inter:digital strategies

I can’t help it; I’m still calling Google Webmaster Central "Google Sitemaps". What can I say? It’s more defining of the function to me. Webmaster Central theoretically encompasses a broader set of functions than just the Sitemaps - however, most of the issues I ever address have more to do the Sitemap functionality.

However, that’s off the topic for this post. What I actually intend to write about it Google’s recent changes to the preferred domain feature in Sitemaps. Previously, they automatically added the "non-preferred" domain to your listing of sites owned when you set a preference. They will no longer be doing this, do to complaints of confusion from users.

I don’t know how widespread these complaints were, but it certainly came up in a Cre8asiteForums thread in August, where Vanessa Fox actually responded to a member’s complaints about the preferred domain system.

It’s nice seeing Google explicitly responding to problems - and in a reasonably efficient manner, as well. The complaints were initially posted on August 20th at Cre8asite, and the changes were announced today - September 12th. Three weeks isn’t a bad turnaround.

That said, it’s important to keep in mind that your www and non-www versions of a domain are, technically speaking, different web addresses. Like any subdomain, the "www" domain represents a subset of what can be present on your domain name. Although having this automatically added is confusing, given that many people don’t differentiate between the two addresses, maintaining the ability to register separate Sitemaps will still be possible.

Statistics are an unending struggle for internet marketing. Understandably, clients always want some hard facts to demonstrate that their money isn’t going to waste - but what numbers do you give them?

Web site traffic statistics are famously variable in interpretation. Since no traffic service has a handle on the actual statistics for all website traffic, the numbers are usually based on particularly selective data sets. Rand Fishkin gave his detailed report yesterday on Alexa and Hitwise data, comparing them to the data provided through Feedburner and Indextools. The numbers tell it all - different statistics services provide vastly different data.

Imagine that all the webdev category sites receive 9 million uniques per day.

Pimpyourpro.com - 9 mil x 2.07% = 186,300 visitors per day

SEOmoz.org - 9 mil x 0.01% = 900 visitors per day

In reality it should be something like:

SEOmoz.org - 9 mil x 0.085% = 7650 visitors per day

7650 visitors a day is based on SEOmoz’s real visitor traffic. The other data is based on percentage of traffic as reported by Hitwise - see a problem?

So, given that the easily available data is, for practical purposes, only usable as a very general guideline, what kind of data should you actually report to your clients?
Recently, this question was asked at Cre8asiteForums. The answers vary - but the essential focus is that the only meaningful statistics to report must be based on the site’s business goals.

1. Focus reporting on specific metrics: income earned, referrals, registrations, whatever is considered a success for your site’s conversions.
2. Establish objectives for the campaign. The more specific the goal the better - and be realistic.
3. Don’t depend on any statistic that you need to convince your client is relevant. If they don’t understand that tracking campaign revenue is relevant, it may be that you don’t want to be working with them!
4. Identify the characteristics of a successful conversion. Differentiate between visitors who purchase the product and those who don’t. Determine everything you can which is different about these two key groups of visitors.

Pure traffic has some place in reporting - even if the traffic isn’t converting, a lot of traffic means greater exposure for your web business. But pure traffic numbers shouldn’t be the highlight of your statistics analysis. It’s worth mentioning any increase, but the bottom line is not directly related to visitors - it’s all about sales.

If there’s any one thing which I really wish Google provided, it would be search refinement. Their option to "search within results" is OK…but not exactly user-friendly. The link is buried at the bottom of the search results page, first of all. The number of times, early on, that I filled in my refining terms at the bottom of the page and then clicked the "search within results" link expecting the refinement to be performed is just ridiculous!

But, assuming you’ve understood what this tool is meant to do, you’ll click the link and head off to the search box. And once you’ve reached it, you’ve got no beautiful suggested refinements, no suggestions of ways you might refine your search, and no clue.

Of course, that last bit might be your own fault…

However, the lack of a simple, user-friendly, and one-click solution to search refinement is a big lack. They do keep playing with various ideas along these lines, however - today, Michael Martinez takes note of an integration with Google Base which has some neat features.

Specifically, this example currently comes up for a search on cheese dip recipe, and provides drop down menus which allow you to examine recipes which use a specific main ingredient, in a chosen cuisine, and using a specific keyword. In this case, the main ingredient and keyword fields are prefilled from your search query.

It appears that "recipe" is the particular keyword which is triggering this additional search, although that actual behavior is a bit more complex. The drop down menus were triggered by a search on "artichoke recipe", but without providing an additional keywords field. I thought this might have been because of the lack of a third word in the query; but experimenting with a variety of third terms in the query simply caused the menus not to appear.

Generally speaking, however, most searches (all that I tried) for a food item and the word "recipe" bring up these drop down menus, although I have been unable to reproduce the extra keyword field.

So, if you’ve got a weird lump of kohlrabi and you don’t know what to do with it, Google will gladly help you figure out a solution!