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.

The mobile browser report can help to decide whether a mobile version of your site is needed by looking at the bounce and conversion rate of mobile visits.

2. What territory specific pages or languages do we need to support?

The languages report under visitors is a useful way of seeing the proportion of foreign visitors to your site; this is particularly useful if you have an international website as it may indicate territory specific versions required that may help increase conversions.

Additionally, even if your website is UK focused, you may find that foreign speakers use your site.  This is especially relevant if your business is travel related as foreign people living in the UK or visiting short term may be interested in your services.  See this report under Visitors > Languages.

3. Can our customers find what they are looking for?

The internal search reports are really insightful as they show what your users are looking for once they are on your site, giving you an indication about missing or difficult to find content. A word cloud is a quick way to see what search terms regularly appear.

To create a word cloud, download the data, put the search term in column A, the number of times it was searched in column B and paste the formulae =REPT((A1&” “),B1) down column C. Grab all the words from Column C and paste into Wordle.

Word cloud from the internal search of World Vision, one of our charity clients (posted with permission)

4. Which landing/promotion pages need improving?

In a redesign it is important to understand which pages need changing as well knowing which pages are working well and should be left as they are. Google Analytics offers several reports & metrics for interpreting the performance of individual & groups of pages:

Goal funnel visualization – one of the most easy to understand, it graphically shows where visitors are leaking out of your sales funnels. Goal funnels need to be set up manually and when done so can be found under Goals > Goal funnel visualization

Site overlay – Using this report (Content > Site overlay) you can see at a page level what visitors are actually click on helping to show the effectiveness of call to actions and promotions. Not only can you look at the number of clicks on these items but also the ecommerce value i.e. users clicking this button have gone on to generate xx revenue

£ index – this under used metric, shown in the top content report, shows how important visits to a particular page are when visitors convert. You may find that pages like the about us, shipping & returns pages have high £ index values as visitors often view them before making a purchase and help a user decide if they should buy your products. Sounds obvious but it might suggest that including a shipping and returns policy info box on product pages helps improve conversions (particularly likely on high value goods).

Bounce rate/exit rates – bounce rate shows the number of visitors that viewed one page and then left, while exit rate shows visitors that leave the site after viewing a particular page (they may have viewed multiple pages before). These metrics can help you understand which landing pages are under performing or common places that visitors are leaving your site.  

(Page URLs removed from image)

However, these reports, like most analytics, must be understood in context to know if there really is an issue or not. When evaluating a page it is important to consider the objective of the page, how does its performance compare to other pages and are any problems a result of a design, content, product or brand issue (always difficult to know!).

The analysis of the above reports provide a great starting point for user testing as they can help identify issues on your site that are preventing conversions.

After launch

When a new site is built it is obviously important to bench mark performance before and after using KPIs that are relevant to your business such as visits, conversions, average transaction value, revenue etc.

However, it can take a few weeks for these metrics to settle down making it difficult to tell early on if there are any problems with your new website. By setting up custom alerts you can get near real time warnings of any errors or changes that may have occurred. The sensitivity of these alerts depends on your website, suggested values are used below

5. Is tracking set up correctly?

A common error that occurs in Google Analytics is a large amount of self-referrals showing up in the traffic source report i.e. the top referring site is your own! This can happen for a number of reasons such as certain pages not having tracking codes, use of frames, page redirects or sub domain and/or multi domain tracking not set up correctly. These self-referrals overwrite the original referral information preventing you from knowing where these visitors came from.

To be able to fix these tracking errors quickly before they skew your reports, it’s useful to use a custom alert (Intelligence > Custom report) to email you if there are any large daily increases in self-referrals.

Even with this alert I recommend that you add an analytics check into your QA/testing process to ensure no errors or loss of data when an updates are made.

6. Has the redesign affected our search rankings?

With any luck your new site and content will have significant improvement in search engine rankings and subsequent increases in traffic.

