Web Analytics
How To Pick A SEM Agency: Part 1 Search Engine Marketing
When picking a agency to manage your SEM (search engine marketing) you need to take into account more than just if they know Google Adwords. Today there are a multitude of factors that you need to consider to get a complete experience when it comes to your online marketing. We’ll be publishing all of the components that go into your strategy in the order listed below. The first of five part series will focus on SEM itself, but I want to stress that the other four components are very important as you look at a comprehensive strategy for Online Marketing.
- Search Engine Marketing
- Web Analytics
- A/B and MVT Testing
- Landing Page Optimization
- Online Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Today Google owns roughly 70% market share, Yahoo 20%, Microsoft 5% and Ask 5%. These numbers constantly change, but your agency should know that a comprehensive strategy encompasses more than just Google. Different search engines produce different conversion rates across different verticals. Your product could work better in Yahoo than Google, so ensure that your agency tests them out to see which performs better.
You also want to see what services are included in your contract. Services vary greatly by agency or consultant. Some are bundled as packages, others claim to do ‘everything’. What you need to ensure is that everything is spelled out ahead of time so that nothing is left to chance. Some basic services include:
- Keyword Research
- Account Setup
- Geotargeting
- Dayparting
- Negative Keywords
- Ad Creation
- Content Network Research
- Conversion Tracking Implementation
- Account Management
- Reporting
Other services may be more complex, depending on if your agency or consultant needs include integrating with existing APIs, database or inventory management, web analytics tracking, etc. This will need to be discussed with the agency or consultant as to the extent of this involvement.
Paying for an agency or consultant to manage your SEM is still not yet standardized across the industry. Some work on a fixed monthly cost, others on an hourly or retainer basis. The most popular method though is working off a percentage of ad spend. The percentage varies from 8% to 25% depending upon the agency or consultant and the task involved. If your goal is to simply drive the cheapest traffic possible then it obviously requires substantially less time than if you had a product that has a finite quantity and constantly needs to be adjusted. Adding in performance based incentives, setup fees, or working for a mandatory minimum amount of ad spend is another way that some agencies and consultants operate.
Contract length is another topic that deserves some attention. A highly skilled agency or consultant has substantial front loaded time dedicated to properly setting up a segmented account, implementing web analytics, conversion tracking, keyword research, etc. To be fair I would recommend a six month contract. The first 90 days are filled with experimentation. As a client do you want to try bidding on competitor keywords (as long as they are not trademarked)? Do your organic keywords convert better or worse as paid keywords? These are all questions that time needs to resolve. Days 91 - 180 are when you truly get a firm understanding of what your ‘money’ keywords are, and has started to optimize your account.
Certification is something that I have been asked about quite frequently. Do you need to hire someone who is an Google Adwords Certified Professional or a Platinum Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador? The answer in my opinion is that these certificates are similar to what the IT industry has with certificates. Nice to put in a PowerPoint presentation, but not incredibly indicative of ability or skill. I have these certificates and would say that anyone who reads the Adwords Documentation for eight hours could pass this test. Do you really want to ensure your campaign to someone with eight hours of on paper experience? I once had someone who worked for me fail the test the first try, but who I considered my best SEM analyst.
Now that you have some of the basics use the following checklist if you’re looking for an agency to simply handle SEM. Future posts will outline a more comprehensive strategy which I highly recommend. The basic checklist should look like:
- Setup a meeting with several vendors
- Come prepared to explain your product, target cost per acquisition, etc.
- Request an RFP complete with costs, services, and forecasting
- Negotiate terms, reporting, consultation, etc.
- Account should be able to start within one to two weeks of contract signing off
- After 30 days meetings should be setup to assess progress
- Continue to actively monitor your progress on a weekly basis
I’ve tried to cover most of the basics, but for the sake of sanity I haven’t went so deep as to be highly confusing for a novice who is just starting out. For further explanation please feel free to comment or contact us.
How To Use Google Analytics on Myspace
I received an interesting email from a reader last week about using Google Analytics on a Myspace profile. As most of you know Myspace does not allow for the addition of JavaScript into profiles, and up until now there has not been a solution to allow for this. Over the years I’ve received thousands of visitors looking for information about this, but I’ve never had a solid solution in which to offer up until now. Please note that this solution is for technically savvy users of Flash, but hopefully an easier solution can be built through a script or simply application. The reader proposed the following solution:
Simply put since Myspace allows embedding flash objects. You can create a flash file 1px by 1px with the same color background as your myspace page. Then you would call the javascript from the flash object as shown at (http://blog.projectx4.com/2008/03/28/google-analytics-flash-easy-peasy/).// GOOGLE ANALYTICS SIMPLE TRACKING /// Script by: corban baxter import flash.external.ExternalInterface; function gaTracking(page) { ExternalInterface.call(“pageTracker._trackPageview”, page); } //end// CODE FOR SIMPLE CALL IS BELOW \\
gaTracking(“/flash/home”); //sends event to google’s analytics system
Please note that I have not verified that this is in fact a permanent solution, but a very clever idea to solve the issue of getting web analytics tracking beyond Myspace’s rudimentary ‘views’ tab. Please feel free to provide comments, and I’ll be sure to update this post as reader’s give it a shot. Through community and heopfully with some web developers with a few spare moments users of Myspace will be able to tag their profiles with Google Analytics.
