Google’s Matt Cutts Inducted Into University of Kentucky’s Hall Of Fame

Google’s Matt Cutts Inducted Into University of Kentucky’s Hall Of Fame
http://bit.ly/VzAOB4

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, a name familiar to most of the readers here, was inducted into University of Kentucky’s Arts and Sciences Hall Of Fame last Friday. This was reported in the Kentucky Kernel.

The article explains that Matt Cutts attended the University of Kentucky while working for the Department of Defense as part of the university’s co-operative program. During that time, he became very interested in information retrieval and search engines and became one of Google’s first 100 employees.

On Friday, Matt Cutts visited the University’s Student Center to talk to the community there about his achievements. He spoke about search, search spam, linkage topics and many other details when it comes to how Google and search engines work.

Matt Cutts was among four to be inducted into the hall of fame on Friday with James C. Duff, Susan Abbott-Jamieson and Louis Swift. He also joins the current 30 alumni and 6 emeritus faculty Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame members.

Matt told us that is was nice to visit his old campus and take his wife around, including visiting Ale8 to try their sorbet.

Related Topics: Google: Employees | SEM Industry: Awards | SEM Industry: General



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Google Searchers 3x More Likely To Be Logged-in Than Bing

Google Searchers 3x More Likely To Be Logged-in Than Bing
http://bit.ly/RcTVNg

A study we recently did at Conductor found that search engines still have work to do when it comes to integrating social search results in the SERPs: 62% of respondents reported they do not want or gain benefit from social results mixed in with search results.

In the same survey, we asked the 150 respondents about their social network login behavior when using a search engine.  Specifically, we wanted to know the frequency users are logged-in to the search engine’s featured social network (Google and Google+; Bing and Facebook) when searching on the engine.

bing-google logins

 

The data showed that 61% of Google searchers are logged into a Google service when using the search engine, compared to 22% of Bing users.

logins to bing and google

 

Here, Google is showing their clear advantage in owning a unified user login across all their products and services; a user that is logged-in to any of their services is also logged-in on their search engine and social network.

In looking at this further, we were reminded of a research study we did earlier this year on [Not Provided], where we asked respondents to indicate their primary email program.

Interestingly, the results seem to support the Google unified login impacting the percentage of users logged-in while searching:  almost the same percentage of respondents who reported being logged in while searching (61%) reported using Gmail as their primary e-mail on the Web (57%).

gmail logins

So what does this all mean?  The major search engines have been continuously working towards formulating a cohesive response to searcher queries that extends beyond the web index and to do this, they need to take into account semantic social network content and behaviors and alternative data sources.

Creepiness factor aside, this means that Google has a substantial advantage over Bing in collecting user information like social data and behaviors due to the greater rate at which searchers are logged-in to Google’s services vs. connecting Facebook and Bing.

It’s not yet clear the extent to which searchers actually want social data integrated into search results or how good of a job the engines have done in integrating the two thus far.  But the extent to which users are logged-in when searching on Google vs. Bing suggests that if social and search continue to merge together, Google will be at a significant advantage.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here. Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Can You Really Increase Conversions By Decreasing Engagement?

Can You Really Increase Conversions By Decreasing Engagement?
http://bit.ly/RcTgeN

Engagement is a magnetic “measure” of online effectiveness. You might call it an “engaging” metric. This is because it is a nice stand-in when real measures of sales, leads or subscriptions are too difficult to track or deliver disappointing results.

“No, we didn’t increase sales, but look at the engagement!” is the mantra.

The definition of “engagement” changes from channel to channel. On a landing page, it may mean tracking how many visitors scroll the page, click on a form field, or watch a video.

In social media, engagement can be measured by liking, commenting, following, connecting, uploading a photo – almost anything.

On your website, it may be measured by how many visitors bounce, how long they spent on the site or how many pages they saw during their visit.

In general, engagement is a predictive measurement. It doesn’t tell us how much money we’re making or how many new prospects we’ve identified. In general, a high engagement rate is considered a sign that we are more likely to get more sales or more leads.

As it turns out, this is not a very good assumption.

The Fine Line Between Engagement & Distraction

Having just come back from Conversion Conference East, my head is freshly filled with the odd workings of the human brain when interacting with the Web. In particular, Tim Ash’s mantra that rotating headers on an ecommerce home page will kill your conversion rate.

