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How to Analyze Google Analytics (not provided) Data

Adam Kerr — 2012-02-10T09:07:09+01:00

It has been over three months since Google announced the (not provided) update that would ~~protect privacy~~ hide search referral keywords for organic traffic. Since (not provided) results only show up while logged in to Google, the increase to over 60 million Google plus users – and estimates of 400 million by the end of 2012 – indicates that the problem of search referral data is not going away anytime soon.

While Google’s own Matt Cutts estimated that “even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searches on google.com,” SEOs and web marketers are seeing that percentage grow steadily past initial estimates. While this might hold true when looking at total Google searches, likely it is not true for you or your clients. If you don’t like this kind of uncertainty in a career, then maybe SEO isn’t for you. However, if you love a challenge and finding creative ways to overcome obstacles, read on.

Which (not provided) results are branded?

One of the most immediate problems that the Google update caused was the inability to differentiate branded vs. non-branded search traffic. Before, simply excluding the branded keywords in Google analytics was enough to see how much traffic was coming to the website directly from SEO. Now, you get something more like this when you exclude brand keywords:

This accounts for 14.6% of the total (non branded) search referral traffic for this particular site, or 373 keywords that remain behind the mysterious (not provided) veil. That means that only 2177 search referrals are known keywords. While not all of these 373 visits are branded, there are enough that are to skew the data making it harder to track growth over time of SEO efforts.

Before you go cursing the Gods of search, take a deep breath and count to ten. After you find your inner Zen, let us look at how to solve this problem. Follow these three easy steps:

Keyword Landing Page - As you probably know, there is a little option to check the landing pages that each keyword was linked to from the SERPs.

Filter not provided - Once you click this option and turn it on, scroll to the bottom and filter the results by typing in “not provided” (with our without the parenthesis).

Look for “/” – Once you have your results filtered, you can easily see which (not provided) results went to the home page and which went to internal pages. The number of (not provided) results that went to the home page (showing up as “/”) indicates roughly the number of branded keywords.

Conclusion:

In the above example, there are 92 results that went to the home page which indicates that 281 of the (not provided) results are non-branded keywords. This means that there are now 2,458 referrals that are non-branded.
One draw-back to this technique is that you cannot conclusively say that the 92 results to the homepage are ALL branded. In this particular example this may not be a huge deal since 92 visits is only 3.6% (92/2550) of the total known non-branded keyword traffic. However, with a site that gets much more traffic, 3.6% could easily turn into hundreds or thousands of unknown keywords driving traffic.
One potential way to estimate the number of branded keywords that are coming from logged in Google users is to look at historical data. For example, if before the Google update your site received 30% branded search traffic, then you can take that number and multiply it by the (not provided) searches that went to your home page. In the above example, that would mean that roughly 30 visits of the (not provided) were branded.

Differentiating (not provided) keywords

Once you have discovered how many (not provided) search referrals are coming from non-branded keywords, you are still left with gaping hole in data. With a little bit of patience and creativity, you can segment (not provided) keywords into general categories of search traffic making it especially useful for any type of analysis that depends on categorical keywords rather than exact match keywords. This method will only work if the keywords that ARE provided by analytics are matching up nicely with the correct landing pages.

So you have a nice list of (not provided) keywords and which pages they landed on. At a quick glance, you can quantify roughly how many keywords of a certain category were searched while logged in.

In the example above, on the second and third rows one can tell that 32 visitors found the website by searching for the broad match keyword “zorro zoysia grass,” and 28 for “how to lay sod.” While there are a number of keyword searches that could land on /zorro-zoysia-grass-sc (like “zorry zoysia grass”, “zoysia grass”, or “zoysia sod”), you now know that over this period of time 32 keyword searches related to “zorro zoysia” landed on your website.

This is wonderful information by itself, however sometimes you need more than at-a-glance data. When you have hundreds or thousands of keywords and landing pages, having an automated approach is necessary for analyzing large datasets. An entire new post could be written on how to do this using Excel or Google Docs. However, if you read Richard Baxter’s post on how to do keyword research using categories, you can take a lot of the same logic and formulas to segment (not provided) traffic into keyword categories to measure the change in categorical traffic.

As Google Plus continues to grow, organic search referral data will continue to decrease. How will you adapt to the lost data of Google Analytics?

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7 Steps to Make Your Infographic a Success

Slavik Volinsky — 2012-02-09T10:35:38+01:00

Posted by Slavik Volinsky

At the end of 2011, I spent many nights and weekends creating my first infographic titled Inbound Marketing Ecosystem. I’ve never been involved in infographic creation before and to be honest, I never actually planned to create one. One night, I came across an idea and started sketching it on paper...

Now that the Inbound Marketing Ecosystem has gotten a decent amount of re-posts and inbound links, and can be considered “a success,” I’d like to summarize what has ultimately worked, and what could have been improved, in the post below.

From the first draft to the published version. See the whole process here.

1. Start with a Good Great Idea First.

In other words, do NOT create an infographic for an infographic’s sake. As an marketer, you should be creating great content regularly: be aware that an infographic is just another format to get your point or idea across, and for some information, graphical visualization works better than a blog post or a video.

Just because it is called an “infographic,” doesn’t mean that you can attract more inbound links while slacking off on the quality.

