Improving the accuracy of web analytics for social media tracking
There is a big elephant in the web analytics room... We are less likely to accurately track visits referred from social networks than we are visits from more traditional sources. ‘Less’ likely because the rise of those sources of traffic has coincided with (or helped cause) the rise in use of mobile apps or desktop clients at the expense of traditional web browsers.
So the visits you see as being reported as referred from one of the social networks are only the tip of the iceberg.
You’re almost certainly getting a better return on your social marketing that you think. It’s just not showing up where you’re looking for it. As we near the end of 2011 many are asking:
“If social is so ‘big’ why can’t I see those visits in my site’s analytics?”
If your calculations of the return on your efforts in…
5 DIY options for identifying duplicate content to improve SEO
SEOs talk a lot about why duplicate content matters and what to do about it, marketers don't tend to.
I think an understanding of duplicate content is important to all marketers who manage SEO so they can ask the right questions of their search specialists or agencies or fix the problem themselves. So to help bridge the gap, this is first of two posts explaining what duplicate content is, why it matters and what to do about it.
What is duplicate content
Duplicate content is where a search engine identifies different pages as similar. As a result it either doesn’t include them in the index or down-weights their importance. So you may have pages that you think are unique and should attract visits, but the search engines don't see it that way and pages identified as…
A survey of the most popular SEO tools
I found this infographic really interesting since it shows the range of tools available for SEO. It also shows how other people approach managing SEO and the kind of reasons they choose to use software to help.
I think software that helps review and improves SEO is great, as long as it is not trying to help cut corners, such as automated link building!
I have used a majority of the software mentioned in the infographic below and we have paid subscriptions for Majestic SEO (Backlink analysis) and Screaming Frog (Managing internal links).
Our reviews of SEO services:
Over the last eighteen months we've introduced the main types of SEO tools for marketers - here are the options:
Rank checking
Google Webmaster Tools
Keyword research and specifying target keyphrases to monitor
Monitoring competitor activity
Backlink analysis
Link-checking tools
Here's the infographic from Search Engine Journal:
…
The key issues to consider when you switch email service provider
Email marketing is at the core of many transactional businesses and drives substantial amounts of revenue. The email marketing solution is quite simply a mission critical system and a break in operation can’t be afforded. Yet it's fairly common to move between Email service providers (ESPs) to gain a better deal, features or service. If you do this, there are a lot of potential issues to consider, so Dave Chaffey and I thought it would be helpful to cover these in case you're considering a change. We've called them headaches, since they may well be, particularly if they aren't considered.
Any contemplated move to a new ESP needs to be planned and executed with the mission critical nature of the system taken into account, as any false moves will directly impact revenue.
When moving to a new ESP there are many moving…
ToBeSocial tools enable you to benchmark your campaigns against competitors
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: ToBeTracker
We like this simple, free tool which enables you to visualise the growth history of fans of Facebook pages. This example shows how you can see the growth rates of campaigns once registered on the system. Data is extract direct from Facebook Insights using the Facebook API to extract data.
Note: this campaign no longer live, but is still seeing growth.
Marketing implications of this tracking tool
This is a simple tool that can help benchmark what is working for your competitors. You can browse different categories of companies or compare 3 or 4 pages - handy for presentations.…
Using the Geckoboard Business Dashboard for marketing
Value rating: [rating=4]
Recommended link: http://www.geckoboard.com/
Update - see Geckofuel
Since we published the post we have had some feedback that Geckoboard looks useful, but doesn't support social follower counts. Well it does, but by this separate additional (free) service Geockofuel. Geckoboard supports any custom data feeds in an XML format and offers many ways of then displaying that feed. The Geckofuel site has prebuilt some of these for additional services including Facebook and Twitter. You can see that you could also use this for your custom reporting.
Our commentary
We're seeing a new class of business or marketing dashboard now which are distinct from the web analytics systems like Google Analytics, Adobe/Omniture Site Catalyst and IBM Coremetrics.
These dashboards use the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces for automated data exchange) from different systems to integrate data from different systems. This makes…
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: The Next Web
Last week Twitter quietly changed it’s method of linking from tweets through to sites. It didn’t post it to its main blog but it was reported by The Next Web - see link above - thanks Dan Barker for alerting me to this. However, the Next Web didn’t go into the details of how this could affect your analytics, which is what we’re alerting you to here.
What this means in practice is that if you are active in Twitter you will see a sharp increase in referrals from T.co domains which is what we’ve seen:
Note that the traffic using other shortened URLs such as bit.ly or Ow.ly, which is a big…
Many of us happily spend many hours editing text in our favourite blogging platform or CMS. In my case, and for many others this is Wordpress. I love Wordpress, but there was one big step backwards compared to my previous Plone CMS; the lack of a built-in markup language to make it easy to enter text without using HTML or fiddling around selecting formating and linking with the buttons using a mouse. I did check a couple years ago, but there were no suitable plugins for a multi-author blog.
But my problem is solved thanks to a tweet from Paul Boag (@Boagworld). Now I can edit without any distractions, without using the mouse!
What is a markup language?
Byword, the editor I’m using uses a syntax called Markdown. You can see it’s easy…
What is Stumbleupon and what are its benefits?
StumbleUpon is another way of finding & consuming content online, just as Twitter, LinkedIn news, Facebook sharing / likes & Google do.
Since web users are likely to use a number of tools as way of finding and sharing information, StumbleUpon may be worth a look. [Editors note: by chance as we published this, a new report suggested that StumbleUpon sends more traffic to US websites than Facebook. I'd have to say treat this caution - this is only for sites with Statcounter installed, which won't be representative of larger sites].
If your audience is active on StumbleUpon, then it makes sense that your business is active on StumbleUpon. During this blog post I'll cover, what StumbleUpon is, who uses it, why & how your business can be active on the service.
Here's an intro to the scale of StumbleUpon which shows its scale
…
Our review of SEO Spider from Screaming Frog
Hi! In this post I wanted to introduce you to a great new tool for SEO specialists and web content managers. My fellow Smart Insights commentator Dan Barker introduced me to this and recommends it. It's a tool that has really built on the features available in the Xenu Link Sleuth and taken them to a new level for people involved with Search Engine Optimisation.
Those familiar with Xenu will know how difficult it is to find similar software, especially if like me you use a Macbook. If you don't know Xenu, there's an excellent review by Tom Critchlow of how to use Xenu for SEO. So, onto my review...
Introducing - Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Key differences to Xenu
Mac friendly :-)
The tool really makes use of the crawl data to give you relevant on-site optimisation advice & alerts - problems you need to look…
