Stale.
One thing that I never want to be.
We all have a tendency to learn up to a point, we get comfortable and keep chugging along rarely investing in our ongoing education.
I call it the slow but sure path to irrelevancy.
Let me share my prescription for avoiding irrelevancy: Try new things.
Simple right?
At any given time I have six or seven interesting tools running on this website…
According to the NY Times, Google has released a “Do-it-yourself” platform for Android, called App Inventor, whereby anyone can create an Android app without knowing how to program.
The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly inschools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors…
Good morning Mozzers!
Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries…
They might prefer to use different labels (so as to minimize fear in the marketplace & slow down regulators), and they might claim that aggregate statistics control the investments & thus they are not really publishers, but they plan on skimming a big piece off of the top of many big markets…
When was the last time you checked the bounce rate for visits from Hong Kong? You may never have needed to, until an “alert” in your Intelligence reports tells you that the bounce rate from Hong Kong has suddenly doubled.An automatic alert in Intelligence is triggered when the expected performance of a metric, historically, differs from what is happening now. Intelligence monitors the past and current activity of all your metrics and lets you know when something out of the ordinary happens…
Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 71.65 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 26, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.37 percent, 9.85 percent and 2.19 percent, respectively. The remaining 70 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.94 percent of U.S. searches.
Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers
Domain
May 2010
June 2010
Month-over-month percentage change
www…
Jason Cohen recently authored a post on A/B testing that deserves both broader awareness and a deeper dive. Most of us in the online marketing world are aware of the power A/B tests can bring through improved click-through, sign-up and conversion rates. Getting a higher percentage of visitors to a page to take a desired action is powerful stuff.
The process by which we hypothesize, design, create and run testing, however, is fraught with peril…
Google Analytics has gotten so many new features in the last year, that the only way I could incorporate those into my Google Analytics plugin, which has been downloaded 927,443 times, was by doing an almost complete rewrite. That’s why today, I’m proud to announce version 4.0 of this plugin.
What’s new with this Google Analytics plugin?Asynchronous tracking
First of all, this new version 4…
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Late last week, we made a change that caused some visits and campaign data to be processed incorrectly. All data was properly collected, but your reports may currently be missing some visits and campaigns information for the dates June 24th through June 29th. We are reprocessing this data and expect to have all report data corrected by early in the week of July 12th.The impact of the incorrect processing will vary by site…
The video below was developed by Ian Lurie of the Conversation Marketing blog. The video gives an overview of four basic SEO metrics, what they mean, and how to track them in Google Analytics.
SEO analytics 101 from ian lurie on Vimeo.
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Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.
This month I’ve added Twitter accounts for the contributors of this great content so you can connect further with the gurus. Hope you like!
Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of one of the world’s most popular blogs – Mashable.com, which happens to be powered by WordPress! Since 2005 Mashable has been a leader in social media and technology news coverage in addition to hosting events like the recent media summit and social media day. In tip-packed show, Pete shares with us:
In news:
I updated my Emergency WordPress access script today, because of some issues we’d discovered at OrangeValley and some bugs submitted by users. When I updated the post, I realized I should be emailing all the commenters, as some of them had had the same issue, and most of them would want the updated script.
Quite a while back I’d written a plugin for exactly that purpose, called email commenters…
It’s the 10th Anniversary of Web Analytics TV! Happy Birthday to us!In this exciting series, with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via our Google Moderator site for Web Analytics TV and we answer them.Here is the list of last week’s questions.
In this action packed episode we discuss:
Here are the links to the topics we discuss:
If you found this post helpful, we’d love to hear your comments, please share them via the comment form below…
While measuring relationships should be the paradigm for social media analytics tools, relationship building is just an intermediate step for any marketing campaign. Ultimately, marketing needs to drive financial metrics found on balance sheets or income statements.
But the ROI you can derive from social media isn’t uniform across communities.
Twitter can increase customer loyalty by enabling you to do customer service online…
Facebook pages are popping up as quickly as websites and blogs, in fact I am often seeing organizations push users to their Facebook page due to the built-in social interactivity of Facebook pages. With the majority of our online experiences still starting with search, whether it be on Google, Bing or Facebook, there are many factors that will help boost a given Facebook page to the top of the results…
A couple of weeks ago, we announced the Conversion Champion Challenge, a contest to help you get your ROI in shape for the summer using free AdWords conversion products. It’s not too late to enter and compete to win the grand prize – an AdWords voucher and a trip to Google!
Whether you’re just getting started or actively working to get your conversion rate in shape, here are some best practices for getting the most out of two key conversion products: Conversion Optimizer Search Funnel reports…
When you’re developing XML sitemaps, no matter on what platform, it’s pretty hard to debug them sometimes to be proper XML. You have to validate all the time and you can’t do a quick “glance” over to see whether your sitemap has the URL’s you were expecting.
As mentioned before I’m working on my WordPress SEO plugin, and it’ll do sitemaps, three kinds of sitemaps actually: video, news and normal…
We have more web metrics and data than there are stars in the universe (slight exaggeration!).
Yet we stink at informing decisions. Our reports are ignored. Sites & online marketing continue to suck.
A large part of the reason is that a large part of our job seems to consist of glorified data puking, hoping someone will be impressed. After all there is so much data in those reports!! #fail
This blog post encourages you see the forest, the much hyped big picture, and shares a framework that will help you ensure that every single moment of your day is spent on activity that will be:
1…
With Facebook growing to well over 400 million users, their rise is happening all around the world. For instance, outside of China, Iran, Japan and Russia, Facebook has reached the top 20 ranked sites across many of the top online nations. Google is basically #1 across the board with Twitter climbing on many fronts as well.
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We have all been there once or twice, maybe a few more than that even. You just launched a site or a project, and a few days pass, you login to analytics and webmaster tools to see how things are going. Nothing is there.
WAIT. What?!?!?!
Scenarios start running through your mind, and you check to make sure everything is working right. How could this be?
It doesn’t even have to be a new project…
Distinguishing between Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Result Indicators (KRIs) can improve clarity and help focus attention where it matters most. One of the most important components of effective web analytics is identification of key performance indicators that can provide a focal point for site improvement amidst the multitude of data points that are [...]…
We recently posted some correlation statistics on our blog. We believe these statistics are interesting, useful and provide more insight into the wasy search engines work (a core principle of our mission here at SEOmoz). As we will continue to make similar statistics available, I’d like to discuss why correlations are interesting, refute the math behind recent criticisms, and reflect on how exciting it is to engage in mathematical discussions where critiques can be definitively rebutted…
comScore recently released their monthly numbers in regards to online video usage and rankings for the month of May. Below are some highlights from the release:
Fiction: Site maintenance periods and delays in my AdSense reports mean that data isn’t being recorded properly.Fact: Although there can sometimes be delays in the stats pipeline, all data is still tracked accurately.We call the process of tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings the “stats pipeline.” The stats pipeline runs continuously, reviewing the logs of activity written by our ad serving system, aggregating them, and updating the storage system…
Do you like Web Analytics? Do you want to stay up to date on the latest developments in the industry? Recently, a few Web Analytics “geeks” decided to start an audio podcast to interview key people/vendors in the Web Analytics space. The podcast also covers topics related to Web Analytics such as Mobile Measurement, Social Media Tracking, Engagement, etc. With over 20 episodes and 20,000 downloads so far, the podcast has been well received and we’d like to help spread the word…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
