GAUC 2012 Amsterdam. An Introduction Of Social Analytics In Google Analytics

Yesterday (20-Mar-2012) it was published on Techcrunch that there will be much deeper integration of social in google analytics. On 21-Mar and 22-Mar the google analytics user conference is taking place in Amsterdam, Netherlands. For some reason the google analytics guys tend to like Amsterdam as the location for their events in Europe. Last time I attended a google anaytics conference was in 2009 around the same time as now. At the time, google decided to send a few of their own staff, but the course conductor was Justin Cutroni. At the time he was with EpikOne. As you may know, he joined google in early 2012 to work with their analytics product. The keynote of day 1 was also presented by him. It was about social integration and only social integration. The product has just been launched and will be rolled out in the next weeks to all GA accounts. There are some really really interesting aspects and features.

Social Network Data In Google Analytics

1. Google has identified around 400 social networks, whose data they segment as social within google analytics
2. Some social networks even partner with google analytics and send data straight to it (not facebook)

This all means that google analytics and its many reports now have several more reports that solely focus on social. You can see really cool things such as:

1. Conversions where social was a touch point at some point prior to the conversion
2. Conversions where social was the last touch point prior to the conversion

This is seriously cool s*** as it allows you to see how different social networks performs with regards to your conversions. As Justin pointed out nicely: social network 1 may give you very different traffic than social network 2. Makes perfect sense!

My Take On Social Integration In Google Analytics

I don’t believe that you can measure your ROI on social 100% (people still read your stuff without necessarily engaging with it – such as facebook newsfeed). BUT you can definitely use the new google analytics reports as an absolutely awesome indicator as to where people talk about you, where people engage with you and where people from which social networks converts with you. In an ever more competitive environment where social plays a constantly increasing role this is seriously valuable information. The best is that it is automatically in the Google Analytics reports which makes it awesome for people like me who take on new clients with existing GA accounts. The question just remains – will site owners continue to just focus on visitor numbers and not dig deeper? In a market like the one in Luxembourg, I fear so. Join us on Twitter Here to read more stuff from the conference and items on analytics in general. Follow @OMLU

Marco Janck On Linkbuilding

Marco Janck from Sumago held the session with the title “Von Landminen, Lenkwaffen oder Problemen der modernen Linkführung”.

The (shall we say interesting) layout of the slides and the heading of this session was in warfare mode. That is not how Marco comes across at all. The session was very straight up and delivered from the heart. Marco gave a fair amount of advice on simple ways to make more of your links. When he asked how many in the room owns more than 10 domains, many hands went up – yet many own domains that just sit there an do nothing. Often these domains are rather old and if they would be used, they could generate good links.

More than just off-page SEO

Many people only focus on off-page SEO – links, links, link… “Where can I get links from?”. If you look at on-page items, there are many things that can be done. Especially in the internal linking structures. Are they making sense? If not, rework them.

Link prices generally range between 50 and 1500 EUR – that is when the bullshit radar should be switched on. Many people sell a lot of non-sense and it is up to you to realize what is good and what is not. Question the ‘link packages’ that people try and sell you.

There is also the very boring task of link management, it is important to keep and eye on the links you have worked for to get.

Networking with real people is key. It takes much time and effort to build and maintain your networks of people with whom you do SEO-related work.

All in all, this session was giving the message that if you want to do SEO, you need to use common sense and make sure your bullshit radar is on…one of these presentations that must be seen live, that you cannot just read the transcript from.

Case Study: Karriere.at

Klaus Hofbauer is head of SEO at karriere.at. He talked about how the site increased their traffic by 200% over the last year (with 120% of them being from SEO).

Before we get staeted, let’s just look at some numbers related to karriere.at:

• 450k visitors per month
• 8200 jobs
• 1400 clients
• 36k CVs

The site uses paid traffic generation from sources such as PPC, Job-Aggregators, TV, Radio, Offline Display Networks and Other Partner Networks. The unpaid traffic sources are SEO and Email Job-Alerts (which is heavily promoted via a pop-up when visiting the site.

Unpaid traffic makes out 55% of the site’s traffic which is also why the SEO department within the organization is divided into three parts:

• Inhouse SEO
• Marketing department for linkbuilding, PR, blog content etc
• IT Team for the technical stuff

Google Indexing

Landing Pages & Sitemaps

At present, the site has about 1 million pages in its own landing page index. That is why they are first checked for duplicate content before submitted to google via the sitemap. Furthermore, they use tools such as google analytics and google webmaster tool to avoid duplicate content. Often the Rel=Canonical tag is the helper as well.

Site Speed

Site speed is really important for the site as it increases the crawl rate and thereby also the freshness. By reducing the use of javascript and css, the user experience has improved and the organization have seen that this has lead to better ranking.

Linkbuilding

• Manual
• Organic
• Big Scale

Note: This slide was really good – you should ask the guys from karriere.at for this slide until I get the link to it here.

