Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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.I wanted to use Shareasale’s subid for tracking at the campaign level and Prosper 202 for tracking at the ad level (since Shareasale doesn’t let you use multiple subids/variables on a given link).

Well, in addition to redirecting to Shareasale’s link, Prosper 202 adds its own link ID on to the end of the URL, which causes a 404. Or at least, it did in my case because the end of the URL here was a Shareasale ‘custom link” – the name they give to deep links that affiliates can make to particular merchant pages.

So, for example, instead of executing my tracking script and redirecting to merchantsite.com/page.html , Prosper 202 caused the redirect to end up at merchantsite.com/page.html2341 or merchantsite.com/page.html9163 .

Now, in fairness to Prosper 202, this was my own fault.

The program specifies, when asking for your affiliate link at the campaign set-up stage, that you need to have the end of the URL allow for the subid to be added.

Because it’s late, and Facebook Ad Manager says the same thing (so that it can add its own subids to your ads when it mass-creates and split-tests them for you), I got Prosper 202 and Ad Manager confused. When Prosper outputs its own redirect link, it ends with ” t202kw= “. Somehow I confused that – which would allow Facebook Ad Manager to add its own subid numbers after the t202kw= parameter – with the input URL that you need to give Prosper.

The story has a happy ending though. I figured out a simple workaround to get the tracking and redirects to work!

You just move the ” afftrack= ” parameter (Shareasale’s subid) to the end of the URL that Shareasale gives you. Since that subid can be anything, Prosper’s adding a random number to it is no problem. Of course, it’ll make my Shareasale tracking a little messier, since now the same campaign subid will be duplicated multiple times by Prosper 202. Eg. afftrack=campaignA1234 afftrack=campaignA5678 etc.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

This is a major usability problem – they’re turning away 1 in 20 visitors! Try making an offline retail location a success by turning away 1 in 20 visitors.

Here’s an analogy in plain English, for the non-techie readers.

Suppose FutureNow’s site is a brochure. The point of giving out the brochure (getting traffic) is to generate leads.

Well, FutureNow are gluing together the inside pages of their brochures. So people lacking a glue solvent (5% of those getting the brochures), can’t see the inside of their brochures!

Result: The inability to see crucial information and wondering what’s going on frustrates potential leads. This being the web, they’re short on patience and leave, rather than becoming leads.

Solution to Javascript tabs and Javascript-required functionality: By using something like the coda slider I linked to in my previous post, FutureNow could achieve the same tab functionality yet still make the content accessible to those with Javascript disabled.

(Kudos to this Missouri Web Design shop for the coda slider reference on SEOmoz.)

The same visual effect and user interface is created, for those with javascript enabled. For those without, there’s an alternative in place to display the tabbed content.

Solution in plain English: Make a display with all your brochure info and set it up on an easel. Then point those without glue solvent to it. That way, all your marketing copy is available to everyone!

Here’s what the coda slider content looks like with javascript disabled. You just scoll down to see the rest of the content or click on the jumplinks (Sites, Files, Editor etc.), which will have the same effect.

Today’s Key Takeaway On Conversion Optimization: If you use javascript for any essential functionality, make sure to provide an alternative for those with javascript disabled. If you must glue your brochures together, also create a big display that shows all the brochure info at a glance.

p.s. I realize that my own site is full of conversion problems and that FutureNow is eons ahead in its conversion optimization.

In my defence, I’ve bought the three books by the Eisenbergs (Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and Always Be Testing), plus Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy, and a bunch of other stuff recommended by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, whose book Web Design 4 ROI was seminal for me. It introduced me to the practical field of conversion optimization in earnest. And I’m speaking to Sandra now about some consulting that I hope to get with her next week . That should help direct my priorities with my update/redesign efforts for conversion optimization…

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Note: If you like this post, please link to this page from your blog or share it on StumbleUpon by clicking this button:

Here’s how to project the ROI you can expect on SEO. This way, when your boss asks you to predict next quarter’s SEO numbers to help him with his forecast to analysts, you predictive task will be easy. Better yet, the ROI forecast you make will be defendable.

The detailed explanation on making your forecasts follows after the flow chart.

1) Pick some short-tail or mid-tail keywords. There’s no point picking long tail keywords, because the ROI on them individually is small in absolute terms.

2) Check the keyword for commercial intent.

- Microsoft offers a keyword commercial intent estimator tool. Caveat emptor: The tool’s estimates can vary significantly by day, so just take it as another data point, another road sign along the way.

- Correlate that by asking people to do word associations with the given keyword. You can use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for that. The associations will show the intent behind a given search.

- Compare the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) estimates Google provides you with for each keyword (set on exact match). The higher the CPC, the likelier there is to be commercial value.

Note: For CPCs under $1, this isn’t very meaningful.

3) Find search volume for your target keywords.

Use Google’s KW tool on exact match to find the exact volumes on target keywords.

It’s crucial to use exact match, and not broad match data, because rankings will result in getting you traffic for your exact match keywords and maybe a few variants. It’s best to be conservative.

3.5) Don’t just accept those search volume projections at face value. Double check.

- Run a PPC campaign.

- If you’re not going to run a PPC campaign (eg if the CPCs are too high), you MUST at least correlate the data to other people’s numbers:

• Use Wikirank, if you see Wikipedia in the top 10.

• Compare with Aaron’s tool.

• Ask friends who’ve been in the same vertical about the search volume. Apparently the accuracy of Google’s numbers varies by vertical, so friends who’ve been there can provide valuable insights. (It’s not too difficult to find such friends once you’ve been in this business for a few years.)

• Also, check against competitors’ keywords. Are you on the right track or really, really clueless?

4) Find out whether you can rank. Scope out the competition:

• Look for backlink numbers and quality,

• Consider backlink growth rates,

• Calculate backlinks/referring domains to find out if there are big brands you need to be aware of,

• Look at their anchor text,

• Consider their own domain name – an indicator of anchor text past, present and future, as well as financial backing for marketing.

5) Estimate your costs including domain, hosting, site design + development, links, man hours.

Note: As pointed out by professional search marketer Simon Serrano in the comments below, certain costs are fixed regardless of whether you do SEO or not. So if you’re doing this with an existing site, then you can exclude those costs. But you’ll probably compensate with the man hours etc.

My perspective in suggesting that the domain and hosting costs be included was that of someone starting a new site from scratch, with the mentality, “I’ll rank and sell to search traffic.” For them, the exact match domain might be a big cost that wouldn’t be incurred otherwise, for example.

6) Estimate the traffic attainable from various positions. See Aaron’s big resource page on the topic and scroll down about 1/3 of the way for the breakdown of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentage by position.

Hat tip to my friend Henry Shih of online jeweler Ice.com for coming up with the idea to “make a range of projections, from conservative to optimistic” last summer. Todd Friesen has also suggested this.

