Search & Analytics provides readers with tips and techniques for utilizing web search analytics and measurement tools to define and manage success metrics from (organic and paid) search driven traffic. Columnists write about the basics of implementing analytics software, covering tagging and tracking search traffic to more advanced issues and topics such as ROI and conversion tracking, as well as how to gain greater insight and develop actionable strategies from your search analytics data.

Smart Geographic Segmentation & Bidding With Enhanced Campaigns

Jun 14, 2013 at 9:11am ET by Benjamin Vigneron

New PPC Best Practices In An Enhanced Campaign World was one of SMX Advanced Seattle's most engaging sessions; and, as a speaker, I have received a great deal of feedback and questions about those bid location modifiers. As it turns out, location bid modifiers are one of the (only) benefits of upgrading to enhanced campaigns, as they can be applied by location in a very granular and simple way. I thought I'd recap a couple of thoughts about geo-segmentation and location bid modifiers. Segmenting Your Paid Search Account By Geography The segmentation tips below can help improve the perform [...]

Tips To Ensure The Validity Of Your Day Parting

Jun 7, 2013 at 10:26am ET by Benny Blum

One of the most classic and beneficial analyses conducted for paid traffic acquisition channels is day parting. Not all visits are equal, and the time of day/day of week of the visit usually has a strong correlation with user qualification and likelihood to convert. That said, day parting is one of the most commonly misconstrued analyses as it's very easy to manipulate and misread the results when segmenting data into very small buckets such as hour of week. This post is intended to walk through some basic recommendations for ensuring the validity of a day part analysis, showcasing some [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Tips for Analyzing The Impact Of Your Marketing Activities In Google Analytics

May 31, 2013 at 9:00am ET by Carrie Hill

I work with a wide variety of clients across a wide variety of industries, and one of the most common issues I come across is what I call analytics forgetfulness. What typically happens is that a company will devise a plan to improve their online marketing and will implement various changes as a result -- but then, nobody remembers to measure the impact of these changes or otherwise conduct any sort of followup down the road. Email marketing pieces, AdWords changes, even new landing pages are added to a marketing campaign; yet the "when," "how" and "who" are lost in the ether. Below are [...]

5 Excel Skills Every Marketer Should Know

May 24, 2013 at 9:30am ET by Annie Cushing

[caption id="attachment_160723" align="alignright" width="300"] Photo from marfis75[/caption] One question I get asked a lot is this: what Excel skills are most important for marketers to learn? I have whittled that interminable list down to five skills that I believe are absolutely essential for marketers to know, presented below in order of importance. Table Formatting I believe that table formatting is the baseline skill that every marketer needs to know how to use, and I wrote a post here on Search Engine Land on how to use table formatting with some discussion on why it’s so he [...]

Analyzing Competitiveness In Your Paid Search Account

May 17, 2013 at 10:40am ET by Benjamin Vigneron

The auction-based industry we work in involves a number of metrics which help search marketers identify where they are doing better or worse than the competition. Just to name a few, the most common metrics search marketers usually look at are the Quality Score (QS), the average cost-per-click (CPC), the impression share (IS), and the 'Relative CTR' on the Google Display Network. While the Quality Score indicates whether your keywords/ads/landing pages are relevant against the competition, it does not tell much about the actual competitiveness of the market. Instead, the average cost-per-cl [...]

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

Web Analytics Software Comparison: Identifying The Right Web Analytics Tools For Your Business

May 10, 2013 at 12:50pm ET by Tom Demers

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 [...]

Managing The Bounds Of Profitability: iCPA & iCPC

May 10, 2013 at 9:14am ET by Benny Blum

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 [...]

Using Advanced Segments & Scroll Depth To Test Content Types In Analytics

May 3, 2013 at 9:00am ET by Carrie Hill

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 [...]

Deduplicate Your Google Analytics Reports in Excel

Apr 26, 2013 at 9:20am ET by Annie Cushing

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 [...]

How To Determine Your Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords

Apr 19, 2013 at 9:59am ET by Benjamin Vigneron

Since I received some solid feedback on my last column detailing how to determine mobile & geo bid multipliers for enhanced campaigns, I thought I’d share some more actionable stuff this time around. While hourly bid multipliers aren't new, they remain a crucial tactic for optimizing your AdWords campaigns. They work by reducing your ad spend at poor-performing times of the week and increasing your exposure at the best times of the week. Here, I'm going to share the steps you can take (along with a helpful spreadsheet) to determine your hourly bid multipliers for better campaign opt [...]

From 3rd Party To 1st Party: The Evolution Of The Google Advertising Toolset

Apr 12, 2013 at 9:01am ET by Benny Blum

A year ago, I was firmly anti-Google. Not in the sense that I disliked Google -- I just felt that Google did not provide the best tools in the business to analyze and make decisions on their own advertising placements. When asked if an advertiser should consider a 3rd party technology to help manage ad spend, I would undoubtedly say "yes" because Google Analytics, AdWords, and Merchant Center were (and remain) imperfectly bound systems requiring a lot of proprietary work to merge and make informed decisions. Much has changed in the last year. Google has made some significant changes (PLA [...]

How To Measure Content Engagement And Effectiveness With Analytics & WordPress

Apr 5, 2013 at 11:22am ET by Carrie Hill

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 [...]

5 Simple Ways To Debug Your Google Analytics Installation

Mar 29, 2013 at 1:01pm ET by Brian Massey

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 [...]

How To Determine Your Mobile & Geo Bid Multipliers For Enhanced Campaigns

Mar 22, 2013 at 11:59am ET by Benjamin Vigneron

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� [...]

How Enhanced Campaigns May Affect Your Analytics

Mar 15, 2013 at 12:38pm ET by Benny Blum

You’re probably sick of hearing about it, but it’s true: enhanced campaigns are going to impact your ability to structure, segment, and optimize campaigns. Whether it’s in a positive or negative way is up for debate. Regardless, I hope you have done your research and understand the transition -- how it affects you, your business and campaign management. If not, numerous articles have been written on the topic so there’s a bevy of available content. That said, little has been divulged about how your analytics will be impacted by the enhanced rollout. So, I’d like to share a few tho [...]

Drilling Into Top Conversion Paths For Valuable Insights

Mar 8, 2013 at 12:11pm ET by Carrie Hill

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 [...]

How To Get Full Referral & Content URLs From Google Analytics

Mar 1, 2013 at 1:06pm ET by Annie Cushing

While cruising through the standard reports in Google Analytics (GA), you may have noticed that you can only get URIs (the part of the URL that follows the domain, AKA hostname). You can’t get the full URLs. That can be pretty unhelpful. So, I’m going to show you some tricks to pull full URLs into your GA reports in an export-friendly format. Helpful Export Tip Before you even get started creating these reports, you’ll need to know how to get all of the rows from your report into your export. The GA interface caps you out at 500 rows. However, to get more, just look at the bottom-right [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

How To Use Regression Analysis To Estimate Incremental Revenue Opportunities

Feb 22, 2013 at 11:17am ET by Benjamin Vigneron

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 [...]

How To Get Analytics Right With PLAs

Feb 15, 2013 at 11:07am ET by Benny Blum

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. [...]

Google Analytics Rolls Out Solutions Gallery

Feb 8, 2013 at 11:04am ET by Carrie Hill

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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