With the insertion of iPad, recently announcing over 1 million sold, and the growing base of smart phone users I wanted to highlight the quick resources you have available in Google Analytics to view this level of data.

Under advanced segments there is a default segment for Mobile Traffic. This includes traffic from iPad, iPhone, iPod, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Samsung etc.

Under the visitors section on the left hand side navigation is a drop down for Mobile which includes two sections 1) Mobile Devices and 2) Mobile Carriers

Explore and learn from the data, if you’re seeing traffic and conversions you may want to investigate tapping into this market.

It is imperative to utilize Web Analytics to make informed, actionable decisions on adjustments to your site to increase conversions. A great tool recently added to Google Analytics is the option to add annotations. This enables you to make notes of changes you have made to the site within the Google Analytics interface, so you can easily see what and when those changes were implemented, so when analyzing the impact of them you can quickly pinpoint which change(s) were effective. For those of you not using this feature I would suggest you jump on the wagon, it’s extremely useful.

As previously blogged, Search Alliance, the name for the partnership between MSFT / Yahoo! is due to go ahead in Q4 this year. Sarah Quinn attended the Yahoo event yesterday in New York and here are some of her updates:

- Target date for full traffic migration and full adCenter transition is 10/15/10
- They emphasized “transition with quality” and that if they (both sides, MSFT/Bing and Yahoo!) were not comfortable with the initial 10/15/10 target date, then they wouldn’t migrate until 2011
- There will be an adCenter interface update/release before the full traffic transition (so Aug/Sept if they are still looking at the 10/15 target date)
- The full traffic ramp will be “based on checkpoints” and the above is one checkpoint to see if all is OK before moving all traffic over
- The platform goal is “AdWords or better”, but this sounds more long term than in this calendar year
- Yahoo! signs off on the roadmap for adCenter updates

If you attended the event or have any further questions or updates feel free to leave comments.

Yesterday Facebook announced their auto-suggest feature to the search box, enabling users to find and connect faster. As with Google, Yahoo and Bing it will auto-suggest as you type a query into the search box. In honor of St Patricks Day yesterday below is a screenshot of this new feature.

How does Facebook look for suggestions? Here is their explanation:
Now as you’re typing in a query in the search bar, you will instantaneously see results not only of the people, events, groups and Pages you’re connected with but also the connections of your friends and globally relevant results.

This feature is due to roll out to all users over the next few days. For more information click here to direct to the official Facebook Blog.

So many times I have come across reports that look great: lots of juicy data, trending graphs and conditional formatting. However, what’s the high level roll-up that all that data is stating? What are the key takeaways? If you opened up the report a year from now, would it still make sense when that call or meeting explaining the report is no longer top of mind? My tip of the week is a reminder that:

1. Reports should make sense in isolation from a call or meeting
2. You should always review the data and answer the questions why, what and how

For example, Why did the CPC increase? What happened that could have impacted it? How do you plan on counter-attacking this in order to stay competitive but still reach client goals?

One extra tip:  Use a nicely formatted naming convention for reports so they are not only easy to sort your folders start getting full, but also enable you, if dated correctly, to find those old reports so you can run historical year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons.

The day has finally arrived. In July last year, we first announced the imminent Microsoft and Yahoo! merger. Today, antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe cleared Microsoft to take over Yahoo!’s search business, without any imposing restrictions on the partnership. This MSFT / Yahoo! partnership has been named “Search Alliance”.

In our opinion, this is a great opportunity for our clients as it will level out the playing field, and finally presents a challenge for Google. We have been disappointed with Yahoo!’s differences in understanding standard industry terms when they decided to go with advanced and standard match, instead of broad, phrase and exact match. Microsoft AdCenter remains consistent with industry standard definitions, which will certainly help our paid advertisers. We feel clients will benefit from additional volume, relevance, quality and increased conversions due to more robust control on the backend and increased transparency. Microsoft, after all, is a technology company.

How will this impact the content network for these two partners? Between the two of them, they have the largest trafficked content networks on the web. Separately, they have both failed in being able to offer a solid product to advertisers. I am hoping that this combined effort will increase the opportunity in that area.

How will this impact SEO? Will they hold more weight now? What are your thoughts?

