However, the rate of goal completion is only one of the factors involved in optimising a web site. If a source has a 25% goal completion rate, but only brings in four visitors in the measurement period – there may be reasons to suspect that the single conversion might be less important than the half dozen conversions from a lower converting source that sends a lot more visitors. The likely maximum number of visitors from a source is important – so understanding all sources of conversion is essential.

Google Analytics has recently added a “weighting” switch to the Goal Measurement page. I was hoping that this might then weight according to how many conversions were involved. Instead, it does something quite mystifying. The source with the largest count of conversions is listed *last* in the sort order, below dozens of sites with no conversions at all. I can’t imagine why a positive count of conversions sorts after sites with zero conversions.

Here’s an example of the same data, without and with the weighting.

Why the largest volume source of conversions is weighted so that it doesn’t show up at all… I have no idea:

Notice that with the weighting enabled, the 5,000 visitor source just vanishes from the listing altogether. Useful though the idea of weighting the converting sources is, if you have a lot of sources, watch out – you might inadvertently lose track of some valuable sources if you simply enable this switch without paying attention.

http://www.google.com/sitesearch/#utm_source=en-na-us-blog-GSSpricing11/12/2010&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=GSSpricing11/12/2010


Note the presence of the “#utm_…”. Though the permalink in the RSS feed for the blog uses the query parameter method to specify the feed source.

With many sites still using query parameters in the path to specific unique resources, and what appears to be a general lack of use of the Webmaster Tools to remove tracking parameters, I’m wondering how long it’ll be before we start to see Google Analytics and the especially the ever useful Google Analytics Tag Builder, recommending the fragment for tracking… I think I’m going to start testing it.

I’m not sure that this tracking method will do anything to remove the bizarre consequences of forums autoconverting dropped URLs based on adverts, but it might help Google to disambiguate questionable paths from preferred paths.

I logged into our banks internet banking facility. I wanted to make a payment on Friday, 5th February 2010. I went through the identification of the recipient, and the payment and changed the offered date from Monday 8th, to Friday 5th. It refused the payment request, saying that I must choose a date between Monday the 8th and some date in June.

So I picked the 6th (Saturday). Still no go. Then the 7th (Sunday). Still wouldn’t accept it. Finally, I selected the 8th February, a Monday. Bingo! Payment will be processed.

It then processes the payment and tells me that the payment will be taken from the account on Friday the 5th February and deposited in the target account later that day. Which was exactly what I wanted in the first place, and it kept telling me it wouldn’t do.

Imagine my annoyance at having, for ten to fifteen minutes been told I couldn’t do what I wanted, and then being told that despite offering a different date for the payment, it would be paid earlier than I’d actually requested? What if I *had* wanted to pay on the Monday, 8th Feb? Then the funds would have been out of my account on the 5th, and not the 8th, as requested.

I’m disturbed by my Banks inability to work out when they are prepared to act, and the misrepresentation of the dates of actual activity, versus requested. It makes me less confident that they’ll do as I request. and I’m now more likely to pick up the phone or drop into the Bank. Or to change banks.

Purchase Processes – Especially For Special Offers

Our client had a similar issue – there was a particular offer they made, which couldn’t be fulfilled through the order interface, until after another action had been completed. But this wasn’t expressed clearly to users. They wanted the offer, signed up for what they were told to buy, and then couldn’t see the mechanism to access the offer – until they’d completed another stage in the the checkout. There were technical reasons why this order of actions was important – but the user could have been given a text notice that this is what the system would do. It’s no good when only *your* staff know how the system works – it is the customer that needs to be told, and told clearly, or conversion rates online suffer and the customer service phone lines heat up.

The only diagnostic that this company identified was an increased dropout in the funnel and decrease in conversion rates – when they were expecting total sales to increase.

This is a classic example of “you have to understand your business the way that a customer sees it, not how you know it works”.

