STC Podcasts on Analytics and SEO

Podcast: Michael Gray with Eric Enge

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 13:28:33 -0400

Podcast Date: February 26, 2009

The following is a written transcript of the February 26, 2009 podcast with Michael Gray of Altas Web Service and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, this is Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting, you can see our website as www.stonetemple.com. I am pleased to be here today with Michael Gray of the Atlas Web Service; you can see his website at www.atlaswebservice.com, where he offers a variety of consulting services, and you could also see his blog which is rather well-known at wolf-howl.com. How are you doing today, Michael?

Note: Michael Gray tweets as @graywolf and Eric Enge tweets as @stonetemple.

Michael Gray: I am good, how are you?

Eric Enge: Let's discuss the basic uses of Twitter and the different ways that people can use it.

Michael Gray: There are lots of different ways to use Twitter. I wouldn't say that there is really a wrong way, but some ways are definitely better than others. The first level is people who just use it to follow their friends. Maybe they have five, ten, fifteen people that they follow and that they just use it so they can send status message back and forth.

They may just be having normal, everyday conversations, but this level is usually used by people who have been separated by geography. It's actually a big way for all of them to share information with each other, but it's a very small little thing. It is typically not a big amount of information that is being shared or anything that's really important. It's mostly a personal thing.

The next level is people who are just interested in communicating with other people online. Maybe they have friends that they have met through other forums or newsgroups or who share the same interest. Maybe they play the same online games or they are the part of the same community. And again, those people are almost always separated by geography.

The next level is people who are trying to engage a larger part of the community. Maybe there are people who are really interested in iPhones, and they like talking and sharing other apps, doing little hacks and finding out the best things to jailbreak, that sort of thing. They are just on talking with people in a larger part of the community who have a specific interest. As it moves up, we get people who are just interested in talking with other people online.

Maybe these are people who work from home and they don't have a lot of interpersonal interaction in their lives, and they are just looking for people that they can talk to and discover interesting things from and share links with throughout the day. At some point, we start to cross into the commercial territory, but this is kind of fuzzy because there is not always a hard line here.

People who have an online business or a website, sort of foot and bolt camps where they have personal and business related interaction. Maybe they are dropping links to their blog, maybe they are talking about some of the services they are selling, maybe they sell photography and they are posting their pictures or maybe they make videos and they are trying to get people to watch them online. . And again, it's sort of a mix somewhere between business and personal.

That hybrid model is probably where you'll find the most activity, where most people are. They will talk about their personal lives and then they will mention things that they are doing with their business websites, or something like that. There is sort of a cross promotion there.

Next, we get into the level of people who are strictly business. These are people who are on Twitter on a company account. It's either one person or multiple people running an account, and they are using it for some level of business. And there is a lot of variation within this particular group.

They could be using it as a customer service avenue where they are looking for a people who happen to have problems relating with their service, so they are scanning for specific keywords and trying to solve those problems. Maybe they are selling products and they are looking to help people solve their issues. For example, someone who sells spyware software may be scanning Twitter looking for people who are constantly complaining about spyware. Then they drop little hits to them about how to fix a particular problem. That sort of thing.

Probably the farthest away from that is the strictly commercial level, where people adjust them Twittering out sales promotion, different things that they want to get to get a conversion on there, maybe it's products that are on discount, maybe it's like liquidate, they just run a really cheaper discount or liquidation things like that. Something like Woot is a very good example of that, where they are just Tweeting out products, and that's it.

Eric Enge: So, when someone is that commercial do they get much of a response?

Michael Gray: It depends, being a commercial account is pretty tricky. You've got to setup that expectation when you start the account. If you start out being an extremely personal blogger and you switch to strictly commercial, you are probably going to get some resistance. If you are a thought leader in the space and you mix in some commercial links, sometimes you do get some backlash.

An example of this is a Guy Kawasaki's feed. A lot of people go there and are expecting just to hear Guy give information about businesses and creative stuff like that. But Guy also has a couple of websites, Truemors and Alltop, where he will go through and Tweet out anywhere from four to 12 links to any of those things every day. Some people get pretty upset because they are expecting to hear Guy talking about business, not Guy pimping himself. So, he will get some backlash, but he just tells them, “hey, it's me, I am doing these, so you've got to kind of manage that expectation.” If you are just doing sales it really helps if you are a very well known brand so people will care.

Woot is well-known online and they are online just to sell their product. You are going to start out from day one and you are probably going to have a lot of resistance. The way to overcome that is to give out good, time-sensitive deals. If it's a unique deal that you can get that no one else can, you would do better with that, depending on how good the deal is.

The more unique and more valuable the ad is, the better off you will be with a commercial account. Most people don't have the ability to offer those deals, so they have to find a balance between being helpful, giving out information and mixing in a little commercial material.

Eric Enge: So, where are you in this spectrum?

Michael Gray: Most of my accounts are mixed accounts. My main account, which everybody probably knows me for, is for experimenting more than anything else. I will try a lot of different things, and sometimes people probably wonder what the heck I am doing. I talk with people on the account and that's fine, people can ask me questions and that sort of thing, but there is a lot of experimentation going on there as well.

Sometimes, you will think I am hitting the bottle or something, but there is lot of experimentation going on, so take some of the things you see with a grain of salt. The other accounts that I run are all commercial accounts, but I don't have anything that's strong enough to support a commercial brand on its own. And, I just don't think that that's necessarily where most people want to be. You get a lot more interaction if you are willing to engage people at some level.

I think one of the most important things that people can do is always answer back. If someone asks you a question that has to be answered, you should really answer it. It's not only common courtesy but it's just a really good way to interact with your community. And again, I think it's really an outreach program and it's a great way to build a profile that's useful to people.

One example is an account called BBGeeks, and it is all about BlackBerries. Basically what they are doing is scanning for people who are having problems with their BlackBerries. And if they have an answer to their problem in their blog, they will Tweet the person back give them a link to find the solution. Sometimes they will send them to a competitor's website or an informational website. They have a series of questions and answers that they have links for and that's just a really easy way to help someone.

Eric Enge: How much time does it take to get somewhere with an account? I mean, you have spend a lot of time on it, correct?

Michael Gray: Sure. Getting an account of the ground is probably the hardest part because there are lot of people who are looking at Twitter for a short term gain, and basically they will go in and they are just looking for spam. So, you can't go in and make thousands of friends and expect people to take your accounts seriously. You've got to grow it gradually and you have to learn how to work the tools better over time.

There are a lot of tools out there that let you Tweet at specific intervals. Say you know you are not going to be in front of you computer tomorrow, but you want to make your account still look like it's alive. There are programs that you can use that actually will help you do that. The easiest way to do that is to use something like Twitter mail and LetterMeLater. Basically, what it does is set out a secret Twitter account and a secret email account that you use to send an email to your Tweeter account at a scheduled time. Another service that I have been using is Easy Tweets. It's probably a lot more integrated than a lot of the stuff out there, but the downside is that it's is a paid service. With this you really have to decide how many accounts you are doing, how much time it will save you and whether or not you want to pay for it. If you are running more than one, it's probably worth looking at a commercial solution, but if you are only running one account, you might be able to get by with some of the free tools.

Using searches is another key feature. You can go in and setup things like a Tweet-beep to monitor for particular searches, and it will send you an email once it hits a certain threshold. You can also use an RSS feed for search. So, if you want to go through and look for everybody who is selling accounting software and everybody who is selling accounting software that they hate, you can go through and setup an RSS feed for that.

All you have to do then is scan the RSS feed once a day. This way you don't have to be sitting in front of the computer all day monitoring that kind of stuff. If you use tools to make it, you can check-in two or three times a day and respond as needed. Again, as the account grows and gets more active, and you get more followers you may have to devote a little bit more time to it. But once you've got the background down on what keywords you are looking for, you really can do it in probably an hour a day.

Eric Enge: That isn't too bad an investment, depending of course on the return you get out of the whole exercise. What about strategies for building followers?

You talked about good content, but you can go beyond that, right? You've got to seek people out and communicate with them proactively at some level too?

Michael Gray: Sure. Now, when you are an SEO, probably one of the best things that people do is recommend what to start with. They say you are going to need link, and where you should start looking for them. So, you mine the backlinks of your competition. You should just take that same theory and apply it basically to Twitter.

If you are running in a particular account and it happens to be a travel account, you can go out and find the big travel accounts on Twitter like Jet Blue and Southwest, and you start mining their backlinks and following the people who are actually there. There is a debate as to whether you should follow all of your followers or not. Some people say it's right, and some people say it's wrong, but that decision is up to you. The thing that they will say is, if you are running a commercial account, the object is to get people to follow you.

Following people back is probably just the smart thing to do. Now, are you going to do that manually? That's up to you, they are getting in a lot of programs that help you do that automatically so that you don't have to. It just depends on how much time you have to invest, how many accounts you are running and whether or you want to use it or not. But, mining the backlinks of your competition is probably the smartest place to start. And then, I would almost always follow anybody who asks you a direct question. That's just because in the end, it's an easy way to get somebody to follow you.

Eric Enge: Right, it makes sense. Now, what about this notion that someone follows you and later they drop it. Do you go back and proactively stop following them?

Michael Gray: Here is the way the followers work: Twitter tried to combat spam because they had a bunch of people who would go in, follow a million people and several people would follow them back. Then, if you've followed enough people and you've got enough followers, you would show up on any of the top Twitter people list.

You were able to get thousands of followers without doing any work. Twitter had to make it a little harder; so they imposed some limits as to how many people you are allowed to follow. You are now allowed to follow as many people as you want up to two thousand, so you can basically have one person following you and you can follow two thousand people. Now, that looks really odd and it makes you look like you are a spammer when you do that. So, I wouldn't recommend anybody go anywhere near that particular level.

Go slower and in smaller steps. And again, Twitter is actually taking some steps to try and combat that. If they see a lot of activity, they will go and flag an account. Then you will have to ask for a manual review for them to let you back in. So, add your followers slowly in the beginning. Once you hit that two-thousand level, you are blocked.

The only way you are able to get past two thousand followers is to have at least two thousand people following you. You are allowed to follow approximately 1.1 times as many people as are following you. Until you get more than two thousand followers, you are not going to go beyond this. So basically you are able to grow your follower account by 10% per day.

It's up to you if you want to un-follow people when they stop following you. If you are trying to grow an account and you are using some sort of software to follow people, you are probably going to have to drop the people who aren't following you. You have to play the numbers' game.

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. They are basically limiting your ability to grow.

Michael Gray: Right. And, they sort of put a governing mechanism in, and I understand why they do it. But, you've got to understand what your motivation is. I wouldn't sit there and say, "oh this person un-followed me, sod I am going to un-follow them tomorrow." That's not necessarily the way to do it, but if you are looking to grow your subscriber base you are going to have to start dropping your followers. That's just a reality of the game.

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. So, let us just focus some more on the types of commercial purposes. What are your thoughts on networking and using it as a tool to meet people?

Michael Gray: There are lot of people who are doing these things they call Tweet-ups , which are basically meetups of people are at a particular event. Usually it's a group of people who have a particular shared interests and they are all going to be in the same area doing something together. I have even seen Tweet-ups before movie premiers where a bunch of people get together, hang out and talk about the movie, and then they go to see the movie that night.

That's another interesting little thing. It's basically a way to try and build your brand within the particular community. It's hard to attach a dollar value to something like that because there is no real conversion. But if more people knew you when you come out of that particular event, then that's probably a good thing.

The key thing everybody wants to know is who are the "A-players" in their space. If they are on their radar and they write an interesting post, A-players will hopefully link to them and mention them, that sort of thing. That's a game that everybody is playing, where interacting within a community is a good thing. So, if Robert Scoble is an A list player in the tech space, whether you like him or not or whether you think he is important or not, is irrelevant. If he has enough people following him and he Tweets something about you, a big mass of people are now going to know who you are and go follow that link. And that's really the ultimate goal of this, to get him to Tweet about you.

Eric Enge: The re-Tweet process.

Michael Gray: Now here is an interesting thing with re-Tweets. I will give a little secret to everybody who is reading. If you are looking for people to re-Tweet what it is that you are Tweeting, do a search for the words re-Tweet, or people sometimes abbreviate it RT, and whatever your keyword is. So, if you have a website that says movie reviews, go to the Twitter search and search for everybody who says "re-Tweet movie review." That will give you a list of people who found movie reviews interesting enough that they re-Tweeted them, and you should probably friend all of those people.

Eric Enge: Right. They might be interested in your topic and get some of them to follow you. , You might get a re-Tweet out of that, and now you are exposed to their audience.

Michael Gray: Right. And, it kind of grows exponentially. If you can get a really good network of re-Tweeters following you that can really grow your exposure. It's that old Malcolm Gladwell thing; you've got to get the connectors.

Eric Enge: Yes, well absolutely. So, just to go back to who you mentioned before, if you know what Robert Scoble re-Tweets and you have something related, then you might be able to get into his huge network.

Michael Gray: Yes, he has something like 60,000 people following him, so if even one tenth of those people go and re-Tweet your link, that's a huge amount of traffic to your website. Hopefully people might think it's interesting and subscribe to your blog or start following you.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, is that the basic strategy for using Twitter to get traffic to their site?

Michael Gray: That's one of the basic strategies. The key is to give away an interesting bit of information. You've either got to solve someone's problem or, if you are doing something commercial, give them a really good deal. The better the deal, the more likely someone is to re-Tweet it. If you are going to tell somebody, "hey, there is a cruise next week and it's $5,000 a person," you are probably not going to get any re-Tweets.

But, if you offer them a 7-day cruise for $200 because the ship is having a hard time filling space, you are probably going to get a lot more people re-Tweeting because there is value-add there. So, you've just got to measure what it is that you are giving out. There are a lot of people that say you should never ask for a re-Tweet. I am of the opinion that no one is going to know you want to be re-Tweeted if you don't ask. A lot of people have that personal threshold that doesn't let them actively sell. If you are trying to get something across and you want someone to do something, you should suggest it at the very least.

Eric Enge: Do you have a suggested way of doing that?

Michael Gray: If you are going for the re-Tweet model, there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind. One is to leave some space. Twitter basically gives you 140 characters, so you want to leave some extra space so that people can re-Tweet, add your name, or add their own little message onto something. Don't max out at 139 characters because that's not going to be as effective. Somewhere in the 100-character range would be ideal. You've just got to try and be as direct as you possibly can.

And you have to practice that a little bit, but it's a skill that you just pickup slowly over time. And again, ask people to re-tweet if they find the information helpful, that's a really simple way to do it. There are some people who a little bit more not straightforward about what they do.

One example that I love to bring up because it's always so amusing, is Matt Cutts at one point posted a link to a Digg page and said, “maybe someone should call their congressman about that.” Now, when I read something like that, I put on my Judge Judy hat and say you don't send me to a Digg page unless you are looking for me to Digg an article. Matt just claims that he was really, genuinely interested in the local politics of that particular case, and I will leave that up to everyone who is listening and reading to decide. But I am of the opinion you don't send me to a Digg page unless you want me to Digg something.

Eric Enge: Well then, the advice might be that if you really do have an interest, you should be a little more explicit?

Michael Gray: Yes. Now, the one thing I will say about social media is that there is an upside and a downside to it. If you ask most normal people to stumble or vote something up, they will do it. Sometimes within the SEO world, there are quite a bit of haters there. So, if you have an account and you are known as an internet marketer or an SEO, I would be extremely careful about asking people to Digg, mix or stumble upon your stories, just because there are a lot of people who hate on you. They will specifically go and watch your account just to figure out who your clients are, what websites you own and they will specifically go and down vote you.

Eric Enge: Other traffic strategies for Twitter?

Michael Gray: Don't push your followers too much, and also be aware of time-zones. If you are Tweeting something at five in the morning, there are probably not a lot of people who are going to see your Tweet. Most people are now following more and more people, so they are not going to go back and look through all of your Tweets.

Tweet your important stuff during primetime, when people are at work. Be aware that there is an east coast and the west coast. Sometimes if I find something that is important, I prefer to Tweet it two or three times a day, just so people all across the country can see it. The other thing I will say is don't Tweet only about yourself. If every single thing coming through your Tweet profile is a link to your blog, that's probably not adding a lot to the space. Tweet other people's stuff in there too. Sometimes just Tweet out stuff that is interesting or funny, just to make your scream a little bit more interesting to be a part of.

There is a little bit of a debate over whether everything should be a single-person account or multiple-people accounts. If you are running multiple-person accounts, let people know at some level. I know a lot of the bigger, commercial accounts like Jet Blue will change their status to say now Tweeting Jennifer or something like that. This is just so people know who is actually there so they don't come back and say, "hey, you told me to do this four hours ago," and the person at the other end of the screen has no idea what you are talking about.

So, if you are going to be doing that kind of thing and you are big enough, let people know. The other thing is to be aware that this is the social space and some negativity goes on here sometimes. . You do sometimes get people who don't know where the line is and they cross that, so be careful about what information you are giving out. Never give out anything too personal, such as your phone number or your address. For 99.9% of for the population on Twitter this is not an issue, but there is always that possibility.

Eric Enge: Right, your troll?

Michael Gray: Yes. You've got to be aware of that.

Eric Enge: What about using Twitter as a tool to build links, is that something that can work as well?

Michael Gray: It is hard asking directly for links. You are probably better off working it on a social angle and just saying, "here is an interesting piece you wrote that helps you do this." Asking directly for links usually doesn't work. Twitter does most of your things through a tiny URL that is no-followed, so you are not getting any real link juice through there.

I believe search engines are monitoring that sort of thing and toolbars are actually capturing the URLs that are going through there. There are actually some services that will go through and reverse-engineer some of the tiny URLs to let you know how much things are being tweeted. This way you can gauge the effectiveness of a website. If you actually put someone's URL in Quarkbase, it will go through and scan Twitter to see if people have tweeted that particular URL. So, if you are looking at someone's website, maybe you want to see if this person is someone that you want to try and engage a relationship with based on how active they are in Twitter. If the person is active in Twitter and you are looking to grow, there are some keys that will tell you if you should try and engage this person a little bit more or not.

Eric Enge: So the way I think about it is absolutely don't go and directly ask for links, but if you have built a good following and you are able to periodically get other people to re-tweak your stuff, then it is like a PR mechanism.

Michael Gray: Yes, it basically just carries forward. Again, if you know that there are bloggers or reporters who have Twitter streams and they are covering your sector, do what you can to get your URL in front of them. I have a couple of different bloggers who have picked up things in front of them and linked to it because they thought it was an interesting piece. So, it is definitely worth doing.

Eric Enge: Yes, well very effective overall. Any additional key tips you want to give people before we wrap up.

Michael Gray: Don't be afraid to push hard, but don't push too hard. You don't want to come off as being super-aggressive, but you should definitely get involved. Go through your referral logs, see if there are people who are re-Tweeting your stuff who are sending you traffic and make sure that you are friends with them. Go out of your way to thank someone for re-Tweeting your link. That's the kind of thing that people appreciate.

At the end of the day, it is a social mechanism and people are involved. People on the other end of the screen are guilty of the same things we are. They like to have their ego stroked, and every time you mention them you make them feel good. Controversy is a tricky angle, not everyone can pull it off effectively. It is very powerful if you can find out what other people are monitoring. If you happen to be a pro-Bush person, whenever an Obama speech is on, go ahead and aggressively engage the Obama supporters.

That way they are going to start re-Tweeting your name out there and that's going to get you some exposure. Again, you've got to make sure you know what you are doing, you have to know where the line is and you have to have thick skin.

Monitor the key words that people are searching for in your subject. If you are a TV blogger, look for people who are blogging about Lost when Lost is on. If you are an entertainment blogger, look for people who are Tweeting about the Oscars when the Oscars are on. Use those hash tags sometimes, which is when you put the numbers on and you put the word after. People would use them to group everything together. Basically, the hash tag is your way of saying that your tag is part of this subject. Do everything that you possibly can to be creative about getting traffic.

Eric Enge: So, if you are in Twitter and you want to find all the people who have searched or Tweeted on the Oscars, what exactly are the mechanics of doing that?

Michael Gray: There are two ways you can do it. There is a service called hash tags, and you will go back to hash tags, put in the word "Oscars" and it will show you everybody who has used the Oscars hash tags. The way that is easier and probably going to get you some more people, but not as refined, is just going to the Twitter search mechanism and typing in the word "Oscars." It is going to list everybody that's in there doing it. There are a couple of Twitter monitoring services that monitor for trends on Twitter.

So, if you are looking to play that game, you should definitely be subscribing to those and they will tell you what is actually hot. Again, there are a couple of services like Twitter grader and Mr. Tweet that are trying to match people together who have similar interests. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't; it all depends on how big your particular niche is. If you are playing in a big area like an iPhone, you are probably not going to have a problem finding anybody, but if you are doing something like a knitting school, it is probably going to be a little harder to find people who are interested in that particular thing. Sometimes people just aren't there.

Eric Enge: Excellent. Anything else?

Michael Gray: Oh, I think that's pretty much it. Again, the opportunity is here. Don't squander it just Twitting about what you had for lunch and what you are doing with your cat. Use it to find ways to grow your exposure or find ways that you can turn it into commercial enterprise. As an example, I had a commercial account that I started last year.

I pretty much ignored it and it babied up three hundred followers. I had some free time studying in January, and I started working the account. I basically went from 300 followers in the middle of January to just shy of 7,000 at the end of February. I worked the account, I got people who are re-Tweeting commercial links and I e got people who are re-Tweeting affiliate links. So again, if you are willing to put the time in to experiment and try different things, it can work.

Eric Enge: Great, well thanks a lot, Michael. I appreciate it.

Michael Gray: Thank you!

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Eric Enge and David Szetela Discuss PPC Optimization

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:58:59 -0500

Podcast Date: October 24, 2008

The following is a written transcript of the October 24, 2008 podcast with David Szetela of Clix Marketing and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hello everybody, this is Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am pleased to be here today with David Szetela of Clix Marketing. You can see his website at www.clixmarketing.com, that's c-l-i-x marketing.com. Thanks for joining us today, David.

David Szetela: Thank you, Eric. Great to be here.

Eric Enge: Indeed, so we thought we would talk a little bit about what's going on in the world of broad match. Let us start just by talking about some of the general problems with broad match if we can, and then expand into the way Google has expanded it recently, making it potentially a lot more dangerous for advertisers.

David Szetela: Got it. So broad match is one of the keyword match types that can be used in Google Adwords PPC Campaign, and basically the way the broad match is supposed to work is for a given keyword, let's say a two-word keyword for example like red sneakers, Google was supposed to display the advertisers ad when somebody does search using both of those words in any combination.

So, broad match will match the keyword red sneakers to "looking for sneakers that are red" as well as "I want the red colored sneakers", so the point I am trying to make is the words, the keyword will be matched to a search term when that search term contains those two words in any combination with any intervening words that might occur in the search query.

So about a year ago, maybe a little more than a year ago, Google decided that that they would start matching keywords, broad match keywords, to a broader range of synonyms, and their official explanation for this is that they are helping advertisers who don't have the time or the imagination to bid on all of the variations of keyword that they should be bidding on.

Eric Enge: Right, maroon for example might be a synonym for red.

David Szetela: That's right. My official stance on Google is they are not evil, at the same time they are a publicly-traded profit-making company, so this is an example of a move that they made to both benefit some advertisers and benefit the shareholders as well, because increasing the number of search queries that match a keyword displace the ad more frequently and therefore I gets more click money for Google. Hopefully, that means more click money for the advertisers as well, but in practice there is a problem, and the problem is that Google's software matches the keyword to a variety of search queries that is way too broad.

I will give you an example, let's say the advertiser is a sneaker manufacturer and they sell red sneakers and they sell a lot of them. Well, Google might match that keyword with a word that has synonyms for each of the individual words. So for example, they might match, if someone typed in a search term where can I see a picture of Ruby slippers?, the ad for red sneakers might come up because of the fact that Google decides that they have matched the word red to ruby and sneakers to slippers.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: Obviously that's a problem because the ad is not at all relevant to the search query, and Google might say or some might say that's not really a problem because if the ad display and the ad is pertinent to the search term then the person doing the search will not click on it. Well, there are two problems with that explanation, one is that if the ad comes in reaction to a search term that's irrelevant, the ad accrues an impression and the click through rate is worse and the quality scores worse, so that's a problem.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: A bigger problem is something that I have been trying with calling the Szetela Theorem which is that people will click on anything. Basically Eric, when we start talking about content I will describe this again, but basically you can assume that no matter how irrelevant the ad to a search query, some people that use that search query will click on the ad, and I think it's intuitively obvious that all of those clicks and combination will be less likely to convert, so the net effect is impressions go up, clicks go down, the clicks that do come through a low conversion rate, so that in a nutshell is the expanded broad match problem.

Eric Enge: Right, so it seems like you have two options: you can spend more money and get less results or you can spend more money and get less results. Let's talk about how we can avoid this problem or at least minimize it.

David Szetela: Yeah, there are three good ways to minimize it. I will start with the most extreme, and by the way we have tested all of these methods. I also worked out a couple of methods with the help of my good friend Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster, who's a brilliant guy.

Here are those three ways - #1 is just don't broad match on one word and two word keywords, okay. So, that's kind of the most prudent, safest method; just don't bid on them. And as a segue into method #2, I will say that if an advertiser has a sufficient number and variety of phrase match and exact match versions of dangerous one-word and two-word keywords, then they should be covering most of the bases. So again, solution #1 is just don't bid on one-word and two-word variations of keywords, broad match versions of those keywords.

Variation #2 is at the other extreme, which is keep them, and this is actually Google's suggestion, which is go ahead and run one word and two word broad match keywords, but use a very useful report called the search query report that does a pretty good job of showing the advertiser the search queries that are matching the keywords in the ad group. So basically, this is how we first found that the bad matches were happening, running the search query report and seeing things like Ruby slippers, mauve high-heeled things like that, that Google was, that search queries that Google was matching to our keywords.

Then, Google's recommendation continues by saying then the advertisers should use negative keywords to try to make sure that such bad matches don't occur in the future. Well, I think that could be a fine strategy for advertisers with relatively small campaigns, with relatively small number of keywords; because it takes a lot of time #1 and #2 it, Matt and I coined the phrase, it's like playing Bob the Weasel, it's basically closing to barn door after the horse has gone or scrambling to negative out bad matches after the money has been spent.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: So, for our clients, we concluded that basically closing the barn door once a week or once a day was basically prohibitively time-consuming and not really staunching the flow of ad money.

Eric Enge: Right, so that the preferred tactic then is the, take the one-word and two-word phrase and exact and phrase match them.

David Szetela: Right, but here is one trick, and this is solution #3 and I have to credit Matt for this, which is let's take the example of red sneakers again. The phrase match version of red sneakers would match the search query I am looking for red color sneakers but it would not match the search query I am looking for sneakers that are red, because phrase match only matches search queries with the same words in the same order.

So, the way to mitigate this is, and I will through a quick step-by-step process which is the way we are handling it, and that is #1 stop bidding on one-word and two-word broad match keywords, #2 make sure that the phrase match and exact match versions of all those keywords that you might turn off do exist in your campaign, and #3 add phrase matched versions that are the inverse of the two-word broad match keyword. So if you bid on phrase match red sneakers and phrase match sneakers red, then you will cover the widest variety of almost all of the matches that you might have gotten with broad match if it were correctly, it wasn't expanded out.

Eric Enge: Right. So, that's very cool. Well, super. Why don't we talk a little bit about ways to turbo charge your Google content advertising?

David Szetela: Yeah, okay, before we get into that I just remembered one thing that I really do need to include and that is 3 months or 4 months ago Google introduce yet another feature very similar to expanded broad match called Automatic Match. And I am not going into detail about it, just realize the fact that it's like broad match but on steroids, and it results in an even greater number of inappropriate ads being triggered by keywords where the search query and keywords bear no resemblance to each other.

So, my recommendation for most advertisers is to definitely do not use automatic match, turn it off if it's on; the only exception again is the small advertisers with small ad groups or small overall campaigns with a small number of keywords that just don't have the time to manage a campaign as tightly as others.

Eric Enge: Alright.

David Szetela: I hope I saved some listeners a lot of money.

Eric Enge: I imagine you did, and so let's talk about content advertising.

David Szetela: Okay, in a nutshell, and by the way I want reference to our blog where there is a lot of information about expanded broad match and content match or content advertising and also to the 30-Installment Search Engine Watch column that I did on content advertising, so I am going to summarize the best advice from those 30 columns in about 10 seconds to 45 seconds.

Okay, the #1 reason why advertisers do not succeed on the content network is they don't realize that best practices for content network PPC Advertising are much, much different from best practices in search. So here are the top three tips, #1 never run a combined search and content campaign. Unfortunately, this is the condition by default in Google and Yahoo and Microsoft too. So basically, if you have combined search and content campaigns, turn off the content. If you are creating new campaigns, create separate campaigns for search and separate campaigns for content; just do that and you will save the lot of money.

Tip #2 is that one of the main reasons that, one of main ways that content and search campaigns are different is that the keywords function completely differently. In a content campaign, the keywords should be the words that appear most frequently on the kinds of sites where the advertiser wants their ads to appear.

So one of the examples I give in the column is, a company that sells bodybuilding equipment and they realize that their target audience is also interested in hunting, so basically they want to put their ads on sites where hunters hangout. So basically, their keyword list would be all about hunting, it would be big-game hunting, I don't know hunting very well so I am not going to do well on these keywords, but let's just say the keywords are all about hunting; so that the ad which may even be addressed to hunters like "hey hunters, want to make sure that you are physically fit for the next hunting trip come to our body building website" it seems counter intuitive to search advertisers because they are used to making sure that their keywords match search queries, search queries match the ad and it's all about the product and service.

To be successful at content advertising, you have to start thinking about what kinds of sites do I want my ads to appear on and sometimes that's a demographic group sometimes it is a special interest group, so the keywords, if you just follow this one tenet you will do fine, and that is the keywords in a content keyword targeted campaign should be the words that would appear most frequently on the target group of websites.

Eric Enge: Right, because ultimately this is display advertising, it's a different environment, right? And, someone is on a website, this is about hunting site, they are not really thinking about bodybuilding when they get there, but because the demographic matches right, that might be good place for you to run your ads.

David Szetela: Absolutely. In concert with that, tip #3 is exactly as you just said Eric, content advertising is much more like display advertising, or print advertising, or television, radio; basically the ad is interrupting the main event which is the content that the website visitor came to view.

Search advertisers are used to writing ads that assume that the person looking at the ad came to the page with an interest in what the ad might be selling, just the opposite occurs when an ad appears in a website, the site visitor and the person who is looking at the page came for the content and the ads are tangential to the content. So, the ad has a responsibility that every ad has but it's even sharper with content ads, and that is it's got to jump up the page and scream I have got something for you, so it has to, its first duty is to distract attention away from the content and to the ad.

So, I go into probably two installments of this in the column using imperative words, using exclamation points, using very, very strong offers in the ad are all good practices. Now, the good news is that, and this is another major difference between content and search; with content ads you are not penalized if your ad text does not correspond directly to the keywords and if you think about my explanation of the keywords you will see why that's true.

So, there is lot more latitude the advertiser has in the language that they can use in the ads, they could and should basically jump off the page, grab this site visitor by the throat and convince them that there is something to gain by clicking through to the website.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: And by the way, I go into a lot of detail in the column about non-text ads because as many people have probably noticed there are some really great non-text ads that do a great job of distracting attention away from the content. Sometimes obnoxiously so, but if you do, the advertisers do their job right, they are making a very logical, credible connection between the content, the ad, and the website that's offering the product or service.

