After you learn about campaign tagging for Google Analytics, you may be excited that you can add all that extra information to a simple little link – so excited that you want to put campaign tags on every kind of promotional link that leads to a web page on your site. But there’s one kind of link that should never get campaign tags. You should never put GA campaign tags on internal banners or on-site promotions that lead from one page of your site to another.

Why You Shouldn’t Use GA Campaign Tags for Internal Promotions

Imagine this sample scenario: A visitor clicks an email campaign link from your latest marketing effort and lands on your site. Google Analytics records the traffic source and starts collecting data for the visit. Of course you hope that the visitor will continue to view pages on your site and maybe even convert on an important goal like registering for an upcoming conference or buying your latest e-book. When they do, you’ll be able to attribute that conversion to the campaign and evaluate that campaign’s success.

But what happens if the visitor clicks an internal banner with campaign tags before they convert? Google Analytics records a new traffic source and starts a whole new visit. So now you have at least two problems: You’ve split what was really one visit into two visits, skewing your data. And you can’t tie the original email link directly to the conversion, because the conversion happens in a separate visit.

To track internal promotions without splitting visits and losing credit for conversions, try one of these instead:

• Add your own campaign parameters (not GA campaign tags) to the links and view the data in your Content/Pages reports
• Use event tracking when a visitor clicks an internal banner or promotional link and view the data in your Content/Events reports

Alternative #1: Add Your Own Campaign Parameters

The first method involves making up your own tags, ones that GA won’t recognize and will pass right along into your Pages reports with the rest of the URL. Instead of utm_source or utm_medium, for example, you might simply add something like “from=promo” to the target link:

http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?from=promo

Or you could use a more detailed scheme if, for example, you run internal promotions with many types of links in different places. So you might have one parameter similar to campaign name, like “campname=e-book”, and another parameter that describes the links, like “camplink=home-page-banner” or “camplink=side-nav-feature”:

http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?campname=e-book&camplink=home-page-banner

http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?campname=e-book&camplink=side-nav-feature

As long as you stay away from Google Analytics utm parameters, these types of URLs will appear in your Content/Pages reports and you can tell by the number of pageviews exactly how many times a visitor clicked the tagged link to arrive there.

Alternative #2: Use Event Tracking

The second method involves adding a bit of code to the link on the page. Inside the anchor tag (a href=”…”) include an onclick event like this (a href=”…” onclick=”…”). And in the onclick event, add the event tracking code using an event category and action like “internal promo” and “home-page-banner”:

onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'internal promo', 'home-page-banner', this.href]);"

After the event category and action it’s a good idea to include the optional event label. For the label you can simply write the target (href) of the link, using this.href.

View this data in your Content/Events reports by drilling into Top Events through the “internal promo” category, where you can see the how many times someone clicked each of your different internal promotional links.

Combine with Custom Variables for Goal Data

Okay, so where’s the goal data? You may have noticed that Google Analytics has Goal tabs in Traffic Sources reports, but not in Content reports. The whole point of these alternatives was to keep your original traffic source intact so you could tie it to a conversion. But you probably also want to know how well your internal promotions lead to conversions, too, right? Of course you do.

Well, there’s another set of reports that has Goal tabs, where you can combine conversion data with a set of dimensions that you define, and that’s the Audience set of reports. You can write a custom variable with the parameters or event data you created in either alternative described above. And then you can easily compare goal conversion data in a single table that lists all your internal promotions.

The thing to remember when writing custom variables is that the data needs to piggyback on a _trackPageview or _trackEvent call.

For the event tracking alternative, add _setCustomVar to the onclick event, like this:

onclick="_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'internal promo', 'home-page-banner', 2]);_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'internal promo', 'home-page-banner', this.href]);"

For the other alternative where you make up your own campaign parameters, I suggest adding _setCustomVar to the page that’s the target of the link, right before the usual call to _trackPageview. You can use a little Javascript to read the URL and write the custom variable according to the campaign parameters that appear there. For example, if the URL is:

http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?campname=e-book&camplink=side-nav-feature

The resulting custom variable code (placed before the call to _trackPageview) could be something like this:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'e-book', 'side-nav-feature', 2]);

In both cases I’ve set a session-level custom variable (indicated by the number 2 above), and I’ve set the custom variable to slot number 1 (out of 5). If you are already using that slot then you’ll need to assign it to another one. Read our post about how to keep track of custom variable slots and scopes for more guidance.

No More Split Visits

Avoid the split-visit problem. Keep visit data together by keeping internal and external promotions separate. Track your external campaigns with GA’s utm parameters and try one of the above alternatives for internal campaign tracking. And tie both external and internal promotions to conversion data to evaluate the success of each.

