It’s very much worth testing the price of your app or service, but also worth trying to avoid having too many different prices visible to potential customers at the same time when you’re running different tests and segmented offers.
Here are 8 examples of different prices for FT.com subscription, all found within a couple of minutes searching Google for ‘ft subscription price’, ‘ft.com subscription offer’, etc.
There you go – eight prices – without even taking into account ‘monthly’ vs ‘annual’ rates.
I wonder whether this increases or decreases their results, and whether they’ve taken the “people who see multiple prices” effect into account in their testing.
‘Bots’ often cause problems for website owners. Among many negative effects, they often damage the accuracy & precision of web analytics data, and cause website owners to make faulty decisions.
This comes up at least once a month with clients, and I’d spotted the great @peter_oneill, @matt_4ps, & @danieljtruman talking about it on twitter so thought I’d share this.
Here’s a quick Google Analytics ‘Custom Alert’ to help you spot some bots before they’ve caused lots of damage. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps flag when it may be happening, allowing you to delve in & investigate further, and to then filter out the traffic if it is indeed a problem.
The Problem
Here’s an example of what bot traffic looks like, when isolated from all of the rest of the traffic on a site:
Just there, it’s a robot sending around 375 visits per day. That’s not huge, but it’s roughly 11,000 visits over a period of a month, none of which converts, all of which has a 100% bounce rate. That causes the following issues:
It totally skews our bounce stats
It skews our conversion stats too.
All of the surrounding metrics like ‘per visit value’, ‘% new visits’ become misleading.
Stats by region/browser/etc are often messed up, as bots tend to favour one particular region/browser.
It does all of the above in an unpredictable manner, and is time consuming to look for.
The Solution: How to alert yourself when this is happening?
One solution to alert yourself when this may be happening is as follows:
Set up an ‘advanced segment’ to spot ‘new, direct, bouncing’ traffic.
Set up an alert so that if that ‘new, direct, bouncing’ traffic ever increases massively, Google Analytics sends you an email.
Here are those 2 steps:
Step 1: Create An Advanced Segment
Usually, but not always, bots follow this pattern:
They visit the site ‘direct’.
They don’t store cookies, so are identified as ‘New’ visitors.
They record as 100% bounce rate.
Not all of that traffic will be bots, but we know if it jumps considerably there is a much higher likelihood that it’s a bot than if any other type of traffic jumps.
In order to isolate those people, we’ll set up an advanced segment:
(if you’re lazy, you can simply click this link to create the above: http://bit.ly/maybebots)
Step 2: Set up the Alert
Following that, set up an alert to fire off an email when traffic leaps from your new ‘may be a bot’ segment:
To set that up, go to the following in Google Analytics: Intelligence Events > Overview > Custom Alerts > Manage Custom Alerts > Create new alert.
Once there, copy the following:
That essentially says “Please pay attention only to Direct Traffic, where that traffic is New to the site, and where it Only Views One Page. While you’re paying attention to that – if it’s more than double what it was last week on any given day – send me an email.”
Depending on your site’s traffic pattern, you may want to increase/decrease that ‘100%’ value.
Not perfect, and it won’t catch everything, but better than not spotting anything at all.
Summary
That’s it. Set that live & – when that ‘new, direct, bouncing’ traffic that is often caused by bots doubles – you’ll get an email telling you. From there you can investigate further & filter it from your google analytics data if it is indeed a bot.
Do post any thoughts you have on this, or any other solutions.
I thought I’d put together this ‘100 Web Analytics People to Follow on Twitter’ list. Click on any of their @names to jump to their Twitter profile.
The people on the list are all gathered from the #measure hashtag, and are ranked automatically by PeerIndex’s black box algorithm. If you’d like to be added to the list, drop me a note at @danbarker. And do retweet if you find it useful.
(If you’ve got this far, you’ll have noticed there are a few more than 100 on the list! I noticed that for some reason the tool had resulted in the list being a bit ‘male’ heavy so I sought to even it out a tiny bit – if you have any more suggestions for people to include do let me know).
If you’d like to be added to the list, or have suggestions for some who should, do drop me a note at @danbarker
And do hit the Retweet button below if you found this useful:
Google’s new Chromebook Pixel is very, very high spec, and very expensive.
The most common response so far seems to be: “Why would you pay more than £1,000 for a chromebook??”
The answe犀利士 r to that is – I think – 2 things. The first is immediately obvious, the second is not obvious.
