/ DOWNLOAD THE RESEARCH (PDF)

There have been some major world events this year that have impacted our ability to travel, from of the eruption of the Icelandic volcano to the political unrest in Thailand.

The Research & Insight team at iCrossing thought it would be interesting to investigate whether these events had an impact on the Travel Insurance category and take a look at the wider category as a whole. These kinds of events have meant that travellers’ interest in their travel insurance policy has increased as uncertainty around their trips has grown. Many passengers have been left stranded abroad forced to make their own way home at their own expense.

This report covers the travel insurance sector and aims to identify the main categories within that space, who the top competitors are, the demographics of travel insurance, search linguistics, mobile search and any seasonal and event driven trends.

Some of the key take aways from the report include:

• Searches for travel insurance have dropped in recent years, probably due to the global economic downturn. However natural disasters and political unrest have fuelled localised and temporary uplifts in the numbers of people searching for information about travel insurance
• People in the UK are most often searching for travel insurance in relation to European destinations, with the most popular financial / buying related qualifier being ‘cheap’
• The UK market is heavily dominated by generic travel insurance search terms, as consumers are unsure or unaware of which specific policies to go for. This opens up educational opportunities
• There are several specific travel insurance niches (‘student’, ‘business’, ‘ski’) where competition is less fierce, allowing smaller players to enter the market
• High street names dominate when people are searching for branded travel insurance, however it is the web-only companies that dominate in the generic travel insurance space where ranking for ‘head’ terms such as ‘travel insurance’ or ‘holiday insurance’ is key
• Women are 12% more likely to search for travel insurance than men
• 99.9% of search is happening on desktop computers as opposd to the mobile web (0.1%)

/ DOWNLOAD THE RESEARCH (PDF)

Post from: Connect

Travel Insurance Research Report

The trade body and its research partner on the study, PricewaterhouseCoopers, are working with digital media agencies including Isobar and Group M to model the social network’s ad revenues so it can present as accurate a picture as possible of digital ad spend in the first half of 2010, due in October.

Facebook is known to account for a large portion of display spending in the UK (and elsewhere) but it is not currently one of the more than 300 media owners that supply its revenues to the IAB to compile the study.

The IAB is keen to beef up the amount of display spend represented in the figures since it is paid search that continues to account for both the bulk of total spend and growth in the sector. Display advertising is seen as the area ripest for new growth as long as advertisers can be persuaded to use it as something other than a direct-response mechanism.

Speaking at a recent Guardian digital event for client advertisers, IAB head of research Tim Elkington said it lamented the degree to which display was not given due credit for its role in delivering online sales higher up in users’ routes to purchase.

The role of display for traditional brand awareness and perception has long been a key issue for the IAB to tackle since the format has become commoditised thanks to comparison with more successful channels for direct, sales-focused advertising, primarily paid search.

A recent study by the IAB examined the campaigns of three airlines to discover that display ads do increase the likelihood of conversion through ‘last-click’ routes like paid and natural search.

Elkington said discussions with Facebook about contributing formally to the study were ongoing and positive and agreed that modelling its revenues might help persuade the company to participate.

He added there had been discussion with the media agencies helping in the task about whether Facebook ads actually constituted search advertising since they are targeted against keywords in users’ profiles. However, it is most likely they will be treated as display due to the format of the ads.

Post from: Connect

UK IAB to ‘guestimate’ Facebook revenues for next online adspend study

I like it. It’s a neat proposition that suitably fits the challenges and opportunities that brands are faced with today.  With a digital space that has become less a place where we dip in and out of to achieve isolated tasks, and more a place we exist in day to day.  In true planner style I have a diagram for this:

The surprise here for me is that search, something iCrossing has carved a strong reputation in, is just a component of this.  Connectedness is so much more and as a newbie here I am impressed (and pleased) to see a company striving to help their clients make sense of what this means and how it works.

I augment this slightly ‘teachers pet’ post with some related thought pieces I am a big fan of around ‘molecular brands’ or ‘brand molecules’.  In a nutshell, these theories or concepts introduce the brand as a fluid and evolving form, one that is defined by the context in which it exists and by the users that interact with it. I find this interesting for iCrossing and their Connectedness philosophy for two reasons:

1. Connectedness can be fluid, defined by the common ground between an individual’s life and the brand’s life. So….

• Let’s understand more about these points of common ground in and around the immediately obvious
• Let’s pay full attention to the wider cultural values we want to connect with as well as those of the individual user
• Let’s listen and observe to what the brand means to people in different places, at different time
• Let’s understand how every point of interaction and participation shapes the brand in different ways

2. Connectedness is a brand concept, impacting strategic decisions about how a brand should behave or exist, beyond the implementational elements. So….

