BEM Interactive Joins Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) Program

GREENSBORO – BEM Interactive, an industry leader in interactive design, development and digital marketing, announces the company is now a Google Analytics™ Authorized Consultant, joining a group of organizations worldwide.

Google Analytics™ Authorized Consultants are organizations that demonstrate sophisticated expertise in Google Analytics™ web services, which report how website visitors search, navigate, and convert. To qualify, potential organizations undergo the application process and meet qualifications, including being able to provide comprehensive and complex Google Analytics™ case studies. BEM Interactive's Google Analytics™ consulting services include: implementation, assessment, customization, consultation, training, and ongoing support services.

“BEM Interactive is honored to have received this designation from Google,” says Malinda Pengelly, founder and president of BEM Interactive. “Becoming a Google Analytics™ Authorized Consultant represents our company’s steadfast commitment to providing exceptional interactive expertise.”

“In today’s online savvy business world, Google Analytics™ is instrumental in helping organizations understand and leverage data about their website visitors rather than simply collecting it,” adds Pengelly. “With the assistance of our Google Analytics™ in-house experts, our clients are seeing real returns, growing their businesses, and maximizing overall web effectiveness.”

About BEM Interactive
Founded in 1996 and based in Greensboro, NC, BEM Interactive provides award-winning interactive design, development and marketing to more than 350 clients, ranging from small start ups to Fortune 500 companies. Focused on delivering positive, measurable results for clients, BEM Interactive is known for innovative designs; reliable web development; comprehensive digital marketing solutions, including search, email, mobile, social marketing, and Google Analytics™ Services. The BEM Interactive Education Center, located at the company headquarters, offers seminars on Internet, marketing and technology topics critical to success in today’s increasingly online savvy business world.

Google Analytics Audit - 3 Quick Tips

It's a simple fact of life: like George Lucas's continual "improvements" to the Star Wars trilogy, your perfect, flawlessly executed Google Analytics implementation will suffer at the hands of routine website maintenance and updates. New pages will appear out of the ether, untagged and untracked. Your exquisitely customized tracking code will inexplicably have a link to a dancing hamster gif inserted directly in the middle of it. That guy in IT will somehow gain admin access to the primary GA account and make "creative adjustments" to your custom reports, citing mysterious and illusive "corporate reporting standards". Then he spills a Mountain Dew on your keyboard.

"Revenue? Why are we reporting on THAT?"

Simply put, the more people touching your site, your data, your analytics kingdom, the more watchful you have to be. The best defense is constant, proactive vigilance, but even then, things will slip by you. Designers, programmers, and developers have their jobs to do, and analytics tracking quality is usually an afterthought. A well-developed QA process and management's emphasis on its importance will do wonders here, but in the meantime, here are 3 relatively quick ways to audit your Google Analytics implementation.

1. Are all pages tagged and passing information correctly? Sounds obvious, but lots of questions on missing, incomplete, or "weird" data in Google Analytics can be answered by identifying one or two untagged pages. Without the ability to capture user data set within the GA cookie on every page, you're going to start seeing a lot of odd data in your reports. In fact, I'll go on record as saying that if you haven't tagged every page on your site, you can not produce sound business recommendations from your analytics solution. This seems obvious, but depending on the site, a simple, untagged "About Us" page can throw a wrench into the whole works.

You have a couple different options here.

• Visual confirmation. View the source code of the page in question (in your browser of choice, right-click and "View Source"). For a basic installation using the current Javascript code, your code should be inserted immediately before the closing tag - hit Ctrl + F and type "ga.js" to quickly find the code. While the presence of this code on the page doesn't necessarily mean its firing and passing data to GA, you'll be able to visually inspect for proper placement and/or random code insertion.

WHAT.

• Scanning tools. For sites with more than 3 pages, the above option isn't really feasible. A great free tool is EpikOne's SiteScan, which will scan the first 100 pages of your submitted domain, then generate a very helpful CSV file with the results. Premium users get some additional features, but for smaller sites, the free service typically fits the bill. For an in-house solution, WASP (originally developed by Stephane Hamel of immeria) is an extremely robust extension for Firefox that will manually crawl your site and deliver all sorts of information on a wide variety of analytics solutions, not just GA. Extremely helpful is the fact that WASP doesn't simply look at the page's source code for tracking code, but actually tracks if the code fires. The free version is limited to 20 pages per crawl, but this is such a useful tool that you'll probably want to purchase a license if you're serious about tag audits. 

2. Clean your filters! Functioning as a data bottleneck or net for which information gets displayed in your reports, filters in Google Analytics offer a fairly advanced level of customization. However, improperly formatted filters can result in inaccurate statistics populating your reports - or, in fact, block important data from being passed to GA at all. When first setting up a new filter, or if multiple users have access to edit existing filters, make sure to:

• Always maintain a default, unfiltered profile. Since filters function as a kind of "data net" that prevent certain information from showing up in your reports, it's important to realize that once you apply a filter, that data is gone. If you set up an exclude filter on February 1st to block all internal traffic from appearing in your reports, then realize on the 28th that you've somehow managed to exclude all tracking data on visitors coming from Google, well...that's that. That data is gone, with no way to retroactively find it, and now you've got to explain to your boss why organic search traffic dropped 95% in February (and why you didn't catch it until the last day of the month!). Always maintain an unfiltered profile.
• Brush up on that RegEx. Regular expressions offer an extremely flexible way to craft your filters, but can be fairly confusing at first. An inadvertent "." can completely change the data set you're capturing, so be sure to take some lessons and make use of another handy EpikOne tool, their RegEx tester. If you're simply trying to exclude internal traffic from a certain IP address, or a range of IPs, you can verify your coding skills with Google's RegEx generator for IP addresses.

