Unmask (Not Provided) Goal Completions in Google Analytics As of late, the SEO blogosphere has been rich with posts from authors seeking to diagnose seeming declines in branded organic traffic. The common culprit (or deceiver, if you will) is Google’s grand obfuscation – (not provided). In the technology industry, the presence of (not provided) in keyword reports has proliferated drastically. Comfort is a commodity, after all – a commodity granted to those who haven’t seen such a stark increase in (not provided). Reporting on (Not Provided) In looking at overall goal conversions from organic search traffic, we might be tempted to postulate that the conversion keywords that show up in our reports are distributed similarly across the (not provided) segment. As SEOs and analysts, we love granularity. Gains in organic search traffic will appear lessened, and losses will be accentuated. Segmenting (Not Provided) Conversions As these segments become more and more clouded, so too do our reports on goal conversions resulting from each of them. 1. 2. 3.
How to Carve Out Marketing Strategies by Mining Your Competitors' Backlinks The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Image from the National Archives If you want to see how your competitors are gaining a strategic advantage, one of the best tactics to overtake them is to take a deep dive into their backlinks. They leave breadcrumbs behind that reveal their best tactics. Then pivot (no pun intended), glean ideas from their brilliance, and do it even better! Required skill: pivot tables If you don't know how to use pivot tables, you need to check out this video walkthrough. Download example pivot table I redacted my client's data from the pivot table in the Excel sheet, but you can get an idea of how I pulled together the data in the "Raw Data" tab and then see how I organized my pivot table in that tab. You can download the Excel workbook from Dropbox. Steps to pull data together Step 2: Add another column and label it "Site." Video tutorial
Split Testing With Google Analytics Experiments In today's tutorial, we're going to be looking at one of Google Analytics' most recent additions to its feature set; Experiments. Using this tool, I'll be showing you how to serve up different variations of a page to determine which one is the most successful in converting visitors to the site. Preamble If you've ever created a website, you'll almost certainly be familiar with Google Analytics. From small personal projects to enterprise level sites, Google Analytics has established itself as the market leader for very good reasons; it's free, simple to implement and is suitable for the casual user or even the most battle-hardened marketer. Ready to get started? A Brief Introduction to Split Testing We've covered split testing before as part of Ian's thorough roundup on conversion and online marketing, but let's take a brief look at split testing in the online arena. Variations must be run all at the same time. The Scenario Here's an image of the third page variation: Step 3: Create a Goal
Demystifying Link Disavowals, Penalties & More Google Webmaster Hangout Findings from a recent Google Webmaster Hangout on Air (video) demystify link disavowals, penalties and more. Read on for the official word from John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst from Google and friend to webmasters everywhere. First, Some Background Last month, I introduced Five Steps To Clean Up Your Links like A Techie. First, the development of that list was meant only to be a technically-minded way to create a solid list of pages to check. However, if you have a valid contact address and believe it’s worthwhile to contact the domain owner, please do. That said, most links you want to remove fall into one of three categories, in my opinion: You know the site owner or you paid for the link. Insight From John Mueller On Commonly-Held Assumptions About Link Disavowal Clarifications aside, let’s talk about what came out of that Webmaster Hangout. • Conventional Wisdom: Multiple Reconsideration Requests Will Hurt Your Chances Of Reinclusion FALSE.
A/B Testing with Google Analytics Content Experiments Google Analytics has announced a new A/B testing feature called Content Experiments. This is a pretty significant evolutionary step for Google Analytics in making it an analytics and optimization tool. Think of this as Google Website Optimizer being baked right into the Google Analytics interface. Using Content Experiments in lieu of GWO will allow you to easily define content URLs and goals for your experiments, analyze your reports more efficiently and will eliminate the need for all those extra GWO tracking codes on your site. I want to review the basics of A/B testing and running GA Content Experiments, as well as discuss some important technical details and advanced considerations. What is A/B Testing? A/B testing takes a lot of forms. A/B testing is very easy (and free) with Google Website Optimizer. How to Setup a Content Experiment Prepare. After you’ve completed an experiment, start the process again with another page and keep trying to make incremental improvements to your site!
