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.

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Our new Chrome extension - numbered SEO results

Facebook is quickly become an absolute internet behemoth, with 175 million people logging in every day - and growing at such a rate that this stat might already be meaningless. I’m going to say that again for emphasis. 175 million people log into Facebook Every Day! That’s the equivalent of the entire populations of Croatia, Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Denmark, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Austria, Azerbaijan, Sweden, Belarus, Serbia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Netherlands, Romania logging in daily.

“By this summer well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month” - techcrunch.com

Increasingly we are turning to social media, not search to get the answers we need online. Not 10 minutes ago I saw what appeared to be smoke over the Brighton skyline, did I Google search to find the answer? No. Knowing that currently Google would be unable to provide me with such real time information I turned to Twitter. A quick search for ‘#Brighton’ brought up the following as the first result:

“linda_boucher: If you’re thinking of playing hooky from work to sit in the sun on #Brighton beach, forget it! Sea mist spoiling all the fun :(“

Sea mist. Luckily, Brighton wasn’t on fire. Of course Google is well aware of needing to get into the real-time space and, in particular, social media. It recently announced a project to index pages in real time, it’s attempting to take on Twitter with Google Buzz (official video or better video) and recently bought Aardvark, a social search engine that uses people to answer questions rather than algorithms and web pages. Social search engines are outside the scope of this post, but I would highly recommend you read this white paper, which explains in a very powerful way what a social search engine is and how it differs from search engines as we currently understand them (brief overview available here).

Humans are inherently social and as the internet slowly matures it adapts to the way we naturally want to behave and communicate with each other, expect it to become ever more social. If you own/work for a business and social media is not part of your online strategy you will be losing out on a significant portion of the online pie. Don’t go hungry.

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Facebook now bigger than Google

Microsoft Pivot

Think of pivot tables on steroids. This new, highly visual data manipulation technology from Microsoft allows you to quickly zoom in and out of the data, cut and filter what is being shown all in a deliciously visual fashion. I could write reams of text on this, but as it’s a visual tool, I recommend watching the video below.

Click here to try it out

Google Data Explorer

A nice little tool that lets you look at public data and easily trend it over time. Motion charts are a great way of discovering patterns in the data and see how various elements interplay. The video below shows how internet access spread around the world. It’s interesting to see that countries such as Bermuda are leading the way, I would have never expected that!

Google Public Data Explorer

State of the Internet: Infographic’s

Finally just for fun as we all love a good infographic, here are two that pull out some key stats surrounding the internet and our favourite Internet behemoth

Click on the image below to see the full infographic

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Data Visualisation: How to spice up your data

Attri-what?

All the discussion about attribution modelling comes from the understanding that most tracking software will generally attribute a conversion to the channel where the “last click” happened. So if I visit a website through the organic results, an affiliate, a regular referral, then finally through a paid search ad, my purchase at the end of this time will be attributed to the paid search click. I am oversimplifying this, but let’s assume that this is the case.

You can see that in reality many marketing channels have contributed to my purchase, but the last click is getting the value attributed to it. So how can we attribute the value of the purchase in a less biased way that gives a better picture of the value of the previous clicks? This is where the idea of attribution modelling comes from.

Image Credit: CC Semio

All this assumes that you actually have the technology that can give you the kind of data required here. These two posts from Will Critchlow on SEOMoz show how complex this can get using Google Analytics.

Should you even bother?

Avinash highlighted the fact that, in a lot of cases, a company may not even need to worry about this. If your analytics show that the average “time to purchase” is very short - (people come to your site, and if they are going to convert, they do so very quickly) - there is no point setting up a complex attribution model because more likely than not, the last click is the only click involved in most purchases.

This is a very complex problem, and there is only going to be tangible benefits if your customers have a long purchase process which is more likely with higher value products. (I’d imagine that you don’t spend a few grand on a cruise holiday the first time your visit a site - but check your analytics!).

Attribution techniques

Avinash described three different ways to try and use attribution, listed in the worst to the best in his opinion (which I agree with):

• First Click - attribute the purchase to the first channel the user visits your site through. This is a very weak model - Avinash likened it to attributing your wife to your first girlfriend.
• Even (Equal) Attribution - spread the value of the purchase equally over all the clicks a user made to visit your site.
• Favouring the Last Click (Weighed or Cascading Attribution) - attribute most of the purchase value to the last click, but spread the rest of the value over any other clicks using some kind of formula.

NB: This is only a very simplistic overview of attribution - for a lot more detail about these types of attribution, and their potential benefits, I would definitely have a read of Dax Hamman’s post called “The Truth about Attribution“.

Give us an Example Then!

This is the example that Avinash gave of a retail client he had where they saw that their higher value products had a longer time to purchase - but he made sure to state that an attribution model should be unique for your business, based on the behaviour of your customers.

The Example…

• Attribute 75% of the value of any purchase to the last click.
• Attribute the other 25% of the value equally over the previous clicks within a certain amount of time before the purchase - based on the value of the product. I think it was around 7 days for lower value products, and up to 14 days for a higher value product.

This is quite a nice example, but it needs to be tailored to your business - and it’s only worth pursuing if you are sure you are going to get some useful/actionable results from it.

NB: I should also reference Jaamit Durrani for his recap of the full talk he posted practically seconds after it had finished.

