Rob Stoubos, SEO Manager at ClickThrough, gives a quick introduction to Facebook Per Page Impression Data.
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Facebook has introduced page post impression data to all accounts – it was previously only available to pages with +10,000 likes.
The statistics will be available to the page admin, and give information on the number of ’impressions’ for a page (how many times it has been viewed – same metric used by display ad and ppc marketers) and also a new ‘feedback’ metric.
This feedback metric is a percentage, dividing the number of likes and comments for each post, by the number of times that post has been viewed. This is a reasonably good proxy for user interest in a post, and can help you obtain more information on what posts resonate best with your fans.
For example, with one of our clients we could see that the best time to send out status updates were 4.30pm and 8.45am – just before the start, and end, of the working day.
This new data source also helps you get an idea about what type of Posts are the best. For example, for one of our clients we found that:
These new statistics are only available for posts after June 25, 2010. Also, don’t expect to see clicks or video plays – it’s like and comments only.
Analytics continue to add additional insight to social media marketing campaigns, and this new data source from the biggest social platform of them all can only be welcome.
As part of our Digital Academy staff training program Dave Chaffey, our Insights Director, held a Google Analytics ‘Boot Camp’ training session today for the ClickThrough team. Dave gave a streamlined version of his Econsultancy training session, taking into account the fact that almost everyone at ClickThrough uses Google Analytics on a daily basis!
For our newer members of staff, Dave went through the intermediate skills areas of Google Analytics Advanced Segments, Custom Reports, Goals and Funnels and use of Regular Expressions. Dave also demonstrated how using the Pivot feature in Analytics can help to reduce the need to combine data offline for comparative analysis and how to use custom variables to segment visitors across multiple visits.
It’s great to see that our search conversion experts were already using many of the more powerful functions e.g. Intelligence Alerts, Profile Filters, using regular expressions in goals and URL-based campaign tracking, but also really useful as an opportunity to keep up to date with the latest change to the Google Analytics tracking code as Asynchronous tracking is finally rolled out.
Big thanks to Dave for sharing his web analytics expertise, and to everyone who contributed some great questions.
Companies who have collected and analysed data over the years have often exhibited a considerable competitive edge; none more so than Google, who have taken data acquisition for advertising revenue to extremes – often at the expense of popularity with some who take exception to this level of data mining.
However, the quantity of data now available to companies (particularly with the response to the call for open data from government bodies) means that any company, large or small, can begin to build exciting and useful ‘maps’ of customer preferences and locations, (think of the information about you that a supermarket loyalty card generates) as well as create business tools, e.g. route maps for most efficient delivery routes based on when a customer will be available to sign for a parcel.
As we all know, possibly the most useful information your website can provide for your business is the statistics available from your analytics package. However, this wealth of information is often only given the most cursory attention, meaning that much that could be learned is ignored. Beyond your own data provided by your web analytics service, there are a number of sources making data available to all, including government departments – check http://www.data.gov.uk for an enormous range of data and new mash-ups of the data of interest to every British citizen as well as businesses.
For more on how data mining is changing our lives, this article in The Telegraph provides some very interesting new uses of data: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7963311/10-ways-data-is-changing-how-we-live.html
Back in March 2010, search funnels were added to Google Adwords. For many, the conversion data available up to now has been deemed sufficient, but Google have appreciated the fact that whilst a conversion may seem to have come through a specific product or service ad, the truth is that consumers have entered a site and then followed a different trail to full conversion. Until now, this has not been tracked.
Search funnels allow you to understand the entry points as well as conversion and exit points, giving businesses a real chance to follow users through a thought-purchase process. Additionally, it gives further drop-out data for any business utilising the option, which can help to adjust adverts, landing pages, conversion text, e-commerce pages, and contact processes, according to the data supplied by previous users.
More importantly, from a marketers’ point of view, search funnels will show data from previous user searches eg assist clicks and impressions, that have led the visitor (occasionally unknowingly) back to your site through different search terms, keywords and phrases, including days or weeks later.
This technology will also permit you to track ineffective keywords and phrases that are under-performing and therefore give you the option to remove these from your ad campaigns, or to give preference to higher performing terms.
We are likely to see further developments on this type of technology during the next 12 months, and for pay per click agencies keen to push Google AdWords accounts to the max, this is one place you should experiment.
“Our website doesn’t work” is a common claim from businesses. The site may be attracting visitors, but the conversion rate is low or the bounce rate is high. Too few businesses analyse the real problems and will often plump for a re-design rather than getting to the bottom of the actual issues.
Common problems are a failure to call the visitor to complete a particular action; the ‘eye candy’ drowns out the real messages and content; landing pages without a purpose; badly written or presented content; non-functional aspects of your site e.g. shopping basket, search, or non-standard HTML which doesn’t render correctly in your visitor’s browser or on their mobile phone.
Before your website design company advises starting again, think about changing and testing various aspects of your site. WhichTestWon website testing gives very good examples of how even minor changes can make a considerable difference to a website conversion rate.
Delve deeply into your web stats first. Many businesses pay only the most cursory attention to their site stats, and yet this is where you will find the clues and evidence as to why your website is failing you. Look carefully at the pages with high bounce rates – these bounce rates clearly indicate a problem, or two. Set up goals in your stats so you can see if people are dropping out part way through a process eg in the shopping cart. Check the conversion rates from your landing pages and consider what changes you could try to improve them.
