Google Analytics

SEO Traits Your Strategy Should Contain

On May 31, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

As a business you need to fully understand the power and the process of SEO before you decide to get started with applying it for yourself or your business. You need to possess certain kinds of characteristics and traits because SEO is a long term marriage and you need to be in it for the [...]

As a business you need to fully understand the power and the process of SEO before you decide to get started with applying it for yourself or your business. You need to possess certain kinds of characteristics and traits because SEO is a long term marriage and you need to be in it for the long haul.

Here are some traits required for search engine optimization and the overall internet marketing campaign to work well:

Patience: Depending on your industry it could take a great deal of time to really see the effects of SEO. Unless you analyze your Google analytics information almost every day you might not see the power that is building in the background. Studying your analytics information you will be able to see where your traffic is coming from and what links have been generated from your search engine marketing efforts. It is not uncommon to have to wait 6-12 months for things to really work well.

Branding: You have to be able to understand the importance of branding your business online. Search engine optimization is more than just increasing your rankings. It is all about branding your business online the right way and building your business with solid footing in place.

Diversity: It is also important to understand that diversity is the name of the game with marketing your business online. Taking a diverse approach and being open minded will allow a person or a business to bring in website traffic from multiple avenues and locations. Beating a few chosen efforts into the ground is not a long term approach. You have to be willing to utilize all the resources that surround your business.

Trust: This is very important because often times a business lacks the trust of their SEO firm or person to get the job done right. If you have spent some time really isolating the right type of marketing firm to partner with you will have to put your trust into their skills and services. Don’t fight the steps they propose, embrace them.

Do you possess these traits and characteristics? These are important for growing a long term healthy website in the online space. Branding a website and being an open minded business owner will allow your search engine optimization efforts to go much further. Don’t fight your SEO company (or your own internal self if you are building your SEO program yourself), but rather put your trust into them.

Search Competition Tools to Use – Do it Right!

On January 15, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Measuring the success of competitors using your keywords is a must. Known as competitive analytics, the process looks closely at what differences there are between their search engine optimization strategies and your own. Where some businesses let themselves down is the area that determines who their competition is. Just because another business is in [...]

Measuring the success of competitors using your keywords is a must. Known as competitive analytics, the process looks closely at what differences there are between their search engine optimization strategies and your own. Where some businesses let themselves down is the area that determines who their competition is. Just because another business is in the same niche doesn’t necessarily mean they are competitors. When it comes to search engine optimization, they are only competitors if they are targeting a similar set of keywords to you. Your competitors are those placed above and just below you in the search results for that keyword.

On the flip side, it is important to understand who you business competitors actually are. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen companies not properly identify their competition. Just because you are in the same industry does not mean you are a competitor. If you have an established company that has a great reputation and brand and if you starting out then, I would think twice about considering them your direct competitor.

Now lets switch back for your competitors in the search engines. If they rank above you, why? Do they have more links, or better quality links than you? Are their pages well written using known SEO techniques? By analyzing what they are doing successfully, you can determine which areas need more work on your own pages. By analyzing those behind you, you can determine where they are improving and what strategies you need to undertake to maintain your position.

Here is a good list of SEO competitive research tools that I recommend:

1. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics – Yes, these are 2 of the best free tools on the market. Before you can look at your competitors, I would look at and analyze your own website. Organic search visitor data and the amount of inbound links.

2. Compete – Compete has become a great and industry standard for competitive research that goes beyond SEO. They offer tool and several anayltics products that are truly excellent. I would recommend Compete to any marketer or business owner at every level of experience.

3. SEOmoz – If you are not going to hire an SEO expert or search engine optimization firm to help you with your SEO, I highly recommend SEOmoz. I consider SEOmoz to be advanced and is excellent for the marketer or business owner that “gets” search engine optimization. If you are a beginner then, I would look elsewhere. SEOmoz offers a full suite of tools including the competitive research aspect.

4. Link Diagnosis - Here is a good tool that combines some other link data, I think it pulls in data from Yahoo and Bing as well.

5. SEO Book Firefox Tool - Very good plugin to install on Firefox that gives some top level data about your competitors as you search. This one is a must use…I switched from the IE web browser to Firefox when I found and started using this tool.

Another important point here is to always remember to check your own analytics to determine which keywords are delivering visitors and conversions. Make sure you undertake a competitive analysis for those keywords as well. You may not be targeting them, but if they are delivering traffic, don’t let your competitors overtake you and steal that traffic away. Those phrases possibly rank well – can you improve their rankings and maintain that advantage? Competitive analysis is all about measuring your competition – just make sure you are assessing your competitors correctly.