The motion of a rotating header draws visitors’ attention – it engages them – but it does so at the expense of their natural page-scanning behavior. If your constantly changing offers aren’t what the visitor came for, and their scanning is interrupted, then they won’t find a reason to dig deeper into your site.

In this scenario, the rotating header (or rotating logos, or rotating testimonials) on the page tests out as a distraction, not engagement. The primary difference between an engaging feature and a distraction is that one reduces your conversion rate while one increases it.

When doing split tests, it is not unusual for us to see a decrease in engagement for the winning treatment. In situations like this, if we focused on increasing engagement, we would be driving the conversion rates lower and lower.

The bottom line is this: Don’t rely on engagement statistics unless they correlate to a conversion rate. You want to be sure that engagement is predictive of conversion, and not a distraction. Engagement and conversion must move in the same direction.

Engagement and Conversion Don't Always CorrelateDon’t assume that better engagement means higher conversion rates.

Unfortunately, this means that you must solve the ROI problem. When ROI is hard to measure, engagement is usually put in the game. But, you may unwittingly be putting in his evil twin, distraction.

Simplicity Rules For Landing Pages

If you’re driving search traffic to landing pages (as you should) distraction is more common than engagement.

The person who clicked on your PPC ad came expecting something specific. Your ad is a promise that the landing page must keep. If you place “engaging” content on a landing page, you are more likely to add to distraction.

Even things like a description of your company or your products should be well-considered before being adding. If they build trust with visitors, they may be engaging and increase conversion rates. If they make the page harder to scan or obscure the key call to action, they are a distraction.

For each component you add to a landing page – or the ecommerce equivalent product page – ask yourself if that component is important to the action at hand. Does it make completing a form easier? Does it remove a barrier to clicking “Add to Cart”?

Even navigation and logos found in your corporate site template will add distractions. Consider the backwards landing page process.

The best way to ensure that you’re adding engagement and not distraction is to track visitors all the way to conversion. This means measuring revenue or lead count for each visitor.

Of course, once you’ve established a correlation between engagement and conversion, why bother looking at engagement at all? I don’t know.

Video Cuts Both Ways

A lot has been written about video and it’s ability to deliver a step up in conversion rates and revenue per visit. Because of the cost in time and money, we don’t usually test video. It’s as if we just don’t want to know.

The truth is that video is full of both engagement and distraction. In my Conversion Conference keynote, I stated that showing visitors video is like breaking a bottle against the back of their skull 30 times per second.

While there is a lot of research on how we watch Superbowl commercials, there has been little done on how we watch video more common to landing pages.

Until now.

In a partnership with Mirametrix Eye Tracking, we tested three kinds of video: talking head, webinar-style and drawn whiteboard. What we found is that video can be a major source of  engagement as well as a distraction.

Motion in the video pane can steal attention away from the form

In this series of frames, a call to action in the video causes the viewer to look at the landing page form. Then, motion in the video seems to steal their attention back.

Our hypothesis was that whiteboard video would engage the viewer more, keeping them on the page and increasing conversion rates. When we looked at eye tracking studies, we saw that participants who viewed whiteboard video spent significantly less time looking at the copy and forms on our landing pages. We thought this might reduce conversion rates.

In the series of images at right, you can see that a call to action in the video directs attention to the landing page form. However, the scene changes and the animation seems to steal the attention away from the form and back to the video. The green dot is where the viewer’s eye is looking.

Tests Will Tell

Fortunately, we combined our eye-tracking study with a split test. As of this writing the talking head video and whiteboard video are outperforming the slide video, the latter of which has the least motion. You can participate here.

So, while eye-tracking data shows that motion will draw attention away from our call to action, it doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on conversions. The low-motion slide video like that delivered by webinars is converting more poorly by comparison.

How To Use Motion To Your Benefit

Motion can be a distraction or can increase engagement depending on how you use it. Based on our preliminary findings, here are some good rules to follow.

  1. Minimize motion of all sorts on a landing page. If you use video, repeat the page’s call to action in the video.
  2. Use talking head video and whiteboard video to teach or explain concepts. These keep the attention of visitors long enough for you to tell your story.
  3. Place calls to action in or near moving components.
  4. Test moving components including video to ensure they are increasing engagement (conversion) and not increasing distraction.

