VijayWeb.com

Here is the best example on Real-time optimization of marketing spend online.   This is really superb.  Marketers can count on availability of such tools very soon.  The demo starts after the second minute in the video:

More often, the three factors that influence a purchase decision are “Cost, Convenience and Trust”.  It is a question that we need to ask ourselves when doing analysis to increase the sales or your website sales conversion rate.

Cost: When was the last time you ordered a product online or offline without comparing if the price you are paying is comparatively reasonable with the similar products available in the market.  The majority of customers are price conscious, when they have made a decision to buy some “x” product or service…we really have to ensure them that the price they are paying for the product is reasonably okay.  Building a pricing analytics process within your current organization and providing quick access to some of the price comparison information would not only persuade the user to make a quick price decision but also improves your business’s credibility score in the eyes of the customer.  Make sure you provide information upfront on all costs that are going to be incurred for the prospect upon his/her sales transaction.

Convenience: When the visitor has already made a decision to buy a product or service. It is imperative that you take him/her thru entire purchasing process more seamless and friction less. HFI stresses the importance of convenience with a rat box below.  If the cheese is the product offering and electric grid is the purchase process on your website.  Users take pain and order something if the product offering is too enticing, reducing the friction in the shopping cart would improve the conversion rate dramatically.

Trust: Trust is the only big thing in entire purchase transaction process.  It doesn’t matter how cheap price the product is being offered and how easy and persuasive the user experience on the site would be, unless the visitors reassured on each step in the shopping process..you are going to loose him.

Building Trust is not just Branding your business but also ensuring the user that they are protected while transacting with your website.

Here is a nice tool called “Personas Web built by MIT Lab”   This tool analyze the content snippets avilable on the internet and summarizes how you are seen online at a high-level. http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

Analysis in Process:

Final Summarized Report:

You can also find out what people think about you brand by just entering the brand name in the text box. I guess it doesn’t work if there is only one word…like hewlett packard works instead just hp.

I found some thing that got my attention today – it is an ad on economic times website.  I immediately clicked and surprised to see it is a website that sells Diversity Visa Programs Application submission.  And, I immediately closed the browser.  One “ad dollar” was wasted for the business that was advertising.   I am wondering if we count such $’s how many million it would add upto.  And, this is served from advertising.com network.

Diversity Visa Program or Green Card Lottery is run by USCIS which is a governing body for issuing US Visas.  But, I am not eligible for the Diversity Visa Program or any Indians.  It would be a waste of money in targeting Indians for this service. In fact, for any service or product that we would like to sell – It is always important we select the right audience.  This is where the analytics play an important role.

10-years back we all excited with the buzzword “targeting”, we all had said targeting makes the difference between traditional and online advertising.  But, are we really targeting NOW?

With the advancements in technology we are able to identify where the user is located, even based on browsing behavior we are able to say if the user can be a male/female, and other demographics, probabilities of really converting that user to a lead or  a sale.  Spending a portion of the ad-budget really in some exciting tools would really produce greater results with less ad-budgets.

When comes to Advertising especially if you are offering some niche solutions, it is always recommended to go for qualified traffic than un-targeted traffic that hits in volumes.

Usability Analytics: The four most key factors measured in website usability testing include: learnability, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.  Though, it is not a perfect alternative for the traditional one-to-one usability testing methodologies, but very economical and fast when we already have web analytics data with us in form of reports example, Google Analytics Data.

Learnability:

Effectiveness:

Efficiency:

Satisfaction:

Tag Cloud for VijayWeb.com

Tag Clouds became very popular in Web2.0, though tag clouds are started widely for secondary website navigation  mechanism…it is being also used for various other fields. I feel it is a great tool to visualize the Search Keywords in one small graph like above.

There are free tools popping up for us to leverage this technique for Search Analytics.  One can also use this tool to visualize the theme of the web-page content and accordingly use for Search Engine Optimization benefits.

Free Tag Cloud Tools for Search Analytics.

• http://www.wordle.net
• http://tagcrowd.com

There is also a free script available from IBM to download and run from our side.  I am posting the direct download URL for the file (you may have to register and login if the link doesn’t work for you) – Click here to download IBM Tag Clouds Software

URL means Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it.

An URL structure generally includes a domain name, folders, files and extensions in it.  We are going to discuss the best practices in URL Structure for the benefit of SEO, Usability and Branding too.

A domain name has several levels to it.  In domain name “www.vijayweb.com ” -  “.com” is called as the Third Level or Top Level Domain, “vijayweb”is actual domain and it is also called as Second Level Domain, and finally “www” is just a sub-domain.  We use www as prefix or a subdomain more commonly as the interent has been branded in that way from the beginning. It is just a custom than a technical requirement.

Choosing a domain name was the most difficult part in the beginning of the DotCom story than it is now One had to really do a lot of research and brainstorming, even taking consultants assistance to really choose a right domain for new dotcom business.  The main factors that were used to rate “a domain name should be easy to remember, easy to recall, easy to pronounce, spell, write” are some of the main requirements to choose a domain. But, with Web2.0 they all have really not a big stand and any catchy word will work, for example, reddit.com, digg, del.icio.us, youtube, flickr etc.,    Earlier there was great option to depend on the domain name for branding the business or service, now with all the domain names are gone with cybersquatting, we are left with minimum options.  Now, we are left with chosing a catchy word and brand the domain name with the unique solutions we are offering.

