Most Web analytics packages allow you to set up standard reports that are automatically delivered via email, monthly, or weekly. These reports can be pretty useless lists of meaningless data that users tend to ignore or automatically file without paying any attention to them. Web reporting does not have to be this way. Here are some simple tips to take your Web reporting to the next level.

Use context - Long lists of uninteresting metrics are useless. Find interesting data points and explain why they are relevant. Visual reports show where visitors click and give easy, at-a-glance insight to content and usability issues.

Use appropriate images - Using simple graphs and tables can make presenting data more easy to read and understand. Using 3-D graphs or pie charts can confuse the data as they can be misleading or tough to interpret.

Show cause and effect - It is less interesting to know that traffic spiked last month than knowing what caused the increase. Also a high-average time on site may seem like a good sign. But, you may find out that visitors are frustrated and spending a long time on your site ‘ping-ponging’ between pages as they cannot find what they are looking for by taking a deeper dive into the path information through your Web site.

Compare time over time - Comparing year-to-year or month-to-month provides a good way to see benchmark data and spot seasonal trends.

Segment - Probably the most important way to report on your Web site traffic is to break the visitor groups into segments and analyze top metrics for each segment. This is a great way to find out not only what is ‘working’ for all of your visitors, but what content and paths lead to conversions. By segmenting, you can find ways to improve the user experience for all different visitor groups.

Just when you think people may be starting to understand what Search Engine Optimization is all about, and how it can help your site - you come across a Website that just doesn’t get it such as this one from the Gruniad (old joke about the name, they’re famous for typo’s)…

It’s all about search engine optimisation these days, readers. See, ORGY the more words SEXY BITS that interweb types search for PARIS HILTON COVERED IN GREASE that the Mill HOW TO GET A GIRLFRIEND, YEP JUST ONE WILL DO, IS THAT ASKING TOO MUCH? sneaks into this article the higher up it will PARIS HILTON COVERED IN KETCHUP appear on Google…

Is that what SEO is? Merely stuffing keywords into the body content and sticking <Strong> tags around them? Well, they did place the term Paris Hilton in the title tag, a <h1> tag, and in the alt tag of the image of Paris Hilton (the description tag reference a post from another day, looks like they forgot that one); so they are trying to see if they can rank for these terms.

Why are they doing this? Surely, the Guardian is a well respected newspaper / site in the UK.  Do they really need to resort to this kind of rubbish (ranking for non-relevant keyword terms)? No they don’t, and the reason they’re probably doing it is just because they want to see if it works.  Or, possibly because they want to see if they can get these terms to show up on the analytics reporting and embarrass whomever presents the reports. Why? Well, it’s because this particular section of the Guardian is known for it’s humor and wit (or in some cases failing attempts at both).  And, because the site itself is well trusted, with a large number of incoming links…they stand a good chance of success.

Photo by casaroger, fake ketchup added by me

How is it doing for them? Well, after a few hours they were already ranking first for “Paris Hilton Covered in Grease” and “Paris Hilton Covered in Ketchup”.  Although, you really have to wonder how many people are going to search for those terms (according to KeywordDIscovery that would be 0). Even if people are searching for them, how pleased would they be to find upon arrival at the site they didn’t find their hotel heiress covered in condiments as promised, but instead found a recap of daily soccer rumors for July 3rd? Probably not too thrilled, so they’ll mostly head right back out the way they came.

This all gets back to the issue of relevance. Whatever your goal is for your site, your content should support that. For you to increase your conversions, you need to funnel people in in specific ways.  Tricking them onto your site may increase your traffic, but it’s going to substantially reduce your conversions, and that’s what really counts (unless of course, the only metric you’re measuring is traffic, in which case I’d suggest also adding time on site and bounce rates into the mix).

Since the introduction of Universal or Blended search last year, where images and videos can now show up alongside the regular search listings, it makes sense for businesses to go ahead and work on getting videos and images indexed and ranked by the search engines, if for no other reason than to take up more of that valuable search engine shelf space.

But how can you do it for your company? Videos take time and money to produce don’t they? After all, if you want it to look good you need to have a flashy title sequence, and so on. Well, not really, as long as what you say is relevant and interesting enough. The lack of flashiness doesn’t hurt, in fact it may even help you as viewers may see your home produced video as being more real to them.

These days most laptops come with a built in webcam, so there’s no real excuse not to go ahead and record something. Your first few efforts don’t even have to go on the web, use them as practice, finding out what works and what doesn’t. After all, it may be disconcerting for you the first time you’re looking at the screen and you turn left while the image turns right…

How long does it take? Well this took 5 minutes to write the script, and substantially less to record. In fact I expect it’ll take longer to upload this video than it’s taken to create.

