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An essential part of any website marketing campaign is your own analytics data ‘ the statistics that show the number of visits to the site, which pages are viewed, where these visitors come from (referrals), and at what point they leave. Analytics can provide much more information as well, yet there are key data trends that can provide valuable information on the effectiveness of your online strategy.

Most websites will have access to some form of analytics data, probably provided by their web hosting company or as a subscription to a software package. We have previously reviewed the different types of website statistics programmes available, including Google Analytics which launched at the end of 2005.

Google Analytics recently underwent changes to the way data is presented and it remains a powerful and user-friendly analytics package that should be seriously considered, especially if your hosting service only provides a basic level of data. It’s also free!

Changing over from one analytics package to another can create discrepancies in data due to the way that different packages record and analyse traffic logs, so the trends over time through one analytics package are more valuable. As you review these trends, you need to consider what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important for your business, to see whether they are improving or not.

For example, how well is your site working for your visitors and what is the proportion of unique visitors or the split between first time visits and repeat visits over a period of time? You can review how long, on average, your visitors spend on your site. If you have a large site but the time being spent is relatively short, then there could be an underlying problem with the type of visitors your site is attracting, or with the way the site is being perceived or how well it works.

You might need to look at the entry and exit points on the site to get an indication of whether visitors are leaving straight away (possibly the wrong type of visitors for your business?) or if they are leaving at a common point within the site (perhaps where a page is slow to load or an enquiry form is asking for too much information?). This type of data can then give you ideas on what needs to be changed so that you can test alternative approaches and review the change in the statistics over the next few months.

Website analytics may also show that some pages are being visited more than others, which can again reflect your site optimisation and ranking performance, or the navigation routes into the site from the Home Page. If key pages are not being visited enough, or less important pages are attracting proportionately higher volumes of traffic, you might need to look at how these pages are performing in the search results, or whether links to them form other pages need to be revised and made more, or less, prominent.

The referral data within an analytics package will also indicate which search engines or other websites are driving most visitors to your site and, with search, which terms have they been using. This can reflect how your site is ranking (or which PPC terms are performing well) but does this also reflect how people are searching and therefore are there other terms that should also be driving more visits to your site?

Reviewing trends within a website analytics package should be done at least monthly and often more frequently, particularly if there are changes being made to the website or the marketing campaign ‘ whether online or offline. The depth of data available can provide an excellent insight into how your web business is performing and should be used as a tool to test, adjust and review on a regular basis.

If you’d like to know more about how your website analytics can be used effectively to monitor and improve your online performance, contact us now for more information.

Whether your business is using conversion tracking as part of Google Ads (AdWords), or goal tracking in Google Analytics, this type of data is essential to understand where sales or enquiries are coming from, down to the keyword and advert level. However, for any business where most leads may come via a phone call, this is harder to track as the link between the source of the website visitor and the phone call being made is broken. This is where phone call tracking techniques can add more insight and value to an advertiser.

Phone call tracking has been around for many years in different forms, and as the need to track and optimise conversions grows, this technique is becoming another important tool for the advertiser. There are a number of good phone call tracking companies operating in the UK market and they can provide a reasonably low cost way of tracking the source of conversions, whether they come from Google Ads (AdWords) or any search engine visit, or from any other third party website. Google Ads (AdWords) also provides a call tracking system in the US and UK.

Call tracking usually works through the addition of some javascript on a website or web page, which identifies the source of a visitor and displays a unique phone number on the website. If the visitor calls the business, that number will track the lead by source, potentially down to individual search term level. Whether the website has their standard phone number displayed in the text or as an image, an alternate number can be displayed depending on where the site visitor come from, although images will need to be changed or adapted to cater for this.

The advertiser will buy a range of phone numbers – usually 1300 or 1800 – to be used for the various advertising sources and displayed on the website. The call tracking company will generate these numbers and track the calls made, including the option of recording the phone conversations, and provide analytics to show which sources have generated the calls. This data can sometimes be imported into a Google Analytics account as well, as a goal source.

One potential issue for advertisers is if they use a memorable number, such as 1300 FLOWER, as call tracking won’t be able to replicate this number and make it so memorable to the user – which can be an issue if the number might be used in a radio advert or on a billboard. The other main question is how many numbers might be needed, as these can be generated as ‘absolute’ (one number for each source) or session based (where a pool of numbers are used and displayed in time segments to identify source). The former method can be very expensive, particularly if there are lot of search terms being used in an AdWords campaign, but is more accurate. However, the latter method should be sufficient for most advertisers.

