What is a backlink?

Any link to your site from an external domain is classed as a backlink, although in SEO terms this usually refers to editorial links (PR, blogs, articles etc) as opposed to those from search engines, banner adverts or other paid traffic sources. Despite being a source of traffic for the site, these links are vital to organic search rankings.

Search engines index web pages and store them in a database, but the order in which they serve these pages is dependent on the perceived relevance of the page to the search term used; and to the quality of the site itself. The search engines use various pieces of information in order to determine this, but the most important is the volume, quality and nature of backlinks to the site and to the specific domain.

Whilst no-one really knows exactly how the search engine algorithms work, studies are regularly carried out to assess which factors have the greatest impact on rankings. The latest ranking factors survey from SEOmoz identified the following as the top most influential factors:

1. Keyword focused anchor text from external links
2. External link popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
3. Diversity of link sources (links from many unique root domains)
4. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag
5. Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains

As you can see, 5 of the 4 relate to external links. Almost all aspects of the site itself and its content are considered less important.

Therefore, if the site is to rank highly for high volume keywords, it is imperative that the right kind of backlinks are created and encouraged throughout the internet.

What makes good backlinks?

The following describes the characteristics of the best possible backlink (in no particular order):

• Relevant site – the domain/site on which the link exists is relevant to the destination site. It has appropriate and relevant content and appeals to the same target market.
• Quality and reputation of the site – the domain/site is trustworthy, popular and well respected in its field. For example, non-commercial sites such as Wikipedia will always score higher than content aggregators and directories.
• Relevant content – the editorial content of the page on which the link exists is relevant and similar to the content of the destination page.
• The link is embedded in anchor text which uses a term for which you need to rank highly. For example, “I highly recommend reading my web analytics blog if you get chance”
• The body text around the link and in the article in general uses keywords and phrases for which your site needs to rank highly.
• The destination of the link is a page appropriate to the article, context and the anchor text used.
• The sentimental context of the link is positive. Negative descriptive words around the link lead the engines to believe that the site is unpopular.

Backlink PR : Creating and improving backlinks

Links will appear naturally throughout the internet as the site gains popularity. But these links will not necessarily match the above criteria. There are several options for building new links and persuading content owners to amend or remove existing links:

• Press Releases – PR that will feature on-line can be crafted and distributed according to all the above guidelines. It may even be possible to pre-populate the copy with links and anchor text which can be used by the content/media owners. If this is not possible, guidelines can be supplied along with the press release. These may not be used, but it doesn’t hurt.
• Blogs (internal/affiliated) – blogs created by you or your associates on 3^rd party domains can be fully crafted according to the above guidelines.
• Blogs (created by others) – if backlinks are found within 3^rd party blogs, a polite and descriptive email to the blog owner can often persuade them to make small changes to the link, especially elements such as the anchor text. It is not appropriate to try to influence the editorial nature of the copy.
• Blog comments – other people’s blogs almost always include the ability to make comments. If the blog is relevant to the subject matter of your site, then a comment can be made including a link to the appropriate page. Some blog sites also provide the ability to use html href tags, therefore allowing anchor text. This type of link-building should be approached with caution. Absolute transparency about who is making the comment is essential. Also, the comment should be appropriate, relevant and meaningful. Bloggers are very quick to pick up spamming and underhand link building techniques.
• Articles/editorial created by others – relevant articles and editorial content are a prime target for link building. If the article already contains a link to the site, then (as with blogs) a polite email to the webmaster or editor can often result in subtle changes being made to the link copy. If the site is relevant and does not include a link, a similar email can be crafted to persuade the inclusion of a link. Media owners may get a large volume of these emails, therefore the email must be personal, the content relevant and the link must add something to their article
• Wikipedia etc – has high kudos with the search engines. If articles can be created or contributed to, then links and/or foot references can be placed. As with other links, these must of course be relevant.
• Directories – bespoke directories for your particular industry/topic/hobby often allow short descriptions to be created along with site submissions. However, only the most relevant and well respected directories should be used.

A note on etiquette

Aggressive link-building techniques almost always backfire and result in lower search rankings or bad publicity from bloggers and other online commentators. Link building communications should be approached with the same respectfulness as any other marketing communication. For example, the motivation for commenting on a blog post may be to create a link, but the content and relevance of the comment itself is far more important. If the comment is not relevant and does not reflect your brand then this is far worse publicity than anything that can be incurred by lower search rankings if the link were not there.

What is web analytics anyway though?

