The Dublin A4U roadshow comes to Dublin. This is the first time the A4U roadshow has come to Ireland so the expo is a great opportunity for irish affiliates to meet reps from Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Linkshare, Affiliate Window, amongst others!

Crisis Management

Damien had a great example of crisis management and how ignorance of how the internet works can add to the crisis instead of detracting. Damiens example was the Irish Pork Scare of 2008. Even now if you do a search for “Irish Pork” in Google, these are the results you see:

google irish pork results

Now you’ll notice from the results that the majority of the results are from News sites, which are authorative sites but you’d expect to see a result from a Government website, such as the Department of Agriculture considering that the pork industry is the 4^th largest agriculture industry in Ireland but you won’t because they don’t know how the internet works. If you look at the Dept. of Agriculture site, it is a PR8 site, this is an authorative site but if you search the site for an article with “Irish Pork” in the title it will return no results:

google doa irish pork results

It’s not that they didn’t release a statement it’s just they didn’t put any of the keyterms used to describe the crisis in the Title Tag:

doa site irish pork results

1. Use the language that is being used to describe the crisis by the public
2. Always have the best team possible – if you do not know how a certain medium works, higher an expert. (Some that I would recommend who understand how online media works would be Damien Mulley (obviously), Piaras Kelly (Edelman), and Simply Zesty (especially when it comes to social media)
3. Make sure somebody has ownership for managing the crisis and is responsible for cleaning it up, which obviously wasn’t executed efficiently in this case with these results still showing almost 2 years later. This point will lead us onto the next topic.

Some other sources I recommend for reading:

http://www.pkellypr.com/blog/2006/0123/online-crisis-management/
http://outspokenmedia.com/guides/orm-guide/

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation management is a growing field affecting all businesses with an online presence. The growth in review sites, such as TripAdvisor for hotels, RateMySolicitor for solicitors, Yelp for restaurants and hotels and ReviewCentre.com for multiple industries, means that no matter how small your business is, all consumers have access to online portals to vent their frustrations at substandard products or bad customer service and possibly tarnish your reputation. In the case of the search results above for “Irish Pork”, I think we can agree it is doing the industry no favours and possibly damaging sales, so what do we do about it and how do we manage it?

Lessons Learned:

• Assess how bad the potential damage from the query could be? You want to see what the monthly volume of searches for the query is. To do this you can look at the query in adwords to see how many people are searching for it:

google adwords irish pork results

• The volume of searches for “Irish Pork” currently is quite low but was quite high during Dec 2008 as can be seen through Google Insights:

• Identify why these other sites are ranking above you, is it due to authority or links. (Copyblogger has a great article on authority and iCrossing have a great study on the correlation of links to ranking). Some tools that can be used to identify links to an article/page on a site are Seomoz’s OpenSiteExplorer, Majesticseo and Yahoo’s Siteexplorer.
• Ask the Top 10 results link to your article as the definitive source for the query.
• Use other authorative resources as well by putting other related articles on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Develop a link building campaign to the articles hosted on sites that you control but also to articles on third party sites that echoes the response you want to be seen for the search results. Make sure you use the keywords of the search query when linking to articles (Anchor Text), i.e. irish pork, irish pork recall, etc.

Finally on occasion you will want to change the sentiment of the results for a query, as in the case of “Irish Pork”. There is no point to address the “irish pork recall” 2 years later so you’ll want to change the results that show up for it.

1. Look at the keywords that are used in the results and query, i.e. irish pork recall
2. Develop a positive spin on the keywords, i.e. Do you recall the first time you tasted irish pork?
3. Develop a campaign around it and release it to the online community

In the video above I showed a spreadsheet I created to identify online influencers and bloggers to incorporate into your campaign. If anybody wants it just ask me on twitter @leofogarty

Now it’s not known how Google decides what tweets it picks up. It definitely doesn’t pick up tweets from everybodies accounts but I have found a very simple way of identifying what twitter accounts it will pull tweets from. All you have to do is perform a google search on somebodies twitter username as shown below with the example of @lyndoman:

If their latest tweets are listed above the serps as shown above it means their tweets will appear in the real time results. So if you want to appear on the front page in google for real time results, make sure people with these types of accounts are tweeting about or retweeting your content.

Update: This seems to have now changed and now all twitter accounts can be part of Google’s real time results, so it seems that this was probably due to them rolling it out entrprise wide.

I can’t believe I’m only getting around to posting this now! Last Saturday I got a chance to go to the Irish Web Awards in the Radison SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin. I have to say it was a great night and a big thank you should go to Damien and the rest of the organisers for putting on an event which isn’t one of those typical back slapping award ceremonies but more for deserving sites which are actually used and appreciated by the online irish community. Below are just some of the pics from the night, check out awards.ie for further details:

Congratulations to all the winners.

