Fat Pandas and Thin Content

If you’ve been hit by the Panda update or are just worried about its implications, you’ve probably read a lot about “thin” content. We spend our whole lives trying to get thin, and now Google suddenly hates us for it. Is the Panda update an attempt to make us all look like Pandas? Does Google like a little junk in the trunk?

It’s confusing and it's frustrating, especially if you have real money on the line. It doesn’t help that “thin” content has come to mean a lot of things, and not every definition has the same solution. To try to unravel this mess, I'm going to present 7 specific definitions of “thin” content and what you can do to fatten them up.

Quality: A Machine’s View

To make matters worse, “thin” tends to get equated with “quality” – if you’ve got thin content, just increase your quality. It sounds good, on the surface, but ultimately Google’s view of quality is defined by algorithms. They can’t measure the persuasiveness of your copy or the manufacturing standards behind your products. So, I’m going to focus on what Google can measure, specifically, and how they might define “thin” content from a machine’s perspective.

1. True Duplicates (Internal)

True, internal duplicates are simply copies of your own pages that make it into the search index, almost always a results of multiple URLs that lead to the same content. In Google’s eyes, every URL is a unique entity, and every copy makes your content thinner:

A few duplicates here and there won’t hurt you, and Google is able to filter them out, but when you reach the scale of an e-commerce site and have 100s or 1000s of duplicates, Google’s “let us handle it” mantra fails miserably, in my experience. Although duplicates alone aren’t what the Panda update was meant to address, these duplicates can exacerbate every other thin content issue.

The Solution

Get rid of them, plain and simple. True duplicates should be canonicalized, usually with a 301-redirect or the canonical tag. Paths to duplicate URLs may need to be cut, too. Telling Google that one URL is canonical only to link to 5 versions on your own site will only prolong your problems.

2. True Duplicates (Cross-site)

Google is becoming increasingly aggressive about cross-site duplicates, which may differ by their wrapper but are otherwise the exact same pieces of content across more than one domain:

Too many people assume that this is all an issue of legitimacy or legality – scrapers are bad, but syndication and authorized duplication are fine. Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t really care. The same content across multiple sites is SERP noise, and Google will try to filter it out.

The Solution

Here’s where things start to get tougher. If you own all of the properties or control the syndication, then a cross-domain canonical tag is a good bet. Choose which version is the source, or Google may choose for you. If you’re being scraped and the scrapers are outranking you, you may have to build your authority or file a DMCA takedown. If you’re a scraper and Panda knocked you off the SERPs, then go Panda.

3. Near Duplicates (Internal)

Within your own site, “near” duplicates are just that – pages which vary by only a small amount of content, such as a couple of lines of text:

A common example is when you take a page of content and spin it off across 100s of cities or topics, changing up the header and a few strategic keywords. In the old days, the worst that could happen is that these pages would be ignored. Post-Panda, you risk much more severe consequences, especially if those pages make up a large percentage of your overall content.

Another common scenario is deep product pages that only vary by a small piece of information, such as the color of the product or the size. Take a T-shirt site, for example – any given style could come in dozens of combinations of gender, color, and size. These pages are completely legitimate, from a user perspective, but once they multiple into the 1000s, they may look like low-value content to Google.

The Solution

Unfortunately, this is a case where you might have to bite the bullet and block these pages (such as with META NOINDEX). For the second scenario, I think that can be a decent bet. You might be better off focusing your ranking power on one product page for the T-shirt instead of every single variation. In the geo-keyword example, it’s a bit tougher, since you built those pages specifically to rank. If you’re facing large-scale filtering or devaluation, though, blocking those pages is better than the alternative. You may want to focus on just the most valuable pages and prune those near duplicates down to a few dozen instead of a few thousand. Alternatively, you’ve got to find a way to add content value, beyond just a few swapped-out keywords.

4. Near Duplicates (Cross-site)

You can also have near duplicates across sites. A common example is a partnered reseller who taps into their customers’ databases to pull product descriptions. Add multiple partners, plus the original manufacturer’s site, and you end up with something like this:

While the sites differ in their wrappers and some of their secondary content, they all share the same core product description (in red). Unfortunately, it’s also probably the most important part of the page, and the manufacturer will naturally have a ranking advantage.