• Let’s help brands take the theory of connectedness beyond web traffic and search term performance.
• Let’s explore how every part of connected activity creates a coherent brand story.
• Let’s focus creativity on the design of an overall brand experience.
• Let’s start with core brand values or a brand proposition and build a connected strategy from the inside out.

Arriving as a digital strategist with a brand planning and research background I am quite excited about pursuing these ideas and contributing my take on things.

I’ll keep you posted on how things develop, in the meantime I would love to hear what everyone else thinks about connectedness and brand molecules!



Post from: Connect

Connected brands as molecular brands

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.icrossing.co.uk/file1.html
• http://www.icrossing.co.uk/file2.html
• http://example.com/another_file.html
• http://www.acompletelydifferentdomain.com/

You might find yourself in a position where want to take this list and reduce it to just the domain portions like this:

• example.com
• icrossing.co.uk
• icrossing.co.uk
• example.com
• acompletelydifferentdomain.com

It’s possible to use an Excel formula to do this. Here’s one I found by searching:

=IF(LEFT(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1),4)=”www.”,MID(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1),5,256),LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1))

This is fine, but as you can see the formula is rather long and combining this with any further functions would be a real headache. To try to solve this, I wrote an add-In for Excel that adds a handy function to perform this step (along with a few others).

Download the URL Tools Excel Add-in Here

To use the Add-in, you’ll need to save it somewhere on your computer (we use ‘C:\Program Files\URL Tools\’ by convention, which helps when sharing workbooks) and install the add-in via the Excel Options menu as follows:

1. Click on the Office Button in Excel

2. Select ‘Excel Options’ from the bottom of the menu

3. Select ‘Add-Ins’ from the left hand menu in the resulting dialog box

4. Click ‘Go’ where it says ‘Manage Excel Add-ins’

5. Click ‘Browse’ and browse to wherever you saved the Add-in file

6 Click ‘OK‘ in the appropriate places to return to Excel

Hopefully, you will now have the Add-in installed. To test this, do the following: Put a URL in cell A1. Any URL, but try something long like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_edmonds. Then, in cell A2 type ‘=wwwsubdomain(A1)’. All being well, this formula should return ‘en.wikipedia.org’. If so, celebrate, otherwise go back and check the installation steps again.

There are a number of other functions included in the Add-in that I will summarise below. There are a couple of options for handling the domain extraction outlined above, but they are subtly different. If in doubt, you probably just want to use ‘=wwwsubdomain’.

• subdomain() – returns the domain part of a URL including any subdomains e.g ‘http://www.example.com/index.htm’ becomes ‘www.example.com’
• nowww() – removes ‘www.’ from the start of a URL (note that www must be at the very beginning of the URL)
• wwwsubdomain() – basically, a combination of the above, equivalent to ‘nowww(subdomain(A1))’. This is what you want to use most of the time!
• urlencode() – Encodes a URL string (try it on a string like ‘Hello World!’)
• urldecode() – Un-encodes a URL string (try it on a string like ‘Hello%20World%21’)
• tld() – Returns the TLD of a URL (not 100% perfect but pretty good)
• geturl() – Extracts the URL from a Hyperlink

I hope you find this useful. It’s very much a work in progress so please let me have your feedback or questions in the comments section below.

Post from: Connect

URL Tools Add-In for Excel

If your brand is serious about becoming a publisher – whether on your own site or elsewhere on the web, you can learn a huge amount from the people who are creating and delivering the best content and services on the web.

I’ve asked the members of the Content team here at iCrossing to describe their favourite websites – and explain why it works for them on a personal level. It’s a good way to share our ideas on how to match content delivery to user need and business objectives, which is what content strategy boils down to. So here, then, is the iCrossing Content Team’s Top Websites List. If you’re thinking of getting going with a content strategy in the second half of this year or planning for 2011, it’s a good place to start if you want to understand best practice.

BBC News
Tamsin Hemingray – Content Director
My favourite website is the BBC News site, which has just been redesigned. If your content strategy is going to involve producing a high volume of very topical content, then the design and layout here is worth looking at. It’s impressively clean given the number of individual news stories it delivers from the homepage (30+ stories above the fold from my small laptop screen). I look at it pretty much every day, rarely feeling the need to delve deeper than the homepage because that single page has given me such a wealth of serious, topical and whimsical news.

