Web Analytics
Any effort begins with a web analytics package. This should be a no-brainer. If you have a website you need to know how much traffic you’re getting and where it’s coming from. Are search engines sending you traffic? Are the blog posts that you’re writing generating any traffic for you? Even the simplest analytics packages can provide this data for you. There are dozens of choices so initially I’d say don’t get too bogged down in this feature vs. that, just start collecting data. You can switch later if something becomes important.

Here’s a handful of options, in no particular order.

• Google Analytics – probably the most popular. It’s free and feature loaded. 95% of sites on the web will never need more than this. The only drawback is that the data isn’t instant, today’s traffic shows up in tomorrow’s numbers.
• Woopra – a very good choice, feature rich tool with live data (see today’s data right now), campaign and conversion tracking, and more. Pricing is reasonable and is based on the number of pageviews a site recieves, but there is a free version which should be sufficient for most small sites.
• Piwik – this is another free tool, and bills itself as an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It has all of the features of the most robust tools, with the added benefit that all of the data is entirely yours because it runs on your own webserver.
• KISSmetrics – this is a newly available tool, and has an interesting twist on other options. They track people, not visits. This likely makes them a great choice for those new to web analytics. Pricing starts at $149 per month.
• SiteCatalyst – this has traditionally been the choice of larger sites that require advanced reporting. There is no free version, but the data is customizable and real time.

Taking it a Step Further – As soon as you begin working with web analytics, you’ll probably start to have questions about which visitors are the most valuable. This is where things begin to get interesting. Suppose you’re running two campaigns, an AdWords campaign and a web banner campaign, which of them is generating the most business for you? Which of them generates repeat visits or the most pageviews? Any of the packages listed above can provide this information for you. For more information try reading Avinash Kaushik’s web analytics blog or the SEOmoz blog.

Click Heatmaps
Once your site has some traffic to work with, you’ll want to identify what on your site is working for you, and what isn’t. Does the site’s navigation structure do a good job of drawing people further into the site? Does one section of the site continually underperform in relation to the others? Web analytics can only take you so far, now you need tools to evaluate how effective your site’s layout is. Heatmaps to the rescue.

A heatmap is a tool that shows you where visitors are clicking on your site. While that sounds pretty simple, the data is VERY revealing. Here are the tools to provide this data.

• Clickdensity – very affordable tool with nice data presentation. And, they include a hover map, which can give you information about which content your visitors are reading.
• ClickTale – this tool has some nice features over the others, in the way of reporting. The heatmaps can be displayed a couple of different ways, data sets can be filtered, and they also provide information on form conversions. They also provide complete click paths and hover maps. This is the most expensive tool in the list, but you get the most data.
• CrazyEgg – fantastic tool, beautiful interface, and quite affordable as well.
• ClickHeat – this tool is different than the others. It’s an open source package that you install yourself. It’s not as feature rich as the others here, but its free which is what you may be looking for. This will be sufficient for most users, but advanced skills will be needed for installation & setup.

One quick note, anyone familiar with Google Analytics will know that there’s a site overlay that shows you where people are clicking. This is not the same thing, and if you rely on this you’ll be missing data. The site overlay tool only shows the LINKS that people are clicking on. If they click on an image hoping to leave the page, and it isn’t a link, you’ll never know that you’re misleading your visitors with that image. Unless, of course, you’re using a real heatmap tool such as the ones listed above.

If your site is having trouble with converting the traffic that it receives, give one of these tools a try and find out where your visitors are getting stuck. It’s simpler than it sounds, and the imagery is both fun and informative.

Taking it a step further – Hover maps will tell you where your visitors are looking (assuming that the eyes follow the mouse, which is a fair approximation in most cases). This will tell you which content on your site is getting the most attention.

