For Search News Central I wrote an article outlining several often-overlooked data tracking opportunities that can help website owners make more informed decisions about how to improve their site:

Search News Central: Are You Tracking All That Happens on Your Website?

Many people seem to think that just installing Google Analytics tracking code on every page of their site is enough and that this’ll tell them all they need to know about their website. This is, of course, not true. There’s a lot more potential data out there that can be gathered and analysed to make better decisions about how to improve a website.

My latest for State of Search is a somewhat incoherent rant about a sense of impending change in how search engines rank websites:

State of Search: An Imminent Revolution in Search

I think everyone who works in search understands on some level that we’re living in truly interesting times. There’s a sense of anticipation, a mood of imminent revolutionary change. SEO has never been a static industry. As long as search engines have existed, and thus as long as SEO has been around, there’s been a ceaseless state of flux, a continuous exchange of fire between search engines and optimisers.

Website Tracking / Revolution in Search is a blog post from Barry Adams.

I wrote a host of short blog posts for State of Search over the past few weeks to cover for the site’s owner Bas van den Beld while he was on vacation.

The most substantial of these blog posts is a case study on why geotargeting users based on IP address is a silly affair, especially when trying to determine what region of a country a user is from. In the UK especially, IP targeting is utterly broken.

State of Search: Geotargeting Based on IP Address is Broken

It’s when you get to regional IP targeting that all semblance of accuracy goes straight out the window, and it becomes nothing less than a total crapshoot. In fact, firing buckshot at a big national map will probably yield more accurate results than the geographical data you’ll get from any web analytics package.

Some other blog posts I wrote for State of Search recently are primarily news stories about new developments in search and web:

• The Explosive Growth of Google+
• Google simplifies Adwords for small businesses with AW Express
• Branded AdWords advertising boosts total site traffic
• Growing pressure on Microsoft over Bing
• Adobe Edge: SEO-friendly web animations?
• Universal Search: how often are they shown on Google’s SERPs?

IP Address Geotargeting / State of Search is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Late last year I decided to use my quiet time in the holiday season to set up my own URL shortener. I like bit.ly a lot, but the idea of having full control over my own URL shortener as well as a ‘personal brand’ short URL – along the lines of yoa.st – persuaded me to try and get one of my own.

First of all I needed to find a good URL. This was probably the easiest choice: once I discovered the .ms (Montserrat) TLD existed and the bada.ms domain was still available, I didn’t hesitate for a second.

Secondly I needed to find the right software. I could have gone for bit.ly pro, so that the people at bit.ly would be doing all the hard work for me. But instead I opted to set up my own shortener and not rely on an external third party. Somehow that felt more like it would be mine, instead of something I leased from someone else.

There are a few solutions out there but the Yourls.org package appealed to me most: it’s open source and based on PHP and MySQL, and there are plenty of plugins for it. It also easily integrates with Tweetdeck (my preferred Twitter app) and I found a great installation guide for it on Lifehacker.

Once I had it up and running I installed the Random Keywords plugin so that instead of having to choose my own short URL every time, I just let Yourls generate a string for me.

And there it was, my own URL shortener: bada.ms.

January Statistics

I started using the shortener on December 31st but didn’t unleash it in the wild – i.e. on Twitter – until January 1st. I only used it on links I posted on my @badams Twitter account, and then only for links that didn’t use a branded short URL themselves.

It’s been running for a full month now, so let’s see what kind of cool stats Yourls can give me.

Click Activity
In January I shared 74 bada.ms short URLs on Twitter. These URLs achieved an average of 68.44 clicks, and a median of 41.79 clicks.

The top three most clicked URLs were:

1. http://bada.ms/rxd – (Jan 06) 286 clicks. This points to a Slideshare deck by Eldad Yogev which explains Mobile SEO in great detail. Not coincidentally this was also my most RT-ed tweet of the month.
2. http://bada.ms/4ou – (Jan 21) 282 clicks, points to one of my own blog posts.
3. http://bada.ms/vbn – (Jan 12) 215 clicks, points to a blog post about the dangers of free WordPress themes.

The least clicked publicly shared URLs were:

1. http://bada.ms/thg – (Jan 03) 26 clicks, points to a story about spam in Google’s SERPs.
2. http://bada.ms/9s6 – (Jan 21) 29 clicks, points to one of my columns on the Belfast Telegraph site.
3. http://bada.ms/rw6 – (Jan 06) 30 clicks, points to a news article about the MMR vaccine scare.

