Speaking at Search Marketing Exp (SMX) Toronto

I will be speaking at SMX Toronto next week. If you have not registered yet, you can still save $200 on your registration for SMX, Toronto.

The topic of my session will be “What is Search Analytics and Why Should I Care?” Below is an overview of the session:

Effective use of analytics solutions and processes significantly boosts click through, conversions, return on ad spend and dozens of other metrics that may be important to your organization. To benefit fully, you need to create meaningful action plans based on data.

Speakers in this session define and shed light on the growing discipline of “search analytics” providing case studies from their own successful analytics-driven search marketing action plans.

This session will be moderated by, Marco Bailetti, Sapient. Other speakers in this session are

• Marko Hurst, MDH Studios
• Jeff Quipp, Search Engine People
• Alan K’necht, K’nechtology

Web Analytics Rock Star, and the author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics An Hour a Day, Avinash Kaushik will be the keynote on Thursday, 8th April.

I look forward to meeting with you at SMX Toronto

Free Tools for Web Analytics, Search, Social Media & Competitive Analysis

Last week I was on a “Measuring Success” panel at PR+MKTG camp in Seattle. Someone from the audience asked if there were any tools for a newbie to start measuring PR & Marketing efforts and learning. I uttered the names a few tools that came to my mind.

Considering that there might be many others in the same situation I decided to write this blog post. In this post I am listing some of the tools that you can start using for free. Please note that this is not the most comprehensive list of the free tools.

Side Note: All the panelists unanimously agreed that you need to first figure out your measurement needs based on your business requirements and KPIs and then find the tools that meet your needs. One of the biggest mistakes most companies make is that they pick the tools first and then try to modify their measurement needs according to the tools they have in place.

However, I recognize that someone who is not familiar with the various measurement tools needs some exposure to the tools to really think about the questions they might want to ask before making an investment in a paid tools.

With that, here is the list of tools that you can start using today for free:

Web Analytics

For monitoring the on-site behaviors of your users and the performance of your site, use the following free tools

1. Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
2. Yahoo Web Analytics – http://analytics.yahoo.com/

Search

Use the following search tools to learn what keywords your customer/potential customers are searching for so that you can optimize your site accordingly.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. SEOMOZ has set of Free tools - http://www.seomoz.org/tools
3. Google Webmaster Central – Provides you data on how your sites in crawled and indexed by Google.
4. Bing Webmaster Center - Provides you data on how your sites in crawled and indexed by Bing.
5. Google Trends - http://www.google.com/trends
6. Google Insight for Search - http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Social Media

I already mentioned two tools in my blog post titled “Free Social Media Monitoring Tools for Small Businesses”, here they are again (and two new ones) :

1. Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
2. SM2 by Techrigy – http://sm2.techrigy.com/
3. Twitter Search – http://search.twitter.com/
4. Yelp.com – Good for small and medium size businesses. Find out what customers are saying about you and your competitors.

Here are some more but I have not used all of them, http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/

Competitive Analysis

Want to know how your competitors are doing compared to you? Use some of the tools listed below. Keep in mind that all of these tools use different ways to collect the data and hence the actual data you get from one tool will differ from the other but overall it should provide you good competitive information.

1. Search and Social Media Tools – Many of the tools listed above can provide you competitive information as well. E.g. Set SM2 to monitor the keywords that describes your competitor and you can start to see what customers are saying about your competitors
2. Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
3. Compete - http://www.compete.com/
4. Quantcast - http://www.quantcast.com/
5. Google Trends for Websites - http://trends.google.com/websites
6. Google Ad Planner - http://www.google.com/adplanner. Here is my review of Google Ad Planner

Like, I mentioned above this is not the most comprehensive list but it should get you started. Do you have a favorite free tool that is not on this list? Leave a comment on this blog post or send me an email with the name of the tool.

Comments? Questions?

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Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board

• Senior Data Analyst
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Web Analytics, Search Marketing and Social Media Analytics Jobs

I have few open positions in Web Analytics, Search Marketing (Organic and Paid) and Social Media Analytics.

