The social data hub aims to enable social network partners to submit their activity streams, making the data available to Google Analytics users within a set of social reports currently in development.

This means that GA customers will be able to determine down to the activity level – e.g. +1 button, comment, vote – what activities are taking place relevant to their content, when, by whom, and how they help achieve goals.

This comes as an extension to Google’s recent development of default integration of +1’s into Google Analytics.

The social web offers a great opportunity for brands to engage with customers in relevant and genuine ways, but social measurement hasn’t kept up. The goal of the new social data hub is to provide marketers and publishers with a comprehensive view of how social helps customers discover their brand and drive sales.

Google has partnered with several social platforms allowing Google Analytics users to integrate their activity streams straight into GA.

The launch partners are:

• Digg
• Reddit
• StackOverflow
• TypePad
• Delicious
• Gigya
• LiveFyre

and of course

• Google+
• Google Blogger
• Google Groups

Google will be following the Activity Streams specification, an industry format for describing socially interesting events, or “Activities,” about the people and things an individual may care about. In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, and an object. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object. For example, “Geraldine posted a photo” or “John shared a video.” Any of the data submitted may potentially be used but it must adhere to the specification. Detailed requirements are available on the GA Developer Documentation site.

This is another fantastic step by Google. There are already paid services that exist in this field but this now makes Google Analytics an even more valuable tool to SMEs as they can really begin to get a handle on the social web without it costing the earth.

What are your thoughts on this announcement? -@danpeden

1. Open Chrome

2. Type ‘Do a Barrel Roll’ into Google

3. Enjoy!

It’s certainly not the most creative thing Google have ever done but the response on Twitter and Facebook has been huge. This showcases more than ever how something fairly simple can be hugely popular, providing it has the right brand attached to it.

For those not in the know, the ‘Do a Barrel Roll’ phrase comes for the 1990s N64 game Star Fox.

This Google stunt is to showcase the power of CSS3 and this is underlined by the fact that this feature doesn’t work in Microsoft’s ‘ever friendly’ Internet Explorer.

Apart from being quirky, the big takeaway from this is that brands with huge followings don’t need something astonishing to gain social traction. They can create something simple and easily shareable that doesn’t take up too much time – think Angry Birds and you’re probably along the right lines.

What do you think of the ‘Barrel Roll’? – @danpeden

(Photo: WSJ)

I think what Google has done is pretty remarkable. Google Analytics is on more than 50% of the busiest websites in the world. To be able to take, crunch and display all that data within one to two seconds is seriously impressive.

What does this tool mean to me? This is one of the questions I always get asked when I demo a new feature or tell clients about it. The answer in this case is unfortunately very very little as I can currently only see a couple of use cases of this new Google Analytics feature:

1. Monitoring the live performance of a TV campaign
2. Spotting errors and correcting them

I’m still not 100% about the first one.

Monitoring the performance of a campaign as it happens is nice, but what can you actually do there and then if the performance is not what you expected. The answer: nothing.

The error spotting is certainly useful. If your site sees an influx of traffic or errors, you can jump on it quickly and hopefully correct the problem. This is provided you have a developer on call and can make rapid changes. This tool could also provide a free version of some error reporting tools you may currently have installed. However, these typically work best on the server itself.

I think this is one of the first times I’ve actually been disappointed by a new Google feature. Considering the amount of development time, money, and resources it took to create it, I just feel like they could have spent that time elsewhere. Perhaps fixing the bugs of version five or adding more resources to some of the more interesting new features yet to be announced?

I can see why Google has created this but it certainly sits in the ‘selling of the tool’ category rather than the ‘using of the tool’ category.

I’d love to hear some real world use cases for this if anyone out there has one….

-@danpeden

You can expect SLAs, advanced tools, extra processing power and dedicated support – at the right price of course.

At a rate of $150,000 per year, businesses will get you the ‘GA on Steroids’ that many people have been asking for. The flat yearly fee could be of interest to some but Google has potentially priced themselves out of the mid-range market that currently pay less than that for their analytics solutions.

However, actual SLAs, unsampled data reporting and fresher reports all move Google Analytics towards a much more suitable enterprise level product. The additional features of 50 custom variables and the attribution modelling (more to come on this later but it’s like no other tool out there) also begin to help the cause.

I certainly don’t think this is the finished article as an enterprise solution but it’s certainly a start. I fully expect more and more features to be added over the coming 12 to 18 months which should make the overall analytics marketplace an exciting place to be.

I suspect this addition will come as no surprise to most; social buttons have become a more and more common addition to webpage. The need to understand and track interaction on these has also grown. For the most part, more advanced implementations of Google Analytics have used virtual pageviews or event tracking to monitor this interaction – these are required no more!

Google has created a specific social tracking tag (_trackSocial), which will allow the tracking of most social elements. This tag looks like a spin off of event tracking, but with the welcomed addition of its own unique section under the ‘visitors’ report heading in Google Analytics.

This is a great little addition from Google. The only downside being the amount of additional code required to enable tracking – this is by no means an out of the box solution.

The main problem Google faces with tracking other social elements is the lack of consistency each of the providers (Facebook, Twitter, etc) take when designing their social buttons. Google has done a great job of creating some working examples of Fackbook and Twitter integrations, but even with this there is a large amount of (above average) Google Analytics code required to make this work.

One social element that is tracked automatically is the recently expanded Google +1 – any interaction with these buttons will automatically be reported within Google Analytics.