2. Have a Great Distribution Plan.

I was so involved in creating an actual infographic that I did not think about my distribution. Thankfully, I was looking for feedback and tweeted Mike Volpe (HubSpot’s CMO), who referred me to Kipp Bodnar, Inbound Marketing Strategist at HubSpot. Both of them suggested adding more statistics to prove my point and said that I would be better off posting it on a popular site first. Big-name sites like MarketingProfs, Social Media Examiner, and even Mashable came up in the emails — I was pretty ecstatic.

Kipp not only provided great advice, he has helped push it through his network and as a result, the infographic was mentioned on SocialMediaExaminer.com and had a full review by the amazing Ann Handley of MarketingProfs. A full post, dedicated to the infographic, is what truly launched it with hundreds of retweets, mentions, and compliments. I was very lucky!

To create a great distribution plan, approach your industry’s “big minds” and ask for their feedback with full intention of listening & improving the infographic. Do they know somebody who would be interested in publishing it? Ask a few other influencers for the feedback and when it is published, tweet your thanks to them. They will be much more likely to retweet you, spreading the reach of your infographic!

3. Have a Variety of Stats and Information Sources.

Adding more statistics to the infographic not only helps prove your point and back it up by the research, it also adds additional reasons for others to talk about it. For me, an infographic with added research data now became an educational piece, where I explained why treating inbound marketing as an ecosystem is beneficial to a business, and how marketing trends are moving towards the “pull” approach.

Examine your sources carefully and have a good number of them. Are you quoting companies which did research to only benefit themselves or is it from an independent research organization? Recognize and link to the original sources.

4. Create a Landing Page On Your Site.

Publishing an infographic on my own site worked because it served as a landing page for links. Even though way more tweets linked to the other blogs, my site was a reference point to many bloggers who looked for the original source.

Also, my page contains “embed this” HTML code (thanks to Ross Hudgens for tweeting about minimalistic embed code) and social sharing buttons, which helped to spread the word even further! Make sure to have these elements on your infographic's landing page.

5. Have a Clear Call-To-Action.

I knew my goal — to get more followers and exposure in the marketing circles — but those who looked at the infographic did not. I made a mistake of making “follow @svolinsky” too little and once the infographic was out, it was too late to change it.

I tried minimizing my losses by adding a Twitter Follow button on the infographic’s landing page and in the embed code, but I’ve certainly missed the peak.

Make your call-to-action BIG at the bottom of the graphic — whether it is following your company on twitter, entering a contest, or downloading an eBook. Make it easy for prospects to complete some kind of an action & engage with your organization.

6. Make It Visually Appealing.

I wouldn’t call myself a creative designer, but in my opinion, you simply need to know the basics. Don’t use too many fonts, use complimentary colors, highlight important insights. Focus on communicating your point first, and then work on the visual appeal and bells n’ whistles — gradients, background patterns, shading and more.

Important: be careful when visualizing statistics, as it is easy to visually distort the data (e.g., bar graphs’ width should always stay the same).

7. Say “Thank You” and Develop New Connections!

Set up Google Alerts as well as twitter alerts (I use TweetDeck) for URLs where it was published and for the title of the infographic. Whenever somebody shares it, comments on it, or pins it on Pinterest, I say “thank you.” I think this worked great for me and I really got to know the audience. Many people might not have known who created the infographic, but after receiving a thank-you tweet from me, they now have a good reason to follow me (which did increase my following).

I strongly recommend doing this for any mentions of your content (not only the infographics)!

As much as possible, I tried to set realistic expectations for your infographic. Just because you have a great idea and spent time to create one, doesn’t mean that it will “go viral” or it will double your sales. Distribution is the key and if you don’t know any influencers right now -- start networking and building those relationships -- it will sure to benefit you throughout your career.

I would love to hear from you in the comments below or say hello on twitter: @svolinsky.

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Slavik Volinsky is an Online Marketer at Amsterdam Printing, promotional products company. You should follow him on twitter or subscribe to Amsterdam Printing’s Promo & Marketing Wall blog.

Set Up Your YouTube Channel for SEO Success

joelchudleigh — 2012-02-07T10:49:35+01:00

Posted by joelchudleigh

As you have probably heard, web video is now massive and you need to be doing it otherwise your business is going to fail fail fail!

OK, so that’s not really going to happen, but scare tactics aside there is great opportunity through integrating video content into your marketing plan.

YouTube is now the world's second largest search engine and in 2011 there were 140 online video views for every person on the planet.

As well as raising awareness of your brand, video also serves to build trust and respect in your brand and can increase website conversion rates significantly.

Although you can choose to host your video on your own server or on a range of platforms it does make sense to go with the Google owned overlord as your base. The reason being is that your videos get easy entry into the two largest search engines in the world. Additionally it is incredibly easy to embed and share videos that are hosted on YouTube.

So, assuming that you are sold on having a YouTube channel for your business we will now look at how to optimise your channel for usability.

Editing Your Profile

Firstly, we will take a look at editing your profile. On your main channel landing page you will see that the profile subtitle and description have moved from the left to the right hand side in the new YouTube design (December 2011).

You can see in the screenshot below that you can simply click “edit” (top right) to make changes.

In the old YouTube profile there was a single followed link that you could add but unfortunately this has now been removed.

