osvaldohess48's Space http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com Most recent posts at osvaldohess48's Space posterous.com Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:01:00 -0800 Diabetes Mellitus – Een Lifestyle Related Disorder http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/diabetes-mellitus-een-lifestyle-related-disor http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/diabetes-mellitus-een-lifestyle-related-disor Diabetes Mellitus – Een Lifestyle Related Disorder
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Nice site for locating out extra details about Diabetes Mellitus, why not pay a go to and look at the information

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Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:02:00 -0800 test http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/test http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/test test
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The scum walks a prior viewer

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Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:59:00 -0800 333 http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/333 http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/333 333
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a xenophobia. How will you eat yours?

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Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:01:00 -0700 led downlight http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/led-downlight http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/led-downlight led downlight
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fantastic web site for led downlights and vitality preserving lightbulbs

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Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:14:00 -0700 The SEO Path to Becoming a Great Funnel Owner http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/the-seo-path-to-becoming-a-great-funnel-owner http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/the-seo-path-to-becoming-a-great-funnel-owner The SEO Path to Becoming a Great Funnel Owner
http://bit.ly/S8Uaqk

Posted by searchbrat

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

There has recently been a lot of great discussion around the role of an SEO and how SEO strategies are evolving to include more tactics (PR, Social, Content, CRO, etc.). In my opinion, the role of an SEO hasn’t changed much as the focus is still on driving more organic traffic to their client’s sites.  If SEO consultants want to own more of the funnel, their title will need to change to support a more expansive role that includes multiple channels, rather than changing what the term "SEO" itself means.

A background in SEO definitely provides a solid foundation to take ownership of integrated marketing campaigns that encompass a lot more of this:

For this post, I am going to focus on two key areas of SEO from a presentation I recently gave. They are:

  • Beyond keywords
  • Content that works

My main goal for this post is to show how strong SEO’s have the skills to become great funnel owners, without having to change the term SEO. Let's get started!

1. Beyond keywords

What good SEOs already do:

Model search behavior across the funnel

Good SEO’s are already skilled in the art of modeling user search behavior across a search buying cycle. They look to identify what language prospects are using relevant to their business. How they refine their search at each stage of the cycle and what the potential competition is for each of their target phrases. This helps identify what keywords a business can complete for (taking budget and resources into account), what content should be developed for each phrase, and what are the target keywords for their link building strategy.

Good SEO’s will:

1. Use PPC data

SEO’s will create exact match Adwords campaigns for the keywords they've identified for a business. This gives them an estimation of potential traffic and conversions (whatever that may be for a given site). This would only be an estimate as there are big differences between PPC and Organic click through rates.

2. Measure head vs long tail

They use advanced segments in Google Analytics to split this traffic out by keyword length (get advanced segments for keyword lengths here). This allows SEO’s to bucket keywords into head, body, and tail, adding competition stats and potential ROI.

3. Track top of funnel keywords

They pay close attention to data from sources like Google Trends and Google Instant (UberSugget.org) to look for top of funnel keywords that are not mapped against commercial intent, but instead whose sole purpose is to attract people in the awareness stage and begin to grow the brand online.

4. Create keyword funnels

Good SEOs will map keywords across the buying cycle of a business, including lots of extra information about those keywords. In this example, we have simply added the potential revenue from that keyword and keyword difficulty from the SEOmoz tool of the same name. The keyword marked green is one whose search volume is rising fast (data from Google Trends).

5. Create content maps

The great SEO will take all this data and either map it against existing content, or create new content suitable for the target key phrase.

The smartest SEO may even start thinking about why certain pages will attract links and build this into the design.

If you need more information on keyword research, you can check out:

I want more of that funnel

What great funnel owners do:

Model the whole customer

Likely due to my background in software development, I am obsessed with persona modeling; I’ve talked about this previously on SEOmoz here and here.

Persona modeling is nothing new, and smart marketers have been using them to help with brand marketing, website design, and UI for years. In fact, SEOmoz did a great whiteboard Friday on the topic back in 2008 with Ian Lurie and Rand Fishkin sporting some very groovy hair!

Persona modeling is a critical task conducted by great funnel owners, and SEO’s can definitely apply their skills to provide this function.

