Pageview is Giving Way to New Metrics and it's About Time

MarketingVox, one of my favorite marketing sites has an excellent article about page-view becoming obsolete as a major metric for site success.

This is an issue I've been very passionate about. While page-views are important for determining part of the overall site metrics, I personally feel that in the new era of social media, social networking, social sites that combine different technologies like Ajax and Flash, it's becoming less and less relevant and important. Steve Rubel's article about page-view is a brilliant description of how other aspects and other metrics are becoming more important.

One of the aspects of the Web 2.0 mindset is to have users interact with the website. As more and more people spend more time online, companies are finding ways to encourage user interaction. Sometimes this happens on a single page, other times it's browsing. With the Web 2.0 mindset, page-view is less descriptive of the behavior of the users.

In the past, we looked at page views as a way to see where people are going on a website, we can see them migrate from the homepage, to the category page to the product page and finally to the checkout and purchase page. This linear model is becoming less and less relevant in socially based sites. YouTube and MySpace rely on people to bounce from profile to profile, video to video and interact with the elements on the page. This creates less of a linear pathway and more of a meandering pathway.

Steve Rubel describes tracking "events" as a more important way to look at analytics and user behavior on a site. He makes an excellent point that page-views and even unique visitors don't account for multiple monitors, multiple windows or in Firefox (I would assume) multiple tabs. As I write this post, I have 9 tabs open.

He makes an excellent point that I completely agree with:

Time Spent

With the rise of online video and other rich media, marketers also rely on time spent to measure attention. This is a good metric and it even holds as people interact with embedded video and widgets on whatever platform they choose.

Unfortunately, time spent fails to capture the most engaged users who like to peruse RSS feeds. For example, I subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from the Wall Street Journal but I only click through on those that I want to dig deeper. Still I spend up to 10 minutes a day with my Journal feeds and over an hour a day overall within my Google RSS reader. That time is not accounted for - at least by the Journal, but certainly by Google. There's the dilemma

His conclusion is that the more we track events and time spent, the more accurate the data is going to be to determine user behavior, site value and overall marketing efforts.

Right now, the industry still values some of the more traditional methods of determining and interpreting metrics, but I agree with Steve Rubel. There's an analytic shift that corresponds with the new way of internet marketing and Web 2.0 that current habits dont fully describe.

CrossEngine: Searching the web from one place

CrossEngine looks like a very interesting tool for hard-core researchers who desire aggregations of information with as little wasted effort as possible. CrossEngine takes a simple query. For this case, I'll use the term "iPhone".

The first thing I notice is that the default search is going to Google, it's appropriate and retrieves the same results as a regular Google search. I can then look at the results in any of the other search engines, traditional, blog or even fine tune my desired results to .pdf or .ppt.

I switch the focus to looking for iPhone images, and it gives me choices from Google Images, Picassa, Flickr and several others.

The concept is sound, it's interesting and while it's been done before by other sites, this one is by far the most comprehensive search aggregator I've seen. The power in CrossEngine is its simplicity of concept and the time saved when doing comprehensive cross platform research and searches.

The critiques I have is that while this may never really catch on with the casual searcher, this is a good tool to any competitive intelligence professional, marketer, interactive marketer (just to list a few) to get good information in a short amount of time. The second thing I like about this site is that it allows people who aren't familiar with some of the lesser known search engines or social media sites, it gives users a chance to experience something that they haven't seen before.

I do however, have a few critiques.

My first exposure to the site was a bit confusing. Take a look at the screenshot below:


I'm a huge fan of usability and design... the layout, the green check mark, the overall look and feel didn't inspire a lot of interest, it didnt guide me where to go or what to do. While I could have clicked the "learn more" link, I'm a firm believer that any site should be intuitive... the user should instinctively know what to do within 8 seconds of landing on the page.

In my humble opinion, it's a powerful and useful service that hides behind a somewhat wonky design.

Now, I know that a lot of people are going to hate the fact that the entire thing is using frames. From my perspective, it seems that this aspect is more of a necessity than anything else. I cant link to any of my searches, I cant show people the results I've found and I found that a little annoying because I do it so often with other engines. When I'm preparing detailed analyses for my clients, I often cite sources. With CrossEngine, that's not really possible unless I go directly to Google or Flickr and repeat the search.

If I were to change anything, it would be that feature... or at least have a button where I could download the source link from CrossEngine.

