Bounce rates going up? So what if they puke?

Image credit - http://www.freshgasflow.com/

Having been in many discussions with our clients in the last few months, it seems that more businesses are starting to get smarter about their website stats. With Google Analytics being the analytics product of choice for most, getting access to useful website data has never been easier.

It is all well and good to have access to the data but when it comes to interpreting it, more skill and expertise is required. To the untrained, I guess it is a lot like looking inside the cockpit of a plane; lots of information at your fingertips but how on earth do you make sense of it to achieve what you want?

Due to the way that Google Analytics has been designed, one of the key metrics now being scrutinized is bounce rate. In very simple terms, bounce rate is the percentage of people who come onto your website and then leave straight away. Or to quote the increasingly famous Avinash Kaushik

“Bounce rate is when people get to your site, puke, and leave.”

Most people in the industry think that a high bounce rate is a bad thing. At SES London recently, experts said that bounce rates of over 50% were a worrying thing. In 99% of cases, this means several things. Either your website traffic is poorly targeted or there is something (seriously) wrong with your website design. Or worse still, both...

However, generalisation is always a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to the Internet.

When I pointed out to one of the clients that we are working with at the moment that their bounce rate had gone up, we initially thought that this was a bad thing and we needed to change the design. After all, if you've invested time and effort getting someone to your website, you want them to do something positive when they get there. After digging into the data, it turned out that although bounce rate had gone up, it seems like it is actually a good thing.

While traffic had stayed roughly the same, the users who are staying on the website were actually more interested and engaged with the website and spent more time on it, looking at more pages, more often. The changes to the design lead to an increase in bounce rate which actually filtered out the people we didn't want to attract.

Whilst it costs nothing to keep someone on your website, it is also not worth worrying about those people who have no interest in your services. Due to the size of the Internet and the way we use it, it is very possible that a good percentage of people who click on your website were never interested in what you offer anyway. It's those who are interested in what you offer who you want to engage with and keep on your website.

The ultimate goal from any online marketing campaign has to be to get the desired results. In this instance, enquiries have gone up compared to last year and the website is generating good leads for the business.

So as long as we generate enquiries, beat the targets we are set but bounce rates are higher than we want, what's the problem?

Top tweet round up of #seslondon - Day two

The second day of SES London saw a drop in the amount of activity on Twitter coverage. This was due to the lack of consistency of over the hashtags used for the reporting of the sessions. Perhaps the organisers should do more to promote an 'official' SESLondon hastag next time? It makes coverage of the event much harder when their are multiple streams being discussed.

We decided to follow the previous days hashtag #seslondon and saw more interesting posts, mainly around the social networking side of things and the ways that businesses are using them to promote themselves and drive sales. Enjoy!

• Morning keynote: Bryan Eisenberg - 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites. http://bit.ly/dusnnP - http://twitter.com/danielkjellsson/statuses/9226844757 
• Amazon performs 200 tests a month on their site - http://twitter.com/GavinSmithLeeds/statuses/9227813533
• 21% of Facebook's traffic comes from instant messenger (MSN) - http://twitter.com/KnutBarth/statuses/9249724547
• Fascinating insights from outrider / comscore on effects of social media on conversion across all channels http://bit.ly/1D8WE - http://twitter.com/chrislunduk/statuses/9242370908
• Video 50 times more likely to get a first page ranking than a text page #seslondon - http://twitter.com/DavidWorsfold/status/9241934528
• Five times more views if you can get your video embedded in a blog etc #seslondon - http://twitter.com/DavidWorsfold/status/9242297119
• Social Media synergy with search proven by GroupM study http://bit.ly/Xn4Q #ses2 #seslondon - http://twitter.com/CrispinSheridan/status/9242160275 
• Eye tracking studies show that search listings including images significantly removes the users focus from 1st position - http://twitter.com/GavinSmithLeeds/statuses/9228703042
• Crispin Sheridan "exp conversion rate from referring traffic sources such as Facebook and Twitter avg 5%" - http://twitter.com/sammurray/statuses/9242004828
• 53% of Facebook users visit the site every day. That's quite a few people - http://twitter.com/thehacksaw/statuses/9241459240
• avereage uk facebook user spends 202 mins a month on FB - http://twitter.com/chrislunduk/statuses/9241345251
• Search can get people to a site but often the content disappoints - http://twitter.com/DavidWorsfold/statuses/9240884442 
• Email is very important to all political parties. Labour call it the 'Holy Grail' with 80% clickrate - http://twitter.com/thehacksaw/statuses/9238185538
• I've seen the future of SEO. And it looks like this http://bit.ly/akiagC - http://twitter.com/NicholaStott/statuses/9233781042
• Google states they make around 400 changes a year to their algorithm so how we do keep up to date? - http://twitter.com/sammurray/statuses/9233146212
• the fastest growing segment in Facebook is 55-65 year old females! - http://twitter.com/MatW/status/9229472129
• "You can't create a viral campaign. You create a good idea and it might go viral" - http://twitter.com/adcenter/statuses/9229552126
• Onebox results are appearing twice as much on higher traffic volume searches than they were a year ago - http://twitter.com/ZirconZippy/statuses/9229545456
• Social Media101: If Facebook was a country it would be the 4th largest in the world - http://twitter.com/lisadmyers/statuses/9229244347
• 34% of bloggers post opinions on products & services. Not a lot? Now consider there is over 200 million blogs - http://twitter.com/sammurray/statuses/9229153709
• social media has overtaken porn as the number activity on the web - http://twitter.com/sammurray/statuses/9228928714
• 21 sectres of top converting websites http://bit.ly/9QvCoI - http://twitter.com/NicholaStott/statuses/9227981805       