The Solution

There’s only one viable long-term solution here – if you want to rank, you’ve got to build out unique content to support the borrowed content. It doesn’t always take a lot, and there are creative ways to generate content cost-effectively (like user-generated content). Consider the product page below:

The red text is the same, but here I’ve supplemented it with 2 unique bits of copy: (1) a brief editorial description, and (2) user reviews. Even a unique 1-2 sentence lead-off editorial that’s unique to your site can make a difference, and UGC is free (although it does take time to build).

Of course, the typical argument is “I don’t have the time or money to create that much unique content.” This isn’t something you have to do all at once – pick the top 5-10% of your best sellers and start there. Give your best products some unique content and see what happens.

5. Low Unique Ratio

This scenario is similar to internal near-duplicates (#3), but I’m separating it out because I find it manifests in a different way on a different set of sites. Instead of repeating body content, sites with a low ratio of unique content end up with too much structure and too little copy:

This could be a result of excessive navigation, mega-footers, repeated images or dynamic content – essentially, anything that’s being used on every page that isn’t body copy.

The Solution

Like internal near-duplicates, you’ve got to buckle down and either beef up your unique content or consider culling some of these pages. If your pages are 95% structure with 1-2 sentences of unique information, you really have to ask yourself what value they provide.

6. High Ad Ratio

You’ve all seen this site, jam-packed with banners ads of all sizes and AdSense up and down both sides (and probably at the top and bottom):

Of course, not coincidentally, you’ve also got a low amount of unique content in play, but Google can take an especially dim view of loading up on ads with nothing to back it up.

So, how much is too much? Last year, an affiliate marketer posted a very interesting conversation with an AdWords rep. Although this doesn’t technically reveal anything about the organic algorithm, it does tell us something about Google’s capabilities and standards. The rep claims that Google views a quality page as having at least 30% unique content, and it can only have as much space devoted to ads as it does to unique content. More importantly, it strongly suggests that Google can algorithmically measure both content ratio (#5) and ad ratio.

The Solution

You’ve got to scale back, or you’ve got to build up your content. Testing is very important here. Odds are good that, if your site is jammed with ads, some of those ads aren’t getting much attention. Collect the data, find out which ones, and cut them out. You might very well find that you not only improve your SEO, but you also improve the CTR on your remaining ads.

7. Search within Search

Most large (and even medium-sized) sites, especially e-commerce sites, have pages and pages of internal search results, many reachable by links (categories, alphabetical, tags, etc.):

Google has often taken a dim view of internal search results (sometimes called “search within search”, although that term has also been applied to Google’s direct internal search boxes). Essentially, they don’t want people to jump from their search results to yours – they want search users to reach specific, actionable information.

While Google certainly has their own self-interest in mind in some of these cases, it’s true that internal search can create tons of near duplicates, once you tie in filters, sorts, and pagination. It’s also arguable that these pages create a poor search experience for Google users.

The Solution

This can be a tricky situation. On the one hand, if you have clear conceptual duplicates, like search sorts, you should consider blocking or NOINDEXing them. Having the ascending and descending version of a search page in the Google index is almost always low value. Likewise, filters and tags can often create low-value paths to near duplicates.

Search pagination is a difficult issue and beyond the scope of this post, although I’m often in favor of NOINDEXing pages 2+ of search results. They tend to convert poorly and often look like duplicates.

A Few Words of Caution

Any change that would massively reduce your search index is something that has to be considered and implemented carefully. While I believe that thin content is an SEO disadvantage and that Google will continue to frown on it, I should also note that not all of these scenarios are necessarily reflected in the Panda update. These issues do reflect longer-standing Google biases and may exacerbate Panda-related problems.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen very few success stories of Panda recovery at this stage, but I strongly believe that addressing thin content, increasing uniqueness, and removing your lowest value pages from the index can have a very positive impact on SEO. I’d also bet good money that, while the Panda algorithm changes may be adjusted and fine-tuned, Google’s attitude toward thin content is here to stay. Better to address content problems now than find yourself caught up in the next major update.

