Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

UNIT 5

Introduction to SEO, How to use internet &search engines, Search engine and its
working pattern, SEO phases, On-page and off-page optimization, SEO Tactics,
Introduction to Digital Analytics- Data collection of Web Analytics, Key metrics
Impact matrix, Machine learning in google Analytics, Multichannel attribution

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing the visibility of a

website by improving the ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Search engine is web programme designed to retrive or search for information on the
web. The search results are usually displayed in aline of results on pages known as the
SERP. When auser enters a quesry,search engines dispaly both organic and paid
search results. Organic results are natural and unpaid, whereas paid results are paid
for - advertisers have to pay to get the sponsored web page link display for a search.

How Search Engines Work :

To show results matching user query, search engines perform many activities are

The process starts with web crawling, which is looking for the content available on the web.1
Websites are crawled by automated bots or spiders or crawlers that are software programs that
visit each web page. You may wonder how crawlers will know which domains to visit?
Crawlers get information about registered domain names and their IP addresses from Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is a non-profit organization
responsible for assigning unique identifiers such as domain names and IP addresses for the
entire Internet. CrawOing is done periodically depending on the frequency that webmaster
requests as websites keep updating their content.
Search engines then take all the data that has been crawled and place it in large data
centres with thousands of petabytes worth of drives. After that, search engines index the data,
which is a classification of pages into categories by identifying the keywords that best
describe the page and assigning the page to keywords. Indexing involves many concepts from
linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics and computer science. Using those concepts,
search engines have developed capabilities to index media files such as video, audio and
graphics along with the text.
When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. compare the search
query with the indexed pages in the database. Since more than one page will contain the
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

search query, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its
index to the search query. The last step in search engines’ processes is retrieving the pages
with the highest relevance score on top of the search results and displaying them in the
browser.

SEO PHASES :

The process of SEO for marketing

involves six multiple steps phases. The
starting point is audit so that the
marketer knows where the company
stands and identify the goals. After
having the real- ity check done,
marketers must put in efforts to follow
best practices of search engines. The
first step is to make sure original,
relevant, high-quality content is there
and is discoverable by the search
engines using processes such as
submitting a site map or a robot.txt file.
Subsequently, on-page optimization has
to be done, which is the easy part as it
is to be done on the web pages and
hence is within the control of the
marketer. After that, off-page
optimization, which involves backlinks, needs to be done. This is the difficult part of SEO.
Subsequently, social sub- mission must be done across social media channels to increase the
reach and get the interaction of users. After that, regular maintenance of the website must be
done so that it does not fall behind others in SEO.

Website Audit (Phase -1 ):

The SEO process begins with an audit for a reality check so that we know where we stand.
There are many freeresources available on the Internet fordoing an overall audit, such as
seositecheckup.com, smallseotools. com, maiesticseo.com They give a score out of 100,
which oilers a quick and easily understandable assess- ^nt of site performance on SEO. The
target should be to get a score above 80.

Some of the main elements of the Audit are

 Keyword Position - For important keywords, what is the position of a website in SERP?
https://smallseotools.com/keyword-position/ is an excellent free resource for finding out
keyword positions.
 Site Map - Sitemap shows the architecture of the site to search engines such as category
and deeper pages and hence facilitates crawling and indexing by search engines.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

http://seositecheckup.com/tools/sitemap - text free tool. which helps us know whether

sitemap exists for asite, or not. you can also check out your sitemap on
www.example.com/sitemap.xml
 Browser, Operating systems,Device Compatibility - It is important to check if the
website is compatible with different browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. It is
possible that website functions very well on Chrome but not on Internet Explorer or vice
versa, or works on desktop but not on mobile devices. There are hundreds of screen sizes
available in the market, therefore websites should be checked for their responsiveness.
 Backlink Checker - Search engines use backlinks as an indicator of the authority of the
site. Check out how many backlinks are coming from which domains and what is the
authority of those domains.
 Domain Authority - Many free tools give domain authority of the site based on backlinks,
which indicate the likelihood of website coming high in SERP.
 Keyword Cloud - Which keywords appear more often and have a greater density on the
website? Are they the right keywords?
 Speed Audit - Website loading speed is one of the important aspects of user experience. A
good benchmark is 2 seconds. Many users close the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to
load. Two popular tools for measuring site speed are Google Page Insights and Pingdom.
They give the score out of 100. A score of 85 and above indicates good performance.

Those are only the key elements of an audit. Apart from them, several other aspects are there
in an overall SEO check-up, which we discuss in the following sections. This audit will help
in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the website and hence give actionable insights.