The real root of this issue is the fact that many companies fail to see what the real goal of web analytics is. They see it as something extra that might be useful, but only when they get around to it and when they don’t have anything more important to do. In the mean-time they carry on as normal; churning out emails, scheduling site updates, adding and removing things to the home page – all based on gut feel or, as Avinash Kaushik likes to put it, the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). What they don’t understand is that all this stuff they do and web analytics are actually one and the same! Talking about performance marketing not only makes web analytics seem less geeky, it brings to light the fact that our ultimate output IS marketing.

Performance Marketing is a much better clarion call

The specific client I was talking to had exactly this problem; because they didn’t understand web analytics they just couldn’t connect it mentally to their own jobs. In this situation it’s no good talking to people about maturity models or measurement frameworks, or trying to train them on tools, because they still won’t get it. You need to educate them about why they should even listen to you and, more importantly, you need get them excited about why they need to be involved. This is how I went about it on this occasion:

Step 1 – Show them why they need it

The client was under immense pressure to deliver results with a reduced budget, and couldn’t see any way of doing it. They dismissed all notion of ‘web analytics’ because it sounded expensive, time-consuming and like something that wouldn’t deliver immediate results – i.e. they didn’t get it. The first step was to try and show them (without talking about analytics) that they needed to be cleverer about their marketing:

The Need for Data-Driven Marketing

This chart is specific to this client’s market and situation, but what it actually says isn’t so relevant. The key point is that mass marketing is no longer effective, even if you have got the cash for it. Customers are more individual than they use to be, and so you need to get closer to them and have more genuine conversations with them.

Step 2 – Make the connection

Nobody can really argue with what you’ve just said, and then the line of argument progresses in this fashion:

1. The ability to be pro-active and to successfully affect consumer decisions is reliant on the ability to listen, learn and to communicate genuine value through intelligent dialogue.
2. In an online environment listening and learning is achieved through web analysis, measurement and research; understanding how customers currently interact with us and how they want to interact with us.
3. Intelligent dialogue is achieved by optimising the customer experience in order to communicate our message in the most appropriate way, based on what we have learned by listening and understanding.
4. The process is only possible if the data, tools, capabilities and the methods for using them are available and tuned in to what we want to know, and so careful planning is required in order to ensure that insight can become actionable.

This describes holistically the whole process of marketing based on listening, which can also be called performance marketing. Then you can start talking about how to enable them with the ability to actually do it. At the heart of this is the ability to streamline and simplify the flow of data so that decisions can be made:

Enabling Performance Marketing

If data and tools are faster, easier, better and generally more efficient at providing meaningful insight, then your staff are able to spend more time generating action based on that insight and less time trying to work out what it means. This, in turn, means that more attention can be focused on optimisation and improvement initiatives that drive increased performance; and the final result of this is that dialogue and relationship with the customer becomes more tailored, more meaningful and more effective.

Now you can talk about analytics!

Only then can you start to have discussions about maturity models, vendors, internal or external consultants etc etc. It might still be a very long slog, but at least your client (or boss or whoever) can understand what the end game really is.

The way to get out of this is to set good, robust goals for your KPIs – ones which are achievable and based on sound insights and benchmarks. This isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, it is the foundation of a good web analytics measurement strategy or the downfall of a bad one if it’s missing!

Why goals are so important in web analytics

To illustrate the importance: imagine that your website drives offline sales of retail products. Recently you have gradually but consistently improved visitor numbers and congratulate yourself that this will mean more sales in stores. However, unknown to you the market for your particular product has just exploded and there are floods of eager new customers looking for ways to buy it, almost all of whom end up at your competitors. The ultimate effect of this is that you rapidly lose market share in the stores, but of course you never see any of this because you’re too busy congratulating yourself on your 2.3% increase in visitors.

To simplify this a bit – imagine if you owned a shop but never ever left the building or looked outside. You might think you’re doing well because your 10 average customers a day is more like 12 these days, but what if in reality the street outside was teeming with thousands of people and all the other shops had mile-long queues? Would you still think you’re a success?

So, goals – they’re really important! Here’s some tips on how to set them and use them:

How to create goals for your website KPIs

Creating a goal for a KPI is simply about asking first ‘where are we now?’ and then ‘where do we want to be?’ – there are a variety of data and insight sources that you can use to do this. In an ideal world you will use all in combination:

Corporate goals – This is so obvious that it shocks me how often it is ignored by web analysts and even marketing folk. Put very simply: how does your website relate to the overall goals of the business, and what does it need to do to help achieve them? For example, if you have a content site that makes money through ad revenue, how much ad revenue do your shareholders want/need in the next year? You can easily work backwards from this to understand what your goals should be: if you need an extra £85K revenue, how many additional visitors do you need and/or how many extra pages do you want people to view? Simple!