Sad panda image licensed from iStockPhoto (©2010).

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14 Things to Ask Before Starting a PPC Project

14 Things to Ask Before Starting a PPC Project: "

I was alerted to a post titled “Failed SEO – Who’s to Blame” recently and Julie Joyce asked for a comment response from the PPC perspective.

My comment started to get pretty long so I turned it into a blog post with questions you need answered before you start a new PPC project. But, most of these are applicable to any marketing initiative, including SEO.

1. Who is the decision maker for the client? Frequently you will work with numerous people that represent your client. They may all have valuable input but, you need to agree on which one is in charge. Who has the final say if a decision needs to be made? If you don’t determine this before moving forward, any answers you get to the following items may come into question if there is a problem down the road.

2. What are the fees and terms? You need to have a contract that outlines how much the client has agreed to pay and what they get in return. You also need to include a minimum time commitment to ensure that you have enough time to properly optimize the campaigns and try to meet the client’s goals.

3. What is the budget? The client’s budget is an integral part of the campaign development process. If you don’t know what the client’s budget is when you start, you may start developing a strategy for a budget that is not in line with reality. Without knowing the budget you really shouldn’t discuss any other facets of the campaign including which networks you’ll advertise on and what the goals are.

4. What is considered a conversion? Which type of conversion is most valuable? In most cases, it’s fairly easy to look at a website and understand what is considered a conversion. But, your client may have different goals for different products or services, may want more phone calls than emails or may not consider anything but an actual sale a conversion. You need to clearly define what will be considered a conversion, how conversions will be tracked (AdWords code, Analytics, etc.) and the value for each type of conversion in order to properly set up your campaigns and reporting. If your client doesn’t want phone calls, you wouldn’t want to use click to call ads. If your client doesn’t consider form submissions to be conversions, only actual sales, you may still want to track the form submissions but not count them in your CPL calculations.

5. At what point does getting a conversion become the client’s responsibility? You can send a significant amount of qualified traffic to a client’s website but if the landing page doesn’t convert (more on landing pages later) or if the leads are not handled properly, the campaigns won’t be successful. Even if you are meeting your cost per lead goals, the client may tell you that the leads aren’t turning into sales so the campaigns aren’t profitable. Before you begin advertising you will need to agree on what part of the process you are responsible for and what part the client is responsible for. You will need to agree on what a qualified lead is and you may need to review how they handle those leads so you can ensure that they are converting at a reasonable rate, giving the campaigns a better chance at succeeding.

6. What are the goals of the campaigns? Each client will have different goals but you should always set client expectations and have goals that you both agree on to measure the success of the campaigns. If your client can’t give you any guidance on goals or doesn’t know how much they can spend to get a lead or sale, you may not want to rely on them being around long term. You should be able to determine an acceptable CPA goal, number of leads, traffic level or other acceptable metric. This should be an attainable but aggressive goal to get the most out of the campaigns. The goals can be revisited at a later date if they are too lofty or too easy to attain. Yes, if the goals are too easy to attain you should revisit them. If you aren’t challenged by the project, it’s too easy and you may be doing your client a disservice by not trying for more.

7. What is the timeline for the campaign? Short term campaigns and long term campaigns are managed somewhat differently. If you only have 6 weeks you’re going to need to be much more aggressive with changes than you would be with a 6 month campaign. You may also choose not to use certain keywords on a short term campaign since they are keywords that are generally associated with a consumer in an earlier stage of their buying cycle.

8. Can the client withstand the initiation period where you may not meet their goals? At the launch of new campaigns, there is typically a period of time where you may not meet the goals you set. Optimization and finding the right mix of bids, keywords, ads and landing pages can take time. You need to make sure your client is prepared for this and that they can afford it.

9. Does the client have a creative resource? You need to determine upfront if your client has a designer they want to use for banners and landing pages. In some cases, you will use the client’s regular site for PPC landing pages. In many cases you won’t. You need to determine if they have someone available to design and build these landing pages or if they expect that will be included in your fees. You also need to make sure that you have access to the designer so you can steer the development of the pages and banners. If the designer has never designed a good PPC landing page, you’ll need to be very involved in the process to ensure your campaigns perform well. If the client doesn’t have a designer available, you’ll need to build this cost into your fee structure. Make sure you are very detailed about what those fees will cover (10 banners and 4 landing pages with two rounds of revisions for example).