3. Verify your incoming link tagging structure. If you have control over an inbound link (say, your specified destination URL for a Bing PPC ad), you can append the URL with some tracking variables to properly categorize that traffic in your reports. For example, my Bing ad, when clicked on, might take visitors to example.com/product.html?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=adcampaign1 - the bolded variables in this URL are captured by Google Analytics and let you know that the visit came from Bing, but was in fact from a CPC (cost-per-click) ad within your "ad campaign #1". Now that this information is tracked, you can analyze these visits in the same CPC reports you use for advertising in Google and do some nifty slicing and dicing.

I've covered link tagging in Google Analytics in more detail before, so here I'll just say - make sure your variables are logical and consistent. Don't tag paid Bing traffic as "ppc" when Google AdWords is grouped under "cpc". Remember that these tags are case-sensitive - "keyword" and "Keyword" will show up as two different items in GA. If you're doing banner advertising and paying for bundles of impressions, not clicks, don't throw that in with your pay-per-click campaigns! Doing so will only make analysis more difficult on your part - a well organized hierarchy of link variables can make the difference between spotting a staggeringly awesome opportunity and blowing past it with a "Traffic Sources" report that runs for 3 pages.

A lot of issues with Google Analytics revolve around these 3 items, or a combination thereof, so it's important to audit regularly and intelligently. A corporate push for data quality and a rock-solid QA process are incredibly helpful, but a weekly rundown of these 3 areas (using some of the tools above) can dramatically reduce lost data, identify potentially inaccurate statistics, and hopefully pinpoint some opportunities or areas for improvement!

SEO Tip in Google Analytics - Spotting Broken Inbound Links

Much of the challenge in SEO (search engine optimization) lies in link prospecting and maintenance - that is, tracking down high ranking, relevant, and/or authoritative sites and encouraging them to link to your site. This in itself is no easy feat - and nothing is more frustrating than discovering that great link from AwesomeSiteThatRules.com is now pointing to a broken or now-nonexistent page on your website.

Link monitoring is a time-consuming and fairly tedious process, but there IS an easier way to find referring sites that are linking to inaccurate URLs. If you use Google Analytics on your site, here's a quick snippet of code you can add to your 404 page to capture those sites.

Every page on your site should have the default, standard tracking code installed. To view this within Google Analytics, find the profile for the site in question and click "EDIT" from the account overview screen, then "Check Status". It should look something like this (click to enlarge):

That circled bit of "X"s will actually be your unique GA account number. Now to see what sites have broken links pointing to your website, you'll want to add the following segment of code to the standard tracking code on only your 404 page. In the call to trackPageview, you'll add ...

"/404.html?page=" + document.location.pathname +

document.location.search + "&from=" + document.referrer

And you should end up with (click picture to enlarge):

Once this is set up, you should be able to track your 404 page from GA's "Content" reports, including referring sites. Now it's up to you - start bugging those people to update their links!

Google Analytics, Marketing Campaigns & Conversion Attribution

In the words of web analytics commando Avinash Kaushik, "I humbly believe that the world of data perfection ("clean auditable data") does not exist any more." And he's right! In the interests of moving away from data regurgitation and towards drawing actionable conclusions in the sea of web analytics and statistics, the first step should be the realization that even today, with all the cool gadgets at our disposal, web analytics data is imperfect and inherently flawed.

I mention this not to provide an excuse for incorrect conclusions and strategy ("If only that tracking code was installed correctly on my blog, I would've known to avoid using flashing strobe banner ads!"), but rather as a step towards analytics enlightenment. Yes, data may be flawed, but this should be your call to arms - find out how the data is flawed (or, stated another way, the limitations of the data set) and what you can do, as an analyst, to draw real-world conclusions from these numbers.

Here's an example. To let you identify high/low performing marketing efforts, Google Analytics will automatically track the source of visitors to your site. These are segmented into a few default mediums.

Check out the first row. The "cpc" segment captures traffic from "cost per click" or "pay per click" campaigns, such as Google AdWords. From here, you can see how many visitors that clicked through from your pay-per-click ad actually bought something from you, filled out a lead-generation form, etc.

But! You now know that this data has issues. Remember, your newfound acceptance of this axiom shouldn't be an excuse, a crutch to lean on; instead, this should inspire you to dig deeper and not take these numbers at face value.

And here's why: there's a specific way in which Google attributes things like conversions and e-commerce transactions to traffic sources. Let's say a user visits your website several different times via several different mediums, and finally buys something or completes a conversion. How do you know which of these mediums drove that purchase? With one exception*, in Google Analytics, conversions are attributed to the most recent campaign or medium by which that user arrived. For example:

1. Due to a recent break-in at her home, Jane Customer is shopping for broadswords. To begin her buying research, she searches for "home defense broadswords" on Google. From the results page, Jane clicks on a PPC ad for ADT's line of security swords. She browses the site for a while, checks out prices, but does not make a purchase - Jane wants to check out some other brands and options.
2. After sifting through the highly competitive landscape of medieval residential defense products, Jane settles on ADT and clicks on one of their banner advertisements on her Yahoo homepage. She arrives on ADT's site and makes her purchase.

In this example, it's fairly clear that Jane's first visit, via ADT's pay-per-click campaign, was probably most responsible for generating this sale! However, the purchase actually occurred on her second visit, when she arrived via a referral site - her Yahoo homepage. Google Analytics will attribute this purchase as being generated by a referral visit from Yahoo...and all the while your PPC conversion rate sadly continues to drop, bit by bit.

Uh-oh. So how flawed is your data? Can you make a serious business decision regarding the effectiveness of any given marketing campaign, based off incorrect or incomplete information? (Or as Mr. Kaushik would say, the "known unknowns"!) In terms of severity, this can be a serious issue if you're selling a product that's fairly expensive, fairly complex, or otherwise has a high-involvement buying process - every time a potential customer returns to your site, whether to continue researching or to purchase, their previous traffic source data is being overwritten!

