David is going to talk about statistical analysis and attribution. He is the performance director for 7 Things Media.

What is Diminishing Return?

David talks about when does profit disproportionately falls in relation to spend. Is it still worthwhile investing in. He was recently asked by his client about this and faced with the dilema of cutting their budget on affiliate marketing.

Multi Attribution Modelling?

David shows a slide from Google Analytics and Multi Channel Funnels. The different touch points people can now review is becoming more important.

Why is it important?

We need to weigh up the value of the whole funnel and the differences in reach and performance. Every change affects the output of a campaign. Its something David looks at closely. He goes on to talk about the recession and why people are looking more closely at where they invest their budget.

As a result planning models needed to be more concise. David looks at micro and macro level models and activities. This gives him a more clear picture of what provides value and how to optimise his spend.

No Definitive Solutions

There are no plugins or tools to work this out. It involves mining data and using lots of complex mathematics. Different modelling might provide a more optimal result and is something David is looking into.

What Can We Use to Measure It?

Data + Maths + Technology

This gives us the information we need to make correct decisions. Historical data is key however and the more data you have the better.

The Monte Carlo Simulation

This is where continual simulations of random scenarios are run until a pattern emerges. This process often outputs a train line like pattern from which you can pull data from.

How it Works: CPA v Spend

David shows a graph of the simulation results which gives you an idea of the lowest CPA you would get from a particular channel. From the line you can develop from the graph you can also see the point of diminishing returns. This is where the level of sales no longer grows or limited growth is achieved after a certain spend.

Plot Optimal Spend Ratios

From this graph you can then put together a spend ratio graph.

Limitations of Model

Large level of data required. If you don’t have the data you can’t compile this.

** David goes on to provide examples on how the model is used against real life clients **

Insights

- Search generally provides the lowest CPA when CPA increases

- Channels quickly change efficiencies at specific points of spend levels

Difficult session to blog without slides but i will add in a link to the slides once available.

The post The Digital Mix and Point of Diminishing Return (a4uexpo live blogging) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Session starts with Sam Crocker who makes the formal introductions.

Kelvin begins session with a presentation about link analysis.

How to do Back Link Analysis Properly

What Type of Links Do You Need?

Competitor research can help you to identify these. The focus should be on doing better than your competitors. Kelvin uses radar charts to analyse links. He starts with link volumes, then link authority, link velocity and anchor text when looking at competitors. To visualise these he uses the radar graphs in Excel. He makes decisions based on these and pull his data from Majestic SEO. He can then see how he compares to competitors and the entire market.

Not about actual links but rather the themes

Should be looking at theme of links rather than targeting one link. So for example if a recruitment site has a link from one conference site then you should potentially look at targeting a whole range of conference links This is rather than the exact one your competitor has.

Understand the second order of links

Think about who links to the people who are linking to you. You need to go one step further as the power of this site may drop over time. For example they have received an initial boost for a topical news story. backlinks.in is a volume link checker and extremely quick.

Track down the tipping point links

Links that have led to good rankings for a competitor. He uses Raven for this and whether they have spiked in rankings for particular terms.

Key point of presentation is that there is a lot more to competitor link analysis than first meets the eye. Presentation comes to a close.

** Sam Crooker now takes to the stage **

How To Find Your Targets

Great data is expensive but you should use tools such as comscore if possible. Cheaper options exist however such as Google Insights.

How To Find Their Keywords

Check meta keywords tag. You can write scripts to pull these from sites. SEM Rush is another tool that can be used as is Spyfu. Finally you could use scraping techniques.

Finding Secrets The Easy Way

Ask them! Submit a support question. Alternatively you could pose an affiliate when looking at competitors.

How To Steal Their Thunder

Use alerts. Have they big up and coming launches. This is however quite reactive. Do searches such as Brand + Keyword to find press releases. You should then pounce on this and submit your own. Nothing wrong with a bad press release provided that the information is true.

How To Go Too Far

Some people will do anything.

Distractions

Setup a fake mobile site, create a fake dev site, mess with their analytics, send in head hunters (Sam doesn’t in anyway recommend these)

The point is you should be aware of these things.

