Whilst Facebook was busy announcing the new Graph Search to the world’s assembled media, Google slyly introduced a new look Google Analytics fascia. It’s not just superficial though – there are some changes geared towards making the analytics experience smoother and easier.
Aside from the aesthetic difference of white widgets on a grey background, the biggest change to the Dashboards is the ability to customise the layout of them as shown below.
This allows for concentrated focus on one particular set of metrics if for example, there is more data, or just for those the user considers most important. A small but very useful change. Read the rest of "Google Analytics’ New Look"
Setting the right goals for your site is an essential way of collecting quality data. Simply relying on traffic or page views will not give you and your company a clear enough picture of how your site drives business.
However, picking a goal alone (x number of purchases, for example) will not give much indication as to where and how your site is bringing in customers. To best achieve this you need to set up goal funnels.
Without setting up your funnels properly you’ll end up with goals like this:
In this post we’ll show you what goal funnels are and why they are so useful in providing solid data from which you can make informed policy decisions.
For each goal, there will be a route that visitors to your page will take that leads to the completion of that goal. It used to be the case you could see how the majority of visitors landed on the site, but with the continuing loss of referral data, it’s becoming harder to do this.
For this, let’s use an example of an online bookshop.
One of your goals (or main goal) will be to sell books. You may well have a homepage with links to categories of books. Clicking on a category could be the first stage in the funnel. You can track, from the homepage, how many people click on a category link. Read the rest of "How Google Analytics Funnels Improve Your Goals"
Last month, Danny Sullivan revealed that search marketers were to lose a new source of referrer data – iOS 6 Google searches. This comes off the back of updates to Google and Firefox in the past year that have also resulted in less referrer data. Thanks to a clever Google Analytics dashboard from Dan Barker, we can now see the true impact of the iOS 6 update. The less referrer data there is, the harder it is for search marketers to monitor and refine their strategy based on actual data rather than guesswork.
Something that Brandwatch’s Andy Keetch spoke about at the Content Marketing Show we really emphasise on our SEO courses is the importance of data-informed marketing – that’s hard to reinforce when that data is disappearing!
So where has all the referrer data gone? And how can we get it back? Let’s think like Sherlock and go hunting for answers…
The Great Loss of Referral Data – Background
Just over a year ago in October 2011, Google created SSL search for signed-in users in an effort to improve privacy. This meant that any organic searches were put through to analytics with the keyword (not provided), which immediately created a headache on our Google Analytics courses with everyone wanted to know what was going on!
So in your traffic report you can see how many people arrived on your site via organic search, but for over 30% of searches you just see (not provided) as a keyword. Google originally said this would only affect single figures.
Firefox then did the same earlier this year – switching to Google SSL search by default when using the built in search bar.
Interestingly, while the move to SSL is touted as a ‘privacy’ measure, if the clicks come from paid ads, you can see the keywords that sent people to your site. This muddies the waters a bit when it comes to privacy and comes close to being a ‘pay for data’ issue.
On Tuesday 20th November we attended the first Content Marketing Show in London, a new offshoot of BrightonSEO. As you can probably guess, it was a day dedicated to content marketing in all shapes and sizes, with a diverse line-up of speakers giving insight into how to source, create and promote your business using content.
We decided that instead of the usual conference round-up post, we would compile the best advice from the day into a complete guide to content marketing. We’ve also added our own insight based on our experiences at Silicon Beach as well advice from top industry experts. Hopefully this will serve as a one-stop resource to learn about content marketing – but don’t forget that we do run regular content marketing workshops in Brighton! We also touch on content marketing from an SEO perspective on our SEO courses if you want to learn more about how content works as part of a wider marketing strategy.
We’ve picked our top 16 points, but if you feel we’ve missed anything then please let us know in the comments or tweet us @sbttraining and we’ll be happy to add it in.
TL;DR - Tell Stories, Draw an Emotional Response, Everyone is Influential, Be Bold, Be Different, Be Nice, Know your Audience, Know yourself, Use the Tools at your Disposal, Use Data to Drive Content, Perfect your Briefs, Pitch it Right, Content Flows, and finally If in Doubt, Steal from the Experts. Read the rest of "How to do Content Marketing – (Almost) Everything you Need to Know"
During my morning round up of BrightonSEO I asked the question ‘Has SEO grown up?‘ For my afternoon round up I’m going to focus on one tip from each talk and why I liked it.
