The Adido Digital Blog

We were lucky enough to take part in the latest SEOMozinar yesterday looking more at how analytics data (and in particular Google Analytics) can be used to improve SEO. I was expecting to get some tips and tricks on how to use the data directly to help tweak rankings but rightly the seminar looked at analysing your traffic and breaking it down into segments to help understand what traffic converts best and how to tie up your data to your SEO rankings. All in all it was a great talk we'll be looking forward to more in the future (although we feel Rand needs to look more into the benchmarking tool...)

Numerous things were mentioned in the talk and on the online chat and I've taken the liberty of posting four links which I felt were worth sharing to help improve your analytics analysis.

Exporting over 500 rows from Google Analytics to Excel
When it comes to analysing big amounts of data from popular websites with decent amounts of traffic, you might need to export more than 500 rows of data. Thankfully analytics works from querystring parameters so if you want to get more data then its pretty easy.


Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics past page one
The guys at Distilled came up with a way to track your Google ranking clicks in Google Anlaytics (something which we originally started doing a year or two ago) This is great data to get your hands on to identify opportunities of rankings that are driving traffic but are out of sight to the majority of most searchers. (around 75% of people don't go past page one!). Give it a spin!

Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics (the best way)
This is the holy grail article that you need if you're serious about viewing your rankings and traffic in one place using Google Analytics. By setting up this in GA you can get to see data about the page someone clicked on in Google and the phrase that they clicked on as well. This improves knowledge of conversions, traffic and rankings in one place which makes life a lot easier for anyone doing SEO.

Plugin for Excel to get Google Analytics data
I'd not seen this before but it looks like a pretty useful tool to help analyse analytics data for those who are confident with Excel. Getting to the root of your SEO problem sometimes isn't that obvious from looking at the graphs you get and by having the ability to play around with the raw data in this way, you can find out more about how successful your SEO efforts are. Worth checking out.

There were lots of great ideas shared by the SEOMoz team  and we're really excited about applying them to our clients sites in the coming weeks to get better visibility of the work we're doing and how to improve our SEO efforts.

If any other attendees of the mozinar had any links to share, please feel free to add them.

After the initial announcement from Bing that they would be introducing Twitter results to its search engine results, Google were quick to follow with the same breaking news.

The announcement was coined as to be Twitter’s saviour with the multi-billion dollar deal meaning that Twitter seems to be around for the long haul. Google launched the Twitter search result function on the 8th of December 2009 which was followed by a lot of interest and hype, especially within the online marketing and particularly the SEO industry. Google stated that they;


“believed search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data”

And now six weeks down the line it is interesting to see whether this statement is still relevant and whether the integration has been seen as beneficial.

So how will the Twitter integration be useful to users?

With Google often being the first turning point for most Internet users when they are searching for something. The integration of this relatively new and somewhat niche technology could cause confusion for most average users.

Google has changed continually since its launch and most notably in recent years with the Universal search to integrate images, maps, product listings, videos and news to name just a few, but have always kept a simple clean interface. Will this new focus on real time results prove to be too much for the ‘average Joe’?

Despite these reservations many believed that as the Twitter results will only be displayed when the search term deems them to be applicable (and ‘enhancing’ to the results), this integration will be more of a help than a hindrance. Twitter results are shown in searches where real time information might be more useful than historical results, such as for up to date information on breaking news, sport, weather conditions and possibly traffic updates.

With Bing we have seen the implementation of a tweet only search page whereas Google has chosen to integrate relevant tweets into the first results page within their own self contained box.



The placement of this box often differs with the search query and it is possible that this is attributed to;

1. Relevance of live feeds to search query
2. How recent the tweets are
3. Activity – a subject highly tweeted on in a short amount of time.


Although after searching term’s which I thought would bring up results with Twitter integration such as; today’s weather, road conditions, the word Twitter itself, SEO, ‘Twitter and Google integration’ and around ten more, my Google page was void of any real time Twitter results.

After going to Twitter and searching for one of today’s trending subjects then searching for it on Google, low and behold the mysterious tweet search box appeared. It seems strange that Google would only want to show tweet results that are already trending and prevalent on Twitter itself. Surely it could be said that those that would be interested in the integrated tweet results would be those that had tweeted them or been aware of the Twitter trends in the first place?

