OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

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This is a common question - how do you reconcile the differences in web stats. It seems like every analytics program comes up with a different number, which can be frustrating for businesses of all sizes. It’s also a problem with paid search because the numbers you see from your PPC analytics may not match up with the numbers in Google.

OrangeSoda recently hired Clint Eagar who worked for web analytics firm Omniture. I asked him to write a post to try to demystify the discrepancies that are common between different web analytics tools.

I get a lot of questions about why there is a variance between how different web analytics packages report traffic results.

It’s All About Cookies
This has to do with how an analytics vendor uniquely identifies a visitor. Most analytics providers uniquely identify a visitor by a persistent browser cookie. When a visitor comes to a website the analytics code checks to see if the cookie exists. If the cookie does not exist it attempts to place it.

If it cannot place the cookie many analytics providers will ignore the entire visit. A large portion of the discrepancy between analytics providers comes into play when a web site cannot place this cookie. Some vendors will build a unique visitor cookie by combining user-agent and IP address. Some analytics vendors use third party cookies to uniquely identify visitors while others set a first party cookie and some visitors have their browsers configured to not accept third party cookies.

Establish Analytic Metric Definitions
The next thing you need to understand is how each analytics vendor defines a page views, visits and other metrics. One vendor may define a visit as a user session that lasts for at least one minute. Others will count an additional visit if the visitor views a page and then leaves the page idle for more than thirty minutes.

So, for example, say you’re reading a news story at CNN.com and get about half way through the article then you head out to lunch for thirty minutes and then come back to your open browser, finish the article and then click to read a new article. This will count as two visits – not one. Some analytics vendors will count this as only one visit. How does your provider track a visit?

How is a unique visitor defined? Is it a daily unique visitor (a visitor that is unique to the site today)? Is it weekly (a visitor that is unique to the site this week)? Is it monthly, etc? I think you get my point.

Tracking Code Execution
Other obstacles to having perfect harmony between analytics vendors could be loading time of site and the location of the tracking code JavaScript, does it load before page content or after. Did the visitor close the browser or click back button before the JavaScript had time to execute?

Web Analytics Is About Trends
Trend is king when analyzing web analytics data. More important than squabbling over a ten percent difference in how Google Analytics or Omniture reports a visitor you should instead be questioning: How many visits to do I have this week compared to last? How are different referring domains driving conversions over time?

Ultimately the differences between analytics vendors is just noise and you should never (did I say never?) attempt reconciliation.

Yelp is a great site for local businesses to get feedback and improve search results for their businesses. Most local business don’t realize how powerful online reviews can be. Reputations can be ruined online by a bad review (know RipOffReport?? Just try to get a negative report off your record!). At first you might not think twice about it but a bad online review can be devastating to your small business (see this example).

More people go online to find out about your business instead of looking in the phone book. A negative review could be one of the first search results that come up when someone types in your business name into Google. That’s why SEO for small businesses is wise - it’s a proactive way to manage your reputation on the Internet. You can create links in search results that go to trusted sites that speak well of your business.

Most local review sites don’t give you a chance to respond to a customer complaint. Yelp recently introduced some new tools so you can manage your business profile. You should claim your business at https://biz.yelp.com and then customize it.

Your gut reaction to a negative review can be to retaliate or react in a way that makes you look even worse. Here’s some practical advice to business owners - from Yelp.

This is great advice for blog posts or other forms of negative reviews that can become PR nightmares and catch you off-guard:

• DON’T review your own business anonymously or get your friends to do the same.
• DON’T overestimate the impact of a single negative review. It happens to even the best businesses. That said, if you see a trend of negative reviews, you may want to take this feedback and determine if there is a way to improve your business.
• DON’T lash out at the people who have written negative reviews about you. Tempting as that may be, we see that backfiring in some cases as the Yelp community may up the ante and even engage in “vigilante justice” by spreading more negativity. Try to remember, “the customer is always right”.
• DON’T offer incentives or payment for your customers to write positive reviews about your business on Yelp. This sort of “shilling” often causes ill will with both current and potential customers. In addition, these paid reviews violate Yelp’s Review Guidelines and will be removed.
• DO review your own business, clearly stating that you are the business owner. Full disclosure is important here, and will be critical in earning the respect of the Yelp community.
• DO take the feedback to heart but remember that each review is just one single opinion, sand it’s the entire set of the Yelp reviews together that really matters most.

comScore and Compete data puts monthly traffic to Yelp at 3.7 million and 9 million unique visitors.

