Online Marketing Trends

While losses at Omniture for the last quarter were higher than same quarter a year ago, it’s interesting to take a small part from the earnings conference call in which Omniture talks about Google Analytics:

It is true that many of our competitors compete with us on price because that’s all they have to compete with us on. And we believe that kind of competition actually works in our favor. Some tools are even free as many of you know, which we do not view as negative. In fact, the company with the purported best free analytics tool placed a major order with Omniture in the second quarter, and that is probably the best estimate of all to the differentiation of Omniture from the free analytics tools.

Interestingly enough, we believe the reason these companies provide free analytics tools is so their customers who advertise in their platforms can convert visitors more effectively so they can afford to pay more for advertising. Well, that’s exactly what we do. We hope our customers convert visitors more effectively. Except that we do it for enterprise customers and mid market customers, and the providers of the free analytics tool will do it for the long end of the tail. Actually, we believe that over time we will develop closer partnering relationships with the major search engines and advertising platforms since our goal is so similar. If they are confident in their technology, they should want their customers to have objective analytics that encourage more spend on the most effective platforms.

More info: Omniture posts wider 2nd-quarter loss, even as sales more than double

After a long wait Google finally releases the next version of the Urchin software, named “Urchin Software from Google”. In short, Urchin Software from Google is a web analytics product similar in scope to Google Analytics, except you install and manage the software on your own servers.

You are able to download a 90 day trial of this beta from the Google Urchin site. After 90 days you will be able to purchase the product at $2995.

It will be interesting to see if this software version will be the next step for current Google Analytics users.

We get a lot of questions about WebTrends tagging instructions for Google AdWords campaigns or Search Engine Advertising campaigns in general. Most of you may know about the existance of the WT.srch=1 parameter but there is more to think about.

If you add the WT.srch=1 parameter a destination URL will look like: www.omtrends.com/?WT.srch=1 This Query Parameter only tells WebTrends that the visitor came from a Paid Search advertisement, nothing less and nothing more.

To determine which Paid Search program was used (ie. Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing), WebTrends will capture the Referral information also. So if this visitor came from an AdWords campaign, WebTrends will see a Referring URL like http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4EGLC_enNL238NL238&q=visual+workstation+hbx and translate this into “Google AdWords”, with help of the file keywords.ini:

[Google AdWords]
ID1=.google.com
KeywordIndicator1=q= 

As you can see WebTrends will capture the q= parameter to retrieve the keywords. These are the keywords the visitor used in Google.

So for instance, if I search for “visual workstation hbx”, I might see iMETRIX in one of the Google AdWords advertisements. WebTrends will pick up the Search Phrase “visual workstation hbx” and report this in the out-of-the-box report Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid). Alrighty! you think?

Not really WebTrends reports on the Search Phrase the visitor searched on, not the phrase you are advertising on. This means that you cannot match your WebTrends reports with your Google AdWords reports. Let’s say you are advertising Broad Match on the word “HBX” and the user searches at www.google.com on “visual workstation hbx”. Google AdWords will report a clickthrough on the word “HBX” while WebTrends reports “visual workstation hbx”. There is no way to match both reports and if you didn’t know about this - you should have had a lot of discussion with your Google AdWords Professional already.

So now we know that  your reports probably aren’t displaying the data you think they are displaying. Let’s fix it rightaway!

We are going to use a Visitor History parameter. WebTrends has 4 available for you; WT.seg_1, WT.seg_2, WT.seg_3 and WT.seg_4. These Visitor History are meant to be used for segmentation purposes but actually can be used for anything you would like to store. A great advantage of using a Visitor History parameter is that it will store the information in a database so that if a visitor visits your site on day 5 of the month through Google AdWords and converts 20 days later, WebTrends will be able to report on this. If you’d use a regular parameter, ie. kw=<keywords>, WebTrends will only be able to report on behavior of the specific visit that has this information.