In an attempt to find a pattern I looked at the time when these URLs were shared. Interestingly the top five best performing URLs were all created between 9:23 am and 12:45 am. This could indicate that URLs shared on Twitter before lunch in the UK get the most clicks.

However, of the five least clicked URLs four were created in the same time frame, and only one fell outside it (4:27 pm). Additionally most clicks don’t originate from Europe (see below), so there doesn’t appear to be any solid correlation between share time and popularity.

Next I looked at the day of the week when the URLs were created and shared. Again I found no correlation – the five most clicked URLs neatly spanned all working days of the week (Thu, Fri, Wed, Tue, Mon) and the five worst performing URLs were also shared across most of the work week.

The only notable issue here is that there are no cases – best nor worst URLs – that were shared on a weekend. This is almost certainly because I rarely tweet on weekends anyway.

The Spike
Unsurprisingly nearly all clicks on a short URL happen within the first 2 hours after the URL has been shared. Traffic then drops off significantly, usually lingering on with a few clicks here and there for a few days.

It’s quite interesting to see that many URLs continue to receive traffic for weeks after they’ve been created, accumulating the odd click here and there despite no longer being actively shared on Twitter. Sometimes a short URL may seem ‘dead’ for a week and then suddenly it’ll receive a few clicks again.

Traffic Sources
The traffic sources report in Yourls makes one thing abundantly clear: people in my Twitter network (my followers and their followers) make extensive use of third party Twitter apps. Clicks from these apps register as direct traffic as there is no referral string sent along with the click. At least 90% of all clicks on any given short URL registered as direct traffic, with the remaining clicks mostly composed of twitter.com referrals and a few others (HootSuite, Netvibes, Wikiwix, etc.)

Apparently I have at least one cautious user in my network: Longurl.org consistently pops up as a referrer. This is a security service that allows you to un-shorten a long URL without actually visiting it, thus ensuring you’re not being sent to a hazardous webpage. I’m not sure whether this is an actual user or an automated check.

Traffic Location
Surprisingly my Twitter network is apparently very US-dominated, with usually more than half of all clicks on my short URLs originating from US IP addresses.

Other countries that are strongly represented are the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and France. Russia, China, and Japan occasionally show up, as do nearly all other European countries. Africa and South America are notably absent from most URL location charts.

Next Month

I installed a new plugin today – Feb 1st – that filters out the clicks generated by automated bots such as the Googlebot, the LongURL api, and Twitter’s own bots. This should help make the numbers more accurately represent actual user behaviour and might also clean up the traffic locations report.

However, I am getting married at the end of February and will be offline for well over a week, so my stats probably won’t be sufficient to dedicate a whole blog post to. I’ll likely wait until March has come and gone before I publicise my next set of short URL stats.

My Own URL Shortener: Set-Up and January Stats is a blog post from Barry Adams.

For Search News Central I’ve written a blog post about the trustworthiness of the data Google shares with us. In many of Google’s free tools, such as Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and even Adwords, the data we’re presented with isn’t always reliable.

Search News Central: Can We Trust Google’s Data?

As part of my work for the Belfast Telegraph I do a weekly report on which articles performed the best, and there was one article that stood out in more ways than one. It was the most viewed article of the week – it was an article featuring a video of the Chile miners’ rescue – but Google Analytics gave me two entirely different pageview numbers, depending on how I approached the metric.

Inspired by a recent blog post by Bill Slawski I decided to build my own Custom Search Engine aimed at enabling easy searching through the web’s leading and most trustworthy SEO blogs and news sites.

Custom Search Engine: SEO Search

Let me know if you feel I’ve left out a major SEO/Search site that should be included in this CSE.

Google Data / SEO Search is a blog post from Barry Adams.

If you’re doing any search engine advertising you should be tracking what your ROI is. In other words, you should be monitoring your PPC spend and your income from this spend – i.e. your conversions from PPC.

If you’re using Google Adwords, you’re in luck: Google has an array of tools that allow you to track exactly what your ROI is. You can track your ROI straight from Google Adwords, or you can tie Adwords in to your Google Analytics account and track your goal conversions there and attribute them to your PPC spend.

