WebShare Search & Conversion Marketing Blog |

Search & Conversion Marketing Blog

Welcome to our blog! Here you'll find posts on the topics of web design & traffic acquisition, paid and organic search strategies, analytics & business intelligence, conversion testing, interviews, videos and more. We hope you find it useful, and invite you to read, share, subscribe, leave a comment, or just have a look at what's here.

Are These Design Elements Providing the Expected Value Add?

August 26th, 2010 by David Evans

We help answer questions like this all the time! And with this simple method, you can too.

With WebShare redesign projects, we do more than just build pretty websites. A truly good website is a combination of being aesthetically pleasing, functional and highly measurable. The purpose of the site has to be clearly defined and the results must be tracked, tested and analyzed in order to make informed decisions to better serve its purpose. Testing, measuring, analyzing: This is what we do.

We recently completed development on the new C3 Concerts website (www.c3concerts.com) and have configured some very common additional Google Analytics tracking to provide the necessary insights to make better decisions about the site. After collecting enough data, seeing how effective various design elements are on the site is a snap!

Example: There are two banners on the home page to showcase various events, promotions or news articles. An internal debate exists over the necessity and/or effectiveness of these banners.

Enter WebShare and Google Analytics. In their native state, these banners are simply links to other pages within the website. Clicks on these banners send the user to the expected page and GA records a standard pageview of that resulting page. However, while this shows how many visitors are viewing a particular page, the method doesn’t provide the insights of how I got to that page (other than knowing I came from the home page). For C3 Concerts, we add virtual pageviews to the onclick event of the anchor tag that links to the target page.

Using an organized naming convention for virtual pageviews makes it very easy to see in the Content Drilldown reports:

A banner was clicked
Which banner was clicked (1 or 2)
What type of announcement (event, news, promotion)
Info about the specific announcement

For example, Banner 1 links to a specific event:

<a onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/vpv/banners/banner1/event/name-of-event']);"
href="event.html" >BANNER</a>

Note the “vpv” that leads it off…by putting all virtual pageviews that we create in this base “folder”, we can easily create profiles in Google Analytics that filter this “fake” data out so as not to throw off our true pageview counts, bounce rates, etc…

In Google Analytics, a few clicks through the Content Drilldown report provides the answers needed to make decisions:

How many banners were clicked?
Which banner was clicked more often?
How many events, news or promotions were clicked via banners?
How many click-thrus per promotion?

About C3 Concerts

C3 creates, books, markets, and produces live experiences, concerts, events, and just about anything that makes people stand up and cheer. Among others, C3 produces the Austin City Limits Music Festival, Lollapalooza, as well as more than 800 shows nationwide. In additon, C3 offers representation services and publicity to artist and entertainers.

David Evans
David heads up software and web design efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about David here.

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Posted in Google Analytics 101, Website Design | No Comments »

How to Locate, Claim, or Create your Facebook Place for your Business

August 23rd, 2010 by Dave Reichenbacher

UPDATED 10/28/2010

You should be aware that last week Facebook launched Facebook Places. Kinda sounds like Google Places doesn’t it? This feature is a way for Facebook users to “check in” at the places they are visiting so they can share that information with their friends. They can also check in the friends they’re with at that same place. For those of you who are familiar with Foursquare and Gowalla this is essentially the same thing. The big difference I see is that Facebook is much more popular – a half a billion users more than those two – so this could get big if Facebook doesn’t mess it up.As a business owner, it’s important for you to understand how your business can take advantage of this feature. If you control your business’s Facebook Place page, you can manage your Place’s address, contact information, business hours, profile picture, admins and other settings. You will be able to advertise it just as you advertise a Facebook Page. However, before you can do anything you need to have control of your business’s Facebook Place. Here’s how you get that control (note: Facebook’s own instructions are located here):

Locating a Facebook Place:
Log in to your Facebook account (not via a phone), search for your business by typing your business’s name in the usual Facebook search box. If your business’s place already exists on Facebook, click on it. You should know that your Place page is not the same as your business’s Fan Page (if you created one). Try looking for a search result that shows how many “checkins” the place has.If you do not locate your business’s Place page this way, try checking in to the business via a smart phone. When you successfully complete a check in, there will be a status update on your Facebook profile page that lists where you checked in and the link of your business’s Facebook Place. Don’t be surprised if you do not find your Facebook Place – many businesses do not have a Facebook Place yet. Skip to “Creating a new Facebook Place” if you still can not locate your Facebook Place at this point.