What do you do after you record and upload the video? Well, you need to make sure you use the right keywords when you upload it, so that the engines know what it’s about. You can link to it, or easily embed it on your blog or site, encouraging people to comment on and / or rate the video. If it’s good enough people will link to it, or embed it themselves on their sites. On some video sites, such as YouTube, you can create a channel which people can subscribe to, so they know whenever you release a new video.

More likely than not you won’t have an instant viral hit on your hands, but that’s fine. If you can use your videos to either build up or engage an existing user base, a base of people who are interested in your company, products or cause, then, search engines aside, that’s a pretty good tool that you should be using…

Whoops… wrong Flash. The big search news from Google, Yahoo and Adobe is that those two search engines are now able to pull all text from Adobe flash (swf) files. So if there is text within the file it can be indexed and found through a subsequent search.

What are the implications? Well, for starters it means that I need to make changes to my SEO training slides where I state that Flash should only be used sparingly if at all (although I do believe that making Flash readable in some manner this year was an ADA requirement). It also means that you may see a shift in the search results as they roll this out, as it’s not a new form of flash that’s being indexed, it’s all flash that’s already out there. The difference is that there’s a new flash parser (reader) that Google and Yahoo are taking advantage of.

One other implication is that any urls in the flash will be crawled, which could result in flash files being stuffed with links in the near future.

So should you rush out and “flash up” your site? Well, since we don’t know yet how well this is going to work, I’d advise caution, plus you also need to think about the usability of your site. Does flash present the look and feel that you feel represents your organization best?  How will the search engines handle the state of the Flash file?  Will they be able to take you to a particular location in the Flash file, or only to the start?  What about sites that are entirely flash based?  Will everything just point you to the first page?  These are just a few of the many things to think about before making the Flash leap.

What I can say is that this is a good move for Adobe, as by giving over 85% of the search market the capability to index Flash, they’ve removed a fairly large barrier for using that format.

Reading Jakob Nielsen’s great article today, ‘Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click’ , got me thinking about delivering my first few trainings when I was with ClickTracks. The reason for this was this heading…

“Unique Visitors” Must Die

Before joining ClickTracks, I felt that Unique Visitors were a pretty important, if not the most important, stat to pay attention to. But, I soon learned the error of my thinking. First of all that metric, depending which type of reporting you are using (log files vs. java script) tends to be wildly inaccurate. (Based on IP addresses in log files and cookies in java script).

But, accuracy aside, it is an even more misleading stat, as Jakob Nielsen explains -

“Chasing higher unique-visitor counts will undermine your long-term positioning because you’ll design gimmicks rather than build features that bring people back and turn them into devotees and customers.”

The funny thing is that people don’t want to hear this. They want to believe that the Unique Visitor count, regardless of any other attribute (e.g. the fact that they leave the site immediately and never return), is the end-all, be-all metric. Countless times when reviewing the concept, ‘Don’t focus on Unique Visitors’ during the ClickTracks training sessions, I was questioned, even challenged.

If Unique Visitors are not the key metric, then what is? This is a great question and can vary from site to site. But, it all boils down to be able to segment out key groups of visitors.

Conversions – What are the business goals of your Web site? There should be more than one. Purchases are the most obvious conversion activities on an ecommerce site, but also important should be lead capture (getting someone’s email address and the permission to continue the conversation with them). Segmenting out visitors who convert can result in valuable behavior information and the ability to improve your site and increase conversions.

Return Visitors/Loyal Users – How many times do visitors return? How frequently? Following the paths of return visitors can give you great insight on the high impact sections of your site. Determining how often and how frequently they visit can give you great insight on the when you need to be updating your content and broadening your inventory.

Word of Mouth Traffic – Is online or offline conversations driving traffic to your site? It is possible to break out the traffic that likely gets to your site from word of mouth. Once the traffic gets to the site, following their path will give you very interesting insight on what people are talking about.

High Quality Traffic – Visitors who spend a significant time on your site (more than 20 seconds). Once again, breaking out this visitor group and following their paths through your site is the only way to find out if they are sticking around because they are happy and finding what they want. Or, if they are hopelessly lost and ping-ponging back and forth through the same pages on your site.

It is well worth getting ‘unstuck’ from the single-focus mentality and take a much broader look at your Web site traffic, not only to get a better understanding of the important traffic but also to be able to improve the user experience.

Last night, I was online shopping for a new beach bag and bikinis for my upcoming trip to the Outer Banks. I typically prefer to shop in brick and mortar stores, because I enjoy the shopping experience - touching and feeling what I’m buying. However, I had a busy work week and hadn’t had a chance to get to the mall.

For the bag, I started with my default luggage site – eBags. I don’t say this about many ecommerce sites, but I love this site. It is user-friendly and exemplifies a near-perfect ecommerce experience. I quickly found the perfect bag and moved on to swimsuits. I started at beachbliss.com, a site InStyle magazine recommended. Due to poor navigability, I gave up after two clicks and went to my old standby – Victoria’s Secret - where I ordered a cute suit that I’ll be sporting next week.

