Google & Bing Performance Tests

According to the test results, speed directly effects the bottom line. The two search engine companies concluded that even a 1/2 second delay will reduce the number of searches performed by a visitor each day. Even more surprising, the average number of searches performed by the visitor stayed suppressed even after the delay was removed.

Speed Performance Tests On Other Websites

A separate study by Strangeloop Networks proves that site load time is also important for every website, not just search engines. Websites optimized for speed showed improvements in qualitative engagement metrics such as lower bounce rates, increased page views, and longer time on site. For sites focused on advertising revenue this equates to more impressions, and the ability to earn more per visitor.

Meanwhile transaction based websites experienced improved KPI’s when optimized for speed. In this specific test, the optimized sites experienced a 16.07% increase in conversion rates, and a 5.50% increase in average order value.

Attention is a scare commodity on the web. Do everything you can to keep and convert hard won clicks. This includes optimizing web page load times. Your bottom line depends on it.

What Is A Tracking Parameter?

A tracking parameter is information appended to a URL that provides additional data about the visitor in your preferred web analytics tool. For example, here’s a tagged landing page for a Yahoo Search Marketing campaign.

Original URL:
www.xyz.com

Tagged URL:
www.xyz.com/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=blue%2Bwidget &utm_content=warranty&utm_campaign=widget%2Bcolors

What does this string of data mean?

Campaign Source (utm_source):

In the example the visitor source is from Yahoo. This parameter is supposed to distinguish different sources from the same channel. For paid search it might be Google, Yahoo & Adcenter. A newsletter might separate sources by segment (b2b vs consumer) or websites where you’ve placed the same banner ad.

Campaign Medium (utm_medium):

In the example the visitor arrived from a Yahoo paid search ad (cpc). This parameter designates channels, such as email, banner, blog, affiliates, etc.

Campaign Term (utm_term):

In the example Blue Widget is the keyword being bid on in Yahoo Search Marketing, not to be confused with the visitors actual search query.

Campaign Content (utm_content):

In the example, warranty is a reference to the specific text ad the visitor clicked to arrive at the site. It could also be set to adgroup if you’re not looking for that level of granularity in your pay per click campaign. For an email, you could use this parameter to distinguish the performance of individual links in the message.

Campaign Name (utm_campaign):

In the example, Widget Colors is the campaign that contains the warranty text ad and keyword blue widget. A campaign is the only parameter that can be common among different sources and mediums. A sale on blue widgets might be promoted in an email, a dedicated pay per click campaign, and by your affiliates. You’d then be able to view the aggregate performance of the campaign under the Google Analytics Traffic sources tab.

While I’ve listed all the campaign variables here as a demonstration, you don’t have to use them all when tagging your links. At a minimum you can use Source and Medium to track your campaigns. To prevent typing errors, and quickly build out tagged links for your campaigns you can make use of Google URL Builder.

Issues With Tracking Parameters

Capitalization

When naming sources and mediums always use the same letter casing. If you tag two newsletters with mediums “email” and “Email” these will show up as two separate mediums in analytics. Choose a letter case and stick with it for sources and mediums.

Length

You probably noticed that adding tracking tags to a URL makes it really long, and ugly to look at. This poses a potential click through problem for plain text emails, or messages on Twitter with the 140 character limit. A way around this is to use one of the many URL shortening services.

Duplicate Content

Google views the original URL, and tagged URL as separate pieces of content. So when you use tracking parameters extensively, and people start linking to both URLS it dilutes the power of your link equity and search engine rankings. To avoid this issue change your query parameter from a question mark (?) to a hash tag (#). However, this will require modifying your Google Analytics tracking tag to pick up the hash tags.

301 Redirects

A 301 redirect of your landing page will strip all your tracking parameters. To prevent this from occurring the URL should point to the final destination page after the redirect. Or the server will have to be modified to pass tracking parameters.

