Linking your blog to Google+

I've resisted the temptation to get serious about Google Plus over the last year or so, mainly as I didn't see much value in Google's social network. To me it just seemed a little errr... pointless. However to be serious about search engine optimisation, I really needed to have more of an understanding of the platform. (No, this is not an admission that Google+ is something I now use privately, just something I use professionally).

My first step towards using Google+ was linking this blog to my Google account. Usually this is a process of just checking a box in the back-end of the Blogger.com administration and off you go. However in my case this was a little more tricky, as my blog was created in an older Google account and my public Google+ profile sits under a different one. This was resolved by adding the account with my G+ profile to the list of authors and administrators of my blog and then subsequently going in a removing the older account.

Having then linked this blog to my Google+ profile, it was only a matter of days before I noticed that this link was recognised by Google's search results.

Meaning a picture of my face and a link to my Google+ profile was now evident.

The Key Objectives For Any Digital Strategy

Every major organisation now needs a Digital Strategy, or should have one already. But is your strategy underpinned by some simple core objectives?

Here are mine:

• Be great
  Create a seamless digital presence that evolves over time to create a service that maintains & improves quality and exceeds digital standards & user expectations. 
• Be inclusive and user-centric
  Ensure as many customers as possible can access your functionality via digital touch-points, regardless of their: ability, connection, devices (e.g. mobile, PC, kiosk, tablet, etc.) and location. 
• Be optimised
  Build a service that optimises your life-long contact with your customers. Provide: relevant, timely & targeted information to maximise revenue using online marketing & communication techniques. 
• Be measurable
  Understand digital visitor behaviour at every touch-point and use that data to create insight to inform business thinking and steer future digital roadmap developments, marketing services and business processes.

Further musings about Meta tags

In a recent posting, I mentioned how the Meta Keywords tag is no longer used by search engines to rank websites. Even Google now officially states that they don't bother with it... so as a search engine optimisation technique, I wouldn't spend any time on them.


This therefore raises the question of whether you should even include it in your site or if you should remove it.

So here's some thoughts on the pros and cons of keeping this tag in your site.

Remove them:

• Your site HTML code can easily be seen by viewing the source in your browser - PC's typically. This means the keywords always on display and can therefore give your competitors insight into the keywords you are targeting.
• Although a lot of people are now on super-fast home broadband and work connection, there are still a number of users on slower download speeds ... including those on mobile devices. Although removing a line of HTML code isn't going to make your site noticeably quicker, as one UK supermarket slogan goes... every little helps.

Keep them:

• HTML / Accessibility standards change and evolve from time to time. Therefore there is the chance that the Meta Keyword tag could be brought back into use (although very unlikely I guess).
• Some on-site search mechanisms might still use them to classify pages on your own web presence 
• If you're after throwing your competition off the scent of what keywords you're actually targeting, you could always put false ones in your meta tags... but then, that might be a little too much

Have a redirection strategy when changing your site

Lots of companies I speak with are changing and updating their websites, it’s the natural evolution of things (and also keeps us digital agencies in business). Some of them are carrying out complete overhauls of their online presence, including:

• Re-platforming (e.g. moving to a more enterprise content management system)
• Changing the design of the user interface and navigation
• Applying a new site structure 

When doing all or some of the above, one very important thing usually gets forgotten… the redirection of old page locations to their corresponding new URLs.

Why is this important?
Well, for a start, you hopefully have previous visitors who have bookmarked specific pages with the aim of returning to them at a future date. You would not want them to get the ubiquitous ‘404 error’ that tells them the page is not found on the server.
Secondly, you want to preserve as much of the SEO value of each page as possible. Current thinking (and input from search engine optimisation authorities such as Google’s Matt Cutts) says that the majority of PageRank Juice’ is transferred to the target page when you do site re-directions correctly. And the correct way of providing redirect is via a 301 redirect, which tells the incoming page request that this is a permanent redirection.

There are some important things to note here:

1. The amount of Google PageRank that you lose through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a normal link.
2. A 302 (temporary redirect) passes 0% juice through to the target page, so should be avoided when optimising your site for search.

