There are plenty of posts on what custom segments are and how to use them, so I’m not going to go over a tutorial on that, but what I’m going to show you are 3 practical custom segments for Google Analytics* that you can use for your online store.

NOTE: If you are using another analytics platform that has the ability to segment besides Google Analytics, you can still use these as well, but you will have to figure out the syntax on your own.

Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #1 – True Mobile Email Visits

Mobile…it’s kind of a big deal. With literally everyone and their mother with iPhone and Android smart phones, more and more visitors are coming through these devices to your site . What you might not realize is that a large proportion of them are coming through because of your email campaigns. I know, crazy right? People reading their emails on their phone, no one does that. What’s funny is that a lot of ecommerce stores I talk to have no idea how many of these types of mobile visitors are coming to their website, and have no insight into what their web behaviors are. What I even find more disturbing is that they are often thinking that their email campaigns are tanking, but in fact they are doing quite well…for people who are clicking through on their laptop or tablet. So how can we find out? Custom segments of course! First, I’m making it very easy for you folks who have Google Analytics, just make sure you are logged in to your GA account and then click this link —-> Mobile Email Visits Custom Segment. Presto, you now will be able to use this segment right away and can see how I made it as well. Now that you have the segment in your account you can also copy and edit it. Try changing the option form “incude” to “exclude”, and look at your email campaign reports, you’ll be amazed at the differences in your email performance in terms of site engagement and conversion.

I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here, so my apologies in advance.

NOTE: If you are currently using the premade GA advanced segment “mobile visitors” please realize that you are getting a very distorted view of your “mobile” users behavior. This segment lumps visitors on mobile phones and tablets together. Some people might disagree with me, but personally, I don’t feel tablets are mobile devices and it is a mistake for them to be put under the same category as smart phones. These 2 types of devices provide completely different user experiences. Honestly, I find a tablet more in common with my laptop than my phone. I never see people on the train or bus looking at their tablet, it’s always their phone. A smart phone requires surgeon hands to navigate non-optimized websites and  the Hulk could easily check out his favorite Reddit posts on a tablet (The Avengers is awesome by the way!). Again my apologies for the rant, it’s just how I feel and I think that segment in Google Analytics is very deceiving.

Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #2 – Non-Branded Search Visitors who Buy your Stuff

For those of you who know this one already, my apologies, but it really is one of the best custom segments out there at measuring the effectiveness of your organic and paid search efforts. Often people like to make this segment and lump all conversions, which is great, Avinash is right, micro transactions should not be ignored. Since most Boss people are bottom line folks,  let’s have a segment that measures true ROI for your inbound marketing channels to make them happy.

Setting this one up is tricky and will require some work form your end, and this Non-Branded Search Visitors Who Buy Stuff segment won’t work without some tweaking on your end. I’ve tried to annoatate it as best as I could, so once you load into your GA account, please input the correct letters in the right places and you should be on your way. Please note that this is just for your company name, really basic (doesn’t cover mis-spellings) and uses regular expression terms. If you don’t know what regular expressions are, I suggest reading up on it (http://bit.ly/Kn0d7Q). It’s very geeky, but once you get it, you can do some really amazing stuff.

Now, with a little elbow grease, you should see what non-branded terms are driving revenue to your store.  Also, you should be able to ask deeper questions about your non-branded campaigns and what keywords and campaigns are performing in terms of the bottom line and not just conversions. (NOTE: Google Analytics information is always different than what Ad Words is, so the numbers will be a little different, so please pay attention to the keywords and not the discrepancies in numbers). Remeber, feel free to copy and edit these segments, as this is another one to switch around the “include & exclude” feature to see for example; non-branded visitors who did NOT purchase. Some primer questions you can ask yourself when you’re looking at the data:

• What pages are receiving the majority of traffic?
• Does one page have a much higher traffic amount and  exit rate than another?
• Are there consistent winners and losers month over month?

TIP: Look at the pages report in site content and look at the exit rates. You can easily tell leaks for people not familiar with your brand by which types of pages are causing them to leave. Also, make some time to go through every report in GA with these segments, because there are all kinds of goodies in the data you could find.

Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #3 – Visitors from Transactional Emails

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last 4 years, I’m hoping that you know what a transactional email is. If you are responsible for an ecommerce store and do not have a transactional email strategy, please contact Alex Williams over at Trendline Interactive, so you can stop leaving easy money on the table. For those of you who have a nice transactional email strategy; are you remembering to put proper campaign tracking on all of your links? This is very important, as this segment relies on you making sure you are tagging your marketing channels appropriately.

