June 20th, 2013

Behavioural Targetting and Visitor Segmentation with BTBuckets1
Matt Hopkins posted in Visitor Segmentation, Web Analytics on November 15th, 2008

In October a new website was launched called BtBuckets, however it was only recently that the site was brought to my attention. BtBuckets offers a free service for you segement your website visitors based on their online actions and place them into buckets. You can set the buckets to only begin filling oncew the user has performed a set of actions a number of times or only once and they can stay in that bucket for as you as you want. Each visitor can be placed in as many buckets as you have predefined with an unlimited number of visitors per bucket.

The service works by using Javascript to tag every page on your site within the page HEAD HTML element so that each user action is recorded to the BtBuckets site. Within the BtBuckets user interface you can define sets of rules by which the buckets will be filled with visitors. For example if a user comes from google.com and fills out the last page of your sales process they can be placed into a “converted” bucket, or if they reach the second stage of your conversion process but have yet to reach the final stage then they can be placed into the “semi-converted” bucket. Perhaps even you have various services for different types of people on your site, like a section for consumers and a section for business users, you could define a bucket for each type of user depending on which pages they view.

BtBuckets is somewhat limited, and that is to be excpeted given that it is a brand new service and free. The limitation comes in the fact that you can only define your bucket rules based on 2 types of criteria, where the user came from (referrer) and which page the user is currently on. You cannot at the moment track details such as Javascript events which would be useful for tracking form level events, no temporal based metrics cannot be used so you can’t segment the users by nocturnal or daylight users, or any other useful metric such as geography.

Given its limitations, I still think BtBuckets could be extremely useful for small website owners, however it is in no way a replacement for services such as TouchClarity which has been aquired by Omniture.

So How can BtBuckets be Helpful Given it’s Limits?

The fun and very exciting part of BtBuckets for me is not so much the visitor segmentation which is available in most good web analytics packages but its the behavioural targetting feature. This is because it is a well known fact that lots of web analtyics installations get setup and left to collect loads of data and most often the data collected does not get used to make meaningful decisions or used to put changes into action. This is where behavioural targetting is an amazing and simple concept. All you have to do is define some rules to place your visitors into buckets based on where they came from and what pages they visit on your site, then you can define which website content each of those buckets can see on your website.

To give you 2 examples of how this would work we’ll look at an e-commerce site and an informational site. The e-commerce site might sell electronics and like all e-commerce stores will have a shopping cart process. If the end of the shopping cart process presented the user with a page that contained all of the products purchased as variables in the page query sting or page name then you could set a bucket rule to be triggered if someone purchased a games console like a Wii or PS3, we’ll call that bucket the “gamers”. Within the pages on the website we could them embed a piece of Javascript that would check to see if the visitor was in the “gamers” bucket and if so would show them other products that may be of interest to gamers such as large flat screen TVs or a link to their video games section. This way you would be presenting the visitor with more relevant content based on their previous actions and as Amazon has proven countless times, this works and increases conversions and enlarges the average shopping basket size.

The second example is an informational site, lets say its a sporting news site with a number of sections for each type of sport, so a section for football, fishing, horse racing, tennis and golf. Let’s assume that the conversion point would be to either signup to the newsletter and/or click on an advert. With modern context based advertising such as Google Adsense we can sometimes leave the advertising targetting to the advert providers (but BtBuckets blog shows how you can mix BtBuckets with Google Ad Manager). However in the case of the newsletter signups, we could set a rule that if a user views more than 2 pages about golf within a 2 week period we can present them with an option to signup for a newsletter all about golf, otherwise they get the general newsletter feature shown. We could do that for each type of sport presented. Or maybe we could put the visitor into many buckets, one for each type of content they viewed then present them with a newsletter signup that highlighted the sections they had previously viewed. I.e.

Signup to our newsletter on fishing and golf to get the latest up to date news and information.

These are only 2 very simple examples, I can think of at least 2 advanced uses whereby the bucket was called using invisible iframe HTML elements so that you can pass any information to the BtBuckets system, or maybe break down the Javascript code within the page tag to call the Javascript event directly based on other Javascript events such as form fields, however I would only suggest that for the very technically abled people.

All in all, I think this is a great addition to any web analytics implementation where you are not at a stage to purchase advanced behavioural targetting software but would like many of the advantages for free. If you have integrated BtBuckets into your site yet and have some nice examples to share please comment below.