Although the cost of call tracking isn’t that high, it is an additional cost to include as part of the marketing activity. However, the insights that call tracking can provide is extremely valuable and enables advertisers to see the real cost per lead being generated by source, which will provide a more accurate figure for a Return on Investment calculation. Otherwise, call enquiries will remain a general ‘pool’ of new business leads which can’t be attributed to a source or the advertising spend.

If you’d like to know more about phone call tracking for your marketing campaigns, please get in touch for a discussion.

The regular changes that Google’s been making to its search algorithms recently to clamp down on poor quality links or content has started to change the focus of many website’s link building strategies. Outsourcing link building to agencies that use bulk link techniques on dubious sites has never worked that well, but now more than ever, an effective link building program should be focused on ‘relationship building’ rather than simple link building.

One of the popular ways to go about relationship building is by being a guest blogger on a reputable blog. This has always been an incredibly effective means of generating high quality links from popular and relevant web pages, but more recently the over-use and poor implementation of this technique has resulted in many bloggers cringing at inboxes full of poorly written, self-serving pitch requests, and ultimately ignoring the vast majority of would be ‘guest posts’. In the same way that numerous linking request emails started to flood into mailboxes several years ago, the same is now true for guest blog requests, so that a number of blogs are now closing their doors to guest post submissions.

Furthermore, according to Matt Cutts – the head of Google’s webspam team – “Google is willing to take action if they see spammy, or low quality guest blogging…which is basically putting low quality articles with embedded links on that site”. He goes on to say that “article-spinning, or low quality syndication are the areas in which Google are going to take an interest”. You can hear more about his comments in a video here.

Guest blogging still works however, and works well, but it has to be done effectively as genuine relationship building, rather than blatant link building. The links will come by building real relationships with the people running the sites so that a level of trust and respect is developed and the guest blog posts add to the quality and tone of the original blog.

Here are some useful tips on the best practice for guest blogging:

• #1 Research potential link sources well: Research sources through social media channels, especially Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Seek out high quality blogs and get to know the blog first, before making contact.
• #2 Don’t be too direct: The first time you contact a blogger, don’t pitch to them – instead, get to know them. If you are targeting a larger blog with multiple writers, then you might want to go by the way of an introduction. Most bloggers are happy to help out people they like with a link, but the only way to get that is to focus on the relationship before the link.
• #3 Approach through social media: Better yet, skip email altogether for the first contact. Instead, make contact through social channels, where you are much more likely to get a response. Twitter is one of the best social networks for finding and connecting with bloggers and should be the first point of contact. Start by following, then tweet directly to them, but don’t ask for a link on the first tweet.
• #4 Personalise the pitch: What if you don’t know enough about the blogger to make it personal? Then it’s probably too soon to be pitching for a link! Nothing will get your guest post denied quicker than sending a generic pitch.
• #5 Offer value: The best way to get what you want is to give something back. The primary value you should be offering is excellent content to the blog, so create valuable, unique content to submit to the blogger. Also, offer to promote and share their content on your social networks, bring technical issues to their attention, such as dead links or broken forms, and leave good quality comments and participate in discussions.
• #6 Maintain the relationship: Often when guest bloggers manage to get a link placement, they don’t continue the relationship with the blog’s owner. So follow up with the blog owner / editor to see if they have any feedback, positive or otherwise. If your content is good, the blogger will be eager to publish more of your submissions in the future. This is particularly useful for agencies that can leverage these relationships with multiple clients.

As outlined above, the process of guest blogging can be time consuming but should reflect the natural process of relationship building rather than a quick link request. If you would like more information about how guest blogging can improve your relationship building (and links), please contact us now for more details.

In March this year Google announced to all Google Analytics users the option to use Universal Analytics. This offers a new way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey through the conversion path, as a typical consumer today uses multiple devices to access the web and interact in many ways with a business. This is likely to become the default system for Google Analytics, so websites have the option to try this for themselves now.

Universal Analytics introduces a set of features that change the way data is collected and organised in a Google Analytics account, so you can get a better understanding of how visitors interact with your organisation. In addition to the standard Google Analytics features, Universal Analytics provides:

• New data collection methods
• Simplified feature configuration
• Custom dimensions & custom metrics
• Multi-platform tracking.