Ok I assume you are not using the WT.seg_1 yet, so we will add it to your URL. The value will be the keyword that you are advertising on at Google AdWords, resulting in this Query Parameter to be used in your landing page URL: WT.seg_1={keyword:nil} Google AdWords will automatically replace {keyword:nil} with the keyword you were advertising on. In this example it will eventually look like: WT.seg_1=HBX. More information about Google AdWords Keyword Insertion can be found here.

As you can see we also use the WT.mc_id campaign parameter. We add this to see which overall campaign performance in our campaign overview report. The gclid parameter is being added by Google AdWords because of the Google Analytics auto-tagging of AdWords destination URLs.

Eventually, when you would click on the Google AdWords adversitement, the destination URL will look like:
http://www.imetrix.nl/producten/Visual_Sciences.stm?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=PRHB&WT.seg_1=hbx&gclid=CKemrfi56I8CFQuuQwod6hU4Dw

This Google Analytics tool, built by Nicolas from Belgium, shows Google Reports in a handy desktop tool. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all features of Analytics.

Nico currently works on the final release of the Reporting Suite, stay up to date by visiting his website and for more screenshots, which also has a cool Google Analytics widget available for download.

To install this Google Analytics Reporting Suite, follow these two steps:

Step 1: Install Adobe AIR
Step 2: Install Google Analytics Reporting suite

I was just playing around with Google Analytics and was missing a Filter Pattern test tool.

I found a site that gives you an online tool to test your creations; Google Analytics Regular Expression Filter Tester.

As Web Analytics consultant I’m often asked why one would use WebTrends, WebSideStory or any other paid Web Analytics software or product instead of Google Analytics. Part of the disadvantages of Google Analytics have been blown away by Google.

The new Google Analytics now features the ability to Schedue Reports and send them as PDF, XML, CSV or TSV file to your email address. Also there is an new feature that allows you to create custom dashboards with drag & drop functionality.

A lot other new features and visual changes have been implemented. I’m sure I will post about those lateron!

- Google’s press statement about the new Google Analytics
- Take a tour through the new Google Analytics

Google Analytics users will be notified by email when their interface has been upgraded by Google. This message will appear in your account:

We’re excited to announce the newly redesigned Google Analytics.
Over the next several weeks, we will be migrating all existing Analytics accounts to the new Google Analytics interface. You will be notified by email once your account has been migrated. For an entire month you will be able to access both the original interface and the new interface. During the migration, you should experience no interruption in service and you’ll be able to see all of your data regardless of which interface you use. For a sneak peek at the new Google Analytics, take a look at the following resources.

Just got this email:

Hello Google Analytics User,

This is a quick update to address some issues you may be seeing in your Google Analytics account and what we’re doing to respond.

First, due to extremely high demand, we’ve temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. This allows us to focus on our primary objective–to provide a great user experience for our existing users.

Next, here is current information on the most common questions we’re receiving:

1. The ‘Check Status’ button is being reworked to check for properly installed tracking code. This should be fixed by the end of November.

2. The ‘+Add Profile’ link has been temporarily removed until we increase capacity. We’ll alert all current users when the feature is restored.

3. While we increase capacity, you may see longer than normal delays in data showing up in your reports. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost.

For additional help with your Google Analytics account, we encourage you to browse or search our online Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/analytics?hl=en.

Thanks for your patience as we improve Google Analytics and add resources to ensure a high-quality service.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics already has problems signing up new customers to their service:

Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your name and email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

www.google.com/analytics

Is Google already upgrading their Analytics service ? I tried to logon to the site and saw this funny message:

“Thanks for stopping by. We are currently migrating existing customers to the newly improved Google Analytics service. This process will be completed later this afternoon. Please come back then to sign up for Google Analytics.”

Web analystics software vendors wake up - Google introduced Google Analytics. They utilize the Urchin software for this new service, the company Google bought earlier this year. Google Analytics is described as:

“Google Analytics gives us an opportunity to invest in our advertisers and everyone else who wants to create quality content on the web. Instead of spending money on web analytics, you can focus on creating targeted, ROI-driven marketing campaigns, and on improving your site design and content.”

www.google.com/analytics

An interesting piece of licence text:

The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site. You may not “meta-search” Google. If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services, you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so in advance. Please contact us for more information