Impact Media's SEO Blog

Negative keywords play a vital part in the refinement of any Pay per Click (PPC) campaign. By identifying these irrelevant phrases and removing them from your advertising, you will lower the number of times ads appear for unrelated searches, helping to lower Cost per Click (CPC) and make that budget go further.

When you come to create a PPC campaign [See: What is PPC Advertising] impetuousness can cost money. It isn’t simply a case of identifying a few keywords that you want to appear for, writing a bit of ad text, turning on broad match and away you go. You have to be prepared to go deeper.

Broad match isn’t without its dangers, as discussed in my earlier post – The Danger of Broad Match in PPC Advertising. Whilst it gets you seen by a wider audience, it can also make a significant dent in your online budget. Effective Pay per Click advertising comes from controlled targeting of campaigns, not blanket exposure.
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The filters within Google Analytics allow the tracking, monitoring and recording of a variety of different metrics. One particularly useful filter allows you to track your site’s position within the search engines when a visitor clicks on your listing.

This information can be incredibly valuable as you may be optimising your site for one phrase, but this filter can show that a slightly reworded phrase delivers better quality traffic. If you have e-commerce tracking and goals set up then the real value of these visitors will clearly be displayed.

Before creating the filters it is important that you create a new profile in your Google Analytics Account. Give an appropriate title like, ‘Search Engine Rankings’. There should always be a profile in your Analytics Account which has all your data with no filters, otherwise you won’t have a record of your overall traffic.

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Now that you have set up your AdWords Account and have traffic going to your website, it is important that you know what all these people are doing on your website. That’s where Google Analytics can help you.

Analytics can separate the traffic you are paying to visit your site from the remainder of your traffic, allowing you to see if your advertising budget is converting to profit.

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We are eagerly awaiting a new feature for Google Analytics which Google says will be rolled out in January 2010.

Annotations will allow you to be able to click on a date and leave a note describing an event or occurrence which happened on that individual day. These notes can be shared or set to private so only you can see them.
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How Will Analytics Help My Website?

Analytics acts as the eyes and ears for a website. It produces in depth information on visitor habits, providing an insight that would otherwise prove impossible.

It doesn’t simply track the amount of clicks a website receives; most packages will be able to analyse how they found you, which pages they visited, how long they spent on the site and the page they exited from. This data is extremely important in the ongoing management and optimisation of any website.
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Hitwise, one of the Internet’s leading authorities on web-wide statistics and analytics, released statistics surrounding healthy snacks and the search patterns related to it.

Whilst the subject itself may not be to your taste, it does perfectly highlight the need to not only achieve a high ranking on search engines, but also provide relevant information for when visitors arrive.

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Bit.ly have published a new tool this week which allows you to segment bit.ly social media traffic within Google Analytics.

The tool can be found here – bit.ly Google Analytics Campaign Tool. You will be required to download a copy of the tool by choosing ‘File > Create a copy’

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Clearly you need to be talented to work at Google. Sometimes though, this can lead to a superiority complex and following hot on the trail of Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, calling Twitter a “poor man’s email”, it’s now been reported in MediaPost that their analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, has made a comment that “hits”, far from being a way of measuring online success, is actually an acronym standing for “How Idiots Track Success”.

Whilst there may be a degree of truth in the point, the way the message was delivered could have been delivered more subtlety.

In terms of success criteria, he does goes on to make a valid point that bounce rate is a more meaningful measure of how successful your site is performing. Obviously, there are many ways to drive traffic to a website but if visitors aren’t finding what they want when they arrive, why bother spending time and money on getting them there in the first place?

On the 4th Day of Christmas, we present 4 Google Analytics tips:

1. Ensure that the Google Analytics code is implemented on all pages on your site and correctly

How can you expect visitors to be tracked on a page which doesn’t contain any code to record their visit? Also make sure the code is exactly the same as the code shown in your analytics account, don’t make any changes as this could cause in error in the code and prevent good data from being recorded.

2. Set up Goals

Goals are there to help you find out if visitors are doing what you want them to do on your site, whether it be a purchase, completing an enquiry form or signing up to a newsletter. Goals are there to help you get more information out of your data so make sure you use them.

3. Link AdWords account to analytics account

If you are using AdWords you will want this traffic source to be identified within your analytics account so you can monitor your paid visitors’ activity.

Login to your AdWords account, and then click on the green Analytics tab, which is between Reports and My Account. As long as you have the same login email address for both accounts then AdWords should have automatically detected your Analytics account. If you have a different email address for you Analytics account then just, make sure the email address for your AdWords account is listed within the User Manager in Analytics.

You should also make sure that the Auto Tagging is enabled within your AdWords account within your Account Preferences – this should be enabled automatically.

4. E-commerce sites use e-commerce tracking

Shopping sites can enable the e-commerce tracking which Google Analytics offers. This is a little bit more complicated to implement and you may need your web developer’s help.