What methods do you use for tracking internal promotions? And how do you tie them to conversion data? Please share in the comments.

Google’s most recent search algorithm update – dubbed the “page layout” algorithm change – focuses to punish websites whose content is pushed below-the-fold by multiple advertisements. While the forecasted number of searches affected is less than 1%, it’s never a bad idea to use an algorithm update as an opportunity to take a step back and examine your site’s search engine friendliness and usability. It is not an occasion to panic, however. Chances are that your site complies with the updated page layout standard. If it doesn’t, it would be hard for me to believe that this change is anything but a blessing in disguise.

Will My Site Be Affected?

As Distinguished Engineer, Matt Cutts points out in his post on Inside Search, placing ads above-the-fold isn’t exactly uncommon. In fact, many of the most highly trafficked and well respected online information hubs use above-the-fold ads in optimizing their monetization strategy. Hosting doesn’t pay for itself.

So, will industry websites like Search Engine Watch (which has multiple ads above-the-fold) be punished? Will your site – the one with a big, flashy banner ad at the top – be punished? Unless you’re supplanting your above-the-fold content completely, it’s incredibly doubtful.

In his post on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan makes the point that Google actually encourages the use of above-the-fold ads through their AdSense recommendations. The onus, now more than ever, is on the publisher (or webmaster) to make sure that these ads are used tactfully and in conjunction with actual content.

Need to Make Changes?

Long have Google’s algorithm updates catered to the end user (and rightfully so). If your site is guilty of having a page layout that’s top-heavy with ads, it’s time to make some game-changing tweaks. Asking users (and now search engines) to simply “deal with it” isn’t an option. Frankly, if you’re at all vested in the performance of your site and the contentedness of its users, it never has been.

As we’ve talked about before, here at LunaMetrics, conversions rely not only on getting visitors to your site, but also the content and usability of your landing and inner pages. Ask yourself: Is my website providing users with an enjoyable, fulfilling experience, while also serving its end purpose?

While I wasn’t able to find any especially noteworthy examples of top-heavy ad placement when searching with Google (hmmm), we can compare the user experience that such sites offer (at least, initially) to that of a parked domain. Now, obviously, with a parked domain (like Cheeseburger.com), there typically isn’t any content being displaced by the above-the-fold ads. However, when a user lands on a page that’s dominated by banner and text ads, the effect can be discouragingly similar. A poor user experience and a terribly high bounce rate.

Maintaining Page Layout Balance

Just as it is in crafting a gourmet cheeseburger, maintaining balance is vital to the page layout aspect of your inbound marketing strategy. Too little ketchup or one too many pickles can be the difference between whether or not a customer comes back for more. If you’re designing a new website or prepping for a redesign, keep this idea of balance in mind. If neither is an option, find a way to improvise.

Remember, the functions of design go far beyond aesthetics. Think about things like ad placement, content-to-ad ratios, the elements of your page that will be visible above-the-fold, below-the-fold, etc. In doing so, you can provide the best experience for not only your users, but also those finicky search engine crawlers.

~

If you’ve found your site a temporary casualty of the page layout update, rest assured that the fixes are relatively clear and certainly implementable. Get some quality content above-the-fold. Limit your above-the-fold ad placement. Redesign if necessary. Improvise if you can. Those are your priorities. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And where there’s a picture of a succulent cheeseburger, there’s a hungry search analyst. Off to lunch!

If you’ve had a personal experience with one of your websites and the Page Layout algorithm update, we’d love to hear about it! Feel free to share questions and comments below.

This is part 3 of a multi-part series on increasing conversions from your website traffic. If you haven’t already, you should read part one, which introduces the Infinite Conversion Loop. And Part Two which gets your Analytics in order.

Now that you have high confidence in your Analytics, let’s discuss the next step of the Infinite Conversion Loop, identifying your visitors. The first thing to understand when you are trying to improve your conversion rate is that not all visitors are created equal, which is why simply looking at your overall traffic numbers is an empty metric.

On any site you are going to have a wide variety of visitors that all want and expect different things. Here’s just an example of a few of the types of people you may see if you run a website for used car shopping, but these same type of people exist for many sites.