10. Does the client need to approve the ad text or the keywords you choose? In some cases, it is necessary for clients to review and approve the ad text and keywords you use. This is very common in highly regulated industries and for large corporations that have brand guidelines. Make sure you know if the client is expecting to review and approve everything before you get too far into the process.

11. Is there anything you can’t or shouldn’t do with the campaigns? Some clients may have restrictions regarding where and how they can advertise. They may have specific websites where their ads cannot appear which you need to block from display network campaigns. They may not be able to ship their products into certain states for legal reasons. They may also already have a lot of intelligence about what has and hasn’t worked with other advertising. Asking for this intelligence upfront will save you and your client a lot of time and stress.

12. Who do they consider their competition? Through your research, you will find many of your client’s competitors but there may be competitors that are not advertising or that do not have a strong online presence. Asking your client who their competitors are will give you insight into your client’s mindset and may expose new keywords or advertising opportunities. You also need to ask if your client has any issues with advertising on their competitors’ brand keywords. It may seem natural to you to have a competition campaign but your client may have agreements with competitors to not advertise on each others’ brands (yes, it happens), may have legal restrictions or may just not feel comfortable with it (not matter how much money it could make them).

13. Is the client comfortable letting go and allowing you to be the expert? It can be hard for some clients to allow other people to make decisions that will affect their bottom line. You need to understand that your client is the expert in their business, and therefore has valuable information to provide to you. But, you also need to make sure that you have the freedom to properly manage the ad campaigns and that your client won’t also make changes in the campaigns which could affect the outcome of your optimization efforts. If you sense that a client will be uncomfortable if they are not able to be hands-on with the campaigns you will need to discuss this with them candidly. If you discuss it and still feel that they won’t be able to let go of control, the success of the campaigns could be at risk.

14. What are your client’s expectations for reporting and communication? Some clients are very hands-off and are happy with a monthly progress report. Others need weekly or even daily contact to feel like there is progress being made. You should agree on how frequently you will provide progress reports and how other communication will be handled. It’s generally a good idea to also discuss the best method of communication. Does your client only check their email once a week? Email may not be the best way to contact them. Do you only answer your phone when you have to (me)? It may be good to let your client know that you may not be available by phone regularly so they don’t think you’re ignoring their calls.

Official Google Australia Blog: Google Shopping arrives in Australia

Official Google Australia Blog: Google Shopping arrives in Australia

7 NEW Tips for Running a Twitter Giveaway

I've written before about running competitions for link building, but given the increasingly important role of Twitter in online marketing and SEO, it's time to address a popular mechanic: Twitter competitions.

Historically, there were two particular reasons to run competitions through Twitter: firstly to increase the number of followers (and hence, the influence) of a Twitter account. The other important reason was usually branding: a competition that successfully 'goes viral' would introduce the brand and the website to huge numbers of new people.

However, now that social media data is used by search engines and appears to have some influence in their rankings, sites like Twitter are no longer just an adjunct to search marketing - but must be a part of SEO strategy.

Various posts abound with guidance for running a competition on the site, including from Mashable and Social Mouths. These focus mainly on the 'older reasons' for running a competition, but the workflow is still similar: define the prize, the start & end dates and - crucially - the entry mechanism.

The method of entering might be one of:

• following a particular account
• mentioning the account name in a tweet
• using a particular hashtag in a tweet
• retweeting a whole message

At the most basic level, if we're actually going to get any SEO value from the competition, then we need the entrants to include a link to a particular page on the site, which leads us to:

Tip 1: People should link to the site from their tweet as a way of entering the competition.

Great, now we're getting on Google's radar with some social links to our site. You could implement this by giving people an exact tweet to copy and paste, but the requirements could be as simple as having to mention the company twitter account and a given URL in your tweet to be entered.

