Google recently sent out emails alerting everyone that the old version of Analytics reporting will end in June 2012. We see the good in the new Analytics and there is a lot more data to play with. However, this is a headache because all of the automatic reports you set up in the old Analytics will need to be made again in the new Analytics. This is good news and bad news. It’s good because it gives you the opportunity to revisit your dashboard and customize it. Unfortunately for agencies this is bad news because all of the hundreds of reports we have automated will be gone! We encourage our clients to log into their Analytics and get familiar with the data. This is the perfect time for them to customize their dashboards to display the data they’re most interested in seeing.
If you need a little help getting started we’ve simplified it for you — 3 Quick Steps to Set Up Email Reports in the New Google Analytics

Facts dispel fear (or at worst justify it and indicate a path towards greener pastures), so I wanted to distill what we know to date with hard quantitative data. Surprisingly the answer is not-a-whole-lot, and what we do have comes from just a couple sources.

A chart produced by SEOmoz shows that “the impact of Penguin was immediate and substantial”, with over 3% of Top Ten Rankings in their analysis changing (versus the ~2.7% change caused by the Panda update on April 19th).

Untold quantities of keyboards have rendered the phrases key-word-stuffing and over-optimized-anchor-text in hypotheses about what Penguin is doing. However, MicrositeMasters had unique access to a fabulously large data set and produced the only set of charts I could find showing detailed effects of Penguin.

 

Findings & Action Items from MicrositeMasters

1. Keyword-Stuffing in Anchor Text: Only sites with over 60% of anchor texts containing “money” keywords matching incoming links were negatively affected by Penguin.

A money keyword generates a lot of search traffic. Guzman defines it as a high-volume search term or phrase with a Google rank of roughly 5-15. In other words, the Penguin is looking for you if over half of your traffic is driven by searches using high-volume keywords that exactly match your anchor texts.

Action Item: Unless your incoming link anchor texts were totally dominated by high-volume search keywords, this component of the Penguin Algorithm is not hurting your site.

2. URLs in Anchor Text: Penguin is going to hit you for stuffing URLs in your anchor texts, but not near as much as money-keyword stuffing (far right in chart below).

Action Item: Reduce your URL-stuffing, but take care of the keyword-stuffing First!

3. Relevant (Niche) Inbound Links: Having links from websites outside of your niche is okay, as long as you have some from relevant websites, too.

I made this chart by eye-balling the numbers in a pair of charts from the MicrositeMasters study. The chart shows two things:

i) It doesn’t matter if you have a high or low percent of inbound links from websites with content that is relevant to yours, as long as you have SOME quality, niche inbound links: websites with low percentage (10%) of same-niche inbound links were penalized at the same rate as sites with high percentage (60-100%) of relevant inbound links.

ii) It matters a LOT if you have NO relevant inbound links – the red bars show that about half of websites with 0% of relevant inbound links were penalized. Once you have even 10% of your links coming from quality, relevant sites though, Penguin isn’t penalizing you for having non-niche links too.

Action Item: Make sure you have some inbound links from quality, relevant websites.

That’s not easy – and it’s part of the point of Penguin: good content creation and targeted community development around your site is harder than typing a keyword into 20 anchor texts. Countless blog posts offer advice on building a quality community (inbound links from websites with good content related to your site). Here are a few tidbits from Brownrigg’s insights on generating a community for your website.

i) Post quality articles relevant to your niche (that people will want to repost on their site).

ii) Compile some of your articles into an ebook.

iii) Publish your articles on sites like digg and submit them to article directories.

Post-Penguin Reality

Penguin seems to have a fairly narrow target – keyword-over-optimized text anchors and disproportionate inbound links from irrelevant websites: in other words, it has effectively removed shortcuts for generating website traffic. In general, however, and despite the apocalyptic rhetoric out there, the new Sheriff should leave the world with a lot of well-deserved winners – people creating genuinely good content and generating traffic with honest “white-hat” methods that ultimately benefit the 2,267,233,742 people searching for content on the World Wide Web.