Eric Enge: So, right I mean at the end of the day, if your mission is to be a distraction, which it is in this environment to some degree, then embrace that mission. I think that's a great tip. This so much opportunity I think in content advertising because very few people do it that well.

David Szetela: Yeah, I mean the time right now is perfect to start using it because #1 at the available click inventory, the number of possible impressions and clicks is huge and growing faster than search and #2 as you just pointed out, since it has traditionally been very scary to advertisers there is much less competition in the content network than there is in the searching network, where the competition is huge and is driven and the cost per click clicks up way out of the range of some advertisers.

Eric Enge: Alright, cool. So let's move to our third topic and talk about different types of keyword variations that people should have in their ad groups.

David Szetela: Great topic! The backdrop to this is that people type some crazy things into that search box and sometimes you can blame the literacy, sometimes you can blame different styles, sometimes there is just no explanation; but we have spent a lot of time in our company doing research into what people actually type into the search box. And so, I will give you three tips out of many that I believe every advertiser should be using in every campaign.

#1 is when a noun appears in a keyword list, the advertiser should bid on three different plural versions of that noun or that noun within a search phrase. And those plural versions are the correct one, and at least two incorrect ones. So if the keyword is a red sneaker, then obviously the keyword red sneaker should be included, but also red sneakers with sneaker's and red sneakers with sneakers'. People use the incorrect pluralizations all the time and Google let's you bid on them separately.

We have frequently found that there are more impressions and more clicks on the keywords that are incorrect pluralizations, and we would not have gotten those if we had just bid on the singular version of the noun or just the correct pluralization of the noun, so that's tip #1. Tip #2 is I am going to, it's kind of 2a and 2b, 2a is many savvy advertisers bid on their trade names, let us say the name of their company.

Eric Enge: Sure.

David Szetela: The slightly more savvier bid on the domain name and the URL of their company because the fact is that people doing searches, many people, and I am talking about uneducated people, I have watched lots of my educated friends do this, they don't even use the address bar or the address field on the browser, they just go directly to Google or Yahoo, they type the domain name into the search box, they don't go immediately to the site, but generally the listing for the site comes up first in organic and then they click on it and then go to the site.

What is less well-known and well-practiced is that, again people type very strange variations of domain names and URLs into the search box. So, we routinely bid on, I think we are hitting up to 250 or 300 different variations of domain names for every brand name or domain name that's we bid on. And I am talking about things like "www (space) domain name.co", things like if the domain name is two words like Clix Marketing, they enter "http://www.clix(space) marketing.com" where they accidentally put a space in.

And if the advertiser is not bidding on that, then the searcher even though they know exactly what they are looking for will not find the site, because the site won't come up in natural and it won't come up in an ad. So that's 2a, 2b is frequently when people are looking for specific product or service, they start by saying to themselves, I wonder if there is a site out there that is named exactly this product or service. So, an example of that is red sneakers; if someone is get set on buying a set of red sneakers right now, many people will say I wonder if there is a redsneakers.com and type that search term into the search box on the search engine.

Another best practice is to find your best multiword keywords or even one-word keyword and bid on all of the domain name variations and URL variations of that word, and you will be very surprised to find that lots of people typing crazy things and the clicks are cheap and the conversions are high.

Eric Enge: Well great David, I think those are some great tips that can really help people who are new or even fairly advanced in paid search and content advertising jack up their campaigns. So, thanks for joining us today.

David Szetela: My pleasure and I just wanted to add that I would love to hear from listeners; I would love to hear success stories based on what I have tried to teach and also be happy to answer any questions. My email addresses david@clixmarketing.com.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Eric Enge and Debra Mastaler Talk about Link Building

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:57:38 -0500

Podcast Date: October 20, 2008

The following is a written transcript of the October 20, 2008 podcast between Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, this is Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link. And, you can see her website at www.alliance-link.com. Good morning, Debra.

Debra Mastaler: Hey, good morning Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. So, today we are going to talk a little bit about getting links for e-commerce sites. It can be very challenging as we'll explore during the course of the discussion. And, we are lucky to have an expert with us to help us think about how to go about doing that. Why don't we start by talking about why it's difficult to get links to e-commerce sites?

Debra Mastaler: I think link building in general, nobody would disagree that link building in general is difficult. But, link building for e-commerce sites has some added challenges mostly because I think they lack readable content. They have actionable content on them and that they sell products; have information that people want.

But, from a reading standpoint they cannot provide the who, what, when, where and how that a lot of people look for in content, so it's more difficult just to go to someone else and say hey, will you link to this purely e-commerce site, that's online to make a profit, can you help me? People are very well aware of the value of the link.

I think as SEOs we've done a pretty good job of educating the public on the value of links and on the value of link building and ranking. People are online so much more now and doing so much business online that it's become imperative that sites rank well in order to see a benefit. And, from an ROI standpoint, nearly everybody understands some aspects of SEO. And, e-commerce sites have a greater challenge in getting links to them just because of that, because they lack some content and sometimes some opportunity to get links coming into them.

Eric Enge: Right. I think one of the key insights that I got over the past few years is that what you are really looking for in a lot of cases is those people who care enough about their visitors that they want to link to great content. Well, they don't think of your e-commerce site as great content; they think of it as commercial, and they don't want to link to you to help you make money. They want to link to you, because they care about their visitors enough to want to give them a superior experience or answer questions that aren't answered on their own site.

Debra Mastaler: Sure, absolutely. Well, if you take yourself offline; if you operate completely online without an offline presence at all, if you go ahead and take yourself offline, you have to ask yourself why would anybody come into my store on Main Street, and what can I do to make myself different and attract attention.

It's no different online; you have to do the same thing. So, you have to appeal to the people that you need to advertise into those venues and into those people to get into and draw the attention to your store. We get a little hung up sometimes just on the fact that we look for easy ways of doing things, and sometimes we just don't stop and look at the bigger picture and say okay now, I have a challenge, this is a big challenge for me; what am I going to do to overcome the obstacle?

If you were just operating at Main Street, USA, what would you do? And, a lot of times if you answer that question you can start to see opportunities online and offline for drawing attention, which in our case online means links. So, sometimes you have to stop and just say okay, I can't, it's hard and oh well, it was me, because I am an e-commerce site. But, truly in the big picture if there was no Internet what would you do; you will have to do something. So, think about those issues that you would start with offline and start to apply them online.

Eric Enge: Right. What are the kinds of things you can do to help attract links to an e-commerce site?

Debra Mastaler: We always get this question, people kind of hit you up and say what can I do, there are so many things to do; we could be here all day long. But, if you break it down into some manageable compartments if you will, and sit down and say okay, we are going to do step A, step B, step C, and approach it that way instead of being a little overwhelmed; and the same thing with this type of link building and this type of marketing online. This is more about linking; marketing for links and it is for link building.

When you have an e-commerce site, you have to take yourself into that mindset. So, let's look at the one basic thing that everybody has online is a website, everybody has their site. And, e-commerce sites tend to have elements to them; they have perhaps video online, or they are running contests online, or they have employment centers online. They have different elements of their sites that makeup their key overall presence.

Each one of those issues, if you are running articles, if you have employment centers, if you offer downloads of some sort, each one of those elements is potential for you to expose yourself a little bit and there are directories out there that each one of those elements can go into. Normally, when we talk about directories, we talk about the basic directories like Yahoo, and DMOZ, and Best of the Web, those are great, but they have a one-on-one submission ratio.

So, you put your site in there and they represent your entire site. There are about 25, maybe 30 decent; I use that term lightly, directories that are still in the Google Index and that are still showing some value measurement there that you can add your site to. After that they are junk. Add your site of 5,000 directories? Most of them are junk.

Eric Enge: Sure.

Debra Mastaler: There are about four or five good ones. So, all of the elements on your site then suddenly become another opportunity. If you are an e-commerce site, you definitely have RSS feeds for example. There are probably 35 or 40 different general directories for RSS feeds; those are links back into your site, they are coupon directories. There are software directories, download directories. Also, there are video directories, and there are article directories.

So, all of a sudden instead of having 35 general directories, you have several hundred specialty directories that take those particular elements of your sites. So, right there your foundational link building has been kind of; you are giving yourself a way to get a handful of base links all pointing into your site.

The greatest thing is that they point to internal pages of the site not just your dotcom, or your dotnet, or your dotorg. So, there is some deep linking that's involved in there as well. So, basic things like that; use your website first, first and foremost. I think another opportunity that we'd look at with e-commerce sites is the Q&A section.

People when they buy products typically have questions about the products, and we always encourage our customers to go back to their customer service people and ask them to draw up questions that people calling can ask. How does this work, how does that work; how does this discount work, how does that work? And, we compile a huge Q&A or some people call it an FAQ. And then, we promote them; we promote the heck out of them.

We send out press releases, we send out media releases; letting the media know that they are there, just because it's added content onto the site. So, develop all of those questions that you get, that come in through your customer service area and build out those areas on your site to content rich. They can be link embedded; they add again fodder into other elements like the article directories. But, the biggest thing is that they allow you to contact the media, because you have the full element on your site. And, once the media gets hold of it, people trust and believe what they see when they read it in an online publication.

So, the trust factor comes up, but you become top of mind too with the media, and you are the one that they contact and they write about. Interview opportunities at that point become golden. Once you have one media person that does the interview, you can use that and send it out to other media people just to say hey listen, I know that you write about x, y, z products, you can see that we've been interviewed by this magazine. If you'd like to interview us as well, or in the future we would really appreciate it.

Journalists are a little bit lazy, and I don't say that negatively, but trying to qualify a lead or trying to follow up on sources takes time and journalists are under deadlines. If you've been interviewed once by a known journalist, you've kind of have that credibility stamp already on your forehead as well. And, it goes a much, much longer way into helping you get interviews down the road. So, there are a handful of things to get started.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, let's pick up on one of those, for example you mentioned article directories. And, it may even be a couple of years ago when Google first took some steps to; what's the right way to put it, to clamp down on article directories. So, if you are looking in an article directory just to use that specific example, what kind of things do you look for to give you a comfort that it's something that is a good link?

Debra Mastaler: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's a great observation about the article directories. A lot of people have questions about those from a duplicate content standpoint, or about the fact that they just don't give a lot of, what we call link juice or link popularity back to a site and those are all elements. You can use the basic general article directories, and again like the general directories it's probably; from my experience anyway from general directory there are probably 10 or 12 of them that are worth it.

People actually use and pull content out of them, and as an e-commerce business you can write about specific things related to your business. One of the issues that we talk about too is accreditation, people don't always credit you back on your site. If you are using articles, be sure that you pull a snippet out of the article and stick it into something like Google Alerts; these are finders that come back and let you know when people have downloaded your content based on the snippet, and make sure that you are getting credit back into your site.

But, there are other things besides just the general directories too if you go into; we use Creative Commons, and I think we have more luck with Creative Commons than anything just because of the fact that they get tens of thousand of views. People are visiting there everyday to download content; also when we use the article directories we come up in the places like Squidoo that we call content generator sites.

We build a presence out on Squidoo for particular term. So, if I had an e-commerce site that sold shoes, I would build out a page on Squidoo say for each one of my types of shoes, running shoes, athletic shoes, whatever, dancing shoes. And, all of the information in the content that we have from our site that we are writing, but also generate into there, that gives you another link into your site and a little bit more exposure. But, article directories are not just the only place to stick content.

If you are an e-commerce business, you probably belong to an association, the better business bureau, your chamber of commerce. All of these websites ask constantly for content; they are looking for information and you can provide content to them to host in their directory sites, which most of them have online. I know here in; where I live in Williamsburg, our chamber of commerce asks for articles from its people all the time and runs them in their newsletters and in their directories. So again, you've got to kind of focus on that. If I wasn't online and I wanted to utilize some of these factors, how would I do it?

Eric Enge: Right.

Debra Mastaler: And, probably the association and the chamber market is professional organization. Most businesses have a professional or what we call a professional fraternal organization behind them. Really good example of something I worked on not too long ago is Phi Alpha Delta. They are the professional fraternal organization behind lawyers if you will; solicitors if you are in the UK.

Eric Enge: Right.

Debra Mastaler: And, they have 300,000 members and 535 chapters. Well, if I was an attorney and I was hocking my firm, then that's probably a fraternal organization that I would want to belong to for several reasons. A), I can solicit to the members in there and solicit links from them. B), they have newsletters; they have article directories I can put my material in. They do conferences; you can buy space in the conference handbooks. I am a huge proponent of deriving links from sources of people that already have a propensity to like what it is you sell.

Eric Enge: Sure. And, it also drives relevance in the picture too, right?

Debra Mastaler: Oh, huge. Those four factors; link popularity which is link quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance, it plays under the two key factors involving relevance and anchor text. So, meaning you are getting links from sites that use the same type of verbiage, that use the same type of approach that you do, and that's huge. So, and it's not just associations, like I said that your chambers, your professional organizations.

Your advocacy groups; different states call them different things, some states call them federations. Some states call them coalitions; these are all groups of people that stand behind a particular cause; sponsorship clubs, even your basic clubs. So, anything that has the demographics that you appeal to, that has a large clustering of people, it's very, very much worth your time to invest and purchasing a membership from, and then work in that particular group of people.

Eric Enge: Right. So, do we have a specific example or two that we can talk about?

Debra Mastaler: Well, for instance when we were talking about the attorneys, that fraternal organization is something that we did purchase membership from for a particular client and went in there. And, this has been several years ago; I haven't done this recently with this particular group. But, he has continued and we've continued to keep them as a client purchasing space in all of the conferences. 535 chapters generally means that they have each chapter as a state, and then they have city chapters.

And, they all do particular conferences, so there's a conference handbook that's online for every one of them. So, if you start to think about buying space, ad space in each one of those for writing articles, you can see that the inbound links would start to grow very, very quickly. I did run something recently in an organization that's demographically targeted. And, for instance there is an association; and this is not my association that I use, I am just going to give it as an example.

But, if your demographic has a large base of say Latinos, there is an association of Latino-Americans. The Irish in this country are huge and very well organized, if you sell into that marketplace as well. And, we have done that; we have purchased memberships in those associations; approached them and said hey listen, we are brand new to the association, we sell x, y, z. We are located at www.blank, and we'd really love it if you come by and visit us. The second email that we sent out to them said hey, we are still the new guy, thank you very much. We want to offer you 20% off on any purchase that you make. And hey, oh by the way if you can link to us that would be great, here is the information. Progressively, each time that they emailed, and they did it four times a year, they would send cut and paste text. And, each time they sent it, they picked up links. So, just from a membership standpoint, because of the incentives that they were running, now we started a contest.

We did several contests within the association; again submitted articles into their newsletters which were all HTML newsletters archived on the site. So, you can see again if you use these elements, and then you start to think like a marketer, you'll find a lot of opportunity. And, one opportunity just kind of begets the next one; is that the right word begets, I think it is. One leads to the next.

Eric Enge: And, we'll see if that begets the next question, oh maybe now I am abusing it. So, let's talk about social media. Any place for that for e-commerce site?

Debra Mastaler: Absolutely. My favorite example of this is, there is a company online called InternetBrands.com. And, they have underneath their wing car companies in different areas. But, the ones that I focused in on were Autos.com and CarsDirect.com, so InternetBrands manages those two car portals. One of them gives you quotes on prices of cars and where you can locate them, and the other one is just a car portal in general. What they did is they went and they built out a wiki presence called Wikicars.com.

Wikicars has morphed in the last couple of years to be the premier site for car enthusiasts. So, anybody can come to Wikicars and talk about most things or catalogs or whatever it is that they like. They have found a true following a passion that's about automobiles. They make no bones about the fact that they are owned by InternetBrands. They are very open about it; they are very transparent. But, people don't seem to care, because they've given them the opportunity to come and talk about cars.

Apparently some people are very passionate about their cars. So, this element of social media, this wiki element is, they have used it very, very successfully. People build out places again depending on their demographic. If you are selling into the baby boomers, it doesn't make sense to be on Facebook. I don't care when anybody tells you, it does not make sense to be on Facebook.

But, it might make huge sense to purchase space on Eons.com. LinkedIn might give you some professional kick there as well, but we have found buying ads on those that are more targeted to send people to landing pages, has worked very well for us. We have definitely driven traffic and driven some links because of it. Social media is blogging as well; people are very much still into the blogging area.

The more you can generate participation in social media, I think the more and the greater opportunity you have for generating links. And, you could run the traditional linkbait type things on some of the social media sites like Digg and so forth, and they do work, there is no doubt. But, if you are looking for long term high authority links for e-commerce sites, we tend to focus more on some of that traditional stuff that we are talking about with the association links and with authority links more so then we do with social media. But, social medial is a great exposure point.

Eric Enge: Right. So, when you talk about blogging, you are talking about putting a blog on the site and doing the whole blogger interaction thing?

Debra Mastaler: A lot of people, several years ago that was very much the hot ticket; that was the bandwagon that everybody jumped on. And, what a lot of e-commerce sites find out very quickly is that they are very time and labor intensive to do.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Debra Mastaler: There was no doubt, the blogs were tough. And so, I have a particular client in the food business, they did this 2 years ago. And, we finally came to the realization that he could either pay someone to be a professional blogger about their products in their industry, or he could invite his customer list and ask them to submit content, submit blogposts and so on so forth. And, he was able to whittle it down to about 30 people from the tens and thousands that they have on this list that continually blog for them.

That's great, because they all have blogs and link to him, and then in turn their blog will also; again it's this whole beget thing that's finding the time in the content for those types of blogs as challenging, there is no doubt about it. So, that's one way you can kind of overcome that challenge if you will as to pull in the people that are using your products and that are your passionate users to have them blog for you. But again, that takes time; that takes a lot of time.

Eric Enge: Yeah. You have to manage them, you have to qualify them.

Debra Mastaler: Oh absolutely.

Eric Enge: And, make sure that they are not nut cases that will do things that will really hurt your brand. And so, a lot of effort there, I agree with you. You would need; there are some companies that are prepared to make the commitment, but you really need to make a real commitment, publish on a regular basis if you are going to go that route.

Debra Mastaler: Well, not everybody is Proctor & Gamble, and there are just a lot of people that are mom and pop. And then, there are some people in between too that are midsize companies. Still the labor issue is a tremendous issue, and time intensive. So, that's why I think all of those elements are good, and I think people kind of expect it at a certain point. I don't know that if I go to LL Bean that I expect to see a blog, and I am not really sure that I care. I just want to know if I have a question about something, I want to be able to research it online.

From a customer standpoint I just don't know about blogs. From a link building standpoint it makes sense to have, because they do generate links. But, at what cost of your time and energy you kind of have to make that decision. And, sometimes you have to learn to cut and run too, and not focus on those elements just because they are the latest and greatest bandwagon things.

Eric Enge: Right. Yeah, well for a lot of sites when it comes to trying to use content on the site as a weapon, I am much more in favor of having just straight HTML directory of articles rather than publishing it in a blog. It gives you a couple of advantages; one is that you don't have the same commitment to publish on a schedule.

So, you can put up a set of 10 articles, 20 articles, or 100 articles, whatever you have the appetite for, and focus on relevant topics. You also avoid the issues that blogs have with poor distribution of link juice.

Debra Mastaler: Sure, yeah that's a great point. And, if you are the guy that sells semiconductor parts, blogging is not in your demographic. It's just not; I am sorry. But, the article writing, especially the technical article writing, and you don't even have to be in a technical area like semiconductors. What happens from that standpoint is if you put 10 articles on your site, you can bundle them into an e-book, or you can bundle them into a package every time you write. And then, you can promote it as an e-book every time you send another package of articles let's say 5 or 10 that make it on the site, you can send another press release that you've opened another category on your site.

After a while when you have 20 articles or 30 articles and you have people citing those articles, you become an expert on that particular topic. Then there is that whole aspect too that you can offer yourself out to all the expert directories and put yourself into a directory as an expert on radioactive semiconductors let's say, and then the media contacts you. You get a lot of contacts for court cases and so forth, but what we have found is when we build people into these expert directories, the media calls. People call because you are an expert; you've been published.

That's the whole thing with the e-book. So, you get links from having e-books, you can put them in the e-book directories. People buy the e-book and link to it on your site, or you can give it away. Contact the media after 10 articles; you can legitimately say you have a new section over your site, right? 10 articles is like, I mean that's pretty topic intensive.

Then, you build your expert; pick somebody in the company and build them as the expert on that topic, and put them out there for trade as well. And, there are many, many, many of those expert areas that you can put your bios into.

Eric Enge: Yeah, there is an important point there too which is you could put the information out there as a dry corporate resource without an individuals byline on it. But, it seems to me that if there is an identified person who writes the articles, they are more likely to get that call from the media asking for that specific expert to help them with something.

Debra Mastaler: Oh absolutely. I don't know if you all have noticed, but the cost of press releases has gone up recently. It's several hundred dollars, if you are using the tracking device that the companies use, that the press release distribution companies, some of them will track for you and they will tell you who picks them up and where they are linked to and so forth. You have to pay a couple of hundred bucks to get that service. And, if you are running press releases 2 times or 3 times a month, you can blow through $1,000 pretty quick.

This way too you can cultivate your own databases of media specialists, which we stick up our hands and wave in any meeting right away. That's the very first and foremost thing that you need to do. You need to find those people who are writing about your topics. And, sometimes, you know what, we go down the Barnes & Noble; stand in front of the magazine rack, and pull out all of the magazines that are in that particular topic or even close to it. And, we sit down and we see who all these people are. Magazines are really great for disclosing who works for them in the front part of the magazine.

It has phone numbers, it gives addresses; all you have to do is pull it out. And then, when you call the magazine, or when you call the newspaper, they are very helpful. They are very forthcoming about who that person is that covers that particular week. But then, you can even ask them for an email address, and you can build your own database list, and that's how you start to become known in that industry. And, it's not just mainstream journalists; I mean there especially in the B2B areas, there are journals, trade journals, trade magazines, the association magazines.

There are just tons and tons of publications; your good old fashioned library will give you a list of every publication that has an ISBN number on them, they are in those books. So, it's just the ISBN publications book I think is what it's called or some variation, the librarian will definitely know what I am talking about. Find out what all the publications are.

Eric Enge: One other thing you touched base on a little earlier was notion of LinkedIn. If you use LinkedIn and you enable your profile to show the websites that you are involved in, which is sort of default to being in your private profile that you enable them to be shown in the public profile, those are good links as well, right?

Debra Mastaler: They are, and that's a terrific tactic. The other tactic that we find that drives a lot of eventual link juice and traffic out of LinkedIn is the Q&A portion of it from a referral standpoint. So, recently I use myself as an example. Somebody asked a question in LinkedIn about some link building service, and one of my former clients bless her heart, totally on her own gave me a glowing recommendation.

From that we have gotten three additional pieces of business. So, I take that LinkedIn testimonial and use it from time to time just as a traffic generator. Not all links have to be used for juice; a lot of them, if you are driving that kind of traffic then all of a sudden it really helps your ROI. Those are definitely links you want to look at as well.

Eric Enge: Absolutely, so any other last tips for our audience before we wrap up?

Debra Mastaler: Gosh, I can't believe how much we've gone through here. Let me look at my list, because I put a little list together. One of the things you and I were talking about earlier about the articles, something we both should remember is all of your articles can be turned into audio versions.

Eric Enge: Yeah.

Debra Mastaler: Some people call them MP3 versions, and they can also be distributed. I know I love to listen to things in the car; I spend a tremendous amount of time in the car with kids going from place-to-place or whatever. And, being able to listen to all of that is a real Godsend, but again there you can convert all of your articles into podcasts.

Video right now is huge with this whole issue with universal search, so e-commerce folks should really be looking at that especially for their; maybe they can show how to assemble something, or how to clean something. Don't forget that you can upload videos to your local listings if you have brick and mortar locations, and get a local listing say in Google Local and Google Local Maps.

You can upload up to 3 videos on your listing. So, if somebody finds you; if they are looking for you and you've got a video on there, it will say the title of the video, how to cleanup, you can show the video. Those little things all help attract attention which eventually all attracts links and exposure into the media.

Eric Enge: Right. So, that's great stuff, and thanks so much for joining us today.

Debra Mastaler: Well, thanks for asking me Eric, I really appreciate it.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Eric Papczun with Eric Enge

Tue, 20 May 2008 10:00:28 -0400

The following is a written transcript of the April 15, 2008 podcast between Eric Papczun of Performics and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Let's start with a top-down of what are the fundamentals of Video Search Optimization. In fact, let's first talk a little bit about the opportunity, because there are some interesting aspects to the opportunity. In some degrees it seems looming and large, and at the same time you can turn around and pretty easily convince yourself that there are at least a lot of situations in which it's not nearly as large as you might have originally perceived.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, it's interesting, I think if you think long and hard about anything, you could talk yourself out of how big the trend is and the opportunity that exists in front of all of us. But, I think to me it's relatively clear, which is that video is becoming more and more important to consumers and more and more in demand. And I think content that is being conveyed via video, it just hits people a little harder and is digested a little easier.

Eric Enge: Right. By the way I am a fan of video also, but I am just trying to play devil's advocate for a minute. Now, if you have to watch a two-minute video versus respond to a hunk of text with a pretty little graphic that you can consume in seconds, if people are in man-on-the mission mode they are going to want the simpler experience, right?

Eric Papczun: Well, I have no question about it. I think it all always boils down to what your need is and as far as what kind of content is going to work best for you. And that surely you don't want to throw away your plans to add more and more text content where it's appropriate. But I think we are encouraging our clients to look for those opportunities to use video where it is most appropriate.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let's talk about what some of those scenarios are. For example, clearly if you are trying to show somebody how to do something, sort of related educational material when you have a buyer in research mode. If it's a kind of buyer who types in digital camera reviews for example, or a specific product name and then the review, those are kind of made for video, aren't they?

Eric Papczun: Oh without question, I think any time you can get the visual product in front of people along with a product expert that's talking about it, it is just easier for people to digest because you are pointing things out as you are talking about them. But, it also just reinforces the brand and the product by actually having a visual representation of it. For instance, when you think about something like people looking for plasma televisions, which is large ticket item, people are doing a lot of research on that item. I think the ability to have someone, a product expert, look at three sets and walk you through the different inputs and the different functions, show you the remote control, show you the difference in the aesthetics of the piece all help to do a number of things. First of all, it kind of puts you more across as a product expert, gives your review a little bit more credibility, as well as it starts to cement people to those brands that you are talking about. It gets them more emotionally involved with the product as opposed to just more of this kind of analytical connection. There is more of an emotional connection that happens when you see the product and you see someone touching and feeling it.

Eric Enge: Right. And there are certainly enough products where even images don't communicate as well as a video where you see someone manipulating the controls or whatever it might be that they are doing with a given product. So, I think that's particularly interesting. But also recently in an interview with John Marshall, one of the things that we were talking about was the intent of the person who comes to your website, because people are at different stages in the process. And the kinds of things we have talked about here is that, when you have someone who needs more information about a product, they want to see it, they want almost to be able to touch it. That's exactly the kind of visitor that you want to steer towards this type of content.

Eric Papczun: Oh absolutely. I think having that understanding that there are different people that are at different stages of the buying cycle and the research cycle, and being able to deliver content to each of those different types of needs is certainly important. I mean, I am not trying to allocate that video should replace any type of table that shows comparisons or spec data, any of that; it's all needed for people at various phases in the research and buying cycle. But what there tends to be not enough of right now is video content to support the other content that's there.

Eric Enge: Right, yes indeed. So, let us sort of switch gears a little bit and start talking about what are good, solid optimization steps? And then, finally after that we can talk a little bit about strategies for promoting and getting the videos out there.

Eric Papczun: Yes, as you know we are very early on in the optimization techniques, mainly because the major engines haven't quite spent enough resources on advancing the engine's ability to do things like visual detections and speech recognition. We certainly know of smaller search players that are doing that, but the major engines like Google, and MSN, and Yahoo haven't quite adopted that yet.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: So we have to focus on them, by doing that. I think the first thing that folks have to kind of focus on is where the video asset lives on the page and how we put that together. One of the biggest mistakes we see s these video players that play the whole catalog of video assets all from one URL, all from one player and that's probably the biggest no-no out there. Some folks have referred to that as kind of like a video ghetto.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: And I think that's one of those things where it can be beautiful and have great looking feel and functionality, but it bails in its ability to allow each and every one of those assets to be found individually and indexed individually. So, that would be the first thing we would steer people to is to make sure that each video file if possible can live on its own unique URL. We would also love to see that video asset be an object as part of an HTML page and have the text that surrounds it and all the kind of signals that would send to the engine to kind of give them an understanding of what that file is all about.

Eric Enge: Right. And the reason ultimately for that is that since the search engine can't see inside the video content itself, they have to rely on conventional webpage optimization or webpage signals about the video, and you can only get those signals if you put each video on its own page?

Eric Papczun: Yeah, its kind of just understanding that the engines for the most part are blind, deaf, and dumb when it comes to the images and videos. And so yeah, I think the more you can surround that, the more you can kind of not so much focus on the video but optimizing the page around it continues to still one of the best strategies when you are just trying to get ranked into Google or Yahoo engine. But, there are also things just like you would do with an image in using the alt attribute to assign it there. Obviously, you want to encode the video with metadata, it's always helpful to give the file a keyword optimized filename if possible. And then, good captions around that content, that video file itself, as it sits on the page. All of those things can help kind of reinforce to the engines what that file has in it. If you can't there is obviously some interesting technologies out there that are doing some things beyond that, like doing voice recognition and allowing you to put a transcript behind the video. All of those things, I think, will help you in the future. But as of today I think ranking in Google, is more about those elements that are on the page surrounding the video than necessarily the video itself.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, you mentioned metadata, and I assume you are talking about data within the header of the video file itself.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, that's correct.

Eric Enge: And, two questions about that, one is what kind of items do you typically find inside a header that you can play with and secondly doesn't it vary by video file format?

Eric Papczun: It does vary quite a bit and it's one of the things that I think is frustrating to lot of folks in production. Yeah, and we hope at some point there is going to be some standards that are formed around this. But, I think, again it is SEO one-on-one type of tactics here, you want that first thing about who your user is and what their intent is and what search phrases they will be using, and then try to really focus on those terms, and not try to overload or stuff keywords in that file. I think it's more about focus and kind of optimizing around just a handful of terms as opposed to a dozen.

Eric Enge: Now, do any of the file formats allow for a transcript inside?

Eric Papczun: I am not aware of any, I think...

Eric Enge: I wasn't either, but...

Eric Papczun: I don't think that there are, I think there are more services that you can click on, turnkey services that are out there that will embed transcripts in the platform, but I don't believe that they are actually encoding as part of the metadata.

Eric Enge: Right. And but of course, you can include a transcript on the HTML page.

Eric Papczun: They absolutely could, yeah. And, I think that probably for certain types of video that's not the bad thing to do. I think transcripts are great in a way, because all of the content is there, but of course we speak more words than sometimes we write and there is a lot more noise in our language when we speak than when we type. And so, there is a downside of that as well, which is that you kind of start to muddy the message if you are not careful with the transcripts.

Eric Enge: Alright. I can tell you that when I do interviews a transcription service does the transcript and then they give it to me and I still spend another hour- hour and a half on it, because they do literal translation and human speech is awful when you read it.

Eric Papczun: I was just thinking about that as we were talking. I was wondering, ‘this is really going to print out quite poorly.' And I think it's just natural for us to not be as structured and as organized in our speech, because we are responding immediately to a question, we are not sometimes giving ourselves enough time to think it through, give it an outline, and really structure in a way that just makes it easier for people to understand and makes your point. And so, I think because of that I do worry a little bit about over-relying on transcripts for optimization, because I think they do create an awful lot of noise.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, of course you can go through the process and clean them up.

