Reading Best of inbound: April to June

April

Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices

  • Variation: synonyms, plural/singular, adjectives, combine keywords, natural language,
  • Branded keywords
  • Natural links: click here, go, link, url
  • Onsite: self-explanatory title tag, URL, h1 tag

Ultimate Guide to Increasing Ecommerce CR

  • Great product presentation: HQ images, copy, videos, customazation
  • Free shipping(!)
  • Clear sales and special offers
  • Make it easy to buy: no registration required, fast support, etc.
  • Persistent shopping cart
  • Offer live chat / support
  • Process indicators: 3 easy steps, for example
  • Offer multiple payment options
  • Improve your search(!!)
  • Create better filters
  • Product reviews
  • Test: UX, A/B, MVT

Ecommerce SEO in 2012

  • Content creation became very important
  • G+ is become more important thanks to rich SERPs
  • Schemas, XML Sitemaps and Site speed
  • Product can be content: esp. customization, product hacks, APIs, UGC, etc.
  • Videos

On-Page Optimization of Ecommerce Websites

  • Customer reviews: collect them, negative reviews are great
  • Q&A content
  • Incentivize social sharing; think about affiliates in an other way
  • Breadcrumb navigation
  • Phone number as trust and support signal

May

Noob Guide to Link Building

  • Your highest anchor text distribution should be branded
  • Use share of voice to calculate possible financial impact of higher ranking
  • Special content
    • Egobait: crowd sourcing, best of, interviews, awards
    • Data viz, e.g. infographics, videographic – precontact influencers
    • Ebook and guest post
    • Blog contest
    • Throw an event: meetup, conference, party, dinner
  • Learn about your audience: social listening, Facebook, prospecting
  • Quick wins
    • Ask for links
    • Profile links
    • Directories
    • Local organizations: BBB, Chamber of Commerce, etc.
    • Joining the conversation: boards, blog commenting, Q&A

June

How to perform a great SEO Audit

  • Start crawling the website as bot (no css, cookies, JS)
  • Accessibility
    • Robots: .txt, meta tags
    • Errors
    • XML Sitemap
    • Flash / JS
    • Site performance
  • Indexability
    • site:example.org vs. actual counts
    • Are you ranking well for branded searches?
    • Penalized? Check first, if the page is really penalized
  • On Page Factors
    • URLs: short (<115chars), relevant keywords, subfolders, use hyphens instead of underscores
    • Check for duplicate content (parameters in URLs)
    • Content: at least 300 words, it is valuable?, keywords?, easily readable?, indexiable?
    • HTML: Markup, titles, meta-description, h1, frames, canonical?
    • Images: alt tag and file name
    • Outlinks: trustworthy sites, relevant, anchor text, links broken?
  • Off Page Factors
    • Popularity: gaining traffic, compare to others and backlinks
    • Trustworthyness: Google’s safe browsing, siteadvisor, hidden keywords
    • Backlinks: how many unique root domains? What percentage if nofollow? Natural anchor text distribution? Relevant backlinks? How popular/trustworthy/authoritative are the backlinks?
    • Social Engagement: retweets, +1s, fb likes, etc.
  • CI (see next section)

Guide to Competitive Research

  • Questions:
    • What is their link building strategy?
    • How do they use social media?
    • SWOT their strategy
    • How do these elements work together, i.e. digital strategy
  • Backlinks
    • Top Backlinks: What can are they?
    • General Backlinks: Content marketing, guest blogs, etc?
  • Anchor text: distribution, coupled terms, branded?
  • Link Building
    • Press releases
    • Directory submissions
    • Blogger outreach
    • Content marketing
    • Infographics
    • Social bookmarks
    • Local influences
  • Social Media
    • Where are they active?
    • How do they promote their estate?
  • Observe continuously: google alerts, twitter search, etc.

