'web analytics' Category

• 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

• Spiders, IIS Caseless, Cookieless and Search Engine Indexes.

  Digging into IIS web server log files is quite interesting. I’ve developed a number of in-house tools over the years that help understanding why web spiders go where they do. I’ve been reworking them from an Apache dominated view to include some of the things that IIS does. You can see requests like “GET /(J(1)S(4dab…..))/” [...]

  September 15th, 2008

• Christmas Is Coming. Really.

  Having been approached a few weeks before Christmas by some online stores keen to boost their sales in peak season, last year, may I point out that planning your Christmas paid search activity should be in progress, now? For maximum impact, you’ll want purpose-designed landing pages to optimise conversion. That usually means running some experiments. [...]

  August 26th, 2008

• SEO, IIS case folding filenames, Spiders, Analytics, and Robots.Txt

  AFAICS, the best way to administer IIS for SEO purposes, seems to be to run screaming from the room and hide under a desk until you are allowed to use Apache. So many of the default behaviours create difficulties for users or SEO. Yes, I’ve been continuing to dig into web analytics and IIS web [...]

  August 20th, 2008

• IIS Cookieless Generates Spider Crawling Problems

  Another case of Web Server Log File Analysis on IIS being disturbed by bots, having the potential for SEO naughtiness and spamming the search engines. The problem is created by IIS’s cookieless model. The idea appears to be to present a unique string in the path so you can track sessions without needing a cookie. [...]

  August 18th, 2008

• Malware Detection Breaks Web Metrics?

  The Register has an article about web analytics problems caused by the malware detection of an anti-virus package. This may have implications for advertisers and SEO, too. I have not downloaded and tried this anti-virus package, yet. I didn’t see any white papers or clear explanation for the AVG LinkScanner technology on the AVG site. [...]

  June 15th, 2008

• Automating Content Network Management – Part 1

  About three years ago (2005), we started efforts to automatically improve performance of the AdWords Content Network, for advertisers. We were hoping to develop a product, but we were also doing some research to see how things worked and what lessons we could learn. This is intended to be part 1 of a multipart article, [...]

  February 12th, 2008

• AdWords Search Query Reports

  Quite a few people have written about using the fairly new Search Query Reports, and the sometimes surprising ways in which Google can extend Broad Match. Here’s another insight into AdWords. Look at the first two clips of screenshots, and notice that the impression volume reported is radically differently on keyword search. This first screen [...]

  January 14th, 2008

• AdWords, Geotargeting Myths

  Note: A short updated article about Google AdWords Geotargeting in 2008 is now available. Changing the geotarget can change your paid search performance quite markedly. However, commentators, and even Google, publish some wildly inaccurate information. I’ve read a few strange myths about geotargeting, in various forums. I’ve got some clients for whom geotargeting at country, [...]

  October 19th, 2007

• Anatomy of a Web Spam Attack

  We’ve recently watched spammers at work, from initial contact through to dropping a litter trail across a site. This is on one of our own sites, rather than a client site, so we’re happy to share what we’ve seen. Because this activity doesn’t involve client data, and is clearly activity that is not intended to [...]

  September 9th, 2007