The holy grail of search engine optimization is to master the factors affecting page rank. SEOmoz.org has a beautiful and highly detailed (forensic!?) explanation of the elements of a web page which influence page rank. I wouldn’t try to print it, though - the solid backgrounds used would run through three ink cartridges in moments. Enjoy!
MSN has converted itself into Bing.com. Now all web analytics packages are momentarily obsolete - until the next upgrade, code release, or until you take matters into your own hands and update the product you use.
First, let’s see how Bing identifies itself as a referring site in your logfiles:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=querystring_here&FORM=MSNH11
Nothing too fancy here. The fully specified domain name and query string value is here. I’m not yet too sure about the ‘FORM=MSNH11′ value - I am sure it is a useful item yet to be discovered.
Google Analytics
I know that Google Analytics (GA) will allow users to add new search engines with a special API call that you need to add after the first pageTracker() call:
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com","q");
What is not clear is if this call should be made only once, or if it should remain part of your tagging at least until GA reports Bing data on its own. More on this later. Somehow I suspect Google will be a bit lackadasical about adding a competing search engine to is reports.
Omniture
SiteCatalyst appears to report on Bing referrals just fine. It nicely displays as ‘Microsoft Bing’ instead of just ‘Bing’. This will help SiteCatalyst users make the transition visually.
Webtrends
The WebtrendsOutsider blog has documented how to update self-hosted Webtrends installations to report Bing data properly. For users running a custom keywords.ini file, this post explains how to make the update. For users running the ‘factory’ keywords.ini and browser.ini files, just hop over to Webtrends and pick up new versioned copies of both files and place them on your WT server.
Lots of sites use Google Analytics and that is good news. The next question becomes: ‘is it installed correctly’? Here’s one tool which can help answer the question: SiteScan™ by EpikOne. It will check up to 1000 pages on your site and report the results via email. Pretty nice for a great price: free.
Social Networking (SN) is rapidly becoming an accepted practice in the business world. Branding and brand protection are some of the main reasons businesses are using SN sites. A great way to find a name or ‘handle’ for your business which can be the same across all or many SN sites is to use namechk in much the same way as finding a valid domain name to register.
I finally found in one place the Google Analytics API documented in one place, all on one page. This page lists the myriad functions which can be called from the pageTracker object.
It’s true - the best way to understand and be sure what activity happens on your website is to open the logfiles. You’ll find a lot of activity which is good for your cause, such as search engine spiders and real human visitor activity, and you’ll find abuse such as hacker attacks and content theft. Blogger Eric Lander wrote this thorough post which introduces log file analysis to webmasters and SEOs.
This Wikipedia entry provides a most complete list of server log analysis tools, but remember, to get started looking at logs, all you really need is a good text editor. Even Notepad works in a pinch.
Big time DBAs, don’t laugh! But honestly, couldn’t it have been easier to format a numeric value as an amount with decimals? Maybe it will help others trying to format dollar amounts which are stored like 1234.1861 in SQL Server to look like 1234.19, for example. So deceivingly simple…
Here is how I searched BigG and found little:
TSQL display dollar amount
TSQL format dollar amount
TSQL format currency no dollar sign
Just pop this around the field name you need to format and you’re in business!
CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), CONVERT(MONEY, fieldname)) AS PRICE
Cheers!
Any publicity is good publicity, right?
Almost.
Some ‘publicity’ can be bad. Now, compliments of blogs and social networking sites, it is easier than ever for employees to get a jab at employers and clients even if they don’t mean to. Some companies have used this as excuse to ban employee email usage and worse; but others, such as IBM, have chosen to develop a set of employee guidelines to set tone for employees and to embrace rather than negate these new venues.
Nice. Now the rest of us have a model to follow. Leave it to ’stodgy’, ‘old’ IBM to address this emerging issue with style.
Yes, the old 5 “w”s apply to web analytics too!
Turns out that in web analytics, we need to know who will receive the reports, data and insights gained from our analytical efforts; we need to know what information we should share (dependent on ‘who’ and ‘when’); we need to know where, as in where do we make this data known to our ‘whos’ so that we can ensure it is used and valued; we need to know when to share our findings; and we need to know why we’re expending all the analytical effort (as in what do we hope to learn?) and why site visitors behave the way they do when on site.
As you can see, the web analyst’s assignments aren’t much different than a news reporter’s or a detective’s. Read well-known analytics expert Jason Burby’s complete blog post. Enjoy!
I just found this interesting blog post at WebAnalyticsWorld which has links to compare Google Analytics to many other web analytics and stats packages. Some of these comparisons are better than others, but they all make for good reading and go a long ways into understanding the long tail of web analytics (check out the vendor list at WebAnalyticsBook - more than 100 vendors and growing!). Cheers!