1. Trying to ‘out-Apple Apple’
This is fairly obvious. The ‘Pixel’ is very light, fairly thin, and very high resolution. If you remove the OS, those are basically the main attributes of a (forthcoming) Macbook Air Retina.
2. Positioning Chrome OS In the Eyes of Manufacturers
This is less obvious I think: The Chromebook Pixel is as much about encouraging other manufacturers to build high-spec Chrome-based laptops as it is about selling a product directly.
Android has been extremely successful on phones & tablets, partly because it spans the full market, from very cheap, low-spec phones, to things like the Nexus 4, Galaxy S3 LTE, etc.
Chrome-based laptops are seeing lots of success, and have risen to (for some retailers) 10% of all laptop sales. At the moment though, all Chrome-based laptops are very low spec, almost throwaway machines. Manufacturers are getting nicely into the pattern of churning out these low-spec laptops, and that is where they see them: low end. But Chrome can only grow so far as an OS when it is strictly confined to the bottom end of the market.
To convince manufacturers to produce higher spec Chrome-based laptops, they could spend tens of millions lobbying manufacturers, sat in partnership negotiations, offering funding pilot projects, etc.
Or – as they have done – they could simply release their own laptop at the very top end of the market. Doing this firstly gives them the control to make sure the first ‘high spec’ chromebook is high quality. More importantly, it changes the positioning instantly in the eyes of other manufacturers, encouraging them to think of Chrome OS in different terms, and produce higher spec models themselves.
Here’s an example from the report. Below, you see I’ve sorted it by ‘visits’ descending, and this tells me that Hour 21. (9pm) was the most popular within the period I was looking at. (eg, I could be looking at a period of a month, and it would add up all of the visits within each ‘9pm’ hour to come to the total ‘134,108’):
These are useful for everyone, but especially for content sites or anyone interested in ‘content marketing‘.
The 4 tabs in the report cover:
Hour of Day – when do you get most visits/pageviews. If you set the timespan on this over (say) a couple of months, this helps you figure out when you’re most visited. Experiment with post times, try and fill in the ‘quiet’ gaps, etc, and see how you can improve based on the data.
Day of Week – very similar to the first tab, but for day of week.
Day + Hour Combined. If you sort this descending by number of visits, it tells you very quickly which ‘hour of the week’ your site is most visited.
‘Linear’ Date + Hour. This shows you, over any period, which were the most popular periods on the site. (in other words, rathe犀利士 r than saying ‘9pm was the most popular over the entire period’, it would say ‘9pm on 7th january was the most popular single hourly period’).
You can apply the Google Analytics Report to any account/profile by clicking this link: http://bit.ly/hrdreport . If you have an ecommerce site, this version contains revenue/transaction/conversion metrics: http://bit.ly/hrdecommerce
Which way do people hold their phones/tablets when browsing websites? Here’re the results of a little experiment in ‘Mobile Device Orientation’. There are only abou犀利士 t 1,500 visits here, but interesting nonetheless:
This shows info ‘on load’ of pages, but it is broadly similar on this site when factoring in people who rotate the device after the page loaded.
I’m about to roll this out for a couple of large sites, but thought I would share the stats before I do so. If you’d like any more info drop me a note!
Here are lots of good, useful, interesting answers to the hypothetical question: “How would you market an ecommerce site on a £10k per year budget?”.
£10k Marketing Budget Challenge
What would you do if you had a fixed £10k budget to market an ecommerce site for the next year?
