No business or person is perfect. Even if you’ve done a good job avoiding trouble and staying on the straight and narrow, sometimes trouble comes looking for you. From an online perspective, negative comments, reviews or posts about your company or products can show up in several ways.
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Google’s new enhanced AdWords campaigns aim to simplify and improve PPC advertising in a multi-device marketplace. Given this goal, you might think that targeting specific devices with your campaigns would be easier than ever… or at least not harder than it was before.
You might be surprised.
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Do you have common metrics that you need to report to higher ups or other departments in your company? ‘Dashboards’ in Google Analytics offers a way to filter for commonly retrieved information, and I use it to quickly provide insights that need a lot of filtering or refinement. There is information that you can easily pull out of a dashboard widget that would be difficult to get from the regular GA reports. Instead of describing how to create widgets in a dashboard, I’d encourage you to just try it out. It’s pretty straight forward, and I’d rather describe some common widget setups that can get you started on creating some useful dashboards.
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When analyzing onsite content, most people use the “All pages” report the most. It provides a good overview of how content is being used on the site, and can give insight into navigational changes. What it doesn’t do, is tell you which pages are attracting the most attention from off the site. Which pages get the most clicks from other websites, organic search traffic, or social media. Where do people start when they initially visit the page? To start, go to Content->Site Content->Landing Pages. Note: I’m using some old data here to throw off our competitors who are reading this. (Hi there!)
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For those of you who have a substantial amount of mobile traffic, separating out mobile can help provide design feedback into what your mobile responsive website should display for mobile visitors, and where mobile considerations aren’t being used by the desktop crowd. First things first, do you get a lot of mobile traffic? To check, go to Audience->Mobile->Overview, and select the pie chart view option.
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We love working with local businesses here at Top Draw. Online marketing can be very rewarding for local companies and we’re always interested in new tools for the job.
We’re big fans of Yoast, and have been using their flagship SEO for WordPress Plugin for a good while now, both on client sites and our own site, to make quick work of customizing meta tags, generating sitemaps, and so on. It’s awesome, and it’s free. Also, you gotta love their adorable cartoon mascots.
We were very excited to hear about the release of their new add-on to this plugin, Local SEO for WordPress. So we grabbed our copy right away and wanted to share our thoughts about it.
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In last week’s For the Win Wednesday, we learned about filtering for branded traffic. This week, we’re doing the exact opposite to find what keywords your visitors use that aren’t your brand name. This information is super important for SEO and tracking the impact of SEO on the website.
To start with, jump over to Traffic Sources->Sources->Search->Organic. As you might remember from last week, this report tracks organic search traffic from most search engines, not only Google. You can check out keyphrase traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc, etc. We’ll use all of their data for now. Next to the filter box, hit the “advanced” link, and replace the “containing” filter with “Matching RegExp”. For Top Draw, I’ve previously filtered for those keyphrases and I know that we don’t really rank on any non-branded phrases that include “Top” or “Draw”, so we should be safe including any keyphrase that includes either of those two phrases. To quickly build a regular expression that matches either of those keywords, I separate them with a pipe ‘|’. I also add in (not provided) to get (not provided)top|draw. This filtering will give me all my non-branded traffic. If you have a lot of misspellings of your brand name, make sure to include those too.
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Not too long ago we (Adriel & Nick) patted ourselves on the backs for passing the Google Analytics IQ tests with flying colours, becoming a couple of the very few GAIQ certified individuals around these parts. We even got fancy certificate printouts!
Yet there was still more to achieve. So we rounded up the Red Bull and Cheetos (actually it was Babybels and Earth Water, but whatever) and hit the books. Once we were all studied up we blocked out an afternoon and each took two more Google tests. This time we went after individual Adwords certification.
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Google made some big changes to their local listings service back in May of 2012. Generally speaking, these changes were for the better, but they also left local business owners either completely unaware that they needed to take action, or utterly confused about how to do so.
To this day, 9 out of 10 businesses that I look at still haven’t made the move to managing their Google listings on Google Plus.
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One of the coolest parts of Google Analytics is the Organic report. In this report, you can see the real queries that visitors used to get to your website. This data is, unfortunately, being pulled away more and more, but it’s still valuable to determine relatively how much search traffic is coming from keyphrases that use your brand or trademarked product names. This data can give you insight into brand awareness and demand online. In markets where brand awareness is very poor, users generally use non-branded phrases, while markets with high visibility and brand awareness typically see less. You can use Google’s keyword research tool to find the information I have below (use “exact match”).
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