Claiming a Facebook Place:
1. If you’re lucky enough to find your business’s Facebook Place, click on it to visit. Then locate the “Is this your business?” link at the bottom left of the page and click it.
2. This link takes you to Facebook’s “claiming flow”. [SEE UPDATE BELOW] It’s similar to other claiming processes in that some of you will need to do a phone verification to validate your are an appropriate representative for your business. It works very differently from other claiming processes when it requires you to supply some “official” documentation to prove your worthiness. You can see what sort of documentation via this screenshot.
UPDATE: Facebook changed their verification process in October 2010 to below. Now you either need to have a company email address listed on your personal Facebook account or provide a scanned document of a utility or phone bill that includes your business’s name and address. Much easier.

Creating a new Facebook Place:
1. The first thing you will need is to be physically present at your business with a smart phone.
2. Download the latest Facebook app for your smart phone. The iPhone app seems to work the best but you can do it from a Droid (we know – we did it). If apps are not working, you can point your browser to http://touch.facebook.com.3. Once in the app you want to try and check in at your place of business. As you found out in the “Locating a Facebook Place” section, your Facebook Place does not exist.
4. Click the “Add” button to the left of the Places search box or the “+” in the upper right.
5. Enter a name for your Facebook Place as well as an optional description. Then, click the “Add” button.
6. Click the “Check In” button to share your visit.
7. Once you create your Place, search for it again on the “desktop” Facebook, follow the “Is this your business?” link, and begin the process to claiming a Facebook Place (see above).

Finally, I highly advise everyone understand their privacy settings with respect to Facebook Places. This video provides a pretty good overview of what you need to know.

Dave Reichenbacher
DR directs program management and operations at WebShare. He also is one of our Seminars for Success instructors and has an affinity toward local search marketing. You can find out more about Dave here.

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Posted in Local Search / Google Places | No Comments »

Quick Reference – language codes for Google Analytics reports

August 18th, 2010 by David Booth

Here’s a quick list of the language codes that Google Analytics uses in the Visitors > Languages report:

http://www.websharedesign.com/tools/google-analytics-language-codes/

While you might know most of the ones you routinely see in your reports, every once in a while it’s nice to have a quick reference handy for that one you don’t recognize or just aren’t sure of, so bookmark away!

David Booth
David is a co-founder and principal consultant at WebShare. You can find out more about David here.

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Posted in Google Analytics | No Comments »

Strange Domain Stacking in Google SERPs? (UPDATED with Google announcement)

August 18th, 2010 by Adrian Vender

One of our co-founders here at WebShare discovered something very strange last night, and we are still observing it today. Spurred by a random discussion about TV shows, he performed a google search for this old house and saw the following:

The first 7 results are all from same domain??? Typically we see that a domain can have a maximum of 2 URLs appearing in a given query in the Google SERPs (not including the indented results).

We were able to replicate the scenario using another search for webshare conversion marketing:

8 URLs from the same domain on page 1. Very strange.

We were able to replicate this from different locations in AZ and CA, so it doesn’t seem like geolocation is a factor. Are you seeing the same results? Do think this is just Google experimenting? Or maybe just a glitch?

What do you all think?

********UPDATE***********

After confirming these results with a few other people at SES San Francisco, I did a little more research and found the following blog post by Malcolm Combs where he’s discovering the same results:

Google treating brand names in search terms as site: searches?

In the comment thread is an interesting point from Bill Slawski where he believes this activity may be associated with what is described in a Google patent:

This looks like the process described in Google’s patent “Query rewriting with entity detection” (US Patent 7,536,382). which was granted in May of last year.

For example, the process might identify Apple as a specific entity that is associated with a specific web site, and rewrite the original query to provide results from the Apple site. From the patent:

Some entity names are unambiguous and uniquely identify particular entities. A large number of names, however, are somewhat ambiguous or generic, making it more difficult to identify the entities to which they are intended to correspond when included in users’ search queries.

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention provide mechanisms for determining the entities to which entity names correspond and selectively rewriting users’ search queries based on the entity names. Accordingly, a user’s search query may be restricted to a search of document(s) associated with the entity that the user intended in the search.

There doesn’t appear to be any official indication from Google whether they are just testing this algorithmic change or if it’s here for good. This kind of change may benefit big-brand entities, but I don’t believe this is a benefit to the searcher since the search results may not be the most relevant.

********UPDATE #2***********

Official announcement from Google regarding the algorithm change:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/showing-more-results-from-domain.html

Adrian Vender
Adrian is a technical lead and search engine optimization expert at WebShare. You can find out more about Adrian here.

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Posted in Search Marketing | 4 Comments »

Getting a direct link to your Business’s Google Maps listing or Google Places Page

August 17th, 2010 by Dave Reichenbacher

1. Search for your Google Places listing on Google Maps

2. Click one of the two More Info links next to your Google Places details

3. In the upper right corner of the resulting Google Place page click Link

4. In the resulting URL, delete everything after the CID number. Your resulting address should look something like this: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=4250254080900850257

Now that you have it you can share it with people. This is a great way to get people to submit reviews for your business against your Google Places listing. Put the link wherever you can put a link (website, email campaign, email signature, social media pages, etc).