** Sam has asked not to blog the next part **

Sam suggests people invest where

Hit Them Where it Hurts

What are they doing badly. Are they socially proactive or invest in poor links. To steal market share you need to do something special. Can be as small as offering a more streamlined design than competitors.

** Sam Crooker now takes to the stage **

Martin Beijk is from ComScore

How Do You Measure Performance?

There are some great tools you can use to measure these.

What is Web Analytics?

The outershell is the click stream and a key part of it. In order to be effective you need to refine and optimise.

Measuring Performance

Ask the network if they can support with track backs. You want to know which pages in your site are performing best and creating the most money. A good flow of information is required.

Do you know who your audience is?

You could use onsite surveys, ad planners, build relationships in person to find this.

What are your competitors doing in terms of web analytics?

WASP Plugin for Firefox. Gives you some insight into what they track. Ghostery can be used to look at the code of a site and understand what a site is trying to measure. You could also take a closer look at their analytics implementation. You can get a feel from what they are trying to gauge from their visitors.

** Dave Sottimano now takes to the stage **

Dave is from Distilled and going to talk about competitive analysis.

Reactive vs Proactive

we should be reactive at certain points however it can be very dangerous. Understand what works and how the landscape is reactive. There is a time and place for being reactive, especially when a competitor makes a mistake.

What do i want know about the market leaders?

Focus on key competitors. You want to understand what they are going to do in the future. Its too late to understand what they are doing now.

Proactive

You want to beat the competitors by staying ahead of the curve. You also want to beat the competitor but not copy them.

Getting Insider Information

Setup a couple of niche sites which is optimised for guest posts etc.

Staying ahead of the curve, Not Just SEO Anymore

There is no tool to beat your competitors. Its a change in mind set and about thinking ahead. Don’t just look at your industry.

** Dave now shows us a tool he has put together **

http://dis-tl/a4u-2011

Takeaway Tips

- Setup a satellite site

- Try something new & cool. Don’t worry about failing.

The post Internet Sleuthing: Gathering the Intelligence Required to Beat the Competition (a4uexpo live blogging) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

First question – Somebody asks Dave opinion on Google’s announcement from yesterday re: HTTPs & lack of keyword referrals in Google Analytics for logged in users

“How ridiculous is that?!” Dave opens with

Dave: It’s really bad for the webmaster. You will see you’re receiving 100,000 users from Google, and you might not be able to know how they found you. Dave just thinks it’s “shitty”.

There will be serious uproar if they launch Analytics premium

Next question is regarding keyword density, and whether it should be reduced on pages in some instances where it’s particularly high. They follow by asking for an ideal keyword density percentage.

Dave: Keyword density is a myth. It has to be natural. Look at what other sites are doing around you. It’s industry specific – look at what the competitor websites are doing, and see what they are doing. Measure against relevant sites, and not against completely random ones (i.e. the BBC or something). Different industry signals appeal to Google in different sectors.

Sometimes less is more. Use pagination if you have pages with large amounts of products.

Identifying the “right” link opportunity: Would you rather have an old post amended to put a link to your site in, or would you rather a site owner create a new article with the link?

Dave: Preference would be to work with the blog owner to create a new and updated version of the original article, then 301 that old one to the new one (containing link). There’s something wrong about only a link changing in an old article from time to time.

All link placements should be with an aim of getting referral traffic – not just for link value.

Let the blog owner do it how they want to. Don’t dictate how the link should be placed. If you’re going out trying to get links from websites – make sure it’s in keeping with the website. Relevance is key, and you need to be able to clarify a link if questioned (i.e. by Google). You need an exit strategy.

What would you tell a brand new affiliate to the game?

Dave: Don’t give up your day job. Research the industry and make sure you know what you’re getting into. Use SearchMetrics to look at the sites you think are doing well, and see how they have done historically (i.e. were they affected by Panda?).

When does it become hidden content when using AJAX or jQuery?

Dave: Make sure there’s a static HTML copy behind the Java. Think about using HTML 5/CSS for “read more” drop downs and that kind of thing – you don’t need to use jQuery for that.