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Intelligent Attribution

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 marketing must evolve too. No longer is it enough to simply “SEO” your site, companies are now learning that they must engage in holistic digital marketing campaigns that create captivating content that users naturally want to engage with and share. They are increasingly finding that the old model of pushing a message at people is failing, instead activities like creating branded engaging content and applications is a more successful way to capture attention.

2010 is going to be an exciting time online, new powerful smart phones mean that we’re spending more time accessing the internet from a mobile device, augmented reality if implemented correctly promises to further evolve social media and how we interact with our surroundings and with brands. We’re searching more using our mobiles, browsing social networks and micro blogging from our mobile device. 2010 is full of exciting challenges and opportunities and I look forward to seeing what it brings.

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2010: The year Social becomes bigger than Search?

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.

Facebook bigger the Yahoo!

Yahoo had a difficult year in 2009 and has seen its search traffic drop from 19.3% (in the US) at the start of the year to 14.4% in October, during the same period Google grew its US share from 70.3% to 73.6%. Meanwhile Facebook has gone from strength to strength and in September hit the 300 million user mark, up from 250 million in July and 200 million in April. In the UK Facebook now accounts for 1 in every 7 pageviews (14.5%).

Image credit: Humane Architecture

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2009: The Winners and Losers

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

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Is it illegal to use Google Analytics in Germany?

The above screenshot shows traffic to our site (top line in blue) and the alerts generated below (green bars). You can see the traffic shows a weekly pattern of peaking on Mondays and falling at the weekend (I guess people aren’t so interested in reading about digital marketing at the weekends!) nice insight but we already knew that and it’s too easy!

By clicking on the alerts we get to see what that alert refers to, in this case it shows us that on Saturday the 3rd the bounce rate dropped 15% below average. Looking at some of the other alerts shows us that next Saturday the bounce rate again dropped below average (perhaps there’s a pattern here). The following Saturday the bounce rate didn’t drop significantly but the next Saturday showed an 133% increase in time spent on site.

When first looking at the data it seemed that Saturday was our worst performing day as traffic was at its lowest point here, however by using the Intelligence feature in Google Analytics we can see that although there isn’t as much traffic at the weekend, the traffic we get is more engaged. Users arriving on the site are more inclined to hang around, and hang around for longer. However the best bit is that it took less than 5 minutes to find this information, leaving more time to do something with it. Having access to a large warehouse of information is useless unless you know what to do with it and this feature just made it easier for you or your analyst to pull out precious gems of insight to help optimise your site / campaign and ultimately help generate more revenue.

Image credit: PalScience

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Analytics gets Intelligent

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.

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Opt-in to cookies - its the law

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?

Office for National Statistics

This is a great starting point for finding out if the government is collecting the kind of information you are looking for.  The ONS  publishes data from most of the Government departments and various related bodies, committees and associations. There are lots of publications here - from hard data tables (which can be exported to .xls format very easily) to snappily-written press releases summarising key trends and information soundbites.  Want to know how much people in the UK are earning - and what impact the recession has had on those earning? The information is here. Interested in what people are spending their hard-earned cash on? That’s here too. Interested in the most popular first names in the UK? Click here.

The trick is to work out how to find what on earth it is you’re looking for. The site’s navigation leaves a little to be desired! If you have a bit of time and are not 100% certain what you’re looking for I recommend using the left hand drop-down menu to browse by theme. If you get lost, or you’re just in a rush, here’s my top tip: ring them up and ask them. The ONS operates a brilliant telephone enquiries service, and the people who answer can help you find what you’re looking for in just a few clicks.  Their number is: +44 (0) 845 601 3034. They can get you to the exact table of information in the exact PDF that you need. Another top tip - once you’ve found that table in the PDF, just click on it to download a .xls version of the data.

Home Office / Research, Develpoment and Statistics (RDS)

The Home office is the Government department which conducts the monumental British Crime Survey (and a number of related crime surveys as well as all the immigration and criminal justice related surveys that the Government regularly conducts). The BCS data is now updated quarterly and really is an incredibly rich source of information down to a local borough level of just what kinds of dodgy things are going on in your neighbourhood. It’s published by the Home Office directly so you won’t find it on the ONS site.

The Crime Mapping Tool provides a really easy to understand visualisation of criminal activity across the country. Results can also be displayed in charts or data tables. As part of the Power of Information Taskforce project, the Home Office is now publishing all data tables as they are available on a single page: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/data. If you can’t find what you need, the Freedom of Information Act means that you can email or telephone the Home Office’s public inquiries team and they must respond to your request within 20 working days. (I’ve tried this - and they do.)

And if you need someone to hold your hand and help you make sense of it all - or to help you fuse public data with your own to create a really useful new piece of functionality for your digital users  - you know where to come. Just take a look at the Household Economy Calculator we built for Cornhill as part of an engagement and awareness campaign this time last year. This used national earning data from the ONS to help people calculate the hard cash value of all the little jobs they do in and around the home. The user-friendly way of presenting the data really captured people’s imaginations.  One “mummy blogger” commented on a post that another mum had written about the calculator: “I have done the calculator and am wondering why I am not driving a Bentley rather than a Nissan Micra given the contribution I make to the household economy!”

Food for thought? Give us a shout if you want to talk about it some more.

IMAGE: Detail from the Home Office’s crime mapping tool

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The best data is free data