Recipes For Practical Customer Experience Design & Optimization – Buyer Legends This is an important post that Anthony Garcia wrote on the Buyer Legends blog If I gave you a recipe some of you would be thrilled and others not so much. You can cook a gourmet meal that will have your taste buds fox trotting. I know that to be true. When it comes to food there are alternative ways to acquire a great meal. However, when cooking up great customer experiences there are no alternatives. If you want customers to to tell the only story that matters, why they love your company, you’ll have to learn how. Have you ever followed a recipe only to find that you aren’t ready for the third step? I have. The results? Frustration and a poor meal. A few years ago it was takeout or starve, but now, I love to cook. I credit mise en place, that’s French for having having everything in its place as you cook, for my conversion from takeout king to aspiring chef. Mise en place is a small amount of effort expended up front that actually saves me tons of time and guarantees tasty dishes. The Buyer Legend process is like a recipe for designing great customer experiences. You can use Buyer Legends to define and improve your content marketing, social marketing, search marketing, conversion rate optimization and thereby improve your communications, execution and revenues. You just need to follow the recipe. We’ve published a basic Buyer Legend recipe  but I’ll be adding more detail in this series. I’ve been training clients and staff in the Eisenbergs’ processes’ for over a decade, Let me show you how to prepare mise en place for the Buyer Legends process.  This is the first in a series of articles that will address each major step of the Buyer Legends process. Pre-mortem because it is the antidote to Murphy’s Law  First we’ll explore the most impactful step of the process, the pre-mortem. Some of our largest conversion wins over the last two decades ever were the result of our clients going through the pre-mortem exercise.  Murphy’s law states that everything that can go wrong usually will and a pre-mortem will help you spot previously invisible problems in your current customer experience as well as plan against future problems. But the pre-mortem step is not for the faint hearted as it may show you things about your precious baby that are not as attractive as you wanted to believe.  The only thing that makes a pre-mortem more powerful is by doing a pre-mortem on a persona by persona and then scenario/ campaign by scenario basis. Read the first Buyer Legend Recipe Post here... Reverse chronology because it explains conversions Assuming you have a product or service worth buying then you and your customers have the same goal.  You want to sell and they want to buy. That’s why when you are planning a customer experience it is always best to start at the end point and work your way backwards to the beginning.  This step requires you to get very specific about how and why every decision and action needs to be taken in the buying journey.  It’s specificity also makes this step important to measuring and optimizing your customer experience when you finally implement it. Your Buyer Legend isn’t fiction so every detail must be accounted for, not only that but you must create persuasive momentum at every step. Persuasive momentum because there’s no such thing as a sales funnel Your customer isn’t truly in a funnel. There’s no gravity compelling them through your experience like there is in a real funnel. There is only the customer’s motivation and your understanding of that motivation to create persuasive momentum. Persuasive momentum is the progressive decision making process that aligns the customer’s goals with our own business goals. I’ll show you the three step test that will insure your customers’ experiences are always relevant, valuable and compelling. Personas because their motivations become your action plan Personas are a common marketing tool, but their value is often misunderstood. Simply put, personas should inform you about exactly what you need to be doing. Personas can be elaborate constructs based on reams of research and data, or they can be constructed quickly with data and information at hand, but as long as they are directionally accurate reflections of a segment of your customer they can be powerful tools that will guide your Buyer Legends processes. I will be discussing how to construct ad-hoc personas as well as help you evaluate and if needed fix your current personas if you have them. Write a Buyer Legend because the only story that matters is your customers’ story This is the step when you actually pull out your pots, grab a spatula and fire up your burners.  I will tell you all the ingredients to include so you can have them at the ready. This is the step where all your previous work begins to pay off and when you’re done you will have an action plan that can be distributed, implemented, tested, and optimized.  A Buyer Legend is where the rubber meets the road. Measurement because if analysts cannot tell the stories and business people cannot measure the stories then the strategy isn’t truly aligned with customers’ needs. Your Buyer Legend isn’t fiction, it’s not for fun or for entertainment, or even for creative fulfillment.  This is business, and anything important to a businesses success should be measurable and accountable.  Buyer Legends are both and I will give you a primer on measuring, optimizing, rinsing, and repeating. The Buyer Legend process orchestrates your best efforts and reconciles them to the needs of your customers so you can create profitable customer experiences.  If you want to become even more legendary at using this process I challenge you to follow this recipe series. I look forward to your feedback, questions, and hearing your success stories. As always, we encourage you to try Buyer Legends for yourself, but if you need help, please let us know. The post Recipes For Practical Customer Experience Design & Optimization – Buyer Legends appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.     Read this post online...

The future of the Internet is being decided in the next two weeks.

The future of the Internet is being decided in the next two weeks, and big corporations are determined to kill it.

The US Government is about to establish new rules on how the Internet is protected, with huge global ramifications. Big corporations are spending millions to wrest control of the Internet from the public. They want to decide which websites we can access at fast speeds, putting anyone they don’t like (or who won’t pay them millions) into new Internet slow lanes.

With so many websites based in the US, the future of the Internet itself is at stake. This decision will have a lasting impact on the fate of free speech and social movements across the globe.

SumOfUs members in the US are already organizing to defeat this corporate attack on the Internet and save “Net Neutrality”. But around the world, we need to stand up and be counted too.

Stand with SumOfUs members in the US and around the world, and tell US decision makers: The Internet matters to me! Don’t kill the open Internet.

When hundreds of thousands of people have risen up in the name of democracy in recent years, like during the Arab Spring, a free Internet has been crucial to their fight. But imagine that instead of people organizing using technology to confront corrupt government, and instead of people around the world clinging to the edge of their seats, we were silent, isolated, and indifferent.

This is what could happen if we lose Net Neutrality. Big US corporations could decide whether or not we could easily and quickly access the sites we needed to -- or whether we get stuck with the corporate media they control.

The Federal Communication Commission -- the US Government agency responsible for regulating the Internet -- and the US Congress are making their decision on Net Neutrality this month. Because many of the world’s largest telecom giants and websites operate out of the United States, these rules have the potential to directly affect access to the free and open Internet around the world.

The good news is, that with SumOfUs members in the US joining with millions of others, we’re winning this fight. But we need to keep up the pressure to get us over the line and save the Internet -- which is why it’s crucial to hear from people around the world.

Tell the US Government: The Internet matters to me. Keep it open and free.

The momentum for Net Neutrality is on our side, and we’ve never had a better chance at winning. After massive public pressure President Obama has come out in favor of “the strongest possible rules” under what’s called “Title II” Net Neutrality -- exactly what we are demanding.