Be careful of using “read more” blocks if your aim is to simply get more search engine traffic. There will be genuine reasons to show further products, etc. If the intent is for the user, Google should interpret that.

How do social signals affect search engine rankings?

Dave: don’t think of social signals as being that “ABC route”. If you’re only using Twitter to boost search engine rankings – it won’t work. Danny Sullivan tweeted some Google search quality guidelines yesterday, and Google will find that. The link might be “nofollowed”, but Google will be able to see this kind of thing.

Re: Facebook – it’s locked down, and very hard for a search engine to understand. Somebody might have 1,000 FB Likes – but from people with no friends. How could you trust that? If you can’t trust it, then it’s likely that Google won’t want to trust it.

Social is a signal – but probably not a straight correlation between number of retweets vs. number of keyword rankings.

There’s a lot of link spam in the SERPs. A lot of top ranking websites have a lot of spammy links. Is the problem down to the algorithm?

Dave: Unless it’s something that’s completely OTT (from a link buying situation), it doesn’t get overlooked; it just gets dampened.

If you’re a huge brand that’s established, with thousands of links, and you go out and buy a few more thousands of links – then these may be dampened, but they will still have an effect. It’s when you start doing it at such a huge scale when it becomes such a big problem. Think JC Penney.

Press release distribution is technically buying links. Infographic distribution is technical buying links, as is paying for bloggers to install widgets on their blogs.

Google will never get away from using links as a major signal.

How many links do you want to buy? Well how quickly do you want to be banned? Be careful when trying to compete by going out and just buying “10,000 links”.

If somebody steals all of the content on my website, what’s the best way of giving them a slap?

Dave: Go straight to the hosting company, and “be a dick with them”. As long as you have a good legal standing, then 9/10 a host will take action. Don’t even both with the webmaster, just get on the phone and keep phoning them until they sort the issue.

“Take it down, or we sue you”.

If the hosting is in Romania or somewhere tricky, submit a Google spam report.

What are the best types of links you really want to get?

Dave: I’ll take any link. The best links are the ones that other people don’t go for (i.e. sponsoring a local football team). Don’t be lazy and just copy competitor links by looking at their Majestic profile. Think outside the box – and find relevance within your industry where other people may not be exploring.

There’s a fear within the SEO industry, that if you link to somebody, you will be seen as being a link buyer. Look at how you can aid other websites to give you a link. Look at your friend’s websites and see if you’re able to get links from those.

Organic search results are become less and less visible (i.e. with PPC/local/etc). What will be the importance of ranking highly in the coming years?

Dave: it’s always going to be important – you want to be ranking in the 1-3 slots.

Start to think about the ways people are coming to your website and cater for them. Look at imagery, video, news, etc to gain more visibility for your website. If you’re an ecommerce website and you’re not using Google Product search then you’re insane. It’s free!

Natural, organic, SEO is lessening. Analyse the industry and find the best locations to promote.

Are mentions of a website (i.e. www.pushon.co.uk) seen as active hyperlinks by Google?

They may be a small signal – but certainly not within any weighting that standard links get.

How much is an IP address and WHOIS information used by Google (i.e. for multiple sites on same hosting and IP address)?

Dave: it’s a neighbourhood affect – you don’t want to be associated with a number of spammy websites on the same hosting that you are on.

If you’re being conscious enough to separate IP addresses of websites in order to link to them, then make sure you aren’t linking them together with Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc.

As long as you aren’t trying to do something particularly spammy, then you should be fine.

What’s the worst example of SEO work you’ve seen from other SEO companies?

Dave: a big UK brand was completely wiped off Google by an SEO agency using encoded links in WordPress templates to boost rankings. They lost all visibility.

They had to switch to a completely new domain and start again from fresh – the old domain couldn’t be brought back to life due to the nature of the links that had been established.

How good are social bookmarking tools, and similar?

Dave: don’t do it.

Can somebody buy lots of links to a competitor and get them punished?

Dave: selling links is worse than buying links. Google are known to reach out to speak to them

If you’re launching a brand new website and somebody buys a lot of spammy links – then it’s going to be hard to convince Google that it wasn’t you.

