First of all sorry about the lack of posts recently, if you want some SEO information take a read of the latest Q&A with Google to see what Matt Cutts thought of the Daily Express selling links.

Now back to the point of this post – to tell you all about a product we have been testing on some of our business to business clients sites. Anybody who has done B2B SEO will know that it’s a different ball game due to many factors:

• Not much traffic to go around
• You compete with consumer facing brands
• A lot of your visitors are sometimes not your target customers
• Products & services are normally more expensive so conversion rates are lower
• Every lead is worth a lot of money

With this in mind we have been trialling a product called Web Forensics which uses 9 databases of IP addresses to identify the businesses that are browsing your website and not filling in your contact form. Once you have this information you can call them up and turn them into leads – even one client a year will probably pay for this software many times over. You have to see this in action to believe how useful it is.

The software is a paid solution with rates depending on visitor numbers but we have negotiated a free trial for Blogstorm readers so you can see the software in action on your own website with no obligation whatsoever.

Here is the important bit – to get the free trial you need to email them via a special address which is freetrial@webforensics.co.uk – don’t contact them via the site otherwise you won’t get the full treatment.

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Business to business SEO tool Web Forensics lets you see visitors who didn’t convert

The single most useful way to find high value keywords has always been to look at the exact search keywords driving sales via AdWords and copy them. Looking at the keywords you are bidding on is useless, looking at the keywords that people are actually searching for is very important.

This month Google is finally going to add a report to Analytics which shows the exact search keywords for AdWords campaigns in your reports, previously this was only available via AdWords (great if you have access, not so great otherwise) and by a filter which was quite hard to implement.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs.

You can see a video of the new reports below:

Interestingly the asynchronous tracking tag is now out of beta and will be the default option for new users.

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AdWords exact search keywords coming to Analytics in May

I’ve never understood why Google Analytics shows percentages rather than actual numbers in the “Goals” report when you are looking at traffic sources. The information below is good but it’s a lot better to just see the numerical amounts.

Luckily there is an easy way to show the amounts, if you are at home using custom reports. Simply set up the report using the dimensions below and the information will be available straight away.

The screenshot below shows the final report.

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How to view actual goal numbers rather than percentages in Google Analytics

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.

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How to identify your sites worst pages

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

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Your unique visitor figures are 2-4 times too high

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.

This data is useful but it doesn’t show us what we really want to know – the keywords with the largest gains and losses from one month to another. To do this you need to export all of your keyword referral data (use Excellent Analytics to get around the 500 row limit in Google Analytics) for the two months that you want to compare and put them in an Excel file with one sheet for each month.

Next you need to add 2 blank columns next to your current months data, one column for last months figures and one for the gain/loss. Once you have done this it’s time to use the VLOOKUP function which allows you to query your previous months data on a keyword by keyword basis.

The formula you need is something like this, where January is the name of last months data sheet and A2 to B501 is the data range.

=VLOOKUP(A2,’January’!A$2:B$501,2,FALSE)

The end result is the nice spreadsheet below which can be ordered to show traffic losses and gains as you wish.

Advanced stuff

To take this to the next level format the data as a table and run a filter on keywords to include certain product names to see if you can identify a particular keyword silo that’s causing the issues.

If you are really advanced then you can download landing page data with the keywords and run reports to see which landing pages are doing better or worse. Combine this with keyword filters to narrow down exactly which keywords and landing pages are being affected and you will get a pretty full picture of your search campaigns.

In fast moving industries you probably want to save this as a template and run the reports each month.

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Analysing traffic increases & decreases using Excel

For affiliates concerned that their hard work will be wasted by ‘leaky tracking’ of offline conversions, Jonathan Treiber’s offline tracking panel at Affiliate Summit East provided hope for a more accountable tomorrow. (I know, we’re already at Affiliate Summit West – the technology is still new and the tips Jon shared still valuable, so bite me .)

Treiber is the CEO of RevTrax, which has a point-of-sale technology that enables retailers and other businesses with brick-and-mortar technology to identify sales that came through online marketing.

In plain English, they use bar-code technology and gift card technology that tie back into affiliate tracking systems. And while he was trying to interest affiliates and merchants in his platform, Jon wasn’t pushy, and made clear the appeal of such a system in general.

While Treiber’s presentation was fluid and eloquent, what really impressed me was how deftly he handled the Q&A afterwards.

Is this a call-tracking system?

Treiber told the audience that while he had the ability to do phone-tracking, that wasn’t really what his platform focused on, and referred people interested in phone tracking to Ring Revenue, an affiliate platform servicing networks, so affiliates can get paid for calls generated. (They currently work with Shareasale, CJ and LinkTrust, for those of you interested.)

Is it possible to do without coupons?

You need a digital ID, an offline ID, and something to tie them together. Jon’s presentation featured coupons, but he made the point here that it’s not strictly necessary to have a coupon from a technology perspective. (The question is how would you get a customer to bother bringing in any tracking device that helps you out, if there’s no incentive [eg coupon] for them to do so.)

Another possibility is to have products/sales/prices that are only available online, so that you know if that’s what people ask for offline, that you had an online touchpoint.

Do you need new hardware or software?

No, RevTrax’s system piggybacks on existing systems. You can think of it as a plugin.

Is it possible to use RevTrax for local internet marketing?

No, it isn’t, because the budget involved is significant. Also, the problem for local retail, restaurant and other service providers is that there are bigger risks of mistracked redemptions. The reason being that you might have a short-term orientation to boost your own profit by shaving commissions, which is less likely when the cashier isn’t the owner or a family member of the owner.

Can you extend the system with print media buys?

