All posts in google analytics


Other SEO blogs linking to us

 

While perusing the SEOptimise Google Analytics reports for last month, I noticed a few traffic spikes where I did not necessarily expect them. Upon taking a closer look, I discovered that many major traffic sources only show up as such on blogs, or rather blogs that are popular on social media.

One of the few products Google doesn’t offer yet*

It seems Google wants to inundate us with new tools, products and services these days. Is this a way to divert attention away from all the bad news about antitrust lawsuits, the FTC and the like? I don’t know. In any case, there are lots of new tools to test.

Many of these will have a huge impact on search and the Web as a whole in future.

Others mights seem less noteworthy at first, but they underscore the long term Google strategy which focuses on social, mobile and HTML5 among others.

Either way, I assume that every business person has to know about these tools, as there are plenty of opportunities here and in some cases also pitfalls.

 

google +1 button

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.

I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.

The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.

One of our clients’ sites had a sudden drop in traffic from London. After the 25th of February, all London traffic – paid, organic and direct – had dropped by nearly 45%. There wasn’t an obvious reason. There hadn’t been any changes to the PPC campaigns or search rankings. It didn’t look seasonal; there was nothing similar in previous years.  Google announced that it was updating location targeting in AdWords earlier in February, but the list of affected locations didn’t include London.  The site’s total traffic had increased slightly, so why would London’s be down?

After a little while cross-referencing half-term dates and glaring at search term reports, I looked to see if any other towns or cities had been similarly affected. And while London’s traffic had nearly halved, that Kensington’s traffic had increased by over 20,000%. Lambeth was up by over 140,000%.

Piwi goals

It’s not only the black hat and the paranoid who are increasingly wary of Google’s privacy issues. Google Analytics has come under attack repeatedly in Europe. Recently, German government officials even threatened to ​declare Google Analytics illegal.

While I consider Google Analytics a minor threat to privacy compared to other Google products and services (like Doubleclick, Google toolbar or Google Chrome), I think there is still room for improvement.

These and other reasons made me revisit Piwik, the open source, self-hosted Google Analytics alternative.

It’s a German project on top of that, so the solution is already there. I was testing Piwik two years ago in an early beta stage. Now it’s available in version 1.1.1 and already it’s quite a powerful web analytics solution.

Image by Westside Shooter.

Google Instant is the talk of the town not only in the SEO industry. While some people still hope SEO will go away most experts agree that SEO is either just changing a bit or now more important than ever due to the recent changes. So I won’t list most of the usual “SEO is not dead” posts here as I expect you to know that. I’ll focus on what the instant search results will mean for SEO, SEM and analytics in reality.

Check out the following 40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & analytics resources list. Btw. The last item is probably the best one.

Use Google Analytics custom segments to audit and improve search marketing

Anyone who has ever reviewed the keywords attracting visitors to a site will have seen that brand search terms usually dominate, often accounting for more than 50% of search related visits for well-known brands.

Every site has associated brands, but to paraphrase Morrisey, some brands are biggger than others. For these, isolating brand search is essential if you’re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.

It follows that it’s futile to try to review and improve search engine marketing without taking brand phrases into account, but that’s the default for the less than savvy. For marketers, reviewing their analytics it’s easy to understand since the analytics tool doesn’t readily isolate brand and non-brand phrases.

A year ago we’ve published a list of 30+ Google Analytics tools and resources. It was one of our most successful posts ever. The list has been even nominated for a SEMMY award. I’m not sure I can top that but I can provide a new list of 30+ more Google Analytics tools, apps, tweaks and other resources.

Are your PPC campaigns eating your organic traffic? Google love for you to bid on your brand name in AdWords, but how to you know if you are wasting money on traffic you could have got for free? Of course, to find this out you need to run some sort of test.

Last week, Avinash Kaushik opened SES London with a superb keynote presentation about web analytics – see this video interview if you missed it.

There’s some good writeups following this, but one of the parts I found particularly interesting was the examples of how brands perform using search.

Marks & Spencer
One of Avinahs’s examples included an M&S paid search ad, where the landing page for a query on “Marks and Spencer underwear” produced a general Valentines Day landing page – no sign of a relevant product in sight! Here’s the landing page I now see for a query on the same term, the Valentines Day page has been replaced:

Marks and Spencer

“They Came, They Puked, They Left” is how Avinash Kaushik described website’s with a high bounce rate, because users aren’t finding what they are looking for, so they very quickly leave. This is very true in the M&S example, where users are dumped onto the homepage, relying on users navigating to find what they want – instead of directing them straight to it.

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