If you’re considering using an analytics platform other than, or in addition to, Google Analytics, it can be a bit difficult to determine what the best alternative will be. Search Engine Land compiled a great buyers guide to enterprise web analytics tools, but what if you’re in the market for a free to mid-level tool, or don’t even know yet exactly what type of software you need? Analytics Software Solutions Below is a brief overview of 25 analytics software options (and one add-on) that should give you an idea of what each tool costs and what functionality each offers. Before you chec [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

In my previous post, From 3rd Party To 1st Party: The Evolution Of The Google Advertising Toolset, I wrote about the evolution of AdWords data and how recent changes have constricted the incremental value presented by third-party paid search tools. I wrote in loose terms about using internal analytics to calculate average profit per conversion to use in AdWords Conversion Optimizer. In this post, I will detail the logic behind and process of incorporating margins into bidding at the CPA and CPC level, in case you prefer manual bid management to cost-per-acquisition based management. Depe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Last month, I gave readers some tips on measuring engagement using Google Analytics and WordPress. This month, I want to dig deeper into how you can use content scroll depth to help craft a strategy for your future content curating efforts. Creating a website that attracts visitors via search engine optimization is one part of the equation; engaging the users to read your content, search and come back for more is another facet of online marketing. As I explained last week, I do think how well people engage with your content may be, or may become, a type of ranking factor. It would at least [...]

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

One of the steps in my last post on finding 404 pages worth saving involved determining if any of your404 pages received traffic in the past year. This can be accomplished by pulling a landing page report and using VLOOKUPs in Excel to see any of your broken pages used to receive traffic. However, Google Analytics (GA) content reports are case sensitive, so you might have multiple versions of what should be a single line item because of this. For example, /default.aspx and /Default.aspx are considered two different pages in Google Analytics. If you're used to exporting your content or landi [...]

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When conducting research, it's not uncommon to perform repetitive tasks like downloading a group of webpages. A favorite tool I use to automate this is iMacros -- it's free and powerful. Just be sure to use the Firefox version, as its capabilities are limited in other browsers like Chrome, for instance. Say you want a list of the Fortune 500 companies' websites. Normally, this would be an arduous task. CNN's Fortune magazine website links to the websites, but you have to visit every company profile on a separate page. Watch what I do with a spreadsheet and a macro. Get a list of company [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics

For many of us that own blogs and generate excellent relatable content, engagement seems to linger just beyond our reach. We write well, there's praise, tweets, shares, +1's – but just how much of your content is being read? Going beyond the search and keyword into how those keywords bring the visitor into content they either read or don't read, is the next step beyond basic Google Analytics. Many in the industry believe a fast bounce from your page back to the search results is a negative in Google's eyes. That user is basically voting your content down, saying "this isn't what I wanted [...]

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

A critical part of doing a site or link audit is checking to see how many 404 (page not found) pages there are in a site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an audit that lists the total number of 404 pages and advises developers to find appropriate pages to redirect these 404 pages to. That’s no big deal if we’re talking about just 20 to 30 pages. But, when a site has 404 pages in the thousands, and you tell the developers to fix these pages, you’re going to look more than a little ridiculous. So, how can you find out which of those 404 pages are actually important? Two [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | How To: Links | How To: SEO | Link Week

As you might guess, we QA a lot of Google Analytics installs. It is often a maddening task that makes you want to "gaq." However, there are some nice tools that go a long way toward making life easier. If you are questioning the data you're getting out of Google Analytics; if your e-commerce reporting doesn't match your sales; if you really thought there'd be more downloads of your whitepaper on the fonts used in movie credits; then you can use these tools to find out if Google Analytics is broken or if the error lies somewhere else. This is how we do it. Things That Go Wrong Typos [...]

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

Recently, I was asked to run an estimate of traffic opportunity for a multinational sports franchise in which I modeled their current global traffic against brand visibility growth opportunities. However, I also identified that to make the estimate relevant, I needed to quantify the traffic more than they had suggested. So, like all good Web marketers do, I got revenue involved in the equation. Want to know how to understand the revenue opportunity available to your brand globally? Read on... Calculating The Size Of The Pie First up: what's the current global reach of my client? To und [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Multinational Search

As every search marketer should be aware by now, AdWords enhanced campaigns now allow you to set campaign-level bid multipliers for your mobile impressions, and also by geo. While mobile bid multipliers seem to be more of a step backward compared to mobile targeted campaigns, geo bid multipliers are actually a nice feature and definitely a step forward in terms of control and transparency. Anyway, this post is about helping search marketers determine those mobile and geo bid multipliers based on historical data. 1. Pulling The Data From AdWords In AdWords, first go to the ‘Dimensions†[...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords: Enhanced Campaigns | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Getting the whole story from your analytics is always a work in progress. Not only do we need to look at user behaviors (or the lack thereof), we need to look at user experience interaction as well as revenues. One mistake I see many novice and new-to-analytics marketers fall into is ending their research path at the Revenue report in the E-commerce section of Google Analytics. While knowing how much revenue your products are generating is important, there's more than just direct revenue. While the argument can, and should, be made for engagement being a form of ROI, I'm actually referring [...]