Content - (2nd Phase):

Content here refers to all the information contained on a web page. The page content can be
displayed in the form of text, hyperlinks, images, audio, animation or videos. The text has
advantages of speed, accessibility and mobile responsiveness. The text has faster download
capabilities from the server than images as text takes less space on the server than images.
Search engines have a limited ability to understand images, animation, audio and video;
however, these forms attract users. In these cases, to determine page content search engine
use file names or the alt (alternate) tag, which we will cover later in the chapter.
Content3 should be unique, fresh, original and should add value to the target audience.
Offering quality content not only attracts visitors but also attracts other websites to link to
your site, thus enhancing your authority. Improving the content on your website should be a
priority, regardless of the website type. Se\cral tools are available to check for plagiarism,
www.duplichecker.com provides a plagiarism and quality check ๙ web content, including
proofreading and editing, smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/ is another plagiarism
checker tool to make sure that content is original and unique.

ROBOTS.TXT :
After having agood content, it’s important to ensure that your content is crawled and
indexed. Robots.tct file is atext file that helps to regulate web robot behaviour and
search engine indexing. It must be stored in root of any website.

Site Maps:
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

A Sitemap is an archive of every page on your website.can visualize your website as

a trace with the home page as the trunk and category pages as branches and product
pages as sub-branches. Crawlers may come and crawl only the home page (trunk) and
a few category pages (branches) and go away as they may not know that deeper pages
(branches and sub-branches) exist. To avoid this situation, it’s best to create a sitemap
and submit it to ‘Search Console’ so that search engines know all the URLs of the site.
The sitemaps can be generated from tools in either XML or HTML format. The XML
format is used for indexing by spiders. Apart from the list of URLs, it also has meta-
data about the impor- tance of URL, frequency of changes and its relationship with
other pages. HTML is for users, and usually y°u find a sitemap link in the footer part
of the website. When it is clicked, it redirects to a page that has all URLs of web
pages. For example, if you are unable to find a product page on the site, then you can
locate it using the sitemap. If there are a lot of web pages on your website, then you
can put links to major categories. An ideal way to put your sitemap is on the root
location as www.example.com/sitemap.xml and not like
www.example.com/..../sitemap.xml. An example of a sitemap in XML format is given
in

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION ( 3RD PHASE) :

There are several on-page factors that affect search engine rankings.

Technical Elements : A good SEO roadmap is built on astrong technical foundation. Unleass
the core technical components of the website are in place, all other SEO efforts will be in vain.
Important elements are

1) Site Performance : Site performance is about the page speed, which is describe in terms of
time aload. It is tough to hold a visitors on your website when the web page does not load
with is afew seconds. The bench mark should be 2 seconds. Slow website tend to have higher
bounce rates and lower average time per visit on the page. A slow webpage will require more
time and hence will reduce your crawl budget. There are many tactics to improve site
performance as follows

i) Enable Compressions by minifying HTML,CSS,JvaScript - minifying here refers to the

Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

removal of all unnecessary characters from the source code without changing its actual
functionality. Ideally HTML, CSS or JavaScript larger than 150 bytes need to be compressed
on the server.

ii) Compress Images - generally, image uploads on the web are different from what you see
when images are captured with a camera or created using image editor tools like photoshop.
the captured images are usually large in size and high in resolution, and if they are uploaded
on the server and added to any webpage in its original form, then the user may experience a
long waiting time for the web page to laod. A good practice would be to compress images to
reduce their size yet maintaining consistent quality so that the page loads faster and the image
doesn’t get blurred on the browser.

iii) Reduce Redirects - Redirect is a way to send users to a different URL from the one they
initially the browser to open. It is also known as the URL forward. When visitor experiences
redirections over the website, there is a waiting time for HTTP Request-Response cycle to
finish. Reducing these redirects can help to improve site performance.

Page load speed is one of the most important aspects of user experience. Page Speed
Insights gives a detailed report about the time taken by different elements of the web page
such as image, text, CSS to load. It gives a score ranging from 0 to 100 points. A high score is
better, and a score of 85 or above shows that the web page is performing well. A Google page
speed snippet.

Domains :

Domain names are Internet addresses of websites. Domains have extensions such
as .com, .in, .org, etc.They are purchased from registrars such as GoDaddy or BigRock who
get authorization of selling available domains by ICANN. There are a few points that one
needs to keep in mind while registering any domain.

1. Domain name Memorability : They are many domains names availabile, but selecting
one is a difficult task. A domain name should be short,catchy,easy to remember,spell and type.
You can conduct an informal survey by giving a few options to people and later see which
ones are the most memorable.

2. Keyword-Rich Domains - Having your keywords in your domain name can increase
click-through rates. It also gives users an idea about your business. However, earlier
keyword-rich domain name would contribute to SEO, but its importance for SEO has
decreased over time.

3. Subdomains and Subfolders - Subdomains and subfolders are second-level parts of

domains (top-level) that are free to be created under any domain that a webmaster could
access. There is a separate section in this chapter later dealing with subdomains and
subfolders and identifying the belter ones for your website.