Sending spammy links to a website is going to cause them problems. If you’re the webmaster and you start seeing these links coming in – get on to Google. Use Webmaster Tools to spot the links and be proactive. If you’re honest and haven’t done anything stupid, then be open and speak to Google, they will listen to you and they have tools to track where these links might be coming from.

The post Search Optimisation Q&A with Dave Naylor (a4uexpo Live Blogging) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Does HTML 5 Matter?

Google doesn’t have any preference. However user support should be considered.

Should i cloak my affiliate links?

Don’t cloak anything for Google.

Should you no-follow affiliate links?

Yes

Mobile specific site vs a responsive layout. Which is better for Google?

Mobile specific sites are typically better, its more of a business decision. The user should be at the centre of the decision. Pierre recently wrote a long blog post on this.

Are there any potential problems with duplicate content with mobile versions of a site?

Problems do occur, especially with redirects.

Someone has the same site in US, UK & Canada but on separate domains. He has changed titles and meta descriptions etc however the content is exactly the same. How far do they need to go to prevent duplicate content problems?

He could potentially use the canonical tag and add in the ‘hreflang’ tag. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=189077 Giving your site some local flavour in terms of language can be really effective.

Why does the site report/feedback process not allow you to submit more than one url at a time?

This is something that is going to be looked at and improved by Google.

How important are links in the algorithm?

A vague response but the Pierre said he should look at ‘how to chose an SEO company’ page on Google Support page as the current company has clearly given him some bad advice. He suggested that he changed his thinking about links and the overall marketing of a website.

Can you talk about the Panda updates in relation to affiliate sites?

Google does not hate affiliate sites. It doesn’t like however sites that don’t add any value. Worth looking at forum post on Google Webmaster Help Forum for people who think they have mistakenly been hit by Panda.

Title tags on occasion being taken from navigation links and brand not being included!

Google does re-write titles on occasion. This is typically when the title tag is empty or called things such as ‘home’. It can also occur on query specific searches. For example CNN and Cable News Network. If you search for Cable News Network then this title could be rewritten from CNN to Cable News Network. This is more useful to the end user.

Attendee asks about positioning of ads in Google. He was seeing them at the bottom of the search results and asked if this will be rolled up fully?

Response: not our problem, this is a question for the PPC team : )

How long before we know if we have a problem when moving an existing site to a CMS?

He should move the site over section by section to minimise impact. Read http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

Apologies for the short post, it was a very difficult session to live blog.

The post Open Q&A about Google Organic Search (a4uexpo live blogging) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

A session about Google’s algorithm update known as Panda.

Timeline

Hit in February this year and since then there have been five updates. The latest is 2.5 and hit 12% of sites. Daniel asks whether this is the last update. He believes that this is not and quotes Matt Cutts. He thinks we should prepare for more updates and moves to what Google suggests to avoid a Panda slap.

Google Recommendations

It is crucial that you improve the qyaity of your content and evaluating whether it is providing value. Look at metrics such as page views, bounce rates. If these are not performing well then it suggests the content is not of good quality. You should review your metrics in Google Analytics and check whether your content is upto date. Any old content should be 301′d to relevent new pages.

Quality of Content

Is it factual, does it provide the end user with any value? Google provides guidelines on what makes good quality content. It provides a series of questions and you should answer these truthfully. We often have a bias to these so its worth putting these questions out in a survey to other people. 200 word pages = think content. Its probably not going to provide the end user wiht enough information. You should review your site for pages with small amounts of content on them.

How do you make great Content?

Daniel asks what are people are talking about and what social stuff is currently being shared. This can provide inspiration. Addict-o-matic is a tool that can help with this. It allows you to enter a phase or keyword and brings back results from a range of sources and lets you see what people are talking about in your niche right now. Ubersuggest or Google Suggest is another tool you can use. You can also look at last years data as trends often reoccur. Q&A platforms can also be useful. These include Yahoo Answers and Quora. Social media platforms could also be used to find ideas. Other ideas include attending events.

Now What? What’s Next?

Duplicate content is becoming an increasing problem, especially with the recent update. Use Webmaster Tools to make checks along with searches in Google. See if others are copying your content. Daniel also suggests that you reduce the amount of syndicated content. Lots of people are using product feeds for example. Why would your site rank well if you have the same product feed as hundreds of other sites. Why not rewrite these using services such as Copify.

