Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

It is possible to get misleading site traffic stats if your Google Analytics code is copied and added to another website page with your account number (this could be inadvertently done if somebody is trying to copy the page without meaning to use your tracking code). If you are intending to make strategic marketing decisions based on the integrity of your Analytics data, this type of misuse of your Analytics code could impair the accuracy of the information you are basing your decisions on.

Thankfully it is possible to configure Google Analytics to only accept data that comes from your domain using a custom filter, to implement this do the following steps. Choose whether you want to apply this ‘own traffic’ filter to the current traffic profile or whether you want to create an additional profile that will conform to this filter. Click on edit on the actions column and then click on ‘add filter’, then on the ‘filter type’ drop down menu, choose ‘custom filter’ and then click on ‘include’ on the radio button options and from the ‘filter field’ drop down menu select ‘hostname’. In the ‘filter pattern’ text box enter the following: ^yourdomainname\.com$. The last step is to choose whether you want the filter to be case sensitive (the default is ‘no’).

Enpiem Internet Marketing is a Northamptonshire based new media marketing consultancy providing strategic planning and campaign management for SEO, paid search marketing, email marketing and affiliate marketing. Contact us to see how we can help you promote your business online.

A question we often get asked is ‘what is an average conversion rate for an e-commerce website’? Whilst this is obviously a very subjective question and a large number of variables contribute to affecting clicks-to-sales (site design, usability, product pricing, seasonality, brand perception, customer feedback, testimonials etc.) there are some benchmarks that have been established so you can gauge your own success.

The UK internet marketing guru Dave Chaffey publishes such details and provides links to free reports and studies at: http://www.davechaffey.com/Internet-Marketing/C7-Service-Quality/Persuasion-conversion-marketing/Conversion-rates-E-commerce

In this post (that we thoroughly recommend you visit at the link above) Dave looks at conversions for a number of metrics including conversion rates by new and returning visitor (or customer), by referrer source (e.g. Google AdWords or Display advertising), conversion rates for different products and conversion rates by visit /visitor. Interesting points he notes include a 50% shopping cart abandonment rate and the power an internal site search can have on conversion rates. He also addresses another popularly asked question – is PPC traffic better or worse for transactional visits?

The Invesp blog also provides insight into specific vertical markets and provides some interesting study results of consumer issues with transactional websites (http://www.invesp.com/blog/sales-marketing/compare-your-site-conversion-rate-to-ecommerce-site-averages.html) and the Conversion Chronicles provide yet further examples (http://www.conversionchronicles.com/What_is_an_average_conversion_rate.html).

Armed with this information you can use your own analysis software to determine how you stack up against the average with tools such as Google Analytics. Set your own goals to monitor conversions and then segment organic/paid traffic to determine the most effective channels. See how they compare to inbound link traffic.

Enpiem Internet Marketing implement and manage e-commerce transactional websites as part of our site management service for clients. To find out how we can help develop, manage and market your online business, contact us today to discuss your requirements.

If you carry out multiple visits to your own/clients website throughout the day this can distort your Google Analytics reporting statistics so it is a good idea to implement a custom filter that excludes your own traffic.

In order to do this, follow these steps within your Google Analytics account:

• Click on ‘Edit Profile’
• Click on ‘Add Filter’
• Name the filter something like ‘Block Internal IP’
• Select ‘Exclude All Traffic From An IP Address’ from dropdown menu
• Enter your IP address in the box ’ Regular Expression for the IP addresses’
• Click ‘save changes’

When entering your IP address, enter a backslash character BEFORE each dot character so an IP address such as 163.212.171.123 will appear as 163\.212\.171\.123. Use of the backslash character prevents dots in the IP address from being treated as wildcards. Google provide more information on this at: https://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55582&hl=en_US&utm_id=ad

If you aren’t sure what your IP address is – use the following website http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and it will locate your IP that can be modified with backslash characters and implemented in your filter.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics and logfile applications including AWStats as part of our Website Data Analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

The challenge for all search engine marketers is to know or be able to accurately anticipate what keywords users will enter when performing a search on their chosen search engine. We have been working recently with a small personal training business that have a fixed geographic catchment area that they will travel within for home-based training or clients to their gym will realistically travel to for regular training sessions. Therefore keyword phrases such as ‘personal trainer’ and ‘personal training’ were far too broad and generic to deliver quality traffic (and unrealistically competitive given our clients marketing resources). It was vital during the keyword discovery phase to find out how a variety of clients referred to our client’s service as (e.g. training, fitness, working-out, health etc.) and also the geographic word usage employed during searches to find our client (county, city, region etc).

