Analytics & Insight

Here in the Natural Search department we use Excel. A lot. And frequently we are taking data from the web (such as from the rather good Open Site Explorer) and manhandling it in order to make more sense of it. As part of this process, it’s often helpful to be able to quickly pull out the domain portion of a URL. For example, let’s say you have a list of URLs like this:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.icrossing.co.uk/file1.html
• http://www.icrossing.co.uk/file2.html
• http://example.com/another_file.html
• http://www.acompletelydifferentdomain.com/

You might find yourself in a position where want to take this list and reduce it to just the domain portions like this:

• example.com
• icrossing.co.uk
• icrossing.co.uk
• example.com
• acompletelydifferentdomain.com

It’s possible to use an Excel formula to do this. Here’s one I found by searching:

=IF(LEFT(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1),4)=”www.”,MID(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1),5,256),LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”"),FIND(“/”,SUBSTITUTE(A1,”http://”,”")&”/”)-1))

This is fine, but as you can see the formula is rather long and combining this with any further functions would be a real headache. To try to solve this, I wrote an add-In for Excel that adds a handy function to perform this step (along with a few others).

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Your analytics data is nearly as important as the financial accounts of your business when it comes to making a decision about your website. Your analytics data helps you understand how effective your site’s marketing, design and content is. And just as you wouldn’t hire more staff without being sure you have the budget for it, you shouldn’t redesign your website without understanding what your customers do when they are on it.

Below are seven ways Google Analytics can be used to help make the right decisions during a redesign.

1. What browsers and windows sizes should we support?

When designing your site you want to ensure that the majority of your customers can view your website and convert without browser versions or sizes preventing this.

I’d personally think that you should design your website in a size that at least 95% of your visitors can see without having to scroll horizontally. An easy way to check what browser sizes your current visitors are using is to go the Screen resolutions report under Visitors > Browser capabilities > Screen resolutions.

By comparing to site average you can also see if any particular screen resolution(s) has a significantly higher bounce rate

In the graph above you can see that the wider screen resolutions are actually performing much worse – this could be addressed by using a liquid layout or JavaScript to position content.

A quick way to check if your site has browser compatibility is to look at the browser report and compare each type to the site average, for the website below it is clear that there is poor support for safari.

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Summer is in full swing and down here in Brighton that means weekends on the beach, having a drink in the sun and going to the cinema to watch the big summer movies. Being a data geek ninja I couldn’t help but take a look at where cinema search was most popular and who out of the main players ruled that space. A big thanks to Amo Bassan Head of Design at iCrossing UK for creating these infographics.

(click for a larger image)

Above we looked at how the top six cinema chains rank for search in each location. Read more…

Recently we performed some analysis for a high street retailer around what happened when you stopped bidding on your brand terms. Would the lost Paid Search visits be ‘soaked up’ in Natural Search (commonly referred to as the cannibalisation effect) or would they just be lost? We found the results quite interesting so we thought we’d share them.

Methodology

In order to perform this analysis a two week benchmark period and a test period were set up. The periods were selected to be as similar as possible, both Monday – Sunday periods, however some seasonal variation was inevitable, therefore we analysed the traffic for non brand terms for the two periods to see if there was any change. The results showed a 5.1% uplift in the second period over the first, therefore a 5.1% uplift was added to the first period to normalise the results.

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Back in January I wrote a post suggesting that social media would soon overtake search. In March Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US and now after months of waiting Social Media has finally overtaken Search in the UK.

Social media is growing quickly in popularity and shows no sign of slowing down. Facebook the biggest social property in the UK currently has 400 million users worldwide and is growing quickly.
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We all know how fascinated keywords are. There is an entire world of analysis around keywords, from a linguistic analysis or from an optimisation point of view.

An interesting analysis is to see a breakout percentage by number of terms used across different countries:

Source: iCrossing -  Trellian data / Forrester

Nordic countries for example have a large percentage of one word search over 50%, compared to American geographies where the percentage is for less than 40% using one word. One can think that less number of keywords means or has something to do with the language itself used in the country. Conversely,  one can immediately see that this hypothesis is wrong. If you compare UK and US or CA split by number of words, this differs completely in percentages despite of these countries tending to use the same language structure and share a lot of vocabulary terms. Another good way to check this is checking Germany as an example as one can expect -one word %- to be in large proportion as Germans use very long word construction that can include adjectives and nouns.
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There is a lot of research around the happiness topic and which is the country that holds the highest index of happiness. I have read different research studies which normally provide different results and obviously different rankings.

Facebook has published a Gross National Happiness Index where you can track levels of happiness across different countries. Users rate their happiness as positive or negative. I found this at least interesting but of doubtful methodology although 400 million of Facebook users is a fair sample.

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I was quoted in an article in last week’s issue of NMA entitled Social Media Analytics. Sadly a subscription is required to read the whole thing; I wonder how much traffic they actually get to older features? Be very interesting to know whether it is really worth locking all that content away. I digress, here’s what the article covered:

“As people spend increasing amounts of time conversing on social networks, monitoring what they’re saying about your brand is crucial. So what tools are there to help you listen in?”

Here’s what I said:

‘Another popular paid-for product is Brandwatch, favoured by Mark Higginson, Head of Social Media at search agency iCrossing, for being one of the most cost-effective solutions available. He says iCrossing tweaks the network of sites crawled and reported on to match its sector knowledge, combining this with analysis. ”We call our quantitative and qualitative research a ’stories and numbers’ approach. It’s through this narrative we ascertain what content to create for which audience and who it’s best to approach in those networks in order to gain the greatest share of available attention.”‘

It’s interesting to read what other people had to say, particularly those that favoured Radian6. They’ve revamped their dashboard since I last tried it out; all well and good but I remember being pretty unimpressed with the quality of the actual data collected, although given how quick they are at responding to blog posts about them there must be something to be said for it. Andrew Girdwood of Bigmouthmedia is quoted as saying:

‘… that the data supplied by Radian6 is “pretty rudimentary” and comparable to that from some of the free tools, but its front end is “sexy”. “If you’re preparing social media reports to show someone else, there’s a lot to be said for a package that will wrap it up and can be presented to the board. Sometimes you’re paying for that.’

I would recommend in the strongest possible terms that you spend your budget on human analysis and insight over an expensive tool with weak data but pretty charts. At iCrossing our reports are generally bespoke, the size of client we deal with means we need to be flexible enough to fit in with existing reporting and a self-serve dashboard just doesn’t serve that need. Also, as I say above, this analysis does not exist in a vacuum; it needs to be acted on and that requires it to be substantiated.
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A few weeks ago I created an extension that would number the search results in Google and Google UK.

I’ve now updated it so it works on all Google regional engines, as well as Yahoo and Bing including all their regional engines.

It also now has another feature which I thought would be quite helpful; one-click switching of the number of displayed results.

Links are placed at the top of Google and Yahoo, which link through to SERPS of different result sizes for the same search term. This utilises parameters in the search engines URL, and will not change your default setting.

You can install the extension by clicking here in Chrome, and extensions homepage can be found here.

Update: Please goto the latest blog post for the number search results chrome extension

They say the simplest ideas are the best. If that’s true, then this Chrome extension is the best one ever built.

Inspired by Ben’s recent post on the top Chrome SEO extensions, I created a simple Chrome extension that will number the organic search results in Google.

This can be useful for quickly checking a ranking without having to count your way down to the result. For the next version, I’ll add Yahoo and Bing, plus some other search result enhancing functionality.

You can download the extension here. For updates, please check back on the extensions homepage.

Any feedback is welcome.