Update: Given Universal search results with maps, news, videos, images etc., you may want to review these results downwards to be conservative. As Simon points out in the comments, the CTR data has changed significantly since the time AOL leaked its numbers.

7) Calculate your potential revenue.

If you’re an affiliate: i) Multiply those attainable traffic numbers by your CTR. ii) Multiply again by the merchant’s conversion rate. iii) Finally, multiply by your average commission. Take multiple values for both your own CTR and the merchant’s conversion rate, so you have a range of estimates from conservative to optimistic.

To simplify, if you know what your earnings per click will be (eg recently work in the niche), you can multiply traffic by EPC.

7b) If you’re an adcents publisher: Multiply that by your CTR and EPC if you’re selling CPC ads.

7c) If you’re a retailer / lead buyer: Multiply that by your conversion rate and then by your average if you’re the merchant.

Finally, divide your potential revenue by costs. This gives you your SEO ROI – the return on investment for each dollar you put into SEO.

I do this in a spreadsheet for convenience. If you add my rss feed to your reader, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet for your own use.

This has literally saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours by helping me avoid niches that offered a lower ROI for the same time and money investment…

p.s. If you want to know how to prove SEO ROI on past activities, that’s easy. Open your web analytics, and see how many organic visitors on non-brand keywords turned into leads or sales. Alternately, show your rankings increase if you’re not yet in the top 10, and thus not driving traffic just yet.

Found this post useful? Add my feed to your reader for more advanced SEO tips for inhouse SEOs, consultantts and independent webmasters and affiliates! If you want a price estimate for SEO services, you can get one quickly here.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Any ideas how to fix this?

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

To my readers, rather than keep visiting every few days or every week, why not save yourself the typing and loading time? So…

Add my RSS feed to your reader !

(I recommend NetVibes, for its usefulness as a Blogger relationship dashboard) and just check for updates to it simultaneously with checking for updates on the other blogs you like!

P.S. Fun fact on how to break your tracking:

I mistagged my What Would Seth Godin Do-”add my rss feed to your reader”-link with the tracking code for my big orange RSS Feed icon in the box on the upper left. As a result, I’ve been miscounting the number of folks clicking the box and miscounting the number clicking the auto-inserted text and erroneously giving it more credit than it deserves! Whoops!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

What’s a persona?

A persona is an imaginary user who is representative of a user group. The main thrust of their representativeness is in terms of their objective in visiting the site and/or using any given page, as well as their demographics and tech savviness.

Creating personas will help me to:

• plan my site’s redesign with users in mind,
• scope it better and avoid scope creep,
• create a better information architecture,
• tweak small things in the interim, until the big redesign.
• And when I do user-testing, I can aim to get more accurately representative testers.

Some people talk about having more empathy for visitors by creating personas. Empathy helps you serve users’ needs by tailoring your site to their behaviour. If you can do that well, accurately, thoroughly and on a consistent basis, you’re going to be very successful.

Read on to find out why people visit my seo site, find out about the personas I’ve built around those purposes, and the action items that I’ve derived from creating these personas. I’ll summarize the persona-building and action-item development process at the end of this post, and give links to more reading on the topic.

The 5 big reasons people visit SEO ROI Services are as follows. The links lead to a section on each persona, lower down on this page.

1. To read my blog. (Thanks guys, I’m flattered !)
2. To do “research.”
3. To seek “technical support.”
4. To “buy.”
5. To “Other, please specify.” (Personally, I’ve always wanted to “other, please specify”…)

There’s some overlap between categories – e.g. blog readers and researchers – but that’s OK. That doesn’t affect the principles of creating personas, except perhaps to the prominence you accord one of your visitors’ purpose.

Blog Readers

As a traffic source, you guys often type in my domain name or use other “loyalty” navigation (bookmarks, feedreaders). Another primary source is other blogs that link here and some social media traffic, such as Sphinn, Twitter or Facebook.

Amongst those visiting to read my blog, user satisfaction is generally very high. I get comments like

“Genuine, personal SEO advice from Gab, who seems to know his stuff… this has been invaluable to me,” or “A very creative legal approach to an important internet marketing issue.”

From further discussions I’ve had with you, you’re often looking for advanced ideas for both the sake of entertainment and gaining a competitive edge. A number of you like that the content gets you thinking. This is education as intellectual recreation.

Based on the readers I know personally, those of you reading my blog tend to be young, roughly 20 – 45 years old, with perhaps skew towards the early-mid career web professional or independent webmaster.

In plain English, that means lots of SEOs and internet marketers ages 27 – 35. Plus some bloggers, web designers and developers thrown in for good measure.

In that respect, you’re fairly representative of the industry, I’d say. Therefore, I can also make an educated guess that demographically, most of you are guys and not girls.

Additionally, based on age, you’re most likely to be at the stage of your life where you’re looking to get married within the next 3-4 years, or else recently married. If you have kids, they’re probably in the babies – infants range, and thus you likely are overworked, underslept, but very well supplied with affection. Of course, if you’re a search vet, your kids might be a bit older.

As to technographic savvy, you guys are above average. You’re fairly comfortable with your browser, which is probably customized with a few extensions, as well as a blog, social media profiles and involvement, perhaps an RSS reader, almost certainly a cell phone and/or multi-purpose mobile doodad like an iPhone. You’re on broadband internet or faster, shop and buy online, and perhaps have some tech-oriented hobbies like video-gaming or digital photography.

Last minute addition: Per this data from SEOmoz, most people reading SEOmoz’s blog are owners/webmasters for small-midsize sites. Guys like Willy Franzen, who runs a site on entry level jobs. The next most popular answer was seo consultant/agency worker, followed by inhouse SEM. See also SEOmoz’s Industry Survey Results.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, which doesn’t need to change that much, luckily…

To this point, most of these things have been educated guesses. Let’s see how accurate they’ve been. I’m searching Flickr now, for a creative-commons licensed picture of a “tech geek.”

Meet James Wilcox, whose picture showed up in said search. He’s a male in a relationship, who looks about 30 years old.

by clompers

He has several pictures of his Motorola Razr2 cell phone and video game screenshots in his Flickr profile. Flickr is a social media network whose purpose is to allow people to share their photography…

He has a website under construction, and an interest in Flock, the “social browser” powered by Mozilla.

Pretty accurate first attempt at creating a persona, wouldn’t you say? It’s obvious that searching for “tech geek” helped find someone with the right technographics, but there are still numerous other points I was on the mark with. Also, I repeated the experience with a few more relevant keywords, and came up with similar profiles. I’m pretty proud of what I came up with, anyways. (Interesting note: I was actually going to call the persona Jim, before finding James… scary close!)

