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.

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How To Manage Big Data With Pivot Tables

Jul 20, 2012 at 9:39am ET by Annie Cushing

Big data is all the rage right now. If you search Google News for the term, there are 53,500 thousand results. And that's just the news. Most of us in Internet marketing aren't truly working with big data, in the truest sense of the word. However, when we're investigating things like the competitive landscape for a particular keyword we want to target, we're definitely working with bigger data sets than your everyday, garden-variety spreadsheet. When you're trying to find correlations and causal relationships, anything short of a pivot table is going to fall short. Pivot tables are [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Making The Case For Adding Keyword Segmentation To Your SEO Repertoire

Jul 13, 2012 at 1:15pm ET by Nathan Safran

Last month in The Forgotten SEO Strategy: Targeting Striking Distance Keywords we talked about how search professionals could approach their keyword strategy by targeting keywords based on their ranking position. Specifically, we showed how they can target striking distance keywords—keywords ranking on page 2—to obtain some quick traffic wins while simultaneously building link equity for longer term targets. This month, I want to advance the conversation and dive deeper into the topic, by providing specific examples of how keyword segmentation can provide insight that will shape your [...]

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When Keeping Analytics Real Time Goes Wrong

Jul 6, 2012 at 9:57am ET by Benny Blum

Virtually every piece of software I get pitched puts near to or real time analytics at my fingertips 24/7/365. It sounds fantastic and in some cases, is true - but the reality of ‘real time’ data is that very few products actually deliver data in real time due to the need to process raw data or dependency on other not-so-real-time technologies. But, this article is not about whether or not real time data actually comes in real time – what’s more important the than latency of delivery is the accuracy and subsequent value of real time versus aggregated data sets. In order to unders [...]

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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 [...]

A Marketer’s Guide To Table Formatting In Excel

Jun 22, 2012 at 9:19am ET by Annie Cushing

If there’s one task most marketers share — whether their focus is SEO, paid search, or social media — it’s collecting and interpreting data. Being able to slice and dice the data to find actionable insights is key to effective analysis. Yet, one of the biggest mistakes marketers make is trying to wrangle static data instead of taking advantage of Excel’s table formatting, which basically turns your data range into an interactive database. I hope to rectify that injustice against innocent data with this guide. Microsoft introduced table formatting in its 2007 version (2011 for M [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Using Data To Plan Your Future, Not Look To The Past

Jun 1, 2012 at 11:49am ET by Carrie Hill

Data is everywhere, we can pull numbers from a wide variety of resources – put them in spreadsheets, compare them to each other, draw conclusions based on data – there are a lot of things we can do with data. The thing we can do, but not many of us do – is use the data to develop a strategy to move our online marketing forward. We're all guilty, we sometimes want the numbers to be enough, and sometimes they are. Reporting numbers and numbly cutting and pasting graphics not only doesn't move your company forward, it's driving your marketing team crazy. Everyone up and down the chain [...]

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What Trademark Search Data Can Reveal About User Behavior

May 25, 2012 at 9:19am ET by Benny Blum

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been challenged by advertisers on the topic of trademark search. The question is simple: why "waste" money buying traffic on trademark keywords when it is clear that the user intends to get to their site? Researching the topic, there have been a number of studies all concluding that it is worthwhile to advertise on trademarked search terms. A selection of notable articles include: Think Insights with Google: Search Ads Pause ChannelAdvisor: The Value of Bidding on Brand Terms in Paid Search SearchEngineLand: Should You Bid on a Keyword if y [...]

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How Big Data Changed Crime Fighting & Is Changing The Practice Of SEO

May 11, 2012 at 1:42pm ET by Nathan Safran

In the mid 1990’s, New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced a technology-based crime measurement system called CompStat. The system enabled Police leadership, for the first time, to discern crime trends and respond to crime fluctuations on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis rather than the limited incident-by-incident view they previously had. The system is credited with a 60% drop in major crime and has subsequently been adopted by major cities including Washington DC, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Interestingly, all that really sparked the change was the acquisition [...]

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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 [...]

