X SEO

Last week, Google rolled out shiny new filter options. In addition to an improved, sorted format for the filters (below), there are also several new custom filters.

We can now filter traffic into or out of profiles based on the following criteria:

• Campaign or AdGroup category:
• Campaign AdGroup
• Campaign Referral Path
• Audience category:
• Visitor Mobile (!!!!)
• Location category:
• Continent
• Event category:
• Event Category
• Event Action
• Event Label

Honestly, any new filter options are welcome, but I was most excited about the Event filters and the Mobile filter.

Back in December, Michelle walked everyone through the slightly complex process to create a mobile profile in Google Analytics. For the past six months, we found this method to be the best way to properly capture the most mobile traffic possible.

The new Mobile filter changes everything. This filter means we can quickly include or exclude only mobile traffic, negating the need for the multiple steps listed in our previous blog post. Now if you want your profile to include mobile traffic, just add this quick filter:

Easy, right?

Google just keeps innovating, adding more features to Google Analytics, and they’re not slowing down. Any predictions for future feature releases? Or are there any new filter options you hope Google adds? Let us know in the comments!

Props to Michelle for noticing the Mobile filter first!

by Mike Fleming

Company owners and other business decision makers who handle a web marketing budget
are given, whether it’s their fault or not, too much website data that
doesn’t directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What’s wrong
with this?  Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an
incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and
the company.  So, when it’s time to decide how to invest,
there’s nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money. 
To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to
focusing on outcomes.

Step One: What’s the Point?

The
first step in this shift needs to involve laying out the ultimate
reason the website exists, along with the micro-actions that signify the
movement of a prospect toward that outcome (stick with 3-5 so you don’t
lose focus).  They could be purchases or certain behaviors.  Whatever
these actions are, they are the ones that tell you if your site is successfully accomplishing its business purpose.

If
you lay these out correctly, they will mostly be outcomes that can be
given an economic value.  But, be careful not to focus on just
e-commerce metrics like Conversion Rate.
Why? People come to your site to do activities other than just purchase
something.  They research, they look for jobs, they get support, read
some content, etc.  They don’t need to buy something for it to be a quality visit and for you to conclude that your website did it’s job. Your website did it’s job if visitors were able to complete the task they came to your website to perform.

Here
are some valuable metrics other than conversion rate that focus on
behaviors that, if improved, directly impact the bottom line…

1. Cart and Checkout Abandonment
   – This shows the people who commit to buying a product on your site and
   then bail.  Find out where and why people don’t start the checkout
   process after adding to their cart and don’t finish the checkout process
   after they start. This puts more money directly into your pocket.
2. Free PDF Downloads
   – If you have a B2B site, you most likely have a longer sales cycle,
   and visitors to your site might typically do a lot of research before
   deciding to purchase. If they come to your site and consume a PDF of the
   information that leads to conversions, this is success.  It should be
   measured.
3. Visitor Loyalty and Recency – This
   metrics distributes visitors in a chosen time period based upon the
   number of times they have visited a site and the time period between
   visits. If you have a content site that makes money based on page views,
   then improving this will directly affect your bottom line.
4. Average Order Value – If you improve conversion rate, but your average order value is less, then you may end up with less revenue.
5. Primary Purpose (Identify the Convertible)
   – Again, not all of your visitors come to your site to buy.  So, to get
   a true picture of how your website performs, you need to know why they
   come and if their purpose is satisfied.  This gives you a better picture
   of how your website is doing.

The challenge for you is to decide on metrics that are most important for your company to improve that will directly impact your bottom line. They are different for every business and site, so make sure you really think and consider the critical few that are most important so that you can have laser focus.

Step Two: What’s It Worth?

Now
that you know what metrics will tell the story of whether your website
is doing it’s job or not, you need to make sure that the outcomes are
given economic value. If you don’t, you won’t be able to communicate
what improving a metric will do for the business. If business owners and
executives are going to disperse resources, they need to know
how the efforts to improve visitor loyalty or support tickets submitted
is going to affect the business in dollars and cents. If the outcomes that occur on your site are not credited with economic value, you can’t do this.