Guide to Link Building with Local Events

  • Event page on your website: info about the event, etc.
  • Find event directories for your city
  • Look out for event data providers
  • Always do CI
  • Search for local blogs / groups who could be interested in your event
  • Advanced: 2nd tier linking the event site, citation building with your local address, schemas, search for external speakers
  • Build a email list, create wrap-ups, ask for links
  • My tip: encourage attendants to blog and twitter about the event

Reading Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog (Part 1)

Another reading session. This time it’s the Adobe Digital Marketing Blog. One of the first posts are from the omniture blog which is now that blog.

Getting your daily dose of dashboards?

  • “feel good reporting” = long reports nobody reads
  • Instead of reading 50 pages, provide fast 30 seconds overviews
  • Daily monitoring helps you to fix problems fast

Industry benchmarks: everything you need to know

  • Problem with benchmarks: things are measured differently
  • Metrics vary between days, geography, etc.

More on conversion benchmarks…

  • How should I act based on trends in benchmarks?
  • E.g. conversion rate down – what does this mean?
  • CTR for emails up – which mails, which basis?

Got Alerts? Don’t let this happen to you!

  • Wanted to buy a new graphics card
  • While checkout a message said “your shopping cart is empty”
  • Check but couldn’t add anything to the shopping cart
    • Activate alerts for your most critical metrics!

The Dark Side of A/B Testing: Don’t Make These Two Mistakes!

  • Example: New home page with special offers and cleaner design
  • 90/10 split test, i.e. 10% to new design
  • KPIs: home page conversion rate and revenue per home page visit
  • both increased
    • Problem: Which helped increasing the KPIs – Clearer design or special offers?
  • Solution: Don’t change more than one element on a page – it helps you understand your customer’s behavior
  • Alternatively: use MVT
  • Example: tested new thing but CV lowered dramatically
  • Look at your customers – are the new or old?
  • Especially old, frequent customers can be unreceptive to changes
  • Solution: Segment your customers, better on RFM metrics

How to Spend Fewer Dollars, Smarter and Faster, during Tight Times

  • Search: real-time, easy measurable
  • Email marketing: fast, easy measurable
  • Online video: expensive but measurable

The Challenges and Value of Digital Marketing Integration

  • Customers are
    • Better Connected – more information, can easy switch channels
    • Bombarded – tons of information
    • Empowered – can publish reviews, write on their blog, etc.
    • Savvy – higher expectation for relevant and personalized experience
  • Harder to track customers on different platforms but possible

User-generated Content and Word of Mouth Marketing

  • Conventional marketing
    • Intercept – target and expose your message
    • Inhibit – make it difficult to compare your product to other
    • Isolate – remove all third parties
  • Digital marketing
    • Attract – create incentives for people to seek you out
    • Assist – be helpful and engage with people
    • Affiliate – mobilize third parties to become more helpful
    • Analyze – find out what’s working and where you can improve
  • Not only conversions matter, they rest of the people do too!

Reaching the Individual: Site Surfers Becoming People

  • Each visitor is unique
  • Provide relevant content if possible
  • Understand the behavior of visitors – how can you improve their experience?
  • Personalize as much as possible

Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part I)

  1. Neglecting key stakeholders – websites touch all facets of an organization!
  2. Focusing on tactical requirements – what are your strategic business requirements?
  3. Believing data equals requirements – don’t ask for KPIs ask for strategic goals
  4. Having too many KPIs – select these KPIs that are strongly tied with your goal

Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part II)

  • Get too much into detail – don’t neglect the global picture
  • Mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the truth – there are differences between measurements in tools. Get over it and start looking at trends!
  • Isolate yourself – Start teaching how to use analytics and bring power users into your circle for more innovation
  • Ana­lyt­ics suc­cess is all about build­ing a base­line for per­for­mance (your KPI trend), and try­ing new things to improve on this base­line. That’s it!

How to Make Testing Successful

  • Do it right the first time, so you have accurate data
  • Start testing the important stuff and act on your findings
  • Start with politically easy things first
  • Be excited about testing and evangelize

Answers to Practical Questions about Targeting

  • Test site elements, content bits, CTA, etc.
  • Targeting helps to feel your customer at the right place
  • You can practically target everything
  • First-time visitor can be targeted by referrer, keyword, time of day, day of week, geography, browser, OS, etc.

