Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

There must have been something in the water the last few days because it’s been stats, stats, stats lately.

AdGooroo SEM and SEO Tracking
At work recently, we’ve started using AdGooroo, which is a fantastic SEO & SEM monitoring application. It can keep track of your paid and natural campaigns, as well as your competitors. The great thing is that you don’t even have to define your competitors. It will simply aggregate everything it finds, and those logically become your competitors.

Facebook Application Tracking
I was reading today on TechCrunch that a new startup called Sometrics (Some Metrics?) is shooting to start tracking applications in Facebook. From their site:

We’re a developer-founded, developer-friendly company that gives you the analytic tools you need to understand your audience.

All of your demographics are compiled every single day. You can even see statistics for specific hours of a specific day. Who was using your app or social network at 3 AM last Tuesday? We’ll tell you.

We track:

• Page views and unique visits
• Installs and uninstalls
• Age
• Gender
• Number of friends
• Locations (down to the specific state if in US)

Features:

• Pie chart for age breakdown
• Maps show saturation of different locations
• Calendar tool that allows you to see statistics from a single day as well as aggregate statistics from multiple days
• Export data to Excel (.csv)

Sounds pretty interesting and, depending on the cost, worthwhile, but what do you do then with those numbers? 13,000 page views - is that good? 200,000 downloads? Ok, so what? It’ll be up to the interpretation of that data that will ultimately lend value and prove ROI. Regardless, it’s exciting to see these kinds of metrics being available for marketers.

YouTube Video Statistics with YouTube Insight
I can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier, but YouTube has released YouTube Insight, which provides demographic data to marketers, users, or anyone interested as to who’s watching your videos. It provides insight into views, demographics, and popularity. Again, it’s great to know these numbers, but unless you know your competitor, can show some actionable result (users bought something, traffic increased, etc.) it’s not going to do marketers a lot of good to know that 20,000 from Turkey watched this video.

What other online metrics or statistical platforms are out there? I’m always looking for “the next best thing”.

There has been a lot happening in the local search spectrum lately: here, here, and here. It looks like some of the big players are really getting into local search, especially with the release of Google universal search (although I think Ask 3D is better), which mashes everything in the Google universe together in one data stream. So why all the hubbub about local search? Well, it appears that as Google acquires more knowledge, both from online streams and offline data, they are presenting more and more detail down to the neighborhood and street level so marketers are trying to continually jump in the mix as Google and other’s launch new features.

And as SEO rankings become ever more specialized and “the long tail” takes over, advertisers and marketers are looking for anyway they can get in front of the user with as few terms as possible. That’s where local search comes in. Here’s an example I’m quite fond of: chicago web development. As you’ll notice, those terms are pretty competitive with lots of optimization in both natural and paid search listings. Local search is the new backdoor to top SEO rankings. How did I acquire this listing? Well, it was as easy as creating a local business, entering my address in Chicago, and then selecting the categories for my business: web design, web development, etc. etc. Viola! I’m #1 with a HUGE piece of real estate at the top of the listings.

I’ve advised a few of my clients (and previous employers) on this and have seen it work wonders for them in highly competitive markets. In case you’re wondering how to get in on this, read over my previous post of how to set up a local business even if you don’t have a local business. So get on the local search bandwagon if you haven’t already.

It’s definitely worth the investment.

Image courtesy of ToastyToastyToasty

I haven’t checked the Chicago Transit Authority’s Trip Planner in a while, but it looks like they’ve done a bit of a redesign on the interface.

The new interface is a nice grid layout (point #4 on my recommendation list) as opposed to the previous layout, pictured below. They’ve added some nice MaqQuest-like iconography and moved the form over to the left, making it easier to jump right in to get directions. They still haven’t added any visual mapping of where you’ll be going during your journey across the city, but that’s still not imperative I guess if you fully trust the CTA to get you from point A to point B. It would still be nice to have a map of the beginning and end points at least so you have SOME orientation of where you are in the city.

I’d still like them to add the ability to export the directions via email or SMS, both to myself or to a friend. That would make it easy for me to tell my friends or relatives who are unfamiliar with chicago transit how to get around easily without having to explain the interface to them or give exact directions.

Overall, it’s a great next step. Clean design, CSS based layout. There are still a few things I’d like to see (embedding directions, sharing with friends, easier use on my cell phone*), but I can look past those things to the next iteration of the transit site. Thanks CTA!