And why not show tweet results on other subjects or even on the subject of the Google and Twitter integration itself? Perhaps it is because it has happened in the past. It also seems that Google has scaled back how many search terms use live stream tweets since the launch, where even the search term ‘lights’ was resulting in a tweet box. This would suggest that even Google isn’t sure about the best way to use this data yet and they themselves are experimenting with different ways of implementing this integration to get the best end result for their users.


Google, Twitter and SEO – a happy friendship?

Short of Google creating their own live stream network, without this partnership with Twitter it could be argued that Google would have been left in the dust of Bing in the real time search world (ok possibly somewhat of an exaggeration there!). With advances in the huge adoption of social networks for both networking and socialising and Google’s failed attempts at being a part of this (despite purchasing Jaiku and internally developing Orkut), it seems that this partnership with Twitter is beneficial for both the Internet giants and not just, as suggested, in securing Twitters place in the online world.

So how can we use this for SEO?

Well if your search term has a tweet box you’re in luck. And if your tweet shows, it is a sure fire way to get a quick ranking, but for how long and at what value? It may be argued that as of yet the value of tweets ranking in Google for SEO purposes are minimal and cannot be measured and that with a rolling tweet box in which tweets change constantly the value if any may not be worthwhile. Whether Google ranks tweets like this in the future remains to be seen.

Google ranking factors for twitter

The integration of Twitter and Google has set many tongues wagging in the SEO industry. Here are just some possible factors that could be affecting ranking of tweets:

1) Reputable followers
2) Unique Content – Beware the ‘hashtag’, it’s possible these could be viewed as spam
3) Ratio between followed and following
4) Fresh Content – Regular and prominent tweeters
5) ‘Domain’ age – age of Twitter account
6) Experts – consistency throughout Twitter account and Tweets
7) Re-tweets – amount of re-tweets an account has received

These factors have been adapted from those that many SEO’s will be familiar with and implement to achieve normal Google rankings, but as with these, only time will tell how important ranking tweets will be within SEO and whether the factors suggested above could aid in getting your tweet to show.

If you’ve got any thoughts, please share them with us below.

To get the best from your SEO investment, timing is crucial. The thrill for most SEOs is seeing month's worth of hard effort paying off and getting to the top of rankings ideally when the search volume peaks. SEO is a bit like surfing in this respect. To get the best results, you have to put a lot of mostly manual effort preparing things and doing the same things over and over before you can enjoy the benefits. Unlike surfing however, if you get your SEO right, the fruits of your labour can last for months and years (and actually improve), rather than finishing in a heap like the gentleman pictured above probably did.

There is still a misconception about SEO with some business owners who still think that you can get to the top of Google overnight. While this is a trend which is starting to change, and despite our best efforts, we still experience a good amount of comments along the lines of 'we are expecting to see results in the next few weeks'.

Indeed, speaking to some business owners recently in some industries there is still a general consensus that just building a website will instantly start to generate leads every day! Unsurprisingly these industries are hardly cutting edge...

However, for those that are looking to get better results in the search engine results pages on the holy left hand side of the results, you can't afford to wait. If you ask any reputable SEO company about how long results will take to achieve most will tell you that it can take anything from week to years, depending on many factors (up to 400 according to Google). These factors will include many things such as;

• How competitive your industry is
• How much traffic there is on the phrases you are targeting
• How good your competitor websites are
  
• How old your website address is (domain name)
• How well you've maintained your website over the years (frequency of updates)
• How well built your website is (are their technical things harming your rankings?)
• How well written the content is (does it use the words you want to rank for in the content?)
• How many links point to your website
• How many internal links there are between each page
• and many, MANY more...

So if it takes months to get good rankings and there are dozens of things to fix to get your website liked by Google, when is the best time to invest and start fixing the problems?

Well, the easy answer is always NOW. If you can fix things with your website to help improve your ranking now then it is only going to work in your favour. However, this isn't always possible due to budgets, resources and skills. If these are in short supply then a more considered approach will be needed. Rather than spending on SEO when budget is available it makes sense to time a good SEO campaign with your searchers. To help find out when the searchers are searching there are a few free tools which can be used.