The About section is now just for plain text. There are three things that you can do here:

Write an overview of the channel in the About section to tell users about the channel and what they can expect to find there.
Link your social profiles. This is very limited at the moment: just Google+, Twitter and Facebook. A note of caution here; Google+ will automatically link up the Google+ account that is connected through the same Google account that your YouTube channel is attached to. If you need to attach your Google+ account from a separate login then see Number 3 below. The Facebook link is also really shoddy; it only allows you to connect to a personal Facebook profile and not a business page at the moment. Users have been complaining about this for well over a year and YouTube has so far been reluctant to fix. Again see Number 3.
Here you can add any links that you like. We have added a link to our homepage, our corporate video product page and also to our blog. You can then add in the links to your Facebook business page, Google+ business page or any other web properties that you like. We didn’t test out the limits to the number of links but it is over 10.

Note: The icon image for the links pulls from the favicon image from the linked website; so if your link is lacking an image then you need to update the favicon on your website (if you are not sure what I am talking about see this page - http://www.favicon.com/ie.html).

Once the links are in place you can shuffle their order by simply dragging and dropping until you are happy with them.

Below the link area there is another text field for you to explain more about your business. I suggest that you use the main text field at the top to summarise your YouTube channel and the second one to summarise your business (or yourself if you are a freelancer/individual channel). Think about your use of keywords, as although there are no links this information will be used for search ranking. It is also worth entering your locational information as it could help with location based searches in both Google and YouTube.

Below this you can also add other channels that you have or that you like as seen in the screenshot here. Just type the channel name, save it and hit apply to save the changes to your channel.

For the homepage, that is about it.

YouTube Channel Views

At the top of your channel you will see that there are three tabs: • Featured • Feed • Videos. The feed tab (shown in the screenshot below) contains all of the activity that you have participated in on YouTube; whether you comment on others videos, receive comments, like a video, upload a video etc.

Users can comment on your channel by using the “post a channel comment” box on the right hand side of the home screen – shown in the screenshot above. You can control the freedoms that users have by clicking settings and choosing one of the three options shown above. We leave ours open as there is not a lot of commentary at the moment, but if you want to manage this more closely the option is there. All comments are shown on the feed tab.

To the right of the feed tab is the videos tab. There are two views in here; firstly the default view shows your uploaded videos. This shows all the latest videos that you have uploaded. You will see in the screenshot below that we have ours set to “newest to oldest” but you could also sort by “most popular” or “oldest to newest”.

The other view shows your playlists; you can flip between the two by clicking on the buttons to the left of the screen as shown below.

Finally, there is the featured tab, which is optional and customisable from your settings to show a video of your choice and below it playlists of your choice (or other layouts – we will get to this in a minute). You can select which one of these three screens to show to users when they hit your page; we use the featured tab as it gives us full control of the user experience (at least on first arrival at the channel).

Edit YouTube Channel

To adjust the basic settings of your channel you need to click the “Edit Channel” button on the top right of the homepage.

On the “Appearance” tab you can choose the new or old version of YouTube, you can upload an avatar and you can select a background image and a colour.

There are many YouTube channels with background images that look excellent and help businesses to promote their contact details, products, services and to add some personality to the channel. However, we found that getting this right for a number of different screen resolutions and devices was tricky. So for now have left it with a plain image that works for all resolutions, it also serves to draw attention to the content within the channel.

Secondly there is the info and settings tab (shown below). Here you can edit the title of your channel as well as the main description; this is the same one that you can edit on the homepage in the top right. You can also insert a number of tags that summarise your channel.

Focus on the keywords that relate to you and that also have some search volume. Here you can select which of the three views that we discussed above. Again we opted for the featured tab. You can also select or deselect to have subscribed users go straight to your feed. This will be down to your user experience on the various tabs and what works best for you; give all options a try and see how the engagement varies (use the analytics tab for an understanding of user engagement – we will get to that in a minute).

Finally under the Featured Tab (shown below) you can adjust the presentation of your homepage; obviously very important if you have set this to be your main landing page.

There are four options:

Creator – You have one featured video at the top and then the page shows your featured playlists below. This is great for most individuals and business channels as it gives a broad view of your content, especially if you feature your content under a range of topics.
Blogger – described by YouTube as “A reverse chronological vlogroll of a featured playlist or your recent activity”.
Network – this would be great if you are aggregating content on your channel or if you have a number of channels that you want to promote but probably not the best option for most businesses wishing to showcase their own videos.
Everything – pretty much what it says on the tin; you have a featured video, then featured playlists followed by some featured channels.

Social Sharing with YouTube

If you click on the drop down in the top right of the channel you will see an option for “settings”. There is a lot in here and we will not cover all of this today as really I am just seeking to take you through the cosmetic aspects of your channel, but it is worth exploring to see what you can do.

One of the settings that does affect the user experience side of your channel is the sharing options. This allows you to control both, how the activity that you are involved in on YouTube is presented in your YouTube feed as well as your connected social channels.

We have set ours to share everything at the moment as we are only connected to Twitter through the account link up; the settings you choose will depend on your behaviour within YouTube as well as the content that you are receiving from other users and it’s applicability to each of your linked social networks.

It means that you need to really take care of everything that you do and say on YouTube as it will be publicly visible, not just where you interact, but also on your home feed and across your linked social networks.

YouTube Analytics

Although it is not necessary to use YouTube Analytics for the set up of your channel it should be referred to frequently once you have content on the channel.

