When was the last time you were asked, “So what’s our average growth rate on Facebook?” Err… Whether it’s a client, a boss, or the CEO of the company, you get questions like this. Ok so perhaps you’ve never heard this exact question, but I can pretty much bet that you’ve heard something similar. They want to know how your social media efforts are doing; they want to know that you’re tracking key performance indicators…

If you’re a marketing professional, you’ve probably spent months preparing your holiday campaigns. But have you focused so much on great creative that you’ve neglected your measurement plan? Don’t despair: there’s still time to make the most of your holiday marketing and measurement. Here’s some food for thought to help you make sure your Analytics is adding value this season and setting you up for success next year…

In our recent post about finding out what online marketing strategy drives the best traffic to your website, you learned how to use Advanced Segments to see your traffic from social media, local search, and other methods of marketing. While this is a great guide to seeing your overall results, it may not answer all of your questions.

You might, instead, want to dig deeper into your Analytics to see more details…

If you’re focused on conversions and CPA (cost-per-acquisition), you may already be using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC to optimize your campaigns to get you more conversions at a lower cost. To ensure that your campaign settings are also in line with your conversion goals, we plan to migrate existing campaigns using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC with “Optimize for clicks” ad rotation to “Optimize for conversions” ad rotation…

How do I buy an online business?

If you are thinking of buying an internet or online based business for the first time, here are a few pointers which I hope you find useful. They are just a few of the things I have picked up over the years from m

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Inbound marketing is a new spin on the traditional lead capturing process.  Rather than working hard to reach out to cold and potentially unqualified leads, inbound marketing is the process of getting your message out to warm, receptive leads who are actively searching for what you’re selling.

Through the old process of outbound marketing, you had to attempt to “warm up” new, fresh leads through cold calling, trade shows, print ads and so forth…

29Prime is easy to spot as a deceptive local seo company that preys on unsuspecting small business folks eager to “be on the first page of Google”. Like many low-life firms of their ilk, they have a number of “aliases” (aka 29Live, 29Maps, 29SEM, 29Search, Locallistings.com etc, etc.) they use to make tracking them a little more difficult.

Their robo calls ring into my office no less than 4 times a week with pitches like “Select one now to claim your free listing on Google”, “We are Google’s 6th largest provider of data”, “We guarantee first page placement, “We are Google Authorized to claim your listing”…

While some companies jump right in to the world of online marketing successfully, others have a much harder time getting into the swing of things. It’s hard to learn all of the various strategies, platforms, tips, and tricks, then apply them to your business. If you find things are not working well for your company in any area of online marketing, then you will want to make sure you are not committing the following marketing sins…

Wanna hear a secret? Do you know how you can guarantee more conversions? It doesn’t involve shoot-from-the-hip guesswork, and it doesn’t have the excitement and appeal of magic buttons or copywriting tricks. It’s a well-defined, systematic process. Interested?

Conversion Rate Experts (C.R.E.) has developed a proven process for growing online businesses through Conversion Rate Optimization…

If you want to do well with social media, then the first thing that you need is a strategy.

Right?

Maybe not – at least, according to Guy Kawasaki; venture capitalist, founder of Alltop.com, and the author of a dozen books, including the recent bestseller Enchantment.

Guy breaks a lot of the “established” rules of social media, and ignores a lot of the best practices taught by “social media experts”…

This post shares new and traditional measurement options to sooth the savage SEO.  We’ll also offer a different take on organic keyword tracking, based on page level semantic cluster analysis using Webmaster Tools to mash in keywords, missing as a result of Google’s encrypted search. SO… read the whole post or skim down now for the sexy stuff. OK, let’s get started solving the new success measurement riddle-SEO, brothers and sisters! We’ll start with the most basic solutions like ranking reports, Bing data and new vs…

YouTube has launched a new ad format out of beta: TrueView Video Ads. The basic concept is that the user has a choice whether or not to continue watching the ad. The advertisers only pays when the user watches at least 30 seconds of the ad (or to completion, whichever comes first).

This new format is referred to as a TrueView in-stream ad. Long-form YouTube videos are eligible for the TrueView in-slate ad format…

When it comes to driving traffic to your website, there are a variety of ways to get visitors. The primary two that individuals and businesses almost always have a struggle with investing their time and money into are search and social. Sometimes the issue is convincing people why these are a necessity for a thriving business. Other times, the conflict is whether to invest in one marketing strategy more than the other, or to only pursue one marketing strategy but not the other…

(Cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog)

Is your website performing as well as it could be? Do you want to get more out of your digital marketing campaigns, including AdWords and other digital media? Do you feel like you have gaps in your current Google Analytics setup?

We’ve heard from many of our users who want to go deeper into their Analytics — with so much data, it can be hard to know where to look first…

I have graphed some Country (as well as specific USA state) average internet connection speeds (up until June 2011) and the results continue to show a wide range of service delivery.

We used the Akamai tool to produce these – it’s an excel

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It’s simple to conceive of a host of clever social media campaigns for brands that sell popular products like packaged goods, food, travel gear, and other “sexy” items. But what if your brand sells a product or provides a service that inspires less consumer enthusiasm?

