To end 2009 we’ve updated and added to Enquisite’s Suite of search marketing tools and products. In fact, there are three major enhancements available to you today, plus a new product in pre-release:
- The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
- A Fresh New Look for a New Year
- Feature Enhancement: Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
- A really cool new product in pre-release
The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
We’ve added a new Enquisite Performance Dashboard to provide you with an at-a-glance overview of all your website’s critical search activity metrics as well as a summary of the performance data for each of your campaigns.
Marketers keep saying that 2010 is the year of the Dashboard, and if the prognosticators are correct, we’re kicking it off right with the first phase of a vital new report to help you understand what facets of your online marketing campaigns are driving your success.
By starting your day with a quick glance at your dashboard, you’ll be able to see trends in your search activity on a site-by-site basis, and know which campaigns you need to focus on for improvement and which ones you can refine to further enhance the performance of your business.
We recognize that everyone always wants slightly different information on their own dashboard, or to be able to pull information from one application into something else. We’ve got API’s for you!
A Fresh New Look for a New Year
When you next log into the Enquisite Performance Suite, you’ll immediately notice a dramatic improvement in the load speed, and look and feel of the platform. We are constantly listenening to your feedback on how to make the application easier to use, and have incorporated these suggestions into the new user interface. Among the many improvements of the new design, the new taskbar will greatly simplify the process of building and managing your campaigns. The overall navigation of the application has been streamlined to make the application easier to use and to improve your overall experience with it. Of course, none of that matters if the application doesn’t get faster too.
Enquisite is the fastest real-time analytics application on the market. Search marketers want to spend most of their time improving SEO and PPC campaigns, not analyzing and reporting. You need insights to act quickly. Enquisite is the only real-time search intelligence and decision support application on the market. With Enquisite, you don’t need to spend 80% of your time figuring out what to do, you can spend that time making a difference to the bottom line of your business!
Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
In our last release, Enquisite provided you with the ability to export segments created in Enquisite Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign. In the current release we enhanced this feature, giving you more options to where you export segment data from Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign.
This feature is found within the “Longtail” section of Enquisite Optimizer, which allows you to segment actual search referral traffic in real-time. Within the Longtail, you can partition actual search referral data on the fly by a variety of dimensions, including geographic location, referring search engine, actions, and conversions. Once you have created a segment of search referral traffic, Optimizer allows you to find the specific keyword phrases of searches from users of that segment that led them to your website. The feature now allows you to take these keywords that you discover and directly import them into either a new campaign or an existing campaign within Enquisite Campaign.
With this new feature, you can now quickly and easily take your analysis of past search referral data in Enquisite Optimizer and use it to better craft your future organic search-based campaigns within Enquisite Campaign.
A really cool new product in pre-release
As you are aware, Enquisite is a company founded on innovation. The very first beta product iteration back in 2005 included our patent-pending technology to extract, and report on keyword referral data based on the position the keyword was listed to browsers in the search engine results. That reporting was a break-through for search marketers hoping to report value more accurately to their clients, and also making it possible to be more sophisticated in optimization strategies. Now, with Google’s Personalized Search updates, that technology is more valuable than ever to search marketers.
That was our very first beta version. We’ve now got many very distinct patents-pending, some of which are incorporated into our Auditor, Optimizer and Campaign products. We’ve never sat still, and have continued to innovate to drive value for our clients.
This brings us to our latest product which we plan to release in Q1 of 2010. In the short term, this initial phase of the product will be available to partners as we ramp up. It’s a very cool, simple to use application which addresses the links pillar of SEO in a novel and fundamental manner. This product doesn’t compete with analysis apps like SEOmoz’s Linkscape. In fact, we’ll be incorporating some of SEOmoz’s data into ours to help your analysis: it offers search marketers something completely different, and incredibly valuable.
If links, and link-building are important to you, (yes they’re important for everybody), then you’ll need this product, or you’ll quickly be left in the dust by your competitors.
We’ll be announcing more around this new product as it approaches release in the New Year. If you want to be part of the pre-release as we move forward, let me know, and we’ll add you to the list as soon as possible.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Ranking Reports, Search Analytics, search analytics
This week I had the pleasure of moderating and speaking at SES Chicago. It was probably my favorite Chicago show yet. What a change from last year when everyone was nervous about how deep the economy would slide into chaos.
One subject that did create some buzz - no surprise - was Google’s announcement of an always-on personalized search. There’s been lots written about it, and the change truly is spectacular. Unfortunately, spectacular doesn’t always equate good.
Rather than dwell on all the questionable issues that the always-on personalized search system raises, I’m going to comment about something that’s actually good in this update: The death of the ranking report. Finally! Finally, rankings are totally meaningless as a reporting metric. Ranking reports which scrape results to identify a position in the search results have been deceptive for years, but now they are unquestionably and completely useless. Anyone providing a ranking report as authoritative is deceiving their clients.
In a way, I am thrilled with Google’s personalization changes, as they make the performance reporting used in Enquisite Optimizer even more valuable. It now is definitely the only real way to measure true page and rank positioning. Optimizer shows where people located anywhere in the world are finding your site in the results, based on actual click-through activity, not some bogus ranking report. This is only analytical platform which report back to you on what your customers are actually seeing in the search results.