But it wouldn’t be a lie to say I’ve seen a big brand push a site live without removing the staging server robots.txt file, which was being used to blocking search engine access, this in turn caused the new site to completely drop out of Google!  Even if large changes in rankings like that don’t happen, its useful to monitor organic traffic after launch to be aware of decreases or increases in visits (as well as changes in rankings using this GA filter).

If you do see drastic falls in organic traffic I’d recommend not reacting unless you’re absolutely sure you know the cause, rankings tend to jostle around a little after a redesign and you could end up changing something for the worse.

7. Tracking 404 pages

When launching a new site it is important to ensure you redirect old pages to new pages, however, errors can easily occur with redirect rules causing users to land on 404 pages.

Tracking visits to 404 pages in Google Analytics is easy, simply add the tracking code to the 404 page template and ensure the page title has 404 in it. Then to see which pages are missing navigate to Content > Content by title > find and click the 404 page, this will show you a list of page URLs that have been requested but not found. Unfortunately a custom alert does not work here as you cannot have the page title as an alert, therefore it is important to check this report regularly after launch. You can also use Google webmaster tools to check 404 pages but I prefer the additional traffic insights Google Analytics can give.

Please share in the comments any other reports, filters and advanced segments that can help during a redesign.

Post from: Connect

7 ways Google Analytics can help when redesigning your website

It feels like we are getting closer and closer to the point where we will be able to use the same metrics across search as a whole, and the points here are where I think that Paid Search methods can now be applied to Natural Search campaigns.

…..and I want to go beyond simply reporting the ROI or CPA of Natural Search campaign because, although it generally makes you look very good compared to Paid Search, I don’t need to explain how to do that (hopefully).

What you should already be doing

Focusing on Revenue

Any PPC campaign is always going to boil down to how much it is costing to drive a sale, or how much money is being made for every pound that is being spent. Taking this mindset into how you target terms (for instance) in your SEO work is going to drive you the right kind of results.

Splitting Brand vs Non-brand

Brand traffic is arguably navigational in the most part, and non-brand traffic is arguably the valuable new customers that you are trying to acquire. This applies to all of search.

Just like you would in PPC, you should be looking at these SEO visitors very differently. Jumps in brand traffic could be an indicator of offline marketing successes, whereas jumps in non-brand traffic are going to be all about your performance for your core terms.

It’s tempting to say “you can’t really take any credit for brand traffic in SEO, because you will always be #1”, but that isn’t always true. If you are a new company or brand, brand visibility and traffic might be valuable KPIs when you begin SEO activity. In addition to this, if your brand has a generic name like “eggs.co.uk”, you need to be addressing the benefits or disadvantages this may be bringing you.

CTR Testing

The Google Webmaster Tools now gives you CTR data. There is no excuse for not testing the titles and meta descriptions for your key landing pages now. It’s not as quick or easy as it is in PPC, but you can get a good idea of the sort of things you should be including. If you have invested time and money into achieving a good ranking for a competitive term, it seems logical to optimise the result you are showing – a no-brainer in my opinion.

Forecasting

Not the easiest of tasks for a Natural Search campaign, but if you are hoping for significant investment from any part of any business, the chances are that they are going to request some sort of forecast. Paid Search teams have been providing forecasts split by product areas, including seasonality, for a long time, and there is enough data at your fingertips to be able to do this for an SEO campaign.

What you might need to start doing soon

It is not uncommon for metrics such as “contributing clicks” to be measured in Paid Search campaigns, where non-brand clicks earlier in the conversion path that end on a branded click are given some value. Nor is it uncommon to measure the uplift in branded searches during a period of good visibility for high search volume non-branded terms. These are the kind of metrics SEO people should prepare to have to report on.

More and more money is going into search marketing, and there is more and more scrutiny over how that money is being used, as the people who control those budgets become more and more savvy. The people running SEO campaigns now need to provide better forecasts, thoroughly explain their activities, and show the true value of the work that is being carried out. There are a number of lessons we, as SEOs, can learn from our friends in PPC.

