with new content and campaign ideas is the built-in analytics suite in Facebook, called ‘Facebook Insights’. Open up your analytics, load up analytics for a little way back, and begin sorting by engagement and stories about this to get some ideas for what kinds of content your user base is engaging with. For instance, I took a look at our post analytics and found that the most engaging content we posted to Facebook routinely featured one or more of the LunaMetrics team directly in the content (We’re a good-looking bunch, so we can’t say we’re too surprised). Using that insight, we started generating content that was more company-centric – like photos of LunaMetrics team members presenting helpful tips, our new LunaTV segment, and pictures from around the office. Our engagement numbers have been through the roof! Checking your own analytics is a great way to see what’s connecting with your audience, and a chance to dig a little deeper and find out why. That, in turn, means more optimized content for your fan base! Win-win.

Hopefully you found a few new places to add to your checklist of sources for inspiration the next time you’re faced with a deadline and a mind full of blanks.

Do you have a special trick to surfacing content ideas for your blogs? Tell us what tools you use in the comments!

If you work in Paid Search, you know that the term “Remarketing” (often referred to as “Retargeting”) is all the rage right now.  What often happens when buzz-words take wind, however, is misuse by marketers.  Advertisers are often so anxious to take advantage of these new tools or offerings that they don’t truly polish off the effort, and therefore get results that are less than desired.  This has become commonplace with remarketing – advertisers see, advertisers implement, and advertisers love; but they forget that they should set limitations to their remarketing efforts.  Don’t abuse Remarketing!  Here are 4 Rules (and a few how-to’s) to follow when implementing remarketing in your AdWords campaigns.

1.Does this Apply to You, or are you ’N/A’?

Let’s face it, remarketing is exciting and with the constant evolution of Google, it’s become easy to both set up and measure.  Advertisers love the idea of getting their ads in front of someone who has already visited their website, automatically assuming it’s right for their business – but is it right for yours?  On top of capturing potentially lost sales, remarketing is great for use in cross-selling and up-selling products, to name a few;  but before implementing remarketing in your account, make sure it applies to your ultimate goal(s).

2. Exclusions Exclusions Exclusions!

The key to remarketing is to remarket to those people who have not yet made the purchase/conversion/lead you are ultimately hoping for.  There are obviously issues that can arise here, such as not being able to appropriately exclude those customers who converted in person; however, it’s essential that marketers do what they can on their end to exclude to their best abilities.  Consider the following scenario:

Company A sells shoes.  Company A has remarketing campaigns running to target those who have reached the athletic shoes page.

What happens more often than not in this situation is that this is where Company A will leave their remarketing efforts, in an almost “unfinished” state.  This scenario needs to be completed, by implemented another factor known as exclusions:

Company A excludes their remarketing ads from showing to those people who have already purchased shoes.  How is this done?  It’s rather simple – you’ll create a remarketing group for those people who have reached the Purchase ‘thank you’ page (generating a code to be placed on that page), and then take the effort a step further by setting this remarketing group as an excluded audience, ultimately telling Google NOT to remarket to them.

a. Set up a remarketing list as you normally would, by clicking on the Display Network tab, clicking “Interests & Remarketing,” then “Change Display Marketing.”  Choose the campaign and ad group in which you want to apply the exclusion.  This time, however, setup will be different because you are setting the list for those people you do not want to market to (i.e. those who have reached the conversion ‘thank you’ page).  Be sure to name it something easily identifiable, such as “Purchased – Exclude” or something of the sort.

b. Next, we will set this remarketing list as an excluded audience.  On the Display Network tab, click “Exclusions” at the bottom, followed by “Interests and Remarketing.” Select the appropriate ad group and campaign, then choose ‘Remarketing Lists’ from the drop down box.  The remarketing list/group you created for your site’s ‘thank you’ page (to be excluded) will appear in the list.  Add this list and click “save.”  Note: I recommend setting exclusions for this purpose at the campaign level.

c. Remember that for any remarketing (inclusions or exclusions) to work, you must add the Google-generated code to the appropriate page on your website!

For advertisers that are using remarketing to cross-sell products, exclusions may not be an option, but confirm this before simply not trying it at all.

