Is it as frustrating for you as it is for me? You’ve registered for an event and they send you that confirmation email. You’re all excited and want to immediately get it into your calendar. One of several things happen here:

1. The event planner did not include a calendar attachment and you need to add all kinds of details (like an address in another city you’ve never been to before) manually.
2. The event planner included a downloadable attachment, but it’s in a format for a calendar you don’t use.
3. You use Gmail and it tries to auto-add to your calendar by clicking the link to the date, but you still have several fields to remember to type in with a poor interface. (see point #1).

That last option is fine for a quick one-subject-line event. But not so much for others, that require an online meeting link or address details and directions.

Recently I received this email, confirming my attendance at a multi-day event. There was an Add to Calendar link included in the email. However, when clicking it, it simply gave me a downloadable ICS file.

Clicking the Add to Calendar link simply downloaded the file. I use Google Apps for email and calendaring. If I used iCal or the desktop version of Outlook, this would have been relatively simple and easy. But I don’t. I feel fortunate I was received this on my laptop instead of my phone. After downloading, I’m stuck with this file icon that will open with the Windows Calendar app (does ANYONE use that?) or Outlook, a program I haven’t used in decades.

Sure, Google Calendar includes an import option. But it’s bulky and truly involves a desktop-only experience.

If I don’t have a tab for Google Calendar open already, I need to do so. Then add “other calendars” and go through a few prompts in a dialog box. No, this is not a big deal. But in a world where our time is more and more precious and where we’re trying to provide a better experience for our customers, this is not the way to go.

(On a completely different note, Google Calendar people – you’re product is aging. It needs some updates to account for this – and other options in the settings!)

There IS A Better Way!

We talk about content marketing a lot. We want to make our content more interesting and easy for our customers and would-be customers to consume. The principles of growth hacking suggest to make signups and customer on-boarding activities easy and convenient by incorporating technology. Not everyone uses iCal. Just like you design your websites or marketing emails for different screens, you should be including calendaring links for multiple platforms. It’s really not that hard.

Here’s a confirmation email I received today.

Look, ma! Multiple calendar links!

While, points should be deducted for the typo in creating the TM HTML entity, the Google Calendar link was there. So was Outlook. iCal format is universal. Be nice to your customers and give them what they want. The devs at GoToWebinar do it right, making it convenient for non-iCal users to add items to their calendar.

But My Developers Always Say No!

Then you need new developers or a new corporate culture.

No marketing team should be held captive by their developers. Having previously been a developer and also having led other developer teams for years, there’s no reason to say no and leave it at that. Perhaps there’s a technical reason why something can’t be done, but alternative methods should be considered and will likely work.

Time? Time shouldn’t be an issue. The iCalendar file format is a simple text file that can be generated with simple scripting, since most of your event information should already be in a database somewhere. There’s all kinds of ways to convert that to other formats. With APIs and other tools at a developer’s disposal. There’s simply no excuse anymore.

Leverage Existing Code

There’s plenty of code out there that can help. Doing a quick search, I found both AddEvent.com and AddtoCalendar.com. Both sites offer menus for multiple calendar formats. AddtoCalendar even offers icon views and an AJAX option.

Your developers should never have to re-invent the wheel. Sometimes it may be necessary to fix or augment the wheel, but rarely should they have to re-create from scratch.

Remember, this isn’t about torturing your developers or just “getting it done” so it’s “good enough.” This is your customers. It should exceed their expectations. Don’t you expect the same?

It has been a long time coming, but I am proud to announce the availability of my first online course. Introduction to Web Analytics Using Google Analytics is now available online at LearnWithThom.com.

The Google Analytics training course is modeled directly from the four-hour masterclass workshops I have been leading for the past five years, but goes more in-depth, allowing learners to comprehend and retain the information without the benefit of an instructor present.

More than a mere Google Analytics training course online, Introduction to Web Analytics Using Google Analytics will teach you the fundamentals of web analytics. You’ll also learn how to use Google Analytics. But more importantly, this Google Analytics course will teach you why you measure, what to measure and when to use each of the different reports.

