Category Archives: technology
Tracking Mobile Searches in Google Analytics
Tracking Mobile Searches
In my last post I was complaining about the fact that you can’t actually see if your mobile customers are coming via search, direct link, or from a referring site. Guess what – I was wrong and I’m man enough to admit my mistake. I did some research and you can see where mobile visitors are coming from and a whole lot of other information about them fairly easily.
Advanced Segments
On your Google Analytics Dashboard there is a drop down named Advanced Segments. Under here you can choose up to four different advanced segments to break things out by. Mobile is one of them. When you choose mobile or any of the other choices you’ll see all of your reports will feature this breakout. That means that traffic sources will feature a breakout for mobile or non-bounced or searched traffic or whichever advanced segment that you want to break out for all of your reports. You can only choose four of them at a time but you can swap them out on the fly so you don’t need to worry about not being able to see any of the choices they give you if you really want to.
Now that I’m aware of this feature (that has been around since 2008 – oops) when I export analytics data for my customers that want to store it in a database and generate their own reports off of it I can now offer another handful of data sets to them.
Getting Back to Mobile
So this is great stuff but getting back to mobile – I pulled the data for one of the websites I manage and saw that I had a fair number of mobile visitors but that they was a 73% bounce rate. Digging farther I could see almost none of them were coming from search. I immediately dropped an email to this client and told them we need to adjust their online marketing because we are not picking up mobile searches and their target customers are affluent and young.
More on Advanced Segments
Here is a great video by Google that explains more about Advanced Segments:
Mobile Search Insights
New York Times Reports on Innovations in Mobile Search
There was a really good article that appeared in the New York Times back on April 25th that I just managed to find. You can read the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/technology/25mobile.html?_r=1 and I encourage you to do so as it gives some really great insight into what Google is doing these days to innovate and make sure they keep their 97% market share.
Why is mobile search so important?
Mobile searches are gaining ground at the same pace that desktop or non-mobile searches grew at when Google first launched according to the article. Also in the article we learn that searches conducted on mobile phones will one day soon out-pace those done in non-mobile environments. As a smart-phone (Android) user with an (as of now) unlimited data plan I am quick to search for things on my phone. Google doesn’t expect that mobile searching will replace searches conducted on traditional devices and their data shows that people are more likely to search during the lunch or evening hours.
So mobile is going to be king one day – what does that mean for your business?
It means you need to be in the game. The NYT article reports that mobile search algorithms are slightly different than their non-mobile brethren in that they give more weight to location. This means that your business, if it has a physical location, needs to be listed in Google Places and needs to be easy found when searched for from a few blocks away.
This change in weight is good for small businesses because it means you can more easily compete with larger companies that have more money to toss into their search engine optimization (SEO). It begins to bring search back to a place where real world location is relevant.
97% Market Share
With Google owning 97% of the mobile search pie and that pie growing at a rate that will overtake non-mobile searching if you’re a business owner who has limited dollars to spend on SEO then you might want to focus on your search ranking in Google over Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. I’m not suggesting that you ignore them – anything but. However if your business is one that will benefit from a high placement in mobile search results for a particular keyword then your focus should be on getting there.
Keywords are King
As the NYT article reports – Google assumed that users would use their voice search conversationally – they would speak to the phone like they would another person. When they analyzed the data what they found was that their assumption was wrong. Google had trained users to think in keywords when searching. This means that that mobile searchers tend to be more savvy which makes total sense as those that are reluctant to use non-mobile searching in this way are probably not rushing out to buy iPhones and Droids.
Heavy smart phone users are generally more comfortable with technology. That is the folks that are comfortable using their smart phone are more likely to understand computers, to understand how computers think, and to be able to interact with them. This is a good thing for your business because smart phone users still tend to be wealthier than traditional mobile phone users. The demographics are changing every day and there are patterns emerging that show some growth in users that opt for a smart phone over a computer.
Google Analytics
Like any other visitor to your website mobile users will show up in your analytics data. You can see how many people come to your site on an iPhone. Google Analytics offers limited insight into mobile. They tell you how many mobile hits for each device and what carrier they came from. What you can’t see in Google Analytics just yet is mobile vs. non-mobile searches. You can create custom reports but as of yet I’m not sure how to add a custom report for mobile because the results. If you know of any analytics packages that offer mobile vs. non-mobile search sources please add them to the comment section.