This article is part of a series of short meditations on user interaction and the extension into social marketing, following on from a look at reducing the barriers to interaction, and some of the pros and cons of allowing user generated content, in “SEO: Remember Relevance?“

Rant mode engaged…

PC World is using an analagous “grab everything early” model for it’s online forums. Instead of the relaxed model used by Google, where you can add increasingly large amounts of personal data to your online persona, PC World *requires* a form to be completed, and users to identify what email newsletters they’ll receive, in order to drop a comment on an article.

Making this even worse, is that the form user interface has a particularly stupid problem. When filling in details, you must provide email address, country of residence and… a US Zip Code. I live in the UK. Strangely, I don’t have a US Zip code for my UK address.

Annoyingly, every time I tried a new way to pass this obstacle, it would keep re-checking the “please bombard me with offers for stuff I don’t want” box. If I uncheck the box, have the courtesy to leave it unchecked. This forced re-checking may well increase sign up rates, but it doesn’t make PC World more loved and needed.

I poked, quickly, around the PC World site looking for a way to provide feedback, and couldn’t find an obvious way to suggest that the registration process was both onerous and broken. So that’s why i’m posting here… PC World has made it clear that the audience is US-only and Foreigners can fuck off aren’t important. And PC World don’t want to hear from me unless they can try and sell me something. I’m not interested in engaging with that kind of business. So, I won’t be part of PC World forums, even for a single comment.

Lessons

If you want to offer social media, it has to be, like a good sales process, easier to be engaged than not. Good marketing and purchase systems make you feel welcome and make the process so easy that it is almost easier to buy than walk away (and that *doesn’t* mean making walking away harder with mousetrapping and other technological tricks). Look at Twitter and FaceBook – easy to sign up and you get invited to be involved, not pressured.

Undoubtedly PC World would see the newsletter sign up rate decline if they changed their registration process. And the deliberate discarding of my preference to avoid unwanted email is just insulting. What, my preference to avoid newsletters I won’t read, is not important to you?

I know PC World wants money, and they want to act a gateway to valuable information. But guys, you aren’t the sole source of information. You need to (re-)read Clay Shirky on Paywalls. What you’re doing with onerous registration forms for commenters, is creating a soft paywall around interaction. That’s not a good idea, long term, IMO. Competitors who make it easier to engage, will probably start beating you – as there’ll be more comments from people less engaged tightly… and those people could fall into your influence if you handle them well.

PCWorld guys, stop thinking like an offline paper with an online presence. Start thinking about how to properly engage with an audience.

Rant over.

Summary

There’s lessons about handling user interactions here.

Users don’t mind engaging with you.

They don’t like being “sold at”.

They don’t like you requiring lots of data before they engage lightly.

Can I avoid PC World? Absolutely. It wouldn’t break my heart if I never saw another PC World article. If they do cover things that interest me, and I think either the author or a commenter has missed the point, I might comment. But now, I’d rather Twitter it than do so on the PC World site. And that makes Twitter richer and PC World poorer.

Think about “friction”.

How hard is it for your users to engage with you? How easily can they point out problems that might help you? Yes, they’ll post other stuff too, but you know what? I got serious, private, answers about the best way to use GitHub public and private repositories from Tekkub. Imagine how I feel about Tekkub and GitHub now. Compare that with how I feel about PC World. Losing GitHub would be a major problem for me. I already pay GitHub for a private Repository. I’d pay them more, to make sure they kept running. PC World? I genuinely don’t care.

Brands have to engage with and be useful to their clients, to be well regarded over long periods. I think PC World set up short sighted performance measurements surrounding registration and sign up, and lost the plot. Make sure you don’t do the same for your business.

I don’t remember seeing this addressed in any of the web analytics blogs and books that I’ve read for the last few years. It’s possible I missed something, and I’ll gladly add references to those articles, if anyone contributes them in comments here, or in emails to me.

Observation

Like much of good science, this starts with an observation:

When you look at the sources for which you have control of the requested URL, a substantial fraction have no referring info.