Job Requirements
One of the following

• Web Analytics Tools Implementation: Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics etc.? Any one tool experience is good.
• Analysis: Do you have experience making sense of the data collected by the web analytics tool? It does not matter which tool.
• Optimization – Do you have experience with A/B , Muti-variate testing or targeting? Experience with Google Website Optimizer, Test&Target, Widemile, Optimost etc?
• Search Engine Optimization – Do you have experience doing search engine optimization? Are you passionate about it? Show me some examples? Show me your process.
• Paid Search – Have you run campaigns on Google Adwords? Bing or Yahoo? What has been the outcome?
• Social Media Analytics – Do you have experiencing analyzing and making recommendations based on social media conversation? Do you have experience using tools like Radian6, SM2, and Visible Technologies etc.? Do you have passion for social media?

If you answer is YES to one or more of the above bullet items then send me your resume. Even if you are not actively looking for a job this won’t hurt.

Job Responsibilities:

Our ultimate goal is to help customer get the biggest bang for their buck.
Work in a fast paced environment and do some cool stuff.
Send me your resume and we will take it from there.

Full Time or Contract?


Either will work. If the fit is there we can make either happen.

Why isn’t there more information?

Well because I don’t want you box yourself based on what I want and provide you a laundry list of experiences. I want you to tell me what you are looking for and see if there is an immediate match, if not then there will be more opportunities. I also know some other organizations that are looking for people maybe I can hook you up with them.

How to contact me?
Twitter: @anilbatra
Email: batraonline at gmail(dot) com

Adding “bing” to Organic Search in Google Analytics

A while ago I wrote blog post on how to add Twitter searches to appear in organic searches. The same principal can be applied to include Microsoft’s new search engine “bing” which is not yet recognized by Google Analytics as a search engine. Till Google Analytics recognizes it as a search engine, you can capture the data in organic searches by a simple one line of code.

GA provides the following function to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X"); to track any custom search engine.

NewOrganicEngine is the words that identify the search engine; in this case we will use “bing.com”

newOrganicKeyword is the query string that contains that keywords, in this case it will be “q” as “bing” uses “q” as the query string that contains the keyword.




Here is how your final code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q")
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Questions? Comments?

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/anilbatra

Adding Twitter Search to Google Analytics

Recently WebTrends blogged that Twitter search will now be listed in the standard search engine and keywords report in WebTrends. Omniture has also blogged about integrating Twitter search data into Site Catalyst.

As Twitter increasingly becomes a tool that people use to find information it is really critical for companies to know how people are finding their sites on Twitter. Doing so will allow them to incorporate that learning into future marketing efforts on Twitter as well as other sources (e.g. Google etc).

Since Google Analytics does not yet recognize Twitter search as a search engine like WebTrends or Ominiture does, I will show you how you can do it easily with one line of code.

However, keep in mind this solution only works when the search originates on Twitter (i.e. http://search.twitter.com). 3rd party tools like TweetDeck, those will not be captured in this solution (nor will it, I believe, be captured in WebTrends’ solution). Use this information to understand general search keywords being searched on Twitter but do not get caught up in actual number of visits that your Twitter efforts are driving.

So how do you capture searches conducted in Twitter?

GA provides a few functions to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X"); This functions to track any custom search engine.

Twitter uses "q" as the querystring that contains the keyword. So in this case our search engine is search.twitter.com and newOrganicKeyword is the value in query string q

So you code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._addOrganic("search.twitter.com", "q")
pageTracker._trackPageview();

(Note: pageTracker._addOrganic("twitter", "q") will also work)

What will the reports look like in Google Analytics?

Note: For some reason I cannot get Twitter search to show up as Twitter in Google Analytics Search Engines report, it shows up as "search"(Maybe it’s a bug in GA? If anybody can provide pointer that will be a great help). However, for now this works fine as long as you know what "search" means in your search engine report. I am playing with filters and if I get that resolved I will post the fix or if you know the fix please email me.

