SEO News

Posted by Lindsay

Today I’m excited to bring you a short interview with two of the top web analytics professionals in the industry, Avinash Kaushik and Annie Cushing. Not only are they experts at leveraging data effectively, they’re incredible conference speakers who are returning to MozCon this year!

Avinash Kaushik is the digital marketing evangelist at Google and co-founder of Market Motive. He is also the author of two best-selling books, Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, and he writes a popular web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor.

He’s an energetic speaker who delivers eye-opening insights about the power of data that you can put into action immediately. He gave an awesome presentation at MozCon 2011 which inspired a flood of tweets and ended with a standing ovation.

Annie Cushing is an SEO and analytics consultant. Her areas of expertise are analytics, technical SEO, and everything to do with data — collection, analysis, and beautification. She’s on a mission to rid the world of ugly data, one spreadsheet at a time.

If you don’t think analytics can be sexy, chances are Annie will change your mind. She shares practical, actionable information that revolves around one of her passions — making data sexy. At MozCon 2012, the audience at her amazing presentation left with tons of useful tips and tricks for creating Excel spreadsheets that are comprehensive, easy to understand, and compelling to decision-makers.

We are honored that Avinash and Annie are joining us again at MozCon, and we hope you will join us, too! Their talks will help you demystify analytics data the moment you get back to the office.

In his keynote, “Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI,� Avinash will apply Occam’s Razor to three user cases and share practical tips for dealing with complexity. Annie will show you how to separate the junk from the sound data when analyzing organic keyword data in her talk, “Breaking Up With Your Keyword-Based KPIs.�

Recently, Avinash and Annie were kind enough to answer a few questions about their upcoming MozCon presentations, must-know analytics information, and which technology would improve their lives.

Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.

Avinash: My plan is to share three stories that serve as an example of amplifying the awesomeness of any business not by focusing on doing one thing well. That seems like such an odd thing to say, but I’ve convinced that if we are to make incredible progress we need to solve for multiplicity.

Three simple examples, from our everyday lives, that the audience will be able to go back and implement in their day to day efforts.

Annie: I’m going to talk about breaking up with your organic keyword data. Many marketers (if not most) who focus on organic search are using junk data that does not stand up to scientific criteria. I’m going to talk about what data is junk, how to differentiate junk from sound data, and some alternatives to junk data that withstand statistical scrutiny.

What is something that all marketers should know about web analytics, but many don’t seem to know?

Avinash: My 10/90 rule. For every $100 you need to invest in making smarter decisions on the web, you need to invest $10 in tools and consultants to implement the tools, and you need to invest $90 in big brains to analyze the data and recommend actions.

People have this insane belief that data talks. No. Data does not talk; people make data talk.

The question to ask, hence, is not how much data you have. The question is how many big brains you have.

Annie: How to report on conversions in a way that gives all of the marketing channels credit for their contribution to the end goal(s). If coaches ran football teams the way marketers report on conversions, only the players who score the touchdowns would get paid.

What uninvented technology would improve your life the most?

Avinash: I know this seems silly, but I think I have all the technology I need in my life. Sure the batteries could last longer and my computer could just type in what I’m thinking – why do I need to physically type in a cramped plane seat?

There is an impressive amount of technology we need to deploy to ease human suffering. Those solutions, big and small, from smarter malaria nets to more precise lasers to target cancer, are the ones I’m rooting for.

Annie: A centralized financial system in the cloud that would enable me to manage all of my financial needs from one place — from investing to paying bills to paying my business quarterly taxes — with robust projection and budgeting data visualizations at my fingertips.

Thank you for speaking with us, Avinash and Annie!

If you would like to read more about Avinash, check out this great interview he did a couple years ago, which covers some of his views on social media, SEO, and why he is always looking for exceptional things. You can also follow Avinash on Twitter @avinash.

Learn more about Annie and web analytics by checking out her info-packed blog, Annielytics, her great posts on Search Engine Land, and by following her on Twitter @AnnieCushing.

Even better, get actionable analytics advice by joining us at MozCon and experiencing their awesome presentations!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

This is particularly true for brick-and-mortar stores as the data also shows that more than a third (36%) of smartphone owners had used a map tool in the previous seven days.

What tasks have you carried out using your smartphone in the past week?

Use of mobile commerce

Though mobile is playing an increasingly prominent role in the customer journey, conversion rates on smartphones still lag far behind tablet and desktop.

