Pod1 Blog

Hands up who uses Google Analytics and gets most Organic- or PPC Revenue from branded terms (Brand name that is). All of you? Thought so.

Here we often have discussions around why you should do PPC and SEO on branded terms when you get most of your traffic and possibly revenue from organic branded terms anyway. I guess we need to take a closer look at what’s happening here.

There are two reasons why you get more traffic from branded terms when using the wonderfully free Google Analytics.

Convenience
Many, (many many) users have Google or any other search engine setup as their start page. Rather than typing your URL into the address bar they just type it into the nice and friendly, large text field in the middle of their screen. Ask a random sample of your users if they know what the address bar actually is. Ask your office mates. I swear most won’t know what you’re talking about.

Last click counts
This is the second reason why you get so many “head keywords”. Users come to your site in different stages of the purchase cycle. They most likely start of on a long tail keyword like: “Pink polka dot jumper”. They find a few pages, check them out and might even land on your page if you’ve done your SEO right. Now they do something else, go back to work; take care of the kids; go out for a coffee and then remember that website where they saw that great Pink Polka Dot Jumper. Most likely they have no idea how they got there or what the product was actually called (I’ll do a post about slang later this month). What they do remember will be your brand name. So instead of going back to Google and using Pink Polka Dot Jumper then click through endless results, they type in your brand name and, shazam, you have a head term conversion.

The problem with Google Analytics is that it only counts the last click from which a user came to your site. So even if they have come from a natural long tail keyword they are likely to convert on an organic head term or even branded PPC term. Analytics will only count this last click, but not the first one or second one or third one. So your stats will be skewed and it might look like only brand terms convert. There is of course and additional problem that many users will use their lunch break to research but convert at home, i.e. switch computers. Forget about these users; it’s going to be a while until we get those tracked.

So should you do SEO and PPC on your own brand name or the other way round: “Should you even bother with this nasty long tail optimisation?” Yes is the short answer. You actually have to do it as otherwise you’ll simply die a virtual death. Always think of the purchase cycle your customers are in. Unless you’re a really really really big brand (Coca-Cola level I’d say) your customers will start of on a long tail keyword search. Most searches are 3 or more keywords long (see: http://image.exct.net/lib/fefc1774726706/d/1/SearchEngines_Jan09.pdf) so it is fair to assume that is the same for your customers. Brand names tend to be a bit shorter. If they don’t find you for Pink Polka Dot Jumper they won’t remember your brand name as they won’t get in contact with it. Not doing PPC or SEO for your own brand terms (PPC even for the sake of getting cheap clicks and preventing competitors to bid on it) will lead to them, if they do find you on the long tail search, not finding you on a branded search.

Now that it is clear that you must do SEO for both, long tail and head keywords what should you attribute the traffic to?

I guess the only way to find out is to launch a PPC campaign on your own brand name and see how far organic traffic drops. The difference should be your convenience clickers, the rest probably very engaged customers.

Discussion more than welcome!

P.S. Yes there are ways to hack 1^st touch into GA, check this out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-get-past-last-touch-attribution-with-google-analytic

There was no need to watch the Oscars live this week you could have used Google instead, the search engine has released some lovely graphs to show how search traffic trended through out the night as different categories and winners were announced. I suppose this is one way to miss all those ‘gushy’ acceptance speeches. Anyway here is Google’s take on their lovely graphs, enjoy;-)

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony:

Click on the image above for the full article

Pod1 NYC is proud to announce the launch of a new ecommerce site for global luxury brand Derek Lam.

Derek Lam Int. was founded in New York in 2002. Lam’s vision for his label is to create clothes that are both luxurious and wearable, with a feminin but unfussy beauty about them.

The site was built using the Magento Commerce platform.

Visit the new site at http://www.dereklam.com

Working within the world of fast fashion means that we don’t always have the opportunity of flexing our usability muscles on some of the ecommerce websites that come out of our well oiled machine. So when I came across this little gem, it urged me to start this new series of posts of sites that put the user at the heart of the website.

1. Nabru: they sell sofas

- Loving the mega top-nav drop-down

- BIG buttons and BIG words make me and my grandmother so happy

- Visual checkout

http://www.nabru.co.uk

Good work fellas.

A while ago we had a heated discussion around whether we should support IE6 anymore or not. I created a monthly report on IE6 stats across Pod1s clients websites and took clients from each of the industries they represent in our portfolio with a focus, of course, on e-commerce. Here are the figures:

Traffic share of IE6 per month

Revenue per browser (last 3 months, this is different from the above)

Where we see a nice and steady decline in the traffic share (YEAH!), we see as well a rather constant level in revenue generated by IE6 users. IE6 users roughly generate 8% of the total revenue on our clients websites. As we see above IE6 contributes a total of about 9%.

This seems indicative for the luxury segment our clients operate in. Peak shopping hours are still around lunch break, 12:00-14:00 and shortly before closing time at around 16:00. I.e users shop from their workplace and large organisations such as banks simply don’t upgrade their entire IT with a more modern browser to allow their users to enjoy YouTube better. So if you work with Clients selling high value goods, you can keep the swanky Flash Intro the CEO is asking for but you will need to make sure you support IE6 as well.

