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John Woods

Google Analytics Referrer Spam

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This is a public service announcement for B2B marketers using Google Analytics.

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I don’t plan to blog here very often about purely technical issues, but this is an important one.

Sadly, there is a new type of spammer at large. And it’s a type that will be particularly annoying for you if you are using Google Analytics to analyse B2B marketing. It can even put you and your colleagues at risk from malware.

It’s called referrer spam (or sometimes referral spam) and it appears in your Google Analytics reports. Here’s an example:

Google Analytics Referrer Spam

Referrer Spam in Google Analytics

Those are real spam URLs by the way. Please don’t visit any of them! (Hard to believe that How To Earn Quick Money dot com isn’t legit, eh?)

All spam is annoying. But this sort of referrer spam is particularly annoying for niche B2B marketers because it can distort our stats enough to cause us to draw incorrect conclusions. And it’s particularly dangerous for B2B marketers because it is more likely to be effective on a low-volume B2B site than a high-volume B2C site.

What’s going on?

Spammers have discovered a way to put spam URLs into Google Analytics reports. Their hope is that analysts will see the URLs, get curious and visit the site. Their goal is, at best, to promote semi-legitimate marketing services. At worst, they are trying to lead people to malware sites. DON’T FOLLOW THESE LINKS!

Why does it happen to my site?

You haven’t been singled out. The spammers are going after everyone. Every Google Analytics profile I’ve seen in the last few months is infected by this sort of spam.

Why is this particularly bad for B2B websites?

On a mass market B2C site there might be millions of visitors every day, so the impact of the spammers isn’t very significant. But in B2B we are often dealing with niche audiences. A specialist landing page on a B2B website might only get a few legitimate visitors each day. A hundred page requests from referrer spammers can swamp the signal from legitimate visitors and make the statistics impossible to interpret.

Why don’t Google stop this?

Good question. Hopefully they will fix this at its root cause soon.

What can I do about referrer spam?

Three things.

First, DON’T VISIT THE LINKS! And make sure that anyone else in your organisation who uses Google Analytics is aware of the danger.

Secondly, add filters to your Google Analytics views to filter out any future referrer spam. Tom Capper at Distilled found a simple approach which I find works well. (Caveat: spammers are constantly evolving their approaches. This filter works well today, but might not work as well in the future. Stay alert.)

This filter will stop most referrer spam in the future, but it doesn’t remove existing referrer spam. (This type of view filter in Google Analytics isn’t retroactive.) So there’s one more thing you need to do: add a segment to your Google Analytics view that applies the same filtering rules to existing data. This is a real pain – you can’t remove the spam, you can only segment it away. If you have a lot of custom reports set up you’ll have to change them. But it’s the only solution I know of. (If you know of something better please mention it in the comments.)

Ready to find out more? Please call on 0118 9485 766.

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    Five reasons your B2B paid search campaigns failed

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    Paid search – which usually means Google Adwords, sometimes in combination with other search channels like Bing Ads or Baidu – is a key part of most of the B2B marketing projects we work on at Sharp Ahead.

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    We love it because it delivers great results for our clients – both incremental new business leads and increased conversions from leads sourced from other channels. And don’t let the “paid” part put you off. Used well, paid search is amazingly cost effective. Once you account for the time and effort costs of so-called “free” traffic (from SEO, social media and other forms of content marketing), paid search is likely to give the best ROI of all B2B digital marketing channels.

    But there’s a paradox. With many of our new clients we find ourselves having a conversation like this:

    Sharp Ahead: “We’re going to be using paid search as a key part of our lead generation strategy.”

    Client: “Really? We tried paid search a while back and it didn’t work for us. We wasted a lot of money and gave up on it.”

    We hear this story of “we tried paid search and it didn’t work so we gave up” again and again, but the contrast with our own work couldn’t be more stark. Done well, paid search delivers excellent results for almost every B2B digital marketing challenge. So why this difference in experience?