Competitive benchmarking - how do your competitors perform against the same KPIs? Whilst this can be difficult and sometimes impossible to find out, what information can be got is insanely useful. Ideally the data should be linked to corporate goals: if you know that your arch nemesis achieves 5 times the traffic that you do – but you also know that they target a larger and less profitable market segment than your strategy dictates – then you can use your market share estimates to work out what your traffic should be, rather than blindly trying to follow them on a pure number. Good sources of competitive data are commercial providers like Compete, Hitwise and Nielsen; as well as free tools like Google Trends. Failing that you could just ask them. You might be surprised how open they would be if you offered to share your stats in return.

Targeted improvements - Sometimes you just want to push yourself. Even if you have great competitive benchmarking, why stop at matching the competition? Push yourself further! This is about understanding what is achievable and stretching yourself slightly beyond it. Very useful if you have staff that work to bonus targets.

Common sense – if you know your business very well and have a good gut feel about where it can go, you might be brave enough to just use your intuition. Be very careful with this though, an unachievable and unrealistic target is often worse than having no targets – it will lead you on a wild goose chase!

How not to benchmark your performance

I have often seen people set up KPIs and then monitor them using a statistical method called standard deviation. In simple terms this is just a way of making sure that your KPI figures don’t fluctuate dramatically; i.e. they don’t deviate from the average in a given period. If the number improves you can learn from it and roll with it; if it declines you can understand why and rectify it. Whilst this has it’s uses on a day-to-day basis, this is a disastrous way to handle goals. Why would you not want to deviate from the average (mundane)? What else is business except the striving for improvement? No brainer!

Further reading

Avinash Kaushik on benchmarking, goals and more

Coremetrics on industry benchmarking

The Big Book of KPIs by Eric Peterson

The concept of ‘drowning in data’ cannot be understated when it comes to web analytics. Apart from the sheer quantity of information available, the situation is worsened because the tools we use are so terribly fast and effective; it has never been easier to slice, dice and peel (?) your way through such huge mountains of click-stream data. But just because it’s there and easy to access certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy to make sense of. I believe most companies that fail in this arena do so because they simply don’t know what to look at, but rather flail around in the data following endless and infinite pathways that, whilst ‘interesting’, ultimately lead nowhere fast.

This post describes how to get your head above the water and start swimming in a straight line. The answer lies in what I call a ‘Measurement and Optimisation Framework’, which might sound complicated but is, in fact, simply a strategy for: what you should be measuring; how to do it; and what you should do with the information once you get it.

Developing a Measurement & Optimisation Framework

The process of developing a measurement and optimisation framework is simply about answering 3 key questions:

1. Why does my website exist?
2. How can I measure the success of that existence?
3. What can I do to make it more successful if I find it isn’t achieving what I want it to?

For very simple websites (such as a personal blog), you could probably get away with just spending an hour or so thinking about this. For more complex business sites it could take some time! Following is a brief summary of the top-level part of the process through which I would typically take a client in order to get this up and running:

1: Define your site’s KPIs

How can you fix something or make it better if you don’t know what it was meant to do in the first place? Not setting proper objectives and goals is the most serious and fundamental mistake anyone can make, and not just in web analytics!

Most companies fail to do this because they assume that they intrinsically know what their site is for and what needs to be done to improve it. Take the example of a site selling CDs – it’s for selling CDs, right? What could be more complicated than that?

But, think about it for a moment, who is it trying to sell CDs to? Is it trying to achieve the lowest price possible or is it selling at a premium because it caters to a niche? And where does the company want to be in 5 years time, and what does that mean in terms of the brand that needs to be built? Is it important that people tell their friends about it? Oh, and how does the profitability work? Do we need to reduce the cost per sale by increasing the number of repeat buyers and therefore reducing media spend? And what about our other sales channels? Sales on the web cost much less than those that go through the call centre, so do we need to persuade some of those customers to get on-line? etc etc etc…

The point is, what your website means strategically is not necessarily all that easy to articulate. You need to get a really firm grasp on what your companies corporate goals are and work downwards. For big companies this generally means using something like a Balanced Scorecard approach. The system you use isn’t necessarily important, the point is that you align the goals of your site with the strategic goals of the company or, better still, the strategic goals of your customers!

2: Set targets

Once you have defined how to measure success (your KPIs), you then need to determine what that success IS. Again, this goes back to your corporate objectives: if your site is there to generate advertising revenue, how much revenue do your shareholders need next year? And what does that mean in terms of the number of visitors you need and the number of pages they need to look at? This is how you set targets.

