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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

2011-12-13T11:32:00.000-08:00

A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optimization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open source Rand, but loses, as usual).

Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases,WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one isBlogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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Link Intelligently
When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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Invite Guest Bloggers
Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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Cover Topics that Need Attention
In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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Use a Human Voice
Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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Archive Effectively
The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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Implement Smart URLs
The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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Reveal as Much as Possible
The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Build a Brand
Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Updated Page Authority and Domain Authority

2011-11-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

Here at Moz, we take metrics and analytics seriously and work hard to ensure that our metrics are first rate. Among our most important link metrics are Page Authority and Domain Authority. Accordingly, we have been working to improve these so that they more accurately reflect a given page or domain's ability to rank in search results. This blog entry provides an overview of these metrics and introduces our new Authority models with a deep technical dive.

What are Page and Domain Authority?

Page and Domain Authority are machine learning ranking models that predict the likelihood of a single page or domain to rank in search results, regardless of page content. Their input is the 41 link metrics available in our Linkscape URL Metrics API call and their output is a score on a scale from 1 to 100. They are keyword agnostic because they do not use any information about the page content.

Why are Page and Domain Authority being updated?

Since these models predict search engine position, it is important to update them periodically to capture changes in the search engines' ranking algorithms. In addition, this update includes some changes to the underlying models resulting in increased accuracy. Our favorite measure of accuracy is the mean Spearman Correlation over a collection of SERPs. The next chart compares the correlations on several previous indices and the next index release (Index 47).

The new model out performs the old model on the same data using the top 30 search results, and performs better if more results are used (top 50). Note that these are out of sample predictions.

When will the models change? Will this affect my scores?

The models will be updated when we roll out the next Linkscape index update, sometime during the week of November 28. Your scores will likely change a little, and may potentially change by as many as 20 points or more. I'll present some data later in this post that shows most PRO and Free Trial members with campaigns will see a slight increase in their Page Authority.

What does this mean if I use Page Authority and Domain Authority data?

First, the metrics will be better at predicting search position, and Page Authority will remain the single highest correlated metric with search position that we have seen (including mozRank and the other 100+ metrics we examined in our Search Engine Ranking Factors study). However, since we don't yet have a good web spam scoring system, sites that manipulate search engines will slip by us (and look like an outlier), so a human review is still wise.

Before presenting some details of the models, I'd like to illustrate what we mean by a "machine learning ranking model." The table below shows the top 26 results for the keyword "pumpkin recipes" with a few of our Linkscape metrics (Google-US search engine; this is from an older data set and older index, but serves as a good illustration).

As you can see, there is quite a spread among the different metrics illustrated, with some of the pages having a few links and others 1,000+ links. The Linking Root Domains are also spread from only 46 Linking Root Domains to 200,000+. The Page Authority model takes these link metrics as input (plus 36 other link metrics not shown) and predicts the SERP ordering. Since it only takes into account link metrics (and explicitly ignores any page or keyword content), but search engines take many ranking factors into consideration, the model cannot be 100% accurate. Indeed, in this SERP, the top result benefits from an exact domain match to the keyword and helps explain its #1 position despite its relatively low link metrics. However, since Page Authority only takes link metrics as input, it is a single aggregate score that explains how likely a page is to rank in search based only on links. Domain Authority is similar for domain wide ranking. The models are trained on a large collection of Google-US SERP results.

Despite restricting to only link metrics, the new Page and Domain Authority models do a good job of predicting SERP ordering and improve substantially over the existing models. This increased accuracy is due in part to the new model's ability to better separate pages with moderate Page Authority values into higher and lower scores.

This chart shows the distribution of the Page Authority values for the new and old models over a data set generated from 10,000+ SERPs that includes 200,000+ unique pages (similar to the one used in our Search Engine Ranking Factors). As you can see, the new model has "fatter tails" and moves some of the pages with moderate scores to higher and lower values resulting in better discriminating power. The average Page Authority for both sets is about the same, but the new model has a higher standard deviation, consistent with a larger spread. In addition to the smaller SERP data set, this larger spread is also present in our entire 40+ billion page index (plotted with the logarithm of page/domain count to see the details in the tails):

One interesting comparison is the change in Page Authority for the domains, subdomains and sub-folders PRO and Free Trial members are tracking in our campaign based tools.

The top left panel in the chart shows that the new model shifts the distribution of Page Authority for the active domains, subdomains and sub-folders to the right. The distribution of the change in Page Authority is included in the top right panel, and shows that most of the campaigns have a small increase in their scores (average increase is 3.7), with some sites increasing by 20 points or more. A scatter plot of the individual campaign changes is illustrated in the bottom panel, and shows that 82% of the active domains, subdomains and sub-folders will see an increase in their Page Authority (these are the dots above the gray line). It should be noted that these comparisons are based solely on changes in the model, and any additional links that these campaigns have acquired since the last index update will act to increase the scores (and conversely, any links that have been dropped will act to decrease scores).

The remainder of this post provides more detail about these metrics. To sum up this first part, the models underlying the Page and Domain Authority metrics will be updated with the next Linkscape index update. This will improve their ability to predict search position, due in part to the new model's better ability to separate pages based on their link profiles. Page Authority will remain the single highest correlated metric with search position that we have seen.

The rest of the post provides a deeper look at these models, and a lot of what follows is quite technical. Fortunately, none of this information is needed to actually use these Authority scores (just as understanding the details of Google's search algorithm is not necessary to use it). However, if you are curious about some of the details then read on.

