Google Analytics announced something pretty cool today – actually something AMAZINGLY cool. We can now get Display Network Impression Reporting in Analytics, including some nifty new features in the Multi-Channel Funnel Reports that allow advertisers to see the true effects of different ad types on users and their eventual conversions. If you’ve ever wondered about how display ads (and different ad types to boot) have concretely played a role in a conversion at the impression level, you’ll now know. Attribution never gets old.

Read the full blog announcement here:

For implementation, check out the GA support article here: Implementing Display Network Impression Reporting
Read More…

Did you inherit a PPC account from another agency? Were you recently tasked with the responsibility of managing Paid Search for your company? Or did your company just bring their PPC program in-house?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above, then this article is for you.

The initial feeling of inheriting a new account can be overwhelming. You’ve probably asked yourself a thousand questions including “Where do I even start?” I’ve outlined five boxes to check upon first receiving an account that guarantees a quick boost in performance:
Read More…

The Problem:

You have some data about your email marketing (for example, open rate) in your email marketing software, and data about visits to your site from email marketing elsewhere (namely, Google Analytics).

Wouldn’t it be great to see an end-to-end view of all that data in one place? With Universal Analytics and the Measurement Protocol, you can, and I’ll show you how, step-by-step.

Today’s post will kick things off by looking first at how to track email opens in Google Analytics. My next post will show how to tag a visitor with a unique ID, so you’ll be able to track them across devices (like in the image below). Finally, we’ll tie it all together so you can see visitor behavior from opening your email to visiting your site and (hopefully!) converting.

The Solution:

We’ll use MailChimp - a popular (and free, if you want to play along) email marketing manager to walk you through how to set this up, but you should be able to apply the same steps to any email marketing solution you use.
Read More…

This is an unusual post for me. I tend to stick to “how-to” articles because I realized a while back that no one really cares about my opinion.

But in an industry where words must be so carefully dissected and examined, we’ve gotten downright silly with some of our favorite jargon. And it’s my time to whine.

4. “Keywords”

I know it sounds crazy to call this one out. I spend many hours every week studying users search queries to influence our clients’ content creation endeavors.

But does it not irk you that people call a 3 word phrase a “keyword”? So “just call it a key phrase fussypants,” you say.

Beyond nitpicking, the real problem is that all this obsession over “keyword research” and “keyword use” betrays the real goal of all that analysis – to figure out what content people you want on your site want to find. And that comes to down to more than the particular string of characters user types in the search box, which is unfortunately the connotation that comes with keyword.

How about geographic location? Am I necessarily looking for general plumber info when I search for “plumber?” Chances are my IP address let’s Google know that I probably want to see some Pittsburgh plumber in my search results page. Read More…

The new goal setup in Google Analytics is great, unless you want to organize your goals. Here’s how to cope until (fingers crossed) Google fixes it.

Let me start by saying I love the new, clean look of the goal configuration screens. I love that GA is always adding new features and making adjustments. Every week there’s a surprise, often a pleasant one. One of the best things in the new goal setup is the next to last step: “Verify this Goal.” Why, yes! Yes, I would like to verify this goal before saving it and wondering next week where all my goal data is. Or without taking several extra steps to verify my goal first.

I’m perfectly happy about the clean, new direction of the administrative UI, except for one thing. The goals list is a jumbled mess!

Problem 1:
Numbered Goals Now Alphabetized

Previously when I looked at the Goals UI, the goals were listed in the order they appeared in my reports. First I had Goal Set 1, and any goals I had configured in that set, then Goal Set 2, and so on.

Now the goals are alphabetized by the name of the goal, without regard to how they appear in my reports. All my macro conversions are in Set 1 (and they still are), but I can’t easily see that in this list. Read More…

I recently completed an AdWords Training in NYC and one topic that required some extra explanation and walk-through was actually linking AdWords and Analytics accounts. When first starting an AdWords account, this is a step that I highly encourage from the start. It only takes 5 minutes and is super easy. If you have an account already (maybe it’s been running for a while and you’ve just been given management), then checking to see that everything is linked correctly is an important step. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have AdWords and Analytics properly connected and “talking”. Your future optimizations absolutely depend on it!

Before we go any further, though, make sure that you have Administrative access to BOTH the AdWords account and the Google Analytics account with the same email log in. This is important since you can’t do squat with Admin access to only one or the other. Read More…

Google Analytics is great for tracking just about anything – inside a webpage. Google’s JavaScript code sits nicely on your website’s HTML pages, and tracks all of your site’s pageviews, visitor session information and various user interactions and events (including resource downloads from links, with some minor tweaking).

The thing about JavaScript though is that it needs to live somewhere on the visitor’s browser (client-side), tucked neatly inside the <head> tag. GA can only track resources that are downloaded when JavaScript is involved.

This is all fine and dandy – except that the world doesn’t always work that way. People sometimes hotlink to PDFs, Word docs and images and visit them directly. And thank goodness! Can you imagine a world without direct links to imgur.com memes?

Read More…

My favorite social media monitoring and management solution by far and away is Hootsuite. It offers crazy good functionality, a ton of additional features, and support for what I consider the three most relevant and important social networks; Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. After hosting more than a few talks, trainings, and panels, I’ve found that I’m definitely not alone in my preference, either.

However, I’ve always felt the search operators available inside monitoring streams were a hugely underutilized feature. If you think you’re familiar with these, I’d ask you to suspend your disbelief for a moment and believe that there’s some functionality you’re missing. Let me start by telling you a little more about what stream search operators are.

Stream search operators

These are, essentially, rules that you can apply to your streams in order to filter them. In order to create a search stream, click the Add Stream button in the top left section of the Hootsuite dashboard. Then, select the Search tab from the dropdown.

Read More…

What is Google AdWords?  How does it work?

If you are new to paid search advertising these are among the first questions you will have.  Let’s cover the basics and bring you up to speed on how to get started with Google AdWords advertising.  After all, before you become an expert you have to start at the beginning.

Before you start…

There are four essential elements you absolutely MUST have in place before you even consider launching any Google Adwords campaigns if you hope to achieve the best results: Read More…

Like every industry, SEO has its own vernacular and acronyms that can be terribly confusing to outsiders. We use 301 as a verb, crave link juice, scoff at EMDs and worship non-branded organic. Even worse, these terms are here to stay. SEO has cemented itself as an essential online marketing function. An expanded digital audience depends on an expanded digital vocabulary.

What is a Non-Branded Organic Search Visit?

In order to answer that question, let’s start at the beginning, which is actually the end: a visit. Don’t be embarrassed if this is new territory. It was not long ago that even the most savvy Internet marketers focused on hits. But for most people that has changed. Now we talk about a broader metric called visits. In Google Analytics, a visit includes most things that a person does during their stay on your website because a broader perspective than simply pageviews provides more insight to user (and prospective client) behavior. If you would like to learn more about visits, particularly how they begin and end, click on the screenshot below.

Now we understand that a visit can include multiple pageviews and actions on our website. The first step is complete. Let’s continue working backwards. A search visit is any visit that comes from a search engine. A search visit can come from two places: paid search and organic search. Paid search refers to an advertisement in the search results. The ads are shown in the red boxes below. Everything in the green, the non-paid listings, is organic.
Read More…