A web marketing professional naturally thinks a lot about the incredible diversity of a site’s visitor demographics. Old and young, male and female, well educated and not, affluent and not… but how much thought has been given to the right-clickers? No, not the right-handed, the right-clickers. Right-clickers are those who right-click on a link to open a page in a new tab, to save a file in a specific location or to copy the link.

Sure, right-clickers are probably more technically advanced users representing a minority of a site’s web visitors, yet still, tracking right-clickers has been gnawing at me for a while. The summer “break” was just what I needed to bring focus to an issue potentially impacting many Web Analytics data collection scripts. These are scripts are used by JavaScript based systems like Google Analytics to track website activities not already included in basic page tracking, such as file downloads and outgoing link clicks.

With the advent of Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code, many sites need to review the automatic tagging code they’re using to track items such as downloaded files and outgoing link clicks. Unfortunately Google doesn’t offer an official library for this purpose; each Google Analytics or Urchin administrator is on their own in selecting an extended tracking script.

Some of the important issues to consider

1. How accurate is the tracking code? Will it work in all major browsers?
2. Is the tracking code compatible with other JavaScript code in the site?
3. Is it possible to configure downloads as either events or page views, based on file type? My general feeling is that document downloads should be configured as page views. Image or other non-document downloads should be configured as events. There are some limits using events in Google Analytics which need to be considered on a case by case basis.

So who isn’t in love with Google’s competitive data tools for web marketing? Of all the sources of public web analytics, Google is potentially the most accurate. Why? No one else has the breadth of web data that Google has. Not comScore nor Nielsen. Not Hitwise. Not quantcast, compete nor Alexa. Forget their admittedly impressive press releases. They just don’t collect anywhere near the about of data Google collects. Consider:

• Google tracks many sites directly with Google Analytics
• Google samples many sites through web users who navigate with a Page Rank enabled Google Toolbar which “calls home” to Google in order to display the Page Rank
• Google knows how much traffic websites receive from the world’s number one search engine

Years ago savvy webmasters realized they could achieve better search engine visibility by creating two copies of a web page. One, text rich and graphics poor, would be seen by search engine robots, such as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp and Microsoft Bing’s msnbot/bingbot. Everyday web users, surfing with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari, would see a different version, often graphics rich and text poor.

The process of providing different web content to search engines and site visitors is often called cloaking although some may prefer terms such as conditional content delivery. Cloaking is expressly prohibited by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s bing.

Figure 1: Once upon a time: Google Suggest with results counts Google Suggest is one of those wonderful features that makes Google irresistible. Ever noticed that as you start to type a query, Google provides the top queries which start with what you’ve typed?

Initially introduced as a Google Labs experiment in 2004, Google introduced Google Suggest to the masses in 2008. By March 2009, Google Suggest was available worldwide. Over time, Google has improved Google Suggest – bolding search terms, adding navigational links and integrating spelling corrections.

The annoying Google Suggest regression

There has, alas, been one significant regression: Google removed result counts in May 2009, saying we didn’t seem to want them. No complaints here, however, as Google still provided results counts to those who wanted them, as long as you knew where to look.

For years search engine search results were limited to 3 basic pieces of information: a title, a summary and a URL. Attentive observers of Google search engine results may have noticed the appearance of additional information, what Google calls rich snippets, in certain results over the past few months. Some results contain review ratings, such as in this case where an iPod received 5 stars from 81 reviewers:

Figure 1: Apple iPod Review

This search for U2 concert information provides event details for tour dates:

Figure 2: U2 Concert Rich Snippet Example 1

Figure 3: U2 Concert Rich Snippet Example 2

Note how the first result provides better detail on where the event is taking place. In both cases the event name is repeated for each date – that may or may not make sense. SEO practitioners have a lot of latitude in crafting these search results.

Yahoo! has closed some of their European directories sometime this year – their Italian and German directory URLs, e.g. http://it.dir.yahoo.com/, are now redirecting to their search page. Others may be impacted but I haven’t checked. At least the Italian directory is still in Google and Yahoo search results but not those of Bing. Yahoo Site Explorer also shows cached pages from the Italian directory with the copyright 2010; unfortunately Yahoo! doesn’t display a cache date. Other Yahoo! directories, such as the US and UK versions, are still open for business.

Figure 1: Yahoo! Directory in Italy, once upon a time

If you’ve been using the web for years, you may remember glorious search engines of the past like DEC’s AltaVista. Eclipsed by Google, AltaVista lives on today as a test bed for Yahoo! technology, although that may no longer be the case once the Bing-Yahoo! agreement is fully implemented. Seasoned search engine marketing (SEM) professions will probably also recognize other names like Fast technology’s AlltheWeb and Amazon’s A9. One of my favorites was Teoma.

Teoma way back in 2001

Figure 1: Teoma in 2001

Teoma is dead… or maybe not

Launched in 2000, it was later bought by Ask.com (Ask Jeeves in the UK) and met the fate of dead search engines in 2006. Or maybe not, as I noticed to my surprise a few days ago:

Hard data on twitter usage has been mostly limited to rough estimates provided by third parties. At twitter’s first developer’s conference, chirp, we got some data straight from the source. The first piece of data is that 75% percent of twitter’s traffic is coming from the third party clients and services using the twitter API. This is traffic which won’t usually be collected by those famous measurement services.

Twitter says they have 105,779,710 registered users. This actually doesn’t mean too much as we don’t know how active these users might be. Many people will create an account only to abandon it later.

In his presentation, the source of these slides, Twitter’s Biz Stone partly answered this question by putting the emphasis on the number of unique visitors per month to twitter’s website. As noted above, this number only reflects about 25% of twitter usage.

When Yahoo and Microsoft announced their Search Alliance in July 2009, only the high level agreement details were available:

• Microsoft will provide the development and management of search engine results technology (bing)
• Microsoft will provide the search and content network ad platform (adCenter)
• Microsoft will manage the relationship with self-service advertisers
• Yahoo will manage the relationship with large accounts
• Yahoo will provide their own user interface on top of the Bing results which will appear on Yahoo properties

Now that US and EU regulators have approved the deal, search marketers need to assess which Yahoo tools they rely on – and need to be prepared with alternatives should these tools be discontinued.