Pulling Levers Blog

Over the years, many clients have expressed how they would appreciate a glance into the path visitors take through their websites. In almost every case, as soon as we introduced them to the Google Analytics path analysis tool, they said thanks, but no thanks. This was mostly due to the daunting feeling that overcame them as they realized it was a lot more data than they expected. They wanted a “visualization” of the data.

And as Google indicated, this is exactly why they created the new Flow Visualization tool. As Google describes the tool, it “allows you to analyze site insights graphically and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site.” In addition, it can be used with advanced segments (unlike the goal funnelization report).

There are currently two types of flow visualization tools available in all Google Analytics accounts: Visitors Flow and Goal Flow.

Visitors Flow
The Visitors Flow report can be found under the Visitors section. Basically the visitors flow view allows website owners to graphically see the visitors flow through their site. This can be viewed by a particular traffic source and other main dimensions. With this report, not only can website owners see how visitors moved through the site, they can also see where visitors dropped off. Here is an example from Google:

The “nodes” seen in the visualization are clustered by the use of an intelligence algorithm. By hovering over these nodes, detailed information is displayed.

For those that want to go deeper into the data, by simply drilling down into a node by “exploring the traffic” you can see additional visitor flow information.

Goal Flow
Goal Flow is currently available for URL destination goals, but Google has indicated additional goal types will be added for goal flows in the future. The Goal Flow is available under the Goals section within Conversions.

Goal Flow, just as Visitor Flow, provides a graphical version of how visitors move through the goal steps and indicate where they drop off.

The goal flow is particularly helpful when there are multiple steps to the goal. With knowledge of where visitors are dropping off or reversing their steps, a focus of improving those particular pages can become a priority.

Don’t have the new Google Analytics Real-Time (currently in beta), here are some quick videos to show you some of the streaming data.

Active Visitors on Site Counter (with high-level medium data bar)

Pageviews Per Minute (left), and Per Second (right)

Location Bubbles

I’ll admit the map reminds me a little of the movie Monsters, Inc. as the shift starts, someone yells out “O.K. people, eastern seaboard coming online! We got scarers coming out!”

Eileen is our second employee celebrating an anniversary with Lever Interactive. Eileen started with Lever in September of 2010.

Eileen has worked on several different clients at Lever, and across most of our service offerings including paid search, SEO, conversion optimization, ecommerce management and social media.

Learn more about Eileen Buleza.

I’ve waited over 7 months, through a player lock-out, to watch NFL football. It is like a second Christmas in my house. My husband and I are both fans of teams different than our hometown so we usually do not get a chance to watch an entire game live.

With the announcement a couple of weeks ago that DIRECTV would be offering their NFL Sunday Ticket through PlayStation 3, both my husband and I thought “Perfect!”. We signed up and anxiously awaited opening day.  What a disappointment. Not only did it take forever to load, it stalled every minute, and looped in commercials and pre-game commentary right in the middle of plays and eventually stopped working. Obviously there were issues.

I jumped onto Twitter and found the first DIRECTV account, which is mostly about their products, but directs you to the service account for issues:

This is a great approach. They can use this account to promote shows, new products, etc. and not have it weighed down with customer service issues.

I immediately go to the @DIRECTVService account to see if I can get an update to the issue.  Unfortunately the great social media strategy on the main account is not carried over to the service account. Here is what I found:

Lots of confusing and contradictory information posted here. Let me take a moment to point out a couple of issues from a social media perspective:

• No all encompassing tweet– While this is only a snapshot, this account never made a single tweet regarding the problem, it was all directed to individual users.
• Not repeating the question or issue in tweets — While the above snapshot does not represent this well, most of the tweets (at least 80%) directed to individuals do not repeat the original issue, leaving those reading the timeline confused. Here is a great example of the timeline in a 22 inch monitor during the outage that demonstrates this issue.
• Confusing/Contradictory information — One tweet indicates a problem with a particular service, another tells a customer where to go for that service that isn’t functioning.