If you are a Google Analytics user (and even if not) it will all be pretty straightforward as you can just see which videos are viewed and how they are interacted with and on what devices.

You can also see things such as:

Geography
Demographics
Traffic sources
Devices
Subscribers
Likes/Dislikes
Shares
Comments.

This data is fantastic at pointing you in the right direction with not just your channel set up but also with the content production.

A note on the author

My Web Presenters have pioneered and built the market leading technology for using web presenters on your website. They offer web video production and marketing that evokes an emotional response in the viewer and brings them closer to your brand.

What Super Bowl Commercials Can Teach Us About SEO

Steve Webb — 2012-02-03T12:54:38+01:00

Posted by Steve Webb

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Steve just wrote this post so he could watch old Super Bowl commercials." And you're not wrong ;-) I'll jump at any chance to watch (and share) YouTube videos. Fortunately, in the process of sifting through my favorite ads from years past, I was able to select a few videos that can actually teach us valuable SEO lessons. So sit back, and enjoy these all-time great Super Bowl commercials, while I drop a few SEO nuggets of knowledge along the way.

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Our first video is truly a classic... and one of the best examples of one-upmanship you will ever see. Of course, I'm referring to "The Showdown," the 1993 McDonald's Super Bowl commercial in which Michael Jordan and Larry Bird play an epic game of H.O.R.S.E.

A few days ago, David Klein wrote a nice post about strategic link building. In this post, David references the old outrun a lion joke, which goes like this: two men are walking in the jungle when they see a lion running towards them. One of the men immediately puts on his running shoes. The other man, in a state of shock, asks, "Do you seriously think you're going to outrun that lion?!?!" To which his walking partner replies, "I don't have to outrun the lion. I just have to outrun you."

The joke's punchline applies to almost every facet of SEO. Whether it's organic search, PPC, or social media, your strategy doesn't have to be the best in the world. It just has to be better than the strategies of your competitors. So the important question becomes, "What are my competitors' strategies?" To help you answer this question, I'll quickly run through a few tools you might find helpful (feel free to add more in the comments). For organic search and PPC, you can identify your competitors' keywords with SpyFu. For link building, you can research competitors' backlinks using Open Site Explorer and SEO Book's link analysis tools. For social media, I recommend reading Rand's post about tracking the ROI of social media. His ideas for tracking your social presence can also be applied to monitoring your competitors. Finally, to learn even more about your competition, I strongly recommend Selena Narayanasamy's guide to competitive research.

You've Got To Pick Your Battles

In the previous section, I emphasized the importance of doing whatever it takes to beat your competitors. However, going head to head with your competitors is not always the most effective strategy. Sometimes it makes more sense to fly under the radar or employ a completely unique strategy to avoid your competition and accomplish your goals. To illustrate this point, our next video is Coca-Cola's 2008 Super bowl commercial, "It's Mine," which includes a bitter competition between Stewie and Underdog that is ultimately won by a surprise participant.

Knowing which battles you can win and which ones will be losing efforts is critically important in SEO, especially when you're creating your initial SEO strategy. For example, you don't want to waste your resources competing against well-established brands for a few highly competitive organic keywords when you can allocate those same resources towards competing for a larger number of less competitive keywords. In fact, this is actually the number one keyword research mistake identified in a recent post by James Agate. The same thought process also applies to PPC management. If you're in an extremely competitive industry with high dollar CPC keywords, you can quickly exhaust your budget if you don't make appropriate strategic decisions. Don't make the mistake of bidding on keywords simply because your competitors are doing so. You need to conduct your own independent research to identify keywords that convert well for your website.

Always Get A Second Opinion

We all have our own favorite analytics package, reporting system, backlink investigator, etc. And I'm not here to kick off a flame war about which tool or data source is better. I just want you to realize that no matter what your favorite tool or data source is, it never hurts to get a second opinion, which can help capture a more representative view of your problem space. Alternatively, if you rely too heavily on one approach, you might find yourself in a situation where you only see what you want to see (and miss important insights that a second opinion could have offered), which is exactly what happens in our next video: CareerBuilder's 2006 Super Bowl commercial, "Monkey Business."

To help you find a second opinion in various areas, I will list a few resources here, and I encourage you to add more in the comments. First, on the analytics side of things, Aaron Wall wrote a great post about why you should use multiple analytics tools, and Mat Bennett recently posted a list of 7 alternatives to Google Analytics. For keyword research, you can use Wordtracker and WordStream as alternatives to Google's Keyword Tool. Finally, for investigating backlinks, I've already mentioned a few options above, but you can also try Ontolo's link building tools.

(Social) Sharing Is Caring

As we're all well aware, the social Web is stronger than ever in 2012, and there are no signs that it will slow down any time soon. So whether it's getting your content tweeted on Twitter, liked on Facebook, or +1ed on Google+, you should definitely incorporate social signals into your SEO arsenal. And that brings me to our next video, which teaches us the importance of sharing: Emerald Nuts' 2005 Super Bowl commercial, "Exaggerating Dad."

I've already linked to Rand's post about measuring social media's ROI (if you haven't already read it, I encourage you to do so), but here are a few more socially relevant resources. First, given Google's strong commitment to Google+, I recommend AJ Kohn's comprehensive Google+ SEO guide. On the Facebook side of things, check out Jennifer Lopez's post about Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about and Adam Sherk's list of Facebook analytics tools. Finally, for Twitter, you can use Twitter Web Analytics, or you can read David Strom's list of Twitter analytics tools.