The first is to use Google Insights. If you've not used it before, it is a really powerful tool to help you see what happens in your industry from a search point of view.



The insights tool allows you to compare multiple variables against each other and to build up a great picture of the micro and macro detail of your market. One of the best things about the tool is that you can see graphically where the peaks in your market are. If you know your market well then perhaps this might not be very surprising but in some cases you might see some unexpected highs of traffic.

In the frivolous example above, we can see Pink Floyd had a spike of interest back in 2005 due to their appearance at Live8. Interest and searches for The Beatles increased at the end of last year when they released The Beatles Rock Band.

In your industry you may find that there is an overall increase in traffic or perhaps even a decrease due to the recession. If you need to get more of an idea about what's happening and how the market is working overall in your industry, this is a great place to start.

The second tool to use is Google Adwords keywords tool. In the same way Google Insights can show you about trends in your industry, Google Adwords keywords tool can help show you which months are busiest for your target phrases. You can use the keywords tool for free and play around with various phrases as you wish.


One of the big things you'll miss if you just use the tool when it loads is Search Volume trend. Use the drop down below as shown above and then click on the relevant option to show it on the table. Using the same phrases as above, you can see that last year, the Beatles had a big amount of searches in September as the insights tool showed us. The key thing about this tool however, is that it gives us numbers instead of graphs. We can use these numbers to try to predict rough traffic estimates for our SEO purposes. We can also sort these columns by clicking on them to get a comparison of various phrases for traffic.


If we can see here that a phrase has had a good amount of traffic in the last few months and has a peak in six months time of X no of searches, then we need to start thinking NOW about how to capitalise on this. Starting work a few weeks before the peak seasons starts is not going to give Google and the other search engines enough time to see your website in a positive light and push you up the rankings.

So if you can't afford to invest in SEO on an ongoing basis, perhaps these tools will be able to help you plan out when to start spending your budget and when to speak to a digital marketing agency to get your house in order.

I've done several presentations in the last few months on my usual subjects of SEO, PPC and social media which have gone down very well. These talks have ignited many peoples imaginations (not my words I must add!) to think differently about how they view their websites & online activity. Where I've had time, I've also discussed the subject of online brand reputation management, a growing issue for many businesses. Just the mention that it is possible has excited many people and when I've given advice on how to do it, it's sparked many more conversations.

With more and more people using social media in the UK and with web 2.0 sites being used more than ever before (where the user controls the conversation, not the website owner) it makes sense to keep an eye on what is being said about your brand and company online.

Monitoring your brand online is potentially a never ending job. But using some free Google tools, it can make your life a whole lot easier. If you're interested in finding out what is being said about your brand online, and have 10 minutes spare, I've outlined a step by step process below which should allow you to do just this. What have you got to lose? Potentially a lot if people are talking about your brand in the wrong way.

Note: There are many ways to do this, this is just what I believe to be the quickest to set up and most convenient way of keeping an eye on what is going on.

1. Go to Google.co.uk/ig
Like 90% of searchers in the UK, I prefer to use Google. If you didn't already know, Google allows you to personalise your own home page to be whatever you want it to be. To get to it, go to www.google.co.uk/ig



2. Get logged in on Google.co.uk/ig
If you've already got a Google account (you'll probably have one if you have a gmail.com or googlemail.com email address), then log in to your account. Otherwise click on the 'Sign In' link as shown below.



This will take you to a new page where you need to click 'Create an account now'



Fill in the form which creates your account and make sure that you leave 'Stay signed in' checked to on. When you're done, press 'I accept. Create an account'.



When you've done this, you'll get an email from Google as well as being logged into your new Google home page. You'll need to click a link which comes in the email to verify your account to allow your Google home page to work correctly.


3. Set Google.co.uk/ig as your home page
Rather than having to remember to check your Google home page each day to see if anything new has been added, it is alot easier to change your browser home page to be your default home page. Google home page is just the same as normal Google but with a few more bells and whistles added. Doing this will make make it alot easier to see what's going on, trust me. To do this in a newer version of IE, press 'Alt' on your keyboard which will show the menu bar. Then click Tools > Internet Options. If you're using Firefox, go to Tools > Options to get a very similar screen.



