A Great Example Of Price Discrimination

legal costs

Most of you reading will probably be familiar with the phrase “price discrimination“. It refers to the practice of charging different amounts to different people for the same product or service. Effectively, you are charged based on your ability to pay, not on what you receive in return.

We came across an interesting example of price discrimination recently when talking to some solicitors. They listed a set of criteria which they use as the basis of calculating what they charge their clients. These included:

  • The value of the item / deal / property involved
  • How important the matter is to the client
  • The rarity of the questions raised

So, for instance, two people getting exactly the same advice about a property deal can be charged different amounts depending on the value of each of the deals, and a company can be charged more depending on “how important” a matter is to it, or how often the question comes up!

Is it any wonder the legal profession is under scrutiny for its pricing practices?

Tagged with:  

New Google Analytics Export

I switched to the new Google Analytics interface and almost immediately ran into that old problem of wanting to export more than 500 rows of data without having to resort to using API calls. The old “limit=50000″ trick doesn’t work with the new format, but thankfully there is a work around which I came across on the Convonix blog.

If you choose to show more than the standard 10 rows using the drop down at the bottom of the page, a new “rowcount” variable is added to your URL. For example, I changed a page to display 25 rows and the variable looks like this:

Google Analytics Row Count Variable

By changing the 25 you can change how many rows get displayed and then export them, up to a 50,000 row limit apparently. I’d caution against relying on this as a long term solution though. The previous 50,000 row limit trick got reduced to 20,000 after so many people started using it, and I imagine the same will happen with this trick once its use catches on. In the meantime though, enjoy!

Tagged with:  

What Patients Want

The information patients look to find on a clinic's website

Here’s a little reminder to us all that no matter what business we’re in, if our customers can’t find the information they want on our websites then there’s a good chance they’ll go somewhere else. Make sure you know what they’re looking for and make it easy for them to find it! (With a hat tip to XKCD for the inspiration.)

Tagged with:  
Rel=Canonical Usage

Typical proper use of the rel="canonical" tag (via SEOMoz.org)

One of the fun problems we have working at WhatClinic.com is trying to organise the millions of pages that result from listing tens of thousands of clinics in thousands of locations for thousands of treatments.

Our search results pages list up to 12 clinics at a time, and when they’re full they offer a great user experience. Lots of choice and lots of information is presented along with a simple way to contact whichever of the clinics takes your fancy.

However, not every combination of clinic type + location + treatment will have a full page of results. In fact with only a little knowledge you could probably guess the URL of a page with no results on it. The obvious solution to these empty pages is to return a 404 response code and not to link to the pages internally, minimising the chance that they’ll be found by users or search engines alike.

What’s Right For The User?

Add one clinic to the page though and we’re left with a quandary. Is this really a useful page for a user? Wouldn’t they like more choice? We know for instance that pages with more clinics on them have a better conversion rate, so would we be better off sending users to a “parent” location page instead, i.e. a location that contains the smaller location but should have more than one clinic on offer?

Another option available to us would be to fill the rest of the page with 11 of the nearest clinics to the location (which could be tens if not hundreds of miles away in some cases), but this would massively increase the duplication of data served across the pages on our site as clinics’ listings would appear in far more locations than they currently do.

Similar Pages – The Rel=”Canonical” Solution

We decided we’d like to see what effect the first option had, i.e. sending the users to a parent page, but we were uncomfortable with 301 redirecting every page that only had one clinic on it, so we decided to try a slightly softer approach.

Having read an article on SEOMoz about using the Rel=”Canonical” tag to get more than one keyword to rank for a given piece of content, we decided to try what we thought was quite a clever scheme that would serve the user and the search engines.

We would put a Rel=”Canonical” tag on our search results pages with only one clinic listed, and we’d hope to send people searching Google for Place A to the search results of Place B, which would contain the search results for Place A and more, giving the user a better choice.

