Last week, I wrote about how startups should gather all the analytics they can.  This week, I want to give you a couple of free marketing tools you can download to help you tell your story in the next board meeting.  Hey, we’re a startup too and this is helping us, so I figured why not share it.

Free Marketing Tool #1

The first tool is what I call the One Page Marketing Breakdown.  It’s essentially a “waterline” that shows the board what marketing and advertising is working really well, and what not working so well.  You got it – above the waterline = good; below the waterline….well, it might be drowning so keep a close eye on it, or do whatever you can to optimize the hell out of it.  Yes, there are other facets of marketing I am not considering here, but this is the stuff you’re likely paying for, and I did compare it with free stuff.  For my company, I set out to test several target websites where I thought the people who are most likely to use our product would be hanging out. (click the image below for a larger view)

Free Downloads

Download the file below so you can edit it to your liking with your numbers, and use it in your next board meeting.

Get the Keynote for Mac here
Get the PowerPoint for PC here

(Warning: because WordPress would not upload my Keynote file, I had to stick it on FileFactory.com – sorry for the crap they bring you through to get it – leave me a comment and I’ll send you a copy if you have trouble).

Now where did I get this information?  I went into Google Analytics and ran a report on Top Traffic Sources, and segmented it by conversion rate (you have to have goals set up).  That easily gives me the conversion rates per advertising channel, and I compared them to all to what organic (free) visitors convert at.  The thinking here is that it’s probably worth paying for (and keeping) an ad channel if it is converting better than your free traffic – hence the waterline.

Next, I calculated my cost per report ran.  I took the monthly pro-rated cost of the ad (like if it was $100/mo, then it’s around $3.33 per day), multiplied that by the number of days the ad ran in the month, and divided that by the number of conversions – so you get cost/conversion.  These are real numbers for Pear Analytics, and our conversion priority are folks who enter their website and run a free website analysis.  For other startups, this may be folks who create an account, request a beta invite, or accounts that convert from free to paid.  I would caution you to keep it simple, as in our case the conversion comes from the last referral and is fairly immediate.  Once you start getting into original referral source, things get really tricky, really fast.

As you can see, for the most part, our conversions can cost around $1 or less, with a couple of sources going up to the $3-4 mark, and Influads getting up to almost $14 (there wasn’t enough data on this since it was only running a couple of days, hence the shitty CPL).

Free Marketing Tool #2

The next free marketing tool is what I call The Simple Conversion Funnel you saw in last weeks post on analytics.  This is such an important aspect of your business, and sadly, I see few utilizing it.  The funnel is simple, and you can get most of it from your Google Analytics account.  We get the information from a combination of Google Analytics, and information we store in our database (we cookie visitors and do session tracking too).

This is just an example of the various stages in your funnel, but you’re going to want one of these for each activity.  You can see step-to-step conversion rates, the overall conversion rate, as well as the CPL (cost per lead), and CPA (cost per acquisition).  Don’t worry, your marketing guy should know what this stuff means.

Free Downloads

Download the Keynote version for Mac here
Download the PowerPoint version for PC here

Now go off an be marketing and analytics ninjas in your next board meeting.  These are sure to impress!  Now, stay tuned for next week’s post where I show you how I changed my Google AdWords campaign and got a 400% improvement on the conversion rate.

Free Marketing Tools for Startups is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

Mayank Lahiri’s fabulous Foursquare gaming code challenge is an excellent write-up on a “small” problem with Foursquare’s check-in API.  You can check in from anywhere, but the system doesn’t verify where you are.  Clever programmers can get around this by taking notes of where their favorite venues are, and can then check-in whenever they want.  It may well be a long time before Foursquare learns to tell the difference between automated check-ins and people forgetting their keys.

The “challenge” in “coding challenge” is this: how short can we make a program that checks into Foursquare like a person would?  There are a couple of basic mechanisms in play.  First, you have to open a connection, log in, and then make a check-in.  As it turns out, Foursquare’s API lets us automate most of the work, so long as we’re willing to pretend to be a browser.  My entry into the challenge is not so much an original entry as it is a refinement of the challenge’s script, as such, the basic idea (a script written in Perl that pretends to be an iPhone) is the same.

