I’m constantly looking for ways to get a better understanding of how sites rank for keywords in organic search results.  And, while there are plenty of tools out there to help you analyze your web site, one that is often overlooked is Google Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools, a free Google product, was often seen as a simple tool good only for ensuring your site was submitted to Google and that there were no problems with how your site was being indexed by search engines.  Recent changes have provided far more richer uses to the web site owner (webmaster) or marketer.  Here’s some of the reasons why you should use Webmaster Tools if you aren’t already.  And, if you haven’t stopped by in awhile, why you may want to go give it another look:

Google Webmaster Tools can help you

1. Get your web site indexed effectively.  Webmaster Tools leverages XML Sitemaps (provided by the site owner) to index the content you want indexed considered.  The XML Sitemaps that Webmaster Tools accepts are standard to the industry, also being supported by Yahoo and Bing.  Beyond the basic Sitemaps which define a website structure.  Sitemaps can also be created to provide information about different types of content, including videos, news, code, mobile and even geographic information.
2. Ensure Google serves your content to your geographic location or the world.  Webmaster Tools has setting that allow you to specify what country you wish to target users in.  The default setting is that Google assumes your content is International, but, for instance, if you are only concerned about people in your Country, the setting is a quick click away.
3. Help you move a website to a new domain.  Called a “Change of address” in Webmaster Tools, advice is provided to do a (hopefully) worry-free migration.
4. Assist in troubleshooting reasons why a site isn’t being indexed as you’d hoped.  Webmaster Tools has a whole section called Diagnostics which provides reports on malware being present on your server, crawl errors and statistics, and HTML suggestions where Google might think you need a hand.  Crawl errors are especially helpful to find errors in your site structure, sitemap file, or pages that were moved but never accounted for so users can find them.  HTML suggestions help out by reporting problems with Meta and Title tags.
5. Know how you’re ranking on Google searches.  This is a feature that has recently been updated, and although I’ve heard of varying accounts of its accuracy, it is  worth knowing about.  Google provides data on top search queries resulting in the display of your site in search results as well as how many clickthroughs resulted.  Knowing that you’re getting a good deal of search impressions but not clickthroughs helps determine ways to optimize your title and meta description tags.
6. Know who links to your site, where, and how.  Webmaster Tools isn’t the best in the business for this, but it’s certainly welcomed data.  Aptly named, “Links to your site,” a series report shows how many links from internal and external sites each page has as well as what the linking anchor text is.
7. Know how Google ‘sees’ your site.  By combining a few different reports, you can form a decent understanding of how your site structure, internal and external links are effecting your Google rankings.  The Keywords reports provides, in descending order, what the most common keywords are on your site and what their significance is.  Analyzing that report in conjunction with the linking structure of your site provides clues to what’s ranking and what’s not.  Other more direct way to see how Google interacts with your site include the “Fetch as Googlebot” functionality (available in the Labs section) as well as the “Site performance” report which coaches you on where speed improvements might be made.

Resources for those interested in Google Webmaster Tools:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Webmaster Tools Help
• About XML Sitemaps
• Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress
• More about creating and submitting Sitemaps from Google

And, if there’s something specific you’ve read here and want to know more about (or have another feature you value in Webmaster Tools), let me know below.

This week Google has announced a few new twists for marketers who use its AdWords advertising program.

One allows marketers an opportunity to re-engage visitors who clicked-through to their site but left with out converting.  The other helps marketers understand how visitors interact with the ads they have placed on Google.com prior to committing a conversion.  AdWords Remarketing and Search Funnels in brief:

AdWords Remarketing

• analogous to what other providers call retargeting
• allows an opportunity to re-engage with visitors who clicked on an ad, did not convert, and then visited another site on the Google Content Network
• multiple Remarketing campaigns can run simultaneously

Of the two announcements, this is the one that I’m the most excited to.  Just to paint the picture simply, I’ll leverage the example from the AdWords blog:

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.

There’s a lot of opportunity here, and I can’t wait to do some real-world tests.

AdWords Retargeting is alive and kicking, patiently waiting for you to tinker with it in the AdWords Dashboard.