If You Will It, It Is No Dream

Our last lesson extends well beyond the world of SEO. Regardless of what activity you're participating in (whether it's SEO-specific like link building or life-specific like getting in shape), perseverance is the key. We're all familiar with the old adage, "It's a marathon; not a sprint," and those words are particularly true for SEO activities. With that in mind, our final video is Volkswagen's 2011 Super Bowl commercial, "The Force" (you can't have a list of Super Bowl commercials without this one popping up). Be like Mini Vader, and don't give up!

I hope you enjoyed the videos and learned a few things along the way. I don't know about you, but I'm excited to see what this year's Super Bowl commercials can teach us about SEO.

How to Turn Your Content into Link Bait

Brian Flores — 2012-02-01T09:17:35+01:00

Posted by Brian Flores

In late December of 2011, HTML5 cheat sheets, which we originally created for WebDesignLedger (WDL), were shared by Google on their Google Developers profile. WDL has 74k+ Twitter followers. Google Developers has 65k+ users in their circles. Together, their promotion increased our referral traffic for that day by 300%. Since then, we’ve experienced a steady stream of traffic and incoming back links. This was definitely a link bait win for us.

I want to share with you how I turn content like our HTML5 cheat sheets into link bait. It’s a straightforward process and a model to emulate for anyone that’s aspiring to land some pretty sticky web content of their own.

The Brainstorming Session

Inviting creative outside-the-box thinkers as well as pragmatists to the brainstorming pow wow can help you come up with more exciting content ideas and effective ways to getting it pushed to the right audiences.

Don’t feel like you have to recreate the wheel every time. If you’re running out of new content ideas, try revisiting infographics that you tweeted in the past, articles you bookmarked, free tools, widgets you built, etc. and see if you can improve them in a valuable way.

Actually, the HTML5 cheat sheets are a perfect example of improving something already created. The idea started when a coworker forwarded me an HTML5 article that contained a wonderful cheat sheet. It had useful information and a great design, but I thought it could be more comprehensive and print-friendly.

A light went on in my head! What about creating a comprehensive cheat sheet that is print and web-friendly! Our graphic designer did some research and discovered that other cheat sheets tried to accomplish these objectives but with little success. We were definitely onto something. Now we just needed to develop it!

Developing Valuable Content

Before creating content, take time to really examine why your content is going to be valuable. This preliminary step provides better focus and direction during the content development stage.

Personally, the HTML5 cheat sheet is an instance of learning this lesson the hard way. I knew I wanted it to be comprehensive, print/web-friendly but I focused too much on its layout and design. I neglected to consider logistical elements such as background color, dimensions, if the graphic was proportionally correct, etc.

The first draft of the cheat sheet that I received from our graphic designer had a clean design and a robust color scheme, but it still had some major issues. For starters, it had too much information on it, which led to barely readable text. Its black background drained our printer of ink. The cheat sheets also became distorted when printed on certain paper sizes. I could already foresee the criticism coming from web developers and designers.

We couldn’t go live with this version of the HTML5 sheet and needed to drastically overhaul its design. The background color was an easy fix but organizing all of its information was going to take some time. Our graphic designer laid out some ideas. However, we still couldn’t get all the content to fit properly.

In the end, we decided that we would divide the cheat sheets into three parts, which could easily be printed on legal paper or larger. It turned out to be a good decision, but it definitely taught me the importance of taking some time before developing content to deeply examining why and how content is going to be valuable and well-received.

Know Who You’re Writing For

Try to familiarize yourself with the guidelines set by a publisher before creating content. Almost every popular and highly authoritative website has a particular tone, scope of topics, amount of words, limitations on self-promotion, etc. that must be maintained. Trust me, it's never fun "completing" an article only to find out that an editor won't publish it until it meets their standards.

With all said, sometimes good content is good content. If you have fantastic content in your possession and you're absolutely certain that you don't want to change it to meet a publisher's standards, then consider publishing the content as is on your website and finding the right promoter to direct traffic to it. I'll discuss this part later.

Lastly, make sure your content is factually correct, lacks grammar and spelling errors, coded correctly (if it's interactive content), and of course has a well-polished design.

Finding the Right Publishers and Influencers

Your content is only as good as who's publishing and promoting it. Many link builders often choose not to concern themselves with critical relationships that go into creating link bait. This only hurts your chances of gaining plenty of social mentions and new linking opportunities.

To exact a list of potential publishers, I regularly use Google search operators like the following:

[industry] + intext:write for us
[industry] + inurl:”write-for-us”
[intitle:industry] + inurl:”contact-us”

Here are some great resources for learning about other search operators:

These days, publishers and social influencers are communicating more than ever on Twitter/Google+, perhaps because these two social networks are valuable tools for communicating with their followers. Typically, my first point of contact with a potential promoter of content is through a Tweet. Email addresses are important, too, but they serve a different purpose. I'll explain that later.

If I need to get in contact with a potential promoter of my content (especially one with a substantial social media presence), I make it a priority to find their company Twitter handle and their Google+ profile, and any of their colleagues. I recommend that you do the same. Definitely engage with them, add them to your circles, retweet their content, +1 it -- bottom line, get them familiar with you.