    Paid search is complex and there are a lot of ways to get it wrong without even knowing it. Here are some of the key reasons why your previous paid search campaigns might have failed:

    1. Not niche = not nice

    It’s easy to set up a paid search campaign based on too broad a set of keywords. You’ll get lots of impressions and lots of clicks – and inevitably spend lots of money. But your B2B marketing proposition is specialist, so you should be focusing on long-tail keywords and highly specific search terms. If your keywords are too broad, most of the people who see your search ads won’t be good buyers. You’ll spend a lot of money on worthless clicks and your campaign will give poor value. A campaign that converts needs to target niche keywords.

    2. Geographic gotchas

    It’s likely that there will be some important geographic factors around your B2B proposition. Perhaps you only sell in particular regions, or you have a different story to tell depending on where the prospective customer is based. One of the most powerful things about paid search is the very fine and subtle control it gives you over geography. You can run ads only within very specific geographic regions, or exclude geographies that are not of interest, and show different ads to people in different geographic regions.  If you run a campaign without using these geographic controls, most of your ads will show to the wrong people and the consequences are the same as if you chose keywords that are too broad – wasted spend and poor results.

    3. Poor persuaders

    Ad copy really matters in paid search, and it’s a tricky art. It might seem easy – after all, there are just a few characters to play with – but crafting good search ad copy is a real skill. If your ad isn’t well written, it won’t get clicks from quality prospects and your campaign won’t deliver a return. This isn’t just about mass appeal: you need to craft an ad that attracts the attention of the niche market segments that are the potential buyers of your B2B proposition. And, of course, you need your ad copy to align with your brand positioning.  Remember, your ad needs to compete for attention with both your competitors’ ads and the natural search listings on the results page, so it has to get its message across effectively in order to get results.

    4. Landing is lacking

    So you choose good keywords, pick the right geographic options and write great ad copy. You get some great clicks. And you send them to your HOME PAGE? D’oh.  A great paid search campaigns needs great landing pages, with information that both clearly defines your business proposition and that is relevant to your advert copy – all within the first click. You won’t sell to anyone unless your landing pages give your potential customers the information, the persuasion and the opportunity for them to take action.

    5. Measurement muddles

    The last reason for campaign failure sounds crazy, but it’s a real issue: your campaign DID work and you just didn’t know it! How could that happen? Several ways, but one of the most common in B2B lead generation is that people see your paid search ad and it drives them to pick up the phone. (Seriously-engaged B2B buyers like the phone; it’s a time-efficient way to communicate and it lets them judge your company via a real human interaction.) It’s likely that you get inbound phone enquiries all the time from all sorts of sources, so unless you’ve taken special steps to keep track of paid search enquiries (like showing a unique phone number with paid search ads), you won’t be able to attribute results to your campaigns. In a recent campaign we found 80% of paid search enquiries came via inbound phone calls, with only 20% filling in the contact form on the landing page. Without sophisticated tracking and analysis tools in place, it would have been easy to misjudge the results and mistake a winning campaign for a failure.

    Did you make any of those mistakes in a previous failed paid search campaign? If so, perhaps you should give paid search another try.

    Ready to find out more? Please call on 0118 322 4395.

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      Google is now your homepage

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      Have you done a search for your brand name on Google recently? If not, you might be surprised. Give it a try right now if you like–I’ll wait. (Pro tip: open an incognito window in your browser first, so you don’t get personalised search results.)

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      Since I don’t know your brand name, anonymous reader (I’m good at personalisation but not THAT good!), I will use the accountancy firm PwC as an example.