Storified by dan barker· Wed, Feb 27 2013 14:58:33
Twitter #Ecommerce Q: What would you do if you had a fixed budget of £10k to market an ecommerce site for the next year?dan barker
@danbarker 1) Hire a part-time writer that understands the brand and social. 2) Produce and distribute shitloads of quality content.Chris Lake
@danbarker what @lakey said plus a good customer based post-order email strategy and ways to maximise UGCAlex Moss
@danbarker Need to show ROI to gain next contract. Your decisions become crucial – what provides more return – PPC, SEO or CRO?Future State Digital
@dergal @danbarker I’d probably do the same. You’ve only got a year to build the business, just don’t spunk it all in the first 2 weeks.Matty Curry
@danbarker produce lots of words and pictures relevant to market & put them online w/value add for subscribers.Ruben Lightfoot
@danbarker Depending on an agreeable CPA, it’d be PPC. Then again, I am biased :-)Shaun Causer
@danbarker develop an email mkt strategy that coincides with your social media and web content strategy.Matthew Adams
@danbarker Hire a freelance/part time copywriter and generate as much quality and meaningful content as possibleMike Upton
@danbarker Got to capture the status quo first. To be honest, 10k on improving stock control could "make money" for the clientFuture State Digital
@danbarker conversion optimisation 1st, then some retargeting and look-alike modeling campaigns. Not sure if 10k will take you very far thouKarine Nascimento
@danbarker save it all and go large in December :)Rob Barham
@danbarker for the next year, eh? I like the PPC method, so long as it was tailored + reinvestable. Content might take too long to pay back.Charlie Southwell
Interesting in the response to that ‘£10k marketing budget’ question – Lots of people define ‘conversion optimisation’ as marketing. You?dan barker
@danbarker I agree. I do it, and ‘marketing’ is in my job title. There ya go!Michel Hendriks
@danbarker Normally comes from same budget "pot" but of course you need traffic before you can testRob Barham
@SEMantiks @danbarker my view is that as we know nothing about this "ecom site" we’re marketing, building on-page value is key.Ruben Lig必利勁 htfoot
@SEMantiks @danbarker but if the site is good and tells a good story, CPA PPC is a good way to ensure good ROI.Ruben Lightfoot
@rubenlightfoot @SEMantiks @danbarker indeedy, as long as you have a good product and decent site, your priority should be volumeMatty Curry
@mattycurry @rubenlightfoot @danbarker I’d agree Matty, like Dan said, where does UX and conversion optimisation end and marketing start.Shaun Causer
@danbarker optimisation part of marketing. So are surveys, usability + other market research, I think. Original q more about promotion.Tim Leighton-Boyce
“@timlb: @danbarker optimisation part of marketing. Usability I would qn!!Mark Pinkerton
@timlb @danbarker Dan – nice topic. Im not sure it does fall under Marketing.. I’m getting some ideas for a blog post… 🙂 Great convo!Daniel (WebAnalyst)
@SEMantiks @mattycurry @danbarker Broadly, UX & CRO = changing what you already have. Marketing = Adding something new.Ruben Lightfoot
@danbarker Content, content, content, social and email. In that order.Dan Goodfellow
@danbarker Test and develop conversion funnel, build an audience through blog and email, then SEO and landing pages.9.9k. £100 for beerDaniel Truman
@danbarker Point 2 – blogging, wordpress, tweeting and linking without spamming and using these keywords can still help with traffic drive!Eddie Stopford
Thoughts? RT @danbarker: What would you do if you had a fixed budget of £10k to market an ecommerce site for the next year?Chris Lake
@lakey @danbarker Pray your sales target isn’t >£1m!Andy Harding
@lakey @danbarker Get another job.Manley
@lakey @danbarker spend it on wine then panic.Alexander Velky
@AlexanderVelky @danbarker Most realistic answer yet.Chris Lake
@danbarker outreach to influential people to promote the product/ brand. Maybe a nice gift basket of product.Mike Robertson
@danbarker depends on the sector. If it was seasonal and I’d get another 10k next year, I’d probably blow the lot on in season ppc.Joshua Geake
Nice! @dergal put together his thoughts on "what to do with a fixed £10k marketing budget": http://usablecontent.co.uk/the-10k-challenge/ #thedigitalsdan barker
Here’s a breakdown of how 2 of the most prominent search algorithms on the web appear to be presenting information that it would be illegal for you or I to communicate.
The first is the Twitter search algorithm, tweaked recently in a way which (inadvertently) increases the likelihood of people finding out ‘illegal’ information.
The second is a Google algorithm, and 2 user interface changes which (again inadvertently) very much increase the chance of ‘illegal’ information being communicated.
In the entire history of the British legal system, there are apparently only four prisoners who have been given new identities. One of them was a boy (now a man) who used to be called Jon Venables. When he was a child, Jon Venables & another boy (Robert Thompson) killed a very, very young boy (James Bulger). If you live in the UK, you will almost certainly know this.
Because of their crime, Jon Venables & Robert Thompson are very likely to be in extreme danger if the general public can identify them. Therefore, they were given new identities, and those identities were protected.
Since Jon Venables was given a new identity, nobody is allowed to know his new name: It is illegal to publish anything claiming to identify him, or even to ‘purport to identify’ anyone as him whether it is him or not.