In reading two tweets directed to individuals I do realize there is a problem with the PS3 stream. O.k., great, they are aware, they are working on it.  I figure I would hang out and check the status.  Unfortunately it was just too painful to watch them answer various individuals, but never give a clear update to all users.

At one point the Twitter account goes dead with no responses to anyone for 30 minutes. Then sporadic answers, but with a lot of dead air in between.

Another problem with this is they are not responding to everyone. And I really can’t tell who they are responding to and not. Some are being told to call, some are being told to send in a direct message.  Not sure why some should call while others should work with the Twitter team.

But the more important question, is the social media team in touch with the customer service team?  As @DIRECTVService is telling people to call for a credit, or that there should be no issues next weekend, their customers are saying something else:

The most baffling is the PlayStation and DIRECTV social media and customer service teams where clearly not communicating. PlayStation re-tweeted from @DIRECTVService to indicate the issue was being worked on and also posted they would be refunding customers:

Unfortunately @DIRECTVService never re-tweeted PlayStation’s refunding announcement and it wasn’t until 3 hours after it was posted was it mentioned by @DIRECTService:

You can see here, the PlayStation snapshot shows the tweet was made 4 hours previously and the first acknowledgement from @DIRECTVService was 1 hour previously. In fact 2 hours previously they were still indicating for customers to contact PlayStation.

And for the icing on the cake: DIRECTV never acknowledged on Twitter what the issue was, that it has been fixed for this upcoming weekend (other than saying it “should be”), nor did they apologize for the service outage.

Lesson learned: Have your social media strategy buttoned down and following best practices BEFORE opening day, and most importantly, be prepared for a crisis.

Look for more blog posts about social media best practices over the next couple of weeks.

 

Jamie is one of two employees celebrating an anniversary with Lever Interactive. Jamie started with Lever in September of 2009 as an account coordinator.  With her passion and dedication to client work, she was promoted recently to Account Strategist.

Jamie has worked on several different clients at Lever, and across most of our service offerings including paid search, affiliate marketing, conversion optimization, ecommerce management and shopping comparison.

Learn more about Jamie Watanabe.

 

Chances are if you know Lever Interactive, you know, or know of, the founder and president Chris Gilmartin.  He started Lever 5 years ago and has grown into a thriving agency.

He brings his invaluable experience from his time at Resolution Media and Orbitz.  His direction and passion about online marketing inspires the entire team at Lever Interactive.

Learn more about Chris Gilmartin.

Google announced that beginning August 11 there will be a change in how Google Analytics calculates a session. For clarification, a session is provided in Google Analytics visits. Visits, by definition in Google Analytics: A count of sessions that have been active on your site for the selected date range.

Prior to this change visitor sessions were considered ended by Google Analytics when one of the three things happened:

• 30 minutes of inactivity between pageviews for a visitor
• End of a day (midnight arrives for the time zone settings in the profile for that report)
• Close of the browser

If any of these three things happened, the next pageview of the visitor was considered the start of a new session.  The new calculation will still end the session on the first two bullets above but will also end when the visitors traffic source changes.  Traffic source information for Google Analytics is based on their cookie values: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid (auto tagging from AdWords). Closing the browser does not automatically end the session. And as with the old calculation, if any of these items occur, the next pageview will start a new session for that visitor.

How Does This Affect My Data?

Data prior to August 11 will not be changed, only data after this data will change.  Google indicates that this change brings the definition of a session more in line with the definition of a visit. According to Google, with new sessions being started for new traffic source information essentially brings a more accurate attribution.  While this might be true for visit  information, conversions or ecommerce transactions were already being attributed to the new traffic source information. Which is why we have implemented a first click/last click analysis and utilize the multi-channel funnels aggressively.

With sessions not being automatically ended with the close of the browser for a short time, sessions can now model the user’s engagement with the website.  With this change, the number of visits can increase, but Google indicates most users should see a less than 1% change. Obviously the more unique your website and tracking, the more this can play into the data change.