Page layout and design maybe becoming more influential. If your site is over ten years old then it is going to need an update. You need to make sure that your adsense units are not in the content. Many sites do this including big article sites.

Look into social link building with your content. Make it easy for people to share your content. Google is looking at this more and more and iss relatively easy to do.

Example

Hubpages was hit heavily by the Panda update. Most companies would have folded however Hubpages decided to adjust its strategy. It reduced the level of syndicated content and advertising and moved thin content pages. The updates they made helped to drive more traffic than they were achieving even before they were hit by the Panda update. A massive recovery and showed that Panda could be defeated.

Takeaways

- Remove low quality content

- Create high quality content

- Deep page link building

** Daniel closes and Kevin Gibbons takes to the stage **

Kevin’s presentation focuses on part time affiliate marketing and how to maximise your working week. This is based on the 4 hour work week.

Looking Genuine

Establishing credibility is key and the aim is to make yourself look like a real business. To do this you should try to include contact details and phone numbers on your site. This is difficult however as many affiliates like to keep a low profile. A team profile page could also be a good strategy. This makes you look like a real business.

An affiliate has to build natural looking links. This takes a lot of time which often affiliates don’t have. A blog can also be a trust signal. Try to talk about things of interest and your company. You should focus on these things as they don’t take too much time.

How to make your affiliate site to look like a business site?

- be creative

- maybe hire a PR specialist

- pitch to journalists, journalisted lists contacts in the field for which you can contact

- Use Haro and become a source. Journalists can then quote you for any stories they maybe running

- Learn SEO so that you can support your outsourced team and understand what they are working on

- Create a content strategy to target top converting terms. Focus on these

- With limited time you don’t want to be writing hundred of articles, posts or press releases. Outsource using Copify

- Remove duplicate and low quality content. If you aren’t recieving any visits for them then maybe redirect these

- Build and manage your online reputation. Create social profiles and conversations

- Trust factors are key. Try to gain certificates, add logos etc

- Register a limited company. Costs £18 and can help to build trust

- Get a virtual office address.

Tactics

- Guest blog. This gives you a link and helps to build your brand. MyBlogGuest is a good place to start

- Participate in forum and blogs. Its not about links at this point but more getting noticed

- Hire a professional designer. 99 Designs is a great place for cheap design work and they look great. People more likely to link to good looking sites

- Hire a professional developer. Designers and developers have very different skill sets

- Scale your activities. Potentially use oDesk to hire a team

- Hire an infographic designer. These have to be good as the market place is over crowded

These activies will cost about £480 a month depending on which activities you do. This is relatively cheap considering the potential rewards.

** Floor opens to questions **

The post Post Panda: Affiliates Guide to Surviving Google (a4uexpo Live Blogging) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Some quick stats:-

Christmas planning is starting earlier each year. The spike happened 9 weeks before Christmas 3 years ago, this is now at 16 weeks. Early snow affected online behaviours last year – it really impacted.

Sunday 22nd March was the biggest peak online in terms of Spring retail this year.

The Royal Wedding caused a big drop off in online retail this year. It’s not just the big events (i.e. Christmas) that cause the biggest change in trend; it’s the individual events that happen throughout the year which can have the biggest overall impact to a marketing strategy.

This session was a little difficult to blog, as it was more of a Q&A with the panel.

The post Am I Taking Advantage of Seasonality in Affiliate Marketing? (a4uexpo Live Blogging) appeared first on PushON Ltd.

His definition of a “super affiliate”:

An affiliate business that has made the transition into being one of the following:

• A well known brand
• A business driving substantial revenue & profits
• A business with perhaps 20+ employees
• A business with real offices

Some examples of these would be Money Supermarket, Go Compare, Confused.com and Sky Scanner.

Characteristics of a Super Affiliate

Become a great business. You have to have a USP. If you want to rank at the top of Google for lots of keywords, how are you going to do that if your site isn’t very good, and is not doing anything different?

Figure out how to make a site that’s better than the people ranking above you.

