Adam Howitt Consulting Blog

In just a minute you can set-up an alert to keep a watch on your family's internet exposure with Google Alerts.

I heard about some changes on the radar for Facebook or maybe MySpace yesterday to protect children online by requiring their parents to register and it reminded me that I was going to post a tip about Google Alerts.  

When the name of one of your family members or your business appears on a blog, in the news, in a video or even in a newsgroup, you can get a daily summary of those listings.  I use it for my business and my running site to make sure I know what people are saying, if anything at all.  In most cases it is a blog somewhere and I leave a comment thanking them for the feedback or offering an answer to a question or a problem they encountered using my site.

You could easily use the same approach to monitor your children's names to protect their online identity.  If you see something they have done or someone else has posted about them that you think could be a problem, you can take action early before it gets to be a bigger problem.

How it works:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts
2. You will need a Google account to set this up so it may prompt you to create one at this point
3. For search terms put the search term you want to track in quotes e.g. "adam howitt"
4. For type, select "comprehensive" to make sure you get a broader insight across video, blogs etc.  If you only care about blogs you can just select that
5. Set "how often" to daily for a daily email
6. Enter your email

Easy huh?  The only challenge may be a common name or that you have the same name as someone else with a lot of activity on the internet.  You can minimize mistaken identities by adding extra qualifiers to your search e.g. "adam howitt" Chicago
Here I'm trying to broader mentions of my name by picking out those that mention the city where I live.  You can create as many of these as you need so in addition to geographical tips like "Chicago" I can use keywords related to the type of work I do or the activities I'm involved in.

Four years ago I began working with a content management system, DuoCMS, which was super flexible but the consequence was that the basic search engine optimization pieces could be missed when implementing anything other than a standard content block.  I developed a simple Search Engine Optimization spider to rip through pages of the site and generate a report of the meta data, keywords and titles on each page to help track down omissions.

Last October I started working in Analytics as an independent consultant and I see the demand for this kind of tool is certainly out there.  For that reason, I've added a slimmed down version to start at your home page and find the first 5 pages on your site linked from the home page.  It shows you the title, heading, meta description tag, meta keywords and finally a rudimentary keyword density analysis for the page to give you some ideas about what to use in your meta keywords.

The intro paragraph to the tool gives some optimization recommendations but it should be enough to lift most pages lacking in any of these areas from mid-google obscurity to a respectable first page placement for your selected keywords.  The exceptions are going to be where you are going after the most competitve keywords.  If you find yourself in that boat, use your title and meta tags to carve out a niche in that competitive space.  For example, if dog walking is massively competitive (2 million pages last time I checked), try to focus on your most profitable or rewarding area of your business which might be large breed dog walking (311,000 pages).  If you add your city to the title, in my case Chicago, you get down to 82,000 competing pages.

To try the tool on your website visit my consulting website at  www.adamhowitt.com and select resources in the top right.  You'll find the tool listed as SEO Preview Tool and can find some of my presentations and white papers freely available for download.  I recommend my Google Technology for Better Content presentation for anyone getting started with Google Analytics.

One of the most important but least tracked aspects of your website is how people use search to find things on your site.  Google Analytics has been updated to include a new section for tracking site searches by category.

I'll explain why it's important to track search, describe each of the new reports Google Analytics provides, offer some conclusions you may be able to draw from the reports and then explain how to configure Google Analytics to track searches.

Why track searches?
People typically resort to searching your site when they are either in a hurry or can't find what they are looking for.  It can also be argued that if they are in a hurry and can't find what they are looking for that you still have an issue in that your site doesn't make the important information obvious enough.  Given that the average person spends around 8 seconds on each page of your site you might notice that it seems like everyone is in a hurry!  

What reports will using Google Analytics provide to help me?

