On the weekend I decided to do some online shopping on the thing as I needed some new jeans. Pretty simple.

Now, I guess like most people, I do have a favourite little online store where I usually do my clothes shopping, it’s pretty basic but reliable; www.sambear.com.au.

Before I went to Sam Bear, I decided to do some comparison shopping (browsing) and hit www.myer.com.au. The site worked OK on an iPad, the prices were terrific but when it came to finding the right size and style, they’d completely sold out of the jeans I wanted. Sad (and frustrated), I left their site disappointed.

Then I surfed over to their direct competitor, www.davidjones.com.au. Again, the site looked OK on the iPad, but I couldn’t navigate to the men’s apparel section and I couldn’t figure out how to get there…

I sprang out my trusty laptop to see what was going on…

Sure enough, the navigation didn’t work properly on the iPad! They use what’s known as a ‘mouse hover state’ to reveal sub category menus. Obviously the problem for iPad owners is they can’t hover a mouse over the navigation, so they can’t get to the categories and products they want to.

That issue, coupled with a complete lack of an internal site search feature, meant that sadly for David Jones (and me) no sale was made that evening. Even though I’d whipped out the laptop, it was the principle.

Tail between my legs, I went to Sam Bear.

Sam Bear’s site doesn’t have any fancy bells and whistles like the others, but it never runs out of stock, works with an iPad and I was able to buy a couple of pairs of new jeans and a t-shirt in quick time without fuss.

I might add that their prices are a little more expensive, but it was worth it given the ease of the transaction.

Last year I blogged about the high conversion rates we see at our agency from people using iPads and with all the fuss over Myer’s and DJ’s foray into online shopping, I find it really disappointing that they (or DJ’s in particular) haven’t properly grasped mobile or tablet shopping.

In America online shopping from Tablet owners is tipped to reach $31 billion by 2016.

You’d expect these two to be the leaders in the online shopping/ecommerce space in Australia, but it looks like they’ve still got a ways to go.

Google has decided to encrypt their main site using SSL when people are logged in for “privacy reasons” so that people’s search queries can’t be intercepted by nasty hackers and also remain invisible in analytics reports.

The keyword report is incredibly useful to website owners and online marketers as it allows you to see what kinds of keywords people are typing into the Google search bar to find you. The report helps your SEO and your Online Sales if you know what to do with this data.

Many people in our industry have expressed their dismay and disappointment with Google’s decision including SEOMoz CEO, Rand Fishkin, who explains what it means and how it will affect people in his recent SEOMoz “Whiteboard Friday” video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-hides-search-referral-data-with-new-ssl-implementation-emergency-whiteboard-friday

Confusingly, Google has allowed AdWords keyword data to still show in analytics, whether a person is logged in or not. So it seems that if you’re prepared to pay for AdWords, you’ll get all the keyword data which referred traffic to you.

I think that this in itself is really weird, as it directly contradicts Google’s stated reason for this move which is supposedly to protect users’ privacy!

There are lots of conspiracy theories going around why this has happened. It’s almost coincided with the announcement of Google’s new and very expensive enterprise level analytics package http://www.google.com/analytics/premium/index.html. Could Google be trying to squeeze out other Analytics products like Omniture and Webtrends in favour of its own product?

Maybe but I doubt it.

Others think it’s to protect Google’s near monopoly over its Ad serving networks and maintain it’s near monopoly.

Personally I reckon the whole thing (at this early stage) is a bit of a storm in a tea cup, although it could get a lot worse in future.

Assessing our Google Accounts which have SEO rankings in the United States (where this has been rolled out first) the impact has been minimal at worst.

If you want to assess the impact in your Google Analytics Account just filter for “(not provided)” in your organic keyword report. The next screenshot shows how to do this if you’re interested, as well as the tiny impact SLL has had on blocking the keywords appearing in the report.

