'web analytics' Category

• SEO, Click Fraud and Mis-Attribution

  I’ve been involved in some paid search click fraud measurement for about five years. It’s pretty interesting work, trying to understand whether the clicks you’ve bought are related to the traffic on the site, and any qualifiers that you’ve added, such as geotargets and the keywords. Oddly, it has provided a sideways illumination on a [...]

  November 23rd, 2009

• AdWords, Dates, Times and a World Business

  You may find Google’s use of dates and time zones to be confusing. It may not be your problem, but a Google problem. Here’s a practical example of the kind of confusion that the AdWords user interface can offer. I have a client on the East Coast of the US, with an AdWords account set [...]

  July 14th, 2009

• Google Analytics – Toolbox Summary

  When I start working with clients that want to learn about AdWords and Analytics, I often end up describing the same collection of tools and techniques, again and again. This new posting in the Analytics Blog is a great summary of the FireFox tools to troubleshoot Google Analytics, and adds tools for MSIE. I’ve developed [...]

  April 29th, 2009

• Internet Marketing For Small Businesses

  Your website can help you stand out from competitors, and give you additional business. Here’s a brief, basic and easy guide to inexpensive ways to improve performance of your existing site, in five steps. I’m expecting that you are an owner-manager of a small or medium sized business – but the advice should still [...]

  February 26th, 2009

• Usability, SEO & Eye Tracking

  Interesting article about how Google use eye tracking to understand user behaviour. This also explains a lot about why ranking is so important. Heatmap tools like CrazyEgg (NOT like the tool in Google Analytics) also give some insight – not as rich as eye tracking, but a lot cheaper. We’ve used CrazyEgg and other similar [...]

  February 7th, 2009

• Google Analytics: Excluding, Or Only Including, Your Own IP Address.

  When you are looking at websites, especially those where your own company visits are likely to be a significant source of clicks, you’ll probably want to exclude your own visits and those of your staff. Assuming that you share a common IP address – your firewall or DSL connection, typically, you can prevent all activity [...]

  November 17th, 2008

• AdWords Ad Scheduling Problems

  Ever seen the Quality Score message “Your account spending limit has been reached“? When you have unspent budget, cash in the account, you’re not in a scheduled off-period and you have a burning desire to get clicks? You get no impressions, no clicks and no reason from Google Support as to why your adverts don’t [...]

  November 10th, 2008

• Google Throws Away The Rules, Again

  Google’s user base may be built on high reputation with organic search visitor volume, but that doesn’t prevent the search giant from leading users a merry dance in the pursuit of profit. Here’s a real world example. I’ve taken this from a real Google Account, with real web analytics data. I’ve concealed the precise search [...]

  October 29th, 2008

• Blogs, Spam And Rank

  This blogs visitor volume slid for a few weeks, a couple of months ago. So did the spam comment volume. It was actually easier to see the slide in the Akismet 15-day spam queue, than anything else. Spam went down 10% over a period of less than two weeks, and was strongly correlated with visitor [...]

  October 20th, 2008

• Google’s Approach To Click Fraud – 2007

  Well, I’m a year late finding this PDF about Click Fraud, ROI and Advertiser Response by Kourosh Gharachorloo of Google. I was doing a periodic scan to see if anyone else has published how to interpret the autotagged gclid in AdWords. It’s nice to see that my old article anticipated many of the arguments – [...]

  October 18th, 2008