Brands That Won (and Lost) Google in 2015

Posted by Dr-Pete

As part of the MozCast 10K (a 10,000-keyword daily Google tracker), we keep a close eye on the domains with the most page-one Google real-estate. As of December 1st, these were the "Big 10":

"Share" represents the percentage of total results each domain has across the entire data set. Of course, absolute rankings can vary a lot depending on the data set, but what's more interesting is how any given brand moves over time.

We watch day-to-day movements closely as search marketers, and often track winners and losers when Google announces a big update, but I thought it would be interesting to take the long-term view. Who are the brands who won and lost the most Google real estate in the past year? All of the data from this post is from the MozCast 10K and spans December 1, 2014–December 1, 2015.

Biggest winners in 2015

If we look at absolute gains in total page-one Google real estate, the winners are in the table below. The "Rank" columns shows their current position in the Top 100:

Online retail giant Amazon.com held tight to the #2 position in our data set, making the biggest overall gain. Etsy made impressive gains, jumping from the #81 spot at the end of 2014 to the #31 spot on December 1st, 2015. Even with its financial woes, Groupon performed solidly on Google, moving from the #87 spot to #40. Instagram jumped from outside of the Top 100 entirely (#141) to #57.

It's interesting to note that two of the biggest gains in 2015 were for Google properties, YouTube and Google Play. YouTube moved from #5 to #4, and Google Play came in just shy of the Top 10 at #12. YouTube gains don't count growth in Video Cards, large video links which dominate some Google results. Here's an example Video Card from a search for "chandelier":

The numbers in the chart above may seem small, but keep in mind that there's only a 0.01% difference in total Google real-estate between #9 and #10 in the overall "Big 10." A tenth-of-a-percent represents massive land holdings in the world of page-one results.

Most improved in 2015

Another way to slice-and-dice winners in 2015 is to look at sites with the biggest relative gains. In other words, who improved the most relative to their position in 2014? Here are the Top 10 Most Improved:

Six of these are repeats from the overall winners list, but looking at relative changes, Etsy's and Instagram's gains are even more impressive. Both sites more than doubled their page-one Google real estate in our data set, with Etsy seeing gains of over 150%.

Biggest losers in 2015

Google real estate is limited, and for every winner there ultimately has to be one or more losers. These are the sites that took the heaviest absolute losses in our data set:

Social media giant Twitter was the big loser in 2015, falling out of the Top 10, from #6 in 2014 to #15 at the end of 2015. This "loss" may be deceptive, however, as Google and Twitter struck a deal in August of this year to display Tweets directly in search results. Here's an example, from a branded search for "Etsy":

Tweets are now a true Google vertical result, occupying an organic position and appearing in almost 6% of the searches that we track. Fellow social media site, Pinterest, also lost ground in 2015, after nearly breaking into the Top 10 (they were #11 in 2014). Unfortunately for Pinterest, their losses weren't offset by a sweetheart deal with Google.

Google-dominating Wikipedia showed a weak spot in their armor this year, losing twice the ground that #2 Amazon gained. Wikipedia took some losses early in 2015, and then ran into more trouble with their mid-year switch to a secure (https:) site.

Online auction site and aspiring retailer eBay added to their troubles in 2015, dropping out of the Top 10 from #9 to #17. eBay took heavy losses in May of 2014, but then partially recovered going into the beginning of 2015. As of December 1st, all of those short-term gains have disappeared in our data set.

Yelp gave up its #4 position in 2015 to YouTube, and seemed to suffer from some of Google's local changes this year. Retailers Walmart and Overstock also saw year-over-year losses, as did online answer site wikiHow.

An oddly dominant site in 2014, the NIH's National Library of Medicine site dropped from #17 to #20. Their presence may be the result of a high number of medical queries in our data set, and was probably impacted by a handful of niche Google updates, including the launch of the Medical Knowledge Panel, such as this one for "type 2 diabetes":

On the bright side, it looks like the Tax Man took a hit in 2015, with the IRS dropping from #19 to #27. While it seems odd that two government (.gov) sites hit our list of losers, I suspect this was coincidental.

The envelope, please...

While Amazon's continued dominance is impressive, and Wikipedia's tumble from grace is certainly worth noting, I think the big story this year is Etsy. In addition to taking the #2 spot in total gains, they more than doubled their 2014 Google page-one real estate and rocketed from the #81 overall position in our data set to #31. Etsy and other niche online retailers will be the ones to watch in 2016.

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For those of you serious about attaining success as an online marketeer, SEO proves to be a critical strategy to work through.

Check Out These SEO Strategies For Your Subsequent Projects

"SEO" is a phrase that you are going to see bandied about often as you educate yourself about Internet marketing. 

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is something that people who own Internet businesses and websites use for their marketing efforts in order to get their webpages as highly ranked as they can in Google. Although it can seem a bit intimidating, you can practice using different SEO methods until you feel comfortable enough with one method to use it for your web page. How do you know which SEO methods are best? 

Use the information in this article to help you figure out SEO and get started implementing it today.

 

​Announcing Search Insights from Moz Local!

Posted by David-Mihm

When we launched Moz Local, I said at the time that one of the primary goals of our product team was to “help business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.” Today we take a major step forward towards that goal with the beta release of Moz Local Search Insights, the foundation for a holistic understanding of your local search presence.

As we move into an app-centric world that’s even more dependent on structured, accurate location data than the mobile web, it’s getting harder to keep up with the disparate sources where this data appears — and where customers are finding your business. Enter Moz Local Insights — the hub for analyzing your location-centric digital activity.

What’s included in this beta release?

We’ve heard our customers loud and clear — especially those at agencies and enterprise brands — that while enhanced reporting was a major improvement, they needed a more comprehensive way to prove the value of their efforts to clients and company locations.

We start with daily-updated reporting in three key areas with this release: Location page performance, SERP rankings, and reputation. All of these are available not only within a single location view, but aggregated across all locations in your account, or by locations you’ve tagged with our custom labels.

Location page performance

The goal of our new Performance section is to distill the online traffic metrics that matter most to brick-and-mortar businesses into a single digestible screen. After a simple two-click authentication of your Google Analytics account, you’ll see a breakdown of your traffic sources by percentage:

Clicking into each of the traffic sources on the righthand side will show you the breakdown of traffic from those sources by device type.

There’s also an ordered list of all prominent local directories that are sending potential customers to your website. While we haven’t yet integrated impression data from these directories, this should give you a relative indicator of customer engagement on each.

We’re hoping to add even more performance metrics, including Google My Business and other primary consumer destinations, as they become available.

Visibility

The Visibility section houses your location-focused ranking reports, with a breakdown of how well you’re performing, both in local packs and in organic results. Similar to the visibility score in Moz Analytics, we’ve combined your rankings across both types of results into a single metric that's designed to reflect the likelihood that a searcher will click on a result for your business when searching a given keyword.

The Visibility section also lets you see how you stack up against your competitors — up to three at a time. But rather than preselecting a particular competitor, you can choose any competitor you’d like to compare yourself to on the fly.

And, of course, we give you the metrics in full table view below (CSV export coming soon) if you prefer to get a little more granular with your visibility analysis by keyword.

We’ve got a number of other innovative features planned for release later in the beta period, including taking barnacle positions into account (originally heard through Will Scott) when calculating your visibility score, and tracking additional knowledge panel and universal search entries that are appearing for your keywords.