Eric Papczun: You could.

Eric Enge: And then, there still would be the transcription of the essence of the video, so it would be a little cleaner. You know, you remove all the ‘sort of' and ‘kind of' and all the ‘um.' Add a basic cleanup, just to make it read a little better.

Eric Papczun: But, the reality probably is Eric, we work with some very large publishers, who has got time for that? I mean, I think more and more people are going to look for scalable services and using the manual kind of editing of a transcript is going to be very, very difficult for large publishers.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: So, for smaller folks, for smaller entrepreneurs that are looking to kind of milk every opportunity, I think that's probably going to be something they will attack. Larger publishers that are dealing with larger volumes, they are not going to be too excited about a solution like that, their focus is going to be wholly on scale and usability.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you had to name the top three on-page elements in addition to each video having its own page, what would they be in terms of getting your video to rank?

Eric Papczun: In a popular engine like Google?

Eric Enge: Yes.

Eric Papczun: Well, I don't think they are going to be any different than anything else. We are saying a title tag continues to be the number one element. Having the first text on the page hopefully in H1, kind of the heading of the page being aligned to the title tag, I would put as number two. And, I would think the third one is just a good summary of the video's content on that page as part of the body would be three. I think there is more on page HTML factors affecting ranking right now in engines like Google than it is the video itself.

Eric Enge: Right. I mean in the video itself, the biggest thing is the filename really?

Eric Papczun: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And, I think the core metadata like the title and the description would be where also I would spend my time. But, I think there is a short-term strategy here Eric, and a long-term strategy. Short-term, you are going to use kind of the SEO one-on-one approaches to get those files found, it would be more about distribution on YouTube and some of these other services that are going to help you out. And, I think long term, you want to think about just getting videos that are more condensed and more focused around particular subject matter. As speech recognition and as some of these other technologies improve, I think they get adopted by Google, whether Google goes out and buys technology or they decided to develop themselves. At some point they are obviously going to address this need for consumers to be able to search and find videos in a way that is just more effective and more efficient for them. I think if that happens, you want to be positioned for it and that would be where I would put long term emphasis on metadata, more emphasis on structuring and organizing the video itself and the content. Think more about what you are actually shooting, what you are trying to get across, and what the audience says, and put more of just the thought into the video's mission and objectives.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: I get a feeling sometimes that that's done and sometimes that it's not. But, we all think about optimizing the actual production of the video, as much as we'll need too in the future.

Eric Enge: Right. Assuming that the companies are involved in our planning and building for the long term, and if they can get in the habit of doing this kind of advance planning as you talk about it and doing the kind of optimizations that will matter more once this search technology improves, they will have a leg up.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, I think so, and I think you can almost see a future a year or two or more from now where if you would ask me that same question. I would say the first thing you need to do Eric is make sure you summarize the topic matter at the beginning of the video. In the first thirty seconds tell me what you are going to tell me, then don't spend anymore than three minutes making your point because you have to worry about the viewership and the abandonment, as well as staying focused on your topic matter. And then, spend the last thirty seconds summarizing what you talked about, and having optimization of the video itself so that engines are going to in the very first fifteen seconds.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: Or they might start to pick up on trends like the fact that there are kind of introductions to videos and that they are cues in here to what the video is about. So, there are a lot of things that we don't know yet, but you can kind of just start to put on your search engine hat and say if you had the technology to break this video down, what content would be most important in telling you what it's all about?

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. So, if you start thinking about the last piece, the distribution piece, what are your thoughts on distribution strategies?

Eric Papczun: Well, YouTube is just killing right now, isn't it?

Eric Enge: Yes. Eric Papczun: I mean, it's amazing. It's just on a market share tier as far as we can see. The number one distribution strategy probably is to get your video up on YouTube and optimize it for YouTube by making sure that it's appropriately labeled. And you do everything you can to get metadata in there. I think that's your first distribution strategy, I think experimentation is probably the thing that we would encourage more than anything else. Find other channels where your videos are a good niche and a good fit and go ahead and attack those and go where the traffic is, go where you are starting to get hits. But I mean obviously, YouTube is paramount, you have to be there right now.

Eric Enge: So, you providing the video and hosting it on YouTube, and you are also hosting it on your own site?

Eric Papczun: I think if it's appropriate for you and your brand, yes. But, that's not always appropriate. There are a lot of folks out there, our clients included, who want to absolutely control their own content and they don't want to release it into the wild., I think you have to think about the potential impacts to your business, both positive and negative. But, I do think if it's all about distribution and all about gaining more eyeballs and more viewership, then I would say try to blow it out there a bit more and experiment a bit more. For those folks who are doing that, you obviously always want to try to bring them back to your site and/or bring them to have some kind of call to action in there for them so that you get something out of the video itself as far as some business or enticing the behavior that you want. So, I think as long as you keep those kinds of things in mind, I would say go ahead and experiment with the distribution and try to get your asset out there to the broadest audience as soon as possible.

Eric Enge: Right. I mean you could create or upload the video to YouTube and just use it to embed a YouTube player on your own site, right?

Eric Papczun: Yeah, oh absolutely.

Eric Enge: And, you could still create a page on YouTube even in that structure?

Eric Papczun: You absolutely could, and that's a great strategy for someone who is more protective of the content. I would say your NBC example is a good example of someone who is centering a lot of content out there. They weren't comfortable with that being on YouTube, they have since pulled back, but there is where you could kind of find the middle ground.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, another new thing I think that's going on these days is that there are so many people offering various forms of free hosting services; Amazon, Google, and many, many others that you could set these things up, where even though you might not want to release them into the wild on YouTube and you may not want the man putting it on their own site, there are still options for you.

Eric Papczun: Yeah. And, I think again it just depends on what your goals are as an organization, if you are smaller and you are not as concerned with having absolute control over the asset and the user experience, then you are going to go out there and take advantage of some of these opportunities. But, there are going to be other folks, like large publishers, that are not going to want to give that control up and are going to want to have absolute control over the user experience in the serving of those videos. So, I think it all depends on the kind of conversation that I hope all publishers are having right now as far as their strategy on video.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah absolutely. So, you can end up with your video now hosted in multiple places, and I guess there is an interesting dynamic here, because search engines in general try to serve only one version of a piece of content. They are very studious about avoiding situations with duplicate content. But in the world of video, it appears to me that they are not nearly as efficient. So, you can actually rank for your video many times.

Eric Papczun: Yeah. And, I think that's frustrating to the searchers, to users; they have got a figure that one out. I mean it can be difficult to find what you are looking for in Google. The thing about Google also is that they tend to give more value to older videos. So, Google.com, the example that I used in my session in New York as I talked about Barack Obama's speech that he gave on race relations, which a lot of people considered to be the most important speech he has given to date. And that speech, I believe was shown on CNN at like 11 o' clock eastern time on a Wednesday or Thursday, everybody was at work, very few people saw it. But, by the end of the day, and the next day when newspapers like USA Today had it on their front page, there was a considerable amount of buzz about that particular video and yet no one had seen it. And people wanted to consume the whole speech, it was only 30 minutes long. They obviously get some sound bytes on nightly news, but I think people really wanted to see the whole speech. And so, YouTube had a huge spike, I think they served like two million viewers???? over a course of week on that video. But, if you look for it on Google.com, which probably a lot of people started with, then you put in ‘Obama's speech' or ‘Barack's speech,' which most people did, \ because they didn't think about his whole body of work, they thought about just that one speech...

Eric Enge: Yeah.

Eric Papczun: And they found a speech from back in Iowa. I think even today, I mean I have to check this, but if you search Google today for ‘Barack's speech,' you are going to find some speech that's like a year old now, and, it's not relevant at all to anything going on today. I think that's a huge disconnect.

Eric Enge: Yeah, that's speaks to whole another problem of management of freshness as a weighting factor.

Eric Papczun: Well. And, that's something Google News figured out, the algorithm there is very much geared to the freshness of the content. And, actually there is an edge for publishers who are constantly refreshing their news stories , not just putting it out and letting it sit, but coming in and making edits to it throughout the day. There seems to be a significant edge for those folks, and thus it creates news results that I think are much more relevant and timely, because of that algorithmic factor. We haven't seen that yet in video in Google.com in the universal search results, but we are seeing it in YouTube. But I think your point is a good one, that even YouTube has got a way to go as far as kind of really figuring out what people want, as far as the query goes. Timeliness there is more important, people kind of believe that you are now able to rate the video, all those kind of things are building into overall factors. Obviously as the number of views and viewership goes up, the video gets higher up in the rankings. So, YouTube's done a lot better job of that. We would like to see more of that being transferred over to Google.com and that being factored into those videos.

Eric Enge: Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. So, if you had to name a couple of the other most important video search properties for people to consider, what would they be?

Eric Papczun: That for search engines or just as...?

Eric Enge: Video search in this case.

Eric Papczun: Yeah. I am really impressed with EveryZing and their technology. I don't know if that is so much a destination as a technology and a platform. But, I do think that they have got it right on, I think that the folks here are using, and I think The Boston Globe uses their technology now. If you look at those pages, they are very optimized for natural search engines and video search engines. And so, there are a lot of things that they are doing right there. As far as video search, I kind of see it as YouTube and everybody else and there is no one that stands out to me or that I would go up there and make strong recommendations to my clients to be on, unless there was a particularly fit for them. There are some folks that do entertainment a little better, some people that do news a little better, but I think overall it comes down to the fact that you have got YouTube now just dominating in market shares. It is almost like, would I recommend people to optimize other sites or try to get distribution, when they spend a lot of time on getting visibility on MSN? The answer is probably not. I am going to focus where the majority of the traffic is coming from and make sure we nail that down. So unfortunately, I don't have a list for you that I feel is strong enough to even spend much time on. I actually try to get people to think more about the reality of the fact that the people aren't using these search engines in any kind of mass. And thus, we have to really focus on Google.com and Yahoo.com and YouTube.

Eric Enge: Well great, thank you Eric.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, I appreciate it!

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Stephan Spencer with Eric Enge

Mon, 5 May 2008 10:24:19 -0400

The following is a written transcript of the April 16, 2008 podcast between Stephan Spencer and Eric Enge (to listen to the podcast click here: Stephan Spencer with Eric Enge):

Eric Enge: Hi, my name is Eric Enge, I am the founder and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, and you can find our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Stephan Spencer, the founder and president of Netconcepts, you can see their site at www.netconcepts.com. How are we doing today, Stephan?

Stephan Spencer: I am doing great, thanks.

Eric Enge: Excellent. So, one of the things that I find interesting when I go to your blog is that the title talks about a scientist become a web marketing virtuoso. Why do you call yourself a scientist?

Stephan Spencer: It's interesting, it's actually one of my designers who designed my blog came up with that tagline. The reason why she came up with that was because I have master's degree in Biochemistry. I was actually on my way to achieving a PhD in Biochemistry when I quit school at the University Wisconsin-Madison to start Netconcepts. As a result, I have a very scientific approach to SEO.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, I can tell you that my experience is that, it's one thing to have gotten a degree in something, it's another to actually think that way, they are slightly different things. I have seen the scientific approach in what you write, and the things that you have done with Netconcepts.

The reason why it intrigued me is that, my father taught physics in MIT for 30 years, and I learned my way of thinking from him. So, I always described myself as being a scientist. People ask me what I am and that's the answer; what they like to do, well that's a completely different thing. Sort of a mindset in how you approach things. How do you think it affects your approach to doing SEO?

Stephan Spencer: Well, it really permeates everything that I do, and in fact the way that Netconcepts operates. We take a very experimental approach to SEO and apply the scientific method where you come up with hypotheses and you test your assumptions. Just like with email marketing, you test everything, you test the subject line, you test the from and the to and everything.

So, why can't you apply that same sort of methodology to your SEO initiatives, testing all your assumptions in regards to the right keywords, to the right page titles, to the right HTML coding, use of no follows, and sculpting PageRank; and you name it, everything can be tested.

Eric Enge: So, there is lot of opportunity to test and do different things with your SEO campaign. How do you think that differs from what you have seen other people do out there? And, I don't mean necessarily be critical of other people, but just you know what are the things that are a bit different?

Stephan Spencer: Alright. So, some folks are just kind of on their high horse saying this is how SEO should be done, and that's their line and they are sticking to it. Now, if that's unsubstantiated, there is a problem there because you can't just take somebody's opinions on SEO whether there are a prominent SEO blogger, or in the forums, or communists, or magazine or whatever; you can't just take their assumptions that they sell you and say okay this is the way that this particular factor works with regards to Google or another engine.

You really need to knock people off their pedestal to some degree and just say well, show me the evidence or at least convince me that you've tested these hypotheses that you are making.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, one of the things I picked out of what you said there is this notion that for some people one size fits all and they want to use the same formula on every website. Certainly, there are certain aspects of tactical SEO where that makes sense, but certainly when you turn around to the link-building side of things, one size clearly does not fit all.

There are a lot of different ways to slice that pie and you can have people doing Digg campaigns and hey that works great for them, but you will have somebody else who doesn't want to do that. And, they might be the ones who are out there pushing their stuff out through a widget because they have something that they can syndicate in that fashion. So, you have to bring a certain mindset to uncovering the uniqueness of each business, their website, their markets, and then build your plan to fit in that, does that make sense?

Stephan Spencer: Absolutely. Different clients have different levels of tolerance for Digg baiting, link baiting, and various types of link building tactics. One client may just be totally not interested in social media campaigns and another who you might not think is well-suited to doing social media marketing is all into it.

So, I know a great example, not one of our clients at the moment, a company called LifeInsure.com, and they are in the top ten in Google for life insurance. These guys have done some really fantastic social media marketing, they have put out some great Digg bait campaigns. One of them was called nineteen things you didn't know about death, it was pretty creepy actually.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed.

Stephan Spencer: The first item on list was that you are still conscious for 15 seconds to 20 seconds after being decapitated, and that was a real treat reading that. But, it's actually something that has been really valuable for them, they were willing to take that risk of putting something quite controversial and appealing to the alpha geeks on Digg.com. They didn't link to it from anywhere on their sites, so their loyal customers and visitors would not be stumbling across this particular article when they browsed around.

But, it made it to the front page of Digg as you would have expected, and got them quite a lot of links. So, it really depends on that tolerance level for being really edgy and also what content you can leverage and come up with. So, some clients have more interesting content than others.

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. And, all this thinking fits into how you put together and plan an SEO engagement. And, you've blogged about this recently in your blog, now tell me what your thoughts are in planning an SEO engagement.

Stephan Spencer: Well, first of all not every client or not every prospect that comes to us would make a good client. The first thing we need to figure out is are they innovative in their thinking, and are they willing to invest in SEO? And actually, an article that you will see on Search Engine Land coming out tomorrow that I wrote is on SEO is not free, you can't just think of natural search traffic as free traffic because you have to invest in your SEO and it is a continual investment, you can't just do it as a one-off project.

So, first thing we need to figure out is, are these prospects right for Netconcepts. And, can we actually do a really good job for them? So, there are cases where it is just not the right fit, and we need to refer them on to others, and I have actually blogged that recently too, that I have put out there a few other SEO consultants that I recommend to folks who are interested in doing SEO but aren't the right fit for Netconcepts.

So, the first thing is making sure that the fit is right and that this is going to be successful engagement. And then, we need to map it out, and we very much take a project management approach to SEO, everything needs to be managed. So, if we can show the roadmap and get the client onboard with that, it's going to be much more successful than if they are not fully committed or don't fully believe in the journey we are taking them on.

There are different stages to this journey, so on that blog post that you alluded to, we talk about getting indexed and having crawler-friendly sites, looking at things like site structure, and best practices, indexation levels, navigation, templates that sort of stuff. Step 2 is getting found for the right keywords, and that involves the keywords research, and the content optimization, and programmatic optimization.

Then step 3 would be increasing visibility through natural link building and that link building really is an art as much as it is the science, and getting the right sorts of links and high value links, it's hard to do, but definitely doable. So, the spectrum kind of goes from the real easy, not very valuable stuff like directory listings to really highly sort after, high value links, very high trust, high authority, aged sites linking to from high PR pages.

It's a kind of a process that we've come up with, and then there are other pieces that kind of fit into that latter step 2 that as much online marketing as it is SEO, and that could be like developing widgets or making existing widgets more search engine optimal so that they are passing page ranks when bloggers and so forth put those widgets on their site to blogging.

And, being really effective and integrating yourself into the bloggers here, and not just putting out some corporate shell of a blog and expecting people, bloggers, and journalists...

Eric Enge: To embrace such a thing, right.

Stephan Spencer: Yes.

Eric Enge: So, it's sort of leads into, excuse me, whenever I talk about link-building, I always, in the same breath almost, talk about content; because the questions that people need to answer with their website is why would someone link to it. And, my favorite way of illustrating that point to people is, they don't link to you to help you make money.

Stephan Spencer: Yes, that's right.

Eric Enge: Right. So, they link to you because you are doing something that's exceptional in someway and that gets back to the content or you know there can be outbound programs such as well-structured widget, which is a content syndication thing; but again, you are still using content. That's a huge part of the picture I think as well.

Stephan Spencer: It doesn't actually necessarily have to be content, it could be functionality, just has to be something that's of value...

Eric Enge: Yeah, it could be the tool, right.

Stephan Spencer: Exactly. And, one of the most successful link baits we've ever done in Netconcepts is to create a WordPress plugin for SEO and that is called SEO title tag. That plugin page gets more links and more traffic than our own homepage does, which is pretty unusual.

That was the a successful link bait campaign, and it really, it was a little bit of a hard sell within Netconcepts with our management to invest the time into really building out this plugin.

Because, the target market for the plugin is not our company's target market; our target market in Netconcepts is really focused around larger brands, and online retailers, media properties; and those aren't the folks who are going to be using the WordPress Plugin. It is the small bloggers, just individuals out there that would be using it, but the value is of course in the links. And so, they picked up on that and got the religion.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: So yeah, it's been a fabulous link bait campaign for us. Now, there are great link bait things you could do that have absolutely nothing to do with your business, and it's just still great content. So there is, I forget who it was, but somebody put out an article and got it submitted to Digg, and it was really funny or interesting urinals. And all they did was they combed through a bunch of a Flickr photos looking for really bizarre urinal photos.

They found some really interesting one, they compiled that into an article with a bunch of photos from these Flickr pages and submitted that to Digg and got a ton of traffic from that and links...

Eric Enge: More than 10,000 diggers, as I recall.

Stephan Spencer: Yes. But, unless you are selling urinals, probably have nothing to do with your business, but the links are still valuable.

Eric Enge: You have to be careful to manage that, with respect to what your site is about and what you are trying to do with it, and how it conveys the reputation of your business out there.

Stephan Spencer: Yes. You don't want to destroy your brand in the process, and that's where doing it on a micro site or on a blog can be less risky.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you mentioned that you focus on big brands and large retail sites; what are some of the challenges that large retail sites face from an SEO perspective?

Stephan Spencer: They are an interesting sort of animal, in that most of these large retail sites don't actually know how many pages they even have, for one thing.

They believe they have x thousand pages, because they have x thousand numbers of skews and therefore product pages and then extrapolate to add informational pages and so forth. But the thing is, this is all database driven and they don't really have an accurate count. Usually what they use is the estimated number of pages that Google reports as indexed, which is really inaccurate.

It is just a very rough guestimate, that estimated number of pages; and so it's not really an effective number to be basing various metrics on. So, there are other things they don't really have a good handle on, and when you are talking about the kind of scale data that an online retailer could have in terms of number of pages and number of keywords they are managing in their keyword portfolio, it's really hard to scale across that, right.

So, when you have hundreds and thousands of keywords, hundreds and thousands of pages; how do you optimize them all? It's really tough, you can't go page-by-page, and so there are different tactics that we've come up with and which I can talk to you about if you like. But, that is another challenge is rolling out optimization across lots and lots of pages. And then, the organization constraints are usually overwhelming.

They don't have a lot of IT resource to dedicate to SEO, or not enough; and the IT departments and the marketing departments at these various companies often times at loggerheads, at odds with each other. They don't all see at eye to eye and have conflicting priorities. So, that's a real challenge, it's hard for marketing, to get stuff pushed through that's important to them, when yet another IT project is getting in the way from the IT folks going home at 5 o' clock at night.

Eric Enge: Yeah, it can be painful. You know you have made this suggestion, it's a great suggestion. Marketing is onboard and then you can wait months before it gets implemented and you are grinding your teeth the whole time because you know what the impact is going to be, or at lest you have some idea of what the impact is going to be, it can absolutely drive you really nuts.

Stephan Spencer: Yes, alright.

Eric Enge: But, yet another thing that strikes me for these kinds of environments is, a lot of time large retailers, the various pages of their catalog don't have a lot of distinction in the level of content. And, they may even be using nothing but third-party manufacturers' supplied text. So, they may or may not have a lot of text, but it's all duplicated from somewhere else.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, duplicated content is the big issue for retailers, not only between the multiple retailers using the same manufacturer's supplied content for the product descriptions, but also a lot of pages are pretty much exactly the same or considered to be quite similar to each other by the search engines due to the way that they have built out the site and the technologies they have used.

Let's say they are using Endeca's Guided Navigation, and they have not implemented it in a search engine optimal sort of way. So, you have all these different permutations that look like a lot of the other permutations, and this creates many thousands of pages that have the same content on them, same products, price range might be slightly different, maybe one product is not listed on this page that was on another page. But for all intents and purposes, pretty much exactly the same pages.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, you mentioned earlier in some of the, or you alluded to earlier some of the things that you do to deal with the scaling problems, and you suggested you might be able to go a little deeper, I think one of the things was, you can individually pick title tags and things like that. So, what are some other things that you do to work around those kinds of issues?

Stephan Spencer: Right. In fact I wrote an article for Search Engine Land on this topic of some scalable approaches to optimizing very large websites. I'll just mention a couple. So one of them we call thin-slicing, and that's after the term that Malcolm Gladwell in the book Blink, where he talks about just kind of making split second decisions not over thinking something, assuming you have an expert pedigree or opinion on this and this, and this is just not an uninformed amateur making this assumption.

You have to really kind of step back and not over think your SEO, and if you take a thin-slicing approach to let's say your title tags, you don't have to spend a lot of time doing keyword research and rejigging things within the page copy and doing the title tag at the same time.

What if you just took a very cursory thin-slicing view and cranked through thousands upon thousands of title tags very quickly, maybe spending only 10 seconds or 15 seconds on each title tag, where you are working on a synonym in changing a singular to a plural and then moving on to the next one, maybe moving a few words around and the another one, just that sort of thing. And, not tying in keyword research and so forth, just kind of using your best guess.

That can work really well, especially when you are talking about a huge website with hundreds and thousands of pages, if you can crank through thousands of titles in the day instead of hundred, you are going to get through all the important pages, the ones that are higher up in the site tree that have more importance in the eyes of the search engines a lot quicker.

Eric Enge: Right. You are subdividing the task and prioritizing, and allowing things to happen a little more on a demand basis almost.

Stephan Spencer: Right. Now, there is another tactic that you can use and we have actually developed the whole product around it. The tactic is actually using a proxy server to make changes. And then, you optimize the proxy version of the website and see how that performs. So, we had at one time, a client who was insistent that kitchen electrics was a category they were going to stick with even though we were trying really hard to convince them that it was not a good category name, because nobody is going to type that into Google.

And so, this is a category that refers to food processors, and blenders and various other small appliances for the kitchen. Kitchen electrics, that's the term for the industry, they would be laughed at by their peers if they changed it to something else.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: They insisted that, no you are going to have to actually prove to us that this is worth seven figures in additional revenue if we changed that, otherwise we are not going to change it. This is like the bane of SEO's existence, right, is when they get a client who makes you prove everything in advance. Well, what if you had a proxy platform or a proxy server based platform where you could change that, change kitchen electrics to kitchen small appliances and see what the impact is? Now, see what the additional traffic...

Eric Enge: Like an AB test basically.

Stephan Spencer: In a way, yeah. But, it's not an AB test where you can test both in parallel; you can only test them sequentially. So, you have the baseline and then you conduct the test, you see what the results are in terms of once the page gets indexed and the rankings shift, and then the traffic then starts to flow in, you collect a reasonable sized samples so it is statistically significant and then you can conduct another test or switch back to the baseline.

Imagine being able to do that in a very large scale, conducting all sorts of different kinds of tests through a proxy-based platform. You could make page specific changes, you could make site-wide changes and do this very quickly and easily where something like a category name change could take months to get pushed through the IT departments, to implement on the native website, you do this on the proxy based website.

You can conduct this test and implement the change in minutes. So, that's the idea behind our product, Gravity Stream, that actually I came up with that based on the frustration I had with this particular retail client back in 2003, that was very frustrating and I was like, if only I could just show them what needs to be done.

Eric Enge: It is a lot easier to talk them into doing a limited scope test and giving them real data basically. So, and it sounds very cool and definitely will look forward to digging into Gravity Stream in an upcoming conversation. What do you thought on SEO reporting?

Stephan Spencer: Right. So, this is an interesting one, most of the SEOs out there really heavily focused on ranking reports. And so then, there are also the indexation reports and the backlink reports and things like that. But...

Eric Enge: Those are just really tools of the SEO trade, right?

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, they are kind of like necessary blocking and tackling sort of things, but it really doesn't give you whole lot of insight.

Of course you are going to do that on your client's competitors as well and look at their backlinks and indexation levels and so forth, and benchmark against your competitors and look for opportunities. But, that is really basic stuff. If you could go into some KPIs there are metrics that are really unusual, but give real insight into SEO, that would be pretty cool. And so, we actually came up with some KPIs, that actually my colleagues here at Netconcepts, he came up with seven of them.

It was Brian Klais our executive VP of Search, and one of them is the brand to non-brand mix because when we are dealing with so many online retailers, they are so heavily focused on branded keywords that they miss the non-brand opportunity. If you look at the long tail of natural search, most of the retailers are comprised of non-brand keywords.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: They are so focused on the branded keywords that they lose sight of the long tail and end up losing the non-brand potential. So, if you establish some metrics around this brand to non-brand mix that would give you some insight into what you are leaving on the table. Another KPI is unique pages, and this alludes to something that we talked about a little bit ago and that most retailers don't actually know how many pages they have.

So, once you establish a KPI around unique pages and you don't assume that the estimated number of pages that Google is reporting from a site: search is your actual number of unique pages, base it on database queries to your database or base on unique pages that have been crawled, you are going to have a much more useful metric to use in other calculations.

Another KPI is pages yielding traffic, or what we call page yield. Now that one is, if you imagine that you have say ten thousand pages to your website and you actually you can measure which pages are driving traffic from the search engines. Well, you would be surprised how few pages actually drive traffic from search engines. So, maybe out of a 10,000-page website, you have 1,000 pages over a given month are actually bringing in search visitors.

So, once you start measuring, that you can focus on that 9,000 other pages that are just sitting there on the bench, the free loaders, they are not doing anything for you there, they are partly a virtual sales forces that's collecting a paycheck but not actually doing anything to help the business. So, measuring that metric will help you to increase your long tail potential and get more pages delivering traffic.

Another one is keywords per page, so you can measure the keyword yield. In other words, how many keywords per page are coming in from the search engines. So, if you have let's say on an average, two keywords per page over a given month, that's how terribly healthy, whereas if you had let's say five or ten keywords per page then you have a much broader, these pages have much broader appeal.

Eric Enge: Yes, some of those are long tail terms.

Stephan Spencer: Exactly, again this is the start of long tail health metrics.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: Another related KPI would be visitors per keyword, also if you let's say have a average merchants attracting let's say 1.9 visitors per keyword while we actually did a study and wrote up a research report on the study and found that that was indeed the case, that 1.9 visitors per keyword was an average yield for the average merchant in our study.

Then, there are a couple of others that I will mention real briefly: index to crawl ratio, that's taking the number of pages indexed versus the number of pages crawled so you can see if you have a lot of pages crawled that aren't being indexed.

Eric Enge: Right, potentially a bad sign.

Stephan Spencer: Yes. Then, what's each search engine delivering in terms of traffic, because each engine has different audience sizes of course, but also different demographics and if the people would be interested in your products and services and might actually buy from you.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. The other thing that I'll add which is that when I am on the phone with a prospective client and they are asking about their search engine rankings and how to improve or how many links they are going to get per day, or whatever the questions are, those are useful things to think about perhaps. But, I always try to get them focused on, well how much business are you closing on a daily bases through your website.

How do you measure that in terms of revenue impact or cash value depending on what you are doing? And, at a goal level, which is little beyond the reporting question I asked you, is the goal to double, triple, or quadruple the revenue. The other kinds of metrics they typically ask about are just part of the process of accomplishing that. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to join me today, and I'll look forward talking to you again soon.

Stephan Spencer:Yes, thanks, I really had fun talking with you..

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Bill Flitter and Eric Enge Talk About Feeds

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:23:26 -0400

The following is a written transcript of the March 25, 2008 podcast between Bill Flitter and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, this is Eric Enge. I am the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Bill Flitter, the CEO of Pheedo RSS Marketing Solutions. You can see their website at www.phedoo.com. How are you doing today, Bill?

Bill Flitter: I am doing great Eric, thank you, and yourself?

Eric Enge: I am doing great as well.

Bill Flitter: Wonderful. Well, thank you for having me today, I appreciate that.

Eric Enge: Sure, definitely our pleasure. We are going to get to dive into RSS in a little more depth than the average person does today, so that should be fun. But, let's start by talking about some of the common way people use RSS and feeds in general today.

Bill Flitter: Yeah, sure absolutely. The definition of that is always expanding and the use of RSS is expanding specially with the growth of widgets, and things like Facebook and Friend Feed. It's the idea of content syndication and aggregation. As more and more information is being created, we are going to need an efficient way to stay abreast of all the updates. Think about Facebook, and if you think about the feed of all your friends data that's a one great use of RSS or even Friend Feed that aggregates all of the conversations that you and your friends maybe having on Twitter, or a multitude of social networks.

Then there is a whole another use of RSS really maybe from machine to machine, if you look at Discovery Channel for example they are using RSS to power the different sections of a website page even. So, the left section is powered by RSS, the right section of the page is powered by RSS or XML. So, it makes it easy to update those pages, and the editors can easily update those in real time, you don't have to do a website rebuild.

More and more, web developers RSS will see different tools being developed for its use. I see a lot of numbers being quoted from some old reports back from 2006, and less than 10% online users are consuming feeds. Well, that number has grown significantly over the last two years, and some new readers might be surprised.

For example, we are finding that 56% of consumers are using RSS feeds, 62% of the enterprise sized organizations use RSS feeds in some manner, either again putting it on their site for people to subscribe to content, or using it to power their websites. And, 60% of consumers actively customize their start pages using feeds or widgets.

For many of the top publishing websites, 50% to 75% of their traffic originates from outside of their website, really kind of the ideal syndication model driving traffic. That's one of the trends we are seeing right now, where content is being removed from websites, and is subscribed to and consumed in great numbers outside of a particular publisher's website.

Eric Enge: Now, there are also a lot of these kinds of feeds which aren't strictly speaking RSS, that are being used for exactly that same website-to- website, or website-to-widget type purposes as well.

Bill Flitter: Yes, absolutely. RSS has kind of become the Kleenex, and is more of a generic name than anything else meaning syndication.

Eric Enge: Given how rich the environment is in terms of information on the web and the number of places that people want to integrate it, you can see that there is just a demand which probably is far from being satisfied as yet.