Post from: Connect

Applying PPC Methods to SEO

Community Pages are “dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it”. Right now there is no ‘community’ to directly contribute to these Pages so they’re being generated in part by running a search query on public posts related to the term in question. Say I’m looking for ODEON’s presence on Facebook and do a search by this brand term. The top result is not a property owned by ODEON but a Community Page that pulls in Wikipedia’s entry as a description followed by a list of the most recent posts featuring this term. This is the top post as I write this:

With no brand-developed Page to compete with, visitors to this Page are going to leave having had no opportunity to engage with ODEON itself. They may even ‘Like’ this page which represents a further missed opportunity to start building an all-important network of followers tied to an official presence. ODEON are losing the chance to be useful and relevant to people who’ve expressed an active preference in finding something out about them. These people are highly likely to be engaging in social activity around a film release, perhaps trying to find out what’s showing and arranging to go and see something with friends.

The posts that are coming up at the moment on the ODEON Community Page are nothing to worry about, but it is possible customer service issues could appear in this list. A serious example can be found by searching for ‘BP’. This reveals the following: ”

There are a host of similar comments and a page refresh reveals more being added minute-by-minute due to the significant attention this disastrous event is attracting. This Community Page has become a hub of anti-BP information with links out to news, video and a wealth of other material.

It could be argued BP would be in no better position with a Facebook Page, something Nestle discovered recently when a representative of theirs exacerbated an already volatile situation by behaving in a hostile way toward commenters. That isn’t the point however. I would say that any business that provides a product or service to individuals is also a part of society and to shy away from addressing issues of public concern is at best irresponsible and at worst reprehensible. If people are talking in one of the most active social spaces on the web then an organisation needs to step up and answer what I believe is a duty to respond, be it a minor issue or a calamity. With the right framework and guidelines in place participation can be open and a dialogue established.

As it is, without an official presence the opportunity to respond, to provide a hub on the most visited destination on the web, to attract real people to follow you who you can build a long-term relationship with is lost. Instead the Community Page will be what people see as the result of a search, something entirely out of your control and an area where Facebook is still unclear on what the exact functionality will be.

Email me or call me on +44 (1273) 827 739 to discuss creating a Facebook Page, managing one you have already set up, or to establish guidelines on how to make the most of this important contribution to people’s perception of your brand.

Post from: Connect

Community Pages make the need for your own Facebook Page more important than ever

the iPad is faced with a massive volume of polarized [sic] opinions and resulting uncertainty, due to a difficulty to see through what I call “the fog of blah” surrounding the launch. This device is an argument magnet, battles over a ton of digital media issues from DRM to the (yawn) PC vs. Mac debate have all converged on the iPad for a few weeks.

What should marketers have in mind? I’ve made some notes:

• Invisible computing: The experience of using the iPad is incredible because of what has been taken away – the mouse and keyboard. Touching content, typing into the screen changes your relationship with the content somehow, makes things more intimate. More than anything else I have used the computing bit of the iPad fades away, you don’t think about the technology very often – you focus completely on the content. The most powerful moment of realisation for me in this regard was when I finished the first novel I had bought on the Amazon Kindle application. I’d literally forgotten I was reading on the iPad.
• Emotional devices: Living with an iPad in the UK for six weeks before their arrival here has meant demonstrating and discussing the thing with anyone passing. And it’s not just geeks: everyone from Octogenarian ladies on planes to my three year old daughter everyone is fascinated by the device, wants to know more. This, as much as the lightning speed of sales should tell marketers and media owners everything they need to know about whether to invest in exploring the possibility of delivering content and services on the iPad.
• Expansion of the web into every corner of our lives: The iPad represents the latest phase in a trend we have been living with since Tim Berners-Lee flicked the “on” switch on the first WWW server: the web’s expansion into every part of the commercial, political, cultural and social world. The iPad expands the web’s presence into some more spaces where paper still ruled until just now – places where I read books and magazines, took notes.
• No panacea for content owners: There are some impressive magazine applications out there, but the most enjoyable and practical content experiences I’ve encountered have been using normal websites like the Guardian, Telegraph and Economist (my usual “newspaper” reads) via the iPad’s browser and also via RSS feeds in the incredible NewsRack application.