Reputation

The Reputation section is probably the most straightforward of the bunch — a simple display of how your review acquisition efforts are progressing, both in terms of volume and the ratings that people are leaving for your business.

There’s also a distribution of where people are leaving reviews, so you have a sense of what sites your customers are leaving reviews on, and which ones might need a little extra TLC.

Over time, we’ll be expanding this section to include many more review sources, sentiment analysis, and the ability to receive notifications and summaries of new reviews.

What’s next?

You tell us! This is a true beta, and we’ll be paying close attention to your feedback over the next couple of months.

Search Insights is already enabled for all Moz Local customers by default. Just log in to your dashboard and let us know what you think. And if you’re not yet a Moz Local customer, sign up today to take Search Insights for a free spin during our beta period.

There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure beneath the surface of this release that will allow us to add new features on a modular basis moving forward, and we’re already working on improvements, such as custom date range selection, CSV exporting, emailed reports, and notifications. But your feedback will help us prioritize and add new features to the roadmap.

Before I sign off, I want to give a huge thank you to our engineering, design and UX, marketing, and community teams for their hard work, assistance, and patience as we worked to release Moz Local Search Insights into the wild. And most importantly, thank you to you guys — our customers — whose feedback has already proven invaluable and will be even more so as we enter the newest phase of Moz Local!

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How to Get Your App Content Indexed by Google

Posted by bridget.randolph

As mobile technology becomes an increasingly common way for users to access the internet, you need to ensure that your mobile content (whether on a mobile website or in a mobile app) is as accessible to users as possible. In the past this process has been relatively siloed, with separate URLs for desktop and mobile content and apps tucked away in app stores.

But as app and mobile web usage continues to rise, the ways in which people access this content is beginning to converge, which means it's becoming more important to keep all of these different content locations linked up. This means that the way we think about managing our web and mobile content is evolving:

So how do we improve the interaction between these different types of content and different platforms, getting to the point of being able to have a single URL which takes the user to the most appropriate version of the content based on their personal context?

The first step is to ensure that we are correctly implementing deep linking (e.g., linking to a particular screen within an app) for apps which have comparable webpage content, to allow for our app content to rank in mobile search.

Image credit: Google Developers

Google indexation provides benefits for both Android and iOS apps. The benefits for Android apps are twofold:

• users searching on an Android device who have not yet installed your app will see the app show up in mobile search results; and
• Android users who do have your app installed will get query autocompletions when they use browser search which can include results from your app, as well as seeing enhanced display elements in the SERP (such as the app icon). It’s basically like rich snippets for apps.

Image credit: Google Developers

On iOS, app ranking is currently only supported for apps already installed on the device. Apple users should see search results which include links to installed apps and also include the enhanced display elements mentioned above.

In addition, Google recently announced that mobile apps which use the new App Indexing API for deep linking may receive a rankings boost in mobile web search. They are releasing a new and improved version of Google Now, "Now on Tap," in their latest OS update (Android M), which allows you to search content across your phone without navigating out of whatever app (or website) you are currently using. The catch is, that app content has to be in their index in order to be included in a "Now on Tap" search.

It’s not just Google, either; Apple is implementing their own version of a search index to allow iOS9 users to search and discover web and app content without using a third-party search engine, Bing has its own approach to app indexation and ranking, and other services aren’t far behind.

This post, however, will focus on how to setup your Android and iOS apps to appear in Google search results. While the idea of app indexation isn’t new, it is an area of rapid innovation and the process for getting your apps indexed by Google has recently been simplified. This post is therefore intended to provide a brief overview of that process and to serve as an update to the information which is currently available.

The implementation

The good news is that it’s getting simpler to add the relevant markup to your web content and get your app content indexed and ranking in mobile search results.

The basic process is only three steps:

1. Support HTTP deep links in your mobile app. For iOS you will need to do this by setting up support for "Universal Links." "Universal Links" are what Apple calls HTTP links that have a single URL which can open both a specific page on a website and the corresponding view in an app.
   Note: At this point, you can register your app with Google, associate it with your website and stop there—as long as you are using the same URLs for your web content and your app content, they should be able to automatically crawl, index, and attempt to rank your app content based on your website’s structure. However, implementing App Indexing and explicitly mapping your web content to your app content using on-page markup can provide additional benefits and allow for a bit more control. Therefore, I recommend following the full process, if possible.
   
2. Implement Google App Indexing using the App Indexing API for Android, or by integrating the App Indexing SDK for iOS 9.
3. Explicitly map your web pages to their corresponding app screens using either a rel=alternate link element on the individual page, by referencing the app URLs in your XML sitemaps, or by using schema.org markup.

You can find a more step-by-step explanation of this process (looking at Android and iOS separately) below.

---

The app indexation process used to be a bit more complex, because HTTP links aren’t supported by older iOS versions. Instead, developers had to use something called "Custom URL Schemes" to link to iOS app content. This meant that you essentially had to create a unique scheme for your app URLs and then add support for these in the app code.

Custom URL schemes have a couple other downsides besides adding complexity, namely:

• different app developers can claim the same custom URL scheme, whereas with HTTP links you can associate the app to a particular domain or set of domains; and

• with custom URL schemes, tapping the URL when the app isn’t installed results in a broken link (because it only links to content within the app), whereas HTTP links are web links as well and can take the user to a webpage if the app isn’t installed (as long as the URL is the same for both the app view and the corresponding webpage).

While you can still use the custom URL scheme approach, the good news is that Google’s App Indexing is now compatible with HTTP deep link standards for iOS 9, which Apple calls "Universal Links."

You should still add markup to any webpages which have content corresponding to a particular app screen. Think of it like like rel=canonical or like mobile switchboard tags, but for apps. Be aware that when Google finds a link between a webpage and an app page which they think are equivalent, they will compare the two pages and you will receive a ‘Content Mismatch’ error in the Search Console if they don’t believe the content is similar enough.

Getting Android apps indexed in Google

Step 1: Support HTTP deep links in your app by adding intent filters to your manifest.

An intent filter is a way of specifying how an app responds to a particular action. Intent filters for deep links have three required elements: <action>, <category>, and <data>. You can find more guidance on this from Google Developers. Here is their example of an intent filter which enables support for HTTP deep links:

<intent-filter android:label="@string/filter_title_viewrecipes">

 <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />

 <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />

 <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />

 <data android:scheme="http"

 android:host="recipe-app.com"

 android:pathPrefix="/recipes" />

 </intent-filter>

</activity>

Noindex option:
Just like for websites, you can add noindex directives for app content as well. Include a noindex.xml file in your app to indicate which deep links should not be indexed, and then reference that file in the app’s manifest (AndroidManifest.xml) file. You can find more detail on how to create and reference the noindex.xml file here.

Step 2: Associate your app to your site in Google Search Console.

This is done in Google Search Console (you can also do it from the Developer Console). As long as your app is set up to support deep links, this step is technically all you have to do to allow Google to start indexing your app. It will allow Google to index and crawl your app automatically by attempting to figure out the app structure from your website structure.

However, if you do stop here, you will not have as much control over how Google understands your content, which is why the explicit mapping of pages to app versions is recommended. Also, if you can’t use the API for some reason, you need to make sure that Googlebot can access your content. You can check that this is configured correctly in your site’s robots.txt file by testing some of your deep links using the robots.txt tester tool in the Search Console.

Step 3: Implement app indexing using the App Indexing API.

