Think With Google’s December Adventure finishes this week with tips on measurement and analytics. We hoped you enjoyed our insights and daily tips this month on the Think with Google Plus Page. If you missed them or wanted to review, here are the previous weeks’ recaps for:

• Week 1: Search insights and tips
• Week 2: Mobile insights and tips
• Week 3: Display insights and tips

Here are the three tips and insights covered this week (and a bonus treat):

#1…

SEO Spyglass is one of the 4 tools Link-Assistant sells (individually) and as a part of their SEO Power Suite.

We did a review of their Rank Tracker application a few months ago and we plan to review their other 2 tools in upcoming blog posts.

Key Features of SEO Spyglass

The core features of SEO Spyglass are:

• Link Research
• White Label Reporting
• Historical Link Tracking

As with most software tools there are features you can and cannot access, or limits you’ll hit, depending on the version you choose…

When I was at school it was in the day of chalk, and spirit duplicators with the occasional photocopied page. At college, sure the photocopies increased, but visual aids were more often than not a textbook page or diagram printed onto a transparen

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Clients or leads with bad websites often acknowledge the problem but say that they’re redesigning anyways, so why implement conversion rate optimization work now when it will only last until the redesign?

If you liked this post, get my latest posts by email or by RSS.

Here’s a secret. That redesign? It’s coming, sure… it’ll be here around the time we achieve world peace…

Much of online retailing revolves around the idea of a slippery funnel designed to push visitors as quickly as possible towards conversion. It’s a transaction paradigm that heavily influences how we practice and measure successful ecommerce.

But with digital disruption becoming more entrenched in consumers’ lives, product strategists and creative retailers alike are starting to recognize the limitations of this mindset as they seek new ways of generating and capturing revenue…

Link building is one of the most important things you can do in terms of off-site search engine optimization. As you probably know by now, search engines like Google tend to rank pages higher in search results based on the number and quality of links to those pages. Essentially, the more links you have, the more likely you will be to rank well when someone searches for keywords related to your website…

With only a week before the holiday gift season is over, it’s time to shut down your online ads and turn off the lights at your e-store, right? Not so fast, not if you want to ride the final shopping wave!

Holiday shoppers are still out in full force, and “dollars per buyer” are up 12% this year, so you’re likely to get even more bang for your advertising buck. Since Christmas is on a Sunday this year, that means last-minute gift-givers could be shopping up until Thursday the 22nd if you offer 2-day shipping…

From our initial limited release of Flow Visualization in October to our recent release to all customers, we have received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. The idea of using Sankey diagrams and applying them to traffic through a website seems to resonate with you. Thank you! We’ve heard all your suggestions and we’re busy cooking up great stuff in our labs for you. Stay tuned….

But, this post is about the other fellow innovators in graph visualization and the different ways that Sankey diagrams have influenced their research…

With the holiday season in full swing both marketers and economists alike are watching the retail sector closely to understand how the economy is doing and whether they put their marketing dollars to good use. Hundreds of millions of people participate in conversations within social networks each day, and many of these conversations reference companies, domains and products, especially during the holiday season…

Facebook used to have them, Amazon still has them – parameters in the URL that show through which on-site campaign link the visitor has reached the current page. But unless you really have a thoroughly thought-through system in place, you should t

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Do you know the main difference between copy that converts and copy that doesn’t?

You might think it’s the story it tells, or the offer it makes, or how well the bullets are written, or any of a dozen things.

But the answer is much more basic than that.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COPY THAT CONVERTS AND COPY THAT DOESN’T IS—THE FORMER GETS READ; THE LATTER GETS CLOSED

And what makes people read copy? You probably don’t need me to cite any studies to know that it’s the headline…

Here at KISSmetrics, we talk about all forms of online marketing for businesses, including email marketing. While beginner’s guides and email timing are important, there is also one other area that may not have a lot to do with marketing, but has everything to do with how effectively you can run your business (and personal life for that matter).

When you work online, you will find that the things that you need the most to maintain important business connections are also the things that will derail you from the path of productivity…

Today, we updated the Google Analytics IQ course, available at google.com/analytics/iq, to reflect the new version of Google Analytics. An updated exam will appear during the first week of January. If you’re already in the middle of studying and plan to take the exam in December, you may wish to continue using the old version of the course, which will remain available at ConversionUniversity.com for one more week…

I love Excel. There you go, I’ve said it. It’s not even a love/hate type thing – I genuinely find that my life is a better place because of this wonderful, agile, willing gem of a piece of software.

Gushing, maybe, but in the 7

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Photo sharing has come a long way. 20 years ago the process of taking, processing, and distributing a photo could take weeks or longer. Now, mobile apps such as Instagram allow us share photos in seconds. What follows is a brief history of photo sharing—where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Special thanks to @semil and @techcrunch.