NewsRack on the iPad - better than a newspaper app?

• Apples are not the only fruit: I’ve been accused of being overly partisan in my favourable opinions of Apple. Fact is, I can’t wait for the Android and Microsoft responses to the iPad. But for now, the iPad is truly one of a kind and something every digital marketer should become familiar with.
• You have to own one to understand its full impact: I was expecting great things of the iPad when I bought it, but I had a clear idea of where it would be used, in between my smartphone and my laptop. The surprise has been how much it has come to be the most useful computing device that I own, stealing most of the uses I have for both of them. Picking one up and playing with it for a few minutes tells you something, but the only way to understand how significant this device is is to live and work with one for a while.
• A playground for innovation: The future of the iPad is not written, we don’t know all of the ways it might be used, might be useful. All the more reason for all marketers and media owners to commit to playing with it, find the ways it could work for them.

Post from: Connect

Best iPad advice for digital marketers: don’t hold back

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.

Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores.The model is taking into consideration the words used in users’ status updates breaking them out by positive or negative words, for later assess that the day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

Additionally, the model has been calibrated differently to ensure consistency for different countries which eliminates effects due to differences in the countries’ population and language use.Computers do the calculations.

The graph below shows a positive and negative word use in status updates which covaries with self-reported satisfaction with life. Also note that the graph shows peaks and valleys on days that are culturally and emotionally significant.

Some interesting insights, Argentina has a peak for the International Woman’s day and Puerto Rico is on the contrary a country with large negative fluctuations. For the UK, anything surprising as Christmas is still the happiest day.

It would have been great to have had Greece in the list of countries.

Now we only need to understand if there’s any correlation between this graph and shopping patterns. A good source of insights during the next Football World Cup or another important sports events.

Maybe Facebook will bring in the immediate future models allowing partners to check automated brand engagement (done by computers) and how happy consumers are with a particular brand or service based on people’s status updates.

Post from: Connect

An unobtrusive model of “gross national happiness”

The queen of content strategy Kristina Halvorson wrote this post in February which argued that: “Content strategy is more or less on the same trajectory as social media was three years ago”.

There does seem to be a growing interest. Google trends data show search volumes for content strategy and related terms in March 2010 running at about twice the rate as January 2007 (taking into account the growth in overall search volumes). Searches specifically for “online content strategy” have risen 70% during that time.

It’s a compelling story. And being honest, as Content Director at iCrossing, it has really helped when talking to people about what we want to do with content to help them to reach their business goals. No one wants to be missing out on “the next big thing”, do they?

But this post isn’t about the “sellability” of Content Strategy as a project or service.

It’s about the idea that this is a new discipline.

Charlie Peverett and I went to a stimulating and well-attended event last week in London’s fashionable Shoreditch. Content Strategy, Manhattan Style invited attendees to meet “three of New York’s finest content strategists… for an evening of informal discussions, socialising, and perhaps a little drinking”. Most interestingly for me, the event blurb suggested that this was “the place to be if you want to learn more about the business value, opportunities, and practical application of this emerging field of practice” [my emphasis].

A web editor by any other name would spell as well

We had a long chat on the way to the event discussing this. I put my theory to him that content strategists are, in fact, the same thing as a “web editor in chief”. Here’s my little story that explains why I think this (and I admit it is based very heavily on my personal experiences of working within the discipline of online content creation):

Once upon a time, the internet was invented, and soon there were loads of websites and random bits and bobs and fun stuff to do and it was all really exciting. Companies who wanted to make money out of the internet got really excited too, and started building websites to join in.

