A quick post regarding news from my native land - the majority of Americans do not like advertisements, discounts, and news tailored to their interests via online tracking, reports NYTimes.  The poll, backed by professors at UPenn and UC Berkley, is "the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioural advertising."



I wonder if it's this simple - that Americans dislike targeted media, or if the fear of privacy invasion what preoccupies their minds?  Either way, targeted advertising via tracking isn't going away so they better get used to it.  Looks like the youth are slightly more open minded to it.

I can't imagine not wanting things tailored to my interests. I'm not as bored when exposed to advertising, I dare suggest I'm even, on occasion, informed!  Except for that spotify advertisement about killing motorcyclists while I drive (complete with splat noise), b/c I don't even have a license.

What do you think? Are these Americans simply naivete to the benefits of target marketing which results from online tracking? Are they justified to be flipping out about privacy concerns - that marketers are "spying" on them when they visit the marketer's sites?  Let me know!

Microsoft's Windows 7 home operating system comes out on 22 October 2009, less than three years after the launch of Vista.  In order to get people "buzzed" about their new product, they are encouraging Windows 7 House Parties! 

Doesn't that sound like fun!?  Naturally, I want to use my Saturday preparing to encourage my neighbors to use an overpriced Microsoft product (I vote Linux).  Don't forget - Microsoft wants pictures!

I was laughing really hard this morning, as I learned how to host my Windows 7 party (yes, they are serious):



What's the incentive?  Why would anyone do this? The answer: a party pack which includes...

* One limited Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate (32 bit)
* One Deck of Playing Cards with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* One Puzzle with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* One Poster with Windows 7® Desktop Design
* Ten Tote Bags with Windows 7® Desktop Design for hosts and guests
* One table top centerpiece for decoration
* One package of Windows 7® napkins

I didn't even add in those little R's!  They came straight from the responder at Yahoo Answers!

Excuse me???  You want me to host a party in exchange for Windows themed napkins?  And playing cards!?  There are no streamers or balloons involved because those extras are only shipped in America.  For a keg and some meat to put on the BBQ I may be tempted.

So I've applied to be a host. I'm not sure why, because I don't need ten Windows 7 tote bags and I have a Mac at home. Maybe my roommate could use the "Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate" for work.

Two parts of the application process made me chuckle - and it made the whole experience so PC-ish. First, I had to go on a duck hunt running tests and confirming my PC here in the office is capable of running Windows 7. Okay, fine, no, I didn't actually do this, but I could have...
Secondly, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to receive emails about Microsoft products.  Oh wait - did I say "decide"?  Microsoft actually made the choice for me, kind of like when my Windows XP decides to restart at 11am to do some random updates I will never need.



And the "legal jargon" section - was FOUR PAGES LONG - single spaced size 12 font!  I feel bad about the internet trees, so I wont publish the whole thing but it's over 1,500 words.   

The Google AdWords ad scheduling setting lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your PPC ads to appear. Ad scheduling can give your PPC campaign a better 'bang for your buck' by improving your ROI by making sure that your ads only run when it makes the most sense for your business.

If you are from a B2B context you might schedule your ads to run only during business hours - let's assume only weekdays say from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. targeting business hours when you think your audience is looking for your products/services. Setting up the ad scheduling is easy as ABC - or B2B! Simply log in to your AdWords account, go to the settings tab, then advanced settings and there you find the ad scheduling settings.

But how can you be certain your scheduled ads actually target your audience effectively, that you are spending your cost per click on your desired audience? This is where your Google Analytics account come into play. Google Analytics Custom Reporting can help you take out the guesswork in ad scheduling when your audience is looking for your products/services. Let your website visitors, who are your audience determine when to target your PPC audience.

By setting up a custom report you can find out how visitors are behaving on your website at what hours of the day, at what days, pages per visit and bounce rate. With this information you can adjust the PPC ad scheduling and budget accordingly.

To set up custom reporting simply login to your Analytics account, click on custom reporting in the left menu and in the top right corner click on "create a new custom report". Nothing needs to be installed or verified.



In the left menu called 'Metrics' click on 'Site Usage' and drag-and-drop 'Entrances' (along with good traffic quality indicators 'Time on Site', 'Pages per Visit', and 'Bounce Rate') one by one across to the 'Metric' boxes. Then do the same thing with 'Dimensions', click on 'Visitors' and drag-and-drop 'Day' over to the 'Dimension' box and 'Hour of the Day' over to the 'Sub-Dimension' box.



Then rename your custom report to whatever you want to call it by editing the title. Click the 'Preview' button to see your custom report and if you are happy with the report then finally click on 'Create Report'. Now you have created your custom report!

With these metrics in your custom report you can in more detail find out how visitors behave on your website, during what hours of the day and at what days. Based on the information you get from the report you might want to refine the PPC ad scheduling.



In the example above the majority of entrances to the website happened in late afternoon between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm and on Mondays and Fridays. From this example scheduling the PPC ads to run only on 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on only weekdays would be advisable.

Set aside a couple of hours to learn Google Analytics custom reporting. Apart from creating a custom report in Google Analytics to refine PPC spend and strategy you can create a custom report to help you optimise your online leads and conversions. More about that in another blog post.

Having gone through a series of SEO evaluations those last few weeks, I was shocked to come across so many cases of websites with bad internal linking structure.   I now think it's essential to stress on good internal linking since I have the impression that web designers often overlook the importance of having a well structured site in terms of internal linking.  The current situation is very sad since a lot of websites are not benefitting of the power of internal linking.  I therefore compiled a short list of factors that one should consider while building the website structure.

Good Navigation - The most important issue here is to make sure that the site navigation is correctly spidered by the search engines.  We can ensure this by either use of anchor text and text based navigation, or an image-based navigation type with significant 'alt attributes' attached to every image link in the navigation.  Avoid Javascript and Flash navigations because they are still not well crawlable and spidered by the search engines.  If you still want to keep your 'flashy' navigation then I'll suggest you include an alternative navigation that would be spidered by major search engines. For example, you could have a text based navigation at the bottom of your page, this will help you inner pages be more spiderable.  

XML Sitemap - I cannot stress enough on having a good XML sitemap on your website.  Sitemaps provide an overview of the site at a single glance but at the same time they help search engines crawl the website.  Submitting a XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool for example can be very useful since it gives the search engines a concise format that provides spiders with a super-fast blueprint for indexing a website. Furthermore, sitemaps also improve web usability as they are an alternative form of a site specific search, which brings users to the information they need quicker.  

Breadcrumbs - I believe breadcrumbs are excellent internal linking tools. Being 'links' by nature, they aid with internal linking and consequently increase the search engine visibility. In addition to anchor text differentiation, breadcrumbs are very useful since they increase the general usability of the website by allowing users to know exactly where they are on the website.  

Links in Content - I had the chance to analyse different kind of websites in different industries but it was quite common to see a lack of links in their copy.  It's essential to have in-content links, since not only they are more likely to have higher click through rates (increased confidence path), but they are also capable to add more significance to a link because of the neighbouring text.  Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to have links with anchor text with targeted keywords in the copy of the website.  

Links to Important Pages - It's essential to always ensure that all important pages are well linked to other pages on the website.  I sometimes found it amazing how some of the most important pages of a website are not properly linked to other pages.  It is better to link them directly to the homepage so that they can benefit from the power of link juice passing from the homepage.  But time and again I see websites with important pages buried too deep and ending up with no page-rank at all.  And it's not uncommon to find those pages not indexed by the search engines.  

Cross-check Robot.txt - This may look stupid, but I came across cases where I found important pages of a website not being crawled and spidered because they were found in a section where the robot.txt was preventing spiders to crawl.  This mainly happen by mistake or when new pages are added to the website.  Sometimes webmasters tend to forget to go back to their robot.txt and check whether all crawlable/non-crawlable sections are up-to-date.  In brief, your important pages need to be findable, if not there's no way they'll get crawled and indexed.  

Linking Policy - It is very important to be extremely consistent in your linking behaviour. What I mean is that while linking pages we need to be meticulous about how we are building the links.  I once had to re-build the links of a whole website since links to the homepage were very inconsistent.  Some links were pointing to the .com page whereas others were pointing to the .com/index.php page.  The website also had some major canonicalisation issues where several links were pointing to identical pages but with different URLs.  Cases like this actually decrease all the power of internal linking since the link juice is diluted around the site instead of being intelligently focused on the essential pages.  In brief a link policy should be setup so that everyone building links knows exactly how and where to link them.  

Just to remind, good internal linking ensures that all pages on your website get properly spidered and indexed on search engines.  It increases the relevancy of a page to the targeted keyword phrase.  Allows proper link juice passing to internal pages hence increasing their page-rank. That's it, hope that this helps tuning and enhancing your internal link structure.  

Earlier this month, Seth Godin wrote a blog post entitled 'Lessons from very tiny businesses'. This piece outlined 5 different things we can learn from small businesses, using examples of companies he has encountered. His second point was 'Be micro focused and the search engines will find you'.

Shortly after reading this, I was searching for a carpet cleaning service. I had used one earlier this year, but couldn't remember his number, so I went to his web site. Now bear in mind this is a one-man show, so what you would typically expect is at the most two pages - landing page and contact page. What you get is something else: 9 fully-optimised pages, a blog, and even a Twitter stream!

The thing that impressed me most, however, was the blog, 'My carpet cleaning blog'. Since November 2008, Chris (the carpet cleaner) has been diligently writing up many of his daily jobs as blog posts. Each one is titled with a variation on the phrases 'Carpet cleaning' or 'carpet cleaner', plus the location of the job, either as a postcode (W4, W14) or as the name of the location (Fulham, Wandsworth), and includes some detail on the job in question. In this way he is targeting relevant searches for carpet cleaning all over Greater London. Oh, and he follows these posts up with Tweets as well.

But that's not all. When he came to clean my carpets, Chris also explained how he has managed to get himself placed in Google Local Business ads for not one, but four different postcodes! By asking customers to write reviews, he is managing to come top of the list as well.

Ok, so not everything is rosy with his site from an SEO point of view. URLs need optimising, his blog is one of those 'wysiwyg' ones, and he has literally no incoming links at all. Still, with little technical background and knowledge, Chris has realised the importance of Google as a targeted traffic generator, learnt some of the basic rules of SEO, and applied them assiduously, and with great effect to one set of keyword combinations. Since last November, the site has been appearing on the front page of Google for many local London search related to carpet cleaning, and the number of contacts from his web site has literally doubled!

What's the lesson for me in all this? It's just as Mr Godin says - or as I interpret it anyway: sometimes, as we work on SEO for large organisations in highly competitive markets, we spread ourselves too wide, and look to achieve too much, making it far more difficult to deliver tangible results. Instead we need to identify where we can make a difference, and we need to focus on it. If an inexperienced one man band can do it, we have no excuses.

Looks like Google is trying out some new ways of displaying SERP URLs.  In this image (taken by @robhammond), Google is sharing the location of a results page within a site by including the page's breadcrumb string instead of just using the first 51 URL characters.




The Renault UK results page (#7) has matching breadcrumbs on the destination page:



Today, a search for mobility provides the same results with "normal" URLs:

So what does this mean?  Should we all style out our sites with Hansel and Gretel in mind?  Keeping Google's usability priorities in mind, I think bread crumbs should be a mainstay in any site anyways.  Also, I do believe this is a feasible full time change we may see some time in the future. 

Displaying breadcrumbs in SERPs clearly maps out for searchers what section of the site their query result is located within; this will enable searchers to better read those URLs and have a clearer idea of whether or not that result is appropriate for their query. Also, if this is a going to be a major SERPs change, it's important the breadcrumbs don't go too deep since as always, there is limited character space.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this alteration plays out - if you see any more examples shoot them to me @ChelseaBlacker or chelsea.blacker@baseonegroup.co.uk .

Regarding display URLs in AdWords ads, Google states that the domain must be identical to the destination URL's domain.  But besides this rule, advertisers are free to incorporate keywords at the end of the display domain to be read as subfolders.  An example is this ad, which bolds the term for my query "sony laptop" at the end of the display URL:


The question begs to be asked, if we can add keywords to the end of a display URL why not incorporate those keywords before the domain via display URL subdomains?  Just to clarify, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger root domain, they read like this in a URL:


To my surprise, not many advertisers are utilising keywords in display URL subdomains.  It's a great opportunity to include an ad group's targeted term at the front of the display URL, so users read those relevant bolded keywords first.  Take advantage of it! 

The ad above with the subdomain "nokia-mobile-phones"  goes to the page "www.top10co.uk" which clearly doesn't include such a subdomain:



Google's AdWords help section confirms that this is a legal technique which is acceptable by AdWords.  However, when I phoned our Irish friends, the Adwords representative I spoke with told me this was not permitted - it's such a rarely used technique that even the Adwords rep's don't know about it!

So be sure to utilise this technique in your AdWords ads.  Also, remember that you can delete the "www." in display URLs which means 4 more characters for optimising your display URL. Now go... re-optimise those ads!