These rules would protect the Internet we all know and love. They would stop big corporations from requiring websites to pay them huge sums of money in order to get access to fast Internet lanes. If sites didn’t pay, corporations could effectively shut them down by making their sites super slow -- like a YouTube video that just won’t load.

The fight for a free Internet is too important to lose. Groups like SumOfUs only exist because of the open Internet of today. Under these new rules, new innovations would find it much harder to take off, because their superior design would be hidden behind an intentionally broken and slow connection.

Valuable resources like Wikipedia could disappear from public view or start plastering themselves in ads to pony up the cash needed to pay big US corporations like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon for the privilege of allowing us to access them. Crucial international moments, like the uprising in Tahrir Square could be censored. History could be hidden from view.

We can’t let this happen.

Tell US FCC and Congress: The Internet matters to me. Keep it open and free.

Thanks for all you do,
Taren, Paul, Nicole, Nick and the rest of the team at SumOfUs.org

**********
More Information

Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now -- Free Press
Everything you need to know about network neutrality -- Vox, February 4th, 2015
Why US net neutrality debate matters globally -- The Hill, August 28th, 2014 

Occam's Razor
by Avinash Kaushik

Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future

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In late 2011, Google announced an effort to make search behavior more secure. Logged-in users were switched to using httpS from http. This encrypted their search queries from any prying eyes, and kept from being passed on to websites the users visits after seeing search results.
This led to the problem we, Marketers, SEOs, Analysts, fondly refer to as not provided .
Following revelations of NSA activities via Mr. Snowden, Google has now switched almost all users to secure search, resulting in even more user search queries showing up as not provided in all web analytics tools.
Yahoo! has recently announced switching to httpS as standard for all mail users, indicating secure search might follow next. That of course will mean more referring keyword data will disappear.
At the moment it is not clear whether Bing, Baidu, Yandex and others will move to similarly protect users’ search privacy; if and when they do, the result will be loss of even more keyword-level user behavior data.
Initially, I was a little conflicted about the whole not provided affair.
As an analyst, I was upset that this change would hurt my ability to analyze the effectiveness of my beloved search engine optimization (SEO) efforts – which are really all about finding the right users using optimal content strategies.
But it is difficult to not look at the wider picture. Repressive (and some not-overtly repressive) regimes around the world aggressively monitor user search behavior (and more). This can place many of our peer citizens in grave danger. As a citizen of the world, I was happy that Google and Yahoo! want to protect user privacy.
I'm a lot less conflicted now. I've gone through the five stages in the Kubler-Ross model. Besides, I've also come to realize that there is a lot I can still do!
In this post I want to share four angles on secure search:

1. Implications of Secure Search Decision.
2. What Is Not Going Away. #silverlinings
3. Alternatives For Keyword Data Analysis.
4. Possible Future Solutions.

While not provided is not an optimal scenario, you'll see that things are not as bad as initial impressions might indicate, yes there are new challenges, but we also have some alternative solutions, and realize that the SEO industry is not done innovating. Ready?
1. Implications of Secure Search Decision.
No keyword data in analytics tools.
We are headed towards having zero referring keywords from Google and, perhaps, other search engines.

This impacts all digital analytics tools, regardless of what company and whether they use javascript or log files or magic beans to collect data.
Depending on the mobile device and browser you are using (for example, Safari since iOS 6), you have already been using secure search for a while regardless of the search engine you use. So that data has been missing for some time.
There are a number of "hacks" out there with promises of getting close enough keyword data, or for marrying not provided with some of the remaining data and landing pages. These are well meaning, but almost always yield zero value or worse drive you in a sub-optimal direction. Please been careful if you choose to use them.
No keyword data in competitive intelligence/SEO tools.
Perhaps you (like me) use competitive intelligence or SEO tools to monitor keyword performance. For example, for L'Oreal:

Secure Search will also impact data in these tools. It will be increasingly distorted because it will reflect only traffic from the small audience of visitors who are not yet using secure search or are using other non-secure search engines or only the type of people who allow their behavior to be 100% monitored – including SSL/httpS. Sample and sampling bias.
You can read this post to learn how these tools collect data: The Definitive Guide To (8) Competitive Intelligence Data Sources.
I really loved having this data. It was such a great way to see what competitors were doing or where I was beating them on paid or organic or brand or category terms. Sadly, it does not matter which tool you use. These tools will only show you a more distorted view of reality. Please be very careful about what you do with keyword data from these tools (though they provide a lot of other data, all of which was of the same quality as in the past).
[sidebar]
These changes impact my AdWords spend sub-optimally. A lot of the keywords I used to add to my campaigns came from the long, long tail I saw in my organic search data (I would take the best performers there and use PPC to get more traffic) and from competitive intelligence research. With both of these sources gone, my AdWords spend may take a dive because I can't find these surprising keywords — even using the tools you'll see me mention below! How is this in Google's interest?
[/sidebar]
No keyword-level conversion analysis.
We have a lot of wonderful detailed data at a keyword level when we log into SiteCatalyst or WebTrends or Google Analytics. Bounce Rates, % New Visits, Visit Duration, Goal Conversions, Average Order Value.
All this data will no longer be available for organic search keywords.
As hinted above, our ability to understand the long tail — often as much as 80% of search traffic — will be curtailed. We can guess our brand terms and product keywords, but the wonderful harvest of category-type, and beyond, keywords is gone.
Current keyword data is only temporarily helpful.
Remember: On a daily basis 15% of the queries on Google have never been seen before by the search engine. Daily! For all 15 years of Google's existence!
That is one reason the data we have for the last year or so, even as not provided ramped up, might only be temporarily helpful in our analysis.
Another important reason historical data becomes stale pretty quickly is that any nominally functioning business will have new products, new content, new business priorities, and all that impacts your search strategy.
Finally, with every change in the search engine interface the way people use search changes. This in turn mandates new SEO (and PPC) strategies, if we don't want to fail.
So, use the data you have today for a little while to guesstimate your SEO performance or optimize your website. But know that the view you have will become stale and provide a distorted view of reality pretty soon.
2. What Is Not Going Away. #silverlinings
While we are losing our ability to do detailed keyword analysis, we are retaining our ability to do strategic analysis. Search engine optimization continues to be important, and can still get a macro understanding of performance and identify potentially valuable keywords.
Aggregated search engine level analysis.
The Multi-Channel Funnels folder in Google Analytics contains the Top Conversion Paths report. At the highest level, across visits by focusing on unique people, the report shows the role search plays in driving conversions.
You can see how frequently it is the starting point for a later conversion, you can see how frequently it is in the middle, and you can see how frequently it is the last click.