If your brand sells children’s clothing, or pet supplies, or organic groceries, a wide array of effective Facebook marketing strategies are available…

While Google Analytics is one of the best free analytics applications out there for getting basic traffic and visitor data, it also has some pretty significant holes. You’ve probably noticed some discrepancies when comparing your Google Analytics data to other analytics sources which can include anything from your hosting company’s own built in analytics to social analytics programs that track hits from shortened URLs sent through Twitter, Facebook, or other networks…

If your website uses Google analytics and you provide services to customers based in Germany you are now required to provide specific information to users in order to comply with recent changes to German data protection law.

Google Analyti

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Back in September Flowr set off on the Grasshopper / KISSmetrics Phone Number Challenge. The idea was that they were going test placing a phone number on their home page to see if they could increase sign ups. The hypothesis was that by having a visible phone number on their home page, the trust factor would increase and therefore sign ups would too.

Jonathan Kay from Grasshopper Virtual Phone Systems, proposed the original concept of this challenge…

Here at Moz, we take metrics and analytics seriously and work hard to ensure that our metrics are first rate.  Among our most important link metrics are Page Authority and Domain Authority.  Accordingly, we have been working to improve these so that they more accurately reflect a given page or domain's ability to rank in search results.  This blog entry provides an overview of these metrics and introduces our new Authority models with a deep technical dive…

Do you participate in so many different types of online marketing strategies that when your boss asks you which one is the most effective, you don’t know what to say? Sure it’s easy to spot the top referring traffic source in Google Analytics, but you won’t be able to say what overall online marketing method is really working as a whole unless you want to start adding up different referral sources with a calculator and then cross reference them with goals, demographics, and other data…

Is your website performing as well as it could be? Do you want to get more out of your digital marketing campaigns, including AdWords and other digital media? Do you feel like you have gaps in your current Google Analytics setup?

We’ve heard from many of our users who want to go deeper into their Analytics — with so much data, it can be hard to know where to look first. If you’d like to move beyond standard “pageview” metrics and visitor statistics, then please join us next Thursday:

Webinar: Reaching Your Goals with Analytics
Date: Thursday, December 1
Time: 11am PST / 2pm EST
Sign up here!

During the webinar, we’ll cover:

• Key questions to ask for richer insights from your data
• How to define “success” (for websites, visitors, or campaigns)
• How to set up and use Goals
• How to set up and use Ecommerce (for websites with a shopping cart)
• How to link AdWords to your Google Analytics account

Whatever your online business model — shopping, lead-generation, or pure content — these tools will deliver actionable insights into your buying cycle…

Internet users and Internet marketers alike are waiting on the final implementation of HTML5 to allow for embedded videos in emails. With the text format of weekly newsletters and blanket emails wearing thin, users are dying to use an engaging med

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Hi there, Mozzers! It's me, Miranda. It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and I’ve missed you! Today, I have something super exciting to share with you: our newest addition to SEOmoz PRO, Social Analytics!!

zOMG, we have been working super hard on the new Social Analytics section; we’re excited for you to try it out and let us know what you think. This is the first step towards our bigger vision for offering social analytics and quantifying the impact of social efforts…

Keeping visitors on your website is a key component to success. The more time a visitor spends on your site, the more likely they are to follow through with whatever action you want them to take, whether that’s subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, or making an inquiry.

For the past year, my bounce rate has averaged 3.5%. If I remove a couple of short events from my stats that drive that number higher (and which appear to be related to changes in Google’s algorithm), it’s averaged under 2%…

It is astonishing common that we are asked to analyze the impossible. In perhaps a career limiting move I'm going to try and do that today (and for a controversial topic to boot!).

In this post, about an important Google change, I want you to focus less on the data but focus more on the methodology. And. So important. I want you to help me with your ideas of how we can do this impossible analysis better, in the complete absence of data …

The guys over at www.semrush.com reached out to us recently and asked us if we would consider doing a review of professional version of their toolkit. We are pretty selective about the product review we do on Web Analytics World but I was keen to

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Speed matters. Faster loading pages mean more visitors land on your site instead of waiting in frustration or leaving. The Google Analytics Site Speed report will help you learn which of your pages are underperforming, so you can address this potential barrier to your conversions.

The Site Speed report was launched a few months ago, but it required site owners to add an additional Google Analytics tracking code to see data in this report…

Social media can be an invaluable part of your business’ online marketing strategy. But one of the biggest issues that comes along with social media are the distractions – those things that take your focus off of your social media goals. These distractions can lead to losing minutes, even hours out of your productivity time. The following are common distractions you may come across on the top social networks and ways to combat them…

In a recent survey, consumers were asked about important factors in deciding whether or not to do business with a certain company. 98% of respondents said that customer experience was among the top 3 factors.

Investing in customer satisfaction has the potential to produce enormous dividends. In this graphic, we’ll briefly cover customer satisfaction, what happens when you get it wrong, what happens when you get it right, and what you can do about it…