You can see above that just 9 visits have been blocked from view since it was rolled out last week. It’s such a tiny percentage of the total report it’s hardly worth worrying about. In the United States, it’s a bit higher than that for many other website owners, but not enough to cause too much of a flap.

I think people are more reacting on principal than anything else.

Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts reckons that less than 10% of searches are conducted when people are logged in so I don’t see the impact being majorly serious unless Google decides to fully encrypt their search engine for all users logged in or not.

If they do that, it’ll be on for young and old.

It’s early days yet, but I’d recommend that anyone involved with SEO should use this feature to enable some pretty powerful keyword research.  You’ll see why in a minute.

First of all, I’ll take you through how to set this up; luckily it’s pretty straight forward.

Step 1. Jump into the new (beta) version of analytics which you’ll see in the top right hand corner of your account once you’ve logged in.

Step 2. Drill down into Traffic Sources and click the (new) “Search Engine Optimisation” report.

Step 3. The next thing you’ll need to do is link your Webmaster Tools account to your analytics which you can see next.

 Step 4. Pick the account you want to associate the analytics with and you’re pretty much good to go.

Once this is all set up, what you’ll see is some really interesting new data about the keywords you rank for, how many visits you’ve received from them, the popularity of the search terms, as well as each keyword’s click through rate.

There’s an example below:

 At an agency level, we’ve already started looking at this as a new keyword research tool. Our research using exact match impression keyword data from AdWords shows that the impressions listed in Analytics is pretty close to the impressions from AdWords on various keywords.

Using the impression column above means you can do some pretty accurate keyword research in my opinion.

The other interesting report is the Landing Pages report, which when you add a new dimension such as “Google Property” you can see where your traffic is coming from in terms of Google Image Search, Mobile search and the web.

One of the really big problems has been tracking phone calls that came through to your business as a result of people seeing your phone number on your website.

It’s a really important lead conversion event, but for a long time has really only been possible through specialised companies such as www.jetinteractive.com.au who can (amongst other things) dynamically change the phone number on your site to identify where a phone call originated from.

For small to medium business owners, solutions like Jet Interactive’s might be a little out of reach.

But lately I’ve been seeing some really simple solutions to help with Call tracking which I thought I’d share.

Realestate.com.au uses a great system to fire an event to their analytics account when they hope a phone call is about to be made. They simply hide the phone number behind a link. You have to click the link to reveal the phone number, and that click event fires off a conversion to their analytics account.

Another really good example is from an accounting company in Queensland.

As you can see, you need to click the phone number to reveal the rest of it. When this click occurs this is recorded in Google Analytics. There’s a case study about how this was done on the above website here: http://www.marketinghub.info/phone-conversionlead-tracking-for-offline-businesses/. It includes all the code to get you going as well.

While it won’t be 100% accurate because I’m sure some people will click the link but not call you, it should give you an idea in your analytics account.

Below is a screenshot which cross references the source of the traffic to the site and phone call “click events”.

By understanding which sources of traffic have delivered active phone leads has helped the owner of the business make informed decisions about whether to continue advertising with the Yellow Pages for example.

That’s pretty powerful tracking and very easy for any developer to implement.

A big thanks to Daniel Brady from http://www.marketinghub.info for agreeing to let me use some of the material from his case study this week.

I’m constantly amazed at the sheer volume of online competitions running at any one time. Try Googling “online competitions” and flick through sites like Win Free Stuff to see what I mean.

Companies usually need a big prize to cut through and often the competition promotion expense is worth more than the prize itself. Kind of ironic.

Having said that, holding a competition can be a great way to build awareness of your products or your brand as well as get lots of people coming to your website. In my experience, competitions are usually designed as an email database building exercise. Entrants exchange their details and opt in to receive marketing emails in exchange for a chance to win a prize. Fair exchange you’d think.

I’ve certainly seen pretty good ROI from email databases collected from a competition, in some cases quite quickly.

But it can depend on the quality of your email database list.