The previous discussion has centered around distributions of Page Authority across a set of pages. To gain a better understanding of the models' characteristics, we need to explore its behavior on the inputs. However, the inputs are a 41 dimensional space and it's impossible (for me at least!) to visualize anything in 41 dimensions. As an alternative, we can attempt to reduce the dimensionality to something more manageable. The intuition here is that pages that have a lot of links probably have a lot of external links, followed links, a high mozRank, etc. Domains that have a lot of linking root domains probably have a lot of linking IPs, linking subdomains, a high domain mozRank, etc. One approach we could take is simply to select a subset of metrics (like the table in the "pumpkin recipes" SERP above) and examine those. However, this throws away the information from the other metrics and will inherently be more noisy than something that uses all of them. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an alternate approach that uses all of the data. Before diving into the PCA decomposition of the data, I'll take a step back and explain what PCA is with an example.

Principal Component Analysis is a technique that reduces dimensionality by projecting the data onto Principal Components (PC) that explain most of the variability in the original data. This figure illustrates PCA on a small two dimensional data set:

This sample data looks roughly like an ellipse. PCA computes two principal components illustrated by the red lines and labeled in the graph that roughly align with the axes of the ellipse. One representation of the data is the familiar (x, y) coordinates. A second, equivalent representation is the projection of this data onto the principal components illustrated by the labeled points. Take the upper point (7.5, 6). Given these two values, it's hard to determine where it is in the ellipse. However, if we project it onto the PCs we get (4.5, 1.2)which tells us that it is far to the right of the center along the main axis (the 4.5 value) and a little up along the second axis (the 1.2 value).

We can do the same thing with the link metrics, only instead of using two inputs we use all 41 inputs. After doing so, something remarkable happens:

Two principal components naturally emerge that collectively explain 88% of the covariance in the original data! Put another way, almost all of the data lies in some sort of strange ellipse in our 41 dimensional space. Moreover, these PCs have a very natural link to our intuition. The first PC, which I'll call the Domain/Subdomain PC projects strongly onto the domain and subdomain related metrics (upper panel, blue and red lines), and has a very small projection onto the page metric (upper panel green lines). The second PC has the opposite property and projects strongly onto page related metrics with a small projection onto Domain/Subdomain metrics.

Don't worry if you didn't follow all of that technical mumbo jumbo in the last few paragraphs. Here's the key point: instead of talking about number of links, followed external links to domains, linking root domains, etc. we can instead talk about just two things - an aggregate domain/subdomain link metric and an aggregate page link metric and recover most of the information in the original 41 metrics.

Armed with this new knowledge, we can revisit the 10K SERP data and analyze it in with these aggregate metrics.

This chart shows the joint distribution of the 10K SERP data projected onto these PCs, along with the marginal distribution of each on the top and right hand side. At the bottom left side of the chart are pages with low values for each PC signifying that the page doesn't have many links and they are on domains without many links. There aren't many of these in the SERP data since these are unlikely to rank in search results. In the upper right are heavily linked to pages on heavily linked to domains, the most popular pages on the internet. Again, there aren't many of these pages in the SERP data because there aren't many of them on the internet (e.g. twitter.com, google.com, etc.) Interestingly, most of the SERP data falls into one of two distinct clusters. By examining the follow figure we can identify these clusters:

This chart shows the average folder depth of each search result, where folder depth is defined as the number of slashes (/) after the home page (with 1 defined to be the home page). By comparing with the previous chart, we can identify the two distinct clusters as home pages and pages deep on heavily linked to domains.

To circle back to search position, we can plot the average search position:

We see a general trend toward higher search position as the aggregate page and domain metrics increase. This data set only collected the top 30 results for each keyword, so values of average search position greater than 16 are in the bottom half of our data set. Finally, we can visually confirm that our Page and Domain Authority models capture this behavior and gain further insight into the new vs old model differences:

This is a dense figure, but here are the most important pieces. First, Page Authority captures the overall behavior seen in the Average Search position plot, with higher scores for pages that rank higher and lower scores for pages that rank lower (top left). Second, comparing the old vs new models, we see that the new model predicts higher scores for the most heavily linked to pages and lower scores for the least heavily linked to pages, consistent with our previous observation that the new model does a better job discriminating among pages.

Don't punish everyone for one person's mistake

2011-11-25T09:08:00.000-08:00

Don't punish everyone for one person's mistake from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices

2011-11-21T02:27:00.000-08:00

How To Win At Football And In Business

2011-10-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

Let me start off today’s COJ with a little disclaimer: A lot of what you read in today’s column might be wrong. Because today I am talking about football! And the truth is, I know crap about football. I mean I understand the basics, but beyond that I am kind of useless. For example, today I learned what a onside kick is, thanks to, Coach Kevin Kelley, from Pulaski Academy in Little Rock Arkansas.

That’s because Coach Kelley used the onside kick as part of an odd strategy to score 29 points before their opponents even touched the ball. Apparently, the team was able to use onside kick’s to push the ball down the field, recover them, and then score. They did this 4 times in a row. Allowing for complete control of the football, touchdown, after touchdown. Granted, on their 5th try they failed, but this was an astounding feat for a team that was ranked nearly last and ended up winning big, 64-34.

Is Kelly the best high school football coach ever? Probably not. Are his players the best players ever? Again probably not. Does Coach Kelly understand the power of thinking outside the box, and developing his own strategy on the fundamentals of the game? You bet he does!

In 1984 Ben & Jerr’ys Ice Cream wanted to raise investment funds to build a new manufacturing plant. At the time they were already on their way to building a strong brand that was shipping across New England. Because of this, venture capitalists were keen to put money into their success. But both Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield had different ideas about building a business.