Tweet round of #SESLondon - Day one

Unfortunately the search team at Adido couldn't make it to SES London this year for a variety of reasons. Thankfully the good folks in the digital world of Twitter have done a sterling job tweeting about the great sessions that have been run by the top SEOs from across the world.

The tweet stream for the official hashtag #seslondon for the event is fast moving and getting the juicy bits of info from the talks is hard. So... we've put together the top tweets from the day for those of you that didn't get to go and for those lucky people who are there but who couldn't see every session.

• Measure of Brand Engagement = (visits with brand terms + direct) / (total search + direct) from Google's ex Head of Analytics - http://twitter.com/AndrewGirdwood/status/9187043309

• Only 1 in 4 queries deliver successful results - 42% of queries require 2 or 3 keyword refinements - http://twitter.com/thehacksaw/status/9183735278

• It’s easier to double your conversion rate than it is to drive more traffic to your website, so why focus on driving traffic? - http://twitter.com/tamaragielen/status/9183747393

• Per visit value" compare the average SEO visitor's worth to, say, display or email - http://twitter.com/AndrewGirdwood/status/9187415629

• Google's ex-Head of Analytics suggests >50% is a high bounce rate. <25% is a low one - http://twitter.com/AndrewGirdwood/status/9187364694

• Only 1 in 4 people get the results they want from search. 15% abandon. 14% re-query. - http://twitter.com/LeilaPan/statuses/9186273943

• PPC spend 89.25%, SEO distribution of clicks 89.47% @randfish - http://twitter.com/smarketer/statuses/9185134756

• "Percentage pages yielding search traffic" is a valid SEO metric from @brianclifton High is good - http://twitter.com/AndrewGirdwood/status/9187193901

• 74% of tweets are by 5% of users - Real Time Search - http://twitter.com/TheGrok/status/9180544416 

• If you take a site that’s been well optimised for both PPC and SEO, the conversion split is 70/30 - for the highest converting phrases people look to the sponsored results for transactions and deals. - http://blog.freshegg.com/ppc-seo-showdown-ses-london-2010-recap_2874

• 30+ GA add ins - http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/10/google-analytics-plugins-hacks/

• Bing has webmaster tools too! - http://www.bing.com/webmaster

• Managing 2 simple ad campaigns would take sme's 31 hours per month - http://twitter.com/ChrisCalitz/statuses/9193519451

• 10 expert tips on email marketing - http://twitter.com/fionacullinan/statuses/9194085915

• Teddie Cowell: The proportion of companies who are tracking PPC ROI has increased from 33% to 45%, SEO 20% to 35% - http://twitter.com/peteyoung/statuses/9193152207

• Only 45% of companies track their paid search properly - are the 55% stupid or do they just like the smell of burning money? - http://twitter.com/guylevine/statuses/9193179844

• Teddy Cowell: 49% of respondants dont know how effective their social media campaigns were #seslondon Thats a bit worrying - http://twitter.com/peteyoung/statuses/9193095074

• “If you’re not getting half of your traffic or more through search, then you are doing something wrong!” - http://twitter.com/dericloh/status/9192196650

• David Fairhurst tells us that average abandonment rate is around 60% for e-commerce websites #seslondon - http://twitter.com/adcenter/statuses/9190133457

• Brian Clifton: the value is in the analysis not in the data collection - http://twitter.com/sjachille/statuses/9187488107

Looking forward to more from everyone today! Day two highlights will be posted tomorrow...

Three tips when using broad keyword matching on Adwords

 Google Adwords has long been the starting point for many online advertisers. Due to its apparent ease of use and worldwide reach, Adwords offers small and large businesses a great way to get website traffic and, if done correctly, online sales.

In our experience, most small businesses that use Google Adwords don't spend enough time on their campaigns. Once the initial set up have been done and the traffic comes in, most businesses tend to leave it there. As long as they see their website traffic go up and money come out of their account, they are often quite content. By missing this ongoing management of their campaigns, businesses tend to overspend on phrases which do nothing for their business or even worse still, pay for irrelevant traffic.

Most novice or starter Adwords clients will only set up broad, or advanced, matching keyphrases due to not knowing the matching options available or having the time & inclination to set up multiple campaigns or adgroups. After all, broad matching saves time from having to set up lots of phrases doesn't it?

What most people don't realise is how broad the matching is on Google Adwords. Google says;

With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren't in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords


To illustrate this, I've taken some real life examples on what phrases we have set up for ourselves against the phrase that was not only matched by Google but was actually clicked on by searchers.

Target phrase	Phrase searched for & clicked
web design ewell	playforce
website seo services	google
web design southampton	fitted bedroom furniture hampshire
web design southampton	dick feet hampshire
seo services	classic furniture companies

 Perhaps one day we'll do as Google says and launch our own furniture collection... (image from www.kfb.co.uk)

Obviously since these phrases have been clicked on, we've gone through and set them (and others) up as negative words to stop them from showing again. It's only by going through our campaigns quickly and frequently that we manage to pick up theses erroneous phrases and therefore help improve keyphrase lists to show up more often or more targeted phrases.

If you do not currently manage your Google Adwords campaigns regularly, then here are our top three tips;

1. Keyword matching
Firstly, be very careful about which phrases you decide to set up on a board match. Broad match keywords and phrases will match to anything related to the phrase you have targeted and the other phrases in your campaign and on your website. If you are not using exact or broad matching on your high traffic phrases then make sure you review them to either set up new matches (you can set the same phrase as broad, phrase or exact) or remove them.

Remember, the whole point of using Adwords is to generate enquiries and sales, not to purely increase traffic.

2. Search query report
If you are using broad matching at the moment, make sure you run the 'Search query report'. This has only been around for a couple of years and is still often underused by in-house staff doing PPC. This report allows you to see the specific phrase the user clicked on against the phrase that you actually targeted (as shown above).

To get to the report, click on 'Client Reporting' then click on 'Create a New Report'.  From the list of reports available, click on 'Search Query Performance' and then choose the relevant settings for your needs. Once the report is run, you'll get something like the example below and from this you'll be able to create a list of negative words and phrases which you can set up to filter out your adverts to stop them showing for the wrong phrases again. If you have a newly launched campaign or one with a decent budget, then it might be an idea to set this report up so that it emails you the information directly to your inbox.

3. Regular monitoring
Make sure you log into your account on a regular basis. If you are spending over £100 a day, we would recommend this is done daily but if you are spending less than this then once a week or a couple of times a month is a good target to work to. Using broad matching might seem like a time saving option, but in a lot of cases it actually adds to the workload longer term as more time is spent generating lists of negative phrases.


If you need more help with your PPC and Adwords campaigns, please feel free to have a chat with one of our team. If you've got any of your own tips for better broad matching, please add them to the comments below.

Google Buzz: Convenience or the ultimate data tracking tool?

For years, we've all used Google to find what we want. Want to know how to peel a potato? Ask Google. Want to know the best place to stay in Rome? Google it. Want to find love? Hmm, Google? (as their somewhat touching advert in the Superbowl showed us). We all know that Google can find the information that we want. And all of this for free.

The worlds most powerful search engine has cornered the search market in most countries around the globe (bar one notable absentee). Now, it is entering into the world of social to try and fend off the threat of competitors like Facebook and Twitter on its search business. Google Buzz, was officially launched today and from an industry perspective, looks to be a decent move and a good product (I've yet to try it). With lots of Google users (myself included) already using Gmail, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and other services, bringing them all into one place makes a lot of sense.