Know Your Visitor
When you look at your analytics reports you can see you’ve got visitors using this browser or that browser. You can see their connection speed and so on. All of this can help you build an idea of the people looking on your site. If their demographics done add up to the demographics that you see as customers or wish to see as customers then you’re probably not targeting your search marketing correctly (assuming that most of them came to your site via a search engine).
If you’re seeing a lot of visits from iPhones, from Android phones, or other smart phones then you can build a picture of that website visitor based on existing demographic information that exists for those phone users.
Capturing Mobile Searchers
Even if mobile searches are still only a fraction of non-mobile searches now it’s important to pay attention to the people conducting these searches are they are more likely to turn into customers faster – they are likely out of the house, running errands, and looking for what they are searching for in order to make purchase.
What are you doing that is working to snare mobile searchers and to turn those searches into paying customers?
The Changing Face of Media
We all can see that the media game has changed so why are so many people still trying to play by the same rules? Can we measure how much the game has really changed? Have those massive changes affected everyone equally? By everyone I mean the owners, workers, and consumers.
I was at a photography seminar yesterday watching two of the most amazing photographers alive today tell stories, teach, and do demonstrations and I came away having learned something kind of photo related but more-or-less related to media and information in general. What I leaned came from David Hobby – new media world shaper extraordinaire.
We’ve all been told that newspapers, magazines, and other such printed media are going away and that a brave new world awaits us. It seems to me that much of that change has occurred at the top and middle but what comes out in the end – what the consumer gets is not and will not change much if at all. Sure there will be changes to how they consume, (on phones, computers, and digital paper), but not WHAT they consume.
Personally I think most of it is hype driven by the people who have the most to loose which is why the average consumer has been all by totally silent throughout the past decade as circulations have swirled around the drain.
David Hobby
David Hobby, (aka Strobist), is not listening to the old rules. David has built his Strobist blog into a hugely successful enterprise, (keep in mind that success doesn’t equal money). In the photography community the Strobist brand is as well known and well respected as Nikon or Canon.
While blogging didn’t make him rich it did provide him with a platform that has allowed him to see the world of media from a different viewpoint. No longer confined by the chains of advertising supported, high-overhead, generalistic news world of old media David has started a quiet revolution in the suburbs of greater-Baltimore. Working away David has managed to shift the future of media into what he wants it to be.
How has he shifted the entire world of media? There are already others who are doing similar or slightly different projects, projects that are compatible and comparable. What is it then that he is doing? David has shifted the world of media by making incremental changes, small changes, to the way media is gathered and shared and it looks like this: hoco360.blogspot.com
HOCO360
David is providing a visual documentation of his community with very little overhead, no editorial bias, and a visual focus on his community. Free from the bonds of the old world. He is now working on what he wants to do in a way that can be made profitable. Has he started to monetize it yet? No, but that will come.
The beauty of his method is it’s simplicity. Everyone is talking about the new world of media being so different. Whereas David Hobby, former staff photographer from the Baltimore Sun has walked over, unplugged this part, hot-wired that part and cut off all the parts he doesn’t need. No longer is David working as part of a tank or 18-wheeler. He’s broken off a chunk of that old machine and fashioned himself a bicycle that is nimble, light-weight, and able to do just what he needs it to do.
What is David Hobby Doing?
What is he doing that is so very slightly different?
David is visually recording his very local community of Howard County, MD – just like a newspaper would or at-least just like the non-hard news parts of a paper would. He is talking about arts and culture and business, and uncovering things that are of interest to the locals. He is delivering content to his readers purely online at hoco360.blogspot.com. The content he is sharing is visual. It’s not weighty and wordy, he doesn’t tackle the local school budget, or the council’s plan to allow solid waste dumping on playgrounds – he has loosened the chains.
There still are restrictions sure but they are less and they are different. One big difference in breaking the machine into smaller parts is that the market can now dictate what the consumers can consume. The gatekeeper has been removed.
Free Market Content
I recently read a post, I think if was by Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com), where he talks about the free market and how those that benefit from the free market the most are the ones that want to prevent it from being free most often (through patents, monopolies, and so on). The reason that you can’t choose every article that you get in the paper (or at least every subject) is because the generalism of the paper maintains the ideals of it’s owner. While many readers might not care about a particular subject covered by the paper they still get articles written on that subject because the editor likes to read about it or they like to read about it with the slant that the writer they hired puts on it.
With what David and others are doing they are ultimately creating a pure and free market for news content. If his photos of his community are worth the cost to make them then he will succeed. If there are enough consumers to support someone writing about the flowers and garden clubs and such in and around Howard County then a writer writing about them will succeed (assuming they understand the business end enough).