(*The exception! For repeat visitors that return directly via a bookmark or typing the URL directly into their browser, Analytics will attribute any conversions to the immediate preceding traffic source. In the example above, if Jane's 2nd visit to ADT was from a bookmark or simply recalling the URL from her first PPC-sourced visit, the conversion would still be attributed to the PPC campaign.)

So for e-commerce sites with these high-involvement/long buying cycle products, or sites with a very high Visits-To-Purchase ratio, analysts may want to direct Analytics to ignore these secondary campaigns and attribute any conversions to the first campaign that directed the visitor to your site. With links under your control (such as banner ads, external blogs, or links posted on your company Twitter account), simply append the variable "&utm_nooverride=1" to the URL. This will prevent the original traffic source from being overwritten, thereby preserving the origin of each visitor. (For more info on Google Analytics tracking variables, see our post on Tracking Facebook, Twitter & Social Networks in Google Analytics.)

Is this solution perfect? No way. But this knowledge of inherent error is what should keep you nimble as an analytics commando. The idea that you can always learn more and refine your conclusions...this is what keeps us on our toes.

New Google Analytics Features Rolled Out

Well, the BEM Interactive team of web analytics ninjas is just tickled pink over the new Google Analytics features that will be rolled out over the next few weeks. Best of all, these improvements bear the stamp of a team interested in generating NODA; that is, Not Only Data - Action.

While it would've been relatively easy for the Google Analytics folks to simply implement a few new metrics and call it a day, these features are geared towards drawing additional insight from the existing data. Hop on over to the Google Analytics Blog for the full scoop, but here's a quick summary:

• Expanded Goals - Each profile can now track 20 goal points rather than 4, and several new engagement goals have been added
• Additional Mobile Tracking - a server side solution for more in-depth tracking of mobile sites and users
• New Analysis & Segmentation Options - Tools like Secondary Dimensions and Advanced Table Filtering (no more looking for high bounce rate keywords and having to weed out single-visit terms!)
• Additional Sharing - more options for sharing custom report templates and advanced segments
• More Custom Variables via tracking API - opens up metrics and dimensions for more powerful custom reporting
• And particularly awesome, Analytics Intelligence - An algorithmic intelligence engine that will spot significant data spikes, swells and changes in site traffic - for example, automatically alerting the user of a 400% jump in organic traffic from a particular keyword over the last 3 weeks. So. Cool.

Needless to say, we are pretty stoked on playing around with these new features! Visit the Google Analytics Blog for additional videos, tips and info on the new features, but kudos to the Analytics team for not contributing to the wealth of raw data floating around out there.

Web Analytics: Stats, Data, and Unwavering Devotion

Congrats (and apologies!) to Jacob Kildebogaard ("Webstatistik, Webanalyse og Effektmåling"), seen here perusing Avinash Kaushik's excellent book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day".

Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics – Tracking Social Networks in Google Analytics, Part 2

(for Part 1, see our previous blog Track Facebook, Twitter & Social Networks in Google Analytics Pt. 1)

Previously, we discussed accurately categorizing your social network traffic within Google Analytics. Instead of seeing your Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube traffic scattered amongst all other referring sites, we used a filter to group social media sites under one medium.

But what about tracking visitors down to a more granular level? For example, you know that 100 visitors came to your site from Twitter – but which tweet drove the most traffic? Do your Twitter followers click when you talk about one product vs. other? We can collect this information using two very simple tools.

Tagging Links in Google Analytics

I discussed this awhile ago (Top 3 Google Analytics Tracking Tips), but for this, let’s focus on tracking specific social marketing efforts. We want to know which specific link brought traffic, and be able to analyze that information. This is fairly easy and only takes about a minute to incorporate.

With a text limit of 140 characters, microblogs like Twitter or Facebook force users to keep it short and simple. Usually, there’s no room for long, drawn out URLs like www.example.com/products/XYZproduct.html. So, websites like TinyURL.com and bit.ly take web addresses, shorten them, and provide that hyperlink, which users then use to direct visitors – thereby giving them more room to include actual text. The great thing about these URL shortening services is that you can tag the original link with Google Analytics’ tracking variables and correctly identify the source of visitors. Here’s one in action:

Let's walk through an example. JimBob P. Yokel owns an online malt liquor supply store (“You ain’t never gon’ find no better booze, no how,” JimBob swears). He uses Twitter regularly to inform his customers of sales and specials, and like many other Twitter users, incorporates shortened URLs into his posts.

But before he shortens these URLs, he uses BEM Interactive’s Google Analytics URL Tagging Tool. This enables him to identify, down to the individual Tweet, how visitors found his site. So for a Twitter post promoting Colt .45 (“It’s the maltiest!” says JimBob), he might tag the link like so:

• Source: twitter (the site he’s posting on)
• Medium: social network (if you’ve created the filter described in Part 1 of this blog, this will correctly identify the traffic as belonging to that category. If not, this can be “tweet” or something similar)
• Campaign Name: colt45 (if JimBob is grouping his marketing efforts by product type, and Colt 45 is a type of malt liquor that he’s promoting in the tweet)
• Term: 7_15_11AM (identifies which specific tweet or post drew the visit. Here, JimBob has identified a post by time - July 15th at 11AM. This can be classified according to whatever works best for you – as long as it’s consistant)

So, if JimBob’s destination URL is http://www.JimBobsHouseOfMalt.com/colt_45.html, then the entire link, with tags, is:

http://www.JimBobsHouseOfMalt.com/colt_45.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social network&utm_term=7_15_11AM&utm_campaign=colt45

Pretty nasty looking, eh? A visitor arriving after clicking that link would be correctly identified and tracked – but a URL like that won’t even fit in a Twitter post! What’s to be done?