Overall, I like the idea, I think it has potential and I plan on using it for my next analysis. If I find anything really useful or cool (or annoying), I'll post that later.

Google's Webmaster Tools Enhance Backlink Information

One of the holy grails of search marketing is to capture backlinks. It's hard to find the quality ones, it's hard to get some good (I hate the term) link bait, and it's hard to develop a backlink strategy that involves a ton of directories you've never heard of before.

Now that Google's added backlink information as a part of its webmaster tools, people like Matt Cutts and Andy Beal are reiterating the following:

- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.

So, if you can assume that viewing more backlinks that may or may not carry any ranking weight is inherently a good thing, the first question I had was what's the point? Why would Google add the links that they would essentially consider to be dren, when a simple link:searchintelligence.blogspot.com will actually give me some of the links that actually lend weight to the ranking relevance.

To tell the truth, I havent exactly figured it out yet. I'm not sure what the real value is, but I do know that the more data revealed, there's a potential that more useful revelations can be made, however, it also carries the potential that data-overload and perception blindness might set in.

I'm definately going to play with this for a while and write again on how it can be turned from raw data into actionable intelligence.

A Vertical Search Engine for Coders: All The Code

There's been a lot of speculation about vertical search engines. Some think that vertical search will be the Google killer, others think they're ultimately doomed to fail under the giant footprint of the big 3.

Nevertheless, innovation is at the heart of the industry and it's good to see another vertial oriented search engine enter the field. All The Code is geared towards coders. However, it has a little bit of competition in the highly niched and specialized area: Koders, Krugle and Google Code.

Search Engine Watch has a great article about the launch of All The Code -

All The Code at this time is a source code search engine for the Java language only. Plans are in the works to add more languages later. All The Code has no mechanism for submission of code. This too is promised for the future. It looks like there is a lot of development still to do.

Visually, it's a little bland, it's a little pale... but it's not offensive and it's not annoying. I dont want to go off on the look and feel on All The Code because from the looks of it, it's got a pretty powerful result engine under the hood. Like all new search engines, it's pretty obvious they need to do some more work, some more tweaking and some more enhancements to the engine to include more than just JavaScript code, but once they start adding more coding languages, I think they have a great opportunity to give coders and coding students what they want quickly and efficiently.

They have sponsored links on the right hand side and on the footer, and I hope that's not their only monetization strategy, but for such a niche search engine, it might work. However, I'd imagine that most people using All The Code will be looking for coding help, any purchases of coding software or services would probably go to Google.

I hope they do well, and I think they are off to the right start. I look forward to seeing what they do and how they improve their engine.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Saturation

In my last articles about search engine metrics, I defined search engine presence as "the number of times a site shows across the search engines for a selected set of keywords". Next, I defined, explained and showed an example of search engine fluctuation as "the natural fluctuation of presence of the same selected set of keywords over time".

This time, I want to talk about the two types of search engine saturation. I'd like to defne search engine saturation as essentially "presence over the total data size". In statistics, the data size is represented by the variable "n". If the data size is a dozen eggs, then n=12. The data size of states in the US is n=50. In this case, we're measuring results over three search engines. "SE" = 3. If we included Ask.com in the results, SE would equal 4. However, at this point, we're only measuring 3 search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

The next part is the total number of results tallied. Since we're measuring the top 15 ranks in Google, the top 10 in MSN and Yahoo!. With this information, we can calculate the total data size for any data capture.

n= (# of keywords) * (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo!).

in this case:

n= (3)*(35) = 105

To calculate the saturation, you divide each presence by "n" to get the percentage of the search engines the site occupies as a function of the entire marketspace.

Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence	SE Saturation	AVG Saturation
www.apple.com	7	17	16.19%	11.43%
www.engadget.com	7	9	8.57%	7.62%
en.wikipedia.org	4	7	6.67%	5.24%
www.gizmodo.com	6	6	5.71%	5.71%
www.appleinsider.com	5	4	3.81%	4.29%
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4	3.81%	4.29%
www.thinksecret.com	7	3	2.86%	4.76%
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3	2.86%	3.33%
www.businessweek.com	3	3	2.86%	2.86%
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3	2.86%	1.43%
www.macworld.com	1	3	2.86%	1.90%
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2	1.90%	3.33%
gizmodo.com	4	1	0.95%	2.38%

Apple.com has a presence of 17, and divided by 105, the search engine saturation equals 16.19%, which represents the market share of the marketspace. This number will fluctuate as the results fluctuate. The saturation measurement is useful as a snapshot of the search engine space and a result of your campaign. However, what's really important is the trend of data. You want your presence to rise and you will want your average saturation to rise as well. The average saturation measures the health of the life of the campaign as the raw numbers of the presence fluctuate. In essence, it's a measurement that you can measure and quantify to see if you're doing well, or if you're trending down.