It’s still too early to be drawing conclusions on how this new data will influence our marketing strategies but what is clear is that a lot more sites will be able to gather a lot more data on social interaction.

This addition isn’t going to radically change how we view web analytics however. Google has reacted positively to meet a growing need for visibility on social interaction – a ‘nice to have’ that follows in the wake of a number of big Google Analytics announcements.

My biggest tip is to get those change requests in! Start the process of getting this implemented into your website – the sooner you start collecting data the better.

Other Resources:

+1 Reporting in Google Analytics

The ICO announced yesterday that this law will be delayed for one year allowing websites and businesses to come up with a workable solution to how cookies should be handled.

This decision will be welcomed by pretty much every online business, analytics provider and marketing provider across the UK. Although delayed, this law is not going away; the EU and the ICO are pushing for website owners to educate customers and allow them to make their own choice on what data you can capture from them.

The current law states that users must be able to opt-out of cookies being set on their devices. This is due to completely reverse as the new law states that cookies can only be set on a user’s device once they have given their consent.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (the body charged with regulating this new law) only recently issued its guidance on the situation.

With the release of the guidelines, the ICO said they were not expecting every UK website to be 100% compliant from day one, and realise it would take a long time before businesses were able to implement changes to their website.

We at Epiphany have yet to see a workable solution that doesn’t damage a user’s experience or completely kill any web reporting tools and it looks as if the ICO have finally realised this releasing a statement communications minister Ed Vaizey said:

“We recognise that some website users have real concerns around online privacy but also recognise that cookies play a key role in the smooth running of the internet. But it will take some time for workable technical solutions to be developed, evaluated and rolled out so we have decided that a phased in approach is right”.

So, although this law does not come into force until next year, we still believe businesses need to consider what they can be doing in preparation for next year.

Here are our tips to moving toward compliance with the law. These are recommended as an interim until workable online solutions are developed:

Tip #1: Update Your Privacy Policy

Privacy policies should include:

•        What types of cookies are being set

•        How they are used

•        Who they are shared with

•        How a consumer should manage them

Tip #2: Audit All Cookies & Tracking

Ensure you have a document available which lists:

• Each of the cookies set on your website
• What the purpose of that cookie is,
• What information it records,
• What other parties access it (if any)
• How that information is used.

There’s no reason to not implement these in the near future. Once you have the above tips in place, it’s time to start thinking about how you would gain consent from users that don’t have the latest browsers. Some cookies are exempt from these rules but these are only ones that directly impact the essential functions of that website i.e. shopping carts.

The UK government is working in the background with browser providers to ensure the type of opt-in agreement required can be set on a browser level, rather than at every website visited. This should solve a lot of the problems facing website owners.

Over the coming 12 months, more and more workable solutions will be discussed and created. The ICO will be expecting more businesses to have solutions in place given the publicity and advanced notice of this law change.

The current law states that users must be able to opt-out of cookies being set on their devices. This is due to completely reverse as the new law states that cookies can only be set on a user’s device once they have given their consent.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (the body charged with regulating this new law) only recently issued its guidance on the situation.

The ICO said they are not expecting every UK website to be 100% compliant from day one, and realise it will take a long time before businesses are able to implement changes to their website. We have yet to see a workable solution that doesn’t damage a user’s experience or completely kill any web reporting tools.

So, although this law comes into effect this Thursday, it’s certainly not a case of all hands to the pump. Doing nothing is not an option but there is no need to panic.

Here are our tips to moving toward compliance with the law. These are recommended as an interim until workable online solutions are developed:

Tip #1: Update Your Privacy Policy

• What types of cookies are being set
• How they are used
• Who they are shared with
• How a consumer should manage them

Tip #2: Audit All Cookies & Tracking

Ensure you have a document available which lists:

• Each of the cookies set on your website
• What the purpose of that cookie is,
• What information it records,
• What other parties access it (if any)
• How that information is used.

The talk in the analytics industry is that the ICO is not coming down hard and fast enough on companies. The independent authority has suggested popups, notice through privacy policy, additional information in footer/headers, and opt-in consent where feasible. The majority of these are not a viable solution without damaging a user’s experience both directly and indirectly.

The UK government is working in the background with browser providers to ensure this type of opt-in agreement can be set on a browser level, rather than at every website visited. This should solve a lot of the problems currently facing website owners.

Once you have the above tips in place it’s time to start thinking about how you would gain consent from users to set cookies on their machine. Some cookies are exempt from these rules but these are only ones that directly impact the essential functions of that website i.e. shopping carts.

The ICO is looking to publish some real world examples of how consent is being gained, while the industry should educate customers and allow them to make their own choice.

We’ve had the privilege of being able to play with this version for some time so it’s great it’s been finally released into the wild.

The new version has a large restructuring of reports and layout along with some nice new shiny features.

My personal favourite is the new account search area – YAY.

Meaning you can type a text search in the top right instead of having to selected an account, wait for it to load, select a profile, wait for it to load.

My other favourite is that when you move accounts the date doesn’t reset!!
Making monthly reports that little bit quicker and avoiding (as I’m sure we all have done) doing the analysis on the wrong date range when you accidentally forget the date range has changed!

There will be more on the new features over the coming weeks – until then – Enjoy!

