SwellPath

Archive for the ‘Industry’ Category

« Older Entries

3 Digital Marketing Insights Gleaned from Malcom Gladwell

Published October 20th, 2011 Industry, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

Malcom Gladwell Portrait by Alex Beck

Last week, I found a great TED talk by one of my favorite non-fiction authors Malcolm Gladwell which really got my digital marketer mind moving. I have enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s works ever since I read Blink for the first time 6 years ago. While I feel he does gloss over some of the more scientific reasons behind his thoughts, I believe he does a great job illustrating interesting concepts about human psychology and its dramatic effects on our environment. This in my opinion, is what we marketers are trying to do every day. As digital marketers our main goal is to understand our customer’s digital needs and desires in an effort to influence them to purchase or consume our said service, product or content. We spend our days filling the world with fantastic campaigns loaded with wonderfully crafted headlines and magical visuals meant to influence our audiences, but are we being as effective as we could be? Below I will be going over concepts from Gladwell’s books Blink and Tipping Point and his TED talk, pointing out 3 cool insights I feel you can walk away with to increase your success rate as a digital marketer.

While most of you I’m sure have read these books, I will warn you right now, this post contains SPOILERS. If you wish not read these spoilers, I would recommend checking them out at your local library or making the purchase from your favorite book outlet.

 

1)   What can spaghetti sauce and pickles tells us about our audiences?

 

Here is the video of Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk I mentioned above. If you have some time, I highly recommend watching this whole presentation before reading further.

 

The first thing I took away form this video is how often I hear the question, “What is the BEST PRACTICE here?” When my client is talking about a specific web page or marketing tactic, and the term “best practices” comes up, I feel it is used in the same way that the Pepsi and Vlasic folks were asking for the “perfect” product for their customers. In my observations marketers and clients are always looking for the “perfect” marketing solution that covers the bases for all of their target audiences. Which in my opinion always leads to muddled concepts and half-assed attempts at speaking to everybody and really never getting through to  anybody. Gladwell illustrates in his examples about how there is not a “perfect pickle or spaghetti sauce” that works for everyone, but rather “perfect pickleS and perfect spaghetti sauceS” that work for certain clusters of people. In marketing we already cluster through our target audiences, but often we forget that within in those audiences we have rather different groups of customers.

 

I have run into this exact phenomenon while I worked at my previous digital design agency and we were debating a fix for the supposed horrendous side navigation.  My designer and I who we’re “experts” and understood design best practices felt that the current side navigation design made the page look to cluttered and since there was so much copy that side navigation we felt was almost unusable due to the fact that it was really hard to identify any text at all. As we spent the next hour explaining to the client the virtues of cleaning up the nav, she told us, that in fact they had tried to do this the year before and we’re promptly bombarded with support calls and emails form angry customers who now could not find what they were looking for and how dare the company change the navigation which worked so perfectly before. Like most cocky agency folks, my designer and I were not having it, and we wasted 30 minutes of our client’s precious time trying to persuade her that in fact, the way they tried was not properly executed. Luckily she did not budge, she knew the type of  ”pickle” some of her customers liked and no design best practice was going to tell her otherwise. Looking back on this as a more experienced marketer, I would have actually recommended that we run a test where we cookied all previous customers, so that they would always be shown the old side nav and then I would run an A/B test on all the non-cookied visitors testing site interaction and overall conversions for the site to see if a more “best practice” nav performed better if we took out the old customer who likes things the way they are bias out. The takeaways for all of you marketers out there would be; next time you are looking for those best practices that have helped others in the past, take a step back and think about your different audiences and how they are segmented, then ask yourself, am I using the right “pickles”?

 

2)   Getting the “buy-in” that matters

In the book Blink, Gladwell looks at how some very trained professionals can make some extraordinarily big, seemingly calculated decisions in seconds and be almost 100% accurate. My take away from it, was that people who have been doing things long enough just develop a rhythm with their craft through hours and hours of practice and exposure and literally just “go with their gut.” I think most of us have at least some experience in this, but what about in the marketing world? Sometimes decisions are HUGE and if they end up being wrong and you’re answering to your CEO with your reasoning that “it just felt right”, you probably will be clearing out your desk that afternoon.  Usually we are presenting our work unseen by most of the company outside of high level folks who we need “buy in” from. As we prepare our final presentation to the “big-wigs” before final sign-off, have we taken the time to get the real “buy-in”? For most of the companies I have worked with, there are  people have been talking and working with the real customers for decades, and while they may not know how to use Mail Chimp or Sales Force, they can tell you know from their gut whether a marketing message or visual is going to resonate with the customers. Personally one of my favorite clients always gave us a creative brief full of insights from her trusted folks in customer service and the folks who actually manufactured the product we were marketing before any concepts had been created. No matter what, we saw great results every time we focused on those specific insights from the brief. By speaking with people who fight the good fight everyday, we can get great feedback in a minimal amount of time.  Understandably, we need to respect other people’s time, but I would bet there are a lot of successful marketers who are making time for a quick 5 minute conversation with people at the front lines, like their customer service or engineering folks. I would also bet that an ounce of their insight is worth a pound of their execs. So next time you have that big email campaign to send out, or if you’re going through a site redesign, go talk to those great folks who fight in the trenches day in and day out and see what they have to say.