Best Practice: Choose a Catchy Word, still keep in mind the basic rules (easy… that is usability).  Be particular about choosing a country specific TLDs (top level domain) if your target audience belong to specific countries.  Country specific TLDs are one of the factors that will win Search Engine Ranking Positions in your country specifc search engines while still play in the global search engines.  (I don’t really see it is important to choose a keyword rich domain  that doesn’t meet the above prequalifiers unless you are building the site specifically for the purpose of search engine rankings).

After Domain Name,  a url structure can have one or more levels  to it. And, this is where the most difficult and confusing part as there is a direct SEO benefit.  There is no one formula works for all when creating search engine friendly urls for SEO purposes as there are only 10 positions every other person want to rank in.

There are different SEO URL structures in practice:

1. Creating content theme by having all similar content into one folder or category.

2. Having all static and dynamic files originating from the root of the domain.

3. Use Keyword rich file name and folder name.

4. Not keeping more than 2 or 3 levels down in the url.

5. Having static pages with no query string parameters

6. Having underscores between the words

But, these are pretty old practices…with the social web in web2.0, SEO will also majorly depend on how users are liking the content and sharing on the web.

Best Practice: While keeping the above guidelines in mind, thinking about the user and how he behaves after he lands and what you want him/her to do on the site would give great inputs in how you can align this with the above SEO practices.  Providing seperate identification in the URL for important sections and features of the site would enable visitors to remember the urls and land directly to the pages. Provide short and easy to copy and share urls.

Opinion Cloud is a firefox plugin for YouTube.  It got a very interesting features which summarize the comments into positive and negative while showing the comments in a nice tag cloud.

This tool though gives the feedback on the video, it can be better used to infer the feedback on the product or service.

You can install Opinion Cloud plugin from firefox website:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11283

Will Advertising Produce this kind of response?

88 Million Views
199K 5-Star Ratings
150K Comments

Not Just that…People started making Spoofs

TV Interviews:

Are we ending up reporting those 2 digit traffic nos. from the ad spending?
It is ime to think about “Stop Selling and Start Helping!”

Role Based Web Analytics Reports – Know which report you should be looking at!

Unless you are a one-man army, you may not require every report that can be generated in your web analytics tool set.  I have seen people looking at all kinds of reports all the time and miss the metrics exactly that require their attention.  I believe no one role/person is required to monitor more than one or two metrics over a period of time. And, I wonder why we should be ending up creating hundreds of those colorful slides every year…which only misses the focus on the things that should be taken care.

You could be a Web Developer, Server Administrator, Usability Professional, Web Content Manager, Search Engine Optimizer,  Search Engine Marketer (Paid),  eMail Marketer, Online Store Manager…there is something that you can use from web analytics to optimize for better.  All  you need to do is define the metrics on what you do, and be aware on how it is contributing to or from others metrics.

Creating Role Based Web Analytics Reports in different Levels would help in increasing the focus on those specific defined metrics and also you know exactly on what you would need to concentrate to improve the metrics that you are responsible to.

Let me put this in a pyramid format for better understanding, I am calling it as “Web Metrics Pyramid” -

Let’s try to apply this Web Metrics Pyramid to one of the web business function or a role… with Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Metrics -  It is very important for the businesses and search engine optimizers to define their success metrics.  Like with any function, the reporting frame-work should be split to the Role…which we are calling as “Role based Web Analytics Reports”.

On a typical case, I am taking two roles for Search Engine Optimization – Business and Search Engine Optimizer.

Businesses may not be interested in how a specific URL is ranking in Google rather they would be very interested in how are they doing in Search Engine Optimization as a whole and what’s its contribution in the total traffic acquisition to the website and how is it compared to competition.  (As a sidenote: Make sure you only measure qualified traffic using the metrics like Committed Visits).  The metrics would be “Share of Traffic” or “Average Variance from the Competition”

Search Engine Optimizers on the other hand would pay attention to the site-level metrics for monitoring the trends and page-level metrics for re-optimization purposes.

On both the stakeholders above, it is important they define what is important to their business and objective of the SEO Program and determine the success metrics.  For example, for big brands it could be branding which is objective of the SEO program….so ranking is relatively important to actual visits from search engines as it gives free impressions for their listing in the search engines.  However, for a small biz owners it is $ more important.  He/She may not be interested to get traffic that doesn’t convert to $ at his/her website.  For them it could be “$ earned per Visit from Search Engine “would be a great metric.

Keeping both the stakeholders above in mind, I am creating the web metrics pyramid for SEO. In the above example, let’s assume business targets to generate US$10K a Month from the search engine traffic…so I put “Revenue as the success metric in the Level 1”

The above SEO Metrics Pyramid is created for illustrative purposes only the actual metrics vary based on the business requirements.