May 4, 2012 at 12:06pm ET by Carrie Hill

As an agency, we talk a lot about client expectations and understanding. Reality and actuality sometimes don’t start off in the same place, or even the same hemisphere. When we talk about Google AdWords, clients sometimes expect a few hours of education on how the setup of a campaign works, and then they’re off and running – generating thousands of dollars with minimal involvement. That’s their expectation. The reality is AdWords for even a moderate budget could really be a full-time, 40-hour-per-week job. There are many intricacies in an AdWords account, and it’s becoming more co [...]

Discover Links Using Google Analytics New Backlink URL Report

May 3, 2012 at 5:09pm ET by Daniel Waisberg

Today the Google Analytics team announced that we will start seeing backlink URLs in their newly released Social Reports. According to the announcement post, written by Ilya Grigorik, Software Engineering Manager, Google Analytics (and PostRank Founder): "These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media repo [...]

Related Topics: Google | Google: Analytics | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Google’s (Not Provided) Impacting More Than Just SEO Sites

May 3, 2012 at 9:03am ET by Matt McGee

Think that (not provided) is only impacting SEO-related websites? Think again. The Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school that's well known in media circles, wrote Wednesday about the growing impact that (not provided) is having on publisher websites. Author Steve Myers shared what he found after checking Poynter.org's analytics: Keywords were hidden in 29 percent of searches in April. That's up from 22.5 percent in November, shortly after the change was made. Now "(not provided)" makes up the largest category of search terms, dwarfing the second place term: Poynter. Overall, 6 [...]

Related Topics: Google: Analytics | Google: Privacy | Google: Web Search | Top News

Google’s Gags Go Worldwide For April Fool’s Day 2012

Apr 1, 2012 at 3:37am ET by Matt McGee

It was right about this time last year when we gave Google the winner's trophy for a series of gags that put all others to shame. We could do the same again right now, because Google has tried to top itself with another round of April Fool's Day jokes that pretty well span the globe of Google's international properties. Below is a recap of Google's (and a few others) pranks, and we'll do our best to update this as the day goes along. Google Racing: Self-Driving Cars Hit NASCAR The main joke at the moment is Google's "announcement" of a partnership with NASCAR called Google Racing, whi [...]

How A Google Change May Mistakenly Turn Search Traffic Into Referral Traffic

Mar 20, 2012 at 6:54pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google's about to make a change to how it reports referrer information for those using its Chrome browser. As a result, some analytics programs may begin listing search visitors as if they instead came directly from Google without doing a search, though major packages will probably adjust OK. The change was posted on the Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday, and it took some follow up to really understand what's happening. Come along, and I'll explain more. Google & Blocking Referrers Referrers are sort of a Caller ID for web browsers. They tell a web site where someone came from. [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Analytics | Top News

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