Tracking Seasonality – Just Do It

With the majority of businesses, the passing of time causes a change in customer behavior. The laws of physics state that an object in motion will remain in motion, however without proper study, one cannot predict where that object will go or how it will act. The same applies to your customer base. If you don’t keep track of where your customers are coming from, what they are looking at, and where they end up, then you will not be able to accurately predict how they ultimately come to the decision to make a purchase.

In the world of online marketing, which encompasses Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising, a business has every advantage they could possibly need. We can track what site a customer came from, what keywords they typed to get to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they went to. We can tell all sorts of things about your online customer base, but you HAVE to have tracking set up in order to know where to go next.

Seasonality is a big factor in the paid search world. If you are in the moving, storage, or real estate industries, your business may peak in the summer months when students are moving out of the dorms for the summer, or people are moving because the weather is more pleasant. If you do not have Google Analytics installed on your website you will never know exactly how big of a jump in traffic and conversions you get in May, and what a sharp decrease they take in September when the weather starts getting cooler.

If you haven’t set up Analytics on your site just yet, but would still like to know how seasonality affects your business, check your monthly or quarterly taxes for profit estimates. If you look over the course of 2-5 years, you will more than likely begin to see a pattern. Please take into consideration large events that may have taken place, such as a change in ownership, location, or large marketing promotions that may have been rolled out.

In addition to using Google Analytics to track your seasonality, install incoming call tracking to accurately report the volume of calls you receive during specific time periods. You can even screen call quality through these systems, as all your calls will be recorded. In some instances, you can track them down to the keyword that someone typed in to produce the ad in the first place. These tools are invaluable in assisting a business to accurately read their customer base and plan accordingly.

Once you have determined whether or not you have a peak season (winter, summer, etc.), month, week, day, or even time of day, adjust your goals accordingly. Last year during October you may have pulled in $55K in revenue, but this year in October, make a goal to surpass that by 35%. Adjust your budget allocation, ad copy, and bids according to your seasonality. Without goals, your business is a race horse with a blindfold, meandering down the track with no finish line in sight. Know where you have been, and where you want to go with your marketing ventures to better gauge the success of your campaigns.

Followerwonk – The Social Analytics Tool for Twitter

I came across a really cool social tool the other day that I can’t believe more people are not using. It’s called Followerwonk and is a miracle tool for cultivating influential bloggers, guest blogging opportunities, and socially authoritative websites. The tool has both a free and paid version based on usage and can be accessed by using your twitter account. The tool has four main purposes and allows you to export your findings to a CSV file and saves your recent searches.

One of my very favorite parts of this tool is the ability to search for twitter users by keyword and compare them based on different metrics (influence, followers, following, age, etc). In practice, if you were looking to connect with authoritative social media bloggers to  promote your content, this tool will let your search, sort, and download them based on the keywords you selected. You can also follow them on Twitter right from the application. Followerwonk also shows you if your account is following the selected twitter profiles or if they are following you.

Once you have selected a short-list of highly authoritative and relevant bloggers, or websites, you can dive deeper into their twitter statistics and then start to analyze their followers (or whom they are following) to help narrow down cream of the crop. There are a ton of metrics to take into account such as the average age, language of their followers, and how active and authoritative they are.

Lastly, Followerwonk offers user twitter analytics to help monitor the progress (or struggles) of your growing, authoritative followers. Using this feature within the tool can provide a closer look at your twitter account’s followers. It can also identify your most influential followers which is a vital aspect to any social media campaign since they are your lowest hanging fruit. You can also identify followers that are recent additions or recent loses. My suggestion would be to periodically pull up your followers that have chosen to unfollow you, identify authoritative users, and then attempt to retain.

For a social media consultant like me, Followerwonk is a great addition to the social media tools we are currently usiong at Web Talent Marketing. Of course no tool has ever created a winning social media campaign. A custom stratagy and solid reporting metrics often work hand in hand to help acheive long term success within social media – but tools like this help out a whole lot!

The Changing Faces of Google Analytics

By Lorianna Sprague, SEO Specialist

Some of you may have noticed, beginning in May of this year, that Google Analytics began changing the look and feel of their user interface. They ran a series of webinars to introduce both website owners and agencies to the new layout. Check them out for a seriously detailed tutorial (seriously means 6 videos at an hour a piece).