While the course contains over two and a half hours of video content, it is broken into multiple lessons that range from 4 to 10 minutes each. The content can be easily consumed in one, long session or over multiple days, depending on how much time you have to spend. And you can even get two full lessons for free so you can get a feel for the system without commitment.

More Classes Coming Soon!

This course is the first of many more to follow. The LearnWithThom.com platform will be the jumping point for digital marketing training from professionals while learning at your own pace. More courses will be released by Q1, 2017. An advanced analytics course is already in development as the next release. It will be shortly followed by a course on Google Tag Manager.

Get Learning Web Analytics Now

[button link=”https://www.learnwiththom.com” size=”large”]  Go to LearnWithThom.com[/button]

What’s Your Goal?

For years, mankind has been concerned with “the meaning of life.” Your website has the same concerns. Every website needs a goal. If you’re directly selling on your site, your goal is likely having a visitor complete a sale. That is a goal you should measure. Some common website goals are:

• Direct Sales
• Sales Leads
• Requests for information
• Whitepaper or other document downloads
• Advertisements served and/or clicked

Do Your Goals Have Value?

Ultimately goals are what generates revenue. If you have an ecommerce goal, your ecommerce software should ultimately be able to dynamically insert the value of a transaction into your data layer or goal event. But what about non-transaction goals, like downloads or lead-gen forms for B2B websites?

I’ll grant you that a lead or a download are not guaranteed customers who will immediately generate revenue. But they start to build trust and establish a relationship with potential clients. how many of your sales team say to you, “if I get the initial meeting, I’ll close the deal”? Thought so.

Leads and sales have value. In your Web analytics software, you can set goals and add a value to them. The value you assign is a quantitative measurement of the revenue you directly generated through sales or hope to generate through the new lead. Granted, it’s not as easy to apply a value to a lead as it is to direct sales that have a dollar amount associated with the transaction.

Consider this:

Generally speaking, leads generated through web forms are warm leads. People have sought out your site, pursued it, entered data through your form and submitted it, entrusting your site with their personal email address. What is the long-term value of one of your customers? On average, what percentage of warm leads do you turn into long-term customers? Multiply those numbers out and that’s the average value of a website lead.

For example if:

• over the lifetime of the relationship, the average revenue for a customer is $1000
• your sales force can close 80% of their leads to long-term customers

Then the value of your lead is: $1000 x .8 or $800.

Stop thinking in terms of visits or page views. While these are very good metrics that can help set a baseline for other measurements, these are not the end-all, be-all. Some of you might also measure bounces – a visit where the visitor views one page and leaves your site immediately. Measuring bounces can be useful, but can also be misleading. Set goals within your analytics software and measure them. Goals are your best measure of ROI.

What What’s Our ROI?

By definition, Return on Investment means measuring your revenue based on the amount you invested. So it follows that your ROI would be the sum of all the revenue values of the your conversions, minus the cost of your investment. Are you tracking the cost per visitor? It’s easy using PPC or display campaigns with AdWords or DoubleClick. The interfaces include conversion pixel tracking that will report back to your analytics. However, what about email or social media campaigns? Do you track print or other traditional media? Data from all campaign spends must be accounted for within your ROI equations. Be sure you’re tagging all inbound links to your site to be sure. Yes, this is still possible with traditional media. Without it, you’re ROI calculations will never be accurate.

A new update – version 3.1.5 – for the Akismet WordPress plugin was released Tuesday afternoon. It addresses a major security vulnerability that could allow technical ill-doers to inject whatever they want into your website. If they really know what their doing, a malicious user even completely compromise your entire site. The sucuri blog published the vulnerability technical details yesterday.

Akismet is the the de facto anti-spam software for comments in WordPress. With millions of active installs, the impact of this could be huge for the tens of thousands of sites that typically go un-patched.

What Should I Do?

Update. NOW.

Cross-site Scripting – or XSS – is a nasty backdoor of sorts that allows unauthorized people to inject unauthorized things in your website. This could be links to viruses, competitors – really any content they want.