I submitted three lines to the challenge, but as an exclusive for this blog, I have it down to two, each of which is reproduced below:

BEGIN {
    eval "use $_" for qw(MIME::Base64 IO::Socket)
}

readline do {
    printf({
        $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => 'api.foursquare.com',
                     PeerPort => 80, Proto => 'tcp', Type => SOCK_STREAM)
    } join (v13.10,
        "POST /v1/checkin HTTP/1.1" "Host: api.foursquare.com",
        "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) "
            . "AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) "
            . "Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3",
        "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
        "Authorization: Basic ${\encode_base64 'YOUR_USERNAME_HERE' . ':'
            . 'YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE'}", 'Content-Length: %2$s', '', '%1$s'
        ), local $_ = sprintf('vid=%s&private=0&geolat=%s&geolong=%s',
            $ARGV[0], map { $_ + rand() * 1e-4 - 5e-5 } @ARGV[1, 2]),
        2 + length),
    $sock
} if sleep rand() * 600

Almost all of the script’s code occurs in the call to printf().  The first argument in the curly braces is the filehandle to print to, and the rest are a series of strings concatenated by v13.10 (“\r\n”, of course).  I’m abusing $_ in order to save creating a $str variable (the format ‘%2$s %1$s’ will reverse the arguments to sprintf).  For maximum compatibility, I’ve used %s as a format for @ARGV[1, 2] despite them being floating-point.

As a signing-off note, astute readers will see that I submitted the vstring v15.12, which is incorrect.  I apologize for getting octal and decimal confused and hope that seasoned PDP-11 programmers can forgive me.

Gaming Foursquare in Two Lines of Perl is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly.  With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there.  So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.

1. Trackback pages are temporarily redirected to the main post.

WordPress automatically creates a new page for trackbacks, such as yoursite.com/blog/2010/blog-post/trackbacks/, which is 302′d back to the original post; /blog/2010/blog-post/ (try typing one in, you’ll see it does redirect back, which therein lies the hidden problem).  The problem here is that a 302 does not pass any link juice back to the post, meaning if you had some nice trackbacks from valuable sources, they would be essentially worthless.  The proper thing to do here is 301 them (permanently redirect) back to the original post.  This will pass all of the link juice, helping that page rank better for the terms it targets.  Don’t allow trackbacks?  You’re closing the door on some potentially decent links that could pass some juice to you, so why not pass it correctly? (Disclosure: I did find this solution on Yoast.com from Joost de Valk – a WordPress SEO expert)

To fix this, go to your wp-trackback.php file.  Find the line that has “wp_redirect(get_permalink($tb_id));” and change it to “wp_redirect(get_permalink($tb_id),301);“, and all of your trackbacks will pass the almighty link juice. Quick update on this one, we’ll have a better solution for this soon because it’s not good practice to update the core files directly, as you’ll lose those changes in the next upgrade.

2. You’re indexing Category and Tags pages.

WordPress also generously and automatically creates separate pages for every category and tag you’ve ever used in the blog.  That’s really nice and useful for searching for something within the blog itself, but we really don’t want Google or other search engines indexing those pages.  In almost all cases we’ve seen, they do nothing but create duplicate content and duplicate tag problems.  The minute you create a post with a new tag OR a new category that has never been used in another post, what happens is that all of these pages end up being the exact same:

yoursite.com/2010/some-blog-post
yoursite.com/tag/some-tag-name (which contains only the one post)
yoursite.com/category/some-category-name (which also contains only the one post)

and that is duplicate content, and you don’t need to have these pages unnecessarily competing against each other for rankings.  Google does penalize less for duplicate content on the same site, but what the heck, why have it if you can fix it, right?  However, for those of you who are more advanced users, you can keep your category pages listed in the index and prevent the duplicate content issue by adding a description paragraph to the top of each category page.  The Wicked Blog explains this in more detail.

To fix this, install the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, and on the Setup page, make sure you check the 3 checkboxes that say “Use noindex for categories”, “Use noindex for archives” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.  Then you can go and remove these pages from the Google index (if they have in fact made it there) within Webmaster Tools if necessary.

These two fixes should only take a maximum of 5 minutes, including the time you need to install the All in One SEO Pack if you don’t have it.  Need help?  Leave us a comment.

Two Simple Settings for SEO in WordPress I Guarantee You Missed is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

We’ve been paying a LOT of attention to the folks who use our product as we build out a minimum viable product, along with a scalable and repeatable business model.  Since July 12th (roughly 6 weeks), nearly 6,000 people from just about every country on the planet has used our SiteJuice product, running over 10,000 websites through our system which shows them basic SEO information with resources on how to fix various issues.  We’ve collected close to 500 responses to our KISS Insights survey asking people what they thought – how useful was the information we gave them.  The answer was overwhelmingly “very useful” – but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to throw up a paywall just yet.  Let me explain…

I believe that you have 2 basic needs to meet if you’re going to sell a monthly subscription for your product: Usefulness and Value.  We can debate other things, like Simplicity, Cost and more, but let’s just focus on these for a second.  My theory is that users can find a product useful all day long, but never pay for it.  Why?  If Google Analytics started charging for the service tomorrow, would you pay for it?  Do you pay for survey tools, or try to use them as much as you can for free?  Why would you pay for KISS Metrics, but not Google Analytics, or KISS Insights, but not SurveyMonkey?  I’m sure there are a lot of reasons why, but I suspect it all points to “value” one way or another.  The tricky part is everyone’s definition of “value” can be different.

