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 […]