It has happened to anyone who watches their organic ranking. One day you are drinking a cup of coffee and you pull up your browser to look at where your site is for your favorite keyphrase. Then you spill your coffee in horror: IT’S GONE! Your website is not there.

How is this possible? You haven’t made any major changes in months. Your website been steady as a rock at the top of the rankings for over a year. How could the site suddenly lose so much visibility?

It probably didn’t. In our experience rankings don’t change suddenly if no major SEO efforts are underway. Instead they slowly shift over time. However, there are a number of things that can create sudden shifts, or the appearance of them. Here are a list of things you can do to confirm whether or not the change in ranking is a real problem, a temporary blip, or even just a trick your browser is playing on you.

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When I’m managing an AdWords account, I can sometimes forget where these ads are going.  A whole lot of AdWords isn’t visible from the user interface.  It’s easy to look at cost per clicks, conversion rates, bids, and ad positions – without really doing a check on the actual substance behind it.  Especially because I’m comfortable with submitting ads and keywords, without having to worry that my ad will actually show on Google and that things will run the way I expect.  But this whole user-interface vacuum, strips away some important performance predictors/indicators:

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We’re hiring!

We are looking for an enthusiastic Internet Search Analyst to join our team. The ideal candidate will have experience developing, launching, managing, and optimizing paid search, organic visibility, and social media campaigns for clients across multiple search engines. This position has a moderate level of client exposure ranging from providing timely and insightful analysis and reporting of online activities to conducting client training classes and coaching sessions. Google AdWords Certification is required. Google Analytics Individual Qualification is desired.

We are also searching for a dynamic Relationship Manager to serve as the main point of contact for many of our internet marketing campaigns. The ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills and a proven track record of delivering quality service across multiple client engagements. Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is desired. Industry experience preferred.

Follow this link for more details on the open Internet Search Analyst position.
Follow this link for more information on the open Relationship Manager position.

Hi everyone,

Megan and I are in lovely Mountain View, California at the GAAC conference. We have been asked to restrict our blogging and tweeting unless the speaker specifically says we can share.

Tomorrow morning the keynote speaker is Avinash Kaushik, so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned! I will post and tweet if allowed. Our Twitter account is @purevisibility.

At Pure Visibility, we savor opportunities to do some detective work for our clients. Analytics offers us great opportunities to dig into what users are doing on websites.

One of our clients has a website geared toward generating leads (as opposed to, say, an e-commerce site). The majority of the leads from the site come from people that are on the site for the very first time, but many leads come from people that visit the site, and then come back later for a second visit.

We got to wondering: when somebody visits the site a second time, how do they get back?

In Google Analytics, we organize the visitors to the site into four categories, based on how they got there:

• Organic: Found the site in non-paid search engine results
• PPC: Paid search advertising
• Direct: Typed in the URL directly, or had bookmarked it
• Referral: Followed a link from another site

We could imagine scenarios where visitors came for their second visit through any of those channels. After discussing the matter, we theorized that the second time people visited, they would either type in the URL (or use a bookmark) or do the search again – they would be more likely to be Direct or Organic traffic, the second time around.

The argument for them being Direct is intuitive. After all, if you’re doing research on different websites before making a purchasing decision, why wouldn’t you write down the URL for sites that seem promising?

On the other hand, the Google and other search engines are increasingly becoming people’s way of bookmarking sites. That is, instead of actually using the bookmarking functionality in their browsers, people just do the same search over and over and find the site they want in search results.

To settle this question, we turned to advanced segmenting in Google Analytics. This functionality lets you filter visitors on the site based on most of the things that Analytics measures. In this case, we created a segment that just shows the people that are on their second visit.

Then, we went to the Traffic Sources section of Analytics, to the All Traffic Sources report, and filtered down to Medium. This is the report that can give you insight into the ways that people are getting to your site. We compared the new segment we created to All Visitors.

This is where we had to pull out a spreadsheet and do a little math. First we recorded the numbers from Analytics in this table. Then, we totaled up all those visits and found out the proportion of visits in each category.

As you can see in the spreadsheet, a higher proportion of visitors used search to find their way back to the website for their second visit – from 32% of all visits to 40% of 2nd visit traffic. It looks like the other channels’ share decreased a bit. It was surprising to see that the share of Direct traffic went down slightly, but it was nice to see that fewer people clicked on an ad to get to the site for their second visit!