A/B Testing
Once you know which parts of your site are drawing the most attention, you’re going to want to make changes to the other areas to increase conversions. Don’t just wing it, test everything and find out what works the best! A/B testing is the process of trying two versions of one piece of content (text, button, image, etc) to find out which works best. Most of the time you will be testing a call to action, but the tool isn’t limited to this.

Here are the tools available.

• Google Website Optimizer – this is the most popular tool. It’s likely the most well documented and it’s free. It’s also capable of A/B tests or multivariable testing.
• Genetify – this tool is a free, light weight script that you install on the pages that you’ll be testing. It provides all of the information needed to determine what’s working and what isn’t, but there aren’t pretty graphs or charts on the reports.
• Visual Website Optimizer – this is a fee based service for website optimization that’s loaded with features. It is capable of handling multivariable testing, and it even includes heatmaps. This service also includes real time reporting. The pricing is reasonable and they’re loaded with features.

A/B testing is real work. It takes time to determine what to test and create multiple versions of the same content. It’s time well spent though. The lessons learned here produce real results, because you’re actively involved in improving your conversion rates. Every major website that you see today does this, whether it’s to increase sales or draw more user comments.

One thing to keep in mind as you’re testing the attributes of your site is that it takes time to determine the results. Without getting too technical, statistics comes into play, so the smaller the data set you’re working with, the less accurate the results will be.

Take it a step further – You really should be A/B testing everything; website content, calls to action, conversion funnels, imagery, navigation structure… everything. This is the tool that will make your website and all of your marketing materials a well tuned machine for bringing in new business. Once you’re comfortable that your website is doing everything it can, A/B test banner creative, AdWords messaging, landing pages, email marketing, etc. Obviously the tools listed above can’t help with anything outside of your website, but don’t let that stop you. Once you have the data from the tests, plug it in to Split Test Calculator and it’ll tell you which is the better, as well as how confident it is in its answer.

If A/B testing is a new thing for you, there are a couple of resources which will help you through the process. There’s an Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing at Smashing Magazine which is quite good. Which Test Won & ABtests.com both show the results from tests, which is pretty informative.

By now you can tell that when you pay attention to the details, there is plenty that you can do to bring in business through your website. The primary benefit of these strategies is that they’re all quantitative. If you find something that works, you’ll know it, and vice versa. As you apply these methods, they can inform your entire marketing effort. If you know of other tools, or other strategies give a shoutout in the comments.

Before discussing the differences it is important to understand the terms, so here are a few definitions.

DART is DoubleClick’s campaign administration tool and is one of the industry standard tools available today. Red McCombs Media uses DART for Advertisers to count the number of clicks a banner receives.

The term analytics refers to any web analytics package. Google Analytics is probably the most widely known, but the same information applies if you’re using Clicky, Omniture, WebTrends, Mint or any other.

A cookie is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by the browser, and may contain user preferences, referral information, or other data used by websites. Most web analytics packages, including Google Analytics, require the use of a cookie.

A publisher site is the site on which a banner or advertisement appears.

A landing page is the target webpage for a campaign.

A click is counted by DART when a person clicks on a banner or advertisement on a publisher’s site and is redirected to a landing page to find out more information about the promotion. This is in accordance with IAB click measurement guidelines. A click is not counted when a user interacts with the banner content in some way (expanding to find out more, retracting or closing an auto expandable, adjust volume levels, play a game within the banner, etc). And, a click is not counted when it is automated via a script or web crawler.  The only way a click is counted is if a person’s web browser exits the publisher’s site.

A visit is counted by analytics when a person interacts with a landing page through a web browser, and ends when the browser is closed or shut down. This term is interchangeable with the term session. A script or web crawler would not be counted as a visit, because they are not operating within a browser.

Because clicks and visits are two different metrics being measured by two different services across two different websites, it should come as no surprise that discrepancies exist between them. Regardless of the campaign it is unlikely that there will be a one-to-one correlation between clicks and visits, and in most cases the number of clicks will be greater than the number of visits.