Quite quickly they realised that they needed someone to run the website for them and make sure stuff looked right and there weren’t spelling mistakes and broken links everywhere. So they hired Web Editors. These people were a bit unusual – they knew about html and stuff and could also use Photoshop and write properly and fiddle about with content management systems. There weren’t many of them about. So they paid them LOADS of money.

Then, one day, a bubble burst somewhere and the companies decided that maybe the internet was rubbish and you couldn’t make money out of it. So loads of the websites got closed down and the Web Editors got made redundant or went and joined agencies and got jobs as producers or writers or Information Architects or UX guys, or they took massive pay cuts to hold on to their jobs and then got pretty much ignored to death by everyone else in the organisation.

Time passed.

Then, suddenly, the internet was back in fashion again, and quite a few companies had found that they COULD make money just by selling stuff on it directly. Then along came social media and everyone wanted their websites to be really cool and shiny again, and they wanted loads of content that did clever stuff and was really engaging and useful. So they hired Content Strategists to work out how to do it. Little did they know that these Content Strategists were in fact the self same Web Editors of yore. But that didn’t matter because the work got done and everyone got paid. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Charlie and I decided to put this theory to the panel at the event. Unfortunately, our question didn’t get chosen, and I got distracted by a different conversation about whether adding a blog to a client’s site can fix a rubbish content strategy [another blog post for another day].

So I was really pleased to see this post by fellow Brightonian Lauren Pope asking the exact question we had wanted to: what’s the difference between a content strategist and a web editor? Like Charlie and I, she has picked up on the fact that the overlap between the responsibility of a web editor and a content strategist seems to get ignored by the Content Strategy Superstars of Manhattan.

I’d add to this that there is a very strong focus on onsite content strategy with these guys that seems not to acknowledge the fact that content strategy in the social age has to cover offsite spaces where you have little or no control at all. [Again, another blog post for another day.]

The final part of the puzzle?

My belief is that content strategy isn’t an “emerging field of practice” at all. Actually it’s the remembering of what anyone who works day to day with content from the pre-dotcom days to right now this second knows: if content is queen [and, since the internet is content, how can it not be?] then you’d better get your content strategy sorted or you’re doomed to failure. And the best person to do that is the person who is creating, managing, curating and moderating it – and conversing in fine detail with users – day in day out.

However, the sad truth is that in most organisations, that person – the post-dotcom web editor – is rarely in an influential position, if they exist at all. That’s annoying, but there it is. So enter the Content Strategist: the next big thing and therefore, presumably, someone that gets listened to.

If you’re a web editor, don’t feel threatened or over-shadowed by a content strategist – see them as your ally. They are the person who is going to take a long hard look at content provision, user needs, technical barriers, business goals, and support you to deliver content that really hits the spot. It’s been a long time coming – but perhaps it is just part of a natural progression. It feels to me that over the last 15 years there has been an ongoing process where we’ve all been working to create websites that look nice, that are sensibly organised, that are really easy to use, that are easy to find, and now we’re finally considering building websites that have stuff on them that people want and like.

Content professionals – take heart. If Kristina’s stats are right, we’re the next big thing! For individuals, organisations and brands who seek to engage and trade digitally it’s even better news – because your websites and your social media activity is only going to get better.

Image by Flickr user Sirkullay, reproduced under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 CC License.

Header Image by Flickr user 10ch

Post from: Connect

Content strategy: the new social media or the old web editing?

When creating a video or TV ad, reference your web site – and not just with the URL but also with “Search for …”. Not only with this aid in the viewer of the video remembering more easily how to navigate to your site, or even a specific web page, but also it can help influence viewers personalised searches within Google.

Through understanding Social Media platforms and understanding the networks your target audience live in you can seed these videos effectively for maximum exposure.

With personalised search now by default within Google, brands need to think how they can maximise on their audiences search history. Instead of suggesting at the end of the video or TV ad to search for just the brand name, consider incorporating non-brand terms into the call to action as well, i.e. “Search for brand product/service“. This can then build you brands relation to these non-brand terms and influence your rankings for these terms as well.

