Building on the new service offering of Social Reports for Google Analytics users, Google is now offering backlinks tracking in order for social media professionals to gauge and track success to analyse the success of campaigns. Back in March, Google rolled out the social report offering so that Webmasters could track where their social media traffic was coming from and in what volumes. Adding links to the equation has simply made Analytics a much more powerful tool for social media and SEO agencies.

So what does this mean for an SEO agency and their strategy? Google’s free Analytics offerings are available to all and the new Social Report backlinking section will provide you with extensive information many paid for tools won’t. The Googlebot will trace all the information for your social report, including original postings, shares and full conversation tracking for the links. All of this is then displayed in easily readable graphs that can be analysed for further link development, and to showcase outreach projects to clients. With the added importance of social sharing in the Penguin update and the previous Panda algorithm, content that provides you with the most links and is widely shared can be clearly identified, and strategies replicated.

Google has just released major changes to their AdWords platform that is set to heavily influence the way video advertising is purchased in the future. Just as Google has done with targeted online advertising through Google AdWords in the past, so they are set to do with video advertising from here on.

Much like the paid search that Google currently spearheads, the new AdWords for Video imitates that bidding model to allow for more affordable advertising and much more targeted video whether you’re an advertising agency or a small start-up doing in-house marketing. Perhaps the most significant change here is that advertisers will be able to target around ten times more users based on their demographics.

Don’t Stop Reading Here – There’s More!

Version Five of Google Analytics imposes some interesting new changes to a system which many came to enjoy using in order to track their online campaigns. The updated look and feel has also altered the reporting in a few ways, some drastic, and some for the better.

Google is attempting to layer a Chrome-like look onto all of its tools and analytics is their latest product to receive a new coat of paint. Today we look over these changes and see how you can adapt and then easily transition to the new, shinier Google Analytics v5:

The most glaringly obvious change is the new interface which eschews stark white borders and functional text for an pleasing look which takes a few minutes to get used to; but once you are familiar with the new look analytics, the streamlined aesthetic will assist you in more easily monitoring your campaign. When you first logged into the old look analytics, there was a snapshot of your accounts with bounce rate, visits and so on; the new screen allows you to handily jump straight to the most accessed pages – visitors, traffic sources, content and conversions to be more precise.

Speakers:
David Sottimano – Distilled

David Scottimano and John Straw

John Straw – Linkdex

David Sottimano – Distilled

We are all faced by the  typical CEO’s question:– why are we not number 1?

As experts we can give a technical answer. But we actually need a clear answer, not just stats. They need something to work off, an actionable process. Don’t waste time. In competitive analysis just find they key things that matter.

1. Identify your competitors (Online in the SERPS not offline) then educate the client. We have a template to do this work that shows us who is in this space (http://dis.tl/smx-london ). Reviewing every few weeks shows the up and coming and also people in this space who are not selling your products who are this possible link targets.

When it comes to measuring effectiveness of a particular online marketing strategy, campaign or experimental implementation that you’re trying out on your website, it’s imperative that you are able to implement effective performance management in order to track exactly which tactics are doing what as far as your site’s performance goes.

We’ve all been to conferences, seminars and online marketing networking events where we meet new people and exchange ideas, theories and strategies that have worked on our websites and others. It is always useful to take note of these strategies and give them a go yourself to try and measure the effectiveness of each strategy on your own websites.

Google analytics implemented their annotations feature at the beginning of this year, and so far most of the feedback on the tool is extremely positive as it is a genuinely useful but simple tool. The problem is, however, that many people using Google Analytics simply don’t use annotations correctly. I tried have tried a few different ways of using annotations and come to the following ideas of DO’s and DON’Ts when using annotations…

A Screenshot of annotations being used in Analytics

1. DO: Noting any technical or structural changes to your site is important. If you’ve switched servers, hosting companies, added new H1 tags, changed URL structures or anything that could affect your sites performance, by tracking these changes in Google web analytics you will get a good idea whether these changes have had a positive or negative effect on your site’s indexing and traffic.

As an online professional who browses the web day in and day out, I’m not a massive fan of completing pop-up surveys. However; but if I’m approached in a non-evasive way such is the case with 4Q survey software, I tend to not mind doing it for certain websites. I recently managed to get one of my clients to implement a 4Q survey on their website and the results have been extremely insightful and have resulted in some large scale changes by the client.

The 4Q survey revolves around the four most important questions that should be addressed to all visitors of a website:

1. What are my visitors at my website to do?
2. Are they completing what they set out to do?
3. If not, why not?
4. How satisfied are my visitors?

Bizreport.com Yesterday released an article indicating that there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of budget that companies are investing in web analytics. Not only has their overall budget for web analytics increased, but they are now also spending more money on manpower to monitor analytics and cutting down on the budget for web analytics software.

Research carried out by Econsultancy/Lynchpin via survey-based research, revealed that companies are now only spending less than 30% of their budget on web analytics software, which is 8% less than last year. The financial cut on web analytics software expenditure seems to now be going towards investing more in people with web analytics tracking skills that are able to expertly utilize this software and manipulate it in order to get the desired results and reports. When it comes to finding the right person to run your web analytics, one also needs to decide whether to hire someone in-house to take care of web analytics or whether hiring an SEO Consultant would be a better idea.