Log into WordPress, click Updates from your main menu, select all your plugins and upgrade them. Remember, backup your current configuration before updating plugins. This is doubly important if it’s been a while since you’ve updated some of them. While this particular Akismet update likely won’t break your site, your mileage may vary with other plugin updates.

Another week, another WordPress plug-in vulnerability. This time, the plug-in in question is the very popular WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. According to Yoast’s site, the plug-in has been downloaded more than 14 Million times. In all fairness, it is the most well-known SEO plug-in for WordPress sites out there.

Just like the SlimStat recent plugin vulnerability, the bug in the WordPress SEO plugin makes your site vulnerable to SQL injection. SQL is the language that runs the back-end SQL database that powers WordPress sites. Through an SQL Injection attack, a malicious user could insert their won SQL code into your server through a known vulnerability. They accomplish this through a series of extra code at the end of a Web address on your site.

The WordPress SEO vulnerability only allows someone who is logged into your site to perform the code injection. However, the injected code could change or delete page content or expose usernames. Full technical details were explained earlier today by Graham Cluley.

What To Do:

Update WordPress SEO by Yoast to the latest version (1.7.4). Now.

Good practice also suggests to make sure former employees and other people no longer affiliated with your website (perhaps and old developer?) no longer have active accounts.

Log into WordPress and look for little icons with numbers next to the Updates menu item. If you see a number next to it, that number indicates the number of plug-ins, themes or other updates you need to execute.

Simply click the update menu item, select all the updates on the page that follows, and click the Update Plugins button. It’s that simple and extremely important!

The problem lies with that key. The key is nothing more than the date you installed the plugin. Anyone with that knowledge in your organization – or FORMERLY in your organization – can easily use that key to not only change the analytics data, but actually break into your site and do malicious things using an attack known as SQL injection. Even people not affiliated with your organization can find the date out simply by using a service like the WayBack Machine at Internet Archive.

WordPress plugins have access to the WordPress back-end of your site. Which means an insecure plug-in can actually make your whole site vulnerable to being deleted, changed or otherwise manipulated. An SQL injection involves a properly crafted line of code could even delete all your users so you couldn’t get back into your website to fix it.

What To Do:

Update your SlimStat plug-in to the latest version. Now. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

When updates are available for any plugin, you should upgrade immediately. Many times, a plugin update contains important security fixes that are crucial, as in the case with the SlimStat plugin today. Typically, the announcement of a security update includes how to exploit the vulnerability, as well. Security blog, Securi, published the full exploit on the SlimStat plugin yesterday. This gives knowledge and courage to the would-be hackers to go out and find sites to attack.

You’ll know simply by logging into WordPress and looking for little icons with numbers like in the images below. These indicate updates are available.

Simply click the update link, select all the updates and click the Update Plugins button. It’s that simple and even more important.

Go – update your site and keep it that way.

Wednesday, May 14th

1:30 PM: How to Collect, Interpret and Use Your Web Analytics Data

My in-depth analytics workshop runs in the afternoon time slot from 1:30pm – 5:30pm. The session runs 4 hours and discusses the finer points of how to measure your inbound marketing, determine business KPIs and prove your business objectives are being met.

Thursday, May 15th

2:30 PM: Get Your Website Graded Site Clinic

Is your website performing the way you’d like it to? Wondering if you’ve been hit with a manual penalty? Get a little tough love for your site and a free audit. If your site is selected in this theater session, you’ll walk out with a mini site audit report card with actionable items to have your IT and marketing teams remedy.

3:30 PM: Digital Campaign Power Toolkit: What Every Online Marketer Should Use

Always have the right tool for the job! Tools are an important part of any practitioner’s day-to-day operations. Are there any “magic bullet” tools? Which tools are the right fit for the various SEO tasks you perform. I join Jim Hedger from Digital Always Media to discuss just that. Join us for the last session on day one.

4:30 PM: Meet the Experts – Web Analytics Roundtable

Still didn’t get enough? Come sit down over a drink and talk analytics with me. This is your chance for free advice for an hour discussing anything you’d like in the Web analytics world.