Bill Flitter: Right exactly. The media business is becoming so fragmented, because there are so many sources of information. We might snack on a few things from publisher A, and publisher B, and create our own custom publication by bringing in all of these different sources of this information. If you think about a Netvibes start page, that's essentially an online newspaper customized to my likes, and that type of idea is being duplicated across the web.

Eric Enge: Right. So, are there some types of feeds, that are being undercapitalized upon on the web?

Bill Flitter: That's a great question. I mean one of the other trends that we are seeing is things like RSS to email. Those publishers who have large email databases, and are still sending out an email newsletter, they are converting a lot of the creation of that newsletter over to RSS. If you think how it was done before, either it was done manually by taking a recap of everything they publish in a period of time, and then creating that newsletter, sending it out to the database, right? That was pretty labor intensive.

They have already created RSS feeds as another tool for users to subscribe to, and they are realizing, "well why don't we use RSS to actually create our emails automatically"? We are seeing that trend increase merely from a management perspective, the end user doesn't know. They still get the content, and they don't know how it was created, and obviously nor do they care. But, publishers are looking to building more efficiencies into their processes, so that's one way that they are leveraging RSS.

Eric Enge: Right. I imagine just there are a lot of emails that people put together which are just really just daily or weekly recaps. If you could automatically extract the data from other feeds, perhaps with a little program doing some processing on the data on those feeds, just to put them in your emails format, you would be a happy camper.

Bill Flitter: Oh, yes absolutely, right. Then, of course if you can find a way to monetize that, and still do exactly what you were doing before, but speed up the creation of that, that's what RSS can do.

Eric Enge: Right. Are there any more really advanced applications that you can talk about, that go even further?

Bill Flitter: Well, I think one that I would circle back to here is really the powering of the websites. It's all about efficiency, so another trend we are seeing is demonstrated by the Discovery Channel, where you think about breaking up a webpage into four quarters, and using RSS to fill in that webpage with data that they are creating on the backend. This way it stays fresh, it stays updated, and it's updated in real time. It's about getting the information, and especially if you are a publisher, getting the most recent information out into the hands of the user as quickly as possible.

If you look at MSNBC for example, syndicating a lot of their content, and providing that to websites to add to a publishers website, a third party publishers website to really enhance the third parties content. That might be an obvious one, what we are seeing is the true syndication model is picking up in popularity, putting someone else's content on your website to supplement what you have already created.

I think the idea of Friend Feed is pretty ingenious aggregating old content from these different social networks to make it easy for me to keep abreast of the activity of my friends. But then, also being able to respond to those feeds in that feed data right from the Friend Feed website, I think that's pretty ingenious.

Eric Enge: Right. What about strategies for promoting your feeds once you have them, do you have any suggestions?

Bill Flitter: Yes. One of the things that our publisher is finding, that's pretty effective is converting people from, who are opting out of your email newsletter. Lots of times, people opt out for reasons other than they don't like your content, that it maybe they just don't like your email, right? They are receiving too much email, or in my case I have opted out of 99% of email newsletters to get the feed from that publisher.

The opt out page presents other opportunities for that user to subscribe to information, and we are seeing upwards a 5% conversion on people who decided to opt out of the newsletter, but then take the choice of subscribing to the RSS feed.

Eric Enge: Right. Inbound email feels like a TV commercial. It's an intrusion, even though you don't have to deal with it if you don't want to, it still feels more like intrusion, whereas in a feed reader, it's when you want it, it's on demand.

Bill Flitter: Yes. When you introduce someone to the idea or the concept of receiving feeds, their reaction is always the same. It's "oh, my gosh, well why didn't I know about this sooner?"

Just because it simplifies their life, you can do scanning very quickly, get the information you want. Put it in a separate bucket away from your email, right? I mean I don't know about you, but getting hundreds of emails everyday is no fun.

Keeping my personal and business email in one bucket, and having my newsletters and RSS feeds in another, for me it's a better way to manage that data.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, my email is by design very transactional. And, we don't necessarily want to read things inside our email package. We just want to see if it's a meeting time, and just respond quickly. If it's a document you are supposed to look at, then you will open it up and you read it in the thing that created the document. But, you really don't want to read a lot in your email.

Bill Flitter: No. If you look at, well maybe the idea that users are very in tune with the feeds that they are reading. What I mean by that is if a publisher's feeds are not updating for whatever reason, either maybe the aggregator is slow in getting it updated, the users that are on top of that saying, where is the content? So, the RSS user is a pretty active person, and they want to receive those updates.

I was a little surprised by that thinking, well it's information, it's content, it's the daily headlines for example. And, a lot of their content is not necessarily life threatening if I don't receive it, and but to some, the latest news on Britney Spears, or the financial information is pretty important to them that they want to receive and get those updates immediately. And, if there is any delay in receiving that information, they are emailing the publisher, asking them what's going on.

Eric Enge: Indeed, so any other strategies?

Bill Flitter: Yes, absolutely. Some ideas are pretty straightforward, put it in your e-mail signature file, we do that here at Pheedo. We have our RSS feed in our signature file, people can grab that, subscribe to our feed. I have seen people actually leveraging, again going back to Friend Feed to promote their feed.

People can see your latest headlines, I see a lot of publishers actually now starting to advertise their feed. They might either do a house ad on their own website, or use an ad network to drive subscribers to their feeds. Make sure it's obviously indexed with all of the aggregators like Bloglines, or Google Reader, My Yahoo, an easy way to do that is just subscribe to your own feed in those services.

Create a Bloglines account, subscribe to your own feed, then Bloglines will start indexing that RSS feed immediately, same thing with Yahoo.

Eric Enge: There is a nice side benefit to that too which is, you can get competitive data from Google Reader and Bloglines and things like that, because they will show you how many people are subscribing to your competitors feeds.

Bill Flitter: That's right. That's a very good point.

Eric Enge: So, you can get a sense as to how you are making progress in terms of developing your readership versus competition.

Bill Flitter: Yes. A few folks I read recently are doing that, having a competition of how many subscribers they can get to their feeds. And, just a simple give away of, I forgot but it was an Xbox, or iPhone, or something, they were doing to an RSS subscriber and trying to grow their list pretty quickly. But, the other thing to keep in mind is, the subscriber count you see there is about the number of subscribers. That's a point of pride for a lot of publishers, but what a publisher really has to keep in mind now is how active is that feed.

It's about active users, not just subscribers, because depending on what the publisher's goal is, if it's to monetize, more activity will increase the revenue. Is their goal traffic? That's pretty important to look at your active subscribers. One obvious thing is to continue to create good content and create what you feel is the right amount of content. So, meaning it is once a week, fine for your readers?

Is it once a day, is it multiple times a day? Is that the right combo? That's what you really have to look at as far as, does your activity increase or decrease by the amount of content that you are producing?

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. I do know that there are tools, FeedBurner has one that allows you to see the consumption levels. That's a very, very helpful thing to do. I agree it's great, you could have a million subscribers, but if only one of them is actually coming to the feed and reading your content, it doesn't do you much good.

Bill Flitter: Yes. That's one of the services that we provide. We measure the worth of that feed from a revenue perspective, just to set some expectations for the publisher. We can tell them "look if you want to make more money, you need to publish more often". Or, we can tell them that they need to create more active users, and sit down and talk about how they create more active users. I think what you will find again, earlier we talked about the growth of feeds.

Publishers are obviously realizing the growth of feeds, and that they need to do something about that, right? They are noticing that a lot of their content is consumed off of their site, so how do publishers make money? They make it through advertising back on their website. So, how do they create revenue strategies, and that's really what I think 2008 will be about as far as RSS is concerned. How do we create meaningful revenue strategies for syndicated content?

Eric Enge: This is a topic that you know just a little bit about I suspect?

Bill Flitter: Yeah, that's true. That wasn't a lead in by the way, that was just something that is real.

Eric Enge: No, let's pick up on it. What typically have people been trying to do to monetize their feeds, and what do you think they should be doing? Where do they get critical mass, I mean obviously if you have ten readers a month, you don't really have critical mass.

Bill Flitter: Yeah, exactly. I mean it's really what your expectations as far as revenue is concerned. But, when it comes to monetization, it's not necessarily about the size of the feed that matters. It's really again about the activity, but also the content plays a big role in that. You might find something like EE Times, who has a very niche audience, and their website doesn't necessarily generate a ton of traffic. But, all their traffic that goes to EE Times is very interesting to some advertisers.

They may get a higher CPM than the average website would, and they may do double digit CPMs, or even triple digits CPMs for that particular content. So, it's not necessarily size that matters. How well it does in terms of readers is what will definitely drive the revenue.

Decide what activity means for you and look at your data that supports that activity level. But, we have to start thinking about is, where our feed is consumed, meaning some feeds are consumed online with online readers Bloglines, or Google Reader. Some are consumed through widgets, or start pages like Netvibes. Some are consumed on bookmarks like Firefox, some are consumed through phones.

Our challenge at Pheedo is, we have all these different environments to worry about, and look, and feel, and displays to consider.

If you think about a website in DoubleClick, or any ad network, they really have one display to think about which is the website, right? That's why there are standards there, we are going to buy 250, or 468/60 etc., right? Well, there is no standard view for RSS in the consumption points for RSS, and that's a challenge and an opportunity all in itself. So, publishers have to realize, and as well as advertisers that. This audience by the way is, they are high income earners, they are active users. Bloglines for example states that their users come back three times a day, and stay twenty minutes in each session, that's a lot of time, right?

They are consuming content with one particular vehicle. There is a very good audience to reach for a lot of advertisers.

Challenge is we have to look at the displays of those ads, and how they might display in these different environments, and be fluid on how we change our advertising to fit. Then, I think because it's easy to subscribe, it's also very easy to unsubscribe, right?

So, if a publisher wants to advertise, we have to think about that end user. They are absolutely in control, it's just one click away from unsubscribing. So, we have to look at the weight of advertising in that feed, we have to consider better targeting techniques for the ads in that feed. We do have data on what people consume within the feed, so that helps us determine what ads to place in front of them.

Eric Enge: Right. That's the big key, how you manage that targeting, so that you do get their focus. So, the EE Times is showing the right high CPM ads without a lot of manual labor to figure out what goes where, right?

Bill Flitter: Exactly. That's absolutely one of our challenge, and the placement within the feed itself. For example, MyYahoo only displays headlines as their default, and that's how most people are viewing feeds through MyYahoo. So, how do you display ads in that environment?

You can't do a banner ad in there, so you have to think about doing a headline-type ad within MyYahoo environment. It's still early in figuring out the monetization scheme of things, and you can't just take your DoubleClick ad code, and plug that into a feed, and hope that's going to go into work. Obviously, that's why we exist just to figure out those hard problems in serving ads into feeds.

Here are some numbers, which I think will show the growth and emphasis advertisers are placing on syndicated content. If you look at RSS, and podcast, and blog ads, that spend is to increase to 21.1 billion in 2011, which is about a 70% annual growth.

That's becoming a sizeable market, one billion dollars in advertising is pretty sizeable. 40% of US Interactive Marketers are using or piloting or have piloted RSS in '07. It's up from 10% in '06, so look at that jump from 10% of marketers considering doing something with RSS in '06 to 40% doing something in '07.

That's a huge jump, and then this is the one that I found was fastening. 74% of the top TV networks included RSS in their media mix in '07. 74%, another very large number, so you can see that not only is the user base growing, publishers and marketers' use of RSS is also growing, it's matching the user growth.

If you look at even our organic growth in feeds, so meaning feeds that we are managing for publishers, the average was 250% last year growth in new subscribers, large right? A huge difference.

Eric Enge: Right. And, that's a big thing as you highlighted before. Services like Facebook are part of this, but it's just getting people to realize that this is a way they consume content, and it's going beyond the early adopter types that always are early in getting into new media.

Bill Flitter: Yes, absolutely. If you look at some of the entertainment feeds, or even the one that got me was that some of the biggest feeds right now are knitting feeds.

Eric Enge: Wow. Do you see any changes of significance coming into Feed Readers in the next year or so?

Bill Flitter: I think one Feed Reader that's really underutilized from a data perspective is actually Google Reader. They have really good data APIs. To my knowledge they are the only one that actually has an API that you can look at some of that data. Bloglines on the other hand, they are making some significant changes. They are making it easier to discover new feeds.

They just did a release, I believe it was this week on bundling feeds. So, for example you can get the entertainment package of feeds in just one click, and you get that. So, it's a bundle of the most popular entertainment feeds, or business, or whatever category you might like. Bloglines is also doing some changes within the UI, so you can interact with that feed a little bit more, a little bit better refer that to Friend, comment, etc. But, I haven't caught wind of, or have seen, any really significant changes in RSS readers.

Maybe there is one, My Yahoo, has their own reader now inside of their email client, right? So, but the one reader if you will or start page is more of start page that has seen a significant increase in our traffic is Netvibes.

Eric Enge: Interesting.

Bill Flitter: We are seeing a lot of feeds being aggregated and consumed within Netvibes. That's really not your traditional, what we think of as a traditional newsreader, it's more of again a customized newspaper. So, you go watch out for that one, I think we'll see those numbers only go up.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. Thanks Bill!

Bill Flitter: Thanks Eric. I appreciate your time, and we'll hopefully talk again in another year and get a recap of what's going on.

Comments?

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Bill Flitter - Eric Enge podcast here.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Jonathan Mendez Podcast with Eric Enge

Wed, 2 Jan 2008 10:42:59 -0500

Eric Enge and Jonathan Mendez talk about Landing Page Optimization

Podcast Date: November 20, 2007

The following is a written transcript of the October 19, 2007 podcast between Jonathan Mendez and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Jonathan Mendez, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer for OTTO Digital, and we plan to talk about Landing Page Optimization. You can see the OTTO Digital website at www.ottodigital.com, that's O-T-T-O Digital.com. And, Jonathan also authors the Optimize & Prophesize blog at www.optimizeandprophesize.com. How are you doing today, Jonathan?

Jonathan Mendez: Great, Eric.

Eric Enge: That's good. So, let's get started, why don't you start by defining Landing Page Optimization?

Jonathan Mendez: Wonderful; and first thanks for having me on the podcast. I would define a Landing Page Optimization as using testing and also targeting to provide measurable improvement in performance. And, I think we need to first define what a landing page is. I think that some people are not benefiting from a landing page optimization strategy or doing any landing page optimization at all. This is due to the fact that traditionally landing pages were seen as a paid search strategy.

People don't recognize their site pages as landing pages. This is because of the way that some of the publishers view their content. The fact of the matter is just about every page is a landing page, a person is coming to that page from somewhere. Knowing their source is an incredibly important tool, and really the first helpful step in landing page optimization. Knowing more than sources is even better; we can talk a little bit about that as we go on, but in the end I would say that landing page optimization is defined by creating experiences that deliver a higher degree of relevance towards the goals and attentions of your users.

Eric Enge: Right. So, one of the things you brought out is that somebody may arrive on the homepage of your site, that makes that a landing page for sure. But, then they take the next step and they are landing on a new page. So, you've got to optimize through that experience if that's a common path.

Jonathan Mendez: Absolutely, and many times the homepage itself as you mentioned is the landing page. Especially, if you think about all the people that come from brand search terms. I would recommend different strategies for someone coming from a brand term to a homepage, for someone who go to a homepage for a more generic type of query. So, we have the philosophy that every page is a landing page, and I think when people start to think of it that way and start to work towards improving their results in that manner, they start to see some great success.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what are the ways that you go about doing landing page optimization?

Jonathan Mendez: There are really a few ways and a few techniques that are used, and then as technology progresses we are getting more and more advanced in what we can do, both through the use of JavaScript, and then through the use of APIs that either are existing or that we can create for clients. And, that starts getting to a lot of more advanced techniques. But, the basic landing page optimization technique is A/B testing or split testing. And, it's really an amazingly powerful and really simple way to improve performance.

The idea behind A/B testing is that we are testing a single element of the experience. So, sometimes we test more than one variation of that element, and then so we might be doing an A-B-C test, if we want to test two variations against the control. Or, what we call sometimes A/B/n testing, or we can do; sometimes we've had five landing pages for a single ad group or keyword. But, the idea is that only a single element is changed, so when you think about split testing or A/B testing, you are only changing a single element. That said, the element can be the entire page; it can even be a series of pages.

Sometimes we do A/B testing of traffic flows, such as a conversion funnel. Other times though the element is a section of the page, so it can just be a specific area like a call to action or a headline. So, in my experience though I would say this is where we really see the largest improvements overall, because and this is also why we kind of start. Usually, we start a landing page optimization strategy or comprehensive strategy with A/B tests of entire pages; and where we can test wholesale changes of layouts and messages.

Eric Enge: Right. What are examples of some kinds of things you might test this way?

Jonathan Mendez: So again, A/B tests we have had a lot of success just testing completely different pages. So, one of the key strategies in successful landing page optimization is what I call creative differentiation. You don't want to test things that are too similar to one another. And, so we'll test the landing pages that have a completely different look and feel, radically different from one another, both in the messaging and the layout or the imagery used. You can be quite successful doing those kinds of A/B tests.

The other A/B tests that are really successful many times are testing elements being present or not present. Many times we think about adding things to a page to improve the page performance, but a more reductive strategy many times has better results. So, start to think about what can you take away from the page and actually test removing things, having things again being present versus not present. You start to see some great results that way as well.

One I would call out would be navigation. So, many times people think that well, it's our landing page, it shouldn't have any navigation at all on it. Sometimes that's true, but through testing we found that many times navigation is actually helpful for improving conversion rates. So, I think overall something we all would keep in mind is so much of what we test, what we find in the result is counter intuitive to what we thought. So, it makes us test even more and more, and again it's really important to look at the results and keep testing.

Eric Enge: Yeah. You've triggered three thoughts in my mind there, so I am going to try to remember them all here. One is I think too many people use their gut feel and they come up with the best design or close to best design for their intended purpose. And, so much of what you find when you do this kind of testing is counter intuitive, and it's not what you expected. Your audience isn't what thought it was, and you really need to not only be prepared for that, but you want to embrace that, because it describes the opportunity in this kind of testing.

Jonathan Mendez: Oh, absolutely. I would say one of things we find again quite a bit is as you mentioned, different people respond to different things. Within a one particular test, when we start to look at the results and filter the results by different segments, what we'll find is that even within one specific A/B test for example, if you segment the results say for people coming from Google versus Yahoo as an example, or people who've been to the page second time versus the first time.

What you'll see there is the results are different even within the one test. So, again based on source and behavior, relevance means different things to different people, and that's where we start to really craft again a holistic and comprehensive landing page optimization strategy. I would say that the core of a good landing page optimization strategy if possible, is to look at your results in a segmented way and start to deliver landing pages by segments that have a higher degree of relevance.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you also mentioned the bit about lot of people think that you want to remove the navigation and that's their instinctive response, because they think of navigation as a distraction from the goal of the page. But, there are certainly groups of users out there, if they come to a page and they see that it doesn't have any navigation, it's actually a turn off or a negative, because it doesn't look like a real business.

Jonathan Mendez: Absolutely, it doesn't look a real business and we found that especially for sites about financial services, for example, that navigation could be tremendously helpful. As you mentioned it gives a sense of confidence, a sense of trust to the landing page and just generally I like to err on the side of providing a better experience for the user; which that does. And again, this is why we test these things, but you are right intuitively you would say well, you don't want to take people to a different section of the site.

The fact of the matter is if your landing page is relevant; if the content of your page is relevant and the message addresses the goal of the user, the navigation won't be necessary. So, it will start to reinforce certain things, but people if your page is done well and optimized, they won't be using it; they will be doing what you want them to do.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what about multivariate testing, how is it different and how do you handle different complex scenarios with it?

Jonathan Mendez: Sure. Well, multivariate testing is a really great optimization technique. It's probably the most interesting one, because it provides learning into the factor of influence that particular elements on the page have on overall performance. So, if you look it allows you to test a large number of elements, and it provides you with the data that informs you of the best mix of all the different element variations that you are testing. So it's really, MVT is really a test scenario where you are listening to your audience and learning, and because of all this learning it naturally leads to a lot of follow on testing, and a never ending steam of test ideas, so it really allows you to be iterative, and it's also really highly addictive.

The multivariate testing algorithm that we use in the Offermatica tool is called the Taguchi algorithm. It's been tested and proven both digitally and manually over about fifty years. So, it wasn't invented for digital or online testing at all, it was actually I think first used in Japan to optimize assembly line production for automobiles. I guess we know how well that worked out for the Japanese oil industry.

Eric Enge: Right.

Jonathan_Mendez: What it does really is it allows the creation of what we call arrays Taguchi orthogonal arrays. Now, this let's us create what's called fractional factorial testing. What this means simply is that the number of tested elements that we use is reduced. So, the fractional factorial arrays allow us to get faster results without affecting the overall accuracy of the data. And so, we use it, and we like it because we get result in weeks in this type of testing rather than months, and months, and months. So, we need less data to get confidence.

The other way of doing a multivariate testing is full factorial testing which requires testing all the variations possible, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. I think it's obviously great if you can test every single factor together. However, many times that's not possible, because it takes so much data and such a very long time to get results with those types of tests. Because, you need to have so much more, in order to get just core confidence in the results, you need a lot and lot of data.

This brings us to a very important point about multivariate testing, and that is the amount of traffic or tested visits that you are getting in for your test. So, more so than A/B testing, the type of multivariate tests you run should be determined by the amount of traffic that you are going to be able to get into a test, and the estimated conversion rate that you are going to receive, and then start to design the type of multivariate tests you want to do around that data. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time creating what maybe a great test, but one that will never get results or statistical confidence.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you are testing six or eight different elements on a page, that's a lot of variants if you were to try to do what you call full factorial testing, which is where you'd have to show all combinations of those elements. Then, you'll have to have enough data in order to be able to draw a meaningful conclusion. And, that's I think as you said where the fractional factorial testing fits into the picture. As I understand it there is this process of where the algorithm decides what elements of the test it's going to treat as being similar in nature, and maybe they won't vary them at once, right? And, it starts testing scenarios out which it thinks would be statistically significant, even though you are not testing each variant data-wise. Does that make sense?

Jonathan Mendez: Yeah, absolutely. That gets into the array which is the array that's created and forms the actual design of the test. That would get back to the end of the pages that you are actually creating, and what different combinations need to be present on those pages.

Eric Enge: Right. Do you need to have a dynamic web application to do this stuff?

Jonathan Mendez: No, well any page optimization can be done without advanced tools. Multivariate arrays, they've been going back for years, they have been done on spreadsheets. You can still do them on an excel spreadsheet; I believe someone has a website somewhere, where you can create an array online. A/B testing of course can be done across different domains, or different URL's, or using redirects. I was doing A/B testing like many other folks back in 1998, 1999, well before this software, or these types of software were available.

The software just makes it a lot easier to do, it's easier to create the tests; certainly it helps with all the data collection. So, the tools that we have today ranging from free tools from Google to other tools like obviously Offermatica's tool really allow you to do so much more, and get incredible production. But, do you have to have those advanced applications and tools; no, absolutely not.

Eric Enge: Right. A really simple example of course is in your Google AdWords account, you implement two different ads and you just specify different landing pages.

Jonathan Mendez: Yup, absolutely.

Eric Enge: That's a very simple trick that anybody could do even with a static website.

Jonathan Mendez: Yeah.

Eric Enge: So, in the spirit of Danny Sullivan's SMX advanced session, where he had a session called give-it-up, do you have a cool secret of landing page optimization you can share with the audience?

Jonathan Mendez: Well, for the spirit of Danny, I will share something. I think one very important thing that I always like to keep in mind is that, the success you are going to have in your testing is usually determined prior to you even launching the test. So, in terms of the test designs that you are going to go through and the creativity that you are going to come up with, so certainly key to success is again not necessarily the techniques, or tools that you are using, but really the creative elements of the test.

When I see people who failed, it's either that the test design was wrong again for the amount of traffic, that they were testing or even more so, the creative that they tested did not have enough differentiation. So, I think I mentioned earlier creative differentiation is really a key. I would say the hidden secret is to be radical, take chances on the creative end. Test pages that look nothing like one another, try messaging that is completely different, fanatically from one another.

What you find when you do that, when you take those chances is somewhat counter to the wisdom of the crowds. A majority of users will be drawn much more to one than to another, and that really, really gets you a big win. When we look at instances where we've had improvements in conversion rate of 50%, or 150%, 250%, it's always the testing the elements that are diametrically opposed to one another. They are really creatively much, much different than one another, so that's my secret of success.

Eric Enge: Excellent. If you just try and tweak small little things, you might get small little results, and you need to do more if you want to get big results.

Jonathan Mendez: Go bigger, go home.

Eric Enge: There you go. Okay, and how about a case study? Do you have a case study you could talk about?

Jonathan Mendez: Sure. Well, we recently did some work with a client, Share Builder. Share Builder is interesting company, they are in the business of helping people build portfolios of stocks, and they have an interesting model. What we did for them was interesting, because we really looked to use a segmentation strategy. When we sat down with Share Builder, we really wanted to understand their paid search campaign. These were going to be landing pages from paid search that we were looking at and they challenged us that they had a landing page that's never been beat.

They had tried many different things, but what we did was break it down, breakdown their search traffic, because they had one landing page for everything. What we did was break their search campaign down, and look at the five ad groups that they were getting the majority of traffic from, and that considered ad groups around their brand returns, investing terms, beginner investing terms, trading, stock trading terms, and buying stock terms.

We also took some traffic from display ads in finance verticals, and created that as another segment. Then, thinking about the different goals and attentions of those different segments, we crafted landing pages that we believed spoke to those goals, for providing more relevance.

Someone coming from a brand term, they know a little bit something about Share Builder. Someone coming from a beginning investment term, certainly there were certain messages and information that they would probably want that the branded person might not need. So, we ended up creating I think seven different landing pages for them around different themes. What we did also was some A/B testing, and again segmented by ad group. We put some of the landing pages into other ad groups. For example we looked at what the buying stock pages that were done, and thought well, maybe we would put one of those into the branding group to see how they would do.

The thinking behind that was to get learning on performance; they may not perform the best or they may, but certainly will tell us though that messaging will inform us more about the content messaging that might work on follow-up tests. We're always trying to think ahead to the next test and learn what will help us on the next test. So, we created all these pages, and we ran a whole bunch of different A/B/n tests. So, each ad group had between four to six different landing pages, that we drove traffic to, and we'll take the branded one to really do a deep dive into.

What we had there was, we actually had a 142% lift on one of the recipes, and getting back to what we spoke about earlier in terms of radical changes, what we did with that, with the winning recipe there, it was actually all the content that they had on their existing landing page that they said can never be beat. But, what we did with that content is we radically changed the presentation of it. We created a page that looked really nothing like what they had, and it actually ended up that that one was the winner. And, a huge win, again a 142% increase from their branded terms, which again for them was huge, because that's where they were getting the vast majority of their traffic.

It speaks to the creative part of landing page optimization, which I think is again probably under appreciated in terms of its importance to a successful strategy. So, what we did, so we took that winner, but the other interesting thing was the three other pages that were tested versus the control. The each outperformed the control anywhere from 30% to 60%. We took the learning from that, and we used those different messages, incorporated them into a follow-up multivariate test.

We did a 4/3 multivariate test as a follow-up. So, taking four elements of the page, and testing the control versus two variations, and the elements that we took on the page were the headline, the benefit statement. We had benefits on the left, and information about the company, more information about the company on the right. And then, also navigation being present or not present as we spoke about earlier, really good test element. So, a really nice mix of different messaging, things being present or not present, and the follow-up to that after the large lift was an additional 14% lift after the multivariate test.

What was also most interesting again there was the element, what we call the element contribution report. So, what elements that we tested had the largest factor of influence to conversion, and it's an interesting issue in this case study, because it came full circle to what we talked about earlier, having the navigation bar actually had a 47% influence on conversion rate. So, really having navigation in this particular test worked out to be really, really beneficial.

Actually I have a deeper dive on to that particular test on my blog, if you go do a search on it. So, but so that I think really a good case study in terms of segmenting your audience, creating A/B test scenarios, and then following up with that learning on a multivariate test to get even more results, better results, and continue learning that can be applied elsewhere.

Eric Enge: Right. So, when you talked about a 142% lift just to get it clear on people's mind, you mean it was almost two and a half times the original conversion rate?

Jonathan Mendez: Yes. We think we do a pretty good job, but even those kinds of results don't happen everyday. But, it's certainly nice to talk about them, but yes they, that is correct.

Eric Enge: What probably happened is that they did their own optimization, but they did very iteratively rather than making radical change.

Jonathan Mendez: Actually they did multivariate testing before, and they did full factorial tests on that particular page. So, they did get some insight, and created a good page before we even got there, which was challenging for us to try to beat it. It was one of the better landing pages I've seen. Usually when we come into a client, we know we are going to have easy time of it, because the landing pages leave a lot to be desired. But, in this particular case, they had been testing for over a year and a half already when we came in there.

They had a page that was really, really working for them, but they just weren't satisfied. They wanted to take it to higher level, and I think again that speaks to, that really speaks to testing. You want to keep testing, and I think these guys as a client had a tremendously great attitude towards testing, they understood the value of it. They created an infrastructure that allowed us to test, they were accepting the kind of bold ideas and radical thinking that we presented to them, and they were able to reap the rewards of that.

So, I think again one thing that we didn't talk about being successful is, you have to have the mindset in place to be successful, and that requires buying into to this idea that nothing is sacred, and everything needs to be tested and validated. And, the data doesn't lie, all those things will breed success, but again it's much easier said than done for many people.

Eric Enge: Right. You need to be willing to take chances, as you have said before, and sometimes for larger organizations that have invested a lot in their brand strategy that could be hard, but there is a lot to be gained. Can you provide some screenshots that we can include in the transcript for people?

Jonathan Mendez: Sure. I'd be happy to send those over to you.

Eric Enge: That would be great. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today Jonathan.

Jonathan Mendez: My pleasure; thanks for having me.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

Bill Slawski Podcast with Eric Enge

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:03:21 -0400

The following is a written transcript of the October 19, 2007 podcast between Bill Slawski and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I'm Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Bill Slawski, the owner of the well-known SEO by the Sea blog and the Director of search marketing at KeyRelevance, and we plan to talk about search engine ranking signals. You can see the SEO by the Sea blog website at www.seobythesea.com, and you can see the KeyRelevance site at www.keyrelevance.com. How are you doing today Bill?

Bill Slawski: I'm doing fine Eric, how are you today?

Eric Enge: Hey, I'm doing great.

Bill Slawski: That's good to hear.

Eric Enge: So, let's dive in. One of the things I really like that you've posted about a couple of times, I think a year ago October and more recently was different kinds of ranking signals that search engines can use. You covered twenty different signals in each of the two posts. And, I'd really like to get your thoughts on which of those signals that search engines might be using now that, aren't necessarily things that everybody understands that they are using now.

Bill Slawski: Okay. Just a quick thing about the genesis of those posts; I tend to cover a lot of different patents that come out from the search engines every once in a while. I find it useful to try to tie a lot of those posts together and extract ideas from them. It seems like that was a good opportunity; looking at the way search engines may take results and re-rank them. I really hadn't seen anybody do that in the industry, so I wanted to last October put a lot of those together and some of them were very obvious. We probably want to skip over those really quickly, but it's just things like filtering duplicate content out, removing multiple relevant pages from the same site, etc. Sometimes you get those indented, sometimes you don't and you see a little link, click here to see more.

There are other ones that are happening that are a little bit less obvious like sorting for country specific results. So, if the search engine thinks that you are in the UK, it might present results in a little bit different order than if they think you are in the US. You can also set language preferences on your browser or at the search engine level for most search engines, so that if your preference is English and you type in a word that might have meaning in more than one language like rendezvous.

