The “Advanced Segments” feature in Google Analytics is a powerful and important tool for marketers of all levels. The ability to look at subsets of your data in an easy and extremely customizable way gives you the ability to analyze trends and audiences in the matter of minutes. The information gained from segmentation allows you to make smarter business and product decisions, but at the same time this information can easily be misinterpreted, resulting in misguided decisions. The most common c...

E-Commerce referral attribution on Google Analytics has had a long history history of misappropriated transactions. While there are many guides out there that depend on a utm parameter to fix the problem, there is unfortunately no guide that can resolve this issue in a manner that can be applied to various use cases. Like many before me, I found many issues with the utm parameter approach and since the public release of Universal Analytics, I figured out quickly that this solution does not work ...

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is an online traffic process that provides organic visibility to a website. Where and how you rank on search engines are based on individual search engine algorithms, which serve the purpose of matching what a user is looking for with the most relevant content possible. There is no golden formula to rank number one for every search and best practices change over time as search engine algorithms become more complex. The purpose of this checklist is to not descri...

Requirements: -Google Webmaster Tools -Google Analytics Recently, I noticed a lot of spammy bot traffic to my blog that has not only corrupted the quality of my data, but has also indicated that these bots could be hurting my SEO rankings. As a result, I decided to take action to ensure that my data and SEO health would be in good shape from now and into the future. There are many routes that you can take to prevent bot traffic from appearing in your data and hurting your SEO rankings and in ...

tag on all of your websites pages....

Google Shopping is quickly becoming the go-to search engine for product searches and comparison-shopping. It is a powerful tool that not only creates an additional e-commerce platform for e-commerce websites, but also allows brick and mortar stores the ability to create an online presence for their products. (Google Trends: Jan. 2011 - April 2014) As you can see from this graph, the interest in the search engine has increased at an impressive rate and has encouraged businesses, both sm...

Google Places or Places for Business is a Google product that provides businesses with the ability to inform and connect with customers by providing in-depth store information and user review responses. This product has quickly become a popular tool not only for providing users with accurate store information, but also contains SEO benefits like lucrative placement above the fold in search results. So why should you use Google Places (Places for Business)? Google is encouraging businesses to c...

This is an extremely broad question that has been asked by our newest clients on numerous occasions. It is easy to provide multiple factors that could be causing this situation to occur, but when talking to a client, its tough to provide them with a multiple factor answer instead of a clear-cut solution to the problem. This issue could be caused by various factors such as not bidding enough on relevant keywords or not running enough relevant keywords to be matched up with the search query, but ...

Note: This guide is for the Asynchronous version of Google Analytics and should not be used with other versions. This means that the code and methods outlined in this post will not work with the recently out-of-beta Universal Analytics version. Universal Analytics uses completely different JavaScript code and methods. Event Tracking Event tracking is a powerful Google Analytics feature that allows users to track website elements that would otherwise not be tracked with the basic Google Anal...

One of the most important parts of running a business is gathering customer data CORRECTLY. A large part of my job deals with running analytics audits (primarily Google Analytics) on brand websites to make sure that they are tracking the right data. At the basic implementation level, the majority of the issues that I run into revolve around sub-domain and multiple top-level domain tracking, but surprisingly, I still run into a hand full of brands that have simple tracking code issues involving d...