Using the App Indexing API is definitely worthwhile; apart from anything else, apps which use the API should receive a rankings boost in mobile search results, and you don’t need to worry about Googlebot struggling to access your content.

The App Indexing API allows you to annotate information about the activities within your app that support deep links (as laid out in your intent filters). For details on how to set this up, see the Google Developers guidance.

Step 4: Test your implementation.

You can test your implementation (always on a fresh installation of your app!) with the following tools. (Find more info about how to use each of these tools here.)

Android Debug Bridge – to test deep links from the command line

Fetch as Google (Search Console) – to test what Google sees when it crawls your app deep links

You can also track search traffic to these deep links in the Search Console’s Search Analytics report.

Getting iOS apps indexed in Google

Step 1: Support HTTP deep links in your app by setting up support for "Universal Links."

To support universal links in your iOS app, you need to first ensure that your app handles these links correctly by adopting the UIApplicationDelegate methods (if it doesn’t already use this protocol). Once this is in place, you can associate your app with your domain.

You’ll do this by:

• adding an "associated domains" entitlement file to your app’s project in XCode that lists each domain associated with your app; and
• uploading an apple-app-site-association file to each of these domains with the content your app supports—note that the file must be hosted at the root level and on a domain that supports HTTPS.

To learn more about supporting Universal Links, view the Apple Developer guidance.

Step 2: Register your app with Google (using the GoogleAppIndexing SDK for iOS 9).

You’ll need to add the App Indexing SDK to your app using the CocoaPods dependency manager. For step by step instructions, check the Google Developers’ guide. Basically what this does is allows you to register your app with Google, just like Android apps are registered via the Search Console. This also means that Google can now read the apple-app-site-association file to understand what URLs your app can open.

Step 3: Test your implementation.

You can test whether this is set up correctly by tapping a universal link in Safari on an iOS 9 device and checking that it opens the right location in your app.

Mapping your webpages to your app with on-page markup or sitemaps

Once you’ve set up the deep linking support for your Android and/or iOS app(s), the final step is to explicitly identify the corresponding webpages to the correct app screens using one of the supported markup options. This step allows you to indicate more clearly to Google what the relationship is between a given page and its corresponding app link (both of which should already share the same URL if you are using HTTP links). Following this step also allows you to indicate the relationship to Bing crawlers, which otherwise wouldn’t see the app content, and to allow Apple to index your iOS app.

You can do this mapping either in the head of the individual page using a link element, using schema.org markup (for Android only), or in an XML sitemap.

A note on formats for app links

The format for an Android HTTP link uses the format of:

android-app://{package_name}/http/{host_path}

The {package_name} is the app’s "Application ID," which is how it is referenced in the Google Play Store. So a link to the (example) Gizmos app might look like this:

android-app://com.gizmos.android/http/gizmos.com/example

For iOS links, you use the app’s iTunes ID instead of the Package Name. So an iOS app URL uses this format:

ios-app://{itunes_id}/{scheme}/{host_path}

For HTTP links the {scheme} is "http," which would mean your URL would look like this:

ios-app://{itunes_id}/http/{host_path}

How to reference your app links

Note: Google provides guidance on the three currently supported deep link methods here.

Option 1: Link rel=alternate element

To add an app link reference to an individual page, you can use an HTML <link> element in the <head> of the page.

Here is an example of how this might look if you have both an iOS and Android app:

<html>
<head>
 ...
<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.gizmos.android/http/gizmos.com/example" />
<link rel="alternate" href="ios-app://123456/http/gizmos/example" /></head>
<body> … </body>

Option 2: Schema.org markup (currently supported on Android only)

Alternatively, if you have an Android app, you can use schema.org markup for the ViewAction potential action on an individual page to reference the corresponding app link.

Here is an example of how this might look:

script type="application/ld+json">
{
 "@context": "http://schema.org",
 "@type": "WebPage",
 "@id": "http://gizmos.com/example",
 "potentialAction": {
 "@type": "ViewAction",
 "target": "android-app://com.gizmos.android/http/gizmos.com/example"
 }
}
</script>

Option 3: Add your app deep links to your XML sitemap

Instead of marking up individual pages, you can use an <xhtml:link> element in your XML sitemap, inside the <url> element specifying the relevant webpage.

Here is an example of how this would look if you have both an iOS and an Android app:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
 xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<url>
 http://gizmos.com/example
 <xhtml:link rel="alternate" href="ios-app://123456/http/gizmos/example" /></url>
 <xhtml:link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.gizmos.android/http/gizmos.com/example" />
...
</urlset>

Additional information

What about apps which don’t have corresponding web pages?

Unfortunately, as of this writing, Google does not officially offer app indexation for apps which don’t have corresponding web content. However, they are trying to move in this direction, and as such are beginning to try this out with a handful of apps with “app-only” content. If you have an app with app-only content, and would like to get this content indexed, you can express interest using this form.

What about getting my app indexed in Bing?

Bing supports two open standard options for linking webpages to app links:

• App Links
• Schema.org

To learn more about how to implement these types of markup, see the guidance on the Bing blog.

Quick reference checklists

Will Critchlow recently spoke about app indexation in his presentation at Searchlove London. He provided two useful checklists for Android and iOS app indexing:

Image source: http://www.slideshare.net/DistilledSEO/searchlove-...

To learn more about app indexing by Google, check out Emily Grossman and Cindy Krum’s excellent post over on SearchEngineLand.

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Campaign Tracking Without Going Crazy: Keeping Order in AdWords Optimization

Posted by anthonycoraggio

Pay-per-click advertising generates vast amounts of data, which presents us with tremendous potential for optimization and success. However, this formidable sword cuts both ways—even skilled managers can quickly find themselves adrift if tests and changes are not carefully tracked. Here’s a quick, actionable guide to keeping order in your AdWords account with a simple and professional activity log.

The philosophy of orderly management

Good Adwords management is an exacting science—every tweak and change made should be for a specific reason, with a particular goal in mind. Think in terms of the scientific method: we’re always moving forward from hypothesis, to test, to result, and back again.

When it comes time to evaluate the results of these changes and iterate to the next step, it’s very important to know exactly what changes were made (and when). Likewise, when the numbers break unexpectedly, it’s vital to be able to eliminate as many variables as possible as quickly as possible in our analysis. Many of us operate in collaborative environments, so this information needs to be readily accessible.

To be able to do that, we need a system that defines when and where these changes happened, and clearly explains the nature of the change. Beyond that, we also need to keep it user-friendly for two very important reasons. First, many of us operate in collaborative environments, so this information needs to be readily accessible to teammates, supervisors, and clients that may need it. Second, it’s vital to remember that the most elaborate, brilliantly-detailed tracking plan is going to be useless if you don’t actually use it consistently. To get started building a good system, let’s take a look at the tools we have at hand.

Tools of the trade

AdWords changelog

The first and most obvious tool that might come to mind is the Adwords native changelog, but this should be viewed as a tool of last resort in most cases. Anyone that has had to dig through that information line-by-line trying to diagnose an issue will tell you that it’s less than optimal, even with the improved filtering options Google has provided. The crux of the issue here is that there is no indicator of intent—why was the change made? Was it a considered part of a test? What other changes were a part of the same move made?

That said, the changelog can be a handy feature when it comes to quick refreshers on a former budget cap or tracing a trend in bids—especially when downloaded to Excel. Just don’t rely on it for everything!