Ask for their personal contact information once you've developed a good rapport and feel comfortable asking them to review your content. Many content editors are pressured to produce/post a certain amount of content per week or month, so checking out your content is something they most likely will consider. If they pass on your content, ask them if they could forward you to other websites/influencers that might want to publish it.

After a publisher agrees to move forward with posting your content, I’d check the following to ensure that your content has a real shot at becoming link bait:

Your content has optimized title tags, H1s and H2s, URLs, meta descriptions, alt image tags, link attributes, page load times, etc.
Ask if it’s possible to publish your content on a day that receives the most traffic. Mondays and Tuesdays are usually those days.
See if the publisher will provide a list of followers/fellow publishers who might want to promote your content to their followers as well.
If possible, host the content on your website and have the promoter write a blog post that directs traffic to you.
Make sure your web hosting plan can handle an uptick in traffic and resources.
Be patient and flexible with publishers especially if it’s your first time working with them. If you’re easy to work with, publishers usually like to make sure your content launches without a hitch.
Confirm the publication date and time of article. I’ve actually missed perfect link bait opportunities because I wasn’t told by a publisher that the content was already posted.
Check to if publisher will allow HTML code that can be copied and pasted for easy sharing.
Include a branded logo on infographics/images as well as any sources you used.

Tracking and Monitoring Social Media Buzz

Now the fun part, broadcasting and monitoring the buzz that's stirring around in your industry. Determine which conversations you want to insert yourself into to widen your reach. Here's your chance to go hash tag crazy. I strongly recommend using these social media tips:

Follow, publicly list or ‘circle’ influential people who retweeted your content and the people they follow.
Send personalized tweets/direct messages to potentially good promoters to avoid sounding like spam.
Tagging people is absolutely important to being seen and tracking on Google+, so definitely incorporate ‘+’ or ‘@’ signs when promoting your content to possible promoters.
If possible, avoid using URL shorteners and make sure your URLs are descriptive. This is not only for branding purposes, it also helps build trust with people.

Tying it All Together

As you should have caught on to by now, creating link bait is a basic yet very involved process. Each component of the process has several large and small factors that can ultimately impact your content's chances of becoming legitimate link bait. This is the process that has provided me the most success; it certainly attracted Google Developers' team. I hope the information I shared helps you land sticky web content of your own on the web, or at the very least, sparks a discussion of other link builders best practices.

Is Charity an Impulse Purchase?

Todd Bailey — 2012-01-31T10:35:00+01:00

Posted by Todd Bailey

Some aspects of marketing seem intuitive, yet after time passes, the reality of data collection sets in. Such is the apparent case regarding the donations-through-text process. An online post revisits the altruistic sentiments relayed by those who donated to Haiti after the destructive earthquake of two years ago.

The report offers some disconcerting news for the Red Cross and other bastions of goodwill, hoping to recruit more funds through the texts of donors. Initially the text-to-give sentiment seemed successful; about $43 million was raised via 4.3 million text donations, many donors doing so immediately or soon following the prompt to give.

Those numbers were impressive. It's no wonder the text-to-give process was repeated, yet not reproducing such altruistic numbers. The American Red Cross garnered $30 million via texts for Haiti, but when trying to replicate efforts for Japan ($1.2 million) and domestic tornado relief last year ($1.2 million) the texting channel did not run as plentiful.

What's a bit more worthy of head scratching is the tenacity of the donors. Of those who gave and were surveyed, more than half reported dedicating little to no interest to recovery efforts thereafter, as if the donation was somewhat of an "impulse" purchase. In addition, only two in five surveyed, who previously gave to Haiti, gave support after the Japanese tsunami, disrupting the hopes of goodwill sources, who were hoping to "target" donors or somehow define a targeted "market" of donors.

More bad news for forming an ostensible target market:

More than 80% who gave to Haiti initially via text, gave no other way thereafter
Only one-third who gave to Haiti, did so more than once (text contributions were limited to $10 per text)

Smart phone usage is booming and connecting with users is highly championed in the online marketing world, but text-to-give does not seem to have the viral inertia showcased through Haiti's relief. What gives? Tim Ogden, a Philanthropy Action blogger, offers, "This very much reinforces that if a charity doesn’t have something to drive what is very much an impulse decision, then text-to-give is not a particularly valuable fund-raising tool.”

Suggestions and Questions:

It's difficult to assess why text-to-give efforts did not replicate the success it experienced with Haiti efforts. The tenaciously waning US economy could have been a factor as well as marketing efforts aligned with the text-to-give endeavor. What the report does not feature is the logistics of the efforts.

Did later efforts utilize social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook?
Did bastions of goodwill contact news sources, facilitating exposure of the text-to-give efforts?
Were official Web sites launched, using SEO efforts to boost search engine exposure and awareness?

It would be a fault to dismiss future efforts due to the weak traction of a couple following the Haiti attempts. Ogden made a good point; text-to-give (or any on or offline effort) does not guarantee results unless it is fueled by other on and offline marketing initiatives. Marketing and connecting with targets are ongoing processes, necessitating repetition and multiple on and offline platforms. Perhaps charities should contact experienced off and online marketers rather than bank on "impulse" decisions.

