Anthony Avolio

New Marketing Channel Reports in Omniture SiteCatalyst

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Anthony Avolio

Late this summer, Adobe announced new Marketing Channel reports for SiteCatalyst that significantly improve upon the traffic source reporting available within the tool. The new reports provide a more unified view of how your various marketing channels are performing relative to one another under the same allocation rules.  For example, the report allows you to see how the performance paid channels like Email and Paid Search stack up against organic sources like Direct Load and Natural Search.  The new reports also allow you to compare performance under first- and last-touch allocation rules.

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iPad Web Traffic Shows Rapid Growth, Browsing Behavior Similar to Desktop

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Anthony Avolio

Apple recently announced that over 1 million iPads have been sold in the first 4 weeks of U.S. availability.  With media fervor subsiding and novelty wearing off, we were interested in better understanding how iPad users are browsing the web.  Listed below are three observations related to iPad traffic stats gleaned from some of our retail clients.  It’s important to note that individual marketers show variations in the amount of visits from iPad browsers, so your mileage may vary.

iPad is rapidly gaining share in terms of site visits.  With just a few weeks of availability, the iPad has shown rapid growth and in some cases, has overtaken more established mobile devices in terms of visits.  While iPad visits make up a small proportion of total site visits (typically less than 0.5%), this fast growth shows promise.  Whether this rapid growth rate can be sustained in the longer term remains to be seen.

iPad Traffic Growth

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Measuring Organic Sitelink Activity

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Anthony Avolio

Sitelinks are the extra internal links that appear with some natural search results.  In addition to drawing more attention to a search result, these links are helpful to visitors that want to jump directly to a particular section of your site.  Organic SitelinksDespite the recognized value of having sitelinks, few organizations measure their popularity or effectiveness.  This post walks through how to use your web analytics solution to measure organic sitelink performance.

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New Google Analytics Features Make it Smarter, More Powerful

Posted on November 10, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

Google Analytics adds more powerful reporting capabilities, expands mobile measurement and adds intelligence engine to drive smarter data insights.

Google Analytics

Several new features for Google Analytics were announced last month designed to make the free web analytics platform more powerful and easy to use.  Below is a highlight of several new features.

Goal tracking improvements.  In addition to increasing the number of configurable goals to 20 per profile, new site engagement goal types have been introduced.  Engagement goals can be set based on the visit duration or the number of pages viewed during a visit.  For example, a goal can be set to occur if time on site surpasses 10 minutes or after 12 pages have been viewed in a visit.  These new goal types allow site owners to measure the proportion of visits that meet a time on site or pageview threshold and are especially valuable for content websites.  AdWords advertisers can use these Google Analytics goals for campaign optimization in cases where ecommerce conversion is not applicable or the target behavior.

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Google Paid Listings Now Appear in iPhone Maps

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

iPhoneSponsoredLink-MapView

Local search ads take mobile leap on iPhone.

Google Sponsored Listings have started to appear within the Maps application installed on every iPhone and iPod touch device. These paid listings appear alongside organic results when users perform relevant searches, helping local customers find appropriate businesses from their mobile phone.  PM Digital is working on getting more details on the specifics of this new program and how it relates to Google’s Local Business Ads program.

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3 Tips for Measuring Marketing Efforts in Omniture SiteCatalyst

Posted on September 17, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

UPDATE: In Summer 2010, Adobe released a new Marketing Channels report feature in SiteCatalyst that addresses some of the issues below.  Please check out our blog post “New Marketing Channel Reports in Omniture SiteCatalyst” for an overview of this new enhancement.

Omniture SiteCatalyst is a popular and extremely customizable web analytics platform.  Marketers new to SiteCatalyst are sometimes surprised that the default traffic source and campaign reports don’t always summarize activity in a manner that they’d like to see results.  Below are 3 suggestions to consider related to traffic source measurement before setting up or enhancing your SiteCatalyst implementation.

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Using Webmaster Tools to Optimize Online Marketing

Posted on August 27, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

Google_Webmaster_ToolsGoogle Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides diagnostic reports and tools for improving a site’s visibility on Google and other search engines.  While it focuses on technical aspects of search engine crawling and is aimed at webmasters and SEO practitioners, it also contains several features and reports of particular interest to online marketers.  Listed below are three features of Google Webmaster Tools that can help improve your marketing efforts.

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A Look at Social Media Measurement

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

SocialMediaLogosSmMost online marketers are comfortable with the measurement and metrics behind traditional click-based programs like paid search.  Less rigorously measured and discussed is activity from social media sites like user-generated links and comments placed on sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.  While social media as a channel presents unique challenges to measurement, there are several tactics marketers can take to start measuring the impact of social media on their business.

Outbound links. If your site includes a social bookmark or sharing tool, measuring usage of this tool can help answer…

  • Which social sites are my customers using to share my content?
  • Which types of content are customers sharing most?  Should frequently shared content be more prominently featured?
  • What type of customer is sharing content on social media outlets? Is your business benefiting from this?

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