What differentiates eBags and Victoria’s Secret from Beach Bliss and what defines a good ecommerce site? Quite a few things:

Searchability - When shopping online, I need to be able to easily find what I’m looking for. I don’t have the time or the patience to click through multiple pages, requiring reloading. In an offline store, I can scan over an area within seconds to see if they have what I’m looking for. I need that same efficiency with my online experience.

eBags has great navigation, search, and filtering. Users can shop by brand or type of bag. The categories/types of bags are spot on and are very descriptive — not just “messengers,” but “men’s” or “women’s.” To make searches even more precise, users can easily filter down to cost, color, material, and top rated.

On the flip side, Beach Bliss has virtually no filtering or searchability. When I clicked on Swimsuits – Bikinis on the home page, I was taken to a page with 30+ brand subcategories. Users have to go to each brand to see what kind of bikinis that particular brand offers. I don’t search by brand unless I’m looking for something specific. When browsing, the last thing I want to do is page through brand after brand. A “View All” option would have been nice, but no luck.

Product Info and Photos – Since my preference is to touch and feel something before buying it, I want to be able to virtually touch and feel it online. eBags does an excellent job of communicating a bag’s size, scale and look via multiple photo angles and techniques. They put items (running shoes, water bottle, ipod) into the bags, as well as take a shot with the bag on a mannequin.

Free Shipping and Returns – All three sites offered free shipping if you spend over a certain amount. However, eBags was the only one who offered free returns as well. This makes ordering from them virtually risk free. Victoria’s Secret also makes returns easier – providing a pre-addressed label, but users are charged $5.95 for returns. Free returns from VS would be a big plus, since swimsuit cuts and sizing vary so widely.

Customer Ratings – I love to know what other people who bought the bag thought of it. Consumers have less incentive to lie/mislead - unlike product manufacturers. So, I weigh their objective opinions much more heavily. I have often changed my product selections based on customer ratings…and have never been disappointed. ebags has customer ratings, plus a “Best of the Best” category that highlights bags customers rated highest.

Upsells/You May Also Like/Recommendations – Just like when I’m at the grocery store and I throw in a pack of gum and a magazine while in line waiting, I will usually fall for an impulse buy if presented with a targeted, easy offer. When buying a swimsuit, the odds are good that I’ll add flip flops or a cover up, especially when the site features them on a page I’m already on and makes it easy to add them to my cart.

Victoria’s Secret has definitely learned that this tactic works…Beach Bliss has not. BB is losing out on many upsell opportunities. Offering a glimpse at similar items is also a good strategy – gets users to browse more product and thus, more likely to buy something.

Nan wrote a few weeks back about Brand Whores and Brand Evangelists. I am definitely the latter, as you can see by my longer-than-recommended blog post (ignoring our own Blog Tips). But as I’ve demonstrated, when you have a great product/experience, users will become your biggest cheerleaders, just because they want to share a good things with others. No incentive necessary, although if offered, I’d be happy to accept commissions from eBags.

Do you have any favorite online shopping sites?

Remember when name brand goods were never blatantly shown in movies or on TV?  Soda cans simply said “Cola” and looked generic.  Those days are long gone.   

Over the last twenty years, a major shift in product placement has occurred.  Advertisers and media realized how valuable subtle placement and outright endorsements could be.  Slowly, brands made their way into movies, TV, and even video games. 

Brands pay directly for product placement or they can pay “in kind” where companies hand over free goods/services in exchange for promotion.  The producers of Cast Away, basically a glorified FedEx commercial, claim FedEx did not pay directly for inclusion.  

Although product placement started subtly, movie-makers are now very comfortable with a “hit-them-over-the-head” approach, as was seen in  You’ve Got Mail (AOL) and The Italian Job (MINI Coopers). 

TV had still shied away from the shameless plug – the king of all product placements – until recently when TV powerhouse American Idol broke that mold.  Simon, Paula and Randy sip from Coke cups and artists (yes, I’m talking to you George Michael) agree to sellout performances to hawk their latest CDs.  But what I love about American Idol, is that they are completely open and unapologetic with their sponsorships. 

I’ve worked with companies who question the ROI of product placement.  I assure them, it works.  Here is one startling example:

I was driving my five year old daughter to school the other day and we were playing “I Spy” to pass the time.  Typically, we play with school busses, or the cars we own (Sequoia, Prius).  This time, my girl throws out “I Spy an American Idol Car.”  I looked around quizzically not knowing what she meant.  Right in front of us was a Ford truck.  She had seen the Ford logo and associated that with the Ford product placements she had seen on American Idol. 

