Bing being a key competitor to Google is not different atleast algorithmically as far as the ranking factor goes. There are striking similarities on the criteria used for ranking between Google and Bing.

TLD Extensions – Top level domains with .gov and .org extensions have the highest possibility of ranking higher in both Google and Bing. The most interesting part is .org is rated higher to rank than .com and it is quiet surprising.

Tip – Grab .org extension for your site and build a community on that domain or redirect to your .com domain.

Keyword in Domain – A website with target keywords in the domain name has the highest correlation with rankings higher on search.

Here is a quick example of my blog ranking higher in search because of the keyword in the domain.

Tip – Buy domains with your target keywords and build micro sites with unique content on those domains.

Keyword in subdomain – Sometimes it is harder to get a keyword rich domain and another alternative is to go for a keyword filled sub domain. Data shows that Google gives some important and Bing does not factors this in their SERPs ranking.

Tip – Stay away from creating too many subdomains to gain higher ranking in search. Create sub domains only if you feel it is required from user point of view.

On page keyword usage – Both Bing and Google ranking analysis data show a small correlation between on page keyword usage and ranking. Alt image is useful to search ranking in some cases, and so is putting keywords in the url.

In the example below, the website webhostingsearch.com has the word “dedicated server hosting” 10 times on the page in comparison to webhostinggeeks.com (3 times) and it still ranks lower. The reason is webhostinggeeks.com has over 2000 unique links to the page and webhostingsearch.com has only 246 unique links to the page.

External links - Having a small number of links from multiple websites is 10x better than having a large number of links from the same website. Websites rank higher if they have diversity in link sources and there is a high correlation for this in both Google and Bing.

Tip – Diversify your link building strategies to multiple avenues. Build social links along with content links and viral links.

Length of url – Data shows that shorter urls rank higher in search than longer urls.

Tip – I have seen that blog links with longer url tend to rank higher in search, and clearly Google and Bing have different set of rules for different types of sites. This could be because blog links are generally longer. It is ok to have longer blog post links but keep your website links short because it helps users remember the url easily.

Anchor text – The number of unique links with anchor text influence the ranking of a website. Having anchor text diversity is as important as the link diversity.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps
Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports

Google vs Bing: Advanced SEO Analytics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

#1 Web analytics is accurate – Web analytics is all about direction and insights. It is funny that we are still worried about the accuracy of analytics reports. We can spend days arguing with the marketing and sales managers on why the reports are accurate even though we all know that web analytics can never be accurate. Instead of focusing on this let’s start focusing on insights.

All web analytics reports are directional and getting insights is the key to web analytics success. Focus on direction, build trends, and apply statistical significance to the trends to get meaningful takeaways.

#2 Site Visitors delete cookies – It is extremely important to understand the difference between the first and third party. First party cookies are cookies from the host domain i.e. your domain. Top analytics tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends) all install first party cookies in order to measure the repeat visitors. The deletion / block rate for first party cookies is atleast 50% lower than the third party cookies.

Having said that, studies have shown that web analytics software cookie (first or third party) will be deleted no matter what. This is the truth about the tag based web analytics industry, and we have to accept it. This does not mean that we should stop trusting the reports and ignore them. The analytics reports are power packed and actionable because it can provide you insights if you follow the direction. As mentioned above the directional aspect of web analytics is unmatched.

So, stop worrying about cookie deletion rate and focus on the trend.

#3 Users disable Java scripts – A major myth that goes around the market is about the blocking of the java script and thus prevent the execution of analytics tags. Java is an integral part of web and disabling java on the web browser can limit the accessibility to a large number of services on the internet.

Still not convinced? Here is a good study conducted by few developers showing why only 3-5% of the users disable java scripts.

#4 Google Analytics data for search ranking - Google analytics data is not used by Google to evaluate search rankings. Here is a quick video from Matt Cutt’s (head of Googles webspam team). In this video, Matt debunks the myth about Google using GA data for SEO or search ranking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#5 Data addiction = actionable insights – Are you lost in data collection, integrations, and data obsession? If you are a pro analyst then you know that data dump, web integrations, data warehouse are critical issues. Please don’t get carried away by data addiction and focus on analytics priorities. Ask yourself “what is the most important and high priority task / project for you in next 5 days/ 5 months.?” Is it business growth insights or painstaking integrations? Is it few key recommendations to your management or never ending analysis?

I agree, analytics integrations can sometimes make your job lot easier but in most cases integrating your CRM and analytics tool is painful. Use excel reports and MS Access for connecting the dots. Leave the integrations for your web developer and business intelligence teams.