The editors achieve this efficiency by using careful prioritisation of stories. In the first instance, prioritisation is based on recency, then it’s based on the relative importance of a story – so the “biggest” stories get the most space and the biggest pictures. Further down the page, the information is prioritised on a third level – with regional stories based on my specific location being given prominence. I find all of this makes it really easy for me to get to the information I want almost without a conscious process of selection happening in my own head.

Although the site will be generating huge amounts of attention overall, each given story will enjoy just a short period in the sun, with large numbers of people reading it in a short period of time. Once it falls off the front page, its traffic stats will similarly decline spectacularly in relative terms. Of course they will still get some traffic – as the BBC is an authority site in the eyes of Google, and so ranks well for most topical search queries. For example its story from 15 July is ranking on P1 for a search on “Raoul Moat”. However long term traffic plateaus are not the priority here, so it’s not surprising that the design and build is so clearly built around a “here today, gone tomorrow” delivery of content.

Bird Guides
Charlie Peverett, Content Strategist
I’m a birdwatcher. When I first went twitchy, back in the 1980s, if you wanted to know what rare birds were around, you had to a) be lucky enough to be on the ‘grapevine’ of information (passed from birder to birder – woe betide you fall out with a key node) or b) ring a premium rate phone line, and listen to a lot of information about places and birds that may or may not be of interest to you as your wallet progressively lightened.

Roll on 25 years and I and most other birders in the UK use Birdguides. It’s the UK’s most comprehensive hub for bird sightings info, and does an amazing job of innovating fast enough to stave off the threat of self-organised, crowd-sourced information while operating a paid-for business model.

My bookmark is to the map page. Here you can instantly see whether a Siberian Rubythroat or something less snazzy has turned up and where. This and other top-level content is free to view, as long as you’re logged in. If you want to drill deeper down – directions to the bird, articles, searchable archives and historical records – you need to subscribe, starting at £40 a year.

I use this site every day, currently as a non-subscriber. Even the non-premium service is useful enough to me that it’s worth a daily check. When I’ve got some spare cash (and maybe more time to act on the information, binoculars in hand) I’ll pay my subs again and make use of more features. But for now the free service is good enough that I don’t bother much looking elsewhere, and they’ll be front of mind when I’m ready to pay for more.

Does the subscription model work for them as a business? I don’t know. But I do know that as a user they’ve kept me loyal with decent usability and judicious distribution of the essential content. A great example of why, for a organisation where the product *is* content, the content strategy *is* the business model.

Red Visitor
Jeremy Head – Travel Editor
I’ve been thinking about destination guides of late.  Airlines, tourist boards, airports, hotels. The web is awash with the things. The end result nowadays is lots of rather generic, sometimes ageing content which is often targetted at search engines and not particularly useful for the user.

So I’ve been hunting for a site that does destination guides really well. And I think I’ve found one. It’s called Red Visitor and it’s in its relative infancy so doesn’t cover that many places

What’s good?

Stunning design. Ok. This is not a pre-requisite, but it certainly helps and the lovely pics and clean, simple design of this site are just great. There’s a nice balance between inspiration and genuinely useful stuff and that’s reflected in the design too which I really love.

Interesting ideas. People are looking for inspiration as much they are hard core info like train times…(Well I certainly am and I think many others are too!) I really like the Travel Ideas tab. If you’re in browse mode rather than hunt mode this kind of stuff is genuinely useful. It’s also easy to navigate using the tag cloud on the right. That’s very nice indeed. Often sites that try to offer you ideas get  the content OK, but screw up the user experience so it’s really hard to find.

Keeping it simple. I don’t want a list a thousand items long. I just want a few judicious choices. And this site does that very well under the experiences tab. For each location it lists the ‘Best’ Galleries, Landmarks, Parks, Shopping etc. Very bite-sized and easy to digest.

Using expert opinion to add more credibility. Who is Red Visitor? What do they know about London or wherever?  Why should I trust their opinion? This is one of the biggest problems for me with on-line content generally. Can I trust it and is it right for me (as opposed to some 10 years younger or whatever)? Using interesting and respected locals to provide insight and opinion really adds a whole new layer to the quality of the content.

Using Video. I’m not a big online video watcher, but I can see why they are a great idea. Very accessible and they’ve been quite tightly edited too. You don’t have to spend buckets on high quality production shoots for online, but you do have to make the edit fast and clean. And again, there’s that veneer of crediblility because the contributors to the video pieces are all local experts

Adding maps. This is totally cool. Want to see where a restaurant they recommend is? Click the view on map link and you get a bespoke google map with all the restaurants on it.