Of course this has huge potential if the videos created are useful, engaging, easy to share and of course have that ‘je ne sais quoi’ element that makes videos go viral.

Photo credit: CC Flickr user dan_taylor

But be aware, if executed poorly like the Orange ‘I am’ campaign you open yourself up to a lot of criticism. Orange promoted “I am” through their commercials & billboards, initially it  was a fail (it still is.. they rank #3 currently) as their site wasn’t ranking for the keyword in Google natural search and industry experts criticised them for their poor implementation.

2) Network Analysis & Link Equity

Through performing a Network Analysis Audit of the Web it is possible to identify where your target audience have their own sites, or where there are communities that are having conversations around your brand, products or topics related to your brand. This analysis allows you to narrow down the vastness of the Internet and ensure your strategy and efforts are as focused as possible.

Not only will this audit and analysis identify ways to engage with your target audience through the means of Social Media but it will also identify opportunities to develop relationships with topically relevant sites. These relationships can lead to your brand creating useful content that can be hosted on these sites, which can have relevant links incorporated where necessary resulting in targeted, optimised links from topically relevant sites.

3) Brand Advocates & Social Search

By understanding your target audience and being active within the communities that they live in you can extend your reach beyond your brands immediate “friends/fans”. This is through looking for opportunities to be visibility to the friends of your brands friends.

As Google’s Social Search becomes more ingrained into everyday SERPs your brand can start to become visible for core, competitive terms through Social Circle listings – even if you haven’t gained a Web listing yet.

Through building your online reputation and influence your brand’s own community will grow and from this it’s extended community will increase massively.

4) Conversation & Link Worthy Content

Link Worthy Content is any content that is created where one of its main purposes is the gaining of natural links. Blogs, forums, news sites and many other sites will frequently link to content that is useful or interesting to their users. Creating content that site owners will willingly link to is difficult, but highly rewarding. This can be content such as infographics, unique vouchers, guides, reviews, exclusive content, etc.

There are various Social Media platforms that are great for developing awareness of new, useful content. These are platforms such as twitter, facebook, Digg and Reddit as well as blogs and forums of brand advocates that have been identified through your Network Analysis Audit. As this awareness increases and traffic is driven to your site people will start to link to your content if it is useful or interesting.

5) Social Profile & Localisation

Localised listing hasn’t really been developed into Social Media platforms but is incorporated in search results for destination related searches. However it is only a matter of time before this cross-over happens.

For example if someone tweets that they are going away for a weekend to London then they can then be shown a list of bars, restaurants and shops with exclusive offers that are on during that approximate time period. All of this pulling in maps and local business listings – whether this is on their laptop or desktop or even via their mobile phone.

As a brand you need to ensure, where applicable, that you own your local listings – even if at the moment this is only through getting all your branches listed in Google Local Business for both Paid and Natural Search.

6) The Platform & The Tail of Search

Now creating a blog or forum may not be appropriate for all brands. Some brands may find the best way to engage with their audience is through other people’s forums or platforms such as twitter and facebook. But if it is right for your brand then it is imperative that SEO is built into this platform and that it is accessible to search engine spiders to ensure the possibility of visibility within search engines.

If your platform is accessible it allows you to mine the tail of search for your products and services. Allowing you brand to gain visibility for niche terms and related terms that may not have a place on your main site. This platform will allow you to build on your customer service as the community you build asks and answers questions about your products and service or related topics. But don’t forget if you do decide to build a platform with the aim of building a community, you do need to give your audience a reason to visit, engage and come back – otherwise you may end up with a ghost town!

7) Topic of conversation & search behaviour

Through monitoring trending topics with tools such as Google Insights and understanding your target audience’s search behaviour you can develop an understanding of their needs. This can help inform the types of conversations you have or engage in around your brand, products and services or related topics.