In today’s data driven world, there are so many places to acquire data about your potential customers:

 

I’ve labeled these strategies either easy or hard to implement based on my experiences. What type of data you get back is heavily dependent on the market you are in. (Note that I put a question mark against psychographic data in Facebook as this is something I’ve only recently begun to look at, thanks to all the great information from @aimclear in sources like this post, this post, and his MozCon session.)

As Ian mentioned in the video above, a lot of persona modeling will still rely on gut instinct. With all this data, you can start to validate your guesswork and pivot much quicker. For example, if we use the seven steps Ian gave in the Whiteboard Friday video (see below), we can see where our data can be applied to help validate our guess work (think how much more data we have for our prospects since that video was made):

 

Bonus Tip: When at step one (brainstorming), I highly recommend Simon Sineks Ted Talk, Start With Why. This talk helps focus your mind on the type of people you are trying to attract. You define why your company exists and what your vision is, and outline how to find people who share that vision. For example, SEOmoz is famous for TAGFEE. They believe in being totally transparent, over delivering on everything they do, and building a world-class community of smart SEOs. You can see how that influences the type of marketing they execute. If SEOmoz started with the “What?” e.g. "We build great inbound marketing tools, come and get them," they may not have been as successful as they are now or attract the type of customers they currently do. Starting with "why" will help you tremendously. 

How do well thought-

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Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:36:00 -0700 SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 23, 2012 http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/searchcap-the-day-in-search-october-23-2012 http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/searchcap-the-day-in-search-october-23-2012 SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 23, 2012
http://bit.ly/TUFk6k

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Bing’s Voice Search On Xbox Now Searches The Web, Too

    Microsoft is expanding Bing’s capabilities in the living room with news today that Xbox users can search the web via their console. It’s part of the “new entertainment experience” that Microsoft is pushing out this week via the Xbox. Bing Voice Search has been available on the Xbox since June 2011, but it could only [...]

  • Webcast: Link Building Demystified – Ask the experts – LIVE!

    Webcast October 25, 2012 1PM EST – Inbound links are paramount to getting top search engine rankings. But how do you go about getting those links? And what’s more important, quantity or quality? During this webcast you can ask the experts these and your other link building questions. Register now!

  • Have Keywords Stopped Being A Proxy To The Customer?

    It’s said that keywords are a proxy for a customer, right? So let’s talk about the customer. Schema this, canonical that, and black and white zoo animals… if you don’t have a search expert on payroll, you’re already behind the Joneses. I get emails like the one below all the time, this one being from [...]

  • The Tale Of Goldilocks & Global Search Budgeting

    In the last few articles, we focused on minimums of keyword research and measuring performance, and now we can extend that process to budgeting. With search budgets, especially for paid search, we have three different options for budgeting. As the fairly tale goes, Goldilocks samples each of the bowls of porridge to see which was the [...]

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

    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 [...]

  • Google News Adds Expandable Clusters To Search Results

    Google News announced they have improved the search results in Google News to enable expandable clusters, like they have a year ago on the Google News home page. What this means is if you do a search within Google News, you will be able to expand a news cluster to see more sources. You will [...]

  • Mayer: Yahoo Not Planning To Invest In Local Search Right Now

    Search is a “core priority” at Yahoo, but the company isn’t planning any significant investments in local search in the near future. That’s some of what new CEO Marissa Mayer revealed today in her first earnings call since she joined the company this summer. Mayer spoke several times about Yahoo and search in general, saying [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEO & SEM

  • A Website with Pull: The SEO Attraction, BruceClay.com
  • Author reputations for sale? An SEO future?, VerticalLeap
  • Google AdWords Policies Crack Down on the Use of DKI & ‘Buy’ in Ads, Search Engine Watch
  • Google Authorship Profiles: No Verification Needed?, State of Search
  • Google EMD update: EMDs decline in SERPs for well over a year, IP Blog
  • Google News Publisher Submission Bug With Multiple Categories, Search Engine Roundtable
  • How social signals influence SEO: five things you need to know, Econsultancy
  • PPC advice from a SEO expert, State Of Search
  • Quick Tips on Google Algorithm Impact Detection & Resolution, SEO.com
  • Scale Outreach Using Pareto’s Law, SEER Interactive
  • Stop Using Google’s First Page Estimates to Set Your Bids, PPC Hero
  • What makes interviews so valuable for SEO content marketing?, SEO Copywriting
  • Why doesn’t Google release an SEO quality check up calculator?, YouTube

Social Media

Related Topics: SearchCap



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Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:31:00 -0700 Who Writes the Most Popular Content on Your Blog? http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/who-writes-the-most-popular-content-on-your-b http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/who-writes-the-most-popular-content-on-your-b Who Writes the Most Popular Content on Your Blog?
http://bit.ly/TUEtTf

Posted by robmillard

Google Analytics’ Custom Variables may seem daunting for a web marketer with relatively little technical knowledge, but they’re actually quite easy to implement and use (especially if you’re using Wordpress). This post will show you how to easily track blog post authors using Custom Variables, and also explores some of the reporting possibilities.