No adverts. Ahh bliss! The design is reason enough to love the site, but the lack of banners with stuff whizzing around and god knows what else interrupting your browsing experience is just lovely. It’s a breath of fresh air. Makes you realise that the web can be a nice place to spend time.

I’m guessing they’ve spent quite a lot of money on RedVisitor already and I wonder how revenues are looking. It’s likely to be a long journey to long term success – I really hope they are successful.

Gilt.com
Trisha Brandon, Content Strategist
One trend that I love is on a site I visited daily in the US: Gilt.com. It’s an online shop that has new items joining the sale daily at noon in limited amounts. They send a daily email at half eleven or so with the brands going on sale at noon, to get you primed. Then at noon the “doors” open. The stock is limited and the site shows you what’s already in people’s basket (so limited stock), so there’s a real incentive/pressure to buy now. Sales typically end after three days or so, if there’s any stock left.

Why do I like it? It’s got an upmarket feel with exclusive and some everyday brands, but it is highly curated to have an intimate feel. When there’s a brand I like on gilt.com, I feel in-the-know and like I’ve gotten a real bargain. Basically, it’s like an online TK Maxx but without having to trawl through all the clothes to find the gem. And because there are just three to four brands per day, it doesn’t feel like I’m taking any time to shop and I’m much more likely to impulse buy. They could do more socially, but there is a real buzz about what’s going to be added. For example, in my old office it was a regular topic of conversation for meetings at noon, like “let’s hurry up, because American Apparel is on Gilt starting at noon.” So they’ve really succeeded in creating a water cooler buzz.

There are others too that have followed this model in the US, Gilt isn’t the only one. Perhaps the UK does something similar?

Facebook
Simon Handby, Editor, News and Blogs
I’m going to be dull and predictable and say Facebook. Its user interface could be better and people seem to find its privacy options baffling, but despite its frustrations I visit almost every day. Why? Because everyone’s on it, and because it’s a good way of staying in touch with people without having to actively do so. They do stuff, you see it, occasionally you’re moved to comment or send a message asking how they are. I like that.

What I don’t like is having so many ‘friends’. It’s partly my fault for accepting requests from colleagues new and old who might be better classed under LinkedIn, and possibly also for not having sorted friends into lists. I don’t like seeing adverts, either: I’m not interested in companies on Facebook, and I’d gladly pay a minimal subscription to filter the paid content. Conversely, when visiting third-party sites, I generally couldn’t care whether my friends like them or not.

Lastminute.com
Natalie Walsh, Senior copywriter / editor
When it comes to great design, slick functionality and high quality, interactive content Lastminute.com gets my top vote. In fact, when working on projects for our travel clients this is one of the sites I point to as a benchmark for success.

It was on the money before we slid into recession – now it’s raised its game with a richer mix of deals for leisure activities home and away, it is for me a primary resource for bargain hunting.

The search and transactional elements are clearly set out and easy to navigate. It’s my first port of call to check out hotel prices which I then compare with other sites such as Expedia.  For city breaks, I’ll usually book my flights and hotels separately and for my latest trip to Barcelona in May, I opted for a Lastminute ‘Secret Hotel’ and got four nights in a four-star boutique hotel (Hotel Soho – a short walk to the Ramblas) for just under £400. That is a genuinely fantastic deal.

On a more regular basis, I check out the restaurant deals. In addition to the ‘Eat out for £10’ offers there are very tempting deals for fine dining at London’s finest – a current example of which is a three-course lunch at Marcus Wareing at the  Berkeley for £38. I’ve booked deals like this several times when I’m organising a birthday meal for friends or a family get-together.

This is a site that understands who its readers are, their needs and how to meet those needs in engaging and innovative ways. Deals and content are clearly presented. Its consistently ‘joined up’ approach showcases the benefits of setting out a clear and dynamic content and social media strategy, and its commitment to high editorial standards is impressive. From its onsite copy to its blog, Lastminute.com delivers engaging, well-written round-ups and posts across a wide range of mainstream and specialist travel destinations and activities and niche/special interest topics.

Mumsnet
Tamsin McCahill Senior copywriter / editor
Despite its ‘bunch of whining women stating the bleeding obvious’ image, I still really like Mumsnet.

