Web Analytic Matt

How Much Should I Pay For a Link?1
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing on January 17th, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The 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 quesition 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 determind more by the relevance of the page, the linking text and the destination page than any page rank.

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 neccessary 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 Offer5
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing on November 28th, 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:-

• http://www.seobook.com
• http://www.leemccoy.co.uk/default.php
• http://www.bitesize-marketing-nlp.com
• http://www.digg.com
• http://www.fathomseo.com/blog
• http://www.wolf-howl.com
• http://www.gregboser.com
• http://www.marketingpiranha.com/blog
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog
• http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com
• http://www.pronetadvertising.com
• http://www.sclanalytics.com
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog
• http://www.shoemoney.com
• http://www.smmguru.com
• http://www.techmeme.com
• http://www.webanalyticmatt.com

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.

Automating SEO, SEM and Web Analytics2
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing 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.

SEM Magazine: Search Marketing Standard1
Matt Hopkins posted in Search Engine Marketing on June 20th, 2007

I recently received my first copy of Search Marketing Standard, a hard-copy magazine about the issues of search engine marketing. After reading it from cover to cover I knew that I should share the very existence of this magazine to you, my blog readers.

Now, I receive a number of magazines on a monthly basis about online marketing and computing in general but this one stood out for me. Where all the other magazines would comment on whats happening in the industry and basically take a ’sitting on the fence’ view, Search Marketing Standard actually contains real content. I’m talking about articles like ‘Think before you link…bait’ which talked about link baiting (the process of writing content with the aim of lots of people linking to it), but there was an actually methodology in there not just someone saying “Yeah, link baiting is good because blah blah blah”. The article on optimising your pay-per-click campaign was equally informative, giving real information that you could take away and use instantly to improve your PPC marketing efforts.

And its because of this great content that I think they deserve a special mention in this post. However I did notice that there is no section on Web Analytics, which I think is becoming an integral part of any online marketing strategy. So maybe I might be able to write a column for them on Web Analytics in an upcoming issue???

Either way I think it’s certainly worth getting hold of a copy.

How To Accurately Track RSS Subscribers7
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing, RSS on May 1st, 2007

That title may be a bit over ambitious, but I think that I have come up with the most accurate method for counting subscribers to your RSS feed.

This post is the sequal to Tracking your email campaigns and will build upon the tracking concepts used within that post. The previous post on tracking allows you to identify visitors who read the RSS feed then visit your site through a link in the feed. So that method will go some way to providing a readership metrics for our RSS content.

A readership metric is great, what about subscribers?

We can track the number of subscribers to a RSS feed in a number of ways, but after a few hours of research one method stuck out. This was to taint the feed URL for every visitor with a random value. Then all you have to do is count up the values and that will give you a subscriber count.

Below is an example feed URL that has been tainted.

http://www.webanalyticmatt.com/feed/?ID=1234

In this case we could count the number of ID values to give a subscriber count. Now this is fine but my method is to take this one step further and have the random value as the persistant cookie value for that visitor. By doing this we can actually identify the visitor even more accurately than using cookies because the feed request becomes the visitor identifier. Therefore it is possible to constantly update the visitor persistant cookie, even if it has been deleted to reflect the original cookie value.

Obviously this method is not without its problems, but luckily the negative effects can be minimised.

For instance you cannot let the search engines get hold of the RSS feed URL as search engines seem to favour RSS content over native web content. To ensure this, make sure your robots.txt file denies access to your RSS feeds.

What if someone syndicates your RSS feed on their site? Well your readership metric should hopefully increase but your subscriber metric will not be changed. Not a great thing but I think it’s an acceptable risk.

No more pinging your RSS feeds to RSS search engines. This would obviously defeat the point of counting of counting subscribers as you would be promoting one subscriber ID which may actually represent many people. But if your content is any good and your search engine optimisation is up to scratch then you shouldn’t need to tell the RSS search engines where you are.

Now the finale, I have read a few blog posts on tracking RSS subscriber numbers but the one thing that differentiates this post is that I am confident enough to implement it on my own blog as well as any site I am working on. To see, just subscribe to my RSS feed.

Designing a website with web analytics tracking in mind1
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on April 6th, 2007

As a web analytics vendor consultant I see all types of websites every day in all different shapes and sizes. But the one main difference between what I think are the good ones and the not so good ones are their trackability. By that I mean the effort required to track visitor traffic throughout the website.

A quick note to remind you that no matter what type of website you have, be it Flash, AJAX, dynamically driven using Coldfusion, all website traffic can be tracked its all about how much effort you wish to put in to tracking.

I have compiled a short list of what I see as the most trackable types of site with the least amount of effort required.

1. Flat file html web page sites with really clear directory structures and page names, the kind your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) company would/should create.
2. Dynamic websites in PHP, Coldfusion, ASP, .NET etc. where all user entered values are output to the URL. Eg. http://www.bookassist.com
3. Dynamic websites that use one page like index.aspx and pageid values for every single page.
4. AJAX websites.
5. Flash websites.
6. Websites that mix any number of AJAX, Flash, flat file and dynamic elements.

Most of these types of websites you can use page tags or log files as your data capture method of choice however it is only possible to capture data for the following site types using page tags. Be aware that when implementing a page tagging solution that you should plan what data and where it should be captured very carefully to avoid misinterpreting your web analytics data.

• Flash
• AJAX

So why are flat file web sites easier to track than Flash files?

Well data from Flash files has to be collected by specifying the user events to track, this is done using page tags. Flat file websites store all their data automatically in web server log files by default.

That is not to say that page tags cannot be used for flat file websites, there are advantages and disadvantages for both page tags and log files.

In conclusion not all websites are created equal but they can all be equally tracked with varying degrees of effort.

Tracking the Effectivness of Marketing Campaigns0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on March 28th, 2007

I have written previously about the tracking of email campaigns. Tracking any other marketing campaign works on exactly the same principle.

This post aims to show you how to effectively track your marketing campaigns and more importantly, show you what is possible with this information.

As with all information analysis you need to define up-front why you want information, what its purpose is, what you will do with the information and what information you require. Once you have written down these things, you can then begin to plan your marketing campaign tracking implementation.

Lets take an example of a television advertising campaign which is designed to drive traffic to your website. TV adverts don’t come cheap so you will want to know if web traffic increased as a result of your advert, did the traffic convert into sales and is it worth running TV ad campaigns in the future?

To gain answers to these questions you will need o identify the web traffic as being generated as a direct result of the TV advert. Once the traffic has been identified it can then be tracked through your web analytics tool to find out if it converted into sales which will answer whether the TV campaign is worth repeating. You could also glean the return on investment (ROI) of the ad campaign by then taking those web conversions and seeing how much revenue they generated in comparison to the cost of the ad campaign.

Here comes the tracking
Every ad campaign will normally contain at least 2 elements. The first is a marketing message that you wish to convey, something like “My product is the greatest!”.

The second element is a call to action which specifies the viewer to carry out an activity, something like “Go to my website at www.webanalyticmatt.com and buy my stuff!”.

It is this call to action that we are going to focus on. We need to make this call to action unique to all other website traffic and other marketing campaigns. To do this we use a number of name = value pairs in the query string of the URL of your site. A query string is everything after the ? in a URL.

An example tracking URL might be www.webanalyticmatt.com?campaign=salesgeneration&channel=tv
&segment=sky1&advert=3&dateofad=22-march-2007

Now, the first thing I think when I see that URL is “No way is anyone going to type all that in to their web browser!”. Luckily we can do some HTML redirection magic to turn that complicated URL into www.webanalyticmatt.com/free. (Heres a PHP script to get you started.) So on the call to action you just need to tell people to visit the shorter, vanity URL which will automatically redirect into your tracking URL thus making your ad campaign traffic trackable.

Breaking down the tracking code
In the above example I used the following codes in the trackable URL:-

• Campaign
• Channel
• Segment
• Advert
• Date of Ad

These codes should be used across all of your marketing campaigns so that they can be compared on a like by like basis. Consistency is key.

Campaign defines the overall marketing objective for that marketing campaign.

Channel defines the distribution channel for that marketing objective to be realised.

Segment defines the individual marketing message or audience for that message.

Advert is the individual advert shown which has driven the traffic to the website.

Dateofad defines the data on which the advert was released, as the same advert may be released a number of times to difference audiences and on different dates.

Using the above tracking codes and the right web analytics tool you can have the tracking granularity to ask most business questions about the traffic your marketing campaign drives to your website.

These tracking codes are specific to adverts but hopefully you can see how they could be generalised and then used for any marketing campaign that had a web element. Example campaigns include TV ads, pay-per-click advertising, link building, affiliate schemes, banner advertising, email campaigns and offline print adverts.

If you come up with a truely generic set of tracking codes the please share it with your fellow marketers by posting a comment below.

How Do You Track The Effectiveness of Your Email Campaigns?1
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on March 24th, 2007

My first question to you is “Do you track the effectiveness of any of your marketing campaigns?”. I deal with lots of companies on a daily basis that have no tracking for any of the marketing that they carry out. To me this seems very silly as you don’t know which marketing activities are working and where you are wasting money, but today I will focus on tracking the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

So, why would you want to track your email campaigns? What are the benefits?
You need to track your email campaigns so that you can differentiate the email shots that work from the ones that don’t, only then can you attempt to identify why some work and some don’t.

If you know which email campaigns drive traffic to your website, you can then start tracking which links within an email shot drove people and which didn’t. Ideally this means that you can, over time perfect your email campaigns for your market and get the best possible return on investment (ROI).

As well as knowing which email campaign drove traffic, you can also find out which campaign converted the most traffic and so track that all the way to how much money you made as a result of that one email shot. This is a true reflection of marketing ROI.

And how do we do this magical tracking?
Firstly, it isn’t magical. It really is very simple and embarrassingly easy.

Lets take an example of a newsletter sent out to 3000 current registered website users. Importantly you know who each one of those users is, well you know a name, an email address and maybe some other interesting data about them such as geographic location etc.

Using their name you can create a unique identifier for them, lets call it a UID code. Store this UID in your email database along with the users record.

Now, constructing your newsletter. Of course you need to write the content, that’s the hard part which may take many days or weeks. But the important bit is including the tracking.

You will probably have some headlines in your newsletter that link to the whole article on your main website. In these links is where the magic happens. For example, lets say that one of your links is http://www.webanalyticmatt.com/article1.html. That’s all well and good but a trackable example of the same link that takes them to the same page would be something like http://www.webanalyticmatt.com/article1.html?UID=765&Source=email&EID=22-03-2007&link=4.

Lets pull that URL apart now, notice that the only thing I added was ?UID=765&Source=email&EID=22-03-2007&link=4.

The ? shows the start of the query string for that page, importantly this does not usually impact the content on the page unless it is dynamic in some way. The UID value identifies the user, Source identifies that the visit came from an email, EID is the unique email identifier and link identifies which link within the email was clicked.

You can gain finer granularity of data with your analytics with the more specific values that you record. So if you wanted to record the users postcode in the email link as well then this could be analysed, allowing you to segment your market further.

Within your analytics application you should be able to perform look ups of your UID values against your email database to bring in the users actual full name and any other information you have on them. This gives your data real business context, especially if you only have a handful of registered clients, it allows you to monitor their website movements very closely should you wish.

Once you define a particular marketing campaign based on your tracking codes within your analytics, you can then see which email converted the most users, which email link or type of link converts the best, and event which dates are best for sending out email shots. Obviously if you have other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you use to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns then these should be used instead.

It is then up to you to calculate your return on investment (ROI) from your email campaigns based on the number of conversions it produces and decide whether email shots really work for your market segment.

The Online Search Trilogy0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on March 22nd, 2007

This is a post for all the online marketing people out there who know about Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing but are a little bit hazy when it comes to how it all fits in with Web Analytics.

To demonstrate one example of how these three parts of the online search story can work with each other I have drawn the diagram below.

How Does It Work?
This trilogy starts with a website. Lets say you have a lead generation website about your carpet cleaning services.

As an online marketer, when building and populating the website with content you would create fully SEO’d copy that would be nicely indexed in the major search engines and hopefully get you a nice pile of visitors that need their carpets cleaned.

Now it is common knowledge that the easiest way of getting traffic to your website is to buy advertising space. Particularly good advertising space can be found at the side of search engine results pages (SERPs) as these will be associated to the search term made by the user of the search engine. Your SEO’d content pages should make reasonably good landing pages for your adverts as long as your marketing message is coherent between the advert and the landing page.

Once you have some visitor traffic to your website you can analyse it in your web analytics application. Things that you may wish to look for are:

• What are your visitors doing once they land on your website?
• Are your visitors converting into leads?
• Which organic keywords are visitors that convert using?
• Which organic keywords are causing visitors to bounce straight off your website?
• How can you shorten the path from your landing page to a conversion page?
• How can you introduce opportunities to convert visitors along the most popular visitor paths from your landing page?

All these questions and more can be asked of your analytics in order to refine your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

Also you can find out what organic keywords cause people to convert, once this is known you can write more content using the good converting keywords. This means that your visitors with a higher conversion rate (targeted traffic) will reach your website via organic search methods. Once your organic content is attracting the right level of traffic you can reduce the PPC campaigns for those keywords and work on targeting other keywords.