Enter the Minimum Viable Product Lifecycle graphic below.  Let’s assume a High Value product that is Not Useful doesn’t really exist – at least I can’t think of a worthy example here.

The bottom right quadrant, Low Value and Not Useful is a dangerous place to be.  Not only are people failing to continuously use your product, but they simply don’t see the value in it.  Perhaps the product has too many features, or the user experience is awful.  But more than likely, the product is not solving anyone’s pain – at least the way they want it to, which means you need to get out of the building and start talking to customers.

Let’s consider the bottom left quadrant of Very Useful and Low Value.  While this quadrant is much better than the lower right, it’s still is not enough to probably get users to whip out their credit card for you.  I feel like our product, as it stands today, is somewhere in this quadrant (although I would argue not at the bottom, but probably right in the middle towards “has some value”).  And I’m OK with that because we are focused on a minimum viable product (MVP), and we’re simply not going to build a boatload of features nobody wants, or can’t figure out how to use (we already did that and failed, so we did a major pivot).  Part of moving from the red to the orange is understanding who your users are – are they “experts,” “prosumers” or “Joe lunchpail”?

So how do you get to the green quadrant?

By talking to customers and finding out what their pain is, and providing a solution to that pain.  By now you should know who your basic customer is and where they hang out.  With enough users you can start to ask them things like “you use our tool quite a bit…what is your favorite part about it?,” or “what are your biggest challenges with [X], and how can our software solve that for you?”  Try to make the questions open ended rather than forcing them into a particular answer that you’re looking for.  For instance, in our last iteration, we found out through talking to customers that their favorite feature was completely hidden. It also turned out to be the most useful.

Update 8/30/10 5:17p: Another way to tell if you are in the “green” is that 40% or more of your customers say they would be very disappointed if they could not use your product anymore.  This is something that Sean Ellis talks a lot about, and he teamed up with KISS Metrics to create the perfect Customer Development survey located at survey.io.  Go and get it today.

How will I know when people are ready to pay?

The easiest thing to do of course, is just throw out a paywall of some kind and just see who pays.  But that takes engineering resources which you don’t want to waste by building upgrade paths unless you’re certain that folks with their credit cards are standing by.  You could create an “Upgrade” link in the software and track how many people click on it, and when they do it just pops up with a “coming soon” message.  What we do is keep a close watch on users likeliness to pay by running a separate KISS Insights survey on pages inside accounts.  That’s right – a user who does not have a free account with us will see a different survey that those who do.  What’s the question?  Well, quite frankly, “would you be willing to pay for this product.”  If the user was willing to go through the account creation process, the assumption is that they must be interested in the product at some degree higher than those who didn’t create an account.  My personal feeling/goal is that if we can get 50% of the responses to say “yes”or “maybe”, then we’re probably ready to explore putting up a simple paywall and testing some prices (right now we’re sitting at a really shitty 1 out of 26).  That may be a lofty goal, and I think some would argue that if you can get just 1 person to pay for your product, you’ve achieved minimum viable product (even freemium models convert at only 2% to paid users).  My issue with that is we had people paying us with the last iteration on the software, and then we hit a wall.  It began to get more difficult to “sell” with bugs and other frustrating issues, and we had cancellation problems.  I think software users are willing to put up with a lot, but they have their limits.  As for now, since we’re not at that percentage, we assume it has to be related to us not hitting their Value needs since they’ve already told us it’s “Very Useful”.

How Do I Create More Value In My Product?

So moving from the lower left to the upper left is a much harder step.  I think it involves careful consideration of what you’re going to “build next” because you have limited engineering resources, and a runway to think about.  No matter what you release, make sure you have a way to measure it’s usage.  Your trying to find the feature that is going to be the most useful and valuable to the user.  We have several ideas on what those could be for our product, but we need to validate them with the customer first by talking to them, releasing the feature, and measuring the usage.  By doing this, the percentage to our “would you pay for this” question should go up.