Google Analytics annotations

This is our second UI option, and a key one. Obviously this isn’t in AdWords itself (though that would be a lovely feature), but if you spend even half your time in online marketing, chances are you’ve got GA open in a second tab or window already! If you commit the effort to nothing else, do it for this. Placing annotations for major changes or tests doesn’t only help you—it provides a touchpoint for anyone else that might need to look into traffic ups and downs, and can save hours of time in the future.. Note that I said "major"—remember that this is a shared system, and you can easily swamp it if you get too granular.

Spreadsheets

This is where most of my logs go, as proper coding and some simple filtering makes it a breeze to find the information you need quickly. I’ll get into more detail on practical usage below, but basically this is where the when/where/why goes for future reference. My preference here is usually to use Google Sheets for the simple collaboration features, but you can do just as well with a shared Excel file on OneDrive.

Project management tools

Keeping your test tracking connected to and aligned with your project management tools is always wise. There are myriad project management software tools out there, but I favor agile PM for SEM applications—Trello, Jira, Mingle, Basecamp, and more are all useful. The key here is really that your activity and test logs are easily available wherever you keep project resources, and linked to from whatever cards or items are associated to a particular test. For example, if you have a task card titled “Client-128: A/B Ad Test For {Campaign>Ad Group}”, note “per task Client-128” in your activity log and link directly to that card if your tool permits it. You can also link to the activity log from the card or a project resource file if you’re using a cloud sheet, as in Google Docs Sheets.

Creating a system & putting it all together

Now you know all the tools—here’s how to put them together. To get you started, there are two primary areas you’ll want to address with your activity log: ongoing changes/optimizations, and major planned tests.

Tracking ongoing changes: the standard activity log

The standard activity log is your rock. It's the one point where the hundreds of changes and thoughts the human brain could never hope to perfectly recall will always be, ready to answer any question you (or your client, or your boss) might come up with down the line. An activity log should, at minimum, tell us the following:

• What happened?
• When did it happen?
• Who was involved?
• Why did it happen?

If I notice an inflection point on a particular graph starting on 9/28 and need more information, I should be able to go back and see that User X paused out Campaign Y that morning, because they had spoken with the client and learned that budget was to be shifted out to Campaign Z. Instant context, and major time saved! If I want to know more, I know who to ask and how to ask the right question for a quick and productive conversation.

Ongoing optimizations and relatively small changes can stack up very quickly over time, so we also want to be sure that it’s an easy system to sort through. This is part of why I prefer to use a spreadsheet, and recommend including a couple columns for simple filtering and searching. Placing a unique sequential ID on every item gives you a reliable point of return if you muddle up the order or dates, and a note indicating the type and magnitude of the change makes searching for the highlights far easier.

Anything you can do with your chosen tool to simplify and speed up the process is fair game, as long as you can reasonably expect others to understand what you’ve put in there. Timestamp hotkeys and coded categories (e.g. “nkw” denoting a negative keyword expansion) in particular can save headaches and encourage compliance. Finally, always keep your logs open. It’s easy to forget early on, and dragging your cursor through just a few extra clicks to open them back up when you’re in the zone can be a bigger obstacle than you might expect!

Formal test tracking

When you’re conducting formal A/B or multivariate tests in your account, a higher standard of documentation is a good idea. Even if you’re not presenting this to a client formally, put together a quick line of data detailing the following for every major test you plan and execute:

• Purpose. Every test should have a reason behind it. Documenting this is a good exercise in holding yourself to account on smart testing in general, but this is most important for future analysis and test iterations—it’s what sets up the "why."
• Hypothesis. Marketers have a reputation for playing fast and loose with statistical methods, but remember that for results you can trust, you should have a falsifiable hypothesis. Again, get this down so you can say what exactly your results do and do not prove.
• Procedure. Exactly what it sounds like—what did you do in implementing this test? You need to record what the controlled and experimental variables were, so you can appropriately account for what might have influenced your results and what might be worth trying again differently in the future.
• Results. Again, easy—what was the outcome? Don’t be stingy with the details here; confidence level, effect size, and the actual ad copy or landing page that was tested should be recorded for posterity and later reference.

I like putting at least the hypothesis and results in a combined test results spreadsheet for quick future reference. Over time, as people shift through roles, what was tested a year ago can quickly fade from organizational memory. When planning your next test, you need to be able to quickly go back and see if it’s been done before, and whether it’s worth trying again. I’ve seen a lot of wasted duplication of effort in companies I’ve consulted for this exact reason—don’t let that be you!

I also recommend plugging in a quick line in my standard activity log for each action on a test (i.e. launched, finalized, paused), since these are often pretty high-impact changes and it’s helpful to have this information in your go-to spot.

Make it work

I’ll close with a brief reiteration of what I believe is the most important part of activity logging and test tracking: actually doing it. Internal adoption of any new tool or process is almost always the toughest hurdle (ask anyone who’s ever overseen a CRM implementation). As with any habit, there are a few simple behaviors that can help you make good tracking practices a reliable part of your routine:

• Start small. It won’t hurt to start by logging just the biggest, most important activities. You’ll have an easier time remembering to do it, and you’ll soon start doing it for more and more tweaks automatically.
• Be accountable. Even if you’re the only one touching the account, tell someone else what you’re doing and ask them to check in on you. There’s nothing like social accountability to reinforce a behavior!
• Have a goal in mind. If you don’t feel a sense of purpose in what you’re doing, you’re probably just not going to do it. Make a pact with yourself or your team that you’ll review your activity logging one week from when you start and share thoughts and ideas on improving it. You’ve then got a clear and present point of reference for success and moving forward.

Do you have any favorite tricks or tactics for keeping good track of your SEM campaigns? Share them with us in the comments!

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The Importance of Being Different: Creating a Competitive Advantage With Your USP

Posted by TrentonGreener

"The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. Those who walk alone are likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before."

While this quote has been credited to everyone from Francis Phillip Wernig, under the pseudonym Alan Ashley-Pitt, to Einstein himself, the powerful message does not lose its substance no matter whom you choose to credit. There is a very important yet often overlooked effect of not heeding this warning. One which can be applied to all aspects of life. From love and happiness, to business and marketing, copying what your competitors are doing and failing to forge your own path can be a detrimental mistake.

While as marketers we are all acutely aware of the importance of differentiation, we've been trained for the majority of our lives to seek out the norm.

We spend the majority of our adolescent lives trying desperately not to be different. No one has ever been picked on for being too normal or not being different enough. We would beg our parents to buy us the same clothes little Jimmy or little Jamie wore. We'd want the same backpack and the same bike everyone else had. With the rise of the cell phone and later the smartphone, on hands and knees, we begged and pleaded for our parents to buy us the Razr, the StarTAC (bonus points if you didn't have to Google that one), and later the iPhone. Did we truly want these things? Yes, but not just because they were cutting edge and nifty. We desired them because the people around us had them. We didn't want to be the last to get these devices. We didn't want to be different.

Thankfully, as we mature we begin to realize the fallacy that is trying to be normal. We start to become individuals and learn to appreciate that being different is often seen as beautiful. However, while we begin to celebrate being different on a personal level, it does not always translate into our business or professional lives.

We unconsciously and naturally seek out the normal, and if we want to be different—truly different in a way that creates an advantage—we have to work for it.

The truth of the matter is, anyone can be different. In fact, we all are very different. Even identical twins with the same DNA will often have starkly different personalities. As a business, the real challenge lies in being different in a way that is relevant, valuable to your audience, and creates an advantage.