Therefore for any sites realistically bigger than a few pages, it is important to plan your redirection strategy. But not just as you are cutting over from one site to another, but as much in advance as possible. In other words, ideally as soon as the new site map and page content have been agreed.

You then have the job of mapping old URLs to new URLs. This can be quite simple if both versions are similar. However it can be far more complex when pages are split across different subjects or when you have an entirely new approach to your site content. So plan your redirection strategy in detail and make sure you are sending users and search engines to the most relevant new location.

Returning to Wordpress SEO

It's been a while since I dabbled with the complexities of Wordpress, the popular website blogging platform that is now the content management system (CMS) behind so many sites.
Note: We've moved onto typically using Drupal for most decent sized sites these days, mainly because it is more of an enterprise CMS and far more stable when you have multiple users all entering and editing content at the same time.

However I had the chance to dive back into the area of Wordpress SEO very recently. This was when a new client was already in the process of having their site developed by anther agency and needed some help to ensure they got the most from their content. Luckily the web developers had used the popular Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin. This was a tool I hadn't used in at least a few years, so it was interesting to see if the popular Wordpress plugin had evolved much.

Luckily the important features are still there, primarily the ability to edit the Meta Description and Meta Title for each post and every page.
Note: Most search engines apparently no longer take any notice of Meta Keywords, which were once the first set of changes for everyone in the search engine optimisation industry. Also older site accessibility standards included some meta data a basic acceptance criteria, however Meta Keywords were not explicitly stated back then and the more recent WCAG2.0 doesn't mention the need to include any specific meta fields... phew!

Luckily the product has improved since I last use it. I really like the Snippet Preview, which gives you some indication of how your page will be displayed in search engines such as Google (however, from experience, search engines don't always take the on-page data you provide and use other sources - e.g. Alexa or http://www.dmoz.org/). Apparently Yoast has been using Linkdex for it's advanced page analysis tools for the last year or so, although this breakdown of: word count, keyword usage and relevance isn't something I've seen in my stand-alone version of Linkdex.

Overall, it's been a rewarding experience going back to something I used to do and re-learning an updated version of a popular SEO tool.

I'll try and blog about the results of my efforts when the site goes live...

Make Customer Experience Management easy for real people

It seems like the world has suddenly woken up to the concept of "the customer journey", the idea that users have specific processes and tasks that they go through to achieve their goals via multiple touch-points & channels.
I must have heard the phrase more in the last few months than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's like every middle manager thinks they have only just invented the term... But that's OK, these people can catch-up with the online industry. We've been using: personas, customer process flows and transactional funnels for over a decade, with great success.

But now things have changed in that time. The idea that the user follows a linear journey is a simplistic model that takes no account for the multiple user types, needs, loyalty, etc. There's also a lot more data available via analytics now can be interpreted, analysed and even processed in real-time to create a dynamic site experience (e.g. product recommendations and multivariate testing) and automate various marketing processes (retargeting, etc.).

However, for all the fancy integration and mathematics behind the scenes, these complex systems still need a non-technical person to manage the experience day-to-day. Normal humans (not rocket scientists) are needed to change assets, conduct conversion experiments and approve content updates. In short, the very person who has now got excited about the improved user experience, now needs a simple way to manage the data-driven customer experience.

Building your corporate digital analytics capability

As an organisation develops its digital understanding, you see certain trends and processes emerging. One of those is the increasing usage of digital analytics and increasing business reliance on the figures produced.

Digital analytics is now taken seriously as a business tool. From what was once a mainly geek-ish domain has emerged a significant service that can empower the business to make more rational or efficient decisions.  But just as other digital resources have grown (and grown-up) over time, the analytics resource in your organisation may well have grown too. If fact, making the point a bit stronger, if your web analytics team has not grown in size or depth in their understanding as the rest of your online capability has matured, you are probably missing something.

