Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

Direct traffic is that traffic which has no referrals recorded by your analytics tracking system, therefore there are certain factors which directly or indirectly impact Direct traffic to your site: Direct traffic is generally considered as the type in traffic, Traffic due by BRAND VALUE, they are users who are influenced by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar. This is not entirely true, as any traffic which is not tracked (has no referrals) are considered as direct traffic:

1. Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking

2. SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools

3. Traffic from Bookmarks.

4. A Viral Marketing Campaign

People who take advantage of direct traffic:

Domain name purchasers, typosquatters, cybersquatters whose intention is to purchase a domain name with typo mistake of popular brand, hence hoping to generate traffic. For more information please visit SEOmoz

Affiliate Marketers, Adsense money makers whose main intention is to make money through arbitrage.

Tracking Direct Traffic

Tracking Radio Ads and offline advertising internally: Some advertisers advertise their brand in Radio and give out the URL such as “http://radio.example.com” which is 301 redirected to URL “http://www.example.com/xyz.php?trackingcode=number”. This way the impact of advertising on the channel can be tracked. This will help in comparing the effectiveness between

1. Two different Ads..

2. Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation

3. Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.

4. You could further extend to record Page Views, Time on Site and other details..

Google has launched tracking of Adwords audio campaigns in Google Analytics..

Below is an Interesting Example of my blog: The search engine traffic, referral traffic to my blog can be easily analyzed and explained as they are fairly straightforward. SEO, Referral traffic analysis requires no expert, even a layman can understand if they look at Google Analytics Report. However, the interesting part is the Direct Traffic Analysis, which initially I failed to understand until a few months back, hence I have decided to share this analysis in this Direct Traffic post.

Traffic Details

Traffic Share – Medium Wise

Direct Traffic User Details

What can we analyze from the given data?

What Google Analytics says?

1. 13.97% of users are direct, how are they finding my blog even though there is no offline Ads, no TV Ads, no Radio Ads whatsoever?

2. 49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?

3. Blog has 80.38% bounce rate (for direct visitors) which is high Can we figure out where the problem lies? What is wrong with the site?

4. Average Time by Direct Visitor is 41 seconds. This is a time taken for glancing a webpage, not even reading it.

This means half my direct visitors are new, they glance the page in 41 seconds and most of them leave without doing anything. Not sure how they are finding my site. They mostly visit 1 page of my site and bounce off the site like it was yuck.

Google Analytics does not give any details apart from the above.

Analysis from the above data

The direct users are landing on inner pages of the site. Its very unlikely they are typing the entire URL in the address bar…These Direct Users must be from RSS feeds, bookmarks.

Another data to look at is number of comments.. I get about 12-15 comments in a day most of which are junk and some genuine ones.

1. Users could be clicking on blog posts on their RSS feeds and land on specific page.. They then read and/or post a comment and leave the page.

    

   This is the reason for bounce rate being so high. The users read the blog post and leave; hence bounce rate is not relevant figure to look at.

 

2. Users visit one page and leave, therefore the Average time spent calculated is wrong. Google can only track time correctly if users visit more than one page.The reason being that when a new page is requested from the server then the log files records the time at which the new page was requested from server by the same user.The difference in time at which the page 1 was requested and page 2 was requested is calculated as time spent on the site. So, consider a example when a single page was requested then time spent by user on that page is cannot be determined. Hence average time here is the time spent on site by the users who browsed more than 1 page divided by the total number of users who visited the page.

 

3. Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
   1. They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
   2. Users may be finding the site through Book-marking sites, Social media sites add it to their own bookmarks, where users directly find the link to inner page of the site.

Direct Traffic is the most targeted traffic, as these visitors really read the content on your website.
Most returning visitors return through Direct Traffic, especially when you are not advertising offline. They are ideally the best source for returning visitors, hence business can sell their content easily.

This Article is Originally found at praveenkodur.com

Copyright @ 2007 Praveenkodur.com

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Every Company into Online Marketing and advertising are concerned about their return of investment..

In Search Engine optimization the cost incurred are mainly is on effort, time, agency cost/employee cost. While as in Search Engine Marketing, the costs are Advertising cost(which is CPC, CPA, CPM etc) and the cost of time/effort.

It is necessary to track the value derived from Visitor Engagement on the site and revenue generated,

Visitor Engagement Tracking

Visitor engagement depends on objective and size of the business,

1) Defining Visitor Engagement depends completely on the content present on your web site.

a. On a Shopping site: Engagement has to be product sale, product search etc..

b. On a Blog: It is the number of comments posted, subscribing RSS feeds, Average time spent on the site, No of page views per visit can be engagement metric.

c. On a Corporate Business Site: People might just visit to pick up telephone number, address of the business. Therefore none of the metrics work.

d. On a News Site: It is number of subscription RSS,Email. It is again time spent on article, number of comments posted, no of page views per visit.

e. On a Forum site: Registrations are a value.

f. Software Downloads Site: Number of downloads are a value.