Image from cognitiveseo.com/blog

Dave Underwood of Topspot Internet Marketing spoke on “Improving Website Measurement & Analytics” at the HiMA luncheon last week in Houston, Texas.

He offered useful insight for successful marketing, some of it surprisingly simple. For example, recording and listening to phone calls: if your sales people give inaccurate information or fail in some other way to appropriately respond to potential customers, it really doesn’t matter if your marketing campaign generates 100 leads from Fortune 500 companies – the sales people are not converting the leads.

He also touched on the hot topic of Organic vs. Paid advertising. Agreeing with a study by Google showing that 89% of the clicks generated by paid ads would not be generated by organic search*, he recommends maintaining a PPC campaign even when your Organic rank is high.

In other words:

People need to see your company lots of times, in lots of places (PPC and search lists), and they need to keep seeing your company show up over time.

* Clearly Google is incentivized to present their findings in a way that encourages companies to pay for advertising, and indeed analysts point out the limitations of Google’s interpretation of their results (Google presents an average rate of Incremental Ad Clicks unique to PPC, and doesn’t explicitly talk about the fact that lower IAC means your PPC is “cannibalizing” more of your organic clicks). In general though, there’s over half a century of robust research demonstrating the familiarity effect, so shelling out for those paid ads is probably worth it for your company.

What’s included in this premium account?

The premium package includes a number of exciting upgrades and new features including more insights and around the clock support from a Google Analytics expert.

Some of Google Analytics Premium’s new features:

• 24/7 live support
• custom training and support
• lifted data limits
• attribution modeling
• more custom variables
• data collection & reporting guarantees

“Premium is everything you need to give everyone in your business the ability to make better data-driven decisions to move from data to insights to action faster than ever.”

Along with this release, Google reassured current users by stating they will continue to develop and enhance the free version of Google Analytics that we all know and love.

Key takeaways from the Intermediates Google Analytics webinar:

• Email notifications are available for any website you are tracking.
• Goal setting is highly recommended.
• Learn about funnel and funnel reporting.
• Learn how to set advanced filters to your Analytics reports.
• Of all the reports Google Analytics offers you, which metrics should you be caring the most about? Visits, visitors, traffic sources, and conversions.

If you need a quick recap of Google Analytics basics, take a look at this Intro to Google Analytics presentation.

We’ve got a number of fantastic upcoming training webinars that we hope you’ll check out.

Here’s a few of the Schipul webinar events coming up in August:

• 8-4-2011: Intro to Drupal – Learn basic content management and site editing through Drupal Software.
• 8-10-2011: Intro to Social Media for Business – Learn the ways your business can benefit from participating in online communities and social networks.
• 8-18-2011: Intro to Web Analytics – Learn the important basics of web analytics.
• 8-24-2011: Facebook Fan Page Optimization – Learn about taking your Facebook fan page to next level with this SEO for Facebook webinar.

Be sure to click the link and register for any or all of these great webinars for free!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the Schipul events on our calendar and remember SchipulCon 2011, our exciting web marketing conference, is taking place October 6-7 in Houston, TX. Register today!

I tried to keep the theme not only how to use Analytics, but what to do with the numbers once you get them. In short, how to use Google Analytics to make Business decisions.

Decisions like:

• “Do we need a mobile site? What about a mobile app?”
• “Which geographical regions to we need to focus marketing on more?”
• “Are our Social Media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn driving people to our site? Are those people converting?”

The slides are posted on Slideshare.com/qcait and embedded below:

Big thanks to CultureMap Social Media Editor and former Schipulite Fayza Elmostehi for inviting me – it was a great group!

The next topic in the series is June 29 on Location-Based Applications – More info available here!

Analytics App and Analytics HD

Available for the iPhone and the iPad, these two apps give you a preview of your data at a moments glance. Both apps allow you to load up multiple Google Accounts so you can track both work and personal sites. The iPhone app is very convenient for tracking on the go, and the iPad version gives you a bigger perspective and is a bit easier to navigate. One of my favorite parts about these apps are the Today and Yesterday reports which can be useful for checking traffic from recent content. The only downside I’ve seen thus far is the iPad version (Analytics HD) seems to be slower to load. This could be the app, or the fact that I monitor over 200 sites. Hopefully this will be improved in a future version.