They wanted to continue to support the economy of Vermont. So, they established a Vermont-only public stock offering. This meant that anyone in the state of Vermont could easily invest in the company. That same year profits grew 120% and Ben & Jerry’s started to become a serious competitor to ice cream heavy weight Häagen-Dazs.

So how do you start thinking outside the box? First, pull yourself out of the box you’re in! If you want to learn more about marketing, stop reading blogs and get back to the fundamentals (story telling, design, and imagination). Want to think outside the box of SEO? Then how about start learning more about the field of Information Retrieval, natural language processing, and heuristic computation.

Writing this post was fun! I am still not an expert on football, but I learned a bit by writing about it. And let’s face it, I wouldn’t have learned anything at all, if I didn’t step out of my box and try something new!

List of F-Commerce Success Stories (and why 45 Likes = 1 sale)

2011-09-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

F-Commerce, the use of Facebook to assist in the buying and selling of products and services, is new, controversial, and next to group-buy, the hottest thing in digital retail right now.

We’ve been summarising the state of the f-commerce nation in the last few articles, and today we’ve put together a starter list of publicised f-commerce success stories from named companies for you…

Of course, the standout case comes from event ticketing site, Eventbrite, with some useful numbers (every social commerce initiative needs its own Tamara Mendelsohn), but there are others. If you have any examples of named f-commerce success stories – whether on-Facebook or off-Facebook (web-store, in-store), let us know, and we’ll add it the list.

Ticketmaster: When a Ticketmaster user posts a specific event they are attending, or may want to attend, to Facebook, it generates $5.30 of direct ticket sales
Eventbrite: Every Facebook share generates $2.53 in ticket sales (DPS – dollars per share (ie RPS (revenue per share)) – or in shares to sale = 24 – i.e. number shares needed to generate a new sale (based on latest av. ticket price ($60)) 24 shares generate 1 new purchase (and 11 visits to eventbrite.com)
- In a recent update to their gold-standard analysis (by marketing director Tamara Mendelsohn), Eventbrite found some interesting twists in the dynamics of social commerce – they installed the Facebook “Like” button (the lowest-friction social sharing tool on the web) on pre-purchase pages, but on order confirmation pages they installed higher-friction but stronger “Publish to Facebook” tool.
  - Eventbrite found that a “Like” generated $1.34 in sales (thus 45 likes generates 1 new sale (av. sale price of $60))
  - Secondly, Eventbrite experienced more sharing post-purchase than pre-purchase (60% vs 40%), indicating that motivation to share is higher post purchase – despite being more onerous (for explanation, see here on loss aversion and the “endowment effect“. Furthermore, the share rate varies pre- and post- purchase – the ‘Browsing Share Rate’ (pre-purchase) is 1%, whilst post-purchase (transaction share rate) was 10%. People are 10x more likely to share post-purchase
  - Moreover, a post-purchase share was found to more impact than a pre-purchase one. A post-purchase share on Facebook drives 20% more ticket sales per share than a pre-purchase one. The relevance of this for brands and retailers is that post-purchase social commerce may well be more valuable than pre-purchase social commerce. (NB social commerce is defined by Eventbrite as “ the intersection of social media activity and eCommerce”
  - Also of note is that revenue per share varies by product category (not just price) – business events have high share rates but generate few sales, whilst music events have lower share rates but higher DPS ($12 vs average RPS $2.53)

Incipio Technologies: Facebook is #2 source of e-commerce traffic, number of shoppers from Facebook adding products to a cart is 3X the average, final conversion rate among shoppers referred by Facebook is 2X the average (ShopVisible).
P&G: Sold 1000 diapers in under an hour on its f-store
Tesco: Generated £2m+ in-store sales with FB vouchers for fans
RachelRoy: Third highest sales the day it ran a temporary ‘pop-up’ Facebook fan store
Kembrel: 20% of all black Friday sales transactions were on Facebook with a 7 to 10% larger shopping cart than their dot.com website
BabyAndMeGifts: 50% of online sales from Facebook (BigCommerce storefront)
LiveScribe: ‘increase in revenue [unspecified] and customer awareness after the small investment of setting up a Facebook storefront (Storefront Social)’ (Marketing Manager Brett Kaufman)
Ettitude: Aussie retailer has ‘logged sales‘ coming from Facebook (Managing Director Phoebe Yu)
Chompon: Group / Flash Sales platform found RPS on Facebook = $14 of revenue, and RPL (revenue per like $8)
Ticketfly: Online ticketing site found that as of Jan 2011, every Facebook share/tweet generated 3.25 tickets sales; Facebook is Ticketfly’s top referrer at roughly 9% of total traffic.
Levi’s saw a 40 times increase in referral traffic from Facebook after implementing the Like button in April 2010 and has maintained those levels since. (source SearchEngineLand) Prior to deploying FB social plugins, less than 1% of traffic came from Facebook, now 40% comes from Facebook
Outdoor sporting goods retailer Giantnerd.com saw a 100% increase revenue from Facebook within two weeks of adding the Like button.(source NYT)
American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors (source NYT)
Children’s clothing retailer Tea Collection added the Like button to sale merchandise and saw daily revenues increase 10 times. (source SearchEngineLand)
ShoeDazzle added the Like button to all of the products on its site and within the first month had thousands of likes for its top products. ShoeDazzle now has over 1M likes (source SearchEngineLand)
ShoeDazzle also lets people login to its site using Facebook, and Facebook-connected users were 50% more likely to make repeat purchases every month than average shoppers.source SearchEngineLand)

Insofar as traffic is a key variable (along with conversion and order value) driving sales, Facebook has released some general stats on the impact of social plugins on traffic generation (via SearchEngineLand)