People who use traditional ranking reports as a reporting metric are no longer able to report any meaningful data. First off, the data collected are unique to that computer. Second, other activity from that computer affects the results. Run just one site’s reports from a system? Do anything else with it? Anything you search for with that computer can now affect the results you’re seeing. Wait until Caffeine rolls out, and anything you do with that computer will cause variations. Use Google Docs, Gmail, or any other Google products? Your results will vary.
So how can any ranking report based on what one, or even 100 computers which repeatedly run ranking analysis reports be accurate? They can’t. The ranking report you used to use as a metric is dead.
If, as a user, you’re not comfortable with the new personalized search “benefit” just wait for caffeine to roll-out in full next year. Me? I’ve already changed my default search engine in Firefox to Bing. Strange, I’m not concerned about how responsibly Microsoft will handle my information.
Posted under Analytics, Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, Ranking Reports, Search Analytics, Search Engines, Search Metrics, bing, search analytics
In honor of Pubcon Las Vegas, where I’ll be heading tomorrow, I’m going to post some more data which should provide meaningful insights to search marketers. First up this week is an answer to the question lots of advanced search marketers often ask me: “how long are most search queries?”, or in other words, “How many words are in most search queries?” I had one of our databases prepare a report on search query length for the month of October, so a poll size of ~40 million search referrals, so enough to be more than just statistically relevant.
Interestingly, four-word queries are more common than one-word queries, and five-word ones are almost as common! Five words!
The database pool used was general web search, and not skewed towards local search, so this breakdown is even more surprising. If it had been local skewed, then a preponderance of local queries such as “Best burritos in San Francisco” would explain the query length.
For the longest query, we actually recorded one search referral with 594 “keywords” in it. Likely it was someone was searching for exact copies of an article, either to identify plagiarism, or link opportunities.
So, if this is “normal” for the Internet, how does your site match up? Interesting to think of this as one more way to determine if your web site’s SEO strategy is healthy: distribution of query length. Not really longtail, what animal shape could we name this metric after? Dana Todd is great at naming these things; maybe I’ll ask her. :-)
For those of you wanting the raw data - I didn’t have time to format the tables, so just put it at the end…
| Words in Query |
Percentage of Queries |
| 1 |
11.08% |
| 2 |
24.56% |
| 3 |
25.77% |
| 4 |
17.68% |
| 5 |
10.03% |
6 |
5.36% |
7 |
2.65% |
8 |
1.36% |
9 |
0.70% |
10 |
0.37% |
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Search Analytics, Search Engines, Search Metrics, search analytics
We are pleased to announce the September update to the Enquisite Performance Suite. This release includes three new features/enhancements:
1. Enhanced action/conversion reporting for Enquisite Optimizer
2. Deeper visibility into performance of campaigns within Enquisite Campaign
3. Usability enhancements to Enquisite Campaign
Enquisite Optimizer has been enhanced to allow you to better understand the activity driving “actions” and “conversions” for your business. The “Actions” tab allows you to segment and view your search referrals across the various site actions you define (e.g., “user registration”), while the corresponding “Conversions” tab provides you with unprecedented intelligence on factors driving revenue for your business.
With this new feature, you can answer such questions as:
* Which landing pages are most effective – whether to fill out a lead generation form, viewing a demo video, or even find their local store on a map?
* Are there certain cities or zip codes which tend to convert more than others?
* Which search engines are providing me with the quality traffic that converts to sales?
* Which root search phrases are driving actions and conversions, which I can subsequently use to research high-value, long-tail terms?
Now, you are able to quickly understand the specific segments of traffic that are engaging your site and ultimately converting – something that would have previously taken hours, if not days.
Check it out… let us know what you think.
Richard
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Search Analytics, Search Metrics, search analytics
Just a quick note to everyone that we completed an upgrade to Enquisite Campaign and the entire suite. Beginning today, Campaign users will have new geo-targeting capabilities, among other enhancements. SEO’s can now determine campaign potential for a defined country and language, not just US/English. For example, you can estimate how many potential search referrals for any term you could receive from searchers located France, in the French language. Geo-targeting has been a consistent request, especially from our European and Asian users, and we made it a top priority. Imagine, not just keyword research, but location-specific keyword research.
Other enhancements include the addition of “page” and “time” sliders to create more precise estimates and forecasts. The page slider allows the selection of estimated page position (1-4) for the keywords in your organic campaign, and the time slider allows the selection of ramp-up time (1-4 mos.) estimated to achieve average page position placements. Taken together, these provide additional degrees of freedom in your assumptions when assessing campaign potential and timing. Lastly, we’ve enabled the seamless loading of baseline referral data into Campaign for Optimizer users. Save time, gain accuracy.
The other major change relates to the entire Enquisite Performance Suite. Starting today, users will have access to all products in the suite with a single login. Get access to everything - Enquisite Campaign, Enquisite Optimizer and Enquisite Auditor — seamlessly. No need to do anything differently, and your data and all your settings will not be affected. Once inside the application, you’ll notice a new toolbar with tabs for each product. Simply click on any of the buttons to toggle between apps. If you’re not licensed for any individual product, you’ll be offered a free 30-day trial to get started.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, search analytics
