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.

Loading mentions Retweet

All right, we've been posting for a while now and hope you like our view of the data world out there but now it's time for a little self-promotion (nevertheless interesting we think). 

Have a look at the below case study outlining the Omniture implementation we did for Vodafone Australia over the past few months (we're rather proud of it) and how it enabled the company to extract some serious ROI from its web analytics platform.

“I’ve been working with SiteCatalyst for over six years, 3 years as a customer and 3 years as an employee, consulting to some of our largest customers around the world. The current Vodafone implementation of SiteCatalyst is one of the most impressive I have seen and ranks in the top 10 from my perspective. It is an amazing foundation for taking action on the data and improving online return on investment.” Adam Greco, Team Lead Business Consulting at Omniture.

(download)

Click here to download:

200909 Vodafone Omniture Case Study.pdf (1470 KB)

Loading mentions Retweet

A little while back, Google discretely introduced a “Show Options” tab that lets you filter your results by media, time or in other interesting ways. Filters are not new, but combined with Google’s awesome search, have become quite useful to me.

Filtering by Visited Pages. Google is being used more and more as a navigational device towards content you already know. Google is good, but if you’re deep in research sometimes it’s hard to find that site again, and this is a brilliant tool for this purpose. 

This behaviour is not uncommon, and an interesting trend I don’t feel is getting enough attention. Search has become less and less about discovery, and more about meeting basic usability requirements about finding existing content... Something search marketers are adjusting for. How often do you already know exactly what content you are looking for before you search? What chance do the other sites have of capturing your click for that impression? if you’re a search marketer, how do you adjust your optimisation metrics to cater for navigational search and usability from something traditionally focused on acquisition?

Here is my search for Domain names. I searched for this last week and couldn’t remember the name of the site which I decided was the way to go. 

Another feature in the options is the wonder wheel – we haven’t seen a lot of people using this from our analytics data, and I am thinking it probably would be more useful for internal search where you have a more defined content set. There are some implications for search, and with adoption will come more users entering your site via more specific keywords and the reduction in broad search terms.

We’ll be interested to see adoption rates of these filters  and any considerations for search marketing – we’re monitoring our logs and see about 5% of visits contain at least 1 filter, and will be looking to use this data in the future to enrich insights around keywords and what users are looking for when they use them.

Loading mentions Retweet

Google has just added a function in Google Webmaster Tools that let’s you flag parameters you wish Google to ignore when crawling your site.

These can include things like session IDs, additional parameters and tracking ids. This is great way of handling the problem rather than forcing the webmaster to implement expensive work-around’s to be found in Google which has historically been the case.

Traditionally, sites that use session IDs as a way of tracking users or e-commerce, will have a disadvantage in search engine optimisation for a few reasons:

• Duplicate content
• Dispersion of page credit
• Potential for bot to get tied up on these additional pages and not crawl other important pages as often

On the tracking front, and speaking from personal experience, flagging removal of tracking IDs is a big boost to data integrity. A recent campaign I worked on saw several blog and news site pick up a unique tracking URL to refer back to the clients site, a tracking ID that was meant to be unique for an email campaign. Google then decided to pick this URL up as it crawled through the sites and it ranked it well in search. The result was most of the search visitors appeared to the analytics system that they came from the email campaign and the collected data were significantly impacted.

Great news and makes life a lot easier for web masters and marketers stuck with this problem.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-parameter-handling-tool-helps-with.html

Loading mentions Retweet

Interesting but obvious GroupM Search, comScore and M80 research exploring the interplay of search marketing and social media (the next hype after the wave of research on display impact on search). People who hear about a brand or discuss it via social media are more likely to search for the brand (I guess we finally have to accept that no matter where people interact with brands they sooner or later want to check them out, i.e. search for their website).

Key findings include:

• Consumers exposed to a brand’s influenced social media and paid search are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s products
• There was a 50% CTR increase in paid search when consumers were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search
• There was a 42-point lift in searcher penetration around brand product terms when consumers were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search compared to paid alone

Click here to download:

Whitepaper-GroupMSearch-Social-Search-Interplay 10-09 FINAL.pdf (1758 KB)

Loading mentions Retweet

There's yet another research report on the impact of display advertising on search, this time from iCrossing (see list of reports below), but I don't think anyone is disputing this fact anymore (nevertheless good to get confirmation).

I think marketers should rather be interested in how much display media they need to boost search! Talk to me at cbartens@datalicious.com if you want to find that sweet spot between display and search spend and I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't save a few media dollars while maintaining effectiveness, most companies overspend and the incremental increase in sales actually doesn't justify the increase in media cost.

Research reports on the impact of display advertising on search
http://www.icrossing.com/research/the-effects-of-display-media-on-search-traffic.php
http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2009_searchanddisplay.htm
http://www.atlassolutions.com/news_20060721.aspx
And I'm sure there's more ...

Loading mentions Retweet