My Google Analytics Wish List
Google Analytics is a very robust web analytics solution that Google provides for free, but there are several features that I would love to add to my wish list for consideration in future updates:
- Ability to remove yourself from accounts. I have several old clients who still have me listed on their Google Analytics and have no way to remove myself. Being able to remove yourself from a Google Analytics account would be a great feature.
- Ability to limit access to reports. Right now Google has two account levels (Administrator and User) which is fine, but I’d love to have the ability to gradually increase the amount of reports that users new to web analytics see. Even as a standard user Google Analytics can be overwhelming, and with subsequent training users could have access to more and more reports.
- Create dashboards that encompass multiple sites. I’d love to have the ability to create a dashboard similar to what Omniture offers that is completely customizable, and offers the ability to create droplets from multiple sites within a single dashboard.
- Show me whats changed. There are third party plug ins that allow you to see what keywords have changed, but it requires Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the plug in to work. Not exactly perfect integration. I would like to see this integrated along with information reporting on increasing and decreases across top content, referring sites, etc.
- Simplify goal tracking. The difference between head, exact, and regular expression is not clearly defined in my opinion. Offer the ability to paste additional JavaScript onto your goal page similar to Adwords conversion tracking as an option to tracking conversions. Same thing could be applied to the funnel visualization as many CMS (content management system) solutions offer the ability to customize the page, but not the URL in question.
- Standardize on exact keyword tracking. Currently if you use broad or phrase match in your search engine marketing campaigns the exact keyword is not passed into your web analytics. ROI Revolution has created a great script that places this under user-defined in the visitors section of Google Analytics, but this is not a standard feature.
- Offer offline tracking integration. This one might be a stretch, but I’d love to be able to create a vanity URL through Google for my offline campaigns and then have it redirected and show up in referring sites. I do this normally through purchasing URLs and then 301 redirecting them myself, but for the majority of users this is probably a more advanced feature. Additionally using Voicestar or other solution for phone number tracking would be great.
- Segment out paid vs. organic for other search engines. Right now you have to manually tag all of your destination URLs for Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask if you want them to be segmented out. There are ways to help automate this as I’ve previously blogged about, but still not a true automation. I’d love to see a way of specifying a key that could them automatically sort the campaigns as appropriate.
- Improved site overlay. A plug in like what Omniture uses seems to work consistently better than what Google Analytics uses, especially for sites that use JavaScript, AJAX, and use of other non standard technologies.
- Creation of custom variables for future expansion. Just as how ROI Revolution came out with the exact keyword tracking I would love to have future expansion of custom variables that can be utilized.
What other features would you love for Google Analytics to include in future releases?
Great Web Analytics Plugin For Firefox
Recently I made the full time switch over from Internet Explorer 7.0 to Firefox 3.0 as I transitioned from Windows Vista to Mac OS X and an Apple Macbook Pro. Along with that transition came the addition of plug ins for Firefox. One great plug in that everyone interested in web analytics should be using is WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler). This tool is available for anyone using Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, and is extremely valuable for both practitioners and marketers in the field of web analytics. To see some of the immediate uses of this plug in I took a screen shot of NBCOlympics.com, which is shown below:
What you can immediately see is the addition to the browser on the left. This is triggered by double clicking on the WASP logo in the bottom right corner of the browser. The bottom right corner displays both the WASP logo as well as information on what is currently tagged on the site that you are visiting. This works for most major web analytics vendors, as well as advertisers, leads, testing solutions and VOC vendors.
For NBCOlympics.com we can instantly see that NBC is utilizing Omniture Site Catalyst and Quantcast for web analytics and Doubleclick for advertising. Instead of manually looking at page code to see what competitors or others are using this information is readily available as soon as the page executes.
Additional features of this plug in include checking for correct tagging of web analytics implementations. Simply navigate to the page that you would like to check and right click on the WASP icon in the bottom right corner of the browser. The current version of the plug in checks up to 100 pages, and allows you to export a report after it is done scanning.
For a full list of feature sets you can visit WASP’s features which details out the current free version, and the upcoming paid version. If anyone has any similar web analytics plug ins that are helpful please feel free to post them in comments below.