Understanding Your Analytics Versus Campaign Management Tools

Apr 27, 2012 at 9:19am ET by Benny Blum

More and more, I have been interacting with executives using campaign management tools as their internal reporting systems. In most cases, these companies have an analytics package but prefer to use ad server data rather than analytics for internal tracking. Campaign management tools and analytics provide fundamentally different information, and while directionally similar in many cases, choosing the wrong data source can lead to inconsistent perception of success metrics between the executive level and those tasked with execution. Understanding the difference between analytics and ad se [...]

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Conversion Rate Optimization In Paid Search: Why Click Through Rate Matters

Apr 20, 2012 at 11:05am ET by Benjamin Vigneron

One might find it strange to talk about click-through rate (CTR) optimization when talking about conversion rate optimization, since these indicators do not initially seem related. Yet, while these metrics are not always correlated, they sometimes – and actually often - are. However, a high click-through rate does not assure a high conversion rate. The two can even have an inverse relationship: an ad copy geared towards curiosity clicks will result in fewer conversions, percentage-wise, than an ad copy geared towards qualified clicks. Keeping An Eye On CTR Helps Maintain Conversion Volum [...]

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Using Data To Better Understand Tablet Consumer Behavior

Apr 6, 2012 at 9:30am ET by Benny Blum

The emergence of the tablet PC as a legitimate device for online activities beyond media consumption has turned the eyes of marketers and analysts towards understanding how tablet user behavior differs from that of traditional desktop and mobile. There are certain things which simply cannot be done on a mobile device - but the gap is quickly closing and tablets are at the center of attention as consumers are embracing mobile tablet PCs as their primary computing devices. With "more normal" sized screens, tablets don't have the same issues with site formatting that high-end mobile devices [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

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 breakdown of 45% [...]

Dear Google: Take Me To Dinner First Before You Try To Score

Mar 23, 2012 at 9:12am ET by Nathan Safran

In the ongoing wake of Search Plus Your World, there has been a lot of piling on the ‘beat down Google’ bandwagon. Much that has been written has been fair criticism of the search giant, but more than a small portion has been a gratuitous ‘piling on’ frenzy. I myself admittedly took part in some of it in the aftermath of the SPYW announcement. Given more time to reflect, I want to offer up what I hope will be a constructive line of thinking around SPYW and the appearance of social results in the SERPs (snarky title of this article aside). Google Introduces Us To Contextual Marketin [...]

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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 Now Data Sampling: What’s The Catch?

Mar 2, 2012 at 9:30am ET by Benny Blum

Google made a significant event out of Leap Day 2012 by releasing a new version of Google Analytics featuring Data Sampling. The idea behind data sampling is commonplace in any statistical analysis: in order to get results faster, you analyze a sub-set of data to identify trends and extrapolate aggregate results based on the percentage of overall traffic represented in the sub-set. While I’m not a huge fan of sampling data when not necessary, larger data sets put a significant load on servers and sampling becomes a necessary evil when trying to deliver quick high on high volume data sets. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

How The Era Of ‘Big-Data’ Is Changing The Practice Of Online Marketing

Feb 24, 2012 at 12:16pm ET by Nathan Safran

In the early days of ‘Mad Men’ marketing, half of all Marketing spend was famously wasted - the Marketer just didn’t know which half. Many a Marketer’s sleepless night was spent wondering what levers of their Marketing spend to push forward and which to dial back. Then, along came the Internet, and with it a new kind of marketing. Marketing online brought with it ‘cause-and-effect marketing’ and a greater ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing effort. New metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates and page views made its way into our lexicon and marketing gr [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

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 [...]

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 your s [...]

Report Affirms Strong Q4 Search Growth In 2011, Offers Additional Insights

Jan 27, 2012 at 11:07am ET by Adam Audette

Marketers have had a couple weeks to digest their fourth quarter numbers and assess their successes and failures from a period that can be a whirlwind, particularly in the retail sector. Now, with Google's Q4 earnings report and Yahoo's out, we're getting a chance to compare our own performance to data put out by some of the major agencies and technology platforms. Earlier this month, we released the RKG Digital Marketing Report with this in mind. Our goal is that it serves as a credible benchmark for advertisers who don't enjoy the luxury of viewing results across multiple sites with multi [...]

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