On top of that, Google has tools to help you increase that ROI by improving your conversion rate: the Google Adwords Conversion Optimiser and it’s big brother, Google Website Optimiser.

All these tools, each with their own approach and implementation, are a bit daunting to wrap your head around. Which should you be using and why?

Google seems to realise this and have published a free online e-book to help you figure things out: Improving Online Conversions for Dummies.

It’s a handy little e-book that goes through every one of Google’s optimisation tools and tells you what you can do with each, and in which scenario they can (and should) be applied.

Not only an excellent guide for beginners, it’s also very useful for seasoned professionals like myself that sometimes get lost amidst the forest of new tools and features Google continually releases.

You can read the book online for free or download a printable PDF version.

Improving Online Conversions free e-book is a blog post from Barry Adams.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 30 March 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

Last week I received a surprising email from Facebook entitled ‘Your Weekly Facebook Page Update’. It contained an overview of all the Facebook pages I am an admin of, with statistics on the number of new fans, wall posts and visits to the page.

Those of us who use Facebook and other social media sites in a professional capacity have been aching for reliable metrics to judge the success of our social media marketing campaigns.

Facebook launched its Insights tool in late 2007 as a means for page admins to gather data on what happened on their pages and get some basic demographical data on the composition of their fan base. However, since then there’s been remarkably little movement by Facebook on the analytics front.

This latest move is an indication that Facebook is starting to take the professional use of their social media platform more seriously, and can be seen as an outreach to social media marketers.

The fact that several professional web analytics vendors such as Omniture and WebTrends have recently announced new Facebook tracking features, makes this latest move from Facebook just that little bit juicier.

Perhaps Facebook is trying to pave the way for its own (paid) analytics package, that will hopefully allow admins to gain deeper insights in to how visitors reach their pages and how they interact with it.

This will hopefully help take a lot of the guesswork out of social media marketing, and allow clients of social media marketers to demand clearer ROI on their investment.

Facebook Takes Social Media Marketing Seriously is a blog post from Barry Adams.

1. Part 1 – Choosing your keywords
2. Part 2 – Writing good ads
3. Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert

In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. In part 2 we showed how to make effective ads. Now in the final part we’ll tackle landing pages.

Search Engine Advertising – Step 3: Create Landing Pages That Convert

You’re targeting the right keywords and your ads generate a lot of clicks, so now you have all these extra visitors coming to your website. You’re paying for these visitors, so you want to turn as many of them into customers. The best way to do this is not to send them to your website’s homepage, but to a custom-built landing page.

Image you’re an average internet user. You’re looking for a new sofa for your living room, and you do a Google search for sofa’s. You see an ad on the search results page which appeals to you, so you click on it. You end up on a general furniture website’s homepage and now you have to look for their sofa’s section. Chances are you don’t have the patience for this, and you use the back-button to return to the search results and try a different website.

So you click on a second ad that seems interesting, and this time you land on a webpage that talks only about sofa’s. It shows you pictures of sofa’s, it has a nice offer for a discounted sofa on it, and there are many links from this page to various different categories of sofa’s. This site appeals much more to you, and you’re likely to stick around longer and maybe even order a sofa from these guys.

The first advertiser you clicked on made the classic mistake of sending PPC traffic to the website’s homepage. From the homepage a web user needs to start his search all over again, navigating your website until he finds what he was looking for in the first place. The user has to go through more clicks and has to invest additional effort, something internet users are notoriously unwilling to do.

It’s much better to send the user straight to what they want to see, which the second advertiser does. This way the user doesn’t have to find his way through your website. He immediately sees content that is relevant to his search query.

Elements of a good landing page

1. Relevance: First and foremost the page you link to from a search engine advertisement needs to be relevant. Just like the ad needs to contain the keyword you advertise on, so does the landing page. If you advertise on the sofa keyword, your ad contains the word sofa, you can’t send users to a landing page discussing kitchens or chairs. You need to send them to a page that talks about sofa’s.

Be sure to include the actual keyword you advertise on clearly visible on the landing page, preferably in a headline. This tells a visitor that the landing page is relevant to the search query they typed in to start the whole process. If you use several different phrases to say the same thing, you’ll probably have to make different landing pages for each or use dynamic HTML code to show the exact keyword the user searched for.