In the first box which shows up, enter www.google.co.uk/ig instead of whatever you have there currently and press OK. This means that whenever you click home on your browser from now on (or use the ALT + HOME buttons on your keyboard) you'll see your Google home page.

4. Adding Google alerts to your home page
Now that you've got a personalised page and have it set as your home page, you now need to add some alerts to the page so that you can see any brand mentions easily and quickly.

First thing to do is go to Google.co.uk/ig and click 'See your page' which will show your own page. This is the page which is now yours and that you'll be changing very soon. Google adds a variety of widgets to your page by default which you can delete or remove as necessary.



Now do a Google search for 'alerts'.



The first link (unsurprisingly) is Google Alerts. Click on the link to go to the alerts set up page.


If you are not logged in already, then you'll need to click on the link at the top and click 'Sign In'. When you created your Google account earlier, you would've received an email from them with a link to activate your account, which you need to have clicked to be able to sign in and make this process work.

Once signed in, enter the phrase that you want to monitor in the first box. In our example, we want to know what people are saying about our brand name, Adido, so we enter it into the box. Note, you can only enter and monitor one phrase at a time so if you want to check multiple phrases then you will need to repeat this process several times.




As we want to get this feed showing directly on our home page, we need to change the 'Deliver to' field to Feed.



Once we're happy with the feed settings, we press 'Create Alert' which will then generate the feed that we want to monitor. It will add it to the alert management centre which lists all of the alerts that have been set up in the past.



If you've just set up your first one, this list will look short so it'll be easy to find the one you've set up. What you need to get now is the feed data. Click on the 'Feed' link which will then show a long list of code, some of which might already mention the phrase you want to monitor (as shown here)



You need to tell Google home page about the feed that you've just created. To do this, click in the address bar and right click and press Copy. This will copy the unique address of the feed for you need.



Next, go back to your Google home page by clicking your home button on your browser or going to Google.co.uk/ig. On the right hand side about a third of the way down you'll see an 'Add stuff' link which you need to click.



Welcome to Google gadget world. This page lists thousands of different widgets or gadgets (or whatever you want to call them) that you can add to your home page to make your life easier. You can play around with this later, but for now, you need to go to the bottom left and click on the 'Add feed or gadget' button.



When you click on this, a larger box will appear which is where Google asks you to add your feed. Hopefully you've done nothing since copying the link so it works ok. In this box you can right click and press Paste which will put the feed your created and copied into the box. Press 'Add' and Google will then verify the feed that you've added and after a few seconds will come back with a tick to show that it liked it and that it is now added to your home page! Success!



Now go back to your Google home page and you'll see that a new widget/gadget has been added listing any mentions that Google has picked up about your targeted search term. Superb!


If your feed has been added but has no content listed, then it means that Google hasn't picked up anything recently. Don't worry, it can take some time (up to several days) for your feed to pick up content up so be patient, it will appear! If you want to see more than the three listings shown here, you can click on the small drop down box on the right hand side of the pale blue bar shown above and change the settings to be how you'd like them.

That's it! You've now got Google telling you about things it knows which match the search phrase you want to monior. If you want to know more, go through the same steps and you'll be able to build up a list of phrases to monitor quickly and easily.

What do you do with this data? If people are talking about your brand online then you should try and interact with them. Normally comments on blog and forums allow links to be posted which can come back to your website. The more links pointing to your website, the better and this will, over a longish period of time (most likely months), improve your rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Why not go further and pick up on anything relevant to your industry and comment on it? This will help build your name outside of your immediate network of contacts.

This tool is really, really helpful. We recently discovered a couple of potentially huge issues relating to the Adido brand using Google Alerts which we have taken action on. If we didn't have this set up we wouldn't have found them and we probably would be none the wiser to what people were doing with our brand. More on this in due course...

Any questions or problems, please leave a comment.

Considering that Google Adwords is the biggest pay per click advertising platform in the world, it is surprising that there aren't more spam emails being sent out trying to get unsuspecting advertisers to click on phishing websites to get login details of advertisers.