"Strong products and services are highly differentiated from all other products and services. It's that simple. It's that difficult." - Austin McGhie, Brand Is a Four Letter Word

Let's explore the example of Revel Hotel & Casino. Revel is a 70-story luxury casino in Atlantic City that was built in 2012. There is simply not another casino of the same class in Atlantic City, but there might be a reason for this. Even if you're not familiar with the city, a quick jump onto Atlantic City's tourism website reveals that of the five hero banners that rotate, not one specifically mentions gambling, but three reference the boardwalk. This is further illustrated when exploring their internal linking structure. The beaches, boardwalk, and shopping all appear before a single mention of casinos. There simply isn't as much of a market for high-end gamblers in the Atlantic City area; in the states Las Vegas serves that role. So while Revel has a unique advantage, their ability to attract customers to their resort has not resulted in profitable earnings reports. In Q2 2012, Revel had a gross operating loss of $35.177M, and in Q3 2012 that increased to $36.838M.

So you need to create a unique selling proposition (also known as unique selling point and commonly referred to as a USP), and your USP needs to be valuable to your audience and create a competitive advantage. Sounds easy enough, right? Now for the kicker. That advantage needs to be as sustainable as physically possible over the long term.

"How long will it take our competitors to duplicate our advantage?"

You really need to explore this question and the possible solutions your competitors could utilize to play catch-up or duplicate what you've done. Look no further than Google vs Bing to see this in action. No company out there is going to just give up because your USP is so much better; most will pivot or adapt in some way.

Let's look at a Seattle-area coffee company of which you may or may not be familiar. Starbucks has tried quite a few times over the years to level-up their tea game with limited success, but the markets that Starbucks has really struggled to break into are the pastry, breads, dessert, and food markets.

Other stores had more success in these markets, and they thought that high-quality teas and bakery items were the USPs that differentiated them from the Big Bad Wolf that is Starbucks. And while they were right to think that their brick house would save them from the Big Bad Wolf for some time, this fable doesn't end with the Big Bad Wolf in a boiling pot.

Never underestimate your competitor's ability to be agile, specifically when overcoming a competitive disadvantage.

If your competitor can't beat you by making a better product or service internally, they can always choose to buy someone who can.

After months of courting, on June 4th, 2012 Starbucks announced that they had come to an agreement to purchase La Boulange in order to "elevate core food offerings and build a premium, artisanal bakery brand." If you're a small-to-medium sized coffee shop and/or bakery that even indirectly competed with Starbucks, a new challenger approaches. And while those tea shops momentarily felt safe within the brick walls that guarded their USP, on the final day of that same year, the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed and blew a stack of cash all over Teavana. Making Teavana a wholly-owned subsidiary of Starbucks for the low, low price of $620M.

Sarcasm aside, this does a great job of illustrating the ability of companies—especially those with deep pockets—to be agile, and demonstrates that they often have an uncanny ability to overcome your company's competitive advantage. In seven months, Starbucks went from a minor player in these markets to having all the tools they need to dominate tea and pastries. Have you tried their raspberry pound cake? It's phenomenal.

Why does this matter to me?

Ok, we get it. We need to be different, and in a way that is relevant, valuable, defensible, and sustainable. But I'm not the CEO, or even the CMO. I cannot effect change on a company level; why does this matter to me?

I'm a firm believer that you effect change no matter what the name plate on your desk may say. Sure, you may not be able to call an all-staff meeting today and completely change the direction of your company tomorrow, but you can effect change on the parts of the business you do touch. No matter your title or area of responsibility, you need to know your company's, client's, or even a specific piece of content's USP, and you need to ensure it is applied liberally to all areas of your work.

Look at this example SERP for "Mechanics":

While yes, this search is very likely to be local-sensitive, that doesn't mean you can't stand out. Every single AdWords result, save one, has only the word "Mechanics" in the headline. (While the top of page ad is pulling description line 1 into the heading, the actual headline is still only "Mechanic.") But even the one headline that is different doesn't do a great job of illustrating the company's USP. Mechanics at home? Whose home? Mine or theirs? I'm a huge fan of Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think," and in this scenario there are too many questions I need answered before I'm willing to click through. "Mechanics; We Come To You" or even "Traveling Mechanics" illustrates this point much more clearly, and still fits within the 25-character limit for the headline.

If you're an AdWords user, no matter how big or small your monthly spend may be, take a look at your top 10-15 keywords by volume and evaluate how well you're differentiating yourself from the other brands in your industry. Test ad copy that draws attention to your USP and reap the rewards.

Now while this is simply an AdWords text ad example, the same concept can be applied universally across all of marketing.

Title tags & meta descriptions

As we alluded to above, not only do companies have USPs, but individual pieces of content can, and should, have their own USP. Use your title tag and meta description to illustrate what differentiates your piece of content from the competition and do so in a way that attracts the searcher's click. Use your USP to your advantage. If you have already established a strong brand within a specific niche, great! Now use it to your advantage. Though it's much more likely that you are competing against a strong brand, and in these scenarios ask yourself, "What makes our content different from theirs?" The answer you come up with is your content's USP. Call attention to that in your title tag and meta description, and watch the CTR climb.

I encourage you to hop into your own site's analytics and look at your top 10-15 organic landing pages and see how well you differentiate yourself. Even if you're hesitant to negatively affect your inbound gold mines by changing the title tags, run a test and change up your meta description to draw attention to your USP. In an hour's work, you just may make the change that pushes you a little further up those SERPs.

Branding

Let's break outside the world of digital marketing and look at the world of branding. Tom's Shoes competes against some heavy hitters in Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and Puma just to name a few. While Tom's can't hope to compete against the marketing budgets of these companies in a fair fight, they instead chose to take what makes them different, their USP, and disseminate it every chance they get. They have labeled themselves "The One for One" company. It's in their homepage's title tag, in every piece of marketing they put out, and it smacks you in the face when you land on their site. They even use the call-to-action "Get Good Karma" throughout their site.

Now as many of us may know, partially because of the scandal it created in late 2013, Tom's is not actually a non-profit organization. No matter how you feel about the matter, this marketing strategy has created a positive effect on their bottom line. Fast Company conservatively estimated their revenues in 2013 at $250M, with many estimates being closer to the $300M mark. Not too bad of a slice of the pie when competing against the powerhouses Tom's does.

Wherever you stand on this issue, Tom's Shoes has done a phenomenal job of differentiating their brand from the big hitters in their industry.

Know your USP and disseminate it every chance you get.

This is worth repeating. Know your USP and disseminate it every chance you get, whether that be in title tags, ad copy, on-page copy, branding, or any other segment of your marketing campaigns. Online or offline, be different. And remember the quote that we started with, "The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. Those who walk alone are likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before."

The amount of marketing knowledge that can be taken from this one simple statement is astounding. Heed the words, stand out from the crowd, and you will have success.

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How to Rid Your Website of Six Common Google Analytics Headaches

Posted by amandaecking

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

I've been in and out of Google Analytics (GA) for the past five or so years agency-side. I've seen three different code libraries, dozens of new different features and reports roll out, IP addresses stop being reported, and keywords not-so-subtly phased out of the free platform.

Analytics has been a focus of mine for the past year or so—mainly, making sure clients get their data right. Right now, our new focus is closed loop tracking, but that's a topic for another day. If you're using Google Analytics, and only Google Analytics for the majority of your website stats, or it's your primary vehicle for analysis, you need to make sure it's accurate.