When you advertise on many different types of keywords, you will have to create a lot of different landing pages. It’s a lot of work, but it will always pay itself back in a higher conversion rate, higher revenue, and more return on your advertising investment.

2. Clickpath: Sometimes the landing page can be the conversion page. If you offer a downloadable ebook or small specialized item, your landing page can also be the page where users can place an order. But often you’ll need to give your users additional information to guide them to a conversion – product options, specifications, accessories, etc. Guide them through the sales funnel, from general overview to detailed information to actual conversion.

An important aspect of the clickpath is that you shouldn’t make it too easy for users to diverge from it. Take away your regular site navigation if you can, try to keep the visitors of your landing page in a clickflow that guides them to a conversion. If users sidestep your clickpath and instead go to your site’s homepage or another page, chances are you’ll lose them there.

3. Calls to action: Once you get a user to click on an ad and arrive on your landing page, don’t leave them hanging. You need to take them by the hand as it were, show them where to go and what to do. Use action words like ‘learn more, ‘click here’, ‘order now’ in your content and in your links to additional pages.

4. Easy conversion: It should be as easy as possible for a user to place an order. Don’t ask them for information they don’t really want to give up. Keep your forms short and simple and only ask for the very basic information you need to complete the order.

5. Persuade: Selling is the art of persuasion. Employ tried-and-proven persuasion methods such as testimonials, special offers, guarantees, authorative sources, instilling confidence, and more. Include them on the landing page itself and on every subsequent page you send your users to.

6. Fast loading: Your landing page should load very quickly. If a user has to wait for a bit before your landing page is displayed properly, the urge to click that back-button will grow. Make your landing pages lean and efficient to optimize loading times.

7. Measure: It’s not as simple as putting your landing page out there and waiting for the money to come pouring in. It’s imperative that you know what users are doing on your landing page. Do they stay and read your content or do they leave? What links do they click on? Do they convert into customers right away or do they bookmark the page and come back later? Do they follow the whole clickpath or do they leave prematurely? If so, where do they tend to leave your site the most?

All these things and more can be measured and analyzed with a good web analytics package. A good place to start is Google Analytics, a free service that contains all the web analytics functionality you’ll need. Use the data you gather to make informed decisions about what to improve on your landing page (and your website as a whole).

8. Experiment: Creating good landing pages is never an exact science. All aspects of a landing page, from the headline to the color of the buttons, can have an impact on the conversion rate. Experiment freely, but do it in a controlled manner. Tools like Google’s free Website Optimizer allow you to perform extensive tests with all kinds of different aspects of your landing page to optimize your conversions.

Don’t test too many things at once – experiment with one or two changes at a time, no more. Allow your test to run for enough time before you make up your mind. And once you find a landing page setup that works well, use that as the basis for a new round of further tests. Never stop testing and improving.

9. Conform to the guidelines: Last but certainly not least, be sure to read the editorial policies and guidelines of the search engine you advertise on. Google, Yahoo and Live all have strict policies about advertising on their search results pages. There are guidelines you’ll need to conform to for your ads and your landing pages, or you’ll risk paying more for each click or worse, not getting your ads shown at all.

Conclusion
Creating good landing pages for your Pay Per Click campaign is not an easy and straightforward task. To do it well you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort in building and perfecting your landing pages. But it’s never a wasted effort. Again and again the results show that good landing pages turn many more visitors into paying customers, and help earn back the money you invest in seach advertising several times over.

Search Engine Advertising: a Step By Step Guide – Part 3 is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Search engines are the motors that drive traffic to your website. Getting your site ranked highly in search engines is an important factor of success. The discipline that focuses on this is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.

In an effort to help beginning webmasters get underway with SEO Google has published a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF). It’s a very useful document that describes the basics of good SEO. Some of the topics in this guide have also been a part of previous blog posts here, such as:

• Page titles
• Site navigation
• Good content
• Headlines
• Using images
• Web Analytics

Other topics in Google’s SEO Starter Guide include description tags, URL structure, anchor text, the robots.txt file, and more. It’s an excellent guide for both new and experienced webmasters that want a solid handle on how to build and maintain a successful website.

Download Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF)

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Broken links on your website are bad. A broken link is a sign of a poorly maintained website. Having broken links on your site doesn’t instill trust in your potential customers. So you want to ensure your site doesn’t have any links that don’t work.