Do You Have an Automated Response and Lead Nurturing Program in Place?

  • Strategy for lead nurturing / drip marketing
    1. Send email from your real sales staff with phone number
    2. Send relevant content for your prospect – e.g. shopping cart abandonment -> send email with reminder; different emails for different industries in a B2B setting
    3. The timing should be right – first contacts to leads should be within five minutes(!); try emails for longer periods
    4. Follow up quickly and then back off slowing – don’t spam your prospect
    5. Automate everything

The Art and Zen of Testing for Success

  • Don’t just take lift as a goal
  • Start witch question: e.g. should be button be blue or red? Is the navigation on the left or right more effective?
  • Try to answer ‘why’
  • Advantage: It isn’t about the goal anymore, it’s about insights

Reading Kaushik (Part 8): Web Metrics

Web Metrics Demystified

  • Four Attributes of great metrics:
    1. Uncomplex – people have to understand the metric
    2. Relevant – every business is unique
    3. Timely – A fast approximately result is better than a perfect result that takes ages
    4. Instantly useful

Six Web Metrics / Key Performance Indicators To Die For

  1. Conversion Rate: focuses on outcomes, force objectives
  2. Average Order Value: helps you to qualify traffic / campaigns, always see AOV in context
  3. Days & Visits To Purchase: help you measure success correctly, segment
  4. Visitor Loyalty & Recency: engaging experience and marketing campagin effectivness
  5. Task Completion Rate: use VOC
  6. Share of Search: e.g. use Compete, google, hitwise

Brand Measurement: Analytics & Metrics for Branding Campaigns

  • Why are you doing the branding campaign?
  • Measurement Recommendations:
    1. Attract new customers
    2. Share your business value proposition: Visitor Loyalty & Recency
    3. Increase your sales
    4. To drive offline action: measure likelihood to recommend and to make an offline purchase, track phone calls
    5. Introduce your business: measure micro and macro conversions
    6. To snatch up market share of your competitors: Share of search
    7. To position yourself: primary market research, google insights, orbitz

Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value

  • Conversation Rate: #Comments/Replies per Post
  • Amplification Rate: #Retweets/Shares per Tweet/Post
  • Applause Rate: #Favorites/Likes/+1 per Post
  • Economic Value

Reading Kaushik (Part 3): Strategic Analysis

Path Analysis: A Good Use of Time?

  • Customers like the path the want to, not the one you force
  • The tool don’t show which page in the path was most influential
  • Most tools don’t track the path correctly
  • Exception: Landing Page experience
  • Possible solution: Group relevant pages
  • Show most influential pages/li>
  • Make segmentation easier

Stop Obsessing About Conversion Rate

  • Overall conversion rate doesn’t allow for actionable insights
    • It only covers a small minority of all visitors
    • People are going to research on your site
    • People who want to learn about your company
    • People who need help with a product of yours
    • People that do something completely different
  • That is, you neglect a big part of your visitors
  • You’ll focus on short term gains
  • Better metric: Task Completion Rate
    • Helps you to cover all customers
    • Successes outside from conversions
    • Ultimately understand your customers better

Getting Started With Web Analytics: Step One – Glean Macro Insights.

  • Understand the macro level first
  • 1. How many visitors are coming to your site?
  • 2. Where re they coming from?
  • 3. What is the purpose of your website? What are your top three web strategies you currently working on?
  • 4. What are you visitors actually doing?