This is all revolutionary in it’s simplicity. Everyone keeps talking about the new face of media and what a vastly different media world we are driving headlong into but David Hobby has shown that through small tweaks the new world won’t be so new to most people – it will simply be a world free of middle-men.
Square Up Credit Card Payments
Tell us how you really feel Don
I’ve told people over at Facebook about Square but I’ve got to post a blog about it because it’s just freaking awesome. Before you get into the bulk of the post please note that I am not being paid to post this. I’ve got to say it up front because I’ve read through what I wrote and some of it sounds like it was written by a paid spokesperson. I promise you that I genuinely LOVE this idea and their execution and that I am not in any way being compensated for writing this.
What is Square
If you have not heard about it Square is a credit card payment acceptance system. There are a few other systems out there – Intuit (the people who make Turbo Tax and Quicken) have a similar app and doggle for your smart phone but I’ve not tried it. Mostly I didn’t try it because at first it only worked with iPhones and I’m an Android user.
I keep seeing them advertise their version but I’m honestly not even interested in checking other options (beyond looking at the price points) because I really like Square so much. That’s not to say that I’m not a fan of Intuit. I use a lot of their products and like them a lot. I know there are a few more out there too and I’m sure PayPal will likely get into the game soon but as long as the price is right I’ll stick with Square and since they are already cheaper than PayPal I’m saying good bye to them.
Where did you hear about Square?
So I still have not seen any ads for Square but I heard a report about it on NPR which prompted me to look into it and I keep hearing about it via word-of-mouth. To me both of those are much better than an annoying TV ad any day. When I heard the report on NPR and then found out that it was cheaper than PayPal I signed up.
It was really easy, they do the micro-deposits to verify your checking account and they send you a free card reader that plugs into your headphone jack on the phone. That means that it works with any smart-phone that can have the app installed on it. You can accept cards without the reader too (it just costs a bit more) which is cool because when getting ready for a shoot I am usually focused on packing gear for the shoot, not on remembering a hardware plug-in for my phone.
Why is Square different?
I still get a lot of checks so accepting credit cards was something that I’ve always been a bit hesitant of (due to cost and volume). Most of the time companies charge you a monthly fee on top of taking a cut on each transaction. Square doesn’t do that. It was made with small businesses in mind – photographers, landscapers, and so on (per the report on NPR) so they don’t charge a monthly fee since the people it’s made for may only accept one credit card payment a month. I’m in that boat and since it still costs me money per transaction I’d prefer to keep taking checks as much as possible. That being said when a customer would rather pay by card I don’t need to send them to my website to use PayPal or to write down all of their info and then double shred it when I’m done.
Why wait until today to tell everyone?
I decided to say something today because I got this email from them that made me like them even more than I already do:
Hi WDO,
Starting today, Square has dropped the 15¢ fixed fee on payments you accept using your Square card reader. Now you’ll simply pay 2.75% per transaction, no matter what you sell.
Why are we simplifying our pricing? Learn more.
How freaking cool are these people! They’re making their service cheaper! That is just awesome.
Check them out and sign up to accept credit cards on your smart phone cheaper than any other service that I know of right: here.
Knowing your market
Google Search Insights
Every month I run reports from Google Analytics and several other sources to see how my websites are doing. Knowing how many hits your website has gotten is important but how do you know how many hits your website could have potentially had?
Keyword Analysis: Pittsburgh photographer
The first step to finding the answer to that question is knowing what keyword(s) you’re trying to use to bring people to your site. For me the keywords Pittsburgh photographer and event photography are very important. Google sent me 116 visitors last month for the keyword Pittsburgh photographer. I know that from looking at my Google Analytics but how do I know how many I could have gotten? For that I need to check Google’s search-based keyword tool. On average there are 200 local searches per month for the keyword Pittsburgh photographer. So that means that last month I received 116 visits out of (an average) of 200 possible visits. That’s 58% of the possible visits. What does this mean though?
It means that not only is my website web positioned for this keyword (in that it shows up in search results) but also that when it comes to searches for Pittsburgh photographers my website receives visits from over 1/2 of the people searching for photographers in Pittsburgh.
The lesson is as follows – knowing how many hits you’re getting is great but knowing those numbers compared to the potential number of hits gives you a better picture. Why spend money on expensive SEO services if you don’t know how many possible hits they can generate? Budgets are tight, don’t spend hundreds of dollars a month chasing after low numbers. Use Google’s search based keyword tool to find keywords that both relate to your business and that generate a fair amount of searches each month. Use these keywords on your website, in your content and in meta tags. Write blog posts about those keywords – like I’m doing here with the keywords Pittsburgh photographer. If you do these things you can manage your own SEO and keep the money you may otherwise be wasting paying an SEO company.
