Twitter, online marketing and online advertising

Website Optimization and Conversion Rate Boost

Web Analytics Is In Details

Firefox vs. IE: Web Analytics Perspective

What is web-analytics?
Who are web analysts anyway?

Web Analytics of Most Popular Browsers

Own Your Own Web Analytics

Browsers Market: Web Analytics Report

Web Analytics Done Right: Know Your Customer

Crawling Web 2.0: Content Hunt

Other Entries

Sergei Krylov | 2010-06-19

Are Twitter and similar microblogging services effective for online marketing and online advertising?

Currently, Twitter is very popular, and microblogging services - clones of Twitter - spring into existence like mushrooms after rain. (Here I'll talk about microblogging, implying Twitter, and vice versa: speaking of Twitter I mean microblogging services in general.) This is a "fashion trend" that many strive to follow as fashion. It would seem, Twitter's popularity speaks for itself. It is hard to imagine that such a popular service that half of the Web is buzzing about (for example, this post about the Twitter itself can be "tweeted" in just one-click) would not be effective for the purposes of online advertising and online marketing. But let's not jump to conclusions - the reality is never brighter than it seems at first glance.

Let's start with skepticism. First of all, the effectiveness of Twitter for online marketing and online advertising campaigns depends on how popular the Twitter is. And this is primarily determined by how universally attractive Twitter as a way of communication. And here I must say that not all active Internet users understand the benefits or even the meaning of Twitter. You can often hear something like this: "Well, what should I write there? That I am drinking tea at the moment? It's ridiculous. A nonsense!". And there are many a like skeptics.

Microblogging, including Twitter, compete with other modern means of Internet communications: the (already) usual blogs, social networking websites and instant messaging (eg, ICQ). And, accordingly, as a means of online advertising campaigns and tool of online marketing microblogs, including Twitter, also compete with those similar services (ie, the same conventional blogs, social networks, instant messaging etc.).

If you consider Twitter only as a means of "tracking" the sources of information, there are alternative instruments available: subscriptions to Atom/RSS feeds, including that ... Read more...

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Sergei Krylov | 2009-07-13

Conversion is all about getting right people to meet right products/services.

Thus, there are no other ways to boost conversion except make those people find products that they need on your site. Contrary, if web marketing efforts are managed poorly enough to bring people who do not need your product, or product is not good, nothing under the sun will save the conversion rate.

Those are fundamental factors that determine conversion rate levels and they are orders of magnitude more important than website optimization and conversion fine tuning. I can probably write the whole book on it. It is up to online marketing strategy, advertising expenditure and lots of work to establish this conversion fundamentals.

But imagine that you've spend a lot and worked hard to make right people to meet right products that they need on your site. The conversion process is almost done. But at this point conversion process is not yet complete and – most importantly! – vulnerable to few otherwise minor factors that may prevent converting those visitors into buyer, killing hard-earned conversion rate and revenues. These factors, if neglected, may put at risk entire investment into online marketing campaigns, SEO, PPC, social marketing, brand awareness building and many more.

Although this factors are not of strategic, fundamental importance, they still very important. They are subject of conversion process optimization and tuning. In fact, this is what we mean when we talk about website optimization.

Here they are – two major groups of those factors (most specific factors that various optimization publications mention actually fall into one of theses two groups):

Copy. Even if you know for sure that your site offers best products/services that your visitors can ever find, remember that they cannot read your thoughts. Visitors of the site should be presented with all information relevant to their purchase decision easily and instantly. If there is ... Read more...

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Sergei Krylov | 2009-07-09

Devil is in details – this is about web analytics.

Here comes the illustration: I just came across interesting post (read them all just after you read my post – this way will save you a lot of time and puzzle) Does Google Analytics overstate the value of search? by Paul Cook, in which he refers to original post by Francois Derbaix in Spanish (most of discussion takes place here, see translation) or in French (see translation).

What that issue is all about?

It is all about details and how important they are in web analytics. Web analytics is everything but trivial, simple, clear, despite it may deceptively look as such.