Following a detailed discussion with our client and analysis of their Google Analytics account, we had a good base from which to start looking at previously used keyword phrases by searchers. As you would expect, there are a number of resources online to assist with this task, some are free, some require registration and login and others require subscription purchase. The following are all free resources that provide instant results without any logging in, registration or payment:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – enter some base keywords and results are displayed matching your base keywords plus a wide selection of assumed matches that don’t directly match your phrase. The default information includes Adwords advertiser competition for that keyword phrase, local search volume for the previous calendar month and global monthly search average. By changing the ‘choose columns’ drop down option you can discover a variety of useful metrics such as the month when the highest search figures were recorded as well as the average cost-per-click if you were considering running a PPC campaign as well as organic search
• SEO Tools – again, enter the lead keyword phrase that you anticipate users will enter and a table of suggestions is presented. In addition to the keywords themselves, supporting information includes Google, Yahoo and MSN estimated daily searches for that keyword phrase as well as links to other research applications such as Google Trends, Google Insight (showing search volumes on a daily basis, useful to match to your own Analytics data)
• Webmaster Toolkit – enter the lead keyword phrase then select the search engine you wish to use as the research platform and then click on ‘research keywords’. The information is purely keyword driven with no supporting information on volume or seasonal variance
• Spacky – a simple to use tool returning a comprehensive list of keyword variations and suggestions. Keyword is listed on the left side of the results table with monthly search volumes relating to each word for Google, Yahoo/Overture and MSN results. You can reorder the list to any of those engines to assist with your keyword prioritising. There is also a single click feature to save all the keywords to a text file for import to applications such as Excel or directly into Adwords or other keyword tools

Client requirements differ in each case, but with clients such as our personal trainer, volume wasn’t the key to success and three word phrases with geographic references continue to provide the best targeted traffic and inbound enquiries leading to new business acquisition.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Whilst Google Analytics will allow you to isolate paid/unpaid traffic sources within core reports, there are a number of reports where you won’t be able to see your PPC traffic as a separate source. One important report is to be able to isolate goal conversions by hour for PPC traffic only. This will allow you to manage your bidding strategy according to the most productive hours for conversions (a function not offered in Adwords itself).

In order to be able to isolate your PPC traffic from other sources and determine information such as goal conversions for PPC, you will need to create an additional website profile in your Analytics account for your domain, and then filter out all traffic that isn’t PPC.

Creating the PPC only filter is relatively straightforward. Click on ‘Analytics Settings’ then on ‘+ Add New Profile’. Then choose the second option ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’. Locate the name of your new profile and click on ‘Edit’ and go to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ section and click on ‘Add filter’ option.

Choose ‘Add new Filter for Profile’ and give your filter a name such as ‘PPC Traffic Filter’. Then select ‘Custom Filter’ from the drop-down list and make sure that the second radio button is marked (this option is called: ‘include’). The ‘Filter Field’ drop down should have ‘Campaign Medium’ option selected and in the ‘Filter Pattern’ box enter: cpc|ppc. ‘Case sensitive’ should be selected as ‘No’. Then click ‘Save changes’ and that’s it!

Before you’ve finished, don’t forget to recreate the goals you had set up in your regular Analytics profile – this will allow you to track goal conversions for just PPC as well as the regular performance metrics from Adwords and Analytics. Google Analytics will now collect the same data as before, but discount every other source apart from PPC data. When you go to ‘Goals’ and ‘Total Conversions’ you can select the ‘Graph by Hour’ option and data you see will be for PPC traffic only. You can then manage your day-scheduling and bidding strategy around these

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Inclusion of your keyword phrase in both the title and body text of a PPC advert has been proven to be more effective than generic ad-copy. The fact that Google Adwords highlight search query keywords in PPC ads by making them bold is reassurance of this.

But how do you anticipate every keyword phrase that users might enter and do you create hundreds if not thousands of ad-groups with specific adverts to ensure there is a keyword-rich advert for each variation? You could do this, but fortunately there is a dynamic method of inserting specific keyword phrases into ad-copy saving you a lot of time – dynamic keyword inclusion.