To understand what that observation means, we need to know a bit more about how visitors arrive, and what sources of data we have about the visitor.

Page Requests

Paid search, banner advertising, email and so on, allow you control the page request offered by users. You can add tracking parameters, and that lets your web measurement system collect that the request came from a particular source. That’s pretty important for click fraud measurement. If you aren’t adding tracking tags, then the visitor could be turning up from anywhere for any reason.

For example, lets’ assume that you are advertising for an Organic Cosmetics business. You place an advert on a keyword offering “organic acne treatment”. You bring people to a page on the site, for that treatment – http://www.organic acne treatment.com /our-products . You *MUST* add a tracking tag, or use some kind of autotagging (offered by AdWords, Yahoo!Search Marketing, etc) so that clicks from advertising can be measured by your web analytics service, and attributed to your paid search campaign.

What the tag looks like, will depend on your Web Analytics package. If you use Google Analytics, you might have tags like “?utm_media=ppc&utm_source=yahoo&utm_creative=organic+cosmetics”. So the requested page will be something like:

http://www.organic acne treatment.com /our-products?utm_media=ppc&utm_source=yahoo&utm_creative=organic+cosmetics

Without that, all you know is that someone requested that page… or is it?

And, of course, knowing that the click arrived as a result of an activity where *you* control the page request (typical of paid advertising opportunities), means that you now have a handle on part of the click fraud questions.

Referer (sic)

Something else that a web browser can optionally tell the web server, is known as the “referer”, in RFC2616 about the HTTP protocol (See Part 14, on Headers). This “referer” header sent from your web browser to the web server, says what the page request was, for the page *before* the request to the server. So we might see that the request for our page in the example, was referred to by “http://www google com/search?q=organic+acne+treatment” (and there’s usually some other stuff in there, describing the language and the browser and so on). So we know that a search engine was the source, and we know the keyword.

However, we don’t *know* that this click was from paid search. A common frustration amongst new advertisers is failing to identify clicks from AdWords, because advert tracking tags have not been added. Without the tracking parameters, all you have to work from is the “referer” header volunteered by the browser – and that only tells you that the user was looking at a page, not whether they clicked a free or a paid link.

So, one common misattribution is to *over-allocate* clicks to organic search and *under-allocate* to paid search, because neither tracking tags are available, nor is there any common way to tell from the “referer” field, that the source was paid search. I’m going to ignore the further complexities of referrer headers when using contextual advertising – it is much more complex :)

Tying the Pieces Together

Assume that we now have tagged clicks, so we can tell the paid sources that are sending traffic. We have the paid source telling us what they claim. We can match the two pieces of data. If they don’t match, then we have some further questions about the sources of mismatch. I’m not going into that, in this article. I’m going to take a sideways look at that other data-stream, the “referer”.

When you have a good source of paid clicks, one that you can trust as delivering a high fraction of the clicks they claim, and where we get good conversion rates and matching keywords and search queries, we can infer that the people being sent are are also “good” – no or few spoofing robots, no or few paid clickers or fraudsters, etc.

If we now look at the “referer”, we should see that all the visitors come from a page with paid search on it, shouldn’t we?

We don’t. Anywhere from 10% to more than 40% of the clicks have no referer_info at all, or have some clearly dummy data inserted instead of a real referrer.

Attribution Of Origin

So if we have no tracking parameters, we can only know what the origin is, if we have the “referer” field correctly filled in. And in about a fifth of the paid search cases, we don’t. So what does that tell us about “Direct” traffic?

It should tell us that Direct traffic is partially composed of search engine driven traffic, that is missing a referrer header. Some of it will be paid search, some organic search and some from other resources that are potentially trackable.

In other words, there may be more than 50% more clicks that should be attributable to organic search, than are showing in normal web measurements. And Direct is over-represented as a consequence of the way that data is collected.