2) Getting Users to Subscribe your RSS feed is a value. These users will read your content more than repeat visitors. It shows the measure of content popularity.

3) Users favourite the page, site in social bookmarking sites, social network & media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com is also a value provided by SEM traffic.

4) If Links to your blog post increases from SEM traffic, due to people positing your link elsewhere in answers etc, then it is a big value..

5) Users might land on specific detail page pick up the phone and dial the number given on page. Measuring telephone call rate is necessary.

6) For smaller business getting targeted traffic to their website is a value, since it adds to brand building etc.. if not sales..

7) For larger websites, brand is already in place, hence traffic which has a direct effect on revenue is more of a value than mere traffic from.

If the mode of revenue generation is advertising then attracting just traffic, might be worth

For small shopping sites setting up ecommerce tracking is very useful and necessary

This can be done by using the option present in Analytics Settings à Profile Settings àEdit. Give details of Currency, decimal places etc.

Tracking Ecommerce Transaction through Google Analytics

Once you opted Ecommerce tracking, you must edit the receipt page, which is the page after transaction, install a script into this page passing the order value into the Analytics system. Google has provided a comprehensive material on setting up ecommerce transaction.

For other business they need to monitor, track the objective of SEM campaigns. If not the engagement of the visitor on the site.

Optimizing SEO, SEM Campaigns

1) Generally Specific Keywords have higher conversion rate but are lower in volume

2) It is important to add as many new specific long tail keywords as possible…it need effort in research on new keywords on regular intervals.

3) The Head of the keyword list is pretty much fixed with little variations but more effort has to be made in making the tail longer…..that is where maximum effort and time as it can change the ROI of the campaigns.

4) Competitive keywords are always costly and extra effort can change CPC minimally…

a. However the efforts has to be done on Landing page creation..

b. Small changes in conversion rate by new landing page optimizations can dramatically increase ROI

5) Constant Generation of long tail keywords and new keywords are always the key…

6) Using different landing pages for each set of keywords is very good

a. Domain name keywords can be landed on home page

b. Category Specific Headings can be landed on respective section on the site

c. Product keywords or Specific keywords must be landed on inner most pages of the site or respective product pages.

7) Make sure your website ranks for all brand terms including the misspellings of your domain name etc..

a. This can be done by creating a page with list of all misspelled keywords

Using Misspellings can be a great way of generating low cost traffic…but remember there can be 2 types of users typing misspellings

a. Users who accidently typed a misspelling, will most likely click on “Did you mean - Correct Spelling”

b. Users who are uneducated or illiterate,

So you need to decide on keeping such keywords based on the quality of traffic you generate

9) For Large Websites tracking of every keyword to last metric of calculating business ROI is essential…For example:

a. Banking website could track the number of savings accounts, number of loans applied per every keyword along other details such as location, amount of loan, income of user and other other quality measurements which will help determine the quality of keyword.

b. This will help them to make a decision of increase bid rates, adding more same kind of keywords etc..

10) Track phone Calls, If you are running a Click to Call Campaign then provide the keyword which generated the call to call center executive. After the call process collect the feedback of the user and measure the business quality of the keyword, which is again fed back into the Adwords campaigns.

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Analytics is a system that gives data about your site. Information has to be interpreted from that data. This Information acts as an aid is decision making.

Analysis of Analytics data begins with a given underlining problem or a query.

Avinash Kaushik’s blog, which contains wealth of Web analytics information, is a must read for every one in this field.

1) Identify the objective of analysis. Define the problem.

A) To Improve Campaign Performance

i) How to increase conversion rates

ii) Which pages have higher pageviews, lower bounce rates and why?

iii) Which geolocation, keywords bring most loyal visitors?

iv) Can you retarget your new users?

v) Which referral sites gives low cost per acquisition? why?

B) Where to spend more money?

C) Where to reduce spends?

D) Which content/product is highly popular? Why?

E) Do you need to add more content, if yes, how often? which category of content?

F) Why is my market share going down?

2) Segmentation of Users: Divide your users into different segments based on your business objectives

A) Identifying visitors based on amount of time they spend on your site

B) Identify users based on length of time on site.

C) Identifying users based on frequency of visits to your site

D) Identifying users based on depth of visits/ number of pages viewed

E) Identifying users by repeat purchases on your site

F) Identifying users by gender

F) Identifying users by geo-location

G) Identifying users by value of purchase on your site.

H) Any additional segment valuable to your website.

Determine the segments most critical to your business, you may also give weights to each segment, for example returning visitors who visit once every 2 days may be the most critical segment for your website. You should be able to find data on above segments and cross-segments.

In a travel site may be returning visitors every month making a purchase may be very valuable. In a shopping site a new or returning visitors who visit more than one page on the site may be more valuable than returning visitors browsing just one page. In an Adsense site the important metric to be looked into is the depth of each visit irrespective of visitor being new or returning.

Based on your business, you need to segment the group of visitors to be monitored for better targeting of your marketing communication.

3) Segmentation of your Market. Based on your competition, quality of users on the site, determine various segments useful for business.