How Much Should I Pay For a Link?0
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing on January 17th, 2008

LinksThe short answer: £1.50 per link per month per page

The long answer:

One of the activities that I have been exposed to recently in the internet marketing area is buying paid links.

For anyone that isn’t sure what a paid link is, it’s a hypertext link that is purchased and placed as opposed to being written specifically for the website users and no money changing hands.

When I started out buying links one of the first questions I had was how much should I pay for a link. This is a very complex question and the answers are equally complex.

Basically what you are doing when purchasing a link is you are asking the web site owner how much they think their site is worth. This is often a dangerous question as you might get the people who just make websites for fun and will accept anything they get, whereas some people are equally uninitiated in the ways of internet marketing and think that 1 link per month is worth more than any average person earns in a day.

It used to be a little bit simpler thanks to good old pagerank, where people would say I have a page with a pagerank of 5 so a link on this page is worth £10 per month. This was the time when SEOs (Search Engine Optimisers) knew little of in-context links.

Alas, Google has taken that little measuring stick away with their pagerank crash last year so now people are even more confused. Some site owners think that they had a PR of 5 last year so just because it has a PR of 0 now it is worth the same. The answer to this is yes and no. Yes because really a links worth is determined more by the relevance of the page, the linking text and the destination page than any page rank.

You find where download mp3 music on player, Do you want mp3 music download for ipod mp3 player

But no because if I see that a site has gone from PR 5 to PR 0 then obviously Google’s algorithm is looking specifically at that site for paid links.

So in conclusion the best type of link to get is an in-context link surrounded by words in the main body of the page text. But if you think about it those types of links with maybe one or two words of anchor text are not going to be attractive to the average website user to click on as they are not very descriptive. From experience, you don’t get a lot of traffic through those types of links unless you really build up the hype in the surrounding text which is very unlikely in these situations. So we can assume that you will get minimal traffic from the link and the only real value is through the potential to manipulate your site’s position in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

In my experience I would suggest paying between £1 and £5 per link depending upon a number of factors.

  1. How much is your product/service worth? So, how much can you afford to spend on advertising?
  2. How often is the site you are purchasing from updated? The more the better.
  3. What is the backlink profile of the site you are purchasing from? You are looking for a wide variety, from directory links, articles, blogs, real sites as well as scraper sites. Diversity is key.
  4. How much will the site owner accept? If they ask for £35 for one link on one page per month then don’t be afraid to say no. There are a lot of websites out there.

Anyway, that is my view on buying paid links. It is a necessary evil but it works and will continue to do so, no matter what new algorithm changes Google decides on.

Let me know if you agree with my take on paid links in the comments below.

SEO Magazine Subscription Offer0
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing on November 28th, 2007

Search Marketing Standard - Winter 2007 I get the Search Marketing Standard Magazine through every quarter as it is one of the best places to find a round up of SEO techniques and ideas that are buzzing around the internet during that quarter.

Now I know that SEO techniques and news can happen in a heartbeat, which is why I still use Google RSS reader for keeping on top of whats going on day by day. But sometimes it’s just nice to be able to sit on the couch and read a magazine about a topic I enjoy.

In case you’re interested my favourite blogs that I have subscribed to are:-

The Subscription Offer
Anyway, Boris from Search Marketing Standard emailed me a few days ago and told me that as a promotion they are doing at the moment, I could offer the subscription at 67% discount.

This means that a 1 year U.S. subscription would be $4.95 (International – $6.60), and as the $ is really rubbish at the moment that means people in the UK can get a yearly subscription for about the price of a cheap McDonalds meal.

To get the offer… just use the coupon code: HOLIDAY67 and go to their subscription page (https://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/subscribe.html).

The offer is good until 10th Dec 2007 and as a bonus, Boris has promised that they will donate $1 to a charity of my choice (Cancer Research Fund) for every subscriber that used the coupon code during registration.

I hope you found this anouncement useful and remember with Christmas coming up that it’s a really easy Christmas present for all the SEOers out there.

What Can I Do With a Web Analytics Tool?0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on October 29th, 2007

Web analytics tools are big!

Nearly all have the basic reports like keywords used by people coming from search engines, a list of referring sites that drive traffic to your site, the browsers people have used etc. Then there are the tools that allow testing via A/B analysis, bid managment, engagement scoring and multi-dimensional visualization of data.

So web analytics tools provide a mass of data and sometimes nice ways of visualising that data. But what can you do with this data that makes it worth while spending a large amount of money and effort on such a tool? After all specific tasks can be scripted to provide information so you need to ensure that you make the best use as possible from your web analytics tool.

The Basics
The first thing to do with any new web analytics installation is to track your advertising spend and make sure you are spending money in the right place. This is really easy to set up, it can be as simple as adding an extra parameter of data to a landing page, for example.

Original: http://www.abc.co.uk/landingpage
After Tracking: http://www.abc.co.uk/landingpage?keyword={keyword}

The above example will take the dynamic keyword generated by a Google Adwords ad and place it on the landing page allowing you to compare organic keywords with paid keywords to find keywords that convert visitors and make your Google PPC ads more effective.

You can track any paid advert as long as you can give it a unique landing page. If you think this tracked landing page looks ugly then simply create a vanity landing page like http://www.abc.co.uk/promo which will 301 redirect to http://www.abc.co.uk/landingpage?keyword={keyword} or vice versa.

Improving the effectiveness of your ad campaigns may save between 10% and 20% of your ad spend if you did some sort of optimisation, more if this is the first time.

However, unless you’re selling expensive products or services then this saving alone will not help much when convincing your boss to get an analytics package.

Newsletters are the next thing to optimise. If you can capture email addresses and send an opt-in email newsletter then you can do some amazing stuff that will increase your traffic and conversion rates. This is done by using behavioural targetting and the tracking as shown before.

Scenario Time
Imagine the scenario, you go to an online computer retailer and look at some graphics cards, maybe some hard disks and some computer games. You then proceed to sign up for a newsletter with the latest deals from the retailer.

Next week you receive your first email from the retailer and at the top they maybe review or have deals on the latest graohics cards and computer games, maybe a bundle deal that is for a limited period.

The reason they knew what to include in the newsletter is based on the onsite content you ahev consumed on your visit to the website. If the retailer expanded this technique to all their customers then it is likely that as the emails are targetted towards the specific interest of the user, traffic and increased conversion will follow.

Now this scale of behavioural targetting isn’t for everyone as it can take some effort to implement but it will certainly pay for the analytics many times over.

Going along a similar line of though, what if you knew that when someone comes to your site using a specific keyword they normally head for specific areas of your site. Why not make those areas more prominent for these users and make it easier for them to convert in a way that they want to. For example, if you had a stock photography site and someone came from Google using the search term ‘flower’. If you knew that 8 times out of 10, people end up purchasing a picture of a yellow rose when coming via the ‘flower’ keyword, it makes sense to put that picture at the top of the list and so on.

It makes logical sense that doing this will reduce bounce ratre and increase conversion rate. Most importantly the user will have a good online experience and hopefully come back for future stock photography purchases.

In conclusion I guess the real way I see of making the most of your web analytics tool is to use the information it provides to feed your website with the most optimal content in an automated way. Second to this would be to drive the website content creators in which content converts and to make more of it.

If you have any other ideas for using web analytics then please post a comment.

Automating SEO, SEM and Web Analytics0
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing, Web Analytics on October 13th, 2007

There are 2 things that have sparked off this post.

  1. The first is that while at work I managed to prove that our SEM strategy is less than optimal but that to fix it on such a large scale would require immense automation.
  2. The second was an article I read about a day later reviewing Yield Software which hypes itself as a Google optimizing service

Now, the review is highly critical and pessimistic about the service and I have also read similarly negative reviews of the concept of automating SEO.

However I think that everything to do with optimizing your rankings in Google is possible to automate given a very skilled programmer and a lot of time.

A few years ago when I first came into contact with the theory of online marketing, as a programmer I thought, “why is all this SEO stuff not automated?”. I then later found that much of it is using software like WebCEO and IBP, together with bid automation tools for SEM, would it be much of a stretch to combine these tools, along with behavioural targeting and page optimization tools like Google Optimizer to make a people and search engine optimized site? I don’t think so.

But what about when Google changes it’s algorithm?
As that question states, we know that Google mainly works off one or more algorithms, so surely you can write an algorithm to optimize for Google’s?

SEOmoz wrote a great example of how to test a search engine algorithm on a simple scale. Basically it uses a random domain name with random text and random links, you then modify the elements that you wish to test and as a result you see how well each of the pages perform in the SERPs (search engine result pages). So, if you had a number of these tests up running there is no reason why you could not use the resulting information to feed your ‘worker’ algorithms that optimize your sites.

The only thing that cannot be automatically optimized is written content. Now, you can certainly have huge database driven websites and optimize them quite automatically but if you have a marketing site then chances are you will have to write some content that will appeal to your visitors. You could get an algorithm to write your optimized content first using a complex Markov chain which would be ok for search engines but you would need to ‘fix’ it to make it human readable.

Some more examples of similar things being done by less than white hat SEOs are control pannels where you enter your domain and some scripts create content, link to it from other sites like social bookmarking, blogs and other domains owned by the user. Personally I think that without looking at Yield Software it is difficult to tell exactly how their system works but I imagine its probably a paid version of one of these control pannels fed by testing domains.

So is it black hat?
I don’t know if their methods are black hat, but i’m sure that if it works then the search engines will make using the software non-compliant with their T&Cs, thus making it black hat.

In conclusion
It’s an ambicious idea and I like it, if they have pulled it off then fair play and anyone that doesn’t use them will dissapear from the SERPs, and it will make SEOs very unhappy and very poor.

Managing Social Media using Web Analytics0
Matt Hopkins posted in Social Media, Web Analytics on September 27th, 2007

It’s quite amazing what you do with web analytics because it is basically your portal into understanding your online presence. This means that you can look at the effect of social media, your revenue metrics and even your more subtle engagement metrics.

So what is social media?
Social media is news or content that is created by every-day people, this could be a bookmark of some useful content, a blog like this made of one person’s thoughts or even a video. Really it can be any piece of content that is generated by a user of the internet rather than a regular publisher.

And this social media is good because…?
It comes down to the search engines, they want to serve their customers by providing the most relevant content at the relevant time. To do this they constantly look for new ways in which the internet is changing and new ways of identifying relevant content. And what could be more relevant than what individual people are saying.

For example if the Sun newspaper (a tabloid newspaper in England) wrote about a new form of cheap and renewable energy you might not believe it entirely as it is only one publisher and may possibly not be as trusted as other publishers. But then you have 50 individuals that are blogging and making videos about this new form of cheap renewable energy. Who would you believe?

Personally I would go for the 50 individuals as the news is likely to be up to date, a blog can be updated any time whereas a newspaper only comes out once a day. Also there is safety in numbers and 50 publishers saying the same thing is probably more accurate than 1 publisher.

We know that more and more people are reading blogs for niche information and so the big search engines must do the same. This means that people interested in their online presence need to be looking at using social media to their best advantage as every-day people trust it as do the search engines.

But how do you measure social media?Buzz Monitor
There are a couple of trains of thought when it comes to measuring social media, some people use things called buzz monitors to track particular keywords or keyphrases that are appearing in certain mainstream blogs or aggregation channels. Some just use their keyword and referrer reports of their web analytics applications to measure the increase or decrease of interest. Obviously you would need to add relevant metrics like engagement or interactivity or time on site etc. to find out if your social buzz translates into the desired on site behaviour.

Another way is to actually use a tool provided by the search engine Google. It is their trends application and this week they made what I think is a major change by having daily updates as opposed to monthly or weekly updates so you can measure the buzz of your project using the search engines. You can see below that social media is a particularly hot topic at the moment, one of the reasons I’m writing about it is it’s relevance at the moment.
Social Media Trend

So what am I using social media for at the moment?
At the moment I’m creating a bit of buzz around a website I’ve created by using social bookmarking sites, writing relevant quality content blogs around issues my new product can address, creating social groups on relevant topics in Facebook and Yahoo groups, answering relevant questions on Yahoo answers and some other good stuff.

And to measure this buzz i’m using my install of Buzz monitor as well as Google trends and of course my onsite analytics. This way I can see at what stage my buzz has reached and where I need to create buzz in order to generate more quality traffic and in the end more sales.

But remember that social buzz is not the only thing on the internet and your website does not exist in a social vacuum, it relies on other interaction from the usual places.

If you’re doing any fun internet marketing with social media and don’t mind sharing your experiences then please add a comment.

Using packet Sniffing for Web Analytics0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Web Log Files on September 4th, 2007

Packet Sniffing
Firstly a packet sniffer is a really simple application that passively listens to any network traffic that runs through or past a network card. When it ‘sniffs’ the network it picks up all the packets for every protocol such as tcp/ip and ARP, it also picks up encrypted SSL packets.

This all sounds very technical and worlds away from anything related to marketing or web analytics so how does it fit in?

Well, using a packet sniffer you can pick up all the packets contained within a HTTP or HTTPS request. If it is HTTPS traffic then you can provide the SSL certificate to the packet sniffer and access the requests in their unencrypted form.