 

3)   What SEO/SEM tactics can The Tipping Point teach us?

 

The Tipping Point, the book that brought the buzzwords “stickiness”, “influencer” and “context” into the lexicon of every modern marketer. I’m not sure if this was the first book to explore how trends and epidemics seem to start in small isolated environments and then almost with out warning, go “viral” and spread exponentially throughout a population, but I’m pretty sure this was the first book that modern business folks read in masses.  The most obvious insights we can glean from The Tipping Point are around Social Media practices. Now there have been numerous posts and presentations about this topic, so I will not write one more word about it. For those of you interested, here is a great presentation on that very topic- Increasing Social Media ROI using Gladwell Tipping Point Framework by Colleen Carrington.

The key-takeaway I got from the book is for those who dabble in the SEO and SEM space. One concept we can take away as digital marketers from The Tipping Point is the idea of predicting trends by watching the trendsetters. For our clients industries there are key people, blogs and publications that represent these trendsetters. Right now, they are using the new “buzz words” that are going to influence how the general population will start to search for terms in your industry in the next few months or years. By identifying these sources and keeping tabs on this content through through RSS feeds or just your weekly readings, you can start identifying these new keywords. Now what are we going to do with these new keywords? Since we are predicting what will be happening in the future buying these keywords and changing copy on our pages right now would not be the wisest move. What we can do though is use Google Insights to track the popularity of these keywords, so when you begin to see an upward trend this is when to start revising content along with getting the jump on some cheap clicks early in the game.  Also, if you use the iGoogle dashboard you can create a gadget for these trended charts to check them out on a daily basis with minimal effort on your part. This simple and straight forward practice can help you start seeing huge gains and make you look like the rock star in your next reporting meeting.

Beyond just Malcolm Gladwell’s works, I’m sure that there is a wealth of knowledge out there as well that we digital marketers would love to apply or own little spin to. I would love to hear from any of you digital marketers, are there are any great not-strictly-marketing focused books or presentations out there that any one would recommend or if you have some other great digital marketing insights you have taken from Gladwell’s works, please let me know in the comments.

SHARE ALL THE THINGS!

Published August 25th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, Social Media No Comments

Two exciting things happened last month in the social sharing space. First, Google released their Facebook killer Google+ and the now ever recognizable +1 share widget. Second, for you fellow Google analytics nerds out there, they made it easier to track all of these share widgets out there with their new social interaction tags. This got me to thinking about sharing as a concept in general. During a digital strategist meetup my good friend Alex C. Williams from Trendline Interactive and I were discussing this topic and how he was trying to increase sharing actions for his client’s email programs. What came out of this conversation was an undeniable fact, 99% of websites and emails have these features, and 99% of them were doing a pretty bad job with them.

As I started my research for this post I began to see what I can only describe as laziness. On most of the sites I visited these poor little widgets looked like they got placed haphazardly somewhere on the page. I could literally see the developer/designer checking it off the “best practices” list. If this is true, then why the hell are there literally billions of dollars being pumped into measuring how many shares, likes, re-tweets, +1’s, karma and all the other verbs people of came up with to describe one simple thought and action – “Hey, I think this content is neat and I bet others would think so too.”  Why are there not hundreds of posts about optimizing these features and functions like we do our button Call to actions (CTA’s) and form designs?

Here’s my opinion on it.

The first thing we must do is think about the placement of those widgets. I believe anywhere in the vicinity of the content you wish to share is good. They can be at the top of the article or after the last sentence of your post works to. Now, the second thing… for Christ oh-mighty please put a frickin headline by it to promote ACTION.  If you just have “share this” written by the buttons you’re better than some, but we both know that just an extra 2 minutes of copy writing could go a long way. If you stop reading this post now and go do this, I’ll have felt this post a success. If you wish to continue, I’ll give you some examples of some surprising sites who are doing this really bad and others that are doing it just right. For those of you who wish to read the whole thing, I’ll conclude with my personal thoughts on what social widgets I think are necessary and which ones you can throw in the trash.

 

Example #1 – So bad and you won’t believe what site this is.

This comes from one of the leaders in tech and internet news, and you think they would know better. The first thing we see is that the share buttons for the article are 435 pixels downward from the actual article content and then to put the cherry on it, there’s a giant rule dividing the share section. I’m sure the UX people out here would agree, at least put the damn buttons by the damn content. Without some visual cues, how am I really even know what I’m sharing? Rule number one, put these buttons in context with the actual content. The second major fail is the lack of a headline CTA. Where’s the reason I should share?  Why should I click one of these buttons? Rule number two, at least tell me what these buttons are supposed to do. This might be suprising, but this is actually a screenshot from Wired.com. All of their article pages are seriously like this. :(

 

Example #2 – How can there be so much creative thought put into this blog, but absolutely none into their sharing section?

