The Art Of SEO - The Science Of PPC

  • SEO Secrets
  • Web Content
  • Match Intent
  • User Interface
  • Speaking Engagements
  • Company
    • Team
    • Contact

November 18, 2006 by Jonah Stein Leave a Comment

Comparative Analytics Study

Tweet

The ROIGuy has teamed up with Eric Enge from StoneTemple Consulting to conduct a comparative study of the leading analytics platforms. The ROIGuy will be leading the PPC analytics while Eric will take charge of the SEO side. We hope to have some preliminary results early in 2007.

Eric had already got the ball rolling by convincing following analytics firms to provide their software free for a few months to help test and compare against one another:

Omniture
WebSideStory
Indextools
ClickTracks
Google Analytics
Webtrends

We are still seeking participating sites, so if you have a monthly CPC budget of more than $50,000, you handle your campaign in house and you want to run six analytic packages on your site for a while, drop an email to jstein@alchemistmedia.com and eenge@stonetemple.com for consideration.

Filed Under: Measuring ROI, Search Engine Marketing

October 10, 2006 by Jonah Stein 1 Comment

6 Reasons Jakob Nielsen’s Blog Participation Analysis is Flawed

Tweet

You can always prove your point by defining what to measure. Jakob Nielsen is a renowned pundit, the leading evangelist for measuring results of user interface design and one of the most experienced and influential voices in design. His October 9th Alertbox shows how even the best pundits can fall into the trap of drawing conclusions using measurements from incompatible systems.
Nielsen’s intent is laudable. He contends that the vast majority of users are consumers of content instead of creators and is urging site operators to make participation easier.
User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

* 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).

* 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.

* 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
Nielsen goes afoul when he talks about blogs, “There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.”
“There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. This analysis has three fundamental flaws.
1. Nielsen takes the broadest measurement of internet users and the narrowest definition of a blog, posts using one of the popular blog publishing platforms such as WordPress that happen to report postings to Technorati. The total number of internet users is not the same as the number of blog readers. To assume that even half of that 1.1 billion “users” would recognize a blog as being a blog defies credibility so it makes no sense to count them when measuring participation. Does someone who has never been to a site count as a lurker or passive participant?
2. Comparing measurements of different values from two different systems is unreliable. It is perfectly reasonable to compare the measurement of the same value from two different measurement systems to compare the measurement approach. You can’t do analysis with measurements tfrom two different system without normalizing the data.

  • Technorati is an American-centric company that doesn’t claim to have an even global penetration.
  • Blogging is a new phenomenon that has only been in the public eye since 2003. According to Technorati sources, the number of blogs doubles every six months. The August figure of 55 million will be around 110 million by February of 2007. It is approaching 70 or 75 million as of the middle of October.

3. The biggest problem is the definition of “blog”? Blogging is a term that embraces much more than the enabling technology. It isn’t about posting your opinion in Word Press; it is about adding your thoughts, opinions and analysis into the public discussion. Nielsen’s AlertBox, for example, is an opt-in electronic newsletter that is also posted to his site. The content he writes is widely discussed in blogs and gets its share of links from the blogosphere. The only reason AlertBox is not a “blog” is that the technology he uses to publish. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that mixing a broad definition of users and a limited definition of participants produces lopsided results.
Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.” Nielsen disappoints again on this point in three ways.
4. Nielsen defines daily participation as the threshold for determining whether someone is a regular contributor to the discussion. His definition stipulates that quantity of posts is the only thing worth analysis. Take Alertbox as an example again. Since 1995, Nielsen has published his column roughly twice a week or about 260 times over 11 years. By his definition of participation, one of the most widely read column on User Interface and Design, written by one of the leading experts on the topic, counts as an occasional contributor.
5. He ignores comments as a form of participation in the blogosphere. Most blogs have at least a few comments and many have hundreds or even thousands. It is hard to justify not including these as participation.
6. The last issue on this point is how he crunches the numbers. Technorati’s measurements are “ancient” as judged by the historical rate of change. Still, if we accept 55 million blogs and 1.6 million posts/day, 2.9% of bloggers post EVERY DAY. If we use a more reasonable threshold like posting once a week or even once a month, participation in the blogosphere may be as high as 10 or 15%.
The 90-9-1 analysis ignores that fact that users are in multiple communities. A user who is a devoted participant in the Amazon community for example, one who has read thousands of books and posted reviews for each, can hardly be expected to be a daily blogger as well, but do you count him as a lurker?
You can prove almost any point with statistics and measurements tailored to your definition. If you want data for reliable decision making, you need to be more thoughtful in your approach.

Technorati Profile

Filed Under: Measuring ROI, Punditry

September 29, 2006 by Jonah Stein 1 Comment

Measuring ROI

Tweet

Dave Morgan had a great piece today on Online Spin about emerging trends among traditional brand advertisers, “These days, all marketers want measurable results related to sales objectives from their advertising and marketing expenditures, particularly online.”

