Customer Intent

If one of Google’s most significant challenges is to clear the cesspool of content spam, the temptation to use analytics data must be stronger than ever.

There is already evidence that Google is factoring in domain age and the presence of legitimacy indicators on site pages. There’s even talk of giving more credibility to well branded sites or certain types of sites. But one of the more significant factors mentioned in one of Google’s patents is “time spent on the document”.

Longer time on the page (or more pages on the site) suggests a relevant document. Some call it Dwell Time but most site owners call it Average Time On Site (ATOS). I see at least three ways that Google can measure this.

1. Time to the Next Selection in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page)

In other words, each time a visitor makes a selection in the SERPS a stopwatch begins. If the visitor clicks another result in the SERPS in say, three seconds, the prior site is deemed less relevant to the search term. There are holes in this data since the absence of a second SERP click doesn’t necessarily deem a page relevant. Also, Google doesn’t see where the user goes next without other data.

2. Toolbar Data

The Google toolbar, in most configurations, broadcasts browser page requests back to Google. Time on site (or page depth) may be calculated from this data. This is very useful data for determining aggregate visitor behavior, but it is limited to the number of installed toolbars that are configured send usage statistics to Google.

3. Google Web Analytics

Google Analytics reports the average time on site (ATOS) and page depth for every site on which it is implemented. It also can assign this data to specific keywords. For this, Google doesn’t need a tool bar and no stopwatch on SERPs is necessary. There are fewer holes in this data and less aggregation cycles necessary to evaluate the relevance of a specific site.

Evil or Not?

In your Google Analytics terms of use, you agreed that Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use [the] information collected in your use of Google Analytics. In other words, Google may use the data in any way it chooses, subject to some restrictions in the agreement. A layman’s interpretation of this is that Google can use your site stats to determine the search relevance of your page.

Is this disturbing to you? Do you believe you “own” the data related to your site when you use Google’s tool to collect and store it?

Let’s assume not. then we should ask, “Do you believe that your average time on site is better than your competitors for a given keyword?” If so, you probably don’t mind Google knowing it. In fact, it would be a marked advantage over your competitors for Google to know your ATOS.

Have Something to Hide?

If you believe that your ATOS (or your average page view count) would be less than average, or misunderstood by Google to the detriment of your rankings, then your choices boil down to: (1) increase time on site or (2) try to hide the data from Google.

I predict that option two will eventually be futile as the SERPS method and toolbar data could eventually reveal a trend of a less relevant site.

Ultimately, the conformists will agree to make a more relevant site. The black hats will game the system (it’s not hard to do at all) until Google finds another way to determine relevance. But until then, we know for certain that the data is available to Google, and they have a strong motivation to use it.

What do you think? Should Google use Google Analytics for ranking?

Yahoo! Web Analytics has started a staged roll out giving access to some Yahoo! Store owners, Yahoo! Developers and Yahoo! Head Advertisers.

According to an earlier post from Dennis Mortensen,

“Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement.”

This is great news for Yahoo-ites since the power of the underlying Index Tools came closer to true segmentation as any tool out there (save for my faithful ClickTracks).

Congratulations to Dennis and the Yahoo! gang for getting this out so quickly.

I just taught email marketing and Universal Search techniques at a small business marketing conference.

A well intended friend asked me why I “wasted time speaking at a small business marketing conference.” He went on to suggest that I only target major conferences that attract ‘bigger’ clients.

At the conference, I was joined by some excellent speakers who also regularly serve large clients. But I suspect that’s not why they were there. It’s certainly not why I was there.

In online marketing, small businesses run circles around corporate America. Unburdened by red tape, they test, fail, innovate, fail, try one more time and succeed. It’s inspiring. It’s educational. And it’s really fun.

In the email marketing session, at least 80% of the attendees already understood the concept of mail server reputation and the value of an email service provider. The ideas coming back from the audience were inspiring. The sense of innovation and entrepreneurship were palatable.