I guess the reason for its huge popularity (20 million monthly page impressions, according to the Guardian) is the reason why I like it too. Like millions of others, my mum, sister and mum-in-law live miles away and I don’t have aunts or neighbours to turn to for advice. So Mumsnet is fulfilling a vital role – giving a sense of community that may be lacking in today’s more isolated society.

The site is made up of two parts. The first are the static advice pages with subjects that include sleep, food and travel, plus completely impartial reviews on everything you may ever need to buy for your child.  Unlike most other websites where the advice can leave you feeling guilty that you’re ‘doing things wrong’, the tips here are anything but po-faced. Take this one on cleaning for example: “My second favourite household chore is ironing. My first one being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.”

The second part is the forums, where you can post questions on anything parent-related. In the past I’ve asked questions on everything from sleep problems to how I can get my lazy baby to crawl. But when posting, you need to choose your words wisely, as it’s here that the site gets its distinctive personality. Some members are amusing, but, as The Times points out, they can be more ‘bitchy’ than supportive.  Take this frank exchange on elimination communication, for example.

But as long as it’s not you that’s getting flamed, it can still be a great place for a bit of banter that you miss out on when you’re not at work. Parenthood is tough and confusing,  with midwives, health visitors and experts all giving masses of seemingly conflicting advice. Mumsnet is an excellent place to get impartial advice from the people who really do know what they’re talking about.

Post from: Connect

What can brands learn from the best digital publishers?

This decision is an extension of Google’s current trademark policy in the United States, where brand terms are already allowed in the ad-texts.

Ostensibly, advertisers will have to meet one of several criteria in order to be eligible to display trademark terms in the ad copy:

•  An advertiser’s ad may use the term in a descriptive or generic way but not in reference to the trademark owner of the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term
• Ads which use a trademark in a “nominative manner” to refer to the trademark or owner if an advertiser:
  - sells or (“clearly facilitates the sale of”) relevant goods or services from the trademark owner
  - sells components of products
  - provides an informational site with non-competitive and informative details about goods or services relating to the trademark term

Of course, I accept that this is likely a major boost for many multi-brand retailers, particularly in the retail and travel sectors, as undoubtedly they will be able to create more relevant ads, drive up click through rates, improve their Quality Score and ultimately reduce their acquisition cost.

However, I disagree with this move for a few of reasons:

1.  Trademark protection is already a contentious issue for the management of paid search accounts and many brand owners, who have spent much time, money and effort into building their brands are suffering and losing out as a result of unauthorised trademark bidding.  Search traffic on brand terms is a function of all the brand’s marketing efforts, and in my view, I think it’s most fair that those brands who have spent time investing in successful brands, reap the benefits of this in search
2. I think the stated reason for the change is largely disingenuous.  I don’t believe this change is designed to improve relevance – I believe it’s to improve revenue: of Google! The relevance argument falls down because for every more relevant ad, you can practically guarantee there will be a new misleading advert
3. Finally, my real issue with this move is that from my experience I doubt Google’s ability to apply this ruling objectively, fairly and to the letter of their own regulations.   The fact is Google assure you that for each infringement they will conduct a “limited investigation”.  Great.  The reality is that this will be adjudicated by different people and with different interpretation of what constitutes an infringement, and therefore getting consistency will be highly problematic.

That said, I do invite Google to make me eat my words;  I’ll happily admit I’m wrong when I see Bing advertising on the keyword “Google” and employing the common verb of the same name…

Post from: Connect

Google’s latest trademark change; the great trademark swindle?

Below are seven ways Google Analytics can be used to help make the right decisions during a redesign.

1. What browsers and windows sizes should we support?

When designing your site you want to ensure that the majority of your customers can view your website and convert without browser versions or sizes preventing this.

I’d personally think that you should design your website in a size that at least 95% of your visitors can see without having to scroll horizontally. An easy way to check what browser sizes your current visitors are using is to go the Screen resolutions report under Visitors > Browser capabilities > Screen resolutions.

By comparing to site average you can also see if any particular screen resolution(s) has a significantly higher bounce rate

In the graph above you can see that the wider screen resolutions are actually performing much worse – this could be addressed by using a liquid layout or JavaScript to position content.

A quick way to check if your site has browser compatibility is to look at the browser report and compare each type to the site average, for the website below it is clear that there is poor support for safari.

The mobile browser report can help to decide whether a mobile version of your site is needed by looking at the bounce and conversion rate of mobile visits.