The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.
People who sign in with Facebook at The Huffington Post view 22% more pages and spend 8 minutes longer than the average reader .
Users coming to the NHL.com from Facebook spend 85% more time, read 90% more articles and watch 85% more videos than a non-connected user.
ABCNews.com, Washington Post and The Huffington Post are said to have more than doubled their referral traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins.
The number of daily likes more than tripled, going from an average of 2,000 likes per day to over 7,000 likes.
Daily referral traffic from Facebook to Metacafe doubled, going from about 60,00 to 120,000.
Total Facebook actions (likes, shares, comments) rose to 20,000 per day.
Video site, Metcafe, following four recommendations for getting a 3-5x boost in use of social pluging (below) saw the number of daily likes more than triple, going from an average of 2,000 likes per day to over 7,000 likes, daily referral traffic from Facebook to Metacafe doubled, going from about 60,00 to 120,000 and total Facebook actions (likes, shares, comments) rose to 20,000 per day.
1. 1. Versions that show thumbnails of friends are used.
  2. They allow people to add comments.
  3. If they appear at both the top and bottom of articles.
  4. If they appear near visual content like videos or graphics.
- Recommendation for Social Plugin Optimisation:

Facebook commerce by the numbers

2011-09-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

f-commerce statistics roundup: Facebook commerce by the numbers

1. First, f-commerce is already a viable retail platform

· Top 3: The top 3 brands on Facebook (by fans) all sell directly on Facebook - Coca-Cola(24m), Starbucks (20m) and Disney (19m)

· 2-4%: f-store conversion rates – on a par with web-stores (avg. 3.4%, according to Forrester/Shop.org)

· $650,000,000: The drop in Netflix share value when Warner opened up a Facebook movie rental (streaming) service in 2011

· 1000: Number of diapers P&G sold on its f-store in under an hour

· 50,000: Number of retailers who have opened an f-store with Payvment

· 6 hours: Time it took for the Rachel Roy Facebook jewelry store to sell out

· 3rd highest: daily sales made by Rachel Roy, the day it opened it’s pop-up f-store

· 1m+: Starbucks customers using their e-commerce-enabled Facebook CRM loyalty program

· 1300: Number of products added every week to the ASOS f-store

· 20%: Proportion of black Friday sales transactions on Facebook for e-tailer Kembrel

· 7-10%: Increased Average Order Value for Facebook transactions (vs. web-store) for Kembrel

· 5000+: customers using Walmart’s group-buy Facebook app on the day of its launch

· $34: Amount paid for the first transaction ever to take place in Facebook at 11.50 am EST on July 8, 2009 for bouquet of flowers ‘A Slice of Life’ on the f-store of U.S. florist 1-800 flowers

2. Second, Facebook drives E-Commerce traffic

· 6.5%: click-through rates on Facebook walls are 6.5%

· 67% of retailers plan to use Facebook to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites

· 25%; proportion of users who post links to other companies, products or services

· 20%: proportion of e-commerce sales from Facebook (for Wetseal)

3. Third, Facebook customers are good customers

· 1.5x: Facebook users spend 1.5x more online that other Internet users

4. Fourth, Facebook is where your customers are

· 1 in 11: humans that are on Facebook (642 613 700) [Q2 2011]

· 40%: The drop in Coca-Cola’s website traffic in the past year, but Coke’s Facebook page is up and is now the world’s most popular Facebook brand page (22m)

· 7.9: In 2010, Facebook grew by 7.9 users/second

· 1/3: Proportion of time spend online on Facebook by Facebook users

· 50%: proportion of users who log on to Facebook in any given day

· 700 billion: Minutes spent on Facebook every month

· 80: Average community pages, groups and events to which a Facebook user is connected

· Bigger than Google: In August 2010, U.S. Internet users spent 41.1 billion minutes on Facebook, surpassing Google Inc.’s 39.8 billion minutes for the first time

· Nine in Ten: Proportion of US social network users who use Facebook

· 57.1%: Proportion of Internet US users using Facebook

5. Fifth, Facebook drives word of mouth sales

· 75%: Percentage of Facebook users who have “liked” a brand

· $2.52: what a Facebook share generates for ticketing site Eventbrite

· 11: Visits generated by a Facebook share for ticketing site Eventbrite

· 30bn+: pieces of content shared online every month by Facebook users (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.)

· 90: Average pieces of content created by a Facebook user each month

· 130: Average number of Facebook friends of a user (who receive their word of mouth recommendations)

· $3.60: the media value generated by the average Facebook fan is $3.60/year

6. Sixth, Facebook drives loyalty sales

· 117%: the additional amount a fan will spend on a brand compared to a non fan

· 17%: proportion of Facebook users who say simply having the ability to ‘Like’ a brand makes them more likely to buy

· 51%: the increase in likelihood a customer will purchase, after clicking the ‘like’ button

· 41%: the increase in likelihood a customer that a customer will recommend, if they have liked the brand

· 28%: the increase in likelihood that customers who ‘like’ a brand will repurchase

· 40%: Proportion who ‘Like’ businesses in order to receive special discounts and promotions

· 30% to 200%: increase in site registrations for sites using Facebook sign on

· 15% to 100%: Increase in the number of reviews and other user-generated content generated when using Facebook social sign-on

7. Seventh, industry adoption of f-commerce is accelerating

· 76%: percentage of retailers who plan to use Facebook for ‘social commerce’ initiatives

· 50%+: proportion of the global top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook using it’s social plugins

· 50,000+: Number of websites that integrated Facebook social plugins (incl. ‘Like’) in the week they launched