Want to learn online marketing techniques? Rub shoulders with small business owners who take time to educate themselves and practice link building, paid search and site optimization just after closing up QuickBooks. Besides being with a fun group of people, the inspiration and knowledge gained is well worth the time invested.

Search marketing innovation moves up these days. Not down.

Sure, we teach search marketing online, but I assert that Search Engine Strategies is a must-attend conference for any internet marketer who can travel to the event.

We’ll be making some announcements at the conference and all active faculty and associates are presenting . Come by the booth and say hello to Market Motive founders and faculty.

Dream Team member Todd Malicoat and others are hosting a special party on Monday night where all proceeds go to charity. Some of the biggest names in search will be present and there’ll be an open bar for four hours (let’s see, at $10/drink you come out way ahead and the $$ helps the kids). Sign up now and live generously.

Bryan Eisenberg (Market Motive faculty for Conversion Optimization) will be releasing his latest book Always Be Testing an excellent book for marketers looking to get more leads, sales and profits from their website.

See you at the conference.

The debate has come up again as to whether or not Google Toolbar can cause un-linked pages to get indexed. Google spokes person, Matt Cutts, says the toolbar does not lead to pages being indexed.

I agree, but have to offer a different conspiracy theory. OTHER toolbars can and do lead to the indexing of unlinked pages. Popular browser plugins that request Alexa rank, or Compete rank will send the page address to these engines. These pages can and do get indexed by Alexa and other crawlers.

How to check? For Alexa, there are two ways

1. Search your server log files to see if the user agent “ia_archiver” has accessed your unlinked page.

2. Search Alexa for the specific page. It might be there now.

So, does Google crawl these pages? I asked Matt earlier this week and here’s his answer:

“http://www.alexa.com/robots.txt forbids Googlebot from crawling several directories, so we don’t crawl those directories. I took a quick look at Compete and just from surfing around didn’t see any places that would lead to deeper crawling by Googlebot, although I didn’t check everywhere.”

This is a reasonable answer that doesn’t rule out the possibility that your unlinked pages, once listed on Alexa, may be exposed through other engines and show up in Google results. Not Google’s ‘fault’ but still possible.

If the Worst Occurs

If Google has picked up a page you want removed, you can remove a URL from Google through Google Webmaster Tools.

Keeping Pages Out

To keep a page from getting picked up in the first place you can use the following:

You can use .htaccess to set a password to control access to a page. Users and robots cannot access the page.

You can use the noindex meta tag. This will keep well-behaved bots from indexing the page.

<html>
<head>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
<title>My secret page</title>
</head>

You can use robots.txt to block access to the page. However, this exposes the page to misbehaving people and bots. It also stops Google from crawling the content of the page, but Google can still show the reference.

In the end, obscurity isn’t reliable enough to keep a page from exposure on the web. Use a .htaccess password if you really want to keep it private.

How many people do you pay to touch your web presence? Nowadays, anyone who changes your site or outbound communication has the potential to derail your hard-earned search marketing progress.

Sure, your staff and consultants are smart - and well intended. But this isn’t enough today. Anyone with access must now have a basic knowledge of search marketing. If you have a large staff, I’ll bet you’re starting to get the picture.

Are you already familiar with some of the following mistakes? Perhaps your:

• Writers didn’t include your top keywords in the main copy
• Design team blocked your top content from the search engines via JavaScript and Flash.
• IT group copied robots.txt from the staged server, blocking all search robots
• PR group has no idea how distribute online or measure the success of a release
• Boss doesn’t understand why you need to pay for web analytics help
• Advertising manager misses the chance to A/B test the latest campaign
• Web team thought it was someone else’s job to submit an XML site map

I’ll bet there are dozens more. Have some infamous ones to add?

In the end, it’s your responsibility to make sure that each person who touches your site, ads, content, or analytics has some level of search marketing education. This includes contractors and consultants!

The rewards are great. We’ve observed significant competitive gains when base-level training is required for all staff that touch the company site, advertising or outbound copy. In fact, it’s why we started Market Motive in the first place - to get the training to the masses.