Even if the behavior is not an e-commerce transaction, give it value if it increases revenue or reduces cost for the business. 
I might have 10,000 e-mail subscribers and they brought $100K in
revenue last year to the company.  So, each subscriber is worth $10. 
Some calculations may be more complicated, so get help from offline
people and data if you need to.  Then, make sure you track what happens
in the online channel to the best of your ability to be able to adjust
for more accuracy going forward.

After you’ve started measuring what’s important and seeing how much it’s worth, you can then start analyzing this essential and extremely valuable data.  You can segment your data and look at visitors who only completed a certain action and see where they came from, what keywords they used, other common behavior they exhibit, etc.  This is where the gold is!

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

More than ever before, the online advertising industry is rife with discussion around optimization metrics.  Traditionally, clicks, impressions, and post-impression/post-click conversions have been considered the industry standards for display media performance. But as ad technology grows…



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

by Mike Fleming

Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few?  You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence…If
you can’t take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the
wrong metric for your business…the simple process of identifying a
metric as your key performance indicator
and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights…before you
diagnose how to improve a metric, you have to identify all the
influencing variables…analyzing the variables will help you identify where the true opportunities for improvement are…it forces you to dig in a methodical manner and let the data, not opinions, drive action…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

We’ve talked about what makes a good metric
to look at for your business.  But, you have to be careful here.  There
is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless
amount of possible metrics. If you are not careful, you will catch
yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea how to get back home
where you belong.  By “home” I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve. 
So, before you dive in and drown in data, the first and maybe most
important thing you can do is determine where to focus your attention. 
By doing this first, you create a map that will guide you to the right
places to dive for those golden insights you so desperately need to make your next decisions for action.

This
is what you want, right?  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to take a few
moments and bask in the glory of your achievements or sulk in the pain
of your failures.  Both can be tremendous motivators.  But the bulk of
your time looking at all the pretty charts, graphs, numbers and arrows
should be to find out what to do next.  What should you do more of? 
Less of?  Who should get a raise and who should get fired?  Remember,
these decisions shouldn’t be faith-based initiatives. 
Don’t let your opinion get in the way.  They should be backed by solid
data that tells a story that leads you to conclusions that show you
actions that give you results.

But, remember the data you’re looking at should be that which will tell you if what you were shooting for with your previous actions was accomplished or not. 
This is how you and everyone else working with your site should be
judged.  If what you were shooting for was to sell 20% more stuff than
last year, who cares if visitors went up by 40% if it didn’t result in
20% more sales!  There’s a problem.  And who cares if visitors didn’t go
up at all if sales went up by 20%!  Someone deserves some love.  Sure,
the two will most likely be intimately tied together, but why worry
about what doesn’t directly matter.  Focus on what matters and figure out what you can do to make it better.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Are you testing different things on your web site? Changing up your landing page copy, your navigation and other elements can lead to better conversion. The people at Monetate have assembled an infographic looking at the frequency of testing and types of testing that are conducted. The second part…



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

class="alignright size-full wp-image-5941" title="Clicky web analytics" src="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/clicky-web-analytics.gif" alt="Clicky web analytics" width="148" height="56" />I use class="track clicky_log_outbound" href="http://yoast.com/out/clicky/">Clicky for most of my day-to-day tracking and analysis, only using Google Analytics for the harder analyses. One of the things Clicky can do most wonderfully is track outbound clicks. There’s an issue however when you start routing your affiliate links through a script or on-site redirect. I redirect mine through /out/ here on yoast.com, but not all of the /out/ links need to be tracked. Let me show you how I do track the ones I need to track.

Forcing Clicky to track a link as outbound

First of all, you need to know that when you add a class clicky_log_outbound to a link, Clicky will track each click on that link as an outbound link. Now I always add a class track or aff to my affiliate links that I want to have tracked, for instance:

<a class="track" href="http://yoast.com/out/clicky/">Clicky</a>

Of course I could manually add the clicky_log_outbound class, but that’s just a tad bit too much work, especially as most of my links have been “classed” already and I might want to use this class for other stuff later on.