For this article I asked my good design friend Elliot Olson what some of his favorite design blogs were, and he directed me to Fastcodesign.com. I myself was very impressed with the overall layout and elements. And then I went into a post detail page. Much disappoint ensued.  How can they be doing so many things right visually and than when it comes to sharing this beautiful site to the world, this sound is sadly appropriate. Considering the creativity of the content and overall design of the site, I feel this section should be just as cool as every other piece on this site, but it looks like it just got slapped on because there was whitespace available. See what I did there my designer readers? At least they are better than Wired’s buttons and are placed  in context of the article.

 

Example #3 – Now we’re getting somewhere.

 

I did say earlier that there were a few sites out there doing a good job and the Huffington Post is one of them. While, I would agree the amount of real estate taken in the actual article seems a bit much and the share headline is a bit weak. Take a second to look at how much utility they get out of these boxes, AWESOME! They do an amazing job with 8 ways to share, plus a one-click action email signup…bravo. Notice that this does not end up looking like a Nascar stock car like we see in some sites out there. Designers and developers take note, with a little bit spacing and background colors these pesky buttons can not only look great, but the amount of utility in such a small space can be dramatic. The placement is also great with absolutely no confusion about what article you will be sharing. Huffington post you definitely get my “SHARE ALL THE THINGS AWARD”, nice work.

 

Example #4 – My personal fave.

Now this last example might not be the best one out there, but I think it illustrates the points I’m trying to make, plus it’s on my favorite analytics blog, Occum’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik . Besides just being overly simple and to the point, it exemplifies what just 2 more minutes thinking about the “headline CTA” can do. Why yes Avinash, I did like this post. Ok, I’ll share it. See, this isn’t hard to do. His placement is also nice, right at the end of the article, no design elements, just a relevent CTA, some buttons and voila. We’ll also give extra points to for having some old school share buttons for the paper pushers out there.

I promised some thoughts on what actual share buttons you should have and what you can throw in the trash, so here it goes. No matter who you are or what your site is about have the big 3 – Facebook’s Like, Google+’s +1, and Twitter’s Re-tweet. They make it so easy to add these buttons and everyone uses at least one of these sites, so stop being lazy and do it. Now comes the hard part, what about all the rest? Is your audience b2b? I would say LinkedIn would be a smart choice. Is your content weird photos in Portland? Perhaps you should have a Stumbleupon button or maybe a reddit link (Digg is dead. Sorry Kevin.). Better yet, look at your data that you collect on your site and see if you historically have gotten referral traffic from one of these sites, if so ADD IT!!! Lastly, for those of you who use Sharethis or Addthis icons, personally I believe these are relics from when we were trying to figure out what this share thing was going to be about. Personally, the metrics I have seen on these being used on sites have been abysmal at best. Last but not least, email sharing. I’m going to get some flack for this, but honestly when was the last time you actually wrote someone an email to share some web content? That’s what I thought. Now let’s go SHARE ALL THE THINGS!

Perfect Harmony – Data Discovery with turntable.fm

Published July 22nd, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News 2 Comments

 

Like some of you over the last couple of month I have found a new internet addiction…turntable.fm. Being a on and off again club DJ for the last 10 years,  I was a bit skeptical about the site, spending hours dropping my favorite tracks to see if my musical taste could serenade the electronic music snob hordes. I had a few misses and a few big wins that first night, but in the end I was hooked. Alas, this is not an opinion or how-to blog post about turntable.fm. This is a SwellPath blog post, and I’m going to focus on the one common cord with everything we do here, THE DATA. But, if you haven’t used turntable.fm and you’re interested in more details, please read this very informative post before continuing.

A few hours into my first session at turntable.fm I was utterly fascinated with the data the boys at Stickybits were collecting. Not only are they getting an obscene amount of music uploads, they asre tracking listening habits, music ratings, genre popularity and God knows what else through FB connect (I didn’t read the terms, did you?) from people around the WORLD.   The best part was all of this data was not through survey’s or prompts, the game, app or whatever this new thing is itself just produces it on it’s own. Using a beautiful mix of crowd sourcing and game mechanics, they are recording true , un-solicited feedback by a self-segmented random population. For you stats folks out there I think this is possibly the most potent and statistically relevant data you can get, right? Where is this data though? They probably have it under lock and key I bet. I can only imagine how many music related firms would love to get their hands on this data in the pure form. Luckily for people like me, there are plenty of developers out there who love to use “scraping tools”  to get  this data and are creative enough to create applications to satisfy these needs. For turntable.fm the app is called … ttdashboard.com.

