There may be an occasion where you have text or a logo or hotbutton on your website or a client website and you’re curious as to how many folks are clicking on it before leaving your website. Normally it’s not going to show up on your analytics and you possibly don’t want to go and add more complexity to your setup by installing a script or additional software but by modifying your links you can add some additional data for a campaign or simply assuage your curiosity.

OnClick Google Analytics Link Adjustment

Let’s have a look at our website Dinkum Interactive which offers an image link back to our Twitter account. We are limited in tracking the number of folks who sign up to our twitter account but where they come from remains a mystery. At the very least, we would like to see who is heading to twitter from our website via a button on our home page. Not very interesting but for the sake of an example, right now the code looks something like:

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/mydinkum”><img src=”images/twittericon.png” alt=”twitter icon” width=”83″ height=”76″ /></a>

So the first part of that link is the destination, the second part is the source of the image file. We are mostly concerned with the first part which we will adjust to accommodate for the onclick and will look something like this:

<a onclick=”javascript:pagetracker._trackPageview (‘/outgoing/www.twitter.com’);” href=”http://www.twitter.com/mydinkum” target=”_blank”></a>

Then we would combine that with the image source code <img src=”images/twittericon.png” alt=”twitter icon” width=”83″ height=”76″ /> to give you your final link.

I use ‘outgoing’ but I know others use different names for that, plus I believe you can pretty much use anything to tag the outgoing URL landing page, you just need to be able to remember it when you’re checking your data which is why I like to keep consistent with it.

Checking Your Data

Now you’re going to have to head over to your Google Analytics account and make your way to the Content Section:

You will then go to Top Content which will display a list of your most popular pages.

Below this list will be a Filter option. Type in the relevant word here. I’ll use “outgoing” but I could also do www.twitter.com if i wanted.

This will reveal the details of visitors who have clicked on our link or logo or a hotbutton…or for you, whatever you have decided to track.

There may be occasions where something like this will come in handy, particularly if you are working with other websites who don’t have any form of analytics installed. You may need to let them know how generous you are and there’s nothing like hard and fast data to back you up.

Think about how much information is floating around the www. News websites, blogs, magazines, videos, photos and audio fills up our online activities and are, more often than not, destinations that drive our online activities. So while you’re busy focussing on how that button on your website looks or what your current keyword ranking is maybe you should be paying a little more attention to how you can contribute to this bevy of information that is being indexed by our Googlebot friend or shared with people’s networks via twitter or facebook. If you also assume that folks aren’t out there looking for your product or service then maybe your business model is flawed (or your confidence is low) because on the Web, there are millions of people out there looking for something. I’ve personally been amazed by some of our clients who have products so unique that i was blown away purely by the search data so I don’t question these things any more. So where do you start? For some, a blog is good foundation and one that offers the greatest control. But it’s not really about control, it’s about getting out there. It’s about sharing.

Articles – chances are you may already have some of these floating around but if not, get going. A strong article talking about your services, distributed through the many article websites can be an effective weapon in your arsenal. Depending on what you’re offering, sometimes a single interested web surfer who seeks to take action on that article can demonstrate a significant return.

Video – people love videos, just look at the popularity of YouTube.com. While there are certain elements people look for in an online video, simply touting your wares or even yourself can be a powerful differentiator and yet another way for folks to find you.

Press Releases – the web is filled with these bad boys (a little saturated sometimes) but again, if you have something to say, don’t rule out the power of a good press release to share your news. For some it can be an announcement of a newly designed website. For others, it can be a truly newsworthy announcement that should be shared with the world. Whatever the reason, getting it out there is a good start which may continue through Google Alerts, a blogger picking it up and posting it on their website, someone tweeting it or Buzzing or adding it to Digg or the thousands of other community sharing opportunities.

Guest Blogging – leveraging the power of an existing blogger with a built-in community is a great way to get your message out. Chances are the bloggers will also appreciate the extra input.