Official Google announcement

If you’re reading our stuff and think: “This is pretty good” or “Wow, that blog about Google Analytics Event Tracking was amazingly useful,” then would you be so kind as to vote for us along with some of your other favourite blogs.

If you need any convincing check out Paul’s latest blog that has been featured on SEOMoz, and his ‘discussion’ with Rand Fishkin about Google’s moral responsibility.

Please vote for us!

Whilst booking simply use the code: EPIPHANY011

This will provide you with 15% off all tickets so get buying! It looks like it should be another good one this year!

Click here to register and enter you discount code details when prompted.

Using event tracking within onclick events only works if the user ISN’T moving between pages.

By that I mean if the event is placed on a flash element or anything that doesn’t change pages.

Something as simple as:

<p><a href="#" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, label);
">Track This</a></p>

Is fine, why? The href=”#” ensures the user doesn’t move between pages. Change the above code even slightly:

<p><a href="/nextpage.html" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, label);
">Track This</a></p>

And this won’t send the event to Google and therefore won’t show up in your reports, why? The trackEvent() function doesn’t have enough time to fire off before the user is moved to the next page.

The solution?

Add a small delay to the onclick event allowing time for the event tracking to fire off.

Start by creating a function to hold’s your trackEvent() call and a small delay:

<script type="text/javascript">
function trackclick(link, category, action, label) {
  try {
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1");
    pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, label);
    setTimeout('document.location = "' + link.href + '"', 100)
  }catch(err){}
}
</script>

Don’t forget to replace the UA-XXXX-1 above with your actual account id and include before the closing head tag.

The onclick event then changes slightly:

<p><a href="/jfnhdsnfn" onClick="trackclick(this, 'Button', 'Click', 'Label'); return false;">Track This</a></p>

Install this across all areas you want to track. These can be button tracking for internal promotion, external / outbound click tracking (although I would use virtual pages views for that one) or even just navigation interaction tracking – they can go anywhere!

Change the ‘button’, ‘click’ and ‘label’ areas within the onclick event to better represent what you are tracking – for help understanding those areas see Google’s event tracking guide

The lessons here can be directly applied to the asynchronous version of Google Analytics as well

Happy Tracking!

Google is aware of the issue that only appears to be affecting the web reports with the data collection and API reports showing a full service.

Google’s update on the current issue is:

“We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by November 6, 2010 12:00:00 AM UTC detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Starting Oct 25th, a 24hr delay with processing in sampled reports was identified in some accounts. No data has been lost and a fix is in progress.”

This being a fairly large problem, I would expect this to be resolved much sooner.

At the time of writing, Google updated their service dashboard to show:

“The problem with Web Report should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

A full packed agenda spread over 2 days looks like a must attend for anyone in the conversion rate business – which frankly should be everyone! One of the keynotes will be delivered by conversion guru Tim Ash – a man I have read a lot of but never actually seen live – so it should be an interesting one.

And again Epiphany is the bringer of great news – we can get you a discount!!!

Whilst booking simply use the code: EPIPHANY010

This will provide you with 15% off all tickets so get buying!

For a lot of people once you set-up Google Analytics you might worry: Have I done it right? There are several ways you can find this out:

1. Look at the Google Stats in a couple hours and see if your recording visits.
2. Use a Firefox plugin such as Live HTTP Headers to view the image calls being made
3. Use SiteScan by EpikOne

All these are great and will allow you to see if the code is installed and in most cases working properly but to take it one step further and identify any errors you may have Google have released their own Chrome extension.

Google released its ga_debug.js script a while back with the main problem being you had to re-tag your pages to use it. They have now taken this and incorporated it into the extension meaning there’s now no need to tag up those pages; allowing you to quickly and simply debug your Google Analytics installation.

What’s great about this is it will provide you with messages on where your problems lie. So instead of just finding out – my Google analytics doesn’t work. You can now find out why it doesn’t work!!!

Hats off to Google again for this – the debug script was a good addition but to transform it into a browser extension is a great move. I want to caveat this post by stating that the extension will only analyse simple installations and will only analyse the page you currently on. Always consult a registered GACP for those advanced implementations not only are they experts at identifying problems but will likely come up with tracking aspects that don’t come out of the box.

• Page load times
• Data collection & accuracy
• Error rates

As a general overview Google Analytics seem to have gotten it right – yey! Google Analytics never really had a problem with page load times but the new snippet improves the load times of even lightweight sites.

Data accuracy and error rates also seem to have improved…..when the code is implemented correctly – this brings me nicely to the purpose of this post. Despite a large level of information supplied by Google on how to migrate to the asynchronous code, web development departments still appear to be getting it wrong!

So here are some of the common problems I have witnessed and some simple code migration tips:

Common problem #1: Leaving the older code present

Although you might think it is silly, I have seen sites with the new asynchronous code implemented inside the HTML head and the older ga.js snippet implemented in the body.

Tip #1: Locate all ga.js code first

Get your site’s source code and use a decent search tool such as Notepad++ to scan each of your code files for “ga.js”, “UA-“ and “pageTracker”. This is a good way of quickly locating all the pages that contain your current Google Analytics code. Make a note of these pages as you WILL need to change them at some point. In the majority of cases you will be removing the code completely because the Google Analytics code moves from before the closing body tag to before the closing head tag. This leads me to:

Common problem #2: Incorrect code location

It’s amazing the number of different locations I have seen the asynchronous code located – I think my favourite was above the opening HTML tag

Sometimes it’s clear that web platforms have restricted the location of the code but where possible it should be placed in its correct location.