Data from Screen Pages shows that average conversion rate from desktop computers is 5.41%, compared to 4.16% on iPad and 1.3% on smartphone.

This is reflected in that fact that although 27% of smartphone owners said they had shopped online in the past week, just over half (51%) said they hadn’t made a purchase on their device in the preceding six months.

A further 26% of respondents had made fewer than three purchases using their smartphone, while only 12% had made seven or more transactions.

In the past six months how many times, if at all, have you used your smartphone to make a purchase from a mobile website or using a mobile app?

Among those who had made a purchase using their mobile, 54% had spent less than £50 in total in the previous six months.

This indicates that in general consumers still shy away from making bigger purchases using the mobile web or apps, although on the flip side 30% of mobile shoppers had spent more than £100.

Roughly how much money have you spent in total through mobile websites and apps in the past six months?

The data comes from a Toluna survey of 1,000 UK consumers, the full results of which are included in the Mobile Commerce Compendium.

It contains tips and advice on mobile commerce, mobile search, and how mobile can be used in-store and as part of a broader multichannel strategy.

Posted by GeoffKenyon

If you do link building and have to pull a lot of metrics from Open Site Explorer, I would like to introduce you to your new best friend, Pyscape. You might use a Google Doc to take advantage of the Mozscape API, but this is better. I promise.

Pyscape, created by fellow Distiller Ben Estes, enables you to pull link data such as an export of more than 10,000 backlinks or look up Moz metrics for a bulk URL list. And it’s super-fast.

What does Pyscape do?

When you use Pyscape, you must choose one of the following operating modes to run:

• Metrics: This will simply show all the Moz metrics associated with the given URL, subdomain, or domain.
• Bulk-metrics: This will show you the Moz metrics for a bulk URL list.
• Anchor: This will give you all the anchors associated with a URL, subdomain, or domain.
• Top: This will return the top pages on a site.
• Links: This gives you a list of links pointing to a URL, subdomain, or domain.
• Ose-style: This will return an Open Site Explorer formatted list of links for a URL, subdomain, or domain.

It is also worth noting that Pyscape does not cut off your reports at 10,000 URLs, and it can be much faster than using the Open Site Explorer Interface — especially for sites with large link profiles.

Selecting Your Granularity

In addition to telling Pyscape which report you want to run, you need to give it a little more guidance. This is especially important because Pyscape will pick an intelligent set of fields to grab from Mozscape based on the options you specify. Start by telling Pyscape how it should interpret the URL(s) that you input:

• -d (domain): interprets the URL(s) as domains only
• -s (subdomain): interprets the URL(s) as subdomains only
• -p (page): interprets the URL(s) as the specific pages only

Links Mode

If you are in the links operating mode, here are a few more commands you should know:

• -o (one): will return one URL per linking domain in links mode
• -m (many): will return up to 25 pages per linking domain in link mode (this is the default)

Anchor Mode

Finally, there are a couple more directives you should know if you are going to use the anchor mode:

• -f (phrase): will return anchor text phrases
• -t (term): will return term matches (default)

Setting Up Pyscape

So now that we’ve covered what Pyscape will do, let’s look at how we use it. The following steps will take you through setting up Pyscape.

1. Go to the Pyscape homepage; download the zip file and then extract it.



2. Enter your Mozcape API credentials (free or paid) in the keys.json file. Get your credentials here.



3. Download and install Python, version 3.2 or above (download here).
4. Go give Pyscape an upvote on inbound.org to say thank you to Ben, or follow him on twitter.

Running Your First Pyscape Report

Ok, now that we’ve got Pyscape installed, I’m going to take you through how to run reports using the command line (It sounds technical but it’s really pretty easy).

1. Start up the “Command Prompt” application.



2. Next you’ll need to change the directory that the application is operating in to the directory where you have extracted Pyscape. “Enter “CD” followed by the folder path leading to the extracted Pyscape directory and hit enter.



3. Now enter your request. Below are some sample requests that show how requests need to be structured.

Entering these commands will give you the data you need to start your analysis in a nice .csv output in lightning-fast time. This Google Doc contains examples of the output data from Pyscape to help you get a feel for which reports will best work for you.

The rest is up to you! If you like the tool, make sure to say thanks to Ben and to vote it up on inbound.org!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!