There are a number of reasons for discrepancies between these two metrics. According to Google Analytics Help there are four explanations for a discrepancy between clicks reported by AdWords and visits recorded by analytics. Three of these four factors also apply to banner advertisements:

• A visitor may click on your ad multiple times. If a person clicks on your ad more than once during the same session, each click will be counted but Analytics recognizes each pageview as one visit. This is a common behavior for anyone that is comparison shopping. Multiple clicks equals one visit.
• A user may click on an ad, then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. In this case the referral information would be retained so one click would result in multiple visits. One click equals multiple visits.
• A visitor may click on an advertisement then click back, stop or close the browser before the page fully loads. In this case the click would be counted but Analytics would not record the visit. One click equals zero visits.

The issue of correlating clicks and visits becomes more complicated when searching within analytics.  It can be challenging to identify which visits are from a specific banner campaign. The easiest way to identify the campaign traffic is through referring sites. This is how most clients identify their campaign traffic. Yet, according to documentation within DART for Publishers (login required) this is an unreliable measurement. Because there are a number of ways for an ad to be implemented on a publisher’s website, analytics could report this traffic as being referred by the page where the ad is displayed or DoubleClick.com.

We at Red McCombs Media have even seen instances where the referral information is not passed at all. This can happen when a campaign banner is served by two or more ad servers, and the cookie is either corrupted or stripped. This is an artifact of the way that the banner for a campaign is distributed to publishers. In this case the click would be counted by DART and the visit would be counted by analytics, but it would not be attributed to a referring site at all.

For these reasons it is unlikely that the number of referrer visits will match the number of visits generated by a campaign, increasing the discrepancy between clicks and visits. There are, however, steps that can be taken to ensure that analytics counts as many visits as possible.

• Use Google’s URL Builder to tag the campaign. This ensures that all of the visits that are counted will be correctly segmented and labeled, making them easy to find. If you’re using something other than Google Analytics, there should be a similar means of campaign tracking available for that specific tool.
• Ensure that the same Analytics tracking code is installed on every page of the landing website. This ensures that if a visitor navigates to another page of the site it isn’t recorded as a bounce.

Note that even with these measures the number of visits will still not match the number of clicks.

Since any comparison between clicks and visits requires data from DART and analytics, how accurate is the data being reported by these services?

According to DART’s counting methodologies whitepaper (login required), their algorithm takes measures to prevent automated clicks and they are excluded from reports if detected. Over time this strategy has proven effective, very few clicks by real users are discarded, and once a user is identified as fraudulent all subsequent clicks are discarded.

Analytics packages are generally slightly less accurate when reporting the number of visits. As mentioned above, most analytics require the use of a cookie. Users have the option of blocking or deleting cookies and ad servers may also affect cookies. According to Brian Clifton, author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics and a whitepaper on the accuracy of analytics software, these factors lead to most analytics services (including Google Analytics) slightly under reporting the number of visitors. This would be in addition to the factors suggested by Google, increasing the discrepancy between clicks and visits.

Now that you understand the factors that contribute to a discrepancy, consider its magnitude. Our experience has shown that the size of the discrepancy between clicks and visits is different for each campaign. Because of this, it’s not safe to assume what the discrepancy should be before a campaign begins. Any assumption about what the discrepancy ‘should be’ is arbitrary at best.

Because of the discrepancies between clicks and visits, in our experience, a much more meaningful metric is the landing page conversion rate. This is the rate at which visitors to your landing page convert (complete a purchase, fill out a form, download a file, etc). While it is not possible to predict what the conversion rate will be before a campaign begins, once the data begins to appear there are a number of things that can be done to optimize the campaign to convert as many visitors as possible. By taking steps to optimize the conversion rate, advertisers can maximize the return on their advertising dollar. There are quite a few books available that cover the topic of landing page optimization. If you want to avoid all that reading, Red McCombs Media offers this as a service.