#6 Analytics code hampers site performance – I cannot deny that java scripts can increase the web page load time. However, there several options available to minimize the code impact on the site performance.

1. Open a Google webmaster tools account. Google has recently added a cool web performance measurement tool in the webmaster tools. It is the only free tool that measures your site performance relative to other sites on the internet and displays your historical performance in a trend line.

2. Install Yslow and Google page speed Firefox plugins. These plugins can instantly provide you detailed reports on how you can improve your site performance.

3. If you are using Google analytics then switch to asynchronous tracking. Asynchronous tag allows the browser to continue loading the web page while the tag is loaded in the background. This decreases the page load time.

4. For other analytics solutions, limit the use of onclick function to reduce server call connections. Tag only those pages that can provide insightful and actionable data.

#7 Unique visitors are absolutely unique – Your unique visitor reports are not really unique. It varies depending on the time frame you are looking at. You will have different data for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly unique visitor reports because of the way unique visitor is calculated. Using visits report with new and returning visitor segment will provide you more insights that you can ever imagine from unique visitor reports.

#8 Time on page is accurate – The time on page can only be calculated if the web site visitor navigates to another page on the same website. What this means is you will never be able to figure out how much time a web visitor spent on the last page of the website. Stop worrying about the time on page metric and focus on conversion and task completion. A task completion could be clickling the link to the next page, subscribing to RSS feeds, clicking the buy now button or anything that page is motivating the users to do.

#9 Free Analytics = Enterprise Analytics – Investing in paid analytics solution is not a bad decision atall. You might have been motivated by someone on why you should never pay for analytics. The truth is far from accurate. Google Analytics is one of the best free tools out there, but it does not provide enterprise level capabilities that are required for advanced business analytics.

Here are the top 5 reasons why paid enterprise solutions win over free solutions-

1. Support – Paid solutions comes with support hours so you don’t have to spend time fixing analytics issues.

2. Custom Metrics – Paid solutions allow you to create custom metrics on the fly. You can create your own task completion and conversion metrics.

3. Multi-dimensional Timeline – Advanced solutions like Omniture Discover and Coremetircs Explore allows you to compare data from more than two time segments. Google Analytics can only provide two dimensional timeline comparison.

4. Analytics integrations – Web integrations become easier with the enterprise analytics provider because of their partnerships with email, crm, live chat and other service providers. Usually they provide integration hours or detailed documentation.

5. Campaign Attribution – Enterprise analytics providers store all the data on the data warehouses. The data can be accessible anytime and both first and last click is captured in most cases (depending on your settings). You can use this data to design a campaign attribution dashboard and allocate funds efficiently.

#10 Dedicated web analyst is not required – Paying $100K to your enterprise web analytics provider and expecting them to provide you all the answer is not going to work. Web analysis is the core of online marketing and without proper analysis and recommendations your business could come to a dead end.

Even though I love enterprise analytics I cannot stress enough that a dedicated analytics team is a must. Intelligent recommendations may be the future of web analytics but without an expert eye to decipher data and implement recommendations you won’t get results.

Hiring a web analytics expert is more important than investing in paid analytics tools and services. Period!

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps
Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports

Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked! is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Here are some of the actionable insights -

• Automate display campaign management
• Track display view through conversions
• Develop better campaign attribution model
• Effective & efficient ad spend

I have acquired special permission from Adobe to allow my blog readers to directly download this informative case study. Enjoy reading and please share your feedback, comments and tweets

Case Study: Using Web Analytics to Optimize Media buy is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

I would like to start this post with a startling fact – there are on average 8000 searches done on Google each month for keyword “site conversion” and only 91 searches for “visitor engagement“!

You can frequently find tons of quality discussion on conversion optimization in forums and groups but rarely on visitor engagement optimization. Conversion experts can tell you why your site is not working, and what you need to do to fix it i.e. call to action, credibility indicators, resistance to purchase, conversion funnel leaks.

However, I rarely come across a post that explains how website visitor engagement directly impacts the website conversion. Some of you will argue, but I am yet to see a website with low visitor engagement and high conversion.

You must have realized by now that this post is about visitor engagement and if you are conversion $$ centric then you might think of bailing out but just hang in there. Let me explain on how visitor engagement can make or break your site conversion rate. Once you understand the concept, the first thing you will want to look at on a low converting site is the visitor engagement.

There are different processes used to analyze visitor engagement. Some of the key methods used are analyzing total visits to top pages, time on site & internal search count. I suggest using avg. page views metric to understand the overall site conversion. The beauty of this metric is that it not only tells the story of the depth & length of a site visit but also provides a great deal of actionable insights.

The pageviews and avg. pageviews reports are located in the visitor sub section of the Visitor sidebar section.

