Training, training, training. It’s something that we love to do (unfortunately, I don’t get to do much of it myself anymore.)

In our own fair city of Pittsburgh, we’ll be doing Seminars for Success (that would be Google Analytics) training on January 23, 24 and 25. The first day is the 101 — very basic, for beginners or those who just want to start at a beginner level. The second day is the 201, a much more advanced level, but still for marketers and analysts. And the third day is the 301, which is for techies. Or as one of the people who designed the training says, it is like a car: The first day is Driver’s Ed, the second day is Learning to Drive a Race Car, the third day is Learning to be a Mechanic.

We’ll follow the three days of GA training in Pittsburgh with two days of AdWords training — a basic day, followed by a more intermediate day. All the training days (Analytics and AdWords) come with lunch, jump drives with the slides, and WIFI  for all (in fact, we encourage everyone to bring their laptops).  And let’s not forget about time to ask and get answers to questions. We are pretty big on this last topic.  The cost per day (for any of the Pittsburgh training described here) is $499/day, and there are volume discounts. You can learn more about the Google Analytics Training (and the AdWords training, too) here, where you can register as well.

In San Francisco, we are doing a single day of SEO training ($199/person), in partnership with the Non-Profit Technology NetWork’s (NTEN) annual conference. Their summit is in SF on April 3-5, and our full day of SEO training is on April 2.  You can read about the day on the NTEN website and you can register in their shopping cart, when you choose to go to their event. Or, if you just want to attend our SEO day, you can register right here on our site.

OK.  Back to our regularly scheduled educational blogging.

Robbin

Everyone can agree: Google Analytics’ custom variables are a great feature. It lets you label your visitors with all sorts of fun stuff. Male or female? Member or non-member? Cat person or dog person? If you can identify your visitors’ answers to these sorts of questions, you can tag them with a custom variable.

But sometimes website owners implement the custom variable code and start gathering these valuable segments of traffic, completely unaware that the numbers aren’t very accurate. What could be causing such a heinous mistake?

Believe it or not, Google warns against the issue right in those instructions there, but they don’t call it out quite enough for my taste. It’s extremely important that you “call the _setCustomVar() function when it can be set prior to a pageview or event GIF request” (emphasis mine). Here are the details:

In certain cases this might not be possible, and you will need to set another _trackPageview() request after setting a custom variable. This is typically only necessary in those situations where the user triggers a session- or visit-level custom var, where it is not possible to bundle that method with a pageview, event, or ecommerce tracking call.

What exactly does this mean? Well, if a visitor fills out a survey on your site, hits submit, and you run _setCustomVar() after the _trackPageview() of the submission success page, that _setCustomVar() call just sits there in deep space, waiting for another _trackPageview() or _trackEvent() function to carry it along to Google’s servers. If that is the visitor’s final pageview in the session, then the call floats away forever, never to be heard from again.

The worst part, though, is if the visitor goes to another page, then the _setCustomVar() will tag along with any subsequent GIF requests. This means that it may appear as if the custom variable is working just fine, according to the reports in Google Analytics, but the numbers are just inaccurate.

So, to ensure that you are tracking your custom variables as precisely as possible, make sure that you always run the _setCustomVar() function before the calls to _trackPageview() or _trackEvent(). If this isn’t possible–you have an include at the top of every page, for instance, and can’t modify it–then be sure to include a second pageview or event after the _setCustomVar() function, like this:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'membership', 'gold', 1]);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Tow Truck', 'go', '-', 0, true]);

This will ensure that every single time that function runs, it gets counted. Guaranteed!

Update: Tyson Kirksey, of Vertical Nerve, reminded me to set the event to non-interaction mode so that it won’t influence bounce rate, pages/visit, time on page, etc. I’ve also borrowed his clever naming convention for the event. Thanks, Tyson!

If there’s one PPC practice that should be instilled among all advertisers, it’s to make your brand stand out: not just physically or visually, but behind the scenes as well.

Of course, advertisers want their brands to stand out above the rest, that is a given; but it’s important to keep this same methodology in place when compiling your PPC campaigns (and I’m not just talking about writing an eye-catching ad).

