We’re all doing SEO – jostling for position, trying to improve our domain authority, vying for backlinks, looking at page rank.  We’re all getting reports from our SEO vendors.  But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to include those core measures in our SiteCatalyst Dashboards sometimes.

Did you know you can?

It’s a bit of a hack – but it works.

At Murdoch Uni we now include, as part of our basic measurements, Domain Authority, Total Backlinks and Page Authority for our homepage.

Why are these important to us?

Because they form part of our overall SEO strategy and despite the reports we get from our SEO agency, we want the data (and reporting capability) in SiteCatalyst, included in our dashboards on a daily basis, so that we can monitor it over time, to ensure that our SEO efforts are paying off.

A bit of background

Domain Authority

Just as pages can endorse other pages, a link which crosses domain boundaries (e.g., from some page on www.perthnow.com.au to a page on www.murdoch.edu.au) can be seen as endorsement by one domain for another.

Domain authority is important as it’s a measure (by the search engines) as to how authoritative you are on your content – the theory being that if others link to you, then you must be pretty good.

Domain Authority is a score out of 100-points, predicting how well a web page will rank on a domain. The higher the Domain Authority, the greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank well.

Page Authority

Page Authority is also a score out of 100-points, and it also predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank.

Total Backlinks

This is a count of the total number of links we have to our site from other sites.

We could also pass in the total number of top level domains that link to us.  The list goes on…

So, now to the how

We actually want to report two items of data into SiteCatalyst; Name and Value.  Name might be Backlinks; value would be the number.

To do so, we use the products variable.

The products variable is used for tracking products and product categories as well as purchase quantity and purchase price. The products variable should always be set in conjunction with a success event.

So the standard implementation for measuring products is:

s.events="prodView" s.products="Category;Product[,Category;Product]"

Notice the semi-colon between the Category and the Product name, and the comma separating multiple categories and multiple products.

Now this doesn’t include the value that we want.  The product name, category, quantity and price are all captured in the products variable.

So, what you’d normally do on the “Thank You” page of your checkout process is to pass back the products purchased, along with the quantity and the price – price being the actual revenue (so if the quantity was 2, then Revenue is 2 x price)…but as we’re not tracking real purchases, we don’t need to worry about that.

So…in our hack, we’ll set it up in the following way:

s.events="purchase" s.products="Category;Product;Quantity;Price,Category;..."

where:

Category = “SEO”

Product = “Backlinks” and “PageRank” and “DomainAuth” etc

Quantity = 1

Price = Number of links and PageRank value and DomainAuth value etc

Notice that we’ve changed the events to “purchase”

An example product string to send in would be:

s.products=”SEO;Backlinks;1;34557,SEO;DomainAuth;1;72.69”;

Remember to remove any commas in the numbers – commas are used as string separators in the product string.  Also remove any $ signs.

The source of the data

Obviously just having the capability to report it doesn’t do much good if you can’t get access to the raw data in the first place.

Well, seoMOZ have a nifty little api that can be used to get access to this data – and bucket-loads more.

If you set up an account with them, you’ll have access to their API and can get the raw data.

We set up a script that queries their API on a daily basis (which is similar to the script on my Tweet, Tweet – tracking Twitter post) and then it formats the data into the s.products string and passes it into SiteCatalyst.

Customising SitCatalyst

In SiteCatalyst, you need to set up a new report suite that is limited to just showing the “Products”.  Once you’ve got access through the menu to the Product based reports, you should then create a Custom Metric called Our Index and set it just as [Revenue], but use the 2 decimal place numeric value.

Then if you take a look at your product reports and use the Our Index calculated metric, you should see whatever you’ve passed in, such as Backlinks, PageAuth, DomainAuth etc.

However, that’s not really what we wanted it for – we want trends over time.

Switch it to the trending report and you’ll have the actual value shown on each day.

Pretty neat really. 

Couple of Gotchas

Using the products variable in this manner comes with a couple of things that you need to remember.

Firstly, the ranked report will aggregate the values, so the ranked report is only useful to look at on a particular day.  Any more than that and you’ll be seeing a total across the days…not much good.

The other issue is that you’re actually reporting a dollar amount – using the revenue field of the products to capture the index values.  So just remember that it’s not a currency value…which is why the calculated metric is used.

And make sure you only set the script to run once per day – any more than that and you’ll duplicate the values in SiteCatalyst.  You could actually use an s.purchaseID value to try to eliminate duplication.

Dedicated report suite

It’s highly important though that you only report into a dedicated report suite – one that doesn’t take “real sales” data, otherwise your real revenue will be totally distorted.

The added benefit to a dedicated report suite is that you can set up custom reports and custom menus.  If you set the report view to trend by day, for each of the “products” you pass in, and customise your menu with just those custom reports, you’ll have trended SEO reports on a daily basis, available within SiteCatalyst.

