Doug Hall, who heads up our conversion and analytics team tells you all you need to know about the problem and how to solve it.

http://www.conversionworks.co.uk/blog/2011/02/25/how-self-referrals-harm-your-web-anaytics-data/

But not having to commute anymore is only one in a long list of reasons that the move to Webexpectations has been so positive. From day one I was impressed at how dedicated and focused the team is on driving and measuring conversions. Boosting conversion rates is absolutely at the core of the business and this ethic is greatly inherent in the mindset of every employee. It’s also great to be working for one of the few UK agencies to have received quadruple accreditation from Google – a reflection of our ability to provide fully comprehensive, leading solutions for our clients.

Here’s a bit about what I’ve been up to since joining the team:

Onboarding of New Business

Following the acquirement of six new PPC accounts over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know the clients and working with them to identify their advertising goals. In addition, researching, planning and implementing effective campaign strategies to ensure that the end result delivers exactly what the clients set out to do.

We currently manage the PPC activity for 14 clients, the success of which has largely stemmed from these initial but important stages of the onboarding process.

Google Advanced Exam

In November I took and passed Google’s Search Advertising Advanced Exam which covered advanced best practices for managing AdWords campaigns. This happened around the same time that as an agency, we gained accreditation as a Google AdWords Certified Partner which replaced our existing status as an AdWords Qualified Company. The new qualification recognises to an even greater extent than before, the skill and expertise upheld by our team which is demonstrated to clients on a daily basis.

Internal AdWords Training

Here at Webexpectations we harness a culture of knowledge-sharing and cross-learning. So I have been doing my bit by putting on my teacher hat and providing AdWords training for some colleagues, starting with the basics and moving on to more advanced techniques in later sessions.

Large Scale Optimisations

As any PPC practitioner knows, the search landscape is constantly changing due to a number of external influences such as competition, seasonality and consumer demand that are outside of an advertiser’s control. As a result, small and regular campaign optimisations in an effort to remain competitive are sometimes not enough so more drastic action is needed such as a campaign restructure. This is something I’ve rolled out for several clients over the past few months.

Testing

Mobile, location extensions, product extensions, sitelinks, Google Remarketing, Google Display Advertising, AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), broad-match modifier, enhanced CPC, Display Campaign Optimiser, click to call tracking, Facebook, YouTube – you name it, we’ve tested/are testing it.

Watch this space for future blogs case-studying successful tests in more detail!

At Webexpectations not only do we design user friendly websites that are built to convert visitors into customers we build web sites that are search engine friendly. As a Google Certified partner WE feel this is a factor of the up most importance.

Why is being search engine friendly important?

For any organisation looking to develop a new website ensuring its search engine (or Google) friendly is a big deal. No-one is going to thank you if 2 weeks after launch your website is incompatible with Google!

Search engine friendly means your website is:

• Accessible to search engine spiders
• Easy for Google, Yahoo! and Bing to index and understand
• Ready to go should you wish to pursue an aggressive search engine marketing campaign

The key point is what happens if your site isn’t search engine friendly? You’re invisible to Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Ouch! This hurts. It also means that if you want to market your website in search engines then organic or natural listings aren’t an option (although you can still use Pay Per Click advertising).

The difference between Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

It so important we include if for FREE!

We passionately believe that being search engine friendly is so important we do it for free, as standard with all new build projects. We also have a dedicated specialist (that’s me!) who’s responsible for checking and vetting site’s before they’re launched to make sure they’re in top-tip Google friendliness.

What do we do?

In the rest of the article, we’re going to walk you through what we believe it means to be search engine friendly. Warning this gets a bit techy!

Title Tags

The single most important on-page SEO factor is the title tag. We ensure that all landing pages have unique titles that relate to the page content. By adding either, the keyword, page name, service or product at the start of the title tag it ensures weight is given to this phrase in the search engine results.

Meta Description Tag

To entice people to click on the site within the search engine results you need to have a good description. All landing pages that we launch within a site have a unique description that is compelling enough to entice users to click on it.

Meta Keywords Tag

Although it has been well documented like on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
(http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html that Google doesn’t read the Meta Keywords Tag anymore, we feel it is good etiquette that this tag is still used the correct way.

Separating Style and Behaviour From Page Logic

Separating the style and behaviour is an important step we take anyway for building maintainable web sites but it is also a logical step for creating search engine friendly sites. This means search engines don’t have to read meaningless content and the pages load faster for the user. All styles as well as scripts are included in the page from external files.

