Peter Grandstaff

Web Marketing for Your Small Business

A 90 Year Old Secret to Online Marketing

Imagine what Bach would do with an electric guitar... it would probably sound a lot like Van Halen.

Ninety years ago a book was being written by a man named Claude Hopkins. That book would reveal an advertising secret that revolutionized the industry. It was called Scientific Advertising and it’s been a “must read” ever since.

And, it’s even more useful today, online.

There are two components to this method, and I have a pair of acronyms to help you remember them.

ART – Always Run Tests.

3D – Data Driven Decisions.

Let’s dive in to these old concepts and see how they can drastically improve the performance of your marketing campaigns today.

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Privacy by Google: Trick or Treat

Google is rolling out some changes to improve users’ privacy, but there’s a bit of hypocrisy involved. The search engine optimization community is abuzz and there’s a lot of misinformation out there.

The plan includes removing keywords from “referer” data. Read on to learn what referer data is, why I’m misspelling that word, and what Google is changing.

When you visit a webpage, your computer sends various bits of information along to that webpage that you never see. These are called headers. One of the headers is the referer. The referer header tells the site you are visiting where you came from. When you click a link your browser tells the page you land on the address of the page you came from.

The reason it gets spelled “referer” instead of “referrer” is that this misspelling was included in the original specifications for the web, back in 1996. I think it’s a fun bit of internet trivia, but I’ll go back to spelling the word correctly now.

Now, when you do a search on Google or other search engines, the words you search for are included in the address. For example, a Google search for [how to play chess] would take you to an address like:

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+play+chess

That’s a nice way to do it because then people can link to specific searches. Also, when you click a link after searching, the site you visit is told the address you came from in the referrer header. That lets site owners track what search terms brought people to their website.

That seems harmless enough, but consider another example. Say someone in Syria or Iran were to search for [how to topple an autocratic regime]. Suddenly this whole situation gets serious. That kind of search could get them arrested, or worse.

And, it’s not just the site you visit that can see your searches. Your internet provider can too. Here in the US, our providers snoop into our traffic to mine data that’s sold to advertisers and such. In countries with dictatorial leaders… well, you can imagine.

So, Google is rolling out encryption on searches. Soon, anyone who is logged into a Google account and does a search from the main Google page will have their searches automatically encrypted. This is really great for privacy. They will also be removing all referrer data when you click a search result. Again, good for privacy, but webmasters won’t be able to see what search terms brought traffic to their site.

This has the SEO community up in arms. (Well, this and another little tidbit to be discussed below.) We pay a lot of attention to the keywords that are bringing in traffic. That’s one of the best metrics we have to judge the success of our efforts.

Personally, I’m okay with trading keyword data for better privacy. I believe that the more encryption is used on the web the better. Here’s the kicker, though: Google will pass your search terms on when you click one of their ads.

That’s right, they will protect your privacy unless someone pays them not to. In fact, they’ll be going out of their way to share your search data with advertisers. Normally, when you’re on an encrypted page and click a link to a non-encrypted page your browser will not pass any referrer data. Google will actually be rigging things such that you will send referrer data to advertisers.

All the keyword data isn’t going to just go away. Probably less than 10% of searches will get encrypted this way. If you have a website, be sure you’re making use of this data. You can find the report in Google Analytics under Content » Keywords. In the long term, we might have to look for other metrics. Time will tell.

 

This post first appeared in my small business email newsletter’s Halloween edition. Sign up with the form at the upper left to get a useful article in your inbox each month.

One Under-Used, Over-Powered Google Analytics Feature

The Google Analytics Menu with In-Page Analysis

You'll find In-Page Analysis under the Content section.

There’s one very powerful feature in Google Analytics that I find very few people discover on their own. So, I want to be sure you know how to use it. I’m talking about the tool called In-Page Analysis. Not long ago it was called Site Overlay, but it’s been revamped and carries a “Beta” tag with the new name. (Beta meaning still in a testing stage.)

When you click the In-Page Analysis link you’ll be taken to a page that shows your website within Google Analytics. You’ll have a column on the left with lots of handy stats for the page you’re looking at. Even better, you’ll see a little bubble by every link on your site showing what percentage of clicks were on that link.

The In-Page Analysis interface

When you first start this feature up you’ll see your site’s homepage. Look at the link stats. Since every website is different and has different objectives it’s hard to give universal advice about what your numbers should ideally look like. Think about what path you want visitors to take through your site and see if the numbers match your ideal. If not, make a note of the issue.

After you look at the homepage, click one of your links and have a look at the next page. Consider where you’d like visitors to go after that page and see if your click statistics match up. While you explore, pay attention to the Entrance and Exit percentages in the left column as well. A high exit percentage on your Contact page is normal. On your homepage, it’s a problem.

You can explore your whole site this way, and I suggest you do. It never fails to amaze me how quickly I can find actionable information this way.

I expect Google will be improving the In-Page Analysis feature a lot as time goes on. Perhaps eventually they’ll even give us click heat maps showing exactly where clicks happen, down to the pixel. Of course, by then you’ll be a pro with this feature because you started using it religiously after reading this, right?

Note: If you have the kind of website that you log into as an administrator, you may need to log out before this feature will work correctly.