We've recently received several of these Google Adwords phishing emails so felt it was our duty to make more people aware of them so that they can be avoided. Here are just a couple the latest one that we've received.

PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINKS IF YOU RECEIVE THEM!


---------------------------------------------
hello dear customer,

You have a new alert from AdWords Alerts
Please use the link below to login:
http://www.adlwevordsx.com/Selects/Login/static/index.html?ref=77493138827

Advertise and Grow your business with Adwords

Yours truly ,
Google AdWords Team ©2009

---------------------------------------------



Here is another email we received asking us to enter our Google Adwords details to another spam/phishing website.



We hope that buy publishing these spam emails that people don't fall into the trap of clicking the link and falling foul of the spammers. We feel that unfortunately some people must click at some point otherwise the spammers wouldn't be so persistent. If you know of anyone who advertises on Google Adwords, why not tell them about these emails as well?

We've read a variety of stats on the open rates of spam emails ranging from 0.0001% through to up to 23%. Given the cost of sending an email is virtually zero, whether open rates are as low as 0.0001% or not it still makes it a worthwhile activity for the spammers to make money, albeit illegally.

Don't fall into the trap!

Please leave any questions that you have below.

On the 25th November, WorldPay changed their system, no doubt for security reasons and not just to irritate the web community but doing so did cause a few problems.

Basically, they disabled javascript from running on their servers. There's a page, the NotificationURL, which you create on the web site's server but that is pulled through by WorldPay, some tags replaced and then rendered from their server. We used to put the GA code here but alas, this is no longer possible.

So... you need a workaround. Now personally, I would work around it by not using WorldPay at all but sometimes these decisions aren't ours to make. Our first step was to do what any self respecting developer would do -> Google it.

I found this article:

http://www.tatvic.com/blog/google-analytics-worldpay-ecommerce-tracking/

Its actually very good and we used it as the principle behind fixing the problem but our implementation was a little different.
Mainly:
1) They use forms to post variables whereas we build up a querystring and redirect
2) They use... ugh.... PHP! :) We use ASP.NET.

My advice would be to read the article above first, admire the pretty pictures, understand the principle, try not to feel queezy at the PHP code or the occasional poor English and then come back here to see how to do it in our world.

.....

.....

Welcome back.

OK so hopefully by now you get the idea. We're wanting to modify the last page before we go off to RBS WorldPay so that we push the GA cookies through the transaction process. Then on completion, we retrieve those cookies and send them back to Google to be tracked.

Step 1: Send the GA Cookies to World Pay

Put javascript like this at the bottom of the page before the user is taken to WorldPay's Payment Page.

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
var save_url=pageTracker._getLinkerUrl("http://www.yourdomain.com/paymentComplete.aspx?key=value");
var aPosition = save_url.indexOf("&");
document.getElementById('<%=hfGoogleData.ClientID%>').value = save_url.substring(aPosition + 1);
</script>

Presumably you don't need telling that the UA-XXXXXXX-X needs to be replaced with your own Google Analytics Tracking number and that the domain name needs changing.

The _getLinkerUrl parameter is the URL of the page that the customer comes back to after being to WorldPay. Being that WorldPay doesn't auto-redirect the customer back to your website, you may not have had a page for this before so create paymentComplete.aspx. If you did have one already, just put the URL to that in here instead.

You may also need to change this line
var aPosition = save_url.indexOf("&");

The point of save_url is to have all of the GA cookies in the returned querystring. After you call __getLinkerUrl, it will be set to something like:
...sitedomain.com/paymentComplete.aspx?key=value&__utma=XXXX__utmb=XXX

In our case, we are already passing key=value so we're looking for the first & (highlighted) so that the substring only includes the GA stuff. If you don't have a querystring, you would search for ? instead, if you have multiple of your own querystring parameters, well then I'm afraid you need to write a little more javascript.

The other important thing in that javascript is:

document.getElementById('<%=hfGoogleData.ClientID%>').value = save_url.substring(aPosition + 1);

This is referring to a ASP.NET Hidden Field control that we've added to the page, just put this line somewhere near the javascript.