Essentially, as it happens, people misunderstood the intricate tiny little details of the way web analytics tools work. Myriad of theories (sure including conspiracy), calls for remedies and lengthy discussions (in multiple languages) were born immediately and spread like fire. That is natural, when everyone is in the same bot – everyone depends on just a single mass commodity web analytics tool and understandably feels uncomfortable and paranoid about that.

Some people wrongly decided that Google has intentionally set up its cookie window to 6 months to "impose conditions that make its services look good when you analyse your site traffic". Although this specific conclusion cannot entirely be rulled out (hey, its a competitive world after all), I can assure you that premiss is entirely wrong. The reason is very simple. Even if we assume that the first click gets attribution (which is VERY unreasonable assumption, see below), the 6 month cookie would same way result in sticky attribution for ABSOLUTELY ANY campaign, not only Google. So, it is not likely to be a conspiracy from Google.

Why the assumption of the first click attribution is wrong? Because otherwise web analytics reports would portray 6 month old source campaigns in current reports, making web analytics information completely stale. No ... Read more...

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Pavel Lebedev | 2009-07-08

As I said in previous post, web analysts should be aware of the differences in usage patterns of most popular browsers to be able to understand behaviours exhibited by specific groups of visitors.

Here comes the illustration. Very simple analytics uncovers significant differences in composition of audiences that use different popular browsers. (No heavy analytics yet, although the heavy analytics of TrackSite reveals even more interesting facts, patterns and anomalies.)

First, historic introduction:

The version 7 of Internet Explorer was released in October 2006, the same month as Firefox 2.0 was released. Until then previous versions – IE6 and Firefox 1.5 – were ruling the world. Firefox 3 was released on June 17, 2008, about a year ago. And recently, the IE8 was released on March 19, 2009.

Needless to say that upgrade process have taken place within user base of each browser during that time. So, what is the result of those upgrade process? Lets see:

IE versions pie for 100 last days on July 8, 2009 (TrackSite Web Analytics):

Firefox versions pie for 100 last days on July 8, 2009 (TrackSite Web Analytics):

So, what we can see? The antiquated IE6 that was first released in 2001 and that was around before the above upgrade story begun in 2006 is still present in very "healthy" quantities – more than a quoter of all IE browsers. In striking contrast, the Firefox 1.5 that was around together with IE6 at the beginning of the upgrade story in 2006, has completely vanished, leaving only trace amounts behind, so Firefox's pie has only 2 slices versus 3 slices of IE pie.

Even more surprising! The share of Firefox 2, successor of vanished Firefox 1.5, is now 3 times smaller than that of ancient IE6. Would you believe this?

Furthermore, if we assume that recently released IE8 has absorbed only share occupied by IE7, then we can add together IE7 and IE8 to estimate the pre-IE8 share occupied by IE7 (because IE8 may ... Read more...

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Alexander Kononov | 2009-07-07

Web analytics is a fundamental, cornerstone part of web marketing.

Accordingly, any qualified web marketer is a web analyst by definition, i.e. possesses web analytics skills and knowledge.

At the same time, web analyst job means specific specialization of web marketing, special type of web marketer, along with other specializations, like SEO, SEM, online (PPC, search, contextual) ads campaign management, blog marketing, social and viral online marketing, etc.

The main task of web analyst is collecting and analyzing performance data of various online marketing campaigns, analyzing interaction of visitors with those online campaigns as well as entire web site (seen as online marketing instrument), with an aim of providing relevant and reliable information for other members of online marketing team.

Accordingly, web analyst is a web marketer, who specializes in web analytics and interacts with other marketers in online marketing team. In other words, web analyst's specialization does separate into standalone job only in the team of marketers , where each web marketer specializes in his/her own area of online marketing expertise. But still, each web marketer is at the same time web analyst by necessity, even though his/her job title sounds differently.

Web analytics combines knowledge of internet technology with knowledge of marketing communications. (What a beautiful combination!) Thus, web analyst (as well as any other web marketer) should understand both web technologies and marketing in general.