Headline Sponsor – Realex Payments

The winners are:

Best Online Publication – sponsored by Maximise

• The Irish TImes

Best Radio Website – sponsored by IGOPeople

• Phantom

Best Podcaster – sponsored by 3 Ireland

• The Persuaders

Best Videocaster – Sponsored by Irish Mortgage Brokers

• Look and Taste

Best Sports Site – sponsored by ArgusCarHire.com

• RTE Sport

Best Music Site – sponsored by Poll Daddy

• Nialler9

Best Entertainment Website – sponsored by Radical

• Entertainment.ie

Best Arts Website – Sponsored by Brennan Sabatini

• Dance Ireland

Best Technology Site – Sponsored by BH Consulting

• Silicon Republic

Best New Web Application/Service – Sponsored by Red Cardinal

• Kildare Street

Most Innovative Website – Sponsored by iQ content

• Decisions for Heroes

Best Discussion forum – sponsored by KRO IT Solutions

• Boards

Best Government and Council Website

• IDA Ireland

Best Education and Third Level Website – sponsored by National Digital Research Centre

• Talk Irish

Best eCommerce / Services Website – sponsored by Cybercom

• Curious Wines

Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by Beaut.ie

• Organic Supermarket

Most Useful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by DoneDeal.ie

• RTE

Best Social Media Campaign – Sponsored by OnlineAdvertising.ie

• Count Me Out

Best Practice – Sponsored by Spinnakerpro.com

• Cars Ireland

An Suíomh Gaeilge is Fear – sponsored by Edgecast Media

• NOSMag

Most Accessible Website – Sponsored by Insure.ie

• Rose Project

Best Website in Ireland – Sponsored by Realex Payments

• RTE.ie

Finally getting around to putting up some posts about Bizcamp. Bizcamp was a brilliant experience for me, theres nothing greater than hundreds of entrepreneurs in one place participating in a free exchange of ideas and experience for the benefit of everyone.

This post is for a session I went to hosted by Caelen King from Revahealth.com . He was giving a talk on online business revenue models and believe me if anybody has researched online revenue models it’s Caelen. Caelens company Revahealth.com which he founded, announced in January 2008 that they had secured a €1.25m investment through Mianach Venture Capital and supported by Enterprise Ireland, with EI backing RevaHealth.com as a High Performance Start Up in 2008.

These models can apply to numerous types of affiliate sites so I suggest you take note because even if you can take just one small bit of information that you hadn’t originally considered from his slides or the video below, it will have a beneficial impact on how you plan your affiliate sites in the future.

Irelands online community is quite small and it’s easy to spot the people of substance, Caelan definitely gives me this impression, he’s got his business accumen covered as you’ll see from above but is also very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO which is great to see in a Boardroom exec for any online company.

Check out Caelen’s blog at http://blog.revahealth.com or follow him on twitter http://www.twitter.com/revahealth

The Data

First off lets look at the popular search terms related to the lisbon treaty:

This isn’t the best way to make a judgement based on data analysis as this data set has been taken from Googles keyword suggestion tool which rely’s on last months search volume but its the best I’ve got available and this is a quick post so it’s what I’ll use as a rough indicator. I’ve trimed the list down to the searches that I could associate with either a yes or a no vote. Based on what I visually could see it leans more toward a “No” due to the slightly greater ratio of negative searches compared to pro but more importantly due to volume of negative searches compared to pro.

Can Search Trends accurately predict the vote?

This is what we are here to find out but lets look at the data we have available compared to the last vote. As we all know we had a No vote in the last round so if we analyse the data in Google Insights to see if it confirms this we get the following:

From the above graph it looks like it accurately predicted the outcome. So lets examine the graph more closely based on search trends during the past month to see if we can predict the next outcome:

From the above graph it looks like we’ll have a No vote again. Like I said this isn’t an accurate test but just a bit of fun inspired by a chapter in Bill Tancer’s book, Click. Whatever way you vote is entirely your choice. Will I be right in my prediction, only time will tell!

Currently I’m reading a brilliant book and am enjoying each chapter even more as I go along. The book is called Click by Bill Tancer. If you don’t know who Bill Tancer is, he is the  general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence services. This book is for anybody who loves Search, Trends and the influece of psychology or economic/socio economic influences on how we search online.

I definitley put this book up there as one of my favourites of this year, what can I say? I’m a geek for data analysis. If you want to be a successful affiliate you need to understand why people search for products and when they are searching for them . This book is great for getting you in the mood for some data analysis. I’m just trying to convince the girlfriend to go on that weekend spa trip with her girlfriends so I can finish reading this book and spend the weekend checking out some real interesting searchs.

If you want to find out more about Bill, check out his website, click or he also writes a weekly column for Time magazine (Time.com) entitled “The Science of Search”.

