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.
Archive for the ‘Industry’ Category
Adam is Speaking at WordCamp Portland Next Month
If you have the slightest interest in WordPress, content management systems, blogging, or the Portland tech community you should definitely make it to WordCamp Portland on September 18th and 19th. The event is an absolute steal at $40! You’ll get a chance to see and hear presentations on a fantastic variety of subjects, in a classic casually-brilliant Portland environment. My talk is on analytics, of course. The title is Measure Twice, Blog Once, and it will cover a variety of methods and tools that can help you get more actionable data on your WordPress site. The list of WordCamp Portland speakers and registration for WordCamp Portland. Hope to see you there!
Vote for Erin Richey’s SXSW Panel
Quick post t
o rally some votes for Erin’s proposed panel for SXSW in 2011: Predictions, Preferences, and Personalization: Recommendation Engines Grow Up. Voting ends today, so take a few seconds to vote for Erin and the other incredible panels if you have a chance. If you don’t know who Erin is, you can read up on her on LinkedIn or Twitter. We were very excited to have Erin come onboard here at SwellPath a couple weeks ago as a digital analyst.
Look for more info on Erin and the rest of the incredible team here at SwellPath in the next month or so as we finally get around to adding a Team page to the site. Meanwhile, you can follow the SwellPath team’s Tweets or connect with SwellPath on LinkedIn right now.
Don’t forget to vote!
Facebook SEO Now a Reality
When Facebook announced Open Graph and everything that came along with it I wrote about how I thought Open Graph integration would become part of almost everyone’s websites. I wasn’t explicit about the primary way in which I suspected this would happen, but these were the main questions I had at the time:
1. Would having Open Graph meta data in conjunction with Like buttons become as necessary for sites, from an SEO perspective, as having proper meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-site components of a solid SEO strategy.
2. Would SwellPath need to begin scoping this into our SEO engagements for clients?
In our opinion, the answer to both of these essentially became yes this week. Earlier this week, All Facebook reported on larger sites with Open Graph integration having pages returned in Facebook search results. It is now clear that Facebook will be indexing pages that have Open Graph integration and have been Liked. These are not “Facebook Pages” but actual pages from other domains.
Now when I bring this up to many people, the response is something along the lines of: “well, how many people are going to use Facebook to search the web anyway?” My response to that is pretty simple: how many people thought they would use Google for email in early 2004? Or how many people thought they would use Google for analytics in early 2006? How many people thought they would use Facebook for showing friends their pictures 4 years ago?
You see where I’m going with this: consumers will shift their behavior. I have no doubt that there is at least the potential for many Facebook users to suddenly find it far more convenient to just search from the page their on.
And what about Facebook’s partnership with Bing? Is it possible that Facebook will give Bing access to this data also? That Bing will begin incorporating the “social value” of pages into their results? I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t jump on this opportunity if it becomes available. Alternatively, we might see the relationship between Bing and Facebook sunset as Facebook takes on the search industry solo.
Some concerns here revolve around Facebook’s ability to crawl and index. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have all been doing this for a long time, and have the technological components in place to crawl and index the web at amazing rates. Will Facebook be able to “catch up”? If they can’t, who will be left out? Likely the “little guys”, i.e. the long tail, which is a fundamentally valuable (the most valuable?) component of Google’s search results. My feeling is that technology can be bought for a high enough price; Facebook has been building the technological infrastructure to handle this, and they have been and will continue to hire the appropriate people to lead this initiative.
Bottom line: this will stick, and SEOs, publishers, retailers, and anyone else who wants their content to be delivered to Facebook users better begin implementing Open Graph functionality into their sites. If we’re wrong about this, that’s great; one less thing to worry about with SEO. I don’t think we will be though, and I don’t want us to be. Disruption is good for any industry, and search is no exception. I’d love to hear others thought’s on this, and how they think this will affect SEO.
How the Facebook Open Graph Will Change Your Web Site
Facebook announced some major changes last week; in a nutshell, the changes facilitate and enhance how marketers and brands can exchange their own site visitors’ data with Facebook. There are a number of great resources out there, I’ve compiled several in the SwellPath Diigo account.