Posted in Local Search / Google Places | No Comments »

Respond to Your Business’s Online Reviews; Google Places Now Helps You Do So

August 16th, 2010 by Dave Reichenbacher

One of the most common complaints I hear from business owners about online reviews is that they typically have no way of responding to them publicly. I’ve seen some owners post their own review to try and respond to something a previous reviewer may have said. It’s true that anyone can post a review about your business but it looks pretty funny when the business owner submits a review of their own business just to make a response. Plus it may put a cloud of suspicion over ALL of your reviews. It may make readers think, “if the owner is posting a review for this, how do I know all these other positive reviews are not from him as well?”.

As a business owner, you should respond to reviews about your business when you are given the chance. Google recently enabled the ability for owners to publicly respond to reviews from customers on their Google Places page. This is yet another reason to claim your Google Places listing in Google. Other directory sites like Yelp have had this capability for over a year; same for SuperPages, CitySearch, and TripAdvisor to name just a few. Both Google and Yelp give you some good suggestions and guidelines on how to respond appropriately to reviews. The short summary is: be nice and view each review as an opportunity to improve your business.

If the review was not completed via your Google Places page, you may not be able to respond. For instance, Google will typically import reviews from other sources. You can only respond to reviews given on your Google Places page….unless you have access to the other directory’s listing as well. For example if I own my Yelp listing and I see a Yelp imported review on my Google Places page, I can simply go to Yelp to respond to that review there. It is yet to be seen whether your response will also get imported by Google though.

You must have your business claimed via Google Places to respond to reviews. Simply login to your Google Places account or go directly to your listing on Google Maps while logged into your Google account in which your Google Places listing is stored against.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory. But remember be nice and view each review as an opportunity to improve your business as “The entire world will be able to read it.”

UPDATE 8/26/2010:

As of today Google is no longer showing Yelp reviews within Google Places.

Posted in Local Search / Google Places | No Comments »

Get Access to Optimizely’s Private Beta

August 6th, 2010 by Nick Iyengar

After our recent blog post, WebShare readers may already be familiar with Optimizely, a brand new A/B testing platform that’s currently in private beta. Today we’re pleased to announce that WebShare readers can gain access to the private beta by signing up and using the invitation code WEBSHARE.

To sign up, simply head over to www.optimizely.com/beta and fill out the sign-up form. And remember: if you ain’t testing, you ain’t trying.

Nick Iyengar
Nick is a senior analytics and web intelligence analyst with WebShare. You can find out more about Nick here.

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Tags: A/B testing, optimizely
Posted in Conversion Marketing | No Comments »

Limits to Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics

August 5th, 2010 by Nick Iyengar

Today I stumbled upon an undocumented (or at best, minimally-publicized) limitation to Google Analytics’ advanced segmentation feature. It’s hard for me to knock what I think is GA’s best feature, but I’ve found that I can only create 100 advanced segments at a time. That may sound like a lot, but when you have more than a few Google Analytics accounts, it’s easy to start creating a lot of segments for yourself. In case you run into this like we often do at WebShare, here’s what you need to know and a workaround you can use.

In addition to the limitation to the number of segments, there’s an annoying little glitch when you try to create your 101st segment. Let’s say you’ve laid out your segment, named it, and tested it, as shown below:

Once you try to save your segment, you’ll end up receiving the following error. Notice how in addition to giving you the error message, Google wipes out your segment. It’s a minor thing, but it would be nice for Google to preserve our segments so that we could open up a profile in another tab and delete a pre-existing segment.

To be fair, there actually is a small warning notification when you try to create a 101st segment. It’s not very visible, though, so be careful.

As a workaround, you can create a “dummy” second login to use for GA. For example, if your username is user@example.com and you’ve run out of segments, create a new username for yourself under “user+1@example.com” or something similar. Note that this works for any GMail account, but may not work on other email platforms. If that doesn’t work for you, simply create an entirely new login to get beyond 100 segments.

Nick Iyengar
Nick is a senior analytics and web intelligence analyst with WebShare. You can find out more about Nick here.

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Tags: advanced segmentation
Posted in Google Analytics | 4 Comments »

How to deal with perceptual blindness – Dare to not be different

July 29th, 2010 by Julie Ferrara-Brown

One of our most popular services at WebShare is to critique ecommerce sites, and one concept that comes up often is perceptual blindness. This is the tendency to overlook something that is right in front of you because it’s not where you expect it to be. Think of the internal site search box on a website. If you moved this to the very bottom some customers may conclude the site is missing the ability to search because they are not used to looking for the search box at the bottom of the page. This is why we say it’s often better to “Dare not to be different” in certain areas of website design.

I just recently experienced the perfect example that illustrates our point. A friend of mine in Germany found out she is pregnant, and so I just had to send her two books right away.

