CAPTCHA is more than a catchy name, it’s an acronym — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But in practical terms, CAPTCHAs are often Consistently Annoying, and Prevent The Conversion from Happening A-Lot.

One study by Stanford University (link opens as PDF) found 3 human users agreed on the “translation” of the CAPTCHA only 71% of the time…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• 5 Common Tracking Problems: How To Troubleshoot & Fix Them

  I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the </script> tag!” I thought it would be handy for the beginners […

If you thought that Google+ would eventually fail like other attempts by Google to enter the social media world, think again. Google has integrated Google+ into their environment in many ways, changing the way marketers must think about search and social media marketing.

The following resources will help you understand how Google+ is now integrated into search and other products, and how you can start adjusting your online marketing strategy for Search Plus Your World…

Custom post types add a level of flexibility to WordPress that makes this open-source Web development platform more useful on many levels. Whenever I have been faced with a Web-based task, especially one that involves organizing information, the first thing I do is examine WordPress to determine if it can handle the job. It usually can.

Image Source

As an Internet marketer and analyst, I need to be able to organize online marketing campaigns in a way that is trackable in Google Analytics…

Our Salary Trend graph has been updated to Jan 2012 and I have also included a snapshot report for Web Developer and Web Designer Jobs.

The trend in Social Media Manager salaries is interesting. Both December and January are showing some uptrend and at this rate Social Media Manager salaries might even meet the averages of Online and Digital Marketing Managers .   

Web Developer salaries are heavily concentrated in the £21k to £31k range and the comparison with Developers is interesting…

CRO is a technique that should be in every digital marketer’s arsenal – it would be short sighted to drive huge volumes of traffic to your site if you’re haven’t got an eye on whether they converting or not.  

But how do you make sure that you’re optimizing your site for all of the different types of user that visit your site, many of whom will have different aims and intentions for their visit?  User personas offer a means of identifying these user groups and presenting them in an accessible format that can be shared throughout your business…

Are you potentially missing out by not using knowledge of your online/website visitors to improve your offline marketing success? (Offline could mean printed media, trade fairs, radio, in-store etc.)

Most businesses these days accept that having a website which reflects the business brand and which performs all the functions that a customer expects is an absolute requirement. The website (with access to even basic analytics) also offers business owners insights into customer behaviours and preferences…

You may never experience an epic failure like Coke did with its “New Coke” marketing campaign back in 1985, but if you are a business owner, freelancer or marketing manager you will eventually fail.

That’s not such a bad thing. It’s really what you do after that failure that counts.

At the very least, failing at a web marketing campaign means you’re trying. The secret is to figure out how not to make those mistakes in the first place…

Our friends at Marketing Experiments are working with one of our clients on their marketing content strategy. They’re inviting everyone to compete in this creative experiment.

Read about their Ad Writing Contest and then submit your best entry as a comment to their blog post.

From their post:”The trouble with a content strategy is that it is very difficult to create content, and very difficult to predict what content will resonate with your customers…

It is painfully heartbreaking to realize that a very small tiny number of people who have access to web analytics tools actually use them.

I mean really use the tool. Ravage all the features. Exploit every possible button. Produce built-in visualization magic. Poke into the hidden crevices and discover exotic delights. Nourish yourself with the info snacks that the tool's Engineers and Product Managers cooked up…

Have you ever been looking for something but didn’t know where to find it? If that something is online, then your search is over (or just about to begin). The following are 40 advanced and alternative search engines that you can use to find just about anything on the Internet. Use them to follow discussions about your industry, monitor your online reputation, and much more!

General Search

To start off our search adventure, let’s look at some general search engines beyond the top three…

The US Court of Appeals has ruled that the ECPA, an American law, protects the data of non-USA citizens when their data is stored on servers in the USA.

Suzlon Case

Korean firm, Suzlon Energy Ltd, wanted Microsoft to disclose email

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In a recent KISSmetrics post entitled Can Product Videos Increase Conversion Rates?, Sherice Jacobs explains why video marketing has finally come of age, and why video is an essential selling tool for any business. One of the more popular video formats these days are explanatory videos, or explainer videos.

Explainer videos are typically 60-90 second videos explaining how your company works and what sets you apart from the competition (your unique selling proposition, or USP)…

For most companies using Google Analytics, reporting on website traffic and performance for a few web properties is a straightforward task. However, if your company manages hundreds of web properties, delivering useful and timely reports can become a significant challenge. For many, the only apparent solution is to manually export analytics data for each web property, then combine and compare that data to answer relevant business questions…

I use Clicky for most of my day-to-day tracking and analysis, only using Google Analytics for the harder analyses. One of the things Clicky can do most wonderfully is track outbound clicks. There’s an issue however when you start routing your affiliate links through a script or on-site redirect. I redirect mine through /out/ here on yoast.com, but not all of the /out/ links need to be tracked. Let me show you how I do track the ones I need to track…

Google’s upcoming privacy policy overhaul addresses two themes:

1. Providing users with more intuitive functionality across Google properties (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), and
2. Providing advertisers with more relevant targeting options across Google properties.