Here’s an example: Imagine you work for an athletic shoe company. If a potential buyer searches “(Your Brand Here) women’s tennis shoes,” you don’t want your generic keyword “women’s tennis shoes” to battle with other brands’ generic keywords in order for your ad to appear. Sure, it’s possible that your generic keyword will trigger your ad as a result of this search, but chances are that any click captured in this way will be much more expensive than a click as a result of a branded keyword. You’re paying more for that click than you should have, and fighting for that click with more competitors than necessary; having brand keywords could have helped your ad show up in a better position while obtaining clicks at a lower price.

PPC gurus know that to develop a successful structure for Paid Search campaigns and accounts overall, product and services should be grouped tightly, in order to ensure potential customers are seeing ads that are relevant to their search queries and landing on site pages that take them where they need (and want) to go. You’d be surprised, however, by how many advertisers group their brand keywords with generic non-brand keywords, assuming that as long as the campaigns and ad groups are specific enough, brand and non-brand keywords will work the same. Moreover, you’d be surprised at how many advertisers don’t bid on brand keywords at all! Always make sure you have brand keywords throughout your account… always! I have seen VERY few instances where not bidding on brand keywords has been the better choice for an advertiser.

What does it mean when “search/organic” turns up as Source/Medium in your Google Analytics reports? It could mean some of your visitors are using the search engine Search.com (yes, there really is a search engine called that), but it could also be bad data because Google Analytics mistakenly attributed visits to Search.com even though they came from somewhere else.

How could that happen? Suppose your site www.anything.com has a search box (of course it does!) so visitors can search the entire site. Unfortunately, the site search engine returns search results pages with URLs like this:

search.anything.com?q=anything

I say, “unfortunately,” because that’s exactly the kind of URL that Google Analytics mistakes for the search engine Search.com.

How Site Search Gets Mistaken for Organic Search

Google Analytics keeps a list of search engines, and it recognizes them by looking for certain items in the referring domain and referring page query string. If the domain contains “search” and the query string contains “q” then GA thinks the referrer is Search.com.

There’s even more bad news. Suppose this visitor originally came to your site from an email campaign, which you cleverly tagged with cool campaign info (newsletter/email), as you should. As soon as the visitor uses your site search, GA mistakenly sees a new traffic source (search/organic)… and starts a brand new session.

This scenario played out recently for one of our clients. The previously documented solution, using _addIgnoredRef, did not work. So we reported it to Google engineers, who reproduced and confirmed the issue and promised to get back to us with an update.

In the meantime, we devised a simple workaround that immediately improved the data. If your data has been compromised by this issue, it can help you, too.

How To Fix It

Our solution is a little script that we include on every page on search.anything.com. The script looks at all the links on the page and if a link goes to anything.com, it appends a parameter to the URL that tells GA not to change the source/medium to search/organic.

jQuery.noConflict();

jQuery(function() {
  jQuery("a").each(function(index) {
    var link = jQuery(this);
    var href = link.attr('href');

    if (href.indexOf('www.anything.com') != -1 && window.location.href.indexOf("search.anything.com") != -1)
      {
        jQuery(link).bind("click", function(l) {
          location.href = href + (href.indexOf('?') != -1 ? "&utm_nooverride=1" : "?utm_nooverride=1");
          return false;
        });
      }
  });
});

If you’re already familiar with GA parameters you’ll see the key to the script is the parameter utm_nooverride=1, which is more typically used when visitors return to your site from third-party shopping carts, or for ad campaigns where you don’t want to overwrite existing referral data.

In this case, utm_nooverride=1 means GA won’t write a new traffic source (and mistakenly start a new session) just because a visitor uses site search.

Remember you also need to refer to the jQuery library before you call the script, like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.4.min.js"></script>

Have you come across this issue on your own site or a client’s? If so, how did you handle it? Please share in the comments.

Local businesses have long doubted the possibility, if not the potential, of ranking favorably for geo-modified keyword phrases in the organic search results. In markets where competition is stiff and ahead of the curve, spending thousands of dollars for results that are anything less than guaranteed is reasonably unjustifiable. Likewise, PPC costs in these markets can be through the roof, costing small businesses upwards of $10-15 a click – a rate that bodes well for too few industries. While websites that are well optimized for conversions can turn these high-cost clicks into profit, it is often difficult for small businesses to stomach the costs of redesign and analytics that it takes to mold such sites. All things considered, it can be a trying, expensive endeavor for a small business to gain traction in the paid or traditional organic search results.