OrangeSoda has a new partner. DoodleKit, is a free website builder that offers small businesses quality web sites that don’t require high tech skills like programming. The free sites are great for hobbies or people who just need a web site. If you want to be found in search engines, their business packages are optimized for online marketing.

Once a web site is built, the next question a business owner usually asks is how to market their web site so they’re found in search engines. I spoke with Heath Huffman, DoodleKit’s Co-founder, about search engine optimization. This is the number one request from their customers - where can they get help with SEO.

Here are some SEO features that DoodleKit offers their business customers to help optimize sites for search engines:

• Image alt tags - which are words that describe an image and therefore can be indexed by a search engine. It’s also valuable for search engine optimization when you can use keyword phrases to describe a graphic.
• Google Sitemap - DoodleKit has made it simpler to create a Google Sitemap according to Google’s specs.
• Search Engine Friendly URLS - rather than long or generic URLs, DoodleKit has made the URLs reflect the title of each page. Another chance to use keyword phrases you want to rank for.
• Built in analytics - so you can see what online marketing efforts are working and where your traffic is coming from.
• Meta tags - right now you can create unique meta data for your site. By next month you’ll be able to change the meta information for each page.

DoodleKit is just a few months old and will continue to integrate good SEO practices into their product.

Most of DoodleKit’s clients ask for additional expertise. That’s where OrangeSoda comes in. We can find the keywords that people are searching for and help your businesses rank higher for those words in search engines.

OrangeSoda also manages paid search campaigns priced for the small business. Google ads help you get immediate traffic to your web site (we also run ads on Yahoo and MSN). Here’s a helpful article on the difference between SEO and PPC.

Here’s the OrangeSoda press release.

Search Engine Land has a monthly column I like to follow called, “Small is Beautiful.” It talks about small businesses and their online marketing successes.
This month there’s an interview with small business owner who is a musician. Musician John W. Tuggle teaches private guitar lessons and tried making an ebook. He only sold about 5 ebooks in over a year - he was discouraged and ready to stop teaching.

He got help with his online marketing and leveraged new media like YouTube, podcasts, blogging, and Skype. Here’s the result of their work: http://www.learningguitarnow.com

Tuggle is doing well by making his local business global. He teaches people all over the world. Small businesses should take note - by thinking bigger.

He teaches more than 40 students, including one in Portugal, and he has 10 students on a waiting list. His podcast has been downloaded about 6,000 times in a few months. YouTube has been a great success - 40,000 views of all his videos in three months and people also buy after seeing the video.

He had a web site but it wasn’t very effective,

“…I focused on looks instead of content. I didn’t know anything about keywords or SEO….the blog, in my mind, had to be an integral part of the site…Everybody is doing blogs now and when I learned how to tag, ping, and bookmark, I got more web site traffic in one day than my other site got in six months. Now that got me excited!”

Here’s the secret too - he creates new products based on research. Not just on his gut feeling on how it will do, but by first looking at the market. Search engine optimization (SEO) is market research - seeing what people are looking for online and creating or spinning your product so it matches what people are searching for.

About his guitar blog:

“I check HitTail and look at the suggestions and what I need help in ranking for. Then I determine what keywords I need to focus on and figure out what I can write about that will interest people, while at the same time help me to get searched or improve rankings.”

