This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington !

I’ve been into web development since 1995. I started dabbling in high school and just couldn’t stop. I felt comforted, and challenged by the vast sea of knowledge that I could learn. Plus, since the languages, technologies, and trends were always changing – I knew I wouldn’t get bored with it. (more…)

I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from P*able. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks. (more…)

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing analytics with a internal search case study from Adi Reguev, and PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Michal Neufeld – Google Analytics – Tying Adwords Into Analytics

Some pros of tying the two together:
- Understand the whole funnel, from search to site exit
- Instant and granular view of ROI on AdWords (more…)

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Adi Reguev – Go Internet Marketing – Internal Search

Some key questions…

1. What/how much people are looking for [something].
2. Does internal search answer your visitors’ questions?
3. Can they find what they need easily?

Case Study: Travel
(more…)

An increasingly popular question in attribution management and in advertising measurement is what effect ads – that were viewed but not clicked on – have. These ads are known in the lingo as ‘View-Thrus’ or ‘View-Throughs.’ The related question people usually have is what percentage of credit to give view-thrus for conversions that came via multiple touchpoints (e.g. the customer saw and/or clicked several ads, before buying).

I’ve come up with an idea for an experiment to measure the effect of such “view-thru” ads on conversion, as well as on acquisition costs. (An acquisition cost is the cost-per-action of acquiring the lead/customer.) (more…)

I didn’t live blog the sessions at SphinnCon, but I did take a good amount of notes. Here’s what I’ve got from my own link building session and from the first PPC session. (more…)

Get the scoop at Janet’s Search Marketing Sage: “Two Must Have Plugins for Landing Page Testing.” The second one you probably never heard of, but Janet makes a great case for !

I just spent a few hours creating and editing an affiliate PPC campaign with Facebook Ad Manager, a Firefox extension that lets you mass-create, upload and split test ads (including split-testing images) on Facebook.

Now, while Facebook Ad Manager saved me a bunch of time, I screwed up with my Prosper 202 tracking setup and so the whole campaign needs to be rebuilt from the start.

Here’s what happened, and how to avoid it happening to you. (more…)

Problem: FutureNow requires Javascript to see the content in the some of its tabs (see “How it Works” and “Details” in the image below), which hides this content from 5% of its visitors. According to studies, (more…)

… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.

(more…)

See here for details: #Iran Election: “Mousavi likely winner” – Google Trends.

I’ve pinged feedburner, but it doesn’t seem to change the fact that when I view this site’s RSS feed via Google reader, it’s out of date and stuck with posts from April…

Any ideas how to fix this?

For a long time, I resisted using Feedburner for my rss feed analytics, but I’ve finally given in. Ok, fine, Borgle – you can have another data point on me. For now. Until a non-Google entity provides comparable analytics. (more…)

By observing patterns in visitor intent and demographics, conversion optimization and redesigns can be planned more intelligently. The patterns you identify can be used to create personas. Through my use of 4Q visitor surveys, I’ve learned the top reasons people visit SEO ROI Services and developed corresponding personas.

What’s a persona? (more…)

Normally, a 404 Not Found error is shown to visitors when they try to visit a non-existent page. But what about when there is a page there, only it doesn’t have what they want – what do you do then? One solution is to offer them a link to the right page, duh! Sounds simple, but it can actually be a bit tricky. Another is to update the page and answer people’s question. (more…)

(Image by Josh Russell) People keep mistakenly promoting the tactic of getting tens of thousands of followers on Twitter by following everyone else, for the sake of having massive influence with any single tweet. But if everyone followed everyone else – the logical conclusion of this tactic – then the tactic dies. Because the attention given to any one tweet would be so tiny as to be meaningless.

Your Twitter stream would amount to a blur of tweets. In that case, no one would have very much broadcasting influence, even though everyone has millions of followers.