Why track authors?

There are many reasons to track blog post authors that apply to your content strategy, including:

Highlighting editorial success

Rewarding those who have performed well and highlighting their success is an effective means of creating enthusiasm within an organization towards SEO and content promotion. Tracking authors can make this type of report much easier to produce.

Evaluating freelancers

Is the freelance writer you’re paying worthwhile? If you’re outsourcing work to a number of freelancers, are some better at optimizing their copy for search than others? What do user engagement metrics say about the quality of their work?

Identifying successful guest authors

If a guest post author is driving a particularly large amount of traffic to your site, it may be because they have a strong social media presence to promote to or that they link from their own authoritative domain. If this is the case, why not ask them to provide content on a regular basis?

How do I set up Custom Variables?

Please don’t be deterred by this section. The plugin implementation is as easy as ticking a few boxes, and the hard-coded route isn’t particularly difficult, either.

Google Analytics for Wordpress Plugin

I would imagine that many Wordpress installations use Joost de Valk’s GA Plugin. This plugin is the easiest way to track authors, so if you haven’t already got GA tracking on your site, I’d recommend installing it. You can find GA tracking by going to Plugins > Add New > search for “Google Analytics for Wordpress” and install the top result.

Activate the plugin and go to it’s Settings page. Select “Show Advanced Settings” and you will see a table called “Custom Variable Settings.” All you need to do is select “Author Names” and hit the update button.

There are a bunch of other tracking options here such as tags, categories, and publication year. You may wish to turn these on while you’re in there as you may find a use for the data later down the line; it’s better to have it ready and waiting than to not have it at all!

Wordpress hard-coded

If you’ve hard-coded your GA tracking onto your Wordpress site, you can make a quick and simple edit to enable author tracking.

This example assumes that your GA tracking code is in the footer.php file. You can edit this by going to Appearance > Editor and selecting your footer.php file from the right hand list. Your GA code should look something like this:

Insert the following code between the two lines that start with _gaq.push:

<!--?php
if (is_single())
$ author = get_the_author();
echo " _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1,'Author','". $ author . "', 3]);";

?-->

Your code should now look like this:

Select “Update File” and you’re done.

A quick note iif you care about what this bit of PHP does: it checks whether the current page is a blog post (is_single()), gets the name of the author (get_the_author()), and then prints the Google Analytics Custom Variable code with the author name inserted using echo.

If you’re not using Wordpress…

If you're not using Wordpress, you’ll typically need to use whatever server side language you’re using to populate and print the Custom Variable within your Google Analytics tag. It should go in the same place as shown in the example above. The line you need to write looks like this:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1,'Author','', 3]);

The only caveat here is that the number one denotes with Custom Variable slot you’re using for this information. Google Analytics gives you 5 slots (1-5), so if you’re using other custom variables, ensure that you don’t have conflicting tracking that uses the same slot.

Reporting

Custom reports

The first report you probably want to see is pageviews by author; that is to say, whose content is the most popular? You can do this quite easily through Custom Reporting, in which you use Pageviews as your metric and Custom Variable (Value 01) as the Dimension Drilldown:

Adding Landing Page as a second dimension drilldown lets you click into each author to see which of their pages are attracting the most traffic. You can make this report even more interesting by adding user engagement metrics such as bounce rate and average time on page, which could be used as an indication of content quality.

Segmentation

If you want to browse Standard Reporting showing only data for a specific author, you can create a Custom Segment with Custom Variable (Value 01) as your filter. This way you can look through their keywords, referrers, content etc.

Tailored dashboards

Tracking authors also allows you to create dashboards which are tailored to a specific writer by applying filters when you create widgets. Essentially, you can create any widget and filter to show a certain value for Custom Variable (Value 01).