3. Use Frequency Capping

Regardless of whether or not you are using exclusions, frequency capping should be used as well; in fact, I have run into almost no situations in which frequency capping shouldn’t be used.  If you’re not familiar with frequency capping, it’s the ability to limit the number of times a unique user sees you ad.  This can be set at the campaign level, ad group level, or ad copy level, and can also be set by number of times per month, week, or day.  If you do not set any frequency capping, one user has the ability to see your ad hundreds of times a day (or more), which will bring terrible results!  I like to set my frequency capping at around 5 times per day per individual ad, but this can vary greatly based on the number of ads you are running, etc.  Frequency capping options can be found on the Settings tab.  Under advanced settings, click “Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping.”  Here is where you’ll be able to set your frequency parameters.

4. Don’t be afraid to limit that traffic!

Utilize contextual targeting to have your ads show to those who previously visited your site while they are actively showing interest.  This means that your ads will only show on sites that Google thinks are relevant to the keywords you are contextually targeting.  (For example, remarket to someone who viewed the athletic shoes page while they are viewing a page on the Google Display Network that has text around athletic shoes, working out, etc.)  Use placement targeting in the same way, to define pages on the Display Network that are relevant to the product or service you are remarketing for.

Remarketing provides advertisers with amazing capabilities to capture potential conversions that could have once been lost.  It’s important, however, to make sure you do not abuse the remarketing tool by scaring off past visitors.  Take the time to set some boundaries for your remarketing efforts, to capture clicks and sales as efficiently as possible.

Has your business utilized remarketing in your online campaigns, or have you experienced in first hand? Let us know your thoughts in the commments.

Now, with Google Analytics Premium, we have the ability to credit different and/or multiple interactions for conversions.  In the example above, paid search could get all the credit with a First Interaction model, or split the credit with the last medium (organic), and there are other models to choose from. But, if you don’t have Google Analytics Premium, how do you even approach this problem?

The short version of that question is: Go to your MultiChannel Funnels > Top conversion paths.  Be sure that you are choosing the conversion that matters to you the most.  Then, export all the paths where the conversion has a value greater than zero.  Open up the file in Excel or a Google Docs Spreadsheet, and use all your spreadsheet tools to allocate the conversion value.  Here, let me walk you through all the Excel work, with some tips and tricks.

Above: Choose Multi-Channel Funnels > Top conversion Paths.

Be sure (above) to choose the conversion you care about for this analysis. Export into a format that will enable you to drop your data into a spreadsheet.

Remember that you are going to need each interaction to be in its own cell. I exported into .csv, opened with Excel, used “Data > Text to Columns” and chose the > sign as my delimiter, so that I could format as described above. That left me with a lot of white spaces that messed up my data, so a simple search and replace removed the blanks and enabled me to continue.

Below, you can see a screenshot that shows you how I got each interaction into its own spreadsheet cell. Note the yellow highlighting, so that you’ll know how to find this screen.

Important Tip: Once you do the delimiter work above, you will have created a range of cells that include all the different interactions that participated in the conversion. If you only had the four touches in the graphic at the top of this blogpost, your range would look like this:

You might be tempted to think that your range would be A1:D1. However, in all the spreadsheet work we’ll be doing here, remember that your range has to extend as far as the conversion with the largest number of interactions. So if one conversion (your “longest”) has ten interactions, your range would be A through J.

Now for the fun part.  (Note: you spreadsheet experts will be able to find faster and more elegant ways to do this; please add them in the comments.)

Model I: First Interaction

If you want to give all the credit to the first interactions, you merely sort your spreadsheet by the first row, and add up the value of all the conversions associate with each channel. In the example above, I added together all the conversion values that had “Organic Search” as the first interactions, and ditto for Email, Direct, Paid Search, etc. Each sum became the conversion value for each kind of interaction. You can see the results for organic in my small screenshot here.

Remember, you can also get First Interaction right out of the Google Analytics Multi-channel Interface, by going to the Multi-Channel Funnels, choosing Assisted Conversions, and then choosing First Interaction Analysis.  But I chose to do it this way because I needed to do the setup, and because it ended up being easier when comparing with the other models.

Model II: Linear (i.e. Average)

If you want to average the credit out between all the channels that participated in the conversion, the spreadsheet work is somewhat more challenging.