Now, all Fords are American Idol cars.  Ford has planted their brand into the mind of a five year old and associated themselves with a TV show our family loves and watches together.  That is powerful and invalauble.  So yes, it does work.  Now the challenge for Ford is to continue to reinforce that positive brand associaton for the next ten years until my daughter starts driving and purchasing cars.

Yesterday, Google announced a new media research and planning tool called Google Ad Planner. It is targeted to media planners and is intended to allow them to easily create media plans based on the demographics of their target audience or sites that the media planner knows their target audience frequents. The tool will then allow the media planner to dig deeper into the details of each site that matches their criteria to find the optimal mix of sites for the particular buy.

The sites that are included in the database include both those that are in the Google content network as well as other sites from across the Web.

If the new tool is adopted by media planners, Google stands to really benefit. I don’t have the statistics, but I would be willing to guess that there isn’t significant demand for the non-text based creative inventory in the Google content network. If Google Ad Planner is adopted by media planners the inventory is likely to be in higher demand which in turn will drive up the costs for the inventory.

It can also potentially benefit advertisers since it will allow media planners to find many smaller sites that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about. This should allow for media buys to have a greater reach at a potentially lower cost since, at least initially, there won’t be the demand for the impressions on the smaller niche sites that are likely included in the Google Ad Planner database.

It will be interesting to see if media planners are willing to give Google Ad Planner a shot. I would say it’s at least worth testing to see how it compares to the current methods that media planners are using. As long as the buys are being properly tracked and the visitor behavior is being analyzed using the sites web analytics package, then it should be fairly easy to determine if the new tool is cost effective.

For the launch Google has made Ad Planner invitation only so if you’re interested make sure to apply.

How many times have you received a note from the ‘widow’ of a deposed Nigerian General, or an email informing you that your email address was selected to win the UK lottery for 62 million Euros?

Obviously, they’re scam emails. Yet there must be people who fall for them or they wouldn’t keep sending them out.

An even more insidious crowd are the Phishers. These are sites that replicate the interface of your banking website, or your credit card site in order to get you to enter your account information, which they can then use to empty your accounts.

These are more difficult to detect, simply because they look like they are legit. In most cases, the only giveaway is the URL associated with the email / link.

For example, yesterday I received an email allegedly from Yahoo, informing me that my PPC account was out of funds. Clicking on the link brought me to what looked like the login page for Yahoo, yet it was the wrong URL, and my browser was kind enough to inform me that I was on a Phishing site.

Another email I received yesterday was regarding my PayPal account being suspended (I used to love getting these when I didn’t have a PayPal account). Looking at the URL sent with the message, I somehow doubt that Papal.com is legitimate, although I do have to say that it most likely isn’t anything to do with the Pontiff.

I will admit though that I sometimes do have a false positive. I received an email from a local car dealer which I immediately discounted, as the domain of the email address didn’t match their website. However, after I did a little research I found out that this was the domain of the email vendor that they were using. I do have to wonder though, how many potential customers they are losing because of this. Do they realize that people are more aware of phishing scams these days? If they’d have only used their own domain in the from field they may have seen a larger open rate.

What about you? When you’re sending emails are you making sure that the ‘from’ is from your domain? If not, are you missing out on potential customers because they think that your email may be a scam? If you’re using a service that doesn’t use your domain, try doing a campaign with your domain and compare the open rates.  If you see a difference (which you should), then you’ll know what you’re missing out on - and can make the decision to switch vendors / packages.

Last week I wrote about how to track word of mouth traffic. Once you benchmark the data for your word of mouth traffic, you can begin to improve on it, to increase the traffic from word of mouth.

1 - Make it easy to spread the word
On every email you send, landing page you create or any other promotion add a ‘Send to Friend’ link. Make sure you test the link to make sure that it does not break and it is easy to use. Also make sure that it is obvious that the user was successful. There is nothing worse than ruining someone’s experience with your brand by lack of testing or confusing functionality.

2 - Make it worthwhile to spread the word
Reward your loyal customers and visitors. It is likely that a small percent of your customers will become true brand evangelists. These are your BEST and most important customers and you need to keep them happy. It is well worth the effort to go out of your way to make sure that these customers are appreciated and know it.

3 - Use contests to grow word of mouth traffic and email marketing database
This is such a simple and great way to increase the volume of quality, word of mouth traffic, but it is so often ignored. Create an email contest for your opted-in list that explains the contest. In the email, add a form so recepients can forward the email to their friends (e.g. five or ten) by simply entering the email address and first name into the form. It will involve some simple database programming, and some validation that the email addresses received are valid and qualified. But it is a simple way to encourage your loyal customers to spread the word, and grow your email marketing database at the same time.

There is a fourth way to encourage word of mouth traffic. Be remarkable. OK - so that is not easy, not by any means. But it is great when companies really go the extra mile to be remarkable.