As an example, I’ve created a dashboard for a ukulele songbook website I made a while back, showing only data for songs written by The Beatles. (I need you to imagine that The Beatles are writing for my site. Thanks.)

This dashboard shows:

  1. Acquisition: where is traffic to their articles coming from? Traffic types, top referrers, top keywords
  2. Behaviour: what’s happening when they get to the site? Bounce rate, avg. time on site, visit and pageview trends, top pages
  3. Outcomes: what’s the result of their work? In this case, AdSense revenue and top AdSense pages, but this could also be conversion and eCommerce data.

This makes dashboards a whole lot more interesting for a particular writer, so hopefully they’ll come back and check it more often. Why not schedule it to email to them on the day they tend to plan their work?

Most linked to authors

Exporting this data and combining it with other sources can produce useful reports. For example:

  • Use a Custom Report with a flat table, Landing Page and Custom Variable (Value 01) as dimensions and Visits as the metric.
  • Export up to 5000 rows of this report with the URL hack.
  • Use a VLOOKUP() to combine this data with an export of the Top Pages report from Open Site Explorer.
  • You can then use a Pivot Table to show the most linked to writers. Select the whole table, then click Insert > Pivot Table > Click ok on the wizard. Then use your author column as a row label, and drag inbound links into values. This will give you a list of authors by the sum of all links their content has generated.

Obviously there are many, many different ways to use this data. Are there any ways you use the above data differently? Leave your good tips in the comments!


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Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:58:00 -0700 Webcast: Link Building Demystified – Ask the experts – LIVE! http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/webcast-link-building-demystified-ask-the-exp http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/webcast-link-building-demystified-ask-the-exp Webcast: Link Building Demystified – Ask the experts – LIVE!
http://bit.ly/P2o7ux

Webcast October 25, 2012 1PM EST – Inbound links are paramount to getting top search engine rankings. But how do you go about getting those links? And what’s more important, quantity or quality? During this webcast you can ask the experts these and your other link building questions.

Register now!

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

Related Topics: SMX & DMD Alerts



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Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:53:00 -0700 Election 2012: Searching And Researching The Presidential Debates http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/election-2012-searching-and-researching-the-p http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/election-2012-searching-and-researching-the-p Election 2012: Searching And Researching The Presidential Debates
http://bit.ly/P2nnFJ

The final debate between U.S. presidential candidates Obama and Rommney airs tonight. Until the election next month, a lot of attention will continue to be on the presidential and vice presidential debates.

Here’s an easy and free way to keyword search debate video and then immediately view the video online.

In fact, all of the presidential debates back to 1988 can offer keyword searchable video.

Where do you search and access?

Visit the wonderful, irreplaceable and important C-SPAN Video Library.

I’ll be taking an in-depth look at this resource in an upcoming report but in a nutshell, the C-SPAN Video Library allows you to search (keyword search and/or browse) and view just about everything that has ever aired on the C-SPAN Network since 1987. This means about 194,500 hours of video content as of today.

While C-SPAN is best known for providing live coverage of Congressional activity, you’ll also find political rallies,  book talks, one-on-one interviews, special events and much more like this recent forum on Google and anti-trust.

Quickly and Easily Keyword Search Presidential Debate Video

You can watch the first two Oct 3, 2012 and Oct 16, 2012 debates where President Obama and Mitt Romney debated a wide range of policy issues in nationally televised debates.  Or view the October 11th debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Paul Ryan. You’ll find links to tonight’s final debates on the C-SPAN Video Library homepage or in the Campaign 2012 section of the library.

Direct links to video to debates between 1988-2008 are available here.

In Depth How-To: Searching The 2012 Vice-Presidential Debate

You’ll see a link labeled, “View Full Event (3 Programs)“.

Here you can access both the prologue to the debate (Martha Raddatz talking to the audience, not seen on other networks) and the switched screen feed of the debate (the camera switching between both candidates).

Whichever video you select, they’re all searchable. Let’s head back to where we first landed a moment ago, the “Split Screen” feed. 

Scroll down and find the transcript search box. Make sure it’s marked “text”. Here’s where you enter the search terms.

Enter your search term(s). You can search all speakers or limit to either candidate or the moderator.

Using quotation marks for phrases does not work. So, just enter your term(s). In this case I’m looking for the phrase american people.

Click the arrow or hit return.

