You probably already know about the Funnel Visualization and Goal Flow reports in Google Analytics. They’re a great way to understand how users complete (or don’t) some kind of process on your website, such as filling out a series of forms, like a registration or checkout.

Sometimes, though, there isn’t a clear path. On this site, for example, we have a contact form that doesn’t just appear on one page, it appears in lots of pages, and this isn’t an uncommon feature of lead generation sites. Likewise, sometimes people say things like, “Well, page X is our goal. But you can actually get here either by going A > B > X, or by A > P > Q > X, depending on what options you choose.” How do we know which way people got to X?

The Reverse Goal Path is a report that helps fill in these details. You’ll find it under Conversions > Goals in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics, and like all the goal reports, you can select a particular goal you want to see from the drop-down at the top. It’s very simple: it gives you the goal completion URL and the URL of each of the 3 pages that came immediately before. You don’t have to predefine a funnel or anything, it simply looks 3 pages back in the visit and tells you what they were.

So here’s an example from our contact form. The first column is the “Goal Completion Location”, which in this case is always /about-us/contact/thank-you/. Then each of the subsequent columns walks back one page, telling us whether someone was on the home page, the contact details page, the client list, etc. No funnel necessary!

To sort out this information, note that you can use the advanced filter. So if you’re only interested in one particular path or page, you can narrow down the possibilities you’ll see here.

Of course, this report only tells you about completed goals, not abandoned ones, so it’s not as if it replaces the funnel or goal flow reports. But it can be a handy way to fill in information that funnels might not otherwise help you with.

Social media management has come a long way in the past few years. Whereas once it was relegated to the emphemeral domain of ‘social media’ guru-hood, we now have concrete strategies and metrics we can draw on in order to develop and measure real business success from social media marketing. Here are five metrics that I use for reporting that every social media manager should be familiar with.

1. Assisted Conversions

What it is:
Assisted Conversions show the overall impact of marketing channels by comparing conversions that came directly from a channel to conversions that came indirectly from that channel.
Why it’s important:
The Assisted Conversions Report can give you deep insight into how your different marketing channels work together to create a conversion. The Report lets you see the overall impacts of your various channels, campaigns, sources, or mediums, in both a last click impact (visitor from that source converted during that visit) and assisted impact (visitor from that source left, then came back through another channel and converted). Importantly, the Assisted Conversions report also compares the ratio of Assisted to Last Click conversions for each channel. Channels that have very low ratios are typically the ‘Direct Response’ channels for your company. Those that have a higher ratio are the ‘Awareness’ channels for your company. This figure can quickly inform you of where each channel impacts your conversion funnel throughout the conversion process. It also shows you the way that channels that don’t provide direct sales impact your overall conversion process, like social media.
How to measure it:
Open the Assisted Conversions Report under the Multi-Channel Funnels Reports.

2. Owned vs Earned Social

What it is:
Owned Social are visitors who come to your site from a link that YOU shared on a social platform, and Earned Social are visitors who come to your site by clicking a link that someone else has shared on a social platform.
Why it’s important:
Without differentiating between the two, your analytics will be unable to help you determine the impact your social media communities are making on your business’ bottom line. This data can be used to determine the value of your social communities, the impact that your content sharing is making on your traffic, and help you spot content that does well on only your social sites or only in your communities. You may then apply that knowledge to your content creation and sharing efforts.
How to measure it:
You’ll need to start tagging your shared links with Campaign Parameters, which you can do simply and quickly using Google’s URL Builder Tool. In order to ensure that your social data shows up in your Google Analytics reports where it is supposed to, make sure to tag your Medium as ‘social’, in lowercase. This will allow you to look at how social as a whole impacts your business and still segment out Owned Social.

3. All Traffic Sources

What it is:
This is a simple breakdown of where traffic to your site is coming from.
Why it’s important:
The Traffic Sources report can tell you a few different things about your marketing and digital efforts. Large dips or spikes can inform you of when something has changed on your site or in your market segment that might require your attention. Sources sending in a steady flow of healthy traffic, i.e. visits with a low bounce rate and higher-than-average time spent on site, can indicate areas that deserve more marketing spend.
How to measure it:
Access the All Traffic Report under Sources inside the Traffic Sources Reports.

4. Network Referrals

What it is:
This report, located in the Social Reports, shows you a breakdown of visits to your site by referring social network.
Why it’s important:
Knowing which social networks are driving the most traffic (and the highest quality traffic) to your site can offer a revealing look into which social networks are the most valuable to your business and deserve more attention. Use these reports in combination with other metrics, like a segment dividing up pageview quartiles, to really deliver deep insight into what counts as valuable traffic for your organization. Be warned, however, that Google Analytics has had a less than desirable track record when it comes to social reporting.
How to measure it:
Access the Network Referrals Report under the Social Reports

5. Plugins

What it is:
A report showing you social network actions by page, in conjunction with social plug-ins you’ve installed onto your site.
Why it’s important:
This report can show you what kinds of social actions visitors are most likely to take when sharing your content. It can also show you the difference between a non-socially referred visitor and a socially referred visitor, and the actions that they take on your site. This may surprise you – a socially referred visitor is not necessarily more likely to share your content on a social network. In fact, they might do just the opposite – whereas a social referral denotes that they already have seen the content be ‘shared’, a non-social referral implies they have discovered it through an alternate means, and would thus feel that they would be contributing something of value by sharing your page. This report can also give you insight into the way that changes to your page layout or design affect the likelihood of your content being reshared – after all, it only measures the impact of your plug-ins, not your total social presence.
How to measure it:
Have your developer or IT department install this feature into your Analytics, then access the Plugins report under the Social Reports.

There are, of course, more metrics that can provide value than just these five. What are your favorites? Share them with me in the comments below.

One of the advantages of Google Analytics Premium is that you can get unsampled data, but it’s still processed data. Have you dreamed of getting access to your raw GA data?

Those dreams are about to come true. Announced today at Google I/O: later this year BigQuery will be available to users of Google Analytics Premium.

Query hit-level data at interactive speed

BigQuery is a web service that lets you query billions of rows, a.k.a. Big Data, with a response time in seconds. Without Google Analytics Premium, you upload some data first and then run your queries.

With Google Analytics Premium, your hit-level GA data will be available for the same type of interactive ad hoc queries. Pose a question, get an answer. Does that lead to another question? Rinse and repeat! You can batch queries, too.

Build complex queries and join data sets

Direct granular access to your GA data opens the door for all kinds of complex queries. You’ll also be able to combine data sets from other sources for powerful business insights.

Imagine having data at your fingertips to solve problems like these:

• Narrow segments of large data sets with no sampling: For the past two years, how many purchases came from a social referral and what designer drove the most referrals and conversions per product category?
• Offline purchases for visitors with loyalty cards who also log in to your site: Are visitors who click on display ads more likely to come into the store and buy? What pages do they view before coming to the store and what do they eventually purchase?
• Language processing with regex across massive data sets: Which groups of organic keywords brought the best-qualified visitors? Which visitors converted the most (consumed content, became a sales lead, or bought something), and how does what they read, submitted, or bought relate to what they searched for?

If you’re a Google Analytics Premium customer, or thinking about becoming one, consider all the data sets you could combine with GA and BigQuery: from customer data, to inventory, to content management, taxonomies, and more.

LunaMetrics is an Authorized Reseller of Google Analytics Premium, and we’ll be happy to help.

All the benefits of BigQuery

The integration of BigQuery with Google Analytics Premium connects all the benefits of the BigQuery service to your GA data:

• Google’s computing power delivers insights in seconds rather than hours.
• No up-front investments, either in hardware or software licensing.
• Collaborate quickly and securely using Access Control Lists.
• Protect your data with multiple layers of security from Google.
• Store as much as you want. Pay only for what you use.

Not familiar with BigQuery and want to learn more? Get the details or watch the video for a good overview of how it works.

If you’ve been on the fence about Google Analytics Premium, does this new feature move you? What’s your reaction? Please share in the comments.

We know you’re eager to start paid search; it can be a crucial way of bringing potential customers to your site. But there are a few things you should make sure you have in place to be successful.

1. Work the Numbers

Stop. Do not pass go. Do not deposit $200 in your AdWords account (yet).

First, figure out what your conversion is — a sale? a lead form submission? Then you have to try to figure out how much money it makes sense to pay to bring people to your site so that you get more value from that conversion than you spend on the advertising.

You can go at this two ways. If you know the value of the conversion (you sold a $100 widget), you can work the ROI calculation backwards to figure out what a reasonable cost per conversion and cost per click might be. Alternatively, if the value of the conversion is less well-defined (like in lead generation), you might simply pick a reasonable target for cost-per-lead.

Here’s a great article from the LunaMetrics archives to give you perspective on how to think through the numbers before beginning paid search, and really understanding whether and how you can make an impact.

2. Be Ready to Convert Traffic with Landing Pages

OK, so you figured out what kind of budget you need to be looking at and some targets for success. But before you start spending that money, you (and your website) need to be ready to receive that traffic and do something with it.

Rarely is your home page a great place to send visitors who clicked a paid search ad. Sure, it may be a good introduction to your company, but you’re not fully utilizing the most important aspect of paid search, which is that we know just what someone is looking for (based on the keyword we bid on). We don’t have to give them a generic page; we can be specific and targeted.

So, it pays to have specific, targeted landing pages ready to go for those visitors. Sometimes an existing page on your site might suffice, but take a hard look at it to make sure it’s clear and easy for the user to make the conversion. Here’s another article from deep in the LunaMetrics archives (from 2006!) about fourteen things to pay attention to on your landing pages, and they’re all still quite relevant today.