Again, these are all of my opinions based on what I have learned.  If any lean startups or advisors have different (or additional) advice, please add it by commenting.  We do get a lot of startups reading our blog, and I’m sure it would help them too

Startups: The Minimum Viable Product Lifecycle is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

This is a lengthy, instructional post outlining typical SEO problems and solutions with sites that have gone through several re-designs. OK, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s get down to business.  If your site is more than a few years old, chances are it’s been through a fair share of changes.  You’ve probably had three different designs, multiple programmers or web shops working on it.  You probably went from PHP to .NET, and back to PHP again, and you added a blog from WordPress and migrated all of the static content there too.  You added a boatload of pages, and got rid of just as many after marketing went through their nineteenth change in messaging.  Sound familiar?  Right – that’s why your site is…well….not showing up in Google as frequently as it should be.

Don’t worry – we all go through it – even us.  The good news is that it’s all fixable.  And believe me when I say that if you fix these issues, your rankings will improve. (We’ve seen it happen).

Sign #1 – You have 404 pages everywhere.

These pesky pages are usually a result of people adding pages, changing them, deleting them, and changing your mind.  What you didn’t know was that through all of this ADD, Google went ahead and indexed all any any pages it could find and loaded them up in their index, and you forgot to tell them you’ve changed some things around.

How to detect: run your site through Google Webmaster Tools and see if they find any crawl errors.  Pay attention to the last time it was detected since they do tend to keep a running log, meaning you could have fixed the problem, and it will still show in the list.

How to fix: if you are using WordPress, you can use the Redirection plugin to 301 these pages to where you want them to go.  For everyone else, you’ll have to add the redirect to your .htaccess file.  Here is an example of how we wrote one for Pear, but be warned that these are different for every site and server configuration:

RewriteRule ^(\d{4})/(.*)$ /blog/$1/$2 [R=301,L]

Be sure to read The Relevance of 404 Errors in SEO.

Sign #2 – You’re temporarily redirecting pages (using a 302) when you should be permanently redirecting them (using a 301).

You may have fat-fingered the rewrite rule above, and instead of using a 301, you used a 302.  Hey, it happens.  This is also a bigger problem in WordPress, where all trackback pages are 302′d.  The problem with a 302 redirect is that is does not pass any of that wonderful link juice to the “new address”, and is all kept back at the source because they think the move is temporary.  Bummer, because this really sucks if you have some great sites linking back to you.

How to detect: this one is tough, but if you are a Pro member at SEOmoz, you can get this done over there.  Hopefully we will be adding this to SiteJuice in the future.

How to fix: In WordPress, you’re going to have to modify the wp-trackback.php file.  Find the line that has “wp-redirect(get_permalink($tb_id));” and change it to “wp-redirect(get_permalink($tb_id),301);“, and all of your trackbacks will pass the almighty link juice.

Sign #3 – You’re loaded with duplicate content.

Duplicate content is common if you are running affiliate pages, or you are indexing category and tags as pages from your blog.  Duplicate content, or having the same content on multiple pages (either on-site of off) can cause the pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings, and now the better page will ultimately perform worse.

How to detect: you can uncover duplicate content in Google Webmaster Tools because they will detect duplicate title tags, so you can start there. SiteJuice looks for the www redirect only.  We will be adding a more comprehensive duplicate content checker, so for now you can try the SEOmoz Pro tools to detect this. (It’s what we used for Pear).  Check for duplicate titles and other SEO tags while you’re at it.

How to fix: first, you’re going to need to tell the search engine which URL you prefer, and so you can use the rel=canonical tag on the preferred page.  There is a Yoast plugin for WordPress that accomplishes the same thing.  Make sure each page has a unique title and description.

Sign #4 – Your pages are so slow that I’ve grown a beard waiting for them to load.

Over the years you’ve added every single script and add-on you could think of.  You added three different visitor trackers, live chat, Tweetmeme and Facebook Share buttons, and a bunch more.  The footer is now bigger than the main body section of the page.  Whoops.  Even though most scripts load pretty fast, it does add up.  You want to make sure your page load time doesn’t exceed 2 seconds, because it can contribute to visitor loss.

How to detect: load your page into SiteJuice and let ‘er rip.  We’ll measure the load time, plus give you pointers on how to fix it.  For you more fancy pants users, you can also use YSlow for FireFox.

How to fix: You can start by using asyncronous tracking scripts where ever you can (Google Analytics is now async, and so is Clicky).  This means the script loads in parallel to the page, and does not affect content load time.  You can also minify your HTML and CSS, and use a CDN for your images.  We find for most sites that either scripts or images are the culprit.