You can pre-order a copy of the video eye-tracking report today and get the complete results of the study.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Search & Conversion

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Google Q3 Earnings Leak: $14.1 Billion, Disappoint Surprised Investors

Google Q3 Earnings Leak: $14.1 Billion, Disappoint Surprised Investors
http://bit.ly/RcTgeJ

google-g-logo-2012Google’s Q3 “consolidated earnings” leaked early and are below analysts’ expectations. Search clicks were up 33 percent vs. a year go but CPCs were down 15 percent, probably a result of the impact of lower mobile CPCs. Traffic acquisition costs were also up, as were other expenses.

Investors were surprised by the early release and generally disappointed. The press release, which appeared on the SEC website, says “pending Larry quote.” So the early release was a draft and not final. Clearly this was a mistake. Earnings were supposed to come out after the market closed today. Nonetheless the proverbial cat is out of the bag.

Total Google consolidated revenues (including Motorola) were $ 14.1 billion, which represents a 45 percent increase vs. last year. Indeed, this was the first quarter in which Google reported Motorola revenues.

Google reported that Motorola brought in $ 2.58 billion (“$ 1.78 billion from the mobile segment and $ 797 million from the home segment”). This was 18 percent of consolidated Q3 revenue. However there was a Motorola operating loss of $ 527 million.

Google top-line results:

  • Google (only) Revenues: $ 11.53 billion or 82 percent of total revenue (including Motorola). This was a 19 percent increase over Q3 last year.
  • Google Sites Revenues: Google properties saw $ 7.73 billion, which was 67 percent of total quarterly revenues. It also represents 15 percent growth over last year.
  • Google Network Revenues: $ 3.13 billion, or 27 percent of total Google revenues — a 21 percent increase vs. a year ago.
  • Google International Revenues: $ 6.11 billion or 53 percent of total Q3 revenue. UK revenues were $ 1.22 billion (or 11 percent of the total).

Here are some additional details from the release:

  • Paid Clicks – “increased approximately 33 percent” vs last year and 6 percent vs. Q2.
  • Cost-Per-Click – “decreased approximately 15 percent” compared with Q3 2011 and down 3 percent vs. Q2. This may be a result of mobile CPCs being quite a bit lower (marketers are valuing mobile clicks less than PC clicks)
  • Traffic acquisition costs, paid to network partners, increased to $ 2.77 billion in Q3 (vs. $ 2.21 billion in Q3 2011).
  • Other Cost of Revenues – “increased to $ 3.78 billion, or 27 percent of revenues.”

Google cash on hand and cash equivalents was $ 45.7 billion in Q3. The company also said it had 53,546 full time employees (36,118 Google, 17,428 Motorola). Google also paid an effective tax rate of 22 percent for Q3 2012.

In response to the leak Google stock was down roughly 10 percent. Trading of Google shares has now been stopped apparently.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Business Issues | Top News



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10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google for SEO

10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google for SEO
http://bit.ly/RcTeDw

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

It's no secret. When engineers built Google+, they constructed an SEO juggernaut to dominate search results above all other social platforms. Although Facebook and Twitter are essential to marketing efforts, both restrict Google from accessing much of their data. This limits their SEO effectiveness.

Not so with Google+.

Here’s an experiment: If you use Google+, perform a search for your name and check the domain distribution of first 100 results. The graph below shows what happens when searching my own name.

Google+ SEO Dominance

Even though I use Twitter and Facebook far more often, Google+ dominates the search results. Google+ even beats SEOmoz and my own blog. Multiply this for 100's of millions of people, and you can begin to comprehend the scope of Google's platform.

Fortunately, there are several ways to take advantage of this SEO domination for your own benefit.

1. Follow your profile links

Consider this: at SEOmoz you must earn 200 Mozpoints before earning a followed profile link (submit good comments!) On the other hand, Google+ not only allows you to link to your other profiles across the web, but you can embed followed links directly into your bio with the anchor text of your choice.

Google+ Followed Profile Links

The value of a link from Google+ is, in theory, like any other. It depends on the authority of both the page and domain. My own profile shows the following metrics:

  • MozRank: 1.91
  • PageAuthority: 49
  • PageRank: 3

If you can raise your visibility by getting more people to engage with you, share your posts, or link directly to your profile, the more valuable your profile links become.

