Category: Analytics

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March update

Hi Everyone,
It’s spring, which means it’s already been a full quarter since the year started! As always there is a lot of new digital marketing information to catch up on and hopefully implement into your strategy as we enter the next three months.

If you follow me on social media (Facebook / Twitter / Linkedin) you may have already seen some of the following articles, but I have also compiled some here so you may easily read through. Each month I sift through a variety of articles with topics you will find useful as you build an online marketing strategy for your business.

Enjoy and relax while you learn with the content I’ve shared, and if you have anything you want to discuss, drop me a line.
Andy Commons – Internet Marketing Consultant
Andy@andycommons.com
www.andycommons.com
406-962-5683

Search Engine Optimization
Google gives SEO tips on how to handle day-long site closures
Need to turn off your website for a period of time, but worry your Google rankings will drop? Here are some tips from Google’s John Mueller on how to handle it.

Blogs
Will my organic rankings suffer if I don’t have a blog?
A blog can be a major investment, but the SEO benefits can make it worth the effort. Columnist Stephanie LeVonne makes the case for why blogging works to improve search visibility.

The Best Words and Themes to Generate Featured Snippets
Featured snippets have proven to be a valuable source of organic traffic and increased click through rates. This post explores the effects of query modifiers, CPC, search volume, and query length on featured snippets. 

Social Media
Follow These Simple Steps To A Massive Social Following
By following a few simple rules, any business can begin building or expanding their current social media presence.

Categories
Analytics

“redirect.viglink.com” in Google Analytics

If like me, you have started to see a referral source in your analytics of Redirect.viglink.com on or about April 1, it’s no April fools joke.

Instead, for my client,  it turned out to be a change in the way the website PromoPro.com built their referral link.

While other companies may also use viglink, my client was getting a decent amount of traffic via PromoPro right up until March 31. It stopped, and an equal amount of hits started coming in from referral.viglink.com.

PromoPro is by no means the only company that has figured out how to make money by linking automatically to content. So your original traffic source may be any number of sites that happen to use the VigLink API to generate links to your site.

This may obscure the original source of the link making it harder for you to know the true referral source. I hope this tip helps you figure it out.

If you, dear reader, have something to add let me know and I’m happy to update this post.

-Andy

viglink

 

 

Categories
Analytics Pay Per Click

New trick with Google remarketing Smart Lists

If you’ve seen banner ads start to appear everywhere you visit on the web after visiting a certain website, you’ve been on the receiving end of “Remarketing”. Many companies now offer this service, including Facebook and Google Adwords.

As an advertiser taking advantage of this, there can be an almost unlimited number of ways to target people.  It can be overwhelming.  Google has recently announced they will help with that problem.   

It’s called Smart Lists.  With Smart Lists, you can now let Google watch the response of users, and based on performance goals you establish, Adwords will adjust where your ads are shown to help maximize your ad’s performance.

Now this sounds great, but remember, this is a computer program making decisions for you. So I recommend you try this out with only a portion of your daily budget and use another portion of your daily budget for a separate campaign that you run yourself. This way you can compare and decide for yourself if the Google automation is really working well for you.

More details about this are found on the Google Analyics blog at:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2014/04/smarter-remarketing-with-google.html

If you find this idea intriguing and want some help getting started, then give me a call. Helping you with your Adwords campaign is part of what I do.

-Andy

 

Categories
Analytics

Avinash Kaushik Keynote

If you have heard of Google Analytics, then you may know of Avinash Kaushik and his site Occam’s Razor. The insights I can gain from Google Analytics really helps me put some tracking behind various marketing efforts to see how well they are working.

The Marketing Pilgrim site posted this story about his recent keynote address at SES New York.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/avinash-kaushik-discusses-web-analytics-wives-and-girlfriends.html