The Cast

1. Mr. Shotgun – This guy isn’t great at searching, just average. If he wants to buy a new 2012 Audi A6 with leather, his query is probably just “audi”. Then he clicks on the first search result he gets without reading, hits back, clicks the next one, hits back, until he finds something that kind of meets his expectations. These are the people that end up on page 5 of Google result and kill your bounce rate if you don’t have a clear message.
2. Miss Untargeted – This is the visitor you get from Reddit, Hacker News, Drudge Report, etc… when you post a great blog. They give you that big awesome spike in traffic that never seems to result in increased conversions. They make you feel good about your traffic numbers, but really they have no intention of converting on your website. They also make your site-wide conversion numbers useless, and cause Sys Admins to pull their hair out.
3. Mr. Confused – This person is running IE6, unpatched, he’s looking for exactly what your website sells, but can’t figure out how to find it on your site, and when he does he don’t trust you because you don’t have the Visa or BBB logo.
4. Señor Advanced – This person found your website with a query like: used -new acura tl -reviews “low mileage”. Your website is exactly what they’d want, but your refinements don’t let him find what he’s looking for in an efficient way so he leaves.
5. Mrs. Researcher – She got to you by clicking your ad, she’s looking for what your site sells, and she even finds product she wants, but wants to make sure she gets the best price, so she’ll bookmark your site for now while she looks at some other sites.
6. Botman 9000 – Some percentage of your traffic will be bots, spammers, or others who have no intention of using your website like a real person, let alone buying something. While the bots won’t usually show up in your analytics, they will often submit forms and do other things that makes your “back end” numbers never quite match up with the Analytics numbers.

This cast are the reason your overall visits mean nothing. These people represent the 98% of people you get daily but are not converting. I could give you a million hits today, but if they are the people in this group, you’ll see $0 out of it. The key to improving conversions is first getting a handle on what type of visitors are likely to convert in the first place, and then optimizing your site to convert those that are not converting now for some reason (some of the above have the potential, but your website has deficiencies that prevent them from doing so).

The Numbers

So first, let’s figure out who IS converting on your site. The first thing I would look at is your landing pages report, ordered by visitors. Specifically the Bounce Rate (The percentage of people that visited that single page then left).

What do these stats mean? First, these are from a profile I use that broadly groups types of content into single URLs. This site has over one million URLs, and I find most useful to categorize everything into types of pages (you can do this with filtered profiles in GA, which is probably the topic of another post). You can see the Index page of the site is how most people are entering by far. 22% bounce immediately, meaning something about the home page felt completely wrong for whatever those people were looking for. We’ll examine how to improve that number in future posts. You’ll notice a few popular blog posts have much higher bounce rates. These are the “Miss Untargeted” that are coming to your site for one-off content, but are probably not interested in buying whatever you are selling. It is interesting to note that one blog only has a bounce rate of 50%, indicating there is something about that post that invites people to dig further into your site.

Next I would look at the Exit rate (The percentage of people that left on a given page). The Exit rate is useful for identifying common pages that people are leaving your site on. This often points to problems on the page or shows you that people are not finding what they want (for example if a search result page is a common exit point). I order this report by Exit rate, filtering out outliers first.

Next look at where your most valuable traffic is coming from. I would do this by going to Sources->All Traffic, clicking ECommerce at the top, and then sorting by Ecommerce conversion rate. In this case, once you take out a few outliers, it looks like search engines (both paid and organic) are giving us the most valuable traffic. Another case of how blogs, social networks, etc… will increase overall traffic but not necessarily contribute to the bottom line (these things may be valuable for SEO though, so I’m not saying don’t do it, just don’t focus on overall traffic numbers as a KPI)

Of course it’s very difficult to read people’s intentions just by looking at numbers. The only real way we can try to find their intent is by looking at what they searched for to get to us (hurry before the number of logged in Google users increases!). Create a report of Organic Search Traffic ordered by Ecommerce conversion rate to see what terms are the most valuable. You’ll usually see some good long tail keywords you never would have considered. I would also sort by 0% conversions to see the keywords you may be wasting your time with. Remember to normalize these results by filtering to see keywords with at least 10 visits or so.

Those are some beginner ways of segmenting users or figuring out what they are trying to do on your site, some proactive ways to segment is the use of Custom Variables. Most people use these to track “logged in users” or what affiliate someone came from, but what about tracking those people who found no search results? That’s what I did here, and there is no surprise there is $0 revenue from those users… perhaps an opportunity to use spelling correction or show similar products.

Using Custom Variables is a great way to create segments of content and visitors to determine easily what types of users, content, etc… leads to the best conversions.

Hopefully using these tips will get you started in figuring out where your traffic is coming from, the next post in the Infinite Conversion Loop series will delve deeper into actually seeing what people are doing on your website.

This article was originally published in Social Times.