So what? What do we do with this knowledge? Well, you never know when a bit of research will come in handy, one day. Knowing that users are more likely to choose search when they want to get back to the client’s site underlines the importance of branding. Whether the users search for the client’s name, or do a general search and pick the client’s site out of the search engine results, it comes down to the user knowing the client’s name. Also, we now have another bit of data that we can bake into a user persona when we describe how they might research and choose our client.

A constant source of frustration in the world of SEM is the seemingly conscious decision by Google to prevent the analyst from running reports detailing conversions and conversion rate by hour. From a campaign management perspective, it’s extremely valuable data for day parting.

Day Parting, for those who are unaware, is a technique allowing you to adjust bid rates by time of day and/or day of the week with the goal of taking advantage of times with high conversion rates or low cost-per-leads, while not wasting money during the less effective and more expensive times.

I can see the Google Ann Arbor building out the window next to me, and I’ve shaken my fist in that direction a few times before, but today I’ll avoid the conspiracy theories of why Google would not want to share this beautiful data with us, and instead refocus that anxious energy on solving the problem!

THERE IS A WAY! With a little mixing and mashing of reports from AdWords and Google Analytics, its possible to conjure up  a report that gives conversions by hour (regardless of date) and by day of week. To do this, you will need to have ‘Conversion Goals’ set up in analytics already. If you don’t, do that now and come back in a month.

Let’s map this out….

What do I want?
A report detailing Conversions and Conversion Rate by time of day (regardless of date) at the Campaign level.

1.) In AdWords reports:
Report type: Campaign Performance
Settings: Hourly (regardless of date),  choose a date range and your campaign of choice.

Run the report, and export to .CSV for Excel.

2.) Lets go to Analytics!
- Set the date range for the same time period.
- On the left-hand side, click Goals, then Total Conversions.
- Underneath the graph, it gives you the option to ‘Select Goal’.  For this example, I choose to select ‘All Goals’.
- Next, graph by time of day.  This option is located in the square with a clock in it by the top right corner of the graph.
- Now we need to filter the data to include only the campaign we’re interested in.  To do this, we’ll need to create a new Advanced Segment.

3.) Advanced Segmentation
- Click ‘Create a new advanced segment’
- Dimensions –> Traffic Sources
- Drag ‘Campaign’ to the ‘Dimension or Metric’ box,  choose your campaign from the drop down menu, and name the segment.
- Click the ‘create segment’ button.
- Un-click the ‘All Visits’ tab, and select your newly created one.
- Export the data into a .CSV for Excel

4.) Mash it up!
- Make sure your Time Zones for AdWords and Analytics are the same (and then double check, this is pretty important…)
- Select your Conversion Rate data from the analytics .CSV you just created, and line it up with the AdWords spreadsheet from step 1.
- Format the data however you please.  I’ve added Conversion Rate, Cost/Lead, and % of total Leads

5.) Visualize the data, and interpret it accordingly.

6.) Day Parting
You’ve analyzed the data, came up with a plan of action, and now your ready to optimize your Ad Scheduling.
- Back in AdWords now, click into Settings for the chosen campaign.  Under Advanced Settings, you may now edit to your heart’s content.

Voila! Together, we’ve outsmarted Google for a minute *high five*, and avoided purchasing a 3rd party software!
Now as mentioned earlier, you can view the data by day of the week also.  The only changes that you’ll have to make are adjusting the unit of time you want to view in AdWords to ‘Day of Week’, and in Analytics, view data by day (then organize and aggregate once in a spreadsheet).

Yet another small victory that makes life exciting!

On Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a new reporting feature in AdWords: view-through conversion reporting for display ads on the Google content network.

AdWords display ads show on Google’s partner websites (websites that participate in the Google AdSense program), alongside relevant content. Display ads can have more subtle effects on user behavior than traditional search ads, not just encouraging clicks but also impacting future branded searches and brand recognition.

Google’s new metric sets out to answer the question, “What effect do online branding efforts have on sales and leads?” Now, when a display campaign runs, we can measure not just conversions (sales and leads) coming from clicks directly on the ads, but also conversions that came from people who saw the ad within the last 30 days but did not click.

This may be just the thing that helps sales-focused businesses get into the branding game. If Google can prove that display ads can drive a demonstrable lift in sales, marketing teams will finally have the data to justify branding budget. I, for one, can’t wait to experiment.