Find Invisible Pages Using Google Analytics

On January 14, 2010, In SEO, by wrttnwrd

Posted by wrttnwrd

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One often-ignored part of SEO is making invisible pages visible. When I say ‘invisible’, I mean pages that have received zero clicks from organic search results.

If you can find those pages, you can decide:

To keep them, but work to raise their organic search profile;
To keep them, but use more of their link juice to help other, higher-profile pages on your site;
Get rid of them, and 301 redirect them to higher-profile, higher-value pages on your site.

Soooooo, how do you find ‘em?

Turns out, a new Google Analytics feature can make it happen: Pivot table reports

Here’s how you do it:

In Google Analytics, click ‘Content’.
Click the ‘Top Content’ report:You’ll see a list of the most-viewed pages on your site. Not much help just yet.
Now for the good stuff. At the top-right corner of the ‘Content Performance’ tab, click the ‘Pivot’ button:
Change ‘Pivot by’ to medium. Leave ‘Showing’ set as ‘Pageviews’. You’ll get a new table showing pages as the rows, and the mediums (media? mediumses?) as the columns, like this:
Now, sort the ‘organic’ column ascending (lowest values first). You’ll see a nice, clear list of pages that haven’t received any clicks from organic search:

That’s it! You can take a look and find the pages getting zero organic clicks.

A few cautions:

This report will not show pages with zero pageviews overall. If a page never received any pageviews, then the Google Analytics tracking bug never fired, and the page isn’t in Google’s reports.
This data is a lot more helpful for pages that otherwise get lots of traffic. If a page gets 1 view overall and zero organic views, that may mean it’s got SEO issues. Or, it may mean that the page just sucks overall. Use your judgment.
This is only 1/2 the battle. Don’t assume the invisible pages need optimization, and that all will be well. It’s possible that these pages simply shouldn’t be there, or that there’s a problem with how you’re linking to them, or something else. Use this report as a starting point. Not an end point.

Happy Analyzing!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by wrttnwrd

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One often-ignored part of SEO is making invisible pages visible. When I say ‘invisible’, I mean pages that have received zero clicks from organic search results.

If you can find those pages, you can decide:

To keep them, but work to raise their organic search profile;
To keep them, but use more of their link juice to help other, higher-profile pages on your site;
Get rid of them, and 301 redirect them to higher-profile, higher-value pages on your site.

Soooooo, how do you find ‘em?

Turns out, a new Google Analytics feature can make it happen: Pivot table reports

Here’s how you do it:

In Google Analytics, click ‘Content’.
Click the ‘Top Content’ report:You’ll see a list of the most-viewed pages on your site. Not much help just yet.
Now for the good stuff. At the top-right corner of the ‘Content Performance’ tab, click the ‘Pivot’ button:
Change ‘Pivot by’ to medium. Leave ‘Showing’ set as ‘Pageviews’. You’ll get a new table showing pages as the rows, and the mediums (media? mediumses?) as the columns, like this:
Now, sort the ‘organic’ column ascending (lowest values first). You’ll see a nice, clear list of pages that haven’t received any clicks from organic search:

That’s it! You can take a look and find the pages getting zero organic clicks.

A few cautions:

This report will not show pages with zero pageviews overall. If a page never received any pageviews, then the Google Analytics tracking bug never fired, and the page isn’t in Google’s reports.
This data is a lot more helpful for pages that otherwise get lots of traffic. If a page gets 1 view overall and zero organic views, that may mean it’s got SEO issues. Or, it may mean that the page just sucks overall. Use your judgment.
This is only 1/2 the battle. Don’t assume the invisible pages need optimization, and that all will be well. It’s possible that these pages simply shouldn’t be there, or that there’s a problem with how you’re linking to them, or something else. Use this report as a starting point. Not an end point.

Happy Analyzing!

Do you like this post? Yes No

How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

On January 13, 2010, In SEO, by willcritchlow

Posted by willcritchlow

In last week’s Whiteboard Friday "Kill the Head or Chase the Tail", Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business (clue: it’s probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you). Today, I’m going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.

The problem is well described by the ever-excellent Avinash Kaushik in his post entitled Measuring Upper Funnel Keywords (although nominally about paid search, his description applies perfectly well to natural search except you aren’t paying for traffic in the same way). It can be summarised by thinking about all those reports we have all seen showing branded search terms being the best-converting. While this is true in the sense that the individual finally converted after searching for the brand, it’s clearly not the way they found out about your services. For the purposes of setting strategy, you need to understand in better detail your "visitor acquisition" channels that eventually lead to conversions. Sam’s superb post on SEOmoz’s conversion rate lessons from 2009 touches on this in point 2.