3. Be Ready to Measure the Conversions

You must be a new visitor to this blog if you don’t already know we are ALL ABOUT MEASUREMENT here at LunaMetrics. But there’s a very good reason for that: if we don’t know which keywords, ads, and landing pages convert on our site by measuring them, how do we know where we are spending our money well and where we’re flushing it away?

So get Google Analytics (or the analytics tool of your choice, but GA is free, after all) on your site, and make sure it’s set up to measure your conversions.

Once you’ve got (1), (2), and (3) in place, then you are ready to start putting together your paid search campaigns.

It’s safe to say that Facebook.com and YouTube.com are the #2 and #3 most visited websites on the world wide web (behind only Google.com).  No big secret there.  It’s also pretty safe to assume that you or someone you know has shared a YouTube video on their Facebook Wall.  Also not a life-changing revelation.  What might surprise to you is that you can actually target viewers of these Facebook-hosted YouTube videos using a Google AdWords advertising product. That’s right; read it twice.

“How is this possible?” you might ask.  ”Aren’t Facebook and Google mortal enemies?” you might ask.  Well ya, but with Google AdWords for video and some keen investigation you are able to leverage these two super-massive audiences in conjunction with one another.  You get the best of both worlds by effectively serving your advertising message alongside compelling YouTube content within the world’s most popular forum, Facebook.

The best part: you can accomplish this impressive feat in just a few short steps, and it isn’t all that different from a typical video ad campaign setup…

Step 1: Create Your Video Ad & Host on YouTube

No brainer here.  If you don’t already have a video that you’d like to promote, then you should get to work.  Once you have an ad you’ll need to upload it to your YouTube channel because this is the source that the AdWords system will reference when you create your ads.

Step 2: Create a Google Display Network Video Ad

Create your campaign and start building your first ad. When creating the ad you are prompted to select the networks that you would like to target – YouTube Videos, Google Display Network, and YouTube search.  You will select only Google Display Network.

Selecting only Google Display Network allows you to target YouTube videos that are embedded on sites other than YouTube. This will narrow your to targeting to only the videos that meet your first requirement.

Step 3: Select Placement Targeting

So far, so good?  Now it’s time to really hone our targeting…  How do you actually ensure that your video ad is displayed only when a user watches a YouTube video on Facebook?

Easy!  Let’s review our placement report data from other Google Display Network video ad campaigns:

What we see in the above report is that more than half of all views targeting the Google Display Network have originated from a placement called…

http://s-static.ak.facebook.com/common/referer_frame.php.

What is this strange Facebook URL?  It doesn’t work when entered in your browser, and it’s not supposed to either.  Let’s post a video to my wall then take a peak at Facebook’s source code:

You can see that the URL is displayed in the source code.  This is the iframe source which describes the actual location of the video, so that explains why it is reported this way in placement reports (NOTE: this is just one example, Facebook my use other variations of this URL).  By using this abstract URL as a placement target in a new Google Display Network campaign we can target just videos that are played on Facebook.

This is a great way to put your video ads to work in a place where they’ll be sure to attract a ton of views.  If you want to get really clever, you’ll even create an ad tailored specifically to the Facebook audience (maybe you can ask people to “Like our Facebook page“?).

*You can also layer any other kind of targeting – topic targeting, contextual targeting, and even remarketing – on top of your placement target to more effectively target the YouTube audience too.  What fun!

How will you experiment with this targeting option?  Leave a comment below.

The roles and responsibilities of all marketers are expanding. Publicists are conducting keyword research. SEOs are guiding media outreach. These are crazy times.

This article is designed for professionals who wish to streamline their media outreach by creating many semi-personalized pitch letters in Excel using the concatenation function. If you are new to pitching and are simply searching for a way to get a pesky product launch off your plate as soon as possible, please review the Golden Rule below before moving on to the screenshots.

Pitch Letter Golden Rule

As (part-time) publicists, we should never send a form “Dear Reporter” pitch letter to every reporter on our list, even if this blog post makes it really easy to do that. It is not successful, it cheapens the brand and PR people will hate us for doing a disservice to their field. Instead, take time to personalize each pitch, even if there is just one line that speaks to the writer or publication.

The tactics discussed in this article might bend the boundaries of the golden rule but, as the Dalai Lama said, “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” While I believe that is especially true with all writing, it is also a valid lesson in public relations. Liberties taken from a solid foundation create unique, engaging PR outreach. Liberties taken from ignorance are slop.

When Pitch Letter Concatenation Works

For most story pitches, publicists contact a short list of journalist who report on the particular topic and tailor each pitch to its recipient. A streamlining process like this one might not be necessary. Other times, we need a method for organizing letter writing and distribution.

An example might be an article that identifies the best in your industry. Since this is a SEO blog, our sample article title will be “Top 50 SEO Bloggers.” We will rank the bloggers by a series of quantitative and qualitative metrics, maybe open it up to voting to increase engagement. Once we have the finalists, it is time to contact each one to let them know they made the top 50. We have three options:

• 50 personalized emails 
• “Congratulations Blogger” form email
• Semi-personalized letters in Excel

Creating Pitch Letters with Excel

Our semi-personalized email will have two elements: the subject line and the body. We don’t want to use a standard subject line like “Congratulations SEO Blogger” because open rate would suffer–I wouldn’t open it. Instead, let’s us each blogger’s first name.

The formula that you see in D2 (shown as “A2&B2&C2”) combines all of the previous cells in that row. You can extend that formula to the following rows by dragging it to the rest of the rows. Be sure to add spaces between the columns where needed to avoid “HeyJohn, you made the best SEO blogger list.”

The letter body applies the same rules. The formulas in “Body 1” and “Body 5” pull names from “Subject 2” in our original subject line. “Body 2” is a comma after the first name, “Body 4” is a space and “Body 6” is the final period. Concatenate them and we get our letter.

John, just wanted you to be the first to know that you made LunaMetrics’ list of the top 50 SEO bloggers. The article will be published in three hours and we’d hate for you find out via Google Alert for your name—don’t worry, we all do it. Thanks so much for your contribution to the industry. Keep up the great work, John.

That’s it. We created a scalable semi-personalized email for the 50 bloggers on our list.

I am really eager to hear of other ways that this has worked or could work for you. Any ideas?

Problem: You have media like an audio file, or a small video, that you want to put on your website, and you want to track whether people are listening or watching to it inside Google Analytics, or even make it a Goal.

Solution: Use jPlayer and the code below to track your jPlayer events into Google Analytics.

Wait a Tick: What’s with the Bob Ross photo?

Hold Your Horses: All in good time.

What is jPlayer?

jPlayer is a free and open source (licensed under MIT and GPL) HTML5 audio and video player you can use on your website without restrictions. In general it’s a very easy to use player, and most people, with a little copy and pasting, can have a media player on their website in minutes. If you need a media player for audio or video on your website, it’s one of the first ones I’ll recommend.

However, by default, like many things, it doesn’t track into your Google Analytics account. No problem. Doing that is pretty easy as well by following these steps.

1. Install jPlayer

Put jPlayer on your website by following the jPlayer Quick Start Guide on the jPlayer website. This will involve downloading some files, making sure you have jQuery, and copying in both html and javascript to the page. An example of the code you should see at that point is located in the summary of the jPlayer Quick Start Guide.

2. Name Multiple Players Differently

Now, there are two things to pay attention to. First is the player itself. The audio player has two div’s to be aware of, located at the top of the HTML for each audio player:

<div id=”jquery_jplayer_1″></div>
<div id=”jp_container_1″>

For the video player they’re also at the top but in a different order:

<div id=”jp_container_2″ class=”jp-video “>
<div class=”jp-type-single”>
<div id=”jquery_jplayer_2″ class=”jp-jplayer”></div>

The ones you care about are jquery_jplayer_1, or jp_container_1. Each player is identified by these two id’s. If you want to have multiple players on the same page you need to name them different things. jplayer_1, jcontainer_1 and then increment the number, or however you want to do it. However each player needs unique names for each of those values.

3. Modify the jPlayer Script

The script placed in the head of your page will look something like this for an audio file:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
          $(document).ready(function(){
                  $(“#jquery_jplayer_1″).jPlayer({
                             ready: function () {
                                    $(this).jPlayer(“setMedia”, {
                                              m4a: “http://www.jplayer.org/audio/m4a/Miaow-07-Bubble.m4a”
                                     });
                              },
                   swfPath: “/js”,
                  supplied: “m4a”
          });
});
</script>

The first thing you should do is add a line to the code, particularly if you are going to be running multiple players on the page:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
         $(“#jquery_jplayer_1″).jPlayer({
               ready: function () {
                     $(this).jPlayer(“setMedia”, {
                          m4a: “http://www.jplayer.org/audio/m4a/Miaow-07-Bubble.m4a”
                      });
               },
               swfPath: “/js”,
               supplied: “m4a”,
              cssSelectorAncestor: “#jp_container_1″
          });
});
</script>

Next make sure you modify the code for your actual files. The bolded items below are what you need to change. Identify your player and it’s container, and the media extension, as well as it’s actual location.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
           $(“#jPlayer_1“).jPlayer({
                 ready: function () {
                     $(this).jPlayer(“setMedia”, {
                          mp3: “http://www.mydomain.com/media/filename.mp3“
                      });
                 },
                swfPath: “/js”,
                supplied: “mp3“,
               cssSelectorAncestor: “#jContainer_1“
          });

//add the Google Analytics code listed below here.

});
</script>

3. And Now Add the Google Analytics Tracking

That will work to play the file, but it won’t track in Google Analytics yet. For that add the below script where in the script above it says “//add the Google Analytics code listed below here”.