So I came up with some simple math to calculate your true Twitter broadcasting reach / influence. (more…)

The following is what you’ve been telling me via 4Q visitor feedback forms, verbatim. Note that I don’t know how to make these surveys popup at the end of a visit as opposed to the beginning, and 4Q’s folks still haven’t gotten that part down yet, unfortunately. (more…)

The following is copy-pasted from my Sitemeter logs. Can you spot the 3 little non-traditional details that tell me about the real quality of this visitor? (more…)

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

I’ve written before about what I see as the correct paradigm for measuring social media success: the strength of the relationships you’ve built. I’ve been aware of FriendFeed for a while, but I wasn’t aware what it was precisely. And more importantly, I didn’t know that it had an API.

I’m aware of both now. So FYI: you can create a basic social media analytics software/platform. (more…)

Some of you might have noticed I set up my clicktracking script to track clicks on feeds. If you click a link to get my rss feed, for instance, then a little statcounter tells me someone [anonymous] out there clicked the link to subscribe to my blog. Yay! Thanks . From a business perspective though, this solution is way less-than-optimal. (more…)

After spending 4 months using the 4Q survey tool from Avinash and iPerceptions, I have a whole new paradigm on web analytics, and the usefulness of clickstream data. More importantly, I have 4 key lessons to share, as well as my own surprising VOC data for iPerceptions! (more…)

I appreciate you contacting me. If it was a quote request, I’ll be answering you within 2 business days. For all other contact, it may take slightly longer.

If you want to learn more about SEO, subscribe to my RSS or my email newsletter, free!

Also, check out my answers to frequently asked seo questions, or read articles featuring my new SEO ideas and techniques.

If you’re curious about pricing, my rates start at $3000, or $200/hour.

Besides cloning expired sites (being sure to buy the rights to stay legal, of course; hat tip Stephan Spencer), Archive.org‘s Wayback Machine has plenty of uses. Here are some I’ve considered. (more…)

Per Sitemeter’s blog:

“The most disconcerting initiative is the one being proposed by the FTC, which seeks to restrict ‘tracking activity.’ This means internet consumers can decline to allow you (and us) to track visit activity on your website. (more…)

I was out to meet a potential client this week, and after he showed me his list of specs for the proposal, I asked what he wanted to use the percentage of repeat visitors numbers for. How would it be actionable? I was applying the “So What?” test Avinash has taught me to use so effectively. The answer to the ‘percentage of repeat visitors’ vs ‘absolute number of repeat visitors’ question is after the fold. (more…)

Just chatting with a friend at a enterprise level analytics job. Google’s new AdPlanner tool reports that all of their monthly traffic is equivalent to their monthly Google search referrals… “Google @ world all your traffic are belong to us” sent 1 minute ago from twhirl.

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency – most people place it around 7 times – for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have! (more…)

Some of you might have noticed that I recently picked up Ice.com and Diamond.com as clients. Well, for any of you interested in working with me and with the other great people here, I have good news: Ice.com’s recruiting SEO experts, SEM specialists, analytics smartiepants, and web developers / coders / programmers (particularly if you’ve done ecommerce work before)! If you’re looking for a job in search marketing and/or analytics, write to Shmuel at ice, or send me your cv/cover letter and I’ll forward them.

Update: In response to some questions – the work requires people to be in Montreal, Canada. There may be monetary assistance for you to move (emphasis on may because I don’t know), but the bottom line is that Ice.com wants people working in their physical offices. As to the job being full/part-time, I’ll ask and update. I’d lean towards saying it’s full time work though.

In addition, (more…)

Quick note to let you guys know that the click counting script I was using has broken – all the links seem to have deleted. The script has known issues with corrupted databases, but those were apparently at 5 figures in clicks, not 4… Oh well. FYI – last I checked, I had about 2500 total clicks on subscription links. This is after ClickAudit went parked briefly.

So: If you want to subscribe, click the link in the sidebar, not in post links.

p.s. I’ve got an original post love on building branded search volume, and another on seo and usability, coming up. Stay tuned.

Just implemented the 4Q survey by Avinash and iPerceptions. Kudos to Grok for the idea. Hopefully this will help us understand each other better, make me a better blogger and have some better content produced here.

