Have your heard about the upcoming Microsoft pubCenter ? Actually in Beta, this Microsoft’s new program is the equivalent solutions offered by Google AdSense. And it’s about to be officially launch in the next few weeks.

It offers the ability for website owners to enter Microsoft’s network and integrate text-based ads on their website. It’s actually only offered in the U.S and will help Microsoft to enlarge their contextual network.

For those who don’t know, the Microsoft Contextual Network includes several interesting websites divided in 2 categories : Microsoft Properties (MSN Money, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Health, Tech and Gadgets, Wheater, Autos,…) and Premium Publishing Partners (The Wall Street Journal, Fox Sports, CNBC, MSNBC). An expansion to iVillage properties (a network mainly focused on the women audience) is planned as well.

In the end, what will be the split of advertising revenue between Microsoft and website owners will be the crucial point in order to attract new websites and/or convinced others to switch from Google AdSense to Microsoft pubCenter.

In a next post, I’ll try to compare the performance of Microsoft Contextual Network with Google’s one in terms of CTR, as this is a metric that has room for improvement on contextual advertising networks…

The event is taking place at the Westin Bellevue and the event itself sounds like an “SES” Microsoft .

This morning, we’ve had the Keynote presentation from Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Division. The presentation has been mainly focus on the evolution from Live Search to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing ; and the recent improvements of the AdCenter Advertising platform.

There are interesting new features that will come up soon : Display Ads available in AdCenter, new search marketing functions in Adcenter (campaign level targeting, new geo-targeting options,…). Unfortunately, not all of those new features will be available in Canada…

This afternoon, we’ll visit Microsoft Headquarter and take a tour at the Company Store (Who want’s a copy of Windows 7?).

I’ll follow up tomorrow with new information about the Summit and will let you know if I had the chance to meet Bill…

Meanwhile, take a look at YouTube’s Bing channel and give us your feedback on those TV commercials (I really liked the “Hawaï” one).

1. HTML Titles
The title tag of a page is one of the most important elements in search engine optimization, along with the URLs. Because its purpose is to clearly define the theme of the page, search engines give it a significant weight in their algorithm. It is therefore essential to use in the HTML titles the keywords you want to rank on.
Example:
The home page on www.taxi.ca, like all the categories pages, currently uses the following HTML title:
TAXI
This HTML title means nothing to search engines, whereas the following one is explicit:
Marketing Agency – TAXI – Taxi.ca

2. URL
URLs are one of the most important search engine optimization components of a site. Search engines give a high importance to the keywords in the URLs. For this reason, a website that uses non-meaningful URLs is missing a big opportunity to rank better.
Example:
The About page of Taxi on Taxi.ca currently uses the following URL:
http://www.taxi.ca/index.cfm?pid=15199
This URL means nothing for search engines, whereas the following one is explicit:
http://www.taxi.ca/about-us/marketing-agency-of-the-year
Thus, the URLs should be descriptive, and use popular core keywords…
This strategy is generally called URL rewriting, and can be applied, whatever technology (ColdFusion in the case of Taxi) and CMS is used.

3. 301 redirections
Redesigning a site and changing its URLs is a big SEO challenge that should not be underestimated. When a page or a document is moved within a website, search engines must be notified of its new location. If this is not done, the page or document will lose its level of importance and thus will lose rankings in search engines. For lead generation sites or eCommerce sites, this may imply a dramatic decrease in search engines traffic.
SEO experts recommend using 301 redirects to notify search engines of the move or removal of a page. This redirection tells search engines that a page has been permanently moved, and that the positioning weight of the old page, should be reallocated to the new one.
Depending on the technology and server, the structure and implementation of those 301 redirections will vary.

4. Meta Tags
Meta tags were originally used to help search engines know what a page was about. Due to widespread abuse, Meta tags are now less and less important than they used to be. In fact, they do not directly influence rankings. However, Meta tags are used to control a site’s description in the search engine results and, when pages include little content, to differentiate one page from another.
The most important Meta tag is the Meta description. Search engines appreciate when every page of a site use a different Meta description, as it is a proof that the site is credible, and present various types of content.
Reitmans.com currently does not use any Meta description… what are you doing Franck?

5. Non SEO friendly technologies
Search engines have issues understanding content made with some specific technologies, including FLASH and JavaScript. It is therefore crucial to make sure that navigation related components do not use such technologies, or at least propose an alternative to search engines, to make sure than all the pages of the site can easily be accessible to search engines.