If you’re afraid to share your ‘trade secrets’, you’ll most likely be scooped by someone else sharing their (your) ‘trade secrets’. If you’re not a good writer, get one. If you’re afraid of diluting or damaging your brand, spend a bit of time and money doing it right.

As always, time is a factor but there are ways to overcome this obstacle either by getting help or shifting a few things around to make the time. Getting proactive with your content is a surefire way to start or continue building your online foundation, often with some nice side effects (like SEO for example). I’ve been swayed into making purchase decisions by a well written article so don’t think that others wouldn’t.

I’ve been hearing a lot of business owners griping about review websites like Yelp (you should know my opinion of those jokers) and the slew of others. Foursquare offers the ability to post comments about a place you visit (or don’t visit). Target also offers the ability to rate and comment in fact, I would suggest that most large retailers offer the opportunity to have your say. So business owners see these and if there’s a negative one, will freak out and try everything they can to get rid of it or satisfy that complainer with a coupon or something. I have a feeling though, that’s it’s probably not a good idea to do either (handing out coupons for negative reviews may well generate more negative reviews).

Most savvy Internet users are quite aware of the percentages when it comes to reviews. First of all, they know that there is no way to qualify these individuals (unless they follow them) so taking the opinion of Debbie Downer will probably have you going nowhere. Secondly, many competitors have taken to slamming their competition on these places, again without qualification other than they are competitors. Third, a lot of people are idiots, especially online. Back in the day it was comments on Digg and now it’s YouTube but essentially you get the sense that under the veil of anonymity, people are pretty content blurting out without much thought.

What you should be looking at though are the percentages. If you’re seeing a couple of poor service reviews out of several hundred, chances are these folks were either Debbie’s or just got unlucky. It’s probably not going be a worthwhile exercise criticizing your staff based on those percentages as it will most likely not sway a persons opinion about trying your place. Generally if you get enough reviews, even your competitors won’t be able to keep up posting negative ones on your listings and while I have suggested that ‘a lot’ people are idiots, it actually only feels that way and more often than not, these folks are the minority and most are reasonable, good people. People who read reviews generally get a sense for what’s going on.

Now if you are seeing bad percentages, it is time to take stock. What are people’s issues, where are the problem areas. This can actually be a great opportunity to address it based on a focus group that you don’t even have to pay.

I recently started using and checking out restaurant.com after hearing about them from a friend. I was amazed that I had not heard about them before as it seems like they’ve been around for several years so I went and checked out their website which may help to explain why I hadn’t heard about them. Quite frankly from basic SEO perspective it’s a mess. Their popularity however astounded me but it looked as though they relied heavily on affiliate marketing which makes sense and encourages other people to do the work for you. But boy are they doing a lot of things wrong with their website.

Let’s just have a gander a their search visibility. They have a great domain name so I assume that they would do well for “restaurants” and variations on the phrase. A quick search reveals #1 Google ranking for “restaurants” as anticipated.

That’s a strong keyword phrase with some 68 million broad global searches per month which should in itself yield some good traffic. Let’s have a look at what they do. Coupons would be the obvious selection here so “restaurant coupons” would be a no brainer.

I see a paid search result there and the top spot again which is great and a 450,000 search volume which should also yield some good traffic.

So let’s move to local searches which one would anticipate to be higher conversion phrases. Someone in my local area looking to dine out would go for “Philadelphia restaurants” for example. One would anticipate that with a valuable keyword phrase as their domain and obvious popularity that they would do well but I don’t see them for some reason.

So I’m seeing menupages.com and yelp.com and zagat.com but interestingly not restaurant.com. So I wonder why that is.

If I go to restaurant.com and drill down to the Philadelphia section i see this URL http://www.restaurant.com/rdc_site2.net/listings.aspx?PageSize=0&Page=1&sorting=Relevance&Zip=19146&SearchRadius=5&&attribute_value_string%7cCity=Philadelphia
Ok so that explains a lot. Why not http://www.restaurant.com/philadelphia/ for their URL? Sorry couldn’t tell you. Let’s have a look at their title tag then. “Restaurant.com – Dine out for less! $25 Restaurant Certificates for only $10″. Right, pretty useless there.