Now, I add a tiny filter function to my sites functions.php file, this searches for links with class aff or track and adds the clicky_log_outbound class:

function clicky_outbound_filter( $content ) {
	$content = preg_replace('/<a([^>]+)?class="(aff|track)"([^>]+)?>/',
		'<a1class="2 clicky_log_outbound"3>', $content);
	return $content;
}

add_filter( 'the_content', 'clicky_outbound_filter', 10, 1 );

That’s it! Clicky will now track those links as outbound. Now let’s set such a link up as a goal.

Goal Tracking in Clicky

For goal tracking you need to have a premium (read, paid) Clicky account, but it’s well worth it. Setting up a goal is a piece of cake. You go to your site’s analytics and then to Goals, Setup. You’ll see this interface:

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-45207" title="Clicky goal tracking" src="http://cdn3.yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/clicky-goal-tracking.png" alt="Clicky goal tracking" width="499" height="596" />

You simply name the action, set the goal URL to be your outbound URL, you could do /out/clicky/ or, when you sometimes forget the last slash, /out/clicky*. You can set up revenue and even a funnel, a required page before one can reach that goal.

Once you’ve done that, the goals will show, in realtime, in your Goals overview and in your “bigscreen” Clicky display.

More tracking power: campaigns

This feature becomes even more powerful when you combine it with another great feature of Clicky; campaign tracking. Clicky fully supports the _utm type variables Google Analytics uses, so you can track campaigns and terms within campaigns. That is, in fact, how I did the tracking in yesterdays post about  title="On WordPress Dashboard Widgets" href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-dashboard-widgets/">WordPress Dashboard widgets.

href="http://yoast.com/tracking-outbound-affiliate-links-with-getclicky/">Tracking Outbound / Affiliate Links with getClicky is a post by rel="author" href="http://yoast.com/author/admin/">Joost de Valk on href="http://yoast.com">Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting!

by Mike Fleming

…life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving
action, you need to stop and reboot…hits and pageviews don’t mean
anything except that someone came to your site and consumed some
content…metrics are a dime a dozen, so how do you know which ones to
use?  They should have the following four attributes…

• Uncomplex – If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.
• Relevant – they must be measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.
• Timely – Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if it takes nine days while your world changes every three days.
• Instantly Useful – you need to be able to find insights as soon as you look at it.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Your
business is different than everyone else’s, so why would you look at
the same measurements of success as everyone else?  Everyone looks at visitors to their site, but what does that tell you about how your business is doing? 
If you sell a high-end product and the only people coming to your site
are those looking for a cheap solution, it doesn’t matter how far up and
to the right that blue line goes for visitors, your business isn’t growing.
You want to look at the metrics that will tell you if you are
progressing with growth.  That’s why the most important step you can
take toward success is identifying the metrics that will tell you if what you really want to happen for your business is happening or not.

What actions do you need your customers in order to achieve the site outcomes you
desire?  Do they need to consume more content?  Do more of them need to
make it to your product detail pages instead of bouncing off your home
page?  Do you need to increase visitors from a certain website that
sends high-converting traffic?  Do you need more conversions from PPC
traffic?  What needs to happen on your site to get your business to where you want it to be?  Once you’ve got this down, you can now find out what metric will tell you if it’s happening or not.

If
I need visitors to consume more content so that they can learn about
how my product or service benefits them, my metrics for success might be
Time on Site or Pageviews/Visit.  If more visitors need to make it to
my product detail pages, I might make Product Detail Page Entrances on
my site my chosen metric and ramp up my PPC and SEO
to those pages.  If I need more conversions from PPC, I might use
clicks and conversion rate as my primary metrics. Bottom line: what you spend your time looking at and trying to improve should align with the outcomes that will grow your business.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

Designing a great looking website is good. Putting it on a strong information architecture is better.

Rolling out a newly optimized website is good. Checking it first is better.

Investing in SEO is good. Investing in ROI is better.