2. Embed post links

Like profile links, Google+ also allows you to insert followed links directly into your posts – as many as you want. Simply insert the full URL and Google will automatically format it as a link.

The value of these links increases the number of times the post is shared, linked to and +1’ed.

For example, check out this one sentence post from Alexia Tsotsis, which has a PageRank of 3 and is cached by Google every couple of weeks. (Even though PageRank is not highly correlated with rankings, for Google+ it’s often the only metric available.)

Followed Post Links

If your post goes viral or is reshared by high-authority profiles, the value of those links increases.

3. Optimize your G+ title tags

The first sentence of your Google+ post becomes part of the title tag, which is highly correlated with rankings and greatly influences click-through rates. Choose your keywords carefully and consider that the first sentence will be the first thing most people see.

Check out how this simple post from Danny Sullivan ranks for its title.

Danny Sullivan Google+

A widely shared post with a good title has an excellent chance of ranking for its given keywords.

4. Unlimited editing power

Edit this postGoogle+ is just like your own mini personal blogging platform. This means you can fully edit any of your posts at any time. Not so with Facebook or Twitter. Facebook gives you only limited editing abilities. Twitter, after you tweet, only lets you delete.

This is important if your Google+ post goes viral and you want to make updates or changes. If need be, you can also update the title tag and any attached media as well.

You may not own the platform, but Google+ gives you a broad amount of control over your own content.

5. Index new content lightning fast

If you share new content on Google+, chances are that Google will index the page very quickly.

Rumor has it that new URLs are crawled almost instantly. This makes complete sense as part of the purpose of Google+ was to replace Twitter when creating Google's Realtime Search.

In the old days, if you wanted a website indexed you filled out a webform and waited several weeks. Today, it's as simple as pressing a +1 button.

“Google+ is the new Google Submit URL box.”
- Rand Fishkin, GROW 2012 Source

Share your new content on Google+, as well as your other social networks, for quick indexation.

6. Stalk Connect with influencers

Google+ lists 17 different notification triggers that can help you connect with influencers in your industry.

Depending on the individual's account settings, these notifications can take the form of an email, phone SMS, or the omnipresent red Google notification bar.

Google+ Notifications

17 actions that trigger notifications:

  1. Mention them in a post 
  2. Share a post with them directly 
  3. Share a post and you're in a circle they subscribe to 
  4. Comment on a post they created 
  5. Comment on a post after they comment on it 
  6. Add them to a circle 
  7. Suggest new people to add to their circles 
  8. Tag them in a photo 
  9. Tag one of their photos 
  10. Suggest a profile photo for them
  11. Comment on a photo after they comment on it 
  12. Comment on a photo they are tagged in 
  13. Comment on a photo they tagged 
  14. Start a conversation with them
  15. Send them an invitation or update an event
  16. Remind them about events
  17. Any activity on events they created 

Several folks have introduced themselves to me on Google+ by "gently" using the methods above.

Be warned: the few who crossed the line into spamminess have been banned from several inboxes forever.

7. Optimize your author pic for more traffic

Last spring, I performed a series of tests with my Google+ author photo that led to an increase in the click-though rate for my websites.

Google+ Profile Photos

If you successfully implement the author tag and have a catchy photo, it often doesn't matter if you rank 2nd, 3rd or even 4th. With an eye-catching pic you can often grab free traffic away from even your competitor's #1 ranking.

8. Test

Google Gives Update On Shopping Going Full Paid Inclusion, Hints At AdWords’ Future On Q3 Call

Google Gives Update On Shopping Going Full Paid Inclusion, Hints At AdWords’ Future On Q3 Call
http://bit.ly/RcSfDk

Now that Google’s new pay-for-play Shopping is in full swing (the changeover took place October 17), the company used its earnings call to share thoughts on its success thus far, and its future vision for the product. Additionally, Google execs came out with some tidbits about the status and future of other elements of its advertising business.

Nikesh Arora

According to SVP and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora, the company is listing more than a billion products from tens of thousands of merchants and over 100,000 sellers. (The distinction is that marketplaces — such as (Etsy or eBay — could be comprised of many sellers.)