A) Segmentation based on Product Demand.

B) Segmentation on seasonal factors

C) Segmentation based on competition on certain product, geolocation, service.

Web Analytics is used for below main purposes.

1. To keep a watch on regular Metrics of the site on a day-to-day basis.
2. Provide required information to Marketing Team, and other teams.
   1. To increase performance of Online Marketing Campaigns
   2. To identify, segment users visiting your site.
   3. Traffic Sources and amount of marketing effort needed on each medium
   4. Identifying medium for each segment.
3. To find evidence for occurrence of particular event/action. To help in creating better content in the website.
   1. Identify geo location of each segment of users visiting your site.
   2. Identifying content viewed by each segment of users.
   3. By identifying Top exit pages, Top bounce rate on pages.
   4. Average Time spent by users in each page.

Segment Visitors based on the value they provide to your business, then create Goals and work to attaining those goals along with strong measurement techniques.
Identify visitors who are valuable and loyal, customize services for them…

Find out which content on your site these each segment of visitors actually view and how long.

1) Understand the needs of your users’ who visit your website.
A) Understand the needs of each segment of users..
B) Determine the content each of your segment browses
C) Even remote need of small percentage of users must not be ignored. It might help you in creating new products which could get more such visitors back to your site.

2) Provide required information to Marketing Team, and other teams before finalizing strategies.
This would help them assess the amount of effort required on external advertising and internal optimization. Read more about Marketing ROI on Avinash’s Blog.

If you would like to grow your visitors by 100%, then push marketing can do it by 20% & pull marketing can get you remaining 80%.

Reading some of the Best Web Analytics Blogs is must read for anyone in this field, some of them are:

1) Web Analytics Demystified
2) Conversion Rater
3) Occam’s Razor
3) Web Metrics Guru
4) Analytics Guide

End of Article …………….

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Google is the first search engine which added value to a link given on a website for assessing the worthiness of a web page. This was the key philosophy in developing its Page Rank algorithm. It was able to identify the interconnectivity through different links connecting millions of web-pages across Internet, thereby giving a value to every web page.

Most online businesses which operate online perform competitive intelligence analysis tracking competitor products, websites, traffic through various tools available both free & paid.

There are very few companies which analyze the link structure of competitor websites. In an offline scenario, a company is always aware of its competitor’s reach & various business links.

Competitive Link Analysis

This is actually a process of identifying various websites which link to your competitor’s website. Analyzing these websites based

A) Theme of Content containing the link

B) Freshness of links,

C) Frequency of new link addition,

D) Number of links from each domain

E) Network Structure of Links

Advantage of Link Analysis

A) Insight into Competitors’ Online Strategies

B) Complete picture of some sources of traffic of competitor’s sites, referral traffic.

C) Competitors Business Links, Business Partners, Online Alliances.

D) Get insight into competitors’ online promotional activities.

E) Find out why your competitor is ranking in Organic Search?

F) Identify new methods of Content Promotion, Link Building.

G) Find new forums, answers programs where your target audience is active.

H) Find sites which are mostly talking about your industry, business.

I) Include these links in Custom Search Engines, so that you perform niche search or filtered sample size to perform your search.

Tools Required for Link Analysis

Build software which can find backlinks of any website,

a. Retrieve content from webpages that contains the link. Like Title Tags, Meta, Headings etc.

b. Compare different Urls.

c. Group Urls based in Location, IP addresses, theme of content.

d. Get Page Rank of the Urls,

e. Categorize Urls based on Domain names, Org sites, education sites. Etc.

f. Categorize Urls Based on number of pages present on that domain, i.e group urls based on small sites, big sites.

g. Ability to split Urls to extract just domain names.

h. Filter domain names, unwanted Urls.

i. Given a Keyword or a Phrase, your software should be able to find maximum occurrences of this phrase on these set of links, as anchor, as content.

Read my further posts on link analysis …..

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Alexa & comScore

In present day online industry there are numerous players such as companies, agencies, individuals, consultants & others who are coming up with innovative ideas technical as well as commercial in the online medium to make an impact to the end user’s life.

However, the one area where the online industry is lacking & the community needs to put its act together is creating a strong, robust, reliable, widely accepted analytic system which gives the both the end user as well as the community a benchmark to measure & evaluate the effectiveness of a website in the online market.

The presently available tools such as Alexa and comScore are both unreliable as sometimes it is found that they contradict each other while rating a website

There are numerous instances where Alexa and comScore ratings have been doubted by various people:

1) Matt Cutts on Alexa
2) Peter Norvig on Alexa
3) Business Blogs on Alexa
4) WebmasterWorld on Alexa
5) Alexa can be injurious to your wealth
6) Can you trust Alexa?

The point is the main motive behind installing an alexa toolbar is to drive up the ratings. The comscore figures are also seen are far away from the real numbers.

With use of new technologies such as AJAX, calculation of page views becomes even more complicated for the analytical tools.

My belief is there is enough room for any new company to enter and provide real value to end user, companies & other players in the online industry.

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