Look for more info on Erin and the rest of the incredible team here at SwellPath in the next month or so as we finally get around to adding a Team page to the site. Meanwhile, you can follow the SwellPath team’s Tweets or connect with SwellPath on LinkedIn right now.

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Founded in 1977 as an architectural salvage store, Rejuvenation is America’s premier manufacturer of authentic reproduction lighting and house parts. All of Rejuvenation’s products are made-to-order via their catalog, website, and retail stores in Portland and Seattle.

We recently visited Rejuvenation’s manufacturing factory right here in the neighborhood and got a rare glimpse at the inner workings of a skilled craftsman process and a business driven by it’s core values.

Commitment to Quality

It was clear from the beginning that producing the highest quality, handcrafted products is the crux of Rejuvenation’s business . Skilled craftsmen meticulously piece together every product, with unique workstations and individual tools. Each fixture is finished by hand.

Inspiration for each piece is derived from their roots as a salvage store in the 70′s. An entire room is dedicated to restoring old light fixtures and driving new reproduction product lines. See all of the photos from our tour here.

Commitment to Sustainable Manufacturing

Rejuvenation operates its manufacturing processes according to a structure that supports sustainability and a dedication to minimizing their impact on the environment. Among their efforts, they’ve designed and implemented a closed-loop water recycling system that extracts heavy metals from the manufacturing process water for safe disposal. They also use 100% recyclable packaging materials to ship product, much of which is recycled office paper.

It’s great to see a business that understands that sustainable business practices are as great for the environment as they are economical. Read more about their footprint.

Commitment to Community

Rejuvenation also has an outstanding commitment to the local community. Ever year, they donate ten percent of their after tax profits to organizations that help support vibrant, sustainable communities. These are primarily non-profits in the areas of environmental conservation, historic preservation, the arts, and equal access to housing.

Rejuvenation’s business is built on a commitment to great products and socially responsible business practices. They are a great example of business done the right way and their retails stores are a must stop for any homeowner.

This is a great building. Our space overlooks the Park blocks and the basketball and bocce ball courts. As you can see in one of the pictures there is a pretty nice balcony also. Official move in date is October 1st, so look out for an October or November open-house invite from us.

Annotations offer several helpful advantages:

• Save time and effort searching for causes in data fluctuations
• Incorporating offline marketing efforts into your reporting
• Documenting key optimization dates

By utilizing the annotations feature, you can save valuable time digging through multiple reports trying to investigate the cause of a spike in traffic.  Websites can change frequently with content and design as well as the various marketing campaigns and media buys that drive traffic to the site.  The more data that you can incorporate into your annotations, the less time you will have to spend digging through reports or other sources to be able to explain major fluctuations in traffic.

Integrating the release of offline media campaigns into your annotations is a great way to bridge the gap of measuring offline marketing efforts through web analytics.  Insert an annotation on the date that your print ad was distributed and see how it influenced site traffic even if you can’t specifically segment that traffic out.

As media campaigns run over time, your web analytics application is generating valuable data on the quality of that traffic.  Certain ad campaigns will prove to be more successful than others and some campaigns simply need to be optimized to improve results.  Annotations are a great way to mark specific  dates of key optimization efforts.  You may notice an upward trend in paid search conversion rates but and can easily attribute optimization to that change by referencing your annotations.

This powerful and easy to use feature in Google Analytics is often overlooked but can save valuable time and effort if it is utilized.  Hopefully Google will continue to improve upon this feature by allowing you to group annotations by specific categories or allow you to insert an active link to a blog post or article directly into the annotation.

The main Conversion Reporting interface is much improved, it now has a very similar look and feel to Google Analytics. Through the main interface you can view high level data such as total Conversions, average days to Conversion, and average Clicks to Conversion.

The real fun comes through the Top Paths Conversion analysis. This report allows you to view the paths that visitors who converted took through AdWords. The depth of data in this section is excellent, it allows you to view user paths for Clicks and Impressions at the Campaign, Ad Group, and Keyword level. For example, you can see that a user first clicked on a product category ad, then later a branded ad through which they converted. This data is incredibly valuable, and can help you attribute value to Campaigns or Ad Groups which may have seemed like they were under performing, though they were in fact assisting Conversions.

AdWords also has a section dedicated to Assisted Conversions, both for clicks and impressions, which allows you to get a better view of Campaigns and Ad Groups that are assisting your final Conversions, and allows you to assign a monetary value to these Assists.

Overall, the new Search Funnel and Conversion Reporting in AdWords will help provide you with a more holistic view of the Conversion activity on your AdWords account and gives you the data to make more informed decisions regarding account structure changes, allocating budget, and conversion timeline.

1. Would having Open Graph meta data in conjunction with Like buttons become as necessary for sites, from an SEO perspective, as having proper meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-site components of a solid SEO strategy.