View an enlarged version of this infographic »
Click here to download a …

Does your organization have several websites, each serving a particular geographic region? If so you know how challenging it is to analyze the data across these regions in a meaningful way.

Visualizations can help, but they can be difficult to design. Newland communities, a developer of residential and urban home communities, manages numerous web properties for each community and is no stranger to these challenges…

Paid advertising on social networking sites is a relatively new and incredibly powerful tool, attracting attention from Fortune 500 companies and local social media management firms alike. Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, and recently StumbleUpon have all jumped on the paid advertising bandwagon, but these popular social networks all have very different functions and very different audiences…

Speed is an important part of the users experience of your website and is a key way to understand and improve your site performance. So we’re happy to extend the Site Speed report with more metrics in Google Analytics to help site owners improve performance.

So what’s new?
In the Site Speed report we’re exposing a new set of metrics available in the “Technical” section that can be found in each one of the Site Speed tabs (Explorer, Performance, and Map Overlay)…

November was a busy time in Google Analytics. In particular, the Mobile App Tracking Team has a few things to announce.

• EasyTracking Library – automatic session management, better integration with Google Analytics SDK
• Updated Google Analytics SDK – More reliable method for sending hits, Android Market referral issue fixed, available via the Android SDK manager
• More samples – new open source application aimed to help reduce the ramp up time for new developers who want to track their apps

EasyTracker Library
We’ve created EasyTracker libraries for both iOS and Android…

With the rapid smartphone growth, it’s no surprise that consumers are downloading a huge number of apps–10 billion on Android alone, as of last week. Many app developers are recognizing the opportunity to develop on Android, including PrivacyStar, a small privacy services company offering smartphone users the ability to block unwanted calls from telemarketers via their mobile app. To help grow their business on Android, PrivacyStar looked to AdMob to drive quality downloads of their app…

Given the time of year we’re wrapping up warm in the UK, enjoying(?) Christmas shopping and looking forward to a few days off work. You may also have been wondering about some of the less positive things associated with this time of year; burst pi

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Content marketing is a relatively new type of marketing that provides free media-type content to customers in exchange for their attention.

Unlike traditional advertising which interrupts customers to get noticed, content marketing provides content that customers want in exchange for permission to market a product or service.

If you’ve never heard of this concept, that’s ok. This article provides a complete introduction to content marketing by discussing the following points:

• The fatal flaws of traditional advertising
• An in-depth introduction to content marketing
• The advantages that content marketing provides over traditional advertising
• Tips on the best practices that will make your content marketing more effective

If you’d like to learn how you can benefit from content marketing, continue reading…

We have access to more data than God wants anyone to have. Thus it is not surprising that we feel overwhelmed, and rather than being data driven we just get paralyzed. Life does not have to be that scary. In fact a data driven life is sexiest digital life you can imagine.

In this blog post we are going to bring the sexyback. I am going to attempt to significantly simply your life by recommending the critical few metrics you should use to analyze performance of your digital marketing campaigns and website…

Case studies are a great way to tell the world how valuable your products or services are. They go beyond simple testimonials by showing real-life examples of how you were able to satisfy your customer’s needs and help them accomplish their goals. With great case studies, you will be able to highlight your successes in a way that will make your ideal potential customer become your customer. The following are some tips on how to make your case studies a powerful asset in soliciting business…

As a website operator you may want to consider offering escrow agreements to your customers, particularly if you run SaaS (software as a service) applications via your website, which are critical to your customer’s business.

What is Escr

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People are the lifeblood of your business. Building relationships with people fosters loyalty. As a result, loyalty has the potential to increase profits.

An excellent way to start building relationships with people who share similar interests is by developing a fan base. In this infographic we’ll tell you how a fan base can make a real difference and what you can do to nurture it.

Click on the infographic below to view a larger image:

View an enlarged version of this infographic »
Click here to download a …

Today we are announcing the new Google Analytics Core Reporting API as a replacement for the Data Export API. This is the second phase in a larger project we started a couple months back to upgrade our APIs to new infrastructure.

The Core Reporting API has two versions.

Version 3.0 is a brand new API, with a 10x reduction in output size and support for many new client libraries, like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and Java…

At last Thursday’s webinar on Goals, we we explored one of the most fundamental analytics topics: how to translate your business objectives into measurable actions on your website. You sent in your questions, and we heard from many users that you want more guidance on turning all that data into insights.

Please read on for answers to your top questions, and watch the recording of the webinar here:

How do I do data analysis?Performing data analysis requires understanding what your company defines as success before you can even start to figure out which reports and metrics to use…

Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content – on and off their site – and so we’re working hard to make this happen.
To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier…

Understanding how the mind operates is an essential part of marketing and conversions, and always has been.

Today, we are fortunate to have benefited from professional psychological research studies that can give us a much better understanding of how people work, rather than using blind guesses and hunches.

People are very sensitive to taking all sorts of queues that affect their outlook on your product or service…