Millions of internet users have accounts on multiple platforms and to use them all individually can be a bit of a pain. If I want to share information with someone on Twitter from an email I've received, I have to copy and paste content, format it and send it. I might not even be bothered to it at all and therefore might not share data with people who might want to view it. Google Buzz aims to bring many accounts into one place to share information more seamlessly and more easily and with more people.

It is this sharing of data which is going to make or break Google Buzz and then potentially Google Wave (which has done nothing notable thus far). If users don't use the product and don't share information with others, then it's likely it wont take off. Google already has a lot of data about the users who use their products and has even started personalising results pages without people realising. If Buzz takes off, then everything from who we interact with and the data that we share will be known. Google is going to know a whole lot more about who we are, what we do and who we know.

If you decide to use Buzz on your mobile then it gets even more information about where you are and where you go. At the launch of Google Buzz, they had this to say about Buzz mobile;

"When you click on Buzz on the Google homepage, we find your location with your phone’s GPS – we take the lat/long and recommend a place we think you’re at. So how does this work indoors? The same technique but we use time or day, and things nearby you to guess where you are. It’s very smart."

Image credit: Google Code Docs

Google needs to get into this 'social graph' of data as it's currently owned by companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If it can start to own this graph, it can then start to monetize it in even more powerful ways than it does at the moment using Google Adwords. It already has the thousands of advertisers on it's books so can easily roll this out to them and increase shareholder value dramatically.

This might read as a somewhat sceptical post about the motives behind Buzz. While I am an hourly user of Google and most of its services (in fact you could argue that I wouldn't have a job if it wasn't for them!), I do have to wonder about how much one company should know about an individual. I also started to question their attitude to privacy and data after a recent talk at Southampton University about privacy which mentioned the use of LSO super cookies.

About Buzz, Google says;

"Our strong belief is that organizing the world’s social information is a huge problem. The kind that Google loves to solve."


which is an amiable statement. Indeed, getting to the bottom of social media and making all of the emails, tweets, posts and photos relevant and useful is a massive task and one which could only really be solved by a company of Googles size. If it can make our lives easier and more productive (which is one of Buzz's main objectives) then it can only be of benefit to its users.

However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If Buzz does become a widely used tool then its users need to remember that Google will be collecting data even more data than it does already about what we do and using it to ultimately give us more highly targeted advertising. It's also been stated that "Google has never been known to delete data they've collected, since day one." despite it's now dropped message of 'Don't be evil' so could build up quite a picture of every user if it really wanted to.

So we need to make a choice between convenience or privacy. Time will tell who will win.

Four useful links from the #mozinar on 05/02/10

We were lucky enough to take part in the latest SEOMozinar yesterday looking more at how analytics data (and in particular Google Analytics) can be used to improve SEO. I was expecting to get some tips and tricks on how to use the data directly to help tweak rankings but rightly the seminar looked at analysing your traffic and breaking it down into segments to help understand what traffic converts best and how to tie up your data to your SEO rankings. All in all it was a great talk we'll be looking forward to more in the future (although we feel Rand needs to look more into the benchmarking tool...)

Numerous things were mentioned in the talk and on the online chat and I've taken the liberty of posting four links which I felt were worth sharing to help improve your analytics analysis.

Exporting over 500 rows from Google Analytics to Excel
When it comes to analysing big amounts of data from popular websites with decent amounts of traffic, you might need to export more than 500 rows of data. Thankfully analytics works from querystring parameters so if you want to get more data then its pretty easy.


Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics past page one
The guys at Distilled came up with a way to track your Google ranking clicks in Google Anlaytics (something which we originally started doing a year or two ago) This is great data to get your hands on to identify opportunities of rankings that are driving traffic but are out of sight to the majority of most searchers. (around 75% of people don't go past page one!). Give it a spin!

Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics (the best way)
This is the holy grail article that you need if you're serious about viewing your rankings and traffic in one place using Google Analytics. By setting up this in GA you can get to see data about the page someone clicked on in Google and the phrase that they clicked on as well. This improves knowledge of conversions, traffic and rankings in one place which makes life a lot easier for anyone doing SEO.

Plugin for Excel to get Google Analytics data
I'd not seen this before but it looks like a pretty useful tool to help analyse analytics data for those who are confident with Excel. Getting to the root of your SEO problem sometimes isn't that obvious from looking at the graphs you get and by having the ability to play around with the raw data in this way, you can find out more about how successful your SEO efforts are. Worth checking out.