If you don’t know how to track campaigns in GA, here’s Google’s tool (http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578). Here’s a text example for you on what this tag should look like:

http://YourWebsite.com/?utm_source=Transactional_Emails&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Review_Offer_Link&utm_campaign=Order_Confirmation

After you have tagged all of the links on your transactional emails (easier said than done), you can create custom segments around these audiences. I’m just going to give you a simple custom segment for transactional email, but hopefully you should be able to take it from there and create some really cool segments yourself.

TIP: One of the first things you should look at is your campaign report and see what transactional emails are driving the most visits and conversions. After that, have fun, see if there are certain geographic locations or products that are pushing revenue more than others. It’s really surprising how transactional emails done right, can bring in a consistent revenue month over month.

This is just the beginning of the adventures you can have with custom segments. I hope these are a good starting place for you, and help you find answers to some of those tough questions that come down from the top. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and please feel free to share any custom segments you have made.

The Background Story

A couple of weeks ago, I had just wrapped up presenting an SEO strategy to one of our awesome SwellPath clients and spent the last handful of minutes chatting. During our conversation, he commented on the thoroughness of the strategy I’d just presented and proceeded to ask, “So, do you just think about search engine optimization all the time.” I gave him the honest answer without hesitation, “Totally!” I confessed that my brain is processing SEO-related content on a nearly non-stop basis; I spend all day thinking about SEO but I also find myself pondering the greater challenges and mysteries of the craft on my commute, at home, on my way to the gym, and occasionally when I’m trying to fall asleep. I may have a problem (you tell me), but I don’t view that as a bad thing. The topic of search (how search engine algorithms work, how crawlers scour the web, and how to we can optimize websites to leverage what we know about the former) is an insanely interesting topic. The search engines and the web itself are constantly changing, so there’s always more to think about.

You know you want these guys at your next party.

Google and ImagesSo back to my client, I told him that, yes, “I think about SEO all the time”. I then proceeded to tell him a story about an experience I’d had a few days prior. I was on my way back from the gym to the office when I saw a van that belonged to another SwellPath client. As with most company delivery vehicles, it had the company’s logo and, as you see fairly often, a list of their specialties.  I noticed when I saw it that “those weren’t the same keywords we were optimizing for. Also, they didn’t have their primary URL printed with their other contact info.” I then went off on an interesting tangent. I explained that someday in the near-future, the content of your offline brand materials like billboards, flyers, building signage, and even what’s printed on the side of your delivery trucks is going to impact your SEO. Sound crazy? Well listen to this.

An SEO rule of thumb is “don’t ever put important text in images; make sure it’s HTML”. Why is this a rule? Because search engine spiders can’t parse the text from images. Sure, image crawlers are getting pretty good and can identify similar images and even nudity based on color patterns and tones, but they can’t yet (in any reliable and scalable way) “read” text in images. Google, please update me if you’ve made the leap without letting me know, but last time I checked “the Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images“. However, Google is damn smart and it’s only a matter of time before they begin to reliably crawl text that’s contained within indexed images.

What Will the Future Hold

Let’s say that in three years, Google rolls out a new image spider that crawls text in images. Google can then incorporate that text and the keywords used within it into its algorithm. That means that images on your site that have text in them can now contribute to keyword-relevancy. <sarcasm>It also means you can forget about ever taking the trouble to use text-based headings or alt tags because you hate people who rely on screen readers (you should be ashamed).</sarcasm>But it also means much more than that. Think about all the imagery Google has access to that it can now parse text from:

• Google Images
• Images on Yelp, Foursquare, etc.
• Google Streetview Imagery
• Pinterest, Flickr, Panoramio, and other “image sharing” sites.
• Google Earth Images
• and a lot more

Cloon. Offline Image SEO.

Let’s say someone checks in at your business on Foursquareand uploads of picture of your van out front – Google crawls the text from that image and adds it to the index. Say you put up a billboard downtown and the Google Streetview cars cruise by the following week and sends their images to back to HQ - Google crawls the text from that image and adds it to the index. Say that someone takes a picture of their friend wearing your branded t-shirt and pins it onto Pinterest - Google crawls the text from that image and adds it to the index. Do you get where I’m going with this? Once they have all this new data, Google can throw it into the mix when determining your website’s (and brand’s) relevancy for specific searches. A URL on a billboard that is contained within an image can now factor into the your site’s search authority just like a backlink from a website. This is perfectly inline with Google’s goals – they don’t want to just bring you the web; they want to bring you the world. As soon as Google (or another engine) perfects the technology to parse text from images, everything is fair game: online and offline.