Where to start?

Get your staff into sessions at Search Engine Strategies, Online Market World, Pubcon, SMX and other quality conferences. Can’t fly everyone out? [pitch] Sign your staff up for online Market Motive training and consultant access for $299/month [/pitch]. Ask your expert consultants to run workshops on-site to teach optimization techniques. Hold weekly topical lunches discussing SEO, web analytics and site structure. And lastly, reimburse your staff on purchases of books covering search marketing topics.

Did you know that your web analytics system can be applied to your search engine optimization strategy? The keywords your visitors used to get to your site are prime candidates for optimization. But don’t just look at visit counts for each keyword, because that’s only a small part of the story.

To take advantage of this process, you will need three things in place:

1. You must reveal the goal of your site to your web analytics tool. For example, your “Thank you” page, or your email-sign-up-page might be a goal. If you have an e-commerce site, your order confirmation page is usually your goal. Most analytics tools give you the opportunity to indicate one or many “conversion” or goal pages. Take advantage of this.
2. You’ll need a few months of data that reports at least 20-30 of your search engine keywords with more than 200 visitors each.
3. Write down the “average conversion rate” and “average time on site” numbers for the time period that you are going to measure. You’ll need these later.

Now, get a cup of coffee and plan on 20-30 minutes to get your answers.

Find the reporting area of your analytics tool and list search engine keywords by visit count. Use a date range long enough to see more than 200 visits for the top 20-30 search engine keywords.

Using the reporting interface, or an export to Excel, sort the keyword list by conversion percentage descending from highest to lowest - but only for the keywords that brought in more than 200 visitors. If you don’t have conversion numbers, sort by the highest average time on site.

For this report, ignore your brand keywords (your company name, domain name and obvious product names) and double check that all keywords on your list still have more than 200 visits.

Scan the list and highlight the keywords with higher than average conversion or higher than average time on site. Some will be familiar, but often, a handful of phrases stand out as unexpected sources of engaged visitors.

Take these keywords and include them in your SEO and paid search investments make them more prominent in the search results pages. Promoting these keywords will increase your visitor engagement and conversion rates on your website, and you owe the discovery to a simple web analytics session.

Most of the Market Motive Faculty attended and/or spoke at the recent Search Engine Strategies New York. I believe this is the first full SES conference without Danny Sullivan. Though he is missed, the Incisive management team put on an excellent conference attended by over 8,000 folks looking to learn about online marketing.

Market Motive did a co-promotion with Incisive, so while I try to avoid shipping booths & staff cross country, we took a space on the show floor. Honestly, I’m glad we did.

I jot down notes on each day’s experiences at these events, so here are a few things I learned while at SES NYC:

Web Analytics is in a cycle of high popularity.

I witnessed standing room only in each session that covered web analytics. Perhaps the distribution of Google Analytics has caused this. True or not, site owners are starting to grasp the power of seeing visitor behavior on site and are looking for ways to interpret the data into action.

Regardless of the analytics tool, I know most new analytics tool users hit “The Wall” after about 20 minutes of use. I talk about this more in my “Stop Wasting Time with Web Analytics” series.

Testing a message in real-time is fun:

OK, we’re analytics folks. So multivariate testing is our genetic destiny. And this extends

beyond the web to the trade show floor. At SES, one of my goals was to reduce the TUTLGO (time until the light goes on) to less than 15 seconds booth visitors who ask, “So, what is Market Motive?”

To test, we systematically responded with short phrase combinations until we found the grouping that elicited the fastest enthusiastic response. We wanted to convey 1) the on demand video sessions, 2) the call access to faculty, and 3) the Q&A forums. (We learned to leave out #3) What was the winning phrase grouping? Skip the next part if you are pitch averse! It went something like this:

“We provide online classes, just like the sessions here, through a membership web site. After viewing any video, you can call in and discuss it with the presenter.”