Anchor Text Isn’t A Very Strong Ranking Signal For Pages With A Rel=”Canonical”

Unfortunately for us, the experiment hasn’t exactly gone to plan. We were cautious and only put the Rel=”Canonical” links on a subset of our one result pages, but even still we have enough data to see that for now at least none of the Place B pages are ranking for Place A keywords.

Of a sample set of 20 one result pages with a Rel=”Canonical” tag, 14 have been crawled and no longer appear in Google’s index, and searching using the “Place A” keyword for these pages doesn’t return the Place B search results page.

You might think, well Google have decided that the Place A and Place B pages aren’t sufficiently similar to be a valid use of the Rel=”Canonical” tag, and you might be right, but the fact that original Place A URLs are no longer appearing in the index seems to counter this supposition.

More likely it seems is that the anchor text of the links pointing at Place A pages isn’t a strong enough signal for the Place B pages to rank for keywords based on “Place A”.

Back To The Drawing Board

So it looks like we’re back to square one on this particular problem. I think the next thing to try is the option discussed above where we fill out the search results. It seems like a good thing to do for the user, but I am slightly worried about diluting our content by potentially overusing it. We’ll be sure to keep you posted about the results when we try it out.

Have you run any experiments with the Rel=”Canonical” tag yet? For what purpose, and what results did you see? Let us know in the comments.

 

Tagged with:  
office desk

Not *exactly* what our offices look like...

Eilis is an intern working with me on our digital marketing projects. We thought it might be interesting for other employers and prospective new interns to hear first-hand what it’s like for an intern going back into an office after some time off studying. Over to Eilis:

An internship is an excellent way to gain valuable hands-on experience in an area of academic or personal interest to any individual.  Following completion of my studies in Digital Marketing, I was delighted to join the team at Whatclinic.com to put my educational knowledge into practice.  Returning to college as a mature student, I already had extensive experience of working in an office environment and I felt confident that I would slot right back in, like riding a bike.

A Wake Up Call

The reality was a little different.  Although only absent from the workplace for over a year, I was shocked at how alien it felt to me on my first day.  I somehow had forgotten the morning race to get out of the house, the fighting for personal space on public transport and the vast number of clearly mad people rushing around at 8 am.  By the time I had reached the office I was already feeling a bit dishevelled and I hadn’t turned the PC on.

My interview had taken place in the offices in Westland Row so I was familiar with the set up.   The office was open plan and had a busy but relaxed atmosphere.  When I arrived at 10 am it was really positive for me that my workstation was set up, stationery was provided and I had a company email address!

My first task was to read some manuals as an introduction to SEO and Google Analytics.  Easy peasy, I thought, until the sales team got on the phones and technical questions started flying around the place.  I couldn’t hear my own thoughts and I couldn’t filter out the background noise.  I was starting to feel like a fish out of water.

Some Advice

Now that I am nearing the end of my first week, I am feeling a bit more human.  The best advice I could give to anyone starting an internship is to avoid placing needless pressure on yourself and be realistic.  It is important to remember that an internship is an opportunity to learn and that an employer, who has already seen potential in you, does not expect you to know everything about the job.

Be organised: make a note of any passwords required for applications and bookmark any recommended links.  If you haven’t been assigned a network drive, create a personal folder and save everything in a structured manner.

The first week is all about settling in and learning about the workings of the company.  You may be required to use an email service, an application or a browser you are not familiar with.  Take the time to familiarise yourself with these tools.  Refer to manuals and help sections where possible and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Be confident: ask questions where appropriate.  Obviously in a small company it is important not to absorb too much of your colleague’s work-time, but at the same time it is imperative to grasp the basics.   Jot down your questions and arrange an appropriate time to discuss them.  At this early stage you will be mostly turning to a mentor to answer specific questions.  Be sure to make notes so you do not need to ask the same questions again.

Finally don’t be afraid to mix with the rest of the staff.  It is important to integrate; it will make your experience at the company more enjoyable and it provides you will a bigger pool of people to direct your QUESTIONS at !!

 

Tagged with:  

Digging Deeper Into Your Analytics

We all like to keep an eye on the usual metrics when looking at our Google Analytics accounts. Visits, unique visitors, bounce rates, time on site, and conversion rates all get a look in. These are all great pieces of information for making sure that things are working the way you expect them to on your website, but what if you want to look a little deeper?

Unfortunately Analytics can’t answer every question you might have about your site, in which case it’s time to dust off your Excel For Dummies book and get stuck into manipulating the data yourself. For those of you looking for a good guide to some of the most useful Excel functions for SEO analysis I can recommend the Microsoft Excel for SEO guide from Distilled.net.

Digging deeper often requires large amounts of data to give meaningful answers, so you’re going to want to get familiar with adding the “&limit=50000” to your GA URLs, or better still start using the Google Analytics Data Export API or the Excellent Analytics Excel plug-in.

Keyword Lengths and Conversion Rates

I’m a firm believer that the more you know about your visitors and their behaviour the better you can tailor your product to suit their needs. So, from time to time we go and look at some metrics that are slightly off the beaten track. Have a look at the graph below for instance:

Traffic by keyword length with conversion rate

The longer the keyword, the more likely the conversion.

It charts the traffic and email enquiry conversion rate of traffic over a recent two week period. The first thing that struck me was the more keywords people use to find WhatClinic.com the more likely they are to convert. The second thing was that just over 50% of our email conversions come from people who use 4 or 5 keywords to find the site.

All well and good you say, but what use is information like this? Well, for a website like ours with a long tail focus it shows us how long the keywords in the long tail are. We typically optimise pages for one or two keywords, usually two or three words in length. The data above suggests that maybe some pages should be optimised for slightly longer keywords, or perhaps even two longer keywords.

Thanks to other curious SEOs like SharkSEO we also know that you can write two completely different meta descriptions for the same page and the search engines will pick the description that best matches the keyword being searched for. This opens up some new possibilities about how to organise our data and our site structure. Using the keyword length and conversion data above we can make more informed decisions about how to optimise the resulting pages.

Are Keywords Getting Longer?

Just over a year ago I wrote about how people were using longer keywords to find WhatClinic.com. Seeing as we’re talking about keyword lengths again I thought I’d take a quick peek at some data from this year. I was in for a surprise.

keyword length 2010 and 2011

Keyword length doesn't seem to be changing, but that's not the whole story.

If my data was to be believed keyword lengths were almost exactly the same as they were a year ago. The answer seemed too neat to me, so I decided to do a little segmentation. My suspicion was that by looking at our traffic as a whole I was missing some underlying trends, and it turns out I was right.

WhatClinic.com Irish traffic by keyword length

Irish visitors account for more than their fair share of our short keyword traffic.

Traffic from Ireland accounts for around 19% of our total visits, but as you can see from the chart above it accounts for over 30% of our one and two word keyword traffic. Again the question is how is this information useful or actionable? The simple answer again is to do with the messaging – the page title and the meta description in particular.

In Google.ie we now rank quite well for certain one word keywords like “braces” or “dentist”. While this is great for us in terms of traffic, the pages are really optimised for people looking for our page about braces in Ireland, or dentists in Ireland. This means that as the keywords used to find these pages get more generic / head / short tail that maybe we should look at changing the messaging on them to better reflect more closely what the user is looking for. For the cases above, I think that the messaging might be OK, but we’ll test some alternatives and see how they affect CTR and conversion rates.

The Importance Of Segmentation

The Irish traffic above really skewed the keyword length data above. Seeing as our website deals with so many geographies and our keyword rankings quite a lot across them, any decisions about site structures and one page optimisation should only be made once the overall site figures have been sliced enough to have confidence in them.