//listener for playing the file
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.play, function(event) {
           //playerTime grabs the current % location on the file being played.
            //if they’re at the beginning it’s 0. If they’re at the end it’s 100. Etc.
             var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
           //grabs the media currently being played. Usefull for when multiple files are played in the player.
            var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
            //track it as an event with category:jPlayer, action:Play, label:Name of the file being played, value:location on file as %
          _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Play',mediaName,playerTime]);
});
//listener for a pause click
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.pause, function(event) {
           //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
          var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
          var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
           //We’ll only track the “pause” if the percent value is less than 100. This is because at 100%
         //when the player ends, it will send a pause event with the end event.
          //we don’t need that duplication in GA
          if(playerTime<100){
                  //tracking the pause with similar setup to the play event
                  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Pause',mediaName,playerTime]);
          }
});
//listening for the user dragging the seek bar
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.seeking, function(event) {
         //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
         var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
         var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
         //tracking the seeking action similar to above
         _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Seeking',mediaName,playerTime]);
});
//listening for when the user has stopped dragging the seek bar
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.seeked, function(event) {
         //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
         var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
         var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
         //There’s some overlap between the seeked and stopped events. When a user clicks
         // the stop button it actually sends a “seek” to the 0 location. So if the seeked location is 0
         // then we track it as a stop, if it’s greater than 0, it was an actual seek.
         if(playerTime>0){
                  //track the seeked event as above
                  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Seeked',mediaName,playerTime]);
         }else{
                  //track the stopped event as above
                  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Stopped',mediaName,playerTime]);
         }
});
//listening for an end ie file completion
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.ended, function(event) {
         //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
         //except when it ends we force the value as 100%, otherwise it shoots back as 0
         var playerTime = 100;
         var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
         //track the End event as above.
         _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Ended',mediaName,playerTime]);
});

All you have to do for that script is to change each “jquery_jplayer_1″ to match the id name of the player itself.

And that’s it. With that code you’ll be tracking videos and audio played through jPlayer on your website. If you’d like to look at a pure demo page with just the necessary code for the three players, click here.

So What Data Gets Fired

You’ll end up seeing up to 6 events in your Google Analytics under jPlayer. Play, Pause, Seeking, Seeked, Ended, and Stopped.

Play: This will be whenever someone hits play. Usually the value is 0 when someone hits play the first time, but if they pause, and play the file later, you’ll get a different Event Value which is the % of where they are in the file.

Pause: The user has hit pause, or maybe it’s autopaused from another player starting. Either way the pause event on the player fires this event, with the event value showing where as a % on the file it paused.

Seeking: This shows someone starting to scan/seek for a new area using the timeline. The value is where they started seeking from.

Seeked: This is where they end up releasing their seek.

Stopped: The user stopped the file by hitting the stop button. This will have a value of 0 but if you look at the event prior you can see that it fires a Seeked event before the stop, showing where the stop occurred.

Ended: The user watched the whole way through.

this and the events flow give you a good vision of the file. How many people watched the whole thing, how many watched up to a certain point, 50% or 75%, etc. Are there any specific spots on the audio or video that people keep seeking to, etc. Lots of great data can be had, even if it’s just “did someone click play on it”.

That’s about it. Just one more thing…

Please Enjoy Bob Ross Painting a Mountain

I’m curious to see through tracking how many watch the whole video…

Yesterday, I was really taking a deep look at a client’s account – I was trying to find out why branded searches and conversions have decreased this year compared to last year. And while there were a number of conclusions that we drew from the data, what interested me most was the difference in display strategy (and placement) comparing the two time periods.

I might be making some generalizations, but hey, this was a big difference. It looks like 2011-2012 saw a big display push in the months leading up to their “opening day” (early March), while 2012-2013 saw a drastic reduction in that strategy for the same period of time. This really got me thinking about display ads in general – strategies, banner creative and what you can do right now to assess display performance. I’ve summed up the top five things that I think are priorities when it comes to a wholesome display “check”, though there are certainly more that can be added to the list.

 1. Strategy – As I said above, investigating year over year comparisons revealed to me the big difference in Display strategy and the potential ramifications it could have had on Search campaigns (especially Branded). Your Display strategy (or strategies) should have a clear purpose. Are you campaigns helping raise brand awareness? Are they focused on a certain goal completion? For the most part, Display campaigns support the goals of a Search campaign. If they do, then align your messaging so that there is a clear connection between the ads, leading to a higher click through rate as people recognize the offer you are advertising.

2. Formats - Sounds fairly basic, but this is a good check to perform. Ask yourself if the campaign is covering all possible (relevant) ad formats and sizes. It’s not a surprise to me anymore to investigate accounts that are only running one ad, in one size. This severely limits your reach as many networks will only run a certain size, and if you don’t have that in your arsenal, you are not displaying at all. Is mobile part of your strategy? If so, mobile display could be a good format to work with if you want to, or already are, targeting mobile.

3. Creative check - Again, sounds basic, but stagnant creative can live on unnoticed if you don’t regularly check them and see how they are performing. Ideally, you’ll have a banner test running in display and you’re on top of your game. But if you are new in an account, or are taking over management, display ad “age” could be a factor you don’t consider right away. Check when the ads were uploaded and began displaying and do a week over week performance check to see if there have been any declines. Keep an eye out for the relevancy of the call-to-actions as well. Do they match your current strategy as discussed in point #1?

4. Landing Pages – Even if you are getting the clicks, you still need to get the user to convert, so check your landing pages. But first, make sure you really look again at point #3 and ask yourself what your ad’s purpose really is. Once you answer that question, move on to your landing page and see if it aligns with the messaging in the ad. More importantly, that it matches your brand and the offer or promise that you advertised. As with any landing page, not just for a Display campaign, you should have clear messaging, a strong call to action that matches what you advertised with the Display ad, and pertinent information above the fold of the web page.

5. Audience - Has your audience changed? A few interesting points cropped up in the Display campaigns I was looking at for the client mentioned before. I noticed that the ad placements (outside of Google) had changed drastically from this year compared to last year. Some placements that were in full swing the year before, didn’t run at all this year and vice-versa. That, combined with the different timing of the Display campaigns, indicated to me that there was some sort of effect on Search campaigns with both these factors in play. Their “new” audience might not have been the most targeted one compared to the success seen the year before.

These are only a few Display campaign checks, though they are certainly my favorite. Simple, straight forward questions, however can have some complicated answers. Take some time today, or schedule it soon, to dig into your Display campaigns, compare monthly, quarterly and yearly performance and find out what changed.

What other check points are your favorite for Display campaigns? Share in the comments below!

Google Analytics Content Experiments are a great way to quickly and easily set up simple A/B tests for your website. And for most people, setting up these experiments can be done using the interface in Google Analytics.

However, there are some who desire a little more control over the variation pages, that just can’t be done through the setup wizard.

For example, when you’re choosing you’re variation pages, you can specify full (exact) URLs for the variations, or relative URLs. If you choose to specify the variations by the full URL, you’d end up with something like:

Original Page:

http://www.example.com/original.html

Variation 1:

http://www.example.com/variation1.html

Variation 2:

http://www.example.com/variation2.html

If you choose relative URLs, you can take advantage of query parameters to specify your variations. This makes it possible to do site-wide tests, by placing the Content Experiment code on every “original” page of the site. Then, for your variation URLs, you’d have:

Variation 1:

?var=1

Variation 2:

?var=2

and on up to variation 9 (the maximum number of variations).

Doing it this way makes the variation URL relative to whatever page the Content Experiments code is on (regardless of what you specify as your original page in in the setup wizard). So if you have the Content Experiment code on www.example.com/original.html, and Google decides to send you to a variation, it will redirect you to www.example.com/original.html?var=1 (or ?var=2, ?var=3, etc.).

The problem

If you don’t use query parameters for your variations, but instead have them as separate pages, this poses a problem if you want to do a site-wide test. For example, let’s say you have a set of original pages that have the following URL structure:

www.example.com/page1/original/index.html

www.example.com/page2/original/index.html

www.example.com/page3/original/index/html

etc.

And your variation pages:

www.example.com/page1/variation/index.html

www.example.com/page2/variation/index.html

www.example.com/page3/variation/index.html

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just use the same trick as above, and specify the variation pages using the Relative option, and /variation/index.html as the variation page?

That would be great. But it doesn’t work. If you try (like I did) you find out that if you don’t specify a query parameter for the relative URL, then it makes the variation URL relative to the hostname. So your variation URLs end up being www.example.com/variation/index.html instead of www.example.com/page1/variation.html.

Still with me?

The Solution: Content Experiments JavaScript API

I stumbled across this little gem a couple weeks ago. It looks like this documentation was just added recently (April 4th). With a simple little script, you can define your variation URLs however you want. For example, the following code will define the original and variation pages, use the Content Experiments API to choose which version a user should see, and then either redirect to the variation or keep them on the original.

<!-- 1. Load the Content Experiments JavaScript Client -->
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/cx/api.js?experiment=L9UZaiJzTn2z9Ud9XDya0g"></script>

<script>
 var page_variations = [
 'http://www.example.com/page1/original/index.html', //original page
 'http://www.example.com/page1/variation/index.html' //variation 1
 ]

// 2. Choose the Variation for the Visitor
 var variation = cxApi.chooseVariation(); //chooses a variation, or keeps them in same variation

// 3. Send visitor to the correct version
 if (variation != 0) {
 window.location.replace(page_variations[variation]);
 }

</script>

Some important notes

This code is just a sample – you’ll obviously want to test it out for yourself to make sure it works for your site. Also keep in mind the following points:

• The code above completely replaces the Content Experiment code that you get from the setup wizard.
• You still have to set up the experiment in Google Analytics. Notice in the second line of the code above, you include the Experiment ID as a query parameter when you reference the Content Experiments JavaScript library.
• If you use _setDomainName in your Google Analytics tracking code, you’ll also need to specify the same domain name for content experiments with cxApi.setDomainName(‘example.com’); in the script

But wait, there’s more!