Consultants, Analysts: Present Impactful Analysis, Insightful Reports

  1. No data overload: Give value instead of data, provide recommendations
  2. Tie your data to business outcomes
  3. Use other data than just Clickstream
  4. Don’t make it boring
  5. Connect insights with actual data
  6. Meet the “exceptions of scale”: If you are a big agency or written a book on WA, then people expect more from you
  7. Do something unique

Paid Search Analytics: Measuring Value of “Upper Funnel” Keywords

  • Upper Funnel / Longtail Keywords can neglected because of the single session mindset
    1. Understand each stage of the customer purchase life cycle
    2. Map your keywords to each of those cycles
    3. Measure success for each cycle differently
    • Category Keyword: Bounce Rate
    • Category / Brand: Time on Site
    • Brand: Visitor Loyalty
    • Conversion/Product: Conversion Rate / Leads

Aggregation of Marginal Gains: Recession Busting Analytics!

  • Often web analysts don’t focus on the immediately achievable improvements
  • Simple things:
    1. Figure out where you are making money
    2. Check errors in your email campaigns
    3. Use funnels
    4. Fix your top landing pages
    5. Compare organic and paid keywords: Where are gaps between these two and why?
    6. Ask your customer
    7. Fix dumb stuff: e.g. check 25-point Website Usability Checklist

Analyze This: 5 Rules For Awesome Impromptu Web Analysis

  • Question: What would you change on this website?
  • Useful things to remember:
    1. Don’t start with your opinion: you are a proxy for customers / visitors => Better: State hypothesis
    2. Always offer alternatives
    3. Offer data, even when you don’t have access to the site’s data.
    4. State your assumptions about the site’s objectives
    5. Focus on obvious and non-obvious things: micro and macro conversions, competitor’s site, customer satisfaction, ideas for testing, demographic trends, etc.

Web Analytics Segmentation: Do Or Die, There Is No Try!

  • Pick at least some segments in: Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes
  • #1: Acquisition: Where does the company spent its most money on?
  • How to segment:
    • Context: How many visits?
    • (Optional): How many were new?
    • Bounce Rate
    • What was the cost of acquisition?
    • What value could we extract at a per visit level?
    • How many were able to accomplish their goal?
    • Was what the total value added to our organization?
  • #2: Behavior
    • What are the visitors doing?
    • What do people want to do on your site?
    • How deep are they browsing on your site?
    • How long did they take time till conversion?
    • How often did they visited your site?
    • => Traffic source, conversion, average order value, actions, etc?
  • #3: Outcomes
    • Loot at macro and micro conversions!
    • i.e. video clicks, adding products to wish list, applying for a trial, downloading white papers, etc. etc. etc.

5 + 4 Actionable Tips To Kick Web Data Analysis Up A Notch, Or Two

  1. Go deeper — Don’t stop at the obvious border: compare off and online data, create CLV for ecommerce,
  2. Join the People against lonely metrics club
  3. Measure the complete site success
  4. Don’t just report one month: at least three months, understand your business’s cycles, create annotations
  5. Make insights in your data obvious: Better visualizations
  6. Segment your data (previous summaries)
  7. Don’t just look at the top 10 rows
  8. Step away from one-session thinking (later summary)
  9. Achieve multichannel analysis (previous summary)

Win Big With Web Analytics: Eliminate Data & Eschew Fake Proxies

  • Most reports are overloaded with data
  • Though, the readers want context and insights
    1. Eliminate all useless metrics and data in your reports
    2. Understand the desired outcomes

Rebel! Refuse Report Requests. Only Answer Business Questions, FTW.

  • Context is important – no business is the same
  • Answer business questions – what’s the driving request for the data?
  • Attributes of a business question:
    • They are usually open-ended and on a higher level
    • They need likely more information than just visits, bounce rate, etc.
    • They are seldom answered with tables

The Difference Between Web Reporting And Web Analysis

  • Data puking isn’t web analysis
  • Signs that you are doing web analysis:
    1. Actions instead of data
    2. Work with the business, measure economic value
    3. Use the web analytics measurement model (previous summary)
    4. You are doing a bit advanced statistics
    5. If you work with targets
    6. You provide context
    7. You segment your data effectively
    8. If you can provide an impact for a recommendation
    9. If you use less than four metrics in a table
    10. If you use multiple data sources