Monday 4-Nov:

• ClickZ Academy Training – Sold Out!
  How to Collect, Interpret and Use Your Web Analytics Data
  You’ve built your website. Now what? Is it generating revenue, or is it still a cost center? Are people visiting? Once they come to your site, what are they doing? My 4-hour training class on Web analytics covers common metrics, KPIs, segmentation, finding meaning in your data, and reporting it properly.

Tuesday 5-Nov (Day 1):

• Get Your Website Graded (Site Clinic)
  Is your website performing as you’d like it? Get some one-on-one advice and tough love with Technical SEO strategist, Thom Craver. From technical elements to content and usability, Thom will audit your site and present you a website report card to get you back on the path to better rankings, user satisfaction and visitor conversions.
• Tracking the Untrackable with Google Analytics (Moderator)
  Google Analytics is only as great as the information you get out of it. If the actions you want people to take are not trackable or if they occur offline, how do you connect them to the tool? Discover the answer to this question and learn the amazing things that can be done in Google Analytics and the new Universal Analytics. Explore some powerful yet little-known ways to segment your audience using the new advanced segmentation features and multi-channel funnels.
• Growth Hacking and Data Collection: Growing Your Customer Base Online
  Growth hacking is all the rage for start-ups. But established businesses can use the same lean marketing ideas to grow their customer base online. Some previously non-traditional methods of online marketing are becoming more and more common. When used correctly, these methods provide insight to visitor behavior to raise your conversions.

Thursday 7-Nov (Day 3):

• SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Been Reincarnated
  This Fall saw Google give an unannounced one-two punch of Not Provided and the Hummingbird Algorithm, taking away keywords and changing semantic search. At the same time, Bing rolled out instant “Page Zero” searches without leaving the search box and became the default Web Search for Siri on iOS 7. A panel of SEO experts weigh in on what this means for SEO and how the SEO community can cope with the changes for their clients.

Since 2010, Google has made encrypted search available to its users. When using encrypted search, your query (keywords) that were previously supplied to owners of the sites you clicked through to stopped being provided. Marketers and Web analysts who have come to measure site visitors by which keywords they used on Google to find them no longer can because in place of keywords, they now see the phrase (not provided).

Since then, Google has ramped up encrypted search so (not provided) crept into analytics reports.  This past week, Google confirmed they were all-in on encrypted search for all users. This means that for all visitors who arrive at your site from Google search, you will see (not provided) instead of the words they used to find your site.

Across the Web and Twitterverse SEOs are furious. The (not provided) invasion in Google Analytics and other Web analytics tools has been on the rise over the past three years. Now it’s certain for all Google searches.

Google’s official response to “not provided”:

“We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. We’re now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in.”

I’ve seen conspiracy theorists shouting it’s not about privacy because Webmaster Tools and AdWords still show the phrases. I’ve seen angry people blaming a Google push for more AdWords sales. I’ve seen and been asked “what do we do now?” and “how does this effect search and PPC?” Let me dispel rumors and try to provide explanations to the angry masses.

What Does This Really Affect?

Just your keyword reports in your analytics clients. But only the keywords data for Google users. Bing, AOL, Yahoo and other search engines are still provided keyword data. It’s still a subset of data. Depending on your traffic, it might even be a statistically significant sample.

It won’t affect your PPC campaigns. It won’t change your rankings – good, bad or otherwise. It won’t affect how you search. It won’t affect your Webmaster Tools or your bounce rate or your page views. Don’t let it affect your temper, either.

No Keywords Means SEO Is Dead / We Can’t Do Our Job

If you feel this way, you shouldn’t be doing SEO to begin with.

SEO is not about ranking first on Google – or any search engine for that matter. SEO drives more awareness and hopefully higher rankings. But SEO should be more than moving the needle on a keyword. It should be about driving quality (qualified) traffic to a site to increase that site’s bottom line.

Even still, as a practitioner, I understand that ranking higher is a large part of that. You need to measure that. So you start with a baseline (I currently rank 129th for widgets). You do some SEO-y kind of things. (Titles, Headings, keyword stuffing, etc), then you watch to see where you move to (Great, now I’m 99th!).