OK, so I’m sure you have plenty to fix – even we did.  Happy fixing!

4 Signs Your Website Is All F@!#ed Up is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

This is a short post on how you can see the full referring url in one report in Google Analytics (GA).

The problem:

Just a quick background for people who haven’t run into this issue yet.

If you want to segment by source in GA; the referring url is cut at the domain. Which means if you got a referral from http://news.ycombinator.com/a-great-post/ you would see it in the source as http://news.ycombinator.com/. And if you have multiple urls from the same domain we cannot see which page it come from because it will be truncated at the domain.

The solution:

The solution here is to create a filter which will put all the complete referring urls in a user defined report. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to your filter settings and create a new filter

2. Select Filter type ‘Custom Filter’ and then ‘Advanced’

3. In field A- Extract A select ‘Referral’ and in the text box type ‘(.*)’. This essentially selects the entire referring url.

4. Leave field B-Extract B as it is

5. In Output to – Constructor select ‘User Defined’ and in the text box type in $A1. This will take the complete referral of field A (denoted by $A1) and put it in a user defined report.

6. Leave the rest of the settings as they are. Which means Field A required should be selected as ‘Yes’, Field B required as ‘No’, Override output field as ‘No’ and Case Sensitive as ‘No’.

After you are done it should look something like this:

Where do you see the results:

Under Visitors goto User defined and voila! You can now see a report with the referring urls

Hack: How to See The Entire Referral URL in Google Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?”  Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that.  In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”

We’re a startup too, and we know you want to be a “traffic whore.”  That’s fine – we are too – hell, we’ll link bait anything to get 2o more visits.  But as much as you want to be a traffic whore, you need to be an analytics whore too.

In fact, we like analytics so much, it’s in our name – and we have the tools to boot. (yes, that’s a photo of my iPhone…so many analytics tools I had to create a whole folder for it).  So we’re going to show you a few tools and techniques to get you to that next board meeting so you can put on a rockstar performance!

Tools

Google Analytics (Analytics Pro) - this should go without saying, but everyone should have Google Analytics running in their site.  It’s free for chrissake.

Clicky - I run Clicky because I love the Spy feature where you can see who is on your site right now and what they are clicking on.  Yeah, it’ll freak people out.

Chartbeat – this isn’t a traditional page analysis tool. This is about what’s going on right now.  It shows you people who are currently on your site, the pages they are looking at, and the average page load time.  This is cool for when you finally hit TechCrunch or Hacker News and you want to see the traffic spike real-time.  Chartbeat is different from Clicky’s Spy feature because Chartbeat keeps track of active and inactive tabs that have your page open, so you can now see who’s actively reading (or not). On Clicky Spy, once they leave the tab (even if it’s still open), the live visitor count decreases.

Floorboard – this is our home-grown reporting engine.  We also do a lot of cookie and session tracking, so I can track the behavior of account holders (like how often they log in, what they do when they log in), or the time it takes from the minute they hit the site, until they sign up for an account.  Sometimes the data out of the database is more reliable than javascript trackers.  Build one for yourself – if you need some help, let us know.  There was also that great video from Mike McDerment over at Freshbooks on “Flight Systems”.

Pear Analytics - this is our SEO tool made for the iPhone.  (Sorry, you can’t get it anymore off of iTunes because we’re going to make a waaaay better one soon.)  Until then, you can use this free seo analysis tool.

KISS Insights (not shown) - you’re going to need a page level survey to ask people what they think about your tool or service.  KISS gets a really high response rate, so you’ll get data very quickly that you can use in your next board meeting.

CrazyEgg – this is a heatmap tool that will show you the “hotspots” on your webpage.  Are people clicking where you want them to?  The results may surprise you. (And yes, I am pimping Hiten Shah a bit here with all of his tools, but hey – they guy is doing something right.)

Userfly – this is super cheap usability testing.  They record the mouse movements of random visitors to your site.  Are they doing what you want them to do?  Did they see that forward to a friend button?  Still a little clunky on ajax and javascript stuff, but totally worth the ten bucks or whatever it is.

Update 8/24/10 - thanks to Dan Martell for tweeting this post out – I totally forgot to add Flowtown to this list of must-have tools.  Flowtown basically pulls a social profile on any email you have.  So if you have a freemium product that asks for an email to signup, they will cross-reference the emails and find out who’s on any social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), along with some basic demographics, AND who the influencers are.  Now for you advanced users, try overlaying this data with the user behavior data in your database.  Now you’re cooking

Techniques

Okay, now you have a shitload of tools – what do you do with them all?