Pinterest was one of the most heavily trafficked social media networks of 2011, which was surprising to many because its rise to success was a quiet one. Pinterest is a form of social bookmarking where users pin different images and YouTube videos from across the web to boards they’ve created based on a subject area of their liking. For instance, you can create a board entitled Best Places on Earth and then pin images of island getaways, beautiful landscapes or whatever images you think fit this board best. Your boards are displayed on your profile for your network to see, like or repin to their own boards if they so choose. You’re able to follow other users and/or their individual boards of content they’ve assembled. Pinterest allows users to sign up through their Twitter or Facebook, which makes it easy to connect with your friends already on the network.

This platform presents an opportunity for brands to market themselves in a new arena and truly succeed during the network’s humble beginnings. Here are 6 ways brands can rule at fostering their Pinterest community:

1. Create Custom Images Catered for Sharing

Pinterest is all about discovering images that you wish to share with others in a visually pleasing format. With this in mind, brands should look to create image assets for Pinterest that provide insightful, original or branded imagery and information. After you develop these images, share them on your website and on other social networks to encourage their sharing on Pinterest. The best part of this process is that these images can be pulled from other advertising or used for your other promotional efforts.

For example, Cargo created this image of their EyeLighter product that give users quick and easy tips on how to make their eyes pop. This is exactly the kind of image assets users love to share on Pinterest because it’s visually appealing and gives insightful information at a glance. Brands should take note and continue to create content of this nature in the future.

2. Create a Profile for your Brand
At this point in the game, users can join Pinterest by invite-only. Once added to the network, you can create your account by syncing with your Twitter or Facebook. The same goes for when you’re inviting users to Pinterest, except you can invite them initially via email. Since there aren’t yet brand specific profiles, you’ll have to invite your brand to the network via email. The Facebook integration at this time is only for personal profiles, not pages. Therefore, choose the email associated with your brand’s Twitter account to set up your profile.

Once you’re on Pinterest, it’s time to either keep the profile photo that’s been pulled from your Twitter account or upload a new one. I recommend uploading a new profile photo because this is a different social network with its own unique purposes. To do so, hover over your account name at the top right hand corner and click on settings from the drop down menu. From here you can also alter the name and email associated with account, add a location and website and then add a brief description of your brand. Here you can also choose to link your Twitter to your account publicly.

For example, Whole Foods has set up an account and have been actively engaging their community with visually appealing content. This is good example of how you can brand your profile appropriately to appeal to your audience.

3. Add Pinterest Social Plugins to Your Website
There are a few goodies that Pinterest offers brands to add to their websites as a means of connecting their web visitors to their audience on the network.

• The Follow Button can be added to your website or blog to allow your web visitors to quickly and easy follow your profile on the network. By giving users the option to follow your brand on Pinterest, you’ll be giving them the ability to look through the images and YouTube videos you’ve shared previously, in the hopes that they’ll share them with their networks again, and you’ll be able to share images and YouTube videos with them in the future since they are now your follower.

• The Pin It Button allows your web visitors to pin the content from your website directly to their boards on Pinterest. This plugin should be added to similar places where you would add a Like or Tweet button. By adding this button, you’re making your web content extremely easy to share on the platform.

4. Pin Other Industry Content

Pinterest’s etiquette states that users, this includes brands, should shun away from using the network as purely promotional. Sharing images & videos from other industry related user’s boards will help keep your profile community based and not just a promotion center for your assets and products. Repin & like other content that suits your community, which will help strengthen your reach in the long term.

HGTV’s profile does just this on their Start Gardening board where they share content from both their website and other blogs with valuable content about gardening. This helps them strengthen their relationships with other people of interest in their industry specific community on Pinterest.

5. Add Calls to Action to Your YouTube Videos

The main focus of Pinterest is obviously sharing noteworthy photos, but YouTube videos can also be pinned as well (my guess is other types of content will be able to pinned in the future too). Another means of drawing attention to your content is by adding annotations to your videos, basically a call-to-action for your audience to pin videos they find appealing.

Similar to creating and sharing images that would be ideal for sharing on Pinterest, add annotations to videos that are short, visually appealing and provide true value to your community like a how to video for baking apple pie or to how to apply the right amount of eye makeup. These annotations should tell them the visitor to “pin this video to Pinterest” or provide a link to your Pinterest profile. The annotation serves as another reminder to users to engage with you in another way in a different community.

6. Cross Promote

Since the network is still relatively new, be sure to drive traffic from your existing communities on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or wherever your audience is actively discussing your brand. Post links to your Pinterest profile, letting your communities know you’re on this network and looking for them to join in and begin pinning your content.

How are you using images & videos on Pinterest to promote your brand?