Not having data pulling in or reporting properly is like building a house on a shaky foundation: It doesn't end well. Usually there are tears.

For some reason, a lot of people, including many of my clients, assume everything is tracking properly in Google Analytics... because Google. But it's not Google who sets up your analytics. People do that. And people are prone to make mistakes.

I'm going to go through six scenarios where issues are commonly encountered with Google Analytics.

I'll outline the remedy for each issue, and in the process, show you how to move forward with a diagnosis or resolution.

1. Self-referrals

This is probably one of the areas we're all familiar with. If you're seeing a lot of traffic from your own domain, there's likely a problem somewhere—or you need to extend the default session length in Google Analytics. (For example, if you have a lot of long videos or music clips and don't use event tracking; a website like TEDx or SoundCloud would be a good equivalent.)

Typically one of the first things I'll do to help diagnose the problem is include an advanced filter to show the full referrer string. You do this by creating a filter, as shown below:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Advanced
Field A: Hostname
Extract A: (.*)
Field B: Request URI
Extract B: (.*)
Output To: Request URI
Constructor: $A1$B1

You'll then start seeing the subdomains pulling in. Experience has shown me that if you have a separate subdomain hosted in another location (say, if you work with a separate company and they host and run your mobile site or your shopping cart), it gets treated by Google Analytics as a separate domain. Thus, you 'll need to implement cross domain tracking. This way, you can narrow down whether or not it's one particular subdomain that's creating the self-referrals.

In this example below, we can see all the revenue is being reported to the booking engine (which ended up being cross domain issues) and their own site is the fourth largest traffic source:

I'll also a good idea to check the browser and device reports to start narrowing down whether the issue is specific to a particular element. If it's not, keep digging. Look at pages pulling the self-referrals and go through the code with a fine-tooth comb, drilling down as much as you can.

2. Unusually low bounce rate

If you have a crazy-low bounce rate, it could be too good to be true. Unfortunately. An unusually low bounce rate could (and probably does) mean that at least on some pages of your website have the same Google Analytics tracking code installed twice.

Take a look at your source code, or use Google Tag Assistant (though it does have known bugs) to see if you've got GA tracking code installed twice.

While I tell clients having Google Analytics installed on the same page can lead to double the pageviews, I've not actually encountered that—I usually just say it to scare them into removing the duplicate implementation more quickly. Don't tell on me.

3. Iframes anywhere

I've heard directly from Google engineers and Google Analytics evangelists that Google Analytics does not play well with iframes, and that it will never will play nice with this dinosaur technology.

If you track the iframe, you inflate your pageviews, plus you still aren't tracking everything with 100% clarity.

If you don't track across iframes, you lose the source/medium attribution and everything becomes a self-referral.

Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

My advice: Stop using iframes. They're Netscape-era technology anyway, with rainbow marquees and Comic Sans on top. Interestingly, and unfortunately, a number of booking engines (for hotels) and third-party carts (for ecommerce) still use iframes.

If you have any clients in those verticals, or if you're in the vertical yourself, check with your provider to see if they use iframes. Or you can check for yourself, by right-clicking as close as you can to the actual booking element:

There is no neat and tidy way to address iframes with Google Analytics, and usually iframes are not the only complicated element of setup you'll encounter. I spent eight months dealing with a website on a subfolder, which used iframes and had a cross domain booking system, and the best visibility I was able to get was about 80% on a good day.

Typically, I'd approach diagnosing iframes (if, for some reason, I had absolutely no access to viewing a website or talking to the techs) similarly to diagnosing self-referrals, as self-referrals are one of the biggest symptoms of iframe use.

4. Massive traffic jumps

Massive jumps in traffic don't typically just happen. (Unless, maybe, you're Geraldine.) There's always an explanation—a new campaign launched, you just turned on paid ads for the first time, you're using content amplification platforms, you're getting a ton of referrals from that recent press in The New York Times. And if you think it just happened, it's probably a technical glitch.

I've seen everything from inflated pageviews result from including tracking on iframes and unnecessary implementation of virtual pageviews, to not realizing the tracking code was installed on other microsites for the same property. Oops.

Usually I've seen this happen when the tracking code was somewhere it shouldn't be, so if you're investigating a situation of this nature, first confirm the Google Analytics code is only in the places it needs to be.Tools like Google Tag Assistant and Screaming Frog can be your BFFs in helping you figure this out.

Also, I suggest bribing the IT department with sugar (or booze) to see if they've changed anything lately.

5. Cross-domain tracking

I wish cross-domain tracking with Google Analytics out of the box didn't require any additional setup. But it does.

If you don't have it set up properly, things break down quickly, and can be quite difficult to untangle.

The older the GA library you're using, the harder it is. The easiest setup, by far, is Google Tag Manager with Universal Analytics. Hard-coded universal analytics is a bit more difficult because you have to implement autoLink manually and decorate forms, if you're using them (and you probably are). Beyond that, rather than try and deal with it, I say update your Google Analytics code. Then we can talk.

Where I've seen the most murkiness with tracking is when parts of cross domain tracking are implemented, but not all. For some reason, if allowLinker isn't included, or you forget to decorate all the forms, the cookies aren't passed between domains.

The absolute first place I would start with this would be confirming the cookies are all passing properly at all the right points, forms, links, and smoke signals. I'll usually use a combination of the Real Time report in Google Analytics, Google Tag Assistant, and GA debug to start testing this. Any debug tool you use will mean you're playing in the console, so get friendly with it.

6. Internal use of UTM strings

I've saved the best for last. Internal use of campaign tagging. We may think, oh, I use Google to tag my campaigns externally, and we've got this new promotion on site which we're using a banner ad for. That's a campaign. Why don't I tag it with a UTM string?

Step away from the keyboard now. Please.

When you tag internal links with UTM strings, you override the original source/medium. So that visitor who came in through your paid ad and then who clicks on the campaign banner has now been manually tagged. You lose the ability to track that they came through on the ad the moment they click on the tagged internal link. Their source and medium is now your internal campaign, not that paid ad you're spending gobs of money on and have to justify to your manager. See the problem?

I've seen at least three pretty spectacular instances of this in the past year, and a number of smaller instances of it. Annie Cushing also talks about the evils of internal UTM tags and the odd prevalence of it. (Oh, and if you haven't explored her blog, and the amazing spreadsheets she shares, please do.)

One clothing company I worked with tagged all of their homepage offers with UTM strings, which resulted in the loss of visibility for one-third of their audience: One million visits over the course of a year, and $2.1 million in lost revenue.

Let me say that again. One million visits, and $2.1 million. That couldn't be attributed to an external source/campaign/spend.

Another client I audited included campaign tagging on nearly every navigational element on their website. It still gives me nightmares.

If you want to see if you have any internal UTM strings, head straight to the Campaigns report in Acquisition in Google Analytics, and look for anything like "home" or "navigation" or any language you may use internally to refer to your website structure.

And if you want to see how users are moving through your website, go to the Flow reports. Or if you really, really, really want to know how many people click on that sidebar link, use event tracking. But please, for the love of all things holy (and to keep us analytics lovers from throwing our computers across the room), stop using UTM tagging on your internal links.

Now breathe and smile

Odds are, your Google Analytics setup is fine. If you are seeing any of these issues, though, you have somewhere to start in diagnosing and addressing the data.

We've looked at six of the most common points of friction I've encountered with Google Analytics and how to start investigating them: self-referrals, bounce rate, iframes, traffic jumps, cross domain tracking and internal campaign tagging.