I like starting with this report because it allows us to have a smarter beyond-the-last-click discussion and answer these questions: What is the complete role of Search in the conversion process? How does paid search interplay with organic search?
From there, jump to my personal favorite report in MCF, Assisted Conversions.
We can now look at organic and paid search differently, and we are able to see the complete value of both. We can see how often search is the last click prior to conversions, and how often it assists with other conversions.

The reason I love the above view is that for each channel, I'm able to present our management team a simple, yet powerful, understanding of the contribution of our marketing channels – including search.
Selfishly, now we can show the complete value, in dollars and cents, we deliver via SEO.
[Bonus: For more on next steps and attribution modeling please see: Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling: The Good, Bad and Ugly Models.]
If you are interested in only the last-click view of activities (please don't be interested in this!), you can of course look at your normal Channels or All Traffic reports in Google Analytics.
This is a simple custom report I use to look at the aggregated view:

As the report above demonstrates, you can still report on your other metrics, like Unique Visitors, Bounce Rates, Per Visit Value and many others, at an aggregated level. You can see how Google is doing, and you can see how Google Paid and Organic are doing.
So from the perspective of reporting organic search performance to senior management, you are all set. Where we are out of luck is taking things down from here to the keyword level. Yes, there will still be some data in the keyword report, but since not provided is an unknown unknown, you have no idea what that segment represents.
Organic landing pages report.
Search engine optimization is all about pages and the content in those pages.
You can use a custom landing pages report (click that link to download) and apply your organic search segment to that report to get a view that looks like this:

The top landing pages getting traffic from organic search. And of course our Acquisition, Behavior, Outcome metrics.
See Page Value there? Now you also know how much value is delivered when each of these pages is viewed by someone who came from organic search.
So let's say you spent the last few weeks optimizing pages #2, #3 and #5; well, now you can be sad that they are delivering the lowest page value from organic search. Feel sad.
Or, just tell your boss/client: "No, no, no, you misunderstood. I was optimizing page #4!" : )
The custom landing pages report also includes the ability drill down to keyword level, just click on the page you are interested in and you'll see this:

With every passing day this drilldown will become more and more useless. But for now, it is there if you want to see it.
Let me repeat a point. I've noticed some of our peer SEOs making strong recommendations to take action based on the keywords you are able to see beyond not provided. I'm afraid that is a career-limiting move. You have no idea what these words represent – head, mid, tail, something else – or what is in the blank not provided bucket. Be very careful.
Paid search keyword analysis report.
We all of course still have access to keyword level analysis for our paid search spend.

There is one really interesting bit in the paid search reports that you can use for SEO purposes.
When you submit your keywords and bids, the search engine will match them against user search queries. In Google Analytics you have Keyword, in your AdWords report, as above, but if you create a custom report you can drill down from Keyword to Matched Search Query. The latter is what people actually type. So for "chrome notebook," above, if I look at the Matched Search Query I can see all 25 variations the users typed. This is very useful for SEO.
You can download my custom report, it is #2 in this post: Paid Search/AdWords Custom Reports
Beyond this, be judicious about what inferences you draw from your paid search performance. Some distinguished SEO experts have advocated that you should use the distribution of visits/conversions/profits of your AdWords keywords and use that to make decisions about effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Others are advising you to bid on AdWords and guesstimate various things about SEO performance. Sadly these are also career-limiting moves.
Why?
When you look at your AdWords data, you have no idea which of these four scenarios is true for your business:

And if you don't know which is true — and you really won't with not provided in your way — is it prudent to use your AdWords performance to judge SEO? I would humbly suggest not.
If you want to stress test this,…. go back to your 2011 (pre-not provided) data for paid and organic and see what you can find. And remember since then Google has made sixteen trillion changes to how both paid and organic search work, and your business has at least made 25.
Don't assume that your SEO strategy should reflect the prioritizations implied by your AdWords keyword data. The reason SEO worked so well is that you would get traffic you might not have known/guessed/realized you wanted/deserved.
3. Alternatives For Keyword Data Analysis.
With not provided eliminating almost all of our keyword data, initially for some search engines/browsers and likely soon from all, we face challenges in understanding performance. Luckily we can avail ourselves of a couple of alternative, if imperfect/incomplete, options.
Webmaster Tools.
Here are the challenges Google's Webmaster Tools solves: Which search queries does my website show up for, and what does my click-through rate look like?
I know this might sound depressing, but this is the only place you'll see any SEO performance data at a keyword level. Look at the CTR column. If you do lots of good SEO — you work on the page title, url, page excerpt, author image and all that wonderful stuff — this is where you can see whether that work is getting you more clicks. You work harder on SEO, you raise your rankings (remember don't focus on overall page rank, it is quite value-deficient), you'll see higher CTRs.

You will see approximately 2,000 search queries. These are not all the search queries for which your site shows up. (More on this in the bonus section below.)
There are a couple of important things to remember when you use this data.
If you go back in history and do comparative analysis for last year's data when not provided was low, you'll notice that your top 100 keywords in Google Analytics or Site Catalyst are not quite the same as those in WebMaster Tools. They use two completely different sources of data and data processing.
Be aware that even if you sort by Clicks (and always sort by clicks), the order in which these queries appear is not a true indication of their importance (in GA when I could see it, I would see a different top 25 as an example). The numbers are also soft or directional. For example, even with 90% not provided Google Analytics told me I had 500 visits from "avinash kaushik" and not 150 clicks as shown above.
Despite these two caveats, Webmaster Tools should be a key part of your SEO performance analysis.
It is my hope that if this is how search engines are comfortable sharing keyword level data, that over time they will invest resources in this tool to increase the number of keywords and improve the data processing algorithms
Our good friends at Microsoft also provide Bing Webmaster Tools, and don't forget the excellent Yandex Webmaster Tools. Take keyword performance data from anyone who'll give it to you reliably.
[Bonus]
1. Google's Webmaster Tools only stores your data for 90 days. If you would like to have this data for a longer time period, you can download it as a csv. Another alternative is to download it automatically using Python. Please see this post for instructions: Automatically download webmaster tools search queries data
2. GWT only shows you data for approximately 2,000 queries which returned your site in search results. Hence it only displays a sub-set of your query behavior data. The impact of this is in the top part of the table above, Impressions and Clicks. During this time period my site received 1,800k Impressions in search results, but GWT is only showing data for 140k of those impressions because it is only displaying 2,574 user queries. Ditto for Clicks. If I download all the data for the 2k queries shown in GWT, that will show behavior for just 8,000 of the 50,000 clicks my site received from Google in this time period. Data for 42,000 clicks is not shown because those queries are beyond the 2k limit in GWT.
Update: 3. In his comment below Jeff Smith shares a tip on how to structure your GWT account to possibly expanding the dataset to get more information. Please check it out.
Update: 4. Another great tip. Kartik's comment highlights that you can link your GWT account with your AdWords account and get paid and organic click data for the same keyword right inside AdWords. Click to read a how-to guide and available metrics.
[/Bonus]
Google Keyword Planner.
The challenge Google Keyword Planner solves: What keywords (user search queries) should my search engine optimization program focus on?
In the Keyword Planner you have several options to identify the most recent keywords — the most relevant keywords — to your website. The simplest way to start is to look for keyword recommendations for a specific keyword.
I choose the "search for new keyword and ad group ideas" section and in the landing page part type in the URL I'm interested in. Just as an example, I’m using the Macy's women's activewear page:

A quick click of the Get Ideas button gives us … the ideas!
I can choose to look at the Ad Group ideas or the Keyword Ideas.

There are several specific applications for this delightful data.
First, it tells me the keywords for which I should be optimizing this specific page. I can go and look at the words I'm focused on, see if I have all the ones recommended by the Keyword Planner, and if not, I can include them for the next round of search engine optimization efforts.
Second, I have some rough sense for how important each word is, as judged by Avg. Monthly Searches. The volume can help me prioritize which keywords to focus on first.
Third, if this is my website (and Macy's is not!), I can also see my Ad Impression Share. Knowing how often my ad shows up for each keyword helps me prioritize my search engine optimization efforts.
It would be difficult to do this analysis for all your website pages. I recommend the top 100 landing pages (check that the 100 include your top product pages and your top brand landing pages — if not, add them to the list).
With the advent of not provided we lost our ability to know which keywords we should focus on for which page; the Google Keyword Planner helps solve that problem to an extent.
You don't have to do your analysis just by landing pages. If you would like, you can have the tool give you data for specific keywords you are interested in. Beyond landing pages, my other favorite option is to use the Product Category to get data for a whole area of my business.
For example, suppose I'm assisting a non-profit hospital with its analytics and optimization efforts. I'll just drill down to the Health category, then the Health Care Service sub-category and finally the Hospitals & Health Clinics sub-sub-category:

Press Get Ideas button and — boom! — I have my keywords. In this case, I've further refined the list to only focus on a particular part of the US:

I have the keyword list I need to focus my search engine optimization efforts. Not based on what the Hospital CEO wants or what a random page analysis or your mom suggested, but rather based on what users in our geographic area are actually typing into a search engine!
A quick note of caution: As you play with the Keyword Planner, you'll bump into a graph like this one for your selected keyword or ad group ideas. It shows Google's estimate of how many possible clicks you could get at a particular cost per click.

Other than giving you some sense for traffic, this is not a relevant graph. I include it here just to show you that it is out there and I don't want you to read too much into it.
Google Trends.
The challenge Google Trends tool solves: What related and fastest-rising keywords should I focus on for my SEO program?
Webmaster tools focuses us on clicks and the Keyword Planner helps us with keywords to target by landing pages. Google Trends is valuable because it helps expand our keyword portfolio (top searches) and the keywords under which we should be lighting a fire (rising searches).
Here's an example. I'm running the SEO program for Liberty Mutual, Geico, AAA or State Farm. My most important query is car insurance (surprise!). I can create a report in Google Trends for the query "car insurance" and look at the past 12 months of data for the United States.
The results are really valuable:

I can see which brand shows up at the top (sadly it’s not me, it’s Progressive), I can see the queries people are typing, and I can see the fastest-rising queries and realize I should worry about Safeco and Arbella. I can also see that Liberty Mutual's massive TV blitz is having an impact in increasing brand awareness and Geico seems to be having support problems with so many people looking for its phone number.
I can click on the gear icon at the top right and download a bunch more data, beyond the top ten. I can also focus on different countries, or just certain US states, or filter for the last 90 days.
I can also focus on different countries, or just some of the states in the US or only for the last 90 days. The options are endless.
There are two specific uses for this data.
First, I get the top and rising queries to consider for my SEO program. Not just queries either, but deeper insights like brand awareness, etc.
Second, I can use this to figure out the priorities for the content I need to create on my website to take advantage of evolving consumer interests and preferences.
If you have an ability to react quickly (not real-time, just quickly) the Google Trends tool can be a boon to your SEO efforts.
Competitive Intelligence / SEO Tools.
Competitive intelligence tools solve the challenge of knowing: What are my competitors up to? What is happening in my product/industry category when it comes to search?
SEO tools solve the challenge of knowing: What can I do to improve my page ranks, inbound links, content focus, social x, link text y, etc.?
There are many good competitive intelligence tools out there. They will continue to be useful for other analysis (referring domains, top pages, display ads, overall traffic etc.), but as I mentioned at the top of this post, the search keyword level data will attain a even lower quality. Here's a report I ran for L'Oreal:

If you see any keyword level data in these tools, you should assume that you are getting a distorted view of reality. Remember, all other data in these tools is fine. Just not any of the keyword level data.
There are many good SEO tools out there that provide a wide set of reports and data. As in the case of the CI tools, many other reports in these SEO tools will remain valuable but not the keyword level reports. As not provided moves toward 100% due to search switching to https, they will also lose their ability to monitor referring keywords (along with aforementioned repressive and sometimes not-so-overtly repressive regimes).
When the keywords are missing, the SEO tools will have to figure out if the recommendations they are making about "how to rank better with Bing/Google/Yahoo!" or "do a, b, c and you will get more keyword traffic" are still valid. At a search engine level they will remain valid, but at a keyword level they might become invalid very soon (if they’re not already)
Even at a search engine level, causality (in other words, “do x and y money will come to you”) will become tenuous and the tools might switch to correlations. That is hard and poses a whole new set of challenges.
Some of the analysis these tools start to provide might take on the spirit of: "We don't know whether factors m, n, and q that we are analyzing/recommending, or all this link analysis and link text and brand mentions and keyword density, specifically impact your search engine optimization/ranking at a keyword level, or if our recommendations move revenue, but we believe they do and so you should do them."
There is nothing earth-shatteringly wrong about it. It introduces a fudge factor, a risky variable. I just want you to be aware of it. And if you want to feel better about this, just think of how you make decisions about offline media – that is entirely based on faith!
Just be aware of the implications outlined above, and use the tools/recommendations wisely.