His Small Business Online Marketing Tips:

• Create a good lesson or story for a blog post.
• Insert keywords into the blog title and post.
• Add pictures to keep it interesting.
• Social Bookmark Posts (Digg, Delicious, Mixx, and Propeller, Slideshare and Scribd)
• Identify keywords that are effective and use your keyword list in blog titles, Technorati tags, and YouTube videos.
• Ping using WordPress.
• Create a system that will let you bookmark social sites by pressing a button in your toolbar.
• Submit blog to blog directories.
• Spent 15 mins. a day finding friends on YouTube.

He also promoted his site on Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, and Merchant Circle. Read the entire interview at Search Engine Land.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options, but hire help and be willing to keep learning and take a step at a time.

After Chris Finken’s post last week about call tracking, I wanted to follow up with a post by Seth Godin about not only tracking but call quality. Godin is one of my favorite marketers - entertaining as well as enlightening. He just posted on how important a phone call is to your business.
More than a call, it’s a chance to build your brand, and learn from a customer. “The most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call…The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. She’s focused, interested, paying attention and willing to trust you.”
Normally a phone call and especially an email takes low priority, but as Godin points out, it’s an opportunity. He asks:

• Shouldn’t every single inbound call be answered in one ring?
• Shouldn’t there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website?
• Shouldn’t you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in?
• Shouldn’t you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute?
• Shouldn’t there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?”

He concludes: the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.

Have you ever wondered how to get your local business news listed in Google News? I certainly have. Google News is the second most popular news site - Yahoo News is number one (by a long shot). I use one or both practically every day.
The difference between the two sites is that Google uses an algorithm to display results. Yahoo has real people look over your release. Both hold your news for 28 days. That’s why I prefer using a press release distribution service like PRWeb - it’s a permanent link in addition to the news link. Still there is value to both.

Google News blog just posted some tips for getting into or banned from Google News:
Here’s what they say about the timing of your release:

“whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won’t affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster. Simply publishing the same story after another publisher won’t help. Additionally, our system is set up to detect duplicate content and promote the original source of a story.”

Here’s the rest of the tips about getting into Google News.

Online PR - an SEO Tool for Small Businesses

Often the small business owner doesn’t think in terms of news or as news as a way to getting into search engines. However, like most local internet marketing, there often isn’t a lot of competition. That’s partly because each local business is unique already. And because most local businesses haven’t caught on or don’t have the resources or know-how needed. And that’s precisely why we’re here.

OrangeSoda local internet marketing offers call tracking services for local businesses so you always know who is calling. We provide detailed reporting so you can see who’s calling, here are some stats we track:

• who called and when they called (including if it’s a person or a business)
• the phone number called
• number of rings before call was answered
• Call duration

Internet Marketing and Call Tracking ROI

Businesses are interested in Internet marketing for many reasons - metrics, measurement, tracking, ROI…the list goes on and on. The real reason search engine marketing works is more than just Return on Investment (ROI). It’s the fact that you can track exactly what brings the best results.

Some Customers Still Prefer to Call First

We may forget that there is still a percentage of the world that prefers to order by phone. They prefer to talk to someone before ordering from a website. Of course it depends on the industry you are in but there is no doubt that having a phone number can’t hurt.

Service Businesses Depend on Phone calls

Service businesses already realize the power of a phone call because you can’t go to a dentist via a checkout button. You can’t get your carpet cleaned by filling out a contact form and you certainly can’t get your back aligned via email. So a phone number is still very much a necessity. If you are an ecommerce company or anyone doing any type of internet marketing for your business, you shouldn’t forget the power of a phone number (and the calls that result).

More Customers Find Local Businesses Online and Then Call

With the continued growth of Local Search, it’s more and more evident that search engine users are looking for the contact information of their local restaurant, attorney, pizza place, video game store etc. Tracking each and every call that your website generates can only help a business owner realize the value of their internet marketing.

Call Tracking Number Lets You Measure Calls from your Web Site

You can set up a phone number exclusively for your website. Then you can know you’re getting 20 calls a week and that 1 in 3 calls lasts more than 1 minute tells you something. Questions are being asked and appointments being made. Your call tracking number you can match your call tracking montly report with your appointments for the month and see where the names, phone numbers, etc. match up. That’s called more business.