Therefore some of the benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are:

• Understanding how customers interact with the businesses across many devices and touch-points
• Gaining insights into the performance of mobile apps
• Improving lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions to help understand which channels drive the best results
• Improving the speed of a website by reducing client-side demands.

The aim is to change the way that data is collected and organised in the rapidly evolving online world of multiple platforms. Multiple platforms are not just limited to desktop, tablet, phone, but also game consoles, the point of purchase (POP), the shopping trolley, ski lift, billboard and so on.

Many of the benefits promised by Google’s UA hinge on two updates to the platform. Firstly, the ability to get data into UA from any source, and secondly, the shift from tracking visits to tracking visitors. The future of data does indeed seem to be blurring the lines between online and offline, and with these new tools, the hope is to make more sense of it all and to paint a better picture for the brand, the client, or any user’s understanding of the data and trends. Through an understanding of this data, business and individuals can better understand how visitors interact with their business online.

UA is an exciting development that holds significant promise for solving some difficult issues such as multi-device measurement and online/offline integration. Currently, the technology is still new, so more experimentation is needed in order to test UA’s promises in real-world environments. However, new Analytics accounts have the option to use this code, or existing accounts are gradually getting the option to upgrade as UA is being rolled out by Google.

If you would like more details about how the use of Google’s Universal Analytics can help your business, contact us now.

Although Google+ is still struggling to establish itself as a viable social media alternative to Facebook, the number of users is increasing as Google integrates the tool with other services and starts to create a community around the range of features being offered. There are also some SEO advantages to having a well set up Google+ profile with both personal and business pages.

With any link-building strategy, it’s very important to network and build genuine connections and relationships that will help spread your content. Google+ facilitates this by allowing the linking of all of your social media profiles, sites and blogs in an organised manner. It’s also possible to link to sites to which you regularly contribute and, importantly, all of these links are “followed”, rather than “no follow” links and you’re able to select the anchor text (in your bio).

Google will follow the links in your posts and the more people share them, +1 your posts or link to your profile, the more valuable these links become to you. If your post goes viral or is shared by a high authority profile, the value of the links increases more. Content on Google+ is indexed rapidly – some say almost instantly – so it’s a great way to get posts by you into Google’s index quickly when there is a hot topic.

With many social media sites, you have little to no ability to edit your content once it has been posted. However, Google+ allows you to go back and make edits to posts as you see fit. Furthermore, Google provides the option for you to take ownership of that content and so it’s important to set up an author tag (for an individual claiming content on a page) or a publisher tag (for a business to claim ownership of a site).

Both the author and publisher tag can’t be used on the same page and if the publisher tag is used, it’s only for the homepage, not internal pages. You can use the author tag for internal pages with content. It’s still a good idea to use Google’s “rel=publisher” tag, but you won’t get the image in your SERP listing like you do by using the authorship tag.

It’s important to remember that a Google+ profile needs to be set up in order to implement the Authorship Markup and take advantages of its benefits. To set up a personal profile, you can go here. Business profiles can be set up here.

The benefits of doing this are:

• It makes your listing more robust, because it includes a photo, your name and links to more content by you. There are also indicators that your authorship markup may give you a boost in rankings. While some say it doesn’t directly help, others have reported an increase in rankings after implementing it.
• Your authorship markup also helps you build trust as it establishes you as a real person in the often-anonymous online world.
• It also allows you to claim your name (you don’t want someone trying to steal your name!) and your content (you’ll be seen as the original and rightful owner of the content and won’t have to worry about a “copy scraper” outranking you).
• You can improve your click-through rate by playing with your profile image that’s shown in the SERPs. Images that perform best seem to be close-ups where the eyes are looking to the right towards the listing in the SERPs.

Once you’ve completed the profile and you start posting, keep in mind that the first sentence of your Google+ post becomes part of the title tag, which impacts rankings and influences click-through rates. A word of warning is that Google doesn’t tolerate “spammy” practices, so it’s vital not to turn your profile into a link farm!

There are a lot of different ways to connect with influencers in your industry and networking on Google+ with those is one of the core focuses of Google+ users. It’s fairly easy to do because there are so many ways to do it, but be sure you don’t abuse the privilege, as if you become seen as a spammer, it will be very difficult to grow your presence.