Enter Google Places, Google’s online local directory – an avenue through which all local business owners can (and should) pursue organic traffic for their websites. Know a local business owner? Own a business yourself? Great! The following post will walk you through the steps of setting up your Google Places listing, complete with tips for optimizing your listing for Google’s local search results. If you’re already familiar with the setup (and curious about the optimization exclusively), you’re welcome to skip ahead to Step 3.

1. Create a Google account for your local business/website.

Believe it or not, this is one of the most important steps in the process. Not only does your Google account enable you to claim your listing, but it also is the account that you’ll need to access if you wish to make any changes/updates to your Places page. Whether you’re the business owner or not, I recommend creating an account that’s specific to your business, rather than using a personal account. If the responsibilities of maintaining the listing or the business itself should ever change hands, you’ll not want to grant the new employee or owner access to your personal account. Trust aside, it’s just not something that’s preferable – for managerial, organizational, and personal reasons. Keep the login simple – something that’s easy to remember, but also sufficiently secure. I’d go with mybusinessname@gmail.com. That’s simplicity! Also, when creating your account, you have the option to specify an “other email address.” Be sure to specify an address that uses your businesses domain name, for example joe@mybusinessname.com. This is one more signal that helps Google trust the information you’ll provide in the following steps.

2. Claim your Google Places listing.

Once you have your account set up, it’s time to claim your listing. Go to the Google Places homepage, where you’ll see two options. For our purposes, we’ll be choosing the option on the right – Claim your business listing on Google – for free.

After you click “Get started”, you may be asked to log into your account once more. Kindly oblige to this additional step towards security and continue on. If this is your first time listing a business under the new account (which it likely will be), you should be directed to a page that prompts you to search for your business by telephone number. Enter your business land line (formatted like the one below), select your country, and click “Find business information”. Be mindful that, due to its integration with Google Maps, Google Places must be provided with a land line to associate or pair with a physical address. You should not use your personal or company cell number when completing this step. I’ll explain more about this later.

If Google was unable to find your business information (which is fine), you can move onto the next step. If it does, that’s generally fine, as well. In most cases, you’ll be able to edit and claim your existing listing (which may simply consist of basic information pulled from the various sources like InfoUSA, Yellowpages, etc.). In the rare case that someone else has already claimed your listing, you can either determine who has claimed it (if, perhaps, it was claimed internally) or claim it again.

3. Edit your Google Places listing.

This is where the bulk of the work gets done. First, I’ll address how to go about editing an existing listing (should that be the case). If your business is found, you should arrive at a screen like the one below, where you’ll see your business name, land line, and physical address. To edit your listing, simply click “Edit” on the right hand side. Don’t worry about verifying anything just yet; we’ll get to that in the next step.

Alright. Now it’s time to do the legwork that will serve as the foundation for our Google Places listings. Appropriately enough, this section will be a little longer than those before it; so hold on tight. This is like that 30-minute, touristy train ride at the beginning of the National Park that all the kids want to replace with “exploration”. You can go on and explore or stick around, learn, then explore. I’ll let you be the judge of which is more beneficial. Anyways, let’s get to it. While most of the sections of the listing are pretty self explanatory, I’ll outline the two that I find to be most pertinent to our listing’s ability to rank.

Basic Information

In this section, you’ll fill out some of the basic information about your business, including country, company name, street address, city, zip, etc. If you have a website, this is where you’ll enter the URL. One thing to keep in mind in this section (and throughout all of your online listings) is consistency. Consistency across multiple listings and seed channels is often considered to be one of the key determinants of search engine visibility for Google Places listings.

For instance, when filling out the Address field, something as simple as using the shorthand “Mulberry St.” , rather than the written form “Mulberry Street” is something that you should monitor for the sake of consistency. An integral component of a given listing’s ranking potential is the availability of information with which Google is able to triangulate validity. When moving from one seed site to the next (be it Yelp, Citysearch, Hotfrog, what have you), be mindful of any discrepancies between inputs – however minute they may be. Remember, when it comes to the inputs that are indicative of your physical location or contact information, the more consistent your listings, the better.

