ben robison

Campaign Tracking in SiteCatalyst

At the risk of this blog starting to sound like an advertisement for SiteCatalyst, that is not my intention, I’m just continually surprised by the amount of control you can exercise over your data.  There are so many different ways to combine your data so you can view it from every angle.

I just barely finished reading sections of Omniture’s Implementation Manual and the Omniture Advanced User Training documents.  Today’s tidbit deals with tracking campaigns.

Omniture’s code includes a variable for a campaign.  When this variable is populated, it persists as a visit continues until a visitor completes a success event (a purchase, a registration, a download, etc.) that the site owner has defined.  If you own a commerce site, you can use different codes to track pay-per-click campaigns, affiliate referrals, email click-throughs, and any other number of marketing efforts.

You can view the reports for these  in the commerce section of a report suite by running the Tracking Codes report.  This will show you your different tracking codes and their relative success rates (again, how you measure success is completely customizable by you).  Not enough detail you say?  Well there’s more.

Let’s say you want data about more than just a single tracking code.  Let’s say you run a marketing campaign that consists of emails, banner ads, affiliate links, and AdWords bids.  SiteCatalyst allows you to classify all the different tracking codes into Campaigns and report on those as well.  I can’t say enough about the value of this type of information.  To borrow a term from a recent visitor to our web analytics class, running an online business without this information is the equivalent of flying blind.

Is your web site a sucker?

The article that prompts this post is Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015.  If you’re easily offended, this post may not be for you.  If the references to the quality of your web page doesn’t offend you, Vincent’s sense of humor may.  The article also serves as a decent index to the many articles he’s written.

Many have probably heard about Web Pages That Suck.  I think I first ran across it several years ago, but largely forgot about it.  A few months ago, I ran across it again.  Most of the content was new to me, so I looked through it and read a few of the articles.  If it’s late at night, or you’ve got a few geek friends crowded around, you’ll really get a kick out of the 10 Worst Web Pages in 2006.

Some of the things that people are doing with their website are absolutely appalling in their horribleness (yes, I made that word up), but some of the other things that people do wrong are rather subtle, and I find myself falling into the traps sometimes.

So, if you’re wondering how bad your web site sucks, you can head over to the checklists to analyze your own site.  Checklist 1 is a list of things that mean your website definitely sucks.  If you check a box, then your site sucks.  Checklist 2 is a kind of conglomerating thing.  It’s hard to tell how many of these you can check before your web site qualifies as a sucker.  After looking at the checklist, head on over to What do I do now? page to find out how to fix it.

On a completely different note, my website seems to have finally made it into somebody’s spam index, and Akismet really earned it’s keep over the weekend.

Secret Sauce & Choiceskills.com

There have been millions of articles about Google’s secret algorithm for ranking pages and prioritizing content to give to users.  This article is simply one more in a long line of people trying to figure out how to do it.

With so-called black-hat ranking tactics (spamming, cloaking, link farms, google bombs, etc.) becoming more taboo, there is more and more emphasis on the legitimate and accepted ways to get your pages to rank higher in Google’s search.

Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google and has apparently become the default liaison with the webmaster community.  He says that the best way to get your page rank up is to ignore your page rank and focus on your customers.  Figure out what your customers want and then create buzzworthy content, vital content, or something that provides a service or a resource to users.  Create the kind of content that users want to bookmark and your ranking will climb.

We’ve recently begun working on another project in the web analytics class.  A local businessman has written a few books about character education and teaching social skills to children.  He’s quite passionate about the subject and it’s absolute necessity and he’s created http://choiceskills.com to sell his products.  It’s a small business mostly receiving traffic from Google pay-per-click campaigns, and in it’s own little way, it’s profitable.

Until recently.  His web host provider went out of business and he was forced to move over to a new host.  In the process of doing that, some links broke, and there were some other issues, but suddenly all orders came to a grinding halt.

The web analytics class is now responsible for reviving the site, growing revenues, and making this into a viable business.  I’m actually really excited about this.  So with these thoughts floating around in my head, I’ve started to do some thinking.

The first thing to do is figure out what markets these books appeal to.  I believe we were told that the bulk of sales that used to occur were from school districts, but doesn’t this seem like the kind of content that would be suitable for parents to teach their children as well?

What kinds of searches does our local businessman want to end up at his site?  Which keywords is he buying?  If he wants to drive more traffic, how can he use the secret sauce to create a buzz?  Would creating a blog about the major topic of the site help bring traffic?  I know that Google brings a lot of traffic to my blog, and while I have looked at some of the results, I haven’t taken any special measures to climb the ranks.

Choiceskills is a static site right now, and doesn’t show up anywhere in the top ranks of searches that I thought were relevant.  A static site isn’t going to be moving anywhere quickly.  Maybe something dynamic could help bring people in.

In addition, perhaps he could partner with some of the sites that do show up at the top of relevant searches.  Googling “character development” brings up all sorts of sites that look  like they’d be willing to provide links to drive traffic.

One final thing to wrap up my initial thoughts that I don’t want to come off wrong.  I know this is a legitimate business because I’ve talked to the owner about his plan and his business, but if I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t spend my money on the site.  It just doesn’t look like the kind of site that I would trust with my credit card number.  Perhaps giving the site a more professional, business-style template could help things out a bit.

In any case, I’m excited to get moving on this latest project and build this business.  Seriously, how often do you the opportunity to do fun things like this?

Path Reports in SiteCatalyst

Another observation about the differences between Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst. Most visitors to my blog are single page visitors. This makes sense to me, since most of the people who read the blog regularly are subscribing to the feed, and they probably come directly to an article.

Those who are googling in are landing in my How To pages, are staying for a decent duration (8-10 minutes in most cases, long enough to get the job done) and then bouncing out.

Recently however, I’ve noticed that the homepage itself has started to perform better relatively to the other pages on the site. And it has a much lower bounce rate (as homepages should). So then I got curious as to where people were going from the homepage if they weren’t bouncing. That’s when I noticed that Google Analytics has no path reports.

SiteCatalyst has a pretty nifty feature called the Next Page and the Next Page Flow. It basically just shows the page you ran the report for, followed by the page that people visited next, and next again. It can also show you the entire path through the site that visitors are following, from entry to exit, and every page in between.

I was talking to Matt Belkin from Omniture after our competition the other day, and he highlighted another important difference. I’ve heard it said before, but with Matt the message came across quite clearly and simply. If you’re not doing at least one million page views a month, SiteCatalyst probably won’t be worth your money.

No Hard & Fast Rule for Paid Search

I ran across this post on Hitwise this morning, and the basic idea is that there is no perfect, optimal amount of paid search that applies to everyone.  It’s different for industries, for companies within an industry, for the combination of keywords you want, etc.

I suppose if you stop to think about it, it makes intrinsic sense, but now we’ve got data to back it up.  The post has a few graphs to illustrate paid searches and click-through rates.  Hitwise collects and displays information mainly for the UK, but I want to know how they get access to all that data…