404 Error/500 Error

Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

404 error is an error message that appears when the web page that the user is trying to reach
could not be found on the server. When any web page that the user is trying to access is not
available on that website server then the URL is redirected automatically to the 404 error
page. It is important to set up the 404 error provide to give visitors navigational options to let
them stay on to the website. This 404 error page ideally should have a link back to your root
page and could also provide some popular content on your website. Typical 404 error page
would contain: User notification that the page does not exist.
Search box
Homepage link
Another error that one can encounter is the ‘500 error’. These errors are internal server error
shown when any unexpected conditions occur. The server here could not be more specific on
why the problem has occurred and the solution to it. This error can occur due to server
hardware or a software code issue publisher should avoid the 500 error as it gives a bad
impression to the visitor as well as the search engine when 500 error occur the users can
refresh the web page, clear the browser's cache or they can even try deleting browser’s
cookies .

HTML Tags : Hyper Text Markup Language is markup language commonly used to create
web pages. To create webpages in HTML, we use different tags so that web browsers can
read the code and process them to display on your screen It provides a means to create
structures webpages that browsers can understand. Meta tags are written that describes the
pages, count and does not appear on the front end to users. if only exists in the html and
usually in the <head> scope.

Meta Tags
Meta Title - While creating any HTML document you often indicate page titles
using title tag on your web page. This page title is visible on the browser tab. A title
tag describes the topic of any web page. It is denoted by <title> and should be
placed within the scope of the <head> tag of any HTML web page. Ideally, there
should be a unique title for each page on any website. When the search engine
displays any website or web page, it uses page titles in the snippet, as shown in
Figure 10.11. Therefore, it is always recommended to use short and informative
titles. If a title is too long, the search engine will show only a portion of it in the
search result. The tliree dots at the end of the title indicates that the page title is
longer than the space meant for the search result (60 characters) and search engines
have clipped the title.

Meta Keywords - Meta keywords are used to define the content of a web page by
providing a bunch of keywords or tags specific to that web page’s content. Most
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

search engines (Google and Yahoo!) penalize user for abusing this function. The best
practice is to use keywords in all HTML and meta tags such as title, description, alt
tags, anchor text, URL.
Meta Description - Meta description is used to describe a web page that gives search
engines a summary of that page. It can be written in a sentence or two or even in
paragraphs if needed. The meta description is important as search engines may use
them as snippets of your web pages on the search result page. Ideally it should be
within a 150-character limit to fit in the snippet. Search engines may choose to use a
relevant section of your web page’s text if it matches the user’s query. In case the
search engine cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet, page
description would be used.

Heading Tags:

Heading tags help to dfine page structure and allow users to scan a page to find what
they are looking for. A good practice would be to start a page with H1 and then follow
with other heading tags depending on the content. Atotal of six headings tags have
been used.

Anchor Tag
Anchor Text — Anchor text is highlighted hypertext link, which can be an internal
website link or external source. Appropriate anchor text helps the reader to learn
content associations. For search engines, link relevancy is one of the factors that
determines web page rank.

The best practice is to use rich keywords in the anchor text, which is related to the
content of the landing page so that the user can anticipate the nature of the landing
page. The content around anchor text is also important and should signify lhetheme to
which anchor text belongs naturalty. It ts not a good practice use anchor texts such as
‘click here’.

IMAGE/VIDEO OPTIMIZATION

On the web page the ‘Alt’ attribute provides image related information. ‘Alt’ basically
stands for alternate, where we describe an image in a textual form. Every image
should have a distinct filename and associated text of the image in ‘alt’ attribute
which would allow specifying which images is for what. It also helps visitors who
cannot access the image. In the case of inaccesibility, screen reader whould be able to
identify the corrosponding ‘alt’ text and speak the text mentioned in the ‘alt’ attribute.
To help search engines to understand the context of the used image we moust use the
‘alt’ tag.

Keywords : Keywords are the words and pharses in the content that makes it posible
for users to find websites by using the search engines. While writing any content
digital marketers should focus on building a theme out of the content. Themes are
formed through relationships between concepts and gropus of keywords. Closely
related keyword pharses strengthen the topically of any web page.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

Choice of Keywords : careful research needs to be done for choosing the right
keywords for optimizing the website.

Long Tail and shor Tail keywords :

The web is made up of short-tail and long tail keyword searches. Short tail leywords
are very few, and each one has millions of monthly search volume. The are typically
generic or category keywords. Most of the keywords are the long tail. which is no
longer phrses and each of them has only a few hundreds pf monthly search volume.

RSS FEEDS : RSS(Rich Site Summary or Really simple Syndication) os an XML

code that contains recent information updates, RSS feeds give auser the ability t opt
for asubscription very similar to newspaper subscription.

