OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

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Seats are filling up quickly to hear OrangeSoda’s Chris Finken speak at WOMA - the Wasatch Online Marketing Association which is based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

If you’re nearby, you can join us this Friday, September 12^th from 12-2pm at Westminster College, in Salt Lake City, Utah. We’ll be in the Foster Building, Room: 101.

Chris Finken will speak about: Pay-Per-Click Search Best Practices

Specifically he’ll talk sharing knowledge across multiple search engines and platforms. So what can be learned from Yahoo to help with Google and visa versa.

Lunch is included. If you want to go, hurry and RSVP by Wednesday, Sept. 10th. To RSVP Email  rsvp@wasatchonlinemarketing.com.

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.

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.

Jay Bean, OrangeSoda’s CEO told us the good news a few days ago:

“We are very excited that OrangeSoda was named the top Startup in Utah County last night as part of the UV 50 awards.

Utah Valley Business magazine researches and names the top businesses in Utah each year. This is a great achievement being named the top startup company out of the hundreds of companies they looked at in 2007.”

The picture is the more formal one, but I don’t have a copy of the best picture, you’ll have to see on the site. So picture our founders sitting with up at the table with bottles in their hands. No, not beer bottles - bottles of orange soda.

In the article Jay admits to drinking Mountain Dew, talked about how we give away Orange Schwinn bicycles, and how revenue has grown an astounding 12,000 percent in a year and a half.

OrangeSoda started and continue to focus on internet marketing for small businesses.

I wish I could grab the great photo they took but the picture on the site is chopped up into slices. I think we better call Utah Valley magazine and pitch them our services.