See, there are lots of people who describe themselves as amateur or professional ‘compers’.  Like professional party goers who would turn up to the opening of an envelope, professional compers basically make a tidy profit by entering into as many competitions as they can. And they’re pretty good at it.

I used to work with a husband and wife team who won a tonne of stuff, including a new Mini. They subscribed to forums dedicated to competitions; sharing tactics on how to enter a competition to maximize their chances of winning.

They once bought a pallet of diet coke to enter a competition where a prize was being given away every hour. To enter you had to SMS a special code printed on the label. After a while they figured out that at precisely 55 minutes past the hour the prize would be awarded. They cleaned up.

The issue for some of our clients is that many of these competition forums and websites cotton on the fact there’s a competition running and the compers pile in.

The traffic referred from these sites is, on paper, super high quality as you can see from the screenshot below with conversion rates from traffic from the website www.lottos.com.au running at an astounding 64%. Wincompetitions.com.au is also pretty impressive delivering a 61% conversion rate of visitors to entries. You may notice that Direct traffic also converts highly – you can put that down the fact the competition in question was also advertised offline as well as online.

So while you’re patting yourself on the back for the amount of competition entries you received and how big your email list has grown, there could be a catch.

If you’re running a competition to build an email database, you need to be smart about organising the segmentation of people as they are added. Everyone who enters should be segmented into a ‘list’ which is clearly marked as “Previous Competition Entrants” (or similar) so that when you start sending emails you understand the dollar value of the audience when (or if) they convert on your site.

The problem is that your “Previous Competition Entrants” list could also contain a sizable group of compers who probably couldn’t care less about you, your products or your brand. They’ve got their eye focused firmly on the prize.

What we’ve started to do is segment the “Previous Competition Entrants” email lists even further by looking at the referrer when someone enters. If they’re from a ‘professional’ competition website like www.lottos.com.au then those entrants are flagged and segmented.

It will be interesting to see how many of the professional compers unsubscribe from emails when they’re received and how many actually respond at all to the marketing message contained within, compared to the ‘non-comper’ recipients.

My guess is the professionals will opt out of receiving future emails more than average and probably not be interested in the contents of the email at all if they don’t. Unless the email is promoting a new competition of course.

The deal is that they look for common misspells of a domain name like a well-known brand or product and monetise the domain for profit (or try and install malicious software on your browser).

It amazes me how often I find typo squatters monetising misspelled domains right under the nose of the rightful owners. There’s very little awareness by business owners about how insidious and damaging this practice actually is.

Recent examples I’ve stumbled across include: www.k-mart.com, http://www.krumpler.com/,  http://www.angusandrobinson.com.au just to name a handful. Over the years though, I’ve seen hundreds. When this happens we normally refer our customers to the specialist IP law firm www.actuateip.com.au.

Many typo squatters and domain squatters are making a small fortune leveraging other people’s brands for profit. And they continue to get away with it! Disclaimer, I’m not whiter than white either… I own www.ewetube.com.au.

To protect yourself (and your growing brand), you do need to buy up as many misspells as you can without breaking the bank and you can do this quite efficiently using a couple of methods.

The first is by brainstorming as many misspelled combinations as you can think up. Then you’ll need to check to see if they’ve been taken, so use a tool like http://www.planetdomain.com which can help you see what’s taken and what’s not.

To help with your search for misspells, use your analytics data as this will also help you know what kind of misspells are driving traffic to your site.

I was consulting for a large e-commerce provider just this week, and in the top 10 keywords driving traffic to their website was a misspell of their brand name. I checked to see how much revenue this misspelled keyword had generated and it was about $130,000. The first recommendation? Buy that domain.

Here’s an example on a much smaller scale using my own (personal) website.

OK, so the real name of my personal business is Hibermate, but as you can see above there’s a misspelled keyword which in the last 30 days has delivered a modest $70 in revenue so it’s definitely worth the $35 buying the domain for a couple of years to protect my IP.