Now these are some ideas that could be used for your brand, and this is by no means everything, for example I haven’t mentioned the recent incorporation of live twitter results into SERPs and the Google’s convergence of Search and Social. However it is not about rushing in and trying everything, or even any of these ideas. That could even have a negative impact on your brand and its growth online. It’s about the research and the execution of the strategy that will allow your brand to flourish through the means of Search and Social Media.

Post from: Connect

7 Search & Social Synergies

Positions:

SEO Check (£1.19)

This one is simple but effective. Check your positions, nothing more. It gives you the possibility of tracking international SERPs and keeps a history record of your positions, which may be quite useful. It has a nice interface too.

SEO Search Ranking (£1.19)

This one is not as nice as Seo Check, but it does the job. Nothing new here, move on.

Analysis:

SEO Adviser (£1.19)

This app will check the basic optimisation elements and obstacles depending on the keywords you tell him to check. And I don’t really like the UI. But it does the job.

SEO Automatic (£5.99)

Another analysis app. Very simple and intuitive, in fact, a bit too simple for my taste. If you don’t want to spend £6 on this, there is a free Lite version.

SEO IT (£1.79)

Quite a clunky app that will analyse any page you introduce. It can give you a quick link report, which is nice. And it is quite useful to analyse content. However, I was really put off by the interface of this app.

Analytics:

Analytics App (£3.49)

Google Analytics in your iPhone. As simple as that. It has a beautiful interface and you can easily change dates and add several accounts. Recommended.

BAM Analytics (Free)

Similar to Analytics App, BAM Analytics is Google Analytics in your phone. With a slightly uglier and simpler interface, it easily lets you drill down to goal conversions. A good free alternative.

SEO Stats (Free)

A very basic app that will tell you things like Age of the page, pages indexed, links reported by Google & Yahoo, and some other stats.

News:

SEO Post (Free)

Although it looks like a german app (in fact, it is), it also has a RSS feed in English. It pulls the most recent blog posts from the usual suspects. As a nice feature, it also plays Matt Cutts’ videos from the GWT Youtube Account. This app is not amazing, but it can do if you have some spare time on the train…

Other:

The Art of SEO (£2.99)

iPhone version of the book written by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola. It may be a bit uncomfortable to read, but it is cheaper than the book.

That’s all from me. Please note that there are more apps out there, but I just don’t think they are good enough to be in this list. In fact, some of the above do not deserve to be in this list either. There is a need for SEO apps for iPhone, so if you are a developer, now it is the time to get your hands dirty!

Post from: Connect

SEO Apps for the iPhone

Post from: Connect

The social media lessons of Chat Roulette

Now, I appreciate that to some people the connection might not be immediately apparent, and others may even think it tenuous, but bear with me and all will become clear.  And if, like me, you very much like paid search and snowboarding, then you’re in for a treat!

Now, without further ado…5 ways in which you can use snowboarding best practice to improve your PPC ROI:

1. Check your bindings are secure before you launch  /  do your pre-campaign checks

When you’re barrelling down a mountain and carving a track through a group of unsuspecting skiers, the last thing you want to do is look down and realise that the binding which is keeping you bound to your snowboard is flapping loose, causing you to lose concentration and your edge and face plant into a drift of snow.   Such a calamity can be avoided by taking the time at the top of the mountain to ensure that all those vital straps are tight and secure before you set off.

For paid search, it’s no understatement to say that the set up is the single most important time of a campaign and as such there are commensurately many checks to go through before you go live and start spending the big bucks which will help you avoid an ROI related disaster.   My top 5 easy pre-launch checks are:

• Do a test purchase to check that the tracking has been installed correctly and ensure that all URLs are appended or encoded correctly.
• Double check all destination URLs are the best match for their respective keyword to ensure maximum relevance
• Ensure all the language and geography targeting settings are as per your campaign specification and not Adwords’ Editor’s default
• Spell check your ad copy (nothing looks shoddier than ads which contain typos)
• Ensure you split out the Google’s content network into a separate campaign for evaluation in isolation to the search network

2. Allow your board to run flat before initiating a new turn  /  allow a new strategy chance to build up data before changing tack

To successfully initiate a turn when snowboarding it’s imperative to first allow your board to run flat and true down the fall line of the mountain.    Failure to do this will pretty much guarantee that you catch an edge and slam face first into the snow.