Links to the site are good, but if this competition is going to generate a real rankings bump for the linked page, then it makes sense to put this weight behind a real landing page. This could be done by tying the giveaway into a particular product or category from the site, then putting the promotion instructions on that product landing page, and making *that* the page that people should link to in their tweets.

Tip 2: A landing page from the site should also carry the competition information, and be the page that entrants link to.

After the competition has ended, this page will have the benefit of any weblinks / social links generated during the competition. (In addition, doing this keeps you white hat and above board - in contrast to the 'bait and switch' pulled by some sites who run a competition or publish link bait on a URL which is later 301ed to a commercial landing page - leaving lots of sites unwittingly linking to pages that they never intended to.)

You can see this tactic in use at the moment by Food Service Warehouse, they're running a bar supplies competition, right there on the related category page.

On a related note: if you're getting hundreds of people to link to a page for you, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of getting targetted anchor text as well. One way to do this is to make sure that the competition has a name that you'll be happy with people using to link to it

In an old post about getting domain diversity and good anchor text, I made two recommendations that could be useful here: firstly give the competition a name that will benefit you when people link to the competion.

These giveaways from Nordstrom were branded diferently - the second giveaway in the list received richer anchor text from links than the one show above.

A second suggestion - which is particularly relevant to running a promotion on Twitter - is to take advantage of using a short URL with keywords in it. For example, the competition above could have used http://bit.ly/bartending-set instead, to get some keyword rich links.

Tip 3: Get good anchor text by using a relevant name for the promotion, and using keyword-rich short URLs.

When it comes to promoting the sweepstake, the first people to reach out to are Twitter users that are interested in the type of prize that you're giving away.

Tip 4: Search for relevant Twitter users, to tell them about the promotion.

You can search for people by interest on Twitter - type a phrase into search, then click on the 'People' tab. For example: people on Twitter with an interest in 'home brewing'.

Alternatively, FollowerWonk is a third-party service that does a brilliant job of mining Twitter user data to find appropriate people to talk to.

FollowerWonk's list of users interested in 'home brewing'

NB: if you're logged into FollowerWonk with the account you're promoting, it'll also tell you which of the listed users already follow you.

There are various resources that go into depth about doing outreach via Twitter. It's unnecessary for me to cover that again now, suffice to say: please don't be a spammer! You're running these promtions to help your brand and SEO; this is no time to ruin the company's reputation.

Beyond doing outreach to relevant Twitter users, it's also appropriate to do regular link building, and traditional online outreach to appropriate webmasters / bloggers. This step shouldn't be overlooked, as promoting a good giveaway should be easier and more effective than trying to get links to any kind of commercial content. Which leads us to:

Tip 5: Just because the sweepstake relies on Twitter as a mechanic, you can still do traditional link building.

The sweepstake niche also has a lot of dedicated directories and listing services that you can submit to. These might be good for SEO, but are usually excellent at sending large numbers of people who can enter the competition (and in the process, promote the Twitter account and create social links to the site.)

As well as the sites I listed on this post, sites like CompetitionHuter.com, SweepsAdvantage and Online-Sweepstakes are worth looking at. (The latter sent very healthy traffic to a competition we recently ran, when the giveaway was added to the site by a member.)

While all this is going on, you'll be able to see entrants mentioning the company account name in the @replies tab or Twitter's internal search. However, this information isn't easy to parse and will disappear relatively soon.

Tip 6: Monitor discussion of & entries to the giveaway while it's in process, and record this data for use later on.

It's worth using a service that will monitor and record all this on your behalf. Right now, Distilled is using Rowfeeder, and I'd definitely recommend it.

The service monitors Twitter for particular account names and hashtags, stores all those tweets for you, creates useful charts/graphs and (perhaps the simplest feature, but one that I really like) will dump all the information into a Google Docs spreadsheet for you, in real time.

Depending on how the promotion is run, this data might be useful while it's in progress - e.g.: to track the viral spread around the country / the world (since RowFeeder stores user location if it's available) - but it's worth storing the data to process after the event. In fact, that should probably be a tip as well:

Tip 7: After the promotion, analyze the people who entered or mentioned it on Twitter; look for any relationships that could be nurtured.