Tip #2: The async code should be place just before the closing HEAD tag

If you can’t get it in there get it as close to the opening body tag as possible.

Common Problem #3: Not using the migration guide

Ok this is a bit of a cop out, but on some sites it looks like developers just guessed what code needed to be present. Google provides the migration guide as a reference, you can look at what code you have on your current site and what the equivalent asynchronous version is. This leads me to:

Tip #3: Use the migration guide

The migration guide from Google is a great reference if you are unclear about what code should go where. The one area it doesn’t cover and our final common problem:

Common Problem #4: Incorrect snippet order

A standard ga.js snippet looks like:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

It is essentially in 2 parts:

[TRACKING CODE] being:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>

[TRACKING ELEMENTS] being:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

From an overview perspective the code is in the following order:

[TRACKING CODE]
[TRACKING ELEMENTS]

The same is NOT true of the asynchronous code. The async code is still essentially in 2 parts but the parts are in reverse order to that of the ga.js.

Tip #4: Ensure the code order is correct

The async code still has the same 2 parts:

[TRACKING ELEMENTS] being:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

[TRACKING CODE] being:
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>

But the orders are reversed. The tracking elements are now in front of the tracking code.

The order of the tracking elements is also important with the ­_trackPageview call being the last tracking element on all basic installations and the majority of advanced ones. This brings me to my final tip:

Tip #5: Ensure tracking elements order is correct

Having an incorrect order for the tracking elements is a sure fire way to have inaccurate stats. As a general rule the _trackPageview call will be the last of the tracking elements and the _setAccount call will generally be the first.

If you are in doubt, unsure or just don’t know – ask a Google Analytics Certified Professional (GACP) for advice – most (including ourselves) will offer Google Analytics advice completely free.

Starting with the good…

It’s easy to install and the set-up dashboard is pretty user friendly – although for the non-techies it could with more guidance areas.

As a product it certainly delivers, being able to track a phone call back to its original traffic source is something that (in the past) may only have been available to big businesses. AdInsight breaks down these barriers for little over £60 a month.

It’s simple to track your top level traffic sources i.e. SEO, PPC, Direct, and with a little configuration of your campaigns, you can track down to AdGroup / Single Affiliate level.

The system’s ability to allow the tagging of calls as leads or sales after the call has ended is also a nice feature –some sales guys are forgetting this process but handily you can log into the web interface and correct your mistakes.

My final pro point is on the support. The guys are always quickly reachable on the end of the phone for quick queries and technical questions.

Now for the not so good….

Tracking calls to keywords is not possible. You can set-up phone numbers specific to certain keywords in either exact or broad match but when running an SEO campaign this simply isn’t viable. Even small sites that get 1,000s of unique keywords month so trying to track each one is impossible.

There is also an inability to track a call to a specific customer. A customer will typically pick up the phone when a greater deal of trust is required or the product is a complicated one – this usually means the deal is not done over the phone. A lot of companies, especially ones offering services have a lot of back and forth before a deal is signed (SEO being the perfect example), in this case it would be useful to be able to ‘tag’ a user with a unique identifier (similar to the ‘press 1 for a lead’ tagging the system currently has) – this would then allow businesses to fully track revenue back to a source.

My final con (and it’s only a minor one) is around number use. The more tech savvy businesses will be able to undo this, but once you undertake AdInsight all your website generated calls have to go through them – by default there is no way to only show an AdInsight number to i.e PPC and SEO traffic only. You must have a catch all ‘other’ number. I can see why AdInsight do this, businesses will want know where ALL their leads are coming from and how many leads / sales this ‘other’ sector is generating, and for AdInsight of course, it means more revenue. I would just like the option of not having to put all my calls through a tracking system.

Despite a few problem areas, some of which are already being addressed (see below), I would strongly recommend AdInsight as a means of determining what makes the phone ring. It’s extremely cost effective, can provide great insight into your marketing efforts and shed light on what (until now) was a very dark area.

Side note:

AdInsight are launching a new version of the system (expected July) that will apparently track to keyword level and also tracks a user’s movement through the site; meaning you can begin to analyse which pages made users pick up the phone – exciting stuff!!

Speakers this year include SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights and Ashley Friedlein from Econsultancy.

There’s also a Web Analytics Wednesday (it’s on a Monday but don’t tell anyone) hosted by Google Analytics. Alan Wrafter and the team over at Google will also be hosting a Google Analytics quiz with funky prizes.

And again Epiphany is the bringer of great news – we can get you a discount!!!

Whilst booking simply use the code: EPIPH010

This will provide you with 15% off all tickets so get buying!

Click here to register and enter you discount code details when prompted.

Whilst booking simply use the code: EPIPH010

This will provide you with 15% off all tickets so get buying! It looks like it should be another good one this year!

Click here to register and enter you discount code details when prompted.

The new code provides users with an alternate way of tracking their website by putting the JavaScript code in the header!! Shocking I know!

In a nutshell, the code provides faster code loading times and browser execution. Elimination of errors when the JS doesn’t load and some enhanced data collection.

The beta is now available to all users and I recommend that you all get this up and running sooner rather than later – and why wouldn’t you – with some minor changes you can have more accurate data overnight!