Do you measure that with Google Analytics? I think not. There are FAR better tools out there. Google Webmaster Tools shows you all the queries people used to find you, how many times you appeared, average rank for all those queries and how many clicks through you had.

For straight-up SEO measuring, what more do you need? Maybe the landing page would be nice. But really – does it matter? You should know which pages you were editing for SEO. They should all be targeting different phrases if you’re doing it right. Right?!

SEMrush has more great tools to track ranking. You set the words you want to monitor, then let it go. When you click through, you see pretty graphs showing trends over time. It reports automatically and will even email you every week.

Don’t know which keywords you’re targeting? (Again, shame on you!) SEMrush will do that for you too, if you want:

Bottom Line: Not Provided is NOT the End of SEO.

It may be the end of how you currently do your job. But now you can do it better. You’re welcome.

Google vs Privacy: AdWords and Webmaster Tools Provide the Same Data

No, they don’t. They’re very much not providing the same information.

When you use analytics (not even GA, others too) properly, you can tie personally identifiable information back to transactions. If you use a logfile analyzer, you also get IP address information. Google has tried to make Analytics as useful as possible without compromising privacy. You can’t get individual IP addresses. I know. I’ve asked Google Analytics product managers about individual transactions when interviewing them about their multi-channel attribution tools. Google won’t offer certain data in certain settings because they don’t want to compromise this data.

Here’s my speculation, but based in reality:

Yes, this is all about user privacy.

Webmaster tools does not show who searched. It doesn’t even show landing page. I can’t trace that data back to anything in analytics. I can’t even segment by it if I tie my GA and Webmaster Tools account together.

If you do paid properly, you have one landing page tied to a bunch of keywords. You’re bidding on those keywords, counting on the fact that people are going to search for them. You’re likely using heavily searched phrases. This is not private information. You should be able (through common sense) tie together people who clicked and hit your specific-to-that-campaign landing page to a handful of phrases.

While AdWords provides conversion data, it doesn’t show unique data identifying a person. Analytics can provide far more personal data, possibly more personally identifiable data depending on what other data a site collects or requires for use. For example:

My local grocery store has a “Shoppers’ Club” card that tracks me in-store. To get up-to-date pricing, I need to log into their site when browsing this week’s ad. They can track me online and offline by tying the two data sets together based on the common unique ID that is my card number. As such, they can track my search data back to me, personally. Google wants to avoid this.

Let’s not forget about Facebook and other sharing sites. The Facebook like/share/recommend button is called directly from Facebook, not from the site on which its placed. Can they access search query? Depending on how it’s passed (GET string), yes, they might be able to maliciously do that. Can Facebook tie that back to you personally? You bet your sweet cookies they can!

But I Wouldn’t Misuse Keyword Data!

Of course not. 99% of us likely won’t. But is your site 100% safe from hackers? Are you storing that keyword data – intentionally or not? Are there malicious sites out there that might misuse the system? Of course there are. Don’t be silly. Have you seen the phishing and spam sites out there?

One bad apple can spoil the bunch. You may not like it, but that’s a hard truth of the Web.

Google’s Only Doing This to Push AdWords and Paid Search

Really? How?!

Paid data is significantly different than organic data. It won’t tell you where you rank for all those SEO efforts you just made. I’ve already said this change will not change your rankings. So tell me how this will push people toward paid? What I’d really like to know is how many of those that are screaming this “more paid” mantra are the same people who say “people ignore ads.”

This argument is rubbish. There’s no correlation between encrypted search and paid. Not when you’re screaming “end of SEO”/”can’t do our jobs!”

Not Provided Final Thoughts

Most SEOs I know have moved off the segment-by-keywords thought process long ago. Those who haven’t shouldn’t be miserable. It’s an opportunity to improve yourself in your field, instead of continuing to use stagnant, older practices.

You’re in a new world of content marketing. Make good content. Know what keywords you’re targeting on that content. Measure people based on landing pages and source (social, email, etc). Keywords are a signal your content is doing well for the words you already targeted. They have no bearing that your overall marketing is bearing fruit.

No one ever made board room decisions based on visits per keyword. They’re based on revenue and cost savings. Stop whining and start marketing!