Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization

Google Instant Expands – Adds Keyboard Navigation

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Google Instant is expanding. The company has just announced new features and wider availability of the search-as-you-type feature.

Let’s start with the latter; Google says Instant is expanding in two ways:

Google Instant On Vertical Search Properties: In addition to being available on Google.com searches, Instant Search is now functioning on “many” of the vertical search options in Google’s left navigation column, like Videos, News, and Blogs.

Google Instant In New Countries: Instant Search is now available to signed-in users in 12 new countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Finally, when using Google Instant, there are new keyboard navigation options. You can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to navigate through the search suggestions (pretty sure that’s always been the case) and through the search results, too. This video shows how it works.

Tracking Google Instant Partial Queries in Google Analytics

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My previous post describes Google Instant and the new search results user interface. Now that folks have had several hours to play certain realizations begin to set in. What does this mean for Search Engine Optimization? What does this mean for my traffic?

All good questions in this post I will address the first question which came to my mind. What about Analytics? How do I track Google Instant partial queries? Now that Google is presenting real time or instant results, there is a high chance that the query string that gets passed to Google Analytics is incomplete or rather partial because the link was displayed before the user even completed typing the query!

For example an instant query result for “weather” may only be passing along “w” as the query parameter to Analytics since Google displays the link to weather after just typing “w”. To understand what a user needed to type to find the result they were looking for an additional parameter is being used in the result set. The parameter is “oq=” which will give you the information you are looking for.

To track Partial Queries, and their position in Google Instant, you will need to create a new profile along with a new filter in your Google Analytics Report. It is pretty straight forward; below is a sample filter you can use to start tracking.

  1. Create a new Filter name: “New Instant Ranking Filter”
  2. Set Filter type: “Custom filter – Advanced”
  3. Field A -> Extract A: Referral, ^https?://www\.google\.(co.uk|com)/(?!custom|m/).*[?#&]cd=([^&]+).*&q=([^&]+).*&oq=([^&]+)
  4. Field B -> Extract B: Medium:^organic$
  5. Output To -> User Defined: $A5 (position: $A3)

You may have to play a little with the filter for you specific requirement but this should give you a good start.

Let me know if you have any other suggestion or comments.

Google Instant – New Search Enhancement

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Google LogoThe big anticipated announcement from Google this morning is “Google Instant”.

Google is moving away from the traditional HTML based results to a more robust AJAX based application for delivering ‘real’ time search results. Marissa Mayer noted that Google has already made approximately 500 changes to search ranking and user interface (UI) in 2010.

It takes a user on average 9 seconds to enter a search query followed by a few hundred milliseconds on Google’s Servers to render a search result. The user then averages about 15 seconds looking at the results. Google Instant claims to save user 2-5 seconds per query, which in turn will save 11 aggregate hours per second.

Google will display characters in black that they have typed followed by shifting grey predicted characters as the user continues to type. Why even keep the search button at this point? Well it forces Google to search for exactly what you’ve typed, without predicting how you’ll finish that search.

Instant will begin rolling out to Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

For more information from Google you can visit their brief description over at:

 http://www.google.com/instant

Web Browser Statistics – 2010

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Over the past couple of years it appears that the demise of Internet Explorer 6 has finally reached some momentum. I do concede this may not be true in larger organizations where simple changes like upgrading a Web Browser to a newer release can be a very large undertaking.

However: Looking back at my 2010 analytic stats I can see the increase in Internet Explorer 8 adoption amongst the general home user (my target demographic). What I do find interesting is that IE7 seems to have had a very small adoption rate. This may be in part due to the commercials Microsoft has released promoting the “Enhanced Security” features of IE8.

Below are two images showing the different browser distribution of my visitors and more importantly drastic trend to move away from Internet Explorer 6.
type of browser Internet Explorer Version Chart

Crazy Egg – A Must Have Analytics Tool

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A.F. (Analytics Forgetfulness) is a problem that all website owners encounter. Like many others I have been overly obsessed with Search Engine Optimization and building links that I have neglected the actual visitors who land on my site.

Sure I check my Google Analytic stats every now and again, but what value is this truly providing me? GA gives website owners a false sense of security IMHO. What we tend to forget is that GA tracks links on any given page. Sure it can give you a pretty overlay on a map, but what does this mean? What does this translate to? I’m really not sure to tell you the truth.

Recently I decided to concentrate less on driving new visitors to my site and focus on “Converting” the visitors I actually have. Google Analytics did help me identify my ‘poor’ conversion rate 34% to be exact.

So the quest began, I had no idea what visitors were truly clicking on? What was driving them away? What was causing them to not convert? Oh no what do I do? How do I find out? Help!!

Crazy Egg to the rescue, they offer four views which you can see described below:

Overlay – Learn more about each element on your page.
List – Learn more about each element on your page.
Heat Map – A picture of where people clicked on your site. This tells you what’s hot and what’s not.
Confetti – Dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon the things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser, etc…

To get started with Crazy Egg you sign up for $9 which will allow you to track up to 10 pages and 10,000 visits. You’ll need to add a piece of JavaScript to the pages you want to track. The sign up process is simple and painless, adding the JavaScript is just as simple and the same code is reused across all pages you wish to track.

After installing the JavaScript and tracking for just a few days I was easily able to identify the “Problem” areas in my design and adjust accordingly. After making the changes my conversion rate has increased to 76.5% which is more than double.  It’s simply CRAZY! Or rather CRAZY SIMPLE!

In conclusion Crazy Egg is a must have tool to compliment Google Analytics and for the price you would be Crazy to pass it up.