After @i_am_cam suggested to break this down by revenue per browser I started looking at individual clients and how the browsers are spread. We can see that there are two shifts:

1. The more expensive the items the more Safari
2. The younger the audience the more non-IE

Have you ever felt like painting your car with nail varnish? Well… you’re neither insane nor alone.

Brilliant video promoting new Fiat 500 Pink Limited Edition and http://www.pinkmyride.tv/

It’s 8:30pm, I’m still in the office, I’ve had 3 coffees, no lunch, I’m starving and my take-away delivery has still not arrived after an hour

I call the restaurant and in a polite voice start the conversation…”Hi there, I placed an order about…”

I am cut off abruptly “What is the postcode?”

I answer

“The driver left 10 minutes ago” he says

“Ok thanks” I reply

8:45pm…
8:50pm…
9:00pm…

I call and in a polite voice start the conversation…”Hi there, I placed an order at 7:30pm; this is the second time I have phoned”

A polite answer “What is the postcode? Oh he left 10 minutes ago”

Hmmm isn’t that what they said last time….FIRE THE WEAPON!

“Thank you for the update but that is what you said last time. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a bad review on Urbanbite.com”

Finally some good service…“Let me call the driver….” he replies

Suddenly there is a buzz on the office door “I think he is here I say to the man on the phone. Thank you”

I run to the intercom and buzz the delivery driver up…

5 minutes…
10 minutes…
No delivery

I call the restaurant again and in a frustrated voice start the conversation…”Hi there, this is the third time I have called. The delivery driver has disappeared!”

“Let me call him again” the man replies

5 minutes later the driver arrives with my food. He is friendly, apologetic and tells me he got a bit lost in the office block (understandable). I smile back, take my food and thank him despite my frustration.

The phone rings…it’s the man from the restaurant “Have you received your food?”

“Yes I have”

“I’m very sorry for the delay. Here is my personal number and name. Please call the restaurant or my number next time you want to place an order and you will get a discount. Whatever you do please don’t give us a bad review online!”

My observations and questions:

• How powerful is the threat of a bad review?!
• Is a follow up call and a simple gesture all it really takes to make customers happy and are major brands simply missing this point?
• What sort of person am I? Should I be forgiving, harsh but fair or brutally honest?
• How many other people are forgiving with reviews thus potentially skewing the ratings? (Just a thought)

1. Homepage takeover of VIMEO that is pretty outstanding. Great execution. It goes from this:

To this:

(originally found here: http://www.andykinsella.com/2010/03/02/tostitos-salsa-nice-takeover-example-on-vimeo/)

2. Skinput: using the skin on your arm instead of a joystick/keyboard – see for yourself:

This article at Internet Retailing reports research that suggests millions of online purchases were abandoned last year, due to poor website performance.

It’s previously been reported that a 1 second dip in page load times can lead to a 7% dip in on site conversion rates, and it’s clear that a subjectively fast website makes more money than a subjectively slow one. The problem is that infrastructure can be expensive, especially if it needs to be maintained all year for the occasional seasonal / promotional spike.

There are solutions to this problem, though. We are working with content delivery networks to deliver the high volume, large files containing images, Javascript, style sheets and such like very cost-effectively, meaning that the load on the core web-server isn’t so heavy. Our smaller clients pool their hosting resources, so they all benefit from load-balancing, multiple servers, and the performance and fault tolerance that comes with that. This year more retailers will be able to benefit from a technology called ‘private clouds’ which will enable companies like Pod1 to offer scaleable hosting on demand, on their own farms of web-servers.

It’s important to be proactive about this, if you’re to avoid revenue slipping away that could be caught. We would suggest something like the following:

• Assess what your maximum load might be on your website (this is a simple spreadsheet task that we do frequently)
• Load test your current infrastructure, capturing performance data and lots of log file data during the test
• Fix the performance issues, upgrade the hardware where necessary, but often simple application changes can help, as can cheap upgrades like content delivery networks
• Re-run the load test

Load tests should be run periodically: upgrades can cause performance issues sometimes, and other factors (like the performance of the company running your domain name services) can change over time without being immediately recognised.

We’ve implemented Wordpress for many of our clients, and the social side of blogging is one of the main reasons to do that. The options for doing social networking around a blog have just got broader, as an enhanced version of the Buddypress extension to Wordpress has just been launched.

Buddypress offers bloggers the following:

• Enhanced membership and profiles for registered members (who might be anyone)
• Groups so those members can organise around shared interests
• Ability to have lists of friends among other members of the blog’s community
• Activity streams, showing what members have been up to
• Messaging and discussion tools that extend Wordpress into a true social application

Buddypress has matured and become very reliable, and the latest version addresses 2 important limitations of its predecessors:

• You don’t have to install Wordpress-MU any more, which made set-up and administration more complex. You can still use Buddypress with Wordpress-MU if you want to.
• You don’t have to create Buddypress specific Wordpress themes, as they’ve developed tools that make existing Wordpress themes work with Buddypress.

I’ve installed Buddypress on my personal blog so that people can see it in action if they’re interested. It doesn’t have much of a community at present (just me!) but you can see all the features in operation.