Action Items for James:

• As a savvy user, I can have him do the online version of card sorting by tagging my posts. This will create better content organization – the way users would see it – either in the immediate future or once I redesign. In design-speak, this creates superior information architecture.
• Incentivize him to return / leave comments / be a brand evangelist by providing sneak preview access to tools before public release.
• Write content oriented towards his worldview. How To Deal With Slacking Teammates. Get The Boss’ Buy-in For Social Media. “Why Great SEO Works Like Marriage {Subhead: The client/husband should always get the last two words: ‘yes dear!’}”
• Survey blog readers to find out what topics they find most interesting. (While we’re at it, I’m listening, guys – let me hear it ! )

Researchers

You guys are more likely to be referred by Google. I know that because you

1. Have said so in 4Q,
2. Make comments that directly or indirectly indicate you’re new here, like ‘nice website’, or ‘first time visitor’, when I know that the majority of my Google traffic is new here
3. Make comments reflecting queries I know I rank for.

Also, you tend to be slightly less satisfied than other users. For better or worse, I get a fair amount of traffic on keywords that are either irrelevant to my content or else poorly articulating the user’s needs.

For example, this post on disguising your text link ads as adsense gets a bunch of people looking for things like “disguising links” or variations on that. One person wrote:

“I wanted to know how to disguise my domain with text but just didn’t understand what i was supposed to do It was n’t [sic] made simple enough”

Uh, I don’t know how to disguise your domain either. Do you want to cloak it? Do you want to redirect it? Do you want to hide the destination of your links? Something else?

For those of you running forums, these visitors are your easy wins to convert searchers into members. Hide the answer behind a registration form. Anyways, the result is that this large segment of my visitors more often leaves unsatisfied, relative to my average.

Shouldn’t I create relevant content for those pages, even if it’s not related to my main theme? Maybe – I’ve made changes this weekend to that effect on my top 5 bouncy pages (tip from Maki). And for those where I just can’t create that content for legal reasons, how can I unrank for the keywords whose traffic I’m not interested in?

For now, I’ve edited the titles and meta-descriptions to better qualify the visitors who clickthrough. Some keywords have included ‘advertising presentation’ ’serps’ (a foreign pension acronym, apparently) and ‘how to disguise links’). I’ll probably add some content where it’s relevant, though I can find better uses of my time for now.

Who are you?

Like the blog readers, I’d say you’re young, generally. Let’s say that you are 18 – 26. Perhaps even younger than the average, as my visitor feedback and search queries indicate a certain number of people who are plausibly looking for information to use in college.

For example, I’ve had the following feedback: “I’m writing a term paper for my statistics class on the role of Facebook as a marketing tool. Was hoping for some charts etc.”

Others are likely entry-level employees preparing presentations for their bosses. “My purpose is still a bit vague but I would like the most up to date information on social media user stats.”

Another item which came up fairly frequently was that you guys are internet marketers with either some knowledge of the blogosphere – as indicated by comments that you’d return later – or of SEO in particular, as seen by a reference to Dan Thies, of SEO Research Labs.

Finally, because “research” is such a vague term, it’s not all that helpful at indicating to me how I could better satisfy you guys. I wish 4Q would let me define specific objectives so I can see what exactly people have in mind when they say that. But your comments are indicative, as quoted above.

Meet Danny Dover and Rebecca Kelley, guys! I’ve actually met and hung out with them both in person, and they’re pretty cool, bright folks. In his mid-20s, Danny’s an SEOmoz employee “currently attending the University of Washington” who says, “I like to spend a lot of my time simply studying the internet.”

Rebecca graduated from the University of Washington in Arts, with a Spanish minor. She writes, “I compete in triathlons and marathons. I like to think of myself as a mediocre yet stubborn athlete.”

Both Rebecca and Danny have got a bit of a fun/playful side to them. Rebecca’s recent post on getting a massage had me laughing out loud, hard. It’s not the first time, either. And Danny writes in the ‘Fun Facts’ part of his bio:

“Every year I try to do one good act of revenge. My favorite ones have been tin foiling all of my friend’s possessions and filling a different friend’s room with packing peanuts. I spent a year secretly collecting packing peanuts before filling the room. My friends don’t play pranks on me anymore. ”
Lisa “I wannabe in the foreground” Barone and Rebecca Kelley by Tamar Weinberg

Action Items for Danny and Rebecca:

• Write better titles and descriptions, then refine them periodically, when I notice above-average bounce rates.
• Make use of the Table of Contents plugin, as I keep telling myself I’ll do.
• Create comprehensive, Wikipedia style posts so that I can not only satisfy loyal readers, but the “vague intent” searchers. This relates to better category SEO.
• Feature charts, statistics and broad-appeal images when writing/editing for this group.
• Target these visitors to turn them into subscribers, since many are internet marketers.
• Try and please this segment with humorous, wise-ass content.

Tech Support Seekers

Similar to researchers, my intuition tells me you guys visit from Google.

However, there’s one big difference with researchers, and that is that you tend to know less than people who are “researching,” based on the depth of feedback I’m getting and some of the behaviour I’m seeing. For example, one person used it as a contact form.

Some other comments have included:

“26.03.2009 too early for any answer”
“22.03.2009 i don’t know, too early to say”

This tells me that the technographics – that’s fancy talk for tech savvy – of this user group is less. Kind of obvious in hindsight, but I initially thought these were my savviest users looking for help on advanced, thorny issues. Those guys probably fall more into the researchers category.

From personal experience with clients, I’d argue that this group is most likely to be composed of the mid-career business owner or marketing expert, who’s now learning about the web. You know a lot about business and are comfortable promoting offline, but you’re not entirely up to speed on social media, web technologies (and buzzwords!) like Ajax, and creating search-friendly websites.

You’re 40 years old with a wife and 3 kids, a dog, a nice house in suburbia that’s mostly paid off and are probably a college graduate. Meet Ewell Smith, Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board Executive Director!

by lsgcp

“Smith got involved in marketing and promotions about a year after earning an MBA degree from the University of New Orleans. He also has a psychology degree from Louisiana State University.

He says he came to the realization that marketing was his strength when he worked for New Orleans Publishing Group. He became involved with a company that promoted concerts and special events.

He later signed on as marketing manager for Southern Forest Products Association, the trade organization for southern pine timber. While there, Smith conceptualized the first branding of a wood species, coining the slogan “Southern Pine By Design,” for which he earned national accolades.” (Source: All Business)

Action Items for Ewell Smith and other Tech Support Seekers:

• Use plain English, rather than SEO jargon. Review previous posts for jargon and minimize its use (without compromising search traffic from savvier researchers who know the jargon).
• Add an SEO jargon glossary and expand the FAQ section, orienting it towards business questions.
• Link the jargon to the glossary.
• Expand the SEO FAQ.
• Tie things back towards their experience
• Promote my one-hour consultation service more prominently, while keeping a balance to offer tech support for quickie questions.

Buyers and “Others”

But for buyers, I’ve still sold SEO services to a number of folks, and there tends to be a certain ‘profile’ that emerges when I think about it.

