Archive for the ‘Search Analytics’ Category
Going Local, and a lot more
Just a quick note to everyone that we completed an upgrade to Enquisite Campaign and the entire suite. Beginning today, Campaign users will have new geo-targeting capabilities, among other enhancements. SEO’s can now determine campaign potential for a defined country and language, not just US/English. For example, you can estimate how many potential search referrals for any term you could receive from searchers located France, in the French language. Geo-targeting has been a consistent request, especially from our European and Asian users, and we made it a top priority. Imagine, not just keyword research, but location-specific keyword research.
Other enhancements include the addition of “page” and “time” sliders to create more precise estimates and forecasts. The page slider allows the selection of estimated page position (1-4) for the keywords in your organic campaign, and the time slider allows the selection of ramp-up time (1-4 mos.) estimated to achieve average page position placements. Taken together, these provide additional degrees of freedom in your assumptions when assessing campaign potential and timing. Lastly, we’ve enabled the seamless loading of baseline referral data into Campaign for Optimizer users. Save time, gain accuracy.
The other major change relates to the entire Enquisite Performance Suite. Starting today, users will have access to all products in the suite with a single login. Get access to everything - Enquisite Campaign, Enquisite Optimizer and Enquisite Auditor — seamlessly. No need to do anything differently, and your data and all your settings will not be affected. Once inside the application, you’ll notice a new toolbar with tabs for each product. Simply click on any of the buttons to toggle between apps. If you’re not licensed for any individual product, you’ll be offered a free 30-day trial to get started.
Microsoft Bing Tracked
Someone asked me yesterday if we could report on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. They were concerned because their present analytics vendors, (plural) were not tracking it properly or at all.
I am happy to confirm that yes, we added bing.com upon its release, and you are able to see it recorded within your Enquisite Optimizer search analytics reports.
I was chatting with someone in Marketing from Bing.com last night at the SMX Advanced event in Seattle, and they were quite interested to find out we were already tracking their results, and I proposed that we publish a note next week, and subsequent follow-on posts about how their marketshare is evolving. She was excited to see the results. So, next week, I’ll start putting together data to post on Bing.com’s evolving marketshare.
Keep watching this space…
Building a New Business Begins
continued from part 3 Starting to Build the Campaign Platform
So, In June 2005, I set about separating Enquisite as an entity from Metamend. This was a crucial and critical step for me, and the company. I needed to establish a firewall between the companies for many reasons, not the least of which was to ensure that competing agencies would never have to fear that their data was accessible to potential competitors. My co-founder at Metamend, Todd Hooge, along with Glenn Convey, a very talented individual in his own right, took over operating that business. It took a few months, but I removed myself from all operational involvement, which was personally challenging. But by December 2005, it was done, and I was out.
By this time, I also had a complete outline for what would become the core elements of Enquisite Campaign, and the next generation of products still to come after it. Over the next few months, I proceeded to break down the functions into manageable pieces we could build as foundational elements for the platform. I received a lot of valuable guidance for each foundational block along the way, and added some key people to the company whom I still depend upon today. Key internal technical counsels for me were our Lead Developer, Rick Morris, and our VP for Technical Operations, Greg Caws. They foresaw many technical hurdles we would face long before we ran into them. Their advice made a dramatic difference every step of the way.
Building the foundation of Campaign was not trivial. Fundamentally, we needed five pillars to support the architecture for the system. We built the various pillars and released them as individual products. So while we’ve received great reviews and feedback for Pro (Now Enquisite™ Optimizer), PPC Assurance (now Enquisite™ Auditor) and our Links Report (within Optimizer), we’ve really looked at these as stepping stones. The last two pillars - the internally-facing “Collector” and a massively scalable, super-fast database - rounded out the foundation.
To build the opportunity analysis and the reporting functions for Campaign, we needed to deal with paid search traffic in a way no one before had. We needed to understand, and value, paid campaigns in relation to organic ones. This perspective, and the requirement to segment out paid search traffic in a new way, led to our PPC Assurance product. This application reveals click accuracy for PPC with amazing precision, enabling advertisers to credibly claim credits from Google, Yahoo! and others and potentially save thousands, even millions of dollars. Equally important, this first step allowed us to understand paid search in a different way from existing solutions.