1.  Set up goals - both Clicky and Google Analytics have the ability to set up goals – or conversion places – or places where people do the things you want them to.  This could be fill out a form, subscribe, or sign up.  For Pear, it’s those who come and run a free report with our product.  Now you can tell which traffic sources are converting the most.

2.  Take the time to add the proper tracking codes to your marketing activities - Google Analytics has a way to read special URL parameters so the data goes into the right place into the reports.  If you’re running a banner ad on Mashable, don’t tell them to link to just www.yoursite.com.  Append the URL like this:

www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=mashable&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=125x125a&utm_campaign=startups

Now you know which banners work the best, which campaign, which source, etc.  You can even play with banner copy and calls-to-action now.  Cool, right?  If you need help building that URL, go here to the Google URL builder tool.

3.  Build funnels for all of your activities – what you want to know is where people drop off during the process you take them through to sign up, pay you, or whatever it is you want from them.  If you are using the DaveMcClure AARRR concept (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) – with the exception of Referral, that’s your funnel.  Make pretty little graphs for your board meeting too, like the ones below, for every marketing activity.  If it’s hard to get some of the data, that because it is sometimes.  Don’t whimp out.  If you want, you can also try KISS Metrics to do a pretty schnazzy funnel analysis.

4.  Segment, segment, segment – Google Analytics made the advanced segmentation module just for you.  Want to know out of all of your new visitors, how many went to page X AND page Y?  Create a segment.  Or maybe you want to know how many visitors stayed at least 2 minutes, AND visited at least 2 pages (one of Dave’s acquisition examples).  See how we segmented our top performing organic keywords using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics together.

5.  Test, test, test – you want to be split testing your copy, landing pages and anything that gets a user to try your tool, or ultimately pay for it.  You might have to test different pricing structures, or even test certain features with cohorts of users.  You want to develop your code in a way where it is “test friendly” too….Rails has a plugin called “A/Bingo” made by the guy who invented the Bingo Card Creator.  There may be others out there, but in case there aren’t, you can try Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce.

6.  Know your CPL, and if you have a paywall, know your CPA – your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) is a great way to measure what marketing activities are working and which are not.  Without doing this exercise, you may be tempted to stay with the cheaper form of marketing, even though it performs the worst.  Now what should your CPA be?  That’s up to you and your board to decide, and probably will be based loosely on what you know about the Lifetime Value of your typical customer or subscriber.  Your CPL, however, should never really exceed about 15% of the CPA limit.  That means if your CPA limit is $10 (you’re willing to spend $10 to acquire a paying customer), then you should see what marketing activities are giving you leads at $1.50 or less.

Wow!  Now you can go back to the boardroom with some real insights and data to make decisions!  And that’s what your investors want – they want to know what you learned from your experiments in trying to find a repeatable, scalable business model.  We’re by no means the experts here, but if we can help you, please reach out to me – ryan at pearanalytics dot com.  Oh, also be sure to read Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Startups: Get All The Analytics You Can is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

I thought we would do something different for this week’s SEO Tip Tuesday. As an Audi lover myself (on my 2nd A4 Turbo), I frequently search the new models so I can mostly drool and go through the whole “I wish I had..” sentiments. And I find myself at times in a bit of a love triangle between the Audi RS4 and the BMW M5, albeit different classes. So I search a lot for various BMW products, and I love watching M5board.com and seeing the M5 take on anything from an RS4 to a Porsche C4S Turbo.

I found it really strange when searching for “audi rs4″ last night that the entire first page of organic results on Google did NOT include a listing from audiusa.com. Hmmm…that’s strange. I went through five pages, and still no listing for the US Audi site. So then I did a search for “bmw m5″, and BMW has two listings on the first page; bmw.com, and bmwusa.com.

Could it be that BMW’s search engine optimization efforts are superior to those efforts over at Audi? Let’s dig in a little bit.

Basic Analysis
Using the Pear Analytics free SEO analysis tool, we ran a quick page analysis to gather some stats. Both sites did fairly well, Audi having 4 issues to BMW’s 3 issues.

For BMW, we could not find an XML sitemap, an H1 tag, or one of the 9 analytics tools we look for. Audi also did not have an XML sitemap, and then less important infractions of invalid HTML/CSS and a meta description that rambles on.

Both sites have a PageRank of 7 (they are both authoritative and trusted), but BMW has more than 5 times the links coming into the domain compared to Audi (555,735 to 94,782). Audi does have a better deep link ratio, which means a larger percentage of their links point to internal pages compared to the home page.