Patrick recommends reading the book “Good to Great”.

What are Super Affiliates Great at?

Digital marketing and sector expertise. The difficulty with any big affiliate site is that you’re likely to be competing against a lot of other similar sites. You need to have a strong grasp of both digital marketing and sector expertise to succeed.

The barriers to entry are quite low – unless you’re doing something particularly unique. Anybody can launch an affiliate site, which means more competition. You need to show Google you are a trusted brand before you get aggressive with SEO.

If you have a new affiliate site, you are competing against big brands with authority, links, PPC campaigns etc. You need to find the balance between natural growth and aggressive marketing (i.e. link building).

Link Building

Any SEO that is building links needs to understand the types of link building that needs to take place. If you’re working with a trusted brand, then you can be quite aggressive with your link building. If you’re working with a new site then you need to be very careful. The same type of link building doesn’t work for all types of websites. Understand the type of website you’re working with, in terms of authority, competitors, etc.

SEO is Not Your Marketing Strategy; Super Affiliates do Everything

Spend money where you are getting returns. You shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket with just SEO (i.e. relying on organic keyword traffic). Integrate social media, PPC and online PR.

Multi-channel funnels now lets us attribute conversions to the correct channels. We can now understand the channels that we might have thought weren’t particularly valuable, and the budget for those can be allocated based on success.

High Level SEO is about Rankings

Long tail traffic is great, and everybody should be doing it, but you need to be ranking number one for all of your major keywords.

Ideally an SEO team should be separated from the commercial team. Have people that don’t have to worry about content, conversions, etc, simply have them dedicated to ranking number one for the main keywords that the site needs to be ranking for.

Clients will always want to look at rankings for big keywords – not long tail traffic. Don’t shy away from the major keywords – this needs to be the absolute focus. Link building should purely be focused on big keywords – ensuring they get to number one.

Select a keyword, rank for it & move on to the next.

Keyword Strategy

If you chose the wrong keywords, you’re not going to make as much money. Simple as that.

Patrick uses an automated tool to get organic + PPC keywords from a site, then run this through the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (API) to find volumes. They then look at the maximum CTR for each keyword (around 20% for nr 1 ranking, taking into account people who may click PPC ads). Finally, they then look at the conversion rate (either non-brand site avg, i.e. 1.5%, or specific conversion rates for particular keywords if they are abnormal), and revenue per sale.

• Opportunity = Search Vol * Max CTR * Conversion Rate * Revenue per Sale

All of the keywords need to be rank checked. They currently rank check over 100,000 a day at the moment.

An excel doc with “Maximum Opportunity” and “Current Revenue”, along with the keyword rankings, will allow them to see which keywords should be focused on (i.e. to push from 8th to 1st).

If you can do this on a monthly basis, you have some great data to work from. This will allow you to see in more budget, etc, to a client, showing them the exact opportunities that are available.

Teams

When you see a big affiliate site ranking at the top of Google – this isn’t by accident. They have dedicated teams (for content, etc) to ensure every area is covered.

Link building and content writing should be separated. Don’t make your link builders write articles every time they want to get a link – it will slow them down and make them less productive.

Research

To SEO like a super affiliate you have to learn what they do, and how they do it.

If you have competitors that are releasing information (i.e. financial, press releases, even SEO specifics), then you need to be reading it. Setup alerts and monitor what your competitors are doing.

Patrick proceeds to show us a screenshot from Searchmetrics – he highly recommends using it. Another good tool is spyfu.com/uk/ – this allows you to see competitor AdWords spend, etc. Another tools worth using are Open Site Explorer and Google Trends.

Building Links

Link building like a super affiliate:-

• Press releases every week
• Pitch to bloggers, give quotes, etc
• Writes guest content for blogs
• Pay for links (ensuring they look 100% natural)
• Become an authority by being a voice in your sector

A typical link building process may look like this:-

1. Competitor analysis
2. Search Google
3. Shortlisted Sites
4. QA process (quality control)
5. Story ideas
6. Pitch stories
7. Content production
8. Place links
9. QA process (quality control)
10. Promote links
11. Track links

The above needs to integrate all of the teams (i.e. link building & content).

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