An Attempt To Build The Perfect Link Checker

Netvantage Marketing — 2012-01-30T10:34:50+01:00

Posted by Netvantage Marketing

Lesson #1: No Matter How Good Something Is I Want Something Better

Like most people who play in the broken link building space, I was overjoyed when I found the Check My Links extension for Google Chrome. jrcooper did an excellent write up on this extension a few months ago in the ol' Youmoz blog (find it here). It was lightning fast, remarkably simple and it even had a sort of sexy look to it. One thing I've learned throughout my life, however, is that I'm never satisfied, and the more I used this tool I found it lacking a few things that I felt I just had to have:

The ability to export to a .csv. Sometimes you're crawling through a bunch of pages and I just want to be able to pull down a list of what's dead without having to do any real manual labor.
The ability to see the number of links pointing to a single page and/or the entire domain that the broken link is on.
The ability to see if the domains the broken links were on are available and the ability to quickly buy them.

So of course I worked around these issues for a while but it always burned at me when I knew I could be more efficient if I could just get my tools to do what I wanted them to. So I sat down with our neighbors at Nicholas Creative (I am by no means a developer, nor is anyone else at Netvantage) and asked them if they could help build me my perfect backlink checker. They agreed, and after several rounds of iterations and some helpful feedback from beta testers (thanks to Gab from SEOROI, Ben at Ontolo and Garrett at Citation Labs for helping spread the word) we finally finished our first "tool" and have dubbed it Domain Hunter Plus.

Here's the lowdown:

Once installed you'll see the DHP logo in the upper right hand corner of Chrome.

Click on it and you'll have the option to scan your page - click Start Scan and let the magic begin!

Once your page is scanned, DHP will show you all the broken outbound links, tell you if the domain is available and show you the number of links pointing to the individual page and the domain according to the Linkscape API. Even better? Click on the numbers and it will open Open Site Explorer for your page or the whole domain! If you want to buy a domain, leave the check box filled in and click register and the domains will be in your cart in GoDaddy in a new tab. If you want to save the data for later just click export and all the data will be neatly bundled up into a .csv file for your later use.

Interested yet?

We're pretty excited about this tool and it definitely knocks a couple steps out of the typical process for broken link building. If you're interest is piqued, head on over to the Domain Hunter Plus website to try it out for yourself or learn a little more in the walk through video there. The Nicholas Creative Blog and the Netvantage Blog also have write ups, but you're probably better off just downloading it and using it so I won't waste your time with more links. Happy domain hunting and link building!

How to Determine Exactly Which Google Display Network Site Delivered a Conversion

petrosianii — 2012-01-26T10:47:58+01:00

Posted by petrosianii

Or How to Track the Original (or First) Referrer of a Conversion using Google Analytics

The purpose of this post is to answer one specific question: How to find out exactly which Google Adwords Display Network site was responsible for a conversion recorded in the Goal Funnel Visualization section in Google Analytics.

Now, I am sure there is more than one way to do this. I am sure there are cleaner, easier, simpler methods of doing this than my way. But as my Indian coding brothers like to say, "I didn't found one" - not one that worked consistently and under all cases, at least. Admittedly, this way is a bit complicated, consists of a lot of steps, and isn't all that intuitive. But it works. Our team spent two days researching, testing, tweaking, over many different test cases. So, we're confident it works and are excited to share it with you.

Can't You do This With Adwords Conversion Tracking?

Supposedly, you can do this with Adwords Conversion Tracking, as Brad Geddes explains here. However, we needed to do this for a client account, which complicates things. In order for Conversion Tracking to work, you have to be able to link your Adwords and Analytics accounts (I think). But you can only do this if the Adwords and Analytics account are under the same Google Account credentials .. or something. At any rate, we couldn't figure out how to do it this way. We are managing the client's Adwords campaign inside our own Adwords account, but the client is sharing the analytics data with us from inside their own Analytics account. So, linking the two - we couldn't figure out how to do that. (I don't even think it's possible when the Adwords and Analytics accounts have different usernames, but if someone else knows how, by all means, share!)

What You Will Need

The Filter Manager - You will need to create two custom filters which we will show you later.
Manual URL Tagging - with a slight modification
Javascripts mentioned below
A webserver to upload a .js file to be called remotely

The Steps

1. Add the GA Initial Referrer .js file to your webserver. You can find the script on our website here. (Note: Please ignore the other scripts and samples on this page; this is a testing page we use to house some coding we're working on). Kudos to John Henson at LunarMetrics, Brad at the ROI Revolution Blog, and Brian Clifton's first referrer tracking scripts. Scroll down to the section called "GA Initial Referrer Script". Copy this to a text file, rename the .txt extension to a .js extension, and upload to your webserver. Remember the path because you will need it later.

2. Add the GA Initial Referrer Script 2 .js script to the web pages you want to track. You can find the script on the same page as in # 1, in the section titled "GA Initial Referrer Script 2". Add this just above your existing Google Analytics tracking scripts, on all pages. You may even add this script on your confirmation pages as well. Your revised tracking script should look like this:

Note that you will need change the path of the first line of <script src= ...> above to whatever path location and filename you established for your .js file. You will also need to add the profile UA ID you're tracking where it says UA-XXXXXX-X.

