Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Unscrambling the Online Marketing Statistics

I like the numbers to work out. So I tried this exercise. Here are some real numbers from one of my websites.  Any ideas on why this stats don't make sense.

UnScramble
Take the term unscramble.

When you type "Unscramble" into Google, my site is 10th. I'm only looking at organic rankings and traffic in this article).
When I look at my analytics traffic over the last 30 days, I see that I have received 2,072 visitors who arrived using some search term containing  the word "unscramble".
When I look at the Google Adwords tool to get a sense of the traffic on this term in the last 30 days, it reports 301,000 searches.  So, it appears that I got around 0.7% of the traffic.  This makes some sense to me. I'm 10th and get less than 1%....could be true.


Sound-alikes.  My site is first or second for this term (Meaning: Same sounding English words but with different meanings and spellings).
Analytics reports 18 visitors whereas Adwords reports 3,600 searches for the past 30 days. So 0.5% came to my site.  This does not make sense to me. I'm the first or second term, how come I'm getting less than 1% of the searches.

I think the first example makes some sense but the second one doesn't. I would think that as the first, second, or third in the rankings, a site should harvest between 4-25% of  the searches.  Unfortunately, I have far more examples where the numbers don't make sense than where they do.  Any ideas? Anybody have any experience trying to reconcile different pieces of Google-based data?

One possibility is that that the adwords tool is showing not just the searches but all the  impressions that would be created if an advertisement was created to be run against the word Unscramble.  

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Communication Skills, Comic Strips

Building a website or a business online is always about communication. I'm often amused how programmers put up wording on sites that makes perfect sense to them but to all the likely users, it's just Greek.

Recent examples that I've seen on my sites are when programmers, thinking they are simplifying but helping people find info, put a link to filters. Can non-technical people make any sense of why there is a link to filters?


The cartoon below in in the same vein. It made me laugh. The site that it is from (XKCD.com) says it's OK to use it so long as its properly referenced.

The xkcd site cracks me up. Even the forum topics were witty and dry. http://forums.xkcd.com/
For instance:
Serious Business
For the serious discussion of weighty matters and worldly issues. No off-topic posts allowed

Mathematics
For the discussion of math. Duh. 



I have often wondered why I don't hire some comic strip writers to jazz up my social media. Anyone know any social media-aware cartoonists who want to make killer cartoons for me for not all that much money?