Here’s where the TinyURLs of the world come in! JimBob copies his resulting URL, complete with Google Analytics tags, out of the builder tool. Then he heads to TinyURL.com (or bit.ly, or any other URL shortening service), plugs in his nasty-looking tagged URL and hits submit, getting a cute little link in return! It looks better, gives JimBob more space to pitch the product (“Only the maltiest make the cut,” he vows), and perhaps most importantly, retains all the visitor tracking tags and information.

Maintaining the correct variables & formats of those variables, you can track all your website traffic from links in Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, or any other links. This control and flexibility really comes in handy when analyzing the numbers and impact of social network marketing.

Track Facebook, Twitter & Social Networks in Google Analytics (Part 1)

A cornerstone of any organization’s overall social marketing strategy should be reliable web analytics – that is, accurate tracking of traffic coming from networking sites on which you’re conducting marketing efforts. This will enable you to slice and dice statistics for those visitors, and hopefully align those numbers with your marketing goals - when a client comes to us and wants to engage in some form of social media marketing, this melding of analytics and strategy is always paramount.

Google Analytics will automatically track referrals from other websites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networking sites. In your reports, you’ll see something like this:

However, these sites are grouped in with all other referring traffic! What if you want to track statistics for incoming traffic from ALL social network sites? It’ll be hard to do that if you have to sift through all your other referral traffic.

Additionally, how can you track what exactly someone clicked on to visit your page? Wouldn’t it be nice to know which of your Twitter posts (ah yes, which “tweet”) generated that $500 purchase?

With a few tweaks, we can track exactly that in Google Analytics.

Grouping Social Network Traffic in Google Analytics

Google naturally defines traffic as being organic, direct, referral, etc – so what we’re doing here is telling Analytics to place certain sites within a certain category, or “medium.” Chances are, this is how your Traffic Medium report looks right now:

Organic traffic covers non-paid visits from search engines, (none) means direct traffic (IE, a visitor typed in your website’s address directly), and all your social networks are grouped under referral traffic.

We want a separate category for those sites though! Using a filter, we can tell Analytics to remove specific sites from the “referral” classification and group them under a new medium.

(Note: This technique involves creating a filter. Create a duplicate profile (how?) before proceeding – any mistakes can screw up your historical data. We’ll install the filter on the new, duplicate profile.)

Once you’ve got the profile set up, click “Filter Manager” from the Overview Screen (the one that lists all your profiles), then “Add Filter”:

Name your filter something descriptive, then select “Custom Filter” from the Filter Type drop down box. We are advanced analytics ninjas, so select the “Advanced” button and configure the filter like so:

The “Campaign Source” and “Campaign Medium” fields can be customized based on your site’s traffic – in this example, we’re pulling any referrals that contain “Stumbleupon” or “ezinearticles”, and we’ve grouped them using the Regular Expression character “|” (directly below your Backspace key), representing “or”.

So, to pull out all traffic from Facebook, Digg and Twitter, I would type “face|digg|twitter” into this field – any referrals that contain these terms (“face”, or “digg”, or “twitter”) will be grouped into a new medium called “social network”.

After you’ve applied the filter, you should see this spiffy little line in your Traffic Medium report:

…and presto! Your social network traffic is grouped in one distinct category, separate from your Google Image referrals (man, that’s a lot of cat pictures).

In part 2, we’ll talk about tracking visitors down to more specific sources, enabling us to answer questions like “Which tweet drove more visitors, the one about lunch or the one about that jerk-face Bryan from accounting?” and “Does anyone really care about my Facebook status?” Stay tuned!

Note: Part 2, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Analytics is now up.

All I ever needed to know about Analytics I learned at....

Jeremy Shaffer's Web Analytics 101 Course this morning.
...well, almost everything, of course he left us hanging a bit until the next Course 102, Date/Time TBD.
Here's a couple of tidbits that I found pretty neat:
-Add a filter in Google Analytics to exclude your IP address from showing up as a visit on the site. That way your internal staff that are frequenting the site, won't skew the results.
-35-40% is an average bounce rate for most websites.
- You can set up goals based on a conversion point on your site's contact us form, whitepaper downloads, or at checkout for e-commerce sites.

Drop us a line if you're interested in signing up for the next course and I'll add you to the notification list for upcoming sessions.

(Oh! And in case you're wondering whether we ate this cake pictured above...we did not. However, we did enjoy yummy bagels and coffee from Panera)

Search Engine Marketing & SEO Tips for MSN's Bing

Microsoft's massive marketing engine has brought the world of search into the public eye with the launch of Bing. Bing has been labeled as not a search engine, but rather a "decision engine" - that is, capable of delivering intelligent results, rather than simply aggregated data. It's MSN's latest attempt to take on Google, and Bing is equipped with some pretty fierce weaponry for the job.

Attracting Traffic In A Sea of Options

From a business standpoint, the advent of engines like Bing and Google means a dramatic shift in the amount of information available to customers. Marketers and webmasters will have to adapt to users having a much larger set of options and greater access to detailed information. A great example is Bing's "Related Searches" options displayed on their results page.

Bing provides not only related searches, but provides subsets of similar information. Here, a search for "1966 GTO" yields multiple links to more specific data (click to enlarge).

Case in point: your vintage car dealership may hold the number 1 position on the search results page for the term "1966 GTO." In Google, this is great! Related searches are listed at the bottom of Google's search results page, and anyone looking for anything dealing with a '66 GTO is likely to click through to your site - simply because it's in the first position. But in Bing, the related searches are listed directly alongside the results! Someone looking for "1966 GTO body parts" may see that term displayed directly to the left of your website. Since that's what they're really looking for, they click, and boom - they're off on another, more relevant search, and your #1 position listing goes sadly unclicked. More than ever before, it's important to anticipate (as specifically as possible) what people are truly seeking, and optimize around that.