However… creating, scaling and keeping your web insight team is not an easy task.
Firstly positioning the team as just another marketing service is not the right approach. Having them regarded in the same light as a search engine optimisation or pay-per-click resource misses the point. This is not to take anything away from the SEO or PPC staff you might employ but the online analytics function is not just there to inform and maintain the current activity… but can also be used to feed insight back into your organisation too.

Creating the right online customer analysis and insight team structure depends a lot on the size & scale of your company. Most small companies do not have someone dedicated to this role (unless they are a digitally-focused business such as an eCommerce site) and even a lot of bigger companies combine the work of a web analytics function with other disciplines, and in a lot of cases this is digital marketing. It is therefore typically only much larger enterprises that can usually afford or utilise a dedicated person or persons in a digital analysis capacity.

Structuring this multi-person team can then be a little different from the way you might structure another digital functions. Although a lot depends on the types and quality of the individuals you hire. Just having a bunch of people who can all do the same things might not provide enough specialisation or focus… and analytics can quickly get into specifics. Some larger teams can range in skill-sets from more technical-orientated people through to business-based modellers who can pull trends and opportunities from complex data structures.

Keeping the team (aside from the effects of your own management style) can be the hardest thing to achieve. From my own experience there is currently a lack of decent experience digital analytics professionals out in the market right now. Quite frankly, we need more digital analytics experts. People with the right skills and experience are given far more choice about who and where they work, with many choosing a more lucrative career as a freelancer or consultant. Therefore holding on to good digital insight staff is crucial if your organisation is to you want to grow your capability and retain best practice knowledge.

Lawyer's Letter to Merchant Soul

In a previous post, I  copied an open letter to Stephen Halpin of Merchant Soul about him owing our company over £26,000 of unpaid invoices.

Below is a letter sent to Stephen Halpin by our corporate lawyers:

Dear Sir

We act for Ideal Interface.

We are instructed to recover from you the above mentioned sum which is comprised by several invoices dating from as long ago as October 2012, full details of which have already been provided to you by our client.  There is no dispute concerning the invoices – you have simply failed to honour your payment obligations.

The matter is obviously of great concern to our client since there is every indication that you have been continuing to incur liabilities without any obvious means of being able to meet them.  This conduct is indicative of wrongful and/or fraudulent trading, the penalty for which includes being compelled to repay money owed out of your own pocket and being disbarred from acting as a director ever again.

The context of this is to make it plain to you that the sum outstanding is sufficiently high that if it transpires that you have wrongfully or fraudulently traded, our client is prepared to take all such steps as are necessary to prosecute such a matter to a conclusion through the courts and the DTI.  

In the circumstances we urge you to give this matter your most urgent attention.  Accordingly unless we have your payment in full, or acceptable terms of payment, by 4pm on Thursday 15 August 2013, our client will take all such steps as are necessary to effect recovery whether through proceedings or insolvency process. We hope that this is not necessary and that common sense can prevail.

Tracking individual users in Google Analytics

Several people have recently asked me if it is possible to use Google Analytics to track and store information on specific individual visitors to their site. Usually the popular analytics package only reports trends and grouped user behaviour, you never get to see the granular detail of each person (e.g. their specific browsing path around the site, etc.). However this can be quite annoying for some marketers who want this information and who have used competitive packages from companies such as WebTrends or Adobe (Omniture) in the past.

If you read the Google Analytics support documentation on Google’s website, you will see in several places there is a reference to NOT using PII (Personally Identifiable Information). This is data that can be used by Google to identify an individual and includes info such as: Name, Address & Email address. However PII can also be a mobile phone’s unique identifier or some other way to recognise a specific device.

There are work-arounds to this restriction (such as using Custom Variables that hold randomly-generated reference for each specific user), but these come very close to violating Google’s End User License Agreement and are definitely not in the spirit of the platform.

So can you upgrade to Google Analytics Premium (the paid-for version of GA) and then start to store important user data? No. The collection of personally identifiable information (PII) is in violation of Google Analytics entire EULA and therefore paying $150k still doesn't let you use the platform as you might have hoped.
Google has therefore been pretty specific in its user agreement (with its new Universal Analytics product also currently having the same restrictions) and even gives the warning that:

Your Google Analytics account could be terminated and your data destroyed if you use any of this information.