The Content Experiments feature reference includes information for even more advanced customizations and configurations. For example, did you know you can use the Management API to create new experiments, update existing experiments, retrieve a list of experiments, get the details of a single experiment, and delete experiments?

A lot of folks come to us asking us to help them restore a decline in website traffic that occurred after a site migration or major update. Typically, most – if not all – of the traffic loss was preventable. There’s a lot of different update and migration scenarios and a lot of different things that can go wrong, but we keep seeing many of the same underlying issues.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll define a migration as anytime a large amount of pages or content move from old URLs to new URLs  whether it be migrating an entire site to a new domain, a subdomain to a subdirectory, merging a small site into a bigger one, or what have you.

And I’ll assert that most potential problems with any migration can be prevented by following 7 fundamental pieces of advice so simple that even a CEO should understand.

1. Understand the Stakes
2. Make Sure No Content is Missing
3. (Properly) Redirect Every URL
4. You Need a (Cross-Functional) Migration Team
5. You Need a Pre-Launch Plan
6. You Need a Post-Launch Plan
7. Use Tools

1.    Understand the Stakes

Things can go really wrong with migrations.

There’s horror story after horror story after horror story after horror story, and I (and any other veteran SEO) have seen enough after-effects of botched migrations to tell you the risk is very real.

Total traffic of one of our clients.

Organic search traffic of the same client. Can you guess when they moved things around?

So the first step in a migration is to make sure everyone involved realizes the importance of doing the migration right, because:

• A lot of traffic can be lost.*
• This traffic has value.
• Missing traffic can mean permanently missed opportunities.
• Restoring organic traffic declines can take weeks or months.
• It’s easier to prevent migration problems than to fix them.

Thus, mitigating risk and minimizing losses is of utmost importance.

A lot of migration problems happen simply because there isn’t a person of sufficient influence who knows enough to know they should insist on doing the migration right.

*For many migrations, like domain migrations, there will always be some initial traffic loss – but the severity and duration is very highly dependent on execution. For many migrations, initial traffic loss is completely avoidable.

2.    Make Sure No Content is Missing

It’s a little mind boggling to think that someone might have pages with content that draws traffic, move things around and lose the content, and then wonder why traffic is down.

And yet it happens – often.

Don’t let it happen to you. If any content is missing, or is not 100% guaranteed to arrive when the new site or upgrade is launched, then you are not ready for launch.* Simple.

*There is one exception to this rule – and that is if the web team has come to the careful conclusion that the site would be better off without certain content. Just make sure that decision is based on what is best for the site, not because someone is not willing or able to move the content.

3.    (Properly) Redirect Every URL

So even if you’ve made sure there is a home for all the articles in your blog or all the products in your catalog, you can still be quite screwed if the content can’t be located by visiting the old URL it used to be on. So, if the content of Page X gets moved to page Y, then you need to make darned sure that visitors to Page X get sent directly to page Y. This is called a redirect, and here’s why it’s important:

• People don’t only get to pages on your site from your site. They might be getting to the page because they have it bookmarked, because a search engine sends them to it, or because another site links to it.
• If a person tries to get to a page in one of these ways, and there is no longer content at that page, they’ll get a “Page Not Found” error. They won’t like that, and they’ll be less likely to do what you wanted them to on your site and less likely to come back.
• If you properly redirect those moved pages, the search engines will associate the authority signals of the old URLs with the new URLs. That means, all other things equal, the new URLs will rank well for the same keywords as the old URLs, and there will be no disruption in organic traffic. If you do not redirect the URLs, then the new URLs are treated as new pages, and must start trying to rank for keywords from scratch.
• If the content still lives on the old URLs as well as the new URLs, then you have duplicate content. This is a big problem for search engine optimization.

Thus, every URL with moved content needs redirected.

Credit: radialinfo.com/using-301-redirects.php

There’s one technical detail you need to know here you must use permanent redirects, also known as 301 redirects. If you do not use permanent redirects, then search engines do not known that the content has permanently moved and will not associate all of the authority signals of the old page with the new page – thus the new page is still starting from scratch in the eyes of the search engine.

Also note that a proper redirect is not from any page to any page; it must be to content with the same or very similar content (not ten zillion 301 redirects to the home page).

Most of the migration damage I’ve seen is caused by failure to ensure all content is live and/or all URLs are properly redirected.

4.    You Need a (Cross-Functional) Migration Team

So there’s a few other problems that can happen during migrations. To avoid them, you need a plan. For the plan to be adequate, you need a team working on it. And you need the team members to have different areas of expertise and frames of reference to ensure you don’t miss anything big. Often the root cause of migration issues is that the migration was dominated by someone lacking the holistic frame of reference or full range of knowledge need to plan and do everything right. Plus, it’s easier for several heads to catch something than one head.

Below are a few of the characters you might see in a proper migration task force.
The SEO
The SEO makes sure organic search traffic doesn’t take any big hits. Major related tasks may include ensuring proper redirects are in place, snuffing out duplicate content issues, submitting XML Sitemaps, submitting changes of address, and more to ensure search engines fully understand the new changes in a timely manner.

The Back-End Developer
The back-end developer is typically the person who “flips the switch” to make the migration happen. This implementation specialist should also make sure the site doesn’t break in the process, help other team members bring their ideas to fruition, and make sure changes happen in an efficient manner.

The Advertiser
If you advertise, and you don’t account for advertising in your game-planning, then you could be in for a few unwelcome surprises. For example, if your advertising links go to a missing page, you can waste some serious money as well as seriously tick off any affiliates you have working on commission. And if you change domains and you use AdWords, you need to change the display and destination URL of every ad, even if you use redirects. The advertising specialist can address these issues while making sure the brand experience is consistent and positive.

The Customer Experience Advocate
You’ll want someone on who will ensure that users won’t be saying “WTF!?”. Whether it’s be a rockstar usability consultant or your customer service rep who knows what people always have trouble finding, you’ll need someone on the team who knows the customer and will make sure the customer gets what they’re looking for.

The best cast for a migration team depends on the situation. Maybe you have one advertiser handling branding, one advertiser handling paid search, a customer service rep, and a developer who is amazing at SEO, and that team could work out for you. Or maybe all you have is 2 of these competencies in house, and you hire a consultant. The important thing is to ensure each of these roles is played well – otherwise you’re in for an unhappy ending.

Character Image Credits: Dilbert, Bitchdujour.com, Mad Men, Every Website Ever.

5.    You Need a Pre-Launch Plan

The migration team’s mission is to develop a step-by-step plan and execute the plan to perfection. Wingin’ a migration often doesn’t work out well.

Fortunately, there’s already a few great checklists out there to build from, including, but not limited to:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
• http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
• http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/07/5-wordpress-seo-subdomain-to-subfolder-migration-steps.html
• http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2158206/-checklist-website-redesign-migration
• http://www.virante.org/blog/2013/02/12/website-migration-checklist/

Here’s a few pointers on the pre-launch checklist:

• Use a checklist that fits your type of migration (cms upgrade, domain-only migration, site-merge, re-design, etc…).
• Don’t use any existing checklist without improving to fit your specific situation.
• Have the whole team involved in building the checklist.
• Do not move forward until everything is crossed off the list.
• Measure twice thrice, cut once.

6.    You Need a Post-Launch Plan

A lot of folks stop after launch-time. That’s how you crash and burn. Before you’re ready to launch, you also need to have post-launch game plan set. There’s three main elements: follow-ups, diagnostics and monitoring, and problem resolution. Note that many of the post-launch tasks are time-sensitive, so you’ll need to plan carefully to minimize downtime and nip issues in the bud before they become huge problems.

Follow-ups
Once the URLs themselves are migrated, you’ll likely need to update a few things. Examples include (but are not limited to):

• Submitting new XML Sitemaps
• Submitting change of address to Google and Bing
• Updating local business listings
• Making advertising URL changes go live

Diagnostics and Monitoring
I’ll be honest – the last migration LunaMetrics saw through did not go exactly as planned. However, we nipped the problems in the bud within 24 hours because we had a system to check for problems. They do arise, so do make sure the team understands major potential threats and plans to check for each possible problem post-upgrade. You’ll want a combination of:

• manual site spot-checks
• data analysis
• a comprehensive site crawl

Problem Resolution
If there’s an issue, who you gonna call? You don’t want to be scramble for two hours only to find out that the only person who can fix the problem is vacationing in a remote village in Borneo. There should be a team on stand-by prepared to deal with issues.

7.    Use Tools

Credit: http://www.academicpkm.org

Don’t leave it up to up to human error, and don’t be inefficient. Use tools to smooth the process and make mistakes easier to catch. Below are four essential tools you’ll need, especially for to check on things before and after the update.

• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• A Website crawler – for example, Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog

###

A lot of websites shoot themselves in the foot during migrations. While there’s a ton of things that can go wrong, I’ve found they can almost always be avoided, or at least promptly resolved, by following the fundamentals. So be smart and use teamwork and careful planning to ensure your migration leaves you in better – rather than worse – shape than before.

Your social media traffic data is split across several reports in Google Analytics. Are you taking steps to get it together?