1. Figure out if each channel participated in each conversion, and how many times.  (You can use a formula like this: =COUNTIF(Range,”Direct”) – that will show you how many times “Direct” was in the mix for each conversion. Change this formula for each channel you are working with, such as “Organic Search,” etc.)
2. Then prorate the conversion value over the channels, taking into account that some channels may get more credit, because they were in the conversion path more often. In the example in the graph all the way above, we saw paid search used once, so it would get ¼ of the conversion.  Organic played a part three times, so it gets the other ¾ of the conversion value. You can use a formula like this: =ConversionValue/COUNTA(Range)*HowManyTouches.  Remember to replace ConversionValue with the cell that has your conversion value. Replace (Range) with the range all the interactions are in, and replace HowManyTouches with the cell where you stored the data from #1 in.
3. Then add up all the values for each kind of channel.
4. Here’s a screen shot that includes two rows (two conversions), each of which has only two interactions.  I set up the table to see the interactions in one column (that was the #1 above) and allocated the values in the second column. Not shown: Adding up all the values for each kind of interaction.

Model III: First and Last Touch

This is a customization of what GA Premium calls “position based.” I included it because it shows you how you can customize for your own needs (and because it is interesting to me).   Here, you divide the credit between the introducer and the closer, i.e. between the first and last interaction:

1. Give half the credit for the conversion to the first channel, in the same way that you were easily able to give the totals to the first channel in Model I.
2. Figure out which one is your last interaction.  This is much harder than it sounds, because some conversions took one or two interactions to happen, and others required many more. You can use a formula like this: =INDEX(Range,MATCH(REPT(“z”,255),Range)) – just remember to replace Range, in both places, with your range.
3. Allocate the other half of the value to the last interaction.
4. Add everything up (not shown below)
5. Here’s a screen shot where I show three conversions. The first one has three interactions and the next two only have two. By using the function I outlined in #2 above, I am able to figure out what the last interaction is (see the red balloon, below.)

What about the other models?

How about time decay? What about other customizations? Well, now you have the tools to create any kind of model you want, but full disclosure: it’s a lot of work. Creating this post sure did make me see the value in pushing a button and getting the data.

Interested in learning more? Robbin will be speaking more about this topic in her presentation ‘Credit Where Credit is Due’ at Internet Week New York on May 14th – click here and find out more!

A lot of users have commented on an older post of ours detailing how to use the then-newly updated Facebook app for iPhone. To be specific, we’ve gotten about 40-50 comments (80 including our responses) asking for help with things like feature locations, how to delete posts, and a variety of other questions. However, the most frequently asked question, by far and away, dealt with posting content to Facebook pages in the iPhone app. If your posts on your page show up on your personal profile or vice versa, you’re in the right place. This post aims to detail a few quick ways to troubleshoot common problems with managing your Facebook page from the iPhone app, Android app, or Facebook’s mobile site. Unfortunately, when it comes to mobile Facebook hasn’t been as on the ball as they could be (hence the $1 billion dollar acquisition to play catch-up), and both their mobile site and mobile apps can be very buggy. Here are a few steps you can take try to fix any issues you might run into.

1. Reinstall the app

Although a bit time consuming, this is also the easiest way to troubleshoot things. Log out of the Facebook app on your phone, uninstall it, reinstall it, then log-in. Test the problem you’re having – no dice? On to the next step.

2. De-admin yourself

This requires help from a friend (or two Facebook accounts). What you’ll need to do is have the second account become an admin of your Facebook page. That person will then go to the page, select the ‘Manage’ tab in the admin panel, then click ‘Manage Admins’ on the right side of the page. Then, they simply remove you as an admin by clicking on the ‘X’ next to your name and photo.

Log out of your account, then log back in and confirm you’re no longer an admin on your page, and then have the other person add you back in to the list of admins. Refresh your page and then test the problem you’re having.

3. Use the mobile site

If neither of the other two solutions did the trick, you’ll have to try using the mobile site. Unfortunately, the mobile site is not as fully featured as the mobile apps can be, but it usually mirrors their available features pretty closely. To use the mobile site, simply navigate to facebook.com on your mobile browser – it will automatically redirect you to the mobile version of Facebook, which should look pretty familiar once you’ve logged in. Test your problem again, and if you’re still not having any luck, fear not – there’s an almost catch-all solution.

4. Use the desktop site on your mobile device

If none of the other steps you’ve taken have done the trick, you’re going to need to use the desktop site on your mobile browser. To access the desktop version, all you need to do is go to facebook.com on your mobile browser, click the three horizontal bars to pop out the side panel, and scroll to the bottom of the menu. There, you’ll seek the words ‘Desktop Site’ at the very bottom, to the right of your language preferences.