Enter multi-touch analytics tracking.

Most analytics packages use last-touch attribution by default meaning that conversions are allocated to the most recent source of a visit for that visitor. We are interested here in first-touch attribution or even multi-touch attribution models to understand how visitors are influenced over time by repeated visits to the site. If you are interested in analytics packages that can track multiple touches ‘out of the box’, I recommend reading John Santangelo‘s YOUmoz post on Google Analytics alternatives.

First-touch tracking in Google Analytics

Patrick at Blogstorm has written about over-riding last click attribution (something I also discussed in my presentation Analytics Every SEO Should Know that Scott linked to from the Whiteboard Friday). But this method only works when you can specify the exact URL of the landing page including parameters as it relies on the utm_nooverride parameter. This works fine for email and PPC traffic, but doesn’t help with tracking organic search traffic.

For this, we need a slightly more involved method.

In my presentation, I touched on the function setVar and a custom function called superSetVar, but in the updates announced in October last year, the GA team released a new function called setCustomVar that is now the best functionality to use. For this purpose we want to track variables at the visitor level.

In your GA tracking code, you want to check for the presence of the __utma cookie which will be present only if the user is a returning visitor. If it is not present, use the JavaScript variable document.referrer to set a visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original referrer") and use location.pathname to set a second visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original landing page"). Take care not to re-use custom variable slots you are using elsewhere in your analytics.

You will probably then want to add a filter to your analytics profile to convert the raw referrer into referring keywords using a filter like this one for getting detailed PPC keyword information (obviously not filtering only PPC traffic). You might also want to pull out the original source (which you can work out from the referrer and landing page) into a separate variable.

With this all set up, you will be able to run conversion reports by original keyword for a given original source and see conversion information based on first click attribution. I would expect that you would see the long-tail contributing far more than it does in the standard reports and branded search much less (not zero of course – there will still be first-touch branded searches driven by PR, offline marketing etc.).

Multi-touch attribution modelling

If you are feeling especially hardcore, you can dig even deeper into this whole mess by attempting to capture multiple touch-points. The idea here is that you want to give attribution for conversions not only to first- and last-touches but also give so-called assists to touch-points along the way (e.g. a conversion path could look like long-tail keyword > head keyword > branded search > direct visit – under this scenario, you might want to give the head and branded searches some attribution for the conversion).

This becomes especially important if you have different departments contributing to the marketing – you would like to be able to give some credit to the departments that bring the visitor in, some to the channels that keep the visitor returning and to the channel that finally converts them.

I haven’t set this up with the new GA functions, but the basic process would involve something similar to the superSetVar function for the new setCustomVar. The idea here would be to stuff repeat visit information into the custom variables. This information is almost certainly unusable via the interface and you will likely need to export to Excel and play there (most likely with Pivot Tables – you all know how much I love them – it’s a little while since we ran a conference call (that link is to a recording of the one I did on Excel) but I’m planning the next one so go and sign up if you aren’t already on that mailing list).

If you’re hardcore enough to really want this information, you can probably work out the details! If anyone has done it and wants to write up detailed instructions, I’ll happily update this post with a link to your explanation.

View-through conversions

The missing piece of the puzzle if you are doing multi-touch attribution modelling is giving ‘assists’ to branding events such as the viewing of a display advert (without a clickthrough). Rich, our PPC guru at Distilled, wrote an introduction to Google’s viewthrough conversion metric.

There are all kinds of privacy concerns in extending this further – but the data is out there to gather this kind of data across whole platforms (e.g. understanding search funnels that led to your site in the end). The signs are there that we are going to get ever more information like this – particularly out of Google who are obviously always looking for ways to persuade their customers to spend in areas outside (the generally cheaper) branded search!

I love analytics and statistics, so I’d love to hear your favourite tips and tricks in the comments.

I’m sure future conference calls in my schedule will involve analytics tips and tricks so go ahead and sign up if you’d like to hear when they are running. You also might be interested in a post I wrote about integrating Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics on SearchEngineLand.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by willcritchlow

In last week’s Whiteboard Friday "Kill the Head or Chase the Tail", Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business (clue: it’s probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you). Today, I’m going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.

