It’s not the easiest thing to search for on Google. But that is not stopping companies (like Pure Visibility!) from taking advantage of the open source analysis software R for client and internal analytics, from statistics to machine learning. So why aren’t you using it?
Pure Visibility’s Jessica Hullman, author of many fine posts on this blog, has become the first guest poster on the Google Analytics Blog. Her post is titled Mastering Motion Charts – Trend Analysis.
New analysis tools and visualizations like Motion Charts are always exciting for Pure Visibility and we jumped at the chance to continue or work of helping others gain insight from them. Of course, we were also honored to be recognized by Google as a trusted source in explaining and promoting their tools.
Congratulations, Jessica!
In client meetings every month I share paid search results and Google Analytics findings. For Google Analytics I typically look around for interesting stories/findings, take some screen shots and then recommend things to tweak or change based on what we find. Within the screen shots clients see some of the metrics that Analytics tracks and the 2 metrics I get a lot of questions about are “Bounce Rate” and “Time on Page.” Questions about bounce rate and time on page are good because these numbers can be misinterpreted easily. Jessica had a good post about Visitor Engagement and she pointed out that depending on the type of site you have, time on page should be viewed differently. The same is true for bounce rates, and to make matters even more complicated I would say that different pages within a site should be viewed differently in terms of bounce rate.
A common way I’ve seen these metrics misinterpreted is by not looking at sufficient amounts of data. For example if you see an average time on page at 10 minutes for a certain page you may be tempted to jump up and down thinking it’s a success, but what if you’ve only had 5 visitors to that page in that time frame, and let’s say one of those five left there computer on and walked away. This one person would skew the data from showing the accurate average time on page which could be less than 2 minutes. This is why I always suggest looking at the larger time frame to reduce the level of inaccuracy. This strategy can apply for most of Analytics metrics including Bounce Rates although with bounce rates I see a different misinterpretation.
The bounce rate is the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. Basically, a bounce is someone who doesn’t find what they wanted on your site and leaves right away. The bounce rate metric can be a good measurement if it is studied in the right way. From my experience you really have to look at Bounce Rates on a page by page basis because different pages on your site probably have different goals. This is very apparent when you think about landing pages. Landing pages are pages that are used for a paid search campaign. It is a page designed with a goal of having that visitor take some form of action like buy a product, fill out a form, download a whitepaper etc. Since landing pages are in some ways a gate that qualifies and collects information from customers, bounce rates should be viewed with different expectations than your homepage. The landing page is supposed to make non ideal visitors leave and ideal visitors to take action, so a high bounce rate could actually be a good thing. However, if you are examining a page like your homepage, which is supposed to speak to anyone and invite them to explore more, then a high bounce rate would be a very bad thing.
My overall suggestion is to read Analytics metrics with caution and don’t jump to quick conclusions. Analytics is a great tool that allows us to see a lot of insight into a website, but sometimes you have to dig deeper than the surface level to determine if the numbers you are reading are “good” or “bad.”
Is video really going to help your online marketing? It depends.
The use of video is going to grow. With Google’s universal search (AKA blended search) integrating multiple media into search results, video can give you another way to be found. It gives you a way to explain how your product works in a way that text and static images cannot. It can help you form a more personal connection with potential customers.
But before investing in video, it’s important to understand your primary audience – your users.
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The minutia of technology news tends to distract me from the big picture. The specs of the new Macbook, AMD backing off the move to next generation chips, plans for a YSM or adCenter Desktop Editor, the widget that makes you look like Shepard Fairey’s Obama portrait…etc. I’d like to briefly reflect on the big picture, and momentarily shelve my enthusiasm for the latest and greatest.
As of yesterday, America has a new President. What do you think about the new administration’s technology goals? I think I see Eric Schmidt’s fingerprints on some of those priorities, particularly health informatics and energy ideas that overlap with Google.org goals. It’s interesting to see network neutrality prioritized; it’s right at the top of the page. [Here's a Washington Post article on the subject. Tech Crunch has a pretty good piece too.]