Many advertisers overlook the option of (and benefits to) managing their Paid Search efforts through more than one AdWords account.  While the initial effort needed for splitting up an existing account or setting up multiple accounts may seem tedious, it can be done quicker and easier than you might think (and the benefits to account management can be great).  Here are five reasons you should consider operating through multiple AdWords accounts as opposed to just one:

1. Budgeting/Strategies

This situation is often very common, as many advertisers will designate different budget amounts for certain campaigns.  Many times this is due to certain campaigns representing different strategies or business goals (direct response vs. awareness) where the funds are separated to support the individual strategies.  Similar to this, an advertiser may have different budgets for different portions of the business, even though they may be housed under the same domain (‘Shoes’ received X number of dollars, ‘Clothing’ receives Y number of dollars).  If managing the budget becomes messy and difficult within one AdWords account resulting in less than efficient PPC management, breaking up an account into two or more accounts can help alleviate this issue, by setting clearer boundaries for budget management.  A great example of when this should be used is when a business has separate sectors/portions of a business running on separate budget, and runs PPC coverage on accompanying brand terms.  In a previous blog post, I outlined why it’s necessary for every advertiser to have Paid Search coverage for brand keyword terms.  If an advertiser has brand keywords specific to different portions of the business that should be pulled from separate budgets, the most efficient way of allocating spend from brand campaign(s) is to separate the strategy/business goals into separate AdWords accounts.

2. Reporting

Reporting reasons for separating AdWords accounts are very similar to the above budgeting reasons, as reporting often comes down to separate marketing strategies and/or goals.  It’s usually the case that an advertiser running a PPC account with separate marketing goals would like to view and report on the results of those strategies separately, and make optimizations within the account based on those results.  For a cleaner and clearer look at data, separate accounts are extremely beneficial, allowing you to view the data more quickly and efficiently for each separate strategy in both Google Analytics and the AdWords interface.  Therefore, as I stated earlier, if reporting under one account negatively affects your ability to make the best strategic optimizations, it is absolutely worth it to separate them.

3. Multiple Destination URL Domains (Company Subsidiary)

This situation is common: one advertiser wants to send visitors to multiple domains, but only has one AdWords account.  While Google allows you to set any number of unique destination URLs within an account as long as they have the same domain (i.e. subdomains), it is not recommended to have more than one domain running in one AdWords account.  Often, advertisers run into negative affects of one account on the other (i.e. quality score) and many “disapproved ads” situations.  Rather than settling for advertising only one domain or risking an attempt to advertise two or more, set up an additional AdWords account to run PPC coverage in for that domain.  While many people are under the impression that Google allows only one AdWords account per company, this is not the case.

4. Account Quality Score

Quality score is an extremely important metric to any Paid Search account, and should be taken into consideration when reviewing account performance.  A previous post explains the different ways a quality score can affect an AdWords account, with a bad quality score resulting in higher CPCs for a given average position, etc.  It is important to keep in mind that a quality score is not something that we can change with the click of a button within AdWords, but is something that encompasses multiple relevancy and performance factors over the history of the account.  Therefore, advertisers may choose to split up one AdWords campaign into two, due to certain keyword sets or campaigns having low quality scores that could negatively affect remaining keywords/campaigns.  (Remember, when determining any given quality score, Google takes into account the historical quality scores of the whole account).

5. Account-Level Settings

The following settings are set at the account level, and therefore cannot be distinguished by campaigns.  If you plan on setting up an AdWords account that requires any of these settings to vary, that will only be possible with two or more accounts:

• Billing & Payment Preferences: Do you prefer to have certain campaigns billed to different bank accounts or debit/credit cards than others?  Would you like to set various payment options (how your account is billed) within your AdWords account?  With one account, this won’t be possible.  Instead, you’ll need to group those campaigns by who they’re billed to/how they’re billed, and put them into separate accounts.  (Note: If you have separate AdWords accounts for other reasons, you are permitted bill to the same person, bank account, or credit/debit card as your other accounts – Google does not require that billing information be unique by account).
• Currency: Do you wish to manage an account using more than one type of currency?  This situation is less common, but will require a separate AdWords account for each different type of currency.
• Time-Zone: This situation is also less common, but also requires separate AdWords accounts for those advertisers wishing to manage PPC based on different time zones (i.e. ad scheduling).

Thanks to the Google AdWords Editor, it’s simple to break one account up into multiple accounts, with a simple copy and paste of your campaigns from one account to the other.  Doing this will not only copy your campaign, ad groups/ads and keywords, but it will also copy the campaign settings (ad rotation, schedule, targeting options, etc).  This makes for minimal work when swapping campaigns between accounts.  I always recommend never to delete old campaigns (or anything within your account), as this will result in loss of data.  Instead, pause the campaigns so that you can refer to past performance whenever necessary.

If you decide that separating your AdWords account is the right strategy for you, whether it be for these reasons or any others, I also recommend setting up an MCC (My Client Center).  This will allow you to further streamline your PPC management by allowing you to toggle quickly between accounts, rather than having to log in and out each time.

Create an account, copy the code, and paste it on every page of your site. Easy, right?

Not so fast.

If you’re just starting out using Google Analytics, you may not be aware of all the advanced code implementations available, much less how to modify the code for your needs. But if you are tracking across subdomains or multiple domains, or if you want to do some advanced tracking with events that’s exactly what you need to do.

To make matters worse, navigating through the labyrinthine administrative interface to find the tracking code snippet can be somewhat daunting. Especially if you’re used to the old version of the interface. And although the code wizard in GA does include several configuration options, the instructions are neither complete nor easy to follow for beginners.

To solve these problems, the team at Raven Internet Marketing Tools has built the Google Analytics Configuration Tool. (Full disclosure: we provided consulting on some of the technical details for this tool, so of course we’re thrilled to see it’s birth). They just launched this free tool, aimed at simplifying the process of configuring your Google Analytics. Out of the gate, there are several specific situations they provide instructions for, including:

• One domain with subdomains
• Multiple domains with subdomains
• Site search setup
• 404 error page tracking
• Event tracking
• Setting up goals
• Tracking Facebook page and referrers

There’s also a URL  builder for tagging your URLs with campaign parameters.

Besides just giving you the snippet of code, the GA config tool leads you step by step, asking questions about what you’re trying to track and then providing the code and instructions of what to do with it. It also provides the code in either asynchronous or the traditional ga.js.

This is a godsend for people who don’t deal with GA on a daily basis. Trying to figure the correct code configurations has generally meant wading through a sea of posts in the help forums, where the information is often outdated and inconsistent. This tool takes the guesswork out of the setup, letting you focus on what matters – your data!

Coming from the folks who also created the Schema Creator (for creating structured markup for your site), not to mention their core suite of internet marketing tools, this will be an essential addition to many digital marketers’ arsenals. They’re already working on adding functionality to help with regular expressions, setting up filters and other points of analytics confusion.

Go try this tool out and let us know what you think. Are there any other GA-related instructions you’d like to see added? What is it about GA that is most confusing to you?

The comments are yours.

As of today, Google search has just become richer, more social, and more personalized. Google officially announced today that it is incorporating more results from Google+ into search results for users signed into Google+.

If you are involved in internet marketing or use Google+, you need to watch this video. (If you aren’t, I’d still like you to watch it so that I’m not the only person with that song stuck in my head.)

Search plus Your World Features

In its official announcement today, Google introduces three new features for its search engine that combine together (like an internet Voltron) to create the powerful Search plus Your World. The three key features are Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and Related People and Pages.

Note: These features are just rolling out now, so they may not be fully functional for everyone just yet.

Personal Results

Picasa and Google + have been fused, and photos from people in your circles are likely to show up in your personalized results. Users can also expect to find relevant Google+ posts from their friends in search results. There will be a button so that users can now turn personalization on or off.

Profiles in Search

Google+ profiles have been integrated with predictive search.  When you type in the first view letters of a friend or Google+ superstar, you’ll see an autocomplete prediction for their name. You’ll also see a button to add people to your circles. Google has made a nifty interactive graphic on Profiles in Search.

Related People and Pages

There will be a new results segment displayed on some search results for – you guessed it – related people and Google+ profile pages. “How do I get my profile ranking?” you might ask. I could try to go in detail here, but Google actually does a nice job explaining how to appear as a related person or page. Basically, you need to show your Google+ profiles some love, post frequently, and use the keywords you want to rank for.

Privacy and Control

Google states that personal search results will receive the same level of security and privacy protection as Gmail. In addition, personal results are marked with little icons that denote the search result being Public, Limited, or Only You. You can toggle personalization on or off as well.

Issues for Internet Marketers and Search plus Your World

Like with many of Google’s major recent developments, Search plus Your World is not all rainbows and unicorns for search marketers.

More Personalization = More Difficult SEO

Remember the days when you knew exactly where you ranked for a key phrase and exactly what the SERPs would look like when anyone in the country typed in the given search term? Those days are long gone, friends. This makes tracking SEO progress more difficult, since rankings are becoming less and less of a reliable performance indicator.

Also, optimizing for Google’s standard search is different from (and not always as valuable as) optimizing for specialized search such as Google Images and Google Places – and now we must add People, Places, and Profiles to the ever-expanding Google search marketing mix. We’ve long known that increased personalization and diversification is a prevailing trend in search results, so we know that multi-faceted SEO plans and higher-quality, more relevant content should be a prevailing trend in SEO – at least by SEO firms that are worth their salt <insert LunaMetrics horn-tooting here>.

More (Not Provided) Keyword Referral Data

Making Google more personal and social – when users are logged in – provides another compelling reason to be signed in to Google while searching. Which means more (Not Provided). Every time a person is logged into their Google account and clicks through to a site via organic search, Google Analytics shows the used the keyword (Not Provided) instead of the actual search term they used. We anticipate that Search plus Your World will result in higher Google account usage and an expansion of this black hole of keyword data. Indeed, Google now has Search, plus Your World landing page linked to from its main page, and this  alone will likely provide a boost to Google+ conversions. Increased prevalence of (Not Provided) is something we’ve predicted. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about (Not Provided) besides whine – unless we want to join together in Mountain View, CA and lay down in the middle of Amphitheatre Parkway.

Opportunities for Internet Marketers

Like usual, this change to the search engine game also provides several major opportunities to the savvy Internet marketer:

• The increased integration of Google+ and search will really help you gain exposure if you are a Google+ superstar or blue chip. Your Google+ profile and page hits are likely to ramp up in the near future, especially if you put some effort into optimizing your Google+ profile and networking (which you should).
• It appears that the ranking algorithm for Google+ pages and posts is based on keyword relevance and engagement. This likely means the engagement level of your posts and the amount of people engaged with your profile or page.
• If you already utilize great images and get good results on Facebook or Flickr, you should probably start uploading and sharing your images on Google+.
• Authors can better brand themselves. If you are a prolific web author, 3 things you need to do are:
• Utilize Google’s authorship program (which will list you as an author in search results and link the name to your Google + profile.
• Use a nice profile picture on Google+ (author’s profile pictures will show up on search now).
• Market yourself on Google+ by creating a strong profile and networking.

Is Google’s Search plus Your World a momentous landmark in the evolution of the Internet? Is it merely Google blowing hot air in an attempt to breathe down Facebook’s neck? Time will tell. One thing we know for sure is this is a development that is more than worthy of the keen attention of the Internet community.

What are your thoughts on Search Plus Your World?

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on increasing conversions from your website traffic.  If you haven’t already, you should read part one, which introduces the Infinite Conversion Loop.

The old cliché – “How do you know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’ve been?” is especially applicable to Analytics.  Before you can even hope to get a handle on increasing the conversion rate of your website, you need to make sure you’re actually tracking all of the things that will help you analyze what’s going on!

The most common problem we encounter with customers here at LunaMetrics is an incorrect or incomplete Google Analytics configuration.  Here’s a checklist of a few of the things you should definitely be doing before going any further in the conversion loop.

1. Is the tracking code on EVERY page (and is it functioning)? To get a complete picture of your website, you need to see how all content is performing, including legacy content, 404 pages, terms of service, you name it.  If it can potentially be viewed by a person, I’d recommend putting tracking code on the page.


It’s also recommended you update to the Asynchronous code if you are not already using it.  In my experience it provides much more reliable numbers.   The second question of “is it functioning” can be tested by looking at your data in GA, and also using an HTTP monitor to make sure the utm.gif is being requested on page load.

2. Are sub-domains and cross-domains being tracked correctly?  You need to be able to see how people are flowing from one domain to another to assure conversions are being attributed properly.
3. Are goals configured, with funnels?  Specifically, are they configured correctly?  Being able to visualize funnels will be key for analysis.
   
4. Is E-Commerce configured?  All E-Commerce sites should have E-Commerce configured (obviously) to track dollar values of transactions.  But really any site that can provide a concrete monetary value to an action should have this.  Does a confirmed lead generation add to your E-Commerce?  What about a donation?
5. Is AdWords Linked?  If you do any type of AdWords spending, it’s crucial that you link your account to be able to see how well these campaigns are working.
6. Are Campaign tags being used consistently and efficiently?  Are you even using Campaign tags in your marketing?
7. Are you tracking Events? I recommend tracking any high value action as an event.  If people are leaving your site for a third-party site, that should be tracked as an event. Downloading a file, clicking a drop down menu, it’s up to you to decide what actions make the most sense as events.
8. Is Site Search configured?  This is one of the most useful things you can do.  If you have a search box on your site, more likely then not a confused visitor will do a search to find what they are looking for.  If they still don’t find what they want from your search, you can guarantee this will add to your bounce rate.  (On the flip side, often a really useful search box can make up for other navigational problems your site may have).
9. Are you tracking Social Engagement?  Today “The Net” is much more then the web.  If you don’t have a social component to your site, you should consider adding some type of social sharing widget right now.  Once you have that installed, it’s important to see how and where it’s being used to get a picture of your engagement. That’s where the GA Social Engagement plug-in comes in.
10. Is AdSense linked?  If your business relies on AdSense as a revenue, you’ll definitely want to see how it performs on your site.

Now that you have all of this setup, next time we’ll talk about how to analyze this data (beyond page views and visitor counts!) to figure out what’s going on with your site and how you can begin to optimize.

Training, training, training. It’s something that we love to do (unfortunately, I don’t get to do much of it myself anymore.)

In our own fair city of Pittsburgh, we’ll be doing Seminars for Success (that would be Google Analytics) training on January 23, 24 and 25. The first day is the 101 — very basic, for beginners or those who just want to start at a beginner level. The second day is the 201, a much more advanced level, but still for marketers and analysts. And the third day is the 301, which is for techies. Or as one of the people who designed the training says, it is like a car: The first day is Driver’s Ed, the second day is Learning to Drive a Race Car, the third day is Learning to be a Mechanic.

We’ll follow the three days of GA training in Pittsburgh with two days of AdWords training — a basic day, followed by a more intermediate day. All the training days (Analytics and AdWords) come with lunch, jump drives with the slides, and WIFI  for all (in fact, we encourage everyone to bring their laptops).  And let’s not forget about time to ask and get answers to questions. We are pretty big on this last topic.  The cost per day (for any of the Pittsburgh training described here) is $499/day, and there are volume discounts. You can learn more about the Google Analytics Training (and the AdWords training, too) here, where you can register as well.

In San Francisco, we are doing a single day of SEO training ($199/person), in partnership with the Non-Profit Technology NetWork’s (NTEN) annual conference. Their summit is in SF on April 3-5, and our full day of SEO training is on April 2.  You can read about the day on the NTEN website and you can register in their shopping cart, when you choose to go to their event. Or, if you just want to attend our SEO day, you can register right here on our site.

OK.  Back to our regularly scheduled educational blogging.

Robbin

Everyone can agree: Google Analytics’ custom variables are a great feature. It lets you label your visitors with all sorts of fun stuff. Male or female? Member or non-member? Cat person or dog person? If you can identify your visitors’ answers to these sorts of questions, you can tag them with a custom variable.

But sometimes website owners implement the custom variable code and start gathering these valuable segments of traffic, completely unaware that the numbers aren’t very accurate. What could be causing such a heinous mistake?

Believe it or not, Google warns against the issue right in those instructions there, but they don’t call it out quite enough for my taste. It’s extremely important that you “call the _setCustomVar() function when it can be set prior to a pageview or event GIF request” (emphasis mine). Here are the details:

In certain cases this might not be possible, and you will need to set another _trackPageview() request after setting a custom variable. This is typically only necessary in those situations where the user triggers a session- or visit-level custom var, where it is not possible to bundle that method with a pageview, event, or ecommerce tracking call.

What exactly does this mean? Well, if a visitor fills out a survey on your site, hits submit, and you run _setCustomVar() after the _trackPageview() of the submission success page, that _setCustomVar() call just sits there in deep space, waiting for another _trackPageview() or _trackEvent() function to carry it along to Google’s servers. If that is the visitor’s final pageview in the session, then the call floats away forever, never to be heard from again.

The worst part, though, is if the visitor goes to another page, then the _setCustomVar() will tag along with any subsequent GIF requests. This means that it may appear as if the custom variable is working just fine, according to the reports in Google Analytics, but the numbers are just inaccurate.

So, to ensure that you are tracking your custom variables as precisely as possible, make sure that you always run the _setCustomVar() function before the calls to _trackPageview() or _trackEvent(). If this isn’t possible–you have an include at the top of every page, for instance, and can’t modify it–then be sure to include a second pageview or event after the _setCustomVar() function, like this:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'membership', 'gold', 1]);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Tow Truck', 'go', '-', 0, true]);

This will ensure that every single time that function runs, it gets counted. Guaranteed!

Update: Tyson Kirksey, of Vertical Nerve, reminded me to set the event to non-interaction mode so that it won’t influence bounce rate, pages/visit, time on page, etc. I’ve also borrowed his clever naming convention for the event. Thanks, Tyson!