If you have paid search clicks being tagged and tracked, this means that there is a systematic data error, in which clicks are allocated to Direct, when they come from unknown searches on unidentified organic search engine results.

Summary

Watch out for over-allocation to “Direct” as a consequence of missing or misleading information fed by Web Browsers to web servers.

You should be able to use paid search data to estimate the likely misallocation of clicks to Direct when they should be organic search, and even to estimate the likely frequency for higher volume keywords.

AFAICS, most web measurement and analysis services do not compensate for missing “referer” fields – they don’t even directly report on the number of missing referrer fields in attributed clicks, making the estimation of misattributed clicks hard.

Thanks to “bizwriter” on Twitter for drawing this article to my attention.

• Google will struggle to retain revenues using a variety of techniques
• Searchers will spend more time browsing and convert after more clicks
• Online revenues will generally increase – but business margins will be squeezed
• Internet Theft Scandals – Click Fraud, Phishing and Account Theft

Details and the consequences? Read on…

Google Will Adjust To Preserve Revenues

The basic idea of paid search is simple. Searchers submit search queries, and advertisers pay to have their adverts shown to more or less interested searchers. This meshes with the purchasing process (buying model) in several ways. At the most basic, when someone searches for your unique trademarked business or product name, it is likely that this searcher is intending to buy something. More likely than if they’d typed a competitors name. When they search for something that describes the product category, they are less likely to buy – they are in an earlier stage of the buying process.

Auctions have some basic characteristics. As a broad generalisation, the more bidders there are in an auction, the higher the revenue for the sellers. So Google’s goals have to include increases in the number of bidders in an auction – Broad Match and adding ever more advertisers all help with this. Convincing advertisers to bid high – traffic scales heavily with position; Google needs to convince advertisers (or, rather, prevent them from becoming aware of the relationship) that position and click quality are not related, but that position and volume are related. Finally, Google needs more outlets, so that advertisers see more reasons (more impressions) to be part of the ecosystem; however, that largely means adding new, smaller volume, publishers – some will have niche specialist interests, but overall this encourages more Made For AdSense sites, which, IME, have an appallingly poor conversion rate and value (reducing click quality by adding more outlets).

You’d expect that in retaliation, advertisers would then want to stick to Exact Match and using only Google’s Search Pages. There’s other factors at play, though.

Users miskey – they can’t remember the name of the company properly. So someone looking for the travel company Thomas Cook might key “thomson cooke”, “tomas cuik’ and all sorts of other variations. This means that Exact Match isn’t enough to identify all people looking for the trademark or brand name. Broad match helps by allowing Google to send these near misses to the right advertiser. Google do a phenomenal job of matching; if an advertiser like Travelocity doesn’t use “cheap holidays” as a search term, then Google will match a high bidding Broad Match keyword to that search.

People will also type more specific searches, longer searches; most searches, by a long margin, have more than two words in the search query. Users will type “logitech mac support” or similar, to more rapidly jump to stuff they know exists somewhere in the vendors site. Some of these longer searches won’t lead to sales – as in this example, some searches are support inquiries. So Exact Match also fails as being too specific, because these search queries wouldn’t be matched. Phrase Match is useful to find unexpected variations and more specific searches – leading to the idea that you can help users to jump deeper into the site with the right combination of technology and advert. Again, typos and miscomprehension by users will mean that Broad Match captures additional searchers who intended to find the business, but would have failed with solely Exact or simple Phrase Matches in the campaign.

Google’s problem is that when someone has decided on “Honda”, or “iPhone”, the searcher is unlikely to be deflected by alternatives. The consequence is that there will be few competitors for a brand name. Brand names are usually the best return on investment – so the average costs per click will tend to decrease for brand names. This is part of what you’d expect from a basic analysis of the buying process – you generally type a specific company name after you have researched and typically just before buying. So there is an inbuilt pressure to decrease advertising on exact matched competitors name – resulting in lower revenues from trademark terms. That’s a problem for Google.