While Google+ numbers aren’t as large as Facebook, they are growing and as with most things, it’s the early adopters that do well in the long run. So it’s worth beginning now to establish your position. Google+ is probably here to stay and also likely to get more important to your rankings and traffic.

If you’d like more information about Google+, or help with setting up a profile, please contact us now.

During May, Google announced the launch of a new tool called “Display Benchmarks” that provides useful comparisons or reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry. If you are using display ads as part of a marketing campaign, this new tool facilitates an understanding of how your display campaigns compare to the rest of your industry, which helps to better plan and measure the success of those campaigns.

The comparisons can show average expansion rates for automotive creatives, expected Rich Media interaction rates for retail creatives from France, or just the average clickthrough rate for Entertainment ads from the US. So if you’re looking for comparisons by country, industry vertical, or how different ad formats and sizes perform compared to each other, the tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions.

For example, through its own use of the tool, Google has shown that people are increasingly choosing to interact with video ads. They state that video completion rates are the highest ever seen, increasing by approximately 24% since Summer 2012, to a 60% completion rate. This improved interaction rate correlates to larger ad sizes: the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. It also found that rich-media-expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for encouraging longer interactions.

So, if this tool is used to its full potential, it can certainly shed some valuable light on the best way to improve display campaigns by reaping the benefits of the industry-wide information it provides. You can learn more about it here.

Contact us now if you’d like more information about how we can help you improve your display advertising with this tool.

During May, Yahoo! acquired one of the leading blogging services – Tumblr – for US$1.1bn. This is a notable deal, made by Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer who was appointed in July last year, and she has called the move a “unique opportunity”. However, it could also be a huge risk for Yahoo!, which now has to generate revenue from the deal without alienating the Tumblr user base.

The plans for the acquisition are for Tumblr to continue operating under its own brand and independently of the new owner, with co-founder David Karp continuing as Chief Executive. Tumblr combines elements of blogging with social networking, and its simple design has attracted millions of users since its launch. According to the site, it now hosts 108 million blogs, with over 50 billion posts. Crucially, it also has a significant presence on mobile devices.

Observers says that the move is partly an attempt by Yahoo! to regain favour with the younger ‘hip’ market, where Tumblr has proved a great success. Yahoo! has lost favour in recent years, both in terms of search and also as a social site, although the initial reaction from Tumblr users to the takeover has been mostly negative – which would be expected.

However, Yahoo! is hoping that its purchase of Tumblr will boost traffic to its other properties, such as the photo sharing site Flickr, which is being relaunched with new features to compete against Instagram. But the question is really whether the US$1.1bn fee will also help to boost revenue?

Analysts suggest that Yahoo! has significantly overpaid for the deal – Tumblr’s 2012 revenue was just $13m, according to a recent report by Forbes magazine, and despite its fast-growing user base, it has struggled to make money and has traditionally resisted advertising. Yahoo! says they will be working with Tumblr to create ads that “are seamless and enhance the user experience”. However, there is a danger of alienating users with more advertising – a challenge that faces most social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo! has struggled in recent years, with a lack of direction and innovation, which is the reason why Marissa Mayer was brought in from Google. Despite this, Yahoo! remains a major online property, with around 700 million visitors to its website every month and the majority of its revenues comes from advertising. However, it has limited mobile reach and lags behind Google in the search engine rankings. It also shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012 and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.

If you’d like to know more about this deal and the role of Yahoo!, please contact us for details.

Each year, Google changes its search engine’s algorithm up to 500-600 times. While most of these changes are minor, every few months Google rolls out a “major” algorithmic update that affects search results in significant ways. In this article we evaluate how Google has continued to evolve the significant releases of their “Penguin” and “Panda” updates, how these changes caused some website’s rankings to decline, and what can be done to prevent this from happening to yours.

On February 24th 2011, Google announced its first ever “Panda/Farmer Update”, which was a ranking penalty that targeted poor website content (what it termed as “thin” or “not good enough”), or websites that used dubious content farms and ones with high ad-to-content ratio. Panda is a site-wide penalty, so that if enough pages are tagged as poor quality, the entire site is subject to it, (even though some good quality pages would continue to rank well). The only way to lose the penalty is to remove or improve the poor quality content. This major algorithm update hit some sites hard, affecting up to 12% of search results according to Google.