2. Would SwellPath need to begin scoping this into our SEO engagements for clients?

In our opinion, the answer to both of these essentially became yes this week. Earlier this week, All Facebook reported on larger sites with Open Graph integration having pages returned in Facebook search results. It is now clear that Facebook will be indexing pages that have Open Graph integration and have been Liked. These are not “Facebook Pages” but actual pages from other domains.

Now when I bring this up to many people, the response is something along the lines of: “well, how many people are going to use Facebook to search the web anyway?” My response to that is pretty simple: how many people thought they would use Google for email in early 2004? Or how many people thought they would use Google for analytics in early 2006? How many people thought they would use Facebook for showing friends their pictures 4 years ago?

You see where I’m going with this: consumers will shift their behavior. I have no doubt that there  is at least the potential for many Facebook users to suddenly find it far more convenient to just search from the page their on.

And what about Facebook’s partnership with Bing? Is it possible that Facebook will give Bing access to this data also? That Bing will begin incorporating the “social value” of pages into their results? I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t jump on this opportunity if it becomes available. Alternatively, we might see the relationship between Bing and Facebook sunset as Facebook takes on the search industry solo.

Some concerns here revolve around Facebook’s ability to crawl and index. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have all been doing this for a long time, and have the technological components in place to crawl and index the web at amazing rates. Will Facebook be able to “catch up”? If they can’t, who will be left out? Likely the “little guys”, i.e. the long tail, which is a fundamentally valuable (the most valuable?) component of Google’s search results.  My feeling is that technology can be bought for a high enough price; Facebook has been building the technological infrastructure to handle this, and they have been and will continue to hire the appropriate people to lead this initiative.

Bottom line: this will stick, and SEOs, publishers, retailers, and anyone else who wants their content to be delivered to Facebook users better begin implementing Open Graph functionality into their sites. If we’re wrong about this, that’s great; one less thing to worry about with SEO. I don’t think we will be though, and I don’t want us to be. Disruption is good for any industry, and search is no exception. I’d love to hear others thought’s on this, and how they think this will affect SEO.

I held the student role when I completed the UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics program and now have the opportunity to provide mentorship to other students through the Analysis Exchange.  The UBC program is excellent however there is a gap between learning the concepts, techniques and best practices and actually getting the opportunity to apply your knowledge in the business world.  Companies are looking to hire analysts with professional experience and a track record of success so after completing the courses it is difficult to prove yourself as a new hire.  The Analysis Exchange offers a way to bridge that gap and provide students with that next step towards a career in web analytics.

Swellpath Interactive signed up as a mentor for the Analysis Exchange and was paired with a student and local Portland non-profit, Schoolhouse Supplies.  We collaborated with the student and Schoolhouse Supplies to define a project that was achievable to accomplish in the suggested 3 week time frame.  Based on an assessment of the website and of the current configuration of their Google Analytics account, it was decided that the final deliverable would be to build a weekly KPI report.  The report would then be built out into a PowerPoint deck to deliver on a weekly basis to Schoolhouse Supplies and include analysis of the data by the student.  In our particular case, the student works for Schoolhouse Supplies so they will be able to continue the reporting after the project development work is over.

Some issues that came up during the project were mostly focused around technical and development resources available in-house for Schoolhouse Supplies and configuration issues with Google Analytics.  These types of issues can occur in any business engagement as well so we just worked with the resources and functionality that we had.  Schoolhouse Supplies was taking its first steps towards analytics reporting so any data they can pull and report on was a step in the right direction.

The student that we worked with was very responsive and timely as I set forth action items and deadlines to keep the project moving.  The initial objective for the student was to define the goals of the website and then determine which of those goals were measurable within their current Google Analytics installation.   From there we moved on to develop the framework of the KPI report and created an analytics tagging guideline document to address the issues where we weren’t collecting the data we needed.  Fortunately, Schoolhouse Supplies has a developer on their Board of Directors to help with the tagging implementation.  The final deliverable is a PowerPoint presentation where the student includes an overview of the weekly data, trended graphs of the data with the student’s analysis and a slide of recommendations and action items for the Schoolhouse Supplies key stakeholders.

After the project is completed, each party evaluates the performance of everyone’s efforts.  Students will receive a score on their project work to help quantify their performance to help build their resume with real experience.  Each party can then move on to join another project.

This has been a great program to get involved with and a great concept to help further the web analytics profession.  Swellpath Interactive has been offering voluntary services to community non-profits over the years working with the United Way of the Columbia-Willamette and the Surfrider Foundation.  The Analysis Exchange is another great program for Swellpath to partner with and we encourage other analytics professionals, agencies and students to get involved.

With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA. Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:

1) Social Media Monitoring

Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.

Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.

2) Tags

Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.

Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:

Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…

Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -

“…explore their environments using cell phones.”

“…no more location updates. Yay.”

“…and also a game.”

This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.

3) Trending

Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.

TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.

Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.

BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.

4) Social Search

Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.

OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.

Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.

5) Cool Social Tools

Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.

Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.

Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.

MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.