• Visits: Who searched and when?
  • When did visitors use site search? - Trends over time to let you know when people are searching.  The drop down box on this report allows you to dig deeper to see how many visitors searched, total unique searches, how many result pages were viewed per search, percentage of people leaving after seeing your search results page (hint: they didn't find what they were looking for), percentage of people refining their search to be more specific (hint: your search results were not very helpful), time spent on your site after they searched and lastly how many results did they user click on to find what they needed.  All of these sub-reports should help you be more critical of your current embedded search.  If people are constantly refining searches or leaving but you know the content they needed was there, maybe it's time to consider Google's site search or another service.
  • How do visitors who searched compare to those who didn't? - This report has the standard 3 tabs you may be familiar with from elsewhere in Google Analytics "Site usage", "Goal Conversion" and "Ecommerce".  The site usage tab allows you to use the drop down boxes to compare visitors that searched against those who did not in terms of how many pages were viewed, how many people after just one page (a "bounce").  If you have configured goals for your site you can switch to the goal conversion tab and, for example, compare visitors who added an item to their cart who used search versus those who did not to see if searches are more or less likely to purchase from you.  If you have e-commerce configured for analytics you can go one step further and the e-commerce tab will tell you if you get more revenue from people who search than those who don't.
• Search: What did visitors search for?
  • Which search terms did visitors use? This report can tell you what the top terms used to search your site were and gives you the same 3 tabs as the previous report.  This means that you can see whether people were more likely to leave your site or buy something based on the terms they used to search.  Clearly if you do track revenue based on visitors to your site and you see that a popular search term results in substantial revenue, it is a strong indicator that this item or product isn't prominent enough in your navigation but has good demand.
  • Which categories did visitors search?  This report tells you how many people are using the more advanced category based searches. You can investigate whether one category of search causes more people to leave the site or purchase something than the other categories of search.
• Content: Where did visitors search?
  • Where did visitors start their searches?  Searchers always have a starting page and this report can tell you which page was the last page they visited before they gave up clicking your navigation and tried to search instead.  This doesn't necessarily mean that the starting page was the dud because they may have bounced around your site with the navigation first.  People want to be successful and feel empowered when they use your site and you can improve this feeling by making visitors feel like they were able to find what they needed by clicking.  It's a small victory but it makes people feel a little happier to use your site so if they resort to searching it can be very disappointing. 
  • Which pages did visitors find?  Once they searched, where did they end up?  This report will tell you where people went for each type of search.

What should you look for?
Take a look at the top 10 search terms on the site and think about the role of your website.  Are any of the search terms valid terms for someone interested in reaching the ultimate goal of your website?  The ultimate goal might be signing up for a newsletter, filling out an application, buying something or submitting a contact form.  If the terms are for this type of content then you may have an information architecture problem.  The solution to this problem is broader than the scope of this post but you should probably gather some of your team together to brainstorm some ideas.  Here are some general pointers but for more information checkout Steve Krug's "Don't make me think".

1. Emphasis is an accent.  If everything on a page is emphasized, nothing on a page is emphasized.  
2. Prioritize.  Your web page reads from top to bottom so the most important messages should appear at the top.  There is only one number one slot on the page.
3. Keep it above the fold.  Not everything deserves to appear in the top part of the page, the trick is deciding which content doesn't belong there.
4. Think like your visitor.  Try to get some people who are unfamiliar with your website to review any different concepts for reorganizing your pages to make sure they can find the new elements you introduce.  An alternative is to try the Google Website Optimizer to test the new designs side by side, otherwise known as an A/B test.  Google serves your new and the old design to a fraction of your existing traffic so you can monitor changes in search behavior and navigation behavior.  Ultimately you can track how many more people converted/ purchased/ signed up because of the new design and make the switch if you have positive results.

To setup search analytics for your site in Google Analytics

1. Go to Analytics Settings for the site where you want to monitor searches
2. Click the edit link on the far right of the "Main Website Profile Information" section
3. You should see a site search section with "don't track site search" selected
4. Change this to "Do track site search" and you should see a new field appear for query parameter and categories
5. The query parameter is the part of your URL which is used to tell your web server which search term was used.  To work this out, go to the search box on your site, enter a search term and hit submit.  Look at the URL on the search results page and you should see something like q=my+search+term or search=my+search+term or something similar.  "q" and "search" are query string parameters and "my+search_term" is the search term.  You may have more than one pair of parameters and search terms, especially if your search has options like cat=my+category where you filter a search based on a category of your website.
6. Enter a list of each query string parameter found in the previous step, separated by commas. So we would use q or search for our example above.
7. If you found that you do have different categories of search like "search people", "search offices", "search products" and there is a query string parameter used to differentiate each search type, select yes where it asks "Do you use categories for site search?" and enter the list of category parameter names.

