What is video.js?

video.js is a free, fast, open source (licensed under Apache) HTML5 video player available at http://www.videojs.com/ which was developed by video experts from Brightcove & Zencoder. It’s really easy to set up, but like most of these types of popular open source players, it doesn’t come with built in Google Analytics tracking. As a possible benefit though it doesn’t use jQuery, so if for some reason you can’t use jQuery, or you’re having issues with jQuery on your website, video.js could be a good option for you.
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You probably already know about the Funnel Visualization and Goal Flow reports in Google Analytics. They’re a great way to understand how users complete (or don’t) some kind of process on your website, such as filling out a series of forms, like a registration or checkout.

Sometimes, though, there isn’t a clear path. On this site, for example, we have a contact form that doesn’t just appear on one page, it appears in lots of pages, and this isn’t an uncommon feature of lead generation sites. Likewise, sometimes people say things like, “Well, page X is our goal. But you can actually get here either by going A > B > X, or by A > P > Q > X, depending on what options you choose.” How do we know which way people got to X?

The Reverse Goal Path is a report that helps fill in these details. You’ll find it under Conversions > Goals in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics, and like all the goal reports, you can select a particular goal you want to see from the drop-down at the top. It’s very simple: it gives you the goal completion URL and the URL of each of the 3 pages that came immediately before. You don’t have to predefine a funnel or anything, it simply looks 3 pages back in the visit and tells you what they were.

So here’s an example from our contact form. The first column is the “Goal Completion Location”, which in this case is always /about-us/contact/thank-you/. Then each of the subsequent columns walks back one page, telling us whether someone was on the home page, the contact details page, the client list, etc. No funnel necessary!

To sort out this information, note that you can use the advanced filter. So if you’re only interested in one particular path or page, you can narrow down the possibilities you’ll see here.
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Social media management has come a long way in the past few years. Whereas once it was relegated to the emphemeral domain of ‘social media’ guru-hood, we now have concrete strategies and metrics we can draw on in order to develop and measure real business success from social media marketing. Here are five metrics that I use for reporting that every social media manager should be familiar with.

1. Assisted Conversions

What it is:
Assisted Conversions show the overall impact of marketing channels by comparing conversions that came directly from a channel to conversions that came indirectly from that channel.
Why it’s important: Read More…

One of the advantages of Google Analytics Premium is that you can get unsampled data, but it’s still processed data. Have you dreamed of getting access to your raw GA data?

Those dreams are about to come true. Announced today at Google I/O: later this year BigQuery will be available to users of Google Analytics Premium.

Query hit-level data at interactive speed

BigQuery is a web service that lets you query billions of rows, a.k.a. Big Data, with a response time in seconds. Without Google Analytics Premium, you upload some data first and then run your queries.

With Google Analytics Premium, your hit-level GA data will be available for the same type of interactive ad hoc queries. Pose a question, get an answer. Does that lead to another question? Rinse and repeat! You can batch queries, too.

Build complex queries and join data sets

Direct granular access to your GA data opens the door for all kinds of complex queries. You’ll also be able to combine data sets from other sources for powerful business insights.

Imagine having data at your fingertips to solve problems like these: Read More…

We know you’re eager to start paid search; it can be a crucial way of bringing potential customers to your site. But there are a few things you should make sure you have in place to be successful.

1. Work the Numbers

Stop. Do not pass go. Do not deposit $200 in your AdWords account (yet).

First, figure out what your conversion is — a sale? a lead form submission? Then you have to try to figure out how much money it makes sense to pay to bring people to your site so that you get more value from that conversion than you spend on the advertising.

You can go at this two ways. If you know the value of the conversion (you sold a $100 widget), you can work the ROI calculation backwards to figure out what a reasonable cost per conversion and cost per click might be. Alternatively, if the value of the conversion is less well-defined (like in lead generation), you might simply pick a reasonable target for cost-per-lead.
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It’s safe to say that Facebook.com and YouTube.com are the #2 and #3 most visited websites on the world wide web (behind only Google.com).  No big secret there.  It’s also pretty safe to assume that you or someone you know has shared a YouTube video on their Facebook Wall.  Also not a life-changing revelation.  What might surprise to you is that you can actually target viewers of these Facebook-hosted YouTube videos using a Google AdWords advertising product. That’s right; read it twice.