OFF-PAGE OPTIMIZATION (4TH phase) :

Initially SEO was mainly on-page. But since it was under control of webmasters,
some started absuing it by stuffing keywords. Hence search engines introduced the
concept of off-page optimization.
The major part of off-page optimization includes

BACKLINK :
A backlink is the process of getting hyperlinks from external pages that are not owned
by you to link to aweb page of your website. Backlinks will help in building the
authority of the website. Each link to awebpage is counted as avote for that page and
the page getting most votes win. The link represents an ‘editorial endorsment’ of a
web document.Building backlinks in the important and challenging activity in SEO.
Only quality backlink will help in search engine ranking.High quality backlink comes
from high quality websites that are trustworthy and have a high reputation. Source
Diversity and Source Indenpendence are have a backlinks.

Authority and HUBS : The most important obejctive of off-page actiivities is to build
the authority of the website. the concept of authority has been borrowed from
academia. The quality of a scholarly paper is judged by how many citations the paper
is judges by how many citations tha paper has receipved.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

Blog Post/Commentings
Press Release
Directories/Classifieds
Forums
Article promotion and syndication
Avoid unnatural links

Social media Reach :

Social media is becoming increasingly important in SEO. Search engine consider
social signals such as like, share,retweet as user feedback. content that is engaging
and getting organic traction is considered to be good quality by the search engine.

Video Creation and submission:

Marketers create videos as they are richer format . But most only upload the videos
without optimizing them for search and discoverability you must do the following for
video optimization.

Rich Snippets -
Video title
Optimize your description
Transcripts
Leangth
Embedding Options
Informational Options
Informational, Not Just Promotional
Taret-specific

Maintenance :

SEO is not a one-time task as search engine algorithms change constantly. Moreover, SEO
must be done regularly for new content that is posted. Also, if SEO is stopped, then the
website will start falling behind, and competitors will catch up. To maintain your web
presence and stay at the top of SERPs, you must regularly do SEO.

SEO TACTICS
Black Hat SEO
Spamdexing, search engine poisoning, webspam are some commonly known names of black
hat SEO. When someone deliberately manipulates indexes of a search engine to improve the
ranking of web pages, then we can call that the usage of black hat SEO. The search engine
discourages such practices; hence we should avoid using them. It involves several techniques
as follows.

Keyword Stuffing - Keyword stuffing15 is a technique in which web page is loaded with
keywords unnecessarily in the meta tags or in content to obtain a rank on search engines. It
may lead to a website being penalized by search engines.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

Example of Keyword Stufiing:

If Rajasthani turban is what you’re looking for; then you are definitely in the right place to
buy Rajasthani turban. When it comes to Rajasthani turban, you won’t find a higher-quality
selection of Rajasthani turban anywhere! Our Rajasthani turban experts know how to pick
only the best material from the bunch, and we sell this premium-limited stock Rajasthani
turban right here for you to enjoy Rajasthani turban. We guarantee you’ll come crawling
back to buy our Rajasthani turban.

Cookie Stuffing - It comes under illegal affiliate marketing technique, which involves
placing an af- filiate third-party tracking cookie from an entirely different website on visitors’
browsers without their knowledge. If the user later visits the target website and makes a
purchase, the cookie stuffer will be paid a commission. Because the stuffer has not driven
traffic from his site to the target site, this technique is illegitimate and can even steal
commissions of genuine affiliate marketers as fraudulent cookies write their cookies.

Hidden Text/Links - Text can be hidden in several ways such that it’s visible to the search
engines but not to the users. An example is a white text on a white background, using CSS to
position text off-screen setting the font size to 0, hiding the link by linking only one small
character such as a hyphen.Within the code, when someone uses comment tags to hide
keywords, link or content, then it also comes under hidden text/link practice.
Comments tags are used by developers to give some clues to other coders.

Cloaking - This technique is an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the

content served. Delivering content based on IP address does this. When a user is
identified as a search engine based on IP address, a different web page is served, and
when the user is identified as a human, then a different page is served. Hence while
the user may see pornographic content, search engines may see non-pornographic
content.
Gateway Pages — Also called doorway pages, designed to create fake pages that are
stuffed with content and optumzed for one or two keywords that further link to
another landing page. The end-user or visitor will never be able to see doorway pages
as they are automatically redirected.
Mirror Site - Process of creating multiple websites with similar content and design
hosted on different domains is called site mirroring. It is done to drive traffic to the
main site and get backlinks. Search engines consider this as duplicate content and can
penalize the site.
Blog Comment Spam - The spammer to get backlinks writes a certain script that
targets certain websites. Because of the script, comments appear on multiple websites
promoting some content with malicious URL that possibly contains a virus. Figure
10.35 demonstrates a WordPress blog comment spam. By looking at the email
addresses of the commenter, we know that it’s spam.
’S

Social Networking Spam - It is unwanted spam content appearing on social networking

Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

sites that have user-generated content such as comments, updates, etc. It can be done
using fake accounts to send bulk messages or hate speeches, fraudulent reviews,
malicious links, etc. When there is a huge number of postings and messages on social
networking websites, as shown in Figure 10.36, it is social spam.