I've been working with a client to troubleshoot his Google Analytics setup and discovered a documented issue you should look out for.  The Google Adwords campaign summary was reporting over 2000 clickthrus but the Google Analytics AdWords campaign summary showed zero visits for the same period.  After some investigation it became clear that the issue manifested itself after the new site was launched.  In my mind if a click was occuring but not recording a visit my concern was that the adunit was redirecting to a page that had gone away.  I clicked the link in the adunit but it took me to a valid page.  Knowing that 301 redirects are used to redirect clients to new permanent homes of content I fired up Fiddler 2 to inspect the actual http request and discovered a 301 redirect.  My instinct told me that a 301 redirect wouldn't pass on the campaign data from the original page and was ready to set up my own experiment to test the theory when I came across the definitive answer on the Google Analytics support page "Why do AdWords and Analytics show different figures in my reports?".

When a user clicks a link on your site, taking them to a new domain or sub-domain, your Google Analytics reports show an abandonment from the first domain and a referral on the second.  This poses problems if you are trying to track things like a sales funnel because you get artificially high abandonment rates.

You can install the Google script on both domains but because the cookie is tied to the first domain it is recorded as an abandonment for one and a referral for the second site you go to. 

To get around this Google has instructions about tracking domain changes as your customers navigate from one domain to another and back again.

The intent of this approach is for things like third party shopping carts where you may have control over the layout to be able to show your script but the domain name is that of the provider. 

After 9 years of working for other people I've decided to go solo and start my own consulting business.  The site is rudimentary right now as I only handed in my notice today.  As regular readers may be aware, I've evolved from an entry level programmer to a Senior Application Architect in my current role since getting my Masters in Software Engineering and developed an interest in implementing Google technologies.  In my spare time I've been fostering a worldwide smash-hit, WalkJogRun.net, with over 4,000 visitors per day and 100,000 routes worldwide.  I'm addicted to Google Analytics and have a white paper due out under my current employers, Duo Consulting, explaining how to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and tune the content on your website.

The last three years at Duo has been a fantastic experience for me giving me the freedom to explore exciting new technologies and all under billable hours because our clients are willing to try new things.  I've load tested and refined the Chicago Park District programs website to support as many as 3,000 transactions in the first 3 minutes of registration every quarter, debugged and load tested third-party ColdFusion CMS tools and built a Cicada Emergence Google Mashup in the last year alone.  I've implemented Google Analytics for many of our clients resulting in important business changing results.  Clients have paused underperforming ad campaigns, monitored the performance of redesign work, reallocated advertising dollars and even redesigned their shopping cart checkout process on the strength of tell-tale numbers through my analysis.

The primary focus of my new business will be helping clients to install Google Analytics, establish their goals for the websites and then monitor the effectiveness of their sites and the advertising campaigns they create.  I'll help them identify areas of their sites underperforming and evaluate their ad campaigns to get the most out of every dollar.  I have colleagues who can help with content development, Duo will be my first referral as far as deeper restructuring work and I can do development work too.  

The secondary focus for my business will be to load test web applications and either help developers benchmark the sites or discover the bottlenecks and resolve them.  I see this as a huge opportunity as the web continues to grow and web applications surpass the lowly traffic expectations they were initially conceived to handle.  In some cases the trouble will be at the database level, sometimes it is the JVM, sometimes it's an innocuous ColdFusion funciton like createUUID that hit the OS behind the scenes and crash JRun every 10 concurrent visitors.  
If you have read any of my posts in the past and value the expertise you have found, or if you have read this description and think you or someone you know would value from this kind of service, please pass on the link or get in touch.  I can be reached by email at adamhowitt@gmail.com or by phone at +1 (312) 714 9229.  Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more of the same tips, tricks and commentary.

I did my first newsletter mailing today to the 6,000 members who opted in over the last year to WalkJogRun for infrequent email updates and I've got to tell you - it was a blast! I wrote the content and Jeff put together a design for the format, correcting a few things here and there. We used Campaign Monitor to send the messages and the tools are perfect. I uploaded a CSV list from my database of the opt-in members while Jeff uploaded the HTML and ran a few tests to make sure his semantic markup looked good in a range of email clients. They currently charge $5 base cost plus one cent per email so it cost us just over $65 for the list. At 1pm CST 6,000 WalkJogRun members emails were on their way and we had 5 mins to wait before the stats started to come in.

The first response of course is all the bounces from mail servers around the world declaring hard and soft bounces for their domains. Next was a swarm of Out of Office replies in the reply to email address box. Some of these were "I'll be out of the office until..." but some were "I'll be out of the office - forever! I no longer work at ...". Some of these were really funny to read, others straightforward. Being obsessive about things like this, every 15 minutes I would hit refresh to see the open rate and clickthrough rate climbing. As it stands at 2pm (26 hours into the mailing) there have been 1,729 unique opens and a 486 clickthroughs to the site or the articles, 34 people have unsubscribed and 176 emails bounced (101 hard). The reports give you a great overview of the campaign progress to date and allow you to drill down to view opens over time, unsubscribes over time, link activity and plenty more.