“How is this possible?” you might ask.  ”Aren’t Facebook and Google mortal enemies?” you might ask.  Well ya, but with Google AdWords for video and some keen investigation you are able to leverage these two super-massive audiences in conjunction with one another.  You get the best of both worlds by effectively serving your advertising message alongside compelling YouTube content within the world’s most popular forum, Facebook. Read More…

The roles and responsibilities of all marketers are expanding. Publicists are conducting keyword research. SEOs are guiding media outreach. These are crazy times.

This article is designed for professionals who wish to streamline their media outreach by creating many semi-personalized pitch letters in Excel using the concatenation function. If you are new to pitching and are simply searching for a way to get a pesky product launch off your plate as soon as possible, please review the Golden Rule below before moving on to the screenshots.

Pitch Letter Golden Rule

As (part-time) publicists, we should never send a form “Dear Reporter” pitch letter to every reporter on our list, even if this blog post makes it really easy to do that. It is not successful, it cheapens the brand and PR people will hate us for doing a disservice to their field. Instead, take time to personalize each pitch, even if there is just one line that speaks to the writer or publication.

The tactics discussed in this article might bend the boundaries of the golden rule but, as the Dalai Lama said, “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” While I believe that is especially true with all writing, it is also a valid lesson in public relations. Liberties taken from a solid foundation create unique, engaging PR outreach. Liberties taken from ignorance are slop.

When Pitch Letter Concatenation Works

For most story pitches, publicists contact a short list of journalist who report on the particular topic and tailor each pitch to its recipient. A streamlining process like this one might not be necessary. Other times, we need a method for organizing letter writing and distribution.

An example might be an article that identifies the best in your industry. Since this is a SEO blog, our sample article title will be “Top 50 SEO Bloggers.” We will rank the bloggers by a series of quantitative and qualitative metrics, maybe open it up to voting to increase engagement. Once we have the finalists, it is time to contact each one to let them know they made the top 50. We have three options:

• 50 personalized emails 
• “Congratulations Blogger” form email
• Semi-personalized letters in Excel

Creating Pitch Letters with Excel

Our semi-personalized email will have two elements: the subject line and the body. We don’t want to use a standard subject line like “Congratulations SEO Blogger” because open rate would suffer–I wouldn’t open it. Instead, let’s us each blogger’s first name.

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Problem: You have media like an audio file, or a small video, that you want to put on your website, and you want to track whether people are listening or watching to it inside Google Analytics, or even make it a Goal.

Solution: Use jPlayer and the code below to track your jPlayer events into Google Analytics.

Wait a Tick: What’s with the Bob Ross photo?
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Yesterday, I was really taking a deep look at a client’s account – I was trying to find out why branded searches and conversions have decreased this year compared to last year. And while there were a number of conclusions that we drew from the data, what interested me most was the difference in display strategy (and placement) comparing the two time periods.

I might be making some generalizations, but hey, this was a big difference. It looks like 2011-2012 saw a big display push in the months leading up to their “opening day” (early March), while 2012-2013 saw a drastic reduction in that strategy for the same period of time. This really got me thinking about display ads in general – strategies, banner creative and what you can do right now to assess display performance. I’ve summed up the top five things that I think are priorities when it comes to a wholesome display “check”, though there are certainly more that can be added to the list.

 1. Strategy – As I said above, investigating year over year comparisons revealed to me the big difference in Display strategy and the potential ramifications it could have had on Search campaigns (especially Branded). Your Display strategy (or strategies) should have a clear purpose. Are you campaigns helping raise brand awareness? Are they focused on a certain goal completion? For the most part, Display campaigns support the goals of a Search campaign. If they do, then align your messaging so that there is a clear connection between the ads, leading to a higher click through rate as people recognize the offer you are advertising. Read More…

Google Analytics Content Experiments are a great way to quickly and easily set up simple A/B tests for your website. And for most people, setting up these experiments can be done using the interface in Google Analytics.

However, there are some who desire a little more control over the variation pages, that just can’t be done through the setup wizard.

For example, when you’re choosing you’re variation pages, you can specify full (exact) URLs for the variations, or relative URLs. If you choose to specify the variations by the full URL, you’d end up with something like:

Original Page:

http://www.example.com/original.html

Variation 1:

http://www.example.com/variation1.html

Variation 2:

http://www.example.com/variation2.html

If you choose relative URLs, you can take advantage of query parameters to specify your variations. This makes it possible to do site-wide tests, by placing the Content Experiment code on every “original” page of the site. Then, for your variation URLs, you’d have:
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