So, what exactly has changed, and what does it mean for you and you’re own digital marketing initiatives? 18 months ago it was considered forward-thinking to have a link to your Facebook page on your brand’s website; now what is forward-thinking, and what is standard best practices? I’m not sure I can entirely answer those questions in this post, but I can address what I think the key opportunities are, and how SwellPath will play in this space. First, a quick overview on the changes:
The Basics
First, the basic opportunities. The changes allow us to lay the social framework of Facebook into our own web properties. In the simplest form, this is made possible with 5 new social plugins. These plugins allow for integration of data into your site, but also the opportunity for authenticated Facebook users to modify their own profile via your site. For example, we can now put a Like button anywhere, and anyone authenticated on Facebook can click it and indicate that they like an object. Click the Like button below if you like this post (you can wait until you’re finished reading it):
Beyond Basics
In the more complicated forms, this “weaving” is enhanced with the Open Graph Protocol and the complimentary Facebook Graph API. This is where things get interesting, and possibly revolutionary, in terms of how you’ll be able to leverage the new features on your sites. Just as you raced to gather fans of your brand’s page on Facebook, and waited for those fans’ friends to come to your page, now you can gather “likes” of your content (your objects) throughout the web, and links to that content are syndicated through users’ feeds. Likewise, just as proper meta tag implementation for SEO purposes has become a necessity, proper Open Graph integration may also become a necessity to maintain adequate site visibility. It enables Facebook (and whomever else) to quickly “read” and sort the nature of your objects (i.e. content).
Open Graph & Your Site
So, how will this change your web site, or sites you’ll be building in the near future? Well, if you do things the right way, you’ll now be able to “borrow” the social experience we all have with Facebook, for your own site. You’ll at least want to carefully assess how if you can leverage Open Graph to socialize your site, or areas of your site. Once you’ve figured out there are opportunities, you’ll want to work with the appropriate stakeholders to decide the best way to integrate the various options Facebook has created, and ensure you’re optimizing the syndication potential for your content, and that you’re following best practices. While the opportunity that Facebook has created is way beyond the old days of slapping a Facebook icon on your footer, it also is way more complicated, and there are written and unwritten rules that need to be followed.
SwellPath & Open Graph
Here is the shameless plug for SwellPath: we will continue to help our clients navigate the social media marketing landscape, Open Graph now just increases the options we can present to our clients. There no longer is a massive gap between those who can afford to promote their brand through costly Facebook applications, and those who simply can afford to have a vibrant Facebook page for their brand. That gap is gone, and in it’s place are a fantastic variety of possibilities for web designers and developers to creatively loop in Facebook. We’re excited to see these possibilities come to life for our clients and the rest of the industry.
Web Analytics Certification & Education
Web analytics education has an active been subject of my life in several ways in the last couple weeks, so I thought I’d throw together a post covering my thoughts on the subject, what I’ve been up to, and what others have been up. First up, I’m officially ramped up to be Webtrends go-to trainer for Webtrends for Marketing Professionals: Fundamentals I and Fundamentals II, as well as their new course in Advanced Analytics. I’m really excited about that last one because it covers essentials for aspiring expert analysts, gets into advanced use of Webtrends, spends a good bit of time covering how to sell-in analytics in your organization, and includes an actual certification. After getting reacquainted with the materials, I highly recommend these courses for Webtrends clients. A few days of training can have a major impact on the evolution of your analytics program, and the value any marketing professional can personally derive from having a strong understanding of web analytics.
I previously posted about how I had the pleasure of teaching a couple of lessons for Aaron Gray as part of a course he is teaching at Portland State University called Measuring & Optimizing Your Website. I already wrote a blog post on that, so I won’t say much more about it, other than the presentations are now up on the SwellPath SlideShare account. There is Getting Started with Google Analytics and Getting Started with Google Website Optimizer.