 

Google recently announced a change to the appearance of their organic sitelinks.  Organic sitelinks show under the first listing in the natural search results and are direct links to various pages within the particular domain.  They are generated automatically by Google and not all websites will have sitelinks.  Here is what they looked like prior to this most recent change:

With the change announced by Google, the appearance and layout of the sitelinks has been updated to improve the search experience.  Google does indicate that how sitelinks are generated has NOT changed.  They will still be “generated and ranked algorithmically based on the link structure of your site, and they’ll only appear if useful for a particular query,” according to Google.

Take a look at the new organic sitelinks:

 

Let’s Break Down the New Sitelinks

Here is a quick snapshot to the changes you see:

• Pronounced - Sitelinks are now the same size text (before they were in smaller text), with the green URL and a line of text below.  This mimics the usual search results. Presumably this makes them easier to find or notice.
• Optimized  -  With this change, sitelinks that are shown and their ranking can change based on the searchers query, which means more optimized results.  Prior to this change, sitelinks were fixed, up to eight links were shown or not shown, regardless of the search query.  Finally, up to 12 links can be shown, and again this is based on the search query.
• Separation – In prior search results, pages for a particular domain would be show in the sitelinks, in subsequent natural results (position 2 or lower) or both.  With this change, there is a clear distinction between the top domain and other domains.  If the results show a top domain with sitelinks, all results below will be from different domains.  So, while the top domain can physically take up more room on the page, other domains will have a chance to appear in positions two through ten. Note: one exception to this change is if the top result is for a subpart of a domain and all the sitelinks are part of the same subpart, other parts of the domain may show in subsequent results.
• Unified Algorithm – By combining the components used to generate and rank sitelinks (link structure of websites) with Google’s traditional ranking, Google indicated they have created a unified algorithm. There is no longer a distinction between the traditional results and sitelinks anymore.

Sitelinks and Webmaster Tools

With the old version of sitelinks, site owners chose to block pages from the list of sitelinks generated. Here is an old view of the way to block pages from sitelinks:

Webmaster Tools has already been updated and site owners can continue to manage their sitelinks. The change in managing sitelinks through the Webmaster Tools is through “demotion” of pages that site owners do not want to appear as sitelinks.  Keep in mind removal of these links are not guaranteed.  With sitelinks varying over time and through individual queries, site owners will need to suggest parent pages to be “demoted.” Site owners can designate 100 demotions per website.  Any pages that were blocked in the old system have been converted to demotions.  Here is what the new demotion system looks like:

This change does not impact one-line sitelinks or paid search sitelinks.

Happy Anniversary to us! During the month of August we are celebrating our 5 year anniversary.  We kicked off our celebration with a surprise party for our president, Chris Gilmartin, at a local restaurant on Thursday, August 11. Our entire staff participated, as well as their significant others. Photos have been posted on our Facebook fan page if you want to see the fun we had.

As part of our month long 5 year anniversary celebration, we will be posting employee spotlights as well as various case studies here on our blog.  Be sure to check back and read about our greatest assets: our employees and clients!

We develop close relationships with our clients so that we can understand their entire business and help where we can succeed even further. We don’t just look at keywords and ads within a paid search campaign, we take into consideration everything, including landing pages, shopping experience on the website, offline marketing, anything we can get our hands on to see what impact those components have on paid search and vice versa. Part of that includes the ecommerce platform the site is utilizing. Understanding the platform’s strengths and weaknesses helps us and the client know what we can highlight as well as limitations the store may have.

In our long-standing relationship with ThePetStoreOnline.com, we had both come to an agreement that the Yahoo store platform the site was using was creating more limitations to the overall conversion rate of the site. With our many successes of using Miva Merchant as an ecommerce platform, we worked closely with ThePetStoreOnline.com to switch from a Yahoo store to Miva Merchant. I recently wrote a guest blog for Miva Merchant about this transition. While no transition is ever easy, one that we had confidence in resulting in even further success for our client was definitely fun and worth it.

Guest Blog: Case Study: The PetStoreOnline.com And Miva Merchant