As your website grows it gets harder to keep track of all links. A change you make on your site may break an internal link, and you can’t control what other sites do that may invalidate your links to them. But there are several ways of finding broken links so you can fix them.

For internal links you can look at your web statistics and find the 404 error pages. These errors occur when someone clicks a link that points to a webpage that doesn’t exist. A link can become broken if you deleted a page, moved it to a different URL, or typed in a wrong link. Make sure to regularly check your statistics for 404 errors occurring on your website.

Another way to find broken links is to use a link checker. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to quickly identify many errors on your site, including broken links. Another tool and a long time favorite of mine is Xenu’s Link Sleuth, a small Windows program that spiders any site you send it to and returns extensive reports on all it has found, including broken links.

An added benefit that Xenu has is that it can also check external links. By running Xenu regularly on your site you can keep track of your outgoing links and correct them if one suddenly stops working.

However such automated tools have their limitations. Nothing can replace a set of human eyeballs when it comes to checking if the pages you send your website’s visitors to still have the content you want them to see. So go through your site once in a while and click on every link and button to make sure it all works as it should.

Fix Your Broken Links is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Privacy matters to internet users. People are aware of the dangers of giving out personal information, and everyone that has an email address understands the hazards and annoyances of spam.

As a result users are less inclined to type a lot of information in a website’s form. Whether it’s a contact form or an orderform, users will be reluctant to give you their information. Many research studies show that elaborate web forms turn users away.

Every field you add to a form will make it more likely a user will not fill it in and simply go somewhere else.  Especially form fields like address and phone number throw up barriers for users that are concerned about their privacy.

It’s therefore important to keep the forms on your website as short and simple as possible. A mistake I often see is that companies base their forms on their own internal wish-list of customer information. Especially sales people want to have as much information on their customers as they can get their hands on. This usually leads to long forms that request a lot of information from users, often with little to no reward for the user when he fills it all in.

It’s necessary to use forms on your website, as a form makes it easier for a user to get in touch with you. But when you ask for much more information in the form than what you’d ask for if the customer simply phoned you, you’re not likely to get a lot of submitted forms.

Whenever you create a form for your website, keep these guidelines in mind to ensure your visitors will feel comfortable filling it in and giving you their information.

Only ask for the absolute bare minimum. For generic contact forms the name, email address and message fields are enough. For online orderforms only ask for the minimum information you need to properly complete the order process. Any additional field risks a potential customer turning away and going to a competitor.

Reward your users for giving you their information. If you really, really need to ask a lot of information from your users, give them a reward that fits the amount of information you’ve requested. This reward can be in the form of a free downloadable ebook or white paper, a possibility to win a prize like a mp3 player, or another reward that fits with your target group. Make sure this reward is clearly indicated on the form itself.

Give your form proper context and explanation. Don’t just put a form up on a web page without any explanation. The best forms are those that are short and simple and clearly indicate to the user what happens with their submitted information.

Encourage your users to submit the form. By using action words such as “submit now”, “learn more”, and “sign up today” you encourage your users to fill in the form and will make them feel good about doing so.

Include a privacy policy. Link to your privacy policy and be sure that it states you will never give your users’ information to any third party. Your privacy policy needs to be in plain language as well – hiding your intent behind cryptic legalese will not engender any trust. It also helps to state clearly on the form itself that you won’t share your users’ information.

Use a “thank you” page. When a user submits the form, send them to a “thank you” page where you confirm what you will do with their information, such as replying to the customer’s inquiry, giving them the link to the downloadable reward, enrolling them in the prize draw, etc.

Measure the submission rate.  Track how many submissions you receive compared to how many page views the form itself gets. If the submission rate is very low, you’ll need to tweak your form even more. A submission rate of 20% is a good figure for generic contact forms, so don’t be surprised if your form does a lot worse than that.

Use a simple CAPTCHA [?] to ensure your submitted forms actually come from humans instead of automated spam robots. Some CAPTCHAs are overly complex and difficult to read even for humans, which leads to real people abandoning your forms instead of just spambots.

Simple forms pay off in the long run. You may generate some additional work for yourself or your sales people with the limited information you receive, but it will result in many more contact moments with your clients and eventually in more paying customers.

Keep Your Forms Short And Simple is a blog post from Barry Adams.