It’s pretty obvious that we’re now looking at a poorly coded web structure that’s going to impact their search results and little thought to SEO so they are without a doubt missing out on some low hanging fruit. Then again, it looks like a popular website with a strong affiliate marketing campaign and a search marketing campaign which I’m sure is costing them a pretty penny. One wonders at how much value an SEO consultant could be to them particularly for what appears to be a predominately online business. Maybe if they go their act together they would piss off their affiliates. Still, for someone who bases online businesses in SEO, it’s a good opportunity to demonstrate what not to do.

While I don’t really “do” Social Media, I’m a fan of it and see great benefits to it. One thing I keep seeing is the issue of Social Media ROI, or businesses trying to determine if Social Media is “worth it”. To me, and as we’ve mentioned in the past, that doesn’t seem to be the main point here but since we’re in the Internet Marketing business, there needs to be some consideration in this area.

Something I do understand is Search Marketing which has its own set of justification requirements, some of which carry over to measuring Social. Fortunately, to a certain extent, Search is a much easier activity to demonstrate value even though questions still arise and the gap that exists with the data is still problematic. So I understand Social Media to be an even tougher challenge. In thinking about the “proof” that many ask of Social Media Marketing, even if you’re just dipping your toes into this brave new world, I can see a few key areas that you should pay attention to.

Listen – this has to be the primary reason for adopting social media for your business. We’ve spoken about this before, and since it’s not a huge time investment for us its a no-brainer. Set yourself up with a simple company name search in Twitter, get your Google Alerts going and you’re underway.

Analytics – you knew I’d bring this one up. At the very least measure traffic. While not directly able to justify your campaign, it should be one indicator of its effectiveness. I assume you’ve set up your goals and possibly your funnels; if you have you’ll be able to determine who converted and where they came from.

Engagement – definitely a tough one to track. I’ve seen folks set up a basic database system that simply outlines social mentions, comments, feedback, DM’s, whatever. Can also be easily done on an Excel spreadsheet. I imagine it’s got to be pretty painful to keep track of but the conversation is one of the great benefits of participating in a Social Media Marketing campaign.

Brand - While I don’t really want to get into this area due to its poor measurement ability, I can see the benefits of using Social Media to enhance your brand and image. I have to think that the number of social mentions can be a contributor. If you’re a small company and can regularly discuss your activities with the customer service reps to help determine if there has been a reduction in complaint calls or the like, one should probably look to your online activities as possibly being a reason for this.

So while the contents of this post are uneducated and based solely on my own experiences (hey I didn’t even consult with our Social Media expert), the main point here is to think about some form of measurement. I still don’t think that “proof” should be the overall goal here but like most marketing activities an objective or outcome must be part of the strategy.

Google Earth and Street View have both provided great fodder for those with plenty of time on their hands, the conspiracy theorists or simply those looking for weird and wacky things. After recently telling my Mum about Google Earth, she went ahead and started having a look around the globe, starting of course, in her own backyard. It wasn’t long before she stumbled across someone who has somewhat of a resemblance to me walking in front of the local post office. Many agree, others (like my wife) do not. While the face is mostly hidden, there are some notable similarities. You can view it on Google Maps.

View Larger Map
Similarities
1. I have been known to talk on a mobile phone while walking.
2. I have a watch that resembles the one shown in the image
3. I do have sneakers that look like those and have been known to wear the ankle socks
4. I wear shorts that look like these ones
5. I have a solid physical build not unlike the one in the image

Questionables
1. That shirt doesn’t look familiar
2. The legs are too skinny (could be the angle)
3. No gray hair at the temples
4. The belly area looks a little larger than mine (could just be bad angle though or simply my own interpretation of my belly:)
5. I was only in Sydney twice last year for a total of 6 weeks so what are the odds of that!

