Carrie Hill is the co-founder of Ignitor Digital, along with long-time colleague Mary Bowling. After years working for other agencies and learning the ins and outs of great customer service, Carrie and Mary opened Ignitor Digital to serve the small and very small business with top-quality Local Search, SEO and Social Media services. When not working, Carrie loves to cook for friends and family, hang out with her pretty awesome kids, and read books that have little-to-no educational value!
Not Provided is all anyone is talking about these days — with good reason. Holding data hostage and forcing users to buy ads to see it is pretty dirty pool, in my opinion. Most of my clients cannot lay out the money just to grab data, so we’ve had to come up with some creative […]
Paid Advertising Platforms are growing exponentially on what seems like a weekly basis. What once was Keywords + Ad + Bid = Money has now become a full-time job. Bid adjustments, rules, remarketing, extensions, day-parting, local or geographic targeting, modified broad match, and more — the vocabulary alone is a struggle for small business owners […]
There’s a lot of buzz these days around the wonderful world of Schema, semantic markup, and rich snippets — much of it centered around the increased click-through rates from SERPs and other amazing SEO benefits such markup provides. But, once you’ve added the markup to your website, how do you measure the results? The ability […]
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 — […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We’ve all seen it, lurking in our Analytics reports, nearly always at the top, sucking a huge chunk of data into a black hole of uncertainty and uselessness. Not provided was predicted as having a single-digit impact on sites. In my research, I’ve found it to have upwards of a 40% impact, especially on smaller […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Many new webmasters and website marketers are under the mistaken impression that online marketing is a “Field of Dreams” and “if you build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, you can build it, but if you don’t market it, and place it in front of the audience that buys your products, nobody will come, and neither […]
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 […]
The first login to a Google Analytics account can be daunting. There are so many things to see, and so many different ways to tweak data, that deciding which are the most important metrics to watch can be an insurmountable decision. Ultimately, in my opinion, you are the only one who can decide what metrics […]
Setting up Analytics accounts has evolved beyond installing “generated” scripts on pages and calling it a day. What started with the advent of software that told us how many “hits” we got a day has evolved into a sophisticated decision assistance engine, and keeping up on the new and cutting edge offers full time employment […]
Data is a fickle friend. It is only as reliable as the setup you have and the effort you put into understanding the numbers. There are so many variables that can kill your data, and fixing the things that are broken is always a process of elimination. I can tell you that most skewed data […]
I analyze websites every day, as well as a lot of Facebook pages, and a ton of blogs attached to websites and Facebook pages. I realized something this week. There are a lot of junktastical blogs out there, and I now wonder why people have even added this feature to their site. Here’s the truth….you […]
For a long time, I thought utilizing a strong Landing Page Optimization program was only available to large companies with large budgets. The software to create landing pages on the fly by keyword is pricey, and the learning curve is significant. If you have the time, budget and manpower to utilize a design team and […]
During the Matt Cutts You & A at SMX Advanced in Seattle last week, someone asked Matt if Google would ever “like” query systems that provided ranking reports to SEOs. Matt said, again, that the focus shouldn’t be on rankings, and that website should be focused on “what makes the most money.” I rebutted that […]
I heard the other day that if someone “Likes” your Facebook business page, they’re over 90% likely to never look at it again. Wow. 90% is a lot! We could assume that’s exaggerated by ½, but 45% is still a lot. When a website’s conversion rate is a fraction of its actual traffic – a […]
When I first started down this 6-lane highway called Online Marketing over six years ago, we used an absolutely archaic bid management software whose name escapes me. I want to say it was a Yahoo! (or precursor to Yahoo!) product, and basically it automated our bids so they would go up and down based on […]
A few weeks ago, we went over the pros and cons of using Phone Extensions and Location Extensions in your AdWords campaigns. This week, I’d like to finish up our AdWords Extension feature by running through the best practices for using Site Extensions and Product Extensions. Using Product Extensions In Adwords Being in the travel […]
Over the last year or so, Google has been steadily adding features to the AdWords interface that on the surface seem wonderful, unless managing and learning AdWords isn’t your full time job. It seems like just keeping up with what remains and what is gone and how to work the new stuff is a 40+ […]
It seems every few months a new feature of Google AdWords rolls out destined to make it easier for the do-it-yourselfer to compete with the big-wigs in Google Sponsored Results. Earlier this year, Google made it easier for small-to-medium size business owners to compete with larger international competitors within the display advertising arena. What changed? […]
I’m a huge fan of treating Page Titles and Meta Descriptions as ad copy. Using language that speaks to a person’s motivation for shopping and buying will encourage the click through when your listing appears organically, as well as in a paid position. The problem Having a “testing” environment for organic ad copy has, until […]
As I was searching for a topic for this article, the news has come in that legendary UCLA coach John Wooden has passed away. Not only was he a coaching legend, he was an extraordinary mentor and a damn fine human being. From what I’m seeing on Twitter, I probably won’t be the only Search […]
Google Maps (or Local, or Places, or whatever it is calling itself this month) is the bane of my existence. Well, maybe 3rd place behind Bing and Yahoo PPC platforms…but you catch my meaning. Inevitably, I can expect at least one phone call or email a week from a client asking why they’re not showing […]
Are you overwhelming your visitors? Generally in this column, I offer step by step instructions to figure out a part of Search Engine Marketing on your own from the comfort of your favorite chair. This week’s column may deviate from that just a bit (maybe even a borderline rant) because I’m currently being bombarded by […]