Page views report shows the total count of pages on your site with breakdown of pages views by date. Average pageviews report shows the overall page views/site visits and also provides the calculation by date.

In the screen shot below, I am looking at the Google Analytics page view report of a site with average pageviews of 1.46. It means that on average a site visitor views only 1 page on this site . Can you make a guess on the site conversion rate of this website? I am not going to reveal it for privacy reasons, but it’s not something to talk about.

Excited! Well, with this report we are just touching the tip of the iceberg. The real fun begins when you start segmenting this report with different metrics and segments.

I mentioned the word segmentation in this post quite a few times because I am a big fan of segmentation. The data that you can get after segmenting the avg. pageviews is pure gold! Don’t worry if you are new to segmentation because Google Analytics has made it easier than you can imagine.

All you have to do is to click the “Advanced segment” drop down located on the top right hand corner. This will bring up a segmentation option box.

Notice that “All Visits” segment is checked by default. Uncheck “All visits” and check the “Visits with Conversion” (last segment in the Default segment box). Click Apply and viola! The avg. pageviews number will automatically change to a secret number that is access code to your conversion success.

The new page/visit number is telling you that on average it takes X many pageviews for your site visitor to become your customer/lead/member (whatever your site goal is). Can you beat that? From this point your goal is to increase pageviews and use this number as a benchmark.

I am not saying that you can simply throw lots of crappy content pages and expect the conversion to skyrocket. I am also not saying that you should not optimize your conversion path and form fields. Each step is equally important in the conversion optimization process.

Remember, always be testing principle is always true. The moment you stop testing your competitors will gain advantage.

Please provide your comments, feedback, or tweets here.

Here is a list of other helpful blog posts -

Bounce rate Calculation in Site Catalyst Omniture

What is Web Analytics?

Is Web Analytics Right for My Small Business?

Visitor Engagement or Site Conversion? is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

The rapidly changing economic situation is causing more business owners to rethink their market and business growth strategies. Most fortune 500 companies are cutting back on their marketing expenses. According to AC Neilson, online advertising purchases have decreased compared to last year. People are cutting back on luxury item purchases and focusing more on things they need the most.

I am not trying to paint a gloomy picture. I want to bring to your attention the importance of ROI, conversion, customer value and customer engagement. These are the words that were considered to be the last thing a business owner wanted to focus on because they were “busy” getting new business; however, recent developments in the national and world economy have made it mandatory for all of us to focus on the metrics that can turn around a business nightmare into a business success.

Customer or visitor engagement is one such metric that has gained more limelight than any other in recent times. Customer engagement cannot be measured directly because of several factors influencing customer behavior on the website. There are, however, some key sub-metrics that can provide quantitative data on customer engagement. Measuring the customer frequency, recency, and time spent on a website can provide the quantitative data required to understand customer engagement and visitor behavior.

Business owners are trying different strategies to keep the customers engaged and to influence visitor behavior on their websites. Most business owners use blogs, newsletters, midgets (mini application) and videos to increase loyalty.

A new buzzword in the website design market can become the ultimate customer engagement tool. Web 2.0 technology and customization programming (AJAX, dynamic html) are tied together to create what is called a Rich Internet Application (RIA). RIAs are the Internet version of your normal desktop application. iGoogle is a brilliant example of an RIA web page. If you have an account at Google.com, then iGoogle helps you create your own customized search page by dragging any toolbox to any part of the webpage. You can see your Gmail inbox, your website statistics, and Google news on the same page and add more RIA apps.

You can now implement the same technology on your website and increase the time customers spend on the site. Instead of providing a plane webpage to your visitors and customers, you can create an interactive page that allows them to customize your website’s appearance . The more time your website visitors spend on your site, the more they are likely to buy from you. Similarly, your customers will want to buy from you again. RIAs help the customers become a part of your business process by adding value to their purchase.

If you do not have access to high-quality website designers to produce an entire RIA website, you can add RIAs to a small portion of your site. Probably, a single RIA webpage could be a great starting point. You can find many RIA Web designers for pennies on the dollar at websites like rentacoder.com or elance.com.

RIAs act as interactive Web toys for average Internet users who are used to seeing a flat webpage. Possibilities are endless on what you can design using this technology. Even if you provide a service that cannot be customized, you can still add RIAs to your website to improve customer engagement significantly. A dentist can include RIAs in a webpage to help the customers understand the teeth cleaning process; a hair salon can use RIA and help customers visualize how they will look with different hair styles, a car dealer can provide customized paint RIA apps.

RIAs are truly a new frontier in the customer engagement arena.

Customer Engagement At The Speed of Light is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog