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.

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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.

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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

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When Yahoo announced their effective exit from the search engine business last July, the main points seemed clear:

• Microsoft will provide the development and management of search engine results technology
• Microsoft will provide the search and content network ad platform
• Microsoft will manage the relationship with all but an elite group of advertisers
• Yahoo will provide their own user interface on top of Microsoft’s Bing data

The Bing-Yahoo agreement, should it receive the necessary anti-trust approvals, may have a wider impact on web marketers (as a side note, I believe the agreement is a bad thing as it reduces competition in this strategic market). Consider the uncertainty surrounding just two of the web marketing tools currently provided by Yahoo:

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As many may know by now, Google has been experimenting for a few months with Ajax (JavaScript) based search results. One problem with the initial trial was that no referrer information was passed when a user clicked on a search result, “breaking” the historic ability of Web Analytics systems to track search traffic from Google. Google has more than one service on each of it’s domains which may send traffic to a website, such as the Google Reader, so just knowing traffic is from Google isn’t so informative.

Keyword information from search referrers is in particular very important as we want to know not only where our visitors came from, but what was their intent, intent indicated though the keywords they use to express their need or desire while searching.

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To judge by an e-mail I received, and this post Microsoft is abandoning the Live Metrics solution it relaunched as adCenter Analytics.

On a personal level, this reminds me lot of another web area (book search) where Microsoft competed with Google but later got cold feet and pulled out. I hope Yahoo remains steady in its commitment to Web Analytics [and hope they open it to SEO folks like me ]

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The rel=”canonical” link duplicate content panacea

As many readers probably know, Google and other search engines recently announced support for a rel=”canonical” link attribute value. The new attribute value canonical (not a tag mind you, link is the html tag) can be used by website developers to specify which of essentially similar web pages is the definitive version.

A SEO problem known as duplicate content arises when websites use different URLs, generally through parameters, to provide slightly different versions of a page, such as a printer friendly version, or to support web analytics campaign tracking. In order to give search users unique choices, search engines tend to choose the “best” URL for a page, filtering out similar versions.

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One of the nice things about web marketing is the wealth of data available to use in decision making processes. Web marketing data also helps in getting and maintaining management support for SEO activities.

This SMX West session focusing on in-house SEO considered what data to present to management, when to present it and how to best present it. The line-up is an all star cast – two in house SEO practitioners at companies, that among other things, own search engines. As if that wasn’t enough, we also have John Marshall, founder and former CEO of Clicktracks. Rounding up the line-up is Jessica Bowman, a SEO consultant specializing in setting up and guiding in-house SEO programs.

Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com

Speakers:

• Duane Forrester, Senior Program Manager SEO, Microsoft

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The title might be a bit provocative, but the topic is important for companies which want to insure their website is a profit center rather than a cost center. The number of page views tracked by a web analytics system is often a weak indicator of website monetization potential. With the advent of monetization programs such as Google’s AdSense, the specific content of a web page has become much more telling in this regard. Let’s see why.

In this article we will restrict ourselves to advertising as the monetization tool.

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Recently a friend asked me for some pointers on the measurement of social media, such as blogs.

I have found that Jeremiah Owyang has a lot of interesting things to say on this topic, as exemplified by has article What should we measure and the document Tracking the Influence of Conversations: A Roundtable Discussion on Social Media Metrics and Measurement.

Yet it isn’t sufficient that we measure conversation on the web, we must also consider potential traps hidden in the data – we need to interpret it.

Consider the case of a blog post. The extent that a post has been read and has involved a blog’s readers might be deduced from the number of comments the post has generated. Two potential problems arise using this metric.

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