TTdashboard.com is credited as being created by @alain_gilbert and I give him major props for putting a site like this together. It already brings a lot of cool real-time reporting features starting of course…with a dashboard. Like most dashboards, it shows high level data like who the top DJ’s are in terms of points and fans, the most played song (I think this feed still has some bugs), and actually a pretty accurate update of the top 6 rooms with a display of the current song and its ranking in the room.  Personally, I dig the fact that you can actually see the number of negative votes, which is not visible information in turntable.fm interface for some reason. Personally, I didn’t find the dashboard to interesting, but as I dug into the site I found the deeper pages much more fulfilling.

 

The Room Detail Page
When you dive into a room detail page, you have a long listing of the tracks that we’re played, with the likes and dislikes for songs. You also get a decent data visualization example, a trending line graph showing room occupancy over the last day. Sadly, data visualization only looks at the current day and not over the life time of the room. I think a couple of data visuals showing time peaks and visitors over the lifetime for the room would have been far more compelling. A lot of work can still be done on this page, so let’s see where it goes from here.

 

 

The Profile Page
The profile page has the least amount of functionality right now, but I think the most potential for tracking great data points.  Currently it’s only has your avatar, current fan and points total unless the system has tracked you. Again I’m not sure how this is tracked, but the ability to categorize song’s you have liked and not liked to revisit later for possible purchase would be an awesome feature. I personally have gone through hours on Turntable.fm and kicked myself later for not documenting a song I liked to look up later. I also would love the ability to easily access DJ’s who I have fanned to see what tracks they have been playing to be better prepared for my next turntable battle.

 

The Song Page
My favorite page is the song details page, which can be accessed by either typing in your favorite song into the search bar or just clicking on a song title from any page. The ability to see the aggregate of likes and dislikes for a song is sweet, but since ttdashboard.com only tracks the most popular rooms right now, the data they show is just the tip of the iceberg of what is probably available. This is where I could see showing some really great visualizations around likes and dislikes, or play frequency. I’d be interested to see some dynamic comparison graphs that show how songs fair across different rooms, in particular if certain songs are generally favored across all rooms, not just their specific genre. Again, we’ll see where this goes, my fingers are crossed.

 

 

I’m really interested in where the information on turntable.fm can take us. I can already see the potential for great global and regional visualizations based on music genres, or maybe a real time trending music graph showing the top 10 hottest songs on the site that could be adjusted by time. The amount of the global music insights you can get if turntable could get to the size of a twitter or facebook are really astounding if you think about it. Beyond this I have already tried to prompt my DJ and music producer friends to use this as a vehicle to get their songs noticed. If anybody out there knows how Mr. @alain_gilbert is pulling this info or better yet you have access to some real data from turntable,fm, I would love to hear from you and your ideas about what we could do with this amazing data. You can usually find me spinning some house music in an electronic music room, under my DJ alter ego Anton Loshe.

 

Summer Fun with Google’s Correlate Tool and Otter Pops

Published June 8th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News, Paid Search, SEO No Comments

Here at SwellPath we’re interested in data, not your simple hey check it out our visitors have increased by 100 this month data, we’re talking the crazy kind of how can we optimize the marketing campaign for the new Death Star kind of data. Now when Google released their new correlation tool on May 25th, the data nerd inside me was stoked. Imagine the crazy correlations I can illustrate could mean absolutely nothing (REMEMBER: 1st rule of statistics: Correlation does not mean causation), or could they?

First, the basics. What does this new tool do exactly?

The Features

Search correlations in terms of time trends since 2004:

Ever wonder what correlations in total search popularity with “Otter Pops” over the years? Well, it turn out they are very correlated with other summer item terms, peaking in July and bottoming out around New Years . I know, not exactly the Grand Unified Theory kind of breakthrough, but still gets your mind going on what terms could possibly correlate for our clients search terms over time and season. I found real quickly the tool can lead you to some interesting findings about clients. For instance one client we have, Ariat seems to be in sync with the search term “black jackets”. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with this data, but this year’s Black Friday could be huge!

 

“Search correlations” in terms of US locations:

From what I can tell, it’s based on two search terms along with how many people are searching in those locations. For instance ifyou look up “tornadoes” you will see a lot of correlations to terms with tornadoes all in the Midwest where the horrible tornadoes disaster is recently happened. To be honest, I haven’t been able to figure out a good use for this yet. But evidently “Otter Pops” and “Costco jobs” are huge on the west coast. Also, there seems to be a correlation for guns and fox news in the south…yikes!

Upload your own data to compare:

This is the feature that is most intriguing to me as a data hound, but also the most confusing. I’ll admit that it’s been a bit of time since my last statistics class, so the concept of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient took me a bit to get my head wrapped around it and have already started gathering some data together for this upcoming holiday season for our retail ecommerce clients. Hopefully, we’ll be able to show you more in detail later in the year.