Qualified web marketers in general, and web analysts in particular, are relatively in a short supply on the job market, since despite there are many marketers around, only small fraction of them has substantial knowledge of internet technologies, and vice versa. This is because Internet is relatively new technology that grows exponentially and explosively just for last decade or so. Educational programs and job market simply did not have enough time ... Read more...

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Pavel Lebedev | 2009-07-06

As I said in the previous post, I have Firefox, Opera, IE, and Chrome installed on my desktop and use each of them from time to time. This post will be about some relative merits and drawbacks – as I see them – of those four most popular browsers. So lets start from the less used browser (as shares pie suggest), Chrome.

Chrome

Chrome is the browser developed by Google based on open source WebKit browser technology. Its most appealing property is simplicity and carefully designed GUI and "chrome layout", and it is a very strong appeal, in fact. In particular, I myself love that Chrome uses the window's title bar at the top for tabbing. The window's title bar is usually underutilized in most cases, and such solution saves quite a lot of precious vertical visual space (especially when working on laptops with relatively small screen).

I tried to find similar chrome layout for Firefox as extension, but failed. A couple of Firefox extensions attempt to produce similar GUI, but they luck its main feature – use of window's title bar.

Apart from more efficient use of visual space, it is perfectly intuitive and logical to have tabs bar at the window's top title bar, not where most browsers currently have it (just above the document's space). This is because in such layout specific tab visually "incapsulates" everything that relates to its content: location bar, menu commands that apply to document opened in that tab, etc. Such chrome layout is more intuitively understood at subconscious level, so it is more optimal.

Another Chrome's attraction is ultrafast new V8 JavaScript engine. It is really ultrafast. In several benchmark tests, V8 is faster than JScript of Internet Explorer (many times), SpiderMonkey of Firefox before version 3.1 (but TraceMonkey of Firefox 3.1 and above is equally fast as V8), and JavaScriptCore of Safari. And it is really very important, because Web 2.0 evolution, the advent of JavaScript Ajax libraries/frameworks ... Read more...

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Oleg Tulin | 2009-07-01

What if doing business online is only (small) part of the story -- what if our business is more of bricks-and-mortar? Then it may not be optimal to hire in-house staff to run online channel directly -- instead, it may be optimal to hire some Internet agency to take care of our online presence.

Internet agency is an outsourced pool of competence that businesses can use without incurring too much costs to build their own competence in cases when it is not likely to pay off. Folks from Internet agency are busy reusing their expertise running online marketing for multiple clients at the same time, so they are more efficient in their job than similar underutilized in-house staff and in theory they should cost less for businesses with small online presence. Internet agency specializes in online marketing, SEO, SEM, building and maintaining websites, etc. Sometimes they also provide some solutions from web analytics vendors as well as do web analytics for their customers. In general, since there is a synergy between all these functions and they require specialized expertise, those are better coordinated in a single unit -- agency or in-house department.

Regardless of the fact that Internet agencies may do their job well and provide good outsourcing, there is one point that clients should take care of when building relationships with them. Even if online channel is not a major channel of our business for now, it may still be a strategic resource. We should not allow Internet agency to end up owning that resource. And that may happen very easily, since creating dependency is the easiest way for service provider to secure us as clients. One should take care to ensure that every intangible asset, such as systems, data, registrations, access codes, reports, etc., created by agency for us is really transferred to us, not remain with the agency. The contractual relationships should be built accordingly.

To the full extent this applies to web analytics. Ideally, ... Read more...

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Pavel Lebedev | 2009-06-29

Monitoring browsers market of the site is probably the most simple web analytics that has immediate direct value for site owner, webmaster and web analyst.

Browsers often render pages differently, and site owner (webmaster, web analyst) needs to know what site looks like for the majority of visitors. Thus, browsers most often used by visitors need to be identified. If Rich Internet Applications (RIA), JavaScript Ajax libraries/frameworks, Flash, etc., are used on the site, then browser differences may become even more significant. Even despite browser vendors target Internet standards and, on the other hand, major JavaScript Ajax frameworks (like Dojo, jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc.) target cross-browser compatibility, they have not yet achieved neither complete adherence to standards nor cross-browser compatibility of entire functionality (compatibility is incomplete even for a handful of most common browsers).