When typing up the description, you have 200 characters to describe your business. Use these 200 characters efficiently and effectively, maintaining a healthy balance of your targeted geo-modified keywords and usability. Do your best to include partial match keywords in your category selections, as well. You can choose to list up to five different categories (many of which are predefined).

Service Areas and Location Settings

In this section, you’ll specify whether your business operates out of one location or offers business/service to customers at their homes. If you choose the first option – “No, all customers come to the business location” – you’re essentially guaranteeing that the primary root location of all of your geo-modified key phrases will be the city/town in which your business is located. In selecting the second option – “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations” – you’re (perhaps) indicating that all towns within your scope should be given equal weight when tacked onto your key phrases as geo-modifiers. Makes sense, right?

As far as determining your coverage area goes (for those of you who select the second option), you have two choices. The first – Distance from one location – allows you to specify a location and a radius (measured in miles). All areas within the circumference of the resulting circle are considered to be part of the coverage area. The other option – List of areas served – allows you to list specific cities/towns in which your business or service operates at the customer’s home. This is handy for those of you who don’t necessarily work within or without the confines of a given circumference with a defined center. It’s also useful for showcasing for Google the towns for which you’d like your listing to rank locally. In my mind, there’s a time and a place for each of these different options. Do your best to discern which will work most effectively for your type of business.

Other Information

It should be clear at this point that the Google Places listing requests a pretty comprehensive set of inputs and information. If I were to offer you one word to help you make your listing the very best that it can be, it would be ‘completeness’. Not only does completeness give your listing a better chance of ranking, but it also provides for the best user experience. Have pictures of your storefront? Upload them. Have a product review video or a 30-second television spot? Upload it. You get the idea. Substance is optimal. Make sure you have something for every field.

Once you’ve assured that your Places listing is both consistent with other online listings and ripe with completeness, you can proceed to Step 4.

4. Verify your Google Places listing.

Verification is a necessary step of listing your business on Google Places, and there are two methods for doing so. When you’re done editing your listing, click “Submit” at the bottom of the page. If everything is status quo, you’ll be taken to the verification screen, where you’ll be asked, “How would you like to validate your listing?”.

In most cases, you can choose from either phone or postcard verification. If you choose to verify by phone, moments after you click “Finish”, you will receive a phone call from Google’s automated machine at your business’s land line. When you answer the phone, the Google “bot” will read a 5-digit verification PIN, which you’ll need to write down. Simply input this 5-digit PIN under its respective business within your Places account, and voila – your listing is live. Verification by postcard replaces the phone call to your business address with the mailing of a postcard to your business address. The postcard (from Google) should arrive within two to three weeks of clicking “Finish” and contains the 5-digit PIN that you’ll need for verification. The downside to this method is obviously the time that it takes to get your listing live. While phone verification is almost always preferable (as it is instant), it is not always provided as an option.

5. Manage, maintain, & market your Google Places listing.

We’re at the end of the road . . . or are we? Once your listing goes live, it’s up to you whether or not you want to devote time and resources to managing, maintaining, and marketing it. Let me limit your options, here. DO IT. Take a few minutes every now and then to monitor your page.

If you have Google Analytics set up on your business website, consider tracking traffic and conversions from users finding your listing through the local pin drop results. Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on your Places page. Post semi-frequent updates – including special offers and coupons. Build your online reputation by creating listings with other notable local directories, keeping consistency in mind throughout. The honest pursuit of these tasks, when coupled with an underlying quality of business or service, provide for a socially engaging listing that’s fit to rank well in location-specific results.

And so ends in brevity this guide to Google Places for local businesses. If you’re looking to learn more about specific ranking factors for local SEO, have a look at David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors. That should give you some further insights into what it takes to rank for local queries. If you have any questions, comments, or tales of the Google Places you’ve been, don’t hesitate to share! In the mean time, have a safe, tremendous holiday.

This is part one of a multi-part series on the fundamentals for maximizing the conversions for your business’s website.

