Oct 1, 2012 at 1:07pm ET by Danny Sullivan

A change in iOS 6 made by Apple and not anticipated by Google means that for the past week or so -- and likely for some weeks to come -- those reaching web sites from Google's search engine after doing searches from within Safari will be counted as "direct" traffic rather than "search" traffic. As we reported last week, those using the built-in search box within Safari are now having their searches sent though Google SSL Search, if they use iOS 6. Apple apparently made this change in order to increase privacy for searchers. It won't officially confirm that but neither is it saying that [...]

Safari Shifts To Google Secure Search in iOS 6, Causing Search Referrer Data To Disappear

Sep 27, 2012 at 9:55am ET by Danny Sullivan

Another source of Google search referrer data appears lost. Searches through Google that happen in Apple's Safari browser search box in iOS 6, Apple's latest mobile operating system, no longer pass along search terms to publishers. For those unfamiliar, "referrer" data is information a browser passes along to a publisher about the last page you were on. When you do a search on a search engine, this means what you searched for -- the exact words -- are passed along as part of the referrer. The change, as we've learned as this story has developed, is because Apple apparently -- as part of [...]

How To: Google Analytics Installation For Novices & Beginners

Sep 21, 2012 at 10:51am ET by Carrie Hill

If you're an intermediate to advanced Google Analytics user, this article will probably be of little interest to you personally. I suggest you bookmark it anyway as a reference for clients or friends who are just starting out with Analytics. As a long-time agency employee, I see many clients, prospects and even casual acquaintances with websites that feature absolutely no Analytics data. They have no idea what is going on, or what they're missing because the visitors that come to their site disappear into a vacuum. This article is meant to walk first-time installers through the process, [...]

A Primer On AdWords Remarketing Using Google Analytics

Aug 24, 2012 at 9:39am ET by Carrie Hill

Remarketing has been around for quite a while as part of the Google AdWords suite of tools. Remarketing works by creating a "list" or "audience" within Google AdWords. The pages that are pertinent to that audience are tagged with special code that allows Google to place a cookie in the browser of anyone who visits that page. It's a great way for you to get your brand out there in front of your website visitors, even when they're not thinking about shopping and buying from your site. There are tons of ways for you to segment your website to serve remarketing ads; you can even get as granular [...]

Figure Out What Is Important, Then Measure It

Jul 27, 2012 at 12:33pm ET by Carrie Hill

As search marketers, we are constantly digging around in analytics, finding data, thinking it looks neat, then stepping back and saying, "But is this important?" I've done this a million times, and recently came across a quote that put some of what I'm always looking for into perspective. Don't make the measurable things important but make the important things measurable. The data you have is not necessarily the data you need to succeed. I think we go about this all wrong sometimes. Instead of finding data in Google Analytics or some other tracking program and trying to figure out if [...]

Google Tests Adding Analytics Data To AdWords

Jul 13, 2012 at 12:56pm ET by Pamela Parker

You've long been able to see AdWords account data in Google Analytics, but many marketers have longed for GA data in their AdWords account, as well. Google is currently testing such a feature in a limited number of accounts, as first noted by Periscopix. Google isn't saying much about it but a spokesperson sent me a statement saying, "We are currently conducting a small beta test to provide advertisers with more insight into campaign effectiveness." Though I'm not seeing this in my AdWords account, Periscopix says the metrics now appear in the Campaigns tab under Columns, where you can c [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics

Virtual Pageviews Or Event Tracking – Which Is Right For You?

Jun 29, 2012 at 12:41pm ET by Carrie Hill

An interesting challenge came across my desk this week. A site owner had installed a new contact form plugin on their WordPress website and they were struggling with tracking the submissions. The form submit button triggered some JavaScript and didn't then open its own thank you page within the site. The problem? Virtual Pageviews were previously chosen as the necessary method of seeing submissions. The new form was not recording those Virtual Pageviews. Something was wrong with the tracking setup when using the new contact form handling system. Unfortunately, the need for this new [...]

Using Google Analytics To Collect & Benefit From AdWords Position ROI

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, which b [...]

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. [...]