Select it and the site will reload as though you were on your home computer or laptop. On Android Phones, you’ll be able to upload photos, videos, and do anything else you normally could do from your desktop. However, iOS devices will have limited access to features like uploading photos. This means you’ll still be able to share links or status updates that might have previously posted to the incorrect profile, just no photos. It’s a cumbersome method, but it will guarantee your content gets uploaded properly and not inexplicably dumped onto your timeline.

5. Access your desktop using a remote viewer

This is the most radical of the options available to you, but I’ve resorted to this method before to upload content when Facebook was being especially finicky. You’ll need to download a free remote viewer to both your mobile device and your computer – I suggest TeamViewer, as it’s free, excellently supported, and has clients for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and OSX. After you install the app, you’ll be able to remote access and control your computer. Access Facebook through there and you’ll definitely be able to get your content where it needs to be.

Have an alternative solution, or a question? Let us know in the comments.

Pros and Cons of using contributing authors

Pros

• More content – Ten authors can produce more content than one.
• More ideas to learn from – More authors results in more topics covered and more writing styles. The editor can see which techniques and topics best resonate with the audience and result in better engagement and more inbound linking, social sharing, and conversions.
• More time for the editor – For blog editors who write the majority of their blog’s content, additional writers means the editor can spend less time writing and more time on improving the interface and planning, curating, editing,  and promoting the blog. In other words, for editors who spend a significant amount of time writing, bringing in more authors allows the editor to be an editor.
• Built-in article promotion – Authors often promote their own content. Established authors will likely promote their contributed articles on their own blogs and social networks, building in automatic inbound links and social mentions and opening the blog to the authors’ fan-bases.

Cons

• Editing is time consuming – Managing a blog and proofing and reformatting articles takes a lot of time.
• You may have to upset a few authors – If every guest author totally had their way, every article they contributed would be an advertisement or mini link farm. In addition, some people just ‘don’t write no good’. You will have to say “no” a lot, and you will have to make edits that some authors may not like. Be prepared for this.
• You will lose consistency – Sites that open themselves to contributed and user-generated content generally sacrifice consistency of message. Writing styles, lingo, and the actual messages in the article will all be different from what you’re used to generating, and editing the content to be 100% consistent with your own content is typically impractical. Experiencing a loss of brand control is inevitable.
• SEO article spammers – Once you allow outside authors to post external links, the links will likely show up on SEOs’ radars as they perform competitive link analysis. You may become an article spam target. Article spam can become time-consuming to screen out and detrimental if you don’t screen it out.

SEO Article Spamming

That last one deserves more than a single bullet. I’m talking about the typographical symbol, of course. Blackhat SEOs LOVE to contribute “articles.” Contributing articles with contextual links is a great tactic to build strong links, and is utilized by many whitehats, including myself. It’s also a tactic commonly abused by blackhat SEOs, whereby they send out loads of poor quality or non-original content to anyone who might be foolish enough to post it. Editors need to be hip to article spam tactics so that they don’t waste their time or wind up posting poor or duplicated content. To help screen such spam, keep an eye out for the following 3 red flags:

1. Duplicated content: Many spammers will send the same article or quickly “spun” articles (“spinning” quickly changing the title and a few words of an existing article to make what appears to be unique content). Use a tool such as Copyscape to screen out duplicate content.
2. Machine generated content: Many spammers will send out machine generated content that may initially appear to be decent, relevant  material but turns out to be gibberish should you actually read through it. In general, if the article looks and smells like crap, it probably is crap.
3. Automated emails: Most spammers won’t spend the time to write a personal e-mail or message when initially contacting you. If the email or initial contact message is not specific and could apply to anyone, or if the author does not identify him or herself (or provides an alias), you may have been contacted by a spammer.

Ways to recruit guest authors

There are many ways to attract and utilize contributing authors. The methods you employ should compliment your overall blogging strategy. Below are just a few ideas:

• Start within your own organization. Most organizations I’ve worked with have considerable untapped resources in the form of articulate employees who are experts in the field that are not being utilized to write for the blog.
• Reach out to established authors. If you encounter quality writing relevant to your blog’s subject matter, look up the author’s other works and forge a connection if that individual’s content would make a good fit for your blog. It may take a while to develop a working relationship, but it can be time well spent.
• Connect with other bloggers in your industry. In many instances, a competitor may not want to help you out. However, if you have a local business, there may be hundreds of non-competing bloggers in your industry outside your geographical area. So if you’re Joe the blogging plumber from Cleveland, research other national plumbers, Google “plumbing blog”, and forge a connection with other plumbing bloggers to recruit them.
• Content exchange. Kill two birds with one stone by contributing an article to someone else’s blog in return for utilizing their content. This is an awesome win-win situation.
• Make an “open call” and spread the word. Established brands can often attract very strong contributors merely by posting a “Want to Write for Us?” page and linking in the right spots on their website and social media properties. This is also a great place to define and set expectations in terms of formatting, topic selection, self-promotional limitations, etc…
• Launch a user-generated content contest. Sometimes the line between guest blogging and user-generated content is blurred, and that can be just fine for you. There’s millions of ideas here, from photo and video contests to stories and educational content and more. This is also a great social media tactic, but it may require a strong social presence and/or a good deal of promotion to get the word out.
• Post it to the classifieds. If you’re willing to pay for good content, there’s no shortage of authors looking to get paid. For a cheaper method of recruiting expert writers, consider targeting universities.

So should you use guest bloggers?

Augmenting your writing department (which may very well consist of one person – you) with multiple contributing authors can turn your blog into a link baiting machine and a powerhouse viral content generator. Or it can turn your blog into a giant spam target, dilute your brand, or waste your time. It is a strategy that is more appropriate in some situations than others.

The changes of your guest blogging program being a success go up considerably when you:

• have soundly identified that putting more resources into your blog is worthwhile.
• do not have the current resources in your staff to realize your blog’s full potential.
• are in need of writing from industry experts or need more creative inputs.
• are not overly reliant on your blog as a platform to promote the unique skills and expertise of your staff.
• understand guest bloggers’ needs.
• understand article spamming.
• have strong enough brand and/or website authority to be able to attract quality writers and/or you have strong enough recruiting or networking skills to compensate.
• have strong editorial resources in terms of time and skills (both proofing and blog management skills).
• clearly define and communicate what content you hope to receive, in terms of topic selection, writing style, formatting, article length, self-promotion limits (# of links per article, author byline limit, brand mentions), etc…
• clearly develop, define, and communicate benefits to potential contributors. (Will you tweet about the articles? Feature articles on main blog page? Provide an author biography page?)
• are able to forge a win-win environment.

Is guest blogging the right strategy for your blog?

Social tracking in Google Analytics is changing.

Gone are the days where we measured social engagement as an aspect of a visitor.

Since I think sometime last week.

The social reports were under “Audience”. “Such and such a user” is socially engaged. We’d see whether socially engaged people were more likely to purchase something or complete a goal. Of course we had to add extra code to get that to happen with any other social sharing than Google+.

But how useful was that? So the person who shared your product on Twitter had a higher conversion rate? Is that really a shock?

Of course there was other information that was related to social media that wasn’t located there in the audience section. Referrals from social sources for instance. Looking at how often a page was shared, and then how often visitors to that page from similar social sources converted, was a far more complicated report to divine.

Well now it’s all about traffic. It’s about what that social sharing is DOING for you.  Those socially engaged people… What are they sharing, and what pages are being shared, and the people who come in from social media.. What are they up to?

It’s about the social traffic coming into your site, and how those different sources, actions, and hubs affect your conversion. It’s about putting it all in once place so you can best take advantage of it.

It’s about who loves ya baby*

I’m not going to talk about the new reports and pages in this post. Someday soon, we’ll go over all the new reports. But for you to make any kind of use of those reports you need to have additional code installed on your page so you can actually track your social engagement ahead of time.

One of the things that came up in questions and comments about a previous post about Social Engagement Tracking in Google Analytics was about plugins for WordPress, particularly whether a plugin like Digg Digg had social engagement tracking in it. Sadly, most don’t, and Digg Digg specifically does not. Which is sad because I put Digg Digg on my personal blog and really enjoy it. So I decided to solve my problems, and yours with a handy little WordPress plugin of our own.

That’s right! A LunaMetrics WordPress Plugin!

Now normal legal stuff… We’re releasing this under the terms of the GNU General Public License, so feel free to take this and modify it to your hearts content. This plugin has been tested with WordPress 3.3.2 and has been tested to work on at least my personal blog with Digg Digg and the LunaMetrics site using custom buttons, so most likely it’ll work with other social media plugins. But I didn’t test all of them, so you never know. For all I know you’ll install this on your blog and it’ll melt your computer. Well, it probably won’t. Okay, I’ll bet money that your computer won’t melt. But at worst it’ll conflict with some other plugin you have, so install it, and if you pop errors, uninstall it (but let us know what those errors are.. maybe we can fix it up for you).