When people hear that LunaMetrics does consulting and training for Google Analytics, I often hear “Really?? There’s that much to Google Analytics? Everyone knows how to use that!” Possibly, but if I had to guess how you use your Google Analytics, it’s probably something like this:

1. If you happen to remember, you login to GA
2. You look at the default date range, and see if the overall visits are up or down
3. If there is a large spike up or down, you look into the referrers and organic/paid search reports to see why, otherwise you close GA and call it a day

Done. Right?

But then you wonder “Why am I only getting 5 sales a day from 1,000 visitors?”. Someone suggests you update the website to be Web 3.0. It’s not converting because people think it looks dated. So you spend the money to get a new pretty website. And then you check your graphs. Maybe they look the same, maybe they’ve gone up a little, maybe they’ve gone down a little, but you really have no idea how this new website has impacted anything. And your conversion rate is about the same. Sound familiar?

This is what many people I talk to do, and even though a select few are obsessed with some aspects of analytics, they still feel helpless with regards to conversions because they don’t complete what I call the “Infinite Conversion Loop”.

What’s the Infinite Conversion Loop?

I’m glad you asked! This is a process I’ve used over the years and it takes the guesswork out of what will and won’t improve your conversion rate. It sounds time consuming, but as I go into detail in the next couple of posts, you’ll see it really only requires a few hours a week. At the worst, you’ll understand why you only get a .5% conversion rate, but in the best case you may be able to double or triple your conversions.

1. Measurement of a baseline – To do any part of this process accurately, you need to make sure you have all of your Analytics configured so that everything is being measured equally and effectively from the beginning. This is not complicated, but it does involve more then just slapping GA code on every page (although that’s a great start). Specific details of what to do here will be the subject of my next blog post, but to really visualize what’s going on here, this is a crucial first step. Do you know exactly how much money your website makes? Do you know what your shopping cart abandonment rate is? Do you know what people are searching for and not finding on your site? Do you know how your site is being shared on social networks? If the answer is no to any of these, you’re still on step one.

   

2. Identify your visitors – Not all visitors are alike. You love seeing traffic go up, but that doesn’t always mean an increase in conversions. Now that you are measuring everything, how can you tell who is visiting your website, and more importantly why are they not converting? How much of your traffic is even likely to convert? If you have 1000 visitors and only 5 convert, surely you must be wondering what the heck those other 995 were up to.

   

3. Passive User Testing – There’s some answers you will never be able to get by just looking at the numbers, you really have to study how people use your website to see what they are doing. There are great tools that allow you to watch recordings of what people are doing on your site (completely passively) and study their behavior. You don’t get to ask them questions, but this often helps you identify larger problems with your website, including that JavaScript error you never discovered on Firefox 3 for Mac.

   

4. Active User Testing – I always do passive user testing before active, because active user testing is more expensive and time consuming, and you want to make sure you’ve fixed the big problems first. With Active User Testing, you’ll write a script for people to follow, often based on confusing behavior seen in the previous step, and let them narrate their thought process as they try to do it. The best user testing lets you ask people along the way, “Why did you do that?” or “Did you notice X?”. The difference between Active and Passive user testing is that with Active you hear their thought process as they are using your site “Oh, I thought the search would show me this, but instead it showed me another search”. or “Hmm, I want to checkout, but I don’t see the Visa logo”

   

5. A/B and Multi-Variate Test – The previous four steps should have given you some ideas of changes you can make to improve conversions. The final part is something that scares most people, but some new tools make this once complicated task quite simple. Start with an A/B test to test larger theories, and then use multi-variate tests to figure out the absolute most optimal combination of elements.

By the end of this cycle, you’ll have a very good idea what percentage of visitors have the potential to convert, what’s keeping people from converting, and whether you need to do more SEO/Marketing to increase your conversions or structural/wording/HTML changes. The cycle doesn’t stop here. After you make these changes you start from the beginning. This cycle is infinite after all!

This is a very high level overview, but stay tuned for future posts describing exactly what each step involves and how you can accomplish them easily. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments if there is something you want to see covered!

If you weren’t in Paris today (c’est la vie!), you may have missed Google’s announcement at Le Web. Don’t worry, we’ll fill you in on the details. The announcement unveiled their efforts to collect data from social networks and platforms in an effort to be able to more fully report on social activities related to your site/business/product/etc. that may not happen on your site. For example, wouldn’t it be nice to open up Google Analytics and see which of your content was shared on Facebook, tweeted about, or plus-oned, Dug (or Digged?), Stumbled, commented on or otherwise mentioned?