This will track the following file types:

• PDF (.pdf)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Visio (.vsd)
• Microsoft Visio XML (.vxd)
• ZIP Archive(.zip)
• RAR Archive (.rar)
• Text file (.txt)
• Downloadable Javascript file (.js)
• Downloadable CSS file (.css)
• Executable (.exe)
• NEW Windows Media Audio (.wma)
• NEW Quicktime (.mov)
• NEW Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
• NEW Windows Media Video (.wmv)
• NEW Mpeg Layer-3 (.mp3)

How to use the Script:

1. Add the custom script onto your server, eg. /scripts/taglinks.js
2. Add an extra line of code to every page on your site, immediately before the ga.js GA tracking code

How to monitor downloads:

The script scans each page and autotags all downloads, mailtos and external links with ‘onclick events’.  This means that every time a visitor clicks one of these links, a virtual page view is sent to GA.

The virtual page views appear in the ‘Top Content’ report in GA and they look like this:

Downloads:                        /virtual/download/page/file-name/

Mailtos:                              /virtual/mailto/page/email-address/

External links:                    /virtual/exlink/page/destination-url/

Each time one of these events takes place,

• the name of the downloaded file is logged,
• the email address to whom the email is sent is logged, and
• the destination of the link the visitor followed off your site is logged

Further, in all cases, GA logs the page from which the virtual page view was triggered.  This is valuable data:

Consider a scenario where visitors have the option to download a newsletter from your home page or from your publications page.   By measuring the page from which users launched the download, you have full visibility on which page generated more newsletter downloads.  Note you may have more than one line entry in ‘Top Content’ for any given PDF.  Each line item records each location where the file was downloaded.

How do I structure my account?

You can measure what you want to measure.  Here’s how.

• If you want to isolate all of these virtual page views, simply type /virtual/ in the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of ‘Top Content’
• If you want to isolate just the downloads, type /virtual/downloads/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
• If you want to isolate just external links type /virtual/exlinks/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
• If you want to isolate just mailtos, type/virtual/mailtos/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.

You get the gist.

For example, to isolate only the file downloads, type, /virtual/downloads/:

The third entry indicates that there were 39 downloads (pageviews) during 36 sessions (unique pageviews) of the file PM18012008.pdf, launched from the page http://www.iqcontent.com/about/jobs/ in the time period selected.

IxDA Industry Session at Irish HCI Conference – 17th-18th September 2009, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

So this was the first event I attended which was held over two days, I have to admit I really was only interested in attending a couple of sessions mainly the ones related to web analytics and search, and I have to say I defintiely was happy with the knowledge shared at the event.

Web Analytics

First up was Niamh Phelan from IQ content discussing how to use Google Analytics, decide on the correct kpi’s/metrics for your business, establish your goals and tweak your website accordingly. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find Niamh’s presentation online but I was able to find a presentation she did previously that shares a lot of the slides:

Ei Presentation on analytics

View more presentations from Lar Veale.

Niamh was great and very helpful, she even was able to give me some advice after the event. One of the areas I was interested in was cross domain tracking on multiple domains and how to implement it.

Why as an Affiliate should I care about Cross Domain tracking?

How to Implement Cross Domain Tracking on Multiple Domains

The scenario

A user searches Google for “cheap widgets”. Your site, www.CheapWidgets.com, appears top of the search results, so the user decides to click on the link to your site. While browsing around, they click a link that leads to your insightful widget blog which is located at blog.CheapWidgets.com.

With the default Google Analytics setup, www.CheapWidgets.com will be seen as a referrer to your blog subdomain and a new set of cookies will be generated for that user, losing sight of information such as the referring site (Google) and the keywords that they used to find you (”cheap widgets”).

Ideally, this information would be preserved across all subdomains and any relevant third party domains that you own.

The solution

Google Analytics does provide a solution for this, but it’s a bit cumbersome:

Step 1: Modify your tracking code to include a couple of extra functions (which is simple enough).
Step 2: Manually tag each link to one of your subdomains or third party domains with a JavaScript function (which is annoying).
Step 3: Remember to tag each link that points to any of your domains (which is a burden). This is something that could very easily be overlooked.

The real solution

Niamh and the guys at IQ have produced a script that will automate this process. It automatically tags links to a set of domains that you configure inside the script.

The first thing you need to do is update the tracking code across each of your domains and subdomains.
Updated tracking code

<script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxx-x"); // Replace with your own account number
    pageTracker._setDomainName(".yourdomain.com"); // Don't forget to update this
    pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
    pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The value of _setDomainName should be the root of the domain you’re installing the code on. So, the value for both blog.CheapWidgets.com and www.CheapWidgets.com would be

pageTracker._setDomainName(“.CheapWidgets.com”);

The next and final step is to download the script, update the domains that you would like to track and include it on your page.
Sample configuration

var domains_to_track =
[
'blog.yourdomain.com',
'wiki.yourdomain.com',
'*.someotherdomain.com'
];

Include the script with the following code (it must appear in the body, just before your tracking code):

<script src="/path/to/js/xdomain.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>