The earlier phase searches, which tend to be naturally higher in volume as people look for alternatives from which to choose, naturally imply a worse ROI – you need to pay for more clicks to support the research, and the conversion rate is lower because searchers are researching. This too tends to drive Average Cost Per Click down, in order to retain a positive return on investment.

Google needs to keep advertisers focused on Broad Match. This lets Google place unsold inventory, offer competitor adverts on trademark searches, and so on. The goal for Google is to increase the number of participants in the auction (helping increase average cost per click and hence inreased revenues), to find ways to increase advertising on unsold inventory and to affect the minimum bid.

Some techniques that are likely to be used by Google?

Expect to hear more about the difficulty of reaching interested searchers with organic search, now that personal search is becoming more deeply embedded. If advertisers think that they are missing audience because of personal search, that they can only reach with paid search, then there will be more advertisers and increased competition. This will be partially driven because of the effects of recession… in some market segments there will be reduced interest, and this will naturally translate as reduced search volumes, resulting in fears that personal search is sapping share of voice.

Expect to hear more about Quality Score changes, probably surrounding the calculation of the minimum cost to appear on a page. This is not the same as, but is confusingly similar in name to, the estimated cost to appear on the first page. The intention will probably be that if the CTR is lower than some target value derived from the rest of the network, that the minimum price is adjusted to meet some revenue goal – it won’t be written like that – I can’t guess how Google will describe the technique, other than that is likely to involve some description about “improving user search experience”. There will still have to be a way to allow $0.01/click – a feature that attracts many advertisers, few of whom have any real chance of achieving this… but it remains an important differentiator over Yahoo and the other competitors in this space. I think it is possible to offer both, because you only get $0.01 on high volume, high CTR keywords – IOW, not things that affect most advertisers.

Expect more dilution of “real search”. Google still wants additional outlets and will continue to re-present domain parks, “fake search”, selected content match outlets and other “opportunities” as if they were what naive advertisers expect from keyword search (that is, that the advert is shown directly in response to a real user search that leads to a directly relevant site – much as happens with organic search results). Google will want the increased impression volume and the *overlap* of keywords with different intent that allows a single outlet to have larger counts of competing advertisers.

Expect more messaging about the synergy of paid and organic search – that even when you have achieved page dominance for the targeted keyword, you should still be advertising as well topping organic rankings. This increases competition, ensures that there are at least ten plausible advertisers, etc. I expect the messaging around this to increase as advertising volume and value shrink.

Expect more overseas advertisers. Google doesn’t offer USD bidding to smaller overseas bidders. The exchange rate isn’t notified to overseas bidders. So, especially when currency exchange rates are in flux, Google can make margin on exchange rates. I expect that Google can easily and all-but-undetectably collect additional revenue on overseas bidders, by tweaking exchange rates – AFAICS, the auction is held in USD, so exchange rate changes are needed for anyone not using USD. This would be non-US income – no-one in the USA will blink at using exchange rates to improve revenues from non-US companies.

Radically – if Google were to remove Exact Match, they could make dramatic transformations of revenue expectation. Would they do this? I think they would, if they could claim that it improved the search users experience. If advertisers fail to appear on a substantial fraction of searches, especially when those clicks turn up in organic search clicks, it would allow Google to say that exact match was preventing searchers from seeing the results that they want to see. This would be a huge step for Google, and they’d probably need a lot of research. It’ll be piloted by some large accounts and evidence will probably be drawn from wide-category vendors, like eBay. It’ll turn out to be complete rubbish for narrowly focused vendors, but Google’s objectives are maintain share of search, and only secondarily to satisfy advertisers – the auction will take care of some that advertiser anxiety.

Increased Search Time & Reduced Conversion Rates

Most people are planning on reducing spend. They’ll do so by spending more carefully. They’ll look around more. They’ll be taking more personal recommendations. Trust in the stability of large organisations and well known brands will continue to be eroded – which means that the right businesses, with the right trust validations, can emerge from nowhere; just because your business has been running for 5, 10, 50 or 150 years is no guarantee that you haven’t recently based your business on false expectations of investments and earnings. A new business with the right accreditations can play on the same field as a 200 year old business, and can raise fear and doubt about the financial stability of well established players.