Link Farms - Link farms are a group of websites that all hyperlink to each other and
hence are formed with the sole objective of getting backlinks and thus improving
search engine ranking.
Cybersquatting - Cybersquatting is an act of registering and using an Internet domain
name, especially well- known company or brand names to earn profit from the
goodwill of some other company.

WHITE HAT SEO

White hat SEO refers to following the search engine rules and policies for doing SEO
and adopting optimisation strategies and tactics with a focus on the human audience
and not search engines. A comparison between Black Hat and White Hat SEO
technique is given below
Black Hat SEO Technique White Hat SEO Technique
On-page factor Hidden text Titles and meta-data
Duplicate content Quality content
Off-page factor Guest blogging
Doorway pages or gateway pages

Links Page swapping Link building

Link farming Quality backlinks
Content Keyword stuffing Relevant keywords

Digital Analytics

Digital Analytics is the process of tracking, colection, analysis and reporting of

websites and mobile applications usage data. It provides several key metrics, which,
when analysed, can give actionable insights. It is required to optimize marketing
activities over the internet.

Data Collection :

WebLogs:
Weblogs or server logs are one of the oldset data collection techniques that were built for
collecting information about server activity. It is automatically created and maintained by the
website’s server. the log consists of details such as visitor’s IP address, data and time stamps,
HTTP code,bytes served, referrer, user agent, etc. These weblog details are not publicly
available and require admin’s access to the server where the website is hosted.
The process of weblogs data collection, is as follows:
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

1. When the user enters a website URL in a browser, the request is made to the server
where the website is hosted through one’s Internet service provider (ISP). Hence,
there are certain data that their ISP shares with the web servers.2
2. Then, the server sends the requested web page using a browser to the user.
At the backend, that web server builds an entry in the weblog for the request. These
log files capture data such as page name, IP address, date and time stamps, and
browser of the user.
Data in the log files are cluttered as they capture not just user behaviour but also search
engine robots’ behaviour. Usually, they are more useful for technical purposes (detecting
technical glitches such as site down, tracing, etc.) and not for business decisions. Hence one
can use parsers (a computer program) to clean the data and make it amenable for marketing
purposes.

Benefits of Weblogs
Some of the benefits of using weblogs for marketing purposes are as follows:

1. Every web server has an inbuilt capability to create log files whether we want or not.
If any other tool for web analytics such as Google Analytics has not been activated,
one can use weblogs to analyse user behaviour on their website. The advantage of
weblogs is that they belong to the business and is their own data.
2. Weblogs is a useful source for tracking the behaviour of search engine robots. Robots
do not execute JavaScript tags, and thus they leave no trail in other JavaScript-based
data capture methods such as Google Analytics. From weblogs, one can know the
frequency with which robots are crawling and indexing your site.

Challenges with Weblogs

Weblogs face a few challenges, such as
1. Page caching by ISP : ISPs keep a temporary copy locally of the page served for a
defined period so that when the next time request come on the same page, the request
is met locally instead of being sent to the server.This helps in cutting down the
timentaken in serving the page, and the page appears to the users to load faster thus
enhancing the user experience.
2. Dynamic IP Addresses: With the increaseing number of users being assigned with
dynamic IP addresses using dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), it
becomes difficult to identify unique users.
3. Proxy servers - It is a network server that behaves like an intermediate between the
user’s device and server on which the website is hosted. They help in improving the
server’s performance and its security. When anyone uses proxy servers to access
websites, the request will not be sent to the main server.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

It is recommended to use weblogs to analyse search engine robots’ behaviour to measure the
success of your SEO (search engine optimization).

Key Metrics :
Three key metrics in Digital Analytics
1) Behaviour Analysis
2) Outcome Analysis
3) Experience Analysis

The aim of these metricsis to obtain actionable insights from the world of web
analytics

Behaviour analysis
Behaviour analysis is what is traditionally called click stream data analysis. It is the
process of collecting, analysing and reporting aggregate data about which pages a
website visitor visits and in what order. Inferring about the intent of the visitors is the
aim.

Visits/Sessions
A visit or ‘session’ is defined as a series of page requests with a gap of no more than
30 minutes between two page requests. When someone visits a web page, it is called a
visit or session.

1. Click versus Visit - Click is when a person clicks on an ad or a link. Upon

clicking, the user visits the web page. In such a scenario, a number of clicks
and visits should be the same. But it is not so. Can you guess why? Users may
click on the link, but before they land on the page, they may close the browser.
Sometimes the page is too slow to load, and hence the user may close the
browser. Hence, the click may be 1, but the visit is 0. Some clicks may be
unintentional. Hence, the user may close the browser or tab upon realization.
Hence there is always some difference between clicks and visits. Typically,
there is a drop of 10-15% between clicks and visit. If clicks are 100, visits may
be 85. But if the difference is too much, then one must check the load speed of
the page.
2. Unique Visitors - Unique visitors are the number of different users requesting
web pages from a website during a given period, regardless of how often they
visit those web pages.