However, I have one important point to raise that has been bugging me…

In GA there is the feature to understand your Multi-Channel Funnels. This is lets a site manager understand the interactions between different online media and see how the channels work together to trigger sales. Since this report gives a breakdown of all the multiple digital customer touch-points over the last 30 days… if Google doesn't uniquely identify individuals, how does it know when specific people use each channel and then join them up to create a complete picture of the steps customers take before actually converting?

Forget creating a digital strategy

Digital Strategy, I hear & read the words repeatedly in the line of my business. It seems that it’s the current phrase to use within a company, which is annoying as I’ve been writing them for around a decade and a half now.

Now typically in this blog I would drill into the subject of the different aspects of creating and maintaining a digital strategy, covering things from a top-down perspective and giving my views on how to implement one.

But not today. I think I need to clear some things up first that have been on my mind.

1. What’s the point in having a digital strategy when there are probably a number of different online initiatives around your organisation that don’t know (or care) about the more strategic direction being taken?
2. Why even plan a digital strategy, when there are simple digital projects that have either failed to get off the ground or have subsequently turned out to be turkeys? (These don’t have to be monumental projects to entirely redevelop your online business, they could be something as basic as a quick microsite that has failed to comply to HTML standards)

Sure, planning an overall approach to all online engagement and interaction is a noble cause. But hoping to just lay this new lush green grass layer over the rubble of bad or missing quality standards or known gaps in your organisation’s digital capability is a recipe for almost certain failure.

Or in other words, forget creating your digital strategy, get your digital tactics right first!

British Airways pricing might need work

The other day I was buying a flight down to London to see a client and used the British Airways website to book. I looked at various options to get the cheapest flight, but was a little surprised to see that the cost of flying from Glasgow to Gatwick costs more when you take less baggage.
Yes that's right, to fly with a suitcase up to 23kg in weight is £11 cheaper than just travelling with hand luggage.

Note: I know that BA's digital revenue management team can't be expected to get pricing exactly right and that errors will occur. However on this occasion I did book the cheap ticket and simply 'forgot' to take my large bag.

eCommerce and the dehydrated mare

Ever heard the phrase “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”?

Well, if you leave a thirsty horse right by the water trough, make it as easy as possible for them to take what they want and show the water off in the best way possible… you are more likely to get it drinking.
The same goes for eCommerce websites, where the you have no control over the actions of a specific user… but by a clever combination of: thought-out usability, customer insight & segmentation, an acute focus on maximising customer revenue and a ‘test & learn’ approach, you stand a far more likely chance of converting prospects into customers and makin more money in the process.
There's unfortunately no one-size-fits-all model for eCommerce, but typically there are best-practice models to follow in each market sector. Understanding what works for your business is then a process of trial and error to establish what combination works best.

Remember, you may drag your customers to your site via a number of different marketing channels; but what they do when they are there is yours to shape and persuade.

email to Stephen Halpin of Merchant Soul

Steph

The time has come for us to stop working together.

Currently Ideal Interface is owed £24,600 by Merchant Soul, not including our final invoice due at the end of July for £1,680. This is a significant sum outstanding and has now become of considerable concern to Moya and myself, also meaning we have not able to meet certain financial obligations.

As I see it, there is either a lack of concern on your part or an inability to pay. If it is the former, then I need to inform you that we have been speaking to a corporate lawyer to take action to claim this money back via whatever means. If it is the latter, then there has been no mention of this by you at all and therefore your company is continuing to trade on money that should have been used to pay suppliers such as us.

You have therefore given me no option but to do the following:

1. Conclude our working relationship with immediate effect

2. Inform any known suppliers of Merchant Soul of my decision and that they are also at risk of non-payment

3. Contact Merchant Soul’s digital clients and inform them of my decision 

4. Lodge this debt against Merchant Soul Holdings with the relevant agencies & authorities

However, from my perspective, what is perhaps the most concerning of all is that you have not responded once to Moya’s emails, calls or texts over the last few months. She has gradually escalated the issue with you and not once have you replied, questioned or apologised for leaving us with this amount of money owed.