The Panda update had a series of subsequent changes over the following year and the “Penguin Update” (aka “Webspam Update”) was released on April 24th 2012. That evaluated the incoming links to a site to determine if they involved link schemes that were solely intended to improve rankings. This was done by automatically raising flags by examining the ratio of links compared with those for competitors’ sites, which then led to a manual investigation by Google. This impacted an estimated 3.1% of English-language search queries.

Subsequent updates were made to Penguin on May 25th and October 5th 2012 and the final release of Panda (#25) was on 14/4/2013. That filter is now going to become part of the core algorithm (Panda Everflux). This means that businesses of all sizes need to consider creating websites/pages with quality, relevant content that enhances the user’s experience. Also, any links that are created to point to it need to be genuine ones, rather than just being developed in an attempt to improve rankings.

So the main outcome post-Penguin, is that businesses need to take care with link building techniques and, ideally, to start earning links through real relationships and useful content. This is not easy for many websites, but Google will reward those websites that follow the process of combining good quality webpage content together with genuine links to support its ranking performance, as these are the kind of sites that it deems will benefit its users’ experience.

If you would like details about how we can help your website improve, rather than get penalised in the rankings, contact us now for more information.

The use of ‘canonical links’ is a helpful tool for webmasters in cases where a website may have duplicated pages of content. The role of ‘canonicalisation’ allows website owners to tell Google and Bing which webpage is the one to give precedence when there are duplicates of that page on the site. However, there are some common mistakes that need to be avoided when doing this.

It’s often a common occurrence for a site to have several pages listing the same information, or set of products if it’s an ecommerce site. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. If Google knows that these pages have the same content, it may index only one version in the search results, or it may penalise the site for creating duplicate content pages.

Therefore website owners can specify a canonical page (the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content) to search engines by adding a ‘link’ element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the ‘head’ section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google that of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful – therefore please prioritise it in search results.

The use of canonicalisation has to be done carefully however, as there are some common mistakes that can be made and it’s important that it should only be used for pages that are duplicates.

These are the most important points to consider:

• Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also appears in the canonical page.
• Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in the ‘head’ of the page.
• Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content (i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).
• Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to featured articles (as that will make the featured article the preferred URL in search results.)

If you would like to know more about how the use of canonical links can improve your website’s indexing of duplicate pages with Google & Bing, contact us now.

The issue of ‘cookies’ is becoming increasingly important for websites, online marketers and privacy advocates. Cookies have traditionally been used by websites to track visitor activity and repeat interactions, as well as what they do on a website through tools such as Google Analytics. The use of these tracking cookies has become increasingly sophisticated, but online users are also more concerned about their role, leading to privacy concerns and changes to legislation in Europe.

A cookie (aka HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie) is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s compueter or device, or in the web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify it of the user’s previous activity so that repeat behaviour can be tracked (such as by Google Analytics), or advertisers can use cookies to display relevant adverts to web users based on their tracked behaviour.

Although cookies were originally designed as basic tracking mechanisms, they have now progressed beyond this and have become a crucial component for marketers to target advertising and to implement direct marketing techniques to relevant prospects. This tracking activity has raised privacy concerns to an extent that prompted European authorities to take action in 2011. The European Union’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive began to dictate that “explicit consent” must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via cookies. As a result, all websites in the UK, for example, that use tracking cookies, need to make this clear and give visitors the option to block these when they use the website.

This area is increasingly becoming a issue between privacy advocates and web users on the one hand, who don’t want their online activity to be tracked, and online businesses on the other, who want to target and improve their marketing activity. This includes user tracking which many websites now do through tools such as Google Analytics, and targeted advertising which companies can use, from behavioural marketing to remarketing activity – which should increase relevancy and reduce advertising costs.

In the past month, Mozilla announced their intention to include a default setting that disables third-party cookies by default in upcoming releases of their Firefox browser. This prompted the US Interactive Advertising Bureau to state that it will fight the move, which it describes as being “a nuclear first strike against the ad industry”, as without the third party data companies will simply not be able to track users across sessions. Firefox may be hoping that this move will attract more web users to start using their browser and if that proves to be the case, then the other main browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, are more likely to follow suit.

This could be a backward step for online businesses, who will lose valuable information and the option to improve the targeting of their advertising. For web users, it can also mean less relevant advertising and a reduced user experience. If you’d like to know more about cookies and how they can affect your online business or privacy, contact us now.