<asp:HiddenField ID="hfGoogleData" runat="server" />

All we have to do now is on the Submit to WorldPay button, grab the contents of that hidden field and pass it to WorldPay.

Thankfully WorldPay provide a useful feature whereby you can pass any custom variables and they will happily carry them and pass them back. You don't need to define them anywhere in WorldPay's system, the only criteria is that they start with MC_. This is our Submit to WorldPay button code.

Private Sub lnkPlaceOrder_Click(ByVal sender as Object, ByVal e as System.Web.UI.ImageClickEvent Args) Handles lnkPlaceOrder.Click
CreateOrder()
Response.Redirect(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("WorldPayTargetUrl") & "&MC_analytics" & HttpUtility.UrlEncode(hfGoogleData.Value.ToString))
End Sub

The only really important detail here is that you must URL encode the value in the hidden field as it itself is a querystring and we want it to pass as one parameter not several.

Step 2: Get the Customer Back

The NotificationURL is the one that WorldPay pulls off your server and processes, its defined in your Production settings in your RBS WorldPay account. If you had GA code in there before, take it out, all you really need here is a button that reads something like "Click Here to Complete".
Herein lies the weakness of this implementation, if they don't click this button then you'll never get the customer to come back to the site and therefore will not get your tracking data!! So.. make the button look important!!

Key thing to remember here is to UrlDecode the returned (posted) parameter from WorldPay, for example:

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/paymentComplete.aspx?key=value&<%=HttpUtility.UrlDecode(Request.Form("MC_analytics"))%>">CLICK HERE TO COMPLETE</a>

Step 3: Track It

If you're fixing an old problem, your old code was probably in the NotificationURL page so you just need to move it here instead but here's an example of what should be on this page other than a nice message saying
"Thank you for coming back so we could track your every move, much appreciated!"
You may wish to alter the wording.

Step 4: Test It

Put an order through and then sit back, have a nap and wait to see whether your GA tracking ever comes through.

Hope you found this blog useful.

Happy coding.

Ross Coombes
Technical Director

(Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex Features - Guardian)

If you asked ten people to look at a website and say if they liked it or not, you'd probably get a wide variety of responses from 'Hate it' to 'That looks good!'.

What is one persons Jedward, is another persons Leona (it pains me to use an X factor comparison but hey). There are very few areas of the Internet which provoke such emotion and talking points as web design and how a website should (or perhaps shouldn't) look.

I've been in many meetings with MDs and marketing managers of companies telling us how their websites should look and how it should be one way or another. In a large majority of instances, it is the case that they know their markets better than anyone and therefore have the ideas on how their website should look to get the best results.

But in some cases recently, we have seen that what is perhaps viewed as a bad website or something which looks old, boring or out of date actually outperforms websites which are cared for and have much attention & money spent on them. Some people might look at a website and say the design is rubbish. It's fine to have an opinion but if the person making the comment isn't part of the target market, how much value should you put on their opinion? By the way when we say outperform, we are talking about online sales and/or online enquiries which in 99% of cases is the most important measurable, not visits or even worse 'hits'.

How do we know this? Website statistics. An often overlooked part of the web design and build process (especially in our experience for smaller digital agencies) is the analysis of statistics. They help us to understand what works from a traffic perspective and also from a user point of view. Whilst some packages such as Google Analytics do an amazing job of telling us what is going on at a top level, they still lack detail at the individual (but there are ways to find this out).

What Google Analytics, and in particular, Website Optimiser, allow us to do is test out our theories on the design side of things to see what works best for each client. What we believe to be the 'best' design often isn't the best for the market. What we prefer and assume will work best, often wont. Ideally we should let the public our target market decide for us.

(Image from Political Carnival)

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no 'best' design and you shouldn't be thinking there is. There are now many tools available which allow us to test and tweak versions of web pages to try and find the most profitable or successful version a page. We shouldn't be stuck with our own prejudices and accept them as being the best, we should let website visitors decide for us. Perhaps if more of us thought like Simon Cowell (heaven forbid!) and let our own audience decide for us, in the way the public votes for their favourite X factor contestant, our websites might get better results.

Comments? Leave them below...