A couple weeks ago I also had the pleasure of talking to Greg Holiat who recently received the University of British Columbia Certificate of Achievement in Web Analytics. It was great to get a first hand account of the program, and how it had directly benefited him. I was impressed with how enthusiastic he was about the program, and his well-rounded knowledge of web analytics. Similarly, this week I was speaking with Dash Levine, who is taking the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence course through the University of California – Irvine, and he had nothing but good things to say about the course.
Finally, the Web Analytics Association launched a new site this week, which (besides looking great) has a section now dedicated to the new WAA certification program. Greg Holiat is volunteering with WAA to help finalize the certification program, and he was giving me the details on it. I’m looking forward to seeing this become a standard for all practitioners in the industry.
There are some other programs and certifications out there (e.g. the Google Analytics Individual Qualification); so don’t consider this post all inclusive, and I encourage you to contact me if you need any more info on any this. I don’t entirely have a point here, other than how great it is to see all of this effort in the industry to educate and certify web analytics professionals. We have vendors, academic institutions, and industry organizations all stepping up. Obviously they all are going to focus on slightly different aspects of analytics and measurement, but the core intention is the same: to fill in the gap in knowledge that exists in the online marketing and business community about web analytics. I’d love our clients and partners at various interactive agencies take an interest in these offerings; a more educated “consumer” will really help analytics really move to “2.0″ and beyond.
Portland Business Journal Article Features SwellPath
SwellPath was mentioned in a recent Portland Business Journal article on web analytics. It was great to get our first mention in the PBJ, as we are avid readers, subscribers, and frequent many of PBJ’s great events. The article is a surface level look at the current state of the web analytics industry. The discussion we had with PBJ focused on how SwellPath helps clients make sense of the seemingly limitless reports available in enterprise analytics solutions. Phrases like “drowning in data” and “analysis paralysis” are more relevant than ever with ever-growing types of reports now available. With social measurement, mobile measurement, rich internet application measurement, and traditional analytics reporting, the need for the tpe of expertise SwellPath provides is more critical than ever for most organizations. It was great to see the Portland Business Journal recognize this and feature SwellPath in the discussion.
Web Analytics Wednesday at eROI
Our friends at eROI are graciously hosting the first Portland Web Analytics Wednesday of 2010 on January 27th, and Adam will be giving a short presentation on real-time analytics. We will be on the 4th floor at eROI, which is located at 505 Northwest Couch Street. As always, everyone is welcome, from existing Web Analytics practitioners to those with even a passing interest in the field.
The event will begin roughly at 5:30pm, with drinks and snacks provided by eROI and SwellPath Interactive. There will be a short presentation by Adam Ware from SwellPath Interactive on options and applications for real-time analytics reporting. Several tracking platforms and tools will be covered, potential application of real-time reporting in various online marketing programs will be discussed, and then some short case-studies and examples will be presented.
The expected schedule is as follows:
5:30 – 6:30: Networking/Drinks/Snacks
6:30 – 7:00: Presentation by Adam Ware from SwellPath
7:00 – 8:00: Questions/Discussion/Networking
More information and please RSVP on Upcoming, and on the WAW website.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Takeaways from WordCamp Portland
I’ve finally had a chance to put down some thoughts about WordCamp Portland, which was hosted at WebTrends last weekend. First off, what an amazing event. The group dynamic was fantastic; it was a great mix of developers, marketers, bloggers, general WordPress users, designers, and others. Second, hats off to Aaron Hockley (@ahockley), Besty Richter (@betsywhim), Dale Chumbley (@dalechumbley), and all of the other volunteers and people that made it possible. Next, props to the other sponsors for putting their money where their blogs are and enabling a stellar setup. Finally, what’s a conference without great presenters? I took away great nuggets from every presentation I attended (and watched); which I can’t always say after leaving an conference. I can’t possibly cover them all, but I want to point a few takeaways that I found the most beneficial for medium-to-large businesses using WordPress as a blogging solution, or even as their complete CMS.
Speeding Up WordPress
Jason Grigs (@grigs) kicked off the event with Speed Up WordPress, an awesome presentation for WordPress administrators (i.e. users) that outlines several methods for speeding up delivery of your WordPress content. This is excellent for those of us running heavily customized sites with many plugins, or those with high numbers of daily visitors. From database efficiencies, to caching, to image optimization, and more; I guarantee there is something in this presentation you are neglecting on your WordPress installation (unless your Jason, or maybe @turoczy now).