The problem is well described by the ever-excellent Avinash Kaushik in his post entitled Measuring Upper Funnel Keywords (although nominally about paid search, his description applies perfectly well to natural search except you aren’t paying for traffic in the same way). It can be summarised by thinking about all those reports we have all seen showing branded search terms being the best-converting. While this is true in the sense that the individual finally converted after searching for the brand, it’s clearly not the way they found out about your services. For the purposes of setting strategy, you need to understand in better detail your "visitor acquisition" channels that eventually lead to conversions. Sam’s superb post on SEOmoz’s conversion rate lessons from 2009 touches on this in point 2.

Enter multi-touch analytics tracking.

Most analytics packages use last-touch attribution by default meaning that conversions are allocated to the most recent source of a visit for that visitor. We are interested here in first-touch attribution or even multi-touch attribution models to understand how visitors are influenced over time by repeated visits to the site. If you are interested in analytics packages that can track multiple touches ‘out of the box’, I recommend reading John Santangelo‘s YOUmoz post on Google Analytics alternatives.

First-touch tracking in Google Analytics

Patrick at Blogstorm has written about over-riding last click attribution (something I also discussed in my presentation Analytics Every SEO Should Know that Scott linked to from the Whiteboard Friday). But this method only works when you can specify the exact URL of the landing page including parameters as it relies on the utm_nooverride parameter. This works fine for email and PPC traffic, but doesn’t help with tracking organic search traffic.

For this, we need a slightly more involved method.

In my presentation, I touched on the function setVar and a custom function called superSetVar, but in the updates announced in October last year, the GA team released a new function called setCustomVar that is now the best functionality to use. For this purpose we want to track variables at the visitor level.

In your GA tracking code, you want to check for the presence of the __utma cookie which will be present only if the user is a returning visitor. If it is not present, use the JavaScript variable document.referrer to set a visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original referrer") and use location.pathname to set a second visitor-level custom variable (named something like "original landing page"). Take care not to re-use custom variable slots you are using elsewhere in your analytics.

You will probably then want to add a filter to your analytics profile to convert the raw referrer into referring keywords using a filter like this one for getting detailed PPC keyword information (obviously not filtering only PPC traffic). You might also want to pull out the original source (which you can work out from the referrer and landing page) into a separate variable.

With this all set up, you will be able to run conversion reports by original keyword for a given original source and see conversion information based on first click attribution. I would expect that you would see the long-tail contributing far more than it does in the standard reports and branded search much less (not zero of course – there will still be first-touch branded searches driven by PR, offline marketing etc.).

Multi-touch attribution modelling

If you are feeling especially hardcore, you can dig even deeper into this whole mess by attempting to capture multiple touch-points. The idea here is that you want to give attribution for conversions not only to first- and last-touches but also give so-called assists to touch-points along the way (e.g. a conversion path could look like long-tail keyword > head keyword > branded search > direct visit – under this scenario, you might want to give the head and branded searches some attribution for the conversion).

This becomes especially important if you have different departments contributing to the marketing – you would like to be able to give some credit to the departments that bring the visitor in, some to the channels that keep the visitor returning and to the channel that finally converts them.

I haven’t set this up with the new GA functions, but the basic process would involve something similar to the superSetVar function for the new setCustomVar. The idea here would be to stuff repeat visit information into the custom variables. This information is almost certainly unusable via the interface and you will likely need to export to Excel and play there (most likely with Pivot Tables – you all know how much I love them – it’s a little while since we ran a conference call (that link is to a recording of the one I did on Excel) but I’m planning the next one so go and sign up if you aren’t already on that mailing list).

If you’re hardcore enough to really want this information, you can probably work out the details! If anyone has done it and wants to write up detailed instructions, I’ll happily update this post with a link to your explanation.

View-through conversions

The missing piece of the puzzle if you are doing multi-touch attribution modelling is giving ‘assists’ to branding events such as the viewing of a display advert (without a clickthrough). Rich, our PPC guru at Distilled, wrote an introduction to Google’s viewthrough conversion metric.

There are all kinds of privacy concerns in extending this further – but the data is out there to gather this kind of data across whole platforms (e.g. understanding search funnels that led to your site in the end). The signs are there that we are going to get ever more information like this – particularly out of Google who are obviously always looking for ways to persuade their customers to spend in areas outside (the generally cheaper) branded search!

I love analytics and statistics, so I’d love to hear your favourite tips and tricks in the comments.

I’m sure future conference calls in my schedule will involve analytics tips and tricks so go ahead and sign up if you’d like to hear when they are running. You also might be interested in a post I wrote about integrating Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics on SearchEngineLand.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Google Webmaster Tools Sends Out Google Ad Planner Ad?