The consequences of failing to hold your nerve when making a change to your paid search campaign trajectory are less snowy than when riding, but if you don’t allow a new strategy to unfold and garner some results, you will never truly develop insight and learning.   This is point is pertinent because many people try to be creative and decide make a campaign change only to completely reverse it at the first sign of poor results.   Yeah, some new strategies start flying right away but most take evolution, tweaks and refinement – none which is possible if you don’t allow a new tactic to accrue enough data to make statistically valid decision on whether or not to can it.

3. Hit the mountain early after a dump to get fresh tracks  /  keep an eye out for tactical paid search opportunities

To snowboard is to ride miles of deep virgin powder; truly there are few better experiences in life.  However to do this so usually requires commitment and an early rise.

In paid search there is also a payoff for the proverbial early bird in catching the worm of a breaking news story and thus benefiting from first mover advantage and deliciously low CPCs.   That’s right, for the fast-thinking, committed and agile paid search manager a breaking news story represents an opportunity to capture new search volume at rock bottom CPCs.  The catch is of course that not every news story is going to be applicable for your business to piggyback on, nor does a single news story comprise a long term strategy, but the more you do this and think about the opportunities that come along then you’ll be surprised at the chances that present themselves.

4. Start your rotations small and build from there  /  build paid search success from a small and manageable base

Let’s face it, if you look to start your snowboarding trick repertoire by mastering the tomahawk it’s going to hurt.    The same principle applies for a successful paid search approach;  you simply must start from a solid base and progressively build to a huge ROI.

A few common mistakes when starting out a new paid search campaign which relate to a pursuit of quantity over quality which you should avoid include:

• Building out keywords list out to an unmanageable and irrelevant degree through a lack of thinking and a surfeit of permutation (thus hampering subsequent optimisation and development)
• Adding broad match keywords on a wholesale basis to an account without sufficient effort put into phrase and exact match combinations
• Making an initial tracking specification so complex that it leads to confusion, delays and errors in installation (initially it might be sufficient to focus only on tracking conversion events)
• Splitting a limited budget between too many search engines such that you dilute optimisation efforts and are unable to achieve market penetration in any one area (where budgets are limited it usually better to get one area performing well first and roll out incremental coverage).

5. Check your speed in flat light conditions

In snowboarding flat light means essentially that you can’t really see where you are going; and of course this greatly increases the chance of your mush hitting the piste (are you noticing a pattern here?)  The simple solution is to take things just that little bit slower and accept that ‘low viz’ might take a touch off your top speed.

The equivalent of flat light in paid search would be a poorly configured or non-existent (!) tracking mechanism.  Thankfully the days of non-existent campaign tracking are all but over (although it does happen – you know who you are!) but more frequent are those occasions when developers “didn’t realise that code should be there” or “Jim in IT says it’s going to have to wait until the next release schedule to get this installed” – which is inconvenient to say the least.   Such occasions are a fact of life and my advice at these times is usually the same: employ the concept of prudence.   If you can hold off a campaign launch until the tracking is installed and you can “see” what you’re doing, then do so.  Similarly, wait on rolling out that big budget increase until that small but crucial bit of code is resident on your site so you can actually analyse the effectiveness of the increased expenditure; you will thank me for doing so, later.

So, there you have it – how snowboarding can improve your paid search.   Next week, how ballroom dancing can turbo-charge your SEO…

Image Credit: by rhys logan

Post from: Connect

5 tips on how good snowboarding technique can improve your paid search