Phanteguin: A Phantom & Penguin One-Two Punch From Google May was a rough month for webmasters, SEO professionals, and business owners. There were two significant algorithm updates that impacted many sites across the web. The first, which I analyzed heavily and called Phantom, was released on May 8. I'll cover Phantom more below, but for now it's important to understand that it targeted content and not links. Then we had the much-anticipated Penguin 2.0 rollout on May 22. Phanteguin - A Powerful One-Two Punch from Google I do a lot of work with companies hit by algorithm updates. But it can get worse. There is a situation that's more serious than just getting hit by one algorithm update. Well, now we have a new one-two punch from Google, and I'm calling it Phanteguin. In this post, I'll go deeper with each algorithm update, explain how to identify the drop in rankings and traffic from each, and then provide some guidance on what you can do now to start the recovery process. Google Penguin and Phantom: Digging Deeper Phantom Insights
Upgrades To Google Analytics Content Experiments A few weeks ago Google Analytics launched Content Experiments, a new testing functionality that can be used to create A/B/N tests to optimize campaigns and overal website experience. Last week Google announced 3 upgrades that will make testing with the tool significantly easier and more powerful. Below I discuss each of the upgrades and how they can enhance testing with Google Analytics 1. Ability To Copy Experiments This new functionality is valuable as it allows marketers to perform additional tests to the same page without modifying the codes, which makes the process much shorter. On the settings page, on the bottom-right corner you will find the “Copy experiment” button, as seen below: After clicking the button, you will get the following message: “Copying an experiment will copy the current settings into a new experiment—where you can adjust as you desire. 2. Relative URLs offer more flexibility in defining the location of the variations. 3. Closing Thoughts
11 Things We Should Never Ever Do In Link Building Again Okay friends, we need to have a little talk. I am frustrated. All of us Link Week columnists genuinely care about giving away good (and free, I might add) information on how to do link building the right way. So why, why, pray tell, do we continue to see so much crap? “We gave you all a chance, but since you little **** teases can’t follow INSTRUCTIONS, I guess we’ll have to try something else, won’t we?” I’ve narrowed it down to the Top 11 things, in no particular order, that we should never ever do for link building again – like, ever. 1. I will take my one link on a site people actually read over your 25 links on sites we don’t even know if Google’s bots can find. 2. Maybe it’s our fault that mass article submission still exists. 3. Along the same lines, don’t take the exact same article, change a couple of words here and there, and then brand it as “new content.” Note that this isn’t repurposing content, where you take a topic and convert it to different mediums. 4. Stop. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Google Analytics Content Experiments - A Guide To Website Testing | Testing & Usability [Last Updated on November 2013] In this article I discuss Content Experiments, a tool that can be used to create A/B tests from inside Google Analytics. This tool has several advantages over the old Google Website Optimizer, especially if you are just starting the website testing journey. Content Experiments provide a quick way to test your main pages (landing pages, homepage, category pages) and it requires very few code implementations. Here is a quick overview of the most prominent features that will help marketers get up and running with testing: Below is a step-by-step guide on how to use Content Experiments to create A/B tests. Creating Content Experiments In order to create a new experiment, navigate to the Behavior section and click on the Experiments link on the sidebar. Once you define all the information above, click on it you will reach the following page. In this page you can add all the URLs of your original page and the variations you would like to test. Click Next. Yay!
My Top 5 Most Used Custom Reports in Google Analytics Well over a year ago now, I found myself in a bit of a situation. A new client who had been on Webtrends had decided to switch to Google Analytics and had lost all their previous data. That, in and of itself would be bad enough, but I was faced with taking the data that was available (about eight months worth) and figuring out what the top pages were and what keywords brought those visitors in through Google's organic listings. No problem, right? That's what I thought, too – until I started diving down into Google Analytics standard data sets and realized that what I needed to see just wasn't there. The only related metrics I was able to view were pageviews. Below are five of my most used Google Analytics Custom Reports. Unique Visitors by Page Get Report This custom report gives you the data I was looking for above. Clicking on the Source associated with your chosen Medium will display the keywords that brought people to this page. Conversions by Date and Time Get Report Customer Behavior
Custom Reporting Using Google Analytics and Google Docs The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Realtime Google Analytics data inside a Google Doc—a panacea! Don't believe me? Check out that screenshot below. Google Analytics is my favorite analytics product. But, despite all the flexibility that Google Analytics offers, sometimes you want to access data in a spreadsheet and create a truly custom report. This blog post is going to show you how to create a custom report by connecting a Google Spreadsheet directly with your data from Google Analytics. Analytics geeks: hold onto your seats! It all started with the Data Feed Query Explorer (Those who want to start accessing data in Google Docs should jump right to the next section.) Before we dive in, a little background. I first discovered Google's excellent Data Feed Query Explorer. The Data Feed Query Explorer is a great way to explore the Google Analytics API, and to understand what data is available.
Traveling Further Down the Link-Building Rabbit Hole This post is about link building, so if you’re one of the folks who is terrified of link building and thinks that Google doesn’t care about links and only cares about user experience now feel free to stop reading. For the rest of you, I am going to take you on a journey Alice in Wonderland style and show you how being just a bit more curious can unlock a lot of great opportunities when looking for outreach opportunities. Building a List of Link Prospects To start this exercise you are going to first need a handful of topical, or industry relevant prospects. Note: This can be done using past link prospects, or already earned links as well. I’m not going to dive into the prospecting element of link building in this post, so if you’re unfamiliar with link prospecting or link building in general here are some folks in the industry I would recommend getting acquainted with both on twitter and through their content: Heading Down the Rabbit Hole In this exercise we are doing two things.
Blog | Web Analytics, SEO, PPC, & Social Media Experts Understanding Bot and Spider Filtering from Google Analytics On July 30th, 2014, Google Analytics announced a new feature to automatically exclude bots and spiders from your data. In the view level of the admin area, you now have the option to check a box labeled “Exclude traffic from known bots and spiders”. Most of the posts I’ve read on the topic are simply mirroring the announcement, and not really talking about why you want to check the box. Maybe a more interesting question would be why would you NOT want to? Still, for most people you’re going to want to ultimately check this box. 20 Google Facts & Stats that Every Marketer Should Know No company dictates the online marketing industry and all of our careers like Google. This post outlines 20 things that every marketer should know about Google. If we missed any important facts, please let us know in the comments. Easy Cohort Analysis for Blogs and Articles Enter Cohort Analysis. Segmenting Google Analytics by Session Frequency
Added Nofollow to Paid Links - How Long for Google to Notice? Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld I disagree with everything you said. If the main income of the website comes from the paid links, why would they fire the company? How would they get paid? Do you even know the difference in price between a do-follow and a no-follow link? Your statement sounds a lot like paranoia: "Hey, if you are afraid of the high odds of getting in a car accident - don't leave your house". As far as the links - if they are relevant and not a lot of them - you have nothing to worry about. There is nothing wrong with linking out. My advice is to cut the middle man (link company) and work directly with the website owners. Remember that using no-follow in your links simply shows Google that you sell ads.