Said Arora:

… we believe being able to do product listing ads gets us closer to intent because if somebody types a Nikon D800 then we know they are looking to buy or looking to get more information about a specific product. And the fact that we can show them reviews, pictures and pricing information gets us closer to action. And we believe in the medium term that’s going to create more monetization and a better monetization for us as opposed to having just 10 blue links of ads that would send them to other websites. So I think that’s going to have a good impact in the medium term, I don’t think I’m going to comment whether that has an impact [on Google's financials] in Q4 or not.

The advertisers participating in Google Shopping are seeing an impact, though, according to the execs. Adorama camera, one of the biggest photo retailers in the U.S. saw its click through rate jump by 176% when the company began using product listing ads, and their conversion rate was up 100% in June as compared to the previous years.

And CEO Larry Page says more changes will be coming to Google Shopping. “There’s much more we can do to get you the right information at just the right time,” he said on the call, later adding that “I think we are still in the early stages of that.”

Goals For Google Shopping

One goal, according to Arora, is to reduce the number of steps from search to transaction, “making the online experience even more valuable to consumers and marketers.” But Google, at least according to product manager Jon Venverloh, doesn’t want to host the transaction itself. At the recent SMX East conference, Venverloh pointedly noted that the customer and the transaction will belong to the merchant, and not to Google.

One way in which the speeding from search to transaction is already happening is Google’s mobile click-to-call ads. Arora said click-to-call ads are now generating 20 billion calls a month to AdWords advertisers.

The Future Of AdWords Across Devices?

The other aspect of the earnings call I found intriguing was Page’s hinting at how the company will be developing its advertising products to optimize for a multi-screen consumer experience. The gist is a vision of an advertiser creating one ad that would be delivered and optimized across multiple devices automatically:

I think we are really starting to live in a new reality, one where [there is a] kind of ubiquity of screens. Apps users really move from intent to action much faster and more seamlessly. I think this will create a huge new universe of opportunities for advertisers…. Focusing on platform-specific queries won’t make much sense because advertisers will be dynamically adapting across a whole bunch of different devices to reach the right audiences at the right time. And that’s kind of how we are thinking about it and I alluded to changes that we’ll make to our ads system to improve the advertiser experience and the user experience around that.

And a little more on the same topic:

…we want to make advertising super simple for customers. Online advertising has developed in very device-specific ways, with separate campaigns for desktop and mobile. This makes arduous work for advertisers and agencies, and means mobile opportunities often get missed. So we’re working to significantly simplify the campaign experience, working very hard on that. Advertisers should be free to think about their audience, while we do the hard work of dynamically adapting their campaigns across devices.

Not sure what that will mean in reality but it sounds like Google wants to use labor-saving technology to customize and optimize across platforms. I can’t imagine current marketers would object unless they didn’t have the option to go manual instead.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Product Search | Top News



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Search In Pics: Blue Google Win, Googlers At Dreamworks & Google Sand Mandala

Search In Pics: Blue Google Win, Googlers At Dreamworks & Google Sand Mandala
http://bit.ly/RcR1YN

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Google’s Sand Mandala By Buddhist Monks:


Source: Google+

Doodlers At Dreamworks:


Source: Google+

Google’s Gundotra With Angry Birds’ Vesterbacka:


Source: Google+

Blue Google Wine:


Source: Flickr

Related Topics: Search In Pictures

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here. Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How To Turn (Not Provided) Into Useful, Actionable Data

How To Turn (Not Provided) Into Useful, Actionable Data
http://bit.ly/RcQRAF

We’ve all seen it, lurking in our Analytics reports, nearly always at the top, sucking a huge chunk of data into a black hole of uncertainty and uselessness.

Not provided was predicted as having a single-digit impact on sites. In my research, I’ve found it to have upwards of a 40% impact, especially on smaller traffic sites.

In conversations with clients, and looking at my own sites, I knew the numbers had to be better – but what do you tell a client when chunks of data, in some cases over 30%, are attributed to (not provided) instead of the keywords you’ve given time, attention and tears to over the previous months and years.

Honestly the standard, “It’s happening, but Google isn’t showing us what it is” is just not good enough. Its not good enough for me; why would it be good enough for a client?

I was on a mission… to find some way to make this data useful again. My goal? I needed a way to attribute (not provided) data to a page, or a keyword phrase, without tearing my hair out. My first stop was CustomReportSharing.com – it’s definitely a go-to for ready-made reports. I’ve talked before about not reinventing the wheel; well, this is where I started.