Interview with Avinash Kaushik
About a year and a half ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Avinash Kaushik, the incredibly popular author of Occam’s Razor and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, what has clearly become the definitive book on the subject of web analytics. Why Jeff would you be re-posting this, instead of providing us with fresh content you may be asking? As I transitioned to this new blog I’ve had several requests to republish this interview, which I have in its entirety. While I’m sure Avinash would like to update some of his answers the vast majority of his responses still hold true to this day. If you haven’t already I highly recommend picking up his book, of which 100% of the proceeds go to charity. I intend to follow up with Avinash in the near future to get his opinion on experience testing along with a wide variety of other topics. The interview is:
1. You’ve been in the field of web analytics for quite some time, did you just wake up one day and think to yourself that this is something that you wanted to do, or were you thrown into the role and simply adapted to it?
At my last job with DirecTV, Sr. Manager for Enterprise Analytics, I had small amounts of exposure to Web Analytics (someone supplied log file parsed numbers into the dashboard). When I interviewed for the job at Intuit (Manager for Web Analytics) I was quite excited about the possibility of taking all my experience in Decision Support and apply it to a 100% exclusive web environment.
There is something so beautiful and scary and challenging and fun about data on the web. It was too hard to pass up. But it would be fair to say that when I took the job at Intuit I had no idea what “web analytics” was, I had not yet had the fortune to have used any web analytics application. Blaire Hansen, my hiring manager, certainly made a huuuge leap of faith in hiring me. J
It has been a amazing ride and yes to answer your question I have simply adapted to it, but since my post MBA experience has been almost solely focused on Decision Support Systems I think I have brought all the learnings from traditional data warehousing and business intelligence and applied it to my current role.
2. What problems if any do you foresee with the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX and the explosion of tab based browsing? Are you concerned about problems of people keeping tabs open when they are not actively browsing the site?
I have blogged about the fact that slowly but surely the page paradigm is dying. That is not saying that the big problem is that the page view metric is going to be crap. It is more that currently almost all web analytics applications are constructed, from an architecture perspective, on the fact that a page view has to happen and all things go from there.
The challenge with AJAX or Flash or RIA’s is that the page view model does not work (remember this is more from a data capture and data analysis perspective). I have blogged about (http://snipurl.com/1al4p) moving to an “event” based data capture and analysis model. The challenge for the web analytics vendors is to change their underlying architectures to accommodate for a event based model and not just try to stuff events into page views because that won’t work in the long term.
There is a bigger challenge from Ajax / RIA’s for business users. We are used to slapping a tag on the page and expecting most data we need to show up. With web 2.0 we are going to have to think way up front exactly what we want to measure, what is success and then instrument these new experience in Ajax or RIA’s to give us the data we need. Most companies and practitioners are not yet prepared for this mental shift.
In terms of tabbed browsing, this simply exposes one more limitation of clickstream data to ultimate actionable insight. Even with tabbed browsing it is hard to make sense of clickstream data. My personal point of view with tabbed browsing the order in which a visitor sees something and follows a “path” is fairly messed up. Depending on how your sessions are initiated in terms of your analytics apps this could also screw up other reports such as referring urls etc.
But it is important to note that if you have a tab open and as long as you are not auto-reloading it, the web analytics application will terminate your session after 30 mins of inactivity and that is not a biggie. Tabbed browsing, and its related impact on clickstream data, is yet another reminder that each website owner should have a mechanism to collect qualitative data (http://snipurl.com/1al54) and to have a Trinity mindset (http://snipurl.com/1al53). Without that they will not truly be able to get actionable insights from their data.
3. What tools, features, and reports would you like to see in the upcoming Microsoft Gatineau product?
Hmm…. I don’t think my friend Ian Thomas has quite the luxury to build whatever I want, but let’s assume he does. J
1. I hope that with Gatineau Microsoft figures out exactly who their target audience is and then delivers a tool exactly and specifically just for that audience. Being all things to all people means being nothing to anyone. I guess I am saying I hope their tool does not have a billion standard reports out of the box, just the six that their target audience needs. Atleast initially.
2. Efficient segmentation. In four clicks (see I am generous!) anyone should be able to segment out traffic from the search engines or from a top referring url /’s or visitors who see x number of pages or come on a particular campaign (whose id is in the url or cookie). It is very hard to dumb down the ability to do intelligent segmentation, yet that is the key to finding actionable insights.
3. Some useful reporting for Search Engine Optimization. I love free traffic and with all the changes (especially at Google, such as increased “personalization”) the PPC gravy train is going to pause. SEO will become more effective at getting the right kinds of traffic yet today most tools pay lip service to the measurement of the results of SEO efforts, all you can do is measure organic traffic and if it goes up (that is hardly a measure of SEO). I hope Gatineau can atleast tap into the MSN data and providing efficient reporting for atleast MSN SEO efforts.