Hayden

True content marketing is calculating page value

I see so many articles on the subject of content marketing it makes my head hurt. They nearly all just witter on about blogs, infographics and social media, but hardly any even mention one key thing... return on investment.

Its like we've stepped back once more to either around 2008 (when social media gained a lot of attention) or the early days of the dot com bubble in the 1990's. Both were a time when a lot of people lost a lot of money, by not focusing on value.  The value of what you're doing compared to what you get out and the value you're adding.

So before rushing into loads of content marketing efforts and wasting everyone's time and money. .. ask yourself "do I know the value of this page I'm either creating or maintaining?".

If you don't, might I suggest you stop right there and work that out first?

Going Global with eCommerce?

If you're looking to take your Internet retailing wider than just the UK, then you'll need to understand the complexities of multi-country, multi-lingual and multi-currency eCommerce.

I'm a great believer in learning from those who have gone before. So I thought I'd share this email from our pals at Cranberry Panda, who recently filmed every speaker at the EcommerceUK event called Going Global.

Here  Dave Elston, Head of Ecommerce at Clarks, presents the challenges that the shoes retailer faced in reaching a global market.



A copy of his presentation can also be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/practicology/going-global-clarks-european-ecommerce

How do you segment financial services customers?

In an earlier post I made it clear that I thought a certain way of segmenting customers has had its day. The method of classifying customers just by their life stage is no longer relevant, with both lifestyles and finances having moved on.

So rather than dwelling on this, I thought it better to look at ways that banks in the future could segment their customers. But to be honest, I couldn’t come up with a single simple way of segmenting financial services customers that made sense in the modern world. Nothing really fitted nicely and any possible model had loads of exceptions to the rules.

And then it struck me... that perhaps there's no longer a few simple segments that fitted all financial services customers. Perhaps this subject is just too complex to put into simple terms... or in other words, perhaps now with the advert of clever data analysis and personalisation, there's no need to segment them into a handful of categories, everyone is in their own segment!

It's therefore my prediction that banks will eventually integrate big data analytics into their CRM systems. This will develop their understanding of who each individual customer is, alongside a record of what products and services they have already got do describe how best to meet their needs.

Some financial services companies may already be on their way to delivering this vision and this should be an interesting space to watch as the use of dig data analysis takes off.

Don't base digital shopper activity on ecoupons.. yet

Research just published shows the growth of electronic coupon usage slowing. Does this mean the predicted dominance of ecoupons has stumbled before it's learnt to run?

In a recent report on this subject the use of money off coupons has now grown in usage to cover 90% of all consumers.  However digital coupons have only grown in use by 9% over the same period. 

It therefore seems that paper-based redemption methods are more popular than ever, but that ecouponing hasn't got the mass adoption it should have.

Why is this? 

Here's a couple of possible reasons:

1. Retailers don't support them
The major supermarkets have so far failed to embrace digital vouchers. Even my Tesco Clubcard app on my mobile phone, which uses a simple bar code shown on the screen, only works on a limited number of their scanning tills (and none of their smaller local stores near me, which seem to be the type growing in number right now). Yet I walk in with a handful of paper - based ones (from newspapers, magazines and even self-printed at home via sites such a supersavvyme.co.uk) and they all bleep through with no problem.

2. Brands are slow to use them
Perhaps as a result of the point above, even the major FMCG brands (typically the early adopters of these sorts of things) have not taken up the opportunity to use electronic coupons in any sizeable numbers.

 

Perhaps when both the retailers and brands collectively get their act together on ecouponing, then there will suddenly be lots of  uses, linked in with tracking and other eCRM initiatives for the ideal digital shopper marketing campaign.

What is a good bounce rate?

This is an interesting question I thought I'd answer, primarily following a series of debates with friends and associates in the digital industry.