Learning How Bing Ranks Pages

But for many folks, the big question is still the same: how can I rank highly in Bing search results? Early analysis of Bing shows that when determining ranking, the engine is actually much more strict than MSN's previous incarnation, and perhaps even harsher than Google! One report indicates that Bing places lots of emphasis on domain age - that is, how long your website has been around.

Oddly enough, Bing seems to pay less attention to incoming links (other sites linking to your page). This is contrary to Google's appreciation for a keyword-rich, widely distributed network of incoming links. This ranking technique, among other innovations, made Google into the search juggernaut it is today - it's quite interesting to see Bing taking a different approach.

There's also some evidence that page titles, text-heavy pages, and even lots of outbound links to other sites (a no-no for Google) have much greater importance in Bing than other engines. Of course, this is essentially a brand new engine attempting to topple the search behemoth - expect to see some volatility in Bing's algorithms (as well as Google and Yahoo!) as the dust clears.

Google Analytics Link Tagging Tool / URL Builder from BEM Interactive

Hey all - just a quick heads-up that BEM Interactive's URL builder tool for Google Analytics is now available. Using this, you can tag inbound links in your newsletters, banners, non-AdWords PPC, etc, so Google identifies and categorizes the visitors correctly (you can read more about that in our previous post on using Analytics to track non-Google marketing & advertising).

We assume no responsibility if you mis-tag your links! But there are some instructions to go with the tool - so go nuts with our Google Analytics URL tagging tool.

How to “listen” for key information on the web

Would you like to be sent an email whenever your company is mentioned on the internet?

How about when a competitor wins a big contract or issues a press release?

Well there are several ways to make this happen and it’s all about “listening” on the internet.

One of the key tools for digging up these juicy secrets is to use Google Alerts. You can setup a Google Alert for just about anything. Google will send you an alert either daily or weekly with the latest updates on all your alerts.

Google offers a great tutorial on how to setup alerts. Check it out here and you'll be on top of all the things you need to know.

Tips for what to listen for:

• Listening for your company name will make you aware when you are the topic of conversation.
• Listen for primary competitors names. You’ll be notified when they send a press release, win a new big contract, as they bring on new staff or if they have a layoff.
• Listen for your trademarks and service marks to ensure you are on top of any potential legal issues with your protected marks.
• Listen for key phrases related to your products or services to keep abreast of your industry.
• Listen for mention of your customers to keep up to date with your key accounts
• Listen for key vendors to make sure you know about any issues they are encountering
  

Although this is a great way to keep informed of key events, it’s not 100% reliable. Google catches many conversations and alerts you to them, but some will be missed.

Affiliate Marketing, Pay-Per-Post Blogging, and the End of Social Networking?

Mitch Joel over at Six Pixels of Separation posted a great blog the other day discussing paid links and pay-per-post blogging in Twitter. In a nutshell, it's when companies pay avid bloggers or established social networking figures to post/blog/link to their product/site/whatever. Since social media sites thrive on accurate & credible word-of-mouth ("Oh, Joe thinks these sunglasses are cool and he's a pretty cool guy. Maybe I can get these sunglasses and be similarly awesome!"), these campaigns are much more effective without full and accurate disclosure on the part of the poster and/or advertiser.

In his post, Mitch pretty accurately sums up my feelings on the matter:



YES. I'm already weeping tears of joy that someone is with me on this, and then:



Awesome stuff, Mitch (the following is my comment on his blog).

One of the things I always attempt to pass on to clients is the genuine understanding and appreciation for XX Social Networking site (wherever they're trying to be). A lot of companies will assign the task to SOMEONE in-house in hopes that simply generating a presence on Facebook, Twitter, whatever, will help their company; of course, it DOESN'T, and sometimes ends up hurting the brand because of actions similar to the ones discussed in your post. There's NO overall strategy, NO matching of marketing objectives to the proper social media site (if there ARE any marketing objectives for the campaign), and ultimately, no understanding that for a social media effort to work, that company has to honestly contribute to and become part of the community.

As marketers, I really think we've got to be conscious of the personal effort people have put into constructing their social media personae and networks. To those folks, this ISN'T seeing a banner ad on CNN.com - affiliate linking (which, let's face it, is more credible/profitable if people think it's genuine and not a marketing campaign) and pay-per-post blogging is seen as an uninvited intrusion into the user's social network and personal life. I've heard dozens of stories of businesses diving headfirst into Facebook or blog networks and just RUINING their name by attempting some silly, heavy-handed traditional "push" campaign, or a poorly thought-out affiliate marketing design.

I don't think social networking will completely be destroyed by things like this, but it certainly will cause more user movement between different websites. Sites will build up buzz and momentum but ultimately, will be deserted as affiliate marketers, link farmers, what-have-you, follow the masses.

Great post Mitch, cheers.

3 Easy Ways to use Google Analytics to track offline, email & other marketing efforts

One of the things I frequently notice when talking to both clients here at BEM Interactive and the general public is a general acceptance of hazy numbers when it comes to measuring the success of marketing and advertising campaigns. By hazy numbers, I'm referring to the traditional standards of how managers can identify marketing efforts as being beneficial to the bottom line...and really, they're not great!

With Google Analytics and similar web analysis tools, the doors have been opened to an entire new world of measurement and research. Google Analytics will automatically track traffic coming from AdWords PPC, other search engines, and referrals from other sites (anyone arriving at your site via a link from another domain) - and we're not talking simply vist numbers here! There's an incredible level of detail available to Analytics users that requires no additional effort beyond the initial setup. Things like bounce rate, conversions, revenue, and even your visitor's physical location and internet connection speed are automatically captured.

Analytics' geographical overlay showing the physical location of site visitors. Currently, you can drill down to the City level of detail. Coming soon: What room of their house are your visitors in?

This is great information, but what about offline marketing efforts? Traditional markets such as print, radio, and television advertising offer numbers like "potential audience exposure" to provide a general idea of how many people you'll reach. But wouldn't it be great to know how many people actually watched your commercial? Or even better, how many people saw your commercial and then bought something from you? It would be great to say, "Well, our site got tons of high-quality traffic from our TV commercial during Seinfeld, but we got nothing from our spot during The Andy Griffith Show." (The problem here is obvious: people that watch The Andy Griffith Show do not own computers.)

Not very internet-savvy at all.

And how about measuring online marketing campaigns that aren't automatically pulled into your Google Analytics interface? For example, did you know that if you're running sponsored ads/PPC in Yahoo or MSN without implementing proper tracking methods, all that incoming traffic is being tracked as direct or referral traffic? How can you tell if spending $500 a month in Yahoo is generating quality traffic?

Luckily, we’ve got some tools at our disposal! Here are three easy steps to take to track non-Google-sourced traffic:

1) Specific landing pages

Honestly, this is best practice for any marketing effort! Driving customers to a special page rather than your homepage is a great idea anyway, and here’s why:

• Tracking and Analysis. The easiest way to study the success of marketing campaigns is to pull people to a specific domain or page. For example, you run www.FruitsJuice.com. You might run a magazine ad in “Fruit Juice Enthusiast Monthly” that urges people to visit www.BananaKoolAid.com – a site specifically promoting banana fruit juice. Since you’ve only promoted this website in one place, you’ll know soon if that magazine is right for your advertisement.
• Customized appeal. You are segmenting your potential customer base, right? If you sell banana-flavored Kool-Aid online, your conversion rate will be much better if your ads AND the page you drive traffic to are related to one specific product offering. Don’t bring people to your homepage – send ‘em to the banana juice page!

2) Google’s URL Builder is your friend

This is important! All non-Google-based marketing efforts need to have tagged links! By appending a unique identifier to the end of any off-site links, you’re telling Google, “Any actions by this visitor should be attributed to THIS campaign.” This should be done for banner ads, paid links, newsletters & email marketing – in short, anything you’d like to track as a source of traffic and/or revenue!

For example, say you purchased some banner ads on FruitJuiceEnthusiast.com and you’d like to see how people like your banana-Kool-Aid related ads. By linking the banner to this tagged URL, you’re classifying the traffic for Google Analytics. You don’t need to tell Analytics to watch for these tags – when someone hits this page, the tracking script automatically pulls the information in and categorizes it!

http://www.BananaKoolAid.com/?utm_source=juiceenthusiast&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=banana_ad

Here, 3 parameters are defined:

• Source. FruitJuiceEnthusiast is the website that’s generating the traffic. Keep in mind, you can name these as you see fit, and shorter is better. Abbreviate if necessary!
• Medium. This identifies the venue or type of link that the visitor arrived on. For example, you might have multiple types of ads on FruitJuiceEnthusiast – by tagging the banner link this way, you can identify which style of ad generates better metrics
• Campaign. Great for different products or categories – this notifies Analytics that this particular ad was part of a certain campaign.

Luckily, these can be generated very quickly using Google’s URL Builder tool or our own spiffy BEM Interactive Link Tagging Tool. There are additional parameters you can add to the tag to identify further details, but the three parts shown above are the only required ones. Shorter URLs are better, so only tag what is absolutely necessary – don’t go nuts.

Banana Kool-Aid: Probably a horrible, horrible idea.

3) And, as always…don’t forget the housekeeping

URL tags and traffic metrics are gathered by the Google Analytics tracking code, which should be installed on every page of your site. This code has a tendency to vanish into thin air when changes are getting made to pages.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

All your tracking and campaign management can go to waste if basic site maintenance falls by the wayside. This is a relatively simple tip, but I always like to include it – from time to time, this code will take an extended vacation from some of your pages.

With a little attention to detail and some creative campaign management, you can move traditional marketing campaigns out of the "hazy numbers" field and start working with realistic, actionable data.

Bounce Rates Primer - Top 7 Common Issues and Solutions

Web marketers really like bounce rate data. And what's not to like? In the massive sea of data that analytics software can provide nowadays, the bounce rate for any given web page is one number that can immediately indicate a problem or a success. It works across all levels of visitor traffic, and can generally be applied to almost any website. As Malinda said in her previous post explaining bounce rates, it really is the golden metric - for a general overview of what constitutes a "bounce" and why it's a solid metric to use, definitely read through that first.

Now, as explained , when a visitor "bounces", they arrive at your website and immediately leave. It's usually a good indicator that whatever they saw, they didn't like. What I'd like to do in this post is go over some common causes of high bounce rates for certain pages, and some actions you can take to reduce these numbers.

Generally, a bounce rate over 40% - 45% is something you definitely want to check out. If people are treating your site like a trampoline, run through this list.

1. Remember your statistics class? Of course you do! Begin by applying a Bayesian inference model - OK, just kidding, but the big takeaway from stats is that you really need actionable, significant data. If you've got a 80% bounce rate on a page with 10 visits, don't freak out! Do some digging if need be, but drawing any sort of conclusion from such a small sample pool won't do you much good. Build up some data first!
   