Demographically speaking, buyers tend to be in the marketing director or business owner type of segment described above, under tech support seekers. They also often rely on the advice of [often younger] assistants, which makes catering to the blog reader and researcher segment equally important. I’ve seen that a few times already, in my interactions with clients.

Their household income is low 6 figures, speaking generally, and they’re generally college-educated and have serious business skills from a decade or two or work experience.

These aren’t the guys you can fool with promises of “guaranteed rankings,” but they are a bit anxious about not knowing all the technical side of stuff. (Note: It’s not like I’d recommend making that promise anyways, since it’s a blatant lie … you can’t guarantee that a girl will go out with your friend, so how can you guarantee Google will like any given site?)

I call this persona “Sam,” after the friendly hotel owner in his late 40s or early 50s who was my first ongoing-services client. He relied on his marketing director, Dino Santelli, for help with web design (Dino also handles a movie extras agency of his own) issues and was fairly anxious about getting SEO done right.

My first meeting with them I showed them rankings I’d achieved on my own sites as well as an SEOmoz PageStrength report (as the tool was then known) and after some hesitation, we started working together.

I wrote the above from personal experience. And as it turns out, this profile was pretty spot on, as per this research on who “internet executives” tend to be.

Action Items for Sam:

• Educating these people builds trust, so aim to get in-person meetings by offering to create an on-the-spot a free “5 action item” to-do list they can take away from the meeting. Limit this to eligible people – those that fit this persona.
• Come in to said meetings with background research done, and also leave them with bonus material that will both educate them and build trust. See SEOmoz’s Trifecta reports, for example.
• Prepare analogies for common SEO questions that can be easily referred to and understood in verbal communication. K.I.S.S.
• Aim to meet people in this group when networking at shows like SMX.

Unfortunately, 4Q visitor surveys hasn’t collected much feedback from you. All I know is that you’re visiting. Thus neither that nor my web analytics are especially useful for building personas as with the other groups.

That’s where it ends for you “other purpose” visitors, except for the time I found out you were looking for a contact form and I had none! Fixed !

How To Build Your Own Personas

1. Focus on BIG audience segments! You need to prioritize the biggest groups in your audience first, to make the most effective use of your time.

Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get bogged down into an eternal sea of insignificant changes because this or that person had a unique view/purpose when visiting.

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, Stephen Covey Jr. gives the analogy of a bucket that you fill with small rocks, then little rocks. The sea of pebbles fill the bucket and block out the few big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, the pebbles can fit around the pebbles. That’s true of optimizing your site, too – focusing on individual users won’t get you anywhere fast.

For example, my Toys.com post attracted someone looking for Toys R Us locations and contact info in South Africa! Obviously, I’m not going to bother updating the page for that person (sorry!).

So what size should your user groups be? How many personas should you make? It depends on your resources for acting on the information, firstly, and the diversity of your audience, secondly. The more resources you have available to take action, and the more diverse your audience (esp. as seen by traffic sources), the more personas you can use.

For a relatively small site like mine, a handful of personas is just fine, because I couldn’t handle optimizing for more. On a Fortune 500 ecommerce site, you’re likely to have more diversity in your audience visitors and more resources to deal with different customer types (hence “for him” and “for her” type navigation and ‘women’s clothes’ search queries).

2. Discover visitors’ intent.

(i) Use 4Q Visitor Surveys to have them verbalize to you what their visit’s purpose is. It’s free! If you’re a bigshot company, I’d speak to iPerceptions about getting a custom solution with better reporting and that deals with the problems I’ve identified in my 4Q service review.

(ii) Check your web analytics for your top volume search phrases, since these also indicate intent.

(iii) Finally, look at your bounce rates to get implicit communication of where your website isn’t matching visitors’ intent. I give the hattip to Maki of DoshDosh for tipping me off as to how he finds pages to improve on his site.

He looks at his top entry pages, defined as those pages getting the most traffic from outside his site. Then he selects the 10 with the highest bounce rates amongst those pages and works to improve them.

3. Compare intent with demographics and technographics.

This is personal! Essentially, you want to get an idea who this person is, as that can inform what content you show them, how you phrase the content, and your site’s functionality. This means knowing your site’s demographics and technographics.

Demographics means personal traits, usually the kind you can stereotype someone by. (Not that you should stereotype people, but it’s possible to make some practical assumptions relative to your audience’s traits. For example, a site about getting out of debt can assume that promoting sports cars won’t hit home with its audience.)

Demographic data includes:

1. Age
2. Gender (See: What women want in websites, hattip this post at seomoz)
3. Education
4. Location
5. Income
6. Career-level
7. Marital status
8. Interests & Hobbies
9. Race
10. Religion
11. Politics

Obviously, some of these are more relevant than others, depending on what site you run. Race is irrelevant to building my reputation in SEO, as are religion and politics. But if you’re running a political blog, obviously those three matter a lot. Conversely, a politics blog doesn’t have that much use for knowing someone’s income, unless they’re making an advertising rate card.

To figure out demographics, I encourage you to use Quantcast demographics on a site you’re curious about, or another site with similar content but more traffic. You can correlate it to Microsoft’s demographics tool. Very handy sites, both of them! See these social media demographics, for instance.

Technographics means tech savviness. How knowledgeable is your target audience relative to computers? How experienced are they? Steve Krug’s famous usability book, Don’t Make Me Think, will have different applications depending on your audience. Sites oriented to graphic designers or women can afford to be more subtle with their calls-to-action. FOR MEN, MAKE THAT CALL TO ACTION OBVIOUS. “CLICK HERE FOR OUR PENIS ENHANCER PILL.”

(Fun aside: Referral data tells me that people from the competitive [read: spammy (porn, pills, poker)] parts of the web use and recommend my internal link building plugin. If the spammers use it for SEO, I think that’s a pretty strong testimonial that it works. Not to mention it’s patterned off Wikipedia…)

4. Name the personas, and refer to them as you create your site! Steve Krug suggests that this helps you empathize better, as do Tim Ash and the Eisenbergs, all of which names are tops in the conversion optimization industry.

—

What are your site’s personas? Can I add other action items to the personas I’ve created for my site above? Do you have any other comments, questions or constructive criticism? I’d love to hear anything you can share, and will add dofollow links here for quality comments – you can choose the anchor text .

For more on personas, try the following:

1. http://www.uie.com/articles/mulder_interview/
2. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/adhoc_personas_em.html – “Thus, a major virtue of Personas is the establishment of empathy and understanding of the individuals who use the product. It is important that each Persona seems real, allowing the designer to ask, “how would Mary respond to this?” or Peter, or Bashinka? “
3. http://deyalexander.com/resources/uxd/personas.html
4. http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas

If you liked this post featuring my ideas on personas, you’ll want to come back in the future for more of the same. To save yourself browsing time later, why not add my rss feed to your reader now?

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

by Florin Hatmanu

What I was going to write was based on a navigation example Steve gave where a store might have these three categories: “Power Tools,” “Hand Tools” and “Sanding and Grinding Tools.” Wouldn’t some of the Sanding and Grinding Tools be properly found in Power Tools? And vice versa?