The issue as I understand it: should website owners pay telecoms for higher levels of service, to make their sites run better than their competitors, and help those companies like Verizon, ATT, pay for their networks by doing so…
Now, fair warning, I’m going to try to incorporate this big picture stuff to Pure Visibility’s business. I often think about democratic aspects of online experience. And I think the text ads that Google, Yahoo & Microsoft display, are pretty democratic. Yes, they use an auction system, so you pay for higher visibility. But regardless of who the advertiser is or how much they bid, their text ad will be four lines of text. At Pure Visibility, we talk regularly about goals for what we do. The co-founders of the company, Catherine and Linda, are very community oriented, and dedicated to helping Michigan businesses grow. I like that text ads provide an effective opportunity that scales well for businesses of all sizes to reach customers online. I like that the barrier to entry is such that is system is a viable opportunity for companies spending millions of dollars a year, or only a few dollars a month.
Last month I attended Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Chicago and a recurring theme throughout the week was universal search/blended search and how to leverage it for your online marketing campaigns. In particular I attended 3 panel discussions on online video and in each session universal search was a hot topic. The big takeaway I got was that if you don’t have any videos online and indexed by the search engines then you are missing out on a lot of potential, qualified visitors to your site.
Universal search means the search engines show results with not only blue text links, but a blend of results from images, video, local listings, news, and text links. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, if you search for “elmo” you get image results, videos, and text links. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have versions of the universal search results and search marketers are observing a trend of more and more people skipping over text links in favor of clicking on other rich media like video or images.
One case study that was explained in the “Video SEO” presentation was about a cosmetic dentist in Sunnyvale who sees a 16% conversion rate from people that contact him after watching his online video, compared to a 3-4% conversion rate from those who find him from a paid or organic text link. In addition this particular dentist increased his search engine visibility, when a user types “emergency cosmetic dentist sunnyvale” in Google, he owns the number 1 organic spot with his youtube video. Having the video allowed this dentist to appear 3 times above the fold because he had a paid listing, a local listing, and a video listing. This is what we mean by starting to “own page one” because he owns multiple place on the first page of search engine results which greatly increases the likelihood that potential patients will find him.
A lot of the people at SES including myself agreed that video is the wave of the future online and the fact that youtube is starting to beat Yahoo in the number of monthly searches only validates this assumption. My prediction is that in the new wave of search engine marketing you will not be able to survive only on a paid search account with text links. Companies will need to have a universal online marketing approach utilizing paid search, good search engine optimization (SEO), press releases, a social media strategy and different online media like video, images. The days of surviving on simply having good SEO and a high ranking for a few terms is over.
Your company is not a person. When you use services like Facebook or LinkedIn to promote it, your company has to play by different rules.
People connect with other people. We crave authenticity. Social media can be powerful ways to reach out to your audience when you allow your people to be themselves – to put a real face on your company like the sun breaking through an otherwise cloudy sky.
When you get started using social media to market your company or organization, don’t make the mistake of starting a personal profile – the same kind that a regular person would – and slap your company’s name on it.
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For an introduction to Mozilla Labs creation Ubiquity, watch this video called, Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us. In it, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch delves into the commonplace activities creating, consuming and sharing information online. He helps us reflect on how revolutionary these activities are.
Ubiquity enables us to add the next layer of richness to our everyday communications. The application will help people combine the functions of different websites. Read More
When you’ve got a burning information need, to who do you turn? The one-size-fits-all search engine, or the niche community of a social network? More importantly, how do you adapt the language of your query based on your choice?
I’ve created sign in information at dozens of sites. Here, I’ll list a couple; how many of these do you have? I’ve got user names and passwords for Amazon, Flickr, del.icio.us, personal Google accounts, work Google accounts, last.fm, WordPress, Basecamp, Salesforce.com, Newegg, mapmyrun.com, YTMND, my public library, iTunes, and Chowhound. Ok, that’s fifteen? Believe me, that’s just a small sample. What does this inconvenience have to do with internet marketing? Bear with me; I think it may be a step in growing online media conglomerates. Read More
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