An example here would be to look for the most prominent users that entered, or any entrants who are particularly influential in their niche. It would be worth sending them a message (via Twitter, email or otherwise) to properly introduce yourself, and try to foster a relationship with them.

I expect we're about to see increased interest in Twitter competitions in the next few months (and the same could be said for Facebook promotions that are aimed at getting SEO benefit, though that's another post) - I hope these tips help you stay ahead of the pack and make sure you get as much SEO-bang-for-your-buck as possible.

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The Validation Era

If there's a clear lesson that emerged out of the past decade, it's this: you can have too much of a good thing. Our excesses get corrected and sometimes in dramatic fashion. This too includes our current obsession with all things social. There are early signs that the social media boom is fraying at the edges and that we are entering a new age of intimacy.

Don't just take it from me. If you dig into media consumption patterns and, in particular, who the public considers an authority, you can see the signs. History is also your guide. Big shifts occur around every eight years.

Back during the Internet's first age, the Commercialization Era (1994 - 2002), only deep-pocketed corporations were able to establish themselves as authoritative sources. During this time big media companies and a handful of well-capitalized first movers, like Yahoo, became our trusted sources.

The dot-com crash and the glut bandwidth and storage, in part, created an environment that gave rise to social media and the Democratization Era. This age, which began in earnest in 2002, started with blogs, then branched out to include Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and, of course, Facebook. The end result is that anyone and everyone could command authority. Brands rushed in too as not to get left behind.

Now, however, we have a new challenge: people overload. This is leaving us gasping for quality.

Perhaps driven by peer pressure, the public - brands included - have been engaging in a friends arms race. Now there are signs that we know we overdid it. The result is that we are now entering a new age - The Validation Era.

Consider that according to a study conducted by GoodMobilePhones, people don't know 20 percent of their Facebook friends. Or that USA Today recently reported that social media users are 'grappling with overload.' Finally, the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, my employer's annual tracking study, notes that experts are now far more trusted than peers and friends. This is a dramatic shift from 2006 when the opposite rang true.

In the Validation Era, intimacy is in and publicness may be out - or at least on the decline. Quality is the new black. What this means that both individuals and businesses will need to increasingly work harder to earn their way in and remain in our stakeholders' circle of trust.

One sure sign of this trend is entrepreneurs, who naturally, are among the first to spot opportunities.

During the last few months, a host of intimate social networks have started to attract attention from the public, the media and investors. Many are tied to texting. These emerging players include Path, Beluga (now part of Facebook), Instagram, GroupMe and others.

While it's still early and these services are still nascent, the fact that there's even a market for such networks indicates change is on the horizon. Recall that many of us could not see the true impact of the Democratization Era until the mid-2000s. Startups saw it first. Should this trend hold, and I believe it will, there are at least three potential implications.

First, companies that take a liberal approach to social media will benefit the most. The reason is that as workers personally forge more intimate connections, it will benefit their employers as well.

Second, in the Validation Era, expertise rules. Businesses that activate their domain-level experts to share their knowledge across several spheres of media, will likely to see their ideas penetrate more private networks, either first-hand or through pass-alongs.

Finally, given that intimate social networks do not offer the same reach as wider platforms like Facebook, some of them will potentially explore gently partnering with major brands. GroupMe, for example, recently rolled out several branded partners, including MTV.

Ultimately what this all means is that the ante to stand out is only going up. Many of the conversations that influence buying decisions will become invisible to us, after years of being out in the open. Pure-play advertising-centric campaigns that overlook the power of validated messages will simply be ignored - either by audiences directly or, worse, by algorithms. And social media will need to become one percent of 100 people's job, rather than just 100% of a one.

What do users want from iPhone apps?

Broadly speaking, customers want apps with a purpose, and that reflect the values of the brand, according to a new benchmark study of iPhone apps.

The eDigital App Benchmark study looks at 46 iPhone apps, using 'mystery shopper' surveys. These include mobile commerce apps, travel apps, news and media and directory and guide apps.

The study provides some useful information about the kind of features users are looking for from apps...

News apps

News apps achieved the highest overall scores from users in the study:

What was good about these apps?

From news apps, users were looking for simple and easy to use navigation and up to date content, while video content was well liked by reviewers.