AdWords Search Funnels

• shows user interaction with AdWords advertisers ads over time
• creates relationships between views, clicks and conversions
• provides the following new reports in the AdWords dashboard: Top Conversions, Search Funnels, Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length

So, in short, Search Funnels provides a much broader view of how users are exposed to and interact with AdWords Ads overtime leading up to conversions.

Search Funnels sounded relatively tame to me until I watched the explanatory video in the post on the AdWords blog.

A lot of the data sounds good.  Maybe the person who does the Google product geek-to-human translation was on sabbatical when the video was pulled together.  Learn more about AdWords Funnels on the AdWords Blog.  Search Funnels are available in the AdWords Dashboard.

Which of these will have more impact on your future AdWords marketing activities?

There’s a lot of love about online marketing from a strategic standpoint.  Possibly the biggest differentiator between online marketing and other marketing methods is the degree to which it can be tracked.  After launching a website, social media presence, or campaign, the next logical step is to understand and optimize the performance you’re receiving.

While marketers often rely on industry best practices, past performance, and trends to optimize performance, one method of optimization seems to often get swept under the rug: A/B and/or multivariate testing.  A/B and multi-what?  Let’s start with what Wikipedia says and bring it down a notch:

A/B Testing

A/B testing, split testing, or bucket testing is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates.

In layman’s terms, two (or several) different versions of an ad, email, or web page are tested and measured to see which one performs best.  Pretty straightforward.  The two promotional banners below could be tested to see which encouraged more sales.

Multivariate Testing

This method is different than multivariate testing which applies statistical modeling which allows a tester to try multiple variables within the samples distributed.

Again, in (hopefully more) simple English, multivariate testing allows you to identify several items on a page, for example,  that for each, you wish to test different one or several different options.  An example would be an email where you want to test three different headlines, two alternate images, as well as three variations of the call-to-action to see which combination is the most successful.

Sounds great. Nah, I’m not interested

The goal of these testing methods is to serve the best possible option to the end-user and in doing so to optimize performance.  So, why doesn’t everyone run tests like this?

Here are three common reasons that A/B Multivariate testing isn’t done:

1. “It costs too much money”
   Unless budgets are incredibly constrained, this shouldn’t be an issue.  Testing doesn’t have to be expensive, especially with the tools available today, including free one’s like Google’s Website Optimizer (note that Website Optimizer is for just that-websites, not email, ads or other media).  And, if you’re working with an agency, they likely have tools that they’ve already licensed.  The cost is then limited to concepting the different versions and putting the test in place.
2. “We tried it once and didn’t see much of a difference between versions”
   You definitely won’t hit a home run every time.  Just because testing on one occasion revealed that between the options tested there wasn’t much of a difference, that doesn’t mean that nothing should be tested.
3. “We know better”
   Clients often simply think that they understand their offering, brand and customer so well that testing is just a waste of time and money.  While I can understand (and respect) a client’s knowledge and intimacy with their brand, what sometimes comes to light is that what performs best can defy common logic or perceived wisdom.  Sometimes the consumer just sees it differently from their side of the equation.

What you don’t know can cost you money

To put it as bluntly as possible, if you don’t test something you simply won’t know if it could have performed better.

Yes, you can run tests and find that other options offer marginable, offer only negligible gains, or offer even worse results.  But, you may also find out that there’s an option that performs significantly better, sometimes by a long shot, pushing the impact of your marketing dollars far further.

If your budget allows for it, I’d recommend testing when it makes sense.

Some final advice

First of all, you certainly don’t need to test everything.  That tagline that the new guy brought up in the marketing meeting that clearly sucked will still suck no matter how many ways you test it.

A great way to get started is to test something that will effect the return on your marketing investment.  Possibly an email that is going out that has a call-to-action to redeem an offer or sign up for a seminar, or a landing page on your website where you drive paid marketing traffic and hope for a conversion.

To find a great candidate for testing, identify something that has created some uncertainty internally.  Are you struggling with two subject lines that both state the same thing, just with a different tone?  Are you considering changing the placement or styling of a form?  Wondering if you might capture more leads if less information were required of the visitor?  Each of these situations would create a great testing opportunity.