Let’s suppose you sell t-shirts in a variety of styles and colours. You could create a separate ad group for each possible colour variation and group relevant keywords into this group. Alternative you could create a single advert with dynamic fields for specific keyword inclusion. Regardless of which colour a user enters, your advert will highlight the fact that you sell that colour and be more likely to receive their click.

The syntax for dynamic keyword inclusion is: {keyword:Cotton T-Shirts} with ‘Cotton T-Shirts’ being default text. Why include default text? When you have included broad-match keywords which include words other than your keyword phrase, Google will replace this with the default phrase. In our t-shirt example the search query ‘red coloured cotton t-shirts’ would show the ‘Cotton T-Shirt’ default if our target keyword on a phrase/exact match was ‘red t-shirt’. If the keyword was ‘red t-shirt’ then the dynamic advert would show ’red t-shirt’ as the title. Dynamic keyword inclusion isn’t a well known technique and dynamic inclusion within the body copy of a PPC ad is even less known. Our experience of using dynamic keyword insertion has been very successful, although it shouldn’t totally replace manual ad-copy completely but run as an integrated element to your campaign. We typically test a number of static creatives proportionally served alongside a dynamic creative to ascertain effectiveness.

There are also a number of refinements you can make to the dynamic insertion of the keyword into your advert. For example, by changing the first ‘k’ of ‘keyword’ to upper-case, this will make the first letter of the first keyword appear in upper case. By also making the ‘W’ of ‘keyword’ upper-case, this makes ALL first letters of keyword phrases upper case (i.e. modify to write as KeyWord). To make all characters appear in upper-case modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYWORD’ or for every character in just the first word modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYword’.

Using dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t direct improve your quality score, but through creating a more targeted advert for the user, this should improve your CTR and therefore indirectly the quality score (in turn lowering your bid).

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Keyword density is a key part of effective on-page SEO, however, if approached incorrectly it can be a hindrance to your search marketing. A content rich website should offer information that naturally contains a number of contextual keywords and phrases associated with the market/sector the site is in. There are a number of useful free resources online that allow you to assess your website keyword visibility at a page-by-page level.

SEOChat.com provide an excellent keyword density tool that allows you to define a number of parameters prior to running your check. This includes variable length of results to display, control over which elements of the code should be included such as meta data, alt attributes and title tags. You can also specify whether numeric characters should be included. You can specify the number of words per phrase that should be assessed so you can get a more accurate picture of your/your clients keyword phrases to optimise. For example when we first set up our own website we checked the density difference between the keywords ‘internet marketing’ and ‘enpiem internet marketing’.

The keyword phrase ‘internet marketing’ appeared 18 times on the page when we included META tags, ALT attributes and Title. This delivered a density of 8.78%. When we removed the META tags, ALT attributes and title this dropped to 9 repetitions and a keyword density of 6.04%. For the three word phrase ‘enpiem internet marketing’ the density is 3.41% with 7 repetitions. Webconfs say that the recommended density for good practice SEO is 3-7% so we removed five inclusions of the keyword phrase ‘internet marketing’ from META content and ALT attributes and this dropped the repetition to 13 uses of the keyword and a keyword density of 6.74% without changing the visible page copy or title of the page.

Another useful resource is the Webconfs keyword cloud tool. A keyword cloud is a visual representation of the keywords that appear on your web page with words appearing in a larger font where there is a higher density. Your leading keyword phrase should ideally appear at the start of the cloud in the largest font. Again, we used the two keyword phrases ‘internet marketing’ and ‘enpiem internet marketing’ from our homepage.

As you can see, the words ‘internet’ and ‘marketing’ are the most prominent with ‘enpiem’ in third position. Stuffing a page with keywords will almost certainly result in you being penalised by the major search engines so using tools like these can be very beneficial when trying to maintain the balance of engaging copy with a clear indication to search engines as to the priority of the page.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

For those without the kind of budget to gain access to Hitwise or sufficient traffic volumes to appear in Alexa, the Google Analytics benchmarking tool provides interesting insight into how you rank amongst your peers.

To access Google Analytics benchmarking data you must have opted to share your site data anonymously with Google. This is done from the ‘Edit Account settings’ page and the ‘Google Analytics Data Sharing Settings’ section. Your data is then collated with other site information in an anonymous, aggregated format. Be aware that it could take up to two weeks for the benchmarking data to appear in your Analytics account after the data sharing settings have been changed and saved.