6. XML SiteMap
In order to help search engines find all the pages available on a site, an XML Sitemap should be created, installed on the server, and submitted to search engines. This XML Sitemap will contain all the URLs of the site.

7. Link building
If you drop in SERPs after the redesign, link building is a good way to come back on track! Let me explain the concept of link building.
In their ranking algorithm, search engines tend to give additional weight to inbound links, or hyperlinks that point to a website from another site. The reason is simple: it is much more difficult to optimize a network of inbound links than to optimize a website, which increases the integrity of the results returned by search engines.
The more competitive the market, the higher the number of inbound links a website must possess. In competitive markets, site analysis is no longer sufficient to determine which sites deserve to rank among the first results. By analyzing a site’s inbound links structure, it is possible to analyze its credibility, which provides a much more objective measurement than site analysis does.
If site A has a hyperlink pointing to site B, search engines will interpret that link as a vote by site A for site B. Site B thus gains in credibility and in ranking power.
The Google PageRank tells how important a website is. Developed by Google and displayed in the Google toolbar, this index uses a logarithmic scale in the range 0-10. The higher a site’s PageRank, the more important it is considered to be. Very few sites enjoy a PageRank of 10.
The higher the PageRank of site A, the greater the ranking power its vote will confer on site B. In addition, the more hyperlinks there are on a page, the less ranking power each one receives, since this ranking power is distributed.
The anchor is the word or phrase that is at the source of an hyperlink.
Anchors are extremely important to search engines. It is therefore essential to create anchors that include the keywords you want to rank for, as identified in the keyword analysis report.
For example, you would not create a link to yoursite.com using only Yoursitename as an anchor, since the site already ranks for this term. Instead, you could use generic keywords. You should vary anchor texts in order to rank for a variety of terms, as well as to make your anchors look more natural to search engines.
The closer the themes of sites A and B, the greater the ranking power conferred by an anchor will be.

To clonclude, my good friend Thomas Champeval and I tried to find a way to integrate all the Link building strategies from short terms tactics and long term strategies.

I’d love to hear what you think about the black, white and grey hat scale based on your experience … whoever you are a SEM project manager, underground freelancer or SEO experts …

Well, your Google Analytics account is like your home. OK I might exaggerate a little bit, but you got the picture! Profiles should be well organized for several reasons:

• You’re not eternal; other people might have to work with this account in the future.
• Other people – possibly not seasoned web analysts – might need access to this account.
• You want to be efficient and see your data at a glance.

I won’t discuss whether or not you should create additional profiles; others have already done that very well here and here. I assume you know what you’re doing and have to create profiles for good reasons.

1. Keep it sorted: group profiles together.

What would you think of a Google Analytic account such as this one (found on Google Images)?

It’s not that bad, isn’t it? Though, it could be better. Let’s say you want to quickly compare bounce rate between new and returning visitors. It’s not easy to do so, because both rows are not next to each other. Maybe you want to know which the most important source of traffic was for last month. Again, it’s hard to tell in a second, because profiles are not grouped by type.

Since profiles are sorted by alphabetical order, a good way to do that is to prefix profiles with numbers, e.g. “01. My Profile”.

2. Keep it simple: do not use exotic names.

Example above is still pretty clean because there are only 7 profiles out there, but what if you had 15, or 20? I often see profiles with names such as:

• GEO-SEGMENT - MySite | Ontario | KJR
• GEO-SEGMENT - MySite | B2C United States (New York)
• GEO-SEGMENT - MySite | Ontario
• www.mysite.com - Full Referrs
• My Site – Goals

Other people can’t read in your mind! Make sure you think about users that will access to the profiles. It drives me crazy to find this kind of Google Analytics configuration where you can’t find the data you want, and have to go through each profile configuration and filters to figure out what’s happening there.

Instead, use clear, descriptive names. I prefer short names so that it doesn’t spread in many rows, making it hard to read. Should I add “do not use uppercase”? “01. Master”, or “01. Main” is easily identified as main profile by anyone.