So, shoppers will be more wary. You’ll need to improve your sites to have online messages address current concerns. The fears, uncertainties and doubts that were addressed in marketing communications last year, won’t work so effectively this year; the concerns are different. Your customers will be concerned that even buying from a major brand will damage them, or is at least risky. Reassurance and validation will be important – especially with the media focusing on bad news. Bad news sells and media outlets will want more viewers. The at-risk media outlets, old broadcast media, seeing declining share of advertising budgets will want to stimulate sales through increasing interest in controversy, further weakening consumer confidence. Failure to address offline media reports online will impact conversion rates – though you will want to avoid directly feeding the controversy.

Minor brands should be able to gain, if they are cash flow positive or can find investors with imagination, foresight and cash. Guarantees and warranties, future-safe products and ways to reduce service costs for consumers; ways to manage domestic finances effectively; ways to cut back while still having luxuries.

The results of these will be to put some strange pressures on paid search. Companies that have previously survived on word of mouth and low or zero advertising, will need new customers. They’ll advertise. As new advertisers, they’ll make a lot of mistakes and won’t be willing to pay for expert assistance. That will increase claims of click fraud, and apply upward pressures on bids, sometimes from advertisers that shouldn’t be in the auction.

Existing advertisers will want to improve performance and will decrease budgets and target the spend on the most effective keywords and adverts. This will increase pressures on the paid search companies to dilute the inventory – the result is likely to be that overall clicks/conversion will continue to worsen, otherwise the paid search companies will report losses, and decreases in search volumes. It’s always bigger news if a big company loses, than a bunch of smaller businesses – so expect that larger businesses will use their asymmetric control of information to manage smaller customer businesses expectations and margins, through manipulating click quality. Expect the search engines to protect themselves at the expense of smaller advertisers.

ROI will generally worsen, but there will be islands where specific companies have struck the right messages that resonate with users. The result will be that paid search competition will continue to heat up. I expect that the average CPC will decline, the total value of paid search will decline, but some advertisers in various niches will have justifiably higher Average Cost Per Click and increased spending.

Affiliates

The affiliate industry will also become even more heated. Out of a job? Looking to make money with a low capital investment? Then you could become an affiliate…

However, who needs more novice affiliates? What does an influx of untrained, cash starved and at least initially ineffective affiliates do, when the real super affiliates (not the one man and a dog operations blogging from “super affiliates are us”, but the real, quiet, and highly effective super affiliates) already handle about 80% of affiliate traffic? The answer is that these new affiliates will provide free advertising for marginally effective businesses, by spending their own money essentially as an investment. Expect more companies to switch to affiliate advertising models to control their in-house marketing costs and to reduce spend on advertising agencies. Expect a lot more annoyed novice affiliates.

The affiliate industry will boom; but leave a lot of disillusioned “internet advertisers” in their wake. There will be some emergent new stars – not everyone who comes in will fail, and some existing leaders will cash out and move on. Expect some churn in the top affiliate products – but that’s pretty standard in the industry anyway.

I expect that the real super affiliates will be the same next year as this year – they have developed their techniques, and they are effective. They might retrench a little and change their focus on the businesses they are interested in, but they’ll survive and probably continue modest growth; their main obstacle to growth has historically been cash; 60 and 90 day payment cycles on sales conversions mean that working cash is tied up, effectively limiting them to “four to six inventory turns” a year. That reduces their rates of growth, and with banks not in lending mode, these guys are bottled up, at least in paid search.

