Many moons later, I was introduced to Google Analytics and had a classic “Eureka” moment. If only I had known about this before! Not only did I realise what content was converting, but I could make adjustments quickly and effectively, gradually building a steady stream of traffic.

As the world of online business has developed and become ever more competitive, it’s not only vital that we monitor our traffic, but also that we make necessary changes as quickly as possible. It’s not enough to make changes as and when you add new pages, products or features. You have to be first to spot the gaps. But until now, we could only use Google Analytics to make changes based on information we had about the past. There’s only so fast you can be when you are reacting to something which happened a few hours ago, yesterday or last week!

With the new Google Analytics Real Time Reporting, we can monitor our traffic as-it-happens. It’s a live view at what’s going on RIGHT NOW. The old adage “Knowledge is King” still applies but now it’s about who can get it quickest.

Application of Real Time Google Analytics

I’m sure it won’t take long for SEOs and Digital Marketers to find tons of different ways to use the new real time data and you can’t help but get excited about the potential of this update.

Here are a few ideas that I’ve come up with but please be sure to leave a comment with some of your most elaborate ways to apply this powerful tool.

If you are launching a product discount, perhaps for one day only, you can monitor your promotional activity in real time. As soon as you see traffic tail off, you can see exactly when to “ re-engage” and get promoting again, without fear of overkill. You can also see what promotion techniques are actually driving traffic to the product and which are a waste of your time.

If you see searches are particularly high for a certain product/service, due perhaps to an unforeseen trend or news story, you can maximise your sales by promoting that particular product or service while the demand for it is still “hot”. Be the first to see the demand, be the first to supply it.
It’s hard to gauge how much immediate traffic a new blog post is generating, at least it has been until now. With Google Real Time Analytics you can see the traffic your new post is bringing your site, as it happens. You can also use it to see when your tweets have stopped bringing traffic to the blog post and re-engage again. Real Time Social Monitoring!

Real Time Google Analytics is available now, although you may have to select it via the “New Version” button, in the “Home” tab. Enjoy but be warned, it is highly addictive!

It's likely you will land on the "Standard Reporting" version. To see "Real Time", click on the "Home" tab

Here you can select how you want to sort the real time data.

The Benefits of Google Analytics Real Time Reporting is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

There was an introduction to the whole event by Neil Morgan, (Senior Director Digital Marketing, Adobe EMEA) and he explained the morning had been devoted to clients and the afternoon session was devoted to agencies.

What Neil explained was that Adobe is well know for the creative suite of software about 15 at the moment, but since it bought Omniture in 2009 for an eye watering $1.8 Billion they have moved firmly into the search and analytics markets. The combination of creating content and delivering then measuring the results seems to be their current mission. The brands that currently use Omniture reads like a who’s who of the biggest companies in the world, BBC, Oracle, Nike to name a few.

Neil went on to introduce Jeremy Spiller (MD of white hat media and senior trainer for Econsultancy) who gave a wide overview of the way in which data is being used currently and what we should expect in the future. Jeremy’s voice sounds a bit like Barry White so his words seemed to carry even more weight in the confines of the cinema.  It was a great insight into the ideas that data and then action is an old way of reacting to events, the whole process has to have information gleaned from the ‘data’and intelligence focused on the information to then employ intelligent actions. One slide I particularly enjoyed read:

“Data is not information, information is not intelligence, information is not always useful”

I suppose we can all take away the idea that without making the data useful and informative it’s very hard to utilise it in an intelligent way. The mass of information that we are bombarded with on a daliy basis can be overwhelming to say the least.

Jeremy went on to explain that the way that people arrive at a purchase can be a very varied road, buyers making numerous ‘touch points’ on their search.  One might start with a Google search but then ask a question on Twitter and then watch a video of the product on Youtube and so for a marketer it’s hard to know which site to attribute the sale to?  Jeremy also explained that the way that we search is changing as well, that people are inputting txt speak into search engines to save on space on their smart phones.

