Individual keyword analysis

[smartbear]

Hi,

We're using the service for free right now, but we're looking to upgrade to get at least 1 month of data in the "log."

However, the keyword "analysis" is really lacking. I see the same keyword sets listed multiple times although by checking the raw logs I see it's the same person.

Also, we need individual keyword statistics. For example, if people are searching for "A B", "A C", "A D", and "A E", the system should be able to tell us that "A" is a big deal. In general, we get stuff like this:

foo bar A gee whiz
ack A mar see an
baz bar foo A gee
...

In other words, it's not immediately obvious that "A" is used everywhere just by visually scanning the keyword list.

Also, if we upgrade, the keyword list will be very long... and without the analysis above it's useless.

Right now we use home-grown Perl scripts to analyze raw data. I would love to switch us over to your system because there are many things that are done very well, but I'm worried that with these issues we won't get meaningful data from the system.

Thanks for your time.

Yes we are strongly looking into a better analysis of the keyword stats.

Although that duplicate keywords again and again is an interesting point. This is sometimes because the user refreshes your front page, and the referrer string gets stored again. So the same referrer gets recorded more than once. So the same keyword is shown more than once for the same visitor. It's something we'll have to look into more.

[smartbear]

Is there a timeline for features such as these? I've noticed that most responses to important feature requests in this form are positive but without mention of when it will be completed.

We are happy to upgrade our account to fund the development of this and the other useful feature requests, but it's difficult to commit to you guys without some idea of when the investment will result in action, since before these things are done the service doesn't do much for us.

This service is off to a great start -- fast, easy to use, pleasent to look at. Frankly we'd rather go with a small shop like you instead of the larger more impersonal guys. We just need something to go on...

Thanks for a great service which even now I will recommend to others.

Hi smartbear,

All upgrades and your upgrade would be greatly appreciated :)

You can rest assured that any money we receive is being put to very efficient use. In terms of timeline you could be expecting an awful lot to be coming on stream by the end of April.

Many thx for your support and please keep recommending us to your friends.

[mattr]

I'd like to second a request for this feature. I'd really like to know what keywords, or keyword phrases, are getting folks to my site. A page that lists a summary, similar to what you do with the OS, brower, or resolution statistics would be perfect!

I just started using your service two days ago, and am highly impressed! Keep up the good work, and I'll keep looking forward to more feature improvements and the same excellent level of service!

[janylyn]

Hello,

I setup my new/free account on February 9th. I am planning on upgrading within the next week. However, I agree with everything Smartbear has said about keywords and their analysis and am looking forward to a more sophisticated reporting algorithm.

I have also noticed the problem of duplicate tracking of the same visitor-keywords as reported in this message stream as well as others on this forum. This is not due to the visitor hitting the back button and returning. One of my projects is also tracked by another site that has very reliable reporting and I can see the visitor on both trackers. The visit was made only once. I believe you have a bug that will skew any statistics you develop.

Otherwise I think your service is great and shows great potential to knock your competition's socks off.

Hi Jany,

Thanks for posting. I believe you're right. This is part of the reason why we are not doing that type of analysis right now, because there is some type of discrepency. So we list them all out individually so people can judge for themselves.

Rest assured though when we start grouping the keywords and search engines together in the advanced tracker and ecommerce tracker we will have fixed this problem.

Look out for us by the end of April. It's going to be good.

[smartbear]

Seeing that this thread has gotten longer, I would like to add one more thing to the conversation.

I probably speak for all on this thread when I say that the reason we care about keywords is to make our sites more accessible via search engines. This means optimizing the site for higher search ranking as well as advertising tips.

When you develop your keyword analysis, please consider the user's end goal. There may be some things you can do to further this end goal besides giving raw histograms.

For example, a common question is "Which keywords are people using where I don't already have an advertisement?" The answer helps guide additional ads. For your service to answer this question, you need the list of keywords I am currently using in advertising. Because I (and most everyone I think) use Google's AdWords, I can export all my keywords and ads in a text file. If I could upload this text file to you, you could turn around and answer the above question.

Just think of some of the amazing features you could create with this information. For example:

This is my dream application: You track paths through our web site based on referer, country, etc.. I can get reports on which pages they saw, which links they took, and where they exitted. Also path length and whether they came back. THEN, I can also see this matched with keyword analysis -- either in raw form as now or better the individual word analysis. Now I can see which phrases are best.

Here's why this is so amazing: Sometimes we have keywords that people click a lot but they never get past the front page. Reason is: our ad is great at getting the draw, but those people don't actually want our product -- they are looking for something else. Result: We are wasting money on this ad, even though from click-through alone it appears to be a success.

With the application I just described, we could catch these kinds of things right away. In fact you could make a special report showing "keywords where people hit the front page and then left." This would be incredibly useful. Note that for these numbers to make sense you have to pair that report with one that shows which keywords lead to people making it to interesting pages such as the trial download or puchasing page.

I know I just threw a bunch of complex feature requests at you. I wanted to give you an idea of what I believe would be a truly useful service. I imagine there are 10's of 1000's of people who want exactly what I just said.

Think of it this way: If you can make our advertisement more targetted and help us see where people go and leave, you will be directly saving us money and getting us more business. What's the price of that? The difference between making and losing a sale for us ranges to many thousands of dollars, and by noticing that some "good" ads are actually bad we've saved hundreds of dollars per month.

Therefore, if you enable us to do all this with mimimal effort, you are saving us hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month. Obviously we are happy to pay for such a service.

Thanks for your time.

Hi Smart Bear,

Many thanks for the time it took you to put together that post. Very informative, actually this is exactly the type of information we want to make available to you - instantly. At a drop of a hat and see it in real-time.

This is planned for the eCommerce tracker. Stay tuned. End of April for this feature.

[joyousigs]

In using Statcounter the last couple weeks since you opened up the system, I have noticed that the keyword analysis is a bit lite. I have been using extreme tracker during the same time and its search keyword analysis is simple but effective. Essentially its just a individual word frequency histogram, and a second frequency histogram based on search engine. Also effective would be a frequency histogram on the phrase (currently you list them individually).

One item I have found is that the other site does not count searches from other directory services like netscape, etc. Its great with google, yahoo. That is one item you may want to consider when update your system.

It has been interesting using both services. Each excells in different areas and the differences in alogrithms and approaches. Statcounter excells at using a record based approach to each visitor based on the type of the analysis (keyword, visitor, etc.). The other one attempts to display everything as histograms. There are positive approaches to both types of analysis. For initial analysis (especially on active sites) histograms are great (for summarizations), while detailed analysis requires the record approach. It would be a good step foward to have the information summarized in histograms then followed by the details - just like your summary page. By no means take this as a negative on statcounter - I think its great.

Keyword/search engine histograms
http://extremetracking.com/open;ref2?login=joyousig
search engines & phrases
http://extremetracking.com/open;ref1?login=joyousig

Thx for the feedback. We are far from finished with our keyword and search engine analysis. And if you upgrade your account, you can get a better overall summary as well as being able to drill down to see the data you want.