Analytics & Insight

Image credit: Creative Common Attribution: webtreats

2009 was the year social media became mainstream and your mum got a facebook account. Twitter took off in a big way (Twitter bigger then Amazon) and Facebook saw massive growth (Facebook bigger then Yahoo!) but search was still king of the hill, will that change in 2010?

Hitwise released some interesting stats last year that showed that social was now bigger then search in New Zealand and that at the end of the year Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site on the internet (albeit only for two days). So is this a trend that will likely continue into 2010? Well the growth of Social Media has not levelled off yet, people are now using the internet to blog, upload pictures and videos, socialise and network in greater numbers all over the world (click right for larger image). It looks like social media will soon surpass search in Australia and I would expect the same to happen in many countries this year.

So is search passé? Most definitely not, 2009 saw many of the big search engines integrate social data into their search results. You can now see real time Facebook and Twitter results in search pages, results based on your social graph and a whole litany of other social data (images, videos, news etc) right on your search page. The web is evolving, search results are becoming more personalised, social media is playing an ever increasing role online and as such online Read more…

Twitter bigger then Amazon

2009 was most certainly the year of Twitter and in the UK it is now bigger then internet superstar Amazon. Twitter quickly gained popularity at the beginning of the year when celebrities such as Stephen Fry started using and talking about the service. The service has become so popular that now even some beds have a twitter account and will tweet out a “Frenzy Index” when their owners are doing you know what.

LinkedIn bigger then Myspace

2009 has been a good year for LinkedIn, so much so that it is now more popular then Myspace (at least in the UK). Myspace the former social networking king has seen its visitor numbers continue to tumble, while business networking site Linkedin has gone from strength to strength. Myspace has seen its daily visitor numbers fall from 300,000 at the beginning of the year down to 80,000 at the start of December, whilst LinkedIn has seen strong growth signing its 50 millionth member in October.
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The use of Google Analytics is currently subject to a heated debate in Germany, dealing with web analytics and data protection. On Friday, November 27th the “Düsseldorfer Kreis”, a panel of the German supreme supervisory authorities for data protection, said that the collection of IP addresses violates current law. In particular, the creation of user profiles is caught in the line of fire. What will this mean for digital marketing?

For the storage of personal data there are strict requirements in Germany. They may be collected only with the consent of the user. For Internet Service Providers it’s possible to identify a user on the basis of the IP address. Advertisers who use web analytics software possibly store IP addresses; however, as long as the user is not logged in to in to a web service, it is not possible to retrieve any information about the person behind the IP address.

Special attention is currently devoted to Google Analytics. The German data protection commissioners worry that Google uses web analytics data to create user profiles. In the terms of service  (TOS) (1) Google assured they won’t link the IP address to other Google data, but they also retain the right to change the TOS at any time. Millions of websites are affected. According to a recent article of Zeit online(2) more than 13 percent of all German websites use Google Analytics.

The controversial question still is: Are IP addresses personal data? Now the German courts have to decide. The legal situation is still unclear.

For digital marketing agencies like iCrossing, web analytics are very important. We use tools like Google Analytics to measure visits, page views, bounce rates and other performance indicators. The behaviour of an individual user is not relevant for us, so we have no interest in storing the user’s personal data.

I personally consider IP addresses no personal data. An IP address can change at any time, it can be shared and you never really know who the person behind the screen is.

Nevertheless: If the Germans courts decide that IP addresses are personal data this would be a slap in the face for the whole online industry.

(1) http://www.google.com/intl/de/analytics/tos.html
(2) http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2009-11/google-analytics-datenschutz

About a month ago Google released Google Analytics Intelligence and we’ve been having a lot of fun playing with it here at iCrossing. In a nutshell it does statistical analysis on your analytics data and highlights areas where you might want to look, thereby saving you time and potentially highlighting things you would not have normally noticed. The system does a lot of the data crunching for you allowing you to hone in on the interesting parts and pull our great insights quickly and easily.

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In what some say is a reaction to an industry that refused to self-regulate, the EU has jumped into the problem of data privacy and cookies, and voted to pass a ruling that requires a user’s ‘explicit consent’ before they receive a cookie. There appears to be some exceptions to this ruling, including cookies used for logging in to sites and for shopping carts, but mostly, permission will have to be sought.

This will have significant impact on all types of digital marketing, including display, affiliate marketing, email, analytics and search; how much impact will depend on each member state’s interpretation of the ruling when they implement the law, something that has to be complete by April 26th 2011. We must not take this as a soft threat - the EU has taken action before in relation to Phorm, the ever controversial ad network that worked on deep packet inspection - and never got off the ground in the UK.

Behavioural Targeting techniques like Phorm are probably the cause of the fuss - thanks to the media exchanges we are going through a mini revolution in display media where we can target consumers more accurately than ever before - but how much is too much? Clearly the EU felt that Phorm had crossed the line and are now redrawing the battle plans to say that ALL Behavioural Targeting is too far without a user’s consent.