Methods to calculate Unique Visitors

There are primarily two methods for calculating unique users.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

1. First is a cookie-based method.3 A cookie is a small text file placed in the

browser of a device. Each cookie has a unique cookie ID. Hence a count of all
unique cookie IDs during a given time will be a website’s unique visitors,
These cookies should be persistent cookies and not session cookies. Persistent
cookies have an expiration date and are stored in the computer. Session
cookies do not have an expiration date and expire upon closing the session or
browser. Google Analytics sets persistent cookies. The information in the
cookie is passed on to Google via the JavaScript tracking code installed on the
page. So, if a visitor has cookies disabled, or JavaScript disabled, or both, then
they are not tr However, statistically, this is a very small percentage of users.

The challenge in the cookie-based method is that if the user deletes

cookies, then the unique cannot be counted. Also, if users access from multiple
devices then, since different cookies will be set on different devices, it will lead to
inflation in the number of unique users.

2. The second method of calculating unique users is the IP-based method. In this
case, unique users the number of unique IP addresses. The challenge in this
method is that the same IP address c:: assigned to different users if they are
using a proxy server, which will lead to deflating the number^ unique users.
Network address translation (NAT) hides IP addresses of clients operating
from a subnet (e.g. intranet) that are insulated from the greater Internet by
firewall/gateway. Therefore multitude of physical users may be represented by
a single IP address.
Alternatively, different IP addresses can be assigned to the same user through
dynamic IPs, which will lead to inflating the number of unique users. Dynamic host
configuration protocol (DHCP) dynamically assigns client an IP address drawn from
the ISP subnet address pool. Therefore, the same physical user may be represented by
several different IP addresses when a user accesses an online resource.
The important thing to keep in mind while calculating unique user is to use a
consistent time period. Sum of daily unique visitor will be different from the
weekly total, and this will be different from the monthly total just because of the
calculation used.
According to ComScore, the deletion of cookies alone contributes to 2.5-
fold inflation of unique visitor statistics.4 Additional cookie inflation comes from
the usage of multiple computers, devices and locations to access the Internet.
Hence both unique IP address and cookies overestimate unique visitors.

、Time on Site ,
■ The time on site metric indicates engagement of the visitor. The more is time
spent, the higher is the stickiness of the site. But it should not be considered as a
thumb rule for all types of websites. For some sites, less time may be an indicator
of better user experience. For example, for an FAQ page, less time may be better;
whereas for a blog, more time on site is better. Hence for interpreting time on site,
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

one should consider the nature of the web page.

Calculating time on site

Entries in the log files are:
Click 1: Home Page 0900 hrs.
Click 2: Product Page 0901 hrs.
In the given situation, time spent on the home page would be 0900-0901, hence 1
minute.
Since the method of calculating time spent is by subtraction, time spent on
single-page visits is not includ ed as the time calculated for them is 0. Another
interesting fact is that the last page time is also not calculatec
There are always hacks available to record the time spent on the last page.

a. Tabbed Browsing
All of us open multiple tabs while browsing. How is the time calculated in tabbed
browsing? There are tv ways to calculate this, as follows.
The First method
Outcomes: Assuming one session for each of the two tabs in the browser,
Let’s take Tp as Time of Page,
Hence the total time spent on two tabs is 5+ 6= 11 minutes according to
this method.
The second method

The second method is called the linearization method of calculating time spent. These
are visits organised by time stamps.
Outcomes: One session
Ts( session duration) = 7 minuits
Note : Google Analytics uses the second method called “linearization’ Method.

Page Views : Page views are the number of pages viewed or requested by user. Every
unique URL is apage. It is also refered to as ‘Depth of Visit’. It is very applicable to
content websites. More page views mean more engagement with the visitors. One cal
calculate an average number of page views per visitors. The metric will become
actionable when one segments the page views according to trafic sources.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits. They are visits in
which the users leaves from the landing page without interacting with the page. if the
user interacts by playing a video or answering a poll or using a flicker or closing a
pop-up, then it will not be counted as a bounce.

The visitors can possible add to the bounce rate by

 Clicking on the link to a different website
 choosing the ‘Back’ option to leave the website
 Closing an open window or tab
 Typing a new link
 Session timed out

Heat Map Analysis :

Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

A heat map is the graphical representation of avisitor’s engagement on the website.

Heat map depicts the engagement section by using the colour spectrum. The Hot
sections shows the higher attention of visitors and Cold sections show the lower
attention of visitors.