2. What territory specific pages or languages do we need to support?

The languages report under visitors is a useful way of seeing the proportion of foreign visitors to your site; this is particularly useful if you have an international website as it may indicate territory specific versions required that may help increase conversions.

Additionally, even if your website is UK focused, you may find that foreign speakers use your site.  This is especially relevant if your business is travel related as foreign people living in the UK or visiting short term may be interested in your services.  See this report under Visitors > Languages.

3. Can our customers find what they are looking for?

The internal search reports are really insightful as they show what your users are looking for once they are on your site, giving you an indication about missing or difficult to find content. A word cloud is a quick way to see what search terms regularly appear.

To create a word cloud, download the data, put the search term in column A, the number of times it was searched in column B and paste the formulae =REPT((A1&” “),B1) down column C. Grab all the words from Column C and paste into Wordle.

Word cloud from the internal search of World Vision, one of our charity clients (posted with permission)

4. Which landing/promotion pages need improving?

In a redesign it is important to understand which pages need changing as well knowing which pages are working well and should be left as they are. Google Analytics offers several reports & metrics for interpreting the performance of individual & groups of pages:

Goal funnel visualization – one of the most easy to understand, it graphically shows where visitors are leaking out of your sales funnels. Goal funnels need to be set up manually and when done so can be found under Goals > Goal funnel visualization

Site overlay – Using this report (Content > Site overlay) you can see at a page level what visitors are actually click on helping to show the effectiveness of call to actions and promotions. Not only can you look at the number of clicks on these items but also the ecommerce value i.e. users clicking this button have gone on to generate xx revenue

£ index – this under used metric, shown in the top content report, shows how important visits to a particular page are when visitors convert. You may find that pages like the about us, shipping & returns pages have high £ index values as visitors often view them before making a purchase and help a user decide if they should buy your products. Sounds obvious but it might suggest that including a shipping and returns policy info box on product pages helps improve conversions (particularly likely on high value goods).

Bounce rate/exit rates – bounce rate shows the number of visitors that viewed one page and then left, while exit rate shows visitors that leave the site after viewing a particular page (they may have viewed multiple pages before). These metrics can help you understand which landing pages are under performing or common places that visitors are leaving your site.  

(Page URLs removed from image)

However, these reports, like most analytics, must be understood in context to know if there really is an issue or not. When evaluating a page it is important to consider the objective of the page, how does its performance compare to other pages and are any problems a result of a design, content, product or brand issue (always difficult to know!).

The analysis of the above reports provide a great starting point for user testing as they can help identify issues on your site that are preventing conversions.

After launch

When a new site is built it is obviously important to bench mark performance before and after using KPIs that are relevant to your business such as visits, conversions, average transaction value, revenue etc.

However, it can take a few weeks for these metrics to settle down making it difficult to tell early on if there are any problems with your new website. By setting up custom alerts you can get near real time warnings of any errors or changes that may have occurred. The sensitivity of these alerts depends on your website, suggested values are used below

5. Is tracking set up correctly?

A common error that occurs in Google Analytics is a large amount of self-referrals showing up in the traffic source report i.e. the top referring site is your own! This can happen for a number of reasons such as certain pages not having tracking codes, use of frames, page redirects or sub domain and/or multi domain tracking not set up correctly. These self-referrals overwrite the original referral information preventing you from knowing where these visitors came from.

To be able to fix these tracking errors quickly before they skew your reports, it’s useful to use a custom alert (Intelligence > Custom report) to email you if there are any large daily increases in self-referrals.

Even with this alert I recommend that you add an analytics check into your QA/testing process to ensure no errors or loss of data when an updates are made.

6. Has the redesign affected our search rankings?

With any luck your new site and content will have significant improvement in search engine rankings and subsequent increases in traffic.

But it wouldn’t be a lie to say I’ve seen a big brand push a site live without removing the staging server robots.txt file, which was being used to blocking search engine access, this in turn caused the new site to completely drop out of Google!  Even if large changes in rankings like that don’t happen, its useful to monitor organic traffic after launch to be aware of decreases or increases in visits (as well as changes in rankings using this GA filter).

If you do see drastic falls in organic traffic I’d recommend not reacting unless you’re absolutely sure you know the cause, rankings tend to jostle around a little after a redesign and you could end up changing something for the worse.

7. Tracking 404 pages

When launching a new site it is important to ensure you redirect old pages to new pages, however, errors can easily occur with redirect rules causing users to land on 404 pages.