The draw tool:

 

By far the most fun feature of this new application, it allows you to draw your own frequency lines over time and see what was popular in search traffic over Google. Ever wonder what was popular in 2005 and now is making a comeback in 2011? Now you can… in seconds, and evidently it’s … Jordan shoes and wristbands (I can see the business plans already). Now is this tool going to give us any practical data we can use? Probably not, but it definitely will provide you a fun time suck for 15 minutes or so.

 

I’m not sure what will come from this new tool in the future, but I do know that us data geeks are sure to find new interesting insights into the world around us. Personally, besides the retail correlations, I’m interested to see if there is some PPC keywords we can bid for that never came up in our initial research. I’m sure there are already 5 hedge funds that are incubating their new S&P crusher as we speak. So, if you have any useful ideas or thoughts on how we can use this tool in the marketing measurement industry or just want to proclaim your love for Otter Pops as well, let us know.

 

The New Google Analytics Interface: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Published May 4th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News 3 Comments

As most people in the Web Analytics community are aware, Google Analytics launched a new version of the interface, in beta, with some great new features.  The big changes are pretty well documented already, events can now be setup as goals (Awesome!), the dashboard is super customizable, etc.  As someone who stares at Google Analytics WAAAY too much on a daily basis, I thought I would write a post on some of the more subtle details of the new interface that you may not notice right away.

The Good

Formatting exported reports…….in Excel………what a time suck!  Why does Google Analytics export data to Excel with messy formatting?  Not only is it ugly to look at, it requires additional time to re-format the data to match what you actually see in the reports.  The worst one, average time on site or time on page, required an Excel formula + formatting to get that metric to look right.  With the new version, all that wasted time is over.  Exported reports come out nice and clean and readable.  That is huge when you are aggregating data or have a client or key stakeholder that wants the raw data for something specific and you want to just setup an auto-export.  Now the data they are receiving will be nice and clean and will prompt far fewer questions back.  Thank you for that precious time back Google!  What happened to the PDF option though???

 

There are some small organizational changes that are really nice in the new version.

  • Another great organizational improvement is that the Top Content report, now called Pages… similar to other solutions…., has quick access to the navigation summary report for path data.  For those of you doing tons of search reporting, the organic search and paid search reports are now separate reports.  No more clicking Search Engines then clicking non-paid, total or paid.  It’s the little things right.
  • On a larger scale, the accounts home page is way different.  Not sure how I feel about the new version yet.  One thing that I do like is that you can head right into a specific report section (visitors, traffic sources, etc.) from the accounts home page rather than being pushed into the dashboard.

 

The Bad and the Ugly

Now for the items I don’t like, yeah that’s right.  There are some funky things going on that look like they may be problems as I attempt to navigate the waters of the new Google Analytics interface.  The biggest thing that freaks me out is that when you are utilizing filters within a report, let’s say your Pages report (aka Top Content), the aggregate data at the top does not adjust based on your filter.  So if I wanted to see the aggregate data on a particular group of pages from the filter I applied, where are my totals?  Don’t tell me I have to export the report to see the totals/averages!  That seems troublesome, especially for keyword, content and product reports.

 

One of the absolute best things about Google Analytics is the way you can easily segment traffic and build out your custom segments.  The new version has one feature missing that was really helpful – especially when you are working with manually tagged campaigns that are not 100% “clean”.  The feature missing is the dropdown bar.  The new version just gives you an empty field to add in your values and requires you to use Regular Expression.  A good example is if you try and build out a custom segment that includes: source matches exactly > direct, you will not match any results.  That is because the source to match is actually (direct), with parentheses.  The old version would spit out some options based on your filter and would even update the list as you started typing.  That little feature helped me out countless times when trying to figure out why a custom segment was not working or was not capturing everything I wanted it to.  Please, please add that functionality back in.

 

As we spend more time in the new interface I’m sure that more good and bad features will emerge.  What changes have you found that you like or dislike?  How about multi-channel goal attribution?  I’m looking forward to taking that for a spin.

Social Search Just Got Real

Published March 30th, 2011 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

Google +1 for Social SearchToday, Google rolled out their new +1 feature. The +1 is similar to a Facebook “Like”, but for search. There’s a lot of chatter about Google attempting to compete with Facebook by making search results social, and how much of an influence this will have on search results and user behavior. Here at SwellPath, there are a lot of different views on how this new feature is going to play out and why it may be good or bad for users, advertisers, and websites. Found below are contrary viewpoints on the topic, one on why the +1 is going to make a big splash in the search world and influence users, SEO, and online behavior, and another on why the +1 is going to fizzle out before it really has a chance to get going.