Also, in a slight takeoff on Rand’s recent post, How to Choose the Right SEO Vendor, I wrote a post How to Choose the Right SEO Client For Your Business. Hopefully Rebecca will have it up to sate you guys’ appetite while I’m away at SMX Advanced.

BTW, at SMX I’m scheduled for the huuuuge privilege and honour of speaking alongside Todd Malicoat, Jeremy Shoemoney Shoemaker and Jeremy Wright on the site buying panel, moderated by Stephan Spencer and Eric Enge.

So: Fill out the survey and come say hi at SMX!

Update: Check out this “How to forecast SEO ROI” article if calculating the ROI on SEO is the info you want.

What follows is an editorial / research article showing that SEO is valuable – but not explaining how to calculate it.

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer). (more…)

My reaction was a loud WTF when I tried logging in to check my click stats. Click Audit, the link/click tracking tool I was using until very recently to track subscriber count to SEO ROI has just been turned into a parked domain! In other words, it just features a bunch of useless ads. It may be a temporary thing, because the site likely didn’t make the owner(s) much money, but I’m not waiting around to find out. (Updates below; I found another click counter, and Click Audit is back online.) (more…)

And it isn’t Google Analytics, as I mistakenly thought. So I need to apologize to Google (and to you, my readers) for the error/false accusation and getting people worried for nothing.
Even more humbling, both Matt Cutts and the official Google Webmaster Central blog have called yours truly’s site “high quality.” So let’s see … (more…)

Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data. Here’s my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. This is an approach to use as a foundation for creating social media analytics tools, not a tool.

If you want tools, then check out the tools listed at the end of this article. Unfortunately, the best they can currently do is just measure brand mentions and track them; that only solves part of the problem as we’ll see. (more…)

Google Analytics is broken (like PageRank is broken), and leaking my data into the index. All the site searches here on SEO ROI are resulting in site-SERPs pages getting into G’s index. How is this happening?

Final Update: This has been disproven as being the source of the site-search-results appearing in Google’s search results. I had good reason to believe that Google Analytics was the source of this (you can see below for my original thoughts on the matter), but there’s now a clarification. My apologies to Google and to my readers for the mistake.

A while back I saw a video about using Google Analytics to (more…)

I was emailing a prospect recently who mentioned that a competing firm had proposed doing A/B multivariate testing. If you’re familiar with the jargon of testing different ads/landing pages, you would know that A/B testing is different from multivariate testing. I can’t blame the prospect or my competition however, because ours is an industry enamoured with jargon and it sometimes gets me confused too! In any case, let’s see what A/B testing (more…)

I was chatting with Ann (she of the SEO Smarts) the other day about measuring social media efforts. What follows are a few ideas on how measure that, as well as a related metric that might help you identify linkerati who’ve visited your blog. If you like this post, I encourage you to subscribe. My other material is just like this. (more…)

Formal writing is really frustrating because it requires you to dress up simple ideas in complete sentences, edit your work for grammar and spend an unholy amount of time writing what it would take you a few minutes to express verbally. When you come up with new ideas or discover new stuff as often as I do, that can get really frustrating.

So I’m hereby inaugurating what I hope will be a regular column here: Scratchpad (scratchpad picture courtesy of one eye fish). I’ll share my latest ideas, in a raw scratchpad type format and be paying even more attention than usual to your feedback. (The Post #88 reference was the pre-naming version of this post’s title and I found it quite appropriate to an informal column.)

For this first issue, I’ve got

1. New uses for Google’s Keyword Tool External,
2. Mined ideas from Google’s Press Days 06 and 07,
3. Revelations of what the PPC arbitrageurs (more…)

Here is the final campaign data of my two Facebook flyer campaigns, both of which were terminated December 3rd. All things told, spending under $2 for about 30,000 impressions seems like a sweet deal to me! Plus, I got some clicks and awareness, and it helped me make a good industry connection that has since translated into a few links. So while Aaron paid $500 for links through AdWords, (more…)