Google's SEO Guide On A/B & Multivariate Testing. Google posted some guidelines on how you can conduct A/B or multivariate testing and stay clear of any issues with being listed in its search engine, such as avoiding penalties. No Cloaking Google says you shouldn’t cloak, show its crawlers something that humans wouldn’t see. From its post: Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. An example of this would be always serving the original content when you see the user-agent “Googlebot.” Use rel=”canonical” Google says publishers should make use of the rel=canonical method to ensure that any alternative pages reference what should be the main one: We recommend using rel=”canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation.
Use 302s, Not 301s Google recommends using the temporary direction method, a 302, over the permanent 301 redirect: Don’t Run Experiments Longer Than Necessary. 5 Little Known Facts About Google Analytics (and Why They Matter) InShare31 Google Analytics may be "free" to get, but not free to "get right. " Over the past couple of years, digital analysts have seen one major headline eclipse all other news. And that is of the emergence and now well-established hegemony of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics, or "GA" as folks like to call it, has changed the analytics landscape. Or Is It Really That Simple? For some, it's really that simple. Where mainstream vendors send you expensive proposals, complicated account teams, service-level agreements, caveats, and contracts, GA sends you the tracking code. But there is an undertone of smug satisfaction in the GA paradigm as well. The unjustifiable satisfaction comes mainly from folks who throw the code out there and say they've "done analytics. " The fact that GA is free makes the insouciance rather easy.
Problem is, some people don't know what GA does and what it doesn't do. So here goes: No. 1: GA ignores data after a certain activity level has been reached. Make sure: How To Measure SEO - 5 Ways. InShare50 Hint: Bypass ranking reports. SEO is getting harder and harder. If I was using search engine optimization as a key component of my marketing today - which I am - I would make damn sure I know how to track success. Because SEO is harder, it's also more expensive than ever. If you plan to use cheap links and content outsourced to third-world countries, you are living in a fantasy world of search engine optimization. There are many ways to measure SEO but using ranking reports is not one way.
Have you looked at Google recently? In the last 30 days, here are my rankings (with clicks) for the phrase "google plus local" from Google Webmaster Tools: Which position would you show your boss? I'm fairly confident that I am somewhere between position 1 and 10 (except when I'm on page 2 or 3). Look, I still run these reports. You Want Results! You aren't trying to rank well for your health. The end results could be things like getting people to: You get the idea, right? I love this information. How to Use the New Google Analytics Social Reporting Tool. The new social media reporting tools from Google Analytics provides marketers free social media monitoring and measurement capabilities. The new reporting features provide the most value when coupled with Google+. This way, community managers gain insight around off-page activity as Google Analytics and Google+ are happily integrated.
Tracking off-site social activity is just one of the cool new features that community managers will be swooning over. Check out the other actionable reports outlined below and discover how businesses can best leverage them to determine the value of social media. This article will cover how to use the new social reporting features inside Google Analytics to help evaluate and measure your social media campaigns. #1: Social Visitors Flow The newly added Social Visitors Flow is a visual presentation of how visitors from social properties are navigating your website.
The chart outlines the top social referrers, the top landing pages and also the page drop-off rate. Making the Web Work for Brand Marketers. Learning from the past In the 1950s, brands slowly moved to TV, just as they have started to move online today. In both instances, buying and selling systems improved; audiences and new content quickly moved to the new medium; and the creative possibilities inspired great ad campaigns. However, a key moment for TV came in the 1950 with dramatic improvements in measurement—like ratings and quantitative market research. Once major brands could see who they were reaching and what impact their campaigns were having, they fully embraced the medium, creating a multi-billion dollar industry...and TV’s golden age began. Making better decisions with actionable brand metrics Unlike the early days of TV, digital advertising is already incredibly measurable. But as brand advertisers - such as movie studios or consumer goods companies - know, it’s a challenge to measure changes in brand favorability of a movie or whether an online campaign is driving more consumers to the store.
More to come. Understanding conversion tracking reports - AdWords Help. Once you've set up conversion tracking, you'll have access to attribution reports, a handy set of reports about your conversions (those important actions your customers take on your website, such as a purchase or email signup). Benefits Attribution reports show you the paths customers take to complete conversions and provide insights into how your different advertising efforts work together to create conversions.
For example, you can see whether certain keywords assisted conversions that eventually happened through other keywords. This gives you a better sense of your potential customers' conversion paths than just looking at the last-clicked keyword. How to find your attribution reports Attribution reports help you understand different aspects of your conversions data. To find attribution reports: In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon . Tip If you manage multiple Google Ads accounts with a manager account (MCC), you can use cross-account conversion tracking.
Date range Dimension. Social Media Metrics Plugin for Google Anayltics for Greasemonkey. Script Summary: This will display social media metric data in google analytics Last Update: Oct. 10th, 2008 This is technically an update to the "Add the Digg count of your page to your Content Details report in Google Analytics with Greasemonkey" post written in July.
We received a ton of great feedback from the social media and link bait community so I thought we should take this tool to the next level. Not only will it pull the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content Detail reports automatically, but the icons are interactive. As an example: if you had zero diggs you could click the digg icon and it will automatically take you to the digg submission page. New metrics pulled into GA include: (more to come soon) DiggSphinnMixxRedditStumbleUponDel.icio.us Case-sensitive to the url.Yahoo inLinks Case-sensitive to the url. I expect this script will save you a ton of time. Here is a partial screen shot of the script in action: Notice: Instructions on installing the script: How to Setup Goals in Google Analytics. In this post, we'll explain what Goals are in Google Analytics, why they're useful, and how to set them up.
Let us make two assumptions before we start. First, you know the rules of basketball, and second, you are a Lakers fan (or at least you know who the Lakers are). Note that if you run an ecommerce site, Google Analytics has additional features to help you track purchases. For more information on this, check out how to configure ecommerce tracking. Understanding Goals in Google Analytics Goals (with a capital G) are a way to measure business objectives for your website in Google Analytics. To use a real world example, the Lakers objective is to win games, and the measurable action is scoring baskets. Here's a real world example. In this example, the Goal is scoring a basket and the Goal Funnel is Kobe > Derek > Pau. Now pretend the Lakers players are pages on a website and the ball is the website visitor. Step 1) Define your Goal Funnel In our Lakers example, the funnel is defined as:
A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most widely used web analytics application. Emerged from and based upon the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was bought by Google in April 2005), the tool has become publicly available for free under the new flagship of Google Analytics. In May 2007 the application was heavily edited, developed and released; the design was simplified and more advanced featured were added. Over years Google Analytics managed to gain on popularity because of its simplicity and many advanced features for curious site owners and professional marketers. You probably use Google Analytics on a regular basis, for basic stats tracking the performance of your site. And, just like most GA users, you probably very rarely venture far from the comfort of the reports shown on the dashboard. That’s all the analytical information you need, you may be thinking … or is it?
You may be interested in the following related posts: Analytical Goals. Analytics Help.