Attribution is going to be an area that is ever expanding, how do your customers get to you and on which devices do they arrive?  It’s seems to be invertible that the desktop PC won’t be the number one point of access to the internet in the future. Jeremy had a slide predicting that devices (tablets and Smart Phones) would over take desktops by as early as 2013, although these are estimates.

The talk then moved onto the relationship between Paid search and organic search and where these two sources working in synergy or where they cannibalistic to each others objectives? A few simple examples where thrown up for us to see the way a SERPS page was displaying for keywords such as ‘Apple’ and ‘windows’. Below is the results you get from entering ‘windows’ into Google  (you too can try this at home!)

You can see that all the organic results relate to Microsoft Windows and all the paid results relate to window companies like Zenith. It’s interesting to see the overlap of products and the confusion that can arise. Apparently users stay on a SERPS page for about 7 seconds and either go back and refine their search or move forward from the results.

Jeremy went on to tell an anicdote about a client in a Telecoms company that had 19 different brand managers all wanting to target the same key phrases and how this showed the disjointed approach that some companies had it graphically highlighted that one part of the company can end up competing against another part of the same company.

One of the key points I took away was to be a futurist and learn from the past, obviously there is the data of the past to work from and plan for the future. An interesting statistic was that only 24% of business websites were optimised for devices leaving the majority unprepared for what’s around the corner.

Jeremy finished with some predictions that were soon to be upon us, like the convergance of the internet onto TV and the steady march of geo location technology. We all move about and depend on our smart phones more and more and will see the rise of the QR codes maybe playing videos of products you scan in the store? He also mentioned the mobile technology that allows you to pay using your smartphone wirelessly. It all seems to be coming to a shop near you anytime soon.

The final part of the seminar was dedicated to Search metrics and was presented by Dr Horst Joepen CEO of Search Metrics, a very smartly dressed man who gave an insightful and enlightening overview of his analytics product and how it interfaces with the Adobe Omniture software to give quite stunning insights into both paid and organic keyword performance.

I must now raise my hands and admit that things got quite technical quite quickly and although I understood the principles involved it’s hard to judge the software without trying it, which I will do in the near future. The basic overview is that using this software can give you insights into where your competitors are bidding on the same keywords that you are and where you overlap. There are a multitude of other features that you can dig into but I will leave you to search out and try these.

We were given a demonstration of the software and how you can manage both your paid and organic campaigns under one roof. The ability to really gauge what your competitors are doing in terms of keywords is what really shone through.

“90% of clicks go into organic results and 90% of budget goes into paid search”

I suppose what I really took away from the whole afternoon is that the raw data the we have at our finger tips is ever expanding and it’s knowing how to use and formulate that data into actions that see results is the key. The world of search is ever changing and it’s moving onto devices at a quickening rate. So if your clients haven’t thought about how this will effect their business they should do sharpish because if they don’t you can be sure that their competitors are.

Keeping up to date with the ever ending advances in the way that we search seems half the battle, but it’s what I love about this industry, you adapt and develop, “always be in beta” as Jeremy said. Just keep on testing people!

Adobe Seminar September 29 2011 is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Google Local is a relatively new channel for marketers to obtain traffic and however much we theorise and assume how valuable it is, nothing will give clearer data than tracking and monitoring. We track and monitor every other aspect of our organic and paid search so why wouldn’t we want to track other channels that generate site traffic?

From an analytical point of view Google Local could previously only be measured if a browser came through the Google Maps section to our site.  We were not naturally able to measure visits from a Local Business Listing (LBL) unless we implemented tracking codes.  Now there are a few posts around the web detailing how we should track Google Local, in particular from Martijn Beijk who specialises in Google Local. What I found interesting after reading these posts was that no one ever replied back, detailing whether implementing the analytic codes created any problems and if so, how they dealt with these issues.

We recently implemented tracking code to one of our clients’ local business listings. We experienced some issues along the way which inspired me to write this post about how to track Google Local.