At first I found it amazing how plenty of twitter applications are flooding over the web everyday, but looking at this phenomenon closer may be it's not so surprising.  According to ComScore there has been an increase of Twitter traffic of up to 700 percent since last year and number of twitter users are growing everyday. Therefore it's not surprising to see so many twitter tools emerging everyday, and sometimes it can be difficult to find yourself in this tsunami of twitter applications. 


I was mostly concerned about tools on tracking twitter traffic.  For sure, there are a lot of 'cool' tools out there allowing us to track number of hits, geolocalisation and even do real-time traffic analysis but it was not always convenient to have data separated from my main web analytics software.  My approach to web analytics is to have a consistent, reliable and integrated view of the traffic thus ensuring a clear vision on what is going on in my campaigns.  Furthermore, after testing several twitter analytics applications I didn't find the statistics from the different tools meaningful enough.  So I revert back tracking my tweets on Google Analytics (GA).  It is much more powerful in my opinion when  considering all the functions that we have on GA.  It would be wiser to use them to track our twitter campaigns.  For example, we can track and analyse goals and conversion rates knowing very well how conversion rate analysis is imperative today.

Google analytics by default shows traffic coming from twitter but wait.. it shows traffic coming from Twitter.com only and today most of the people using Twitter never even visit twitter.com! For that reason, I prefer to manually add some utm codes on my URLs and this allows me to track my tweets wherever they are, even if someone forward my tweets by email.

As you know, tweets that include a URL use some type of URL shortening service, like http://bit.ly or http://cli.gs, but we will be using the classic Tinyurl.com which shortens a URL by creating a redirect that is hosted on www.tinyurl.com.  The trick is to add GA's campaign tracking parameters to our Tiny URL, thus encoding campaign info into the URL we use in our tweets:

?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

Of course you can change the utm_campaign and utm_medium names to anything you like but be sure they makes sense since you will be using them in your analyses later.

Example:
http://www.itjoblog.co.uk/?utm_campaign=itjoblogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

After adding this code to the URL, we shorten it using TinyURL and finally use the 'shortened' URL in our tweets which will be traceable by GA.

Below is a picture on how the data appear in 'All Traffic Sources' report in GA:


This is very cool, but it's even nicer to use all the power of Google Analytics in your web analyses, for example you could use Advanced Segments feature to subdivide your visitors based on operating systems they used to reach your tweets (Windows, Mac, Iphone, etc). Or if you like you could create your own segment that makes sense to your campaign.
 
As said by Gail Ennis, senior vice-president of marketing at Omniture: "Online marketers recognise the importance of brand reputation management in the social media environment," and I believe that accurate twitter tracking is fundamental and can help a lot in social media campaign analysis.

I've been playing around with a Digg account lately, trying to figure out how to best incorporate our clients content into this fun social networking site.  Digg is unique because it doesn't

1.An Ace Nickname: The Username.  I'm a big fan of creating plausible usernames - in this case I used my real name.  As a newbie, using a normal name like "Scott Osman" or "Miranda Mocco" helps sets the precedent that you're not a bot out to spam.

2.It's all About Looks: Your Avatar.  This needs to be unique from other users and if possible, consistent across social networking sites.  I threw a relatively ugly yellow border around my image, as an easy way for people to indicate it's me.  Check out some successful avatars and get a little feedback on what people think of yours. http://avatarwall.com/toprated.  Again, I found that as a newbie, people like seeing a face, it makes communicating more friendly, but as always different people like different things.

3.Hang Out in the Cool Places: Share Your Profiles!  Digg permits members to share tons of profile links, be sure to take advantage of this so your future friends can easily contact you.  Be sure to include your: Twitter, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gchat, last.fm, facebook, linked in, reddit, and stumble upon profiles. 

4.Make friends with the popular crowd.  Long ago Digg had a top users list (sometimes referred to as the "holy grail"), but it was deleted.  I used an alternative list set up by SocialBlade to friend top active diggers.
By friending them, you will become their "fan" whereby you receive updates on their Digg activities; it is only when they accept you as a friend that your status is certified as "mutual friends" and your activity will be received by them.

5.Identify stylish trends: Pin Pointing Submissions with Front Page Potential.  How do you find the high potential articles when the majority of submissions are spam with one or two Diggs?  First and foremost, digg your friends submissions as they appear, especially if the friend sends a "shout" (like a facebook wall post) promoting a certain submission.  You're allowed 200 diggs a day - depending on how much of a life you have, try to use all 200.
I'm a huge fan of the Digg Noise Filter, which pulls up articles with your requested number of diggs in it.  Or try the Flash based Digg Watcher.