How The +1 Button Is Going to Be Big For Search

by Mike Arnesen
Search Analyst & Strategist at SwellPath and all around web development geek

The +1 button is going to change search, user interaction with results, SEO, and paid search advertising, here’s why:

+1 and SEO

Of course, Google isn’t socializing search just to connect people; they’re doing it to collect more information and deliver better results. So, is the +1 feature relevant to SEO? You bet it is. Just like when Google and Bing announced they were using social signals from Twitter and Facebook as a ranking factor, today’s announcement further inflated social’s value.

Still, when it comes to using +1 to succeed in SEO, how can you optimize user behavior? When it comes down to is, increasing your site’s +1s is entirely in the hands of users. For now, the way to increase +1s requires the same things as traditional SEO: onsite optimization, backlink authority, and (to a lesser extent) management of social signals. All of these factors will help you work your way up the SERPs and that’s what is going to be important in building +1s. Why’s that? A user is much more likely to +1 a result in the top five compared to a result on page three. It follows the same theory as SERP click through rates.

It will be interesting to see how the +1 experiment plays out, but my guess is that it will be extremely beneficial to build +1s to your site. Will Google start using +1s in its algorithm outside of logged in searches in the future? We’ll have to wait and see.

+1 for Webmasters

Similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, Google is planning on rolling out a +1 button for webmasters to include on their pages. This simplifies the whole process of leaving a +1 and puts more control in the hands of webmasters. Once this feature is rolled out, a user who decides they like your website won’t have to navigate away from your site, find you in the SERPs and then +1 you. They can do it all on page.

Like vs. +1

For SEO, the +1 is going to be much more valuable than a Facebook “like”. The Facebook “like” button will send signals to Facebook (to display in profiles and streams) which then has a chance to promote social sharing that Google and other engines can pick up on. With the +1, you’re sending a signal through a direct link to Google. There’s nothing Google has to interpret or rate; the user is telling them explicitly that the page they +1 is a good result.

Why The +1 Button Will Not Have an Impact

by Chris Sullivan
PPC & Media Specialist at SwellPath and general search nerd

In theory, the +1 button does have the potential to transform search, and create more meaningful results for users, however, it will not get enough traction in order to have a significant impact. Here’s why:

Traction With Users

It seems to me that Google is trying to imitate the success and ubiquity of Facebook’s Like, but for search results (which is to some extent already being done through a partnership with Facebook and Bing). There are a few different issues with this. The reason that users Like content on Facebook is because it was posted by people that they already know, that they care about, and that they have chosen to see. The appeal of Liking content across the web is that their built in, pre-existing group of friends will then be able to see this content.

Google lacks this backbone. Because of the massive failure of Google Buzz, people do not have that previously created network of people that they would be +1’ing (is that really what this is going to be called?) a search result or ad to. Without an existing network, the entire appeal of recommending content goes away. For people who do have established networks through Google Accounts there may be an incentive, but I would bet that these networks include many business contacts. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my professional connections to be privy to my search activities and interests.

Searching Has A Purpose

This ties in with the lack of established network I outlined above, but at this point search is an activity that has a purpose. Users search because they want something. They enter the query, click on the result they want, and put Google out of their mind. Whereas on a network like Facebook, users are meant to spend long periods of time, passively clicking through pages, reading updates and comments, and viewing photos and videos.

It is possible that the +1 button will change this behavior by making users want to check and see which pages their connections have +1’ed (again, really?) and that Google could become more of a destination rather than a means by which users find content, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Lack of Integration

Mike outlined how webmasters will eventually be able to add the +1 to their site, so users will be able to +1 content after they click off of Google. Until this feature is released and widespread, I don’t see anyone using +1. At this point Google is expecting users to search, click through, explore the site, and then either run the same query again and +1 the result, or use the back button to return to the SERP. Users simply are not going to do this. If someone were to not go through this process, and to click the +1 before actually clicking through on the search result, this would ruin the entire purpose of the +1. The site that they +1’d may actually be of very poor quality, which is a complete counter to the positive impact this feature could have on search result quality.

Even after the on site integration for the +1, this will continue to be an issue for paid ads. How is a user supposed to know if the ad is +1 worthy before they click through?

How to Get Started With Google +1

Love it or hate it, Google +1 for social search is something to watch in the coming months. Whether or not it catches on and becomes a larger factor in both logged in and logged out search queries and ad serving remains to be seen. Initial reactions aside, we recommend taking Google +1 for a test drive. Let us know what you think.

As of today, Google’s +1 is only available for users through Google.com. The international rollout should follow soon. To opt in, you’ll need to log in to (or create) a Google profile and visit Google Experimental. Find the “+1 button” experiment click “Join this experiment”.

Social Search with +1

Once you’re opted in, try surfing around the SERPs and test it out. Start by pulling up the websites you love and giving them a +1. It’s also interesting to see who in your circle is already using the feature or if you are totally ahead of the game.

