Yesterday, I posted about Enquisite adding a Social Tracking function to our reporting suite. I got quite a bit of email expressing interest in knowing more. In re-reading my post, I also felt a little egg on my face for making the beginner mistake of leaving a [LINK] comment in the post, and not making it live – sorry. Stupid mistakes are easy to make; when you mess up, clean it up!
Anyhow, most of the email & DM’s via twitter (@rzwicky) asked for more info, and screenshots. Beginner mistake #2 – always include screenshots whenever possible so readers know what you are describing. I do realize that none of you can look inside my head and see what I do, so why the heck would I assume that you could visualize what I’m writing about without a picture? When I used to do SEO full-time, I always explained to clients that a picture’s worth a thousand words to human visitors, but zero to the search engines. Why would I ignore such a basic tenet of providing meaningful information? Text is great, but a picture seals the deal. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is one lengthy document! :-)
So, this post is about correcting yesterday’s errors, and providing more insights into Enquisite Social Reports.
We created Enquisite Optimizer’s Social reports to help provide online marketers with perspective. Last year I spent a fair bit of time talking to all sorts of online marketers: search marketers, social search marketers, social marketers, video optimization specialists, etc., and also VP’s of marketing and CMO’s.
What struck me about social was everyone talked about social, but no one seemed to understand how it related to any of their other marketing activities, nor what conversions it really drove. We already were collecting all the user referral data, but didn’t display the social information. Looking at the information, I realized that while there are some apps which help you understand how many referrals you get from any one channel, there’s no holistic views. For example, when you do a post using bit.ly’s service, you can track how many click through you’re getting from the U.S., but you do have not context as to real geography. We already were reporting on search referrals down to the zip code, so why not do the same with Social? Why not make it possible to track a social push, show where the traffic spiked geographically, and then look at the search referral traffic to see how it compared? Did it follow a similar pattern? Did conversion rates go up? How does one benefit the other? This information was missing from the discussion.
Social marketing offers a huge potential of opportunities in branding, driving visitors, raising awareness, and delivering valued customers to a business. But it’s not a stand-alone channel; it’s a piece of the puzzle. We’ve added social reporting to offer businesses some perspective, so that you can start to understand how they really fit together. For example, take this series of screenshots from Enquisite Social Reports, and then compare it against our Longtail search analytics report.
First off, we have a Longtail type view into social referrals, using categories as a definition. Instead of just reporting on all the referring sites, we added a category layer, so that you can understand the traffic types at a higher layer. In this screenshot you can see that for the particular website being looked at, shopping and consumer review types of social networks deliver the best conversion rates relative to overall social traffic.
In the upper left corner of the screenshot, you should also be able to see the site-wide bounce rate, page view rate and average time on site for referrals from social marketing. Watch how this number changes, and compares against search referral traffic.
Next up, we segmented out just the shopping and consumer review types of social sites – note the segmentation panel. I’ve also dropped in Twitter, as I wanted to see how it related. Note how the traffic quality improves as shown by the increased time on site / pages viewed, and lowered bounce rate.
Now, in this next step, we’ve segmented out social referrals to just ones that came from within the U.S., and are showing this information on the map. Look at the distribution pattern of visitors from social search, and keep this in mind for the comparison to search referrals to come later.
Drilling in to the map view, we have two important perspectives: 1) where do the referrals come from, city by city, and 2) then the following screenshot shows us where visitors were really located when they purchased a product as a result of a referral from a social network or social marketing initiative.
Now let’s compare this against search referrals in Enquisite Optimizer’s Longtail reports. First off, the bounce rate is much lower from search, and the pages viewed and time on site are much higher. So a more engaged visitor from search.
At the present time, search is sending almost 100x the referral traffic that social is to this site. However, to be fair, the business in question hasn’t really engaged a full-on social campaign. More like dipping their toes so far. But, all of a sudden they are recognizing value where they couldn’t before, in that they can understand the conversion rates better, and also they can compare and understand how the two traffic sites overlap.
Finally, let’s look at the map of search referral traffic. First up are referral rates.
Obviously, unlike the social referrals, the search traffic to this business is very broadly dispersed. Looking at conversion rates however, a different trend emerges:
Interesting how the Pacific Northwest is over-represented for conversions, relative to search referrals.
Finally, let’s compare that against conversions that were generated from social marketing, and we can see similar patterns emerge, with certain locations better represented proportionally.
These screenshots were built using the same time range throughout. When tracking specific campaigns, you can get much more granular to understand time lag.
Additionally, for marketers and business operators who want to understand the financial contribution of any channel to the bottom line, we offer Enquisite Campaign, which was designed from the ground up to report on, and provide predictive analysis of opportunities across all online marketing channels, and let online marketers, VP’s, CMO’s and CFO’s understand how the various channels interact, and combine together to contribute to revenue.
Marketing via Social networks is still in the early days, and the impact is usually difficult to understand. But a combined perspective on Search and Social will continue to become ever more important to any online marketer. We recognize that marketers are having a hard time measuring the impact of both channels, independently and together, so we’re bringing some perspective to the marketplace.
Businesses need perspective to properly invest in worthwhile initiatives. We provide insights to act.
Posted under Analytics, Enquisite Search Metrics, Market Share, Search Analytics
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
Surprisingly, I haven’t posted a search engine market share report in 30 days. We did post lots of other interesting data in the interim however. This week, we’re getting back to the evolving search engine landscape. Of course, not a lot overall has changed since our last look at the data.