It's going to try to give you English results rather than French results. With my background in law and legal type field, a lot of legal terms actually have French origins. Appeal, appellate, things like that, and terms like defendant, and that can get little bit confusing as search engine doesn't know which language you are speaking. There are a lot of re-rankings that happen in a smaller niche area like changing results based on commercial intent. I am not sure that any search engine really has folded that into its main search, but an example of this is Yahoo's Mindset.

When you go there, you see a little slider bar and you can slide the bar back and forth to shopping to informational, and it re-orders results. Microsoft's has produced a lot of papers on commercial intent. They may or may not use those today. Some are informational in nature, some are transactional.

Eric Enge: Right. So, when someone uses the word buy in a query, that's obviously transactional.

Bill Slawski: Right.

Eric Enge: Right, as opposed to "digital camera reviews" which is obviously informational.

Bill Slawski: Right. So, with the search engine, if the query is informational or transactional, we rank results based upon that type of intent. One of the other things we talked about is looking at more than one query, where you have a query session. If you look for commercial results by the types of queries that you use one after another, will it change the order of results to give you more commercial results than if you view type in, let's see Portland Maine, and then you type in seafood restaurants. Perhaps the search engine starts giving you search results that have to do with seafood restaurants in Portland Maine, and give you overviews of places like that.

Eric Enge: Right. I think there is already evidence that they are aware of your location based on reverse IP lookup.

Bill Slawski: Not just reverse IP lookup, if you are using a cell phone it might do cell tower triangulation. They might use global positioning satellite information; they might have a query history, if they are collecting web history and search history, showing that you do a lot of searches in that geographic area related to them.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, it gets really interesting if you are sitting in say Boston, and you just did a query on Portland Maine, and then do a query on seafood. So, are you really looking for seafood in Boston or are you looking for seafood in Portland Maine?

Bill Slawski: Right. And, we've been hearing a little bit about generating advertising that's taking the advantage of consecutive queries to show ads related to that stuff. Could we see the same type of thing from organic results? It's possible. A lot of these ranking factors that I've written about to one degree or another are being used or are very close to being able to being used. But, like I said not always within the main context of the search engine, maybe within a smaller sphere like a mindset or with Yahoo's YQ.

It can take certain contextual information from pages that the website owners can tag. This page maybe about thirty different restaurants in Boston, but they've only tagged two of them. So, you have to really learn about those. So, the website owner is determining some of the relevance.

Personalization is another area where you've got to turn it on to get the full impact. But, there maybe things going on behind the scenes during the normal regular web search that influences the results that you see, and that aggregates data from users who search for things similar to what you search for and who tend to select pages similar to the pages you select. You may not have to be signed in or logged into personalized service for them to carry that information over from one search to another.

It maybe done based upon say triples of data. They see other searchers who perform searchers similar to you, and go to pages, select pages similar to the pages you select. There may be 2, 3, 4, 5 different queries in a row in a query session. So, that may influence the next pages that you see.

Eric Enge: Right. Since they know for example that when someone did three similar queries to you, and then they do the fourth query, they know what the majority of the people clicked on. They'd follow that pattern and they can potentially take that if it wasn't the no.#1 result and make it the no.#1 result by the time you get to it.

Bill Slawski: There is a transition there, going from a straightforward keyword matching type search to a more of a recommendation type search.

Eric Enge: What's your sense as to how much of that recommendation model is actively in place now?

Bill Slawski: It's hard to tell. I think we are moving more and more towards it, part of that is triggered by building the statistical model, and doing some machine learning. The more searches that people conduct, the more information that the search engines are able to take and use in a meaningful way, the more you'll see there. The search engines have an incredible amount of data, and when we here talk of infrastructure updates at the search engines, one of the things that we need to consider when they are talking about infrastructure is their ability to switch on and switch off different ranking mechanisms.

Eric Enge: Right, given the global distribution of their data centers.

Bill Slawski: Yes. They may assign different weights to different queries, different categories, different classes of websites, different searchers, and it's possible when you are doing a search that you even have the results from more than one ranking algorithm in front of you at once. Your choice which you click on may not increase the rank of that website, but rather increase the use of that algorithm that produced that website. (Editor: think about this comment a bit, it's a real mouthful).

Eric Enge: Right. Yeah, it's a, there are an intense number of things they can look at. One thing that I'd love to get your take on for example, is how often a particular website is bookmarked by someone, and how that can affect ranking.

Bill Slawski: There is a lot of user behavior information that search engines can collect, and user bookmarks is one of them. The amount of distance somebody scrolls down page, the amount of time somebody spends on a page before they return to search results, whether or not they will come back to a page after looking at some other pages. Those are all things that search engines use to say hey, this is an important page, this isn't an important page; this page matches well with this particular query, etc.

Bookmarking is one of those things; it's an active browsing activity that's outside the normal scope of the search engine. But, if you build in a bookmark tool, or if you watch traffic carefully through ISP information, or toolbar information you can make use of that data. Ask came out with a patent application, where they talk about looking into traffic, and seeing where people go, and seeing how long they spend at places. It even mentioned watching along as people used other search engines, and seeing what results they clicked for specific queries on those search engines.

Eric Enge: Right. The interesting thing to me is when you think about something like bookmarks, right say Google's own bookmarks, Certain people promote and put on their page something that says bookmark us. It seems to me that that would introduce a significant amount of noise into the process, in terms of using that signal compared to sites that don't have a "bookmark this" button on their content. It makes it a very difficult signal to place too much weight on.

Bill Slawski: Webmasters have always come up with ways to get people to extend their relationship with visitors. Newsletter subscriptions, the email update forms or buttons, send this page to a friend emails. You've been able to save pages on your browser as a bookmark. Bookmarking services like Del.ici.ous and others have been around for a little while. There were similar bookmark services that came out in the late 90's that didn't use a tagging system, but they were around. I think what you have to do when you talk about that sites with bookmarking buttons is recognize that if that's been used as a signal, it's just one signal of many.

One or the other patents that was interesting, that came out was actually one of three that talked about building profiles for web pages, and creating traffic estimates that was originally written in the context of paid search. But, it talked about classifying different types of sites by subject, by volume of visits, by search, by bookmarking, and so on to try to get a sense of what the site was like, and build a profile for it. A more recent patent application talked about working on profiles through sites based upon adding site search to the site, and learning what the site was like based upon how people used that site search, what they looked for, how successful they were in finding things, so on.

We have other tools that the search engines are using such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, and so on. So, they are learning a lot about how people interact with individual websites, being able to profile those websites, aggregating the profiles, finding the sites that are similar in lot of ways, that aren't taking advantage of say Google Analytics or Website Optimizer, or a bookmark this page button, so on. They are still be able to find enough points of similarity that they can put the sites together, cluster them together, so they know if these sites are somewhat alike. Bookmark activity by itself its just one signal amongst many.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the individual signal maybe noisy, but the cumulative effect of all the signals isn't.

Bill Slawski: Right.

Eric Enge: Of course the other thing you could do, of course is group sites that have bookmark this buttons together with other sites that actively request bookmarks, and weight them differently. So, the value of their bookmark is different than the people who don't have such buttons.

Bill Slawski: Absolutely. It's same like as you take a small Alzheimer's site that deals in one particular subject matter. It's going to have a different type of profile, and provide different signals to say for instance, than a Blog. You have different quality signals, and signals of importance with the Blog like the number of RSS subscribers. By having multiple quality signals and a big number of group sites together, you can compare them based upon that.

Eric Enge: So, let's talk a little bit about how the different search engines are approaching this, at least Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Do you have a sense as to, how Google is looking at one type of signal set and Yahoo at a different type, and Microsoft looks at yet another type in terms of their emphasis.

Bill Slawski: There are different types of strategies that they maybe pursuing. We know all the major search engines focus upon keyword matching. They may try to find sites that match the internet researcher, and one of the basic tenants of information retrial is trying to be as precise as possible, and trying to recall as many pages as possible that might be relevant. We've heard from some of the folks at the search engines that those are goals, but they are at a long way towards fulfilling them, but they are trying.

You have Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, they can't be clones of each other; they can't do things exactly the same way, though they are trying to reach the same goal, but their paths to these goals are different. We have patents that may exclude one from doing the same thing that the others are doing, and we have different corporate cultures. You take a look at Yahoo which started as a directory and portal, and a lot of that remains. They try to build sites or try to acquire sites that have a strong community, such as Flickr, Del.ici.ous, and so on, where they are user based, and there is user content generation behind them.

Google started out with search, and the idea behind most of the services Google provides isn't the generation of content, but they both try to use user generated content in what they do.

Eric Enge: Yahoo appears to have more assets in that regard, because they have Del.ici.ous, and Flickr, and Yahoo Answers for example. And so, it strikes me that their approach, that they will be faster to leverage social data, and I could be wrong, but it's just something that struck me from looking at it from the outside.

Bill Slawski: It may seem like that on the surface. The goals, I think in all cases are very similar in trying to get people answers to the question that matches their intent.

The approach is different, and part of it I think does have to do with that background, it's a different background. If I want to add Microsoft to that equation, Microsoft, I think has an approach that tries to be more contextual. If you are searching for a certain type of information they try to understand the intent behind the search.

Eric Enge: That's an outgrowth of their neural net algorithm, right? It allows them to look at the data in a different way.

Bill Slawski: The rank net algorithm, which uses a machine learning approach. I think some of it comes from people from the operating file system search side coming over to the search engine and saying "okay, when we worked on calendaring searches, we tried to find the date of all events; when we worked on email searches, we tried to find the date of the email we've sent or the date of the email we just received". So, the different context of searches had different best answers. So, how can we take that and apply that to search in a search engine?

I think trying to look at context, there are the quality signals that they look for in web pages, it tends to be based more upon on site results, but they also look at on site factors of pages pointing to other pages to see how good or how poor referral that is? The page rank method of ranking pages is based upon academic citations. The more citations that point to a page the better, but the higher quality citations that point to the pages is an even better signal. Everybody can point to academic papers that maybe infamous because it does something wrong. So, we want to point to the high quality stuff, and we want to count citations that are high quality themselves.

Eric Enge: Right, did you by the way in what Microsoft did with their shopping search? They added this thing which is automatically scanning user reviews, finding criteria that a lot of users talked about for a given product, say a digital camera, and then, determining how many of those were positive versus negative, and having a rating for those criteria.

Bill Slawski: There is a hidden aspect to that that doesn't get a lot of discussion. Are you familiar with visual segmentation papers, and patents, or VIPS stuff from Microsoft?

Eric Enge: I am not, tell us about it.

Bill Slawski: Okay. The idea is that, for a lot of search we may search upon content founded specific URL's. So, we rank an individual page, or we take content from the individual page that's not necessarily the best way to go about it. Pages can be about more than one topic, right? You can have a page that's about restaurants in the Grange Village that actually reviews twenty different restaurants. So, how do you use those individual reviews in local search for Google? How do you take those individual reviews and break them down, and point them to the different restaurants.

In a local search database, Google came up with visual gap segmentation, where they are looking at not just the HTML code, but also the white spaces themselves. They are breaking the pages into different parts, and pointing the different paragraph set at the local search result, so that if you look at reviews in Google Local, you might find reviews coming from pages that have reviews for lots of different restaurants, or hotels, or different types of things.

Microsoft has talked about breaking pages down into segments, and looking at where the links appear upon those pages. That was something they were talking about a couple of years ago. They have been talking about what they call object level search, where instead of looking at the full page they are looking at parts of the pages, and they are saying "this page is showed with thirty reviews for this product, let's break it down into individual reviews, and count them each as a separate entity".

It may link to the particular product, it may just mention it, but we are going to break this down, and we are going to look to the different products, and we are going to count all the reviews, and we are going to look it to see if the reviews are positive or negative. If the site we are looking at has a ranking system, one star through five stars, we might take that information. The idea is that they are indexing information within blocks, within segments in a page instead of on a page level. Google's talked about doing that, Yahoo has recently, and a couple of patents talked about doing that too. Google talked about something called agent rank at the beginning of the year.

This is where they break down a page into segments, and look for the authors of those different segments. So, if you have a blog that has thirty comments on it from people other than a person who wrote the post, the original post, you have thirty segments, thirty objects. In agent ranking those different objects maybe ranked differently based upon the reputation of the person who wrote each one. So, we are again on a smaller scale than page ranking, which is an interesting approach.

Eric Enge: It's a way of dealing with user generated content, right? The micro analyzing the individual components, I think that's where that special analysis comes in, it's just simply recognizing the individual component.

Bill Slawski: With special analysis they have talked about being able to distinguish between header and footer, main content, sidebars, where a link within the main content on a page is worth more than a link on the sidebar maybe. Nothing says that page rank has to be evenly distributed amongst outgoing links.

Eric Enge: Right. The really simple stuff the higher up a link is in the page content, the more valuable it is, but that's too simple really for evaluating a links value. It seems intuitively more interesting to evaluate is the link embedded in the content? That removes any doubt, well it removes most doubt I should say as to a link being purchased. Links in the left navigation or on the right sidebar are certainly more subject to being a purchased link, and they are certainly more likely to not really be integrated into the unique content of that page.

One funny thing I got to tell you about which is that I had a client who had a link which they had bought, and when we work with clients we always work with people to replace those paid links with natural links. Put that aside for a moment, the link was in right in the middle of this content, so it was like this perfect hard to detect link, except after the link it said "this is really a great site I know, because they paid me to say so". So, a human review component exposed that link rather quickly I am afraid.

Bill Slawski: It's possible that an automated review system might target a window of content and take your text link itself and look for certain words that might target either flagging the content for human review or might say don't count this one. That type of extended window around the link is something I have seen alluded to.

Some of the other differences in strategies between the search engines, is how they implement universal search. One of the things that interests me is how they decide which results to show from where, and with Google we've had a number of possibilities, and a number of different models. The format of the question itself may trigger certain results, and you could have a query such as "define:" and then some word, and you will see a definition. For question and answer type stuff, you will still get a definition. If you ask a question, ask in a question format something like what is Derek Jeter's date of birth, you'll get an answer in a Q&A type format. We are seeing more information extraction ideas showing up in some of these patents. For example, simply choosing which result. Ask.com does it differently. They segment their results pages into different sections, and so having to choose whether or not they are going to display a certain result, they'll just show most of them. If you search on the name of a famous person, they are going to show celebrity type stuff.

Eric Enge: Right. They are more likely to show images. This is something that Microsoft focused on in their Searchification announcement, not only showing more images, but showing rankings for celebrities, and more.

Bill Slawski: We have had certain sections on the page that are likely to show certain different types of things; we have a section which shows query refinements, and we have an images section. With Google they are looking at a statistical model, the user query, and their user query repository. For example, consider people who have been searching for lots of pictures of lions.

They search engine will show pictures of lions, and perhaps there have been many stories in the news recently about lions. Yes, let's show those news results in there somewhere. It might be the Detroit Lions, but it's still lions, but we are getting user behavior, user information influence in what gets shown in those results, and it's filling in the gaps on a page of different types of results. So, that's a different strategy, that's one way that the search engines differ.

Eric Enge: We should wrap up, and the last question I would like to ask you is for the average webmaster out there. How do they deal with all those things in terms of trying to understand it, and how it affects what they do, or what is the smartest thing to do, because what the search engines keep telling us is to make great content, and for users, and call it a day.

Bill Slawski: It's just such a broad statement that it's really not helpful. Success really means having a good marketing plan and a good business plan, and your marketing plan should include more than just what you do online. But, when you go to the online part of it, it doesn't hurt you to setup a strong foundation for success with your website in terms of making it easy for search engines to crawl, having unique content on each page, unique titles Meta tags, so on.

Using the language that your audiences are likely to use to search for the stuff, understanding who your audiences actually are; making it easy for them to complete tasks, making a usable website, being persuasive without being overbearing, understanding where are the places that your potential customers like to go online, maybe advertising there, or participating if it's community or something like that. You go fishing where the fish are kind of thing.

The other thing I think is important is recognizing that there are different types of searches people conduct where people search for information about stuff; they try to conduct transactions, they look for ways to navigate to stuff. We've had there types of queries based upon that most searches tend to be informational, people want to find out how they can do something themselves and save money, or just find the information itself. So, if you have an Ecommerce site that doesn't help people use their information, help them making informed, shopping decisions, you are not going to get so many queries. You are not targeting as big an audience

But, if you make a site that's engaging, that makes it easier for people to shop as possible, but also helps them learn about what they maybe buying, you are that much more likely to succeed in these days of universal search, thinking more about the images that you use, adding video, thinking about audio, using the podcasts like your podcast here, those are good ideas.

You're creating an interesting user experience for your visitors; you are providing them different ways to learn about what you provide. When you throw pictures on your website, make them good, strong, interesting pictures that help supplement the content that you feed on your page, but also they can stand alone, that can by themselves are interesting and might attract people to your web pages; the same with videos, the same with podcasts.

Eric Enge: Indeed. Well great, Bill. Thanks for coming to speak with me in the audience today. I could talk about this for hours on in, but that would make the podcast a little long. So, thanks again.

Bill Slawski: Oh, thank you very much Eric. It's been a pleasure.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

Kim Krause Berg Podcast with Eric Enge

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:49:24 -0400

The following is a written transcript of the October 12, 2007 podcast between Kim Krause Berg and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Kim Krause Berg, the owner of the well known Cre8pc Blog, and the Cre8 site forms. We plan to talk today about a variety of issues with usability and SEO, and you can see the Cre8pc Blog website at www.cre8pc.com/blog. How are you doing today, Kim?

Kim Krause Berg: Very good, thank you and you?

Eric Enge: I am doing great as well. Hey, when we talked the other day, one of the things that you indicated that you were really interested in is the emotional side of usability. Can you help the listeners understand what you mean by that and talk about it a little bit?

Kim Krause Berg: Sure, I can. I will give you an example of a cancer information site. There are various users or people who come visit this site, and the design has to take into consideration the emotional state of the site visitor. If it's a family member who has just found out that a loved one has been diagnosed with cancer, they might not be thinking as clearly, and their hand is not steady, so using the mouse just becomes a little bit more difficult. It's an interesting thing to watch people in different emotional states using a website. And, there are some studies being done on this, and I just find the whole thing really fascinating, because we design for ourselves personally and forget that there are different kinds of people including cultural differences visiting our sites, and how do you address that in the design?

Eric Enge: Right, so another related example would be people who are vision impaired, and what you do to help them navigate a site.

Kim Krause Berg: Exactly. And, another one is senior citizens who are healthy as anything, but certain things begin to slow down, and the connection between the brain and the hands begins to change. This is just the normal course of growing older. For example I watched my father using Google Maps and this is the vibrant 70 year old very smart guy, and he really struggled with it. I was very surprised, but it was just a little slower thinking, and with Google Maps the page is trying to communicate to him a lot of information for him to take in. I am sure that they didn't do a whole lot of user testing on the senior citizen population when they built it. So, it's eye opening to watch people use the applications and websites that we use everyday.

Eric Enge: Yeah, it's makes it a very interesting challenge when you are designing a website that has what you hope to be a very broad audience appeal, because there are so many different types of needs that you need to attend to.

Kim Krause Berg: You don't want it to be generic and boring either, there is always the fear that well okay, if you have to meet the needs of so many people that rules out 90% of the fun stuff.

You have to find a balance, and you really have to know who is coming to use the website, and what the alternatives are. There are things that you can do, it just takes more time, so learn what they are and apply them.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if we go back to the emotional state for a moment, the cancer site example, what are the kinds of things the site should do to try to address that?

Kim Krause Berg: More white space, bigger buttons, clear user instructions, and categories, separate sections for family members versus patient versus healthcare provider, don't throw it all there all at once, because when you are looking for information and you are upset, and you've got all these words facing you, it's intimidating, unless it is presented in such a way that it's easy to understand. In some cases it's not, and you just become so overwhelmed that it could possibly add to the emotional state that you are already in. Sometimes, because there are so many options in the search results, if we just flip in through health oriented sites, we tend to go to the ones where it's easier to read their column, or the colors are more pleasing. There might be human faces that are friendly that help us calm down. A page with just a bunch of words isn't going to have the same effect on us as.

Eric Enge: Right. You might also have a preference for site with pastel colors rather than bright sharp colors.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. The American Cancer Society does this a lot, they have a lot of microsites, and they purposely tone down all the different categories of all those different sites that they offer. They do use a lot of white space, and careful usage of color, careful usage of images whether it's photos, or drawings, and small amounts of information at a time. They try really hard not to overwhelm, because they do so many things, fund raisings, benefits, information, all kinds of things. If they presented it all at once, it would just be overwhelming and confusing, so they break it down.

Eric Enge: Right. That's a good example, and it's the right kind of thing to do for that audience.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. They even break it down by states, I believe which just shows me that they really know who their visitors are, and they can target things all the way down to a local level.

Eric Enge: Right. What are some examples of things that people do with websites that are just really bad usability things to do?

Kim Krause Berg: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is poor navigation, or one way navigation, where the momentum just goes just forward. There is no way to go backwards, and there is no way to go side-to-side. Good navigation structures help with the forward, backward, side-to-side motion, and this begins at the information architect stage where they are laying things out. It's a lot easier to go to from point A to point B to point C, but if you've got sublevels and you need to start connecting them, there is some thought that needs to go into that. And, if it's not carried through the navigation, people get lost. So, that's the first thing and it's one of the most common.

Eric Enge: Right. One example that was brought up to me by Jacob Nielsen was this notion that he had clicked on something, it brought up a dialog box, and he had to enter some data but there was no okay button.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. I have seen that too.

Eric Enge: Right. The thing that was bad about that is actually it was updating the data on the fly as soon as you entered it, so you didn't have to hit okay, but of course the user doesn't know that. So, they don't know when they are done which is a very frustrating thing.

Kim Krause Berg: Which, that not knowing if you are done is another common usability mistake; for example when you are filling out an application or going through a shopping cart, sometimes, or maybe filling out a newspaper or newsletter subscription, there is no confirmation or signal that you are done. You are left hanging, they don't tell you where to go next, they don't, the whole process just stops.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you might complete your shopping cart transaction and find you are staring at the homepage, and you didn't get anything that said we will notify you when it's shipped.

Kim Krause Berg: Exactly. Another one is not notifying you in time to print, if you have reached the last stage, you have been kicked out of the site, and you didn't have time to print anything for a physical record of what just happened, or they don't tell you that they are going to follow up with an email. Now, all of this stuff is just common, but it adds up. Somebody going through a site like this and they are buying a product and they run into these situations, are less likely to come back and are less likely to refer that site to somebody else, which is why these tiny little usability things that seem so small, are huge when taken together.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. It seems to me that one of the big things that people need to consider in usability is when you start designing a website it's not the same as you have a blank canvas and you're an artist and you are going to create a new original picture and you can do anything you want.

Kim Krause Berg: Right.

Eric Enge: In fact you are looking at is a situation where the users have being conditioned by the design of hundreds or thousands of websites that they have looked at to expect certain things in certain areas on the screen. And, that brings up one of my favorite subtopics which is the designers out there who try to create a completely new style of user interface, which doesn't follow any of those conventions. It maybe beautiful, it may even be better, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter; it's just still really bad usability.

Kim Krause Berg: That's a tough one, while you were talking I was thinking about blogs. Once they are used to a certain way that a blog page looks with content on the left, ads to the right, sidebars with all the miscellaneous stuff, nobody even tries to do anything different, and that's the whole niche right there. Nobody is trying anything different or if they do, they do very little. You can try things; this is where user testing comes in. There is no law that says you can't put navigation on the right hand side just because everybody else is putting it on the left.

Or global navigation at the top; people can figure it out if it's done the right way with good link labels that are understandable, and positioning of things. People will figure out what it is you are trying to communicate to them, so if you have navigation on the right hand side in a box, if the box has a purpose nobody complains about that, because they understand as soon as they look at it, what they are supposed to do there. I think the biggest problem with any change no matter what the heck it is, is not understanding why it's there and what it's for. But, if you communicate its purpose people are like "oh, okay cool, I can do that", that we'll even scroll down long pages as long as we understand why we are going there; so a lot of it is just communication.

I am learning how to do that, it isn't that you can't make these changes. You can put a logo in the center, you put it to the right, you can put it to down further left and have a bunch of content, and link the categories above, and then put the logo there. There are all kinds of things that you can do taking into consideration who is coming to visit that site. I think young people are into the Jazzy and they will accept things and changes maybe a little bit more then other people. I hate to say older people, because I am old, but some of us have been just so conditioned, whereas younger people are so getting used to the whole internet, and computers, and things; they are more open-minded.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. I also find it interesting what eye tracking studies have suggested about how quickly people make decisions on a webpage. And, to use the word emotion in a different way, they seem to have almost an emotional response to the experience of the page, and does that tell us something from usability perspective as well?

Kim Krause Berg: Their eyes are going to whatever it is that they understand first. That is where their eyes are going to go, if they make some sort of a connection whether it's informational, emotional, mental, any of those things. I do that going through search result pages, and if a description is chunky and I can't even get a full sense in the search results, I am more likely to skip that website and go further down till I get to a description that's logical and speaks to me even if that site is lower down on the page. Everybody says you've got to be at the top of the search results pages. But, if you are not making any sense while you are sitting there, there are people like me who are just going to keep on going and probably make a connection.

Eric Enge: That's a strong argument for a good meta description tag if there ever was one.

Kim Krause Berg: Yeah, well even some of the search engines mess up the meta description. They grab information from different content on the page. They are throwing it all together and messing it all up, and so you start looking for other things that are also one on the page as well as some of the separate manual results starting to come in really handy instances like what I just described, where I am just not making that connection, not finding exactly what it is that I am looking for. Because, it's not clearly thought out to me what it is that they are offering.

Eric Enge: Right. So, clearly there is a role for user testing and doing things prior to a site launch and ongoing testing as things go along with the website. Can you talk about these a little bit?

Kim Krause Berg: Yes. Obviously user testing is good before, during, and after. A lot of people say well, how can I do user testing before I have even built anything? But, they can look at case studies, they can get an idea in general what certain user behaviors are, and then take that into consideration in their design. As they are going through the alpha and even into the beta stage, they can be showing it to potential customers, or potential users outside of the development team. The people who are looking at that everyday are not the people who should be testing the site.

Even just asking basic questions is helpful, you don't have to ask anything specific to the site if you don't have enough content on there, but you can ask questions like does this color look good to you, because colorblind people are looking at something completely different. I have been in situations where the UI designers are going merrily along, and then you find out that one of them was colorblind, and you weren't even all talking in the same language while you were building the site.

So, it's an ongoing, never ending process, and then when you get to the end and you have ruled something out, that's when the fun really begins and you can experiment with data that's starting to comeback from your analysis. And, you can do A/B split-testing, you can change link labels; you can change words to see which ones actually moved people through the site better.

Eric Enge: That's a one of the great tools for ongoing activity that you mentioned, A/B, or multivariate testing, and just being able to test different scenarios and see what the responses are.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. I don't even have to make a big deal out of it; regular users are cool with that. If you just change a couple of words or here and there, they are probably not even going to notice, but you'll notice if you are checking the data and see what happens.

Eric Enge: Right, indeed. What about survey solutions, things where you do actual surveys of visitors to your site? What are your thoughts on using them?

Kim Krause Berg: I am all for it, the problem is avoiding being invasive. I refer to Amazon a lot as an example of how they implement the survey process. They will survey you after you've bought. I buy used books a lot from them, I never pay full price if I don't have to. And, they'll tell you that they are going to follow up with a survey, so Amazon has an idea of how well that third party business treated you. And, all it is when you get it in the email is a rating; it's not even a real survey.

But, they just say can you rate this person, and there is a quick 5.0 scale; you rate them and you are done. I will respond to those, because I know from experience that they are not hassling me, they are not asking me pages and pages of questions. I think it's kind of interesting that they don't actually pursue and start asking different questions like was I satisfied? There is a place to leave comments if you want to; there are instances where you definitely want more information if you are providing a customer service.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. I mean one of the interesting things about what they have done is that it's just a single trivial to answer question. So, for me it's so painless that their success rate in getting people to respond must be pretty high.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. The other thing that they do is they do not ask you anything until after that sale is complete. A lot of websites will popup their survey before you leave their website including how do you rate your experiences with us. Well, if you have just purchased something from them...

Eric Enge: You don't know yet.

Kim Krause Berg: Yes exactly, you don't even know, you haven't even gotten it yet. Amazon is really smart by not asking you anything about that experience until they know you have the product, because they are following every move of those packages. They follow up after they know you've gotten it, then they send through the email and they say "hey, how was it, how did this go?" Then, you can give them a qualified answer.

It's really important I think for any customer feedback to time it right, and make it easy, and really non-invasive.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what are the right kinds of questions to ask and how do you structure them to be effective?

Kim Krause Berg: I used to work for a survey company, and the first rule was never more than three at a time. Anything more than that is too overwhelming. And, what they did was ratings, dissatisfied to satisfied ranging from 0 to 5 points. It was easier for them to measure and correlate the data that way, that's pretty sophisticated for the general website, or mom or pop or small business site. Something as simple as just emailing them, did you find what you were looking for, just one question, or asking them like a satisfaction type of question, customer satisfaction question; at least it gives you something to work with.

A lot of sites don't have forms, or even an email contact, or an easy way to contact them in the event that you just went through this whole experience, and you absolutely positively hated it. You will never come back and talk to these people again, or do business with them, but there is no way to let them know. And, meanwhile the website is carrying on business as usual and not having any idea that there is a problem. It's a matter of finding the right way to get the feedback, and also enabling feedback in the first place.

Eric Enge: Indeed. I think the relationship implications of just asking if they have found everything they are looking for are significant. I know when I am out shopping in a Whole Foods store, it's not uncommon to have someone when you are checking out ask that question, "did you find everything you are looking for?" And, if the answer is no, they actually want to get the answer and this just creates a different relationship between the store and the customer.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. And, if somebody is dissatisfied then the clerk at the register can direct them to someone to talk to, I have often thought it was kind of silly for the poor, especially young people in a lot of these stores to be asking that question, what if there is a complaint, and they've got to line a mile long. Some of them won't even ask the question, because they're just scared. If their customer says no, you've got to be ready with a way to direct them to get help. And, it's the same thing online; we can use the physical world a lot and translate that into how we do business online. If you are going to ask the question, then you need to be able to put him in contact with the customer service rep if you have one, and make that easy. A lot of sites don't have any persons' name, nobody that you could talk to, whereas in store you can walk right up to somebody, you know where the service desk is, and there are people behind there and you can talk to them, it's very easy. It's really hard to do that online.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. It takes some thought about how you structure that, because the downside of all this as we talked about is the potential for being invasive. That's what was so neat about the Amazon solution. It makes it really easy, if you don't want to be bothered with it, you just delete it.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. It's because I actually tried one and found out that it was painless that I was like okay, fine. I don't mind doing this as long as it's a painless click. They seem to be acknowledging a respect for our time, and that's another thing that's really helpful to communicate to website users to say you understand that they don't have a million hours in the day.

You want information from them, how do you get it without interfering in their day, making it a pleasant experience for them. And, sure a lot of websites are really starting to figure this out, and then there are lot many who don't or don't care. It just hasn't even crossed their minds to even look at it that way.

Eric Enge: Right. It's like you are communicating some very basic things like respect and concern.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. And, if you want to increase conversion, you want to show really, really good customer service every step of the way. And, I want to add that you are never going to be perfect the moment you roll out a site. It's an ongoing process; I am always looking at my usability site. I am looking at it and going "oh, my God I am so confused". If I am, then I know that my visitors are; and I am not the right person to be looking at it. But, it's an ongoing process and what worked three months ago might not be working now because technology and user habits are constantly changing.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the key then is test to the degree you can before you launch, test while you are launching, and keep testing after you are launched. Because, there are so many things that can change what's going on, it could be seasonal, it could be just major change in the way people think or even minor changes in the way people think that are affecting you.