Yes, but it’s less exciting because there are less analytics. (I’m not sure why that would be. Perhaps something to do with the ability to micro-target tracking to a particular person as opposed to just a general tracking code for newspaper X?)

How can affiliates promote this kind of campaign?

Ranking for local store names and places in the longtail, or for product and location combinations (eg product, Miami, FL) is a possibility. Jon referenced CompUSA’s campaign around this point, I think because someone did this kind of local marketing for the big computer retailer.

How does this compare to other forms of direct marketing?

Treiber shared a case study with us about S&K men’s suits. 46% of clients RevTrax drove to their stores were new vs 26% seen from other forms of direct marketing. In other words, there was less cannibalization.

Also, there was $12/click in incremental revenue, according to their tracking.

With regards to commissions, they’ve found that 20% of coupons printed get redeemed, so you can go from a cost/sale model to a cost/print model for tracking purposes. (Eg changing the action in the definition of the program’s “CPA.”) In this respect, RevTrax competes indirectly with Coupons.com, since Coupons.com uses a pay-per-print model, though they work mostly with grocery brands in the consumer-packaged goods area.

How long do coupons last?

It’s a 30 day minimum. The latency is often just a few days to conversion or even immediate conversion for restaurants. For S&K suits it was 1-2 weeks.

Update:

There were a few things I missed or didn’t explain well initially, so I’m copying Jonathan’s explanations (which he just got to me by email) here:

Q: What about leaks with your system (eg human error, tech failures with the barcodes etc.)?

There will always be leaks at the register with human errors the same way there are errors with landing pages and ecommerce sites “going down” for some reason. Both hurt conversion rates. We can track conversion rates across impressions, clicks, prints and redemptions. If we see the numbers dip from print to redemption, we can set flags and institute an investigation with the merchant to understand why.

Q: What do you mean by incremental revenue (the S&K case study listed above)?

The incremental sales are incremental to online sales. The retailer measures what each click delivers in online sales. We show an average of $12 additional dollars of in-store sales to what they are making online.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this article on behalf of DoneSEO.com, which offers SEO services.

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The Lost Cross-Channel Affiliate Tracking Notes

Google Analytics has been rolling out new features pretty fast recently so I thought it might be a good idea to create a wishlist of features people want.

Mine are below, add yours in the comments.

• Real time reporting
• Ability to “move” an account from one login to another (for those poor clients whose data is owned by the web design company)
• An API that isn’t limited to 10,000 rows of data – why not give us all our data?
• Make exact keywords show up without using a filter
• Show average ranking data (the same as in webmaster tools) in the organic keywords report
• Funnel analysis to show more than just the last click

Any other ideas?

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Google Analytics Wishlist

One of the most exciting developments on the web in the last two years has been the increased ability to combine two or more technologies to create something new. We see this most in the Social space, of course, but overlaying data sets could lead to a dramatically increased understanding of the world we live in.

Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called Experian Hitwise) newsletter. It is one of the very very that I actually remember signing up to. The other 100 a day never seem to get to my in-box now. Hitwise always use the newsletter to focus on on me as a UK user and choose an industry to give us some insight about the market share (in terms of traffic) about that industry and today chose to focus on the UK’s online property websites.

I have often thought it would be interesting to Map the link data onto the traffic data to see if there is a correlation between the links and the traffic. If we accept that Google is less of a “search engine” and more of a “popularity contest” then being able to analyse this correlation at the drop of a hat would be worth quite a lot to someone I would have thought.

For example, taking the top five companies listed in the Hitwise data, we can map their cumulative back-links over time:

Data from MajesticSEO Free backlink history checker

It is interesting to see that with the minor difference between the fourth and fifth positions, the inbound links (by domain) puts the sites in the same order as Hitwise does when it tracks traffic:

Data from Experian - Hitwise

What IS markedly different, however, is the copmparitively large market share that Rightmove gets compared to its competion – highlighted presumably accurately in the Hitwise data, even though Findaproperty have almost as many links on the internet.

What might this tell us?

For me, intuitively, it suggests that Rightmove have developed much of their traffic from offline branding. If you have been in the UK and seen adverts or looked in Newsagent windows, you’d probably not need data to back that up, but it does suggest that there may be some maths that could be used to show the power of a brand offline, by looking at the relative difference in traffic patterns, compared to links, online.

This may not be the only insight, however. One thing I tend to look at is the quality of the inbound links – particularly at the upper end – and I can tell you that “Findaproperty.com” has – on the surface – several more links from pages which have huge numbers of inbound links themselves. However – when we look further – many of those links come from the same domain. 8 out of 10 Findaproperty’s strongest links come from the “This Is” range of sites. By contrast, all 10 out of 10 of Rightmove’s strongest back-links come from different root domains. I would wager that their back-link profile is spread with a considerably larger standard deviation of IP addresses or class c domains than Findaproperty.

Further analysis would be required, but I think that’s my point – when you start to map two or more extremely large data sets together in this way, some really powerful new insights are available. This is why we use APIs do be able to securely share data. Whether it is Microsoft’s demographic profiling onto Majestic’s link data or Google’s analytics data onto its Adwords data ( which I am assured they don’t do by the way). The effect can be incredibly powerful and large companies are now starting to collaborate with these kinds of interrelationships.

Dixon Jones.

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Are Links a Good Proxy for Traffic?

With site speed apparently set to be a factor in the 2010 Google algorithm webmasters are looking for easy ways to speed up their sites and Google wants to help.

The latest Google Analytics code loads asynchronously allowing your page to load faster – download it here.

Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a “separate lane” to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements.

The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Using the new tracking code is optional: your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to improve your webpage load times and fine-tune the accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you’ll love this new option.

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Make Google Analytics load faster with asynchronous tracking