Optimizing your e-commerce site is good. Using optimized concantenation schema is better.

Quick-fix SEO is good. Long-term SEO is better.

Performing SEO correctly is good. Doing what you can quickly is better.

Keyword research is good. Keyword research and segmentation is better.

Adding keywords to content is good. Following user-friendly keyword optimization guidelines is better.

Having content on your website is good. Having unique content is better.

Being unique is good. Being remarkable is better.

Meeting your audience’s needs is good. Making your audience feel special is better.

Optimizing for your important keywords is good. Optimizing for a lot of great keywords is better.

Expecting rankings is good. Getting rankings is better.

Getting rankings is good. Growing your business is better.

Increasing traffic is good. Persuading visitors to buy is better.

Growing your business is good. Increasing profits is better.

Understanding algorithms is good. Understanding analytics is better.

Charging (or paying) for SEO services is good. Being fair with charges is better.

Writing about SEO is good. Writing about SEO while trashing Will Ferrell is better.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Fleming

…the bottom line for magnificent success is the people…invest
multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want
to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor…a
great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless.  A
free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja
will yield massive results that impact your bottom line…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Web
data is easy to get at; and it can even be free.  Yes! That is
awesomeness.  But, you know what’s not easy to get and is not free?  The
insights you can get from the data that will result in wise decisions
and actions for business growth.  Since this is the case, it just makes sense that you would spend way more on what will get you insights than you do on what gets you the data. 
The bottom line is that you have to invest in talented people.  Without
them, your data is useless (except you may FEEL good if the blue line
goes up and to the right).

That is what you want, right?  To build
your business?  Well then, you have to know what to do next to make it
better.  Your opinion, although well-intentioned, may not be
well-informed.  Well-intentioned decisions tend to cost more in time and
money than you’ll ever invest in people that can give you well-informed
insights.

If your goal is to grow your site’s effectiveness, then you need analysis ninjas that know what to do with all that data you’ve been gathering in your analytics tool.  Without them, you’re relying on faith alone.  Faith is good, but faith without data is dead.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

How to Choose Social Media Share Buttons was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Social share buttons are a great way to spread the content you have deeper into networks across the Web – but which social share buttons are right for your site? Sometimes, the “catch-all” approach to buttons that we so often see isn’t the best route. You know, those widgets that produce a bunch of buttons for social communities for the sake of trying to reach everybody and their mother. Oftentimes, this can just confuse readers or make them think more than they should have to in order to share the content they like.

There are several approaches to how you can identify which social share buttons you should include on your Web pages. One is checking traffic sources in your site’s analytics. Another is knowing who your target audience is and where they are hanging out socially online. And yet another is assessing the importance of individual social share buttons as metrics in whatever goals you have for the business.

Virginia and I recently decided to do an analysis of the social share buttons on the SEO Newsletter article pages, since they hadn’t been refreshed in quite some time. I’m going to share with you what we uncovered about some of the social share buttons, what we plan to do with it and how you can better assess the social share buttons on your (or your client’s) site.

The Social Share Buttons We’re Getting Rid of and Why

Here’s a snapshot of the social share buttons on our newsletter article pages:

As you see, we have Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious. Looking at sitewide analytics, we saw that we did have traffic from all of those sources, but some more than others. And for many, there were specific stories behind the traffic. But, before we decided, we wanted to understand the health of the individual community and the types of audience it draws.

• Digg: While Digg does have a community within it that’s technology news-focused, its numbers were in steady decline this year as recorded by Quantcast.com. Even though more than 4 million people per month reach is nothing to scoff at, we ultimately decided this community did not directly fit into our goals for content sharing. This was confirmed by the fact that none of our newsletter stories had been shared through our Digg button all year. In this debate in Reddit, it talks about the decline of Digg and the rise of Reddit. But, we weren’t sure Reddit was right for us either, so we did some research on them, too.