Each of these metrics have value in and of themselves, however, when taken as a whole, they start to give you a clearer picture of the life of the natural search campaign.

Business Intelligence Needs to Support the Front Lines

James Taylor, Vice President of Product Marketing/Management at Fair Isaac runs an excellent blog called Enterprise Decision Management. Recently, he posted about an article from Informatics about businesses not understanding business intelligence.

Nigel Rayner says:

BI has been around a long time and people do get returns out of it, but it has been technology and infrastructure driven and is not addressing the needs of senior management.

Mr. Taylor expands that comment to say that,

not only does it not address the needs of senior management, it does not support the needs of operational staff either. Not management, not analysts, but people working on the front lines helping customers. It also does not help the software that support customers.

When using business intelligence, it's always important to define the end results and the goals of the endeavors. Data that goes directly to the senior management doesn't necessarily mean that it makes people more efficient, infrastructure more manageable or the company more competitive.

BI (business intelligence) is the process of obtaining data from various sources, but that endeavor must be driven by the goals and real issues that companies face. One of the litmus tests of any BI driven decisions must be: how it helps operations from the bottom up.

This article has intrigued me, I added his blog to my RSS reader and I'm going to do some serious back reading on it. It seems that every article I read from him inspires a few questions.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Fluctuation

LeeAnn Prescott, the research director for the US markets at Hitwise,
revealed that after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at MacWorld, that the search demand for the iPhone has superceded the search demand for the iPod. It's only a slight coincidence that earlier I defined the concept of "search engine presence" using the example of the iPhone.

That search engine presence measured the top ranking sites, ignoring position, instead focusing on ranking on a variety of terms, that dominate the search engines for a selected sampling of keywords.

Because I was explaining a concept, I chose to use a small sample of keywords that related to a topic that interested me. I used: "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone". The results were as follows.

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

These sites ranked for the preceding terms on 10 Jan. However, for the 4 weeks that ended on 20 Jan, Hitwise compiled the following top sites that had traffic from the term "iPhone".

Apple's sites receive over 50% of the traffic from the iPhone search, however, Engadget, by being one of the most trusted sites on consumer electronics and also having the benefit of ranking well across the board for the searches, received the 4th highest amount of traffic. Hitwise and my search engine presence tool measures two different things, I can only measure presence, Hitwise can measure traffic. While I know that I'm comparing apples to oranges, here's where we see the overlap of traffic and presence.

In the 13 days where I took my first measurements, the search engine marketspace has fluctuated. Supporting the idea that traffic and clickthroughs can influence ranking in the search engines. Notice that Apple and Engadget have a significant upsurge in their presence.

	1/10/2007	1/23/2007
Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7	17
www.engadget.com	7	9
en.wikipedia.org	4	7
www.gizmodo.com	6	6
www.appleinsider.com	5	4
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4
www.thinksecret.com	7	3
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3
www.businessweek.com	3	3
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3
www.macworld.com	1	3
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2
gizmodo.com	4	1

We see EverythingiPhone.com, Gizmodo and ThinkSecret.com drop in their presence, we see Wikipedia increase their presence.

As the search for iPhones increase, as they have... that's created the circumstances for the search engines to continually shuffle the results, shuffle the ranks and shuffle the presence. However, what we have strong evidence for here is that ranks change, presence fluctuates and the environment changes. Therefore, it's vital for any company who has a search engine marketing strategy to keep tabs on the environment for their selected keywords and not just on the position or rank of just a few. If you dont notice the change, it's likely that you could be left behind.

While LeeAnn Prescott and I are measuring two different things, traffic vs. presence. The overlapping data as it applies to the search engines often complement each other and provide a larger picture of what's happening.

Thanks LeeAnn, your article was brilliant, informative and I enjoyed reading every bit of it.

Hard Facts: First Section Review

This book is organized into three sections, for this post, I will be talking about the section called "setting the stage" in Pfeffer and Sutton's book.