Your search term(s) should appear if they were spoken. The transcript you’re searching was mechanically generated using the closed captioning from the broadcast. It’s not perfect so be careful.

To view the video beginning where your terms are spoken simply click the results box where those words are found.

Other Useful C-SPAN Video Features

It’s also possible to browse and view using the text timeline. Select it from the pulldown menu where you selected text transcript. Cursor over each speakers name to see the text of what was spoken.

On the right side of the page you’ll find the “speaker” header. Click here and you’ll find direct links to video of each time the person appeared on C-SPAN.

Below the video box you’ll find the clip and share links. You can quickly share the entire video on Twitter, Facebook or Google. Embedding is also possible. The clip link lets you select a portion of the video to save or share.

I plan to write much more about the C-SPAN Video Library in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, enjoy the debate tonight and viewing the historical archive that this rich repository offers.

Related Topics: Features: General | Search Engines: Government Search Engines | Search Engines: Video Search Engines



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Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:19:00 -0700 How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/how-i-got-a-link-from-the-wall-street-journal http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/how-i-got-a-link-from-the-wall-street-journal How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal
http://bit.ly/VzBQgh

Posted by larry.kim

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal

Want to know how to get a link from the Wall Street Journal?

No ... I'm not talking about dropping some dopey, no-followed article comment or some black-hat trickery - those schemes don't count for anything and will probably land you in the Google SEO jail.

I'm talking about landing a real, legitimate editorial link from one of the most trusted and highest authority websites on the planet – it's an SEO's (or any marketer's) dream come true!! Sounds impossible?

It's not!

In my content marketing case study today, I’ll describe in detail exactly how my team and I recently did just that!

But first - this post reads best with the mission impossible theme song playing in the background, so, cue the Mission Impossible music!

1. Begin With the End in Mind

Every great content marketing operation starts with an objective. For this mission, I set a high bar. I wanted to try to acquire:

  1. Real, editorial links from the WSJ. But not just any link. Ideally, links in an article that:
    • In some way mentioned WordStream (my company) so that we could get a bit of media exposure out of this effort
    • Links to both our homepage and contained to a deep page on our site with relevant anchor text.
  2. Get links from least 500 other high value, unique business and IT publications, like Fox Business, the Motley Fool, or CNET, etc.
  3. Have the story go viral on Social Media Networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
  4. Generate a huge spike in overall website traffic that month
  5. Create a 10% uplift in our overall steady-state traffic from SEO

With these seemingly impossible mission goals clearly defined, we realized that we'd need super-viral-grade content – something new and exciting, as well as a methodological plan to succeed!

Your Mission, should you choose to accept, is to acquire a link from the Wall St. Journal

Your Mission, should you choose to accept, is to acquire an editorial link from the Wall St. Journal!

2. Intelligence Gathering

The Wall Street Journal is not just any old news organization – it’s the finest business news organization on the planet!!

Therefore we would need to create a story more powerful than the typical 'how to' or 'X ways to succeed at Y' kinds of articles that we usually run on our blog. Those angles are great for daily blog content, but are hardly newsworthy of the Wall St. Journal, and just not the right tool for this ambitious content marketing mission!

We started our intelligence gathering effort by closely analyzing the objectives and by reviewing the kinds of articles the Wall St. Journal had covered in the past, in order to get a clear idea of the kind of content that we’d need to develop.

To achieve our lofty objectives, it was determined that we would need content that was:

  • Easy to Understand – We search marketers write about all sorts of dorky shop-talk about this signal or that metric. But since +99.99% of the readership of the Wall St. Journal aren’t search marketers, our story would have to be easily understandable to a broader audience of business people.
  • Unique – Our content would have to be based on new, original data and new insight. You cannot get the attention of the staff of the prestigious Wall St. Journal merely by rehashing old stuff that is already out there.
  • Newsworthy – new and unique is necessary but not sufficient. But is it newsworthy? Is the content timely in some way, such that it might merit coverage by the world’s most powerful business newspaper?
  • Easily Sharable – We would illustrate the key takeaways of our content in the form of an infographic, to enable easy sharing and make the content more visually appealing.

planning our content marketing operation

Planning our Content Marketing Operation...

3. Gear-Up!

In order to achieve our mission we would need the right gear for the job.

