Posts by author:
Patrick Altoft
by Patrick Altoft on February 19, 2010
The worst page on a website is the last page that a visitor looks at before they leave and unless that’s the final page in your checkout process you need to be looking at ways to improve it.
An easy method to identify pages that are causing your visitors to leave is to order your Google Analytics content report by “% Exit” but this doesn’t really help because you get loads of pages with 2 visitors and one left straight away giving a 50% Exit Rate.
What we do is to add a filter to only include pages with more than 50 page views which results in a nice list of your worst performing pages. The next step is to identify the problems with them which we will address in another post.
by Patrick Altoft on February 19, 2010
Analytics programs are never going to be 100% accurate but you might not expect them to be over-reading by 2-4 times on your unique visitor numbers.
According to research this is exactly what’s going on. Scout Analytics has developed algorithms for tracking users across different devices using dozens of unique attributes and utilize patent-pending algorithms to derive a unique signature for the device, network, even the individual user (biometric). Their systems use things like typing patterns to identify people across different computers for example, you can read more on the blog.
During the past 6 months, Scout Analytics tracked hundreds of thousands of subscribers through a combination of patent-pending tracking technologies of device and biometric signatures. Scout Analytics discovered cookies have an inherent weakness that causes them to overstate the user counts on an average of two to four times.
“Virtually all measurement techniques have some rate of error, but online marketers who have a heavy reliance on cookies need to know this method has astonishingly low accuracy,” said John Lovett, senior partner for Web Analytics Demystified. “Because of this, we expect new innovations in measurement technology in the near future that will no doubt minimize marketers’ reliance on cookies and dramatically improve measurement accuracy.”
I expect that some of the major analytics provided will be interested and worried about this. On the one hand they want their figures to be more accurate but on the other hand if they were to start using this technology all their customers unique visitor numbers would fall dramatically overnight.
Via
by Patrick Altoft on February 18, 2010
With the huge amounts of long tail traffic websites get these days it’s very hard to analyse where sudden traffic increases and decreases come from. If you get 100,000 visitors one month and 80,000 the next month somebody is going to need a report detailing where that traffic went.
Google Analytics offers a fairly comparison of one months data over another and is also not too bad for comparing how traffic has risen (or fallen) for your top keywords.
Read more >>
by Patrick Altoft on February 17, 2010
We use Wordpress a lot whenever we are building non-ecommerce sites for clients. It’s a perfect CMS for anybody who wants a mixture of pages and news and the latest versions are really user friendly.
One of our web design clients does online backup for large companies, financial institutions and the UK government and they have just released an Online Backup for Wordpress plugin which backs up all your blog data to their secure servers (mirrored across two datacentres in the UK). Bloggers get 50MB of space for free and when you run out of space the older backups get deleted to make way for new ones.
Read more >>
by Patrick Altoft on February 17, 2010
Despite what you might think, not everybody uses Google and even though only 10% of the UK choosing to search on Yahoo and Bing it’s important that we consider who those people are and what they want to do.
A recent study into the demographic and psychographic profiles of search engine users has found that people who use Bing are early adopters and innovators whereas people who use Google are more middle of the road types.
My feeling in the past has been that people who use Bing and Yahoo just can’t figure out how to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer but this study says otherwise.
Read more >>
by Patrick Altoft on February 14, 2010
Until early 2009 the tactics required to compete in most marketplaces were quite similar. Certainly you needed to use some special techniques to rank highly in industries such as online gaming and real estate (until the famous Google penalty of 2007) but in most other industries the usual SEO techniques worked perfectly well with the right execution.
In 2009 Google started using a few different algorithms such as the famous “brand” algorithm which is linked to satisfaction rates (apparently) and more recently the one not many people seem to talk about which is the “not optimised” algorithm. Read more >>
by Patrick Altoft on February 10, 2010
Last week I started looking into a few rank tracking solutions to see what was new on the market and Yoast pointed out SEO Rank Monitor. We’ve looked quite a lot in the past at SEO analytics tools and I think this market is wide open for somebody to build a fantastic suite of tools but so far there is no clear leader.
The big issue for rank tracking tools is accuracy, most of the tools we try are inaccurate every time we use them and inaccurate data is worse than no data at all. SEO Rank Monitor has been accurate for me on every keyword I’ve tracked this week so that’s a pretty good start. The tool is in beta so if you have any issues with it then I’m sure they are happy to accept feedback.
Read more >>
by Patrick Altoft on February 2, 2010
Until the invention of the Local Business Listings Google had two sets of results, AdWords and natural. Placing some ads around the natural listings was a perfectly acceptable thing to do but Google is limited by the number of ads they can show due to the size of the page. Adding 4 or 5 ads at the top simply wasn’t going to help the user experience.
Fast forward a few years and Google invented the Local Business Listings and suddenly started displaying them for one in every 13 searches (and virtually all the time for geographical searches).
This is probably the cleverest move by Google since the launch of AdWords 10 years ago because it gives Google a 2nd area of the page to fill with ads and a huge ready made inventory of impressions and advertisers – in any competitive industry every single result in the Local Business Listings will become “enhanced” overnight.
Google has always been very much against having paid listings within the natural results but it seems that they are more than happy to have paid listings appearing within the Local Business Listings and on the listing pages.
Read more >>
by Patrick Altoft on January 29, 2010
We’ve had a really good year so far at Branded3 and are looking for at least one/two experienced SEO consultants to join our Leeds office. I don’t want to make this post sound too much like a job advert because I’m sure most of you know the skills and qualities that an SEO consultant needs to have.
You will be working with some of the leading brands in the UK (our client list is missing some of the best accounts we have due to NDA’s) and get to work in one of the fastest growing natural search agencies in the UK.
We’re looking to move quite quickly once we find the right person so please send an email to patrick @ branded3.com and we can discuss the role further.
by Patrick Altoft on January 26, 2010
When you download the Google Toolbar and select the “enhanced features” option you are giving consent for Google to monitor and log all the web pages you visit. That’s always been fairly clear but apparently Google is being a bit more sneaky – the toolbar will continue to track your visitors even after you disable it.
Pretty clever way for Google to get data.
Another story this morning shows graphically how Google is reducing the share of money they give to AdSense publishers. Not a good day for Google.