Online Revenues Will Increase

Well, they will unless the internet theft scandals are outrageously large. In a search for the best value, comparison shopping online and internet supported purchases over the phone will become more important. Where businesses aren’t already selling online, there will be pressures now to do so, to reduce the costs of sales. The final result will be that more is sold online – even though total sales from all sources will decline. There may be some countries where there is a decline in online sales, but it will be less than the decline in total sales – the internet will be seen as one of the brighter spots. Just.

There’s only one reason for internet sales to increase. If executed effectively, you can reduce the costs of making the sale. That tends to be less and less true the lower the volume of sales; so expect continued outsourcing to places like Yahoo!Merchant Stores, where the infrastructure and development costs have already been put in place, and allows dropping the cost of sales. The interim step between often dreadful sites with no compelling call to action and a full online sales site, is a phone number; but placed on an inactive site that doesn’t reflect your best price and the unique value in buying from you rather than a competitor, this will have no effect. So expect the more savvy small business to look for CMS based websites where they can update their own content. I’m expecting that smarter SME’s will be investing more in templated CMS backed websites than the current static crop.

And metrics. Web analytics – free tools like Google Analytics – properly used, can reveal a lot. The problem for SMEs is setting up and understanding the data. There should be an increased demand for skills in setting up analytics, and interpreting what is happening.

Internet Theft Scandals

With money tight and some smart people out of a job… expect internet fraud to increase. With businesses looking for excuses to write off problem debts, expect more disclosure of problems, probably triggered by an inadvertently exposed online scam. This is obviously a tentative projection, as it depends on unforeseeable circumstances. However, this year is the first year since 1994 (when I started internet sales seriously), when I can see reasons to add excuses to the balance sheet, some understanding of the risks to businesses and that even corporations are affected by fraudsters, and a large value of online business that probably will increase (at least in relative terms), and an increase in technological capability by scammers and fraudsters. The combined pressures might make it attractive for the first time to attribute losses to technologically sophisticated thieves.

Online security for the average consumer has not improved in any seriously identifiable way since 1994, other than the progressive plugging of vulnerabilities in web browsers and servers. The introduction of Secure HTTP (https, or “secure server” technology) back then, provided users with a somewhat artificial degree of confidence. Many web sites offer access to financially significant resources with only an account name and password. Account names and passwords are insufficient for best security practices. Banks now often offer multiple levels of password and CAPTCHA, and may require authentication through encrypted PIN checkers – beginning to approach the holy trinity of security (“something that you are, something that you have and something that you know” – at least two of those are addressed by the better banks). However, there are still far too many ways to spend money online that are protected only by guessable account names and passwords, and by essentially unprotected mechanisms to send money to scammers.

There will be scandals about this. Probably soon. If there’s a sniff of a problem, then the offline media will pounce. These media need to pounce and will argue forcefully; their businesses are in decline, and they’ll need to savage the failures of online businesses to help protect their own. While this would be a significantly negative sum game for all online sales, the benefit of defection by an attacked business will be high; “We really made money, and we only show a loss because of internet theft we couldn’t control” will be an attractive excuse to some business, at some point. And then the skies will open and the extent of internet crime will be an issue.

That will damage sales. Hugely. Even if the effects are already part of current accounting systems, reported as part of business accounts and effectively managed by all online businesses, the *perception* of reductions in safety will be very damaging. I don’t see any sign of widespread adoption of even “best practice” account management – internet wide consistent login methods and messages, proper understanding of what a “secure server” means, and so on. While users are prepared to pay money to sites they can’t properly identify in return for promises to deliver products they don’t receive, across national borders (losing nationally accountable and interested police enforcement), this problem will continue to grow. The individual losses are small; the investigations complex. At some point, this will become a more serious problem to deal with than Enron and Madhoff. I think it’ll be this year.

Consequences

New advertisers will start by thinking about paid search – increasing pressures there. This will result in disappointment and claims of click fraud, especially if new advertisers discover that a click is not a click… different clicks have different values, even if Google conflates clicks from multiple sources. Expect a lot more noise and heat from new advertisers who feel they have been mislead.