· 2.5 million+: websites have now integrated with Facebook

· 10,000: number of new websites integrate with Facebook every day (with social plugins) (since April 2010)

· 2m+: Number of sites that have integrated Facebook social plugins

· 7 out of 10: proportion of digital marketers who have implemented or planning to implement Facebook Like feature

8. Eighth, f-commerce is future-proof retail (mobile and app platform, Facebook as the OS of the future)

· 200+ million: Facebook users accessing the utility through their mobile devices

· 2x: People using Facebook on mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users

· 94%: Proportion of phone users who will communicate on their handsets via social networks

· 50%: Proportion of mobile internet traffic accounted for by Facebook and other social networking tools

· 70%: proportion of Facebook users who engage with Facebook applications

· 550,000: the number of active applications currently on Facebook Platform

· 44%: proportion of retailers who plan to use Facebook application in place of microsites for product launches and promotions

A Simple Guide to What Makes a Good Link

2011-09-28T11:14:00.001-07:00

Our industry is by nature quite active and vocal online. Hundreds of thousands of SEO blogs exist, with a wide range in quality, originality, and novelty of content. To those of us practicing SEO on a daily basis, a lot of content may be summarily dismissed as regurgitation or noise, for noise sake.

For those new to the SEO industry, the amount of advice published online can be daunting and difficult to sift through. It is for this reason that I’m providing a simplified guide to the single most-common question I’m asked time and time again during training and consulting: what makes a good link?

When it comes to SEO, there’s no such thing as a simple answer. Yes, we’re all aware that relevancy algorithms are composed of hundreds of variables, each attributed weightings, which means that often a simple question can’t be answered (unless further conditions can be provided). In this case however, I would like to propose a simple rule of thumb that those starting their education in search can use as a universal starting point.

A good link should have the potential to deliver relevant visitors.

Understanding what makes a good link is possibly the most tangible thing to grasp for any learning SEO, as much of what has “the potential to deliver relevant visitors” is common sense and in plain sight. Knowing what makes an “OK” link or a “strategic” link may require more experience and comfort with backlink profile analysis, which may hopefully be expedited by this simple rule of thumb.

1. Relevant Visitors are From the Target Geolocation

What this may mean is that your linking site URL has the ccTLD (country code top-level domain) of the country for which you are trying to grow traffic. If not ccTLD, then perhaps another method has been used by the site to clearly ring-fence their content to a smaller audience.

As an example, for a UK tech start-up product looking to grow its user-base, a linking story in eu.techcrunch.com is much better than techcrunch.com, as the former is focused on a European audience.

2. To Provide Relevant Visitors, a Site Must Have an Audience

If a site isn’t familiar to you, perhaps it can be found on reputable media databases or industry specific directories. Even a small, engaged audience can be valuable, and a good indication of quality.

How does the site being evaluated fare in search for their core terms? Does the site have a detailed and open “About Us” page, which may even offer visitor figures?

3. Relevant Visitors Should Have Exposure to Thematically Similar Content to Yours

Let’s say your site sells nuts and bolts online and you obtain a link in a piece of content about hardware or DIY. Potentially, that link could provide some relevant traffic. Additionally, if the site on which the linking page sits is also thematically relevant, then that’s great, though not essential.

But is it a problem if you get a regional newspaper, rather than a site about hardware, to link to an online voucher-offer that is valid in your newest store, which opens soon in that region? No. Regional relevancy and linking page content relevancy will be extremely valid and should mean a good chance of relevant visitors.

4. Relevant Visitors Come From “Clickable” Links

Think about it. How often have you clicked a site footer link? How often do you click a link in a piece of content that would appear to be about to link to a page of useful further information; or a link in content that is the explicit target of the content (e.g., “Visit NS Hardware now, to get your 25% off e-voucher for the new store.”).

5. Relevant Visitors Can’t (Easily) Be Faked

(As a caveat, we would expect a certain percentage of the visitors to perform some kind of interaction, or conversion activity, to be determined as relevant.)

Page properties such as toolbar PageRank can be easily inflated and may not be reliable or up to date.

In Summary

While there are mitigating circumstances and shades of gray, when it comes to assessing what makes a good link, the above principle is one that is common sense and easy to grasp for new practitioners (or even clients who need a quick answer).

4 Quick Ways to Audit Your Paid Search Account

2011-09-28T11:13:00.001-07:00

Poor account structure and bad campaign settings can cost you hundreds or thousands of wasted dollars every week. Like a physical for your account, good auditing helps to catch bad habits and some warning signs before costs spiral out of control. Here are 4 ways to uncover common mistakes in less than an hour of review.

1. Segment by Device

Is your website mobile ready? Is your product something you’d buy on a phone? Is the checkout easy to do with limited space and time?

If you answered no to any of those questions, it may not make sense to target mobile devices. But, you might be pleasantly surprised, especially on brand terms.

To find out for yourself, use the Segment menu and choose Device.

The result is a report that breaks down whichever segment you’re looking at, say Campaigns, into lines for each of the different devices:

If you don’t have AdWords conversion tracking set up, you can also get data by device in Google Analytics. Go to:

Visitors > Mobile > Devices

The report will separate the data more granularly, but you can use the sub-navigation above the report to roll up or drill down as you like:

Just as you shouldn’t mix targeting for display network and search network in one campaign, you should separate devices (mobile vs. tablet vs. desktop), so you can more directly target, measure, and value them.

2. Do a Bidding Sanity Check

There are a lot of layers to bidding, but the core is that you should you should pay more when you’re more likely to make more money.

The bidding hierarchy looks like this:

Exact Match > Phrase Match > Modified Broad Match > Broad Match

You should target known converting search queries that have the most data using exact match and generally be willing to pay more for them.