Photos of Jon Venables were apparently published on Twitter recently. This hit the front pages of most newspapers in the UK (including, above, The Guardian).
The Twitter Search Algorithm Change
Until recently, Twitter’s search algorithm only returned very recent tweets. A few weeks ago, that was altered to also include much, much older tweets. That coincided with the 20 year anniversary of Jon Venables’ crime. As a result, lots of very old tweets and photos claiming to ‘out’ Jon Venables identity suddenly became visible far more easily, at a time when many were searching for his name. Many of these photos were retweeted; some new ones were posted, some were taken from Twitter and posted on other websites, and many users posted names that they claimed were Jon Venables’ new identity.
That hit the front page of most UK newspapers (though none made the link with Twitter’s algorithm update), and – of course – an investigation was carried out.
Twitter Search Last Week: Jon Venables
Here’s what happened if you searched Twitter for ‘Jon Venables’ a week ago:
You can see there, Twitter has pulled a ‘Top news’ box covering the investigation. It has automatically pulled a ‘Top’ tweet that was Retweeted 49 times, claiming to out Jon Venables’ new identity & urging readers to spread it.
There are 2 big red blocks there too where I’ve obscured 2 important items:
Item 1: Top Photos
On the left (item 1) I’ve obscured 2 photos showing an adult man, roughly the age Jon Venables would be now. Those were posted by users, but the algorithm picked them out as ‘top photos’.
Item 2: A man’s name
Across the top (item 2) I’ve obscured a man’s name, flagged as being a ‘Related search’ for ‘Jon Venables’. Again, as with the photos, this was posted by Twitter users, but Twitter’s algorithm picked it out & highlighted it as being a related search.
Clean Up?
Since this all came out, the UK Attorney General has announced that there will be ‘contempt’ proceedings launched against people who posted images ‘purporting’ to be Jon Venables.
Twitter has obviously made a substantial effort to clean up the photos too.
Twitter Search Now: Jon Venables
Today, if you search for ‘Jon Venables’ on Twitter, the photos on the left (which previously showed an adult man) have gone. BUT, the ‘Related’ search term, showing a man’s name, is still in place:
If you click through on the man’s name in the obscured ‘Related Search’ up there, it leads you through to this:
Twitter Summary
In the first instance, Twitter’s algorithm automatically highlighted photos & details of an adult man whenever users searched for ‘Jon Venables’. Twitter users themselves posted the content, but the algorithm crowdsourced from that to highlight particular photos, and a particular name.
Twitter have obviously gone to some lengths to clean things up here. BUT, on searching for ‘jon venables’, the algorithm still leaves a fairly prominent trail toward a man’s name, and toward tweets linking to photos of an adult man.
And Google?
The Google story is much, much shorter. It involves 2 relatively recent additions to Google’s user interface:
The ‘knowledge graph box’ – an area on the right of search results that is intended to reveal ‘Facts’ related to searches.
Google’s updated Image Search results, which used to show images in the context of a web page, but now simply show the image on a black background on Google itself.
Here’s what happens when you search for ‘Jon Venables’ on Google today:
I’ve obscured an area on the right there (within the ‘knowledge graph’ box), where there are 2 photos (within a single image) of an adult man.
And when you click on that obscured area, it leads us to this quite scary screen:
A few weeks ago, clicking the image from search results would have taken you to the website in question (faded in the background), showing clearly that it was a website other than Google publishing it. Today, doing so keeps you on Google’s own property (note the ‘google.co.uk’ URL). It simply shows a black background, 2 photos of a man, and the name ‘Jon Venables’, the old name of a person it is illegal to identify.
Google Analytics has a set of ‘speed’ reports, found under the the ‘Content’ left-hand navigation item. Here are 10 very quick “Google Analytics Site Speed” tips, collected together for ease of reading:
All of the load speed data in Google Analytics is taken from users’ browsers themselves, so is fairly accurate.
The browser stores all this speed data; Google Analytics then pulls that data at the point the code fires.
Some browsers don’t support page load speed recording (notably Safari) so be very careful on ‘mobile’ speed.
It’s tempting to pay attention to the top level “Avg. Page Load Time (sec)” metric that Google Analytics gives you. Slightly more useful than that: The ‘Distribution‘ report is tucked away behind a tab in the ‘Page Timings’ report. The distribution report is very useful, as you can see ‘% of pages loaded in less than X seconds’.