A few A/B/Multivariate testing resources that might help you:

• Google Website Optimizer
  Google Website Optimizer is designed for testing landing pages for Google AdWords campaigns.  The tool is made available for free by Google.
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
  The blog for Website Optimizer has great ideas and results from real-world tests.
• Which Site Won
  This site is really enlightening if you’re considering testing. Marketing agency consultant Jay Baer of Convince and Convert recently tweeted about it and I wish I would have stumbled across it long ago.  The site shows results of A/B tests, and even lets you play along and see if you can pick which version performed better prior to seeing the actual results.
• Marketing Experiments
  They’ve been running tests for quite some time over at Marketing Experiments, and they provide their results in succinct, easy to understand terms.
• 15+ Free A/B Split Testing Resources
  There’s a good round-up of free resources available on the Internet for A/B testing on this Wingify blog post.  Definitely worth a read.  If you like the post, browse the other blog entries on Wingify… They’re all about testing.

Good luck!

Last night at the Social Media Club Phoenix meeting one quick tip that came up was how you can view statistics on any link created with the URL shortner bit.ly.  In the event you’re thinking “Why would I do that?,” go try it on a bit.ly link one of your competitors made with bit.ly, not your own.  Got it?  Here’s the (incredibly simple) way to do it:

1. Copy the entire bit.ly link
2. Paste it into the address bar in any web browser
3. Add a ‘+’ after the bit.ly link
4. Hit return

You’ll be directed to a bit.ly page that shows the statistics for that link.  Nice.

One word of caution: bit.ly does occasionally start offering up the same shortened bit.ly URL when a strong demand for the exact same link comes up.  Do click on the “Referrers” link on the bit.ly statistics page and you’ll get a better idea if this is the link you created or one that bit.ly is giving to a lot of others also.

Credit goes to Jeff Widman for the tip (@JeffWidman, BrandGlue).  Thanks Jeff!

Analytics is a no-brainer. For any marketing program I work on, getting analytics setup, and setup right, is a prerequisite. Well, apparently that puts me into one of two classes of marketers: those who use analytics and those who don’t.

Surprisingly, my group is the smaller, not larger one.

A recent study by Alterian reveals that less than half of professional marketers use analtyics to measure their campaigns.  Is employing analytics really all that difficult?  Apparently it is.  A press release regarding the study noted that nearly a third “…of those surveyed cite analyzing results as the hardest part of any campaign.”

Not only is apathy for performance measurement en vogue, how a website fits into the marketing mix is askew:

One-fifth of respondents claimed that their website was only ‘basic’ and not at the core of its marketing activity, but with increased investment predicted in online marketing channels, companies need to better understand the importance of the website in effectively underpinning its online presence.  This demonstrates a need for companies to better understand the channels available to them before investing their marketing funds.

Time to back up and get the basics in check, especially in a time when every marketing dollar counts.

Jobless claims are on the rise, housing foreclosures are spiraling out of control and our government is at odds about what to do to straighten things out.  In times like these, companies often find themselves paralyzed, trying to guess how consumers will react, and more importantly where dollars will be spent.  How can search engines help us make some rational, informed online marketing decisions?

In the book The Search author John Battelle describes Google as “a database of intentions.” If you prescribe to that classification, the Google tools I’m going to employ will provide some interesting insight into shopper intentions and how that information can be leveraged.  The first tool I’m going to use is Google Insights for Search.  Insights for Search is another Google Experiment, this time one that allows one to peer inside the volume of keyword (or phrase) searches over time and geographical regions.  Let’s see what we can learn.

What can Google tell us about Valentine’s Day shopping?

Our hypothesis will be that people are still shopping online, but they’re likely looking to get a bargain.  The hypothesis ins’t a stroke of genius, but the devil is in the details.  If we’re going to launch a campaign or put some copy on our homepage regarding our holiday deals, let’s use words that resonate with online shoppers.  Further, since we’re theoretically doing this exercise the week before the holiday, Pay-per-Click is a definite medium we would target.  We’d want to know not only what keywords we might want to focus on for our ads to display, but also what keywords to place in generalized ads to get Internet searcher’s attention.