Search Engines Report will show the following:



Drilling down to keywords will show the keywords on Twitter Search.



Looks like Twitter Search brings me repeat visits and more engaged traffic.

Comments? Questions?

My other posts on Twitter:

• ReTweet Demystified


• Twitter Analytics


• My Views on Twitter

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
Sr/Lead Analytic Warehouse/Java Engineer at Saas Company In the SF Bay Area (Emeryville, CA)
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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Search Behavioral Targeting

Microsoft and Google both have plans for using users past search behavior to provide tailored search results, practice commonly known as Behavioral Targeting. While companies like Revenue Science and Tacoda (now part of AOL) use users web surfing behavior on the internet to determine what users are interested in and server Relevant Ads, search giants are using the past search queries and click though activity to determine users intent and show them relevant search results (organic and paid ads).

As these practices become more prevalent no two users will see the same results on search engine results page for same queries, some of this is already happening. In future even the same user might see her results change from one day to another based on what he/she searched and clicked on between those two days.

An example of how search behavioral targeting might work A user looks for hotels in Bahamas and then search for Scuba Diving lessons the next day, she might see the search results (organic and paid) that combine both the queries to show her Scuba Diving Lessons in Bahamas. Yet another day she decides to search for Jamaica. Guess what? Her organic and paid results might show her Hotels, Airfares (though she never searched for it) for Jamaica and maybe Bahamas or even some other Caribbean destination. She might also get results for local Scuba Diving lessons. So why will the search engine showing all these results when user never explicitly searched for them? Search engine is trying to determine user's intent based on what user searched for and then show the customized results based on the intent. In this case the user's intent is clear; she is looking to go somewhere, most likely in Caribbean. Since she is searching from a geo location other than Caribbean, she might need flight and hence airfare might be shown. She has already indicated she needs Hotel and is looking for Scuba diving lessons so her search results are related to those keywords as well. Once the intent is determined search engine can show can show customized results for a particular user. As the user searches more her intent become even clearer and the possibilities of how search results can be customized for this user are endless.

Last July Google started using immediate search queries to show targeted paid search results. Google is now expanding the time frame that it uses to look for search queries. Here is what NYTimes.com reported on Google’s plan:

Nick Fox, a director of product management who looks after ads on Google’s search site, said the company was now testing the use of more search queries in its ad targeting. He did not describe how it was doing that. But Internet experts said that it was most likely using its cookies.
Mr. Fox said that Google’s approach was different from what Yahoo, AOL and others call behavioral targeting. Those companies look at what a user did a few days earlier to show them ads about the same topic today. Google says it believes that search engine advertising is most effective if it relates to what the user has most recently searched for.
“We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Mr. Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context.”
Google’s previous system of looking at a user’s immediate past query was not useful enough, he said. “It is probably not just the previous query that matters,” Mr. Fox said. “You want to know if the user is still doing the same thing. You wouldn’t want to go back a month. You wouldn’t want to go back a day. But you may want to go back two or three queries.”

Microsoft plans to take it one step further and expand the “behavioral targeting” to the organic search results. Here what is what CNET reported:

Specifically, the company believes examining a full sequence of user queries can lead to more useful results. Today, the company only keeps track of the immediately prior search, but often users use search engines to explore subject areas broadly, said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search, portal and advertising platform group, at the Search Engine Strategies conference.
"I believe this notion of understanding user intent--being able to analyze (search queries) and come up with search patterns and use them to shape the search experience--is one of the most important areas for us," Nadella said.

Recently Behavioral Targeting has been under a lot of fire from privacy advocates and lawmakers. It will be interesting to see how privacy police reacts to search behavioral targeting. Though Behavioral Targeting from Revenue Science is anonymous, Search Behavioral Targeting is based on user provided information (search keyword), which can easily be tied to PII information.

I have always advocated an opt-in model for Behavioral Targeting, a system where users give their consent to be tracked and have an easy option to turn the tracking on or off. I believe that Search behavioral targeting makes it even more desirable to have an opt-in model.

Comments? Questions?

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