Archive for October, 2009
More "Goals" for Google Analytics
by Paul Jahn
A few days ago in the Twittersphere, it’s been mentioned that Google
Analytics is now starting to add the number of “goals” to 20 (four groups of five), up from four only.
For some, this may not be a big deal. For others, it’s just fantastic
and the possibilities are almost endless.
For many companies, a couple goals fit just fine. If you’re generating leads, you may have goals set up for both a long and short form for people to fill out, giving you information about their needs. That’s it.
What if you want to get more
granular? Maybe you have a new service or product and want to set goals on how many users get to these pages. You can test these goals for the number of pages you want people to visit or even how long you want users on your site.
Or, if
you’re an e-commerce site 20 goals still may not be enough. That’s probably a different discussion.
Let’s take a look. Here’s how part of your goals page may look now.
Time on Site and Pages/Visit are just a couple tools you may want to play around with for measuring different site engagement goals.
If you want to measure engagement by “time on site”, you can easily do so down to the second.
Same goes for the number of pages per visit.
As always, Google provides an easy-to-understand YouTube video.
Any of you test these new possibilities yet? More robust tools out there that already have this and more, but the popularity of Google Analytics along with its price (free) makes this new for many.
Check out our small business news site.
How Small Businesses Can Brand Themselves On the Cheap Online
by Stoney deGeyter
People often associate branding with money. Lots and lots of money. Generally, if you try to run a branding campaign you might see from companies like Target, you most certainly will have to fork over a big chunk of change. But small business owners don’t have that kind of money to brand themselves in similar fashion. Fortunately, there are other ways to brand your small business online.
From my examples in my post Why Branding Matters to Small Businesses, you might conclude that a full-scale SEO or PPC campaign is the only way to brand yourself online. SEO can play a role in branding, but you can engage it strategically so you’re spending less time and less money while still building brand recognition.
What are you branding?
First you need to know what it is you are branding. Is it your company name? Your products? Your services? Your personal name or online handle? What is it that you want people to remember?
If you’re a blogger your name is definitely important. So is your blog name. If you’re a business then your business name will be important, as might be your products if they are exclusively yours. The point is, before you start spending money to brand yourself you first need to determine what you have that needs to be branded. Now you have your starting place.
How to use SEO for branding
SEO is a great way to brand your business, products, services or blog. Since you’re not going after high-volume keywords, the cost of using SEO for branding is relatively minimal. The idea is to make sure you come to the top of the results when someone searches for whatever it is you’re trying to brand. The goal here is to make sure your brand is prominent in the results so you begin to build that brand-name recognition.
The easiest way to do this kind of branding is to simply edit your title tags to include your brand name. If it’s your company name, then put your company name first and foremost in your title tag. If you’re branding own name, put that there. Most SEOs will tell you not to put your business name in the front of your title tag. If you’re targeting non-branded keyword searches I fully agree. However if your focus is on building brand name recognition, then you’ll have to sacrifice some keyword real estate for your brand.
The goal here is to make sure people see your company name, or whatever it is you’re branding, whenever your site comes up in the search result. This will also help ensure that when someone does a search for your branded name they’ll find you up top. It will still be important to optimize your site for non-branded keywords, however. The more keywords you rank on the first page for they more opportunities you have to build brand name recognition.
Look for opportunities to optimize for your pages for some of the long-tail keyword phrases. Being ranked on those often generates more highly targeted visitors so branding to that audience is even better.
How to use PPC for branding
Another thing you can do to brand yourself is to buy cheap ads through Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can do this for your name, products or even specific keyword searches. When going this route you’re not competing for top spot, or even for a lot of clicks. Instead, you’re looking to appear on a search result page where you’ll be seen for as little money as possible. Don’t compete. Find keywords that have low click cost or more expensive keywords where you can rank further down the page. Again, the point here is just simply to get eyeballs to fall on your ad–and your brand name–not necessarily to get the searcher to click on your ad (though that’s never a bad thing.)
PPC ads are a great way to get visibility for incorrect or alternative spellings of your brand. Bidding on most variations of your brand name will cost you next to nothing on a per-click bases. You can also run your ads on dozens, or even hundreds, of low search volume keywords. These will get very little traffic, and therefore cost very little, but it gives you yet another opportunity to get your name in front of searchers eyeballs. Lots of little exposures often dwarf the benefit of a few big exposures.
I’m fully convinced that there isn’t a company in the world, regardless of size, that shouldn’t be working on branding itself in some way or another. Branding for your web site or company name is usually the easiest thing to do as most web sites inherently come to the top of the results for those types of searches. But taking it a bit further, expanding your reach can be significantly rewarding, even allowing you to be a little brand in a big commercial pond.
Check out our small business news site.
Local and Social: It’s all Coming Together
Google and Bing strike deals giving them access to real-time social feeds. What does it mean for the future of local search? …
Philosophy and Search: The Big Three Founders and the Philosophers
Does the thinking of Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and David Filo, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates mirror some of the great philosophers of history? …
Asian, Arabic and Russian Characters In Domains Soon: What Does It Mean
ICANN announced it will start allowing domains to be registered using non-Latin characters (English etc.) starting Nov. 16. The news was released during a meeting in Seoul on Friday, Reuters reported.
The news is important as it will see the registration of thousands if not millions of language specific domains. Previously, all domains were basically in English – not quite appropriate for a world wide web.