Some people like me would hesitate to click anything before knowing for sure which was the better choice! And they might leave if the first link was unsatisfactory.

So what I was thinking is that you could create a script that would show a help message that would activate depending on user behaviour.

“Having trouble finding an item? Some items in this category as well as related items are also categorized as “ABC Cat” (linked) and “DEF Cat,” which you might have what you’re looking for.”

For example, someone visits your store and goes to a category page. They browse around for 20 seconds and click nothing. Your script notices this, and then makes that phrase appear, with the related categories. Another behaviour might be what Avinash calls “pogo-sticking,” where a visitor goes between a category page and several detail pages without adding anything to cart. It often indicates that they’re not finding what they wanted.

Anyways, I read further on in the book, and on page 157 (Second Edition of the book), Steve has exactly this kind of situation in mind in a footnote. He writes:

“You may be thinking, Well, why not just put it in both categories? In general, I think it’s best for things to ‘live’ in only one place in a hierarchy, with a prominent “see also” crosslink in any other places where people are likely to look for them.”

While I’ve advocated putting things in only a single category before, for the sake of better indexing, it’s something I’m seriously rethinking. To me, from a usability perspective, it makes more sense to help someone find something right away, by putting it everywhere they might look.

Steve’s point is that them trying, something, not finding it, then going back and getting it right on try 2 is just fine as well. I guess that works for some sites (more news/ecommerce sites, I would guess), but I think most blogs won’t necessarily have it that way where the second click is any better than the first.

Anyways, perhaps you might still make better use of screen real estate by making the phrase’s appearance and links’ appearance conditional on user behaviour that indicates confusion. Anyone have a clue how to code this without tripping search engine filters for hidden content?

Another solution to this is to look at the intent of visitors coming to that page, by comparison to competitors’ interpretations of that intent. As Steve describes in this interview with Marketing Sherpa:

“SK: I haven’t done enough with analytics. I’ve read a lot but I’ve never really done enough with them to have a sense of what’s most useful with one exception which is that I always tell people you really wanna look at your search logs. The search logs are enormously valuable and mostly neglected. So, people should look at their search logs.

I tell them you should have a routine where, once a month, you look at the search logs and you look at the top five or ten things in the search logs and execute that search yourself and see what you get in the search engine. You can usually figure out what people are looking for from those top five or ten searches.

“You wanna make sure that when you execute that search, the first search that shows up in the search results is the best page that you have that meets that query. And if you have to rig the results, if you have to hard-code your search results or add keywords to the page or whatever then you should do it so that, when people execute those searches, they’re guaranteed to get the information they were likely looking for. But you should also, then, look at those five search queries and say, “Well, why do people search for this? Should they have been able to find it by looking at some link on the homepage? Is it important enough that we actually need to have a link on the homepage that would take people to this information and that would also then show up hopefully in Google searches?”

“And you do it once a month. So next month you’ll probably have some of the same queries and some different ones.

Genius! I’ve been having trouble with some of the visitors Google sends, and this “compare to the SERPs” monthly review sounds like just the solution.

A third solution, which would probably be more precisely effective – since competitors are also only guessing at intent and may not be guessing well either, like a game of charades – would be to just survey visitors. “It seems this page is having trouble satisfying visitors. Would you mind helping us help you and others like you, by answering two short questions?

a) How did you get here? This can help us solve the problem for other people visiting based on a similar context.
and
b) What were you hoping to find or do here? The more detail, the better.

A Wordpress plugin and general script for non-Wordpress sites that could do this would be awesome. I’m thinking a little adaptation of 4Q would be enough… Just have it add a checkbox to your Wordpress pages and posts that you check when you see it’s very bouncy. Heck, this could help with StumbleUpon traffic too. The only thing is that it would need to appear with the javascript “onunload” event – when someone is trying to close the tab, window, click elsewhere on your site (can it work for when people type in a new address in the address bar?)

And that’s how you meet the needs of visitors that found a real page, but didn’t see what they wanted on the page because the page didn’t have it there.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

by Josh Russell

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.

Broadcasting Reach and Influence (BRAIN) = Number of Followers (NoF) / Your Followers’ Average Number of People Followed  (Attention Competitors). Your influence depends on people interested in what you have to say relative to others competing for your followers’ attention.

by e-strategyblog.com

Let’s suppose John has 30,000 followers. Each of them are mega-sheep and they follow 10,000 people on average. John has a BRAIN of 30,000 divided by 10000. John’s BRAIN = 3 (OMGz 3 brains?! Freak! )

A variation on this formula that might be useful would be Daily BRAIN. That is, how many people can you reach daily?

Of course, there are variations and other factors to add to this formula. It’s not perfect and there’s lots of room for improvement. Some factors I can think of offhand include:

• The comparative rate at which you tweet and the rate at which the other people your followers tweet. If your followers follow only ghost accounts plus you, then you still have a monopoly on their attention despite them following thousands of other Tweeple.
• The number of times your followers login daily.
• How long your followers stay logged-in for.
• The overlap between your logged-in time and that of your followers.
• How closely what you tweet relates to your followers’ interests.
• Whether you wear your followers out with too many tweets, or with tweet repetition, so that they develop ‘tweet blindness’ to what you post on Twitter.
• Whether other people your followers follow are including links in their tweets, taking your followers’ attention outside Twitter.

I’d love to hear any refinements you can make to this formula, or see you turn this into a program/tool for measuring reach and influence. But as I’m sharing this particular post and formula on an open source basis, I require that if you develop something derived from these ideas, that your tool be open source and free, too (not allowing even a free basic and paid premium tool).

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

Open Ended Responses for January, 2009 for Task Completion: YES and Primary Purpose: Read blog .

..

February: Open Ended Responses for February, 2009 for Task Completion: YES and Primary Purpose: Read blog .

…

Open Ended Responses for January, 2009 for Task Completion: NO and Primary Purpose: Read blog .

…

February’s visitors who did not complete their task and came to read the blog have yet to share any comments…

Takeaways I need to work on to improve user satisfaction with my blog:

Focus more on writing about SEO (oops, screwed that one up already!) as opposed to other topics.

Link out where relevant to visitors, not just for the sake of scoring brownie points with link recipients.

Make it more interesting, perhaps with more pictures/colour/video.