Photo credit The Cosmic Cat

The foot dragging is understandable. It’s shockingly hard to accept that your gut instinct, honed by years of experience, is about as accurate at predicting outcomes as the shake of a magic eight ball. Particularly when pride, and your job is on the line it may be tempting to deny and pass on blame. Hopefully though, you’ll recognize the transparency of results from online marketing is an opportunity to legitimize marketing’s role in many companies. Instead of being known for producing flashy brochures, and gobbley gook copy writing, optimized online efforts can turn marketing into a department recognized for creating top line revenue and profits.

If you think your gut is trustworthy, check out Anne Holland’s Which Test Won? Each week she’ll run a new conversion optimization test for opt in forms, landing pages and other on page variables. It’s a great learning opportunity, and provides a valuable lesson that winning results do not always match up with established best practices. Here’s to continually testing your assumptions!

Photo credit helgasms

When someone goes through the checkout process on our site the url’s look something like:

1) /cart
2) /session/new?return_to=%2Forders%2Fnew
3) /orders/new
4) /orders/3575/payment
5) /orders/3575/confirmation

Notice the dynamic url’s in numbers 3 and 4? After doing a little research I stumbled upon an informative post by Lunametrics, the comments section especially has a wealth of information about setting up goals with dynamic url’s. However, the examples provided didn’t fit my exact situation so I had write the following regular expressions.

1) ^/cart
2) ^/session/new
3) ^/orders/(?=new)
4) ^/orders/b0*[1-9][0-9]{0,8}b/(?=payment)
5) ^/orders/b0*[1-9][0-9]{0,8}b/(?=confirmation)

This will work for a range of numbers from 1 – 1,000,000,000. When we reach 1 billion orders I plan on putting a big flashing neon colored sign on the website announcing the fact. Just like McDonald’s does on the Golden Arch.

Be sure you’ve set Match Type to Regular Expressions in the goal information settings.

Hopefully this helps anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation.

In that instant the little yellow canary inside my head dropped dead. The fumes of misinformation and general cluelessness KO’d the poor bird.

First, Alexa is flawed. So please stop quoting it. More importantly, stop focusing on website traffic. It’s not a useful metric, unless you’re earning money from ads in which case impressions do matter. No sane owner smiles at the amount of foot traffic their retail store had that day, they’re happy with the cash in the register. Diddo for your website.

What should you measure? Nielsen said it best, the formula for website success is:

B = V × C × L

Where

• B = amount of business done by the site
• V = unique visitors coming to the site
• C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do. For me it’s people subscribing to my feeds and downloading my PDF resume and visiting my LinkedIn Profile. You can apply a dollar value to these actions.
• L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)

Everyone is trying to increase traffic, this is evident in the number of articles showing you how to get your writing on the front page of Digg. So, if everyone is gunning for volume you can win by better persuading your visitors to take action and providing a reason for them to return over and over.

Focus on conversion and increasing loyalty. Please stop glorifying traffic. If not for yourself, for gods sake, do it for the canaries.

According to the survey, 34% of marketers are planning to introduce a formal ROI tracking system, with over half saying that quantifying and measuring the value of marketing programs and investments remains the top challenge in the year ahead.

However, using ROI to gage marketing effectiveness provides an incomplete picture. Let me illustrate with an analogy. My sage finance professor, Dr. Stendardi, taught us padwans that when using Ratio Analysis to evaluate the fiscal health of a company you need to compare multiple ratios. Liquidity, asset management, debt, profitability ratios – all of them put each other in context.

What we seem to be trying to do is equate marketing ROI with financial ROE.

Breaking down marketing into short sighted campaigns, and linear processes. When in fact it tends to zig zag.

I say that ROI is good for evaluating our tactics, but it will not guarantee future success. For analyzing our strategy we should rely on long term metrics, perhaps Customer Life Time Value, Return on Objectives, etc.

Care to weigh in on the topic?