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

My previous article was about estimating the potential for growth for those paid search campaigns capped due to insufficient budget. This was definitely the easy part since the logic behind the assumptions involved in the calculation was fairly simple. Now, we can address those paid search campaigns capped due to insufficient rank – and there are going to be more assumptions involved since all metrics are going to be impacted: the rank obviously, then the CTR, CPC, and pretty much everything else as a result. This article goes beyond impression share (IS) analysis and is actually mostl [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

More so than any other product in the AdWords suite, managing, reporting on, and making sense out of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) extends beyond the toolsets provided in AdWords. The levers that we can push and pull exist within two unique systems -- AdWords and Merchant Center -- and, as a result, we need to do some internal legwork in order to effectively merge the inputs and outputs and come up with actionable analytics to optimize on. At my agency, we’ve been working on some different ways to more effectively work with PLAs, given the available analytics and levers for optimization. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Search & Analytics

The quest for the right Google Analytics dashboard, custom report or advanced segment generally begins with a problem that you cannot solve. Until now, you searched for others with your same problem and hoped they shared the solution in a blog post so you didn't have to figure it out all by yourself. While there's real value in solving your own issues, that take so much time to figure out; whereas, finding a solution that others have created is a win in my book. Google Analytics Solution Gallery Last week, Google announced an effort to make finding such solutions even more easily available [...]

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When looking for opportunities for growth, most search marketers try to find ways to estimate how much they can scale up their paid search effort, and what would be the impact on ad spend, revenue volume, and efficiency. There are lots of different ways to go about this – one way I’d like to cover in this post is to leverage impression share data. We’ll see how to aggregate and dig into impression share data, and how to estimate incremental revenue opportunities based on those impressions missed due to insufficient budget. Due to the length of this post, I thought I’d cover those im [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

I have been astounded at the number of social media jobs brands large and small have created over the last year. With each month, more brands realize that Social media isn't an afterthought; it's something that takes time, strategy, attention and even aggression to keep ahead of the pack. With all of these new positions come a large number of employees who are making their first foray into the world of Social Media. They may have been promoted from within, from another department, or maybe they previously handled SEO or paid search ads within the marketing department. Many companies ta [...]

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A question recently came across my desk regarding the use of the Matched Search Queries Report in Analytics when compared to the Keyword Details Report in AdWords. The inquirer was interested in the benefits or drawbacks to both reports, also asking if they were interchangeable. I figured this was a great question to answer in the Search & Analytics field, so I'll do my best to define and give my opinion regarding the pros, cons and interchangeability of these two complex reports. First, we need to understand what each report provides data-wise. Let's take a look at the basic data av [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | How To: PPC | Search & Analytics

Whether you report on just two or twenty different regions, getting a centralised report on search engine result page performance by region can be a headache if you don't have an easy -- and scalable -- reporting system in place. There are lots of ways to tackle the problem, but by far the easiest is via Google's Webmaster Tools, now integrated into Google Analytics, which has the added advantage of being free, always a benefit to those working within tight budgets. Interestingly, looking at alternatives to see what the paid competition offers results in very little opportunity. Truly mu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Multinational Search

I was in this industry when people were starting to throw around the phrase Web 2.0. Video marketing was in its infancy, Facebook was only for college students, and MySpace was where you sold things to a 12-year-old. Along with my time in the industry, social media has grown from a conversation we had with clients, but didn't really worry about, to an intensely competitive and important form of marketing. As we traveled through the lifespan of social media marketing to date, we heard and said a bunch of phrases like, "revenue tracking isn't really possible here" and "your revenue is in [...]

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

Is t time for a mobile website? I was talking to some clients a few weeks ago and in separate conversations, both asked me if it was time for a mobile website. Their current websites rendered okay on a smartphone, but they noticed a lack of conversions for mobile users, as well as a high bounce rate. Generally, a page that can be enlarged can be read on a mobile device. What you run into for the user is a lack of functionality and interaction with the site. Dropdown or slide out navigation is nearly impossible to click on; if you're using video or Ajax functionality it can be lost or not n [...]

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