6. Back Stabbing: Talk about your Friends.  I cannot stress this one enough.  You must comment on submissions, and the more people who vote up your comment, the more recognition you get.  

I've certainly struggled to figure out what makes a popular comment; supporting Obama, comic book heroes, and protests all seem to be green lights.  Whitty banter, sarcasm, and jokes are usually popular, and comments like "interesting submission" often get a thumbs down for being too obvious. 
Being one of the first people to comment on an article that goes to the front page is a great way to build up your recognition.  People who view the article will see your comment as it appears at the top of the page, hence more are likely to vote it a thumbs up, and hopefully friend you.  
Check out where your popular friends are commenting and be sure to "reply" to their comments.  This will call attention to yourself and hopefully be enough to convince them to friend you back.

Spend about 1 month following the above rules.  In part II (which will also take me about 1 month to write!) I'll go over great strategies for submitting content that gets notable traffic.  In the mean time, get commenting!

Some time ago Avinash Kaushik the web analytics Guru said: "Analyzing data in aggregate is a crime against humanity". No we're not talking about the last episode of Dexter but about the visitors to your website.  Segmentation has become one of the most important thing you should do to understand traffic to your website and hence your business.


So why is visitor segmentation so important?

It is simply the breaking of your site visitors into groups and examining traffic and conversion data for those specific groups.  Actually, in Google Analytics, you can perform advanced visitor segmentation and see the number of visits, the average number of pages viewed per visit, and conversion rates for different groups of visitors (example analysis of visitors from different locations).

Google Analytics provides a number of default segments like New, Returning, Paid and Non-Paid Visitors, Search, Direct and Referral Traffic.  But you can also create your own custom segments. For example you could find yourself segmenting branded search vs non-branded search terms for organic and paid traffic.  Why segmenting all these? Because looking at 'all' your figures that in average does not mean a lot. Figures like 'Average Time on Site' does not mean a lot since it is too broad. To find the real actionable insights we need to break our analytics data and split the various sources, behaviour, goals and outcomes.  In brief we need to focus on the details as far as possible.  Because trying to make strategic decision based on global data can simply lead our business to failure.


Ok, let's now really ask why we should segment our visitors and customers and think about the 'real' reasons for these.

In today's, highly competitive world successful companies realise that the nurturing of high-value, faithful, recurring, pleased and lucrative customers is the key solution for having long lasting profits and help the business stay afloat.  In fact, I totally believe that it is imperative for organisations to properly identify their customers. No company can afford to offer the premier level of service to all its customers without really knowing who they are. 

Therefore calculating the visitors' and customers' value to the company enable us to know better the different types of customers we have and therefore put us in a better position to allocate valuable resources to different types of visitors/customers.   After discovery of those different customer classes we can approach different type of customers differently, like proposing appropriate products at appropriate prices for a particular segment.

For exemple: Advanced segmentation could let you see what are the web pages that are most visited by visitors who came on your site by typing brand keywords. And also what are the products that they bought?

Another common term 'Customer Differentiation' is in fact the segmentation of the high-value and high-potential customers but also the identification and separation of the least cost-effective customers. This process is important to know who the company want to serve, it involves the effort to understand what the customer really wants, what are the customers worth or potential.  After discovering valuable information about customers we are is in a better position to give priority to the most profitable ones. We can also decide what to do with the least cost-effective customers.

For exemple: It is useful to discover who are the customers that purchased more than one items on your website, and/or who are the ones that purchased again.  Then based on these figures we could deploy more effort to a particular 'segment' of our customers.

One way of differentiating customers is by establishing a baseline for the servicing cost of all customers.  The segmentation of all customers should then be done to represent them in figures. After that we evaluate actual and strategic value of all the different types of customers (segments) and finally compare the customer value figures to the baseline established before and consequently make appropriate strategic decisions accordingly.  The following graph shows an example of how customer segmentation, customer value and the servicing cost baseline can be represented for decision-making purposes.

Customers in the 'Tier 1' are actually the most valued customers with the highest actual and strategic value, they can be considered as the company's very important customers (VIP) and all effort must be made not to lose them.

Whereas the last group (tier 5) is well below the customer service cost baseline and has also a very low strategic value, appropriate decisions can then be made by managers concerning those customers classified under this group.  For example: keep them with expectations that they can be more lucrative later or simply fire them?

As said by Brett Crosby,  the Manager of  Google Analytics : "Segmentation can help you perform better through an economic downturn and go with what works, find new ways to drive revenue, find the right segments, working for them and invest there to increase their conversions."