Archive for September, 2006

Homestars

September 29th, 2006 by Richard Zwicky

Andrew Goodman emailed me the other day to let me know that Homestars was coming to Vancouver. I’ve been familiar wth Homestars for quite a few months now. They were an early adopter on the Enquisite reporting tool, and I’ve remarked to Andrew in the past at how nicely focused their traffic was. Andrew’s firm, Page Zero Media has been advising Nancy at Homestars on their Pay per Click (PPC) campaign, and Internet Marketing as a whole for quite a while now. Their initial market was the Greater Toronto Area, or GTA; and you could see their successes in their traffic patterns. Early on (for us), they used Enquisite to monitor those successes.
Now that they’re in Vancouver, I expect that they’ll be able to spot similar trends from the Greater Vancouver Region.

Homestars is a small, bootstrapped business, which is now starting to break out successfully. I would expect that this venture into Vancouver is likely the first of many such initiatives in many other cities. With the building and renovation boom continuing strongly, and without a letdown in sight on the West Coast, I know their services are greatly in demand out here!

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Enquisite adds PPC Tracking

September 25th, 2006 by Richard Zwicky

I’m happy to share our second round of updates to the Enquisite Reporting tool since we launched August 1. All updates have been primarily driven by user requests, as was our commitment.

The biggest news today is that we’ve added PPC segregation to the reporting. Each user can specify their own campaigns by clicking on the “PPC Options” options link at the top right corner of their reporting interface. You can then add a campaign name (i.e. Google - black hat tips) and then the campaign tracking ID, or a URL string you want tracked.

You’ll notice an extra tab in your reporting, next to the tab for “Zip Code” - it’s called “PPC Campaigns” That’s where your campaign information, sorted by activity to campaigns is displayed. From there, just like from any other tab in the reports, you can drill down into specific phrases, pages, or cities. Like every aspect of Enquisite, we’ve made this into 3D reporting.

I’ll post a lot more information about how to use the PPC campaign tracking later. You can either enter in your PPC campaign tracking ID, a search string, or a landing URL for each campaign; this means it’s quite flexible. There’s quite a few other cool applications for this feature, beyond PPC tracking. I’ll get into those later, needless to say, you can use it to track things other than just PPC campaigns…

Down the left hand side of the details reports, we’ve added three tabs. All / Organic / PPC. These tabs allow you to flip easily between, and compare your campaign results against your non-campaign results. If you’re not running a PPC campaign, you might try it for an organic campaign.

We’ve also segregated Google News out of Google. We had a few user requests on this, so we did it. Commonly we see Google Images and Google Blogsearch listings in the report, now, you may see Google News, depending on your site.

Lastly, we fixed a bunch of small bugs, and sped up the system just a little bit more! Any speed increase is a good increase!

I’ll post more later - just wanted to let everyone know, and invite you to check it out.

As always, we’re going to continue to build out new features based on user requests. We’ve had lots of requests, and continue to prioritize them. The next biggie we have planned it a data export feature via TSV. We’ll also look at an API, but data export will come first.

Thanks for your support, feedback, comments and suggestions.

Posted in Enquisite Search Metrics | 1 Comment »

Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) and Todd (Oilman) Friesen

September 14th, 2006 by Richard Zwicky

Todd posted a note on his Oilman blog today about a conversation he and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz were having about getting into the Technorati Top 100. Of course, I read the “link love” line, and joined it. Actually, I had already linked to Rand’s blog, and posted about Todd’s earlier.

I never really looked at the Technorati Top 100 list before today - I was shocked: we have a few users on that list! C’mon Todd, Rand - make it two more!

Best of luck guys!

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Search Trends - Early Notes

September 7th, 2006 by Richard Zwicky

I thought I would share some data which reflects what we’re seeing as far as search trends. To do so, I needed to manually compile the statistics from multiple sites which we are tracking. I chose to compile data from 10 sites: Not the top 10; a random 10. Nonetheless, it represents almost 4,000,000 search engine referrals in the span. (a total of ~40,000,000 page views for these 10 sites alone). That’s a lot.

For the data used, no two sites are in the same industry. They are all U.S. based websites, and thus English only - hence a skew in the data. (NOTE: Sept 11, 2006 - They are all California based sites). Also, none are blogs, nor any photo sites. Also, none are social networking sites. At some point I could manually compile data which reflects each of those verticals. That’s going to take quite a bit of time.

I thought the results were interesting; first the search engine usage trends, and second the country usage trend. The data reflects a short period, so it’s not meant to imply it’s representative of anything much more than August 15 - 31.

Note: since I did not include any blog data you’ll not see Technorati, IceRocket, or Google Blogsearch in this top 10 list. I suspect they would all appear in a similar study of blog data. Similarly; Google Images, Yahoo Video, etc. would likely appear in the results for any site which features a lot of video / graphical content.

Do your site trends look similar?

Using Enquisite, you can know this, and a whole lot more.

Posted in Enquisite Search Metrics | 3 Comments »