4. Possible Future Solutions.
Let's try to end on a hopeful note. Keyword data is almost all gone, what else could take its place in helping us understand the impact of our search engine optimization efforts? Just because the search engines are taking keywords away does not mean SEO is dead! If anything, it is even more important.
Here are a couple of ideas that come to my mind as future solutions/approaches. (Please add yours via comments below.)
Page "personality" analysis.

At the end of the day, what are we trying to do with SEO? We are simply trying to ensure that the content we have is crawled properly by search engines and that during that process the engines understand what our content stands for. We want the engines to understand our products, services, ideas, etc. and know that we are the perfect answer for a particular query.
I wonder if someone can create a tool that will crawl our site and tell us what the personality of each page represents. Some of this is manifested today as keyword density analysis (which is value-deficient, especially because search engines got over "density" nine hundred years ago). By personality, I mean what does the page stand for, what is the adjacent cluster of meaning that is around the page's purpose? Based on the words used, what attitude does the page reflect, and based on how others are talking about this page, what other meaning is being implied on a page?
If the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) can analyze my email and tell me the 32 dimensions of my personality, why can't someone do that for my site’s pages beyond a dumb keyword density analysis?
If I knew the personality of the page, I could optimize for that and then the rest is up to the search engine.
Crazy idea? Or crazy like a fox idea? : )

Non-individualized (not tied to visits/cookies/people) keyword performance data.

A lot of the concern related to privacy is valid, and even urgent when these search queries are tied to a person. The implications can be grim in many parts of the world.
But, I wonder if Yahoo!/Bing/Google/Yandex would be open to creating a solution that delivers non-individualized keyword level performance data.
I would not know that you, let's say Kim, came to my website on the keyword "avinash rocks so much it is pretty darn awesome" and you, Kim, converted delivering an order of $45. But the engines could tell us that the keyword "avinash rocks so much it is pretty darn awesome" delivered 100 visits of which 2% converted and delivered $xx,xxx revenue.
Think of it as turbo-charged webmaster tools – take what it has today and connect it to a conversion tracking tag. This protects user privacy, but gives me (and you) a better glimpse of performance and hence better focus for our organic search optimization efforts.
Maybe the search engines can just give us all keywords searched more than 100 times (to protect privacy even more). Still non-individualized.
I don't know the chances of this happening, but I wanted to propose a solution.

Controlled experimentation.

Why not give up on the tools/data and learn from our brothers and sisters in TV/Print/Billboards land and use sophisticated controlled experiments to prove the value of our SEO efforts?
(Remember: Using the alternative data sources covered above, you already know which keywords to focus your efforts on.)
In the world of TV/Radio/Print we barely have any data – and what we do have is questionable – hence the smartest in the industry are using media mix modeling to determine the value delivered by an ad.
We can do the same now for our search optimization efforts.
First, we follow all the basic SEO best practices. Make sure our sites are crawlable (no javascript wrapped links, pop-ups with crazy code, Flash heavy gates, page tabs using magic to show up, etc.), the content is understandable (titles in images, unclear product names, crazy stuff), and you are super fantastically sure about what you are doing when you make every page dynamic and "personalized customized super-relevant" to each visitor. Now it does not matter what ranking algorithm the search engine is using, it understands you.
Now its time for the SEO Consultant's awesomely awesome SEO strategy implementation.
Try not to go whole hog. Pick a part of the site to unleash the awesomely awesome SEO strategy. One product line. One entire directory or content. A section of solutions. A cleanly isolatable cluster of pages/products/services/solutions/things.
Implement. Measure the impact (remember you can measure at a Search Engine and Organic/Paid level). If it’s a winner, roll the strategy out to other pages. If not, the SEO God you hired might only be a seo god.
At some level, exactly as in the case of TV/Radio/Print, this is deeply dissatisfying because it takes time, it requires your team to step up their analytical skills and often you only understand what is happening and not why. But, it is is something.
I genuinely believe the smartest SEOs out there will go back to school and massively upgrade their experimentation and media mix modeling skills. A path to more money via enriching skills and reducing reliance on having perfect data.

There is no doubt that secure search, and the delightful result not provided, creates a tough challenge for all Marketers and Analysts. But it is here, and I believe here to stay.
My effort in this post has been to show that things are not as dire as you might have imagined (see the not going away and alternatives sections). We can fill some gaps, we can still bring focus to our strategy. I'm also cautiously optimistic that there will be future solutions that we have not yet imagined that will address the void of keyword level performance analysis. And I know for a fact that many of us will embrace controlled experimentation and thereby rock more and charge more for our services or get promoted.
Carpe diem!
As always, it is your turn now.
I'm sure you have thoughts/questions on why not provided happened. You might not have made it through all the five stages Kubler-Ross model yet. That is OK, I respect your questions and your place in the model. Sadly I'm not in a position to answer your questions about that specifically. So, to the meat of the post …
Is there an implication of not having keyword level data that I missed covering? From the data we do have access to, search engine level, is there a particular type of analysis that is proving to be insightful? Are there other alternative data sources you have found to be of value? If you were the queen of the world and could create a future solution, what would it do?
Please share your feedback, incredible ideas, practical solutions and OMG you totally forgot that thing thoughts via comments.
Thank you.
PS: Here's my post on how to analyze keyword performance in a world where only a part of the data was in not provided bucket: Smarter Data Analysis of Google's https (not provided) change: 5 Steps. For all the reasons outlined in the above post this smarter data analysis option might not work any more. But if only a small part of your data, for any reason, is not provided, please check out the link.

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Event Tracking - Web Tracking (analytics.js)

 

Event Tracking - Web Tracking (analytics.js)

This guide describes how to send events using analytics.js

The analytics.js snippet is part of Universal Analytics. If you're using Classic Analytics (ga.js) visit the Upgrade center to learn how to migrate your property to analytics.js.

Overview Implementation Examples Cross Browser Event Tracking Using jQuery

Overview

Event tracking allows you to measure how users interact with the content of your website. For example, you might want to measure how many times a button was pressed, or how many times a particular item was used in a web game.
An event consists of four values that you can use to describe a user's interaction:

Value	Type	Required	Description
Category	String	Yes	Typically the object that was interacted with (e.g. button)
Action	String	Yes	The type of interaction (e.g. click)
Label	String	No	Useful for categorizing events (e.g. nav buttons)
Value	Number	No	Values must be non-negative. Useful to pass counts (e.g. 4 times)

Implementation

To send an event, you pass the ga function the send command with the event hit type

ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'nav buttons', 4);

Where:

• button is the category
• click is the action
• nav buttons is the label
• 4 is the value

You can also send events using the following convenience commands. In each command, the optional parameters have been removed.

ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action');
ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', 'label');
ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', 'label', 

    value);  // value is a number.

The send command also accepts an optional field object as the last parameter for any of these commands. The field object is a standard JavaScript object, but defines specific field names and values accepted by analytics.js.
For example, you might want to set the page field for a particular event. You do this using:

ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', {'page': '/my-new-page'});

Similarly, you might want to send an event, but not impact your bounce rate. This is easily solved by configuring the event to be a non-interaction event using the following code:

ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', {'nonInteraction': 1});

Finally, all the parameters of the send command have their own field names. So you can send an event by only passing a field object to the send command:

ga('send', {
  'hitType': 'event',          // Required.
  'eventCategory': 'button',   // Required.
  'eventAction': 'click',      // Required.
  'eventLabel': 'nav buttons',
  'eventValue': 4
});

Read the Field Reference document for a complete list of all the fields that can be used in the configuration field object.

Note: If you use this syntax, keep in mind that the required parameters for an event are the same as if you pass them to the ga function directly.

Examples

You typically want to send an event to Google Analytics when a particular browser event occurs. To do this, you configure a browser event listener and from within that listener, call the event command.
Say you have a link to download a PDF on your page:

<button id="button">Please click</button>

Cross Browser Event Tracking

To track this with pure JavaScript across browsers you would use the following code:

var downloadLink = document.getElementById('button');
addListener(downloadLink, 'click', function() {
  ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'nav-buttons');
});

/**
 * Utility to wrap the different behaviors between W3C-compliant browsers
 * and IE when adding event handlers.
 *
 * @param {Object} element Object on which to attach the event listener.
 * @param {string} type A string representing the event type to listen for
 *     (e.g. load, click, etc.).
 * @param {function()} callback The function that receives the notification.
 */
function addListener(element, type, callback) {
 if (element.addEventListener) element.addEventListener(type, callback);
 else if (element.attachEvent) element.attachEvent('on' + type, callback);
}

In this example, the addEventListener function is a utility to add event listeners across browsers. This function is used to add an event listener to the PDF download link to listen for the click event. When a click event occurs, the event is sent to Google Analytics.

Using jQuery

jQuery is a popular JavaScript library that handles a lot of the cross browser inconsistencies. If you are using jQuery, to send an event to Google Analytics when a user clicks the link above, you would use:

// Using jQuery Event API v1.3
$('#button').on('click', function() {
  ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'nav-buttons');
});

Alex Rojas Riva

Ninja Analytics, HiPPO's, Master in Digital Marketing Plan & Direction, Web & Social Analytics, Free Consultation, Mobile: +44 (0)755 2839713, Skype:janibalrojas.

I can't improve your Website by 1000% but I can improve 1000 things by 1%, if you execute my recommendation immediately or action to take care.

There are Data known known, there are Data we know we know. We also know there are Data known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some Data we do not know. But there are also Data unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the web history, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Quote of Avinash Kaushik

The Best Quote ever !! (Aggregation of Marginal Gains: Recession Busting Analytics!)

Back in the 1980's Jan Carlzon was trying to breathe new life into an ailing Scandinavian Air Services. He was famous for saying "You cannot improve one thing by 1000% but you can improve 1000 little things by 1%".

Occam's Razor
by Avinash Kaushik

3 Advanced Web Analytics Visitor Segments: Non-Flirts, Social, Long Tail

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The last blog post shared custom analytics reports that you can use to find amazing insights faster, enabling you to create a focused, truly data driven organization.
In this blog post I want to continue the let's help make your day-to-day life better path. I'll share three advanced segments that I personally find to be of value in the process of moving from data to actionable insights. I hope you'll download and use these segments, but more than that I hope you'll learn how to create delightful analytics segments with the options you have at your disposal.
I am an unabashed segmentation fan: Web Analytics Segmentation: Do Or Die!
Without segmentation our analysis is focused on unrecognizable blobs of traffic. Total Visits. Average Page Views Per Visitor. Overall Conversion Rate. Yada, yada, yada. Boring. Useless. Life wasting.
With segmentation we focus on groups of people and we focus behavior that has logical connections (everyone who used a particular keyword, group that came via Twitter, people who viewed a TV ad, visitors who saw more than 4 pages on our site etc., etc). That helps us understand data & performance better. It helps us get data-gasms, improve ROI for our web efforts and get our bosses promoted.
How can you not love that?
Below are examples of segments that help us make a lot more sense of all the data we have and the insights that await us. You'll be able to download these segments and import them into your Google Analytics accounts and start using them right away!
Additionally, as I often do, you'll learn lots about the types of delicious analyses you can do with these segments. For good measure there is also a tutorial on regular expressions at the end (no good analyst can live without regex!).
If you use Adobe's Site Catalyst or CoreMetrics or Yahoo! Web Analytics or WebTrends or. . . you'll have enough detail below to create a segment in 5 minutes in those tools as well. Trust me, it takes just 5 minutes and, like with Google Analytics, you won't need to update your JavaScript tags or have to do extra work with IT or buy other expensive versions of their products just to do segmentation.
Let's go. . . three awesome analytics data segments. . .
#1: Non-Flirts, Potential Lovers
Did I get your attention? :)
We all obsess with our bounced traffic because it seems nutty that the person you spent so much time and love attracting to your website bounced! They did not click to see another page. They did not hit play on the video on the landing page. They did not click on a link on your landing page to your corporate site. They just left.
Here's how that segment looks:

It is tempting to analyze these people. Where did they come from? What campaigns? What landing pages? Etc., etc.
You can find value, but to grow the business it is not prudent to focus on analyzing just the people who flirt with us.
Why not first analyze people who do engage with us?
At this point people switch to analyzing all the non-bounce traffic. This is how that segment looks (bottom right):

[The above is a standard segment in GA, just look under Default Segments.]
Better. Ignore the flirts. Focus on everyone else.
Unfortunately that is still a "blob." It includes anyone who just had two "hits" in their visit (hits is a technical term for a page view, event, custom variable, etc., etc., more than one hit = non bounce visit).
I want us to be a lot more deliberate.
Look at the Depth of Visit report (standard report in GA in the Visitors section). It shows the distribution of the pages people see on your site (not the "silly" metric, average page views per session).
The distribution will show you the "tipping point," the point at which a core group of people decide to stick with your site after overcoming their initial "fears" (and your perhaps sub optimal pages!).
Segment that.
To use a metaphor. . . look for people who made it with you to a third date. For many sites, but not all, that's people who have seen three pages. It might take 14 pages to buy, but if they stay to three they are giving you a chance. They might read 8 stories on your non-ecommerce content site, but you note that people who see three engage for a longer time.
Here's that segment:

So simple right?
These 7,610 Visits were ripe with promise. Some people ultimately ended up buying, others just gave you a chance and decided not to consummate.
Rather than focusing on the bounce traffic ("flirts") it is much much more interesting and valuable to initially focus on people who give you a chance.
Where did they come from? 
12.11% from Organic Search via Google. Enough? Not enough?
More questions for you to answer. . . .
What pages did they enter on? What campaigns have a higher percentage of these people? What countries? What keywords? What is the delta between content they consume on your site compared to everyone else?
Look at the row with % of Total. . .