On another note, if you’re interested in seeing Google Analytics’ newest features in action – you can! On December 9th at 10am PST (6pm GMT) Google is presenting its new features via a Webinar. Worth a watch if you don’t have the time to play with the new features yourself.

One of which is custom alerts, which is in the new intelligence section of analytics. This section itself is a great little tool that shows expected results for almost all aspects of the site, and should the data not fall between these expected margins, it creates an alert.  I look forward to see where they take this feature – some form of correlation between the alerts would be very useful, so instead of “x happened” (which is what we currently have) we should be looking at “x happened because of y and z” – but that discussion is for another day.

Moving on to my useful tip:

Knowing when there’s a problem

How often have you had a client or novice web developer *angry face* down their analytics? If you’ve had it, you know how annoying *second angry face* it is to see that lovely blue graph just flat line:

If you haven’t had this yet….it WILL happen, but you’ll be pleased to know when it does you can react quickly.

In the intelligence section you can now create your own custom alerts – yey!
These alerts will email you when someone downs their analytics so you can immediately pick up the phone and in the following order:

1. Fix it
2. Fire the person responsible

So how do I create these wonderful alerts I hear you ask, well it’s simple.
In the intelligence section click the “Create a Custom Alert” link:

Create your alert name, I’ve gone for the aptly named “CODE RED”; ensure the period is set to “Day” and that you have checked the “Email Me” box.

Ensure the alert conditions apply to “All Traffic” and you can then customise the “Alert me when” to: “Visits” : “% decreases by more than” : “10%” : Compared to “Same day in the previous week” – we use same day in the previous week as, for example, comparing a Monday to a Sunday usually created false emails.

This is not a hard and fast rule for every site, you can use day to day and also the percentage will need tweaking depending on the level of traffic consistency each site has. I always ensure this is set-up to be on the more ‘paranoid’ side of things. I’d much rather the system emails me than something goes unnoticed.

You should now have something that looks like this:

Click the button and you’re done!

You will now know (relatively quickly) when there is a problem with tracking in Google Analytics.

There is another useful custom alert coming soon, but let me know what you’ve got set up.

So here is the WORKING example of how to implement it.

Firstly, its key to note you cannot A/B split test across multiple domains, you have to use a multivariate test.

In this example we are testing the homepage (www.mysite.com) and we have 2 conversion pages; one on secure.mysite.com and another on secure.example.com. (If you only have one conversion page you can obviously only show the code relating to your situation).

Let’s start with the homepage:

At the very top of the page code u need to add the control script, which will look something like with:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 _udn = ".mysite.com"; _uhash = "0"; _ulink = "1"; function utmx_section(){}function utmx(){} (function(){var k='1234567890',d=document,l=d.location,c=d.cookie;function f(n){ if(c){var i=c.indexOf(n+'=');if(i>-1){var j=c.indexOf(';',i);return c.substring(i+n.
length+1,j<0?c.length:j)}}}var x=f('__utmx'),xx=f('__utmxx'),h=l.hash;
d.write('<sc'+'ript src="'+ 'http'+(l.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+'.google-analytics.com' +'/siteopt.js?v=1&utmxkey='+k+'&utmx='+(x?x:'')+'&utmxx='+(xx?xx:'')+'&utmxtime=' +new Date().valueOf()+(h?'&utmxhash='+escape(h.substr(1)):'')+ '" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></sc'+'ript>')})();
// ]]></script>

To ensure our cookie can be passed and tracked across our multiple domains / sub-domains we need to add some additions to the control script (these are shown in bold above).

Immediately after the control script you need to add:

<!-- utmx section name="Test URL" -->
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 var b = utmx('variation_content', 'Test URL'); function filter(v) { var u = v[0].contents; if (b && u.substr(0,7) == 'http://' && b.substr(0, 7) != 'http://') { u = u.substr(7); } return u; } utmx('url', 'Test URL', 0, filter);
// ]]></script>

This will be used to load in our test page.

At the bottom of the homepage we then include the tracking script, but again we need to make some amendments to allow the cookie to be tracked.

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+ (document.location.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+ '.google-analytics.com/ga.js"></sc'+'ript>')
// ]]></script>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 try { var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-1234567-1"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".mysite.com"); pageTracker._setAllowHash(false); pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true); pageTracker._trackPageview("/1234567890/test"); }catch(err){}
// ]]></script>

On our test page (page B), we need to add the same above tracking code (not control or page section script, just the above piece of code). This records which page (A or B) has been seen by a user and can therefore record a conversion against it.

Because we are using multiple domains we MUST add the _link function to our code. This is placed on all links between www.mysite.com and the domain with the conversion page (in this example secure.example.com) – you don’t need this code for sub-domains.

On www.mysite.com any links to secure.example.com would look similar to:

<a onclick="pageTracker._link(this.href);" href="https://secure.example.com/purchase.php">Click Here</a>

Without this conversions on secure.example.com will not record.
We also need to ensure that these cookies are picked up on secure.example.com. So you must ensure your Google Analytics Tracking Script (GATC) is present on secure.example.com. Again the additions are in bold, one thing to note is the changing of the parameters passed to setDomainName this needs to be mirrored in your own implementation.

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+ (document.location.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+ '.google-analytics.com/ga.js"></sc'+'ript>')
// ]]></script>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 try { var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-1234567-1"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com"); pageTracker._setAllowHash(false); pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true); pageTracker._trackPageview(); }catch(err){}
// ]]></script>

Moving on to the conversion pages:

Depending on how many you have and which site they reside on not all the following will apply to you.