Social platforms are being invited to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. To do this, Google has built a social data hub to make it easy.

The social data hub

The social data hub is a data platform based on open standards to enable social data partners to submit their activity streams, eventually making the data available to Google Analytics users. This means that GA customers will be able to determine down to the activity level – e.g. +1 button, comment, vote – what activities are taking place relevant to their content, when, by whom, and how they help achieve goals.

The social data hub will make it easier to aggregate social data that analytics users are looking for. It isn’t a product in and of itself, merely a standardized process to get data into GA. This will help marketers and publishers easily access and measure all social platforms and actions side by side.

Who’s in?

Google is kicking this off with a respectable list of partners:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Diigo
• Gigya
• LiveFyre
• ReadItLater
• Reddit
• TypePad / SixApart
• VKontakte

(and of course)

 The technical details

Google will be following the Activity Streams Specification (yes, there actually is one), for describing socially interesting events, or “Activities,” about the people and things an individual may care about. In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, and an object. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object. For example, “Robbin posted a photo” or “Phil shared a video.” Any of the data submitted may potentially be used but it must adhere to the specification.

Search Engine Optimization can be a mysterious field. Every other SEO guru has a different opinion about what tips, tricks or incantations cause your website to rank highly and cause conversions. These tips and tricks can be incredibly useful, and can certainly cause serious increases in your website’s traffic. What these lists don’t mention, however, is that SEO tricks alone do not make a website perform well. SEO tips, tricks and techniques should be icing on the cake.

The backbone of SEO is a well designed and well written website. A well designed website is intuitive and easy to use, and is fashioned to allow search engines to easily spider your site. This means that no pages are forgotten about or lost in space, and visitors to your site can easily navigate to their intended destination. No amount of SEO is going to help your conversion rate if people can’t find what they’re looking for.

Well written copy also performs two basic functions: it provides important keywords, specifically keywords that help make long tail keywords, and it’s the primary source of communicating to your customers. Well written copy is a wealth of information for both search engines and visitors to your site. It allows search engines to determine what your site is all about, while giving important information about your company and your services to visitors.

This might seem a straightforward topic, but often times companies will pour money into SEO projects only to see drastic increases in website traffic that never converts, often due to web designers knowing little about SEO. Without a solid foundation, SEO will unlikely be able to help you reach your goals. Luckily, SEO specialists understand this. If you see phenomenal website traffic for qualified keywords, but not the conversion rates you’d like, it might be worth contacting an SEO company that conducts usability testing. They can help determine why your site is underperforming and can suggest ways to improve your website that dovetail with your current SEO strategies.

If you’ve been to one of our Google Analytics trainings, you may have heard me say this: tracking visitors from one domain to another is a huge pain in the neck. Whenever someone goes from domain1.com to domain2.com, you have to take their cookie data and pass it over to the second domain via the URL. If you don’t, the visitor generates a new visit and their referral data gets jacked up.

Normally, this is a tedious, manual procedure. After making a minor change to your Google Analytics Tracking Code, you then have to modify every link on domain1.com that takes a person to domain2.com. If you have a few links, no big deal. But what if you have thousands of them?

We’ve posted before about automating the cross-domain tracking process, but a lot has happened since then. Namely, Google Analytics has a sexy new asynchronous tracking code. So we finally got around to creating a script that automatically links domains using the new code syntax.

Not only that, but this script tracks outbound link clicks and downloads, all automatically. They’ll show up as events.

We’re pretty proud of it, and since it’s so darn useful to us, we figured we’d share it with you. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you!

Step 1: Modify Your Google Analytics Tracking Code

First, you’ll need to make sure that your Google Analytics Tracking Code is set up to allow for cross-domain tracking. The _setDomainName and _setAllowLinker methods are required for this to work:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-Y']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'domain1.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Make sure that _setDomainName is set to the second-level domain that the tracking code resides on.

Step 2: Download and Modify the Script

Click here to download the script, then modify the domains and file types you’d like to track.

