Author Archive
Bing Announces Release of Updated Bing Webmaster Tools
Posted by: | CommentsBing announced Wednesday the release of their updated Bing Webmaster Tools. According to a recent blog post by Bing titled A New Beginning: Bing Webmaster Tools, they reached out to webmaster and SEO communities for ideas and suggestions on how they could improve their Webmaster Tools. They started over and rebuilt Bing Webmaster Tools from the ground up providing webmasters with more transparency, more control, and more information to aid in optimizing sites for Bing.
They focused on 3 areas in the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools to help you optimize your websites for Bing:
- Crawl – to provide you with more information on crawl issues (redirects, exclusions, etc.)
- Index – browse the Bing index to verify which directories & pages have been indexed
- Traffic – ability to analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data
Bing Webmaster Tools is still not as robust as Google Webmaster Tools in the information it provides, but it is a step in the right direction. I look forward to additional features they have in the works in the coming months.
Testing Video Engagement Using Google Website Optimizer
Posted by: | CommentsUsing Minimum Viewing Time as a A/B Test Conversion Goal
Sample Scenario:
- You want to add a page with a video or demo to your web site.
- You believe that it is important for visitors to view as much as possible of the video.
- You have 2 videos to test against each other, and your test goal is to determine which one of your videos keeps more visitors watching (engaged) for at least a certain period of time and plan to keep the one that engages viewers more than the other.
In this scenario, since your test goal is to determine which video users are more engaged in watching for at least a certain period of time you will therefore want a conversion to trigger and to be recorded in GWO after that set period of predetermined minimum viewing time.
Back to the Scenario:
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Add Notes to Your GWO Tests – My 2009 GWO Wishlist Item #2 Comes True
Posted by: | CommentsBack in April I posted my 4 Items for My Google Website Optimizer Wishlist, and the 2nd bullet on my GWO wish list was:
- Ability to add notes to tests – it would useful to be able to make notes about tests within the test admin itself for each test. Many times we have multiple people looking at a test and I would like to leave comments and get responses within the test, not only for ease but for permanent documentation
Today, Trevor Claiborne of the Google Website Optimizer team posted on the GWO Blog that they have added the ability to add notes to your GWO experiments. I am so very excited as this should really help out with collaboration and to help others who like to look at the current status of tests we have live as even the documentation for past tests. Although I already have a reliable system for test documentation this should help decrease the amount of cross-referencing and multiple email responses to others (I hope!) that now can easily be documented within the test itself.
Thank you Google Website Optimizer team!
Google Analytics Filter: Force URI Case to Lowercase
Posted by: | CommentsPrevent Duplicate Line Items in Google Analytics Due to Mixed Case URLs with the Force Lowercase Google Analytics Filter
Google Analytics by default captures data just as it appears in a visitors browser. This being so, you can have two or more URLs that are the same but appear as separate entries due to different cases in the URLs, both lowercase and uppercase.
For Example:
- /coffee/flavorA/index.html
- /coffee/flavorA/INDEX.HTML
Although both will take you to the same page if you were to put them into your browser, Google Analytics will create separate line entries for each one leaving you to have to merge the two to get to the complete data for that URL. Imagine the pain if you had 100s, 1000s or more pages on your website with multiple line entries for the same URL.
However, Google Analytics allows you to apply a Custom Filter to remedy this problem. You can associate this filter on a profile by profile basis in case you have certain profiles that you do not want this applied to. One thing worth noting is that this won’t “fix” past data already in your reports, but anything going forward it will put into one line entry (either lowercase or uppercase depending on how you setup the Custom Filter.
Here are the easy steps to create the custom filter that will force the Request URI to lowercase or uppercase:
How to Interpret the Estimated Conversion Rate Range in Google Website Optimizer
Posted by: | CommentsInterpreting the Estimated Conversion Rate Range Properly in GWO is of Key Importance!
It’s easy to get initially excited when you see that one of your test panels in Google Website Optimizer has a higher Estimated Conversion Rate than that of your control panel as presented on the Combination Report page. This may even lead to you believe you can end the test (prematurely I may add).
Unfortunately, just looking at the Conversion Rate number given to you by Google in the bold type font isn’t enough, you most certainly need to do a little bit of visualization to really have a better understanding of what is going on and how they are performing against each other.
Whether you are running an A/B test or a multivariate test, this is important to know for either – the number they give you is a conversion RATE RANGE. Many people mistakenly look at just the number given and do not visualize the full conversion range given along with it (done so with simple addition and subtraction of the number given next to the estimated conversion rate after the plus and minus sign). This range is based on the observed conversion rate of during the experiment thus far. Not factoring this in can lead to many people ending or wanting to end tests before they are truly ready to be ended. For example,
Estimated Conversion Rate
- Test Panel – 6.0% +/- 1.0%
- Control Panel – 5.5% +/- 1.0%
Reading and interpreting this correctly would actually tell you that the:
- Test Panel is converting in the range of 5.0% to 7.0%, and the
- Control Panel is converting in the range of 4.5% to 6.5%
This being true, their conversion rate ranges are overlapping each other. Visualizing this information shows you the overlap much more clearly as shown below:
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