Call Tracking and Ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses can keep track of phone orders. With a call tracking number, you can see how your internet marketing efforts impact your website conversion rate. You can see if your phone orders have increased by X percentage, and that means making better decisions on your internet marketing success.

Call Tracking for Other Small Business Marketing

You can get the exact same metrics and results driven marketing by implementing call tracking for your offline marketing. Just add a trackable number to your billboard, newspaper ad, Yellow Pages listing, radio ad, magazine ad, etc. It doesn’t matter how or where you market, you need to track results and call tracking is the piece that unifies your different marketing campaigns.

Google has started running paid search ads that have videos. The ads were announced last month but are now popping up in search results. I’ve looked for some examples but today I’m not finding any. I wonder if that has something to do with all the news about this and how advertisers pay whenever someone views an ad.

As of yesterday, Search Engine Land reported that you could see the ads by typing in search queries like: BlackBerry, AT&T, cell phone or laptop. Today I can’t find a single video ad. The ads show up on the top sponsored listings (the paid ads on search engines that show up in the box before natural results start). There’s a small box that says, “watch commercial” or a similar pitch and if you click it, you can see a video.

Advertisers pay if someone watches the ad or clicks on the ad to go to their web site, but won’t be charged for both. Since I can’t find a live example, here’s a screenshot from Search Engine Land:

If you have tried a Google AdWords video ad I’d love to get your feedback. I assume for now, that not many people have tried it. Where I see it being ideal is for movie trailers or even “how to” videos for very specific products. In other Google news, Google now has demographic bidding options for AdWords - so you can show your ads to specific age groups (over the age of 17) or gender.

As I write this I’m reminded of something one of our trainers says: paid advertising - easy to start, complex to manage. That’s especially true for small retailers, which are OrangeSoda’s forte. We manage Google, MSN, and Yahoo PPC advertising through one tool and our clients can log in to get stats on clicks, conversions, and see how their campaign is performing.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization or SEMPO says the search marketing industry has healthy growth, despite any worries about a recession in the US.

Their 2007 State of the Market survey talks about how “print magazine advertising, website development and other marketing functions…” are growing “as marketers essentially shift the portions of their spending pie, following consumers as they increasingly rely on search engines to conduct pre-purchase research.”

The data is based on questions answered by 867 search engine advertisers and SEM agencies.

Here are key findings about the state of the search engine marketing industry:

• The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
• Marketers are decreasing their spend on print magazine, website development, direct mail, and other marketing campaigns into search engine marketing.
• Paid placement captures 87.4% of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5%; paid inclusion, .07%, and technology investment, 1.4%.
• Google AdWords remains the most popular search advertising program (with almost 90% saying they advertise on Google).

The Kelsey Group recently blogged about the local business search marketing industry. As I’ll blog about in the next post, the local internet marketing market is growing even faster than expected. More local businesses are going online, shifting their marketing budgets, especially to paid search.

Here is some good news from search engine marketing companies that focus on small businesses:

• ReachLocal has a $305 million valuation based on a $55 million round of financing
• Privately funded OrangeSoda local internet marketing company signed on a new partner: “At the same time, Orem, Utah-based Orange Soda got on the map with Freedom Communications, the publisher of The Orange Country Register.” As we mentioned before, we also won an award as the top business in Utah County based on growth.
• New York-based Yodle got $12 million in funding this year.
• WebVisible, took in $12 million in new series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, an existing investor. WebVisible customers include AT&T, Earthlink and McClatchy.
• WebsiteBiz Internet marketing agency ranked as the 87th fastest growing private company in the Southeast region of the United States and is listed on Inc. Magazine’s 2007 Southeast 500.

Also, OrangeSoda’s CEO Jay Bean made the 2008 list of the vSpring Capital Top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs, also known as the v|100. vSpring is a venture capital group that provides early growth funding. Looks like they haven’t put the full list on their web site yet, so find it here.