Accessing the benchmarking information is from the ‘Visitors’ tab and the second option ‘benchmarking’ (below Overview). If the function has been configured correctly you will be presented with six small charts showing top-line site metrics with the familiar blue bar but also an additional grey line showing the ‘benchmark’ value for each metric alongside your own. The metrics shown with benchmarking values are:

• Visits
• Bounce rate
• Page views
• Average time on site
• Pages-per-visit
• Percentage new visits

Below each chart you will see the total/average metrics for the data-range selected. Below this figure you will see the corresponding benchmark metrics followed by a +/- symbol and the percentage difference between your average figure and the benchmark to show how you either exceed or fall below the industry average. You are not able to save these charts to the Dashboard view or apply them to other metrics such as search engine referrals to see how your site performs against other sites for search traffic.

So how are these comparisons of use? You can assess how your site performs against similar sites on given days. For example – do you find traffic is slow on a Wednesday? With the benchmarking report for visits you can ascertain if this is a trend shared by other sites in your market or are you an exception? You can also select a different vertical market to plot the traffic trends for that market then determine if you could promote your products or services to a section of that online community to take advantage of higher traffic on given days/weeks/months.

Benchmarking is done at an account level so it will be applied to all profiles within the account. For example, if you have an additional profile that excludes all traffic other than PPC traffic this will also have benchmarking data. Google determines the traffic volume you are receiving and puts you into an appropriate group so you can compare your data with similarly sized websites.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics as part of our website data analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analysis requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

April fools from Enpiem Internet Marketing!

A client asked our advice last week about email newsletter sponsorship and the effectiveness of advertising formats to generate click-traffic. They had the opportunity go with three options either individually or together including banner advertising, text advertising (like Google Adsense) or sponsored editorial content. They didn’t know which was likely to return the best response.

Most people’s gut instinct is to be very wary of banner advertising because many businesses have had their fingers burnt by expecting PPC level CTRs and click-throughs from websites where banner advertising is a real-estate filler. However, you need to divorce yourself from this mindset of traditional display advertising because the email newsletter audience is already far more targeted than general website traffic. This particular newsletter was a specialist bulletin that was an opt-in publication to members of an content-rich website. With a significant volume of recipients, the publication looked like a good fit for our client. But what type of advertising should they opt for was the question – banner, text or advertorial?

Unlike many online marketing initiatives, there is surprisingly little information, case-studies or advice on this subject. This is probably because of the individual nature of email newsletters and the composition of their audience profiles. We have worked with clients that send lengthy content-rich newsletters that recipients will print to read whilst commuting, whilst other publications offer 1-line teasers of website-based content that draws the recipient back to the website and further information and associated products/services.

A study carried out by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants found that sponsored content such as case studies or white papers received more reader attention than banner adverts. Having analysed the time readers spent on specific sections of a content-rich email, they found that sponsored editorial content received around 90% of the time that the reader spent on content from the regular authors. They also found that results could be significantly improved when combinations of brand exposure were used such as sponsored editorial content plus graphical advertising or text advertising in the same newsletter. Whilst they acknowledged that using banner and text advertising together was more effective than a single ad channel alone, response rates were eight times higher when graphical/text adverts were used in conjunction with sponsored editorial content. The study’s author Hank Berkowitz said “If you don’t have the sponsored content to reinforce the message in your ads, they are less likely to remember who provided the information.”

Another study carried out using the email publication Hedge Fund Daily looked at the response levels of text and banner advertising formats when driving recipients to download a white paper. Despite an initial hypothesis that the visually appealing graphical banner would be more effective, they actually found that the text ad outperformed the banner ad by a ratio of more than 2:1. They believed that this was due to effective integration of text advertising alongside regular editorial content and the reader’s tendency to ‘tune-out’ graphical advertising. But they did add a caveat that this would be something that should be tested on each publication due to the nature of the audience profile.

We would agree with this note of caution when advising anybody of the choice of ad formats. There is no golden rule for which format to use. The best option would be to run split-tests to determine the effectiveness of each format or combination of formats. However, this might not be possible so a sequence of tests could be carried out to the entire user-base on successive broadcasts using various combinations of advertising.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full display advertising service from creative development to placement and reporting as well as a full email marketing service for both sales broadcasts and newsletter communications. Contact us to discuss your display advertising requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.