Let’s take a look at the frequency of terms being searched upon in the United States over the past couple of years using Insights for Search.  The search phrases I’m going to take a look at are:

• Valentine’s Day
• Valentine’s Day roses
• Cheap Valentine’s Day gift
• Valentine’s Day specials
• Valentine’s deals
• Valentine’s discount

Search volume for “Valentine’s Day”

Let’s start by looking up a generalized term about the holiday to use as a baseline for interest overall around the topic over time.  The graph below shows search volume for “Valentine’s Day” from January of 2007 until February of 2009 in the United States.  To be sure we’re focused on shopping, we’ve restricted our inquiry to the “Shopping” category.   The February ’09 data for this year, term and region is reported to the current week, but we’ll focus on the week before the holiday for all of our analysis.

• 2007: 60
• 2008: 48
• 2009: 53
  

Before we move forward, let’s be clear about what these numbers mean. The numbers on the graph do not allow us to understand the total number of searches for this term in the United States. I’ll let Google tell you what the numbers mean as opposed to paraphrasing:

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals.

If I check the points on the graph, last week’s number (the week before Valentine’s Day) registers 60. The week before Valentine’s Day in ’08 is lower, at 48, and that week in ’07 clocked in at 53.  This shows an increase in the volume of shopping related searches for “Valentine’s Day” for the week before Valentine’s Day this year in the United States as compare to the previous two years.

For the purpose of this exercise, I’m also going to scale data to a 100 point scale when our results fail to do so to make comparisons easier.  Here’s what that will look like for the aforementioned data:

• 2007: 60 (100)
• 2008: 48 (80)
• 2009: 53 (88)

As above, when data is extrapolated to a 100 point scale I’ll include it in parenthesis.  Graph data will not be changed.

Not following the trend

So, we’ve established that the volume of searches for Valentine’s Day gifts the week before the holiday has increased considerably in comparison to the two previous years.  To help illustrate our point regarding the discount terms, I’m going to run an example non-discounted term: “Valentine’s Day roses.”

Search volume for “Valentine’s Day roses”

Below is our result.  Search volume is fairly close to 2008 levels, both of which years are lower than 2007.

• 2007: 62 (100)
• 2008: 43 (69)
• 2009: 42 (68)

So, what about the thrifty shopper?

Moving on to bargain hunting, let’s run the same time period but try some phrases that would show people searching with the intent of finding discounted Valentine’s Day gifts. After trying a few phrases and seeing volume increases that were generally aligned with the increase in searches for “Valentine’s Day,” I found several that also showed strong upticks, specifically around the idea of getting a bargain.

Search volume for “Cheap Valentine’s Day gift”

This first graph is for “Cheap Valentine’s Day gift.” For the weeks preceding Valentine’s day, 2007′s interest level is at 40, 2008′s is 36, and 2009 holds the top end (100). So, while shopping-related searches have increased for the term “Valentine’s Day,” searches for those looking for a cheap Valentine’s Day gift have also increased, but to a much more significant degree.

• 2007: 40
• 2008: 36
• 2009: 100

Let’s look for more terms and see if we can find higher variances while still reflecting intent.

Search volume: “Valentine’s Day specials”

Another term I thought that might indicate an intention to find a deal was the phrase “Valentine’s Day specials.” Again, the result shows the same trend.

• 2007: 31 (62)
• 2008: 28 (56)
• 2009: 50 (100)

Search volume: “Valentine’s deals”

Bingo. “Deals” seems to be a word that people are using far more when shopping for Valentine’s Day this year and looking for a bargain.  Do note that I dropped “Days” from the phrase as I wasn’t getting results, but felt “Valentine’s” would be enough of a qualifier.  Take a look:

• 2007: 19
• 2008: 29
• 2009: 100

Search volume: “Valentine’s discount”

“Valentine’s discount,” the last phrase I’m including, follows suit with a considerable uptick.

• 2007: 41
• 2008: 42
• 2009: 100

Do we have any actionable data yet?

Not really.  We still need more information to paint the full picture.  If we were going to use this information to understand linguistics and what words were being used more frequently when shopping online for Valentine’s Day compared to previous years, this data is helpful.  But, we really need to get a better idea of how much search volume we’re talking about.

If a phrase was searched on three times during the week before Valentine’s Day in 2008 and 10 times the week before Valentine’s Day this year, we’d see a huge volume increase year-over-year, but creating a marketing campaign based upon that information wouldn’t be the wisest move.