The conversion page on secure.example.com contains the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+ (document.location.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+ '.google-analytics.com/ga.js"></sc'+'ript>')
// ]]></script>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 try { var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-1234567-1"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com"); pageTracker._setAllowHash(false); pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true); pageTracker._trackPageview("/1234567890/goal"); }catch(err){}
// ]]></script>

The additions are in bold and the setDomainName call is again domain specific.

The conversion page on secure.mysite.com contains the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+ (document.location.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+ '.google-analytics.com/ga.js"></sc'+'ript>')
// ]]></script>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
 try { var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-1234567-1"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".mysite.com"); pageTracker._setAllowHash(false); pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true); pageTracker._trackPageview("/1234567890/goal"); }catch(err){}
// ]]>
</script>

The difference in the 2 codes being the setDomainName call.

Now it’s time to do the online / offline validation, once thats done you need to create your variation.

Click to add a new one, enter a name (Test URL) for example. In the text box, enter the URL for page B (your test page) – single line, no whitespace. Save and preview.

You’re ready to launch

Should anyone have any questions or need some help with their set-ups I’d be more than happy to help – you can contact me via the comments.

Source: UK hitwise.

With over 90% UK market share it appears that even the launch of Bing can’t stop the Google juggernaut. With 5 of the top 20 and 50% of the top 6 UK visited websites being Google or Google owned, figures like this really provide an insight on Google’s dominance of not only the search market but of all online traffic. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. Although Google appear to be taking over the world with moving into browsers, phones, operating systems (we all know a monopoly is never a good thing), it sometimes gets easy to forget how much Google have given back to the online community and for the most part, not asked for a penny.

Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Calendar to name just a few, are fantastic FREE products that really pushed the boundaries on quality online services. The prospect of Google Wave is another product that is really looking to change the way we communicate and this continual stream of innovative products is something I applaud Google for churning out time and time again.

At risk of sounding too much like a Google Fan Boy I’m a bit disappointed at their apparent disregard of the UK search market. The second biggest search market in the world has been almost neglected after the recent algorithm update. There has been some discussion on Twitter and elsewhere, about Google’s UK SERPS being ‘broken’, with some anomalous results appearing, and non-UK sites ranking higher than they perhaps ought to for some search terms. Even today I am still finding bizarre results containing foreign or completely irrelevant Government sites littering the first page. Let’s hope Google get round to correcting this sooner rather than later.

1. The ability to link AdWords and Analytics accounts which, until Google’s update regarding cost data reporting meant all CPC traffic was recorded as direct.
2. The inability to create new profiles  which are essential for testing and segmentation
3. The inability to apply filters essential for filtering out your own IP. Applying filters also has some very powerful data manipulation uses.

Each Google account is allowed 25 new Analytics account creations; therefore it shouldn’t be an issue for web development agencies and search agencies alike to be creating new analytics accounts for all sites.

When taking over a site that has the all sites account, I recommend you create a brand new GA account and run the two accounts in tandem. This will allow you to compare trends on the old analytics account whilst reporting more accurately from data in the new account.

When setting up analytics for a site:

• Ensure the site is given an individual analytics account
• Create at least one testing profile
• Ensure goal / e-commerce tracking is correctly set-up
• Filter out your own and the clients IP address
• Link the accounts through Google AdWords
• Grant access to the required users

Hopefully the next time you take over an account the agency will have followed these best practice rules.

As a UK search user I was bitterly disappointed to see that virtually none of the features available in the US are available in the UK. The Bing promotional video really caught my eye and shows some cracking features such as the travel and shopping search. However in the UK version these features are either not navigable to or have been replaced by external service. Shopping search is done by ciao, travel section isn’t linked to and even the maps are handled by multimap.com overall disappointing. For the UK they have essentially re-skinned live search and added a related searches feature down the left.

The main question is whether Bing has enough about it to take some of Google’s UK market share. On launch we saw the predictable traffic spike and Bing became the UK’s second most popular search engine, but I would expect this to be a flash in the pan. As it stands, Bing has brought nothing new or exciting to the UK search table.

Microsoft presents…..Bing!!! (a.k.a Live search in a new dress)

With regards to launching the shopping and travel services in the UK, that could understandably be complicated; I’ve always been one for either launching things that will work well, or not launching them at all. But it’s the simpler things, such as the great addition of search history into the left hand column that have been omitted for no apparent reason.

Right now, Bing is riding the crest of an interest wave, this will soon die out and it will slip back behind Yahoo in the UK Search stakes. The most disappointing thing is that (for the US at least) Microsoft have actually created a very good product. Apart from the search, they’ve taken a lot of what Google has and improved upon it. When Microsoft come round to launching the full UK offering “later in the year, I imagine they’ll take some of Google’s market share; Bing certainly has enough about it to take Yahoo’s second position.

To the average searcher, this delay in launch will make no difference what so ever; to people in the digital industry it’s simply a minor annoyance. Once the launch comes around people will be talking about the quality of Bing UK’s results and how it’s improved (or not improved) on Google product search – not how the US got it months before.

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions allow cross-tabular analysis of data. The possibilities of this addition are huge – in Google’s example they selected keywords and used city as the second dimension. They also pivoted by source, showing all visits per city and keyword from each search engine.