On January 12, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

Back in 2007, Google released a message center in Google Webmaster Tools. It was used for penalty notifications, hacks, exploits, bandwidth issues, and many other webmaster oriented technical issues.

Today, I log into my Google Webmaster Tools account to find, what appears to me, as Google Ad Planner advertisements. Now, I am a big fan of Ad Planner, it is a really neat, free tool. But it just didn’t seem incredibly webmaster related, on the technical side. I received about six of these “messages”, each for a different site.

Here is what they said:

Increase Your Website’s Visibility with AdvertisersJanuary 7, 2010

Dear Webmaster Tools User,

If your website accepts advertising, we invite you to increase your site’s visibility with advertisers in Google Ad Planner, a free media planning tool used by tens of thousands of media planners and buyers. This is done through the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, a section within Ad Planner that lets you take charge of your site profile.

THREE STEPS TO VIEW YOUR SITE PROFILE

To see how your site profile looks in Google Ad Planner, follow these steps:
1. Visit www.google.com/adplanner
2. Type your site’s URL into the blue box that says “View a site listing”
3. Hit “enter” to get to your site’s profile
If your site profile is not complete, don’t worry, we have lots of ways for you to add information to the profile.

EIGHT WAYS TO UPDATE YOUR SITE PROFILE

Use the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to make your profile more complete. For example, you can claim your domains or subdomains, write a site description, provide a URL for advertising, and update your site’s content categories and ad specifications.

You can also opt-in your site’s Google Analytics data, invite additional users to edit and maintain your site, and promote your profile with a Google Ad Planner Site Badge.

GET STARTED

Sign in with your Google Account today at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to get started.

– The Google Ad Planner Team

I have some pictures here and here.

Again, this is likely useful information, but just doesn’t seem all that technically relevant to the Google Webmaster Tools area.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Tools.

Back in 2007, Google released a message center in Google Webmaster Tools. It was used for penalty notifications, hacks, exploits, bandwidth issues, and many other webmaster oriented technical issues.

Today, I log into my Google Webmaster Tools account to find, what appears to me, as Google Ad Planner advertisements. Now, I am a big fan of Ad Planner, it is a really neat, free tool. But it just didn’t seem incredibly webmaster related, on the technical side. I received about six of these “messages”, each for a different site.

Here is what they said:

Increase Your Website’s Visibility with AdvertisersJanuary 7, 2010

Dear Webmaster Tools User,

If your website accepts advertising, we invite you to increase your site’s visibility with advertisers in Google Ad Planner, a free media planning tool used by tens of thousands of media planners and buyers. This is done through the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, a section within Ad Planner that lets you take charge of your site profile.

THREE STEPS TO VIEW YOUR SITE PROFILE

To see how your site profile looks in Google Ad Planner, follow these steps:
1. Visit www.google.com/adplanner
2. Type your site’s URL into the blue box that says “View a site listing”
3. Hit “enter” to get to your site’s profile
If your site profile is not complete, don’t worry, we have lots of ways for you to add information to the profile.

EIGHT WAYS TO UPDATE YOUR SITE PROFILE

Use the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to make your profile more complete. For example, you can claim your domains or subdomains, write a site description, provide a URL for advertising, and update your site’s content categories and ad specifications.

You can also opt-in your site’s Google Analytics data, invite additional users to edit and maintain your site, and promote your profile with a Google Ad Planner Site Badge.

GET STARTED

Sign in with your Google Account today at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to get started.

– The Google Ad Planner Team

I have some pictures here and here.

Again, this is likely useful information, but just doesn’t seem all that technically relevant to the Google Webmaster Tools area.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools Sends Out Google Ad Planner Ad?

On January 12, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

Back in 2007, Google released a message center in Google Webmaster Tools. It was used for penalty notifications, hacks, exploits, bandwidth issues, and many other webmaster oriented technical issues.

Today, I log into my Google Webmaster Tools account to find, what appears to me, as Google Ad Planner advertisements. Now, I am a big fan of Ad Planner, it is a really neat, free tool. But it just didn’t seem incredibly webmaster related, on the technical side. I received about six of these “messages”, each for a different site.

Here is what they said:

Increase Your Website’s Visibility with AdvertisersJanuary 7, 2010

Dear Webmaster Tools User,

If your website accepts advertising, we invite you to increase your site’s visibility with advertisers in Google Ad Planner, a free media planning tool used by tens of thousands of media planners and buyers. This is done through the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, a section within Ad Planner that lets you take charge of your site profile.