What common data integrity issues have you encountered with Google Analytics? What are your favorite tools to investigate?

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The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics

Posted by kristihines

If you don't know what Google Analytics is, haven't installed it on your website, or have installed it but never look at your data, then this post is for you. While it's hard for many to believe, there are still websites that are not using Google Analytics (or any analytics, for that matter) to measure their traffic. In this post, we're going to look at Google Analytics from the absolute beginner's point of view. Why you need it, how to get it, how to use it, and workarounds to common problems.

Why every website owner needs Google Analytics

Do you have a blog? Do you have a static website? If the answer is yes, whether they are for personal or business use, then you need Google Analytics. Here are just a few of the many questions about your website that you can answer using Google Analytics.

• How many people visit my website?
• Where do my visitors live?
• Do I need a mobile-friendly website?
• What websites send traffic to my website?
• What marketing tactics drive the most traffic to my website?
• Which pages on my website are the most popular?
• How many visitors have I converted into leads or customers?
• Where did my converting visitors come from and go on my website?
• How can I improve my website's speed?
• What blog content do my visitors like the most?

There are many, many additional questions that Google Analytics can answer, but these are the ones that are most important for most website owners. Now let's look at how you can get Google Analytics on your website.

How to install Google Analytics

First, you need a Google Analytics account. If you have a primary Google account that you use for other services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google+, or YouTube, then you should set up your Google Analytics using that Google account. Or you will need to create a new one.

This should be a Google account you plan to keep forever and that only you have access to. You can always grant access to your Google Analytics to other people down the road, but you don't want someone else to have full control over it.

Big tip: don't let your anyone (your web designer, web developer, web host, SEO person, etc.) create your website's Google Analytics account under their own Google account so they can "manage" it for you. If you and this person part ways, they will take your Google Analytics data with them, and you will have to start all over.

Set up your account and property

Once you have a Google account, you can go to Google Analytics and click the Sign into Google Analytics button. You will then be greeted with the three steps you must take to set up Google Analytics.

After you click the Sign Up button, you will fill out information for your website.

Google Analytics offers hierarchies to organize your account. You can have up to 100 Google Analytics accounts under one Google account. You can have up to 50 website properties under one Google Analytics account. You can have up to 25 views under one website property.

Here are a few scenarios.

• SCENARIO 1: If you have one website, you only need one Google Analytics account with one website property.
• SCENARIO 2: If you have two websites, such as one for your business and one for your personal use, you might want to create two accounts, naming one "123Business" and one "Personal". Then you will set up your business website under the 123Business account and your personal website under your Personal account.
• SCENARIO 3: If you have several businesses, but less than 50, and each of them has one website, you might want to put them all under a Business account. Then have a Personal account for your personal websites.
• SCENARIO 4: If you have several businesses and each of them has dozens of websites, for a total of more than 50 websites, you might want to put each business under its own account, such as 123Business account, 124Business account, and so on.

There are no right or wrong ways to set up your Google Analytics account—it's just a matter of how you want to organize your sites. You can always rename your accounts or properties down the road. Note that you can't move a property (website) from one Google Analytics account to another—you would have to set up a new property under the new account and lose the historical data you collected from the original property.

For the absolute beginner's guide, we're going to assume you have one website and only need one view (the default, all data view. The setup would look something like this.

Beneath this, you will have the option to configure where your Google Analytics data can be shared.

Install your tracking code

Once you are finished, you will click the Get Tracking ID button. You will get a popup of the Google Analytics terms and conditions, which you have to agree to. Then you will get your Google Analytics code.

This must be installed on every page on your website. The installation will depend on what type of website you have. For example, I have a WordPress website on my own domain using the Genesis Framework. This framework has a specific area to add header and footer scripts to my website.

Alternatively, if you have a WordPress on your own domain, you can use the Google Analytics by Yoast plugin to install your code easily no matter what theme or framework you are using.

If you have a website built with HTML files, you will add the tracking code before the </head> tag on each of your pages. You can do this by using a text editor program (such as TextEdit for Mac or Notepad for Windows) and then uploading the file to your web host using an FTP program (such as FileZilla).

If you have a Shopify e-commerce store, you will go to your Online Store settings and paste in your tracking code where specified.

If you have a blog on Tumblr, you will go to your blog, click the Edit Theme button at the top right of your blog, and then enter just the Google Analytics ID in your settings.

As you can see, the installation of Google Analytics varies based on the platform you use (content management system, website builder, e-commerce software, etc.), the theme you use, and the plugins you use. You should be able to find easy instructions to install Google Analytics on any website by doing a web search for your platform + how to install Google Analytics.

Set up goals

After you install your tracking code on your website, you will want to configure a small (but very useful) setting in your website's profile on Google Analytics. This is your Goals setting. You can find it by clicking on the Admin link at the top of your Google Analytics and then clicking on Goals under your website's View column.

Goals will tell Google Analytics when something important has happened on your website. For example, if you have a website where you generate leads through a contact form, you will want to find (or create) a thank you page that visitors end upon once they have submitted their contact information. Or, if you have a website where you sell products, you will want to find (or create) a final thank you or confirmation page for visitors to land upon once they have completed a purchase.

That URL will likely look something like this.

• http://123business.com/thank-you
• http://123business.com/thank-you/
• http://123business.com/thank-you.html

In Google Analytics, you will click on the New Goal button.

You will choose the Custom option (unless one of the other options are more applicable to your website) and click the Next Step button.

You will name your goal something you will remember, select Destination, and then click the Next Step button.

You will enter your thank you or confirmation page's URL after the .com of your website in the Destination field and change the drop-down to "Begins with".

You will then toggle the value and enter a specific dollar value for that conversion (if applicable) and click Create Goal to complete the setup.

If you have other similar goals / conversions you would like to track on your website, you can follow these steps again. You can create up to 20 goals on your website. Be sure that the ones you create are highly important to your business. These goals (for most businesses) include lead form submissions, email list sign ups, and purchase completions. Depending on your website and its purpose, your goals may vary.

Note that this is the simplest of all conversion tracking in Google Analytics. You can review the documentation in Google Analytics support to learn more about setting up goal tracking.

Set up site search

Another thing you can set up really quickly that will give you valuable data down the road is Site Search. This is for any website with a search box on it, like the search box at the top of the Moz Blog.

First, run a search on your website. Then keep the tab open. You will need the URL momentarily.

Go to your Google Analytics Admin menu again, and in the View column, click on View Settings.

Scroll down until you see Site Settings and toggle it to On.

Look back at your URL for your search results. Enter the query parameter (usually s or q) and click Save. On Moz, for example, the query parameter is q.

This will allow Google Analytics to track any searches made on your website so you can learn more about what your visitors are looking for on specific pages.

Add additional accounts and properties

If you want to add a new Google Analytics account, you can do so by going to your Admin menu, clicking on the drop-down under the Account column, and clicking the Create New Account link.

Likewise, if you want to add a new website under your Google Analytics account, you can do so by going to your Admin menu, clicking on the drop-down under the Property column, and clicking the Create New Property link.

Then you will continue through all of the above-mentioned steps.

Once you've installed Google Analytics on your website(s), set up your goals, and set up site search(es), you should wait about 24 hours for it to start getting data. Then you will be able to start viewing your data.