Helps you find what they are interested in, right?
More questions to answer. . .
Do they all happen to use the comparison chart first? Do they all absolutely read the Sports section? What's so unique about them?
This an astoundingly simple segment to create. Yet analyzing visitor behavior for this segment helps you identify, and perhaps do more of the things you already know are working.
Do this first.
Here's how you can get this sweet and simple segment:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: Non-flirt Potential Lovers Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/SuwKp
Have fun.
#2: Social Media, Baby!
Social media is all the rage. Suddenly Marketers have discovered that convincing people to buy their products/services or read their content or apply to university takes just two things:

A. 140 character missives sent frequently during the day extolling the glories of the company / newspaper / university
B. Creating a Facebook page, and then proceeding with the glory extolling

So easy. </ever so slight sarcasm>  : )
Our job is to hold the feet of these adventurous people to the warm accountability fire, right?
[Remember everything below is only if you use Twitter, Facebook et al for pimping. If you are participating in those media in the manner in which you are supposed to, conversation and adding value rather than pimping, then I encourage you to read my Social Media Analytics post to learn what the best metrics and tools are.]
The challenge in measuring social media impact on your business is two-fold.

1. Most content gets consumed in applications (think tweetdeck, my beloved twicca, mobile etc). They don't send referrers allowing us to tie to the source with our analytics tool (any tool, GA or Omniture or CoreMetrics).
2. Splitting out activity that we caused vs. activity that was caused by others.

My recommendation is, again, two-fold.
First, if you tweet / update / tumble links back to yourself then please for the sake of all that is holy in the world add campaign tracking parameters.
Here's the link I tweet:
http://goo.gl/myisj
It points here:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/12/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports.html?utm_source=social-media&utm_medium=twitterfb&utm_campaign=aktw
See the campaign (utm_) tracking parameters? Trackability, sweet, trackability!! Mobile, apps, html5 pages, bring it on. All visits tracked!
[If you use Site Catalyst or WebTrends or Yahoo! Web Analytics your campaign tracking parameters won't look like the above. Check with your vendor and tag appropriately.]
Second, split your social media value analysis into two different segments. Activity caused by you and activity on your site by all social media visits.

You drag over Source and input the Value you are using to tag your SM links, in my case the utm_source is imaginatively titled social-media.
This tracking mechanism (campaign tag) is used both on Twitter and Facebook links. I can, and often do, split out Twitter and Facebook separately by using a different value in the utm_medium value. I can further segment them separately if I want. For now I want to analyze them at a higher level together.
I did pimping. I got 2,486 Visits. So what?
Easy question to answer, go to your outcomes report and apply your newly minted segment:

Pretty darn pathetic, right?
Only one of the above goals is connected to a "hard" conversion (leads generated, Goal 2). The rest are "engagement" and videos played and other such goals.
Still pathetic, right?
Do you know how awesome, or not, social media efforts directly initiated by you are? It's not that hard. Go figure it out.
Oh and yes, you don't have to stop here. You can apply this segment to your amazing Page Efficiency Report, to your Visitor Loyalty and Recency reports, to your. . . well any report you have. That allows you to measure a broader view of the success of your social media efforts, rather than my effort to instantly put your feet in the fire! :)
Here's how you can get this social media segment:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: My Social Media Traffic Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/fvuXP
Time to create our second, more expansive, social media segment.
As I had mentioned above, this time around we'll look at the social media to our website(s) from our efforts as well as that of all our friends / BFFs / haters.
Before you create this segment you should go checkout your All Traffic Sources report and see how your web analytics tool is capturing various channels people show up from. Based on that review of my site, here's the segment:

A quick explanation.
Values for twitter, facebook, sphinn, stumbleupon are there for people who use web based versions of these social media websites. I can add delicious, digg etc., etc., if I want to. They are simply not that important a source of traffic for me. See why the review of the All Traffic Sources report recommended above was important?
[Some people will obsess and create a ginormous catch-all segment. But remember, you don't need to understand data from the last 10 visitors to make smart decisions.]
The value for "social-media" is there to capture the social media campaigns tagged by me. See our first social media segment above. You'll use your own tracking values.
Value for awe.sm is because for a while I was using awe.sm to auto-tag all my links. There are some latent visits which should get flushed out of the system in the near future (as I have standardized on www.goo.gl and www.bit.ly).
That's *my* All Social Media Segment.
If you are thinking: "Good lord that is messy!"
Welcome to the world of social media tracking. It is messy-ever changing-and you should know that you are going to babysit this constantly. Sorry.  [Also see comment above about needing the last 10 visitors: you don't!]
But after you create the segment, awesomeness follows. . .  analysis!
Step one: Answer: "So What?"

Better, but honestly still pretty pathetic. Remember the goals are a mix of hard and soft conversions (see above)!
By now I am never surprised when I see the above result for Social Media efforts of most outcomes-driven pimping efforts via those channels.
Perhaps you are an exception. Now you know how to measure it!
As mentioned above Analysis Ninjas won't stop at just Outcomes analysis and will dig deeper to see if there is any value that this traffic is adding to our company. My personal favorite place to start is Visitor Loyalty analysis.
Ok so these people are not delivering any hard or soft conversions. Does their loyalty profile look any different?
Here, check it out (standard report in Google Analytics and other tools):

Hmm. . . a very different profile from other visitors to the site.
Other traffic to the site has much less loyalty than social media traffic. See the delta between 60.98% and 44.35% in the first two rows? Also see the much better, sweeter, distribution for Visitors who visit from 9-14 times through 26-50 times.
For this content website there is value in the social media efforts in that they are delivering an audience that tends to then be much more loyal than all other traffic that ends on their website.
Provable value! From social media!! I know!!! :)
A couple more ideas for our Ninjas to dig deeper, and types of analysis they could do to determine other types of value.
It is trivial to measure the base metrics for your website for your Social Media segment. Visits, Pages/Visit, Average Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rates, Conversion Rates. . . . and so on and so forth. . .

