Posts Tagged ‘Analytics’
How Long is Normal: Data Shows Normal Length of Search Query
In honor of Pubcon Las Vegas, where I’ll be heading tomorrow, I’m going to post some more data which should provide meaningful insights to search marketers. First up this week is an answer to the question lots of advanced search marketers often ask me: “how long are most search queries?”, or in other words, “How many words are in most search queries?” I had one of our databases prepare a report on search query length for the month of October, so a poll size of ~40 million search referrals, so enough to be more than just statistically relevant.
Interestingly, four-word queries are more common than one-word queries, and five-word ones are almost as common! Five words!
The database pool used was general web search, and not skewed towards local search, so this breakdown is even more surprising. If it had been local skewed, then a preponderance of local queries such as “Best burritos in San Francisco” would explain the query length.
For the longest query, we actually recorded one search referral with 594 “keywords” in it. Likely it was someone was searching for exact copies of an article, either to identify plagiarism, or link opportunities.
So, if this is “normal” for the Internet, how does your site match up? Interesting to think of this as one more way to determine if your web site’s SEO strategy is healthy: distribution of query length. Not really longtail, what animal shape could we name this metric after? Dana Todd is great at naming these things; maybe I’ll ask her.
For those of you wanting the raw data - I didn’t have time to format the tables, so just put it at the end…
| Words in Query | Percentage of Queries |
|---|---|
| 1 | 11.08% |
| 2 | 24.56% |
| 3 | 25.77% |
| 4 | 17.68% |
| 5 | 10.03% | 6 | 5.36% | 7 | 2.65% | 8 | 1.36% | 9 | 0.70% | 10 | 0.37% |
Enquisite Optimizer Update
We are pleased to announce the September update to the Enquisite Performance Suite. This release includes three new features/enhancements:
1. Enhanced action/conversion reporting for Enquisite Optimizer
2. Deeper visibility into performance of campaigns within Enquisite Campaign
3. Usability enhancements to Enquisite Campaign
Enquisite Optimizer has been enhanced to allow you to better understand the activity driving “actions” and “conversions” for your business. The “Actions” tab allows you to segment and view your search referrals across the various site actions you define (e.g., “user registration”), while the corresponding “Conversions” tab provides you with unprecedented intelligence on factors driving revenue for your business.
With this new feature, you can answer such questions as:
* Which landing pages are most effective – whether to fill out a lead generation form, viewing a demo video, or even find their local store on a map?
* Are there certain cities or zip codes which tend to convert more than others?
* Which search engines are providing me with the quality traffic that converts to sales?
* Which root search phrases are driving actions and conversions, which I can subsequently use to research high-value, long-tail terms?
Now, you are able to quickly understand the specific segments of traffic that are engaging your site and ultimately converting – something that would have previously taken hours, if not days.
Check it out… let us know what you think.
Richard
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…
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.
New Year, New Features
Welcome to 2009… where, like last year, I’m tempted to use the first line of this space to repeat my refrain of “I’m sorry for not writing more often.” I really am. And while I won’t go so far as to swear that I’ll write more blog posts in 2009, I do think that my schedule will make it a bit easier to get some blogging done.
I think that this year will be different, for a variety of reasons-the most interesting of which I should be able to share with you sometime after mid-January. Keep your eyes on this space, as a lot of last year’s hard work is soon to be unveiled.
Exciting things are happening around Enquisite, not the least of which is the recent addition of several new major features being added to Enquisite Pro. Over the past several months, we’ve completed 3 updates: first came the Opportunities Report, followed by the Potential Analysis functionality, and just last week, Map Overlays. Rather than describe all three right here, I’m going to let the suspense build a bit-I’ll give you the scoop on each feature individually in upcoming blog posts.
But first, a sneak peek at the next major update we’re tackling: our new Links report. Rand Fishkin has been eagerly (and somewhat patiently) waiting a seemingly infinite amount of time for this one-and it’s almost here. Though it’s still in production, we’ve shown it to a few folks and the general reaction to it is that they’re blown away. The Links Report will be delivered over the course of several iterations, with additional functionality being added as programming on it is completed. The first piece you’ll receive will be reporting, and the second starts into analysis. Right now, everything is on track for this to start coming out during January.
Anyhow, Happy New Year to everyone. You’d better strap on your seatbelts-we’re all in for one heck of a ride in 2009!
Search Engine Referral Rates by Page in SERPs
I’ve been asked a lot of questions over the last 10 years about how deep in the search results do people actually go before they clicked through on a result. In the past I’ve run a few reports on this information, but using only a month or two worth of data.
I just ran another report, but instead of two months, I used a sampling of our data representing ~300MM search referrals pulled from a much longer time period. What I found was the percentage of traffic from page one is actually increasing over time
I didn’t segregate out PPC or image searches, so this data does represent referrals in the aggregate. When we look at the hard numbers behind the data, the growing gap between page 1 and the rest is stunning.
| 2007-04 | 2007-05 | 2007-06 | 2007-07 | 2007-08 | 2007-09 | |
|
Page 1
|
85.50% | 86.03% | 87.18% | 87.79% | 88.07% | 88.40% |
|
Page 2
|
7.61% | 7.52% | 6.90% | 6.52% | 6.47% | 6.44% |
|
Page 3
|
2.84% | 2.71% | 2.48% | 2.35% | 2.28% | 2.21% |
|
Page 4
|
1.30% | 1.19% | 1.09% | 1.04% | 1.00% | 0.92% |
|
Page 5
|
0.82% | 0.75% | 0.69% | 0.66% | 0.64% | 0.58% |
| 2007-10 | 2007-11 | 2007-12 | 2008-01 | 2008-02 | 2008-03 | |
|
Page 1
|
88.42% | 88.47% | 88.81% | 88.90% | 88.78% | 89.71% |
|
Page 2
|
6.47% | 6.44% | 6.23% | 6.19% | 6.39% | 5.93% |
|
Page 3
|
2.20% | 2.16% | 2.05% | 2.06% | 2.04% | 1.85% |
|
Page 4
|
0.92% | 0.91% | 0.89% | 0.88% | 0.87% | 0.78% |
|
Page 5
|
0.57% | 0.57% | 0.55% | 0.55% | 0.54% | 0.46% |
It’s stunningly obvious that Page 1 generates the vast majority of traffic. Everyone knows this intuitively, but this data provides the facts to substantiate it. Page 2 still gets some traffic, but it’s negligible by comparison. While not appearing to hold much value, these placements are not entirely worthless.
Although a Web page which is found on Page 2 or lower on search engine result pages, (SERPs) may not get much traffic, you want to make these pages some of the prime targets in your SEO campaign. Although people aren’t finding these pages as often, they have incredibly high value simply because the search engines are finding and placing them, just a few small steps away from the success of page one.
Consider it from the opposite perspective: 90 percent of search engine users never venture beyond the first page of results. Listings found on page 2 of the SERPs are incredibly valuable, just not quite valuable enough to make it to page 1. These pages are your gems in the rough, and should be thought of as home-runs in waiting. With a little work, they can easily place on the first page, and you can hit it out of the park on an SEO campaign, just by concentrating your efforts in the right places.
Find the pages where you’re achieving page 2 or 3 placements, and focus on optimizing and improving the pages found there. Small adjustments can bump you up onto page 1, and will make your traffic soar. Get more pages moving up in the listings, and the effect on other pages in your Website is cumulative.