   
2. Maybe it's NOT so bad. What's being displayed on the page in question? Remember, most analytics programs consider a visit to be a bounce if they don't click through to any other part of the site - it's entirely possible that the visitor got everything they came for without needing to browse deeper. You'll generally see high bounce rates for:
   -pages with an offline call-to-action (IE, a phone number)
   -pages that only link out to another domain (counted as a bounce, since the visitor is leaving www.yoursite.com)
   -pages that many people have set as their browser's homepage
   -blogs (most folks tune in to read the newer entries; for these, it's better to examine returning visitors vs. new visitors).
   
   
3. MAN that's ugly. For designers, this is always hard to take, but look at your site through a visitor's eyes - how attractive is the site? Look at color scheme, graphics, font size and choice, content placement, etc...does the site make you want to hang around? Could you remove maybe one or two of the flashing "CLICK THE BUTTON!" banner ads? Run it by your friends & co-workers to get some fresh eyes on it.
   
   
4. Functional Issues. Closely related to design, site usability is paramount! Some very basic features are still being ignored by some websites - is the navigation easy to use? Do links lead to functioning pages? Is the text size big enough to read? Does the logo at the top of the page lead back to the homepage?
   
   For a great general checklist covering details like these, check out Larisa Thomason's Web Site Usability Checklist over at NetMechanic.
   
   
5. Technical Issues. Perhaps the most basic, but still forgotten often! Does the page work? Find out what links/search engines are driving most of your visitors - then take that route yourself! If the page in question has dynamically-generated content, make sure the page is getting populated with the right information.
   
   And folks...it's 2009. Pop-ups, pop-unders, etc...let's just set aside that ugly chapter in web marketing and move along. Nothing to see here!
   
   
6. CONTENT. Really, after doing the housekeeping of the previous steps, this is what it comes down to. Most analytics software allows you to segment your visitors, so try to narrow down which sources are sending you traffic with the highest bounce rate:
   
   -For PPC traffic, make sure your keywords, ad text, and landing pages all align and are relevant to each other - the more they match, the better. If someone types in "tennis balls", make sure your displayed ad and the landing page are about tennis balls, not tennis rackets.
   -For visitors from organic search results, examine the keywords that visitors came in on. Make sure the page is optimized for the correct keywords. Most search engines are getting better about indexing pages correctly, but on-page content still has a lot to do with it; if folks are coming to your tennis balls page, make sure they're not finding it by typing in "tennis nets."
   -For traffic coming from links on other sites, be sure that your link is surrounded by the appropriate keywords and content. Your bounce rate for the tennis balls page is gonna be pretty high if someone gets there via a baseball equipment site.

These are some problems we look for right off the bat when we spot a high bounce rate. Run through this checklist thoroughly and hopefully you'll see that bounce rate drop!

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him submit a "Contact Us" form

...namely because they lack opposable thumbs and the capacity for higher thought. But in the realm of website contact forms, this is a problem many people face at some point. You've got the site, you've got the marketing campaigns, and you're seeing the traffic - so why aren't folks filling out your HTML forms? Where are the leads?

Google Analytics gives us any number of powerful tools to observe visitor behavior while they're browsing a website. If you're getting low bounce rates (hmm? Bounce rates explained by Malinda) and high average page views and time spent on your site, there may be something that's turning people off before they get around to providing their info. Here's a quick checklist to run through before you decide to abandon user-submitted lead generation forms ("Contact Us", "Request More Info", and so on).

Does it actually work?

Try and try again! A smart web designer already tests across multiple browsers and in multiple screen resolutions, but this applies to HTML form submissions as well. Run a few test submissions to make sure there's not a breakdown somewhere between the user's input and that data showing up in the right place.

Are your tracking codes inserted? Are they correct?

Leads and newsletter sign-ups are great, but they don't mean much if you can't track where they're coming from! If you're using an analytics package or tracking software that requires code to be inserted, make sure it's inserted in the right location in the page, and that all unique IDs are correct. One of the great things we do here at BEM Interactive is track leads from marketing campaign to conversion; for folks accustomed to the vague data provided by traditional advertising campaigns, this is a wonderful insight.

Sooo...what happens next?

There's nothing I hate more than filling out a form requesting more information and being sent...riiiight back to the site's homepage. Tell the user what they can expect - a phone call, an invite to a webinar, a pillow case embroidered with your company logo - whatever it is, let them know (and if possible, create anticipation for it).

Don't overdo it.

I know, I know - it's a lot easier to sell someone a new car if you know what they hate about their current one, but try to resist the temptation to ask visitors for too much information. They're already taking the time to provide you with potential revenue; the last thing you want to do is drive off potential customers once they've come this far. If you simply must have more information, then make sure to explain why you need it, but if possible, get the essential data and save the details for later on in the selling process.

And perhaps most important...

Where's the motivation?

Internet users have come a long way. Sure, people still fall for the deposed Nigerian prince scam e-mails, but most folks can spot a sales pitch from aways off. You wouldn't sign up for extra TV commercials or more billboards on your morning commute, so ask yourself: what am I offering people?

Invariably, the most popular websites are informative or entertaining, not sales pitches. It works the same way with user submission forms. Is there some incentive for people to send me their information? This can be almost anything, so check out what your competition is offering - then offer your visitors something better.

Online lead generation is a cornerstone of web marketing, so make sure you're doing all you can to utilize it. Follow this checklist and you'll show that horse who's boss.

Behind the Form: Google and the Deep-Web Crawl, Pt. 2

In our previous blog discussing Deep Web and its impact on search data, we left off with the innate problem with automated web indexing programs ("crawlers" or "spiders") - that is, their inability to move past any HTML form requiring specific values to be entered. This meant that a vast amount of information was not being cataloged and delivered to search users - there was just no way that anything dynamically generated (ie, triggered on the fly by human input) or behind a form could be indexed.