The Sky apps, which both feature in the top four, have plenty of video content, and the Sky Sports app was praised for its use of video and image to enhance the articles.

Drawbacks

Users disliked having to open up Safari to view articles in full, as was the case with the Yahoo app. It also means that they had to reopen the app after they had read something. Articles should be available to view within the app.

Another criticism was the lack of content on offer. Users want to see a broad range of articles across a number of topics.

There are some good news apps missing from this category though, such as those from the BBC, Guardian, and Telegraph.

Directory and information apps

These apps are potentially very useful for people on the move, but this turned out to be the lowest performing category.

What are people looking for from directory apps?

The reviewers appreciated features such as maps which plotted the positions of businesses and services they had searched for.

They also want shortcuts that make searches easier and reduce the amount of typing they need to do, such as using the iPhone's GPS to search for services near the user's current location.

Detailed information and descriptions of businesses and locations, along with user reviews helped people to make a decision.

What are the problems?

Slow loading times was a major issue for the mystery shoppers. The nature of directory and guide apps means that they are used when people are out and about, and this perhaps means they are more vulnerable to variable connection speeds.

Among the worst marks were for those that used the apps merely as a portal to mobile sites, which defeats the purpose of an app.

The RAC Traffic app was marked down for poor usability, difficulty searching for traffic updates by postcode or city, and the lack of traffic alerts.

Mobile commerce apps

What did users like about mobile commerce apps?

Customers were looking for a similar experience on apps to that on desktop e-commerce sites, meaning the same stock availability, product information, and the ability to make a purchase.

Mobile usability is crucial, and the best apps were praised for ease of navigation and good filtering functionality.

Not surprisingly, Amazon was the top rated retail app, and this is because it ticks most of these boxes. The product pages are detailed, and most items contain plenty of reviews, while it has an easy payment process. If you already have an account (and plenty of its customers do), then making a purchase is very quick.

People also like the barcode scanning features on some of these apps. Amazon's has this, as does the recently released Debenhams app.

Drawbacks of retail apps

The Sainsbury's app received the lowest score, and this is because people are not able to make a purchase, just view store details and offers.

As the report points out, people who have downloaded a retailer's app are more likely to be engaged with the brand, and not providing a route to purchase is a missed opportunity.

Other criticisms included limited stock, in the case of the House of Fraser Gift app, and a lack of product photos and information on the Interflora app.

Hotel apps

What did people like about these apps?

Booking.com was the top app here, thanks to an attractive design, good usability, and the ability to actually make a booking through the app.

Users want good information about hotels, including clear photos and customer ratings. These features help people make a decision about which hotel to use.

Geo location features which show nearby hotels on a map and provide directions were valued by users.

Where are these apps going wrong?

The lack of customer reviews and contextual information about the local area (things to see and do, restaurants etc) was a common criticism.

People also wanted to be able to make a booking through the app. One of the reasons that the Hotels app was marked down was that it directed users to an external website. It also didn't show availability.

To see more, download the App Benchmark study from eDigital Research (registration required).

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How to use Google Analytics to find the best time to send emails

In my experience, the day of the week and hour of the day at which marketing emails are sent is often based on little more than the gut feeling of the email marketer and the performance of previous emails, rather than real data.

As someone who could put the anal in analytics, I think that's a rather inexact science. Surely there's a more accurate way to figure out whether the assumption is really true?

There are clearly some days of the week and hours of the day that result in higher conversion rates than others. So theoretically, if you can get your email marketing to your customers' inboxes at the time they're most likely to convert, or just before, your efforts should result in better conversion rates and more revenue.

Fortunately, there is a better way to determine the optimum mailing time, rather than using gut instinct - you can do it via Google Analytics.

However, it's actually surprisingly challenging to pull this data out of GA.

In fact, it's currently not at all trivial, without resorting to some advanced segmentation and some ingenious interface hacks that allow you to use Analytics in a way in which Google never intended.

On the plus side, no coding is required. It can all be done via your browser.

Step 1: Create your segments

In order to find the time of the day at which your site's conversion rate is at its highest you'll need to create some advanced segments to separate transactions into time period segments.

