New Video. Old Message. Evergreen Advice. As an online marketer I routinely review SEO trends. Google’s Matt Cutts released a video in August but it was recently picked up by the Search Engine Journal on October 16. This is a case where I can honestly say “we told you so.” In this post I’ll explain …
Web Analytics
Not Provided (Encrypted) Search News
Not Provided Search Activity — a critical data point on what is driving organic traffic to your website — in Google Analytics has been slowly increasing. Keywords that brought qualified visitors to your website is now not provided. We riffed about this back in June, grousing about how website keyword data is getting diluted. Well …
Advanced Segmentation & Insights
Data — especially intelligence garnered from Google Analytics — is a beautiful thing. One of my favorite features is Advanced Segmentation. It allows you to isolate subsets of your website traffic. In this post I’ll share the predefined segments I routinely use when pulling Google Anlaytics reports each month. Predefined Advanced Segmentation in GA Advanced …
Webmaster Tools Makeover
New Navigation to Reflect How Search Works Webmaster Tools just got a new look. Don’t get too excited. The interface is still pretty stark. Even so, this analytic tool is powerful. It provides info to manage a healthy website. If you weren’t familiar with the old version, no worries. I’ll highlight functionality and important changes …
Google Analytics Dashboard Customization
Arranging Key Reports At A Glance Your Google Analytics Dashboard can provide amazing insights on the health of your website. Like any tool, learning all the bells and whistles can be daunting. I’ve been playing around with customizing dashboards and including Real-Time Widgets and I’m loving it. GA is notorious at providing tons of information. But it …
Website Speed Affects Conversions
Website speed not only affects SEO rankings, it can dramatically impede online sales conversions. There is a correlation between how fast a site loads and visitor interaction with a company’s website. Not convinced? According to Gomez (the web performance division of Compuware), 32% of consumers will abandon sites between 1 and 5 seconds. We’ll share how you can test …
Why Use Digital Analytics Experiments
3 Reasons Why It Makes Good Business Sense Sometimes you just guess wrong. Despite deep knowledge of your industry, consumer behavior zigs when you think they’ll zag. That’s why we recommend Digital Analytics Content Experiments. This cool feature of Google Analytics lets you test out website features and goals, like sign-ups for a newsletter, downloads …
GA Enhanced Link Attribution
Enhanced link attribution was announced last week for Google Analytics. Since links can dramatically affect SEO ratings, I thought it was important to hit the highlights. But first, let me explain the issues this update solves. Before In-Page Analytics only showed clickthrough info by URL, meaning it didn’t show the actual link on the page. This was …
Analytics Bounce Rate Nuances & Settings
Measuring your analytics bounce rate is an important but deceptive metric. At it’s highest level, bounce is one measure of how sticky your website is. But depending upon your analytic program, bounce rate can be calculated in a variety of ways. Analytics Bounce Rate Default Google Analytics is a very powerful and free tool that should be …
Spectrum Snippet: Webmaster Academy Merits
Learning to use Web Analytic tools (like Webmaster Tools) can be an overwhelming task especially if you’re new to managing a website. Google has set up an amazing amount of information in their Webmaster Central (help forum) collection. But they also created Webmaster Academy, educational materials designed just for beginners. These modular lesson plans cover …