Thus, the only practical solution for site owners (webmasters, web analysts) is testing in at least most common browsers. (Testing complex RIA functionality in all/many browsers may be extremely time-consuming.).

This is where the knowledge of browser market among your site's visitors can bring real value.

It is important to realize, that no two sites are the same, even if they belong to the same industry. Each site is very individual, specific thing. Neither knowledge of aggregate global shares of browser market nor such shares sampled from another site or multiple sites in the industry in no way should be viewed as good proxy. Those shares vary widely depending on the composition of website audience, which in turn depends not only on the topic/industry, but also on the traffic sources, i.e. the specific way (mix of the ways) site's audience is acquired, which varies widely even within same industry.

The pie chart above reflects shares of browser market that are specific to our site, www.tracksite.ru. It do not apply to your site ... Read more...

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Oleg Tulin | 2009-06-26

I often read or hear the popular misconception about web analytics that the main rationale for its implementation is that it can help us identify and diagnose problems with our site's content, navigation, usability and other aspects of its design. Identify and diagnose problems, that's it.

The truth is, however, that this is only a minor one among reasons for implementing web analytics. The main reason is that... well, briefly speaking... web analytics is essentially, and to the fullest extent possible, a business intelligence unit for any business that uses online channel (it's XXI century -- modern, Internet-driven marketplace is right behind our computer monitors).

However, despite I myself tend to overlook that minor reason, "identify and diagnose problems" still applies. It caught me by surprise, recently.

That happened when I was watching visitors sessions on one of the sites that I keep an eye on (it sells electronic equipment for DJs and other musicians). I suddenly came across one session that made me look at it closely. For 21 minutes visitor was repeatedly downloading same file from website. Even worse, he or she was using not only onsite download links, but also download links for that file published by other sites (offsite links).

Thinking for a while, I came to the conclusion, that someone is desperately retrying failed download. I looked at reported response status -- it was OK (200). Puzzled, I came out to download that mysterious file myself and see what is wrong. The file was downloading (200 was reported right), but checking downloaded file revealed that for some reason it was corrupt.

This site undergone CMS change recently and, thus, there was significant probability of surprises -- so I was actually not very surprised. Previously, we had tested that site for broken links -- all links were fine. Still, link testing tool do not go all way to test integrity of downloaded files (understandably, since it is technically not ... Read more...

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Pavel Lebedev | 2009-06-26

Anyone tracking search engine bots (crawlers) for a few last years has certainly noticed dramatic changes in crawling activity.

First, previously it took relatively long time for a new web site to get into the indexes of major search engines, but nowadays it is just a matter of days really. Often web analytics detects first ever visit by search engine crawler within days from the moment a brand new site was submitted (or linked from already indexed site).

Second, frequency of crawling a site by major search engines has increased substantially. It is not uncommon to see crawlers revisiting same web page several times a day. Nowadays there is an intense crawlers activity on a web site (activity that is often invisible in web analytics or, at least, not transparent to web site owners).

Furthermore, having been retrieved by crawler, new or updated web page becomes searchable by entire world (gets updated in search index) within days.

All these are the signs of Web 2.0 Era we are now living in.

Before Web 2.0 Era content was mostly static – there was no need for crawlers to revisit same web page (recrawl site) often since in most cases it did not change anyway.

Currently, things are entirely different. There are plenty of web publishing technology available that make content dynamic, easy to change, update, etc. It is now easy to publish online as never before.

In particular, the advent of blogging technology (you read a blog post now) has contributed to explosive growth of dynamic content.

In addition, the adoption of syndication feeds technology (Atom, RSS) substantially increased reach of and, hence, demand for dynamic content. The supply has followed.

As a result, web is now flooded with dynamic content.

On the other hand, web has become a true commercial venue, unleashing more and more of its economic potential. As a result, competition between search engines has increased. To be competitive, search engines need to keep their ... Read more...

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