Panda

Through panda, they reduced the number of the sites in the sitemap by nearly 50% – as a result they were not hurt by panda. Actually, panda helped them grow their traffic

Measuring & Reporting

A rather large 70 page monthly report is created in which everything is monitored. This includes reports from tools such as: GWT & GA (main ones), OVI, SEOmoz, Majestic, Linkresearchtool.

The ROI on the SEO efforts

Over the last year, traffic went from 150k to 330k visitors. 40-60k of this increase is explained through ‘natural increase’ due to the job market situation. If they had to go out and buy this traffic via PPC (at 0.17EUR CPC), the costs would have been 20k-23k Euros. Via SEO, they have spent 12k-14k. So the savings are good and makes perfect sense for the organization.

According to Klaus Hofbauer, the key to success here is the fact that everyone in the company is involved in SEO. Everyone understand the way they can contribute and they understand the impact.

SEOkomm 2011 Pre-Event Post

Live-Blogging To You This Year

Together with Thomas Sickl and Bernhard Hochrainer, I will be doing the official live-blogging from the SEOkomm 2011. I have never attended this event, but the feedback from last year makes the conference seem very promising. Furthermore, there is a very good line-up of speakers with some pretty awesome topics (especially if you are active in the German-Speaking area). I will mainly be following ‘track 3‘.

Unfortunately, I will miss the party tonight (24-Nov) – The good thing about that, is that I will not be hung over and therefore able to provide you guys with better updates . Feel free to hook me up on twitter and if you see me, feel free to have a quick chat. I really prefer to get interesting content with input from the crowd (after all the event is for you) – rather than just echoing the speakers. We decided that I write my posts in English, but I speak German, English, French and Danish – so don’t be shy. I look forward to the event and even more to meet some of you guys.

Below is a picture of me (one in conference mode and one in party mode) – I am sure there will be some of both tomorrow.

Google’s Green Message In Conflict With Google Chrome For Mac

‘Being Green’ has become a widely used marketing message from leading tech companies. This is also the case for google. They have even dedicated an entire section of their website and $780 million on being green and energy efficient etc etc. Very good and very nice. But google could become seriously greener by simply looking at their software engineering for their web browser Google Chrome for Mac.

Let me share my story and view with you.

Like millions of other people, I am all for being green, but also like millions of other people, I do not cut the electricity of my energy hungry computer setup, tv, stereo – the list goes on and on. I have it all on standby when I don’t use it – yet knowing that it is still using serious amounts of energy. Yes, it adds up on my  electricity bill – but so be it. I should care, but I don’t and I am getting of the point of this post now anyway

So after the motherboard of my highly loved 3-year-old macbook pro decided to give up on me, I was forced to get a new one (fuck investing 600 EUR in an old computer to get it repaired). The amazing apple engineers have managed to produce laptops with significantly longer battery life which was something I was seriously looking forward to. Going from 2-3 to 6-7 hours of battery life on one charge is awesome after all.

Google Chrome really is draining my battery life

I got the new baby and recovered the settings/software etc from my apple time capsule and a few hours later I had my old computer back inside a new piece of hardware. It did not take long before I noticed that I am NOT getting the 6-7 hours of battery life as promised by apple. Being the tech geek that I am, I went through various tech forums to find out why this was. It did not take long until I read about google’s web browser Chrome being the cause for all this.

Check out the screenshot from the battery life indicator while Chrome IS running.

And now see the battery life indicator while Chrome IS NOT running.

So holy shit – this is actually true. Google Chrome is really the cause for my battery life to be far below what it should be. That sucks major time – especially as running Apple’s Safari does not impact the battery to anywhere near the same extent (firefox also causes more energy use, but nowhere near the same as Chrome).

What this means for energy consumption

Let’s get back to ‘green’. I don’t want to be like an idiotic corporate strategy consultant, but putting together a little energy calculation is needed here.
If Chrome causes my computer to use 2x as much energy, I will also need to charge it 2x as often when using Chrome. Therefore using 2x as much electricity out of my electric socket.

I looked around the internet for ages trying to find out how much energy is actually used to charge a macbook pro 15″, but couldn’t find it. Anyway – it doesn’t matter right now. According to Wikipedia, Chrome’s rising market share is currently somewhere around the 15% mark while apple has just over 10% of the US PC market with about 1.8m devices sold per quarter. That means every quarter about a quarter of a million additional mac users are using google chrome in the US alone. OK, this is getting confusing now and these numbers really need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

What now?

My point is, that if so many people need to charge their macbooks 2x as often, we are looking at a fucking lot of energy consumption here that is not necessary when the apple and firefox guys were able to develop a web browser that does not use as much energy. So here is my suggestion to google. Why not take some of the $780 million in your ‘green fund’ and put it towards engineering a version of Chrome that takes it easy on the energy consumption. It would leave macbook Chrome users with longer lasting batteries and cheaper electricity bills while making google’s green effort look more genuine and something people can relate to.

Please do me a favor

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Thank you for your time – if you have additional input or comments, add them in the comments section. I keep and eye on it and will reply to them so that you are not talking to a wall