I wrote about this on my personal blog as the news broke in the US.  Read more thoughts on the new EU law, the implications for the USA and how this may get implemented.

I’m currently researching some data for a budgeting and savings planning calculator for one of our clients, and during the course of my research, I’ve been struck once again by the wealth of free data that is available to every citizen in the UK at the click of a few links.

As digital marketers I’m sure none of us need to be told about the power that intelligently analysed and appropriately presented data hold. After all, where would our businesses be without web analytics? But did you know that there are huge, shimmering pools of astoundingly robust and statistically accurate data sitting on government servers just waiting for intelligent minds to dive in? And all for free?

Here are my two top sources of free, public data - so why not hold your nose and take the plunge?
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Well not quite but it has added forecasting to its Insights for Search research tool.  The tool will now show you a 12 month forecast of what it expects the keyword volumes to look like over the next year as well as past historic trends for the keyword.  This can be quite useful if you want to look at what the seasonality will likely look like over the next 12 months for a given area/keyword as well as whether that space is likely going to grow, shrink or stay the same.  Where this tool falls over is where there is no easily discernable pattern, where the pattern has changed recently or the search volumes are too low to show a pattern.

The graph below shows historic search trends for ‘Hotels’ within the UK.  It has a nice simple pattern that repeats every year, with a high in January and August of each year, a smooth bowl like curve between and a sharp drop off at the end of the year.  You can see that Google have extrapolated this pattern out over the next 12 months on the right of the graph.  They have also taken into consideration that each year search for ‘Hotels’ as a proportion of web search is decreasing and have reflected this in their forecast.

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A Linguistic Profile (LP) is one of our research pieces we do here at iCrossing that looks into the language used by a customer whilst searching online for specific products or categories within a given sector.

This type of research is useful in a number of ways to ensure both online and offline marketing campaigns are communicating to a potential customer with the right language, to ensure that they find the right information at the right points during the research and purchase cycles.

We are often asked about the various uses of an LP, so here they are…

1. Guiding on and off-line messaging:
This piece of work informs the most appropriate language to use for brand messaging.   The Linguistic Profile helps you to speak and reflect your customer’s language online and in all other channels; choosing the right language can amplify your messaging and increase consumer affinity and engagement with a clients.

These understandings can be used to guide all messaging and communications, from Paid Search ads, website copy and display creative.

2. Behaviour analysis and persona development:
The Linguistic Profile provides a unique window on the behaviour of a clients’ online consumers.  Mapping search language back to distinct demographic and socio-graphic and economic groups forms the basis of detailed persona development where user identities can be constructed, explored analysed and targeted.

When customer personas have been mapped to search language this allows for effective planning and communication to each of the different groups.

3. Informing product development and purchasing decisions:
Understanding search volume by different categories helps understand consumer demand within a clients’ sector(s) by search term. A map of demand in the client sector can be an invaluable tool for product development

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An interesting new study by the guys over at Catalyst Group shows that although users like Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, they are unlikely to switch.  From a usability focus group of 12 (expected to capture 80-90% of issues), after using both engines 8 said they preferred Google while 4 said they liked Bing.  That being despite the fact that 82% preferred Bings design, 64% preferred Bings organisation of features and another 64% preferred Bings refinement and filtering options.  With regards to relevance of results, the majority of users thought both engines preformed equally well.  I think  this goes to show how entrenched Google has become in our thinking when it comes to search.  Even though Microsoft won 3 out of the 4 tests and tied the last, two thirds of users were unprepared to switch.  After all, we no longer search for something, we Google it!

What I found particularly insightful, was in seeking out participants for this study the researchers were unable to find anyone who hadn’t heard of Google, but none of the participants had heard of Bing.  Granted it’s a new engine, but it just goes to show the marketing mountain Microsoft has to climb if it wants to even get close to knocking Google off the top spot (although I’m sure having $100 million to throw at the problem won’t hurt!)

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A while ago I wrote about some research we’d conducted into non-brand natural search Click Through Rates (CTR)  in Google. Today I’m going to talk about natural search CTRs on branded search.

For many sites a large portion of their search traffic will come from branded search. If you have a strong well known brand there will likely be a lot of search on that term and you will (as the brand owner) likely rank well for this term (position one in most cases). When a user searches on a brand term they already have a particular company and/or product in mind, the search is less exploratory then a non brand search and therefore you would expect CTRs on brand terms to be higher then non brand terms, because of this the non brand CTR research we did before does not apply in this case.

Above you can see branded CTRs organised by industry.  The above are for results that ranked at position one at the time of investigation (most brand search ranks position one, if you’re not ranking first for your brand terms you need to talk to your SEO agency! ).  You can see that the entertainment industry performed particularly well, with most industries hovering between the 40-50% mark.

So what does this all mean?  You can now benchmark yourself against the rest of your industry.  For example if you’re a travel company and your brand terms achieve an average CTR of 60% you know you’re performing very well, however if you’re in finance and only get an average CTR of 30% on brand terms you know you need to either speak to your SEO team, brand department or both!