As a bonus, the work on Enquisite Auditor led to our second product, Enquisite Pro. Earlier this year it was officially recognized by Yahoo!, when they began recommending it via their Traffic Quality Center. We built the early version of Pro - now renamed Optimizer for a purpose - to provide search engine positioning reports, and to segment traffic and campaigns in ways that had not done before. We also pushed the development team to devise a new way to collect data which resulted in the simply named “Enquisite™ Collector.” In case you haven’t noticed, we have very simple and functional product names. In this case, the Collector is an fantastically scalable next-generation data logging system that uses over 26,000 web servers distributed worldwide to collect log file data for our reports.
Continued in part 5….
Starting to Build the Campaign Platform
continued from part 2 The Genesis of the Enquisite Campaign Idea
To make Campaign work technically, I knew we needed at least two things off the bat: (1) we needed to capture some critical information which wasn’t presently available; and (2) due to the absolute scale and magnitude of data, we needed to capture it much more efficiently than present web-based logging systems did. The first conundrum was capturing that critical information, and it was during an animated discussion with my business partner at Metamend, Todd Hooge, that we hit on a means to gather it. This led to Enquisite Optimizer’s (formerly Enquisite Pro) search engine positioning reports.
At first, I didn’t know if the rank reporting process would work the way I needed it to. So we started testing, and I kept dreaming up ideas around a better business model. I didn’t share these ideas with Todd, as we were far away from capturing the data necessary to power a new reporting system. I also suspected that if I had shared these thoughts, he probably would have looked at me like I was nuts (again), and made some comment like “it would also be nice if cars could fly.” Plus, I was still thinking about all the things we would need to build for the “finished” system, including the nuts-and-bolts implementation. Anyhow, Todd helped me tremendously to break down that first, crucial, barrier around capturing the necessary data. It may seem trivial today, but it was a big deal then. Even today it’s still a big deal to people when they get an explanation of the entire data capture system.
Once we worked out the germ of the idea on how to capture the data, we were off. I hired a developer to turn the theory into practice. Simultaneously, I started writing up some of the ideas for patent submissions. By June of 2005, we were ready to try out a basic data capture and reporting system, and I had written a phonebook’s worth of documents to file for patent protection.
When I showed the initial reports to some of my search colleagues, they all said, “When can we have it?” It was at this point that I seriously started considering building out the entire suite for a larger purpose. While at first it was an interesting and meaningful project to help me build out my search marketing firm, based on the initial reaction to the first reports (which now sit within Enquisite Optimizer), I realized we could build a system for everyone, not just ourselves.
Continued in Part 4:
Enquisite Pro Update - March 2009
We’ve made quite a few updates this month in the Enquisite Pro product. I thought I would use the last day of the month to recognize these updates.
Apart from Enquisite Pro updates, I should note that we continue to move forward aggressively with the development of the Enquisite Campaign product. I’m happy to announce that we’re taking this to a larger beta immediately. If you want to be part of the Campaign product beta, please sign up, test it out, and provide us feedback. This is quite an advanced beta at this point, it’s very stable.
If you don’t know about Enquisite Campaign yet, it’s an online marketing monetization platform which allows you to audit and monetize organic search, links, social media, and any other area of online marketing you could wish to. I’m not a big one for hyperbole, so please forgive me if this sounds simple. It’s not, and it will change the face of online marketing. We already have some of the biggest agencies in the world supporting and engaging. Feel free to contact me directly for more information.
However, the point of this post was not to discuss Enquisite Campaign, rather it was to bring everyone up to date on improvements made in March 2009 to Enquisite Pro.
There were four major updates, three of which are easily visible, and all are based on user requests. First off, we’ve change the calendar system used in the application to make it more flexible for users; Secondly, we’ve added an “Organization” tab to the Longtail reports; Third, we’ve added an IP Exclusion feature to the reporting admin, and finally; A major API update with additional functionality built into the API. Rather than just posting what these are, I thought I would provide a short example of how you can use them.
The calendar feature is self-explanatory: you can select longer date ranges, and it’s easier to choose flexible time periods. It’s also an update in anticipation of some future features, and aligns with the calendar system being used in Enquisite Campaign.