The key distinction here is “across Google properties.”
While the most privacy-conscious users may be concerned with the changes, for advertisers there is nothing but upside…

In October, we made Google Webmaster Tools available to all users in Google Analytics, allowing everyone to surface Google search data in new Search Engine Optimization reports. Starting today, Webmaster Tools will update how they calculate data to make it better match expectations about what a search engine ranking really means.

Based on their research, the answer to the question “What is your rank in search results?” is the first position of a link to your site…

Are you a Netflix subscriber?

Well if you are, I bet I can guess how long you’ve been a customer…

…alright, I know there is no way I can guess how long you’ve been a subscriber, but the odds are you’ll only stay on for 25 months. How do I know that? Based on their lifetime value metric, an average Netflix subscriber stays on board for 25 months. And according to them, the lifetime value of a Netflix customer is $291…

The Google Analytics Team has always supported the promotion of analytics education and professional development. We’d like to share this guest post by Wendy Greco & Eric Peterson from Analysis Exchange – an initiative designed to provide hands-on training opportunities for aspiring web analytics professionals while providing free web data analysis to the entire nonprofit community.

In the right hands, technologies like Google Analytics can do great things, but unfortunately not every organization is able to hire resources to dedicate to web analytics…

You may have already heard that Google is rolling out a new main privacy policy on March 1. With these changes, the privacy policy will be easier to read, and will help us create one beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google products and services. The new privacy policy makes it clear that if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services – helping us treat you as a single user across all our products…

In November 2011, MSN began supporting exact match negatives. It was a long time coming since Google has supported the match type for years. Although MSN differs a bit from Google in other match types such as their use of broad match, exact match negatives work the same in both MSN and Google.

Using exact match negatives gives you the ability to exclude very general search terms while maintaining the high volume search traffic that comes with broad and phrase match…

We know that digital marketing has turned traditional marketing models upside down however has the global economic backdrop affected the trends? Who has been spending online marketing budget and on what?

To understand how Google makes mone

…

Earlier tonight, I sent out the following tweet:

Have any questions about search, social, content, conversion or analytics you want answered? I'm taking requests for the Moz blog tonight

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 24, 2012

I was clearly under-prepared for the amazing responses. In order to tackle such a magnitude of great questions, I'm giving myself some rules for replies…

When I started Urchin Software with a few colleagues back in 1998, it was hard to imagine the scale and impact that Urchin and Google Analytics would eventually have. And yet, I remember rolling out the first version of Urchin to our customers and being blown away by the response. It was clear that Urchin was filling a fundamental need to understand customer engagement in a new medium. Suddenly, it made the intangible packets of traffic flying invisibly all over the world very tangible…

Although looking up specific companies on social networks has been a common practice for years, many consumers have now discovered that they can use social networks to actually find a company that deals with the product or service they need.

If a consumer is in need of a law firm, all they have to do is type “law firm” into the social network’s search bar and a list of law firms will show up…

Is that Virtual Pageview really being sent to Google Analytics when someone submits my registration form? Does the Event Tracking Call for outbound links get to GA in time before the visitor has left my website? Why do I not get any data for clicks

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As investment in digital marketing increases, data and insight continue to be critical assets for marketers and content owners. If 2012 is the year to develop your measurement and optimisation skill set, we have a range of resources to help you.

Individual Qualification with Google Analytics
Whilst you’re improving your measurement skills and campaign results using Google Analytics you can also work towards becoming individually qualified with a recognised Google certification…

User personas are fictional characters which are typically used in the user-centered design process to represent the different user types of a website.  They can, however, be useful in your online marketing campaigns and in this post I’m going to talk about how they can be applied to your SEO.  They can help you to find the right keywords for your target audience and create the right content, and they can also be a useful tool when identifying targets for building links…

Since May of last year we’ve been working on a new version of Google Analytics and quickly adding new features and functionality to provide you with fast access to the insights you need.

We’re extremely pleased with the new capabilities around multi-channel measurement, real-time analytics, flow visualization and improved device reporting to name a few. Our goal was to create a faster, more intuitive platform for the future and I think we’ve met many of these goals…

You’ve read a lot about Google Analytics by now, especially here on KISSmetrics. But if you’re not applying what you’ve read, then you’re not going to get what you really want out of Google Analytics. If you are ready to get actionable metrics out of your analytics, then here are the things you need to set up NOW to get actionable data out of Google Analytics!

Track Goals & Conversions

If you have read any of my other posts on Google Analytics, you might notice how I continuously mention setting up Goals…