Here are some other tips to help improve your current site:
Test and tweak, and monitor the results so you can discover what works and what doesn’t. Good web usability doesn’t come quickly. Don’t redesign in a hurry, particularly as this is likely to be an expensive solution to a problem which may be easily solved.
Whilst many businesses understand that their analytics can provide them with invaluable data, few use the features of their analytics packages to full effect.
Once you have installed the necessary tracking code on each page of your website, then there are multiple options which you can configure to make the most of the data available. For instance, you can set conversion goals to check whether your visitors are performing the tasks that a) you expect them to and b) without abandoning processes part way through. This will allow you to rethink your strategy if visitors are not completing goals, and check that all your processes are working correctly for the users.
E-commerce tracking is a little more complicated, particularly if you have multiple products. In Google Analytics you will need to activate e-commerce tracking within your Google account, and then place specific code for each product on your site. Full details of this and an example are given within the Google Analytics Help pages.
So, check you are gathering the data that your analytics package makes available to you, and then monitor how your website is performing. If required, seek the help of web analytics consultants. As ever, it is by monitoring, measuring, and adapting that you will benefit the most from your own data.
A search demand gap analysis is an essential part of a search engine marketing audit to check how well your search engine optimisation and/or pay-per-click marketing is working for your company. It will show you the commercial opportunity available from search engine marketing and compare your current performance against this opportunity, so showing sales growth potential. It’s often completed as part of a quarterly or annual review, but due to seasonal fluctuations in search volumes and changes in Google’s ranking approaches and competitor activity it should also be completed more regularly; we suggest monthly.
Here’s an example of a gap analysis. As, you can see it’s based around the main strategic high volume generic for a particular market, in this case related to LCD TVs.
A gap analysis will show you where you are underperforming for particular keyphrases or products and you can then set goals and then brief an agency or colleagues to take actions to improve performance in these areas.
A gap analysis also has the benefit that it enables you to compare performance of your search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. Since these channels are often treated separately, it helps bring these together in an integrated way to compare their relative performance. For example, in the example above where bounce rates are relatively high or market share is relatively low the cells are shaded in red.
A gap analysis is a comparison of the potential visits, leads or sales from searchers arriving on the site against what the company is actually achieving. It should focus on high volume phrases which are typically two to three keyword phrases including brand searches. However, a form of the analysis can also be completed for longer ‘long-tail’ keyphrases made up of more than 4 keywords.
As for the review of the performance of all traffic sources, the main measures you need to look at are traffic volume, quality and cost:
These measures are all available from your web analytics system such as Google Analytics from which data is extracted for the analysis.
You should also measure the percentage traffic gap which can be calculated by comparing the number of visits against demand indicated by a keyword research tool. We recommend using the Google Keyword Tool to review demand in a single country. It’s best to select the exact match reporting although it can be worthwhile to select phrase match for a different form of long-tail review.
Dr Dave Chaffey is Insights Director at ClickThrough Marketing. As Insights Director he’s responsible for the quality of analysis and reporting used to review and improve the performance of clients’ natural and paid search campaigns. He’s also involved in consulting on digital and search strategy for ClickThrough’s clients through analytics-based audits typically using Google Analytics for which he holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ).
You can also read his advice on best practice and updates on the latest developments in digital marketing at his Smart Insights Digital Marketing advice site. Dave is a recognised expert in digital marketing, listed in 2004 by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing. Dave is author of five best-selling business books including Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and eMarketing eXcellence (with PR Smith). He is also author of the Econsultancy best practice guides to Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search Marketing, Web site design and Managing Digital Channels. Dave also contributed the foreword to ClickThrough’s first two search engine marketing books.
Now you can make the most of teamwork by allowing every member of your company who has access to Google Analytics to annotate the graphs about your traffic and highlight, for instance, why specific peaks and troughs have occurred in your website traffic.
Whilst it is possible to do this with static graphs taken from analytics already, eg in a Powerpoint presentation to a client or management, now Google have added the chance to annotate graphs to show why certain highs and lows occurred in your traffic.
Having this information available, rather than lost on a team member’s hard drive from research they were conducting, can only be ‘a good thing’.
Check out Google analytics annotations now and have a play!
We predict: 2010 will be the year of analytics analysis. It will be the year when people finally begin to nail down what works for their company and website, and what doesn’t, through hard-nosed maths, facts and evidence instead of guesswork or following the sheep.
We are very pleased today to announce the launch of our add-on for phone call tracking with Google Analytics.
This add-on allows you to track phone call conversions from any source – banners, affiliates, forums, as well as PPC and organic searches. The importance of demonstrating ROI to internet marketing clients can never be under-estimated, particularly during economic rough patches, and this analytics add-on does precisely that.
We have been offering phone call tracking as a free service to clients for some years, but this latest version of the tool adds deeper functionality to enhance the service.
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E-consultancy have recently published a very interesting article citing Google Chief Economist Hal Varian stating that research shows that position is not related to conversion rates.
So, whilst you may have staff dedicated to maintaining your position in the PPC SERPs, it could well be shown from this research that they would be better utilised if they focused on other internet marketing strategies.
Sure, being in the top 10, above your competitors, seems to bring in more clicks, but importantly, it does not seem to bring in more conversions. In other words, the position is not related to attracting quality, targeted traffic who will then complete the call for action, be that a purchase, download, sign up etc.
Whilst being in the top 10 rankings, or nowadays the top 20, is still of key importance, where you figure within those top adverts seems to be irrelevant to produce the results you require.
I can see a few PPC agencies laying off staff…….
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