You guys have any more pointers? On a related note, I have a very low satisfaction rate amongst respondents who came to “research” (presumably from search engines, mostly). How can I better serve them? If you liked this post on analytics and people, then add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

IP Address		116.197.228.19 ? (MobileOne Ltd)
ISP		MobileOne Ltd
Location		Continent : Asia Country : Singapore (Facts) City : Singapore Lat/Long : 1.2931, 103.8558 (Map)
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution : 1280 x 800 Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 12 2009 7:34:22 pm
Last Page View		Jan 12 2009 7:36:32 pm
Visit Length		2 minutes 10 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co…keywords&pws=0&gl=US
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		how to steal your competitor keywords
Visit Entry Page		http://seoroi.com/se…le-protecting-yours/
Visit Exit Page		http://seoroi.com/se…le-protecting-yours/
Out Click		RKG http://www.rimmkaufman.com/

1. PWS=0 means, in English, personalized search is turned off. We have a search engine savvy person here.
2. GL=US means, in English, that this person is looking for the American search results – not stuff customized to Singapore. Also advanced SE usage.
3. They were most likely looking for a particular post I wrote, since their keywords match the [non-generic] title very closely.

The last one in particular is really cool since I wrote it up, in part, almost a year ago along with 3 other new metrics you can find interesting! And perhaps as a bonus thing, the outclick to RKG suggests good taste in content!

If you pointed to the time spent on site, you could argue that’s helpful, but it’s less telling about the savviness/intent of a visitor. The other metrics I’ve pointed out are behaviour that correlates highly with quality visitors, which is not necessarily true of time on site (e.g. usability problems like my insite search, so-so archiving etc.).

Idea: If you can write a little script/filter for Google Analytics to track people visiting your site with these footprints (i.e. pws=0 gl=us but their ip is located elsewhere, and the search keywords are a post title), you could probably have some nice linkbait there.

If ya liked this post on web analytics, add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

First, non-cash spending is a slippery beast. My high school economics teacher, Mrs. Guedon, actually taught us this and yet I dismissed her preference for using cash as being silly and old-fashioned when an ATM can easily give you an update on your account balance.

Unfortunately, ATMs are not especially good at keeping your spending in check. Especially when you’re paranoid like me and feel the need to destroy your ATM receipts – your memory of account balances ends up being pretty weak.

In 2009, I’m going to review my monthly cash-flow – in all accounts – much more closely.

Second, StumbleUpon ads have a very variable ROI and pricing. I experimented heavily with StumbleUpon ads over the past year and spent roughly $1400.

From what I’ve seen of other StumbleUpon advertising case studies, this is some of the most extensive advertising anyone will publicly recognize. I’m sure there are bigger spenders, but they don’t want their social media success to look fake.

Personally, I’m in the online marketing business, I know that distribution is key and I’m not embarassed to say I advertise my content. I’m proud of it really, because it shows how much effort and pride I take in my material.

That’s a big digression though. What you need to know about SU Ads is this:

• The bounce rate is about the same as other SU traffic – often around 95%. For you money, that means that you’re really getting 5 cents on the dollar worth of traffic that is going to pay attention to your content. Though SU prices their traffic at 5 cents a visit, you’re really paying $1/visit.
• But wait! StumbleUpon traffic is unique: It generates its’ own follow-up traffic when your paid visitors give you thumbs up and reviews! So you’re not really paying $1 visit.
• It’s hard to quantify precisely how much follow on traffic you get. I tried digging into my analytics to tell you, but it’s reporting fewer visitors than I even paid for. That’s normal, since we’re talking about web analytics that relies on javascript, which many stumblers block. Test SU ads yourself if you must know.
• Complicating things further, when you’re buying large quantities of StumbleUpon traffic as I was, and “friending” the stumblers who give you thumbs up, this leads to more reviews and traffic. So there’s a latent benefit.
• The catch is that those relationships, if not kept up, wither and the latent traffic dissapears. Except for my loyal friend and reader, Ann Smarty (internationally famous link building pro, and noted blogger), I rarely get folks stumbling my content any more *sniffle.
• In fairness, that’s largely my fault since I didn’t know what to do to keep building the relationship, after friending those stumblers. I reviewed some of their blogs when I liked them, but most had no sites…
• On a related note, I think I rarely if ever added StumbleUpon buttons prominently above the fold and throughout my content – this may improve your results.
• The StumbleUpon analytics aren’t that insightful – most posts get ~1-2%  of folks thumbing them up or down. You only get more than that with controversial content. No offense to the StumbleUpon team – but there’s just not much you can do based on that info, imho. At best you can promote content on the same topics that do well…
• StumbleUpon no longer lets you advertise SEO content in their “search” category. Considering SEO industry voices like Search Engine Watch made the category, that’s ass-backwards to say the least. Heck, I stumbled the search category recently and saw a meta search engine displaying an award from SEW!
• For all the talk of quality content gaining links, exposing my content via StumbleUpon attracted hardly any links except for when I released Internal Link Building. FYI: I spent my StumbleUpon budget on original feature length content like disguising text link ads, measuring distribution to project link building success (ironic, I know), domains not being legally equivalent to real estate, how Google would rank for mortgage calculator terms etc.

By comparison, my search engine traffic bounces much less and I suspect is responsible for gaining me various social media links etc.

Third, you really have to know what you’re doing before messing around with buying Facebook ads on their app traffic. And you need a large budget so you have time to optimize. I got myself smoked for hardly any conversions on ~ $300 of testing. Not a big loss, but the ~$30-$40 I made was a punch to the ego. I didn’t have the thousands nor the patience necessary to test that into profitability.

Fourth, launching Internal Link Building was one of the coolest but also most time-consuming projects I handled this year.

1. I had to handle a bunch of bugs at the outset that slipped through my beta testing.
2. I got links.
3. Two more sphinns and it’ll be my first post to make 100! .
4. It taught me to shutup until things are really ready to launch or you piss people off. I announced it before my download counter was working properly, delaying launch by several days and wasting MEGA traffic.
5. There is a HUMONGOUS search marketing community in the former Soviet Block. Besides the Russians, you have Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians and many more who are deeply involved in this business.

Fifth, if you’re not in it consistently, the domain name game isn’t for you. You need to put up or shut up. While it saddens me to an extent, I hereby resolve to liquidate my domain name portfolio this year.

Amongst other gems:

• Motocyclette.ca (Motorcycle.ca in French)
• MontrealHotelReviews.com
• UserGeneratedContent.ca
• PMEs.ca (SMEs.ca in French)
• Gvn.ca, which gets typeins from people presumably looking for the government.
• NorthfaceJacket(s).org – check the search volume kiddies … can you say ecommerce?
• WebmasterWelfare.com (aka Adcents)

I’d prefer a buyer who can pick up the whole portfolio, to be honest. Email gab at this domain if you’re interested and have a budget in the low 5 figures. My finance domains are particularly sweet generics.

The same goes for affiliate marketing. I haven’t figured out my approach towards affiliate marketing for 09, but I suspect it will be a merely residual monetization stream as I work to develop Original Monetization.

At the end of the day, you need to focus on what you do best – for me, that means coming up with new ideas, not domaining or affiliate marketing or stumbling. It sucks to look back and realize that – even though I knew it from my first year in online marketing – you can’t focus on more than one or two fields at a time, and you have to limit your projects too.