Here’s a video of a recent trip up to New York to visit a client. Thanks to Drew Hood of Throwing Light for both accompanying us and putting this together.

The old Chinese domain name scam seems to have morphed recently with a new intellectual property rights angle:

Dear Manager
We are a professional intellectual property rights consultant organization, mainly deal with the global domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.
On May. 21st, 2010, we formally received an application from KangShen Technology Limited, they applied to register the internet brand ( ourcompanyname ) and some in China and Asia’s domain name.

During our preliminary investigation, we found that these domain names’ keyword is fully identical with your trademark. Therefore, we need to confirm with you, whether you consigned KangShen Technology Limited to register these domain names with us or not? Or, is KangShen Technology Limited your business partner or distributor?

If you have no relationship with this company, we assume that they have other purposes to obtain these domain names.

Currently, we have already suspended this company’s application temporarily due to the seriousness of this isuue. In order to avoid the vicious domain name grabbing, please let the relevant person make a confirmation with me via email as soon as possible. Thank you for your support to our work!

Best Regards!
Anne Ling

Registration Department Manager
Hong Kong NewName Net Service Limited
Tel:+852-3069 6940
Fax:+852-3071 7730

Email:anne@trademarkdns.com
Internet:www.trademarkdns.com

I’ve actually received a few of these recently, so they seem to be on the go a bit more lately. I’s be curious to learn stats about how effective something like this is. Always search for something like this before you pursue any further.

Akismet does a great job of preventing a lot of spam comments on your blog. A few do sneak through but a lot of them can be very complimentary.

“hello there, i just saw your web portal via google, and i would like to tell that you express interestingly good on your website. i am truly struck by the method that you write, and the subject is excellent. anyways, i would also like to acknowledge whether you would like to exchange links with my website? i will be to the great extent than willing to reciprocate and put your link off in the link exchange area. waiting for your respond, i would like to convey my appreciation and cheers!”

I mean, for someone to “express interestingly good on your website” is quite obviously a very touching sentiment and one not to be taken lightly. Of course I am willing to reciprocate.

And this one

“Cheers for this informative article. I am constantly searching for information on different subjects and it’s seldom far away on the internet. I’ll be coming back soon.”

They will be coming back soon. That’s great news. But my favorite of late that really offers up the warm and fuzzies and actually finishes with a smiley face is

“I view are made up of unnecessary waste copied from some other websites a trillion times, nevertheless I have to give you credit this website is in truth decent and also possesses a lot of unique substance, therefore kudos for stopping the trends of exactly copying other people’s websites,”

My website is in truth decent. If you don’t have a few comments slipping through the cracks, maybe once in a while have a little peek at what it does pick up. It may well cheer you up.

I don’t consider myself anywhere near an expert at Social Media but do use as many tools as I can to check out and see if there is any value there for myself or clients. In Australia, we have bizarre nicknames for just about everything so I was poking around to see if folks use nicknames for certain well-known Social Media ‘moves’ but I came up empty. I figure it might be time to try and build a starter list.

Changing of the Guards – someone who replaces their profile picture more than 3 times in a week.
The Grizzuti - a person who only retweets (named after Barbara Grizutti Harrison who coined the quote “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.”)
The Drew – someone who uses social media to promote a fund-raiser or charity. Named after my mate Drew who sold his twitter name to Drew Carey for the Livestrong Foundation.
Brokeback – someone who keeps threatening to quit using social media tools like twitter but just can’t seem to do it. Named after famous Brokeback Mountain movie quote “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
Earhart – a person who suddenly disappears from the Social Media Radar (most likely because they are applying for a job).
Peeping Tom (also lurker) – someone who watches Social Media conversations but never participates.

It’s a start. I’ll keep building on the list but any suggestions are welcome and I’ll make sure to add.