Matt Hopkins: Web Analytics Consulting & Online Marketing

What Can I Do With a Web Analytics Tool?5
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 Analytics3
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.