How to Optimize Offline Imagery for Maximum SEO Value

Let’s assume that I’m not just an overly-enthusiastic SEO and I end up being right. That means in a few years we’re going to have to start thinking about brining offline branding materials inline with our SEO strategy. Before we dive into how to start optimizing real-world text to support your SEO, let’s think about how Google is going to use that text in ranking. In 2012, we know that having a link to your website surrounded by relevant keywords is great for SEO because search engines will collect that data and use it as a relevancy indicator and authority signal. Text parsed from images will be treated much the same way. Here are a few points:

• Images won’t have HTML links where there’s user-friendly anchor text that masks a very technical link to a URL.
• “Linking” to your website in the real world is going to consist of having your website URL spelled out.
• Relevancy for that URL is going to be determined by the keywords that surround it.

That’s what we need to take into account when optimizing offline imagery for search. So building from there, here  is the 1, 2, 3 of offline brand material SEO.

1. Try to always include your URL in your branding materials (use common sense, this probably doesn’t apply to clothing unless your brand name is your URL). Also, make sure the URL is spelled correctly.
2. Obviously, you’ve performed keyword research and have a keyword strategy for your website. Make sure that your marketing materials use appropriate keywords that align with your strategy. It probably makes sense to target the same keywords that are targeted on your homepage.
3. Consider using a font that has appropriate contrast and is easy to read from a distance.

Consider the Geekstravaganza truck above (first image in this post).

1.  It should really have the URL on it: geek-extravaganza.com (the domain is available, FYI).
2. The keywords that we’re using for the website’s homepage are “Graduation Parties” and “Bachelor Parties”, not “End of School Parties” and “Single Dude Parties” (which have no search volume, BTW). The keywords on the van should align with the onsite SEO strategy.
3. A hasty stencil job is definitely not going to be the easiest thing for the image crawler to parse. Choose a more legible font and get your text put on professionally.

That’s just an example, but these 1, 2, 3s of offline branding material SEO are easily applied to anything else. Remember though, we still have a handful of years ahead of us before this is something we need to worry about, so don’t break the bank this next month reprinting all your pamphlets, ordering new giveaway pens, and repainting your fleet. Engage in website SEO on an ongoing basis and as you produce new offline branding materials, think about consulting your SEO, or referencing your strategy, and follow the 1, 2, 3s above. You just might end up massively ahead of the game with your competition left in the dust.

Like this post? Follow Mike Arnesen on Google+

Here are the details and RSVP for the first meetup of the Portland Google Analytics User Group. We really hope to see you there!

Customizing Google Analytics can provide a tremendous amount of new data (and yes, insights) but without an objective-first approach, you’ll be data rich and insight poor. Before you start looking at what’s possible when tweaking Google Analytics, start first with a simple framework that will define what to customize. Our approach looks something like this –

This framework allows you to understand what metrics need to be tracked and where the holes in your analytics strategy lie. That’s the foundation that needs to be put in place before you start customizing your Google Analytics install.

Let’s walk through an example using a question we commonly hear -

 “How are potential customers using my ecommerce website and how can I improve sales?”

It’s a question that can (and should) be broken down into multiple sub-sets. The objective is clear, drive sales. The next step would be to identify the levers that affect sales, and one (of many) has already been identified – website usage.  Now the question is – how do we optimize the website experience (lever) to encourage more sales (objective)?

There are more  levers for website optimization, such as, ratings, reviews, on-site messaging, usability, product videos, etc. In this case, let’s focus on on-site messaging and how it can be leveraged to put more potential customers in the conversion funnel. By applying the aforementioned framework and objective-first approach, it might look something like -

We now have a focused approach and have identified multiple levers that point back to the objective. Now the question shifts to –

“How do different messages and placements drive users into the conversion funnel?”

This is a much more concise and measurable initiative and Google Analytics can be customized for this. One of the more common on-site messaging tactics are homepage campaigns, most often in the form of a tout or banner. One metric we already know we should now watch would include – % of people who navigated to the landing page from the homepage. That’s an easy out-of-the-box metric in Google Analytics but doesn’t provide the full story. There are holes in the measurement plan.