Without explaining how this works and to avoid getting people confused, my best advice is to view the video below. It’s a great real world example of how this works:

1. Search and the Evolution of Marketing
This session will cover how marketing and its consumers are evolving, and the part search has to play in this ever-changing environment. I imagine recent recession statistics will be discussed in this presentation, showing how search spend has only decreased slightly and has been largely unaffected when compared to many other areas of marketing. This is the opening keynote of the event and always a topical subject to kick the event off with.

2. Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic
This is an area that I still feel a lot of companies fall down on. SEO is no longer just a case of driving as much traffic as possible and seeing what sticks, it’s about driving the right traffic. Search analytics have come a long way over the past few years allowing the categorisation of visitors into certain types, and information on what makes them tick. This should be a session an SEO would love to attend – who doesn’t want learn how to make their campaign more effective?

3. Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques
This has got to be the most mouth-watering session of all. Link building secrets and tips that will surely only enhance your campaign with some very well respected speakers. I was particularly excited by the appearance of Rand Fishkin on the panel. I have seen him speak before and the guy certainly knows his stuff, but understands how to apply it to the corporate environment and, more importantly, knows what clients expect….results.

If you are still without a ticket don’t forget you can get 15% off by using our SMX London Discount Code.

Simply use the following discount code: DPUK09
to receive 15% off a 1/2 day or Combo pass for SMX London 2009 Happy Days!

Just have a look at the line-up and upon registration enter the above promotional code to receive 15% off.

One post I particularly enjoyed was Rand Fishkin’s 10 Reasons you must attend SMX London. He puts across a compelling argument for attending.

Enjoy the discount

Jill Whalen

Jill has been involved in commercial SEO for over 13 Years and founded her successful company High Rankings in 1995. She is a prominent figure in the SEO community, called upon to speak at industry conferences around the world and published in national and industry publications. We posed her some SEO questions relating to Google in the UK, agencies, in-house SEO and the state of our industry as a whole.

No ‘run of the mill’ SEO questions here!

Epiphany: Google’s search dominance in the UK is huge, we don’t see anything around currently that could dislodge or even eat into Google’s market share. What are your thoughts on this?

JW: Google has done a great job of working its way into the popular culture and therefore, I can’t imagine their market share doing anything but going up over the next few years. It’s been Google’s game to lose for quite some time now, and they show no signs of cracking. The thing is, even if they did do some really bad and dumb stuff, it would take many years (and something hugely better) for people to stop using Google. I just don’t see it happening.

Epiphany: During 2008 there was a lot of doom and gloom talk in the SEM industry regarding a fall in the use of SEM providers in favour of in-house teams. The latest e-Consultancy UK Search Marketing Report and our own observations show that this predicted shift either didn’t happen or was very minimal here in the UK. What is your take on this?

JW: I haven’t seen the numbers, but I do believe that smart companies will indeed (or at least they should) take their SEM in-house. It would be a much more cost effective way to do it. Unfortunately, it’s still very difficult to find people with the skillsets required to do SEM who are interested in going in-house. I believe that we will start to see more companies taking their SEM in-house, while also keeping an outside consultant or agency close at hand for those times when some specific expertise is required.

Epiphany: What would you say are the main challenges facing companies looking to bring SEM in-house during 2009?

JW: As mentioned above, finding people with the right skills is certainly a challenge. Beyond that it’s getting all stakeholders in the company onboard with the SEM program and working together to make it happen. So many SEM efforts are thwarted because different departments within the company don’t seem to always be able to work well together for the common cause. When bringing SEM in-house, it is critical to have someone in charge who can bridge the gap between marketing and IT in order to be successful.

Epiphany: In the UK recruitment for SEO technicians is still difficult with a lack of truly experienced candidates and a lot of false claims in CVs. On the understanding that you could teach a new employee all they needed to know about SEO, what traits and skills would you look for when recruiting?

JW: This is indeed a very difficult task. I’ve had to hire people for my SEO agency, and it’s nearly impossible to know from a few interviews and a CV how well they will learn SEO. It is one of those careers that seem to do best with extremely passionate people, so that’s certainly one trait I’d look for. I also feel that the best SEOs often have both sides of the brain working well, meaning they are often both technical and creative at the same time. They should like solving puzzles, as well. I’ve also noticed at the various conferences I’ve been to through the years that a disproportionate number of SEOs are also musicians, with many having been professional musicians at some point in their lives. So musical ability might be a good trait to look for as well.

Epiphany: We are still seeing a lot of large companies that don’t understand SEO and even some who don’t understand it having employed an SEM agency for the past 12 months. This leads us to believe that SEO is still seen as shrouded in mystery with snake oil salesmen a plenty. Would your own observations agree with this and what would you say the SEM community as a whole could do to change this?

JW: Yes, yes and yes! This is something that has plagued our industry since the very start. Unfortunately, the snake oil salesman label is never going to go away as long as there are still a ton of that type of SEO company around selling their snake oil. And there are many. Way too many, in fact. Nearly every call we get these days to our agency is from someone who’s been burned by a previous SEO company. They waste time and money performing tasks that are in reality just SEO myths and of course never seen any results. The only way to change this is to continue to educate the public as a whole on SEO best practices as much as possible so that they don’t fall for the scam artists. Google has helped a bit because they have made it harder and harder to get websites to rank, so many of the scam companies just start to disappear. But not without first having taken a ton of money from unsuspecting clients.

