Charting 'Unique Keyphrases' Using Advanced Segments In order to develop effective SEO reports, It's important to have a clear understanding of SEO itself, as well as which metrics are most important to you and your clients in order to measure progress and success. SEO metrics won't be the same across every organization or even every client, and neither will the business goals you're speaking to. Things like campaign goals, strategy, and team activity all play into which metrics need to be followed and analyzed during each reporting period, so be sure to have a handle on what your client wants — and know how to get there. If you're not familiar with SEO, or if SEO is a new addition to your marketing responsibilities, spend some quality time with The Beginner's Guide to SEO. If you're having trouble pinpointing business goals or how they tie to SEO, watch this 12-minute-long Whiteboard Friday. If you're struggling with telling a story that highlights your business against a competitor's, read through The Guide to SEO Competitive Analysis.
7 Google Analytics Advanced Segments I Love (and you should too) I love using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics. Sure, you can export a big chunk of data to Excel and then use some Excel wizardry to clean up the data and display it in different ways, but what if you just need to get a quick snapshot of certain traffic or trends, but the default segments don't go far enough? I've put together a few of my favorite Google Analytics Advanced Segments for you, so that you can add them to your own Analytics and use them as you need. Segment 1: 1 word keywords This first segment will just give you all of the one-word keywords that are driving traffic to your site. ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){0}\s*$ Segment 2: 2-3 words This next statement gives you all of the two and three word keyphrases driving traffic to your site. ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$ Segment 3: 4+ words This segment is like the statements above, but instead gives you all keyword phrases that have four or more words in them. ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3,}\s*$ Segment 4: Social Media Traffic Finishing Up
Segmenting Social Media Traffic Using Regular Expressions I’ve been working on a project for a client and one thing they wanted to know was “what percentage of my overall traffic is from social media?”. This lead into a deep discussion of Reach on the channels they were engaging, and got me looking at creating some Advanced Segments to isolate traffic down to only refers from particular social media sites. Depending on which type of analytics tool you use, your regular expression might differ, but because I spend 95% of my time in Google Analytics, I’m dedicated this post to it. Like many things in life, there is more than one option for creating the same segment. To include .com, or not to include .com? Without .com = facebook|twitter With .com = facebook.com|twitter.com Difference = 276 Do you see why? Although the above value is not large in this sample, the number can slowly creep up to you if you are segmenting more channels that others have used in their URL, whether it be a sub-domain or within the domain itself.
3 Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segments for Google Analytics Before joining SwellPath, I knew a bit about analytics from my old digital agency, I was actually one of the best at it there. But, after coming to a true analytics agency, I realized how much I really did NOT know. One of the first things the analysts here showed me was that unless you are making your own custom segments, you will never be able to do a dive deep into the web data and find true insights about the visitors looking at your website. There are plenty of posts on what custom segments are and how to use them, so I’m not going to go over a tutorial on that, but what I’m going to show you are 3 practical custom segments for Google Analytics* that you can use for your online store. NOTE: If you are using another analytics platform that has the ability to segment besides Google Analytics, you can still use these as well, but you will have to figure out the syntax on your own. Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #1 – True Mobile Email Visits Mobile…it’s kind of a big deal.