You would likely want to know the CTR of a homepage banner in order to gauge it’s popularity among the homepage real estate. I also would want to know if someone clicked on the banner and then purchased a product. Both are custom metrics (using event tags and custom variables) that will better measure on-site messaging, leading to more potential customers in the conversion funnel and ultimately sales.

You can read the full 2-part series on measuring the effectiveness of internal campaigns here.

A good data-backed organization has a framework in place. A good framework lends itself to a good measurement strategy. Without a good measurement strategy in place, efforts spent customizing Google Analytics could potentially be squandered and drown you in data.

Like this post? Follow John Koenig on Google+.

What are Author Rich Snippets and Why Do I Need Them?

What is an Author Rich Snippet, you ask? An Author Rich Snippet consists of a specific author’s picture, name, and a “More by” link that’s added to a standard search result.

Aside from the obvious ego boost that accompanies your own Author Rich Snippet showing up in search, Author Rich Snippets offer the following additional benefits. An Author Rich Snippet:

• breaks up standard wall-of-text search results.
• calls significant attention to your result.
• leads to more qualified traffic by giving searchers a better idea of what to expect when they click on your results.
• establishes Author Authority for the author and builds search trust for the site.
• allows readers to get to know you and trust your contributions to the web.

Now, Author Rich Snippets aren’t for everyone. However, they are for most people, so if you’re serious about doing well in organic search, ask yourself the following questions.

Do you want to attract more search traffic to your site?

By setting up Author Rich Snippets, you’ll increase your CTR (some sites report a 20-30% increase in CTR) from search results. Users who have read your posts in the past will get to know you and be much more likely to click on your next blog that they encounter in the search results.

Do you want to set yourself apart from your competitors?

Unless you’re doing business in the online services space, the chances are that most of your competitors aren’t down with Author Rich Snippets yet. By becoming an early adopter, you can really set your site apart in non-branded search. Which search result do you think your target audience/customers will be inclined to click on?

Need to improve your site’s search trust or recover from Google Panda?

Modern search algorithms (notably Google’s) focus on what can be referred to as website “search trust”. Essentially, search engines have learned that spammy sites, sites that use boilerplate content, and sites that use low-quality or hastily produced content give their searchers a poor experience. As a result, Google’s Panda update identified criteria that indicated low-quality sites, applied them to machine learning, and released “Panda” on the web to determine the quality and trust of websites. Those that failed the test got hit pretty hard in the search results and their respective webmasters were left scrambling to pick up the SEO pieces. It’s been well over a year now since Panda hit, but if your site is still battling to establish itself as high-quality, Author Rich Snippets are a great way to speed the process along. Why? Author Rich Snippets connect website content with real people; this equates to quality content (in the eyes of Google, at least).

Want to build a reputation for yourself?

If you’re looking to build up an online reputation as an authority or thought-leader in your industry, you need to be using Author Rich Snippets. Not only will they allow your face to be seen all over the SERPs, searchers can also easily click your “More by” link to access more of your articles and posts. Soon enough, people will scan SERPs just for your picture so they can find reliable information that they trust. #winning

Author Rich Snippets for Companies

Faceless company blog posts are going out of style, fast. Google is well on its way to leaving anonymous corporate content in the dust and focusing on company spokespeople who have the experience and talent to produce truly great content for Google searchers. At present, you can’t apply the theory of Google Author Rich Snippets to Google+ pages (business/brand pages). A brand or company isn’t a person, so it would kind of defeat the whole purpose of promoting authors.

If you want to get your company on Author Rich Snippets, you have the following options:

• Set the author of every company blog post as a single company spokesperson (CEO or other key persona). However, I don’t recommend this option because it’s not authentically representing the true author.
• Highlight employees as the authors of their own posts. This is really the way to go. If employees are already active on Google+, their circles will be leveraged to benefit the company as a whole.

Your company is made up of talented individuals; don’t let that go to waste by stripping the person out of the post.

How to Set Up Author Rich Snippets on Your Site

If you haven’t been sold on ARS (moar acronyms!) yet, you can stop reading now. If you’re so excited about getting your face in Google’s search results that you can’t contain yourself, then this is your section. There’s a simple way and a somewhat more complex (IMO) way to go about this. I’ll begin with…

The Simple Way To Set Up Author Rich Snippets

There are a few things you need in order to step up Author Rich Snippets:

1. A public Google+ profile.
   Make sure to upload a decent looking profile picture. Google will use this when it pulls in your Author Rich Snippet. If you already have a presence online, I recommend using the same photo you use elsewhere (Twitter, Facebook, Quora, etc).
2. Access to your blog
   That, or a webmaster/IT guy who doesn’t hate your guts. You’ll need to tweak your blog posts or blog post template a bit.

The Somewhat More Complicated Way to Set Up Author Rich Snippets

Now this probably isn’t that much more complicated. In fact, it may even be simpler. However, I prefer the previous method as this one places more trust in Google figuring out things on their own rather than being hand-fed the information. Another reason I don’t typically recommend this method is that it requires you to have an email address at each domain you write for. In a lot of cases, notably guest blogging, this isn’t feasible.

How to do it:

1. Make sure you have a Google+ profile (same as in option #1)
2. Make sure each blog post your write has “by firstname lastname” (the name must match that used on your Google+ profile).
3. Go to https://plus.google.com/authorship and “apply” for authorship with Google.
4. Google will send a verification email to the email address at the domain you write for; verify.

Now, Let the Magic Happen

After completing one (or both) of these options, you might be inclined to repeatedly Google the titles of your recent posts until your fingers bleed or hold your breath until your Author Rich Snippet appears. I don’t recommend it. It can take a day or two for Google to make the association and re-crawl your blog post. I won’t guarantee this will work, but go ahead and re-pimp your posts on Twitter and Google+; you know Google is going to be crawling those links and therefore end up on your posts.

So that’s how you configure Author Rich Snippets to appear in Google SERPs. I highly recommend it. Give it a shot and I’d love it if you came back here to give me a report on how it works out in the comments. Happy optimizing.

Like this post? Follow Mike Arnesen on Google+

The expected schedule is as follows:

5:30 – 6:15: Networking/Drinks/Snacks

6:15 – 7:00: Short Presentation (Topic TBD) & Discussion

7:00 – 8:00: More Discussion and Networking

More information on the WAW website. Please sign up there  also, so we have a good idea of how many are coming.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

UPDATE: Here’s the preso topic.

Tackling Attribution in the Era of Instagrams, Pinterests, and Tablets

If you have some foos skills, or just like fun, you should enter the tournament. We’ve already got over a dozen teams, and we expect to have about 20 by the event. We’ll cap it at 32. We’re borrowing ShopIgniter’s table, so we’ll have two games going at all times. Show us what you’ve got!

In 2012 we’re going to continue to focus on what we’ve done exceptionally well for 3 years – making marketing decision making as easy as possible for our clients. John and I launched the company with 3 clients at the beginning of 2009. All three of those clients are still with us – our attrition has been virtually non-existent! That’s because our clients lean on SwellPath for their most important marketing decisions. We inform, support, and facilitate those decisions in ways none of their tools or partners can. We’re going to keep doing that in 2012, and we’re going to find ways to make it better, faster, and ultimately easier for our clients.

Charts and graphs and numbers are great – data should drive decisions. But behind all those things, there ultimately had to be human design. We’ve got an outstanding team here at SwellPath. We added some awesome folks in 2011 (Charles, Dan, Christian, and Danish), and we plan on adding more in 2012. What makes startups fun is the tightness of the relationships that are developed – everything is small and close together. We’re psyched to add more people to the SwellPath team, and develop those relationships. We’re also excited to develop relationships with more clients and partners, and we think we’ll have a lot more of those by the end of 2012.

So that’s a bunch of high-level talk – besides what we’ve always done, anything different? Yes! We’ll have some big announcements this year, so keep your eyes and ears open. We’ve found ways to help way more marketers – we think the “old” way of tackling digital marketing analysis is out – we’re the new.

Finally, what’s with the baby picture? For the first 3 months of 2012, our rockstar Katie Sachse won’t be in the office. Baby Olive was born on 12/31 just before we started 2012. Katie was employee #1 at SwellPath 3 years ago; I still am not used to her not being around. The picture of baby Olive personally reminds me of some things that are important to keep in mind when running a startup. Enjoy it.

How to Disable Flash

The conference is ending with an Ignite-like Super Accelerator session. I’ve thrown my hat in the ring and have a few words of wisdom of my own to impart on the crowd. If are making it to ACCELERATE, make sure you stay through the end and see the Super Accelerator session. The list of presenters is great, and it’s sure to be an entertaining hour. Hope to see you there!