So, what’s changed? Here’s a quick list of the most obvious differences in the analytics interface:

• Visitor and Goal Flow Visualization – using Sankey diagrams
• Multi-Channel Funnels – to see what channels your customers interacted with in the 30 days prior to converting
• Real Time Reporting – updates your site’s activity continuously so you can see the results of your campaigns unfold in real time
• Mobile Reporting – gives you a more detailed look at how mobile users are interacting with your site so you can optimize for those users and improve conversions over time
• Integration with Webmaster Tools – which gives website owners and agencies access to the top 1000 keywords that landed people on a website over a 30 day period; this is the work around for the lack of access to keyword data through the Traffic Sources section of Analytics (see below)
• Limited Display of Keyword Traffic Sources – (based Google users who are logged in while searching) the good news is that what you lost in “keyword’ Traffic Sources, you have gained back in Webmaster Tools; if you have not integrated your Webmaster Tools account with your Analytics, now’s the time
• Advanced Segmentation – and the ability to define your own segments based on what matters, such as removing brand terms, or creating a segment to view traffic for only visitors who know about your company or brand
• Site Speed
• Social Interactions
• Better reports, and so much more.

Web Talent’s Lancaster, PA SEO Meet Up will be discussing the New Google Analytics in 2012. Join the Meet Up and comment here to let us know what parts of the new Google Analytics you would like us to explore.

Google Split Testing – NOT!

Recently, while perusing the performance of a client, who shall for my own job security remain nameless, I noticed that all of a sudden quite a few of my text ads were disapproved in Google Search. What the sweet Jolly Green Giant is going on here, I thought. I hovered my cursor over the thought bubble next to my Disapproved status and it very helpfully told me that all the display URLs within the ad group must be the same.

Identical, like creepy little PPC minions.

Fair enough, I thought, and I went to look through my active ads. To my not-at-all-surprise, all my active ads had identical display URLs. I figured it probably was an older disapproval and maybe I just needed to make a small edit and resubmit it. I can always go back later and put the display URL back the way I want it, all properly capitalized and looking adorable and useful. Then I clicked on the ads tab at the campaign level, and lo and behold, ALL the ad groups had disapproved ads. Mother of Pearl! I went through and edited every single one of those suckers until after about ten minutes I realized that I have edited myself into a circle, and have started re-editing ads that within the last few minutes have been disapproved AGAIN.

This looks like a job for Annoying Girl! Annoying Girl calls Adwords Support hotline (which is 866-2-GOOGLE, for any of you that do not have the secret weapon) and complains about the hypocrisy inherent within the system at length to the (I’m sure very lovely) girl on the other end of the phone. Despite my gratitude that she spoke perfectly clear and easily understandable English, the fact remains that there are built-in flaws within the Adwords system, and if I cared half as much about politics as I do about getting Google to improve this program, I would have mastered the art of making protest signs and have an arrest record the length of my leg.

Give me split testing or give me DEATH!

Here is what I was told by said lovely girl, and here is why I still don’t want to make friends with her: The display URL of all the ads that are paused and DELETED within an ad group will affect the approval of the active ads. Therefore, if you decided that you didn’t like the display URL you used last year, and wanted to revamp your company image, you would have to create an entirely new ad group to change it. Even so much as a change from mygreatcompany.com/rock-on to something more like MyGreatCompany.com will get your ads disapproved.

The whole rule about identical display URLs, to me, goes against the entire point of having multiple ads. Why can I split test everything under the sun, but not my display URLs? I know some of you are thinking that this really shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. No, seriously it is! How can I explain the statistical reasoning behind a “best practices” of building adwords ads to a client when I cant even show them the difference in performance between their www.reallylongandobnoxiousurl.com/subdomain and my super sweet ShortURL.com/Yea. Maybe this is the lament of just one species of marketer. But I say if I deleted something, that means I no longer own it, and like wiping a misdemeanor off a minor’s record, you should not be able to hold past performance against me.

In order to remedy this situation, I had to go through all paused ads and edit them, thus losing my historical data. To find the data that once was, I have to go through deleted ads and guess which one it was. Google, if you could possibly, I would really love it if you could make my job a little harder. Kthnx. So, I’m sorry Very Lovely Adwords girl, whose name I cannot remember, I don’t think I will be adding you as a friend on Facebook, and please tell your employer I think they smell.