As the Independent noted:
“Considering it is known as the “World Wide web”, the internet’s reliance on the English language has long been maligned as a hangover from the web’s beginnings as a communications tool for the US military.”
“100,000 new characters are expected to be added, in a multitude of languages including Mandarin, Russian and Hebrew,” according to the Independent.
No doubt there will be a stampede to register domains like the Oklahoma Land Rush of the the appropriatedly named “Unassigned Lands.”
This move also shows a loosening of US control over ICANN and “most striking about the development is the symbolic shifting of power underpinning the web, which comes at a time that America’s economic power around the world is diminishing. With Chinese web users now outnumbering their American counterparts, commentators will see this change as another step in the gradual de-Americanisation of the internet.”
Business Wire Conducts Video Interview of Warren Buffet
Last month, after watching HostingYourParty, which told people how to host a Microsoft Windows 7 House, I asked: If you create something so bad that it goes viral, is it a public relations disaster?
Today, after watching “Warren Buffett is Bullish on America’s Future, but Says That a Full Economic Recovery Will Take a While,” I’ll ask a different question: If you create something so good, is it a video marketing triumph even if it doesn’t go viral?
In the video, Cathy Baron Tamraz, President and Chief Executive Officer of Business Wire, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, interviews Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Okay, so not every company has the “Oracle of Omaha” as its chairman. But every company has a chairman, CEO or president who their customers, stockholders and the media want to hear from.
Yes, yes, you can always insert a quote from Le Grand Fromage in your next press release. But, imagine inserting a video interview as well.
You’ll find the Business Wire press release was posted yesterday. It is entitled, “Warren Buffett is Bullish on America’s Future, but Says That a Full Economic Recovery Will Take a While.”
And attached to the press release is the video below.
So, even if 590,000 people don’t view it in the next three days, I still found it compelling.
Oh, speaking of 590,000 views, that is what a demonstration of Google Maps Navigation (Beta) has received in the past three days. You can see it below.
Okay, okay, so most companies don’t have brand names that are verbs as well as nouns. But every company has products that its customers, shareholders and other stakeholders want to hear about.
So, do these videos have anything else in common? They aren’t funny, which also makes me think: Why isn’t your company using video marketing?
Google Flu Trends Intense in Canada, High in United States
Okay, so Google Flu Trends has been around since November of 2008. But Google has found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity.
Check out the world map below to see how Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity. It is intense in Canada and Norway. It is high in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.
Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer.
You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
Google has found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together.
Google compared its query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often Google sees these search queries, it can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.
So, according to the world map, now would be a great time to visit Australia, where flu activity is minimal. Throw another shrimp on the barbie.
Anchor Intelligence Reports Decline in Click Fraud, Identifies New Hotspots
Anchor Intelligence has released its click fraud report for the third quarter of 2009. It paints a different picture than the Click Forensics report that was recently released. Where Click Forensics saw an increase, Anchor Intelligence saw a decline.
Overall, click fraud was 23.2% in Q3, down 14.3% from 27.1% in the second quarter. Anchor Intelligence breaks its click fraud rates into two categories: attempted click fraud, the kind with evil intentions, and innocuous click fraud, like an accidental click. Attempted click fraud was 18.6% in Q3 down from 22.9% in Q2. Innocuous rates increased from 4.2% in Q2 to 4.6% in Q3.
Anchor Intelligence’s data reports attempted click fraud, not billed click fraud. Their ClearMark for Traffic system integrates with ad networks and search engines and identifies fraudulent clicks before the advertiser is affected.
Egypt and Indonesia have emerged as leaders in click fraud rates – percentage-wise. Volume is still highest in the United States:
Anchor Intelligence says it did observe more sophisticated click fraud schemes in the third quarter, such as browser hijacking. They also saw an increase in the threats of malicious advertisements in paid search and ads on publisher websites.
Google Crawls RSS Feeds to Discover New Web Pages; AdSense for Feeds Now Available in Blogger
Google recently launched a new feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds to discover new web pages. This helps Google index new webpages faster than traditional methods.
As a result, you’ll want to make sure that your robots.txt file allows Googlebot to crawl your feeds. To learn more about robots.txt from Google’s standpoint, click here.
In other feed news related to Google, AdSense for Feeds is now available directly in Blogger. You can find the integration under the “Monetize” tab in the Blogger dashboard.
AdSense for Feeds allows bloggers to make money from advertisements that are included in RSS feeds. This is important because not all RSS readers click through to visit a site, where bloggers can make money off of display ads.
Blogger is a blogging platform that was acquired by Google in 2003.
Google Tests Mortgage Comparison Ads, Updates Real Estate Search in Maps
Google is vamping up its real estate search offerings with two new announcements. First up, AdWords is testing comparison ads in the mortgage/refinance vertical. The idea behind comparison ads is to help searchers filter what they’re really searching for when they type in something like “mortgage.” Check out this screen shot of a comparison ad, per the Inside AdWords blog (click for a larger view):
When you click the ad, you get taken to a chart that lists various rates and lenders.
The second real estate announcement is for Google Maps. There are new ways to help searchers find real estate using the mapping service.
The first one involves the “More” menu that’s directly on the map (not the one in the sidebar results). When you click on that, you’ll see a real estate option. The second one is the ability to search rentals.
What do you think of Google’s pursuit of real estate? Let us know by leaving a comment.