Analyticator

This WordPress plugin shows your Google Analytics data within the WordPress back end interface. This is probably a great fit for publishers who aren’t interested in all that the web interface offers while still wanting to know basic things like visitor and pageview counts, keywords, and traffic sources. If you run a WordPress blog (like this one) or a WordPress website, this plugin is a great addition.

Link Tagger

Ever wanted to track downloads or external clicks but didn’t know how to do so in Google Analytics? Link Tagger can help with that. This is a javascript script you can download and include on your site pages that will automate the process of attaching the required Analytics code to track outgoing links and downloaded files. It works across all browsers with javascript support, so that should cover all users that analytics can track.

Ego

This is a personal favorite of mine. Ego allows you to view stats at a quick glance for Google Analytics as well as Mint tracking and other sites like Twitter, Vimeo, Tumblr, Feedburner, Squarespace, and Ember. At a quick glance you can tap through and see your stats for today, yesterday, the week, month, and year. The full iPad app allows you to swipe and load up the full statistics in the middle of the screen. I’ve yet to test that one, but I can attest to the iPhone version.

Be sure to check out the entire Google Analytics Application Gallery to see the other things like phone tracking, reporting tools, and site analytics auditing.

Google uses site speed in rankings – we’ve known for a while that Google was headed in this direction, and they finally made it official. Site speed is now counted, though it’s more of a tie-breaker than anything. Check out the full article. There, Matt Cutts points out that in addition to helping you in the rankings, speeding up your site will also please your visitors. Win-Win.

Google Analytics browser-based opt-out – Google takes privacy seriously and is working on some browser plugins that will allow people to opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics. As a site owner, don’t let this frighten you. Web users have always had the choice to opt out of many tracking tools by turning off javascript (though many don’t as it affects their overall web experience). Chances are you will not see any major dip in your statistics, and your users will have an additional tool to control their privacy online.

The So What test to Analytics reporting – This is a favorite topic of mine. While Google Analytics and other tools offer you a sea of reporting options, very few of those give you actionable steps to improve your site’s KPIs. Avinash Kaushik offers a few examples of how asking “So What?” can improve your reporting efficiency and save you time, energy, and help move you closer to your online goals. Take some time to read it and then look at the reports you usually review and ask, So What?

To stay up-to-date on the important news in the SEM world, you can Subscribe to The SEM Blog and receive all of our updates in your favorite RSS reader.

More Goals

Previously you could only have 4 goals per profile. Now you can have up to twenty, made up of 4 sets of 5 goals. Additionally, you can now setup Engagement Goals which allow you to use Time on Site and Pages per Visit as goal-capturing metrics. This is valuable for many types of sites (like Blogs!) that may consider a Goal accomplished without actually capturing contact information or making a sale.

Advanced Filters

Advanced Filters allow you to create single one-off filters for different reports. Currently, you would need to use the Advanced Segments to accomplish this. Now, filtering top landing pages with over 10 visits and bounce rates over 80% is a snap. This will help you find the pain points in your site and make positive changes. This can also help you identify your top performing keywords and markets.

Automatic and Custom Alerts

If you use Google Alerts then you know how valuable it is to have this kind of automation. These alerts will allow you to track increases in certain activities or to certain pages on your site. They will be very useful when tracking different campaigns and when monitoring the effects of social media. These alerts can be viewed and grouped by date or by type, so you can create clear reports for the things you need to watch, and they can be emailed to you automatically. Alerts are not available yet but should be out by the end of the month.

Other features include Mobile tracking without javascript for older mobile browsers and more custom variables options for tracking members and logged-in status. These take a bit more work to setup but can give you even more details for your more advanced sites.

Many of these features are available today and the rest will be rolled out very soon. Check back with us at theSEMblog for more tips on how to use these great new tools.

"Lack of metrics – 86% of all traffic going through Google is search engine clicks. But, 89% of spending budgets are on PPC. Why? Metrics should bridge the gap."