Social media traffic sources appear in Social :: Network Referrals, as well as in Sources :: All Traffic and Sources :: Referrals. They also appear in Sources :: Campaigns if you use campaign-tagged links, not to mention the ones masquerading as direct traffic.

There’s little you can do about the direct traffic, but to get a handle on the rest of it, it’s helpful to understand where the reports overlap and where they don’t. Some of the sources for these visits are accounted for across reports. Others appear only in Sources reports and not in Social reports.

For example, the Sources :: All Traffic report shows visits from t.co and twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com (values of the Source dimension), while the Social :: Network Referrals report pulls them together as visits from Twitter (a single value of the Social Network dimension).

It’s not clear from these two reports whether the two campaign-tagged sources “twitter” and “Twitter” on the left are also pulled together into the social network “Twitter” on the right. Actually it’s not even clear that the other three sources are part of the social network, either, but we’d like to think that, wouldn’t we?

The Big Questions

• Besides the big names, what other sites are considered Social Networks in GA?
• Which domains and subdomains does GA associate with each network?
• What does GA do with campaign-tagged sources like “twitter” and “Twitter”? Do they count as Social Network visits or not?

Clues: An Obscure Dimension within a Buried Definition

Answers to these questions are conspicuously absent from the GA documentation on social networks, although you will find a helpful dimension here called “ga:hasSocialSourceReferral”. You may have seen this somewhat obscure dimension (named “Social”) in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, if you’ve ever dug into the definitions within the Basic Channel Grouping Template.

The definition of the Social Network channel clarifies that “Social=Yes” means GA recognizes the visit source as a social network. It also indicates that campaign-tagged sources need to be tagged with a few specific mediums to count as social.

The full regular expression, not visible in the screen shot above, is:

^(social|social-network|social-media|sm|social network|social media)$

which implies that any visit resulting from a link you’ve tagged with utm_medium=social, or any of the other terms in the expression, GA will count as coming from a Social Network. This may be true for Multi-Channel Funnels, but is not necessarily true for Social reports (more on that later).

Answers: Unearthed in Existing Data

Since we have a lot of data from multiple clients here at LunaMetrics, I thought, “Why not see how many different social networks we’re already capturing and what domains are associated with them? While I’m at it, I’ll check the campaign-tagged social traffic, too, and see if it’s really all Social=Yes.”

With a little help from Google docs and GA Magic Script, I queried some of our largest clients’ data sets and compiled a list of 195 unique Social Network names, corresponding to 5,015 unique Sources (domains). Although this is almost certainly not a comprehensive list, it sheds some light on what may possibly appear as a social source.

Click here to see my (partial) list of GA Social Networks and Corresponding Domains.

Additionally, I found that campaign traffic from links tagged with utm_medium=social did not all turn up as Social=Yes. Only the traffic where utm_source values were in GA’s list of social sources (still waiting for that to be published) counted as Social=Yes.

For example, this campaign traffic counts as Social=Yes and appears in both the Sources and Social reports:

utm_medium=social
utm_source=twitter

This campaign traffic does not count as Social=Yes and appears only in Sources reports:

utm_medium=social
utm_source=fb

Because the second source was “fb” instead of “facebook”, GA did not aggregate this visit with the other visits under the Social Network “Facebook” in the Social reports.

No More Giant Regular Expressions?

Others have advocated tagging every social link with utm_medium=referral and relying on the Sources :: Referrals report to combine data, but I hate using a giant regular expression to pull social media sources from that data and I’d never have them all.

You can make pulling social traffic data easier by ensuring that you don’t abbreviate social sources in your campaign-tagged links and always use one of the social mediums in the defined list. That way you can see aggregated social network traffic in the Social reports, or query for it using ga:hasSocialSourceReferral==Yes (with a capital Y).

Unfortunately until GA publishes the complete list of sites they recognize as social, you have to rely on the data you can already see, or one by one test campaign-tagged URLs to see if those sites appear in your data as Social=Yes. Feel free to start with the list of social networks from my data and add to it.

Have you done any testing or checking of social sources in Google Analytics? What solutions have you found for pulling this data together? What questions are you still trying to answer? Please share in the comments.

In digital marketing, cannibalization occurs when a paid search ad “steals” traffic away from an organic listing.  You’ll typically find questions associated to this topic like, why should I bid on my brand name keywords?  Or, why should bid on keywords that I rank #1 for organically?

Let’s put these questions to rest once and for all because, in my opinion, cannibalization is a pretty harsh term to associate with paid search.  So, unlike my Pac-Man example above, I prefer to view the relationship between PPC and SEO as a symbiotic one where both channels work together to achieve an overarching marketing goal.  Let’s look at a few examples and discuss why it’s beneficial to appear in both spaces simultaneously.

1. Real Estate on the SERP

Real estate consumed on the search engine results page is the most easily seen benefit of targeting identical keywords in both paid search and search engine optimization efforts.  Increasing the shear visibility of your brand is always beneficial; your (1) more noticeable and (2) consumers will begin to associate your brand more often with a particular search phrase – both branded and non-branded.

I’ve conducted a search for the keyword sears in the example below.  I am not only served an organic link (with sitelinks), a map displaying locations, and a Google+ page, but I’m also provided with a paid search ad that consumes a huge portion of the SERP.  In fact, the only brand visible above the page fold is Sears®.  This advertisers has certainly done their homework in both SEO and PPC.

Example 1 (click image to enlarge):  Branded Search > “sears” 

Speaking specifically to the PPC strategy, it is well planned. The advertiser has incorporated many, many ad extensions to help their brand dominate the SERP: Enhanced Sitelinks, seller rating extensions, and social extensions. It is this domination of the SERP that leads me into the next two points…

2. Messaging Variance & Messaging Solidification

Because the advertiser is dominating the SERP, they now have the ability to generate over a dozen different messages and ways (links) for the consumer to interact with their brand.  But how do they leverage this visibility?  Notice how the messaging differs between PPC and SEO, and think about how both PPC and SEO work separately.  SEO is a long-term strategy, and PPC is a short-term strategy.

The SEO message is structured in such a way that it creates the foundation for the brand and focuses on longevity.  The calls-to-action will ALWAYS be relevant regardless of the scenario:

• Begin your Shopping Experience
• Buy Online
• Pick up in Store
• Find Store Locations
• Find Great Brands

Now, look at the PPC messaging and how it actually works to reinforce AND build upon the SEO message.  The consumer is presented with different ways to shop, added benefits to shopping with Sears®, and time-sensitive offers.  The calls-to-action generate a sense of urgency asking the consumer to act immediately:

• Save on Top Brands
• Up to 20% Off
• Get Huge Deals
• Pick Up In Store Today
• Rewards Program
• Free Shipping
• Deal of the Day
• Shop Now!
• etc

Now, let’s briefly look at a non-branded example:

Example 2 (click image to enlarge): Non-Branded Search > “shop appliances”

We see similar techniques at play here in the non-branded PPC example: ad extensions, calls-to-action, etc. are used to build upon and solidify the message presented in long-term SEO strategy.

3. Increased Total Web Traffic

The third benefit of targeting the same keywords in both SEO and PPC channels again harkens back to consuming real estate on the SERP.  It is plain and simple; with more links pointing to your website at any given moment there is more opportunity for increased visitors.

It is true that paid search ads may pull some visits away from your organic listings, but they will actually help to incrementally increase your website’s overall traffic.  Let look at an example to clarify:

In Scenario 1, paid search ads are not running.  Organic links are responsible for 1,000 website visits.  In Scenario 2, paid search ads are running.  Although organic visits have decreased due to the incorporation of paid per click ads, total website visits have actually increased to 1,250.  So that’s 250 visits (1,250 minus 1,000) that you would not have received without the use of PPC advertising.

-

Since SEO and PPC strategies essentially share the same goal of increasing your overall website traffic, you should certainly consider using both strategies in conjunction with one another to achieve your marketing goals.  Both digital marketing strategies are tools used to achieve your marketing goals.  Learn how you can use one to strengthen the other, forming a symbiotic relationship.  Once this is achieved you can start to dominate the SERP and dominate your competition.  Have fun!

Questions?  Comments?  Leave it in the section below.

“This thing all things devours:

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats high mountain down.“

-Gollum

The answer to Gollum’s riddle was of course time. It devours all things. It doesn’t do it quickly, it does it drip by drip like water. Throw water at a rock and it splashes and makes the rock wet. Throw water at a rock every second of every day for a thousand years and the rock becomes sand. The slow steady drip of time wears away at everything.

Real-Time data is like watching a river in that respect. It’s watching the steady flow of time and visitors across your site. Ebbing and flowing, changing and reacting. If a standard report in Google Analytics is a table of data presented to you saying “This many cubic feet of water passed us in the past day, including 4 barges, 2 pleasure craft, and an otter.” then a Real-Time report is sitting on a rock watching the river, listening to the sounds. And when things change, you can react quickly.

Though they have been introduced in the reports for a few weeks, Google Analytics announced on Tuesday April 16th 2013, the introduction of Real Time Widgets to the Dashboards feature. In all there were four different widgets introduced.

Counters: These show the number of active visitors on your site, similar to the prime “Right Now” counter on the Real-Time overview report. The major difference is that you can determine what the dimension is, if any, to be shown under the counter. On the Real-Time Overview report it shows New vs. Returning users. On your widget you can select a different dimension to break out that counter’s numbers from the set 11 dimensions available in all the Real Time Widgets: Campaign, City, Country/Territory, Keyword, Medium, Page, Page Title, Referral Path, Source, Traffic Type, or Visitor Type.

Timelines: These show the scrolling pageviews over either the last 30 minutes or last 60 seconds.