Final thoughts

There’s really no end to this type of data going into SiteCatalyst to enhance your overall view.  You could pass in Twitter Follower counts to see if your Twitter-clan is growing daily, or pass in Lead counts to measure optin/optout/total list size over time, or pass in the Google PageRank. 

So there we have it.  One more reason why a paid-analytics solution like SiteCatalyst rocks!

They’re tweeting away.  You probably are too.  But they’re not necessarily following you, or you them.  Are you even aware of them?  And are you reporting on their mentions? 

Twitter is pervasive nowadays.  Which isn’t bad for only 140 characters or less.  And it’s amazing what you can actually say with so few words.  Good, bad or ugly, it’s happening around you.  At the breakfast table, on the way to work, at work, at lunch and at night.  And the audiences are huge.  Lady Gaga – 6.6 million followers; Barack Obama – 5.5 million.  Ok, so maybe you’re not a Lady Gaga, but you get my drift.  What’s to say someone with thousands of followers isn’t tweeting away about your brand? 

Some quick stats about Twitter (as of 2nd Sept 2010), courtesy of Techcrunch.com

1. 145 million registered users
2. 300,000 registered apps connect to Twitter
3. 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on a mobile device
4. 46% of active users now use some sort of mobile Twitter experience

Did you know you can report tweets in SiteCatalyst?

Not only can you track the number of daily mentions, you can also see who is a brand advocate, or bashing you constantly.

You can also set alerts so that if your tweet volume changes by a certain percentage, you’ll get an email (configured in SiteCatalyst with Alerts).

If you log into the Adobe Developer Connection and have a look under the Code Gallery (apart from loads of others information – spend some time and have a good rummage), on page 10 there is some custom code that you can download to get brand terms reported into SiteCatalyst.  Thanks to the guys at Omniture Twitter Analytics who created the code – great job guys!

The instructions for use are pretty easy…although it’s a PHP5 solution, so you might need some tech help in setting it all up.  Just set a few values, type in some search terms and off you go. 

You’ll also need to create a new report suite as you probably want these reported separately.

If you schedule it to run every hour, then it’ll pick up new tweets that match your search terms and report them into SiteCatalyst.

Ok, so what do you get?

Well, for starters, you get to see the volume of tweets that are occurring.  Because you’re reporting them in on an hourly basis, the granularity is the same as your other reports.

Then you get to see all of the tweets containing the search terms you put in:

They’re called Page Views, even though they’re not technically that – it’s just how they’re reported.  So once you’re over that, the number represents the number of separate tweets that have occurred on each tweet.

If you want to see the volume of tweets for each Search Term, you can do that too:

Again, page views = tweets.

Then you get to see who they are, and with some basic traffic correlations, you can see their tweets.

Now some of those authors you’ll know.  Some will be you or your company.  But there are likely to be others that you don’t know – and this is where it gets interesting…

Obviously there can be a substantial brand impact based on the size of their followers.  So, part of the solution is to also track the number of followers they have.  You end up with a report that has a bunch of numbers in it:

Not a lot of help really…other than a quick glance.  

Classify Follower volume into buckets

If you classify them, you get a better view.  You’ll do the classification on the s.prop Followers.  You actually self-determine the different bucket values to us.  We’ve used the following:

1. Less than 100 followers – low impact
2. More than 100, less than 1,000 – medium impact
3. More than 1,000, less than 2,500 – high impact
4. More than 2,500 – extreme impact

Call them what you want, it’s really just to get an understanding of the size of the audience and the tweets they’re being exposed to.  Not to say that someone with less than 100 is any less impactful than someone with over 1000…we all know where that leads to…

Once you’ve classified, you can then get a report:

So in the above example, there have been three tweets from people that have over 2,500 followers (based on our classifications).  A quick drill down into the Extreme group and we see that in fact, they all have over 5,000 followers…so, another quick view allows us to see who they are, and what they tweeted:

Get notified quickly

One of the other benefits is that you can create an alert to be sent to you.  For example, if tweet volume changes by 25% over the last hour – something’s going on that you probably want to have a look at…

Some final thoughts

Even if you’re using Tweetdeck to monitor your brand terms in real time, and even if you have a dedicated social media butterfly (we do and she’s absolutely awesome – nice work Jo), and even if you use social media monitoring tools (which you should be doing anyway), having the information available to you in SiteCatalyst gives you just that little bit more insight into what’s going on.

Couple of parting thoughts…

1. The solution we use from the folks at Omniture Twitter Analytics is really good and, for us, suits our technology platform (PHP).  But there are many out there that don’t have PHP-based platforms.  Perhaps the folks at Adobe can look at a simple Genesis integration through the Twitter API?
2. Social Media monitoring is becoming more and more critical to organisations.  Having mentions from blogs, news sites, Facebook, Twitter et al, reported into SiteCatalyst, would be an awesome result.  Maybe that should be another product option on the Adobe Pinwheel…