There were lots of great ideas shared by the SEOMoz team  and we're really excited about applying them to our clients sites in the coming weeks to get better visibility of the work we're doing and how to improve our SEO efforts.

If any other attendees of the mozinar had any links to share, please feel free to add them.

Google introduces Twitter Results

After the initial announcement from Bing that they would be introducing Twitter results to its search engine results, Google were quick to follow with the same breaking news.

The announcement was coined as to be Twitter’s saviour with the multi-billion dollar deal meaning that Twitter seems to be around for the long haul. Google launched the Twitter search result function on the 8th of December 2009 which was followed by a lot of interest and hype, especially within the online marketing and particularly the SEO industry. Google stated that they;


“believed search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data”

And now six weeks down the line it is interesting to see whether this statement is still relevant and whether the integration has been seen as beneficial.

So how will the Twitter integration be useful to users?

With Google often being the first turning point for most Internet users when they are searching for something. The integration of this relatively new and somewhat niche technology could cause confusion for most average users.

Google has changed continually since its launch and most notably in recent years with the Universal search to integrate images, maps, product listings, videos and news to name just a few, but have always kept a simple clean interface. Will this new focus on real time results prove to be too much for the ‘average Joe’?

Despite these reservations many believed that as the Twitter results will only be displayed when the search term deems them to be applicable (and ‘enhancing’ to the results), this integration will be more of a help than a hindrance. Twitter results are shown in searches where real time information might be more useful than historical results, such as for up to date information on breaking news, sport, weather conditions and possibly traffic updates.

With Bing we have seen the implementation of a tweet only search page whereas Google has chosen to integrate relevant tweets into the first results page within their own self contained box.



The placement of this box often differs with the search query and it is possible that this is attributed to;

1. Relevance of live feeds to search query
2. How recent the tweets are
3. Activity – a subject highly tweeted on in a short amount of time.


Although after searching term’s which I thought would bring up results with Twitter integration such as; today’s weather, road conditions, the word Twitter itself, SEO, ‘Twitter and Google integration’ and around ten more, my Google page was void of any real time Twitter results.

After going to Twitter and searching for one of today’s trending subjects then searching for it on Google, low and behold the mysterious tweet search box appeared. It seems strange that Google would only want to show tweet results that are already trending and prevalent on Twitter itself. Surely it could be said that those that would be interested in the integrated tweet results would be those that had tweeted them or been aware of the Twitter trends in the first place?

And why not show tweet results on other subjects or even on the subject of the Google and Twitter integration itself? Perhaps it is because it has happened in the past. It also seems that Google has scaled back how many search terms use live stream tweets since the launch, where even the search term ‘lights’ was resulting in a tweet box. This would suggest that even Google isn’t sure about the best way to use this data yet and they themselves are experimenting with different ways of implementing this integration to get the best end result for their users.


Google, Twitter and SEO – a happy friendship?

Short of Google creating their own live stream network, without this partnership with Twitter it could be argued that Google would have been left in the dust of Bing in the real time search world (ok possibly somewhat of an exaggeration there!). With advances in the huge adoption of social networks for both networking and socialising and Google’s failed attempts at being a part of this (despite purchasing Jaiku and internally developing Orkut), it seems that this partnership with Twitter is beneficial for both the Internet giants and not just, as suggested, in securing Twitters place in the online world.

So how can we use this for SEO?

Well if your search term has a tweet box you’re in luck. And if your tweet shows, it is a sure fire way to get a quick ranking, but for how long and at what value? It may be argued that as of yet the value of tweets ranking in Google for SEO purposes are minimal and cannot be measured and that with a rolling tweet box in which tweets change constantly the value if any may not be worthwhile. Whether Google ranks tweets like this in the future remains to be seen.

Google ranking factors for twitter

The integration of Twitter and Google has set many tongues wagging in the SEO industry. Here are just some possible factors that could be affecting ranking of tweets:

1) Reputable followers
2) Unique Content – Beware the ‘hashtag’, it’s possible these could be viewed as spam
3) Ratio between followed and following
4) Fresh Content – Regular and prominent tweeters
5) ‘Domain’ age – age of Twitter account
6) Experts – consistency throughout Twitter account and Tweets
7) Re-tweets – amount of re-tweets an account has received

These factors have been adapted from those that many SEO’s will be familiar with and implement to achieve normal Google rankings, but as with these, only time will tell how important ranking tweets will be within SEO and whether the factors suggested above could aid in getting your tweet to show.

If you’ve got any thoughts, please share them with us below.