Sixth, search marketing shows rock. Go SMX! The great folks at Third Door Media and their mods gave me my break at SMX West last year (thanks Vanessa!), and then again at SMX Advanced (thanks Stephen!), and I’ve been fortunate enough to be accepted back to the podium this year. Let me know if you’re going and we’ll hang out! Also, fyi, you can use “SMXSpeaker” as a discount code to save $100 off the registration for SMX West.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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

You hook up your code to Friendfeed, and count how much interaction is going on between folks. Then your software’s users login and can see how many karma points they’ve racked up.

If you want to get fancy, you can try and parse the language for nasty interaction such as insults, and subtract karma points for that. Also, since we tend to forget the [small] good things people have done for us, there should be a natural attrition rate of your karma points.

So how long will it be until someone creates these social media analytics tools? What will they be called? How will they be monetized? Will Friendfeed’s lack of integration with StumbleUpon and niche networks (e.g. Sphinn) prevent you using these tools? Here’s looking for comments! Also, add my RSS feed to your reader!

p.s. This also reinforces my earlier point about the trend of commodification of data.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

First, it doesn’t correspond well with actual feed usage. It seems that many people add RSS feeds to their readers … then proceed to ignore said feeds. I have to admit I’m as guilty as anyone, as I dislike using my clunky RSS reader (Feedreader.com). Whatever the reason though, there’s an enormous disparity between clicks – indicating intent to subscribe – and action – people actually accessing the feed within their readers once they’ve subscribed.

How do I know? I compared my stats with Linda Bustos of Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog after seeing that I’d had a few thousand people click my RSS subscription links. Turned out they were getting multiple times the traffic, while having approximately the same amount of suscribers.

While I could attribute that to other factors, like superior use of social media, I don’t think that’s the answer. I don’t have raw numbers to back it up, admittedly, but I’m pretty certain that the difference is at least partly related to subscriber base. They probably had multiple times more clicks on their subscribe links, so that the actual usage numbers of their feeds came out to several thousand – not the intent numbers, which must have been far higher.

Second, click-tracking sucks because it only gives me intent numbers, not usage numbers. And while that’s actionable to an extent – I can tell what content I might develop follow-ons for or what categories are better at gaining new subscribers – it still leaves me flying partly blind as to what folks read.

In theory, the categories should correspond between intent and usage, but who knows. Some categories may be skewed towards folks who subscribe a lot but read a little.

Another reason I’m at a disadvantage as a result of not having usage numbers is that those are the de facto standard for tracking subscribers. Therefore, trying to sell this site might be that much more challenging (let alone finding a buyer who’ll value the tens of thousands of dollars of links I’ve earned this site…). And it also limits the social proof I can use, since I have no Feedburner badge.

I’ve yet to see anyone else raise this issue of a difference between intent and usage, for RSS feeds. In the email world, it’s subscriptions vs opens. My understanding is that open rates vary from 5% to 30%, on average. If I had to guess, I’d say my open rate is on the low end of that.

(My memory might be faulty, so on that note, go buy yourself a copy of Sitepoint’s Email Marketing Kit yourself – it’s terrific and worth the investment in your future education. And no, that’s not an affiliate link. Note: Like other Sitepoint Kits, it’s geared more towards beginners, not seasoned vets.

Do any of you know alternatives to using Feedburner or Google Analytics to track subscriptions? Massive dofollow link love, a free 1 hour consultation (worth $200) plus an hour of linkbuilding to anyone who recommends an adequate solution to get me equivalent data without sharing more of my info with the Borgle.

Update: Willy Franzen – whose entry level jobs site you should check out – has made some excellent headway on solving this:

“Use a WP plug-in that allows you to have content that is only shown in the feed. Then add a unique tracking image to every post. Your server logs will show all of the times the image is downloaded.

It’s the same way that e-mails track open rates, I believe.

Make sure that you disable hotlinking of images, so that if your feed gets scraped your stats don’t get screwed up.”

The next issue to resolve is to adapt the pixel tracking solution to the various feedreaders out there, since some of them request the feed (and tracking pixel) whenever a user does, while others request it once and serve it to all their users. So for those feedreaders, all the users would appear as a single subscriber. How can that be worked around?

p.s. Hat tip to Avinash Kaushik for helping me resolve this difference between clicks/usage.

Oh, and of course, if you liked this post on analytics – get my rss feed, pronto .

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

1. When you’re buying traffic, and especially traffic that has to convert and is not just bought for branding purposes, be sure to pause your 4Q survey tool! I made this mistake when I was hiring recently, which resulted in lowering my visitor-to-job-application conversion rate. At least one person took the survey to tell me that it was annoying to come for a job application and get that, and another decided that he’d give me his email in the survey and let me get back to him that way.

There’s an exception to this rule though: If you’re buying traffic and your conversion rate really sucks, then 4Q can help explain what the matter is.

When I first published my Internal Link Building post, it wasn’t actually available to download yet. I got a good deal of flack and learned my lesson to only announce things when all my ducks are in a row and ready to be used/downloaded/bought etc. Similarly, if your traffic doesn’t convert, you may as well ask them what the problem is!

2. Answers get repetitive after a while, assuming that your site doesn’t change its purpose. In my case, there’s a number of loyal fans and friends in the industry who’ve built a relationship with my blog and I and appreciate the content. There’s also people who find the survey annoying, but I’ll get to that later.

On the stats side, roughly the same percentage of people each month come by for each given purpose. Those looking to read my blog tally about 35% (when I buy traffic) – 50% (when I don’t buy traffic), a tiny percentage come in looking to buy or contact me (under 5% each), and about 30% visit looking to “research.”

In this respect, the tool goes from great to good to just OK ! As time goes on, you get marginally fewer and fewer original, useful responses and it takes increasingly more time to find an actionable point that you haven’t yet addressed.

Which leads me to my next point.

3. Regardless of what your site does (blog, ecommerce etc.), some percentage of your visitors are probably looking to contact you. If you only offer a quote request form as the sole means of contact (besides listing an email address or postal mail address), then some of your visitors will leave discontent. I myself rarely contact people whose sites don’t offer a contact form. So the lesson here is twofold: (i) Make sure you have a contact page and (ii) Put a form on it. It may be obvious to you, but it wasn’t to me.

4. People don’t read instructions, especially when there are colourful elements in the same area as their eyes are focused on. Graphic design leads the eye around a page, form or whatever else you show visitors, and this is true of survey forms as well. The number of people who thought that they were supposed to do the survey right away leads me to conclude that the instructions were ignored. This is especially so since 4Q uses a popunder; visitors had to click on it to bring it up – they had to make at least a small effort to do the survey.

5. Bit of a bonus, but mostly for newbies: visitors ignore your main navigation. Therefore, your homepage would do well to offer redundant links to your most valuable pages (e.g. “site-purpose”- / “conversion”-wise) .

For iPerceptions, here’s some feedback to improve your product.