Even if you can’t get anyone in your company to give you these targets, you should make them up yourself! It is incredibly difficult to optimise something to work better if you don’t know what ‘better’ means. If you are not able to prioritise which areas of the site need the most attention at any one time, you will drown – and you cannot do this without a sense of the goal for each KPI. Just do it!

At this point in time you might be able to produce something like this:

Typical Web Analytics Measurement Framework

[Please note: I doctored this a lot to protect the identity of a client, so it won't necessarily make complete intuitive sense and is provided more as a visual example]

3: Guide your analysis with a KPI dashboard

Now you know what your KPIs are and how to measure them you can produce a dashboard report showing where they are against where they need to be. This is incredibly important because it is the guiding light of your analytics and tells you exactly what to look for. If, taking the example KPIs in the chart above, I produce my weekly or monthly dashboard only to find that my unique visitors are dangerously below target but that all other KPIs are OK, then all my analysis for that week/month will be guided by a very specific question: what drives unique visitors and how can I improve the volume?

By investigating this you might find, for example, that you have saturated your search market and therefore need to optimise the site for different, non-branded keywords – or that the TV campaign you tested sent lots of high quality traffic and should be repeated. The point is that, without the KPIs, targets and the dashboard, you have nothing to focus you and, more importantly, have no solid way of telling your marketing director why they need to spend more on TV!

4: Optimise, optimise, optimise!

Remember finally that web analysis is not about understanding, its about doing. If you think your job is to report figures to someone else so that they can make sense of them, then you are not an analyst. The output of everything you do is about making changes to your site, media strategy, internal processes or whatever. Analysis and optimisation are essentially the same thing!

Empower yourself!

So what’s the benefit of all this? If it isn’t already obvious think about these two possible scenarios in which you are presenting your ‘analysis’ to your wider team:

• You hold a meeting in which you present 30 charts of data from your analytics tool, moving through geography, time on site, hour of day, browsers, screen resolution and lots of other fascinating charts. At the end everyone agrees that it was really interesting and goes back to their jobs.
• You hold a meeting in which you state that you can make the company an additional £1.5m per year in sales revenue and then proceed to present a road-map for implementing changes to make it happen, with a full ROI justification of likely costs. You get promoted and paid more!

Which one would you prefer?

“But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it” Buddha (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

Embrace action

Web reporting

It never ceases to amaze me how many people seem to miss the real point of web analytics. They say that we must interrogate the data in order to understand what is happening, or that we need to break it down to get to the bottom of it, or summarise it and extract it and manipulate it and evaluate it. Once we have completed these tasks and filled our brains with everything we can possibly know we will at last be full of knowledge and our analysis will be complete. Job done!

Excellent, you are omnipotent. But now what? What are you going to do with all that knowledge, and why did you even want it in the first place? These are the real questions of analysis!

Web analysis

When we’re talking about web analysis, everything that I described above is basically reporting. It might be super-intelligent and insightful reporting, but it is nevertheless a report. The analysis comes when we work out how to use our knowledge to improve the performance of our sites. Just like the Buddha says in the quote above: when you understand that something is good for you, accept it and live up to it – i.e. change your life, adopt your new outlook, make things happen!

This is a report:

“Last month we had 52,847 site visitors and 359,487 page views, which was a 2.651548% increase on the previous month”

This is analysis:

“If we optimise the calls-to-action on our campaign landing page we could sell an additional 300 units at a ROI of 5.6, what are we waiting for?”

If reporting is a rear-view mirror, then analysis is a steering wheel!

What’s the question?

Analysis is answering a question. The formulation of this question is where most people go wrong. As analysts we get asked:

• How many visitors are coming to the site?
• What’s the click-through rate?
• Did it work?
• What’s the path analysis?

These questions can be answered very easily: “2,485″, “1.5%”, “No”, “What do you mean?” This is not real analysis because these are not real business questions. These are real business questions:

• How effective is the website at influencing the path-to-purchase in comparison to other channels, and therefore what is the comparative value of our site?
• Do our email communications cannibalise our retail sales and what’s the overall impact on the bottom line?
• How can I improve customer service satisfaction levels through the website and therefore reduce call-centre costs?

It’s all very well sitting around complaining that we don’t get given questions like this, but this is usually because no-one has thought them up yet, and they need our help in order to do it. As analysts we must help our clients formulate these questions so that we can give them genuinely actionable recommendations.

Meditation

If analysis is like meditation, by all means meditate. But when you’ve finished your profound musing and contemplation and are fully aware, make sure that it changes your life.