Kim Krause Berg: Right. And, if it's a global site, consider the cultural. I wish I had more data myself on how people from other countries do tasks, how they read, or Eye-Tracking studies. I was in the airport, coming back from the San Jose Conference, and I was watching an Asian man reading a book and it was the coolest thing as he was reading it backwards.

From the backwards to forwards, and he was just going right along and I was marveling at that, and taking and translating that to my world, the website world, and I so badly wanted to ask him how he looks at websites? But, I was afraid if he didn't understand English, I would be doomed. It was just a great example about how we are all using the same things but in different ways.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. Well, it's a fascinating challenge and one that I think webmasters need to take into consideration, because usability can ultimately drive your conversion rate, and causes significant gains in your getting visitors to the places that you want to get them to.

Kim Krause Berg: Not to mention that it fortifies any SEO effort, if you are paying someone to market your site, you really want that site to rock.

Eric Enge: Right. Ultimately it's not useful to bring someone to your site, if you do a poor job in converting them.

Kim Krause Berg: Right, exactly.

Eric Enge: Well, great. Thanks for joining us today, Kim.

Kim Krause Berg: Thank you, thanks for the chance to talk about usability and SEO.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

Eric Peterson Podcast with Eric Enge

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:50:57 -0400

Transcript of Podcast with Eric Peterson

The following is a written transcript of the September 4, 2007 podcast between Eric Enge and Eric Peterson:

Eric Enge: Hello listeners, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Eric Peterson, the CEO of Web Analytics Demystified, and we plan to talk about what organizations need to do to be successful in web analytics. You can see the Web Analytics Demystified website at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com. Hello, Eric

Eric Peterson: Hello, Eric. How are you today?

Eric Enge: I am doing great, how are you doing?

Eric Peterson: Excellent, thanks very much.

Eric Enge: Hey, it looks to me like things are going well for Web Analytics Demystified at least as an external observer. Can you talk about how things are going?

Eric Peterson: Yes, things have been going really, really well. I am tremendously excited about having my own company, about being able to pick and choose my own clients, and can really start to do some of things for the web analytics community that I've wanted to do for years. And, I have just been either time limited or limited by what my employers really wanted me to do and where they wanted me to focus. So, at just about 100 days into it now, the decision to leave Visual Sciences and start Web Analytics Demystified Incorporated has been just great. So, thanks for asking.

Eric Enge: Sure, I noticed since you mentioned the thing that you wanted to be able to do serve community that you didn't do before. One of those things was that free analytic survey that you put out there not too long ago.

Eric Peterson: Yes, and I am about to do a second round of that. I plan on doing those surveys twice a year, one time looking more at attitudes, which was the March survey. And then, in September we are going to look more at tool usage. That's the kind of thing that none of my previous employers, certainly not Jupiter Research, would have said go ahead, spend your own money, conduct research, do the analysis, write this up, get it edited and put it out there for free. Nobody would have ever given me the ability to do something like that, but I have always wanted to do that. At Jupiter Research, I wanted to focus more on web analytics and more of the kinds of problems that people at ground level, like real practitioners, have. But, I had a research program, and not to say anything bad about Jupiter Research, because it was a good research program, but, I can now make those decisions, let's focus on this; let's look at that. And, it's very, very satisfying as I am sure you know at Stone Temple.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. One of the things I saw in that survey is that you came to the conclusion that people who use the free web analytics tool are less likely to dive in and get the deeper value out of the analytics experience. Is that a fair assessment?

Eric Peterson: I have a second piece of free research I put out titled the problem with free analytics.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Eric Peterson: The data suggested that companies who primarily using free web analytics solutions were not really taking advantage of the technology the way they could. More adhoc usage of analytics as opposed to regular programming, a regular program for conducting analysis, employees to manage that or a process streaming approach, certainly companies deploying free solutions were less likely to be paying people to manage those solutions. So, some of the really important things, right, you know this, I know this, Eisenberg and Sterne and Barbie and everybody knows this, that you have to dedicate people. You have to have somebody whose responsibility it is to do web analytics, and that just didn't shine through in the data. So, I speculated that this may result in a very substantial number of companies who are not really getting the benefit; that was the essence of that report.

Eric Enge: Right. And, it doesn't mean that somebody couldn't use a free analytics tool and get the benefit. It just suggests that there is a correlation between those who do use one and don't pursue that level of benefits.

Eric Peterson: Exactly, so not only does it not suggest that you can't be successful with free analytics tools, it doesn't say anything about the value of those free analytics tools. I think of Google Analytics as being the prototypical free tool, and I think Google Analytics is great. I use Google Analytics; I get a lot of value out of Google Analytics. Certainly there are things that I don't like about it, and I fill the gaps there with other web analytics tools. But, it's not about the technology itself, it's not about the tool, and not even really so much about the people.

It's how the people are using the tool, you have to be committed to doing this, you have to be committed, you have to have every intention of using web analytics tools whatever you have, to better understand your audience and better understand your online marketing efforts. It's really that simple. Some people didn't take it that way; some people said that I was bashing free tools. Some people actually said that I was bashing for free tools, but again it comes down to reading the documents and really thinking about what the data says, what the data can tell you about how people are using the tools today.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, I took it the same way that you've just expressed it, but yes you had to dig in a little bit to make sure that you were really reading the whole document. Well, let's dive in a little bit. One of the things I have seen you write about or do presentations on is, it seems like a lot of organizations dive into analytics, and then assume that a continual improvement process will be sufficient. But, I have seen that you made the argument that it's not sufficient, can you explain that?

Eric Peterson: The continual improvement process is sufficient if it is truly a process. What I have seen and I talked about this in San Francisco a little bit at the Emetrics Summit, and I have been talking about it since then. What I have seen is that there are still a fairly substantial number of companies that seem to nod their heads, they bow their heads yes, yes we get it when you talk about continual improvement, but they haven't gone so far as to implement the actual process part of the continual improvement process. One of the most important things to continual improvement is having a testing platform; right is that AB testing or controlled experimentation or multivariate analysis, whatever you want.

Just having the ability to run parallel tests is fundamental to continual improvement done right. And, there are still a lot of companies that haven't deployed those kinds of technologies, maybe they are doing things in serial, but maybe not. I think a lot of times web analytics stops for companies when the reports have been generated, and they don't take it far enough. They don't get to analysis, they don't take analysis to multivariate testing; they don't do the processes behind web analytics. And so, I think that maybe there is not a limitation in understanding, but there is a limitation in use.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what about the management process used that are necessary to take this a step further?

Eric Peterson: Well, the management process used, and I wrote about this fairly extensively in a white paper, again a free white paper that I provide at webanalyticsdemystified.com, talking about the role that management needs to play. It's real common and certainly at Jupiter Research I experienced this and also at Visual Sciences, it's real common to go in to a situation where a company has spent significantly on web analytics tools technology, but don't have a named, assigned senior owner. Right, a Senior Vice President or a Vice President or an EVP or somebody whose responsibility includes web analytics, who includes making web analytics actually successful in the organization and deriving positive return on investment from Omniture or WebTrends or Corematrics or Visual Sciences or whatever they have got, and their people. There are series of management processes that often get forgotten and it's unfortunate, because where you end up is with well-intentioned, well-meaning, right people actually doing web analytics, but nobody is taking advantage of their analysis. Nobody is actually taking it to continual improvement, and taking it to the next logical step of let's do something with this data.

Eric Enge: All reports and no action?

Eric Peterson: Very common, very common: all reports and no action. It's actually, I don't if you attended the Web Analytics Association Webcast that I did last week, but I have just started talking about something called RAMP. I have always been looking for what is the most memorable; what is the most simple way to communicate, how to be successful with web analytics? And, I think it is this, ramp is resources, which is technology and people, ramp is analysis, ramp is multivariate testing, and ramp is process. You take first letter of all those, you get a clever little acronym, because everybody wants a ramp that goes up and to the right.

But, it's all of this, and it's management buying into the RAMP, and it's IT buying into RAMP, and it's analytics and it's everybody saying we can use web analytics and website optimization ecosystem of technologies to be very successful in the online channel as long as we are committed and as long as we have a roadmap, as long as we understand what we are going to do, when we are going to do it, and why we are going to do it. But, the evidence of that, the ability to be successful is everywhere, you know that, it's your clients, it's my clients. It's Jim Sterne's clients, and Semphonic's clients, it's all the vendors' case studies. The evidence for being successful with analytics is absolutely overwhelming, so it's not the technology, and it's not the people that are holding everyone back. It's really I think about the process and about being well-intentioned, and really trying to make this stuff work.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you can think of it as creating a data driven culture?

Eric Peterson: Creating a data driven culture or creating a data driven culture within a larger culture. Talking to Tom Davenport a little while ago and asking him if companies are not data driven from the top-down; are they just doomed, are they not going to be able to compete on analytics? And, what we eventually came to is you can't compete on analytics, but you can compete on web analytics at the microscopic level. So, one department, one group in the organization, will you be more successful if the whole organization is data driven? Probably yes, but it doesn't mean that if you are not data driven from the top-down, you can't be successful with web analytics. It just means you might have to work a little bit harder to not be led by the data, but to use the data to your advantage.

Eric Enge: Right. It's interesting to think about if you are dealing with the person who is currently not particularly sophisticated, and that's probably the wrong word. But, just not knowledgeable in the area of analytics at this point, and they are getting into the RAMP, and thinking about it for the first time. They are looking at a real investment, there is the buying of the tool; there is building up the organization with all the people. It's the cultural thing as it needs to happen and as Avinash Kaushik, famously said that the tool should be 10% of your cost, and the people 90%, and whether you agree with those numbers or not, you are really looking at taking a big step. It's fascinating to me, because you and I are both seeing what the returns are when you do that successfully, but how do you go about educating someone who doesn't have the knowledge and background as to what they can hope to get in return for their investment?

Eric Peterson: That's an excellent question, it's an excellent question. It's something I have been talking about a lot more lately. It really is how you get to it. Web analytics is hard, right. But, I don't know, we should probably have discussed this before we started recording the call, because I don't know how you feel about this. But, I think the web analytics is hard, right. I have a presentation where I go through 20 different examples from the vendors and from authors and even stuff that I have written and stuff that Avinash has written, and stuff that Google; a bunch of stuff from Google that says web analytics is easy, web analytics is easy, Google Analytics makes web analytics easy.

I don't think that's right, I think web analytics is hard, and I think the assumption that web analytics is easy or it is supposed to be easy is actually hurting our industry. Its hurting individual practitioner's ability to communicate to the large organization what has to be done to take advantage of web analytics. When you walk in the door and you say this is easy, we are all going to get it. Then when inevitably people struggle with definitions, when they struggle with data inaccuracies, when they hear about cookie deletion; when they see these new archaic terms, when they look at these interfaces, they think to themselves well this supposed to be easy, but this isn't easy for me.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: I think the recognition that web analytics is hard, and it's something that requires an investment of time and energy and resource is how you get organizations to buying into it. You put together processes, how are we going to educate managements in the organization about what you can and cannot do with web analytics. How are we are going to educate senior managers about the terms, the definitions that they need to know to take advantage of the reports that they are getting, and more importantly to take advantage of the analysis that they should be getting? If so it's easy, and it's going to be a slam dunk for you. I don't think you are going to give it the attention that it deserves. Again, this goes back to the free versus fee conversation we had moments ago. If web analytics is easy, I don't really need to spend Avinash's $90, right it's easy. So, we will just all be able to pick it up, right?

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: It's not easy.

Eric Enge: Yes, I agree completely. I mean it's like I could spend a dollar, and maybe I will get $2 back, or I can spend $10 and I am going to get $50 back. Well, getting yourself to spend the $10 might be harder to do or take little more thought upfront, but I really think the web analytics situation is like that. The ROI grows as the expense grows assuming of course that the expense is being spent in a smart way, but I think the ROI grows as you ramp up the effort.

Eric Peterson: Yeah, I agree. But, it's about getting people to ramp up the effort and having the right expectations.

Eric Enge: Alright, did you mean to use your acronym there by the way?

Eric Peterson: That's what I want, RAMP, right let's RAMP it up. It is an important thing; I got some comments back from the WA Webcast which I will be making freely available through webanalyticsdemystified.com. I think towards the end of next week, thanks to the good graces of the folks of the WAA. One of the comments I got back was I saw this in the Yahoo group that Peterson wasn't talking about anything groundbreaking or revolutionary with RAMP. And, I am not, we all know this.

The problem is we are very insolated little circle of individuals, the web analytics blogers, the people that go to Emetrics, and we need ways to take web analytics out to the masses, to everyone in the organization and people outside the organization. So, RAMP is one way to do that, right it's not to simplify it so far that it makes it useless, but to communicate it more effectively. And, multivariate testing, right you don't get to continual improvement done well until you get good at multivariate or AB testing, I mean this is just the reality of it. So, feel free to talk about RAMP all you want.

Eric Enge: Sure. So, another thing I noticed is that you are really into detailed diagramming of every part of the process, and maybe you can talk about why you feel that's so important?

Eric Peterson: Yeah. I don't know that I am a huge proponent of pedantic diagramming of everything. I don't know that I am that big a proponent of getting up the pens and papers or SmartDraw or Vizio or whatever in diagramming everything. But, I am trying to convey with this point that there has to be more attention paid to the detail, because people say we have web analytics integrated into all of our campaigns and page deployment processes, web analytics is the strategy part of our business. And then, I say okay well, so that means that you never forget to tag a campaign and you never forget to tag a new page and you haven't deployed Web 2.0 Applications, such as Ajax or Flash, or a podcast, or an RSS feed, that every time you deploy something new there is always analytics baked into that, right. I say that to companies and I get this funny look back, and then somebody in the back then goes no, actually we forget to tag campaigns all the time, and we just launched a brand new Ajax application and it doesn't have any tracking in it at all.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: And, I say it's because it's not part of the process. You have not diagrammed web analytics into the process; you have not considered the importance of web analytics. And, so then it comes in at the 11th hour, and then you fall behind, you get busy and it just drops out. I mean how frequently does web analytics drop out of sight or campaign or content deployment process, it is still very common. So, this diagramming is simply an exercise, this is something that I go out and do with Web Analytics Demystified clients.

We sit down and we say let's talk about how you deploy a new campaign, let's draw out all the steps and look at where measurement should be, and let's talk about whether or not it's there or not. Simply the act of creating those maps, of creating those checklists gets people to think more carefully about the value of measurement and how measurement has to be in there. So it's, I mean it's not an end, it's a means to an end. This diagramming is something that, you do a couple of diagrams you get the gist of it, you say yeah, yeah, we have to remember to do web analytics, we have to remember to insert measurements into these processes. So, it's not something you have to do forever, you don't need big binders, process binders for your web analytics integration, it's everything else you do. But you just, you have to think about it that way and I found that to be the best tool for getting my clients and my customers and my friends to think about it.

Eric Enge: Right. What I find is in terms of, if somebody rolls out a new section of a site or like you say an Ajax application or something like that, what happens in a lot of companies, is that somebody goes and tries to pull the data, and that's when they find out the analytics is missing.

Eric Peterson: Data is not there, I mean I just stop counting the number of times in sort of the explosion of Web 2.0, which I think is great. I mean I think Ajax and all of this stuff is fascinating, I love my iPhone. I spend more time then is absolutely necessary on the FaceBook application on iPhone, I am really into Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies, but they need to be measured, right. It's not responsible to create these measurement black holes, and I just stopped counting the number of times I would sit down with companies and say hey, this is a great Ajax application, this is really engaging. How do you measure visitor engagement with this? And, they go well, we are not really measuring that much, and I go well, at least you are measuring like the conversion rate, i.e., the people are using this application to complete the critical conversion process, right? Then they go no, we are going to hope to back that in and like the third version of it or something like that. And then, I am just sitting there staring at them. I am like okay, I am the guy who wrote 3 books on analytics, are you just admitting to me that you spent $200,000 building this cool Ajax application, and it's got no measurement in it. I mean it's so uncomfortable conversation there for a couple of seconds, and then we move on.

We start to talk about how do you measure Web 2.0, how do you bake the tagging or the click tracking or whatever you need into it while it's being developed, and test that that works and think about, what do we want to know? You don't need to know everything, you don't need to know every drag and drop and zoom and click and all of that stuff, but you need to know some of it. How do you know what you need to know in advance? And so, in some ways Web Analytics 2.0, which is the subject of my longer talk at Emetrics in Washington this year, Web Analytics 2.0 is a lot like Web Analytics 1.0 was, years ago. We are going to have to relearn a lot of these things, only more money is being spent and more peoples' necks are on the line now.

Eric Enge: Yeah, ultimately you expect that the tracking mechanisms will follow the way that people make money on the application in some fashion. So, that's the thing that absolutely must be measured, right?

Eric Peterson: Yeah. No, I agree. The funny thing is people ask me, the Wall Street guys specifically will ask me who else is out there, like who is going to just do a great job of measuring Web 2.0 stuff, like Ajax. So I just, don't think it's somebody from left field, I think that the Website Optimization ecosystem of technology is right. This is Web Analytics Technologies, Customer Experience Management Technologies, Voice of Customer Measurement Technologies, the forsee Results and Tealeaf's of the world. I think the stuff we need is already out there, it's just about using it the right way. I think it's just about understanding how the technology should be used, what you hope to measure and how you hope to use that data. I think it's really that simple, it's just it's not playing out that way.

Eric Enge: Indeed. So, can you summarize for us then what are the keys to success in Web Analytics today?

Eric Peterson: Yeah, sure. First key to success is to recognize that web analytics is hard, right. It is hard; it is something you are going have to work out. You are going to need people, you are going to need resources; you are going to need time and money. Web analytics is not easy, and when people tell you that web analytics is easy you should question their motivation, are they trying to sell you something? Are they trying to sell you on something, do they want you to buy a book or read a blog or something like that? Web analytics is hard; the second thing is RAMP; resources, analysis, multivariate testing and process. You've got to have all four of these things and you got to have, you got to understand how all four of those outputs or inputs work together to drive your businesses success. Resources' is technology and people, analysis is the desired output, reports are just reports, right. Reports are only good if you know what they are telling you, but analysis and recommendations is the desired output from Web Analytics projects. Multivariate testing we've talked about a fair amount, process we've talked about a fair amount. You have to consider all four of these things to build a ramp that will ultimately increase the success of your online business.

Eric Enge: Well great, thanks for taking the time to talk to us Eric.

Eric Peterson: Absolutely. Thanks for asking me Eric. I wish you all the best at Stone Temple and I got to say man, I am really, really enjoying the podcast and the interviews that you've been conducting up there, just great stuff this global interview. You've really managed to grab onto an idea and talk to some really great people, and then cover some great information. So, I want to just say I very much appreciate that.

Eric Enge: Well, then thank you and I am pleased to have you in the list of those people I've been able to talk to.

Eric Peterson: Excellent.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

Eric, Brett, and Avinash discuss Google Analytics

Thu, 5 Jul 2007 08:19:12 -0400

Podcast Date: June 13, 2007

The following is a written transcript of the June 13, 2007 discussion between Eric Enge, Brett Crosby, and Avinash Kaushik:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the president of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com, I am here today with Brett Crosby and Avinash Kaushik from the Google Analytics team. You can see the Google Analytics website at www.google.com/analytics, and you can see Avinash's blog at www.kaushik.net/avinash. So how are you guys doing today?

Avinash Kaushik: We are going great, thank you.

Brett Crosby: Great. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Enge: Okay, super. So one of the big things that has happened recently is you did this release of Google Analytics on May 8th that had a really dramatic change in the interface and many new features. How is that been received by the industry?

Brett Crosby: It has been received very well. We have been very happy with the response so far and we are really proud of what the team has put together. They have done a phenomenal job. I don't know if we can give our engineers on the front and backend enough credit or how well it turned out. But we are pretty happy with the results, and so far the public's reactions have been very, very positive for us. One other thing, I just wanted to mention was, I talked about it briefly at Emetrics, when we launched, was a little bit about the impetus for why we get the redesign.

There were several reasons, but the primary thing that we saw was a bit of a paradigm shift in the industry, and that is that the previous model was around how people who were used to web analytics were interacting with their web analytics tool. And the previous interface was pretty much designed around that model, just a relatively small web analytics community. But what happened over the past couple of years, is that we really increased the size of the industry and the amount of people outside of the industry who wanted access to you web analytics data increased dramatically. There is this whole new kind of audience has cropped up for us. So we did some pretty dramatic things. We have really redesigned the entire interface so that it is more contextual, and data is very, relevant within other pieces of data in the reports. And then, the second thing is that you can now email these reports out so that expert web analytics people do not have to sit there and explain what everything means and then email it out and kind of present it to the rest of the company. They get to focus on doing their deeper analysis and we added a lot of tools for them to do that in this interface. And they can have automated emails sent out with really relevant and contextually informative data right in the interface so that people can see those reports and take action right away, so that whole kind of combination we think is a pretty big step forward.

Eric Enge: Right. I think there is an increasing appreciation of how web analytics can help a web-based business, or web-based portion of the business make money, or make more money than they are making without it has really grown. And I think that is absolutely the case, more and more people understand what web analytics can do for them and therefore more and more people want to get access to, it including senior managers at companies that don't want to take the trouble to log in, they just want the data presented it to them in the most convenient way possible for them. I think that was a good step forward, in terms of adding that email capability that came, you've put in the product.

So you released an additional new update yesterday. I think this actually included a few tweaks based on user feedback. And one other thing that was interesting is that there was a lot of demand for seeing the data on an hourly basis as the old interface supported and initially you had removed from the May 8th version. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Brett Crosby: Sure, happy to. This latest update that we launched yesterday, is something that we are happy to get out there. Once we launched the new interface, we heard a lot of people asking for a few specific features. We heard pretty loud and clear that these were things that people wanted. As a result, we added, hourly reporting back in the product as you mentioned. Our friends at Yelp and guys like Andy Beal really wanted us to get those things back in there, just to name a couple. But, many others wanted those things. Clickable URLs was added into the product, and this is actually done through an icon. You can click into URLs that link to your site, or your own website URLs. And, sometimes if they are dynamic, you can click them and they won't work, that is fine, that is to be expected. But at least, it is better than copying and pasting it out of the product and finding out it as that you are getting...

Eric Enge: Right. Getting the same result.

Brett Crosby: Exactly. Danny Sullivan has been harping on that forever for not having that in there. We have been wanting to put it in there for a long time. In the new interface it was actually kind of tricky to figure out, because you can click into the URLs and keep drilling down to find out more information about the pages, so we could not actually make it a clickable URL, so we added an icon instead that then links to the site that brought you the traffic.

Eric Enge: Right. So one of the things that I like about hourly reporting is that if you are marketing to, or just being found and put on, social media sites, it gives you different level of visibility as to when you achieve success. You can see when you achieve front page status on Digg, and when you left the front page. It provides you a good visualization of the time frames for that particular campaign, that I think you can't get quite as well if you just reverse engineer it from the daily numbers.

Brett Crosby: Right, exactly. That is definitely one of the key things, to see when you have been posted on Digg or something like that. Or the other thing is that a lot of people like hourly reporting so that they can do hourly bidding within AdWords, and we understand that as well.

Eric Enge: Right. So I guess the perception there is, for certain hours of day there are hours that offer the best conversion, is that the idea?

Brett Crosby: Right. Exactly, and what some people like to do, or what some people find is that there are certain key words that can mean multiple things, and their audience is buying for those things at certain times of the day, maybe around the lunch hour or maybe before work or after work, or and it could vary by time zone or geography as well. But, you find people that really get into certain keywords and spend a lot with them to manage these little eccentricities that really work for them as well.

Avinash Kaushik: The other thing is that in some of the blogs and websites there was feedback that people wanted to do more than look at days in silos, but lots of people like to compare the patterns of shopping on their websites this week versus last week, or this month versus last month or last year. Then at the aggregate level they can understand the behavior of their customers down to an hourly level and then maybe even sub-segment it by geography or city so that they can get more complicated about how they should be running campaigns, whether with AdWords or otherwise. In those scenarios where you do have an ability to react fast enough, hourly reporting can certainly be something that is quite helpful.

Eric Enge: Right. That makes sense. Another big area was the addition of cross segmentation by network location?

Avinash Kaushik: Oh definitely. The reality is with all the complexity that is going on with DHCP and IP addresses, that people still used this feature a lot. It sort of goes to show that the response of the team in reacting to what our customer base would like to use and see as an optimal feature set for them. Network location is great, and we have learnt that a lot of people will use it to simply size their core key data in Google Analytics or create segments of data in Google Analytics that allows them to understand the IP addresses of where people are coming to their websites from, which seems to help them quite a bit in terms of creating the experience they want on their websites and understanding the usage on their websites. It is something that a lot of people seem to be using and something that was very quickly added to the latest release. Only a month after the recent major release went out.

Eric Enge: Right. So we are going to see a new release in another month?

Avinash Kaushik: No comment!

Eric Enge: What a surprise! Yeah. I think that is great that you have come up so quickly with an update release because that is what happens whenever you put a product out there, you are always going to get some very fast feedback of a few things and it is good to address it.

Avinash Kaushik: Exactly and I think Google has focused on ensuring that it is very responsive to customer feedback as well as providing the data and feature-set that are relevant to its customers. For example, you'll also notice that the number of rows we can export at an instance is now increased to five hundred rows of data on a single report. And the beauty of this is that you can actually export segmented narrow data that you actually need rather than getting a span of aggregated data. Give me all ten thousand rows or all five hundred rows of search key words on my website. What you can do is, you can say no, I want all search keywords from people who came from Google during these hours in a day, you can actually segment, you can go down to the data you actually need and export that out so they can create another presentation layer for your management, for example if you want, or merging it with other offline sources.

I think it is great, that the number of rows you can take out on a single report has increased. And also, interesting metrics are now highlighted very prominently, such as Bounce Rate, one of my favorite metrics. I am in the process of writing an article for marketing professors and the working title is Sexiest Metric Ever- Bounce Rate. There is so much value in that metric in understanding the quality of the acquisition strategy that you have for your company, and the traffic that is coming to your website, again that has also been enhanced with the latest release. So there are a good bunch of things that have been released with the latest upgrade for Google Analytics and I am not sure if you noticed, but it is already out of beta, it is probably the shortest beta ever in the history of Google.

Eric Enge: Google does have products that are still in beta that were announced years ago.

Avinash Kaushik: Yes.

Brett Crosby: Absolutely.

Eric Enge: Yeah. So, another thing I really like about the new release overall is the path analysis functionality. I think there are some really good things, I know you mentioned that to me, Avinash when I was out at GooglePlex during my last visit. But I would really like to talk about some of those things, such as the navigation summary, for example and entrance pages, etc. Can you talk about these?

Avinash Kaushik: Actually, the core essence of the issue, Eric, is that for the longest time people who are consuming web analytics' data, or trying to analyze the data, have judged the effectiveness of a page simply by the number of people who might be exiting from it. And it is usually a very primitive barometer of the page, and if it is performing the way it should be. I find a lot of people who are getting deep into path analysis where they are try and recreate and restructure every single path, that every single person has taken on a website. And then try to understand what the most common path is on the website. The challenge with that, is it the most common path on the website might be actually only taken by one percent of the site traffic. Say one percent of site traffic is following the same path, what would you do? Would you take any action on it, and so what I am noticing is there is this gradual paradigm shift in analyzing the value of pages. People are actually looking at much more sophisticated amounts of data all in one place. For example, with Google Analytics you could go down to content, you can pick any page you want, and very quickly you will see the default detailed data, which gives you a very quick understanding of how many times a page was seen, how many people bounced off it, how many people are, and how long did they spend on the page.

Then with a very quick drill down on the analyze button, you can truly begin to understand if the page is performing correctly by looking at entrance paths, which probably is a very unique feature to Google Analytics. What it tells you is very very interesting. It takes a lot of the mathematics and complex computations behind the scenes, and you cab see everywhere that the people who saw this page came from, but then the beautiful thing is you get a box where you can say, what was the next step that people took from this page. By clicking on each of those next steps you could see how much that particular next step is contributing to where the people ended up. So let us say you are trying to drive a lot of orders on your website, you could say from the product page, what is the next best step that people can take, is it the next best step that they go to a comparison chart, do they go to a product overview page, or do they go to one of the user generated content. Also, what is the next step that has the most amount of influence in people ending up placing an order. That is easy for you to understand, all of the math and computation is done for you already, and you can take quick action.

If turns out that one particular next step is causing people to buy more, well you could figure out how you could merchandize better that particular step, or how could you learn what is not happening in the other paths, and this is a very unique report to Google Analytics. The nice thing is that it actually helps you drive action. The same thing goes to the other two things you mentioned, Eric, which were entrance sources and keywords. I am always encouraging people to try and understand customer intent because if you understand customer intent, you will be much better able to analyze if the content on the page is actually delivering value to them. So by analyzing data, by entrance sources and entrance keywords, you get a peak into the customer's mind, what were people thinking of when they enter the page, and what were the top keywords that built traffic to the page.

If you find that there are specific kinds of keywords that drive traffic to a page, you can match up to say, hey is the page doing its job, and do I have content related to that those keywords on that page? Same thing with entrance sources. What are the websites that are driving traffic to this page, and am I communicating on this particular page? You can see that within three mouse clicks now, you have a wealth of information that you can use to understand customer intent, why do people come to your website, how they are coming, but also then optimize their content in the page and the navigation structure and merchandizing to ensure that people are able to reach the goals that you want them to accomplish on the websites. It is a very powerful set of tools that are now available to all users.

Eric Enge: Right. So in terms of entrance sources, what you are really looking at is, are people who are initially landing on the page that you are examining from some other person's site, is that right?

Avinash Kaushik: That is absolutely correct. In fact with the massive proliferation of search engine optimization strategy, and all of the robots from search engines indexing your websites, one of the myths out there is that, the home page is still most important page in the world. Well, it is a important page, but it is not the most important page because roughly eighty percent of the world now starts at the search engine when they are looking for something and they are going directly to a deep page in your website. So they are not looking at the holy message that you might have on the home page, rather they are going directly to the relevant content to them, and it is important that you treat every page on your website, or at least most pages on your website, as the home page, with the same love and attention you give to your home page.

What the entrance sources helps you understand is, if people are landing directly on this page on my website, where are they coming from and what is the value proposition I can create on the landing page to ensure that customers get what they are looking for.

Eric Enge: Right. So the Entrance Sources report allows you to evaluate pages as initial landing pages. Whereas in the case of the entrance page report you could be looking at a step that is already part way down the process, and it is not a necessarily the initial landing page on the site. It could be the second, third, or a later page someone visits, but you are really trying to see how they behave on the page and compare their behavior on that page to their behavior on other pages.

Avinash Kaushik: Exactly. A simple way to think about it is, you start your analysis by understanding what are the sources that send traffic to my website, that is the entrance sources. Then you want to understand if people came from a search engine, what keywords they are using to find this page. Once you have a good understanding of that, the next step for you would be analyze the entrance path, what happens from this page on and is this page effective, and what next step is effective in driving people to reach a goal on your website. So that is how I would order it, sources, keywords, paths.

Eric Enge: Right. Excellent. So, Avinash, not too long ago, you were an employee of Intuit, back on March 6th, I believe you made the announcement that you were leaving. What was it that motivated you to leave Intuit and accept a role with Google?