Also, you can see from the source of the traffic that most people who typed in the misspell are from the United States, so I’ve registered the domain www.hybermate.com (US audience) and forwarded it to www.hibermate.com.

You can get really sophisticated  by adding a UTM tag (or campaign tag) to the redirect to understand how much revenue has come from people typing in the misspelled domain names you own.  Speak your developer about setting this up. Then you’ll really know from your ‘Traffic Sources’ | ‘Campaigns’ reports (in Google Analytics) whether it’s worth renewing when it comes to re-registering the domain!

Say it loud and say it s-l-o-w.

The official name is Expanded Sitelinks, but I like mine better.

Anyway, here’s how they look (mainly on brand related search terms):

Whenever Google changes something, you may have noticed us ‘SEO people’ tend to pounce pretty quickly to try and figure out how to make the most of the change.

Change is your friend, change creates opportunities…

By the way, this is what they used to look like:

Apart from the fact that there are lot more of them than there used to be, underneath each of the new Expanded Sitelinks is a small snippet of text describing what the page is about in a little more detail.

For the most part, this snippet is being pulled from each page’s Meta Content Description Tag. Even though the Meta Content Description tag doesn’t help your SEO (keyword optimising it for SEO doesn’t help your rankings) Google and the other search engines usually bold the words you’ve searched for in the results.

Here’s a website we all know and love dearly which really isn’t working its sitelinks to great effect:

It’s quite possible that the ATO has the worst SEO of all the Government department websites.

They have rubbish results like the ones in the screenshot above because all their pages don’t utilise the Meta Content Description Tag; Google simply resorts to using ‘on page’ snippets. Google’s also using the DMOZ editor description for the home page ‘2 line snippet’ in the results.

I could go on, but I can feel a tax audit coming …

So what can you do to get more traffic and more sales with this new change?

The first few words of your Meta Content Tag are really important now. You’ve got at most about 35 characters to play with so use them to try and encourage a click. Brookstone in the US does a fantastic job. You can see they’ve added great action words and phrases, “Be the first to get the new…” and they kick off their opening words with calls to action, “Buy kitchen tools, appliances…” They’ve also used benefit driven copy, “Brookstone coupons save you money…”

There’s more information from Google here, especially useful if you have embarrassing site links (as DFO had a couple of years ago (language warning).

In your Google Webmaster Tools account you’re also now given the option to ‘demote’ a page showing in the sitelinks, so you have a better chance of a more important page showing up.

There’s more useful information about Expanded Sitelinks here.

Work those meta descriptions.

Here’s the Ad currently running on Seek.com.au

Background

Reseo is a strategic and boutique online & search marketing agency currently based in Melbourne. As a division of the Reactive Media Group, Reseo receives a constant stream of leads and opportunities from Reactive Offices located in Melbourne, Sydney, London and Auckland.

Due to significant growth in the Sydney Reactive Office, there is need now for an account manager to help drive sales and service existing Reseo clients in Sydney.

Benefits

• Learning cutting-edge online marketing techniques
• Interaction with very high quality blue chip local and international customers
• Formal and informal training opportunities every six months
• A close team that’s seriously passionate about their work; sharing and collaborating on ideas!
• Real focus on employee job satisfaction and retention
• Meaningful work where you have the ability to strategically plan and influence campaigns
• Extensive training will be provided in Melbourne to the successful candidate in order to ensure you’ll have all the skills required for to you to perform at a high level

Your brief

• Online Marketing Account Management
• Formulate and customise online strategies to match each client’s situation and goals
• Write and close project proposals
• Delegate deliverables and action items to an internal team
• Keep clients updated with current activities and results
• Realign and troubleshoot the strategy as required to achieve client goals
• Manage and optimise online campaigns (Google AdWords, SEO, Social Media Advertising)
• Work with Reactive Account Directors and their clients to understand their online marketing needs and sell them in
• Help grow business in the Sydney market

The person we’re looking for

• Agency or client side Search Account Management experience (1.5+ years)
• Sales experience, new business and up-selling/cross-selling to existing clients
• AdWords (and possible Yahoo Search Marketing) experience
• SEO experience
• Social Media Advertising experience
• Analytics experience

You’ll need to possess awesome interpersonal and presentation skills, have a great eye for detail and high level written and verbal communication capabilities.