I logged on to Amazon.com like I always do, entered her address and was about to pay when I saw that Amazon was estimating it would take over a month for her to receive the books, plus the shipping was more than the cost of one of the books! At this point I was beginning to rethink buying these books from Amazon. On a whim I decided to check out Amazon.de (the German version of Amazon).

One thing to point out is that I don’t speak a lick of German, but with Amazon you don’t have to! I searched for the titles in English, the pictures of the covers confirmed I was ordering the right books. So now it was time to add them to my cart. While the text on the “add to cart” button was in German, the buttons and checkout process was so intuitive that I knew exactly what to do without even reading the text. Since the spelling of the months are extremely similar to English, I was easily able to see that the delivery time was much more appropriate and since I was buying on the German site and shipping to Germany I was able to get Free shipping! (which I knew because the location of the shipping charges are in the same place as on the US site—right where you would expect them).

By now you should be picking up on a consistent theme. I was able to make this purchase without knowing any German because Amazon understood the value of consistency and meeting expectations. While it is important to make your company stand out from the rest, be careful to ensure that you don’t actually make it harder for people to do business with you. People abandon shopping carts for lots of reasons—don’t let a frustrating UI be one of them.

Julie Ferrara-Brown
Julie is WebShare's chief statistician and conversion testing expert. You can find out more about Julie here.

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Posted in Conversion Marketing, Website Design | 1 Comment »

User types and cognitive learning

July 26th, 2010 by Mark Geyer

When improving the user experience of your site or just fine tuning elements to improve conversion, it’s important to understand your user types first before you make any rash decisions. When we work with clients on designing a site, one of the first questions to ask is who will be using the site? Specifically a user’s age plays a huge role in what people like and how people think. In this post I’ll generally talk about how users cognitively look at interactive mediums (not just the web).

There are many different types of users out there, especially when you think of how they learn and digest information. So to quickly categorize them, they are: kids, teens, and adults. Many of these people use technology every day and are accustomed to make certain decisions based on their device of choice, their way of looking at the world, and most importantly what matters to them.

Kids
Kids are click o’ holics. They’re very visual and will click on virtually anything regardless of whether or not it’s a button (their favorite color, character, etc). This is why the majority of kid’s interfaces are created in Adobe Flash. It’s the visual/interaction engagement factor (animation, games, etc) that gets kids attention. Kids are sponges and generally absorb everything and learn through visuals, audio, and interaction (kinesthetic learning). Kids will spend 2 seconds on a screen with just text, but will spend a great deal of time on a page with visuals and interaction.

Without experience with different types of interfaces, kids don’t know any better. Kids are more likely to click on elements that have nothing to do with the content or that lead them to a dead end. They except what they see and generally don’t make a lot of criticisms (like we do) on how an interface could be better.

Teens
Teenagers spend a great amount of time online through a home computer, but more than likely a wireless device (cell/smart phone, iTouch, etc). Their fixated on what and how other people see them, so their online presence with friends is important, especially social networks. They’re not adults yet, but would like to be considered one.

Like I said before kids are sponges, but as kids get older the ways they learn and take in information change or tend to favor one vs. the other (visually, auditory, or kinesthetically). A teen is more likely to read more about what a peer thought of something than an adult and more so what their friends thought of it.

Adults
As we get older, we get stingier about our interface decisions. We know what we want and we want it now. At this point we know what feels wrong in an interface but maybe not able to express why or how it could be better. More than likely if an interface is hard to use, the business wasn’t thinking about their users and those users have long since went somewhere else, or struggled through the process of using that interface if they couldn’t go anywhere else.

Generally adults with interfaces or on the web are looking for information or services, selling/buying items, businesses, people (friends), basically anything you can think of. So based on the user’s needs, interfaces work out best when choices are user centric, unlike kids or teens who don’t mind being told what to do or having things already done/filled out for them. Left brain, right brain, the learning aspect continues and tends to stick. If a person learns a certain way (say, visually), it’s more than likely that the person will always learn things that way.

So what kind of learner are you? When I say “fire truck”, what comes to mind?

If you’re a visual learner like me, you would say red. If you’re an auditory learner, you might be thinking about the siren that it makes or that you actually saw one or heard one this morning.

Here’s another example, for the next time you get gas for your vehicle. At the gas pump you swipe your debit card and type in your pin, if that numeric pad didn’t beep while you were pressing the buttons then I bet you’ll look at the screen to see how many asterisks are shown. Plus if the numeric pad didn’t ‘feel’ like it was being pressed, it would have the same effect, you looking at the screen to verify.

Regardless, it’s important to understand how users think vs. what actions you’re asking them to do. That way you can apply various techniques to your interactive mediums and create a holistic experience that’s intuitive. Your users will thank you for it.