Pfeffer and Sutton start the book by describing what evidence based decision making is. It's essentially defined as a process to find the best evidence that you can. Through primary or secondary research, collecting the data and acting on that data. They say that there is an inherent perception blindness when making decisions from what you've always done, what you thought was true, your personal philosophies or beliefs and what ever fad is gripping the business world at the moment. I was impressed with the description of evidence based management or decision making is not a "thing you do", it doesnt have discreet boundaries, it's a process, it's a way to make decisions with a little data to help you out.

One of the examples they explore is how mergers and acquisitions tend to show strain about a month after the merger. Cisco has a great record for mergers because they measure several aspects for its merger targets, not just product or service, not just market share.. but culture as well. They've walked away from deals when the culture didn't match.

Pfeffer and Sutton identify common problems that consistently cause failure.

• Casual benchmarking
• Repeating what's worked in the past, or what's worked for others
• Following deeply held, yet unexamined ideologies
• Substituting facts for conventional wisdom
  

Each of these common problems can cause failure in strategies because they either ignore the data that's there, they fail to take into account new, unmeasured data or they assume that their belief is enough to make decisions. One of my favorite quotes (which I have in my quote generator) is David Hume's quote: "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence". It's not wrong to believe, but in business and strategy, you need to have evidence to support those beliefs.

They provide logical and interesting anecdotes (which, in and of themselves are not evidence) that elucidate some of the principles, and they do an excellent job in documentation and referencing the examples they provide.

In my niche market of "search intelligence", I live and breathe data. Whether it's analytics or mined data, I try to be very careful to either only say what I can prove, or qualify any statement that has more intuition than data.

I just finished the second section, and without finishing it yet, I can say... buy this book. Read it, and let me know what you think. It's good.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Presence

In an earlier post, I mentioned (without explicitly defining) the term of "search engine presence". This came from the dissatisfaction I felt when talking to clients about the health of their search engine optimization/ marketing campaigns. All too often, I would hear the same mantra..."I want to be number 1 for the term X" or "Why aren't I number 1 for the term X?"

This felt inherently wrong to me. However, I couldn't really answer their question, nor could I give them a sure-fire way to attain that position. I sometimes felt that I should be glib and say "If I knew that answer, I'd be working at Google as one of their engineers, right?"

At the same time, everyone who's been in search marketing for more than a week knows that it's best to rank well on a variety of keywords, while remaining true to the core goals of the site. After looking at some WebPosition Gold ranking reports, something struck me as odd about them, they gave the ranking reports, but the data it gave seemed too myopic. This is when I started thinking about "presence" as a metric for measuring the health of the search marketing campaign.

I went to Adam Schultz, and I proposed to him a creation of a simple program that we would later called the Competitive Analysis Baseline Reporting tool. This program would take the core, top level keywords from the client's input... adjusted and perfected by some keyword research and take a look at which sites ranked for those keywords. We wanted to get a good look at the entire search spectrum, so we took the top 15 results in Google, the top 10 in MSN and the top 10 in Yahoo!. This way we would get an overview of what I later called the search engine marketspace. It's a capture of data at a specific time of what the marketspace is.

For a practical example, lets take a few keywords... "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone" for this example, we don't need a lot of keywords because I'm looking at defining, in a practical sense, "presence".

So, with 3 keywords and (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo) we can expect to have a sample size of 105 potential slots for search engine results to appear. When the same company, like Apple shows up across the search engines and at different positions, their presence is counted as 1. Each presence is counted and sorted for the total presence. In this case, the top 1o results is as follows:

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

For those terms, Apple.com shows up in Google, MSN and Yahoo 7 times, as does Thinksecret.com and Engadget.com. Gizmodo shows up 6 times, and so on. The idea here is not to diminish the actual position, or rank of the site, but emphasize the presence in the overall search marketspace. When your company relies on capturing qualified traffic from search, it's obviously better to have several keywords working for you, rather than focusing on only one keyword. Unfortunately, all too often, SEO/ SEM companies attract the client by either telling the prospect what they want to hear, or implying that ranking on their top keyword is paramount to success.

What we see here is a lack of education and a hype of expectations. When the client is properly educated on the strategies of SEO and SEM, they're more likely to abandon the expectation of the single keyword on top hope and adopt a more gestalt view of the search engines as an environment that changes, evolves and fluctuates. Once they see that, they'll recognize the value of having several keywords that work for them and not just one.