Broad match, which will attract a wide range of terms of varying value, is inherently less valuable, because you don’t know what you’re getting.

If you’re bidding more for broad match terms than exact match terms, you’re wasting money.

The same is true on the display network (formerly content network), which looks something like this:

Retargeting > Managed Placements > Automatic Placements

Automatic placements are like the (very, very) broad match of the display network. Managed placements are similar to exact match. Retargeting is often the most profitable display campaign, though not always.

To find new keywords and sites to promote to exact match and managed placements, run search term reports (a.k.a. search query reports) and site placement reports, respectively.

3. Analyze Brand vs. Non-Brand Terms

Conversions on your brand terms are earned through other marketing. Sure, there are plenty of important things you need to do to make brand terms more successful, such as grouping them properly and implementing sitelinks.

I’ve seen more than a few clients who outsource their paid search management and things look profitable until you look past brand terms, which can account for more than 50 percent of conversions, but less than 10 percent of cost.

Non-brand keywords are your growth opportunity. They’re where you’ll be able to find new customers who aren’t as familiar with your brand and they’re a more scalable source of traffic.

Start by analyzing the KPIs of your account segmented by brand vs. non-brand keywords, such as:

It’s common to wonder whether you’re undervaluing non-brand terms with last click attribution (i.e., did the click on a non-brand term, search on a brand term and then convert). Both AdWords and Google Analytics default to the industry standard last click attribution.

Attribution is a complex topic and many of the specialized tools to tackle it are out of reach for most advertisers. However, you can use two free tools.

AdWords Search Funnel

This hard-to-find section of AdWords can show you the average clicks to conversion, top paths, conversions under First Click attribution and more. Go to:

Reporting and Tools > Conversions > Search Funnels (lower left corner).

The Top Paths report segmented by search query is a particularly good place to start.

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics

If you want to see inter-channel assists, the new version of Google Analytics has a similar report.

If you’re in the old version, click to the New Version in the top right. Then:

Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths

This is the result.

Chances are that you’ll see self-referrals are most common and that it doesn’t take that many clicks to drive conversion. If so, you can rest assured that your ROI metrics from last-click attribution are reasonable enough. You can start optimizing non-brand terms without worrying about collateral damage on your brand terms.

4. Examine Ad Group - Text Ad Harmony

The two most common issues with ad groups are that:

Grouping isn’t tight enough.
Ads don’t address target search queries and their goals.

Grouping Isn’t Tight Enough

Your text ad can’t appeal to everyone. But, you greatly increase your chance the more narrowly you cast the reach of that text ad.

Put another way, you’ll get much further writing specific ads that target “cat food”, “dog food”, and “pet food” keywords individually than as a group.

David Szetela shared a good rule of thumb: all of the keywords in the ad group should have at least two words in common.

Ads Don’t Address Target Search Queries & Their Goals

PPC ad writing is a science (see these articles about testing) and an art (as seen on theBoostCTR blog).

Great PPC ad writing attracts as many people as possible who are as qualified as possible. One of the easiest ways to improve click-through rate is to repeat the search query in the text ad, possibly in the headline.

Which search query or keyword should you target? Sort by the impressions and look for common terms in the top 3 on the list. If you can’t find enough common ground, split up the ad group accordingly.

Cut Wasted Spend with an Audit

It’s easy to forget the fundamentals or overlook some best practices when you’re building out new campaigns. Whether you’re taking over an account, reviewing someone else’s work, or just need a refresh, a regular checklist and audit can easily trim wasted spend.

Search Advertising Revenues Hit $7.3 Billion in First Half of 2011

2011-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Search advertising remains the online advertising leader, as revenues increased to $7.3 billion during the first half of 2011. During the same period, online advertising shattered more records, growing to a record $14.9 billion in revenues.

That $14.9 billion spent by U.S. Internet advertisers during the first six months of this year represents a 23.2 percent year-over-year increase, eclipsing last year’s first-half record of $12.1 billion in revenue, according to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report from IAB.

Search was once again the top online advertising format with $7.3 billion in revenues during the first half of this yeaer, good for 49 percent of all revenues. The $5.7 billion in first-half revenues last year accounted for 47 percent of all revenues.

In Q2, search accounted for 49 percent of al revenues, or $3.8 billion, up 29 percent from Q2 2010 when search totaled $2.9 billion.

In the past five years, search has been king, seeing strong growth, despite losing some overall share last year to display. Display grew to $2.8 billion in Q2 and accounted for 37 percent of all interactive spend in the first half of 2011.

Another online advertising record was broken in Q2 as revenues increased 24.1 percent to $7.7 billion, up from $6.2 billion in Q2 2010. Online advertising also hit a new high of $7.3 billion in Q1 this year.

Search advertising was forecast to hit $14.38 billion, according to a June eMarketer estimate.

Advanced PPC Budget & Bidding Recommendations

2011-09-28T11:11:00.001-07:00

An optimization framework based on their own methodology, with tips to help marketers discover the most impactful activities to increase campaign performance.

Budget Maximizing Tips for Large Scale Paid Search

In budgeting, they recommend regularly reviewing top performing campaigns to ensure they aren’t hitting a budget ceiling and missing out on potential traffic. Use what-if forecasting to discover new ways to drive volume, ROI, and profit in different bidding target scenarios. Based on their experience with large scale paid search advertisers, Marin also offers the insight that campaigns with Google’s “standard delivery” option receive fewer impressions than those with the “accelerated delivery” option, with the same budget.

Pointing to the success of paid search as one of the most profitable online marketing channels, they recommend giving Google’s beta Keywordless Ads feature a shot. Noting that their own e-commerce and retail clients who have tried it saw a lift in conversions and revenue, this is something for marketers looking to increase profitable volume with long-tail expansion, without cannibalizing clicks from existing campaigns, to test out.

Improve Bidding with Day Parting and Headroom Analysis

Compare historical data, when possible, to determine how performance varies by time of day or day of the week. When using this strategy though, Marin warns against confusing time and date of click with conversion, which can result in a long period of latency skewing your analysis. The goal is to increase bids for the times and dates clicks are most valuable, not necessarily when conversions happen.

Occasionally review the list of keywords below the minimum bid to determine where your CPA or margin goals are not achievable; lowering margin targets or increasing CPA targets could identify keywords that will perform better now than they had in the past. Also, make sure none of your campaigns are missing opportunities, with maximum bid threshold settings below the minimum first page bid.

Calculate headroom by subtracting the cost-per-click from keyword bid for keywords where the maximum bids are higher than your CPCs to determine headroom, budget that would be better spent elsewhere to increase volume. Marin recommends averaging out the headroom for your position 1-2 keywords, as they cost less than you are willing to pay and won’t affect CPC or volume, and re-allocating part of your budget to boost bods on keywords with lower average positions.

Marin Next Offers Prioritized Recommendations for Marketers

Designed for advertisers and agencies, Marin Next helps marketers discover new revenue opportunities in large-scale search, display, and social media campaigns. The previous version of their online marketing platform managed campaigns and pulled data to help marketers get better insights and optimize their bids. Marin Next adds prioritized recommendations and workflows for previously unacknowledged opportunities.

Marin Software VP of Marketing Matt Lawson tells Search Engine Watch that Marin Next was developed through the collective experience and best practices they’ve learned in working with over 800 clients. One of the challenges they had seen with large-scale advertisers was that they missed opportunities that were right in front of them, simply because of the sheer size and scale of their programs

How to Spoof Facebook Friends with Dodgy Headlines from Trusted News Sources

2011-09-28T11:10:00.001-07:00

I’m not sure how long users have been able to edit the titles and descriptions of news posts shared by friends, but people should be aware – especially marketers.

Here are a few things I really shouldn’t be able to do, yet inexplicably, Facebook allows me to:

Change the Title of a News Article

I can change the title when I reshare a friend’s link, attributing the weird title (which I could have really gone crazy with) to Huffington Post and the share/read to my friend. I could have said my friend had been reading about something really embarrassing, but I was trying not to be a jerk. Until I tried again on someone else.

Change the Title & Description While Attributing Fake News to a Real Publication

The publications that allow you to change the description are even more fun.

Just like that, it looks like my friend has been written up by Yahoo News for being knighted by the Queen herself. It’s all in fun and games, but imagine if I’d changed the Yahoo title and description to reflect a made up natural disaster or terror attack? My friends could all share it. They wouldn’t be able to click through to anything, but the title would grab some attention. Not so funny anymore.

Attribute Fake News to a Business Page

In this next example, I change the title of a news article shared by a business page. I could make it look like a competitor shared something like porn or worse… use your imagination. People aren’t likely to click the link, but they’ll sure read the title and see who “shared” it first.

Be Awesome. Or Be a Jerk. It’s Up To You

It’s a little nuts that anyone can edit a title or description simply by clicking on and still show that content with a major publisher’s logo and URL. That’s how things like this happen:

Quick Steps to Causing Havoc

Click the 'share button' under a story appearing in your news feed to re-share the link a friend has already posted. Hover over the headline or description in the dialog box. If either highlight yellow when you mouseover them, then those sections are editable.

Then simply click the yellow highlight to edit and start editting in the text fields that appear.

Way.

Too.

Easy.

Conductor Examines SEO Technology Impact on On-Page Auditing

2011-09-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Examines SEO professionals’ on-page auditing behavior and their attitudes toward SEO technology.

In the first part of this study, they conducted several experiments that simulated auditing 100 to 500 pages using one of three methods: manual auditing, semi-automatic software, or a fully automated SEO platform. Not surprisingly, this initial experiment showed that the SEO platform was several hundred times more efficient and required far less in man-hours.

Conductor then surveyed 46 SEO pros in an effort to understand if their actual on-page auditing behavior resulted in optimal page visibility. While 48 percent reported they believed they were auditing as frequently as needed, three quarters audited their pages less than once a week; over 50 percent audited less than twice per month.

In an examination of over 11,000 web pages, though, Conductor found that 85 percent changed more than once a week. They point to a disparity between audit frequency and the actual rate of web page change that suggests SEOs could do more to maximize natural search visibility.

A few key findings from Conductor’s analysis:

The mismatch between auditing frequency and the rate of web page change leaves opportunities on the table.
Up to four full time resources are needed to manually audit 500 pages.
Manual or semi-automatic auditing is costly and can result in a narrower view of the on-page landscape.
87 percent of SEOs surveyed believe they would be more effective at on-page auditing with automated technology.
28 percent of respondents said they would audit more frequently but lack the tools to do so.
35-45 percent of auditing must still be done manually when using semi-automated software.

Google+ Hits 50 Million Users, Adds Circle Sharing

2011-09-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Many brands have been impatiently waiting for Google to unveil Google+ business profiles. Now there's more news that should make marketers even more eager: Google’s social network has hit an estimated 50 million users, partially thanks to a surge in use after Plus opened to the public.

Google is "close" to unveiling the profiles, Advertising Age reports, which will allow companies to create a page and circles, which also includes access to a newly announced feature that lets you share your Google+ circles.

Google+’s 50 Million Mark

Estimates show that Google+ hit the 50 million mark over the weekend, according to Paul Allen. While Allen’s estimates have a noteworthy margin of error, he makes a good argument for why his statistical analysis is roughly correct.

“It is possible that my U.S. - non-U.S. ratio is off slightly,” says Allen. “And it is possible that my 15% fudge factor for private profiles and for non-Roman characters could be way off.”

That said, he has taken pains to demonstrate how his methodology – which looks at the occurrence of rare last names – yield on-target results, even if he can’t pinpoint the user count. According to his estimates, the site boomed from 43.4 million users on September 22nd to over 50 million on September 25th. The reason boils down to Google+ being opened to the public.

Hitwise showed a similar boom; according to their analysis, Plus saw a 1,200% increase in traffic after it opened its doors to all users. Hitwise has yet to respond to an inquiry on whether this examines the front page or all pages, but I would assume they’re referring to the plus.google.com page itself.

In any case, it’s evident that Google is getting a rush of users now that it’s not invite-only; Allen suggests that there has been a 4 percent daily growth, equating to about 2 million user registrations each day since the public launch.

Circles Are Now Shareable

Getting all those new users is a big deal for Google, but the company’s innovation continues to focus on connecting those users. Changes to Circles, the feature that lets users divide their contacts into heavily curated groups, allow greater manipulation of those circles – including the option to share them.

The new feature can be found in the Circles menu. Just click on the circle you want to share, click the “share this circle” option, and choose who you want to share it with.

You can share a circle with your other circles, with individuals, or even share it publicly. While the share will reveal who is in your circle, most privacy concerns are addressed: the name of the circle isn’t shared, nor are future updates.

Google Analytics Visits Metric: Change. Implications. Opportunities.

2011-09-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Recently the Google Analytics team changed the way sessionization algorithm. In lay terms… how the start, duration and end of a Visit is computed.

A minor version of the butterfly effect occurred, one small change in a part of the system caused a few other smaller changes in other parts of the system. Some people freaked out. Others wondered what the fuss was all about. Still others wondered what they were going to eat for lunch. :)

If you were in the first two categories this blogpost (delightful video actually!) is for you.

Some of you know that I am the co-Founder of Market Motive, and also lead the Web Analytics Master Certification course (which is one of eight courses in Internet Marketing certification). The course is a structured program that teaches the gamut of web analytics. You start at the beginning (I know!) and evolve to an Analysis Ninja-hood.

Here's the rough path: Web Analytics 2.0 immersion > Adv KPI analysis techniques > Segmentation (Oh I love this so) > Actionable reports > Surveys > Testing > Multi-Channel analytics > Competitive Intelligence > Dissertation > (If you pass the rigorous evaluation) > Certification.

A key strategy for having the most kick butt course in the world is that it is astonishingly fresh. In addition to the structured curriculum we do weekly hour and half calls. Guess what the latest video in the Web Analytics Master Certification course was? Did you guess GA Visits changes? Ding, ding, ding!

I wanted to make an exception and share that video with all of you. It will hopefully give you an idea of the love and unique approach that Market Motive brings to teaching, along with sharing some very critical context and guidance on this important issue.

This important video covers:

00:00 – 02:14 Intro. Which metrics are impacted?

02:14 – 09:20 Context. How do web analytics tools currently compute visits? And if you use Omniture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, Piwik, what important question should you ask your vendor.

09:20 – 12:45 Impact. Estimating how much the change impacts you! Details, and grab the custom report.

12:45 – 17:50 The change. Clear articulation of what the change actually was. The new sessionization algorithm.

17:50 – 21:48 The implications. With examples that impact on Average Page Views per Visit, Bounce Rates, % New Visits, % Returning Visits.

21:48 – 31:20 Multi-Channel Funnels. Impact, new sweet yummy implications, and digital media attribution analysis. The one report that will probably cause you to hyper-ventilate a little bit.

31:20 – 37:02 Closing thoughts. My four point guidance on the implications and opportunities.

There is one important thing the video does not cover. At the time Google Analytics switched over to the new sessionization algorithm, coincidently a bug also impacted GA users data. The bug, temporarily, made it seem as if the impact was crazy because of the sessionization change. This bug was identified, data was fixed, that "craziness" is gone. Hence I'm skipping covering that.

Okay are you raring to go? Sink your teeth? Jump into the knowledge pond?

Here's the video:

Full of surprises, right?

I hope the video shared the reports and data you need to figure out for yourself in what way this change impacts you, the context you need to figure out how to internalize the change and share concrete information with your management team (rather than the FUD so easily accessible via tweets, Plus, Facebook posts, etc). For some of you the changes might be larger than the range I've mentioned in the video. But consider this: You know have a MUCH better idea of how your customers behave. You would not want to be blind to that (and have no change in data!). I suspect not.

I particularly enjoyed sharing with you the multi-channel funnels part, and the implications on attribution analysis. Is it not amazing that without the monkey gyrations – JavaScript tag updates, variables capturing, praying for rain – other tools might put you through (*if* they do multi-channel unique visitor analysis), that you can get this amazing data?

Beyond what's in the video consider the Assisted Conversions report, Top Conversions Paths, Time Lag and Path Length details. Earning a load of money and happiness because, finally, you'll deliver big consistent impact to the company bottom-line is now reality.

In closing… Change is always hard to accept, especially when it comes with even the slightest impact on status quo. But if there has to be progress in life, then change is just the thing that puts us in a higher, more optimal orbit. It makes a better existence possible.

Go give the new data and reports a try. Thinking in a new way will require effort and brain power. But real happiness is worth it.

All the best!