Once the packet sniffer has recreated the HTTP and HTTPS traffic it can then create a log file, similar to one created by a web server. From this you can use your favourite web log analyzer to process the log files and provide you with website visitor data.

So where does packet sniffing fit into the data collection methodologies?

You might already know that the main difference between page tags and log files is that page tag data is collection on the client side whereas log files are generated on the web server. Packet sniffing also resides on the web server or at least the Local Area Network (LAN). This means it has the same problems as log files with proxy caching and so is likely to be less accurate than page tags.

But there are advantages, packet sniffers pick up every piece of tcp traffic including form data that has been sent using the POST method and all packet sniffer applications will output that data. For technically minded web analysts there are loads of performance statistics about the network that are also output to the log files.

Another extremely useful aspect of packet sniffers is te ability to amalgamate data from multiple web servers into one log file. For example, lets say that a large content provider has 20 servers that are load balanced and in front of them there are 10 proxy servers. If we use standard log files then we need to either use the proxy logs assuming the proxy servers are all on the same platforms and can be configured correctly to output the required information, or cluster the 20 server log files during analysis. Using a packet sniffer in front of the proxies we can pick up all of the data from one point and because it uses passive sniffing it will not slow down the network traffic.

In any other situation I would suggest page tags or log files depending upon your preference. If you are currently using a packet sniffer(like Clipen) in your analytics environment I would be interested to hear of your experiences which you can detail in a comment below.

First Party Cookie Confusion2
Matt Hopkins posted in Visitor Segmentation, Web Analytics on August 1st, 2007

Cookies in their own right are really simple little things, the idea being that every time you view a web page on a website, you will be given a code to store on your local PC. The next time you come back to that site it can read your stored cookie and so count you as the same visitor who has returned.

So where is the confusion?
Well, the confusion comes when you start talking about first party and third party cookies and how they are treated differently by web browsers.

A first party cookie is a cookie that is given to the website visitor by the same domain (www.domain.com) that the web page resides on. Whereas, a third party cookie is one that is issued to the website visitor by a web server that is not on the same domain as the website. I’ve made a diagram below which shows how the first party cookie and third party cookie differ.

Cookie Diagram

So when might a third party cookie be used?
Generally third party cookies are issued when are third party is interested in tracking your website visitor traffic, this could either be by a banner advertiser who places a number of banners on your site and wants to know how many times it has been requested, or it could be a third party hosted analytics vendor that issues a page tag for each of your pages that forces a cookie on your site.

In the last situation, where an analytics vendor issues a cookie through a page tag the cookie is seen as a third party cookie because it is being generated by the analytics server which is having the tracking 1×1 invisible gif image requested from it by the page tag. It is however possible to have an analytics cookie issued by the third party vendor but still look like a first party cookie.

There are 2 ways of achieving this:-

  1. Create a DNS alias for third party analytics server so that it looks like it is actually part of your domain and so anything issued by this server because 1st party (including cookies)
  2. Have the Javascript page tag create a cookie at run-time and then pass the cookie value back to the analytics server so the cookie is created within the page and so becomes a 1st party cookie.

The obvious advantage of the DNS alias option is that you can have a smaller page tag which is quicker to load, however the cookie making page tag has an advantage over the DNS alias because no structural changes need to be made to the site’s infrastructure and the implementation of the tag should be more straight forward.

So, in the end you want to aim for a first party cookie as these are typically blocked by fewer browsers than third party cookies. To give you an example, I did a test a few weeks ago using on a site using a third party cookie and measured that over 70% of the cookies were being blocked. After a similar test using first party cookies only 30% were being blocked. This shows that although cookies aren’t as accurate as we might all like, all cookies are not created equal.

My First Engagement0
Matt Hopkins posted in Visitor Segmentation, Web Analytics on July 24th, 2007

No, i’m not getting married just yet.

But I have just released my first white paper which focusses on website visitor engagement and it follows on nicely from my orginial post on engagement scoring.

Let me know what you think.

Web Analytics Jobs0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Web Analytics Jobs on July 9th, 2007

Curious about the current state of the web analytics market to see if we in the UK are getting close to the US I did a quick search on Google to find this great site on web analytics jobs.

Another thing to mention is that there is currently a web analytics job survey happening which is organised by Anil Batra. I think this is a great idea so we can all learn about how this market is maturing and allows career planning for the future in terms of the skills required.