      I am old enough to remember the Jurassic era of the internet. Way back then, a Google search result was just a hyperlinked heading and a snippet of summary text, much like this:

       

       

      But now the inhabitants of the internet have invented stone tools, tamed fire and developed the X Factor, Google has moved on:

       

      Now my example PwC is a BIG company with many, many locations. Let’s see what happens if we give Google a tiny extra hint:

       

      Think for a moment about some of the things I can do from these two Google results pages:

      • I can see a phone number for a nearby PwC office – so I don’t have to visit the homepage and find the “contact us” page

      • I can see the address of a nearby PwC office, and a clickable map – so I don’t have to visit the homepage and find the “our office locations” page on the website

      • I can use a dedicated search box to search the PwC website – so I don’t have to visit the homepage and find the site search engine

      • I can go directly to the PwC Twitter, Google+ and YouTube accounts – so I don’t have to visit the homepage and find the “follow us on social media” functions.

      • I can see navigation links (Google calls them “sitelinks”) that will take me direct to six different sections of the website – so I don’t have to visit the homepage and find the careers link, the graduate careers link and so on. (It’s interesting to speculate why Google has chosen these particular links.)

      • I can see company information and news – so I don’t have to visit the homepage and find “about us” or “news” if I just want some basic info.

      • And if all else fails – I can click on the top link and visit the homepage!

      Spot the common theme here? Google has provided many ways that I can bypass the homepage and get straight to the information I want.

      If I had been logged in to Google when I ran this search, I might have seen different results personalised for me; for instance I might have seen more sitelinks slanted for B2B decision makers rather than job seekers. These could have replaced even more homepage functions. But in my anonymous state, Google has realised I’m searching from the UK and has personalised the search results to have a UK slant (showing the PwC UK website, not pwc.com). Very useful. If instead I’d just typed “pwc.com” in the browser, I’d end up on the PwC global website not the UK site:

       

      …and then I have to find the “international PwC sites” link and navigate to the UK site before I get anything specific to the UK.

      Let’s think about this from a user’s perspective:

      • The Google results page is offering me a better user experience than the PwC home page for a large number of common use cases–like finding a phone number, or seeing info from the UK site instead of the global site. The information I want is right there on the Google search engine results page (SERP).

      • The Google results page is offering me a more consistent user experience. If I search for a different brand I’ll see much the same functionality presented in much the same way, whereas if I visit two brand homepages I’ll see big differences in layout.

      Over time, this combination of a better and a more consistent user experience is going to drive Google’s users to rely less and less on homepage navigation and more and more on brand search results.

      So, Google has become your brand’s homepage, or at least it has mirrored and in most cases refined many of the functions that your homepage is designed to perform. And over time, it’s likely that Google will take over more and more of your homepage’s functions. Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant–Google has the initiative and there’s no going back.

      This has some important consequences for B2B digital marketers:

      • We need to stop thinking of the homepage as the first page in a user journey. For many, if not most users, the Google results page for your brand term is the first page of the user journey. Be familiar with that page and think of it as a key brand asset.

      • Make sure your SEO team are aware of the things they can do to influence your brand results page, for instance providing location information via Google My Business.

      • Natural search sitelinks are particularly important. They have a prominent position on the brand results page and they can be used to service important use cases like providing careers information for job seekers. Your SEO team can’t fully control these natural sitelinks, but they can influence them (using Google Webmaster Tools, for example).

      • Paid search on brand terms is a way to take some control of the brand results page. Done well it can complement natural search and allow you to handle use cases for particular target segments.

      Here’s an example of using paid brand search to complement natural search. See how the sitelinks in the paid ad for Expedia feature deals and city breaks, whereas the natural search links are mostly about flights and hotels. Combined, they provide better navigation options:

       

      If Expedia’s brand ad wasn’t present on that results page, “Top City Breaks” would barely feature anywhere. A person looking for a city break might even give up at that point and search for a different brand name supplier.

      So to recap: Google has now become your brand homepage. Internet users are learning that the Google results page for a brand term is the best place to find navigation links and other important functions, like site search and contact details. You can take advantage of this to offer a better user experience (and so better achieve your marketing objectives) by thinking of your brand search results page as the first page in the user journey, and by making full use of the various SEO and PPC tactics available to enable you to influence that page.

      If nothing else: check your brand search results page regularly. Your prospective customers do.

      Ready to find out more? Please call on 0118 9485 766.

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