3. Create a filter to view the conversion referrer. The filter looks like this:

What this fliter does is takes the value in utm_medium of a manually tagged URL and rewrites it to the utm_source value. Later on you will see why this filter is needed when we get down to how you're supposed to manually tag the URL. For ease of reading, the values for the above filter are

Filter Type: Custom -> Advanced
Field A: Campaign Medium -> ^(cpc|ppc)$
Field B: Referral -> ^https?://([^/]+)/
Output To: Campaign Source -> $B1
Field A required: Yes
Field B required: Yes
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

By the way, you can find the place in Google Analytics to create such a filter here. See the yellow highlighted section below:

4. Create a second filter to view the full URL of the referrer. (GA out of the box doesn't show you the full URL). It looks like this:

For ease of reading, the values for the above filter are

Filter Type: Custom Filter
Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: leave blank
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined $A1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

5. Manually tag the URLs for your Display Network ads following this syntax:

http://gnosisarts.com/home/Free_Press_Releases-a?utm_source=&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=EP

Notice the orange highlighted section in the code above. Normally, you need to specify a value after the " = " sign for utm_source. However, for this case, you must leave the value blank. I am not sure why, but we noticed that, when you put in a value for "utm_source=", that value overrides everything else in the User Defined Value segment of your Analytics. We don't want this value to be hardcoded in there. Rather, we want it dynamically populated, as it were, from our customized tracking scripts.

Now you see the reason behind the first filter (number 3 above). Since we are rewriting the utm_medium to the utm_source value, we suspect that this is the reason we need to leave the "utm_source=" value as blank.

For example, when we put in "PRON3" as the value for "utm_source=", this is what we get in Analytics:

When we specified "utm_source=PRON3", this is what results. We get a (not set) for User Defined Value, when what we are really looking for is the original referrer URL.

But when we left "utm_source=" as blank, this is what we get (see lines numbers 7 and 8):

Notice that we tried many different combinations and permutations of this (lines 1 - 6 and 9-10). All other versions of the manually tagged URL produced a "(not set)" in the User Defined Value.

Putting it All Together

What line 7 in the picture above tells us is that a person started off at a Display Network Placement of "http://www.pressreleasesonline.net/2011/ ..." and ended up at our conversion confirmation page (http://gnosisarts.com/home/Thank-You3.html). Google Analytics now shows us the full referrer URL of any content network placement that delivers a conversion! This is valuable because it gives us another way to see which content network sites are producing conversions and which aren't. We no longer have to just rely on the CTR of the Content Network placement to evaluate that placement's worth to our campaign.

Now, we do not know which of the elements mentioned above is causing GA to report all this in the way that we want. We tried many different combinations and permutations and none of them gave us exactly what we were looking for except this one. So, since we can't be for sure, we suggest you use all the steps we stated above - even if one or more of them is unneeded. Again, I'm sure there's a simpler way to do this, but we don't know of one that works as reliably as this one.

Google Analytics Cross Domain Tracking Made Easy

Martijn Verstrepen — 2012-01-19T10:28:43+01:00

Posted by Martijn Verstrepen

A default Google Analytics implementation will break your visits when tracking cross domain websites (such as webshops using an external payment gateway) because the first-party cookies can only be read from the domain that set the cookies. When switching domains a new cookie is created and thus a new visit is registered. This could result in an incorrect report of the number of visits, but even worse, it could also strip the original referrer from your visits. All that hard work that has been put into optimizing your SEO and SEM campaigns goes down the drain when all conversions and transactions get attributed to your own website as a referrer.

This can easily be fixed by adding some additional lines to the Google Analytics tracking script and by adjusting all links and forms pointing between the domains. This procedure is well documented by Google Code. For relatively simple websites adjusting all links and forms is pretty easy, but as time passes and your website becomes more complex maintaining a correct implementation becomes harder. You might forget to adjust some links or someone adds a new form that doesn't have the right adjustments. Luckily jQuery offers the ability to automatically adjust all links and forms pointing between the domains by including one script that can be used on all pages. To learn how jQuery works, how you can select specific DOM elements, and how you can apply functions, check out this jQuery documentation page.

Adjustments to pages on Domain A
If you haven't done so already include the jQuery library within your page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Adjust your Google Analytics tracking script by adding the following line:

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Your script will look like this and should be placed in your <head> section:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount','UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
//]]>
</script>

Include the following jQuery script after the jQuery include and before the GA tracking script:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function() {
// Add onClick _link to all <a> elements on page where href contains example-B.co.uk
$("a[href*='example-B.co.uk']").click(function() {
_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]);
return false;
});

// Add onSubmit _linkByPost to all <form> elements on page where action contains example-B.co.uk
$("form[action*='example-B.co.uk']").attr("onSubmit","_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this])");
});
//]]>
</script>

Adjustments to pages on Domain B
If you haven't done so already include the jQuery library within your page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Adjust your Google Analytics tracking script by adding the following line:

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Include the following jQuery script after the jQuery include and before the GA tracking script:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function() {
// Add onClick _link to all <a> elements on page where href contains example-A.com
$("a[href*='example-A.com']").click(function() {
_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]);
return false;
});

// Add onSubmit _linkByPost to all <form> elements on page where action contains example-A.com
$("form[action*='example-A.com']").attr("onSubmit","_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this])");
});
//]]>
</script>

You can test this by inspecting the url after clicking on any of the links or submitting any of the forms between the sites. You should notice a string of parameters appended to your url containing the cookie data from your originating domain. Google Analytics will process this url and recreate the cookie on the other domain causing the visit not to break and to keep the original referrer.