Excluding the Irish traffic, keywords have gotten slightly longer since 2010, but not massively so. It is the relative shortening of Irish keywords that is much more significant to us on this occasion.

keyword length with separate Irish data 2010 2011

Irish visitors are skewing the data

We have previously observed similar big differences in user behaviour based on whether the landing takes place on a brochure / listing page or on one of our search results pages. We’ve even observed that the nearer the top of the tree structure a user lands the more likely they are to convert.

It’s often worth digging deeper than the reports or segments in Google Analytics can offer by themselves because the information that comes out can offer you a clearer picture of some of the bigger underlying trends affecting your site and give you the information you need to not only stay ahead of your competitors in the SERPs, but ultimately make your site better for your users.

 

Blueface Business Plus VoIP Review

Blueface VoIP Logo

I’ve been using Blueface as my personal VoIP provider for the last four years, however I waited until two weeks ago to finally switch WhatClinic.com over to their Business Plus account, migrating from another well known VoIP provider.

Blueface has been in the personal VoIP market for about 5 years but despite having had something of a business offering it only seems to have really started to make progress with businesses accounts during the last 12 months.

I had been meaning to move the WhatClinic.com account for a while as we’d been experiencing intermittent quality problems with our previous VoIP provider resulting in the sales team loosing trust with them and using Skype in preference.

Setup

The setup was quick and easy and completed over the web without the need to talk to anyone in Blueface. It was easy to assign phone numbers to SIP accounts and setup the voicemail. Initially our account only came with four SIP addresses, which seemed a bit odd as it had 8 phone numbers. An email to their support department sorted this out 12 hours later at no extra charge.

We use SMON 320 phones and initially we could only make outgoing calls but not receive incoming calls. A quick look on the Blueface support forums quickly found the solution and we were up and running.

Another problem we ran into was calls were taking up to a minute to initiate, i.e. we would dial a number and it wouldn’t start to ring for up to a minute. This lasted a couple of days and eventually resolved itself without any obvious intervention. I suspect that if we had rebooted our phones it would have sorted the issue immediately.

Self Service

One of the major benefits of Blueface as compared to our previous VoiP provider is their self service interface. This allows us to monitor charges in real time as well as adding new phones and changing voicemail settings. Compared to calling a support line, this is a major time saver and gives us considerably more control. This ease of setup and control means we already have more phones working than we had with our old provider so Blueface is getting more of our business.

Quality

The primary reason we moved provider was because of the intermittent quality of our old setup. As a long term personal user I had high level of confidence that the quality was going to be good, and after two weeks of extensive usage we have found it to be consistently better than either our previous VoIP provider or Skype.

During the two week period we have experienced no quality problems, although like any VoIP provider we expect to have occasional regional outages and have prepared contingency solutions.

Price

The Blueface Business Plus package costs €69 a month and includes 8 direct dial numbers, unlimited UK and Ireland landline calls and 250 mobile minutes. Calls to our international customers are significantly lower than with Skype or our previous VoIP provider on a per minute basis. [It should be noted that Skype have several monthly subscription plans that offer significant savings over their per minute rates.]

Simply put, the price is low enough to make telephony charges to most countries a null issue.

Problems

The phone numbers we were assigned were not all in sequence and neither were our voicemail accounts. It would seem to me that this would be a normal requirement for most businesses and I’m sure I could get it sorted out by contacting Blueface support but I think it should be standard.

Overall

We are very happy so far and I would certainly recommend them based upon our experiences. Having said that we have yet to experience any outage yet and in my experience this is the true acid test of any telecoms provider.

 

Tagged with:  
SearchMetrics OPI Graph For eHow.co.uk

SearchMetrics OPI Graph For eHow.co.uk

Just over a week ago Google’s Panda algorithm update was rolled out for all “English language Google users”. Given that our own traffic is largely English-language, and largely Google sourced, we paid particular attention to both our own traffic, which thankfully has increased since the Panda update, and any reports that were available about how other sites were being affected.