Scaling WordPress to the Next Level
Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), the founder of WordPress, did a Q+A session on day one that was great. I’d never seen Matt speak, and I was blown away by how engaging he was. With the growth of the WordPress empire, I really believe Matt is one of the most influential internet entrepreneurs ever.
One of the last questions Matt answered was in regards to how WordPress is being used for sites that are far from being blogs, and sites that see massive traffic. I had a similar question queued up, because as we make recommendations to some of our larger clients, regarding content management system decisions, we want to be confident that WordPress is being developed to handle the “non-traditional” things it is being made to do by users and developers. Matt’s reply to this question gave me confidence that WordPress will be able to handle the load as developers customize it more and more, and larger sites push the product.
More Takeaways
Many more takeaways from the event, here are a few:
Duane Storyey (@duanestorey) developer of WPtouch, gave a great preso on WPtouch and mobile web development in general.
Shayne Sanderson (@shaynesanderson) showed us how awesome the WP Ecommerce plugin has become, and how it can be used in WordPress MU.
Will Norris (@willnorris) on How Not to Build a WordPress Plugin, for developers (a bit beyond me, but interesting).
There were many many more awesome presentations and breakout sessions. Check the Twitter feed for #wcpdx, and checkout the official WordCamp Portland site for links to streams, descriptions on presentations, and other good info.
Tips to Online Marketing in a Recession
Advertising dollars fluctuate with the ups and downs of the economy, making many marketers worry about the impact the current economic times will have. Savvy marketers realize the importance of marketing in a down economy, however blindly spending dollars on all mediums will no longer be an acceptable approach as budgets tighten and accountability increases. With potentially lower budgets, marketer will need to maximize the return on every dollar spent, something best realized online.
It’s no surprise that traditional advertising mediums are expected to suffer in this economy, while online marketing is expected to grow. EMarketer predicted that online advertising spending in America, will increase by 8.9% in 2009 and for good reason.
Online marketing has shown to be a viable source to drive brand awareness and consideration in addition to sales and leads. However, simply shifting spend to online is not the answer, but instead ensure that your online marketing is measurable, generates an ROI and is focused on the long-term.
Focus on Measurable Results
As opposed to most traditional marketing mediums, online efforts can be tracked. Depending on your analytics platform, they can be tracked down to a user, area, time, source, you name it. Platforms such as Omniture SiteCatalyst allow for unlimited tracking variables, enabling you to segment your data in many ways. Don’t stop at just off-site data such as click-throughs and impressions, but integrate and track on-site metrics such as conversions, user paths, bounce rates, etc. Combining tracking variables with off-site and on-site metrics help to qualify and focus marketing efforts.
Generate a True ROI
Effective tracking allows for fully measurable results used to produce a true ROI. For starters, each marketing activity should have a specific ROI. This is easier for PPC and affiliate marketing efforts but more complicated for such activities such as SEO and link building. Regardless, all online marketing services should be separately tied to the bottom line and given a unique ROI.
If you are using an SEM agency or consultant, make sure their services are being figured into an ROI. A positive ROI on PPC management might quickly dive into the red once the $2,000/month you are spending on an agency is factored in. Many agencies hide behind an ROAS rather than a true ROI.
Focus on the Long-Term
While marketing budgets should be allocated to the the most effective activities, it’s easy to take a short-term approach and not invest in a longer, sustainable strategy. Activities such as paid search and email marketing generally produce the best return, especially in the short-term, but investing in such things as web analtyics and a blog for instance will help ensure your future online success well past a recession.
Have the patience to setup A/B and multivariate tests using analytics, invest in your blog and create a social media strategy. These example strategies take longer to produce a return, but can have a huge impact on your website objectives and business goals.
Rather than becoming stagnate during a recession use it as an opportunity to innovate and expand efforts online. With proven effectiveness and fully measurable results, focusing your marketing dollars to online will prove to have the greatest short and long-term return.
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