In my next post I’ll take what I’ve learned so far and leverage another of Google’s tools to show how this information could be used to make online marketing decisions.

If you’re an online marketer one of the sharpest tools in your toolbox is your analytics package.  Once you’ve established goals for your site, built it to perform and have begun marketing it, analytics provides the most effective means of measuring your effectiveness.

Non e-commerce web sites often measure their success based on the averages analytics tools provide.  Does average page views per visit or average time spent on site sound familiar?  If so, the video below is worth your time.  In it web analytics professional Avinash Kaushik lectures on how averages can blind us from seeing the valuable data that can drive effective decision making.

If you enjoy this video, consider Avinash’s book Web Analytics and Hour a Day, and add his web analytics blog to your feed reader.

Every client I work with wants a relative measure of how they compare to their competition online. The standard measuring stick is traffic. For years Alexa has been providing a ranking based upon traffic (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), but they didn’t provide what they felt those traffic numbers were. Instead, they provided (and still provide) a relative measure, rank, based upon their collection methods.

Today, there are other options, and ones that go far beyond a relative rankings system or even traffic. For the price (free), no one provides more information than Quantcast. Before we dive in, here’s how Quantcast defines themselves:

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites and services. Only Quantcast combines directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver accurate third-party metrics and easy-to-read profiles on digital media properties.

Here’s a quick overview of some of what you can learn about your competitors on Quantcast’s web site:

• Visits per month
• People per month (individual visitors)
• Gender, age, household income, ethnicity and more of domestic traffic

That’s far more than you’ll find over at Alexa. But, there’s more. Beyond traffic and demographic information, Quantcast also provides:

• Brand and site affinities
• Other sites with similar audiences

Let’s take a look at some of that data. Here’s some sample Quantcast data for John Battelle’s Searchblog (http://battellemedia.com)

Here’s some information Quantcast provides:

• People – Global: 36,884
• People – U.S.: 23,461
• Average Page Views/Visit – US: 1.33 US
• Average Page Views/Visit – Global: 1.31
• 62% of traffic is Male, 38% Female
• The household income for 64% of visitors is between $30,000 an $100,000
• The majority of visitors, 70%, are 35 or over
• Visitors have brand & site affinities for telegraph.co.uk and the Washington Post

How Quantcast arrives at the information it provides is through the combination of panel data and directly measured data. Not all sites on Quantcast are providing directly measurable data, however. John Battelle’s Searchblog is, and you can tell that because on the report page for the web site, there is a “Quantified Publisher” icon toward the top of the page. This indicates that this web site has placed a tracking script on each page of the web site, allowing Quantcast to directly measure (and share) site usage information. If this icon isn’t present, the data Quantcast provides is not nearly as accurate.

Just to be clear, providing competitive metrics isn’t why Quantcast exists. That said, by the nature of the information it provides Quantcast can be used for competitive metrics. If you leverage it for competitive research be sure you understand how Quantcast collects information. If you’re making decisions based on what Quantcast (or any other data provider offers) the first step is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your data source.

I know two places: Sphinn and gooruze. Both are created by online marketers for online marketers. Sphinn takes a Digg-like approach whereas gooruze takes a more social route. If you’re in the industry, both are worth a look.

My gooruze page: smcandrew.gooruze.com
My Sphinn profile: smcandrew on Sphinn

On the heels of Yahoo’s announcement of their acquisition of web analytics purveyor IndexTools, Yahoo announced that the tool will be made available free of charge.

There are some caveats.  Current IndexTools customers will be required to sign a standard Yahoo! agreement, and at this time the freebie won’t be for everyone.  The masses will have to wait until a later release to take advantage of the tool.  During that time Yahoo will likely be tightly integrating IndexTools with their complimentary offerings.

So here’s the analytics landscape by search provider:

• Google’s analytics tool: Google Analytics
• Microsoft’s analytics tool: adCenter Analytics (previously “Gatineau”)
• Yahoo’s analytics tool: IndexTools (for now)
• Ask’s analytics tool: Nothing to speak of. They do have “the algorithm” for whatever that’s worth.

Although I’ve never used Index Tools but I’m more than excited to see another compelling offering at no charge.

More on Yahoo and IndexTools:

• IndexTools web site
• IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics goes FREE! – VisualRevenue