Information Overload
Too Much Information
Are we really at the point of total information overload?
How we got here
Let’s stand back and view the expansion and dissemination of information over the past 30 years since the advent of mass user networking. Even before the internet and hypertext protocol were developed as a means to share information more easily the groundwork was laid for the ever expanding mess of data that we have available today. It crept out of universities in the 70s through home consumer networks and Listservs in the 80s and exploded with the birth of the web in the 90s.
As the number of websites grew and came to be indexed, (as we all probably know), search was developed and marketed as a means to find the information we wished to consume. Now the information was out there and we just needed to know how to look for it. This passive means of data interaction works great assuming you know how to look for what it is that you want to know but what if you don’t know what it is you want to know? You know? That’s when the technology of information consumption made it’s next leap …
Stop! I think it’s happening again
Along comes RSS that offers to feed us information without us needing to lift a finger to search for it. Sure you initially have some limited activity in setting up an RSS reader but with tools like Google Reader and Google Alert we no longer need to hunt for information, we just need to sit back and consume it.
We can think of this process like the chocolate production line episode from I Love Lucy. If you’ve never seen the episode or the show for that matter, GOOGLE IT. If you’ve honestly never seen it Lucy and Ethel have no issues at first with the trickle of candy (information) but it quickly overwhelmed them and they have a hard time reacting to it, comedy ensues, and the candy speeds up even more before the scene ends.
As a more personal example in my Google Reader I subscribe to more than 70 RSS feeds. Some of those are aggregators so the number of posts I get each day is often over 150. I have them categorized by subject but at times it still is overload and my retention is probably very low.
In fact I decided to write this post only after seeing this in my Google Reader:
That’s from the website: thxthxthx.com which shows a thank you note everyday. Now, this isn’t off of one of the 70+ RSS Feeds I get. It was from another section in my Google Reader where I can see things that my friends who also use Google Reader want to share but it makes a great and very true statement. By the time I get done reading all the new posts in Google Reader there are more of them there.
The Answer
There are already books published about the effects of this kind of information overload on our brains. It’s frightening to me at least that there are serious physiological changes that have been observed and documented that can scientifically be traced to our changing means of information consumption.
So how do we combat these changes?
The truth is that there is little chance that people are going to slow their consumption. We’re not going to go back to 3 TV channels and no internet. True there are those that limit their exposure but does this actually have a positive effect or do they just read and consume things at an even higher rate because they know they have a time limit? Can their activities be equated to the use of filters on cigarettes? A means that only purports to have a health benefit when in actuality the smokers just suck harder.
I can come up with two ideas on my own though I can’t actually develop either myself.
One idea is to create a more targeted flow of information. RSS is great but when we add key-wording in no longer am I getting each post from a photo-blog that often features mediocre nudes, lackluster portraits, boring “art photography”, and amazing architectural photos. If I add in the keyword restriction or only subscribe to posts that are from the architectural category then I get to see what I want and the signal comes through the noise a little stronger. I also see a lower number of total unread posts in my Google Reader which doesn’t make me think – crap, I can’t look at all of these, I’ve only got 20 minutes before I need to leave.
So idea one is to add a new layer to RSS would be beneficial and really already exists. It’s category based RSS and some sites do offer it – it just needs to be more widespread.
The second idea is to stop beaming bright light directly into our eyes.
These new tablets and iPads and things are really cool but when are the even cooler thin, readable in all light, vivid color, electronic ink devices going to get here? Right now we are bombarding our eyes with the lights from our computers and that stimulates the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) but we don’t fight or flee, we just keep reading or watching.
Maybe someday soon there will be a device that works more like a newspaper with full color vibrant photos, that is small, flexible, and doesn’t require back-lighting to be read. They’re working on this stuff but when will it get here?
I know that the Kindle has an e-ink display but it doesn’t have color and that’s going to keep it from being able to replace newspapers and magazines. Not so much because they include images in stories but because they do so in ads. For them (so far) it’s the web, these tablets, or nothing.
So really I don’t have all the answers and those I have I can’t implement alone but I think we need to start to critically think about ways to adapt the consumption to the consumer because they’re not going to stop consuming or even slow down until they are forced to. I know I’m not.
Do you have any ideas how to do that? If so leave them in the comments or better yet start a tech company that changes the world.
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