THREE STEPS TO VIEW YOUR SITE PROFILE

To see how your site profile looks in Google Ad Planner, follow these steps:
1. Visit www.google.com/adplanner
2. Type your site’s URL into the blue box that says “View a site listing”
3. Hit “enter” to get to your site’s profile
If your site profile is not complete, don’t worry, we have lots of ways for you to add information to the profile.

EIGHT WAYS TO UPDATE YOUR SITE PROFILE

Use the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to make your profile more complete. For example, you can claim your domains or subdomains, write a site description, provide a URL for advertising, and update your site’s content categories and ad specifications.

You can also opt-in your site’s Google Analytics data, invite additional users to edit and maintain your site, and promote your profile with a Google Ad Planner Site Badge.

GET STARTED

Sign in with your Google Account today at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to get started.

– The Google Ad Planner Team

I have some pictures here and here.

Again, this is likely useful information, but just doesn’t seem all that technically relevant to the Google Webmaster Tools area.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Tools.

Back in 2007, Google released a message center in Google Webmaster Tools. It was used for penalty notifications, hacks, exploits, bandwidth issues, and many other webmaster oriented technical issues.

Today, I log into my Google Webmaster Tools account to find, what appears to me, as Google Ad Planner advertisements. Now, I am a big fan of Ad Planner, it is a really neat, free tool. But it just didn’t seem incredibly webmaster related, on the technical side. I received about six of these “messages”, each for a different site.

Here is what they said:

Increase Your Website’s Visibility with AdvertisersJanuary 7, 2010

Dear Webmaster Tools User,

If your website accepts advertising, we invite you to increase your site’s visibility with advertisers in Google Ad Planner, a free media planning tool used by tens of thousands of media planners and buyers. This is done through the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, a section within Ad Planner that lets you take charge of your site profile.

THREE STEPS TO VIEW YOUR SITE PROFILE

To see how your site profile looks in Google Ad Planner, follow these steps:
1. Visit www.google.com/adplanner
2. Type your site’s URL into the blue box that says “View a site listing”
3. Hit “enter” to get to your site’s profile
If your site profile is not complete, don’t worry, we have lots of ways for you to add information to the profile.

EIGHT WAYS TO UPDATE YOUR SITE PROFILE

Use the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to make your profile more complete. For example, you can claim your domains or subdomains, write a site description, provide a URL for advertising, and update your site’s content categories and ad specifications.

You can also opt-in your site’s Google Analytics data, invite additional users to edit and maintain your site, and promote your profile with a Google Ad Planner Site Badge.

GET STARTED

Sign in with your Google Account today at www.google.com/adplanner/publisher to get started.

– The Google Ad Planner Team

I have some pictures here and here.

Again, this is likely useful information, but just doesn’t seem all that technically relevant to the Google Webmaster Tools area.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Tools.

How Does Google Get Their Data For Ad Planner?

On January 8, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

I think Google Ad Planner is pretty amazing and chock full of information. But to some webmasters, the information they have is either so accurate it is scary or totally off and worthless.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, Google AdSense representative, AdSenseAdvisor, replied to questions about where they source the data, how to opt out and what to do if the data is off. Let me quote what Google said:

To estimate website traffic we use a combination of two approaches:
1.) We extrapolate website traffic from sample data we collect from a variety of sources. For our sample data Google Ad Planner combines information from sources such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.

2.) Individual websites can opt-in their Google Analytics data to improve the accuracy of data displayed about their site in Ad Planner.

This methodology is similar to that of other 3rd party online measurement tools, which also use hybrid approaches that blend server side measured numbers with sample/panel based estimates.

Google Analytics Opt-in Data
@Cancellara – Did you opt-in your Analytics data into Ad Planner? We don’t use your Analytics data in Ad Planner unless you explicitly choose to share it. So unless you’ve chosen to opt-in your Google Analytics data to Ad Planner, it’s possible that the Ad Planner estimates are different than your Analytics statistics.

@Oxydada – When looking at your Analytics reports compared to Ad Planner, are you comparing US to US figures? Ad Planner by default shows US numbers while Analytics shows worldwide figures, so this could be the cause of the discrepancy.