Well, between mapping the ocean and opening a school that will probably discover the meaning of life before lunch, Google did just that. Working with scientists from Cornell and UCSD, Google researchers (whom I can only hope will not become supervillians at some point) have devised a method for their spiders to complete and submit HTML forms populated with intelligent content. The resulting pages are then indexed and treated as regular indexed data and displayed in search results - in fact, at this moment, content gathered from behind an HTML form is displayed on the first page of Google search queries 1000 times every a second. The methods the bots are using are pretty cool, but I'm Nerd McNerdleson about that kind of thing. So we won't dive in to the technical stuff here, but check out the article if you're into it.

That's cool...NERD. But what does it mean?

Everyone knows Google loves relevance - their entire business model is built upon it. This technology is about pulling exactly what the user is searching for and immediately providing it without even requiring them to visit any page outside of the Google results page! Spooky.

Say that you're feeling under the weather. Rather than type in "symptom checker" and find a WebMD-type page, you type "coughing, runny nose, strange bubonic plague-like swelling" directly into the search engine. Google - who has already had their spiders hit every medical symptom form out there, query them in endless varieties and combinations, and determine the relevance & popularity of the results - immediately comes back with "You've got the Black Death" and you're set (or...maybe not).

From a retailing standpoint, many sites have functions to generate product lists based on user input. As it stands now, a shopper looking for a red, American-made minivan with under 30K miles would find the appropriate website, input his or her criteria, whereupon the website would query the database and return the results. If Google continues to move forward with their deep web crawls, this information could be displayed directly through their outlet of choice without the user ever accessing any site other than Google (if the user makes a purchase, does Google get a cut? Hmm...)

Obviously, this is a massive step forward in search technology and, in an industry that seems to change every hour, represents a new method of obtaining and presenting information. As web marketers, this is another variable, another challenge to consider in our work - how can we optimize pages that can be generated in a seemingly limitless number of ways? With search engines becoming increasingly more powerful and their data mining capabilities getting deeper, will there come a time when all data is presented through one aggregate portal? This may be years down the line, but the technology and the foundations are here now; forward-thinking businesses and web marketers need to be there as well.

Behind the Form: Google and the Deep-Web Crawl, Pt. 1

Crazy Things That Really Rich Companies Do

Kind of like that weird guy at the party with an acoustic guitar and the Pink Floyd shirt, Google is getting DEEP. Some would say...uncomfortably deep. After an already busy year, wherein Google released an open source mobile OS and a browser that's rapidly gaining market share, they recently announced that they had mapped the sea floor, including the Mariana Trench. And hey, why not found a school featuring some of the greatest scientific minds out there and see what happens?

So Google's been more visible than ever lately, and there's no doubt that this'll continue as they get their hands into more and more projects - but let's drop down a few floors and look at something that should dramatically affect the way Google's indexing programs ("spiders" or "crawlers") collect data, analyze websites and present the results.

As much work as the BEM search engine marketing team puts into making sites appeal to spiders (and there's a lot we can do to make those spiders love it), the spider programs themselves are pretty straight-forward: hit a site's page index, check out the structure and content, and compare that to what Google has determined to be "relevant" or "popular." But because of the way these programs are written, there are certain areas that they simply can't reach...namely pages that require human information, input, or action. As a basic example, there's usually a confirmation page after a user submits a "Contact Us" or "Newsletter Sign-up" form - this could contain a promotional code or some other kind of unique data.

This dynamically generated content (this could also be a search results page, calculations or conversions, even the results of a symptom tool on a medical site) simply doesn't exist until the user creates it! Depending on the form you filled out, the resulting page is yours and yours alone - so try to ignore that tingle of omnipotence next time you Google something.

But search engine spiders can't understand what the form is asking for or the info being delivered to the user - and even if they could, how would they figure out what to insert in order to generate any relevant content? Drop-down boxes, category selection, zip code input - any of these forms can prevent data from being indexed. Collectively, this blocked data is referred to as the "Deep Web." By some estimates, the Deep Web contains an astounding amount of data - several orders of magnitude more than what's currently searchable. Since they chiefly rely on site maps and hyperlinks, search engines crawlers just can't find a way to access the information.

Is there a way around this problem? Well...yeah! Look for the second half of our discussion of Deep Web and search engine crawlers coming soon!

Google Analytics Bounce Rate – The Golden Metric

Google Analytics is one of the best web analytics tools available. It provides so much information about your web site traffic and visitors. This is not only its strength, but can also be a hindrance to new users of Google Analytics.

There are so many really good metrics to look at you can easily get lost in the sea of information. But the Bounce Rate is by far the best metric for validating the content of your site and the relevance of your advertising campaigns.

So what does Google Analytics (GA) define as a “bounce”? If a visitor comes to your site and doesn’t look beyond the page they landed on, it’s considered a bounce. In essence, they took a peek at a single page on the site and decided this is not the place they wanted to be.

The Bounce Rate Percentage is simply a metric that compares the number of single page visits (bounces) to the total visits. GA gives you an overall bounce rate for your site; however, I find that looking at this metric at the page level is best.

What should your bounce rate be? Obviously every site is different and your bounce rate can vary depending on several factors. Generally a bounce rate of less than 30% shouldn’t give too much cause for alarm. Alternatively, a bounce rate in excess of 50% should send you hunting for the culprit. Again, look at your bounce rate at the page level, not the overall site level.

What can cause a high bounce rate?

• Poor content on the landing page
• Technical browser errors on the landing page
• Disconnect between an ad campaign promise and the content on the site
• Poor selection of target audience for an ad campaign

Start improving your bounce rate by picking 3 pages on your site with the highest bounce. Taking 3 or 4 pages at a time can keep this otherwise daunting task a bit less overwhelming.

(To explore bounce rates in more detail, check out Jeremy's blog Bounce Rate Primer: 7 Common Issues or contact us today.)