3. Keep it standard: reuse the same structure.

Although some configurations require specific profiles, you will find in most cases the same basic needs, including (but not restricted to):

• A “Master” profile that you might duplicate for additional goals.
• A “Backup” profile, exact copy of the main one, just in case the master is deleted by the client who had admin access to the account… Believe me, it does happen!
• An unfiltered profile, containing no filter so that you make sure to grab all your data even if something goes wrong in the configuration.
• A “Test” profile, to try the brand new, untested, filter you just found on the Internet!
• A “Staging” profile, in case of a website redesign, to easily grab data from new website and share access with developers.
• A bunch of “Traffic Sources” profiles, prefixed with the same number to keep together your direct, organic, paid search, etc. traffic.
• And so on…

Use your own standard, it doesn’t matter. But please, define one! As a result, you get a clean account that might look like this one. Easy to understand, easy to compare.

Track interactions with social networks.

In a social networks perspective, that would be interesting to track those external links in Google Analytics. Unfortunately, since links are not pure <a> tags, our automatic script to track outbound links with Google Analytics doesn’t work. And anyway, the div element containing the links is loaded dynamically and is not available on page load.

An update to the Wordpress plugin

For the purpose of this proof of concept, we have updated the Addthis plugin for Wordpress, so that a new option is available in the configuration panel. Simply add your custom code here; it will be executed in the onclick event attached to each link within the Addthis box. You can add a virtual page view, an event, or whatever you like for any tool.

This will simply execute the Javascript code defined in the configuration panel, such as on this blog:
GoogleAnalytics.customLink("exit","Addthis:"+this.childNodes[0].innerHTML,”");

Next steps will be to see if it’s possible to tag the complete links set when a visitor clicks on the “more” button.

Back to last year, Julien Bissonnette, a fellow web analyst here at Magnet, first contacted Brian with a fix to detection of existing GA code in the onclick event, with IE. Since then, we have worked a lot on the script to finally get a completely revisited script. Several limitations have been fixed, including:

• Fix a bug with onclick attribute handling with IE that prevent any data to be collected with IE,
• Track links within <area> tags,
• Better exit link detection: do not track when no href attribute is present, or when exit is managed with Javascript in the onclick attribute, and so on…,
• Track a download link on an external server as a download instead of an exit,
• Collect data with a customizable function.

How do I install it?

1. The very first thing you need to do is to download Javascript file.
2. Include the script somewhere in your HTML pages:
   <script src="script/ga-links.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 
3. Call the script at the very bottom of your pages, just before the </body> tag:
   <script type="text/javascript">
var extTrack = ["127.0.0.1","example.com"];
var extDoc = [".doc",".xls",".exe",".zip",".pdf",".ppt"];
addLinkerEvents(”pageTracker”, extTrack, extDoc,”"); 
</script>
4. Complete the list of domains and extensions to track. Make sure to review 1st parameter of addLinkerEvents function, according to your own implementation.
5. Edit function customLink within Javascript file to grab data the way you like. As an example, you might want to use event tracking.

What’s in it for me?

If you keep the Javascript file “as is”, you should create a profile that use an exclude filter on Request URI to filter out “utm_action=(download|mailto|exit)”. This way, you have a clean profile without extra page views if it’s important to you.
Additionally, you should set site search as follow in order to get outbounds within site search reports.

As a result, you will have these kind of report:

Obviously, you can drill down within each type of link to get the detail of each download, exit or mailto. An advantage of doing this is that you can analyze the impact of a type of link, or a specific link on your defined goals. A typical case would be the impact of downloading a document in a specific conversion funnel.

Depending on your website objectives, you might want to setup some goals as well. Simply create a regular expression goal with “utm_action=exit” or “utm_action=mailto”.

But the fun comes when you click on goal 1, to get details on conversions for this specific goal.

Huh? 148 conversions, or 39??? Remember, 148 is the total of all conversions. Hence, we can deduce that display of conversions in “Total Conversions” for goal 1 is wrong. Instead, it displays the total for ALL conversions. Hopefully, other goals are not affected, as shown for goal 2.

Make sure to look at the right data, or you might get misleading data to make decisions!

Update 2009-06-10: this bug has been fixed for a few days now. Good news!

The utm_source paramater is the only parameter really required.

Although Google claims that utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign parameters are required, utm_source is the only one really required. If you only set utm_medium and/or utm_campaign, the traffic will be recorded as direct. But if you set at least utm_source, other parameters that are not set will simply have the value “(not set)”.

