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May 23, 2010

Big blow for web analytics: Google search is going secure and along the way hiding all referrer data

Google search is currently in the process of beta testing a secure search, check it out yourself at https://www.google.com.
 
Even though this might be commendable from a privacy perspective, the move could potentially have devastating effects for all search marketers and online analysts. Turning the normal Google search results into secure pages will essentially hide all usage information including the referrer string which contains data on the used search term. So if you would like to know what keywords are driving your business, you're out of luck. For all secure searches, standard analytics software packages will no longer be able to see the what domain referred the visitor (i.e. search engine) and what search term was used (see screen shots below).
 
It's rumoured that China may be part of the motivation for the switch as this will prevent filtering of certain keyword searches as well as the ability to packet sniff the usage of Google. The switch hasn't rolled out in Hong Kong yet, but you can safely assume it won't be too far away!
 
For more information check out the following Google and Wired articles.
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=173733&hl=en
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/google-https-search/

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Filed under  //   china   encrypted   google   hamish ogilvy   https   keywords   privacy   search   sem   seo   ssl   web   web analytics  
Posted by Hamish Ogilvy 

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May 13, 2010

Research: Google Ad Planner data on website user demographics could be wrong by up to 20%

A quick analysis we did today revealed that Facebook user figures reported in the Google Ad Planner platform can differ by up to 20% from the actual Facebook data.
 
Most online marketer probably know the Google Ad Planner platform and love the data it provides but might have wondered how accurate the user figures and demographics actually are for each website. Well, Google is not exactly open when it comes to revealing its data sources or methodology but it occurred to us that the Facebook ad targeting service would provide a perfect sanity check, at least when it comes to user data on Facebook.com.
 
Summary of key findings
1. Total user numbers are very close
2. Google might have the genders wrong
3. User might not be as old as Google thinks
 
Although the Google data seems to be pretty accurate in terms of total user numbers by country when compared to actual Facebook data (numbers differ less than 0.05%), there seem to be significant differences when comparing user numbers by gender and age groups. 
The gender split between male and female users only seems to match in the US, whereas in Australia and the UK it is actually reversed, i.e. Google thinks there are more male users on Facebook than female users which according to Facebook data is exactly the other way around (user numbers differ by up to +/- 9% here). 
A similar pictures presents itself when looking at users by age group across Australia, the UK and US. Google seems to think that Facebook users are on average much older than they actually are across all three countries according to Facebook profile data (user numbers differ by up to +/- 19% here). 
Now don't get us wrong, we love the Google Ad Planner and the data it provides but we hope that this simple analysis will get more marketers to actively question the data they're looking at (and maybe even get Google to provide a little more transparency in the future).
 
You're welcome to repeat the experiment by extracting the data yourself from the below sites or just download the raw data we collected as well as the Tableau workbook we used to analyse and visualise the data.
 
Facebook ad targeting service
http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/
 
Google Ad Planner platform (now DoubleClick)
https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteDetails
 
Public Tableau workbook including raw data
http://public.tableausoftware.com/workbooks/Datalicious-Facebook-Vs-Google-Ad...
 
(download)
(download)

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Filed under  //   ad planner   australia   christian bartens   comparison   data   facebook   google   tableau   uk   usa   users   workbook  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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April 22, 2010

Google Webmaster Tools gets more transparent, now shows impressions and clicks by result position

In case you didn't catch it, Google Webmaster Tools recently deployed a VERY useful new feature. You can now break your sites search traffic down by the query keywords and also your position in the results. These new stats show how many times you appeared in the results for a given search (impressions) and also how you performed (clicks and CTR). The data also breaks down which pages the users were sent to on your site.

You wouldn't have to be Einstein to know Google is definitely using this information to adjust search result rankings. It's bringing more of an adwords style performance metric into the search algorithm. If people love clicking your link, then it's probably a good result for that search. This type of adjustment obviously helps to weed out crap results, but if it's a well formed result listing to a bad site it may not matter too much (Note: that's likely where Chrome and/or Google Analytics usage data are integrated)

Below shows how the Datalicious web site is performing for the search term "osama bin laden" (Note: We were surprised to see we somehow get traffic off this term too!). For a given query you can see the traffic, and the click through rates for each position. This is not a fantastic example as the click through is too low to compare, but for high traffic terms you will notice wild variations in the click through percentage of each position in the search results. 