Different types of Heat Map :

1. Scroll Map : It shows the percentage of visitors that scroll through each section of
the webpage. The hottor section on the webpage shows visitors have viewed it.
2. Click Maps : It shows the page sections that have more visitors clicks.The section
that is hotter shows the more frequest visitors click.
3. Hover Map - It shows the sections where visitors moved their cursor while reading
web page. The hottor section shows that visitors hung their cursor over it for a longer
period.

Exit Page: It is important to know from which pages users are existing the most. pages
from where visitors are dropping off in the process of buying a product are called Exit
Page.

Trafic source: This is one of the most important metrics and a very good segmentation
variable. There are three kinds of traffic source.

1. Direct Visitors- users that visit a website by directly typing your URL in their
browser address bar
2. Search Visitors : users that visit a website based on search query in the search
engine
3. Referral : users that visit a website because it was mentioned on another blog or
website.

if one gets many visitors directly, it indicates that the brand has a high pull or brand
image. If a business’s dominant traffic source is a search engine, then it means their
SEO is good.

OUTCOME Analysis :
A website may get many sessions and visitors, but wht is more important for
abusiness to track is the business outcome of visits and sessions. Businesses are
intrested in knowing how much revenue was generated how many converions
happend, etc.

The Outcome metrics are

1. Conversion Rate : The converstion rate is the percentage of users who perfom an
action that is desired by the website owner. The archetypical example of convertion
rate would be the percentage of website visitors who do any online transaction on
your website.
The conversion rate can also be:
• The user permitting the website to save his ATM card details for an easier payment
in the future
• The user signs up for a subscription
• The user downloads your trial version software or a brochure, which may allow
people to proceed in the sales funnel
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

• The user requests for more information

• Using a certain feature of an application (mainly new or advanced features)
• If the users have downloaded your mobile app and used it
• Have spent some time on your website or read some articles
• Returning to the site

AVERAGE ORDER VALUE

Average order value (AOV) can be formulated as the sum of revenue generated divided by
the number of orders. This is one of the major business outcomes of an online business. One
can segment visitors and marketing campaigns into high, medium and low AOV groups and
identify where the best (e.g. high AOV) customers are coming from. One can also design
their campaigns to increase the AOV.

Multichannel Funnel : Mutli-channel funnel reports enable understanding of the

different users interact with on the path to convertions.

Topics converstion path- It shows the popular channel combinations users interact
with before converstions. these channel includes
• paid and organic search
• referal sites
• affilates
• social networks
• email newsketters
• custom campaigns that you have created.

Assisted Converstion - the metrics shows the contribution of each channel towords
converstion. there can be three ways in which a channel can contribute - i) last
interaction ii) assist interaction and iii) the first interaction

Time Log - these reports can help one inderstand how many days users take to
convert. Many days may indicte that users are finding challenging to take the final
leap of faith in aproduct or service.

Path Log - Shows how long the sales cycle is. it show how many interactions users do
before conventions
Visitors Frequency and Recency - how many user visit a website during the reporting
time period.
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

New vs Return Visitors Conversition- how many new visitors they have in
comparison to returing visitors.
Valu per visit - One must assign to every single visit on their website.

Micro Conversition - M?icro converstions are assist converstions, which include some
intermediate step, shich might lead to a macro converstion.

Macro Converstion - This is ultimate sale or converstion.

Percentage of visitors who view product pages - the ultimate objective of the website
is to get sales or converstions, and that will hapen only when the users visti the
product pages.

Experience Analysis

The third category of web analytics is Experience Analysis - it is vital to do research

on acontinious basis to know if visitors can find the information they are looking for
andif the web page served their purpose. Experience of customer on awebsite can be
gauged by various metrics and methods. there are many ways to know the experience
of customers on awebsite

Research Data : one can carry out research using three methods i) site surveys ii)
usability testing iii) site visits.

Site Surveys: survey questions can be asked for understanding the value of the web
page.
Usability Testing - To ask the real users to test the functioning of the site to know
how easy it is to navigate and also how intuitive it is.business should take their
feedback about which aspects of the site they are not able to understand and are
experiencing problems.
Site visits: - It is done by going to the customers’ premises and observing how they
accomplish tasks on websites amidst all distractions.

Website experimentation and Testing :

One must regularly experiment and test different things on the website to know what
can be inproved.

A/B Testing : It is also called split testing or bucket testing. where one compares two
verstions of a concept to see which one performs better. The concept that you wish to
test could be an ad,price,page,call-to-action,product, etc.,

steps to perform A/B Testing :

The systematic steps that must be followed to perform A/B Tests

1. Conducting research : Research can be conducted to collect data on visitors

behaviour through google analytics, heat maps and survey. Observations can be made
to identify the customer conversion obstacles.
2. Generate hypothesis : Based on the data collected through research, formulate the
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

hypothesis aimed at increasing the conversion rate.