Two reports in particular got a lot of attention from bloggers and on Twitter. They were from SearchMetrics and Sistrix and they attempted to give some indication of the drop in “visibility” of particular websites after the algorithm was rolled out.

Two Problems With “Visibility”

The first problem with both of these reports is that they measure whether or not certain websites appear in the search results for a number of keywords that the companies are tracking. SearchMetrics for their part say that “Over 55 million domains and 25 million keywords are continuously monitored“. Sistrix say that their report is “based on a dataset of one million keywords“.

But what about the visibility the websites in question have for keywords these two companies aren’t tracking? How much of the websites’ visibility is invisible to SearchMetrics and Sistrix? The answer to these questions started to come quite quickly from companies who appeared on the “biggest loser” lists.

Demand Media, owners of eHow.com issued a press release aimed at their investors and an accompanying blog post both decrying the inaccuracy of the reports. Doug Scott of DiscountVouchers.co.uk went a step further and published pictures of his Google Analytics account to show how “we have lost none of our traffic“. A number of other companies have since raised their hands and said that they haven’t been affected nearly as badly as the loser lists suggest.

Out of interest, I looked back at our own organic traffic since January 1st and looked at how many different keywords were used to find our website. We have had over 1.4 million unique visitors to the site since the start of the year, and they used 1 million distinct keywords to find us. There is no way that either SearchMetrics or Sistrix could hope to measure our visibility in the search results accurately with that many different keywords in play. The only people who could release accurate data about any website’s visibility would be the search engines themselves, and they’re not likely to do so any time soon.

Visibility Does Not Equal Traffic

The second problem is that readers were confusing visibility losses with traffic losses, and SearchMetrics and Sistrix didn’t do a lot to correct this misconception at the time. In fact SearchMetrics mentioned “the statistical value of traffic distribution” and Sistrix mentioned “click-through rate on specific positions” as elements of their visibility indices, i.e. they were trying to calculate the websites’ traffic for the tracked keywords based on their search results positions.

As with our own example, many of the sites mentioned will have very high numbers of distinct keywords bringing in small amounts of traffic each, meaning that the SearchMetrics and Sistrix visibility indices bear little or no relation to the sites’ actual traffic. In fact, wary of some of the criticism coming their way SearchMetrics have now published a new blog post saying that “Searchmetrics OPI does not calculate the real traffic coming in to web pages“.

Why Publish A Visibility Index Based On Incomplete Data?

So why would these companies publish visibility loser lists knowing as they must how people would misinterpret them? The answer is clear: links and online mentions. A quick look at Yahoo Site Explorer shows that the SearchMetrics article has over 670 external links in, and the Sistrix article has over 150. SearchMetrics generated 111 comments on their post along with 225 ratings, and Sistrix managed 15 comments. There were also lots of Twitter mentions, although these are harder to measure because of the different URL shortening services used. [Figures correct as of 19th April 2011 @ 10am]

SearchMetrics and Sistrix both managed to hop on a rapidly moving story that was being closely monitored by some of the most-likely-to-link people in the world, the SEO community, and they succeeded brilliantly in creating classic link-bait. Their data sets were used to fill a temporary gap in knowledge and spread like wildfire. I even tweeted about the SearchMetrics report in relation to the loss reported for Qype.co.uk because it was so astonishing. What a pity then to find out that the data behind the reports couldn’t hope to tell the whole story in relation to the mentioned websites’ total visibility and traffic.

Tagged with:  

Google Analytics Fast Access Warning

[Update: May 10th - This warning originally read "This report is based on sampled data". Google have now explained that the warning appears any time you report on more than one dimension in Analytics on a date range containing more than 500,000 visits. See the Google Analytics Fast Access Mode help page for more detail.]