Chasing page rankings is counter productive, but still provides valuable insight. Rankings are good way to measure against competitors, but much of the progress happens before getting to this metric.

Action Optimization – The values of understanding small changes can be tested and focused for better metric performance. One example is Snippet Optimization for natural listings – the snippet from meta description can be multivariate tested. Can often find improvements from running 30 day testing of snippet by ranking. Run ranking reports showing ranking for keywords and movement traffic. If traffic increases, then metric is improved without drastically changing page rank. Next, run same against competitors and understand metrics available to create your scorecard. If you are ranking well for a keyword phase, testing will not let you fall far or fast, but A/B testing can help improve CTR.

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz on SEO Status Metrics that Matter.
Data driven metrics should remove guesswork. Do we really know how good data is from Yahoo, Google PR? No, but, we all use this data. "Quantified" from Quantcast is like Google Analytics, but public. SEOmoz took this data for actuals and ran comparison to Alexa and Compete.com. Confidence is approximately 95% by statistical correlation as follows.
Compete.com uses the "Unique People" as best estimator of traffic in the US with about 86% correlation. If estimating traffic worldwide, then Alexa "Reach" is a higher correlation with data about 80% correlated with actuals. Don't use or trust a single metric to be the key. Link popularity is still defining factor by nearly 75%, URL keywords next and content

Kelly Kochert, Assistant Vice President New Media, NSI
How well are we really doing? Ask the questions to tell your story?
Log File Analysis vs. JavaScript Tags tell different stories, and you may need both.

Analysis of SEO Traffic can be an example of telling a story by answering questions.

How much traffic? – do you see changes month to month, Seasonality or Year over Year (YOY)
From Where? – Does it align with market share? What search engines? Not showing well on Yahoo? what opportunities are there and then to be better on Yahoo, growing the slice of the pie for a larger share of overall traffic.
What moves the needle? Document start of major updates such as a linkbuilding campaign, site redesign.
Why? Keywords – align keyword traffic with ranking, this can show opportunities, misses and help to review new terms. Look at Branded vs non-branded and work on growth in non-branded.
Where? Understand the Entry pages from your analytics and are they aligned with keywords. Where do visitors go post-landing pages – these are opportunities.
What do they do? How long do visitors stay on a site and what pages have traction. Are they staying longer on the site and where did they go when they left the site. The abandonment rate is related and valuable only if know from where they are leaving the site.
What inbound links are working?
Referral sites and links give an opportunity to change anchor text. If getting good referral from a large site, evaluate if similar sites can be built as linking referrals and update anchor text on referral site. Build landing pages around the topic area.
Where are they from? Location and seasonality
What else? What are the engines doing and how often are they visiting including penetration (pages crawled versus indexed), look at reducing errors.

Brian Klais, Executive Vice President of Search, Netconcepts provides a presentation about Natural Search opportunities.

56% of Google queries serve 0 paid ads (Comscore), but have 10 results for the search results page. Stop talking tactics. Start talking Performance Metrics.

Click-through rate – Calculate your CTR as a benchmark, divide keyword market-size by keyword traffic. Compare CTR by SERP placement.
Acquisition costs – Compare PPC cost vs natural. Use Google's average CPC for each phrase, factor in our cost or resource time and average. You spend $0.75 per click vs. …. ? Focus on reduced acquisition cost.
Landing Page Yield – Determine available landing pages (crawled by the bots), what % of those pages are indexed, and yielding traffic. Searchers per page and CTR can help identify opportunities.
Landing Page Rankings – Engine placement of trafficked pages. YOY ranking analysis with number of pages and phrases on page1, page2, and page3.
Keyword Coverage – focus on non-brand pages and look specifically at these for YOY and MoM.
Incremental Traffic and Revenue – More than just "current' minus "previous" Can; presume non-brand rankings stay constant. YoY calculation should consider delta in KW volume, placement, traffic by keyword, sales by keyword. Proper attribution is often last click, but not necessarily the same in Sales.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – Incremental revenue over incremental cost. Look beyond short-term revenue. Conversion rate variance, New-to-file customers, acquisition profitability and lifetime value of searcher.

Jonti Bolles

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com