Track URLs in Local Business Centre

One method that was recommended by a few people was implementing a tagged URL within your local business listing through the local business centre. This included giving each local business listing a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, theoretically it should then appear in GA under traffic sources – campaigns

In order to tag a URL you should use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in specific information in the tool. The campaign source (in this case; Google local), the campaign medium (local business listing) and also give it a campaign name to differentiate various listings, for example Search_Consultancy_London.

Just to clarify, if tracked correctly the statistics should appear within Traffic Sources – Medium – Local Business Listing

One aspect that you need to be aware of before you update the new tagged URL is to remove any “%2B” or “%20” symbols.  The symbol %2B is part of the URL encoding process and it merely means ‘+’, similarly to %20 which means space. In my experience and after discussing this with others these characters should be replaced with underscores. Hyphens are better from a search perspective but you are not trying to rank this page as it is merely a tagged URL.

Once you have inserted this tagged URL, the local business centre it states that it can take up to 48 hours for the change to be updated. We waited, and waited some more but the change never took place. Some people say you have to wait up to 2 weeks for Google to update their listings to include your utm source code within the URL. After 7 days the update still did not occur and we were not willing to wait any longer as a week without data was long enough. I still remain sceptical that this method works and would love to hear from anyone who implemented this -  was it successful and how long you had to wait? Are you still waiting?

Use Vanity URLs to track page views

Another option is to create separate landing page URLs for each listing that is within the Local Business Centre. The separate landing pages are essentially duplicate pages of the original URL but given a vanity URL name.

For Example:

Original URL:

http://www.example.com/location-service

Vanity URL:

http://www.example.com/localad-location-service

To avoid the duplicate content issue and to specify to Google the canonical URL we would simply input the canonical tag within the source code of the Vanity URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/location-service”/>

Once you have created this page, insert the vanity URL into the Google Local Business centre. The beauty of this method is that it appears in less than 48 hours and you can see instant results. Statistics would appear in content – top content – then type in “local” within the filter box.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method; the main factor is you are restricted to the amount of quantitative data you can analyse.

Since the URL of the local ad page has not been tagged it does not appear within the traffic sources as a ‘medium’. This prevents you from easily evaluating how much traffic this medium generated in comparison to other sources. Furthermore, site visits to the local ad page can only be determined through accessing the top landing pages within the content section of analytics which is not ideal.

Another negative aspect to tracking your local search this way is if you are running an ecommerce booking engine through your Google analytics you will not be able to analyse how much revenue was generated through Local search.

This can only be determined if you tag the URL, which brings me on to my last method.

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

This method may take a little bit more time in liaising with client programmers and web developers but it is the preferred and recommended method.

First you need to set up a vanity URL, but this time do not create a page, just a URL that will be 301 redirected to the original tagged URL which we spoke about in the beginning.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location

needs to be 301 redirected to the following URL

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location.htm/#utm_source=GoogleLocalutm_medium=local_business_listing&utm_campaign=london

This would then track all visitors and able us to see the TOTAL number of visits from Google Local Listings within the Traffic Source (separate to organic and everything else) under the medium local_business_listing (or whatever you decided to title your medium within the URL builder)

This will ensure reporting on monthly statistical data is far easier as you can compare the effectiveness of your campaign and evaluate individual segments.

The amount of data you can now analyse through this method is much greater than the previous method. Additionally to appearing under traffic sources – medium it will also appear as a tagged campaign under traffic sources – campaigns which will let you view each individual listings analytics.

It also provides you with further dimensions in which to breakdown the data, including:

•    keywords visitors typed into Google to trigger your listing
•    Visitor type (new vs. returning)
•    Visitor Country/territory/region

Most significantly, if you have e-commerce set up through analytics it allows you to view how successful your local ad is in terms of generating revenue.  Within traffic sources you can breakdown the following:

•    Overall Revenue
•    Transactions
•    Average Value
•    Conversion rate
•    Per visit value

We also found that by creating the Vanity URL and implementing this in the Local Business Centre it actually improved our local ranking.  We believe this is due to the added keywords within the Vanity URL so ensure you use appropriate and relevant keywords (without spamming) related to what you wish to appear in the local listings for.

How to Track your Google Local Listing is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency