Post-PRISM, Google Confirms Quietly Moving To Make All Searches Secure, Except For Ad Clicks

In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity — except for clicks on ads. Google says this has done to provide “extra protection” for searchers, and the company may be aiming to block NSA spying activity. Or possibly, it’s a move to…

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The PPC Experiment You Never Dare Run

A question that PPC account managers frequently have to deal with is, “Why are we paying for this traffic? Aren’t we going to get that traffic anyway?” It’s a fair question, even if it is completely annoying to hear for the twentieth time by the twentieth new accounting…

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Key Metrics For Success With A Local Business Website

There’s a lot of literature out there discussing what local businesses can do to improve their websites, ranging from boosting search visibility through targeted keywords to leveraging content like video to keep visitors engaged. But what’s often missing from these conversations are broader…

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Google Analytics Visitor Segmentation: Users, Sequences, Cohorts!

My love for segmentation knows no bounds. Weather you do online, offline, nonline analysis, or just randomly playing with data, insights arrive faster with segmentation. In fact I’ve gone so far as to say: “All data in aggregate is crap.” That’s certainly a bit melodramatic, but beyond the most bare bones “ahh, I see something […]

Google Analytics Visitor Segmentation: Users, Sequences, Cohorts! is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Google’s Inadvertent Plan To Withhold Search Data & Create New Advertisers

How do you convince a bunch of publishers to buy ads on your service? If you’re Google, how about withholding data from those publishers about how people are finding their sites, as a way to drive them into your ad system? I don’t think Google planned for this to happen. But…

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6 SEO Challenges Every Business Owner & Marketer Must Contend With In 2014

There isn’t much left of this year. Companies that haven’t started planning their marketing strategy and budgeting for 2014 must begin soon. When it comes to online marketing, most businesses rely excessively upon Web analytics to decide what was (or wasn’t) effective. What they…

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Report: Google’s Not Provided Reached 49% & Much Higher In Technology Industry

BrightEdge has released a report showing that for the 8,400 brands they tracked over the last quarter, 49% of the queries collected did not provide (i.e. not provided) search query data due to Google’s secure search. 49% was the average, in fact, it is higher for the technology industry….

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Rejoice! Safari Is Once Again Providing Google Referral Information In iOS

Since last September, people using Safari on iOS devices and searching on Google have appeared to publishers as if they came directly to their sites, not via Google. Now, the problem has ended, with iOS now apparently having been upgraded to support the “meta referrer” tag. No, this…

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6 Google Analytics Custom Dashboards To Save You Time NOW!

top google analytics dashboardsNed Poulter talks about the 6 most useful Google Analytics Custom Dashboards he has discovered. Read his post to find out how to get the most out of your GA today.

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6 Google Analytics Custom Dashboards To Save You Time NOW!

Google Adds Enhanced Campaigns Bid Adjustment Reporting To Google Analytics

Google announced today that Bid Adjustments reports for AdWords enhanced campaigns are now included in Google Analytics. The reporting, found in the Advertising section under Traffic Sources in Analytics, are designed to help advertisers analyze the pe…

Finally, Auto-Tag Bing Ads URLs For Google Analytics: Bizible Debuts Free Tool

The ability to auto-tag destination URLs in Bing Ads has been one of top product requests for the platform for years now. Manual URL tagging is ire-inducing, error-prone and a real impediment to many advertisers even running campaigns on Bing Ads. If you use Google Analytics and don’t tag…

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Measuring The Effect Of Semantic Markup On Your Search Traffic

There’s a lot of buzz these days around the wonderful world of Schema, semantic markup, and rich snippets — much of it centered around the increased click-through rates from SERPs and other amazing SEO benefits such markup provides. But, once you’ve added the markup to your website, how…

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Linking AdWords And Google Analytics Accounts Finally Gets Easier

Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts opens up a whole new world of opportunity for campaign execution, management and analysis. Yet, the linking process has been cumbersome and not particularly intuitive. That is finally changing. In the …

Google Claims Searches & Paid Clicks Can Predict Box Office Success With 92% Accuracy

A newly released white paper from Google claims the search engine can predict a movie’s opening weekend performance within 92 percent accuracy based on search query and paid click volume. After evaluating search and paid click data for 99 top box office films in 2012, Google correlated the…

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Mystery Solved: Why Mobile Safari Searchers Appear To Come “Direct” To Sites Rather Than Via Google

Since September, people using Safari in iOS 6 and searching on Google have appeared to publishers as they’ve come directly to their sites, as opposed to having been driving by search. At last, the reason behind the Dark Google cut-off of data has been found: mobile Safari doesn’t…

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Tips for Analyzing The Impact Of Your Marketing Activities In Google Analytics

I work with a wide variety of clients across a wide variety of industries, and one of the most common issues I come across is what I call analytics forgetfulness. What typically happens is that a company will devise a plan to improve their online marke…

Google Analytics for Mobile: Where Art Thou?

Analytics App for iPhoneData is vital to digital marketers and without an official Google Analytics app for the iPhone, State of Search recommends top free Google Analytics Apps.

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Google Analytics for Mobile: Where Art Thou?