Epiphany: There is no doubting your commitment to the SEM community with 13 years of running a successful SEO company under your belt and a contribution to the community that surpasses most. With so much on your schedule, do you still have time to relax and what kind of things do you do to challenge yourself outside of work?

JW: I do have time to relax, although in general, there’s nothing I’d rather do then be at my computer reading about SEO! Over the past 2 years since I got out of my home office and into a real office with employees, I’ve found that I can finally separate work and home much better. I’ve finally gotten to the point where many nights after work I don’t even go on my computer at home. Of course, it helps to have an iPhone so that I at least still feel connected. I don’t have any particular hobbies, but now that my children are mostly grown, my husband and I are able to enjoy time away from home watching various Boston sporting events on TV and things like that. Nothing too exciting, but relaxing nonetheless!

The day began with a session on brand reputation & management. Dave Synder began the session, running down hypothetical case studies and a ‘light’ and ‘dark’ side review to online reputation management (ORM). Synder is clearly a leader in this industry but didn’t give that much away in this session other than the basics, and why would he? After all that is his company’s IP. The message that was driven home at this session was that your own publishing network is essential to succeed. Building up a database of Digg power user accounts, YouTube power accounts and Reddit users on your ‘books’. This is apparently the only way to consistently get results.

The next session I attended was on search term research and targeting. This was a very good mix of panellists: tools, analysis and ‘academic’ as it was put in the session. The session covered everything from keyword discovery, assignment and re-analysis. There were some very interesting tool suggestions and Google Analytics add-ons suggested in this session, which I will examine and report on at a later date. One of the more interesting issues covered was judging the value of a keyword. This should never be done solely on search traffic! A site can have all the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t convert the way you want, what’s the point? The panel examined using conversion rates, profit margins, etc to determine keyword value, this is something that is not used enough on many search campaigns.

Another one of my bug bears about campaigns and this was summed up by Dave Chaffey when asked “what’s the biggest mistake to make in keyword research?” Dave’s response was: “Not looking at the tail, only looking at the head!” This was something that rings true on a lot of campaigns we take over, the previous company has only focused on the major search terms and not even considered the 100s of long tail phrases that should convert at a higher rate.

The final session I want to report on is called Beyond Link Bait. Essentially this covered the additional ways you can acquire links with suggestions such as guest blogging and article dropping. These are nothing new. Similar to the earlier ORM this session also suggested building relationships with bloggers and journalists and creating a database of journalists who have previously published your news. One of the more interesting pieces of information, but this was not confirmed as true. Was that 301 redirects are not passing as much power as they have previously done. Where a 301 was expected to pass all power across, it’s now not passing the full amount. This was new to me, but to be honest I’m not surprised. 301 redirects should be used show robots that a page or site has permanently moved. So presumably the moved page will have similar content to that of the new page. I can see this being a factor should Google decide that 301s don’t pass as much power, unless the pages are very similar.

Overall SES London is essential for anybody involved in Search. For the more advanced, you will probably know 99.9% of what is said, but occasionally there are unique nuggets of information you may not have know before.

The topic of link building eventually came up and the general agreement seemed to be that you need to get more creative with your link building, reviewing the psychological triggers for linking and playing on those.

Twitter was also discussed along with Facebook. These were seen as applications that could take away some of Google’s search dominance in certain areas, especially local search. One of the examples used was of when looking for ‘London restaurants’, one of the panel stated they don’t use Google local for that because the search results are so manipulated. Instead they use twitter and ask for advice. Now, this may work for Rand Fiskin or Mike Grehan but is that going to work for the average joe?

Overall I really enjoyed the discussion, one stat I would like to quote Mike Grehan on was that there is now a ratio of 5:1 on user generated content to mediated content. I just thought this to be very interesting to find out how much UGC there is actually out there.

I next attended SEO through Blogs and Feeds. Which began with Maile Ohye from Google talking through the basics of blogs and feeds including what’s available in Google base, how the overall blog post and Google indexing process works, etc etc. Dane Naylor was also present and it was refreshing to see him tell it like it is. His corporate SEO experience really shone through in his discussions and his frank comments were just what the doctor ordered. I never got the chance to chat with him but on almost every comment our beliefs seemed aligned. One of the issues Dave covered was where to put your blog, either on a sub-domain or sub-folder and the agreement was that it depends on your situation. I have to agree. Having it on the main domain adds value to that domain, having it on a sub-domain means it is effectively its own entity. Therefore you can gain link juice from it and also use it as a reputation management tool.

The next session was on News Search SEO, very good information for big news corporations with some real power players speaking. I couldn’t help but think that a lot of this session was aimed at huge news corps, not really at the majority of the audience. However there was some good information for journalists, showing them how online is completely different to print. One line I particularly liked was ‘the art of the headline is dead’. Ciaran Norris provided this and I thought he was particularly good despite his presentation problems.

The final session I would like to report on was the Organic forum right at the very end. Surprisingly quiet for an interesting topic. I just want to quote one of the lines from it:
“It used to be Google vs Yahoo, it’s now Google vs Twitter and Google vs Facebook”
Which for select search areas I might agree. I’m not sure how much of the UK market is influenced by these sources, Twitter has seen a recent explosion, but I’m certain the bigger commercial search terms will not be affected by these. If they are the impact would be so minimal I’m not sure how anyone would notice.