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Filed under  //   clicks   CTR   google   hamish ogilvy   impressions   position   query   seo   tools   webmaster  
Posted by Hamish Ogilvy 

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April 5, 2010

Google is testing new search results page layout making vertical and local options more prominent

Using Firefox, Safari and Chrome at the same time I sometimes come across some interesting a/b tests and this time it's Google. Looks like the search giant is experimenting with a new search results page design making the local and vertical search customisation options more prominent than before, i.e. the left hand pane is open by default rather than hidden and a location auto-detect function has been added.

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Filed under  //   ab   christian bartens   google   sem   seo   serp   testing   trends  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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March 24, 2010

New Google AdWords report called Search Funnels showing paid search path to conversion

Similar to Omniture's Campaign Stacking plugin Google has finally launched a new AdWords report called 'Search Funnels'. Unfortunately, it only seems to consider paid search interactions leading up to a conversion whereas Omniture can path all search activity, organic and paid. Email us at insights@datalicious.com if you would like to find out more or read our earlier post on how to actually do multi channel media attribution.
Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.
AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:

Read the official article here
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-reports-adwords-search-funnels.html

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Filed under  //   adwords   campaign   christian bartens   funnels   google   reports   search   sem   stacking   web analytics  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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February 25, 2010

Google Ad Planner now DoubleClick including new features and improved data integrity

The Google Ad Planner we've come to love so much has officially be renamed to DoubleClick Ad Planner! Thank god, they didn't only change the name but also rolled out some new features and improved the data integrity by 10% (as claimed by Google).
In cas you ever wondered where your Google Analytics data goes if you opt in to share it with the world, here is your answer: "To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner."
This is especially interesting for publisher data and might over time force more of the Australian publishers to add Google Analytics code to their sites.
"In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now."
Google/DoubleClick Ad Planner
http://www.google.com/adplanner 

For more information on the Google/DoubleClick Ad Planner data methodology
http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/answer.py?answer=175532

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Filed under  //   accuracy   adplanner   christian bartens   data   doubleclick   features   google   google analytics   integrity   publishers   stats   trends   web analytics  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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February 25, 2010

New Google Webmaster tool features including site performance and download speed tests

Looks like Google has given its webmaster tool a makeover and added a few new features with lots more data available now on search terms, back links and internal links.

Not necessarily new but still very useful are the crawl stats on how long it took Google to download a page from your site which makes performance benchmarking and basic speed testing available for everyone now.

For more information on how to add this to your own website visit
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

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Filed under  //   christian bartens   crawler   download   google   google webmaster   seo   speed   test   tools  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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February 4, 2010

Free geocoding and address cleaning for files with up to 1,000 line items

Have a look at GPS Visualizer's free geo-coding service below, it not only returns the latitude and longitude but also cleans the address data.

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/

Data entered (misspelled address): 150 william st Wolomolo australia.

Data returned (correct spelling appended at the end): -33.874455,151.218939,150 william st Wolomolo australia,"150 William St, Woolloomooloo NSW 2010, Australia".

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Filed under  //   christian bartens   free   geo   geocoding   geotagging   google   location   tools   yahoo  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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January 3, 2010

How to ensure Google Analytics goal values are accurate when using Windows IIS web servers

When running Windows IIS as your web server, you might find that the issue of upper and lower case URLs can very annoying and troublesome.

Windows is a case insensitive OS, meaning test.html and Test.html are actually physically the same file in Windows. However, in Google Analytics they will by default be recorded as two different pages if you don't do something about it. The following screenshot shows an example of the folder '/candidates/' and how it is tracked as two different folders simply because of the case sensitive issue.

It's very easy to fix the problem. All you need to do is to setup a filter in your Google Analytics profile to convert all the URLs into lower case or upper case. To do that, login to Google Analytics and click on Filter Manager, then add a filter as shown in the following screenshot. This filter will turn all URLs in Google Analytics to lowercase eliminating the duplication on the content and goal reports. Please note, this only works form the moment you create the filter and not in retrospect.

We recommend that all websites running on Windows IIS should have such a filter to avoid the problem caused by case sensitivity.

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Filed under  //   goals   google   google analytics   how to   iis   server   tutorial   URLs   web  
Posted by Chaoming Li 

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December 17, 2009

New: Google Browser Size page overlay to help optimize website design

Check out the new Google Labs tool called 'Browser Size', it lets you visualize how many people can see what parts of your website based on current screen resolution setting.

Just go to the below page, type in your website URL and then double-check that the majority of your visitors can actually see your most important calls to action. If not, might be worthwhile investing a little time in a quick re-design.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/


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Filed under  //   browser   christian bartens   google   labs   resolution   screen   testing   tools   usability  
Posted by Christian Bartens 

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