(oh and if you don’t use WordPress, like I mentioned above, this is just code from our previous post. Go ahead back there and grab the code and do it the old fashioned way.)

LunaMetrics – Google Analytics Social Engagement Tracking Code – WordPress Plugin

This plugin inserts the code listed in the previous post here linked above that laid out all the various code you’d need to put on your site to have your social clicks tracked. Well, this does all that for you automatically. Just download the plugin and install and activate it, and you’re good to go. It doesn’t include the regular Google Analytics tracking code, nor does it put buttons on your page, all it does is behind the scenes code to make that other stuff work and track social engagement correctly. That way you can keep using your current or favorite social sharing button plugins, or your GA tracking code that’s hard installed in your header files, doesn’t need to be modified.

First, download the plugin, and make sure you know where it is. I have it in my downloads folder.

Now go to your WordPress installation, and navigate to your Plugins area. (If you don’t see Plugins, it’s because you’re logged in under a User account, and not an Admin account). At the top of the page, next to the Plugins title is a small button marked “Add New”. Click on that bad boy.

Now, underneath the “Install Plugins” headline are a few different links. Click on “Upload” which is right next to the bolded “Search”.

Now you need to show it where your downloaded file is. Click on browse and find the file.

Select the zip file you just downloaded above, and click open.

Now with the plugin selected, click “install now”

Almost there, all you need to do is activate the plugin. Click “Activate Plugin”.

And you’re good! Check out your plugin list and you should see the Google Analytics Social Engagement Tracking Code plugin installed. Note that I have Digg Digg and Google Analytics for WordPress installed here, to do my social media buttons, and my general GA tracking respectively. Without those, our plugin won’t do anything.

And that’s it! There’s no settings to set, or anything. Once it’s activated the code needed will be added to the head of your pages, and before the closing body tag, just as listed in the previous Social Engagement post. If you add buttons to your page, they should track socially now. So if before you were a little put out by adding code to some of your WordPress templates, you’re in luck. Now all you have to do are those 8 simple clicks listed above, and you’ll be able to better track your social engagement.

*If you aren’t familiar with Telly Savalas then Google him. Why do I have to do everything for you? Jeez.

What’s the Change?

Google made the announcement that in the coming weeks, the Rotate Evenly setting will only rotate ads evenly for 30 days after a new ad is implemented or after an existing ad is edited; despite this being a campaign-level setting, the even rotation will be tracked at the ad group level, meaning each ad group can be at different stages in the 30 day rotation.  One thing that’s extremely important to note is that the campaign’s ad rotation setting will continue to say “Rotate Evenly,” even if the 30 day rotation period has ended.

Following the announcement, advertisers everywhere immediately started responding to the news with negative feedback, angry tweets, and even a petition to stop Google from implementing this new change, available here at www.change.org. 

Essentially (and unfortunately) this setting means that we as advertisers will be losing another aspect of control over our AdWords campaigns.  Even if you have seen great results from running ads that rotate evenly, the possibility of running this setting on an ongoing basis will no longer exist, and will automatically switch to rotate to optimize for clicks after 30 days.  Even worse, this severely skews the validity of many advertisers’ ad copy tests, especially those who don’t accrue a statistically significant amount of data in the allotted 30 days.

How to Prepare for the Ad Rotation Update

The easy answer on how to prepare: hurry up and run any significant ad copy tests you were planning on running!  Alas, it is not always that simple, and the need for ad copy testing will arise in the future, while this new ad rotation is in place.  We all know how important statistical significance is when running tests in Paid Search, but unfortunately, many ad copy tests will not reach statistical significance in 30 days.  When this is the case, the only way to work around this issue (for now) is to do the following:

1.)    Pause the ads that were being tested once the 30 days of even rotation is up

2.)     Create new ads that are identical to those you were testing, to trigger the “Rotate Evenly” setting for another 30 days

3.)    Rinse and repeat until you accrue statistically significant traffic numbers

While this method is not perfect, it is a way to overcome Google’s rotation update in desperate ad copy testing situations.

So far, I haven’t heard that it will be possible to opt-out of this, but I, along with almost every other AdWords advertiser out there, am keeping my fingers crossed that there will be some sort of opt-out option for this in the near future.

How do you feel about this new upcoming change to the ad rotation settings?  If you have any other ideas on how to bypass this setting, please share!