A. The usefulness of 4Q voice-of-customer surveys is very limited by the inability to provide custom answers to survey questions. Knowing that people came to “buy” is interesting … but what did they want to buy? SEO services? PPC Management? Text link ads? My soul? Even more mysterious is the answer “research”.

If you’re going to provide a survey tool, it’s not that hard to let survey creators customize the answers to their questions. Survey Gizmo, which I use for my contact and quote request forms, allows even free users to do that (besides offering a lot of goodies to premium users; more on that soon).

B. Asking for permission to survey people right at the start annoys lots of people; they don’t get that they can do it after they’re done with the site. Like I said, expect users to ignore instructions.

At first I thought it was a technical issue, but after contacting your support, I was told that the popunder works fine across browsers and also told that perhaps I was using an older version of 4Q. I installed the new one and continued to get the same feedback, which leads me to conclude that people ignore instructions, as I’ve said. People get annoyed at being asked about customer satisfaction when they haven’t yet used the site!

And before you dismiss this as no big deal and just the price to pay to get valuable insights from other users, consider that this also annoys people using 4Q to get voice-of-customer data. I had to wade through these useless responses to get through to the good stuff. And I do say wade, cuz they made up a significant percentage of visitors.

Besides, this also distorts your satisfaction percentage numbers downwards.

Therefore, perhaps the popunder should be dropped in favour of asking the question on a visitor’s exit and then show them a popup or dhtml survey.

I shared the post with Avinash beforehand so that he could respond to my criticism if he so wished, and correct any errors I’ve made. Here’s what he said:

“In the context of your experience the post is fine. For websites where things don’t change at all and not too many people use them , it might be productive to use 4Q initially and then maybe periodically. But obviously that would be the case of other types of websites, or for pretty much any business website where things change all the time and as do visitors. I am confident that your readers are intelligent and will understand this nuance.”

If you enjoyed this post on qualitative analytics, get my RSS feed for more of the same!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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

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Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

1) Has the ownership of the site changed? Whois is not the be-all end-all. If Google can destroy sites’ SEO based on radical changes in content, well, perhaps you’d be best advised to know whether that’s happened before based on large differences in content.

Why do you care? Because past history will affect the site’s trust in the SE algos. Slapped before, it’s probably more likely to get nailed again in the future. Otherwise, your leash is a little longer.

On a related note, my subscription to the premium drops tool (I was testing it out, hat tip to Todd Malicoat, if memory serves) just renewed automatically. I hate when that happens. So: If you want to research any dropping domains/make some purchases and you’re not ready to buy the service yet, let me know what data you want and I’ll get it for you, free – don’t spend your money. If you’re a serious player, you might want to consider my website buying services instead though.

2) What was the page’s old URL before we launched the new site? My online jewelry client Ice.com recently relaunched with a new backend and while we work out the kinks, analytics still need to be used to direct strategy. Knowing what the former URL for the checkout, category or product detail page was can come in handy!

3) Was this test already run before? If you keep the same landing page URLs, for example, you can look at the old ones before you signed a new client to avoid duplicating work that’s already done. Some organizations keep good records, others have people relying on the memory of an inhouse expert or agency. When one or the other goes … there’s no one to answer the question. Note: This works better if the page is indexed. Of course, you can do this for all tests, not just landing pages.

* Lesson to the wise: Don’t be reliant on one-two people to track what you’ve learned over time from testing. You paid for that knowledge and should have access to good records explaining:

• What was done: e.g. 2 headlines and 3 hero pics for 6 total variations),
• Why that test was run: e.g. to see whether emotional or logical appeals mattered most and whether beauty or strength or product features mattered most, visually
• What the results were: combo x converted best
• Hypotheses to explain the results: people buy pens based on price; people buy pens based on comfort grips, multi-color changers and fancy packaging (features)
• Next tests to verify those hypotheses.

Note: My friend Claude Malaison of Emergence Web suggests that internal blogs can do serve this purpsoe for ‘internal memoir / archive” for an organization in his chapter of “Why Businesses Should Blog” (”Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires”), a 10-chapter book with as many authors.

Also, the Internet Archive created Archive It, an archiving service that can perform this function for you. Use their contact form to get a quote/get started. Sadly, their usability is not the greatest and there’s no clear call-to-action or obvious pricing page or anything you’d expect/want from a site trying to sell you something. Ironic, I know.

Update: From John Andrews, competitive webmaster extraordinaire, a tip that might be useful to those looking to avoid the competition telling how they’ve evolved or perhaps hide any debatable tactics they employed in the past (or even avoid ending up cloned in the future …):

“In robots.txt every single time:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: / ”

Like this ‘big ideas‘ post? Get my rss feed already, sheesh!

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

“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.

This also means advertisers would not be able to track ad effectiveness, (e.g. whether someone clicks on an ad or not). This would favor ONLY THE LARGEST website publishers who can attract a few brand sponsorship type advertisements as small sites would not have effective data to communicate their value. The bottom line,[sic] [is that] this proposal would essentially break the internet advertising machine for everyone except ad spammers.”

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Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

“Would you tell me please which way I ought to walk from here?” – Alice

“That depends a great deal on where you want to go.” – The cat.

From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Hat tip: The excellent 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.

In other words, you need to employ different means depending on what your goals are. So this isn’t the definitive answer to the “percentage of repeat visits vs absolute total number of repeat visits” debate, but I think it will address what many folks want to use the metric for.

As it turned out, the lead I was seeing was interested in seeing the company’s growth in mindshare. The idea being that as they published new content, more and more people would return to the site to consume it. In the process, his company would become a thought leader and gain mind share. Pretty smart strategy, I’m sure you’ll agree, and one I’ve been working on do myself (check out these top posts of mine).

At the same time, he and I would be working to increase his search traffic. And with the exception of branded keywords, most search traffic to a website is comprised of new visitors.

So if we tracked the percentage of repeat visitors to this company’s website over time, we might actually find that we weren’t succeeding in gaining mindshare. The increase in generic keyword search traffic (read new visitors) he’d get from working with me would distill the percentage of repeat visits. Yet the website would be performing better from an SEO perspective, and converting a percentage of those new visitors directly into leads!

Therefore, I suggested that we look at the absolute total number, month over month, of repeat visitors to the site. The difference is that even with more search traffic, if a percentage of those visitors got hooked on the client’s content, the absolute numbers of repeat visitors would be greater.

For example, month over month the percentage of repeat visitors could be decreasing by 5%, while the actual number of repeat visits would increase by 1000 – 2000. Over a quarter they’d have 3000 – 6000 more repeat visitors, yet the percentage of repeat visitors out of total traffic would be down 15%.

Obviously, the absolute number of repeat visitors would tell a true picture of the company’s efforts to build mindshare.

If you liked this post on analytics and repeat visitors, get my RSS feed.

Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a Wordpress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building page. Update info: Check Marios' updates.
• SEO ROI Calculator spreadsheet.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data