Covent Garden - Inspirational surroundings of SMX Advanced London

Insight in your Local and mobile traffic, that is what the ‘Art of Measuring Local and Mobile Search Results‘ session at the upcoming SMX Advanced London is all about.

I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at this session at SMX Advanced London with the likes of other local search enthusiasts. It is great to have such a nice panel with international speakers. The panel will have 3 presentations followed by extended Q&A for a total of 1,5 hours of brainteasing local/mobile analytics fun. Christine Churchill, president of KeyRelevance and Mike Belasco of SEO Overflow are my partners in crime on this one at the Grand Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden. Be sure to attend our session at day 2 so you won’t miss out on all the fun we’ll be having.

Hope it will be an educational session. Don’t hesitate to say hi or ask some more questions. See you there!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Insight in your Local Search traffic – Speaking at SMX Advanced London

One of the most important things after you have registered your business is to know how much traffic this will get to your website. I’ve put up a very thorough tutorial on Mike Blumenthal’s blog and I suggest you all check it out.

I’ll put up a part here in this post to give you guys a preview of what I am talking about. This part is about adding URL parameters to your Local Business Center URL’s. In the full article you will also learn how to track the vertical ‘maps.google.com’ and the 3-click-path traffic from the Universal Search results.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on Mike B’s blog!

Track URLs in Local Business Center

First of all, we want to track the URLs in the Local Business Center. The Local Business Center provides very basic information. Impressions and Views. Google is very vague in their answers in the help groups/forum on what an impression or a view actually mean. Does it account universal search traffic as well? or just directly Google Maps related views/clicks? And is this data accurate? We will decide to monitor this not from the Local Business Center but rather with Google Analytics.

Imagine your business has 2 store locations. Each in a different city/state. Your website has one URL www.example.com.

We will give each location a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, we will create a ‘virtual’ campaign in GA for our local listing.

In order to do this we will use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in your specific location URL. the campaign source (in this case; google), the campaign medium (maps) and give it a campaign name, for example local_location_1.

Now copy the full URL and enter it in the Local Business Center for that specific listing. Everything should work okay (although the URL might be a bit long for the LBC to display it properly). Note that Google Maps will only display the part of the URL before the parameters!

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

You can do the same using a 301 redirect. (this is my preferred method, but you will have to know how 301 redirects work. ) Using 301 redirects you will be able to have a clean URL in your local business center.

In this case the Google Local Business Center contains the following URL :

www.example.com/locationpage

Google Maps will display :

www.example.com

clicking on the link in Google Maps will actually bring you to :

www.example.com/location/city/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=local&utm_campaign=local_location_1

That’s it to track your Local Business using a virtual Campaign!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Tracking Local Search traffic using Analytics

As part of catching up with writing I wanted to mention something that Google has launched since beginning of march. GA-IQ is a test, for people who use Google Analytics. You can take an individual test to set a score and receive a certificate from Google when qualified. The test is mainly focused on implementation, measuring campaigns and usage of reports. Because interpretation of the data must always be done by humans there is a strong responsability for people working with Analytics data.

Google has put up a new website with learning material, both in written text and screencasts. Learn more about this by visiting the conversion university website.
In order to pass the test you need a minimum score of 75%. I can hereby notify you that I passed the test with a score of 92%.

Do you think you are also up for it? Take the test here.
When finished (or when you decide not to take the test) try and see if you are up for tracking some of your local campaigns using Google Analytics. I wrote an article called ‘Tracking Local Search traffic using Analytics‘ on Mike Blumenthal’s blog.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Analytics Individual Qualification

How to track Universal Search traffic with Google Analytics
Originally posted on January 16th 2009 on the Searchcowboys website but has moved here since May 2010.

After reading the post by Heini van Bergen on setting up filters on Google Analytics something caught my attention. Something I was looking for, since I started researching Local Search Optimisation.  I wanted to know how many people were actually clicking the blended results you see in Universal Search. Google Analytics measures these clicks as Google (organic). But what if my link appears in the SERPS twice? How do I know which link was clicked? And if my link is listed in the SERPS more than once, which one of them is converting in a better way?

Image: Universal Search illustrated.

Looking into the SERP source code can give you a lot of insight. Google is showing parameters for
Universal Search results. This will give us the possibility to set up some filters or advanced segments, based on the full referrer URL.

Overview of parameters:

• sa=x eXtended listings (regular tracking links show sa=t , traditional )
• oi= this parameter specifies the specific universal search feature.
• cd= internal position of a link within the specific universal search item specified with `oi`.

Unfortunately not all links from Universal Search boxes can be monitored in this way directly, for example those listed from Local Search results.
These will show a direct link to the landing page designated for the local business owner. This landing page can be defined in the Local Business Center (and you should!).
So what can we measure directly and how do I set up filters or create advanced segments for them?

Measured directly

The following are specified by the parameter oi

• Blog Search: blogsearch_group,  blog_result
• Image Search: Image_result ,  image_result_group
• Spelling corrections: spell
• Sitelinks: smap
• Definitions: glossary_definition
• Suggestions (link to suggestions/revisions): revisions_inline, revisions_narrow

Measured indirectly
this means that a user clicked on a universal search link, but went to the Google landing page first before going directly to your website, parameters are passed on by Google. Note that if this occurs, it can mean that it took one click to many for the user to get to your website because they couldn’t find what they were looking for in the first place.

Setting up the filters

Step 1 :
Create filter for organic traffic
New filter ->
Filter name `Organic`
Filter Type -> Custom Filter
Checked : include
Filter Field: Campaign Medium
Filter Pattern `organic`

Step 2:
Create filter for All Universal Search traffic
New Filter: ‘Universal Search Items
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Checked: Advanced
Field A -> Extract A -> Referral -> (.*)oi=([a-zA-Z_]+)&(.*)
Field B -> Extract B -> Referral -> (\?|&)q=([^&]*)
Output To -> Constructor -> User Defined -> $B2 : $A2

You can also create separate filters for some of the Universal Search items instead of all of them.

Custom Step:
Create filter for Universal Search – specific
New Filter: ‘Universal Search | images’
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Checked: Advanced
Field A -> Extract A -> Referral -> (.*)oi=image(.*)
Field B -> Extract B -> Referral -> (\?|&)q=([^&]*)
Output To -> Constructor -> User Defined -> $B2 : $A2

You can repeat the custom step above with all the variables for ‘oi’ available.
The output (after step 2) should look like this:

Also, you might consider filtering out the &gl and &hl parameter so you know which engine the search originated from.

What can we do with all this information?

Nice to have all these filters setup and to gain some more insights in clicks from the organic search results, but what use has it?
If the search results for a specific key phrase show both images and ‘regular’ text links for a specific key phrase, how can I tell if the image or blog link was clicked instead of the regular one? They both seem to originate from the same source (Google), same medium (Organic) and for the same keyword. Setting up these filters will help you distinguish the traffic. (It will give you the 3-click-path in some occassions. Thx for Tom Critchlow for clarifying this. )
Do images get less clicks? Or more? Or are users more likely to click the blog result than the regular search result? And is someone who clicked on an image more likely to convert into a lead or action? Or is it the opposite?

Set up these filters and you will know! Feel free to share your experiences.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

How to track Universal Search traffic with Google Analytics