Navigation

A search engine friendly web site needs to have accessible navigation, which in essence is achieved by using text based navigation. Navigation that uses flash or images is not search engine friendly and is not accessible for users.

HTML Elements

H1 Tags are probably the most important on-page html element. There should only be one h1 tag per page and it should be filled with what is within the head title tag or something similar. The h1 tag appearing towards the top of the source code is very desirable to search engines, yet it should be located in the most logical position such as at the top of the content area.

Links

If you type “click here” into Google, you will see Abobe Reader as the top result. This is purely because of the amount of web sites that are linking to it with “click here” in the anchor. Links with keyword rich anchors will add weight to the page the link is pointing to. Try and avoid using “click here” as this is not only search engine un-friendly but also has a negative impact on accessibility.

Images

To ensure images are search egnine friendly as well as accessible we ensure alt’s within image tags are used correctly. This is also an important step to take with ensuring the sites HTML is W3 valid.

Search Engine Friendly URL’s

All the sites WE launch have search engine friendly URL’s. A search engine friendly URL is a URL that is easily read by search engines as well as humans such as http://www.mydomain.com/my-services as opposed a long query string full of meaningless values such as http://www.mydomain.com/page.html?id=313&a=57896das4454543dswd45343s.

Webmaster Tools

Adding a web site to Google web master tools is an important step to ensuring your web site is search egnine friendly. In Webmaster tools you guide Google to your XML sitemap which essentially helps the Google Bot spyder your web site more efficiently. Webmaster tools also provides you with the Google Bot crawl data including any errors and your top search queries.

Robots.txt Files

Robots.txt files are the first file a bot will request when spydering your site. This is where you disallow each bot from indexing the site content that you do not want to be accessible to search engines.

301 Redirects

When launching a new site which is replacing an old one WE ensure all old URL’s will have a 301 search engine friendly redirect added to the new one. This is a very important step as not only will it ensure no traffic is lost going to the old URL’s but it will tell the search engines that they need to index the new URL’s in place of the old.

301 WWW Redirects

We also add a www redirect just to make sure that the search engines know the correct address to index. It is possible for Google to read http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com as 2 separate pages, which could potentially trigger a duplicated content issue.

“We’re really pleased to be working with Spurs, not only are they a great client but they have a one of the most recognized brands in the UK. We’ve already got started on helping them to role-out tests and improvements to their site”
Russell Sutton, Managing Director.

Planning your ecommerce business on known, cyclical, seasonal peaks such as holiday seasons is sound practice but something as unreliable as the weather is another thing – weather forecasting is also known as horoscopes with numbers!

One of our clients sells upmarket eye wear.  Whilst analysing their Google Analytics data, ‘gut feel’ started to hint at some weather related factors influencing sales. There were signs of correlation between temperature, rainfall and revenue metrics.  Look at this graph based on weather data and revenue figures – the data has been manipulated for privacy reasons:

It ‘feels’ like hotter weather offers better sunglasses sales. Isn’t stroking a pretty graph a bit like gazing at tea-leaves to run a business? For sure! We need something stronger. Enter Pearson’s Product Moment Coefficient…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence#Pearson.27s_product-moment_coefficient

This intimidating sounding beast is actually a pussy cat given that most decent spreadsheets (OpenOffice) offer some sort of correlation coefficient function. Basically, comparing two sets of numbers, the formula returns 1 you have a positive linear relationship – when one variable goes up, so does the other. -1 means when one variable goes up, the other goes down, a negative linear relationship. 0 means the two sets of variables are independent, there is no correlation. The closer you are to 1 or -1, the stronger the correlation.

So, having removed data outside the 95th percentile, dropping in the values for sunglasses revenue and temperature by day yields a correlation coefficient of 0.32 indicating a positive linear relationship is present but not strongly so. With rain vs. revenue though, it looks as if the two data sets are more or less independent but with an expected lean towards a negative linear relationship of -0.15.

Although, not shown on the graph for clarity, when we plumb in the sales revenue for regular prescription eye wear with rainfall and temperature data, the correlation coefficient is much stronger than for sunglasses: -0.45 for temperature and 0.62 for rain.  Rainy, cooler weather yields stronger performance for prescription glasses rather than sunglasses.

Whilst these values are not absolutely conclusive due to small data sets, they demonstrate how we can apply statistical formulae to operate with greater sophistication, accuracy and precision compared to ‘gut feel’ when looking at external influences on our client’s businesses.   Be advised that when investigating relationships between two sets of data:  Correlation is not equal to causation; it is only a requirement for it. This means that even though sunglasses sales correlate to a reasonable degree with temperature, sunny days do not necessarily make customers buy high fashion eye wear.  You still need a great site and to market it well!