* You can make it easier to use on my cellphone by either hiding the upper navigation (shown in the image below with CSS disabled) all together so I can skip right to the form to get directions, or providing me a link to jump right to the form “Click here to jump to directions”. Otherwise, I have to scroll past all the navigation items to get to the form.

Thanks for everyone who attended!

Please visit www.northsideartist.com for all the links and steps to set up a blog from the presentation on Tuesday, July 10th. Or feel free to contact me anytime at jeff@jeffwoelker.com for any follow up questions concerning blogs, online communities, search engine optimization, or bicycling in Chicago.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Here’s the listing for the workshop posting.

So the other day, my friends at SmartUSA sent me a nice email about “Thank you for attending our Chicago event to test drive Smart ForTwo’s.” That was really nice of them I thought. But wait, I didn’t test drive any Smart ForTwo’s. In fact, I meant to attend that event, but didn’t have time that weekend to make it there at all.

Email marketing lesson #1: Don’t assume. It wouldn’t have taken very long to vet a list of people who DID attend and send them one email and send everyone else another, “Sorry, we missed you in Chicago. Maybe next time…” Although, I know what they were trying to do, it should have been more personalized/customized.

I also received an email from Kayak.com telling me about great summer vacation deals. Great I thought! Oh, cheap flights to SFO, Oakland, Miami, and Chicago? Wait, they knew my default airport is O’Hare. Why would they include Chicago in this email? Why not try and sell me on another destintation, NOT Chicago.

Email marketing lesson #2: You have the data - use it. Kayak knew well enough that my default airport was O’Hare, so it’s pretty safe to say that I live/work in Chicago or the surrounding area and probably do not need a travel deal to Chicago. Instead, they could have further customized the message to remove my home airport and replaced it with another sales message. I used to do this ALL the time at my previous employer. We used every little piece of information to customize email and print communications we sent out. Kayak should do the same.

Just a few handy tips to remember when implementing an email marketing campaign. There are tons more here:

• Tips and Best practices
• Constant Contact Learning Center
• Microsoft Small Business email tips

Anything I forgot? Let me know in the comments.

Although not the most recent of news, but I just found out about Google Website Optimizer, which is what I’m sure lots of marketers have been looking for to optimize landing pages for their ad campaigns. This is a great little tool that allows you to set up an “original” campaign landing page and set variables to test against, such as: copy block 1, copy block 2, headline 1, headline 2, image 1, and image 2. These are then thrown together randomly into combinations 1, 2, 3, and so on and provide metrics for you to judge against. Maybe you had your campaign ideally optimized using your original combination or maybe something will come out of left field that you completely overlooked. The Website Optimizer will provide metrics for each campaign and how it compare to your “original” test campaign.

One cautionary word when using the website optimizer, make sure to set limits on each campaign so you have standard data across each and also to make the budget small enough so as to not waste ad dollars, but large enough to ensure a valid test sample. My recommendation is to set aside 5-10% of the total budget for testing purposes.

Enjoy!

Because every other website in Chicago only has Super Bowl links on them:

• Every NES Game ever made - awesome!
• Make a paper robot
• Glass bottle oil lamp
• Zap Electric Cars - Take THAT big 3!
• Avoid broken links in email

Since I was sick on Monday, here is my cool link roundup:

Sweet picture of Tokyo

No more LOUD COMMERCIALS!

Optimus Prime iPod Dock

Forget your second life, get a first life

Opt out of everything!

Normally, I am the first person to bash flash, but there are really only a few applications I can think of offhand that make excellent use of flash. The first is LivePlasma.com, which is a fantastic music/movie/actor search engine.

Today I saw another great use of flash with the family tree website, Geni (pronounced “Jenny” or “Genie”?). It’s a pretty cool website that allows people to quickly and easily create a family tree and then invite your family members to add more people, and so on and so forth. It’s pretty much the ultimate viral website. The only worry I have is that this site might turn into family spam if Geni decides to sell this list to outside marketers, but for now, it’s pretty darn cool.

In no particular order:

Make your own birdfeeder with webcam

Very cool ceramic designs (my favorites: here and here)

The job posting for my current job

Get rid of **** expletives!

My next culinary feat: Chocolate Souffle