The afternoon was as varied as the morning with topics from linguistics to affiliate marketing, all from good speakers with something interesting to say and wisdom to impart on the audience.
We were also lucky enough to spot one of our Top SEO Trumps in the flesh! Here’s Ralph Tegtmeier enjoying his pack. We left our final packs dotted about at the after party. Did you find one? Let us know!
It’s a busy time for marketers Brighton this week with Brighton Digital Marketing Festival (#BDMF12) running Wednesday & Thursday and BrightonSEO (#brightonseo) running on Friday with some extra workshops the day before! We have tried to cover the lot, with round ups, analysis, photos and videos from the talks we found the most interesting.
We were live tweeting during all 3 days, and you can check out our BDMF Storify at the bottom of the post to see the reaction on Twitter from attendees.
If you missed out (or attended and want to learn more) then don’t forget that we offer a wide range of SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing and Email Marketing courses which are a great way to begin or enhance your digital marketing learning.
In this post we’ve written up a brief summary of each talk, but we have also written individual posts for the most interesting talks. Keep on reading for a round up of the day or scroll straight to the bottom for the Storify! We have also covered BDMF12 Day 2 in another post.
BDMF12 Day 1
Keynotes
Matt Curry, Head of e-Commerce, Lovehoney The Things We Do for Love (honey)
What a start to the day! Rude words and sex. Matt Curry is a self-professed ‘nerdy statistician’ who happens to work for an online sex shop, having previously sold hot meals to old people.
During an entertaining opening talk, Matt focused on the power of love in marketing. Expanding this concept, he claims that people don’t want to give us their info, so how do we love people we don’t know?
Using Lovehoney as an example, Matt’s main point was how important it is to test and to understand demographics. For example, how do they market differently to ‘unsatisfied traditionalists’, ‘tepid explorers’ and ‘free enlighteneds’. This is important because a product that would appeal to free enlighteneds would frighten off unsatisfied traditionalists.
Matt devised a system that ranked users based on what they are into – we don’t even want to think what interest the 5th scale!
Unfortunately, this system was ruined by a rather famous book called ’50 Shades of Grey’ which completely transformed the ‘tepid explorers’ group and pushed them to search out more ‘extreme’ products.
This brought the talk onto testing, something Matt doesn’t believe marketers do properly. For example, Lovehoney tested 24 different versions of a front page image. Although it turns out that ‘boobs always win.’ Read the rest of "#BDMF12 Day 1 – Brighton Digital Marketing Festival"
When Bing announced on 27th June 2012 that they had introduced a Disavow Links feature to Webmaster Tools, of course a number of blog posts and comment pieces cropped up wondering when (as opposed to if) Google would follow suit.
We were therefore surprised to see posts like this one Search Engine Land and this one on Search Engine Journal which questioned whether it’s worth spending the time checking back links and submitting them to be disavowed through Bing and, when the time comes, Google. There are even suggestions that the functionality could increase black-hat and negative SEO, rather than stamp it out (more on this later).
I tend to agree with the majority leaving comments on the above articles – that disavowing links, in Bing at least, is simple and realistically can only help a website’s SEO. What it will do is help combat negative SEO, help companies try and rectify mistakes made in the past and, most importantly, is a strong signal to the internet marketing industry that black hat techniques of buying high volumes of low quality links is absolutely a thing of the past.
As Google Analytics recently updated their In-Page reports to include a ‘Browser Size’ tool, I thought now would be a good time to take a look at how you can use GA’s in-page reports to improve your website for users.
Make your users happy!
In-Page analytics allows you to see how people are using your site at page level.
It’s a basic tool compared to other paid options and misses advanced options like heat maps, but it is free!
By the end of the day you will know how to use Google Analytics to monitor, measure and improve your site!
We also run an Advanced Google Analytics course for those who want to get stuck into advanced tracking, custom variables and advanced reporting.
Google Analytics In-Page Report Dashboard
You can access your In-Page reports by signing into Analytics and selecting All Pages from the Content menu.
Once on the All Pages screen, choose ‘In-Page’ from the menu at the top.
If you have already clicked on a page, you will see the analytics for that page, otherwise you will be taken to the root page of the site.
TIP! Viewing your In-Page analytics this way is very cluttered. If you now open up any page from your site in a new tab or window, the In-Page overlay will appear without the Google Analytics Dashboard. This makes it a lot easier to analyse your pages. Read the rest of "Using Google Analytics In-Page Reports to Improve User Experience"
It’s a busy time for marketers Brighton this week with 