Custom Filters

I found a great Custom Filter here that allowed me to see a good chunk of data. With this filter, instead of (not provided) we are allowed to see the page that the (not provided) click landed on. This then gives us an idea of what keyword phrases are driving that traffic. Here’s an example:

From September 7 to October 6, my hobby blog received 5,272 visits from organic search. Of those visits, 1,518 were attributed to (not provided).  I lost nearly 30% of my keyword data. So here is what I saw:

I have implemented the Filter mentioned above on a separate Google Analytics profile.  Any time you’re looking at changing how data is reported with advanced segments and filters, it’s smart to have a profile separate from your main profile, where wonky data reporting wont hinder the true data. If it doesn’t work, you want to be able to undo what you’ve done without permanent adjustments to your tracking.

Luckily, this advanced filter worked, and the not provided data became much clearer. With the Advanced Filter in place, here is what I see for the same report and time period:

In the case of my hobby blog, most of those 1,518 visits were attributable to a single post; this likely will not happen with your site – unless you have one piece of content that drives large amounts of traffic like I do.

You can immediately see the added value in the filtered results. I now know which keyword efforts are driving traffic to my site, when previously the data was buried in (not provided) limbo. I can now use the advanced filtering and exporting to group keywords and landing pages together to see actionable results. I’m working on building a custom report that will do something like this and will share it as soon as I get it figured out.

Setting Up Advanced Filters To Improve Not Provided Results

Setting up a new profile with this advanced filter in place couldn’t be easier. Follow the steps in the link above to set up a new Google Analytics profile for your account.

Here are my tips to make things easier as you set up your new profile:

  • Give your new profile a descriptive name – I used “Domain.com – Not Provided” because I created the profile solely to test (not provided) filtering and reporting.
  • Anyone who has admin access to your account will see this new profile, so make sure they know you’re testing and making changes.
  • Don’t skip this step – you want to be able to easily delete the profile if the data becomes corrupted or your filtering and segmentation doesn’t work

Once you’ve set up the new profile, you can immediately create your advanced filter. Click on the “Filters” Tab and click the “New Filter” button.

You’re going to create a New Custom Filter that looks exactly like this:

When finished, click Save and wait for a while for some data to come in. You’ll start seeing “NP – URLdirectory.com” instead of (not provided) quite quickly.

Custom Report Sharing also featured an advanced segment that just eliminates all (not provided) data from the results. If you’re seeing low single-digit site impact, this might be a good option for you. For me, this piece wasn’t ideal, because such a large amount of data was (not provided), my analysis could have been handicapped without it.

I did some more searching and found a couple of approaches I didn’t try – they didn’t seem to provide any better results than what I had from my examples. If you’d like to try them – check it out.

Note: If you think of data and Analytics as a hobby, and you’re not reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog, you’re missing out. I read his posts 3 or 4 times just to try and glean as many nuggets as I can. 

These tips are designed to help you SEE the data, which then makes it actionable. I say it a lot, and I’ll say it again here, if you’re just looking at data, and not making action plans based on what you see, you’re wasting your time. Data is just words and numbers on a page, analysis and plan derivation from those data points is what makes reviewing your Analytics profitable.

Give this a try and see if you can get a better picture of how your site is performing organically. If you have another way to help you see (not provided) data, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

See also our related article on Marketing Land today: Dark Google: One Year Since Search Terms Went “Not Provided”

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Advanced | Beginner | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here. Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Rediscovering The Google AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool

Rediscovering The Google AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool
http://bit.ly/RcQN3M

Google’s Keyword Opportunities (Beta) tool is a gem of a keyword idea tool integrated into AdWords Editor. I recently rediscovered this tool and have been tearing through my clients’ accounts, adding keywords. The tool generates suggestions similar to the Web-based tool, but is integrated into Editor quite nicely.

Suggested use:

  • Launch AdWords Editor and open your Account
  • Launch the Tool – keyboard: ALT-T-O (menu: Tools | Keyword Opportunities (Beta))
  • Uncheck the box for “Include Additional Items”
  • Set Match Type to “Exact”
  • Input your seed keyword, and click the “Get Keywords” Button
  • Select & drag/drop keywords into targeted AdGroups

A Brief History Of The Tool

Google released the Keyword Opportunities (Beta) with Editor 6.5 nearly 5 years ago, as previously reported by Barry Schwartz.