Our big idea was to conduct original research into what industries contributed to Google Revenues. We thought that this idea was both relevant to our core business (search marketing) yet sufficiently generalized to be relevant to the business readers of the Wall St. Journal.

Last year, Google made $ 37.9 Billion in revenues, of which 95% came from advertising. But Google doesn’t provide detailed insight into exactly what industries and companies make up all that money. So, we thought it might be interesting if we could provide an answer!

But how the heck are we supposed to know where Google made their money from if they don’t share that information?!

At WordStream, we have access to a ton of search marketing data that nobody else does, for example:

  • Our Free Keyword Tool which consists of over 1-trillion search queries – using this data, I can model what people were searching for in 2011.
  • Our AdWords Grader has collected some AdWords data including average cost per click data across different industries, etc.

Using this data, along with our proprietary keyword classification technologies, and other data available on the internet (such as spyfu, etc.), it would be possible to develop a fairly sophisticated data model to figure out what people were searching for in 2011, and how much revenue Google generated for clicks on searches in different industries, such as “Travel and Tourism” or “Finance and Insurance” and many other industries.

But our content was still in need of a newsworthy angle. Since Google was announcing their 2011 year-end financial results on January 19th, it was decided that we would have to conduct and publish our data analysis within a day or two of the official Google 2011 earnings announcement. Our content would explain where all Google's money came from!

Finally, we partnered with my colleague, Mr. Brian Wallace of NowSourcing and his crack team of infographic design aces to convert my data into a nice infographic that illustrated the Google Earnings data, in order to make it more visually appealing and easily sharable. Here's what it looked like (Click to Enlarge)

Where Google made Their Money

In a nutshell, we had developed content that was easily understandable to business readers, unique, newsworthy and sharable –perfect for our mission!

content marketing gear

Using the Right Gear (Content) for the Mission!

4. Mission Execution

Having set our goals, put a plan in place, and developing the right tools for the job, all that was left was to execute! We published our infographic just days after Google’s 2011 year-end earnings announcement.

And, as you probably expected, we were indeed successful in getting coverage of our story in the Wall Street Journal!!

Here's a snapshot of what that looked like:

we did it!

An

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Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:14:00 -0700 Google’s Matt Cutts Inducted Into University of Kentucky’s Hall Of Fame http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/googles-matt-cutts-inducted-into-university-o http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/googles-matt-cutts-inducted-into-university-o 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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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:07:00 -0700 Google Searchers 3x More Likely To Be Logged-in Than Bing http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/google-searchers-3x-more-likely-to-be-logged http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/google-searchers-3x-more-likely-to-be-logged 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

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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:05:00 -0700 Can You Really Increase Conversions By Decreasing Engagement? http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/can-you-really-increase-conversions-by-decrea http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/can-you-really-increase-conversions-by-decrea 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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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:02:00 -0700 Google Q3 Earnings Leak: $14.1 Billion, Disappoint Surprised Investors http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/google-q3-earnings-leak-141-billion-disappoin http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/google-q3-earnings-leak-141-billion-disappoin 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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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:59:00 -0700 10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google for SEO http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/10-dead-simple-tips-to-take-advantage-of-goog http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/10-dead-simple-tips-to-take-advantage-of-goog 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

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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:47:00 -0700 Google Gives Update On Shopping Going Full Paid Inclusion, Hints At AdWords’ Future On Q3 Call http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/google-gives-update-on-shopping-going-full-pa http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/google-gives-update-on-shopping-going-full-pa 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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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:31:00 -0700 Search In Pics: Blue Google Win, Googlers At Dreamworks & Google Sand Mandala http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/search-in-pics-blue-google-win-googlers-at-dr http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/search-in-pics-blue-google-win-googlers-at-dr 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

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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:29:00 -0700 How To Turn (Not Provided) Into Useful, Actionable Data http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/how-to-turn-not-provided-into-useful-actionab http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/how-to-turn-not-provided-into-useful-actionab 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

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Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:28:00 -0700 Rediscovering The Google AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/rediscovering-the-google-adwords-editor-keywo http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/rediscovering-the-google-adwords-editor-keywo 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

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

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Sun, 21 Oct 2012 14:16:00 -0700 Two out of Three Social Media Users Let Their Political Flag Fly http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/two-out-of-three-social-media-users-let-their http://osvaldohess48.posterous.com/two-out-of-three-social-media-users-let-their 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

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