@rashidjaved11 – Please file a ticket with our support teams and we’ll try to help diagnose your issue. http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/request.py

@aish1108 – If you’ve checked everything and you’re sure your tags are on all your pages, then you should opt-in your data. The “low tag coverage” message is just a warning to tell people to check their tag coverage. It’s possible that our check is making an error since we’re basing it on Google crawl data and trying to detect your Analytics tags from the crawl. The data you see in your Analytics reports is what we’ll display in Ad Planner

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I think Google Ad Planner is pretty amazing and chock full of information. But to some webmasters, the information they have is either so accurate it is scary or totally off and worthless.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, Google AdSense representative, AdSenseAdvisor, replied to questions about where they source the data, how to opt out and what to do if the data is off. Let me quote what Google said:

To estimate website traffic we use a combination of two approaches:
1.) We extrapolate website traffic from sample data we collect from a variety of sources. For our sample data Google Ad Planner combines information from sources such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.

2.) Individual websites can opt-in their Google Analytics data to improve the accuracy of data displayed about their site in Ad Planner.

This methodology is similar to that of other 3rd party online measurement tools, which also use hybrid approaches that blend server side measured numbers with sample/panel based estimates.

Google Analytics Opt-in Data
@Cancellara – Did you opt-in your Analytics data into Ad Planner? We don’t use your Analytics data in Ad Planner unless you explicitly choose to share it. So unless you’ve chosen to opt-in your Google Analytics data to Ad Planner, it’s possible that the Ad Planner estimates are different than your Analytics statistics.

@Oxydada – When looking at your Analytics reports compared to Ad Planner, are you comparing US to US figures? Ad Planner by default shows US numbers while Analytics shows worldwide figures, so this could be the cause of the discrepancy.

@rashidjaved11 – Please file a ticket with our support teams and we’ll try to help diagnose your issue. http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/request.py

@aish1108 – If you’ve checked everything and you’re sure your tags are on all your pages, then you should opt-in your data. The “low tag coverage” message is just a warning to tell people to check their tag coverage. It’s possible that our check is making an error since we’re basing it on Google crawl data and trying to detect your Analytics tags from the crawl. The data you see in your Analytics reports is what we’ll display in Ad Planner

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Tips for Twitter That Will Help

On December 23, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

So this post has nothing really (directly anyway) to do with search engine optimization, but I thought it would make sense to spend a bit of time explaining some of the basic tips to help your business effectively use Twitter.
Yes, Twitter might not be right for every business but that doesn’t give the excuse [...]

So this post has nothing really (directly anyway) to do with search engine optimization, but I thought it would make sense to spend a bit of time explaining some of the basic tips to help your business effectively use Twitter.

Yes, Twitter might not be right for every business but that doesn’t give the excuse to not pulling up a chair to the dinner table and at least looking at what there is to offer. I don’t generate a huge amount of interaction on Twitter but you think I would when I look at the Google Analytics information. Just because people might not interact with your business on Twitter doesn’t mean they don’t make it over to your website through your profile.

Here are some things all businesses should be doing on Twitter every single day:

Follow: Every business out there must have some sort of competition. Whether immediate or loosely related it doesn’t matter. Sending follow requests to your competitors followers is very important. Some will see that you are following them and instantly follow you back so it is very important to find these people. They are about as targeted as you are ever going to get.

Post Links: I don’t recommend sitting there all day and just dropping links to your website but occasionally it is ok to post a link to a service page or a product page especially if you are running a special promotion or sale on something. Most people won’t mind if you do it tastefully. Don’t drop the link every hour all day long. This will get people turned off by your efforts. If you have a blog each blog post should always be posted into your Twitter account as well.

Retweet: If you see something particular to your industry someone posted I would recommend retweeting it. It will drive more eyeballs to your Twitter page and get that account that you just retweeted on your radar. Plus often times that person you just retweeted might return the favor down the road creating a win win situation all across the board.

Conversation: Reply to people’s posts you might think would be great for your business. Not everyone will respond to you but eventually you will start to build up some nice conversations and some could be the right type of conversations to get your business growing.

These are some efforts every Twitter account should be doing but over time you will find a patter or routine that works best for you. This is just the one that we chose to follow.

Will Google Analytics Hurt My Google Rankings? Speed Issues?

On December 9, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster worried that Google will be using page speed as a ranking factor in 2010. But the reason he is worried is because the site performance feature in Webmaster Tools shows Google Analytics as needing some speeding up.

The two suggestions this webmaster gets from Google is related to their own product, Google Analytics. The suggestions read:

(1) Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 15.5 KB:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js (15.5 KB)

(2) The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js

A Googler named sreeram in the forum said it is okay to “ignore the suggestion to gzip urchin.js.” Google actually noted this issue in their announcement where they said, “some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics’ “ga.js”).”

That response did not satisfy the concern of this webmaster who asked again:

The question is if the speed impact of using these Google products will affect my sites’ rankings?