Geomaps: This will show visits on a map. you can choose to display by country or cities, and drill down your region from a world map down to a national one.

Tables: This shows active visitors, with up to 3 of the dimensions listed above. You can show 5, 10, 15 or 20 rows and you have to option to show percentage bars or not.

All these widgets can be filtered on any of those 11 Real-Time Dimensions.

Why Use Real Time?

Alerts and Intelligence events take time to parse, and sometimes can be a few days before they appear in your Google Analytics account, but Real Time data is what’s coming in as you watch it. It’s how people are using your site right when you’re watching it. This can give, and has given, tremendous insights and opportunities to various companies, particularly when you need to react fast.

Example 1: You run a major email marketing campaign, and they start to fly out to the 50,000 people on your email list. The traffic begins, and you watch it mount. Suddenly you notice that they’re only hitting the campaign landing page. Everyone is bouncing. Nobody is clicking on the conversion button. Panic. That leads you to quickly looking at the landing page, and realizing that a last minute addition by someone on the marketing team has broken the page. The conversion button isn’t working. Your developers quickly fix it, and rather than wasting the entire campaign email with no conversions, you’ve only lost a few minutes and a fraction of the visitors who you can now see begin to click on the call to action.

Example 2: You keep an eye on your dashboards for spikes of traffic, and notice one day an spike in traffic to a particular older article. You leverage that article and write more on the subject, leveraging that traffic. Instead of missing that spike in traffic entirely lost in the mists of your analytics, you embraced the real time data and increase your traffic 600% (actually happened).

I could go on and on and make up scenarios, but the point is that sometimes, for good or bad, you need to know what’s happening right now on your site. Sometimes a report a day or two later on the cubic volume of water won’t cut it.

What can a Real Time Dashboard give me that the Real-Time Reports don’t?

The standard Real-Time reports are great, but they’re very broad, just like ALL the standard reports, and particularly if you have more traffic, you might be interested in looking at just specific traffic.

For instance the default Real-Time Locations report is for the entire world rather than a specific country or region. Real-Time Traffic Sources shows every source and medium, but doesn’t show campaign names. The Top Keywords report on the Real-Time Overview doesn’t filter for branded terms.

Real-Time Widgets let you drill down to display immediately the data you want to see.

Example of a Paid Search Dashboard

Example of a SEO Dashboard

 *note: The Geomaps had been working earlier, but when I went to take my screenshots they were having trouble. As this is a new feature I’m not concerned, and I’m sure they will be working again shortly.

Conclusion

There are a tremendous number of uses for this feature for real time monitoring of your data. Campaigns, SEO, PPC, Social Media, and more. When I asked both a Paid Search Analyst and the head of our SEO department here at LunaMetrics about these dashboards both said at the end of the conversation “Send me that when you’re done.” which to me was a good indication of the value of Real-Time Widgets on Dashboards.

What other kinds of uses can you think of? What would be a great real time dashboard, or dashboard that combines real-time widgets, with standard widgets? Post the dashboards you’d want to use below!

Interest in SEO training has soared over the past five years as optimizing for search climbs from the Desired Skills section to Required across marketing job boards. Dan Wilkerson recently created a graph on Indeed.com that illustrates employer demand for SEO and social media.

The marketing generalist is alive and well, but tool kits are expanding. Marketers must be able to drive traffic to websites and they need SEO to do it.

Enter SEO training. It’s a bridge that must be crossed so the only things left to consider are where to study, what to study and from whom to study.

Where to Study: Online Training or In Person

The choice between online or in-person training depends on preferred learning style. In-person SEO training is best for people who desire a more interactive experience or dedicated time to study. Like learning a language, it can be easier to make time and focus with someone sitting across from you.

Sometimes flexibility is more important. Online training might be best for someone who needs to understand SEO by next week or has to contend with a busy schedule. Here is a list of options for online training. It’s a bit outdated so you might also look into SEO Book and Distilled U.

What to Study: What is SEO 101?

The goal of any SEO training should be to walk away with the resources to optimize a small- to mid-sized website for search and craft a basic strategy for audience expansion.  For the optimization side, find a course that answers these questions.

• How do search engines crawl and rank websites?
• What is keyword research?
• What are the free research tools and how are they used?
• Where should keywords be placed on a website?
• How do links influence SEO?
• How does a website’s architecture influence SEO?

Optimizing a website to play nicely with search engines is the first and most important role of any (aspiring) SEO professional. But that’s just the beginning. After completing your training, you should also be able to expand the reach of your website and brand. For that responsibility, the course should answer these questions.

• What is link building?
• What are the free link building tools and how are they used?
• What is internal linking and link bait?
• What is a content strategy?
• How do social media influence SEO?

Training that addresses these issues should provide a solid foundation in SEO. Even the basics from a 101 course can take a website from nothing to something, which is a larger step than it might seem. It is amazing what optimized meta data and a few technical corrections can achieve.

From Whom to Study: Finding the Right Educator

There are lots of SEO coaches out there and finding the right one might be the hardest part of the process. For better or worse, there is not one method for SEO. Sure, most people approach the basics similarly, but everyone has their own processes and priorities. Aside from the obvious, like price and proximity, it is always a good idea to look at reputation. Here are some final questions to ask.

• Is the trainer experienced?
• Does the trainer have a reputable client list?
• Does the course provide theory and hands-on practice?

Don’t be afraid to ask the questions. All of them. You are investing in your career and need to find the best possible match. If you think that in-person training is the right choice and live within driving distance of Pittsburgh, ask us some questions and consider LunaMetrics’ SEO 101 training on May 17th. Your career will thank you.

This past week I was in Austin, TX for HeroConf 2013, the PPC Hero conference, and as I may have tweeted out during it (See Exhibit A below), it was a PPC haven for all of us PPC nerds out there.

Exhibit A

There was definitely a lot of information to take in, absorb and sort through during and after the conference. Trust me when I say that there was a lot of great ideas presented by some awesome speakers. If you’re new in PPC, or have been in it for a few years, a conference is a great way to brush up on skills, learn about new ones, and network with a bunch of people that like the same things that you do. There were likely a lot of takeaways for each person who attended. For me, these are my 5 top takeaways. If you attended, feel free to add in the comments!

Automation

Automation, and the various tools (both hacked and bought) to achieve it, dominated a lot of the panels and some keynote speeches. At first, I thought it was a way to sell the products that vendors were pushing. And in some ways, yes, that’s exactly what happened. Duh. BUT, what was more important was the fact that automation takes on all forms and you can apply it in different ways to make your job as a PPC manager more efficient. We’ve all fallen victim to the blackhole that can be reporting – pretty sure there are parts of my soul still lingering in that dark, dark world. Automation using AdWords Scripts, Excel macros and the AdWords API are there to actually make your job easier to manage. They don’t make you look lazy – in fact they make you look pretty freakin’ awesome. And as for the actual tools that were being highlighted, my sense was that they are still there to make your job more manageable, and it’s about figuring out what works for you and your clients. There is no one-size-fits-all for automation tools.

Diversify your ad networks

A lot of the speakers emphasized this point – don’t just pick one ad network and never branch out to the others that are available. Sure, Google AdWords still dominates, but don’t discount the value that could be added to your client’s paid search efforts by looking at other networks for search and display. Explore Bing Ads, Adroll, and others for some added value. Start with your best performing campaigns from AdWords and adjust them to the new network. Set up a test and go for it. You might find that it could cost less and convert pretty well, even if the traffic is less than your AdWords campaigns.

Context matters

Whether we are talking about the buzzword “Big Data” or the micro-events that can influence a conversion, context matters. It’s not just about the click and the landing page (woah), but about what is going in and around the user who clicks that can affect the likelihood of a conversion. I think it was John Gagnon who put it best. Micro-conversions drive commitment to a larger conversion later. You can’t just start and stop at one simple goal, but see how the smaller goals influence the likelihood of achieving the next level. As for Big Data, Brian Eisenberg and Kevin Lee summed it up in nicely in their presentations. Big data is unstructured and real-time. It’s constantly in flux and you need to have the tools to understand, move and act with it. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can sort and figure out everything with an Excel document. Make your life easier and use tools like Narrative Science, Bloom Reach, DataPop and more. Look more closely at specific geographic or location-specific events that can affect how your users interacts with a page or changes the volume of traffic to a keyword in an area.

Re-examine account value

Keywords work together to the success of an AdWords campaign; their organization and relation to each other and their ads and landing pages are important in determining things like Quality Score. But keywords should be treated differently on an individual level – from landing page, to geo-targeting, to time of day and more. And don’t think of the keyword–>ad–>landing page cycle as a purely closed loop. Again, go back to the context, a’la the search query and make sure your landing page is speaking to exactly what that person is looking for. As PPC managers we understand the difference between Brand and non-Brand conversions, but do our clients? Think about how you should be presenting the data to clients in a way that is comprehensible and actionable. All this probably sounds like something on repeat, but for me, I like hearing ideas in different ways to remind me that I can always be doing more and doing better.

Look to the future

One of the panels I attended discussed the Past, Present and Future of PPC (a topic voted on by the #ppcchat community!) which gave me a good dose of history and what to look forward to regarding the changes already happening and what we might expect in the future. Unsurprisingly there was a lot of talk about mobile and how it already is and will play into how people interact with a website and ultimately, a brand as a whole. Throughout the conference I had fun catching tid bits of more future technologies, like “cost-per-conversion” or “cost-per-answer” (think: Siri). The whole idea of PPC even with a past, present and future really excited me. It made me glad to be where I am and doing what I’m doing – nothing is more exciting knowing that as time rolls on, you’ll never be doing the same thing day in and day out.