3. Forming variation — Creating a variation based on the hypothesis and A/B test it
against the current version,. based on monthly visitors, current conversion rate and
expected conversion rate, and initiate the test
4. Testing - After initiating the test, wait for the required time to achieve a significant
result.
5. Analyse the achievement and failure

• Pros of doing A/B testing - A/B testing is a cost-effective way of testing cutting-
edge ideas and yet exercising control on them by. testing on only a few users. One can
be ahead of their competition if one constantly tests new ideas. This energizes the
organization, and one can have some fun at the workplace. Google Analytics comes
with content exper- iments integrated. One can click on the ‘Experiments in
Behaviour’ tab on Google Analytics and set up the experiment (Figure 11.21). One
must choose the objective of the experiment, percentage of traffic to experiment, set
a minimum time for the experiment to run, and choose a confidence threshold.
Most testing tools come with built-in capabilities for regression analysis, reports
and a multivariate analysis.
• Cons of doing A/B testing - It is difficult to control all the external factors such as
campaigns, search traffic, press releases, etc. Thus, one will not be 100% confident
of the results (have around 70% confidence in the results, and decide accordingly) on
one’s A/B testing. The kinds of elements that can be tested on the website are also
limited.
In A/B testing, one may know which page variant leads to more conversions, but one may not
be able to discern which elements of the page contribute the most.

Multivariate Testing :

It is a technique that allows the test of multiple variants concurrently. for example, we wish to
test three elements highlighted in the box - the heading, call-to-action and form. If each has
two variants, there will be six different possible versions of the content that will compete to
be the winning variation. The total number of variations in a multivariate test can be
calculated by the following formula:

Total Number of Variations = [Number of Variations in Element A] x [Number of Variations

in Element B] x [Number of Variations in Element C]

The challenge in MVT is that because of the factorial nature of the tests, the number of
versions can quickly multiply requiring the large sample size to be distributed across different
combinations. JavaScript tags must be implemented around the three identified elements.

The Impact Matrix : The imact matric helps to evaluate business impact and time-to-
useful.

How to use the matrix : The y-axis denotes business impact on an exponential scale
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

(from supertactical to super strategies)

The X-axis denotes time-touseful from real-time,weekly,monthly and quartely or 6-
monthly.

Real Time Weekly Monthly

micro 24 super
outcomes strategic
conversions
page value
outbound cost per Retail store checkout 10
clicks Acquistion visit abandon
rates
click-2-
delivery
rate
click-thru page-depth purchase
rate intent
AVOC unique Bounce rate % completed 4
page views videos
viewability GRPs consideration
% new applause awareness
visits rate
Impressions visits super
Tactical

Machine Learning in Google Analytics :

In web analytics, machine learning is the future. Considering the progress of
technology like natural language processing, machine learning is surely going to
revolutionise the way we perceive and utilise web analytics at present.

Here’s how machine learning is incorporated in the Google Analytics system.

A. Real-Time Traffic Monitoring
Through this feature, we can monitor the impact of marketing campaigns and content/design
modifications on our digital properties.

B. Search Feature
Through this feature, we can raise specific queries about a property, metric, duration,
etc. For instance, we can get quick reports, data and insights by posting simple queries
like “last month’s acquisition from Mumbai or “Safari browser users in chennai last
week”
Dr S V N SREENIVASU, Prof in CSE UNIT-5 DIGITAL MARKETING

C. Mulit Platform Analysis

this feature has the ability to provide combined information of app and web users.
through ML technology, google analytics 4 gets empowered to extend instant data
visualisation of metrics,dimentions etc. based on any platform that we select.
D. Smart Alerts
Google nalytics 4 uses ML to send alerts if your website or app experiences drastics
trend changes such as significant rise or fall in number of users. The smart alert sid in
doing root-cause analysis of unexpected spike/decline and in takingquick actions to
stabilise the situation.

Multi Channel Attribution :

User are exposed to multi channels before they purchase a product from any websitte.
Suppose one is selling aproduct; user saw the product advertisment on Facebook but
did not buy it at that instance.Now the user happens to see the same advertisement
again on the search network but does not buy this time as well. The user finally buys
typing URL (direct). The question then aries - how much contribution will FB or
search have in that purchase? this is called multi channel attribution. So we have
different models that can be deployed to measure the contribution of different
channels. Let us look at them.

1. Last interaction/Last click attributation Model

2. First interaction/First click attribution model
3. Linear Attribution model
4. Time decay attribution model
5. Position-based attribution model

Important Questions :

1. What is search engine Optimazattion and Explain the different phases of SEO.
2. Explain the Search working Process
3. Explain the process of data collection through Web logs and its benefits
4. Explain the Key metrics of web analytics
5. Explain the machine learning google analytics
6. Explaint Multi-Channel Atrribution