Ideally you’ll possess some or all of the following qualities and skill sets:

• Account Management and sales experience
• A relevant University degree or relevant industry experience
• Experience using and understanding of CMS systems
• Intermediate knowledge of HTML/CSS
• Experience in SEM and Online Marketing
• Strong highly developed organisational skills
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• Excellent grasp of English and very strong writing skills
• A high level of creativity
• Customer service experience
• Skilled in Microsoft Office
• Ability to manage tasks and meet scheduled due dates
• Ability to analyse, report and act on data

If this sounds like you, feel free to chat with Chris Thomas on 03 9415 2383 or simply forward to your resume and cover letter to: Chris.thomas@reseo.com

I thought I’d share one with you!

One metric we’ve been tracking is ecommerce conversion rates by ‘operating system’ and the results have been quite fascinating.

In the last few months the iPad has consistently led the way in terms of conversion rates. Note that while revenue numbers for the iPad haven’t been anywhere near as high as Windows or Firefox, the upwards traffic trajectory from iPads is rising almost as quickly as smart phones were just a few short years ago.

If you sell online, then iPad optimisation should be taken seriously as a revenue opportunity. Here are some examples showing the iPad leading the way (mostly) in eCommerce conversion rates…

You can see in the eCommerce conversion rates in the middle column, and the percentages of revenue in the right column. As I said earlier, iPads certainly don’t drive the lion’s share of total revenue yet, Windows and Mac’s do, but as a percentage it’s increasing. I guess the question one must raise here is why is the iPad such a high converting device?

I’d argue that it’s because iPad owners probably have higher disposable income, might be time poor and perhaps be under pressure to complete online transactions fairly quickly? Anecdotally, it seems that iPad owners are less in ‘work mode’ and more in ‘relaxing’ mode. So maybe they’re more open to retail therapy? Hard to tell.

Perhaps iPad owners are being inspired by advertising on telly? In the US, 70% of people play with their iPad and watch TV at the same time. With 15 Million iPad’s sold worldwide and over 1 Million sold here in Australia, I’m personally surprised Ad Agencies aren’t encouraging people to respond to TV Ad’s with more calls to action go online.

Watch the iPad.

After all the recent sharemarket hoo har I thought I’d check to see whether searches for ‘recession’ were on the rise and the short answer is yes!

Looking at Google Trends and Google Insights for search, there has been a sudden and very recent spike in ‘recession’ search activity.

Could this be a case of ‘here we go again’?

I’m sure glad I don’t live in Botswana right now. Recession based search activity from there is off the chart. India’s not looking to flash either with over 9% inflation in spite of 8 interest rate rises this year to try and keep it in check.

Google’s been using trends data for ages in all sorts of ways, from health to finance. It’s the enviable position of having so much aggregated search data that it can be put to good use for forecasting.

They’ve had Google Flu Trends for a few years now and it’s used to forecast influenza outbreaks both globally and locally. Tasmania and the Northern Territory are looking pretty good places to be if you want to avoid the flu.

More recently, Google’s created Google Finance where you can check indexes of various industry and economic verticals. It’s a fascinating view of history especially in terms of how search imitates life.

You can see how searches for mortgages feel off a cliff in the United States when the subprime crisis kicked off the GFC. What goes up…

The housing market in the US looks pretty flat and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of recovery in the chart.

These Google Domestic Trend charts are only for the United States at this stage, but will hopefully be rolled out to other countries at some point.

Alan Kohler could have a field day with these!