The organization report has been requested by lots of users over time. We’re glad to finally get make it available. This function is more interesting for B2B businesses, as what it helps you do is understand what specific target customers are interested in. Let’s say for example that you are discussing an opportunity with IBM, and the people you are dealing with are in Seattle, White Plains, and Austin. Right now it’s impossible to monitor what people located at IBM in those areas are searching for when they visit your site. Now, it’s possible. Using the Organization report, you can isolate traffic from IBM, and then segment just the traffic from the geographic areas you want to monitor. It takes less than 30 seconds to set up a profile, and from that point forward you can monitor what the relevant terms are for your potential partner / client. It’s a whole new way to attentively listen to your conversation.
The IP Exclusion feature is also something which lots of people at agencies have asked for. They want to be able to exclude their own site traffic from reporting. Available via the admin panel, this function allows you to enter in IP addresses you want the system to ignore when presenting reports to you. You might exclude addresses to avoid reporting on your own, or your customer’s internal traffic. You might also wish to exclude a referrer with peculiar behavior which doesn’t suit your reporting or analysis needs. It’s simply one more way to refine your data.
Finally, there’s been a big update to the API for Enquisite Pro. It’s workflow related, and designed specifically for creating certain reports which many agencies use repetitively. Our beta users in the test reported that this workflow saved them 2 hours per site in monthly reporting time. That alone paid for their cost of service!
As always, feel free to send me any questions, feedback, or comments.
New Enquisite Feature - Map Overlays
Sure, map overlays are nothing new to analytics. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an analytics package that lets you geographically segment just your search traffic, and view it on a map — until now. I’m delighted to announce that we’ve just added Map Overlays functionality to Enquisite Pro. Let me spend a moment telling you more about why we felt this was so important.
We found that reading the list of cities that are sending you what traffic is interesting and valuable, but let’s face it-seeing that search traffic spread out on a map is much, much cooler. Heck, even I was surprised when I saw Enquisite’s own search referral data laid out on a map!
Using Map Overlays you can visualize traffic globally, by country, state (province / region), or city. We didn’t drill down to zip code, but might in future, if enough people request it. Nonetheless, in the matter of 5 seconds I was able to visualize traffic on a state-by-state basis. I discovered that Missouri sends far more traffic than I would’ve expected and Texas sends fewer referrals than I would have thought. That tells me one thing—we’ve got lots of opportunity for growth within Texas.
But Map Overlays doesn’t just work to show you search referrals by geographic area-We also created it to be able to plot actions and conversions. One thing that’s pretty interesting to do is to plot the search referral traffic to the site on a state-by-state basis, then filter it just to look at particular inquiries, and compare referrals to conversions. Sure helps it easy to make smarter business decisions.
For example—in looking at Enquisite’s data, our international traffic is dominated by the U.S. and Canada, followed by the rest of the world. But when I filter by inquiries, the patterns change-and quite stunningly, mirror our conference appearances. Adding time and city constraints show an even tighter connection–we see visitors from Paris and areas around it after SES Paris last January; from Bavaria, where Search Marketing Expo Munich was held; and so on. Amazing.
Taking advantage of Map Overlays is easy. Open up your Longtail report and where the longtail graph appears, you’ll see a button that says “Map.” Click it, and watch as the longtail graph disappears, and the map comes into view. And if you create a view you’d like to go back to, just build and save those segments, then apply them to any future maps. How’s that for a much more efficient way to work?
We said before that we tackle the problems that help you turn data into action—so how does Map Overlays help you do just that? By giving you visual cues. Looking at rows and columns of data, it’s hard to spot areas that are not sending you traffic, but plot that same data on a map, and at-a-glance you can see where those holes are, and also which areas are unusually active.
So what do you do with this information? 1) Buy geo-targeted ads to test these markets, and 2) Get some links from geographic areas that are underperforming. An often-neglected search engine algorithm value is that of geographic links. For instance, if your site doesn’t have any links from Texas, your site will likely underperform in searches from that marketplace.
Which makes sense. If you don’t have any links from sites or businesses situated in Texas, then the search engines will assume that the subject matter on your site is not of interest to people there. Why would the engines show your site as well-placed or as often as another site with similar content and lots of links from Texas? They won’t. But unless you do the analysis, you’d never know that Texas was underperforming, nor would you know to concentrate at least a handful of link building efforts in Texas. By seeing the information on a map, you’re ready to immediately take action.
