Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Event Tracking Reports without Beta Test Activation in Google Analytics

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Looking into Event Tracking through Google Analytics opens the doors for some very unique and very cool new features. However, Event Tracking is still in beta and only available through only a select few accounts. Making testing & implementation recommendations difficult. However there is a way around this by simply manually adjusting the url when viewing reports.

Tracking Code Implementation

Firstly, implement the event tracking code on events within you site. When deciding on what actions to track, the skys the limit. From tracking lightbox triggers, external links and actions within a flash file. Event tracking can be made to fit a number of required tracking metrics.

Now To view the reporting here’s what you need to do: 

1.  Login to analytics and view the dashboard of the account that you want to view the event reports on
2. View a specific report, such as the “traffic source” report
3. Modifying the start of the url to: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/events followed by the string of variables. As below:

now you can view all the tracked events…

Tags: event tracking, google analytics, return on investment, website metric tracking, website tracking
Posted in analytics, Web | 6 Comments »

Online Archive, Not Just a Search Rank Checker

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Ok, after my previous post and looking at things a bit more. I’ve decided to make the search rank checking tool even more of a knowledge base to help track proceedings over time.

The aim now is to include archiving of:

• Rankings in search results
• Number of pages indexed in the different search engines
• Google Page Rank
• Back link numbers from Google and Yahoo!

Might also look at lower quality metrics such as alexa ranking.

Is there anything you’d recommend archiving?

Tags: archiving tool, google, msn, online archiving tool, rank, rank checker, rank checking, SERPS, Yahoo
Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 3 Comments »

Search Rank Checker

Friday, December 19th, 2008

After looking round for a web based search rank checker solution that will keep an archive of rankings. I decided it’ll probably be easier to develop rank checking software to reside on my server.

I’m after your input, what sort of features would you like to see in a web based search rank checking solution?

Proposed Features:

• Account > Client > Keyword structure
• Cron setup to run rank checking at selected intervals
• Graph rankings over time
• Download CSV export

Once sorted will look to open it up to the public, but in this blog post i’m hoping to get a few ideas around what if any additional functionality I should look to build in. Things like:

• Search engine selection. Google, Yahoo, live, local variants (Google.co.nz), local variants restricted (Google.co.nz New Zealand only)
• Competitors rankings along side the selected keywords
• Number of search results returned
• Rank checking frequency. Monthly, Fortnightly, Weekly or Daily

Your input is valuable for this project.  So please let me know what you’d like to see and try and work it in.

Also if you’re interested in taking it out for a trial run. Drop a comment and I will update you on when it’s stable enough for a trial.

Tags: google, msn, rank, rank checker, rank checking, SERPS, Yahoo
Posted in search, Web | 4 Comments »

Second Page Search Result Traffic Tracking in Google Analytics

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Yesterday I came across this great post: Tracking Referrals from Second Page of Google in Google Analytics

Setup is basic:

• Add a filter to identify if the referal contains page number information
  Setup details
  Filter Type: Custom Filter >Advanced
  Field A –> Extract A: Referral > (?|&)(start)=([^&]*)
  Output To-> Constructor: User Defined > $A3
  Field A Required: Yes
  Field B Required: No
  Override Output Field: Yes
  Case Sensitive: No
  
• Create an advanced segment that selects the user defined information set by the filter above
  Dimension > Visitor > User Defined > Starts with > 10

From an SEO point of view, this information can be used to identify potential keywords that need a little boost to get to the first page of results and if acted on correctly could result in significant increases in traffic.

Tags: google, google analytics, Google Analytics Tips, SERPS
Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 1 Comment »

Google AdWords Budget Suggestion

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

With it being the start of another month, I took some time this morning to review the daily adwords budgets for my client accounts.

In the past I have disregarded the suggested daily budgets as they are usually off the mark when it comes to client budgets and expectations. Anyway this morning I clicked the view recommended budget for one of my client adwords accounts and I was pleasantly surprised with the page being displayed. It is quite a bit different from the expected text “increasing your daily budget to $xxx.xx will result in xx% more impressions.

Now you’re prompted with a cool graphical representation of how your daily budget would have effected the performance over the last 15 days.

Very cool!

Tags: adwords, budget, google, google adwords
Posted in advertising, Web | 1 Comment »

At Last! Week and Month Views in Google Analytics

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Just launched in beta is week and month views on the data. So glad for this as it was something I had asked some of the Analytics team that I met with last year.

Here’s a screen shot

Tags: analytics, google
Posted in analytics, Web | 1 Comment »

Google AdWords Display URL Policy Hasn’t Taken Effect…yet

Friday, April 4th, 2008

According to Google the change in display URL policy was meant to come into effect on the 1st of April 2008. Now its the 4th of April and I am still seeing ads with an invalid display url.

In New Zealand and searching for plumbers

When clicking through this ad it takes you to “http://sites.yellow.co.nz/site/tricklebanks/”

The display url is missing the .nz, allowing them to run multiple ads for the one keyword. This is what the policy change was to eliminate, wasn’t it?

I’d like to hear your views on this.

Tags: adwords, google, google adwords
Posted in advertising, search, Web | No Comments »

Refferal Spam

Friday, April 4th, 2008

I was doing some competitor research the other day and while I was searching the competitors domain in Google I found many serps that included pages from multiple website stats packages.

Clicking through it was obvious that these sites were victim of referrer spam. With links to porn and gambling sites. Sites like these exploit the stats package to generate backlinks to their site for free and without the site owner knowing about it.

If you are running some server stats package be sure to restrict access to the folder containing these stats. It doesn’t look good if your domain is associated with these bad neighbourhoods

Tags: Competitor Analysis, Refferal, Refferer Spam, Spam
Posted in search, seo, Web | No Comments »

Google AdWords All Messed Up

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Sometimes people get the fundamentals of keyword insertion so wrong when creating ads for google adwords. I have seen this done a few times, usually it is because the dynamic keyword insertion hasn’t been implemented correctly.

This is such a bad look. Especially when you get some high profile site such as compete.com. The good thing about this is it makes the rest of us look good. 🙂

Another fundamental issue that I see all the time is when the display url isn’t consistant with the destination page. This here is going to catch so many people out when Google update their display URL policy on April the 1st.

Sometimes the little things count for so much.

Tags: adwords, google, google adwords
Posted in advertising, search, Web | No Comments »

Troubles of an Internet Marketer

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

As an internet marketer, we all know the internet doesn’t stop, there is always something for us to do. Like keeping up with developments, setting up campaigns, tracking roi’s, traffic & more. All this sort of stuff feeds our determination to keep moving forward. This leads getting better results and as a result feel successful in the work that we have taken part in.

However on the flip side is the effect this addiction has on family. The balance between work and family can be one of the most difficult things to overcome.

Here’s a few tips to help through the tough times of trying to balance after hours family and work time:

1. Schedule family time
   Sometimes we get cought up in what we are doing and forget about spending some much needed time with our families. Schedule movie nights, times to go for a walk or may be even dinner somewhere nice 🙂
2. Communicate
   Communicate with your partner to prepare her for some specific project that you’re working on and the amount of after hours time that this will take.
3. Sympathise
   Stand back and think about how your partner might be feeling.
4. Most importantly create time to spend with your family
   Even if it’s half an hour when you get home from the office, or an hour round dinner time. This can make the difference.

It can be hard to keep up with everything but be sure you think of your loved ones and spend some quality time together.

Tags: family, internet marketing
Posted in seo, Web | No Comments »