Bonus takeaway: The Simpsons will always be relevant. I’m pretty sure about 60% of the presentations included some sort of Simpsons reference, which tells me I need to start watching the Simpsons again.

So there you have it! Hero Conf 2013 was an awesome refresher of paid search knowledge and a great sound stage for new ideas and concepts to be brought to the table. Anyone reading attend? I’d love to hear your #1 takeaway.

As the avid users of AdWords know, Google Analytics has a great report that pulls in cost data from AdWords. If you have an ecommerce site or currency values assigned to your goal conversions, it’ll even calculate ROI.

A while back, Google Analytics announced new support for importing cost data from other sources: think Bing Ads, Facebook advertising, etc. This is great! It puts all the power of those AdWords reports to work on your data from any kind of advertising.

The hard part is getting the data in. The data format is actually pretty easy (it’s just a CSV file). However, there’s no big “UPLOAD YOUR DATA HERE” button in Google Analytics. There’s an API for developers to import data, and a number of third-party tools that work with that API to import data from many sources. Ultimately, this is the way to go — having machines do the work on a schedule so you don’t have to. However, sometimes you just want to try things out and play with the data a bit, and if you don’t write code in Python or Java, there’s currently no easy way to do that.

Well, that is, until now. I made it just for you. Consider this your big UPLOAD YOUR DATA HERE button.

Before you do this, you should follow the steps in the documentation to prepare. Briefly,

1. Make sure you have campaigns tagged in Google Analytics.
2. Format your cost data into a CSV file according to the specifications.
3. Create a custom data source in Google Analytics in the Admin settings for your web property.

Once you’ve done all that, you can use this manual uploader page to upload the data (one day’s worth per CSV file). Enter all the information, click the button, and presto!

A few pointers:

• The Account and Web Property IDs can be found in the Admin interface in GA. The web property ID you see all over the place, and it looks something like “UA-12345-1″. The account ID is just the middle number (12345, in this case).
• The Custom Data Source ID is found in the Custom Data Sources tab of the Admin interface, and is a long alphanumeric string. You create a separate custom data source for each different type of data you’re uploading (say, one for Bing Ads data, one for Facebook data).
• The date must be in YYYY-MM-DD format.
• There are a couple of additional settings under “Advanced Settings”. Generally these are OK if you’re just making one upload for each day. However, if your data file exceeds the size limit (5MB) you might have to break it into multiple pieces, in which case you can increment the “Append” value (1 for part 1, 2 for part 2, and so on). Or, if you make a mistake, you can overwrite a previous upload by using the same Append value and setting Reset to true.
• You should see the upload appear pretty much immediately in the Admin interface. However, it may take some time for the data to be processed and appear in reports (the docs say “up to 12 hours”).

This is in very basic form right now: it doesn’t have any helpers to select from your list of accounts or web properties, and it does only very crude data validation. We’ll likely make it better over time. Feel free to leave comments if you find bugs or have suggested improvements. We’ve tested this reasonably thoroughly, but it’s free and there are no guarantees it will work for you, yada yada yada.

Note that this accesses your Google Analytics account through the OAuth protocol, which means it has access to whatever you have access to, but it connect you directly with Google Analytics. Your login, password, and data never touches our servers.

This is all made possible by the new file reader APIs in HTML5 (which your browser must support to use this), the Google Javascript API library, the authorization handlers written by Nick Mihailovski at Google used in the Hello Analytics tutorial, the letter G, and the color orange.

Every Monday, I run through a checklist for each of my SEO clients. The goal is to discover issues that don’t warrant same-day response time, but should still be addressed in a timely manner. There’s slight variations from client to client, and I sometimes use paid tools, but below is the basic template, featuring my 3 favorite free SEO tools: Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics.

SEO Health Checklist

1. Google Webmaster Tools: Check Crawl Errors, Index Status, and Messages.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools: Check Site Activity Screen, Crawl Information, and SEO Reports.
3. Google Analytics Reports: Review Keywords, Landing Pages, Sources, SEO traffic numbers and engagement.
4. Google Analytics Alerts: Review Custom Alerts and Automatic Alerts. Review other reports as needed.

A disclaimer: This checklist is best used in proper scope in conjunction with other intelligence-gathering methods. Other recommended methods include: Google Custom Alerts, Webmaster Tools notifications, and Daily peaks at Google Analytics Dashboard.

The main purpose of this checklist is to fill as much remaining insight as possible in fifteen minutes. It helps me catch SEO problems and opportunities earlier, and informs me on how I need to adjust weekly SEO workflow. It really makes my job easier.

It might take a bit of time to set things up and get used to finding everything, but once you have it down, and you know what your metrics should look like, you’ll soon be gettin’ her down to 10-15 minutes on average.

Below are details on each step.

1. Google Webmaster Tools

I’ve said it before, but if you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools (and many don’t), you need to start. If you’re unfamiliar with how you can use GWT for SEO, here are 3 ways (including 404s) and 3 more.

Crawl Errors

GWT will send you a message if you if it has severe issues accessing your site, but I like to keep tabs on all crawl errors. Below is the Crawl Error screen.

You’ll want to look for increases in any type of error, and see if the error represents a real concern to user-experience or SEO. If so, try to diagnose right then and there. Very recently, when a client took down several moderately trafficked pages and neglected to redirect them, this enabled us to catch it and redirect users and link juice from the 404 pages to better pages.

Index Status

Index bloat is one of the most common problems SEOs deal with. When Google has way more pages indexed then deserve to be organic landing pages, the consequent dissipation of link juice and constrained crawl budget can have a significant impact on SEO traffic. The converse of index bloat, when pages that should be indexed are not, is an equally important problem. There’s no shortage of horror stories of a site’s organic traffic dying because indexation was blocked via misuse of robots.txt, Meta robots, rel=canonical, nofollow attribute, etc… Often, when these indexing issues are in their early stages, the impact on traffic is not yet apparent.

Check the Advanced Index Status report and examine total pages indexed, the number of pages removed, the number of pages blocked by robots, and the number of pages ever crawled. (I like to run the “ever crawled” separately since it often dwarfs the other numbers and makes their movement harder to visualize.)

If any numbers move in a way you didn’t expect, investigate immediately.

Messages

Google will sent notifications for many issues including, but not limited to: problems accessing the site, increases in server errors, increases in not found errors, increases in soft 404s, unnatural link warnings, malware alerts, and more. If you haven’t already enabled GWT message forwarding, make sure you do so (here’s how). I like to double-check and review all messages during the health check, just to make sure nothing important has fallen through the cracks.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools might be the best free SEO tool you’ve never heard of. If you’re like most, and haven’t used BWT, read this.

Site Activity Screen

Just as we monitor indexation in Google, we’ll want to do the same for Bing. Bing’s indexation practices differ quite a bit from Google, and – given the Bing powers Yahoo and thus powers around 26% of searches – you definitely want to keep an eye on Bing’s index.

When you’re in the BWT dashboard, click the “See Reports & Data Graph” link, which is at the bottom of the first section, titled “Site Activity.” This will bring you the “Site Activity Screen”, screenshot below:

Increases in Crawl Errors and unexpected increases or drops in Pages Indexed are worth further investigation.

Crawl Information

It can also be a little helpful to see dig further into Bing’s crawl and see the crawl error breakdown, to see if there is anything you didn’t know about.

SEO Reports

This is my favorite feature of Bing Webmaster Tools, and will give you the breakdown on your compliance with on-page optimization best practices, including keyword optimization issues with title tags, Meta descriptions, alt text, and header tags.

I like to take a screenshot of the SEO report once a month (which I do during my monthly SEO deep dives), and then I’ll just compare the numbers from the weekly check-up with the numbers from that screenshot. If I see any substantial increases in error counts or anything unexpected, then I’ll investigate further – otherwise I’m moving on.

Google Analytics Reports

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re familiar with examining traffic counts, conversions, engagement, keywords, landing pages, and sources. I like to use custom reports to get the metrics I need readily available on the reports, and to have my advanced segments for organic non-branded traffic applied on the keywords and landing pages reports. This way, I have less reports I need to look at.

I also like to pull the reports for the last week as well as the last month, so I can compare week to month to see if anything has changed. Having two monitors helps.

Keywords

I quickly compare this weeks’ keyword report against last months, sorted by unique visitors, goal completions, and/or revenue. Obviously, comparing the visit and conversion counts isn’t useful, since we’re not dealing with apples to apples. Instead, I’m just seeing if the main keyword mix has changed by looking for changes in position. For example, if the number one keyword drops to out of the top ten, maybe someone changed the page title or other content without me knowing (it’s happened). If a new keyword jumps to the top, and it has nice engagement/conversions, I’ll want to see why, so I can keep it there.

vs.

Nothing new here.

Landing Pages

For landing pages, I’m pretty much doing the same thing by comparing this weeks’ mix of top landing pages to last month’s. If a good landing page drops in proportion of SEO traffic earned, then I’ll investigate to see if there’s anything I should do to help it recover like adding internal links to the page, winning some backlinks, or adjusting content. If a landing page suddenly starts drawing visitors, then I want to make sure we’re doing the most we can with that new traffic.

Source/Medium

I also find it helpful to see if the traffic source mix has changed. There’s a slew of potential SEO problems or opportunities this could tip off. For example, a drop in Bing and Yahoo Traffic could indicate fixable Bing-specific problems. A sudden increase in Bing Traffic could actually mean Bing/Yahoo ads traffic is mis-tagged.