Google continues to own almost 80% of the actual click through market share. We recognize that our numbers are different from some other reports. The core difference is our reports reflect click through activity, as opposed to general activity. As demonstrated in the post “how long is normal,” while most search lookup activity is on one word queries, click throughs occur most often on three-word searches. The same holds true for the various engines. A lot of people apparently run searches on Bing / Yahoo, but they refine their searches prior to clicking through. Hence, Google shows a much higher market share when we examine just click through activity.
As it relates to the change in activity over the last month, Bing continues to show strong forward momentum, and Yahoo continues to fade away. Sad, really. Google’s decline which started in June appears to have stabilized at a dominating ~78.4% market share. If we look at areas outside the US, Google’s share is even higher.
For convenience, this graph shows the change in Yahoo / Bing / and other non-google shares since May 2009. If you want to look at the raw data that for back you can view it on the prior blog post about search engine market shares. The data table is getting so long however that we’ll just show the last 4 months from here on out. I’m using an “all-time” chart to show the trends though.
The raw data for those who prefer the numbers:
|
Google |
Yahoo |
Bing |
Other |
| September 7 |
78.68% |
11.51% |
6.80% |
3.01% |
| September 14 |
78.35% |
11.13% |
6.50% |
4.02% |
| September 21 |
77.43% |
11.35% |
7.11% |
4.11% |
| September 28 |
77.65% |
10.80% |
7.27% |
4.28% |
| October 4 |
77.78% |
10.66% |
7.23% |
4.33% |
| October 12 |
77.78% |
10.66% |
7.21% |
4.35% |
| October 18 |
77.89% |
10.65% |
7.29% |
4.17% |
| October 25 |
77.83% |
10.56% |
7.56% |
4.05% |
| November 1 |
77.75% |
10.46% |
7.66% |
4.12% |
| November 8 |
77.96% |
10.21% |
7.75% |
4.08% |
| November 15 |
77.60% |
10.39% |
7.59% |
4.42% |
| November 22 |
77.59% |
10.41% |
7.67% |
4.37% |
| December 22 |
78.43% |
9.73% |
7.86% |
3.97% |
Enquisite collects data from a network of thousands of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S., and reflects click-through activity data.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, Market Share, Search Analytics, Search Metrics, Yahoo, bing
In my recent post, “How Long is Normal?” I published data which showed that based on click through rate, four-word queries are more common than one-word queries, and five-word ones are almost as common.
Today, I’m adding to that information with an additional layer showing a correlation between the number of words used in a query and the time on site, and pages viewed.
One would assume that a more specific query would result in longer time on site and pages viewed. Surprisingly, That’s not the case. In fact it appears that the more specific a query, the more a search referral visitor’s behaviour will reflect a decisive intent and higher level of sophistication in how they navigate web sites. They use the search process to pre-filter results more aggressively, and then they get to the point of their visit very quickly.
This information will of course have implications for bounce rate reporting, as a significant number of search referrals which normally could be classified as bounces more likely indicate a higher than expected level of satisfaction with the results.
| Words in Query |
Percentage of Queries |
Avg Pages Viewed |
Avg Time on site |
| 1 |
11.08% |
6.64 |
4:32 |
| 2 |
24.56% |
4.13 |
2:53 |
| 3 |
25.77% |
3.06 |
1:57 |
| 4 |
17.68% |
2.62 |
1:42 |
| 5 |
10.03% |
2.29 |
1:27 |
6 |
5.36% |
2.11 |
1:21 |
7 |
2.65% |
1.97 |
1.14 |
8 |
1.36% |
1.84 |
1:07 |
9 |
0.70% |
1.74 |
1:04 |
10 |
0.37% |
1.69 |
0:59 |
The longest query recorded in this data sample was a 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.
About the data. Enquisite works with thousands of sites worldwide and captures a trove of relevant search-related data every day. The browser shares reported here are based on data from a selection of Enquisite-tagged sites that cumulatively represent over 350 million page views/month, across most major industry sectors - a very significant sample size. The information published reported solely reflects our data.
Posted under Enquisite Search Metrics, Search Analytics, Search Metrics
Last week I posted some information about user behavior in relation to depth of visit. This week I’m going to share some data regarding how different browsers result in varying user behavior.
For the month of November, I decided to break down the user behavior differences behind Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome. At first glance one would assume that if someone visits a web site time on site and pages viewed should not be affected by browser. Yet, this is not the case. One could argue that Chrome and Firefox users are more sophisticated, as evidenced by the fact that they deleted their default browser, Safari and MSIE usage is almost identical, which should be the norm if default browsers were used, as it reflects the simplest behavior patterns. The most sophisticated users would change away from the defaults, and be faster / less patient in navigating sites.
Are Mac users really any more sophisticated than Windows users; perhaps not…?
| Browser |
Percentage of Visitors |
Average Pages Viewed |
Average Time on Site |
| MSIE |
60.38% |
4.60 |
0:04:08 |
| Firefox |
25.08% |
3.85 |
0:03:42 |
| Safari |
8.58% |
4.33 |
0:04:01 |
| Chrome |
3.42% |
3.65 |
0:03:35 |
The change in browser usage away from MSIE is truly stunning. I’m going to monitor this drop, and Chrome’s surge in case it was Holiday related. Stranger things have happened.
About the data. Enquisite works with thousands of sites worldwide and captures a trove of relevant search-related data every day. The browser shares reported here are based on data from a selection of Enquisite-tagged sites that cumulatively represent over 350 million page views/month, across most major industry sectors - a very significant sample size. The data reported solely reflects our data.
Posted under Browsers, Chrome, Enquisite Search Metrics, Google, Market Share, Search Analytics, Search Metrics, bing