If I wanted to track the domains lunametrics.com and lunametricsstore.com, I’d modify line 5 to read:

var domains=["lunametrics.com", "lunametricsstore.com"];

And if I wanted to automatically track downloads for PowerPoint presentations, I’d add .ppt to the list on line 6:

var fileTypes=[".doc", ".xls", ".exe", ".zip", ".pdf", ".mov", ".mp3", ".ppt"];

Step 3: Upload Script and Include on Pages

Upload the xdomain.js file to your web server and then reference it on all pages of your site. Place the reference below your Google Analytics Tracking Code:

<script src="/path/to/xdomain.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Because the script relies on jQuery, you will also have to reference the jQuery library at some point before the call to the script. You can download a copy of the jQuery library and host it on your web server, or just reference the one hosted by jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.4.min.js"></script>

Step 4: Test It!

To make sure the script is working, click on one of the links that takes a visitor from one domain to the other. Check the URL that displays in your browser location field after the new page loads. You should see a string of information in the query string:

You can also view your cookies (I use Firebug and Firecookie). Check out __utmb. The number after the first period is the pageview count. If cross-domain tracking isn’t configured properly, then it will reset when you hit the secondary domain.

__utmz should also maintain the proper referral. If you visit your primary domain directly and then move to your secondary domain, __utmz should still reflect this:

Conclusion

Hopefully this helps you set up cross-domain tracking (and outbound link tracking and file download tracking) on your site easily, without a lot of headaches.

This script was a collaborative effort by myself and Phil Anderson, who did most of the heavy lifting in jQuery. It’s supplied as-is. We’ve tested it internally, but it’s your responsibility to make sure it works on your own sites. And if you notice anything that doesn’t seem to be working, you’re free to correct the code. It’s released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, so feel free to modify and redistribute. We just ask that you keep the copyright notice on the top, and that you share any cool additions with us so we can use ‘em too!

Link building is tough. You wander through hundreds of websites, carefully dodging bad neighborhoods and figuring out to get past the gate and into the high profile communities.  You try to make new friends, but the webmasters and gatekeepers won’t give you the time of day. If only you already had a large group of friends in high places – folks who would be more than happy to vouch for you via link, folks whose hyper-linking votes of confidence really boosts your credibility to the search engines that be.

Well, chances are that you have more friends than you realize. They can and will help your SEO endeavors, and you’ve probably been ignoring many of them. Your web friends are your entire group of stakeholders – every person, group, or organization who has a stake in your organizations success.

At LunaMetrics, we’ve found that the relationships our clients have built over the years produce great backlinks. Stakeholder backlinks typically are often hard to duplicate, carry solid authority, exist in neighborhoods with small numbers of external links, and are genuine votes of confidence.  We’ve also found that these relationships aren’t always translated online into links, but they often do with just a little help.

Introducing… the Stakeholder Backlink Audit

Helping current relationships bear linkable fruit online has become such an important part of our link-building methodology that we’ve formalized the process into a method we’ve dubbed the Stakeholder Backlink Audit.

The Stakeholder Backlink Audit is a tool for ensuring your website is receiving as many links as possible from those parties who may have an interest in your organization’s success, and may be willing to link to your site. It is a systematic and thorough method of maximizing link love from all the relationships your organization has built.

The Stakeholder Backlink Audit has 3 steps: 1) List stakeholders 2) Review their websites 3) Request links. We’ll walk you through the process using a make believe company – a restaurant chain called Pittsburgh Premier Pizza.  We’ll also show you how to make a mean audit form.

Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 1 – List stakeholders

First we need to take inventory. We recommend that you list on a spreadsheet every person or organization your organization has built a relationship with that you’d want as a referral source. This requires some help from your client or coworkers. Leave out any organizations you wouldn’t want to ask for a link from, and leave out any business relationships you want to keep private. Don’t worry yet about adding a bunch of details, checking the website, or checking for links. This step is simply all about building a nice long list of names, and being as thorough as possible. We’ll pare it down later.

You’ll want to build a sheet and pass it around the office. Your coworkers may have relationships you are totally unaware. We use an Excel form for this. We find it helpful to break down the stakeholders into categories, as it makes the process more manageable and makes it easier to think of names.