Work Smart, Not Hard – An Introduction To Google Analytics Dashboards

Mar 9, 2012 at 9:12am ET by Carrie Hill

I love my Google Analytics dashboard and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It saves me time, helps me look like I'm 100% on top of things when a client calls, and helps me add hours back into days that were previously spent hunting and pecking for information. Right now, my client load consists of about 19 different domains that all have their own analytics installs. Each week that's a lot of information to check, verify, monitor, and create an action plan from. Without my dashboards, and most importantly, my consistently formatted dashboards, I would spend hours finding information - now I have [...]

Google Analytics Update To Organic Reports

Feb 10, 2012 at 6:51am ET by Daniel Waisberg

As many of you know, organic traffic is auto-populated in Google Analytics reports using a default search engine list curated by Google. It is also possible to add smaller search engines manually into the tracking code snippet, using the _addOrganic method; but it's nicer when Google does it for us. Every once in a while, the Google Analytics team updates the list to reflect new or more popular search engines. We have confirmed that, starting from February 1st, a few search engines have been added to the list mentioned above. Below is the list of new search engines that are now part of the [...]

Google Changes Definition Of Average Search Ranking Position

Jan 25, 2012 at 5:46pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Webmaster Blog and Google Analytics Blog announced they are changing how they define the average position in the search query report in Google Webmaster Tools and search optimization report in Google Analytics. The new definition will take the average of the top ranking of your site for all searchers, as opposed to all URLs listed and average that. In the past, they would take all the positions of your rankings and average them together, now they are taking only the top positions. Here is how Google explains it: Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your si [...]

Justified – Beginning Steps To Proving Your Internet Marketing Point

Jan 13, 2012 at 9:38am ET by Carrie Hill

If you’re working in online marketing in some function, you’ve battled this – the need to justify your marketing budget to the bean counters in the office 10 floors up, or even next door. Those not "in the know" about the truly trackable benefits of online marketing are generally skeptical at best when told "I can show you where every penny went, and what we got back in return." The inability to track return on radio, tv or even print ad buys without extensive (and frankly pretty difficult) work and integration between multiple departments makes these less than desireable mediums i [...]

A Beginner’s Guide To Setting Goals In Google Analytics

Nov 25, 2011 at 9:17am ET by Carrie Hill

When I first started using Google Analytics, my "goal" was to not run away screaming. The intense amount of information, seemingly disconnected, made understanding what I needed so overwhelming. In my last article,we talked about the basic reports you should watch as a beginner. This week, we’re going to work on how to make Google Analytics work for you via Goal setup and configuration. The first thing you need to do after login is find where to setup goals, which is not where you see the goal results. In reality, most of the setup in Google Analytics happens behind the sprocket in th [...]

New on Google Analytics Landing Pages Report – Measuring Success

Nov 15, 2011 at 8:25am ET by Daniel Waisberg

At some point last week Google Analytics quietly released an apparently small change to its Landing Pages report (Content tab => Site Content => Landing Pages). This report was almost useless before this change and now it joins the list of the most useful reports on the tool. In a few words the change was simple: we can now link landing pages to goals, i.e. we can see the value of each landing page out of the box. Up till now, the landing pages report was very limited, having only three metrics available on the report: Entrances: the absolute number of visits landing on this page Bounc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | Top News

Euclid Offers “Google Analytics For The Real World”

Nov 4, 2011 at 10:48am ET by Greg Sterling

Yesterday Euclid Elements, a relatively new firm founded by some of the people behind the product that became Google Analytics, announced a $5.8 million first round of funding. The company is seeking to enable retailers and business owners with physical locations to measure things like foot traffic by time of day, average customer time in store, loyalty and lift of online promotions, as well as the effectiveness of window displays and other metrics. Conceptually none of this is entirely new. There are a range of "analog" companies and methods that measure retail foot traffic. However Euclid [...]

Social Tracking Integrations For Google Analytics

Nov 4, 2011 at 10:00am ET by Daniel Waisberg

Back in June, Google Analytics unveiled a new set of Social Engagement Reports, which can be used to get content interaction metrics from social sharing icons such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other. Google+ is tracked by default (no codes needed), but other networks must implement the _trackSocial method in order to collect the interactions. Last week, the Analytics team announced an official integration with social sharing services ShareThis and AddThis. According to their blog post: To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one lin [...]

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