You like what you’re seeing here? It’s just a start. If you’re interested in learning more about how Enquisite can help you save time and do even cooler stuff with your campaigns, you should check out one of our sales engineer Joe’s weekly webinars. During the webinars, Joe answers questions, and demonstrates things you’ve likely never seen—and best of all, these educational training sessions are free!
Like I said before, these are some exciting times at Enquisite. We’re glad you’re here to take part in them. As always, please feel free to send me feedback, comments, or questions.
New Enquisite Feature - Opportunity Analysis Report
Ever wonder if you’re missing out on fantastic opportunities that are lurking within your own web site? Now you can find out. The page 2 optimization strategy I’ve written about in the past is a great way to discover potentially lucrative opportunities, but that strategy focuses on identifying existing opportunities in the search rankings-your pages are out there and recognized by the search engines-you just haven’t made it onto page 1 yet.
The strategy I’m going to talk about today is different. The page two strategy works by identifying the low-hanging fruit that, with a little optimization work, can move new pages onto page 1, an action that typically results in a 4500% increase in traffic. The Opportunity Analysis Report delivers you another way to improve your search referral traffic, and conversions!
Enquisite’s Opportunity Analysis Report is found within the Search Engine Comparison report section. It helps you identify which phrase are driving referrals, actions, and conversions from one or many search engines, but not all. Let me explain. Imagine that you have a keyword phrase that’s driving conversions from both MSN and Yahoo, but not Google. Wouldn’t that be nice to know, at a glance, in 10 seconds or less? Would that have an impact on the search phrases you bid for on Google AdWords? Exactly. The Opportunity Report saves you hours of analysis and decision making by highlighting those phrases that have opportunities on specific search engines, and exporting those phrases to a list that you can easily drop right into your bid management system.
To access this report, simply log in to your Enquisite reports, go to the Comparison tab, and select the “Opportunities” option. Then, choose the search engine (or engines) you want to use as a source, as well as the target search engine-the target will be the engine that isn’t referring traffic (or conversions) for terms that are performing well on other search sources.
And that’s it. We think it’s the most innovative way to do real keyword research on your site. Try it out, and let us know what you think!
New Enquisite Feature - Potential Analysis
As you probably remember, we released the first full version of Enquisite back in August. After our initial release, we didn’t miss a beat-we got right to work on tweaking existing features and adding new ones. I’m happy to tell you today about the first of a series of new features, all centered around the concept of turning data into action.
The first new feature we’re going to discuss is the Potential Analysis. I’d like to thank Andrew Shotland for providing an original version of the formula upon which we ended up basing the math behind this analysis feature on.
The Potential Analysis is found within the Longtail report in Enquisite. It looks at search phrases and calculates a value based on the following variables;
- Referral rates - The number of referrals for a given term
- Conversion rates - The number of conversions a particular term generates
- Page views - Average page views/visits for the phrase
- Time - In seconds, the average time/visit for the phrase
- Bounce ratio for the phrase - The number of sessions driven by the phrase where the visitor left a page or site without visiting any other pages before a session timeout occurred or the total number of sessions driven by the phrase during an interval.
- Activity - in relation to the other terms, and outcomes
Two things worth pointing out:
- A bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a session timeout occurs (we set this to 15 minutes).
- There’s a known issue when it comes to sample size. The larger the sample size, the higher the accuracy of the analysis. In other words, the more referrals, the more accurate the analysis.
Potential Analysis runs automatically and is displayed next to the appropriate column in your Longtail reports. By default, it’s turned on to show you the potential of your keywords. The way it works is simple. There are four levels of potential: High; Medium; Low; and None. A keyword with high potential has a good chance of keeping visitors on your site longer, looking at more pages. Keywords with no potential have virtually no chance of keeping a visitor’s interest.
But why does this matter? Well, for one thing, it helps you make better choices. If you’re interested in selling advertising on a page and are wanting to optimize that page to gain visitors, isn’t it good to know which terms are worth optimizing for? Think about it from a longtail perspective: If you have multiple variations of a phrase driving all traffic, the Potential Analysis will show you the phrase that will have the best ROI for you-in one simple box.
Now think of potential in relation to actions or conversions. Using Potential Analysis, you’ll be able to decide which phrases to optimize (or ignore) even if you have multiple converting phrases arriving on a particular web page from search referrals. This kind of analysis will help you take the guesswork out of the process and make quicker, more effective decisions.