Avinash Kaushik: It is the great food. I had a great omelet with some basil, cilantro and pepper, and tomato sauce. It is like the best omelet I had ever had.

Brett Crosby: Avinash, always shares his Google diet.

Avinash Kaushik: Right. Seriously, At Intuit I had the opportunity to work with some tremendous people in a very good company that really does focus on customer driven innovation and is very focused on analytics. And during that time, I had the opportunity to build out a team and a framework, and that is working, that was received well, and after building that team and putting all of the structure in place I was thinking about what should be the next step that I potentially could consider. And Brett and I actually met at a Frost and Sullivan event almost a year and a half ago and we had been having conversations and chatting about Google.

There was just a great opportunity that Google and Brett crafted for me, where I could come and play the kind of role that I really felt very passionate about, and try and take some of my modest accomplishments in Intuit and see how I could actually help evangelize some of those to other companies and to a broader ecosystem. That is definitely a passion of mine, education, teaching, and speaking. I felt like I would have the opportunity to help build something. The Google offer to me was a great value proposition that, along with the great food, that helped me make that decision to take this next step in my career.

Eric Enge: You began that outward focus when you launched the Occam's Razor blog. You could see it in your blog posts, you are constantly talking about interesting ways to use analytics to help your business, and have shown that passion for quite some time through the blog.

Avinash Kaushik: Thank you, Eric. Yeah. I am actually very gratified with the growth of blog, it has just been around for a year now, and it gets lots of traffic and some amazing conversations. In comments, readers of the blog have written just as many words as I have written in the blog, which is fantastic. So it is great to be able to have this sort of a conversation with people from all over the world, and help move the ball forward when it comes to web analytics and the mind set that should be applied and the kinds of approaches that can yield very powerful results for a company of any size.

Eric Enge: What are your responsibilities in your role at Google?

Avinash Kaushik: I have two primary goals at Google. One of my roles is actually to focus inward at Google. Google as you can imagine does tremendous amounts of great marketing of itself for its products and services. It also uses analytics to actually measure the effectiveness of the website that Google has. Almost all Google properties have Google Analytics on it. So not only do we use Google Analytics, but analytics scales to the power and size that a company the size of Google needs in order to meet its analytics needs. I work with these internal teams to help lay out an approach, metrics, reports, and analysis that can be done to better understand behavior on our sites as well as effectively measure ROI on marketing campaigns that Google itself runs. A part of my role is inward focused.

Then a part of the role is actually externally focused, and which is something I tremendously enjoy, which is to help through speaking engagements, writing, and various other things that we are going to be doing, to help improve the knowledge and expertise in the ecosystem in the broad external web analytics communities with big and small companies, and to help them simply use data better. Because Google Analytics is pretty much on every site in the world already, we are not trying to get more people to use Google Analytics. The focus is what are the specific things that we can do to ensure that people get maximum value out of the analytics tools they use and how can we actually provide tips, tricks, best practices, lessons, and case studies so that people can begin to actually extract value from the data that is already been collecting from the website.

A lot of these will be covered using Google Analytics, but essentially a lot of the curriculum that is going to go out is something anybody using any tool could use and benefit from. There is nothing that is so top secret that only Google Analytic users will benefit from it, the goal is to improve the knowledge of the ecosystem so everybody can benefit and use their tools and data much more effectively to improve their website, improve their customer experience on the website, and of course improve conversion rate. Does that make sense?

Eric Enge: Absolutely.

Brett Crosby: In traditional Avinash style is selling himself a little bit short and being very humble. He is also doing a lot of other things, not just those few things, but he is also helping us develop, new features and ideas for new releases and things like that. So, Avinash, we are extremely lucky to have you here.

Avinash Kaushik: Oh, thanks. The thing is Eric , one of the things that we want to have is an extreme amount of customer centricity to a tool and you saw that definitely with the version-2 launch, which happened before I joined Google. I was thrilled to see the amount of thought that had gone into creating the new version of Google Analytics which is focused on understanding who are the customers, what do they need, and how can we make their lives better and easier by improving the interaction layer, by allowing custom dashboards and all these things.

All this happened before I got here, I was so excited to see the next version of Google Analytics. One of the other things that I hope to bring is through my experience and background, having worked in big and small companies and worked with real people and real users who actually use the data day-to-day, is to bring that customer centricity to the team here so we can continue our evolution, so that Google Analytics will remain a tool that is squarely focused of it's customers and meeting the needs of the customers in a very quick and prompt fashion.

Eric Enge: Right. One last quick question for you guys. I saw on your blog yesterday, Avinash, the only announcement I have seen publicly that John Marshall is leaving ClickTracks.

Avinash Kaushik: Yes. John has decided to leave ClickTracks, I have known John for a long time. He is a great guy, and we've collaborated very often. I have used ClickTracks over the years quite a bit. And John has added a lot of value to the overall web analytics ecosystem, and I think that he has exciting plans for what he is going to do next, and I am very excited to have worked with him because he has been very good participant of the ecosystem. I think ClickTracks will probably miss him, but John is doing great. I know Brett, you have met John several times as well.

Brett Crosby: Oh yeah. I think very highly of John. Everyone has shared their stories on their blog, so I'll share mine. The first time I met John Marshall was, I believe at the 2003 SES San Jose show. It was the first time I had spoken at that show and I think John's first time too. It was interesting because, it was pretty early on in SES history, I think there were maybe a few hundred people at the show or something, and pretty much all the vendors were essentially doing vendor pitches. John did something completely different, and it was great. He talked about the poster that shows Napoleon's march into Russia and all the casualties along the way. I forget the French guy's name who put the poster together, but it was a great presentation. Basically his point was, look this is a great way to show data and someone who is very passionate about illustrating a lot of information in one presentable format. He said as web analytics vendors we have a long way to go. Obviously he was right at that time and he is still right, we do have a long way to go. I think it gives a long bright fuure to the web analytics industry. Hopefully this latest version of Google analytics is a step forward on that, and I do not think we are fully there yet. We have more to go, I know there are more features people want out there, plenty of things, and we have got a very healthy road map ahead of us.

Eric Enge: Yes. Indeed. Well guys, thanks very much for taking the time to speak with me today. Very much enjoyed it.

Avinash Kaushik: Thanks, it was pleasure, Eric.

Brett Crosby: Thanks, Eric.

Podcast with Greg Jarboe and Eric Enge on Web PR

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:19:08 -0400

Transcript of Greg Jarboe Podcast with Eric Enge on Web PR

The following is a written transcript of the April 30, 2007 podcast between Eric Enge and Greg Jarboe:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Greg Jarboe, the co-founder of SEO-PR and we plan to talk about Web PR strategies, and see the SEO-PR website at www.SEO-PR.com. How are you doing Greg?

Greg Jarboe: Good Eric.

Eric Enge: Well, thanks for joining us today. So, let's talk a little bit about the way the PR process used to work as a starting question.

Greg Jarboe: Well, how far back do you want to go? Do you want to go back to when I started, or back when they were crossing the planes and covered wagons?

Eric Enge: Well, let's keep it reasonable and see as we can talk about something like ten years ago.

Greg Jarboe: Okay. Ten years ago public relations was starting to change in a more fundamental way then it had in the previous ninety years. Public relations as a profession was actually only created at the very beginning of the 20th century by pioneers including Ivy Lee and Edward Bernaise. But, by a decade ago, the advent of the Internet was reshaping public relations as people had been practicing it for ninety years in some fairly fundamental ways. Prior to 1997, we focused almost all our attention on journalists. And, the whole public relations profession may have been a misnomer.

You called it public relations, but it was really media relations; you pitched stories to journalists and they either wrote the stories or they didn't and then you were either made or broken by how you were pitched. These days journalists are struggling with their own transitions; there are today about half as many paid journalists around the United States as they were in 1990. A lot of their jobs have evaporated. A lot of the publications that they used to work for don't exist anymore. I know a number of them, because I used to work with them in '90s at Ziff Davis.

Titles like PC Computing are gone; titles like Interactive Week are gone; titles like Yahoo Internet Life are gone, ZDTV is gone and all those journalistic chaps are gone with them. And, in their place, two things have popped up, one of which is bloggers at last count by Technorati, there are over seventy-one million blogs, and it's a hundred and forty times more than they were just four years ago.

The other thing that's come along is search, and the pioneer there was Google, taking a look at it in October of 2002. The first time I did a search and found press releases in the results, I knew that that was a fundamental shift. Now, PR people could communicate directly to an audience, whether or not the press decided to write the story or decided to pass on it.

Eric Enge: Right. That's really a big shift as you say. It seems like one other thing then that this does is it effects how you put your message together, because you get much more direct in conversation with the consumer, and your messaging would be different.

Greg Jarboe: Yes and no. Messaging to reporters isn't that different than messaging to consumers. You still want to speak in plain, understandable English, hype isn't appreciated by either journalists or prospects. Give me the facts, let me make the decision for myself is actually fairly consistent across both audiences. The one fundamental difference though is that your call to action is different. In the old days, the press release basically invited the reporter to please call me for an interview. And, that's still part of most standard press releases, you are still asking for the press to contact you. But now, you have a second call to action possible, which is to give the prospect a link in your release to more information about the company or the product, or click here and go to the website, and now the consumer has a call to action as well.

Eric Enge: I've also seen it suggested that in the new environment, that one of the things you change is the hurdle you have to get over before its good enough news to announce. In other words you'd be announcing potentially smaller events and occurrences and getting a higher frequency of getting press releases out there. What's your take on that?

Greg Jarboe: I guess I take a little different view on that. If you had specialized news in the past that had a narrow audience, your job as PR person was to go find the specialized media that covered that area. Not every story is going to get picked up by the main stream media. But, if you've got something that is only interesting to people who are interested in a cool thing, guess what, there are cool thing magazines out there that you can go pitch the story too. There is always niche media that you could go pitch specialized stories too. What has changed, and what is different is, what is News? News; having something important to say is still useful, whether it's to a consumer or to a reporter. But, the consumer often has a different take on what is News to them, then a reporter might.

Let me give you a good example. We did some work back in 2004 for Southwest Airlines, and they were announcing new service to Philadelphia. As a part of their launch, they announced a $29 airfare one way. Now, there is a story there, if you are interested in Southwest Airlines adding the fifty-ninth city to the number of cities they service. Although, it's not one that might catch most reporters' eyes, but you tell a consumer, you can get the flight to Philadelphia for $29, and that is a story for them.

Eric Enge: Right. So, that is the case where it would cause you to do things more frequently then you might have previously. But, it's really because of what the consumer thinks is important, and how it differs from what the traditional media person or the bloggers think is important.

Greg Jarboe: Exactly. Most journalists, and this has been true for hundreds of years; this isn't anything new, are focused on politics and they are focused on celebrities, and the public is also focused on celebrities, and to some extent politics. But, they have another range of interests that journalists reluctantly get around to covering from time to time. Bargains, or sales for example, is something no journalist would ever report on. But, I will tell you what, consumers want that information.

Eric Enge: Right, exactly. You mentioned before that the number of journalists is about half of what it was in 1990. And, you also talked about how the bloggers are now a substantial portion of the target audience. But, talking that traditional media, do you approach them differently than you used to or is the approach really the same as it was before?

Greg Jarboe: It's actually very similar. Pitching an A-level blogger is just as difficult as pitching a main stream reporter. Both of them are conscious for time. Both of them want to get the story out early. And, you need to establish personal relationships with bloggers as well as with reporters, if they are going to take your call or return your call on a regular basis. And so, in some respects the fundamentals of public relations are the same. What is different is most PR people have a fairly good handle on, if it's the New York Times calling; boy, you better take their call or return their call quickly. So, they have a sense of main stream media's pecking order, and the same is true for A-list bloggers. Note that Technorati just a week ago changed its ranking format, and I had to go back in and re-double check who the top hundred bloggers were as now they were ranked differently.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, and also it's the top bloggers in your particular space that matter, and you have to have that mapping and that's not always so easy to figure out. I can tell you from my own experience in terms of seeing what sort of Click-through rates I get from mentions in various blogs. The click-through levels I get from certain blogs definitely don't lineup with the perceived readership of those blogs.

Greg Jarboe: There is a second factor too. We did some work last summer for the Christian Science Monitor, and we were tracking the traffic and where it came from. We got more traffic, in fact three or four times more traffic from the Huffington Post then we got from ABC News. And, ABC News had run it on the evening television, and then the morning television and they put it permanently on their homepage, on their website. And, Huffington Post still generated more traffic, and I don't think that's because they have a bigger audience. Audience size is one issue, but I also think it's they engage their audience a little more fundamentally, and are more likely to energize an audience and send it your way, then to merely inform the audience and then some set of that audience might be curious enough to look for more.

Eric Enge: One thing that I have always liked about dealing with a blogger is, because they are always putting messages out there, that you can actually see what needs they are expressing, and use that as opportunities to build relationships with them, which makes it that much easier to get them to post about your stuff when you have it. I am not sure the dynamics of doing that are as simple with traditional media people.

Greg Jarboe: Well, there is another factor, which is traditional media people generally wrote for offline media, and links was sort of an after thought. And, nobody had the time, and nobody built the web editorial stuff to add the links. And so, you might get publicity, but you might not get a link to your site. With bloggers on the other hand, links are almost fundamental to what they do and so again you can get two stories; one has a link, one doesn't, and the one with the link is more likely to be found on a blog.

Eric Enge: Right. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about optimizing press releases and things like that. What are your top tips for optimizing a release?

Greg Jarboe: Well, the first one is to do keyword research and that's pretty fundamental whether you are optimizing a Webpage or Press Release, or Blog Post or almost anything else that you might want to optimize these days. And, the one tip I guess I would give people is to recognize that News search engines have a different algorithm from web search engines, and that news search terms are different from web search terms. So, just because they are looking for it on Google, doesn't necessarily mean they are looking for it on Google News. The fastest way to get a feeling for that is to go to Google Trends and type in a term and the Trend line in the top chart will show you what the web search terms are. Underneath it will be a news search term and they will find that the peaks and the valleys and the spikes don't always coincide. So, understanding that News search is a little different than web search is the first step.

Eric Enge: You can use Google Trends then to get keyword data for News Search, or how do you go about getting it?

Greg Jarboe: That's one way to do it. There are a couple of other ways. Keyword Discovery actually now has one of its databases include news search terms in addition to web search terms, so you can also get them that way. Or, the other thing you can do is go to Yahoo News, do a couple of searches and up at the top Yahoo News will say also try, and that will give you then a sense of what three or four word variations of the two word term you typed in might look like.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you can presume that Yahoo! is showing the most commonly used, related phrases. So, you are not getting direct volume numbers, the way you are used to in other tools, but you are in another ways getting indicators of most important phrases.

Greg Jarboe: Exactly, I remembered shortly after Hurricane Katrina trying to trying to optimize a press release about Hurricane Katrina. And, every one of the normal keyword research tools told me nobody was searching for Hurricane Katrina, it wasn't a term. That's basically because most of those tools take data from the previous months and when a news event like that happens it won't report it until after the effect.

That's when we started learning to go to Yahoo News and some other tactics and techniques to try to figure out the search terms that popped up overnight.

Eric Enge: Right. Because, there was urgency there to be much more real time, so they are more likely to have that data update quickly.

Greg Jarboe: Yeah. It's a different world and again it's one of the several subtle but significant differences when you are tackling optimizing a press release.

Eric Enge: Right. It's also interesting to me just as a quick side bar here that, and I don't think most people realize this, Yahoo News is much bigger than Google News.

Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And, that does come as a shock to people, but Yahoo News has actually been around since 1995, and Google News was launched in the fall of 2002. Although Google News was the first to go beyond the typical top one hundred news sources to index four thousand five hundred different news sources. Yahoo News has been around for longer and I think its position in the portal has also helped it build an audience over the years, and it's held on with their audience.

Eric Enge: All right. People forget what leverage Yahoo gets out of all their destination sites.

Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And, they do actually a much more better job with hanging on to their traffic after they get it. So, you'll find that where Google News will point to the headline and a snippet of text over press release over on wire service site, Yahoo News actually takes a copy of the press release, keeps it within Yahoo News and serves ads around it. So, it's trying to harvest that traffic a different way.

Eric Enge: Right. So, getting back to optimizing, the keyword research is used to help drive your title, and some other ways in which to put the content together. But, how about putting links in the release and what's the strategy for that?

Greg Jarboe: Well, the strategy there has shifted; up until December of 2005, anchor text was golden in press releases. And then, unfortunately too many people through the Fall of 2004, and Spring and Summer of 2005 began abusing that by creating a whole new category of Link Spam by creating bogus press releases and just to get the anchor text in the so called release to build links to sites in who knows what industry. Both Google News and Yahoo News changed the way they treat anchor text in press releases and they have now basically eliminated the page rank value of those anchor text links. So, if that is the reason that someone is throwing anchor text in a press release, it stopped working about two years ago.

What still does work, though, is if it's a legitimate release with real news and you get a consumer reading the release, that link is still a traffic builder. So, while it does not have page rank and indirect search engine optimization benefits, it still will send visitors to content on your page and that still has a benefit. The second benefit that the link has is, if a blogger or a journalist picks up the story, and if they then decide to include the link in their story then that link is gold. So, having the link there and encouraging the bloggers and the press that this is relevant information can pay big dividends.

Eric Enge: Right. So, at the end of the day then just throwing press releases out there isn't building link value by itself, and you still need to focus on having a really high quality content in your press release, so that people will take it up and consumers will read it and click through on it, or that people will pick it up and republish the press release and now you are getting link value.

Greg Jarboe: Exactly. And, one other thing that we've found working with our clients on tracking all of this is that the press releases do generate traffic. And, they create measurable traffic, you can tell how many people have come from the wire service release. What is underestimated is that publicity also generates traffic, whether its main stream media or its blogs, and that publicity can sometimes be twenty times more traffic then the press release itself. And so, again the fundamentals of PR are still there, the press release is valuable, it generates traffic, but the publicity is the big multiplier.

Eric Enge: Right. And, since you mentioned it, let's talk a little bit about tracking the results. What are the techniques that you'd recommend for doing that?

Greg Jarboe: Well, each of the wire services now have gotten SEO religion, and are starting to offer some kind of measurement package with their SEO offerings. So, you'll find that's true whether you are using a Business Wire, or PR News wire, or PR web, or Market Wire, or Prime News Wire. All five of those wire services have some kind of SEO tracking package. What all of them track is traffic to the release from Google News, because again Yahoo News takes a copy of it. Unfortunately, as a result you don't get to measure the traffic to the Yahoo News version of the release. And so, that's something that whichever wire service you use, you should make sure that you take advantage of whatever the metrics are that they are offering.

Eric Enge: Right. Just recognize that they are not covering Yahoo News, which is the biggest one out there.

Greg Jarboe: Yeah. You are getting a partial picture, but it is still a useful piece of information.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Greg Jarboe: And, then the way to get the full picture, because obviously the wire services can't track your publicity, they can't track your blog coverage, and they can't track Yahoo News is then to make sure that you are using your web analytic software, that you are taking a broader view and not only looking at the traffic that came in from the wire service or the press release. But, looking at the referrers in your log and identifying the new sources that generated traffic to you, and then connecting the dots. We've done that for a variety of clients, and they are just stunned at just how much of a traffic driver a good healthy, newsworthy public relations campaign can be.

Eric Enge: Right. And, are there any special tools that you use?

Greg Jarboe: There are, and one that we've been data testing for the last several months is called BuzzLogic. What it enables us to do is not only identify who the top bloggers are, you can go figure that up by looking at Technorati and looking at the top hundred. What it does is identify the top bloggers by conversation, so as you mentioned earlier, I am not interested in showing who is just generally popular, I am interested in who is the most influential blogger in the special key area that I am focused on. And, what BuzzLogic does is generally identify the blog post that had the biggest ripple effect, but it also let's you see at the clients both who was upstream, in other words who the blogger linked to, and then who was downstream. I.e., who linked to the bloggers' post, and you can map out the influence model.

Eric Enge: Right. So, it gives you a quick picture that you can use to just figure out who you are going to work the hardest on.

Greg Jarboe: Well, exactly. We just presented a case study earlier this week at the MarketingSherpa Summit for work that we did with Window Secrets, a newsletter. And, we were able to identify the top bloggers, invite them to a webinar the day before a big story broke, and to brief them on what was going to be in the story. They then of course did their articles and blog posts, and what we were able to do is double the, not only the amount of traffic to this site, but also double the number of subscriptions over the first week; over any previous story that they had ever run.

Eric Enge: That's great. What about tools like Vocus for example that provide you lots of information and contact information on various kinds of journalists out there?

Greg Jarboe: All that is useful, but in some cases it's useful as having a phonebook. What is more important is not only knowing who to call, but having a relationship with them. If you are cold calling an important journalist, it's good to have their phone number or their email address. But, if they don't know you and you've never worked with them before, put it this way, it's like any cold calling, it's a lot of calls and very few acceptances.

Eric Enge: Right. You have to be thick skinned to do that kind of work.

Greg Jarboe: Well, you can put junior people on it, because sometimes they don't know enough to be frustrated yet. But, more often then that, the better way to go is to work within a segment of the industry long enough so that people know you and you know them. So, you are not calling somebody for the first time.

Eric Enge: Right; any other tools worth mentioning before we wrap it up?

Greg Jarboe: Well, let's see. One of the ones that we like using is ClickTracks. We use it a little differently then most people do. Most people would just put it on the website like web analytics software. We like to use the hosted version of ClickTracks; and we take snippet of the JavaScript, and we put it on the press release, but we also then put it on the landing page and that helps us sort of connect the dots in the ways that even the wire service matrics don't give you.

Eric Enge: So, you actually embed it in the body of the press release itself. That way when people put it on sites in different places, you can actually have a little bit of your ClickTracks JavaScript sitting on their domain.

Greg Jarboe: Well, if you are lucky, a lot of the scrapers of course wouldn't pick that up, but when it is distributed through XML then yes, you do get it picked up, and you can get a little more robust tracking.

Eric Enge: Right. You are not trying to do anything other then just track the clicks through to your own site from various postings to the press release.

Greg Jarboe: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Great Greg. I think it's been fun and thanks for talking with us today.

Greg Jarboe: Well, thank you Eric. I have enjoyed it.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

For more podcasts see: Podcasts about Web Analytics and Search

For articles see: Articles and Interviews about Web Marketing and Web Analytics

Podcast with Brian Induni and Eric Enge - Emetrics and the WAA

Thu, 24 May 2007 09:24:43 -0700

The following is a written transcript of the May 15, 2007 podcast between Brian Induni and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Brian Induni, the Executive Director of the Web Analytics Association, and also the President, Induni Northwest. We plan to talk today about Emetrics and the web analytics association. You can see the WAA website at www.webanalyticsassociation.org, and you can see the Induni Northwest website at www.induninw.com. So, how are we doing today Brian?

Brian Induni: Oh, good Eric. Thanks very much for inviting me to this podcast.

Eric Enge: Yes indeed. What were your impressions of how the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco went last week?

Brian Induni: The Emetrics Summit was a fantastic event. I really believe it's the only event of its kind for the web analytics industry, and as always it far exceeded my expectations. I would speculate that the rest of the attendees felt the same. Jim Sterne does a fantastic job of paying attention to the details and having a live variety of keynote speakers. And, also helping the attendees be very organized to optimize the Summit's benefits to them. He does that through various pre-mailings and the speakers that he has there. And then, finally, Jim Sterne is involved with all of the attendees during the conference, and I think that provides a huge benefit for those folks that are there. I really look forward to the fall Summit in DC and hoping to make the trip to Europe for the Summit there as well. The Web Analytics Association is really proud to be a lifetime sponsor of this event, and feel that this relationship with the WAA and the Emetrics Summit is a huge benefit to our members.

Eric Enge: I imagine you get vendors, large companies looking to communicate with a lot of vendors efficiently and rapidly, as well as people who are going there just to learn about analytics. Is that a fair assessment?

Brian Induni: It really is. The people attending are all over the spectrum, and in fact I find to my surprise I found a lot of the larger companies that are there send high level executives who are there to learn about web analytics, so that they can drive the buying process, and also to help their teams succeed in their missions in the web analytics space within their companies.

Eric Enge: It's an interesting point about driving the buying process, which is obviously so critical in the analytics world, and it really is an education process, isn't it?

Brian Induni: It sure is, and as a matter of fact, one of the workshops that the WAA organized on the training day was a half day workshop on creating and managing that business culture. So, at least it's a known factor from both sides, the folks that do the analytics in the industry, and from the executives in the corporation. That's been a stumbling block over the years, but now that we have realization on both sides I think, there is a swift movement in the right direction.

Eric Enge: Right. So, since you mentioned the WAA training day, can you talk a little bit more about that and some of the workshops that took place and how it was received?

Brian Induni: Sure. On Sunday, the day before the Emetrics Summit began, the WAA held four, one and a half day workshops. And, these workshops were introduction to web analytics; web analytics for site optimization and online marketing campaigning measurement, and, creating and managing the correct business culture around analytics. So, as you can see, we've tried to address those for highest level topics with as much detail as possible in that short amount of time. These workshops really aren't designed to be a replacement for our courses that we've created for the University of British Colombia. And, a lot of folks have asked me that, are these a summary of those courses? And, they are really not designed to be a summary or a replacement for them, as each of the courses at the University of British Colombia are four weeks long.

Eric Enge: You're not going to do that in a half day, right?

Brian Induni: You are not going to do that in a half day, it doesn't come close to getting in to the detail in four weeks. But, it's really designed to be more of an overview of areas to learn about. It just gives you that knowledge to come up with the questions to ask. And, it really prepares you for the Emetrics Summit event to kind of get into the mind frame of questions, and who to go to for answers. And, so the training day workshops were very well received, and each one was filled to near capacity all the time. This is the second time we have offered this workshop. The first time being in the Emetrics Summit in DC last fall, so the audience always provides great feedback for us, and we continue to incorporate that feedback and suggestions into future workshops. But, I'd say, overall these workshops are a huge success, and we are hoping to expand these as we go forward.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you certainly plan to offer the workshops in the fall at the DC Emetrics Summit.

Brian Induni: That is the plan, yes. And, it really does it help the attendees get into the mind frame of what's to come for the week, because it's like drinking from a fire hose when you get to the Emetrics Summit. There is so much to know and so many people, the gurus of the industry are there, and you really need to be prepared for how to take all of that in.

Eric Enge: It's a testament to the training sessions that the workshops are basically filled to capacity, even though you have to get there a day early to participate in them. That means people were really willing to commit a lot of effort to participate, which is great.

You also had a WAA member meeting and reception at the Emetrics, how did that go, and what took place?

Brian Induni: We had a lot of other events actually, it was very intertwined throughout the week, but immediately following the workshops, we had a member meeting and we had roughly eighty WAA members attend the member meeting. The agenda really was comprised of updates in the committees, and a review of the organization over the past year. We reviewed financials, we reviewed the board members and talked about the new board members that were being elected in. And, following the member meeting, we had a WAA hosted reception and this is really where the members could get to know one another. And then, this is the time that they get to put faces to names, and get to know one another, rub elbows with those leaders of the industry that we call the gurus. And then, on Tuesday evening we held our web analytics Wednesday.

Eric Enge: Web analytics Wednesday on Tuesday? That makes a lot of sense.

Brian Induni: Web analytics Wednesday on Tuesday, yeah. So, it was a little confusing to some, but really and this is the second time we've done it at the Emetrics Summit. And, since the Summit ends on Wednesday, we wanted to make sure that we gave all of those people that were there for the Emetrics Summit event and the WAA event, a chance to meet again in an informal setting. So, this was a non-member kind of a meeting, and a chance meet each other and discuss the industry or discuss topics of interest and mix with those folks that they had heard of, but not seen yet.

Eric Enge: So, this notion of web analytics Wednesday, talk a little bit more about that, because as I understand it, this is a thing that is happening on a regular basis across the globe.

Brian Induni: Yes, it does. The web analytics Wednesdays are an organized event, I believe Eric Peterson is the one that kicked these off, and they are designed to be a meeting of folks interested in the industry. I believe it happens on the second Wednesday or third Wednesday of the month. And, it's designed so that you meet in an informal setting, and you just discuss what's interesting in the world of web analytics, or what questions you might have, or just to meet others to learn more. It's turned into a bit of a competition across the globe. So, the Nordic regions are beating out just about everybody in the world. As a matter of fact, I am looking at the calendar here, in April I believe they had sixty people at this informal event that usually happens in a pub or local restaurant or dining hall. It's a great informal way for people to get together and just discuss what's going on in the industry.

Eric Enge: Right. And, make they connections and network along the way, right?

Brian Induni: Exactly. That is one of the mantras of the web analytics association, and it's difficult in an industry where you have the gurus, the holders of the knowledge that have been in the industry for so long, and then so many people coming into the industry. You have such a gamut of knowledge range, and people are dispersed geographically that sometimes it's difficult to know where to get the information or what questions to ask. So, just being in the same room with people that know more than you do, you tend to just absorb that information and awfully quick.

Eric Enge: Right. And, another thing you mentioned just earlier on is the educational programs that you have with the University of British Colombia. But, I understand you are expanding that now, and you are going to have other schools participating; why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Brian Induni: The program that we created in conjunction with the University of British Colombia is essentially a four course program that allows you graduate with an award of achievement. It's an online program, so each course is four weeks long. You could potentially blast through these in less than sixteen weeks if you tried. But, since the courses are offered at certain times, doubling up is difficult, and they usually are sold out well in advance to capacity. They really do cover the topics that we talked about at our training day workshops with the introduction to web analytics; the web analytics per site optimization; the online marketing campaign and then creating the business culture. But, they really get into it deep and give you a lot more history and information on where go for more information.

The last course was finished in November of 2006. So, we are getting our first graduate out of that course at the end of December, and now we are into a next cycle of first graduates through these four courses again. So, we've taken that concept of these core courses that allow people to graduate with an award of achievement, and brought them to other universities and are talking to universities about wrapping other courses around these core competency courses to allow you to graduate with a certificate. The first University that we are speaking with is the University of Irvine, I believe that they will offer our courses in a cafeteria style, and allow you to wrap other programs surrounding them to suit your business, or IT, or small business focus. And, you can come out with that certificate that is applicable to your area at the world.

Eric Enge: Now, do you imagine that you will move towards certification programs in the future, or what's the thinking on that?

Brain Induni: Certification is something that is very sought after, similar to Microsoft certification or Cisco certification. Our members and folks in the industry are really asking for some level of certification that allows them to be WAA certified, and that being more than just a stamp, but meaning something that they can bring to really a potential employer, or make them more valuable in the industry. There is a huge effort going on right now with that program, and as a matter of fact our education committee, who created these courses for the University of British Columbia is actively working on that certification program now, and they would love to have some volunteers to help on that program.

Eric Enge: Excellent. Switching back to Emetrics a little bit, what were the biggest things that you found or heard about during the Summit?

Brain Induni: I think we are in the middle of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood in the industry. We are starting to get wired a little bit differently, and we are starting to behave a little bit differently. We are an industry we are moving into adulthood, and I feel that way with the Web Analytics Association as well. We are a true organization with members around the globe with money to spend on programs. So, I learned that we have a lot of people in this industry that really cover the full spectrum of knowledge, creative ideas and leadership. We are learning more about the future direction of web applications, and how this impacts measurements and analytics was really a major highlight for me. I talk with a lot of other folks that really had this light bulb going up over their head, and the aha look in their eyes. For example, you talk about Web 2.0 and what is Web 2.0? And, there were a lot of light bulbs going off. I was actually fortunate enough to have very in-depth thought provoking conversation with Judah Philips from Reed Publishing. We were talking about where Web 2.0 is heading. We finally came up with a conclusion that it really could be summed up by one commodity creating term which is a Hippy-Ricky. We are just catching up with 2.0, and now it's moving forward again.