Dave hits one nail on the head. ROI metrics and accountability are addictive. This kind of data seductively leaves the decision making to the return and takes the risk out of marketing investments. Unquestionably, advertisers will continue to strive for ROI measurability and online marketing is more appealing to ROI based decision makers.

Marketers who believe they can accurately quantify the impact of their online advertising, whether SEM or Brand, do so at their own risk. Every analytic system I have ever used is flawed; the assumptions and methodologies inherent in each approach creates measurement error.

One critical element to watch out for is that ROI for keyword search frequently appears as brand search.

  • Customers will find you searching for keywords and then return searching for your brand or some variation/misspelling of the brand.
  • Customers will find you on one computer and return via direct navigation or brand search from another computer to purchase.
  • Customers will enter the URL’s in the search box instead of the address bar (perhaps as high as 15% of users) so direct navigation shows as brand search.
  • Brand searches are frequently latent conversions from keyword searches.
  • Depending on the cookie setting of your analytics system, you may or may not capture this first touch.
  • Referrer data isn’t always preserved through caches and browsers. Firefox users on MSN, for example, will show up as direct searches instead of tagged with a natural search keyword.

I just finished a three month contract for a startup. Despite deploying sophisticated, redundant analytic systems (Google Analytics and ClickShift’s Statistical Bid Management, only half of the orders in the first three months were tracked and many were reported as direct navigation or searches for the brand.

You might expect this for a mature brand with a large repeat customer base, but it defies logic for a startup that was still only using CPC for marketing. Since we had a small data set, I was able to research the orders individually and attribute the source and term for each record in the customer table.

You wouldn’t want to try to repeat that method with 10,000 orders, but the result was a 200% increase in the reported ROI for the CPC campaign. Individually or combined, the analytics systems didn’t produce accurate enough data for decision making.

The only way to really understand ROI from each channel and search term is to find ways to get a customer to login as quickly as possible, while the referral data is as fresh and accurate as possible. Incorporate that referral/source data directly into the Customer_Id table and import all sales information into internal systems to produce the ROI measurement.

If you do not have an initial source associated with a customer record, make it a goal in every customer interaction (survery, customer service call, etc.) to obtain that information. This allows you to accurately attribute revenue to the marketing investment and track every additional touch point that generates a visit regardless of source, medium or computer. With that kind of data on hand, you have a baseline to begin to understand the value of each advertising channel. Then your ROI based decisions can be good ones.

Filed Under: Measuring ROI, Search Engine Marketing

August 4, 2006 by Jonah Stein 2 Comments

Direct Mail That Works

Tweet

Color printing is a high impact marketing tool — when you know how to use it.
The difference between ho hum results and hitting the ball out of the park is a great print piece. One that combines an attention grabbing image with a catchy message that is right on target for your audience. It isn’t enough to slam some stock photographs together with your logo and a snappy message with Word and send them off to your favorite online postcard printer.

Marketing with printing is a combination of art and science. The art begins with the synergy of the message and design. In the last 10 years working with marketers, creative teams and graphic designers, watching them struggle through the process of developing marketing collateral, I have witnessed the best and the worst results of this colaboration. I have seen tens of thousands of different postcard jobs leaving our shop on the way to the customer. I have received twice that many pieces in the mail. The bottom line is that something is either a great piece or it isn’t worth sending.

I have learned one simple way to know if the piece is ready to send. Show your final three designs to 10 customers or other impartial people. If 6 out of 10 don’t pick the piece you want to print, and like it, you aren’t ready to mail it. If more than 8 out of 10 pick the piece you like, you should pick people who are not afraid of you.

The science is easier to explain than it is to practice. Successful print marketing begins like any other successful marketing…with the ability to measure. Many companies will heavily invest in testing and usability studies for their website and spend countless hours staring at web analytic programs trying to fine tune their Search Engine Marketing, then throw their hands up when it come to measuring direct mail. Marketers too often claim that there is no way to measure the effectiveness of a postcard mailing campaign. This claim is born out of laziness.
Measuring effectiveness is more difficult than say, online CPC advertising, but this is simply a challenge requires creative solutions.

  • Ask customers where they heard about you. If your business has a strong repeat customer base, make it a priority to discover the source of EVERY CUSTOMER. Add this objective to your CRM system and offer an incentive to your staff every time they find out where a customer originated.
  • Match new customers to your mailing list and identify records that match.
  • Add a coupon as your call to action.
  • Use a special 800 number for each postcard or list

Filed Under: Measuring ROI, Random Thoughts

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2

Topics

  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Measuring ROI
  • Punditry
  • Random Thoughts
  • RANT
  • Search Engine Marketing
  • Speaking

recent

  • Think Like a Search Engine: SMX West 2016
  • UnGagged Las Vegas 11-9-2015
  • Performance Marketing Summit
  • Building Your Hummingbird Feeder
  • July Search Quality Updates

Intent Focused SEM

SEO and Pay Per Click landing pages should almost always be designed with the same content and the same layout because search engines reward on-page and on-site factors by trying to emulate human users as they crawl the page and navigate the

Copyright © 2022 · Executive Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in