You can make as many of these as you want, but for a reasonably accurate picture three or four ought to suffice. I went for morning (7am-12am), afternoon (12am-5pm) and out of hours (5pm-7am).

If you notice that the out of hours segment seems to provide particularly good conversion rates you may want to add an additional segment for the evening, splitting the day into quarters, giving you slightly more precision.

To create these advanced segments click Advanced Segments > All Visits > Create a new advanced segment. Then click Dimensions > Visitors > Hour of the day and drag the bar to the "dimension or metric" placeholder at the top. Click the "and" link and drag a second Hour of the day bar to the "dimension or metric" placeholder.

Enter the time periods into each field to segment the traffic up according to the time period. Or, to save yourself the time and effort, just click the links below and the segments will automatically be added to your Google Analytics account.

• Time: Morning


• Time: Afternoon


• Time: Out of hours

Step 2: Finding the best time

Go to Advanced segments > All visits > Custom segments, then check each of the segments you just added or created, then click Apply.

Now click the Ecommerce button on the left hand navigation. At the top you should see the All visits conversion rate, and the three conversion rates for the time segments you just added. If one of them is better than the others, then that is when you should send your email.

Use the date widget to check different weeks, months or extend the length to cover a year or more, if you've got sufficient data, so you can double-check that the data you're observing is consistent.

Once you've identified your peak conversion rate time window, it's worth drilling-down a bit further, so go back to the advanced segments tool and create some extra segments for the time periods that fall within.

This will allow you to determine whether the highest conversion rates occur at 7-9am, 9-10am or 10am-12am. You'll want to time your mailing so that it covers all of the peak conversion rate times.

Step 3: Hack your browser

Given that we've just made advanced segments to visualise time periods with relative ease, you'd think it would be straightforward to do the same for days of the week. But you'd be wrong.

Finding the best day of the week is the particularly tricky bit! I scratched my head for quite a while on this one, and I don't think it's even currently possible to do this in GA at the moment - at least not without some browser witchcraft.

The current interface of Google Analytics doesn't allow you to compare data for specific days of the week to see which one provides the best historic conversion rate, because there's no dimension for it.

Weirdly, the day of the week dimension functionality does appear to exist within the GA software, but it appears not to be enabled.

However, it is possible to hack the GA interface to get at the dimensions Google doesn't provide in the current version, which allows you to analyse data in ways the average GA user wouldn't be able to do.

This sounds really complicated, but you can actually pull it off very easily using Firefox and a couple of browser plugins: Greasemonkey and Google Analytics Report Enhancer from ROI Revolution.

Simply install Greasemonkey, restart your browser then click this Google Analytics Report Enhancer link and Greasemonkey will install a browser hack. When you next visit the Google Analytics site you should see an additional logo next to the GA one at the top left.

Step 4: Finding the best day of the week

To find the day of the week that has the highest conversion rate, go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines, then click the Sources button in the first column of the table.
This will open a mega menu style drop down and you should see a link called "Day of the week" under "Custom variable keys". Click it, then click the Ecommerce tab.

You should now see a list of days of the week, along with the metrics for each one - including the all importance ecommerce conversion rate.
Pick the one with the highest conversion rate, or the one which spans a few days with high conversion rates.
Combine this with the hour of the day data from the earlier steps and you've now pinpointed the theoretical optimum time to send your email marketing.

Helpful tips

• 
  Create advanced segments for distinct time periods and drill-down where required in order to get greater precision.


• 
  Use Google Analytics Report Enhancer to add extra functionality to Google Analytics.


• 
  Determine the best time of day and day of the week based on the best e-commerce conversion rate for your site. Chances are, it will differ from site to site.


• 
  Check your data before acting upon it. Look at multiple months, just in case it's a seasonal effect.


• Use GARE to check the best days of the month. Does conversion rate go up around pay day?


• 
  Do a split test on your email database to see if there's any improvement in its performance. If it works, and you can repeat the experiment successfully, go with it.


• If you spot a pattern, also consider trying a similar thing with PPC ads. Bid up when conversion rates are high. Reduce bids when they're low.

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