So, some of these ideas that came out of the summit were extremely thought provoking. I found that the seasoned veterans could renew their basic knowledge, and this was really confirmed by speaking with several director level attendees, who went to some of the introduction courses. And, in some of the true newbies to the industry, they are just so hungry for this knowledge and answers. The Emetrics Summit is such a great place for finding everything from the basics, to the way out there thought provoking kinds of things. I really enjoyed that experience, and I think that that's a true testament to what the Emetrics Summit is all about.

Eric Enge: Right. For listeners let me point out that one of the big challenges with things like Web 2.0 is deciding what it is that you are going to measure. And, it's really very difficult, because the page view is no longer necessarily a page view, and many "views" can happen dynamically in one page. This creates a very different environment for deciding how you measure the performance of a website.

Brain Induni: That's right. And, listening to some of the sessions, and listening to what some of the speakers had to say about that challenge was enlightening, and I think it; you have to be there to understand what's happening with 2.0. You have to be at that point of Web 2.0, not creating it, but realizing the challenges that you face in measuring the type of dynamically created information.

Eric Enge: Right. Ultimately measuring is easy, but the hard part is measuring what?

Brain Induni: Exactly. And, if you measure everything, you will go into analysis paralysis.

Eric Enge: Right. I was also fascinated with the re-branding of WebSideStory into Visual Sciences. As I understand it, one of the major reasons for that is that the company is so focused on cross channel integration that having "web" be an integral part of the company name seemed like a problem to them. But, it seems like there are a lot of other implications to everything they are doing there as well.

Brain Induni: Yeah. I think the company, Visual Sciences, has a wonderfully visual product. And, I think that's been the biggest challenge in web analytics, making it easy to get some information. So, where they are heading with a product that integrates all of their marketing channels into a visual source of actionable information is something that I think you are starting to see more companies do.

Unica is also very focused on that, and so I was happy to see that Visual Sciences has taken that next step, and I go back to my statement earlier - we are really transitioning into adulthood. And, with this absorption of companies into one and creating Visual Sciences brand for their company, it really makes them look like that next level of real business in this industry. And, that was one of the other things that I found at this Summit, which was everybody wants to integrate their channels, and everybody wants to know how their offline marketing helps their online sales. And, that to me really is the nirvana of all of this, and I think we are starting to see more and more companies see the web analytics role, the web analyst role within their organization, as part of their marketing functions.

Eric Enge: As part of this, Eric Peterson has gone off to do his own thing.

Brain Induni: Yes, he has. I am not sure of the details of all of that. I am sure Eric will blog about it, and get into more detail. He is focusing, I believe, on his next book, and updating some others. He is going to be doing similar types of training and speaking as Jim Sterne does. So, I think that will be a great benefit to the industry having Eric Peterson available out there instead of being either an analyst, or a vendor, but being available for our folks to go to for information, I think it's going to be a huge benefit.

Eric Enge: Right. Of course not too long ago Avinash Kaushik did the same thing in terms of going independent and then becoming the Google Analytics evangelist. It seems like a lot of the big names are setting up independent shop at this point.

Brain Induni: I think you are going to see more material come from them in terms of books, best practices, and white papers. I think that is going to be a wonderful benefit to all of us. Avinash is actually creating a book, writing a book right now, and that looks very interesting and I am excited to get a copy of that.

Eric Enge: It's called Web Analytics an Hour a Day. Also, Google Analytics came up with a major new release. I believe they just announced it last Tuesday, and that seemed like a pretty good step forward for them as well.

Brain Induni: Yeah. I think Google Analytics is always talked about now, as being the point that a lot of people can get started with. So, you either have people or money to get started in something like this, and Google Analytics allows you to bypass that money part being a free application. And, part of that challenge that I believe they've had in the past has been the interface, so it looks like they've offered a new interface, and some other optimizing types of tools. So, I think they are heading in the right direction with an offering for some of the smaller businesses who can't afford to get into web analytics very seriously these days. So, I think they are really helping people understand and learn, and helping businesses get into this world of web analytics.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. I think it was a great step forward for them personally. I think if it as closing a bit of the gap that it opened up between them, and the other products out there.

Brain Induni: Yes, absolutely.

Eric Enge: Well, great. I think that was a good overview of what's going on with the Emetrics and the WAA. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today, Brian.

Brain Induni: Well, thank you Eric!

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

For more podcasts see: Podcasts about Web Analytics and Search

For articles see: Articles and Interviews about Web Marketing and Web Analytics

Neil Patel Podcast with Eric Enge (2 of 2)

Mon, 21 May 2007 10:40:43 -0700

The following is a written transcript of the April 30, 2007 podcast between Eric Enge and Neil Patel. This is part II of a two part series on how to win at Digg.:

Eric Enge: Hi, I'm Eric Enge, the president of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Neil Patel the CTO of ACS and we plan to talk about Digg. This is actually the second part of a two part series that Neil and I have been doing on that topic. You can see the ACS website at www.acsseo.com, and ACS also has a blog at www.pronetadvertising.com. Hi, Neil.

Neil Patel: How are you?

Eric Enge: I'm doing great. So, just to follow up on the discussion that we had last time, which was a little more focused on the technical aspects of putting together the right content in the right articles, and right titles and things for a Digg article. I want to talk a little bit today about becoming a top Digg user or doing the right things to get lots of Diggs for your articles from a promotional point of view. So, let's start with a discussion about how you become a top Digg user?

Neil Patel: The best way that I know of becoming the top user is just to suggest great content. One thing that I like doing is to go to the BBC.co.uk, CNN and all those popular sites; subscribe to the RSS feeds, and if you see anything great, submit it to Digg. By doing that you are going to get a lot of Homepage stories, and by getting tons of Homepage stories, you are going to get tons of users who will friend you.

Eric Enge: So, as we talked about last time, now the key is you want articles that fit the Digg audience; the young, male, technical audience. So, you are not putting random news up there; you are putting up something that has a little bit of spice to it, or maybe its anti-George Bush or anti-Microsoft, or something like that. I mean you have to pick the right content.

Neil Patel: Exactly. One great way to figure out if you are submitting something interesting, is to do a Digg search on the topic to see if anything has made the Homepage. If something has made the Homepage in the past, that is similar to some extent, you can try submitting it. If it hasn't or it barely got any Diggs, it will probably tell you that hey, the Digg audience isn't interested in those types of stories.

Eric Enge: Right. So, then you can bag that strategy.

Neil Patel: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Alright. So, how long does this process take, I mean how many times do you have to succeed in getting something out there before you start making your way up the ranks? Neil Patel: I believe you probably have to get a hundred plus stories to the homepage before you are a top user or something close to that. Because, there are so many users, and they keep on submitting; it just gets harder and harder to get; to be a top hundred user. At one point you may have only needed ten stories to be a top hundred user, but now it's quite a bit of stories.

Eric Enge: Right. So, since we are using the term, why don't we define what we mean by a top Digg user?

Neil Patel: So, what I define as a top Digg user, is anybody who has quiet a bit of homepages, and is in the top hundred users. Anybody who is not in the top hundred is not a top user.

Eric Enge: Okay. So, is there another aspect of this that when you become a top user, when you submit a story, other people just sort of naturally look at your profile to see what stories you've submitted. And, in fact it kind of has an accelerating effect, doesn't it; where now that you've succeeded in getting all these stories out there, now your stories get out there just because you submit them.

Neil Patel: Definitely. I think it does have something to do with who is submitting it, so as a submitter, if you have a solid reputation that you've been submitting great stories for let's say three months or four months, and everybody is seeing your stories at the homepage, not your personal stories but just random stories that you are submitting, that are great. And then, you start submitting even more stories later on; you are a top user now, the chances of you getting stories to the homepage just go higher, because you've built that trust with the community that you are not giving them garbage.

Eric Enge: Right. And, the target basically is to get a hundred or so stories up there or more; that's not something that's going to happen in thirty days.

Neil Patel: Yeah. It usually takes quiet a while; I think some people have actually done it in thirty days. These are people who spend pretty much all their time on Digg, but it usually takes three months to get up there.

Eric Enge: Well, and that's a fairly hefty commitment of time, it seems to me. But, obviously as we talked about last time, there is a pretty good payoff. Now, isn't there also an aspect of using the friend's mechanism to build relationships with other people?

Neil Patel: Yeah. So, another easy way that people try to become a top user is that they friend a hundred, or two hundred other members. By doing this, they are hoping that those users will just vote on their stories blindly, which will help get some of those submissions to the homepage. You can also do this, and to some extent it is fairly effective, but to the key to the friend thing is you want those users to friend you back. It doesn't matter if you are friend of thousand people; it matters how many people friend you.

Eric Enge: Right. And, when they friend you, that doesn't mean that they automatically Digg your articles, right?

Neil Patel: Exactly, yeah. It does not mean that they are automatically going to Digg your articles; what ends up happening is, there is a little green star that appears on stories when any of their friends Digg or submit them. So, it just increases your chance that your friend is actually going to vote on the star, because it pops out.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, is there a way for a friend to tell whether you are voting on their stories back?

Neil Patel: There is. Under the Digg friend section, you can actually see what all your friends are voting on and, what stories your friends are actually even submitting. So, in that way a lot of people just go to their friend submit section, and they just vote on all the stories that their friends have submitted. Its kind of; let me just submit this, and I think you actually could potentially hurt your profile by just voting blindly all of your friends stories, because I think the Digg algorithm is sophisticated enough to know if someone is just looking to gaming it. They want someone who actually reading the story and voting on what they are like.

Eric Enge: Well, yes. There is an aspect of trust here, right. In an ideal world, the people you have friended with are people you trust, and maybe you don't blindly vote for all of their stories, but it's an indication that you trust their submissions. So, you would be more likely to vote for their stories, right? Even in the ideal world, I think.

Neil Patel: I agree with that; when I first started up using Digg, I had tons of friends and I would just vote blindly on a lot of their submissions. And, what ended up happening is; by doing that, I personally and I have no proof of this or anything like that, I just thought that it was getting harder for me to get stories to their homepage. But, they want to stop voting on tons of stories; I could have probably voted on twenty thousand to thirty thousand stories. What I'm doing now is, I just started voting on great stories that I actually liked and I read. And, by doing that I think, my percentage of stories that were hitting the homepage when I submitted them, increased.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: And, I have no proof of it; it was just a trend that I saw. But, there could have been many other variables that are factors that cause all these newer stories to make their homepage ignore some of the older ones.

Eric Enge: Right. Now conversely, if you start a Digg account and you make the mistake of just self promoting everything; and like the content is in fact great. Did you sort of dig a little bit of a hole for yourself; no pun intended in terms of reputation with the community?

Neil Patel: I think you do, and a lot of people have made that mistake. I think the easiest thing to do when you do dig a hole is, start over, create a new account, and follow the rules, and the unwritten rules, such as you are not supposed to submit your own stuff. And, by starting that way I think you can do quite well without having to dig yourself out of that hole.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you wanted your own stuff to go up, you really should get one of your friends to put it up there, and not do it yourself.

Neil Patel: Exactly. So, what I usually do is, if I have a great story on one of my own personal blogs, and I want it on the homepage of Diggs. I wait for either someone to submit it, naturally, or if I know someone that might like it, I might say "hey, check this story out, if you like it, submit it. If you don't like it, no pressure; you don't have to submit it".

Eric Enge: Right. I mean it's really important to remember for all its great strengths and its flaws, this really is a social media type site. And, you are in a community, and you have to behave like you are in a community, if you want to prosper there in the long term, it seems.

Neil Patel: Yes.

Eric Enge: Alright. So, what do you do when you are not a top user, and you want to get stories to the front page of Digg?

Neil Patel: The easiest thing to do is friend people that have similar interests to you on Digg, such as look at their voting patterns, and what stories that they actually mark as their favorite stories. And, see which users will have similar interest to your friends as you, and hopefully they will friend you back. And then, that way when you start submitting stories, you go and get some of your friends to vote on them, thus increasing the chance that these stories are going to make the homepage or anything you submit, makes the homepage.

Eric Enge: Right. But, now I'm talking about the situation where you are in fact self promoting, but you don't want to self promote. Should you get one of those friends that you have a closer relationship with and say "hey, I have this article over here you might like", and ask them to vote on it if they like it, like you said before, except you are not a top user yet. But, this way you are working with someone who is more watched on Digg, and have enough of a friendship with that they'll submit it for you. Does that make sense?

Neil Patel: Yeah, it makes sense. So, you are pretty much asking, what would you do or if you are self promoting before, and now you don't want to self promote and you want to get someone else to submit. How would you get one of the other friends to submit?

Eric Enge: Yeah.

Neil Patel: So, the easiest thing you can do is, find some other users on Digg, a lot of them as you list their AIM info as well as email info. Same way, talk to them just like you would do in the real world, right. If you can build that relationship with other user online, and then you can actually get a lot of those people to submit your stuff, if it's good. They are just looking to submit great content.

Eric Enge: Yeah. Or the other thing you can do too is; because you've learnt something about these people, you can do them a few favors before you ever ask them for one. And, you buildup a relationship, and they get a sense of trust and they know that you'll do things for them. And then, you turn around and you ask them a favor. It seems much more likely that they will do it at that point.

Neil Patel: I agree with you on that, and I think that's actually the best route to take. Provide more than you ask for, so if you want one favor, make sure you do two for them.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: So, always do more.

Eric Enge: Build up some momentum. So, where can you still find the top user list for Digg?

Neil Patel: I believe that they have removed them all; one of that; I believe one of the old Netscapers used to create a top hundred list. And then, Digg sent them a cease-and-desist letter from my understanding. So, as far as I know, there isn't any top hundred user list out there.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you kind of have to work your way into the community to figure out who the real players are.

Neil Patel: Yeah. What I do is just look at the homepage, and look at the users who are getting a lot of stories on the homepage; chances are, they are one of the top users.

Eric Enge: Right. Because they are up there, many times a week.

Neil Patel: Exactly. And, sometimes you see them two to three times a day, maybe four times a day on the homepage. So, in most cases that's a top user.

Eric Enge: Alright. The definitely have something going if they are on the home page two to four times a day.

Neil Patel: Yeah. I think sometimes even three on the homepage at the same time within one day.

Eric Enge: Right. And, hopefully you don't have two to three for your own site on the homepage at one time; that would be…

Neil Patel: Yeah. They are often random sites like CNN or News.com, but that's the key, it's similar other peoples stuff.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let's talk a little bit about some common Digg mistakes?

Neil Patel: I think the most common mistake that I know of is, people try to leverage the community before they try to participate in the community, right. Who doesn't want to be on a homepage; but before you try to get on the homepage, sign up, participate in the community; learn what it's all about. And then, you are going to have a much better chance of even getting your own stories on the homepage or any story as a matter of fact, whether its yours or not on the homepage, because you understand the community and how they react, and what they are looking for. I think that's probably one of the major mistakes, and other than that, and I believe we talked about this in the last Podcast, people often write a great story but a crappy title and description; and when they do, you have pretty much burned the story. Because, not too many people click through; a lot of them just vote blindly, and if they get enough votes; you get to homepage. So, they are the two biggest mistakes I see going on.

Eric Enge: Right. And, you mentioned in one of your blog post not too long ago, the scenario with Market Wire submitted many of their press releases.

Neil Patel: I believe there was over a hundred or two hundred to three hundred or something. It was a very large amount, and none of them made the homepage. And, the thing is that like after you even submit ten and many of your press releases are not making the homepage, you should reevaluate it. Because, in most cases there is something wrong, but I think Market Wire whatever, that company was a PR company; they were just submitting it for high PR links. And, the thing is, I don't think it's too effective to get two hundred links from Digg. The value is not the same, because you have already been linked to by that site.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. I mean it's interesting; you think there is some good general life advice there if you try something ten times, and it has been rejected all ten, maybe that's a hint.

Neil Patel: Exactly. It's like time to put in a new strategy or something, because whether you have a power account or not, you should be able to get at least one story out of ten stories to the homepage.

Eric Enge: Right. And, that makes sense. So, are there any other aspects of succeeding from a promotional standpoint in building your profile standpoint on Digg that you think we should cover?

Neil Patel: That's pretty much one or two of the key things that you should always keep in mind that A, you want to provide value so I'll think about the community first, right. Whatever they are like, that's what you want to feed them; because if you feed them that, chance are as can you get to the homepage.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: And B, you want to make sure that you understand the audience. A lot of these people are; now they are young, they are in their twenties, and high school, and some of them are even younger than that. You need to cater to the audience; a lot of them are not a sophisticated audience like people at Harvard, MIT, or anything like that. So, if you start writing a post on how MIT is great, and if you don't go to college, you are dumb, probably you are not going to make the homepage. So, you really indeed understand the audience just like with any other advertising campaign. If you are going to buy banner ads you want to target them, it's the same thing. If you are going to promote something to the Digg audience, make sure you actually target the audience, and understand what they are all about.

Eric Enge: Well, it sounds great. Well, thanks a lot Neil, that was great.

Neil Patel: No problem. Thank you!

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

For more podcasts see: Podcasts about Web Analytics and Search

For articles see: Articles and Interviews about Web Marketing and Web Analytics

Neil Patel Podcast with Eric Enge (1 of 2)

Tue, 15 May 2007 16:35:26 -0700

Transcript of Podcast with Neil Patel (Part 1 of 2)

The following is a written transcript of the April 4, 2007 podcast between Eric Enge and Neil Patel. This is part I of a two part series on how to win at Digg.:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the president of Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Neil Patel, the CTO of ACS, and we plan to talk about Digg. Neil is known as an expert in this area, and it should be very entertaining. You see the ACS website at www.acsseo.com, and the ACS blog at www.pronetadvertising.com. So, with that let's get started. So Neil, why don't you start by giving us an idea of your thoughts on how big a role Digg should play in sites Web Marketing Strategy?

Neil Patel: Alright. It should actually play a big role; if you want to go after organic rankings; it is a great source to get a big boost of traffic, which hopefully will end up leading to quite a few natural organic links. And if you can get quite a few organic links, you can start getting ranking for all the major terms that you are trying to go after. So, it's a great and quick way to get a quick boost in organic links compared to purchasing text links; or doing reciprocal links; all those methods are great and should be considered in a marketing strategy. But leveraging Digg and sites like that, such as Netscape and all these other sites can give you a quick boost and they could be quite a bit more effective.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, if you're just starting out with a brand new site, and you literally have just gotten up live, and you've got some things that are Digg able; how does that work given that your site doesn't have a lot of trust in the search engines yet, and suddenly this burst of links come in? Is there a time delay effect you see in a situation like that, or is that affect that Digg strategy in any manner?

Neil Patel: It does quite a bit, and I too experience that quite a bit with my own blog at ProNet Advertising; what ended up happening is, we have ranked on Digg like twenty-five, thirty times or something like that. And, when we started the blog was pretty new; it only had let's say ten links, fifteen links, and then it started getting thousands and thousands of natural links because of the Digg Homepages and stuff like that. And, what ended up happening is; I wasn't really getting much search traffic from Google Yahoo. But, six months down the road after getting on the Digg front page about 10 times, all of a sudden I started getting a burst of Google traffic. And, they just started happening organically, because I think what ended up happening on the search engines initially was they saw too quick of a growth, especially with a brand new site.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, so that makes a lot of sense. And how about with different kinds of sites? There must be something to what's the right type of site to pursue this strategy with.

Neil Patel: So, you are saying what types of sites actually do fairly well on social sites such as Digg, Netscape?

Eric Enge: Yes.

Neil Patel: For tech sites and, political sites, you can pretty much get almost all topics on social media sites other than things like Forex Trading and stuff like that. Some topics are quite a bit harder to get on. But there is always a social network or social site out there that you can target for that specific type of content. So, although Forex Trading may not do too well on Digg, it may have a better chance on Netscape for example. So, look at what topic your website is on, and then trying to find out the social sites or social media sites that are most relevant to you.

Eric Enge: Right. So, it's matching the social media site to the type of content that you are trying to get Dugg.

Neil Patel: Exactly. It's just like advertising, right. So, if you are going to place a banner ad on a hundred sites or if you have a thousand dollar budget, you are going to place them on the most relevant sites. And, it's the same thing with social media sites; if you are going to go up to them and try to get on their homepage; you are on try to leverage the most relevant sites. Even if they don't grab the most traffic, they are going to be the most beneficial because you chance them getting on the homepage or quite a bit higher. Plus, the ratio of those users actually linking to your site, which is probably the most important thing for SEOs is quite a bit higher compared to, if you got on their homepage of a random social media site; that's not related to you.

Eric Enge: Right. And, the links of course, you get that way a more relevant as well.

Neil Patel: Exactly

Eric Enge: Right, right. So, just how big can getting the front on the front page of Digg be in terms of getting the links and traffic to your site?

Neil Patel: I have seen it where in rare cases some people have had a hundred thousand plus visitors from Digg. And, these are stories that received four thousand or five thousand Diggs which is rare, but they've been very popular. In most cases, I have seen anywhere from ten thousand to lets say thirty thousand in traffic from Digg. And, sometimes it is even less; it depends what time of the day you get on the homepage, and what topic did you get on the homepage for.

Eric Enge: Right. How about in terms of links; third party links that materialize in this process?

Neil Patel: And, in terms of links depending on the topic as well; I have seen anywhere from a few hundred links all the way up to few thousand. Ideal cases is like you get two thousand links, and the thing about Digg; the whole Digg effect is, it drives so much traffic, and so many links such as, if you get a link to by a Wired magazine; other people are going to end up seeing it. And then, the chances are, one of those visitors actually link seeing it, and then linking to you, is quite a bit higher than someone from Digg, linking to you.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: Its basis whole a chain reaction, but overall I believe Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz did a study with quite a bit of stories, and overall he saw two thousand links by getting on the Digg homepage.

Eric Enge: Yeah. It's very, very impressive, and it's hard to ignore if you have been in the process of trying to build links organically to be able to do something so quickly; it is just amazing.

Neil Patel: Definitely. And, and then one thing to know what that is; although if you may see lets take two thousand links if he you get on the Digg homepage; a lot of those links are going to drop off, because a lot of them are going to be from Digg.com themselves. So overall, I would probably expect a thousand or so links by getting on the homepage if you are lucky.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you kind of have to take the short term link boost you see and divide it by two or something like that.

Neil Patel: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Interesting. So, related to this, there has been lot of controversy of late surrounding Digg, and the Digg clubs and the top user list disappearing. Do you think Digg is losing any of its luster or is it shining as brightly as ever for people who know how to use it?

Neil Patel: It is losing some of its luster with a lot of the top users. But the thing is that there are so many users out there who haven't heard of Digg yet. There are lets say a hundred top users or a thousand top users. Everybody else is not really effecting the results that much, so Digg is still growing and its growing at a rapid pace. They continue to implement cool new features, and are still growing at a rapid pace.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what's the type of content that is most likely to succeed on Digg?

Neil Patel: On Digg I would say, if you talk about YouTube, My Space; you can talk about Digg themselves any political type of content does pretty well; Linux topics, Apple does really well. If you say like, how you hate Microsoft that might do pretty well. Digg's not a big Microsoft fan; so the quick thing I would do is, if you are trying to get on the Homepage for example; if you are a website on politics; what I would do is, dig out what type of stories that you are trying to get on the homepage. Do some quick searches to see who in the past have actually made the homepage writing on those types of topics. And then, based on that, you can get a rough idea, what makes the homepage and what doesn't.

Eric Enge: Right. And, what's type of content that typically gets buried?

Neil Patel: If you say you love Microsoft; or you are business oriented such as Forex Trading. The main thing to keep it mind with the Digg audience is, they are very young. A lot of the people that I talk to, they all range from ages such as fourteen to the thirties and what not. But the majority are young, they are in high school or they are still in college, or they just graduated from college. So whatever you are submitting, you got to relate to them, because the problem is most of these guys don't know too much about politics. Netscape is a lot more political than Digg, and most of these Diggers are tech oriented. So, if you've seen that stuff that's not related to them; you're going to probably get buried and have a lot of harder chance of getting on the front page.

Eric Enge: Right. So, I've seen for example, that if you do sort of raw news type of stuff that really has almost no chance unless you are truly breaking something about one of the topics you mentioned before. Breaking news about My Space, and you bring it there; maybe you get somewhere, but other types of news; it seems to; that's the wrong environment.

Neil Patel: Exactly, because if you think about the audience, a lot of these guys don't even watch the general news or general news channels. So, they don't really care about hey, a teenage girl got abducted; although it is very important to read about that or understand that. But, it doesn't necessarily appeal to the Digg audience. But then, breaking news stories such as a dog in London took down the power of the whole city because he peed on some power lines or what not. That actually, would get on their front page; why, because it is foolish; it's humorous; it's true and it relates to the Digg audience.

Eric Enge: Right. And, I guess that's an important another aspect of what the Digg audience likes; they'd like that kind of humor or that irony, right. I think they are really unusual sort of thing, and it seems to appeal to the audience a lot.

Neil Patel: Exactly. They don't want the ordinary stories; they want something that's extraordinary stuff.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, I've also seen it happen sometimes that; that something gets on the front page of Digg, and then it just seems like to disappear and I've learned later that; there is this process of burying stories that basically gets them kicked out of the whole process. So, what's going on there?

Neil Patel: They base it off on percentages and all that kind of stuff; they have a complex algorithm that determines that the story should be removed. But, they pretty much do it; they just remove it from the front page. And, a lot of things that they look at is, what type of burying feature are they using? Are they marking it as spam; are they marking it as duplicate, inaccurate? So, there is a few options, and I don't know this for a fact, but based on what my observation is; someone marks it as spam, it hurts more than if someone marks it as inaccurate; or if three people mark it as inaccurate; it has a higher chance of getting removed, then if one person marked to spam, one marked is as duplicate, and one person marked it as inaccurate.

Eric Enge: Oh, interesting. So, it's the common nature of the votes that causes them to carry more weight.

Neil Patel: Exactly; because if everybody is marking as inaccurate; the story is probably inaccurate. But, if there is all these random markings; yeah, there maybe something wrong. But, it's less likely to have a bigger effect compared to if everybody is just marking it as the same thing.

Eric Enge: Right. I suppose you could argue that the distribution of what it's being called inaccurate, spam whatever, is somewhat random, and it just means that there is the group of people who don't like it, which doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't be there.

Neil Patel: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Alright; very interesting. So now let's start to think about, what it takes to do a good job of prepping a story for Digg. One of the things I understand that's incredibly important is to write a good title.

Neil Patel: Yeah. The title is very important because if you actually look at it; a lot of users just end up voting on a story based on the style and description and don't click through. A lot of people think that hey, if I have a great piece of content; it's going to get on the Digg homepage. No, that's actually not true, because you are going to have a large group of users, who are actually just going to digg something without even reading the content or potentially even bury it without reading the content; so you have to make sure that you are using a very attractive title and description if you are trying to get to the front page. And one thing to keep in mind with the title is, a lot of Digg users like resources, such as how two guides, lists, sure fire tips and stuff like that. So, stuff that's more everlasting and that can pretty much last forever and that's entertaining.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what's the best way to come up with a good title for your particular article?

Neil Patel: Well, I actually like brainstorming with a few people and just trying to come up with the most creative title that you can. The other thing I like doing is see what actually made the homepage in the past, and try to find their very popular stories, and analyze their title and description. Even if that story has nothing to do with your story, you can still see the elements that they use and try to carry that to your story; such as if you noticed that most of popular stories on Digg use how to in their title, you can try to incorporate how to within your title.

Eric Enge: Right. So, how to pick the title for Digg users; could be a sample. So, the other thing, I think you need to do is look at the audience. and I think this is why looking at the example titles is such a good idea, for the past titles that have succeeded can teach you about the audience. And, you have to remember who the audience is that, which as you said before is the fourteen to thirty male techy type users, and it's a way of studying your audience; and then stepping back and figuring out how to deliver your content to that audience.

Neil Patel: Exactly. And, if you really want to understand how important the title and description is; a few months ago I submitted a story, or someone else submitted it, on the first seven days of blogging, and what should you do as a blogger; as a brand new blogger. And, my server went down right after it was submitted. It didn't reach the homepage; it probably had like five votes or six votes. So, it wasn't due to the Digg traffic or anything like that, and the server was down for literally a day to two days, and it was just a bad outage that I had.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: What's happening is this story still made the front page; why, because the title and description were great, and that one hit the front page, and it got thirty plus more Diggs before it hit the front page and the server was down. And, everybody was like oh, the Digg effect, that's why the server went down. So, that means people were voting or thirty plus people voted based on that title and description without even reading the story because they couldn't read the story, the server was down.

Eric Enge: Right. And, they just assumed it was the Digg effect, although it sounds like it was something else that was actually going on.

Neil Patel: Exactly. It was like a bad hard drive or something.

Eric Enge: Alright. So, expound upon that issue a little bit; if you get on the front page of Digg, it is in general a good idea to be prepared for the traffic. So, let's say we talk about one of these posts that gets a few thousand links; and may be twenty thousand, thirty thousand visitors in a short period of time. What should a webmaster anticipate in terms of demand, and how do they make sure they are ready for it?

Neil Patel: What webmaster should do is, make sure they are on a really big server with a lot of RAM; a CPU is important. But the problem is; or with the Linux server, Apache is how many hits per second can you really take? So, it's not necessarily the overall traffic; because you can get thousands of visitors within a day. But, it's when your server gets hit hard and you're let's say getting two hundred requests a second; that's when your server starts croaking because there is not enough RAM and Apache needs to restart and all that kind of stuff. So, you need to make sure that you have a lot of RAM in your server; I like using dedicated servers with at least four gigs of RAM if you are trying to get on Digg and actually stay up, and then the other thing I actually like doing is making sure you are running at least dual Zeon processors.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: And, the easiest way is, if you don't have any of this; Media Temple has a hosting package called the Grid or something similar to that, for something like fifteen dollars a month. They have this big old cluster environment which allows you to put your website on there, and it can pretty much sustain Diggs, and that's what they create the whole environment for.

Eric Enge: Right. I have heard of hosting companies like that; it's essentially guaranteed to survive the Digg effect.

Neil Patel: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Yeah. That's very interesting. So, similar to the title, it seems like the description is also very important, although it may not be quite as important as the title; the description; maybe the rest of the story that the person reads. So, you have to do good job with that as well, don't you?

Neil Patel: Yeah. Description is very important, and you want to make sure that it's still somewhat appealing and that people actually; you want to entice them actually to click through to your website. Because, yeah you can get four thousand Diggs; but what's the point if a small percentage only clicks through to your website. And, that means that you are going to get less links. So, you want to entice them so that the description is attractive; plus it makes them want to click through and read more. Thus, hopefully more people will end up linking to you because of that.

Eric Enge: Right. And, description basically backs up the title; I mean you sort of made a promise with the title, and then with the description you begins to show that you are going to fulfill the promise.

Neil Patel: Exactly. And, one thing I like to do quite a bit is, take a little piece from the article itself; pop it in as a description and entice them; so that's like hey, this is what the article is about; it's like a little taste.

Eric Enge: Right.

Neil Patel: If they like it they are going to click through.

Eric Enge: Excellent. So, this is actually the first of two parts that Neil and I are going to do in talking about Digg and the Digg Effect and how to win a Digg. We are going to do a second part in the near future, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Neil.

Neil Patel: No, problem.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more podcasts see: Podcasts about Web Analytics and Search

For articles see: Articles and Interviews about Web Marketing and Web Analytics