This small case study demonstrates a small set of the techniques that we have used to deliver strong performance gains to our client by combining our marketing, testing, design and technical expertise.

“We spend time with the site owner reviewing their website and giving them instant direction on where to get started. Many clients know changes and improvements need to be made to their site, but knowing where to start is the difficult part. Conversion rate optimisation and multivariate testing is the number 1 technique to increase sales and get a better ROI from your Adwords advertising, so these sessions really help to get companies started on the process.”
Russell Sutton, MD of ConversionWorks

If you would like to attend one of Google’s Conversion Clinics email russells@conversionworks.co.uk

Recently, I bought a new car as my old faithful chariot was becoming uneconomical to keep running. Having put my hard earned cash in the car dealer’s hand, I was the proud owner of a very nearly new motor!

I had an opportunity to drive 200 miles to go to see a client soon after the purchase, so I topped up the car’s tank and zeroed my super-duper trip meter before I set off. My trip meter tells me my average fuel consumption for the duration of a trip as well as in real-time. This is great for a data nut like me.

Brimming with fuel and enthusiasm, I floored it out of the gas station (up to but not exceeding 30mph officer) and my average consumption read an instant 18mpg! Crumbs – my car must be really thirsty, right? Nope. 10 miles down the road, my average consumption is now reading 43mpg – cool. I check again 1 mile later and its up to 44mpg…at this rate I’ll be generating fuel soon!

I had to use the ‘loud pedal’ again later to ‘make some progress’. Whilst doing this I looked at the real-time consumption – back down to 11mpg…wow, really bad…Having said that, later on, I was coasting into a 50mph limit and the real-time was back to 99.99mpg – awesome!

At the end of the trip I managed 43.9mpg – pretty happy overall.

So, what does this have to do with internet marketing and optimisation? Well, having started out looking at a tiny data set, I drew a number of hasty and flawed conclusions about the performance of my car. Imagine sending out a marketing email to your customers. What can you tell about the performance of the email when 5 customers have clicked on the email and been to your site? NOTHING! The data set generated by the traffic is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions.

You CAN use smaller data sets (perhaps generated in realtime) to compare, say for example, two batches of emails sent to like-segments of traffic to see which one generates a stronger immediate response. Treat the smaller data set with respect and contextualise the conclusions to be safe.

So, I saw by the end of the drive that I had a representative fuel consumption level for a variety of conditions – this is something I can budget for. I can use this large data set to draw high confidence conclusions that help me plan my trip. You can do the same with larger bodies of data. Plan your business and make decisions based on data that you can be confident are representative of your true business performance.

As ‘the new guy’ in the team I have noticed on numerous occasions over the last six weeks how everyone’s passion for web analytics plays a huge part in delivering value to our clients.

A third of us are GAIQs!

This drive and enthusiasm has been translated into a small army of new GAIQs. With unavoidable alliteration I’d like to give hearty congratulations to Karen, Ken and Craig on becoming new Google Analytics Individual Qualification Certified and joining our existing GAIQs.

What does this mean for our clients?

This growth in talent and expertise translates into even more bandwidth to enable us to service our clients. With our growing phalanx Google Analytics Individual Qualification certified resources we are adding to our existing quadruple Google certification and strengthening our team.

With a third of the company now qualified in Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Google Website Optimiser we’re flush with expertise to add value to our existing clients and to your business. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you grow your business sustainably and with the precision of data driven business decisions. Feel free to get in touch.

Two companies that do this really well are Dropbox and Tungle. Both companies use the power of simple, easy-to-digest video to explain groundbreaking ideas.

We won’t tell you what they do as they already do a good job of doing that themselves!

www.dropbox.com
www.tungle.me

Our analytics team have been working with Sony Music to implement a new Google Analytics tracking system for their Brightcove video players. The new system tracks all video plays regardless of which website they’re shown on and rolls-up the data into a user friendly set of reports.

Sony Music have tens of thousands of music videos for their artists running across websites throughout Europe.  They needed an accurate an effective system for measuring and understanding how that content is watched and consumed.

Some of the artist websites that will be using the new Google Analytics system on their videos include Sade, Beyoncé, Kesha, P!nk, Susan Boyle, Foo Fighters and Michael Jackson.

If you’d like to learn more about using Google Analytics to track your video content or Brightcove players please get in touch.