Tracking visits to 404 pages in Google Analytics is easy, simply add the tracking code to the 404 page template and ensure the page title has 404 in it. Then to see which pages are missing navigate to Content > Content by title > find and click the 404 page, this will show you a list of page URLs that have been requested but not found. Unfortunately a custom alert does not work here as you cannot have the page title as an alert, therefore it is important to check this report regularly after launch. You can also use Google webmaster tools to check 404 pages but I prefer the additional traffic insights Google Analytics can give.

Please share in the comments any other reports, filters and advanced segments that can help during a redesign.

Post from: Connect

7 ways Google Analytics can help when redesigning your website

As someone who works agency-side I started thinking specifically about what the implications of Paul’s observations of human social behaviour are for brands, especially those taking part in the social web. Intriguingly, it suggests that social media is a customer retention, not a customer acquisition, game.

Social ties

In his presentation, Paul discusses the established theory that human beings develop two types of connections – strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties are those people closest to us, such as best friends and family. Most people are unlikely to have more than six strong ties in their lives. Our weak ties are those we are less close to but might be in infrequent contact with. It is believed that the limits of the human brain mean that the average person is not capable of staying up to date with more than 150 weak ties at any one time. We might know many more people but we simply can’t stay alert to them all.

What does this mean for brands in social media?

The implications for those who work in marketing are quite profound, but also incredibly useful. It opens up a new level of detail, and in some ways provides a reality-check, to the all-encompassing notion of engagement. It suggests there are limits to just how engaged with people a brand can be. Realistically, a brand is not going to make it into someone’s group of strong ties and should not try to do so. This group is incredibly small and reserved for those closest to us.

Equally, it means that judging Facebook success, for instance, by the amount of people who ‘like’ your brand is flawed. For many of the people who have ‘liked’ you, it’s highly possible that your brand still falls outside the 150 weak ties that they can keep up with. The social web has enabled us to expand our list of connections – people don’t limit their list of Facebook friends to 150 after all – but the human brain is no more able than it was before to deal with them all. And, significantly, Paul points out that Facebook users currently have 130 friends on average.

The limits of our ability to maintain any more than 150 weak ties also brings into question the value of campaigns that require you to ‘like’ the brand in order to take part, such as competitions. Here, you are creating one-off relationships that will be difficult to build upon.

Instead, it seems a more realistic, and strategically astute, decision to focus digital marketing efforts on making sure your brand is a valued weak tie in people’s social networks. This is even more sensible when we consider that if we can only ever handle 150 weak ties at any one time then each person’s ties are likely to be at capacity already. A quick look at the brands I have ‘liked’ on Facebook suggests that, other than those that have a work-related purpose, most are ones that I already had a connection with outside of my use of that site. It wasn’t their presence on Facebook that established the connection; the connection already existed.

What should the strategy be?

The suggestion here, as made by Paul in his presentation, is that social networks don’t actually enable the creation of additional connections, they just make our existing connections more visible to us. This of course somewhat belies the common marketing notion that there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people just waiting to fit your brand into their lives. In fact, for most people, their lives are likely to be full already.

The possible outcome of this, somewhat controversially, is that much of a brand’s effort in a social media space such as Facebook should be given to maintaining existing ties rather than establishing new ones; to forging deeper relationships with those people who are already positively predisposed to your brand.

Of course, social media activity is still likely to result in your brand creating some new weak ties – after all, our social ties are not static, permanent connections. That said, if it is predominantly a retention game then the likelihood is that you’ll have to be interesting enough to bump out an existing connection in order to enter someone’s network of weak ties. And of course, if you’re not proving to be interesting enough yourself then you might be the one that gets bumped out.

If all this is true then we are indeed in a relationship-based customer retention game, not a numbers-based acquisition one.

You can find Paul Adams’ original presentation, which provided the inspiration for this post, here. It’s lengthy, but in a good way, and comes wholly recommended.

Post from: Connect

Does human behaviour make the social web a retention game for brands?

I always thought location was the only factor deciding the ranking of the map listing; the better optimised the map is to the location keyword, the higher are its chances to rank on top. However, according to the latest edition of David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors, there are more points to take into consideration. The most positive ones are summarised below:-

1. Claiming places page/local listing
2. Associating Google Place page with proper categories
3. Use of product or service keyword in title and description of local listing
4. Use of product or service keyword in description of local listing
5. Using local area codes or numbers
6. KML File and Geo-Sitemap (the Geo-Sitemap/KML protocol is a standard enabling to identify the physical location of the business in a standard file format.)
7. hCard Microformat (standardized protocol for displaying contact information. Google and Yahoo have both announced their support for this format.)
8. Customer Reviews (although they were once considered an important aspect, this factor is now largely supposed to be diluted, as per the recent ranking research)

More local submissions:

Apart from the above mentioned, submitting to as many local search engines or directories as you can will add more value to the listing as it builds trust for Google. It is also recommended that you submit the website to local search engines such as Yahoo!Local, CitySearch, Yell or SuperPages. Google has a Local Business Center, as well as data providers such as InfoUSA, which are just as helpful in pulling up the site rankings locally.