My only concern is that we are 30% deep into the open rate with 0.26% spam reports. On further investigation, all but one of the spam reports are from hotmail accounts. I'm very familiar with their process for spam having witnessed my wife innocently configuring her email. I'm not sure if it's a default setup but her email is set to only receive mail from people in her address book. All other mail goes to the spam trap. Every few days she looks in the spam trap and reads messages in place, transfers some to her inbox and just outright deletes others. The majority of these are offers from companies she gave permission to keep in touch with her. She doesn't think of it as spam and the separate bucket is just a convention to her for reviewing offers. I believe she, and many other hotmail users are inadvertently flagging marketing messages they opted-in for as spam, but not appreciating the way hotmail treats these reports. Campaign monitor has a 0.25% tolerance for spam at which point they will terminate your account according to the guidelines so I emailed them to let them know that there is a disturbing trend that of the 15 spam complaints, all but 1 was a hotmail account. My theory is that there is something other than a deliberate spam report decision being made. Fortunately the campaign monitor guys are Australian so it was 1pm their time when I sent my message at 11pm from Chicago last night. Within minutes I had a hand crafted response thanking me for my attention to spam and letting me know that I should be in touch again if it continues to rise. I just emailed Matthew with a note to say that we are considering a double opt-in procedure and a note to say "please add adam@w... to your address book" so hopefully that will cool the waters. I'm also sure that this is just teething trouble for our first mailing and subsequent emails will run more smoothly.

If I could do it all over again I would have used the database to categorize the members by membership duration to see if there is a pattern in unsubscribes or spam reports since it is over a year since people opted in. I'm going to speak to the Campaign monitor guys to see if there is a way to update my list with categories after the fact for this purpose. We have another 5,000 members in our database who opted out who will never receive a message from us and lastly 5,000 members who joined before we added the opt-in box. For this last group, we're going to add a yes no question next time they visit the site to see if they want to opt-in. This should make sure we keep growing the list without irritating people!

I've just had some exciting news that my "Using Google Tools to optimize content for business results" presentation at Web Content 2007 is filling up fast.  The presentation explains how to manage the risk assoicated with making changes to your website through Google's A/B testing tool "Website Optimizer" and how to use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your changes.  It wraps up with an explanation about how to run a profitable Google AdWords campaign.

If you are interested in attending, the two day seminar is in Chicago on June 18th and 19th and includes Jason Fried of 37signals amongst other big names.

There was a great question about my Google Analytics e-commerce post this morning so I wanted to repost the solution I offered here.  Greg wanted to know how to work out which referers and keywords drive the most revenue for his site when customers return over a period of a few months.

First I'll show you how to find high revenue customers generally then address your issue where people spend money over several months.

In the new reporting interface if you go to the "traffic sources" menu item on the left of your reporting interface and select "all traffic sources" you are nearly there. If you have correctly configured e-commerce tracking you should see three tabs above the table of results on the page "Site usage", "Goal Conversion" and "Ecommerce". Select "Ecommerce" and the table shows different columns. Left-click your mouse on the column "revenue" and your report is now a sorted list of the referring sites generating the highest revenue for you.

The other sort order you can use would be to click the "average value" comment to see which site refers the customers with the highest average order value which sounds like it might be what you are looking for.

The last report you may want to look at is under "Traffic Sources" > "Keywords" then select the "Ecommerce" tab and sort the table by "revenue" or "average value".

Google's cookie typically will keep track of a returning customer to your site so the original referer is maintained. This means the reports I describe above will still help you identify the best keywords and sites for visitors who keep coming back - just look for the highest average revenue referer and keyword.

If you need to track the average number of transactions per referer you can either set a cookie on the visitors browser incremented each time they place an order and pass that as a custom parameter on the checkout page or a more robust solution would be to query your customer order database on the checkout page to count how many orders they have placed and pass it in the same way. This is more robust because it doesn't rely on the client not deleting cookies periodically. This solution would also allow you to track a different stat too - you could pass the lifetime revenue as a custom parameter on the checkout page. A filter would allow you to translate the values into revenue bands and then under "Visitors" > "User Defined" you could review each revenue band. You have the option of looking at each user defined value cross-referenced by segment (the dropdown) so you can see which referers and keywords are responsible for the highest lifetime value customers.