• Reddit: Reddit’s user-generated news links draw a fairly steady audience in numbers  month over month (about 14 million users) and the community does have a targeted SEO category within the site. Our analytics showed that we did see traffic from Reddit – but, the answer was no when we looked to see if anyone was sharing our newsletter stories from the share buttons. In fact, the spike in traffic we saw from Reddit last year occurred from a guest author we had on the blog who was an active Reddit user. And so we concluded that active Reddit users will share information they find useful as they come across it, but that it’s going to be more far and few between with our audience, and so a share button is not warranted here.
• Delicious: This bookmarking site reaches a smaller audience than the prior two, and data on Quantcast.com shows that the typical visitor goes to Cooking.com, watches Food Network and uses Realtor.com. – not necessarily our target market; but, the site does have a dedicated technology and science category. There were rumors of Delicious shutting down in late 2010, but it has since been sold to YouTube founders by Yahoo!, and active users have risen significantly since then. For our goals, however, it didn’t look like a social share button for Delicious was something we wanted to pursue.

At this point, we were ready to delete the three social buttons we just discussed from our newsletter article pages, but we performed one final sanity check to see if any of them factored as strong social signals in the search algorithms. As far as we know, they don’t, so in the end, it didn’t look like any of these turned out to be significant to us.

The Social Share Buttons We’re Adding and Why

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a growing network that presents a lot of opportunity for people to share content (more than 1 billion referrals per month, according to data in this post on visualizing the StumbleUpon audience). StumbleUpon itself offers many resources for people to target and grow their intended audience, and has also been known to be a factor in content “staying” power. For us, it made sense to keep this button and further explore how we could maximize our presence in this community.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an often-overlooked network that’s proving to be more and more important as a place for professionals of all industries to share ideas and content. If you’re feeling lost about how to best use LinkedIn for business, check out resources like “RockTheWorld with LinkedIn” – a webcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

Facebook

I don’t think much of a case is needed for this one. Facebook is where the eyes are, and is the volume leader in social networks. Not to mention certain search engines have reported using Facebook signals in its algorithm for search results. Looking in our analytics, we already receive a ton of traffic from Facebook. Bottom line: It’s probably never a bad idea to have a Facebook Like button on your Web content so it’s sharable there. If you want to learn more about this button and how it works, check out, “The Facebook Like Button, Dissected.”

Twitter

Again, it’s hard to argue that a Twitter share button is a good idea for pushing out content. With 80 million users (according to an October 2011 stat by Quantcast), the microblog Twitter is an ideal place to share good content and have it spread quickly. On our blog, Twitter is a popular way our audience shares content, and it’s considered a social signal in certain search algorithms. You can learn more about the power of tweets and retweets on ranking on SEOmoz.

Google +1

While many might argue that Google’s social network, Google+, is only used by a niche community (comprised of lots of techies), one report predicts the network will reach 400 million users by the end of 2012, if it continues at the pace it’s going. The fact that the community is comprised of lots of tech people works in our favor; for businesses in other industries, it’s worth exploring whether Google+ and its +1 button is the right place to share content.

When a person +1s content, it not only shows up in the Google+ community, but the endorsement can also be seen alongside search results. And as many of us know, these types of endorsements are becoming increasingly important for many reasons. Many are speculating what the Google +1 button will mean to the future of search. For us, we’re going to stick it out with this share button and see where it takes us.

How Do You Know if a Social Share Button Will Work for You?

There’s a million things that a person could examine in order to validate the use of one social share button over another. In fact, I could probably write a 10-part series on this if I really dug in.

The important thing to remember is, whichever direction you choose, don’t just shoot in the dark. Take the time to understand who your audience is, where they are spending their time online, how people are coming to your site and the long-term health of the social community before making decisions about which social share buttons you want to include on your Web content pages.

The more choices a reader has, the more likely it is to cause analysis paralysis. And the messier your Web page might look with all the social share button clutter. Give fewer, more targeted options to make it easier for your visitors to choose and share content.

And test! Don’t just put a button up and then ignore it for the rest of your life. See if it’s working for you by extracting the important data to measure social share button success and their impact on your content goals.

Do you have thoughts on this topic? Please share with us below!