Spying competitors:

It is good practice to keep an eye on who is appearing on top in the listings and look into which directories they have submitted and what tactics they are using to inform future programmes of work.

Things to avoid:

Among the factors that can have negative impact are using 800# or multiple phone numbers across listings, using non-local area code, listing PO Box on a website without a physical address, multiple listings with same phone number and/or address, over-loading geo-targeted keywords into non-related categories or fields and a high percentage of bad reviews.

The Future:

Inclusion of local search in universal listings must have massively uplifted the number of local searches conducted recently.

Also, with Twitter joining the race and introducing Twitter Places (which lets you tag tweets with specific places as well as creating new Twitter Places), the local search is undergoing a major shift. People might rely more on a Twitter Place page for the most updated snapshot of a local business (complete with the latest tweets), rather than a Google Place Page — many of which often show reviews that are months or years old.

Google has been trying to integrate its business and maps data with real-time context via Google Buzz on Maps, but after its poorly executed launch, Buzz has fundamentally failed to capture people’s interest. Google must now try even harder to innovate if it is to prevent the inception of a Twitter-dominated local search landscape.

Post from: Connect

Ranking higher in Local Search Results

A recent study in the US found that more than half of social network users are worried about their privacy.

In the main, privacy concerns seem to focus on the complexity of managing your public profile on Facebook and other services. However, with a growing awareness of broader privacy issues by  mainstream web users is beginning to invite more attention to the ways brands respect and support their customers needs in this area.

Even activities as apparently benign as listening to social media conversations about your brand are being questioned by some in the media (see the recent Daily Mail story about web monitoring). Now MPs are portraying companies “trawling Facebook for negative comments” as being “something worthy of the secret police”, understandable in a totalitarian state but unacceptable in ours (perhaps we should ask how many UK Government departments are monitoring social media for mentions of their policy areas).

Whatever our opinions on these stories, its clear that brands need to bear in mind privacy issues in how they develop their online campaigns and especially those where user participation or individuals’ data is involved.

Here are some thoughts to bear in mind:

• Understand user perspective on the issue: We tend to see privacy from a legal point of view, but much more important is how people feel about the issues involved. Clear explanations of how data will be used is required to avoid the perception that a brand wants to pry into a user’s personal information.
• Privacy is a social network as well as a personal issue: Friends and family’s  may be affected by breaches of an individual’s privacy and they will affect the user’s thinking about privacy in turn.
• Involve legal expertise early and often in your planning: In the past marketers have tended to think of legal as a clearing house for content, a rubber stamp or brand risk management mechanism quite separate from the digital team. At iCrossing, we have often had to challenge this view, bringing legal expertise into the heart of the planning process for blogs, community platforms and broader social media marketing efforts. With this approach we can balance the users’ needs with a given organisation’s need to responsibly manage risk.
• Legal is part of the customer experience: Think about the way that Facebook apps have been criticised by campaigners for handing over too much access / power to the platform and the brand when you agree to install one on your profile. I recall hearing the brilliant Struan Robertson, a lawyer who runs the Out-Law blog talking at Social Media Influence a couple of years ago about adding in your own terms and conditions to that sign-up process to make it clear what information you will and won’t need access to from a user’s profile and why. This kind of approach goes beyond what’s required, but can help to distance your brand from the clumsy, sweeping disclaimers and small print that most people don’t read, but if paid close attention to can make your intentions to wards personal data see, as it were, less than benign.
• Be aware of shifting attitudes: Understanding of and attitudes to privacy issues online can differ greatly between individuals. There is one universal trend, however; people’s web literacy, their knowledge and experience of how the web works, is increasing all of the time and their attitudes towards issues like privacy will change. For campaigns planned a year in advance, this can be an issue as views and technology use can change quickly.

I’m sure there will be and is more to say on this topic, and it is one we will be watching closely.

Post from: Connect

Brands need to understand users’ privacy concerns