Existing advertisers will mostly reduce and focus spend. AvCPC will have a downward pressure, counteracted by the SE’s including low value inventory – weakening conversion rates and hiding it in a generally slower market with inbuilt tendencies for longer latency and reduced likelihood of sales. ROI will get worse; the question is whether the business can take a few quarters of bad ROI in order to survive to an upturn. There should be increased attention to improving the web site, however, this will be diluted by the feelings of senior management that enough work has been done on the web site – “it’s a finished product” – and that there have been sales, so all that is needed is more visitors. IME, that’s usually wrong – there’s usually a lot of ways to make a site more effective in selling, even for long latency sales.

There will be a switch to increase SEO efforts. If purchasers will spend more time in research anyway, increasing the clicks and site visits per sale, then organic search results become more interesting. This will increase interest in spammy linking as people learn their way into search engine marketing. There will also be increased interest in affiliate advertising – if you aren’t skilled in internet advertising, then getting affiliates to advertise on your behalf will be interesting. However, this again should result in increased interest in web site design improvements; it won’t, because once a business have “put your brochure online” the naive perception is that there’ll be nothing else to do. There’s still far too many naive advertisers with ineffective web sites and a management team that focuses on volume of traffic, not the quality of that traffic and the quality of the response from the website.

There will be a decrease in search volumes for products. Despite the increased research for purchases, search volumes for commercial products will be negatively affected. That’s partially because the economy is slowing, but mostly because people are learning the online environment; they know where to go to get various things at decent prices, so they don’t have to do so much searching and researching – I haven’t heard anyone complain for the last 18 months that they are “useless at searching”. This year may be first year where the combined effects of knowing your internet neighbourhood and slowing commercial activity, actually dent the growth of both paid and organic search.

A significant internet theft scandal will cause a dramatic decrease in online consumer spending, if it bursts. Expect new web browser technology and new web site authentication services. At the moment, I’m pretty sure that the only way to tackle the identify theft problem is solutions that, as an industry, we’re nowhere near considering. The short term consequences will be to push the internet clock back towards use supporting research for purchases, not for actual online purchases.

CMS’s will become more important for SME’s. They’ll finally be able to build customised landing pages, important for improving the effectiveness of paid search.

Web analytics, neglected or misinterpreted, will increase in significance – and Google Analytics low price point makes it a very attractive platform to use, despite the poor general knowledge about how to best use it. The downside of “free” is that expectations of the value are low, and users are unwilling to pay a lot to understand the benefits; smarter businesses will invest in learning how to use GA effectively (IOW, not as it comes out of the box).

The question of excluding your own IP address came up on the new Google AdWords Help forum today, and I realised that I didn’t know where I could find a series of screen clips showing the bits to click on. Here they are. :)

If you access Google Analytics from inside AdWords, the coloured bar in the clips will be AdWords Green, not Analytics Orange.

Log in to Google Analytics, or select the Analytics tab in your linked AdWords account. If you see a graph of results, click the “Analytics Settings” link in the top right, to get to the “Analytics Settings” page, with a list of your profiles.

On the far right of the Analytics Settings page, click on the “edit” link for the profile you want to change.

On the Settings page, look for the “Filters Applied to Profile” section.

Click on “Add Filter” to the far right of that bar.

Select the “Exclude All Traffic From an IP Address” drop down. I’ve censored my IP address, but you can still see the “\.” between numbers, *NOT* just a dot.

Insert your own IP address with a backslash in front of every “dot” in the address

Click “save changes”.

That’s it.

When Will You See Changes?

Note that the exclusion *ONLY* happens with effect from “now”. That is, Google Analytics won’t go back in history and remove previous activity from your site. Only stuff you at look at from today onwards will exclude your own traffic.

Viewing ONLY your own traffic

Of course, you could create another profile for your site, and use it to monitor *only* access from your IP address – so you can see what your own company users are interested in, on your site. Just use a custom filter to only include visits from your own IP address.