A standard practice in any analytics package – not just Google Analytics, which is our preferred solution – is to block traffic coming through from your own IP address(es). This ensures that the data collected and utilized to develop actionable insights is pure and not skewed by data coming through from people designing your website, an agency or people testing the site.

I wanted to not only remind you to put this vital filter in place when you set up analytics, but also remind you that there are two types of IPs – internal and public.

In theory, the only way the internal IP would show traffic on your analytics reports is if the IP is on the same LAN as the site’s server. Every external visitor to the site should only be reporting their public IP address.

Naturally keep this in mind if you are running analytics on your own sites, which reside on the same LAN as the site server. If this is the case you will want to set up two profiles in Google Analytics, the first for all traffic to the site blocking public IP addresses, the second profile blocking public and internal IPs.

Any questions feel free to add to this string.

You may have noticed some additional placements in the Google Sponsored Results recently, particularly when doing a retail type search. Below is a screenshot of an exclusive beta offering by Google called Product Listing Ads. It is a CPA (Cost per Acquisition / Action) model, and it pulls from listings in the Google Merchant Center (Google Base/Google Product Search) so only clients with product listings will be eligible to participate in the beta if it opens up.

In my opinion I feel this is a positive route to go for Google, once again they are leading the way by at least testing out the option for a CPA model search results listing. With the vast amount of click fraud within the search industry a CPA model may be a more feasible route to go than all the lawsuits and resources set aside to maintain a system that monitors and refunds click fraud. Granted it could open up the door for another level of fraud, however if sites are set up in a manner that forms or shopping carts etc. are using validation, the level would be substantially less.

Additional details regarding this beta offering are available on the AdWords Blog.

Even savvy marketers can sometime fall into the trap of “you get what you pay for” and thereby assume that if something is offered as a free service, it can’t possibly be as valuable as its pricey competitors. Towards the end of last year we had a client paying for an analytics solution. Granted many paid solutions are worth it, but in the case of this client, I would have to say that a paid solution was adding no benefit to them.

For a six month period we tested Google Analytics in parallel to this other paid solution. We also had access to the reports a previous agency had put together for the client using the paid solution. During this investigation period we found the following:

1) The reports the previous agency put together were just “data” with no meaningful insights or key takeaways.

2) The implementation of the analytics solution was inaccurate, so the data they were supplying was inaccurate. Unfortunately it backdated for almost four years, which has left the client with poor data to benchmark on year over year.

During these six months we supplied the client with:

1) A plan. We developed reports covering the details they were use to, but revamped them and included a “Yellow Brick Road.” This road supplied actionable insights about areas on their site that would affect change and increase conversions. Not only did we suggest these details, we also monitored them all to ensure they were effective.

2) A useful tool, not just a report full of data. Our newly designed report was structured in a manner that enabled them to share the data with high-level executives within the company, which allowed the client to utilize their time more efficiently.

3) A huge cost savings. They were able to cancel their subscription with the paid analytics solution.

4) Piece of mind. They are now aware that their implementation within Google Analytics is accurate, compared to their previous inaccurate setup.

The lesson:
Remember, a paid solution is not always the best route to go. In essence, you should weigh up what the paid solution is going to cost, and what you can get from a free solution like Google Analytics, and then decide if that difference is worth the cost. Secondly, analytics is not just a reporting tool, it is essential that you dig deeper to find those key actionable insights.

Google Analytics is more that just a reporting tool. Analytics can supply you with valuable, actionable data regarding adjustments you could make to your website and campaigns to improve conversions. If tagged correctly, you can quantify investments not only in PPC and SEO, but in your email and display campaigns by utilizing the Google URL Builder. This tool allows you to track from all areas that you pay to direct traffic to your site. Not only is this an essential piece for reporting, but also allows you to monitor cause and effect.

All marketers know display generates leads/sales at a higher cost than search; however, some feel the real value of display is in branding.  Imagine that you launched a media buying campaign last week–how did it affect all traffic to your site, in particular brand terms on search campaigns? Ask yourself, even if the CPA is twice that of search when analyzing the data side-by-side in isolation, did it have an impact in other areas? And is that impact of value? And if so, is the higher CPA worthwhile?  Click here to go through to the URL builder and start tracking, reporting and optimizing accordingly today.