Never, ever, overwrite campaign parameters during a visit.

The typical case is seen when campaign parameters are used to track internal campaigns. I should not link like this to the post explaining how to tag internal campaigns (unsing these parameters campaign parameters to tag an internal link: utm_source=magnetsearchmarketing.com&utm_medium=textlink&utm_campaign=how-to-not-mess-up-your-google-analytics-campaign-data).

You’re probably wondering what’s so terrible in doing this? I’ve run some tests with source and medium, originally set to s11/m11 and overwritten by s12/m12, s21/m21 by s22/m22, etc. Let’s have a look at the results:

And overall conversions:

How inaccurate are data from overwritten campaigns?

Do you see what happens?

• Conversion rate of 128%, or 9 conversions for 7 visits. Nonsense, since a conversion can only occur once in a visit!
• Sources with 0 visits. Each source/medium combination that have overwritten original source/medium gets 0 visit.
• 0% conversion rate for each item, except the 1st one that had not been overwritten. This means that when a source/medium is overwritten within a session, neither the original or the second element is credited with conversions, although conversions are still recorded at a global level.

These results are completely coherent with these tests on organic keywords, meaning this problem affects any traffic source.

Conclusion

Do not link internal content by using campaign parameters. Use our method to track internal campaigns instead. And if you find some weird data in your campaign reports, think about this issue!

As we have already shown, it’s still possible to get regions, such as Canadian provinces, with a custom report on region dimension. However, this is not the best in a usability point of view.

Greasemonkey script to add region drill down in Google Analytics

In order to remove this limitation, we have created a GreaseMonkey script that simply adds the missing link for any country. Better: it also works for continents. As you can see below, it simply adds a link labelled “region” next to available break downs.

How to install the script?

First, you need Firefox. If it’s not already done, you should really consider installing it. It’s the best - if not the only one - for any web analyst who wants to do serious QA.

Second, you need GreaseMonkey plugin. What’s this? It’s a very cool plugin that runs custom scripts intended to modify any web page, such as adding a region link within Google Analytics.

Third, you need to install the script.

That’s it!

Leveraging power of internal site search

Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t offer any out-of-the-box solution to follow internal campaigns. Some workarounds have already been discussed, here or here. However, none is really effective:

• Using a virtual page name through a call to trackPageview() to record clicks has downsides. First, you increase artificially the number of page views. Worse, by using virtual page views, there’s no convenient way to determine the most important: goal completion? Time on site after click? Even advanced segments cannot fully answer to those questions.
• Adding campaign query parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) is not better. Indeed, it overwrites (at least theoretically) original parameters. Bad: you don’t want to lose the origin of your visitors, do you? And anyway, Google Analytics doesn’t like at all when campaign parameters are overwritten within a session, leading to erroneous results, as shown by our tests regarding overwritten campaign parameters in Google Analytics.

A much better way consists in using “site search” report to measure internal campaigns. It’s so powerful and though so easy to put in place. By the way, others have already shown how to use it to measure impact of sections and pages.

Implement the change in few minutes

Consider this example: Business on the Go. We were wondering whether or not the rollover was clicked. On the previous version of the website, it stood like this:

Site Overlay couldn’t answer this question since rollover was in Javascript, which Site Overlay doesn’t like at all. Neither did “Navigation Summary” report since there were too many links on the home page. Best solution? Add specific parameters to the banners.

Each link, either text or banner, had been edited as follow:

• wp_blackberry_bb8130.asp?utm_internal_element=BlackBerry+8130&utm_internal_campaign=home+page+rollover

Two parameters have been added to original URL:

• utm_internal_element : Identifiy products. Which ones are better?
• utm_internal_campaign : “home+page+rollover”. Do you run a larger campaign throughout your website? Did you place a bunch of links around there? Aggregate them using this parameter.

Optimize your web estate

Simply configure your site search reports accordingly: search term = utm_internal_element and search category = utm_internal_campaign. Make sure you use additional profiles if necessary so that you don’t mess up your existing site search data.
Your data about products clicked within the rollover will look like this:

Better, if you’ve configured some goals, don’t forget to have a look:

By analyzing search category results, we were able to determine that rollover got more clicks than the main banner on the website. What a surprise! As a consequence, during website redesign, the rollover has been made more prominent:

Result? Click-through rate on rollover to product pages has increased by 18% since the redesign.