As marketers, we understand the importance of having web analytics set up, of having an analyst on staff, and of constantly working with the data as part of our daily practice. But what if web analytics aren't enough? Enter Marketing Analytics, the measurement and optimization of your marketing activities.
Google Analytics’ Custom Variables may seem daunting for a web marketer with relatively little technical knowledge, but they are a huge help in tracking metrics of authors who post content on your site. Use these tips and tricks to get the most out of your Custom Variables, no matter your level of technical skill.
Managing and making changes to tags can be tedious and involve unnecessary red tape. Tag management is a concept that was born out of the increasing need for more agile marketing measurement and tracking ability. Now that Google has released a free tag management solution, it might be time for marketers to consider tag management.
SEOmoz has been experiencing an interesting pattern in our branded organic traffic over the last few months. Is interest in our brand declining, or is a different culprit to blame? Ruth Burr digs into the data to find out.
For those of you who were at this year's MozCon, this post is the punch line to my presentation. We put our heads together and brainstormed a way to express the concept of the "whole" user, targeted by Psychographics.
There are many ways to filter your Google Anlaytics results, but how many of the methods out there can actually give us data that we can present to our clients in a way that they understand? After reading various posts on filtering organic traffic in Google Analytics I decided to convert the results we got from the filter into readable, valuable content that the client could understand.
Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email? "How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.
When I hear the word, “cookies,” I generally think of warm, gooey homemade chocolate chip cookies. But when it comes to passing the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test, I had to put my cravings for Mrs. Fields’ Nibblers aside and learn about the differences between first-party and third-party cookies.
There's been a lot of talk lately about whether user data from analytics is a ranking factor. I argue that Google and Bing don't need to tap into analytics - they have 2 powerful user metrics in their own log data: (1) CTR and (2) Dwell Time.
Recently Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. I extend that idea to present similar code for Twitter and Google+ and then wrap it all up in Google Analytics goodness. Using this code you can monitor which social networks your website visitors are logged into.
If you haven’t tried it out yet, blekko.com is a unique search engine. Along with allowing you to customize your own search results (or view results customized by one of its editors) it transparently provides a plethora of data showing why it ranks sites in the search results. The best part is, even if you aren’t trying to increase visits from blekko, their SEO data is very useful.
We launched our site in July 2010. By the end of 2011 we ranked on page 1 organic results for 108 relevant phrases. During 2011 we went from 4 phrases in the top 3 results to 44 phrases in the top 3. Here are the SEO tactics we used to get the equivalent of $100K in PPC ads in 2011 for free.
SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclick and Google Trends for Websites. These sites report massively lower and wrongly trending data - and SEOmoz isn't alone in experiencing this frustration.
Measuring CTR data in search engine results is notoriously difficult, and with Google's recent move to HTTPS for logged in users it is probably going to keep on getting harder. What I wanted was a simple way to measure the change in CTR for a given search query's results when I adjusted entries, but nothing existed.... so I built the SERP Turkey tool.