2011 Web Analytics Conference Season Wrap-Up

Published March 18th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News No Comments

March is a big month for conferences in digital, with South by Southwest Interactive taking up the lion’s share of the spotlight. For web analytics, it’s the conference month. All the major vendors have their user conferences, and eMetrics takes place in San Francisco. So, I thought it’d be good to provide a quick wrap-up on what went down this year, and what’s new with the major platforms.

Webtrends

The month kicked off  with Webtrends Engage in San Francisco. It was a fantastic event, with some top-notch speakers and sessions. Webtrends put the icing on the cake with the announcement of Webtrends Analytics 10. Justin Garrity, Webtrends Director of User Experience, summed it up with this quote: “We want analytics 10 to be the platform you can see all of your digital presence together in one view.”

The product features a much more “marketer-friendly” interface, and some awesome integrations with Twitter and Facebook data. Ultimately it allows marketers to monitor metrics for activity in these spaces, in conjunction with their own site metrics. One of the other new features that got me excited is integration with PostRank. A very valuable feature in my opinion. There’s a great video of Justin Garrity speaking about PostRank and other Webtrends Analytics 10 features of the product in this post on PostRank blog – definitely exciting to see what Webtrends and Justin have done to extend the platform beyond the boundaries of one’s own site.

Omniture

The second week of the month brought about the Omniture Summit. Always a big party, and maybe even more so with Adobe’s backing in the last several years. This year the Summit peaked with the announcement of new features and a new platform for Adobe Online Marketing Suite. The platform changes are a combination of more robust user interface, and supposedly a more scalable back end. The highlight of the new features is the release of Adobe SocialAnalytics. This new component of the suite promises heavily to help marketers capture the elusive social media ROI, and examine the effectiveness of social touch points in all parts of the customer life-cycle. Adobe has published a brief blog post on the features and capabilities of Adobe SocialAnalytics.

The other change that Adobe has made that should excite some agencies and others running larger traditional digital media buys, is the integration of more 3rd party partners into the suite. The new partners include demand side platforms, ad servers, and video networks. See the official press release for a complete list of the new partners for Adobe Online Marketing suite.

Google Analytics

Just yesterday, following on the heals of eMetrics, the first Google Analytics User Conference was held in San Francisco. Though not an “official” Google event, Phil Mui (Google Analytics Group Product Manager) spoke, and Google used the event to announce the release of Google Analytics v5.  Changes to the platform are a mix of cosmetic and functional. The cosmetic include a more streamlined interface, and changes to how reports are organized in the sidebar. The functional include some nice changes to what and how data can be displayed in dashboards; also moving toward the more marketer-friendly side of analytics. For analysts, the best two new features are the ability to use events for goals, and to use filters in custom reports. The first means that we no longer have to spoof pageviews to track goals that involve clicks or dynamic in-page events; thus avoiding inflated pageview numbers. The second means the ability to apply a filter to a custom report, and have it “saved”. This will save time, and allow for the automated export of more detailed custom reports. Here is a great video from Justin Cutroni highlighting some of the major features and changes in Google Analytics v5.

Other Analytics News

Some other analytics related news to come out of March included the release of comScore’s new analytics platform Digital Analytix. Besides creative use of the letter X, the platform also promises the ability to leverage some of the mountains of data that comScore collects, to provide analysts with a better understanding of who their audience is, and the reach of their campaigns. Definitely a platform we are excited to test and explore.

IBM’s more recent acquisitions in the analytics space are coming together, literally, in the form of Smarter Commerce. This new “suite” promises to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of their market and customer life-cycle. From some conversations I’ve had with folks in the industry, and IBM’s information on Smarter Commerce, this is now a very powerful business intelligence platform for companies with a major presence in digital commerce.

Overall, an very big month for digital analysts and those in the measurement space. Lots of focus on social this year; not as much focus on mobile as might be expected, but it was there. Besides the moves by the bigger players, lots of news being made by some of the up-and-comers in the social analytics and digital measurement space right now, and lots of buzz around some of those companies at SXSWi. 2011 certainly will be a busy and exciting year for digital measurement. Now get out there and measure something.

Local Events: WordCamp Portland 2010 and Ignite Portland 9

Published September 21st, 2010 Analytics, Events, Industry, News No Comments

Did you know WordCamp Portland was last weekend? Hopefully you did and you were able to make it over to Webtrends and see all the great stuff that went down this year: plenty of great talks, even more great people, and the (now) annual Portland WordPress town hall with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, himself. I had the pleasure of speaking this year, and I’ve posted up my slides if you’re interested in checking them out. The talk was on getting better analytics data from your WordPress site. Thanks to all the volunteers and sponsors for putting on such a great event and giving me a chance to present.

So, if you missed out on WordCamp and you’d like to make it up to yourself, Ignite Portland 9 is Thursday, and just might be the solution you need! We’re really excited for this one, because we’ll  have our very first SwellPath representation! Erin will be talking about Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Coming Wave of Mental Telepathy. I have no idea how much we can learn on that in 5 minutes, but I don’t doubt Erin will impress us all. So come down to the Bagdad Thursday night for Ignite and see Erin and the rest of the great speakers that are lined up. Hope to see you there!

