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 [...]

Are You In Danger Of An Online Traffic Crisis?

Mar 30, 2012 at 2:30pm ET by Carrie Hill

As relative newcomers to the world of analytics and site and revenue improvements through analytics, many clients ask me about the traffic sources chart in their Google dashboard: Why is this important? I give one explanation of this as a measure of “Are my eggs all in one basket?” and “What happens if they are?” For example, the client above has 66.57% of their traffic from search engines. This is a combination of organic and paid traffic. Of that 66.57%, when we drill further into that segment of data, we see that 84.5% of that is from Google alone with a breakdow [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

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 [...]

5 Common Tracking Problems: How To Troubleshoot & Fix Them

Feb 3, 2012 at 3:55pm ET by Carrie Hill

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the </script> tag!” I thought it would be handy for the beginners out there to have a few tips for finding issues with your tracking and some tricks to resolving those issues without tearing your hair out. I’m Referring To Myself… This is probably the most common error I find, your own domain is showing as a referrer to yo [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

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 m [...]

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