See the BMW analysis here
See the Audi analysis here

(Audi does show up for other popular model searches, like “audi a4″ or “audi s5″, but they do show up under a sub-domain instead of a sub-directory, which does result in a tiny bit of SEO juice loss across domains)

Pages Indexed & Canonicalization
Now I wanted to see how many pages each site actually had indexed in the search engine. Audi seems to have over 40,000 pages compared to BMW’s 4,600. Gee, that’s a big difference. Looking a little further, I discover what seems to be a fairly big duplicate content problem for Audi.

What Audi is doing is creating a web page template for all of their dealerships, except that the content on them are exactly the same (or pretty damn close). See for yourself:

This one is for a New Orleans dealership; and this one is for an Ohio dealership. I also notice that audiusa.com is not classified as the “canonical” URL, and so what Audi seems to be doing is an SEO no-no. They have potentially hundreds of pages all with the same general content on them, which devalues their potential for showing up at the top of the listings, particularly for some of their less popular models (like an RS4 for example). Google simply doesn’t know which page to list, so instead, it doesn’t list any, unless they find a really good match from a page with sufficient inbound links. Oh well, sorry RS4.  Read why Google cares about duplicate content.

Traffic & Subdomains
According to Compete.com, BMW is getting a whopping 43% more traffic to their site compared to Audi. Could BMW be doing a better job at long tail search compared to Audi? Let’s take a look:

Type in “transmission in the bmw m5″ and that results in bmwusa.com listed in the 3rd spot.
Type in “transmission in the audi s4″ and that results in page from configurator.audi.com in the 5th spot (but not audiusa.com, which is what I would have expected).

So it also seems as though Audi is suffering from an identity crisis, and someone over there has subdomain-itis. Using one domain with directories (like /2010-models or /forums) without all of the subdomains (forums. or configurator. or models., etc.) would certainly help Audi fight the long tail fight, as we simply don’t see that (or as much of that) with BMW.

Conclusion
Both of these companies are obviously battling for market share in the U.S., and my gut tells me that BMW may be winning that game, although I prefer Audi over BMW.  BMW is  getting more traffic and they have some of the more technical (and complicated) SEO elements in place.  Audi could do a better job by:

1.  Use fewer subdomains to keep the SEO juice on the canonical URL (whichever that is);
2.  Define the canonical URL and devise a better strategy for dealership site templates;
3. Use a cleaner URL structure for dealership pages that will aid them in local search;
4.  Expand content on product pages and target them with inbound links

So, if any Audi rep out there want to maybe offer up a 2011 RS4 (or heck, even a 2010 S5 would be nice) in exchange for some SEO work, let’s talk

SEO Showdown: Audi vs. BMW is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

This is an instructional post for advanced use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to uncover insights about organic keywords driving traffic to your website.  It’s a bit long, but bear with me – the results will be valuable to you

If you’ve been using Google Analytics, then you might be familiar with all of the new changes in the past year, like asynchronous code, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and much more.  Equally, Google has been making quite a few upgrades to Webmaster Tools as well.  They now show you things like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, links to your site, and now search queries.

We’re going to show you how to combine the search query data from Webmaster Tools and conversion data from Analytics to uncover which of your organic keywords are performing the best, and how to determine which keywords you should focus on ranking higher.

Step 1 – log into your Webmaster Tools account.  If you don’t have one, you’ll need to sign up and paste a meta tag on your site to identify yourself.  Once logged in, go to “Your site on the web > Search queries.”  You should see a screen like the one below. (Click on any image to enlarge it).

This table is showing you all of the search queries that are driving clicks to your website.  Much like paid search, you see Impressions (number of times Google showed your listing in the SERPs), Clicks (self-explanatory), CTR (click-through rate) and the Average Position.  Sort the data by the CTR column first.  This shows you your most successful keywords where folks are most likely to click on your listing.  You can even select the “+” next to the keyword and see which pages are being listed in the SERP (search engine results page).

Step 2 – favorite your top keywords by highest CTR first.  You can also favorite words that have an Average Position between 1 and 10, since these are words you rank on the first page for.  What you are really interested in here is the number of Impressions for each word.  You’ll want to use the data from Google Analytics to see how many visits you are getting from this word to determine the CTR, which is going to vary from Webmaster Tools (WMT).

Step 3 – now go into your Google Analytics account and get a keyword report by going to “Traffic Sources > Keywords.”  Be sure the date range selected is the same as  what was selected in Webmaster Tools (very important!).  Now you can see how many visits each keyword has brought to the site.  Your keyword list should come close to the list you sorted in WMT.