Google Analytics Intelligence: An Underused Asset for SEOs

In 2009, Google quietly released its intelligence module for Google Analytics. This feature allows SEOs and webmasters to create custom alerts for a wide variety of metrics and segments. It is my experience that most Internet marketers are not using this feature to its full potential. There are many benefits that one can obtain from early warnings that allow marketers to respond quickly to changes in their digital landscape.

Monitoring Changes in Traffic

By setting up a custom alert, SEOs can be notified about gross changes in traffic, both positive and negative. You can segment these to cover both organic and paid mediums while  being alerted of traffic changes as well. A useful scenario would be implementing the alerts to detect large-scale traffic drops from keywords week-to-week or day-to-day. We have used intelligence reporting to track visits and conversion changes from targeted keywords and to alert us about changes in algorithms (like Panda).

Monitoring Changes in Conversion

Monitoring conversion rates amongst all or selected traffic sources can help identify daily changes indicating a potentially devastating set of circumstances or a tremendous market opportunity. With custom email alerts, Google intelligence reports could notify you when your conversion rate decreases by massive amounts (like 60%!). This allows you you access your analytics easily to fix any potential problems and address potential issues in traffic quality or quantity at first notice, rather than letting days or weeks pass before you notice a problem.

Monitoring Brand Impact

With Custom Alerts you can quickly monitor your brand’s impact on the web. This is pretty easy to setup in analytics by creating a weekly report to show changes in brand related keyword searches (or any specific keyword for that matter). You can set up the account to email you when metrics experience a heavy spike or decline. This could also be a great metric that can be correlated with your company’s online reputation management efforts.

Monitoring decrease in ROI or Revenues

Revenues are at the heart of every online business. Having a daily or weekly alert set up to monitor massive changes in cost per conversion, ROAS or generated revenue could also be a helpful way to stay ahead of the curb. Once an alert is dispatched your company can pull resources and address any potential problem or get an early warning to secure inventory if there is a spike in demand for your product or service.

You have nothing to lose!

It’s amazing that most people aren’t taking advantage of this free feature in Analytics. The UI is very simple to use and the module has a pretty low learning curve.  The Google intelligence feature allows marketers and SEOs to be proactive and hyper reactive to changes affecting their client’s business and search marketing efforts.  To learn more about how to use Google Intelligence I recommend reading some of the advanced Analytics help that Google has on their website.

Google updates AdWords Quality Score Algorithm to target weak landing pages

For the past several months Google has been testing a new algorithm change that would place higher importance on the optimization of PPC landing pages. Latin America including Portugal, Spain and South America have been serving as Google’s testing grounds while the search company makes final tweaks. The algorithm change will be rolled out to the US market within the next couple of weeks.

Google AdWords’ quality score algorithm already takes into account landing pages quality among other factors like ad relevance, click through rates and general account performance. By implementing optimized landing pages AdWords customers will be able to obtain a higher quality score when entering the auction, allowing them to be served at a higher position at a lower click through rate than poorly optimized landing pages. On the same hand weak landing pages will most likely suffer a lower quality score that would raise the cost per click and any performance metrics beyond the initial bid (ie. Cost per conversion).

The director of product management on Google’s ad quality team, Jonathan Alferness, confirmed the change and stated that “We’ve seen that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads but the landing pages are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction”. The algorithm change would allow advertisers with highly relevant landing pages to perform more competitively with top performing advertisers. This is a huge incentive for AdWords advertisers to more closely align landing page keywords and content with the phrases of which they are bidding on in the auction. Google hopes that the change to the quality score algorithm will result in a more relevant and positive experience for users and help clean up poorly optimized landing pages at the same time.

For those who have spent any amount of time in AdWords, quality score can make or break a campaign. It can be the difference of paying $1 per click or $10 per click! Quality score optimization is a major part of account management and requires a strong SEM partner to help guide advertisers though account setup and landing page optimization. There is tons of great information on Google’s quality score and how it is calculated. “What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance – Choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re target and also a good experience for the end users”, says Alferness.

Just like any Google Algorithm update you should expect some volatility within the auction. PPC advertisers should be aware of the update and be extra alert to account changes. Google has said that things should settle down in couple of weeks as the new update goes live.