‘DOM Timings’ reports were added long after the main speed reports. They’re found in a similar area to the ‘distribution’ report, and are useful as they show how long it takes for your pages to become usable. (giving you ‘Avg. Document Interactive Time (sec)’ and ‘Avg. Document Content Loaded Time (sec)’ for each page).
A big caveat: Google Analytics only tracks ‘page load speed’ for between 1-5% of pageviews as standard. You can fix that (see point 8).
Because the sample size is so low, remember that ‘average’ page load speed is therefore affected if the speed of a page has only been recorded a few times.
To improve the sample rate issue, you can add some extra code to your Google Analytics implementation. This essentially tells Google Analytics ‘try and collect page load speed data for 100% of page views’. Based on the earlier caveat that not all browsers support it, and the caveat that Google cap the total number of sessions they will record this for, you will never see a 100% sample rate, but if you are below that cap, this will increase it significantly. I have known sites achieve site speed data for 30% or more of pageviews, vs the default 1%. The code required to do this is as follows:
For older versions of Google Analytics (these will appear in your code as ‘ga.js’ or ‘dc.js’): _gaq.push([‘_setSiteSpeedSampleRate’, 100]); // this should go above the ‘trackpageview’ line in your Google Analytics code to improve accuracy
For newer versions of Google Analytics (these will appear in your code as ‘analytics.js’): ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXX-Y’, {‘siteSpeedSampleRate’: 100});
If you’re looking for a good KPI on site speed, ‘% of pages loaded in less than 3 secs’ is a safe bet. (and ‘less than 7 seconds’ as a secondary).
You may want to isolate that KPI further: ‘UK Only: % pages loaded in under 3 secs’ split by new vs return, for example.
I’ve done quite a bit of work with ‘Google Analytics Page Speed’ reports & have found them really useful, but with plenty of hidden caveats in the data. Feel free to ask any questions if I can help, & do share this with others if you think it would be useful.
There’s a story in the news at the moment about a woman (Naomi Oni) who was attacked with acid on the way home from work, almost lost her sight as a result, and had her skin badly burned.
The Follow-up Story: “Was it self-inflicted????”
A series of follow-up stories ask “Did she actually do this to herself???“. Here are a couple of headlines from The Independent & The Daily Mail:
Headline from the IndependentHeadline from the Daily Mail
The Two Facts Behind These Headlines
Each of these headlines is based on 2 facts (the second is key):
The police have taken her laptop as part of the investigation
Naomi Oni had previously searched Google for terms related to ‘acid attacks’, having seen a documentary on a woman called Katie Piper, who was herself attacked with acid.
The detail of exactly which terms she searched for is not included in any of the articles; only that she had searched & visited resulting pages related to acid attacks, and related to Katie Piper.
A Missing Fact: People Search For This Stuff Whenever it Hits Headlines
I don’t know the details of Naomi Oni’s case (the key detail would most likely be the actual terms she searched for), but it’s worth pointing out that whenever an unusual crime is featured on TV/in newspapers, people search for the crime itself in droves online.
Here are a couple of trend graphs to bear that out. Each of these graphs shows the period within which Naomi Oni’s story hit the headlines, and when she herself was featured on TV. As you can see from both graphs, there is a massive spike of interest in searches online when the story hit the headlines, with a minor bump in January, and a much bigger bump when it was featured more widely nationally.
Google Trends Data for ‘Acid Attack’:
Note the bumps in Jan/Feb. The first as the story is picked up, the second as it is featured in greater detail after she gives an interview.
Wikipedia Page View data for the ‘Acid Throwing’ page:
Again here, a small bump on the wikipedia ‘acid throwing’ page as the story is first covered, and an enormous spike that coincides exactly with the broadcast of an interview with her, covered by the BBC News.
Summary
This woman may or may not have inflicted this on herself, but the detail in the articles (the fact that she had searched for acid attacks online having seen a documentary) is just not enough to draw any sort of conclusion at all – it is a very common behaviour.
The fact that she searched for ‘acid attack’ having seen a documentary on Katie Piper is not unusual in the slightest.
The knock-on effect of this woman’s story is that tens of thousands of other people have now searched for ‘Acid Attacks’ & ‘Acid Throwing’ onliine.
Every newspaper mention of ‘acid attacks’, or any unusual crime, essentially acts as an ad for the phenomenon, leading people to further research it online.