Step 4- determine the goal you have set for your website.  It could be a goal you set, or even a particular page that was viewed.  For Pear, we’re interested in any new visitors who came through on a particular organic search term (like “free seo analysis”) AND ran a free report (which means they viewed the /free-seo-report/* page).  Now I just went in and set up an Advanced Segment to figure this out

Now we know the following information:

• How many impressions for “free seo analysis” from WMT;
• The average ranking for “free seo analysis”
• how many new visits we received from “free seo analysis”
• how many of those visitors did what we wanted them to, which is run a free report

I can also take it one step further, and actually see how many visitors who find our site from a particular keyword, actually come BACK and engage with us further.  That’s pretty valuable, because now I can really figure out which keywords I want to put time and energy into to rank higher, and drive more traffic from.  So I create a simple funnel analysis for each of my Top 10 keywords, like this:

With this information, I can do several things to improve the CTR, or on-page conversions, such as:

• make sure my title tag and meta description are in line with the keywords I’m targeting.  Maybe they are not stimulated by the wording to click on our listing?
• dynamically generate the H1 tag on the home page to match the keywords the user searched for.  So if they searched for “free website seo analysis”, my H1 changes to that when they reach the target landing page.
• I can test and modify the page to get the user to analyze their site.  That’s why we removed the email and sign up requirement.

Now you are empowered to go and do this for your website!  Your first try at this may take you the better part of an afternoon, but you can set up some automation to get the data easier next time (i.e. favorites in WMT, advanced segments in Analytics, etc.)

Mashup: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics Provide Powerful Insights is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.

A couple of my good friends over at MailFinch, an on-demand direct mail service, and Upstack, a site where you can hire designers to do whatever you need, have both been using ReTargeter.com to drive visitors back to their site.  The way it works is a visitor comes to your site, and ReTargeter puts a cookie on the visitor.  Once the visitor leaves, and goes to another website, there’s a good chance they will see a banner ad from you.  And I’m talking about sites like Huffington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and many more.  It’s all driven to get people to come back, hence the name “ReTargeter,” and so only those people who came to your site and got the cookie will see the ads.

From what Paul and Wes tell me, it’s been pretty successful.  Being an analytics guy, I ask “well how do you know that ReTargeter is sending any traffic back to you?”.  Their response: not real sure, but it feels like it’s working.  People are continuously commenting that they see their banner ads all over the place, and that “they must be spending a fortune on advertising.”  Even ReTargeter mentions this benefit in one of their case studies published on the site.

So the question remains, how do I track these ads better?

Well, the answer is pretty easy.  If you are using Google Analytics, they allow you to append the URL with a string of various parameters to identify a particular ad campaign, banner type, and more.  It’s a great way to see which variation of what ad seems to be working the best, and I don’t have to depend on ReTargeter data if I don’t want to.

So instead of linking every banner to http://www.pearanalytics.com,

I link each banner differently, such as http://www.pearanalytics.com/?utm_source=Retargeter&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=728x90a&utm_campaign=comebacks
To build a URL just like this, use the Google URL builder here.

Where you can see in the URL parameter the source of the ad (ReTargeter), media type (banner), content, or banner size (728×90 version a) and the campaign is “comebacks”.  All of this is recognizable by Google Analytics, and you can now segment your visitors by any one, or several of these parameters.  For instance, you might be interested in which 728×90 banner is performing best (assuming you have a conversion goal set up), so you can determine which copy or messaging is resonating the best.

The problem with just specifying a generic URL, or even a special landing page, won’t give you the data you need to truly segment your visitors and determine their source.  The source may come from many places and may not be readily noticeable in your Referral Source, so tagging the URL with these parameters will give you the insight you need to determine if the campaign is working for you (or not).

Optimization Idea #2: Try banners that talk to the visitor as if they already know you.

As I sifted through the many banner ad examples on ReTargeter.com, I noticed something interesting: no one was creating ad copy that spoke to the visitor as if they already knew who you were.  If I went to website A, then later was surfing on Yahoo News, and saw a banner from website A saying “hey, come back here!” – I think it would make me look twice, versus a regular ‘ol banner with “hi, we do this, and this, and click here to get a discount” type of banner.

So we’re going to try a couple things, and using our nifty URL tracking code for Google Analytics above, test to see if direct copy works better than indirect copy.

Which one do you think will work best?

How To Get The Most Out of ReTargeter.com is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools ad software company.