4. Ok maybe I will ask for a reporting feature. I hope that all the reports will show one extra time period by default. For example show eight days in a “weekly” trend and thirteen months in a “yearly” trend. Seems like a small thing but most web analytics tools are not great at giving context, and context is king. If you look at a eight day trend you could compare this Monday to last Monday and get a feeling for if you are doing better or worse this Monday, with most tools you don’t see last Monday. Ditto for this month vs. same month last year. It gives context to your past performance and is a “internal benchmark” that can frame current performance. Might not scream answers at you but will get you to ask the right “why” and “what” questions. There is nothing uniquely Microsoft Gatineau about the above three requests, though if they are really starting with a open mind it might be easier for them to consider requests from random bloggers such as myself.
4. Do you foresee a decline in the major players in the web analytics field such as Omniture and WebSideStory based upon free web analytics packages, or do you believe that they fulfill a niche and will remain?
It is important to realize that I am a practitioner. I am not a vendor, I not a consultant, I am not a analyst from Forrester or Jupiter or any other esteemed organizations. In as much I probably have no idea what I am talking about when I answer this question.
One overall fact to consider is that the web analytics space is growing by leaps and bounds, driven by the fact that the web in general becoming a medium that is increasing been monetized (to huge amounts). At the moment anyone in the field can do great because web analytics is a baby and the there are way too many people who are falling in love with this cute baby. Near term there is hardly a worry on the horizon.
Longer term both Google and Microsoft will prove to be excellent disruptors. If they provide solutions that are value add (rather than being YATR - Yet Another Tsunami of Reports) and keep improving, as their deep pockets would enable them to, then they should own the small to mid sized clients. There is really no need for you to pay for clickstream reporting and some of the always required analysis.
That leaves some of the mid-market and the “high end”. These will continue to be with the paid-vendors for some time for a whole host of reasons, for the next couple years at the minimum. After that the paid-vendors that and provide more than clickstream analysis (or indeed web analytics) will thrive (those that enable what I call the Trinity Strategy - http://snipurl.com/1al53). Others will feel perhaps more than bearable pressure from the for free vendors and get squeezed.
In a few years it will be hard to find vendors who will just do traditional web analytics and will be paid for those services. There I have gone out on a limb!
5. We know that you’ve become quite a football fan, but what else do you do to unwind after a long day besides blogging and answering questions?
By the time I am done with the blogging, and answering atleast twenty fairly detailed emails from the blog readers, it is usually around 0100 hrs and that is rather late! So I unwind by going to sleep. With a full time job, the blog, emails from blog readers, the book, speaking engagements and seminars, two small kids and travel required by business it is really tough to find time. No tv for the last year, the super bowl game was the only game I saw all year long (and boy was it nice). I suppose for me unwinding is writing my blog. It is way more work than I ever imagined (approximately twenty hours a week at least). But when I write I am fully absorbed in writing, I get an absolute thrill when I get comments, it makes me happy beyond reason when I get emails from readers who appreciate the small amount of wisdom that is one the blog. There is no monetization tied to the blog for me (just lots of work!) but it is great feeling that in my own small tiny way I can help someone in Sweden or Iran or Australia or Brazil or Russia or South Africa or Canada or many other places. I suppose few things are this much work just to “unwind” and few have such delightful rewards.
The Beginning
Everyone has a start somewhere, a beginning of a journey. My beginning came about six years ago when a company I was working for transitioned from just being a traditional brick and mortar channel manufacturer to developing an e-commerce site.
From there my role of being a Marketing Specialist transitioned into at the time looking at web server logs for meaningful data that would play a role in future e-commerce variations. As we become more sophisticated we developed partnerships with shopping comparison engines such as shopping, pricegrabber, froogle, and others.
Then came the ‘new and exciting’ world of SEO and SEM. Beyond that we deployed more sophisticated web analytics tools that were capable of showing the most important metric of all, conversion rate, followed of course by shopping cart abandonment. ‘C’ level executives then wanted dashboards that showed ‘hits’ and of course ‘ROI.’
Once we thought we were done the idea of A/B testing started to come online, which soon became obsolete with MVT testing solutions. Now we look towards using experience testing as the pinnacle of testing standards.
As I look back the world of Online Marketing has continued to evolve and shift which has made the field incredibly exciting. As I look to the future who knows what will occur six years from now. To make sense of all of this I’m starting this blog to serve as a beacon for other Online Marketing Professionals in a similar situation. The days of being able to read, sort, and filter through 25+ blogs on a daily basis were never manageable, but through this blog I hope to be able to help. As always I highly encourage feedback through contact or through comments. It is through these that collaboration occurs; that knowledge is exchanged, and wisdom is gained.