Everyone loves Google Analytics. It’s free, full of great features, and most of the time it works like a charm. We use GA data regularly in WhatClinic.com to make important decisions about everything from internal linking structures to on page keyword priorities, and it really comes into its own when something on the site is broken and we need to track the problem down.

However, like a lot of great free web services GA suffers from being too popular. The amount of data it has to crunch for our website alone is staggering, so imagine the load when you add in the tens if not hundreds of millions of other websites that use it too. Unfortunately the strain starts to show as soon as you really dig into your data.

The Dreaded Fast Access Mode Message

One of my most used features on GA is the Advanced Segment, which lets me filter the traffic I’m reporting on in a myriad of different ways. I can report on only the people who landed on our search pages, or only the people who came from Canada, or pretty much any set of people with an analytics parameter in common.

Google have a problem with this great feature though: in order to give you an answer to your query in a reasonable length of time they often fall back on using sampled data, or “Fast Access Mode” as they now call it, if you are using a date range that contains over 500,000 visits.

Google Analytics using sampled data

Sampled Data

Using sampled data is absolutely fine when your data points don’t suffer from a lot of volatility, but if they do then the results can be very unreliable. Take a look at the data set above. It uses sampled data because I’ve created an Advanced Segment with two parameters (user location and page URL) and I’m looking at a period of three and a half months which contains far more than 500,000 visits. Analytics is reporting a conversion rate in April of just 2.65% for the set of visitors I’m looking at.

Now look at the data set below. It is reporting a conversion rate in April of 4.36%. The difference is that it isn’t looking at sampled data because the period of time is much shorter and the visitors number is less than 500,000.

Google Analytics not using sampled data

Real Data

Our conversion data can be very volatile in places because of the niche or long tail nature of what we offer and what I need to report on from time to time. For instance. We might get 1,000 enquiries for dental clinics in Dublin in a week, but if I look at just the visitors who were looking for clinics in Rathmines that figure might drop to just 10, and those ten might have been made up of 3 on Monday, none on Tuesday, 1 on Wednesday, and so on. It’s the same when you look at American visitors to our Mexican dentists pages, or UK visitors to our Turkish cosmetic surgery pages.

Be Sure To Perform A Sanity Check

As with the case above, when something looks like a problem we all tend to look into it and see what’s going on, but when something looks good we tend to let it slide. My advice is any time you see the Fast Access Mode message in GA you should sanity check it by using shorter periods of time. This takes a little time but it will give you a far more reliable picture of what’s going on.

WhatClinic.com left hand side nav screen shot Vs. WhatClinic.com right hand side nav screen shot

 

Most of the time people run A/B tests in order to try and improve a single metric such as their site’s conversion rate, and they do this on the basis that even if the test fails to show an improvement that they can go back to their original setup and everything will be OK. But what if the original setup isn’t OK in the first place?

In the past we have made the mistake of assuming that just because we tested a theory once in the past that it holds true forever. It’s probably not a surprise to find out that this isn’t always the case, especially on a website that has changed it’s layout and functionality as many times as ours has! So every now and again we test a big change on our site for a few days just to make sure the some of our basic assumptions still hold.

Site Navigation On The Left Or The Right?

For the purpose of this test we wanted to see if having the main site navigation links on the left of the page or the right of the page affected our overall conversion rate. We had run this test in the past and having the links on the left outperformed having the links on the right. Seeing as so much had changed on the site in the meantime we decided to try it again.

Google Website Optimiser Results

The original left hand side navigation layout was a clear winner.

The results thankfully were pretty clear. Moving the navigation bar to the right hand side resulted in a drop in conversion across the site of 11.8%. So the navigation is staying where it is on the left hand side. We’re in good company too – Hotels.com in Europe think the left is the correct side for the navigation on their search results pages too, but maybe Airbnb.com know something we don’t? Their navigation is on the right hand side.

What was the last big change your A/B tested, and what was the result?

© 2010 WhatClinic.com Blog