I hope not, but I also know if has affected my users experience on my site and that affects me.

Google did release asynchronous calls for Google Analytics, which does speed things up a bit.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster worried that Google will be using page speed as a ranking factor in 2010. But the reason he is worried is because the site performance feature in Webmaster Tools shows Google Analytics as needing some speeding up.

The two suggestions this webmaster gets from Google is related to their own product, Google Analytics. The suggestions read:

(1) Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 15.5 KB:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js (15.5 KB)

(2) The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
* Go to URLhttps://ssl.google-analytics.com:443/urchin.js

A Googler named sreeram in the forum said it is okay to “ignore the suggestion to gzip urchin.js.” Google actually noted this issue in their announcement where they said, “some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics’ “ga.js”).”

That response did not satisfy the concern of this webmaster who asked again:

The question is if the speed impact of using these Google products will affect my sites’ rankings?

I hope not, but I also know if has affected my users experience on my site and that affects me.

Google did release asynchronous calls for Google Analytics, which does speed things up a bit.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Best Of: Website Analytics Tools

On November 10, 2009, In SEO, by David

For a majority of bloggers, developers and designers we all seem to running many sites at the same time, if not were busy building websites for clients. Knowing who is coming to your website and how they got there is an important factor to building a successful website, the information is invaluable and can allow you to make changes to your website that allow for greater growth and profit. With this in mind lets take a look at some great free website analytics tools and their merits.

For a majority of bloggers, developers and designers we all seem to running many sites at the same time, if not were busy building websites for clients. Knowing who is coming to your website and how they got there is an important factor to building a successful website, the information is invaluable and can allow you to make changes to your website that allow for greater growth and profit. With this in mind lets take a look at some great free and paid website analytics tools and their merits.

Free Web Analytics Tools:

Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. Most services don’t let you see what’s happening “today” until the day after.

Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg, you would see the traffic spike in Clicky immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation.

Snoop

Running in the System Tray (Windows) / System Status Bar (Mac) you no longer need to endlessly flip between your work and stats. When something happens, Snoop will let you know.

Snoop will run on any website or blogging platform that allows JavaScript. Simply insert the tracking snippet on any page you want tracked and we take care of the rest.

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Grape Web Statistics

Grape is a free, open source program that allows web developers to keep accurate statistics of visitors. The program is currently in a beta testing phase, although it appears to be reasonably stable. Bugs may be reported through the Launchpad bug reporting system or at our forums, which we will address as fast as we can.

Piwik

Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).

Yahoo! Web Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers. By storing data in raw, non-aggregated form, Yahoo! Web Analytics is more than simply a reporting tool. It is a powerful, and highly flexible, data analysis tool. Both near real-time AND historical data can be segmented instantly and even visualized with advanced graphs to help marketers and site designers answer specific business questions and find new insights to improve their business.

WordPress.com Stats

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Woopra

Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. We deliver the richest library of visitor statistics in the industry through our innovative desktop application. But Woopra is more than simply statistics.

FireStats

FireStats is a free to use web statistics system.

GoingUp

Why spend time guessing with trial and error changes and adjustments? Know your audience before you make a change. Know what they expect, know what they want, and consequently, know that you’re making changes for the better. Your website represents the investment of large amounts of time, physical and mental effort, and more-likely-than-not, a significant portion of money as well.

MochiBot

MochiBot is a Flash traffic monitoring tool (similar to a hit counter) that tracks the performance of individual Flash content files (SWFs) no matter where they end up on the web. If your SWF is on 5 different servers, then MochiBot will count the number of views that SWF got for all 5 servers. It’s perfect for tracking how viral your Flash content is.

Mint

Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.

Blog Tracker

Blog Tracker is an invisible tracker that will count your blog visits and other blog statistics. This product is completely free! We will not put any ads on your blog.

Statcounter

A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

SEO Traits Your Strategy Should Contain

Search Competition Tools to Use – Do it Right!

Find Invisible Pages Using Google Analytics

How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

First-touch tracking in Google Analytics

Multi-touch attribution modelling

View-through conversions

First-touch tracking in Google Analytics

Multi-touch attribution modelling

View-through conversions

Google Webmaster Tools Sends Out Google Ad Planner Ad?

Google Webmaster Tools Sends Out Google Ad Planner Ad?

How Does Google Get Their Data For Ad Planner?

Tips for Twitter That Will Help

Will Google Analytics Hurt My Google Rankings? Speed Issues?

Best Of: Website Analytics Tools

Clicky

Snoop