[here, we’d pause and wait for the “oh!”, then…]

“So short of hiring the top 6 consultants, or flying out to a dozen conferences, you can catch any session on-demand, and then talk to the industry authority to check your strategy or get advice.”

[Pause… Light goes on, and the next question would
fall roughly into one of the following four groups:]

80% “Seriously? What does that cost?”
10% “OK, How often do I get to talk to [faculty name]?”
8% Other
2% “Do you take American Express?”

Good fish and Greek food is around the corner from the hotel.

The company made it even better, which included Richard, Jeff, Jim, Emily, Karen Lea and Matt. My favorite topics of our private-room dinner:

• How many domains do you (not your business) own? (my answer: 18)
• How many saltine crackers can you consume at once? I’m up to four… Jeff.
• What was the outcome of Jim’s 2006 expose “click fraud allegations” from late 2007?
• What the heck is a lavraki?

How Many SEOs can you fit into a Irish Pub on Saint Patrick’s Day?

About 20. The rest of us conversational types worked the pub crawl backwards from #6 and met the other crew in the middle.

One bonus find: You can buy a decent 10×10 trade show booth for $499 on ebay

It was also my pleasure to meet Stoney, and Scott and Duane and hope to see you all at eMetrics SES San Jose or Pubcon.

Lastly, while at SES I learned from Jennifer Laycock about the upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference in Houston on April 21-22 backed by my friends Search Engine Guide. $975 for two full days of well known speakers sounds like a great deal to me.

Or: Three ways to get around misleading paid search reporting:

Most of us feel good when we see a positive ROI on our paid search campaigns. And most analytics tools give us plenty of opportunity to feel good about our campaigns.

But there is an inherent lie in the majority of PPC reporting tools, and that lie is based on the assumption that you have zero cost of goods. With few exceptions your products DO cost you something and thus any ROI analysis should be influenced by profit which in turn requires knowledge of margins.

When your campaign performance is measured by raw revenue, you won’t know which campaigns are making profit and which are losing money. Base your campaign measurement on profit and you’ll know very quickly which campaigns to adjust or cut.

Many measurement tools, like Google Analytics, IndexTools and ClickTracks, report ROI based on raw revenue. We can’t really blame them because profit is hard to expose (and collect) in the analytics tool. However, Google goes a step too far when they add a column to the campaign report that pretends to be “Margin” While the help tip says, “Margin is (Ecommerce revenue + Total Goal Value - Cost) divided by Revenue,” the only “cost” reported here is the ad cost and not the cost of goods, which makes the ad performance look far better than it really is.

ClickTracks reports ROAS or “Return on Advertising Spend”. For every dollar you spend, this is how much you get back.

At least ClickTracks acknowledges the need for margin markups in the help text: “… for a full cost/benefit analysis, you need to consider not only the revenue which a group of visitors brings in, but also the profit which you make from that revenue…”

How does this affect you? An Illustration:

Let’s say we bought 100 Marshmallow Shooters at $11 each and sold them all for $16 each. We spent $800 in Google AdWords to close $1600 in sales. Google Analytics will show this at 100% ROI and 50% margin. According to this report, we made 50 cents on the dollar and should invest even more in AdWords. This is how most advertisers (and some agencies) react to the report.

In reality, we’re operating at a loss. Our cost of goods was $1100. With the $800 spent on advertising, our COGS (cost of goods sold) is $1900. With $1600 in sales, the business has lost $300. Actual ROI is -38%, not 100%. The business is losing 15.7 cents on every dollar spent. Run a business this way and it won’t last for long.

How do you really measure ad performance? Solutions fall into three categories:

1. Rely on gut instinct to tell you which ads are generating profit. Many marketers do, so you won’t be alone.
2. Expose profit rather than revenue to your measurement (analytics) tools. This is the most accurate method. Implementation requires that your revenue collection system be modified to calculate margin on the fly and expose it to your analytics tool. This makes sense for catalog and retail businesses, but for many advertisers, a simpler solution will suffice.
3. Use the tools as they are and adjust for inaccuracy. After doing a small calculation, you can know what the reported ROI must be to indicate a performing ad campaign.