You can quickly see at an aggregate level, or a detailed level, if your social media are delivering on the promise outlined by your $150,000 Social Media Consultant.
Here's another bit of analysis that can be useful for certain types of websites.
Say you have a real estate website, or you are responsible for craigslist.com. Both sites are primarily internal site search driven. People come to the site, search, find what they want, do business.
Take your newly beloved Social Media segment and apply it to your delightfully sweet pre-configured Internal Site Search reports. [Left nav -> Content -> Site Search]
Here's what you'll see. . .

You'll be able to analyze if people who come to your site from your Social Media campaigns engage with your site more or less (Total Unique Searches per Visitor). Do they exit from the internal site search results faster or slower (% Search Exits)? Do they have a harder time or an easier time finding the right result (Results Pageviews/Search and % Search Refinements)? And other such analysis.
You don't have to just report clicks and visits from social media. In our real estate website we got to the root of what's a deeper engagement (searching) and we got down to measuring real value (or lack thereof).
Ready to do some real social media ROI analysis?
Here's how you can get the all social media traffic segment:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: All Social Media Visits Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/YnJON
Good luck!
#3: Search Queries With Multiple Keywords [3, 4, 5, 10, 20]
On this blog and in my keynotes I have bemoaned the obsession Marketers have with brand keywords and their sub optimal strategy of optimizing for keywords, rather than key phrases.
I am a search long tail lover. It is the way to happiness (and finding relevant users!). Hence our first segment focuses on helping you understand the balance between keywords and key phrases in the queries used by Visitors from search engines.
It is not actually a "segment," it is more like using advanced segmentation as a reporting engine in a way you can only do in Google Analytics!
My strategy is simple. Use a regular expression to get GA to segment search queries into various "words this query contains" buckets. Here's what it looks like:

"Magical" part: ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$
Not that magical actually, just a humble regular expression. It is looking for the number of words in a query (in this case queries visitors typed into Google or Bing or Baidu that contained three words). The second regex counts visits with four word search queries.
[A quick note of thanks to Nick Mihailovski for helping me come up with the perfect regular expression. I was using ^\w*\s\w*\s\w*$. It was good but would not have caught some variations and it would not work for queries in non-English character languages.]
Ok back to using advanced segmentation as a long tail search report.
The final segment I have created, using the method above, has more "or" conditions that contain buckets for counting search queries with 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 and 20+ words. You can of course create any buckets you like; these were ones I find initially interesting.
When you click the Test Segment button (top right) you get this gratifying view (cropped to a small size):

Delightful right? It really is.
You get such an immediate sense of the long tail in a way that is hard otherwise in the mass of queries from search engines.
521 Visits from people who typed more than 10 words into Google/Bing! There were 36 visits by people using 20 words in their search query! And 237 people typed in more than 20+ words as their search query!
OMG!
Is your search engine optimization and paid search strategy accommodating for this type of behavior? You still bidding on a word or two?
While the above is not even your complete search universe view, it is a very simple and straightforward way to appreciate how long your search tail is.
And notice you did not even look at a report. You could do all of the above in the advanced segmentation view!
You likely want other buckets than 3, 4, 5, 10 , 20. No problem. Just download the segment below and make the appropriate changes and bam!
Here's how you can get this search long tail segmentation reporting:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: Search Query Length Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/v3KbM
Being the Ninja that you are I am sure your thirst of knowledge is not satiated.
Now you are probably wondering how the bounce rate looks for one segment of the long tail traffic (lower usually) or how the conversion rate looks (higher usually) or how many pages do they see (more engagement usually) etc., etc.
The above segment won't help you with that. But all you have to do is create the segment you want.
For example here's the segment for people who see four words exactly:

Save the segment, here it is: Visits via Search Queries containing 4 words.
Now apply it to your favorite search report and hello sweet, sweet delicious data!

You know the search queries, you know how many people came and you know their performance ("engagement" or conversions or downloads or leads etc., etc).
Furthermore, you can also segment this data by Paid Search and Organic Search, or Google vs. Bing and start to do very focused analysis that should fundamentally improve your search marketing program.
You can also take another slice at segmenting your search head, mid, and tail. For example you can easily create a segment for Visitors who came to your site via search queries that had more than four words in the query.
Here's that segment: Visits via Search Queries with more than 4 words.
Now go apply it to your search engine or organic search or paid search or goals reports and do really valuable analysis that will earn you the eternal love and adoration of your peers and superiors!
[SIDEBAR]
In case you wanted to do something more sophisticated beyond what's outlined above here are a quick set of instructions, and a tutorial on using regex.
If you want to create a segment for search queries that contain just one word use this regular expression in your advanced segment:
^\s*[^\s]+\s*$
If you want Visits with two words in Google search queries use this:
^\s*[^\s]+\s+[^\s]+\s*$
or
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1}\s*$
If you want to identify Visits by people who use three words in their search queries:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$
Now you can keep adding to the number in parenthesis and do a happy dance.
Some more cute things.
If you want to query for more than x words, say more than three words use this:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2,}\s*$
Did you see the comma after the number two above? Good.
If you want to identify all search queries where visitors to your site typed 2 or 3 words into the search engine, use this regular expression:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$
Fun eh?
So what the heck are all those characters in these regular expressions doing? Glad you asked.  Let's consider the regular expression we used to identify 2 word search queries.
The expression is (identified above): ^\s*[^\s]+\s+[^\s]+\s*$
Here's an explanation (as best as I can express in lay terms). . .
^          start at the beginning of the line
\s*        match zero or more white space characters
[^\s]+   match at least one or more non-white space character
\s+       match at least one or more white space character
[^\s]+   match at least one or more non-white space character
\s*        match zero or more white space characters
$          end of string
I hope all this "magic" makes a lot more sense.
[/SIDEBAR]
Isn't advanced segmentation cool? And to think you did all this with your standard javascript tag, all on the fly (including historical data analysis) and without having to buy extensive expensive add-ons!
Ok it's your turn now.
What are your absolutely dearest advanced segments? What's the coolest thing you have done with the advanced segmentation capability in your web analytics tool? Care to share some of your favorites? Perhaps a downloadable link?
It would be incredible to have your wisdom help all of us. Please participate.
Thanks.

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