By implementing the e-commerce tracking you will be able to see sales values and transactions and identify pages which have contributed to a sale. Just remember that Google Analytics is an analytical tool and not a sales system so not all numbers may match exactly to your sales orders.

E-commerce tracking can also be used to track non e-commerce sites but this is slightly trickier, but can provide you with a great insight to user activity.

Formally known as Urchin, is a web statistics program that allows users to get comprehensive data on their website and visitors for free.

Reading Lucy’s GA Notes post reminded me of a another great Firefox extension that makes Google Analytics even easier to use.

The combination of using Greasemonkey and the Goggle Analytics Report Enhancer (GAREnhancer) script adds some really useful enhancements when viewing GA reports online.

The one I find most useful is the ability to see conversions as whole numbers rather than percentages. In the past I had to reach for the calculator or export the report to Excel to see the actual figures. Another of my favourites is that when creating a new goal in GA it automatically sets the goal to “on” rather than to the default “off”. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve set up goals and gone to review the results after a couple of days only to find I’ve not switched the goal on. These are just a few of the many enhancement the Gare script offers.

Greasemonkey has many other useful scripts which allow you to customise the way websites appear or behave.  Hundreds can be found a websites like userscripts.org.

Google Analytics Notes is a really great Firefox extension from EpikOne.

As we all know a website is never truly finished and is constantly undergoing further development and changes. Do you wish there was a way you could keep a record of this and at the same time cross reference this with your website traffic. Well now you can thanks to GA Notes.

Install the Firefox extension and follow the instructions which can be found at:

http://www.epikone.com/blog/2008/10/28/adding-business-data-to-google-analytics-data/

Next time you log into your Google Analytics account and view a profile you will see Show Notes. You can then leave business data in your Analytics account like new design launched or added 3 new sales pages. The notes can then be found on every report at the top stored in a concealable table.

Anyone who has access to the Analytics account and has the Firefox extension installed can see the notes.

Great for building up a history of your site’s development, plus the whole team can stay up to date with the latest amendments to your website.

If your website is an online shop selling products to consumers then it is probably easier to measure the success compared to a site promoting a brand.

Every website should have a purpose and be a tool which provides value to a business and you shouldn’t just have a site because all of your competitors have one. Your website should make up part of the marketing strategy and if it isn’t fulfilling its role then review the site to find out why people aren’t buying or not contacting you as a result.

Google Analytics is a great way to measure the success of your website and set benchmarks. A direct measure like the volume of sales or leads enables you to reach a conclusion easier. But if your website is there to endorse your brand then this can sometimes be harder to measure.

By using the data provided by Google Analytics you are able to calculate the sites’ brand engagement by analysing the search terms and direct visits to your site. This can help to measure the impact of offline marketing activities and your brands’ presence amongst your users.

So make sure that you have Google Analytics on your site and start measuring your site’s success!

As a UK Search Engine Marketing Company, we provide our clients with regular reports and updates on how their SEO campaign is progressing. Part of our client reporting includes information on where their keywords are in the major search engines. This is almost a given but it should not be the only measurement of success, nor even the most important aspect.

If you are planning your own search engine optimisation campaign, you really need to focus on your keyword research and understand which phrases are going to bring in the most relevant visitors to your site. It is often the case that a site owner will go after a ‘vanity phrase’ which is often a single word, highly competitive and, even if you were to get a top spot, would not necessarily bring in the ‘right type’ of visitor.

You should try and understand what phrases are more likely to bring in prospects for what you offer rather than the glory of getting hundreds of worthless visits to your site. Quality, not quantity!

We always recommend that you use a good quality analytics package. There are many in the market but, for most site owners, Google Analytics is more than sufficient. Once you have your account set-up and have implemented the code to start tracking visits, you will be able to uncover valuable data about your site’s traffic and will be able to make informed decisions about how well your search engine marketing campaign is performing. For example, you will be able to set up funnels to see how visitors progress through your site and (ouch!), what point they leave.

You will be able to determine your bounce rate* by keywords and see very clearly where you may have rankings that are not adding value or your site needs improving to convert those visitors.

*What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

It’s only natural to want your site as high up the rankings as possible but relevance is key.

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If you’re a UK business wanting to get more from your online marketing, you should review our Search Engine Optimisation Services.

Many website owners may be looking at their analytics accounts and thinking “I’m sure I am getting more traffic than this?” The chances are, they actually are!

As people are using newer browsers like Firefox, they are utilising more of the useful extensions and privacy options, one of which is an option where you can choose not to run JavaScript.

Now the big problem with this is that if you use a program such as Google Analytics that rely on JavaScript tracking codes to track visitors to your website, visitors with JavaScript disabled will not be tracked.

The way to cross reference this is to regularly check your analytics data against your websites log files and that way you will be able to see just how many visitors are invisible to your analytics account.