Let’s expand on the third solution. You’ll need to know your average margin and plug this into a simple formula. There are already great pages that discuss the definitions of margin, but for the purposes of this example, we’ll use profit divided by revenue, which looks like this: (sales-costs)/revenue. (Also for this example, we’ll leave advertising out to the ‘costs’ and focus on basic product costs.)

So, if I sell a product for $10 that costs me $6, my profit is $4. $4/$10 = .40 or 40% margin. Once you’ve got your own margin number, apply it to the following formulas to find your ROI break even point (as reported by your analytics tool).

To translate Google Analytics ROI , use the formula:

(1 / margin)-1

For example: If your margin is .3125, then (1/.3125)-1 = 2.20 or 220%. So, any Google analytics-reported ROI above 220% are performing ads.

To translate Google Analytics Margin column , use the formula:

(1 - margin) * 100

For example: If your margin is .3125, then 1 -.3125 = .6875 or 68.75%. So any Google Analytics-reported margins above 68.75% are performing ads.

To translate ClickTracks ROAS , use the formula:

(1 / margin) * 100

For example: If your margin is .3125, then (1/.3125) * 100 = 320 cents or $3.20. So all campaigns generating $3.20 or more ROAS are generating profit.

To save you some time and paper, here’s a simple tool that will do the calculation for you and display the rates for each analytics tool covered here.

Understand the real value of your ad campaigns, and you’ll be able to focus your investment on ads that are truly performing for your business.

I just returned from Pubcon 2007 Las Vegas. After every conference, a few events stand out as particularly good.. or particularly bad. Here are mine:

To the speakers who still reveal how it really works. Neil, Rand, Aaron, Todd, and others kept the spirit of Pubcon by sharing some raw, unfiltered truths of how things really work in SEO, social media and SEM.

To Joe Morin for arranging for us to see Blue Man Group. If in Vegas, go see the long-running classic at the Venetian. Joe also hosted some nice parties in the Wynn Tower Suites. Very classy Joe. Thanks.

To bad advice. The web analytics advice I heard from the podium was sparse, and often, just plain wrong. I can’t believe people are still teaching that accuracy is the most important factor, or that tracking a single visitor’s path is useful in analysis.

To Microsoft (yep). AdCenter’s Mary Berk came out to ask the advertisers what type of quality score information they preferred. Extra recognition to Geoff Price of Efficient Frontier. For a sales VP, he delivered fairly meaty stuff in our Quality Score session.

To Microsoft (yep again) for the party at the Palms Ghost Bar. Extra smiles to Jessica for suggesting we stay longer and to John Marshall and Heather Lloyd-Martin for keeping us all dancing.

To the door guy who checked badges. This gentleman turned a thankless job into a pleasure for the attendees. Sure, he enforced the rules, but somehow made me smile every time I walked by. A rare find.

It seemed every cab driver we had was a character. We had a movie critic and later, a comedian: “Yeah, they just found my ex-husband. How was I to know they’d build that far out West?” Kind of raw, but still entertaining. What do you expect in Vegas?

For scheduling overlap with Chicago SES. Perhaps it couldn’t be avoided. But again, it’s like asking a kid to pick a favorite parent on the holidays. Some good speakers were missed.

To attendees who asked for more detail on the Quality Score techniques I presented in my session. The level of process and technical understanding at this show is inspiring.

To friends and acquaintances who made the sessions and evenings rich with anecdotes, tech-talk and just plain fun. I particularly enjoyed spending time with Dan Thies, Jill Whalen, Craig Paddock, Jay Berkowitz, Mike Black, Jessica Bowman, Rob Snell, Shirley Tan, and Mark Jackson. Lyndsay Walker knows her web analytics - even though she’s from Canada ;). Matt Tuens patiently explained some techniques on quality content creation even though he’s in sales :). Matt Harper offered promotional contacts within one minute of meeting for the first time. It’s these types of folks that make this industry so special.