How to view Google Analytics data

Once you start getting in Google Analytics data, you can start learning about your website traffic. Each time you log in to Google Analytics, you will be taken to your Audience Overview report. Alternatively, if you have more than one website, you will be taken to your list of websites to choose from, and then taken to the Audience Overview report for that website. This is the first of over 50 reports that are available to you in Google Analytics. You can also access these reports by clicking on the Reporting link at the top.

Standard report features

Most of the standard reports within Google Analytics will look similar to this. At the top right, you can click on the drop-down arrow next to your website to switch to different websites within all of your Google Analytics accounts. Or you can click the Home link at the top.

In the report at the top right, you can click on the dates to change the date range of the data you are viewing. You can also check the Compare box to compare your data from one date range (such as this month) to a previous date range (such as last month) to view your data.

You can hover over a variety of areas on your Google Analytics reports to get more information. For example, in the Audience Overview, hovering over the line on the graph will give you the number of sessions for a particular day. Hovering over the metrics beneath the graph will tell you what each one means.

Beneath the main metrics, you will see reports that you can switch through to see the top ten languages, countries, cities, browsers, operating systems, services providers, and screen resolutions of your visitors.

You can click the full report link on each to see the full reports. Or you can click on any of the top ten links to see more details. For example, clicking on the United States in Countries will take you to the full Location report, focused in on visitors from states within the US.

In this view, you can hover over each state to see the number of visitors from that state. You can scroll down to the table and hover over each column name to learn more about each metric.

You can also click on the name of each state to see visitors from cities within the state. Effectively, any time you see a clickable link or a ? next to something, you can click on it or hover over it to learn more. The deeper you dive into your analytics, the more interesting information you will find.

Types of Google Analytics reports

Speaking of reports, here is quick summary of what you will find in each of the standard Google Analytics reporting sections, accessible in the left sidebar.

Everything in (parenthesis) is a specific report or set of reports within the following sections that you can refer to.

Audience reports

These reports tell you everything you want to know about your visitors. In them, you will find detailed reports for your visitors' age and gender (Demographics), what their general interests are (Interests), where they come from (Geo > Location) and what language they speak (Geo > Language), how often they visit your website (Behavior), and the technology they use to view your website (Technology and Mobile).

Acquisition reports

These reports will tell you everything you want to know about what drove visitors to your website (All Traffic). You will see your traffic broken down by main categories (All Traffic > Channels) and specific sources (All Traffic > Source/Medium).

You can learn everything about traffic from social networks (Social). You can also connect Google Analytics to AdWords to learn more about PPC campaigns and to Google Webmaster Tools / Search Console to learn more about search traffic (Search Engine Optimization)

Behavior reports

These reports will tell you everything you want to know about your content. Particularly, the top pages on your website (Site Content > All Pages), the top entry pages on your website (Site Content > Landing Pages), and the top exit pages on your website (Site Content > Exit Pages).

If you set up Site Search, you will be able to see what terms are searched for (Site Search > Search Terms) and the pages they are searched upon (Site Search > Pages).

You can also learn how fast your website loads (Site Speed) as well as find specific suggestions from Google on how to make your website faster (Site Speed > Speed Suggestions).

Conversions

If you set up Goals within your Google Analytics, you can see how many conversions your website has received (Goals > Overview) and what URLs they happened upon (Goals > Goal URLs). You can also see the path that visitors took to complete the conversion (Goals > Reverse Goal Path).

Speaking of goals and conversions, most of the tables within Google Analytics standard reports will tie specific data to your conversions. For example, you can see the number of conversions made by visitors from California in the Audience > Geo > Location report. You can see the number of conversions made by visitors from Facebook in the Acquisitions > All Traffic > Source/Medium report. You can see the number of conversions made by visitors who landed on specific pages in the Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages report.

If you have multiple goals, you can use the dropdown at the top of that section of data to switch to the goal you want to view or all of your goals if you prefer.

Shortcuts and emails

While you won't need every report within Google Analytics, you should explore them all to see what they have to offer. When you find some that you want to visit again and again, use the Shortcut link at the top of the report to add them to the Shortcuts in your left sidebar for faster access.

Or, use the email button to have them emailed to you (or others on your team) on a regular basis.

If you choose to send emails to someone outside of your organization, be sure to regularly check your emails by going to your Admin menu and clicking on the Scheduled Emails box under the View column to ensure only people working with your company are getting your data.

Answers to common questions about Google Analytics

Got a few questions? Here are some of the common ones that come up with Google Analytics.

How do I share my Google Analytics data with someone?

You don't have to give your Google account information over to someone who needs access to your Google Analytics data. You just need to go to your Admin menu and under the Account, Property (website) or View you want someone to see, click the User Management menu.

From there, you can add the email address of anyone you would like to view your Google Analytics data and choose the permissions you would like them to have.

I don't like viewing the reports in Google Analytics. Can someone just summarize the data for me?

Yes! Quill Engage is a service that will take your Google Analytics data and summarize it in an easy-to-read report for you. Best of all, it's free for up to ten profiles (websites).

I have a dozen websites, and I don't want to check each of their Google Analytics on a daily basis. What do I do?

You have two options in this scenario. You start by going to the Home screen of Google Analytics. There, you will find a listing of all your websites and an overview of the top metrics—sessions, average session duration, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

You can also try business dashboard solutions like Cyfe. For $19 a month, you can create unlimited dashboards with unlimited widgets, including a large selection of data from Google Analytics, alongside data from your social media networks, keyword rankings, Moz stats, and more.

This solution significantly cuts down on the time spent looking at analytics across the board for your entire business.

Google Analytics says that 90%+ of my organic keywords are (not provided). Where can I find that information?

(not provided) is Google's way of protecting search engine user's privacy by hiding the keywords they use to discover your website in search results. Tools like Google Webmaster Tools (now Search Console, free), Authority Lab's Now Provided Reports (paid), and Hittail (paid) can all help you uncover some of those keywords.

They won't be linked to your conversions or other Google Analytics data, but at least you will have some clue what keywords searchers are using to find your website.

How do I use Custom Reports, Dashboards, and Segments?

If you're ready to move to the next level in Google Analytics, Custom Reports, Dashboards, and Segments are the way to go.

Custom Reports (under the Customization menu at the top) allow you to create reports that look similar to the standard Google Analytics reports with the metrics you want to view.

Dashboards allow you to view your Google Analytics data in a dashboard format. You can access them at the top of the left sidebar.

Segments allow you to view all of your Google Analytics data based on a specific dimension, such as all of your Google Analytics data based on visitors from the United States. You can also use them to compare up to four segments of data, such as United States versus United Kingdom traffic, search versus social traffic, mobile versus desktop traffic, and more. You can access Segments in each of your reports.

The nice part about these is that you don't have to create them from scratch. You can start by using pre-defined Custom Reports, Dashboards, and Segments from the Google Solutions Gallery.

There, you will find lots of Custom Reports, Dashboards, Segments, and other solutions that you can import into your Google Analytics and edit to fit your needs. Edit Custom Reports with the Edit button at the top.

Edit Dashboards using the Add Widget or Customize Dashboard buttons at the top.

Edit Segments by clicking the Action button inside the Segments selector box and choosing Edit.

Or, when you have applied Segments to your reports, use the drop-down arrow at the top right to find the Edit option.

As you get used to editing Custom Reports, Dashboards, and Segments, you will get more familiar with the way each works so you can create new ones on your own.

In conclusion

I hope you've enjoyed this beginner's introduction to Google Analytics for beginners. If you're a beginner and have a burning questions, please ask in the comments. I'll be happy to help!

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