Friday, March 28, 2014

Digital Analytics Fundamentals #5/1 - Reporting Overview

This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.

Unit 5/1 - Reporting Overview
Unit 5/1 - Reporting Overview
The Google Analytics Academy started a new course (March 11th 2014) called "Google Analytics Platform Principles" which ended yesterday.  Though not required, it is recommended completing the "Digital Analytics Fundamentals" course on Analytics Academy before beginning this course:

The first part of the fifth lesson provides an overview to the reporting interface of Google Analytics.

For each report you can adjust its date range, which will stay active till changed again or you log out. In addition you can add a second date range to compare current with historic data.

The granularity of the shown data can be changed to day, week, or month.

You can select the shown metric, and also select a second one for comparison.

To mark certain events e.g. for future reference, you can add annotations.

For tables you can choose primary and secondary dimensions as well as its metrics - which are organized into tabs at the top of each report.

You can use filters to display only specific values of the primary dimension or use advanced filters consisting of various rule sets.

You can visualize data in different ways using view options:
  • the data view as default option,
  • the percentage view with pie charts,
  • the performance view with bar graphs,
  • the comparison view to see which values are above or below averages,
  • and the pivot view with a pivot table with rows and columns showing different dimension values.
The plot-rows feature plots selected rows or segments of the table in the time graph.

Shortcuts remember specific settings to avoid tedious reconfigurations ...

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Smart Passive Income #282 - To Be or To Give Up

To Be or To Give Up
To Be or To Give Up
This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.
 
A little bit disjointed, Pat philosophizes about giving up ...

Why disjointed? Well, his post is from September 2010, and he writes that he wondered if he should give up writing his blog in the first six month which would be October 2008 to March 2009 ... Why this sudden introspection? ... Could it be nothing else to write ... or just a personal note ...

Nevertheless, he decided to go on, good for him, good for us!

His motto for today:
Keep at it and keep working hard to provide over-the-top, high quality content. It only takes one influential person, one moment, to change everything.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Smart Passive Income #281 - Spam?

Niche Site Spam
Niche Site Spam?
This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.

Creating niche sites seems to be like stock trading ... you continuously watch the rank of your pages, get depressed when they do not change or worsen, and rejoice when they rise ...

The rank of Pat's niche site rose from #117 to #53 ... Could it be that the sand box a myth???

Nevertheless, Pat learned (or better remembered) that the quality of back links is far more important than the total number ...

Rule #1: Create excellent content, and you will get quality back links. Motto: Build and they will come ... 

To get more (?quality?) back links Pat posts articles to:
... he creates additional blogs with quality-content posts on:
For his niche site duel, he created new blogs on those sites using his keywords in the blog name. Strangely all of that blogs contain only a single entry ... did he abandon his strategy later on, or does this really suffice?

... and he uses two "cheating" tools to create his content ... don't know if I like that! ... he writes an article and uses the tool to "spin it" to create a new article ... is this really "quality content", or is it just spam?

Monday, March 24, 2014

Digital Analytics Fundamentals #4/5 - Collecting Campaign Data

Unit 4/5 - Collecting Campaign Data
Unit 4/5 - Collecting Campaign Data
This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.
 
The Google Analytics Academy started a new course (March 11th 2014) called "Google Analytics Platform Principles".  Though not required, it is recommended completing the "Digital Analytics Fundamentals" course on Analytics Academy before beginning this course:

The fifth part of the forth lesson addresses marketing campaigns.

Two user attributes - dimensions - Google captures are source - the referring website - and medium - the referral mechanism, how the user got to your site.

By default there are three mediums:
  • organic - identifies traffic coming from unpaid search results,
  • referral - traffic from other websites which are not search engines,
  • none - for users typing the URL directly or using a bookmark.
Via link tagging you can add extra information to links to track campaigns - the first three should be added for all manual tagging:
  • the Source and Medium tags allow to overwrite the default values described above,
  • with the Campaign tag you can name your marketing campaign,
  • the optional Term tag allows to identify keywords of paid search campaigns,
  • and the optional Content tag allows to specify different versions of your campaign.
 The URL builder helps to create those tags correctly.

Because Google AdWords and Google Analytics are connected, there is no need to create campaign tags manually for AdWords campaigns. The AdWords auto-tagging is enabled by default and adds also other dimensions specific to AdWords campaigns.

Channels allow to group traffic based on various link tags. There are predefined channels Direct, Email, Social, Organic and Display. It's possible to redefine them and to create new ones.

Campaign information shows up
  • in the All Traffic report - including all sources and mediums from default values and tags,
  • in the Campaigns report - including data for each campaign used in tags and AdWords campaigns, but also information from the Content tag, which however will requires a change of the Primary Dimensions to Ad Content,
  • and in the Paid Search Keywords report - including tagged keywords.

Smart Passive Income #280 - Sandbox Effect & SEO Crash

SEO Crash
SEO Crash
This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.
 
Last time Pat learned about the Google dance, now (September 2010) "he had to" discover the sandbox effect.

The sandbox effect describes the "unconfirmed" phenomenon of being penalized by search engines for bad SEO ... e.g. link spam, buying back links, ...

Pat wanted to speed up his ranking for the niche site duel, using a service which should enter his site into hundreds of web directories ... he paid real money ... his rank did not improve ... now Pat thinks, Goggle does not like him any more :(


Sunday, March 23, 2014

Smart Passive Income #279 - Niche Site Duel Master Plan

Niche Site Duel Strategy
This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.

... back to Pat's niche site duel ... after one month ... it seems Pat is a little bit complaining ... the niche he chose is/was more competitive than the ones of his niche-site-duel opponents ... and he does/did all the work himself ...

Nevertheless, his site now (September 9th, 2010) ranks #119 at Google, #8 at Yahoo.

His strategy did not change:
  • creating content that people find useful and helpful,
  • and content that help higher rankings in search engines. 
Concerning the first one, Pat faces the problem that he actually does/did not know anything about his niche ... Here he refers to "The Curse of Knowledge" found in Made to Stick by Chip by Dan Heath. People who know everything about a certain topic sometimes find it hard to teach newcomers. Where to start? What is considered to be basic knowledge? How to reduce that amount of knowledge to a beginners level ...

Pat starts at the same level - zero. Documenting the steps of his research, provides a unique point of view, which experienced teachers don't have, but might help others starting from scratch and soon excelling, becoming experts ...

To create content that helps higher ranking in search engines, Pat tries to find out what people are searching for and fits his content to address those topics and use those specific terms as keywords ...

... and did you know about the Google Dance? New sites change their ranking quite drastically depending on the indexing process ...

Wordpress Plugin - Social Media Feather Updated ... yet again ...

This blog moved to a new location, please visit us at http://ramble.m2m.at.
 
Two weeks later ... it updated again ... does that prove it's quality or the opposite?

Not long ago I mentioned the social media plugin Social Media Feather for wordpress, and also that there was an update ...

Remember it automatically creates those little buttons with link to various social networks:

http://m2mtech.blogspot.com/

... it's free version supports:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google Plus
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest
  • Linkedin
  • Tumblr
  • Mail
  • RSS
  • Youtube
  • Vimeo
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Foursquare