The current version of the tool is quite slick and integrated with Editor. Google’s help on the Keyword Opportunities Tool covers the main Keyword Expansion part of the tool, as well as the other tabs available from Keyword Opportunities. More detailed usage instructions, tips and tricks follow.

Uncheck The Box For “Include Additional Items”

The tool does a nice job generating keywords tightly related to the seed keyword. Check this box if you want to cast a wider net; but, I found that it generates a wide array of results that overlap with a more organized approach seeding more specific keywords.

If you do check the box, “additional items” appear below the more-targeted result set, so you can give it a try and see for yourself what works for you.

The tool automatically dedupes against your account; It will not suggest keywords that you already have in your account. One gotcha; it checks against your live account, not the local copy. I suggest you Post changes between runs of the tool, so you don’t end up with duplicate keywords to clean up.

Set Match Type To “Exact”

I do this beforehand so I don’t accidentally add all of these keywords on Broad Match. Best practices in our shop dictate that we push toward Exact Match, with limited use of Broad Match to find new search queries we can add on Exact Match. Even then, we usually emphasize Modified Broad Match.

You may, of course, add the keywords with whatever Match Type works for your account. You can also add negatives (instead of keywords), if you find something you don’t want to match for.

Input Your Seed Keyword

Try to be specific enough that you know you can write targeted ads for the results, but broad enough that you are not needlessly limiting your results. The results tend to be pretty tightly targeted around this keyword.

Select & Drag/Drop Keywords Into Targeted AdGroups

This is where the tool really excels. You can filter, select, multi-select, and drag/drop keywords over to your existing AdGroups. Keywords that have already been added are marked with a [+] so you can sort by that and more easily find the keywords that have not yet been added.

You can also filter results, which is really helpful for wading through long lists and getting the keywords into targeted AdGroups. The tool also lets you create a new Campaign or AdGroup shell.

You may find it useful to sort descending by Global Monthly Searches, at least initially. This should help prioritize the value of longer result sets. This deep workflow integration really helps this tool shine because you don’t have to task-switch between tools to complete the job at hand.

You may find it useful to sort-descending by Global Monthly Searches. This should help prioritize the value of longer result sets. One of the best practices we generally recommend to Clients is to push toward exact match keywords. The increased control and precision often do wonderful things for account performance.

However, our aggressive search-query harvesting and keyword expansions don’t always catch everything. This tool helps us add even more keywords on Exact Match, and it is built right in to Editor.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Search Marketing Toolbox | SEM Tools: Keyword Research

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Two out of Three Social Media Users Let Their Political Flag Fly

Two out of Three Social Media Users Let Their Political Flag Fly
http://bit.ly/QJ3GPu

While we can’t comment on the veracity, tactfulness, or true motivations behind any of it, we can report that a majority of social media users are using it to engage politically – in some fashion.

We can tell you that thanks to a study from Pew Research’s Internet and American Life Project, which asked voting age adults about their online political activities this summer.

According to the survey, 60% of Americans participate in some form of social media like Facebook or Twitter. Out of those 60%, 66% had performed at least one of Pew’s eight “political activities.” That mean that 39% of all American adults are being political on social media sites.

Here are the eight “political activities” that Pew asked about:

Liking content on political or social issues; encouraging people to vote; posting their own political thoughts; reposting other’s political posts; encouraging others to take action on an issue; posting links to political articles; joining a political group; following elected officials and candidates.

The most common political activity was liking or promoting someone else’s political content. 38% said they had done that. 35% said that they had used social media to encourage others to vote, and 34% of social media users posted their own political content. Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans are the two most-likely groups to post their own political thoughts on social media.

Only 20% of social media users said they followed politicians on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. Conservative Republicans were more likely to have done so.

As you may expect, younger Americans were more likely to perform all eight of the political activities. The 65 and older group were the least likely to do all eight activities except for one – reposting political content (it’s the chain email for the new era!).

Also found in this study: 100% of people won’t think twice about unfollowing or unfriending you if you say something they don’t agree with.*

*Though true, not found in this Pew study.

[Image Courtesy Nedral, Flickr]

WebProNews » Social Media