The various stakeholder groups you’ll encounter in your link building efforts include business partners, customers, associations, sponsorees, and alma maters. Let’s take a closer look at these stakeholder groups:

Business Partners – Includes suppliers, subcontractors, distributors, resellers and other partners.

• Tips: Leave out any business relationships you want to keep private! This is often a huge category, and you may want to break it down into subcategories.
• Some ways they link – Company’s often show where their products can be found or boast of reputable clients or brand names. They may name drop during case studies, testimonials, blog articles, or out of goodwill. Perhaps you are the best homebuilder in Pittsburgh, and your partners are more than happy to link to you because you’re so awesome (but maybe they just need a little reminder).
• Examples: McDonald’s Mushroom Farm; Pittsburgh Printing Press; SolarStats SEO

Customers

• Tip: This is also a good way to identify raving happy customers that may also write a review or testimonial.
• Ways they link – Businesses might list suppliers or recommend other businesses; some consumers blog about everything.
• Examples: Gourmet Gil the restaurant reviewer; Carnegie Mellon Mel, who writes for his university’s newspaper

Associations – Includes any association, organization, or business community you are a member of.

• Some ways they link – Member directories; news; pages covering events/exhibitions you participate in.
• Examples: Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce; Western PA BBBs; PA Restaurant Association;  Association of Pittsburgh Pizza Makers

Sponsorees – Any nonprofits and organizations you support and/or donate to.

• Tip: Time is money – so if you volunteer, that counts too.
• Some ways they link – “Sponsored by ______”; list of donors; Press Releases; donation announcements; event announcements.
• Examples:  Southside Little League; Pittsburgh Food Bank

Alma Maters – Schools your organizations employees graduated from.

• Tips: Good way to get the elusive “.edu” links.  Make special note if you have top executives that graduated from the school or if an employee remains highly active within the school (regular guest speaker, active in alumni association, etc…)
• Ways they link – Many schools have alumni business listings, alumni profiles, and success stories.
• Examples:  http://www.business.pitt.edu/alumni/news  http://www.upj.pitt.edu/19150 http://www.b-link.bucknell.edu/s/754/start-template.aspx?sid=754&gid=1&pgid=1284

I like to give each category of stakeholders a worksheet in the Excel workbook. Then I ask the client to provide stakeholder names and a very short description, and pass the workbook around the office until it is as full as possible.

Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 2 – Review their websites

Now that we’ve built our list, it’s time to figure out which stakeholders we need to get in touch with and where the backlinks can go.

First you’ll need to see if you have a backlink. There are several methods of doing this, and I personally haven’t found a method I’m fully satisfied with. I’ll check domains in an Excel report of current backlinks and then I might do a Google Advanced Search for a client’s brand names in certain stakeholder sites. I pull the client backlink reports using Majestic SEO (via Raven Tools) and SeoMoz (Open Site Explorer) – these aren’t complete but will find majority of links and most of the important ones.

If there is a backlink, see if it would make sense to try to get more links or improve the current link with better placement or anchor text.

If there is no backlink, decide if it’s worth going for (expect many stakeholders not to link out as policy – sometimes you may not want to bother). If so, how are you going to make the link request and who is responsible for it? Often it’s best that the link request is made by the individual with the closest relationship to the stakeholder. Also, like with all link-building, it’s common that you may have to work for the link, so note how.

When you’ve finished reviewing websites, your Excel audit form will look something like this:

Stakeholder Backlink Audit Step 3 – Request those links

By now, you’ve checked all the stakeholders sites for backlinks and you have an idea of how you’re going to go about getting those links. Again, like with all-link building there is going to be rejection, you will have plenty of waiting, and you may have to perform additional work for the links. You may need to write testimonials, fill out submission forms, hunt down webmasters, submit specially formatted logos, guest blog, write news snippets, and who knows what else.

Being as organized and systematic as possible will lower your work load – you could use the Excel form with comments to track and organize your requests or you can you a backlink manager tool (I use Raven Tools which has a neat browser tool). And always remember the golden rule – treat your stakeholders well if you want them to do the same to you.

It is work, but when you complete your Stakeholder Backlink Audit you will have added some quality, hard-to-duplicate, natural backlinks to your growing link profile.

We recommend that every website perform this backlink audit at least once. Let us know how it works out for you or if you have any comments!