For those unsure what exactly is meant by the bounce rate, it is usually defined as those visitors to a site who only view one page of the same site in any one browsing session. The metric is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors by those who only view one page and then expressing this as a percentage. 

But is a high or low bounce rate a particularly good or bad thing? Let's take an example....

Imagine a company has a website that showcases their products and uses both SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques as well as Google Adwords for Pay-per-click digital marketing. When investigating bounce rates from their digital analytics we see that visitors from organic search engine sources have an approximately 40% bounce rate. This compares with a rate of around 55% for those coming from pay per click adverts over the same period.

Surely the bounce rate generated from the organic source is healthier? As less people come to the site and disappear straight away, this must surely mean that they are 'better' users is some way?

Or to flip it around, doesn't it therefore follow that the paid PPC campaigns are delivering less value than those from search engines?

Not necessarily.  

 A different bounce rate from different acquisition sources makes sense if you consider these factors:

1.      The landing pages for paid and organic traffic could be different.
Search engine optimisation is not an exact science and depending upon the search terms used, the page displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPs) might well be different from the one you really want them to go to. This may also be different from search engine to search engine. If this is the case, it is likely your paid efforts are pointing visitors to the page of your choosing and one that may well be optimised for this purpose.
Note: this may well mean that the users’ paths to complete their required goals are different and could affect the conversion rate.

2.      The paid advert copy might be different from your organic listing
Now far be it if for me to suggest that any upstanding company would deliberately mis-represent their site in PPC adverts to potential visitors.. but I have seen examples where the Ad Words copy significantly differs from the content of the target page. Now I’m all for experimentation to understand the optimum copy in each circumstance… but when the paid advert content sets an expectation with the person about to click on an ad, don’t be surprised if they bounce straight out if the page doesn’t meet those expectations.

3.      Different visitors use different searching techniques.

I know that I have differing browsing behaviour depending upon: the frame of mind I'm in, the device I'm using and the amount of time I have. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Online users also click on different paid placements depending on whether there are other PPC adverts displayed and the quality of the organic listings displayed alongside or below those precious Google Adwords ads.

Whatever your bounce rate, you should always take whatever steps you can, not just to minimise it, but to focus on optimising your collective set of site KPI’s and maximising the commercial opportunities your online presence gives you.

Hilton website shows failed users the door

When using the Hilton hotel website tonight, I had a problem. After entering all my details I waited for several minutes while a spinning icon continued to do nothing. Try as I might, the site wouldn't accept the booking for myself and colleague on our forthcoming room  our overnight business trip.

Instead, and after what seemed like a long wait (although it may have been only a few minutes), I was given the image below:

To some users, this may seem like a well-designed error page, something that shows that Hilton cares about such eventualities. But for me, this wasn't the message I took away. Instead all I saw was a closed door with the handle down and the online equivalent of a 'do not disturb' sign hanging there.

Was this really the message Hilton wants to give users who have already had poor site experience?

Does it matter where anything goes?

I've been meaning to write this post for ages, but never had the chance to pull my collected thoughts together before now. In essence, this article is all about the need to continually optimise your digital presence. But it's also about the bigger concept that change is the only constant in the online world and that anyone not innovating and making mistakes is actually taking a step backwards.

So what do I mean by all this?

Well, as I've mentioned in several posts before, the creation of a website (e.g. an online retailing one) is just the end of the beginning... Not the beginning of the end. Your journey has just started. So if you haven't already begun to use AB tests or Multi Variant Testing tools already, I bet you're at least considering the way you can use them to improve your KPI's.

This does consequently create an interesting debate that you might like to have with your web design / development agency or in-house eCommerce team. Centred around the central premise of "Does it actually matter where you place content and functionality on the web page when you're creating it?"

In other words... if you practice the science of 'user centred optimisation',  then very quickly your iterative process of test & learn will find a better way than you came up with at the beginning of your process.

And yes, if you keep doing it... your site should continue to evolve. Therefore leading to the theory that it might not actually matter how you initially design your website, but that it just matters that you keep evolving it quickly and intelligently.