Why You Should Join the Analysis Exchange

Published September 10th, 2010 Analytics, Industry, SwellPath 1 Comment

The Analysis Exchange, an project launched by Eric Peterson in late 2009, signed up it’s 1000th member recently. That’s impressive growth for a project that provides resources to multiple groups in a relatively “automated” way. In a self-described nutshell, the Exchange “is an effort designed to provide hands-on training opportunities for aspiring web analytics professionals while providing free web data analysis to the entire nonprofit community.” This captures how it benefits the students and organizations who participate, but not quite the mentors. From the surface it may look like mentors sacrifice the most, but I found the sacrifice to be minimal, and the reward to be substantial. Better yet, the reward extends beyond projects you are participating in; I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. I’m going to give a quick rundown on the sacrifice a mentor makes for my project, the reward from my project, and the overarching benefits I’m seeing from the Exchange.

The Sacrifice for Mentors

From here on I’m not going to refer to this as a sacrifice, because the amount of work I put in was very light. I burn more time and energy on a run-of-the-mill Monday morning client firedrill than I did on the project. Not only that, but I really only needed to guide and manage the project, and not really do a lot of the dirty work. Now a lot of this is due to the awesome student I was able to work with, Ferdinand David. Ferdinand was able to get things done on time, meet expectations with the deliverable, and avoid “scope creep”.  A little advice for those of you who are going to go sign up to be mentors after reading this post: pay attention to the project expectations that Eric carefully outlines in the provided documentation. The effort I put into the kick-off meeting to keep the project focused on clear, achievable goals was probably the most important part of my participation. To sum up: there is little sacrifice for mentors. You are looking at a few hours of your time, spread out to conform to your schedule over the course of a couple weeks. Don’t let time deter you from signing up.

The Reward for Mentors on Analysis Exchange Projects

The reward is all about gratification, and you get it in two ways. First and foremost, you help out a non-profit. If you’ve ever had any involvement with non-profits, you know they generally need all the help they can get. You also know that it generally feels really good to provide some of that help. Donations are great, but putting a little sweat into helping out a non-profit is gratifying and satisfying on many levels; I don’t think I need to elaborate on that any more. In addition to helping out the non-profit, you get to help an aspiring web analyst gain a better understanding of what a solid web analysis project entails. So you’re helping the individual, but you’re also helping “the cause” by helping foster another analytics advocate who will contribute to, and strengthen the analytics community. Remember: only a few hours of work results in all this.

The Reward Beyond the Project

I just touched on the benefits beyond your project a bit, with the notion of growing the analytics community one student at a time. There also is the benefit of growing the analysis exchange, by helping it develop a reputation as the go-to resource for students looking for hands-on experiences with analysis projects, and the go-to resource for non-profits looking to get more insight into the activity on their web properties.

SwellPath Hearts the Analysis Exchange

I’m also seeing it as a “badge” for mentors who are involved; it’s a qualifier of sorts. Case in point: when we went to hire both of the web analysts here at SwellPath (Greg Holiat and Erin Richey), we considered their participation as mentors in the evaluation process. Part of that was knowing that they had passed Eric’s criteria when they signed up as mentors, and the other part knowing that they were “tapped in” to the analytics community and involved.

A Call to Action

In an effort to help grow the number of mentors on the Exchange; I’ll finalize this post with a call to action to those of you right here in Portland. I mentioned that Greg and Erin are in the Exchange. Combined with me, the 3 of us make up 50% of the mentors in Portland. Wait, isn’t Portland a mecca of sorts for web analytics? So where are all the mentors? I’ve had lunch with more than 3 local analysts in the last month who aren’t mentors – don’t worry I won’t call you out in this post, but you’re buying next time. Take some time and sign-up to be a mentor; you’ll be glad you did and you’ll be helping the industry, community, a student, a non-profit. Just as important, you’re name won’t be glaringly absent from the list of local mentors.

SwellPath Part of Webtrends Refreshed Partner Program

Published September 1st, 2010 Analytics, Industry, News, SwellPath 2 Comments

This morning Webtrends announced their revised partner program and SwellPath is excited to be included. Our established expertise in implementing, customizing and consulting on Webtrends products puts on the same page as larger agencies like Razorfish and Ogilvy. We look forward to working with WebTrends as they continue to push innovation in marketing measurement and optimization. Read Webtrends press release on the agency partner program.

« Older Entries

Email Updates

Signup for our newsletter to keep up with the latest from the convenience of your inbox.

Connect with Us

Find SwellPath on the socialsphere and keep up with the latest news in our world.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr

411 NW Park Avenue, Suite 400
Portland, OR 97209
(503) 224-9204
info@swellpath.com