Other traffic sources impact organic traffic as well. A spike in traffic from a referral site could mean a popular article features your site – you might want to find the author, thank them, and begin a fruitful relationship. Maybe you see a spike in social traffic because some content is getting some buzz – you might want to increase efforts to amplify that buzz. A big drop in advertising visitors might result in less backlinks earned, so you might need to compensate. Good SEOs pay attention to more than just Google organic traffic.

Other

There’s a few other SEO-related things you might want to regularly check in GA, depending on your preferences and site specifics. Below are a few ideas:

• Metro areas or Cities, if your concerned with location-influenced SEO traffic.
• Regions, if your site gets valuable international traffic.
• Product performance, for e-commerce sites.
• Important custom segments like your best regions, keyword groups, or product families.

Google Analytics Alerts

The last thing to review are alerts, which catch a lot of hard-to-find issues.

Custom Alerts

Custom Alerts are notifications that data behaves in a certain way that you define. Few people have time to constantly look at all the important data in Google Analytics, so it’s good to have Custom Alerts let you know when there’s something you need to check out.

If you’re new to Custom Alerts, below are some resources:

• For instructions on setting up Custom Alerts, check out our e-book.
• Sayf has an excellent post on important Custom Alerts in multiple categories that most websites should have.
• I wrote something on Custom Alerts for SEO specifically.

While Custom Alerts can send you emails or text alerts on issues, I still review them weekly for 3 reasons.

1. I set a few weekly alerts to catch trends on metrics too volatile to monitor daily. These reports come in on Mondays. One of best reasons to the weekly check-up on Mondays is to be able to review weekly alerts at the same time.
2. I set daily alerts on some non-emergency issues that I can’t always deal with same-day, but provide great historical insight. I review them weekly to see if they mean anything.
3. It’s good to review the custom alert screen periodically to make sure you didn’t miss anything important, and to see if individual daily alerts aren’t part of a bigger trend.

Automatic Alerts

You can’t catch everything all the time. Automatic Alerts can help you discover issues you didn’t think to check on. I like to take a quick peak a week.

Almost there…

The second to last thing to do before closing out all the tabs is to ask if there’s anything else worth looking into, and check around as needed.

The last thing is to take a sigh of relief knowing you’ve got a handle on the SEO issues this week.

—And that’s it. I hope this checklist helps you. Let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to share any tips on how you monitor your own SEO endeavors.

In parts one and two, I wrote about using both sides of your brain to do analysis and walked through a simple example of analysis. Now I’d like to turn to something complex, or at least with the potential for complexity: keyword analysis.

Keywords can be a rich source of visitor intent. I’m talking about search queries that lead to visits, as well as terms entered in site search after visitors arrive.

But looking at the top 100 or even top 1,000 keywords (ranked by your favorite metric: bounce rate, conversion rate, or whatever you like) won’t necessarily lead to the most accurate analysis because it neglects information in the long tail, which may be on the order of tens of thousands or more keywords.

If you’ve spent any time examining keyword data, you’ve observed similar terms dispersed throughout the long tail. I want to group those terms and analyze each group’s aggregated data to give a more complete picture. So what’s the best way to do that?

The Answer: Keyword Clusters

Of course, I’m not the first person to propose that analyzing groups or clusters of keywords can lead to more valuable insight than analyzing individual keywords alone.

In January, AJ Kohn wrote about his method for creating keyword rank indexes by exporting a CSV file with keyword rank history and leveraging pivot tables in Excel. Together with Justin Cutroni, he describes how to use event tracking to put keyword rank data into Google Analytics.

Another article from a couple years ago describes clustering keywords by their performance on various metrics. The author mentions (but doesn’t go into detail about) using tools like SPSS or SAS to do the cluster analysis and come up with related groups of terms.

And recently SEOmoz published an article about tracking SEO ‘broad match’ keywords in Google Analytics. Author Tracy Mu creates keyword clusters using regular expressions and then saves them as advanced segments. She then applies four segments at a time to custom reports and, really smartly, saves those reports as GA shortcuts.

The Next Question: Linguistic Complexity

All of those techniques are interesting and useful, but not quite what I’m looking for. The first two methods group keywords by a non-linguistic feature such as rank or performance. What keywords are in those groups? Still individual keywords dispersed across a slightly shorter long tail.

The last method, borrowing the idea of broad match from paid search, does what I want but with a limited number of clusters. The other drawback (for me) is that I don’t want to guess which keyword clusters to create. That’s a little too much art and not enough science.

What I really want to do is apply text analytics methods to discover patterns in keyword data, related to the semantic domain of the customer, and create related keyword groups automatically. This would account for linguistic complexity in all the forms actually produced by site visitors, a seemingly endless variety of word choices, phrasing, and spelling.

Text Analytics to the Rescue

I found someone else looking for the same thing in a question on Stack Overflow about using Python to cluster search engine keywords. The tricky part, as suggested in the question, is developing a domain-specific word source rather than relying on a more generally-informed source like WordNet.

One way to develop a customized word source, or “topic library”, is to mine web content related to the customer’s industry, and then cross-reference it with a database of phrases (such as the customer’s actual keywords). This allows for identification of phrases that will be treated as one word, as well as proper nouns and acronyms that may be specific to the customer’s products or services.

I’m planning to combine the customized topic library with a tool like the Python Natural Language Toolkit to create keyword clusters for better analysis. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

What tools and techniques have you used for grouping keywords for analysis? Please share in the comments.

You’re a paid search manager.  You’ve optimized your campaigns’ settings for efficient use of the budget.  You’ve spent countless hours conducting keyword research.  You’ve built tightly themed campaigns and ad groups.  You’re already on the fast track to success but do NOT stop there!

Writing effective ad copy is next on your checklist, but how do you write a pay-per-click ad that really stands out among the competition?  Using a strong call-to-action is a huge piece of the puzzle.  This is a much overlooked part of the PPC process and can make or break your efforts.

Think about your campaign goals and what you hope to achieve through paid search.  Ensure that you convey that message within your ad copy using a strong call-to-action – or CTA.  Ad copy is your sole chance to tell your audience exactly what action you want them to take once they reach your website.  Don’t pass up the opportunity to make your intentions perfectly clear to your prospective customers.  Remember: you may only have one chance to make a lasting impression.

Let’s take a look a few common examples of call-to-action being put to use in Google Adwords ads:

Goal: Direct Response

I’ve conducted a search for the phrase fishing tackle.  These ads clearly define what action the advertisers want me to take, and I know what to expect once I reach their respective websites:

Ad Text	Call-to-Action
	Shop Rods, etc
	Shop; Buy

We see two different retailers in these examples.  In each case the advertisers expressly mention the action that they want me to take once I reach their website using a call-to-action within the ad copy.  They share a common goal: to entice me to make a purchase.  So they use CTAs such as Shop and Buy.

*More Direct Response Calls-to-Action:  Call, Register, Purchase, Checkout, Download, Donate, etc.

Goal: Lead Generation

The following two ads were among the search results for the query video production and, like the previous examples, these ads clearly define a desired course of action:

Ad Text	Call-to-Action
	Get Free Quote
	Contact us

Because the sales cycle is likely longer in these scenarios and requires far more commitment from the potential customer, we see that the advertiser are focused more on data collection early on as opposed to a direct sale.  They have incorporated calls-to-action into their ad copy like Contact and Request to stress these lead generation goals.

*More Lead Generation Calls-to-Action: Start, Verify, Access, Receive, Fill, Enroll, etc.

Goal: User Engagement

These next ads are results for the search query dinner recipes. Again, the same principle is applied, the call-to-action represents the goal of the campaign:

Ad Text	Call-to-Action
	Check Out
	Visit; Learn

We see that the goal in these last two examples isn’t a direct sale or a request for information, but simply engagement with the respective website.  So we see calls-to-action being used like, Check out, Visit, and Learn that tell the user to remain on the page and digest its content.  This is commonly seen as a branding technique.

*More User Engagement Calls-to-Action: Watch, See, View, Read, Discover, Uncover, etc.

So, when it comes to writing effective ad copy, speak in such a way resonates with your target audience.  Remember, write your ads while keeping your goals in mind.  Announce those goals and let users know what to expect once they arrive on your website.  This level of transparency is key because it will ultimately help you avoid wasteful spending due to clicks from unqualified visitors.

Questions or comments?  Leave a response in the section below.

I don’t blog much anymore (and aren’t you all lucky that I don’t, I would be taking up a “blog slot” from all the people at Luna who have real talent.) But I cut the line so that I could congratulate our friends at Semphonic, with special call outs to Gary Angel, Joel Hadary and Phil Kemelor.  As many readers probably know already, they were purchased by Ernst & Young on Friday.

Semphonic isn’t the first analytics firm to be purchased.  Certainly, EpicOne did it a few years ago when they sold themselves to a company, local to their market, who specializes in automotive sites. There are probably quite a few others that I don’t even know about. But Semphonic did something really special .  This was a strategic sale of a boutique consultancy to an international accounting and consulting firm, and it was enormously important for our industry.

The sales we’ve been seeing in our industry almost always carry strong intellectual property with them. Adobe purchased Omniture and its software suite, Sitecatalyst/Test&Target/Discover. IBM purchased Coremetrics, as well as companies like Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo. We consulting companies bring different opportunities to the table. Sure, we have great branding and awesome links/rankings and a kick-ass client roster. But mostly, we bring know-how.

And it’s so clear that the rest of the world has sat up and noticed. If you read Gary Angel’s blogpost, you’ll see that Semphonic had “two handfuls” of offers (so I suppose that means in the neighborhood of ten?) They were in the enviable position of being able to choose their acquirer.

Best of luck to the Semphonic team on its new journey!

Robbin