There are simply too many factors that contribute to discrepancies between clicks and visits for them to be considered the same, they are two different things measured by two different tools across two different domains. The supporting articles provided should show that the industry agrees. In short, this is not an actionable metric. Landing page optimization, on the other hand, is an effective means of evaluating the performance of a banner or search campaign. Do you agree or disagree with the conclusions drawn here? Please post questions or comments below.

In the coming weeks this blog will be updated with tips for optimizing the conversion rate of your campaign.

1. Mingle2 – In 2007 Matthew Inman (the former CTO of SEOmoz), designed and built the dating site Mingle2. Because of his previous experience with search engine optimization he knew the importance of inbound links, and he had the skills to boost his fledgling site through the likes of Google and Yahoo!. Within four months he generated nearly a quarter of a million links to the site and ranked #1 on Google for the phrases “online dating” and “free online dating.” This success earned him mentions on popular sites such as Digg and MSNBC.com, and generated nearly 2 million pageviews per month. Inman eventually sold the website to, and now works for JustSayHi. However cool Mingle2 is, it would have never succeeded this quickly (and in such a competitive market it may not have succeeded at all) apart from Inman’s skill in generating traffic through search engine optimization. The full story can be found on 0at.org.
2. San Diego Chiropractic – David Klein is the owner of a San Diego chiropractic firm, and when he saw the potential within Google he decided to try to rank for the term “san diego chiropractor.” He attended a couple of PubCon’s and learned some techniques for ranking well for search terms. He then got to work, transcribing the video of a Matt Cutts talk, and generating clever cartoons of some of the people he ran into at the event. These efforts have earned him more than 3,000 one way links and he has achieved his goal. More than two years later he’s still above competitors that have that search phrase in their domain! Matt Cutts was so impressed that he even blogged about Dr Klein’s success.
3. Automobile Recovery Bureau, Inc – This is a Houston auto repossession company that has been in business for more than 60 years and was looking for a boost in business. They contracted an SEO firm which helped them decide on a new domain, update their content and generated links to the site. The plan worked, within a year they ranked #1 for terms such as “houston repo” and “houston repossession.” They must have been pleased with the results because their SEO efforts began in 2002, and over the years they have done the work to maintain a #1 ranking for the targeted terms.
4. Falcon Storage – This is a Red McCombs Media client that leases storage containers in central Texas. In the summer of 2007 they launched a new website that generates quotes, has detailed information about their products, and the businesses which they serve. Six months later they expressed a desire for SEO, so we got to work keyword optimizing their site. Within two weeks they ranked #1 for such terms as “austin connex box” and “san antonio storage container.” The number of quotes generated by their website skyrocketed. Since then they’ve launched a blog, which has helped to solidify their strength in this market.
5. Southwest Airlines – Once again I have to include Southwest. I’m not a fanboy, but I do think that they get modern marketing at a level that eludes many other companies, and this is a great story. Southwest’s social marketing manager, Paula Berg, shared this last week at the Austin Online Marketing Summit. Every year the folks at Southwest’s headquarters, including the CEO, celebrate Halloween with a crazy costume. One year the CEO mentioned that he planned to dress as Gene Simmons. Someone commented that the CEO of USAir had donned that costume a few years ago, and after discussing it for a while they went to Google to prove it. They tried searches such as “doug parker gene simmons,” “usair halloween,” “doug parker costume” and anything else they could think of to find the answer. For every search term they tried, Nuts About Southwest was the top hit. They had blogged about halloween so much that their site was the top hit for terms directly about their competitor. Talk about success!

These are just five stories from a broad segment of businesses. There bottom line is that SEO works, and savvy companies across America are taking advantage of Google’s strength by working to appear for competitive search terms. Don’t be left out. If you think your company could benefit from search engine optimization, please contact us and we’ll discuss the possibilities with you.

Check it out, WAV Group Releases Localism Whitepaper.