Google Analytics

Guide to tracking offline marketing campaigns

To track offline campaign effectiveness requires use of a campaign URL within offline communications like Print or TV ads.

There are several choices with which URL to use, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Here’s a quick run-through with links to more detail at the end. I’d be interested to hear about your preferences for which are most effective. Do most people ignore campaign tracking or vanity URLs so it’s a waste of time or is it worthwhile? Read full story

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Installing Google Analytics on a Mobile Website

A few weeks ago, the Google Analytics team released some fantastic updates to their software. Of particular interest to me was enhanced mobile tracking and reporting capabilities.

The first thing to understand about mobile website reporting is that it works differently than regular websites. Many mobile browsers do not yet support javascript, the language that platforms like Analytics depend on to track website stats. Instead of the browser doing the work, mobile tracking leans on some server-side code to track visitors properly.
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Google Google Analytics Adds Real-Time Statistics to Blogger

Will such a feature be added to Google Analytics?

It seems like a natural next step. Currently, the popular Web analytics service only updates every few hours. Keeping it that way while another branch of Google is allowed to update every few minutes would be maddening for webmasters, not to mention completely nonsensical.

Then again, adding such an interesting feature to Blogger doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the first place. Perhaps Google is simply testing it on a less popular service, but that doesn’t exactly jive with the company’s most recent analytics efforts, which have involved letting Web surfers opt-out of being tracked.

In any case, at least the Blogger addition will make reviewing statistics a tad more interesting.

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A new face to Google News Sitemaps

Given the feedback we get from publishers, we’ve redesigned our interface to make Google News Sitemaps more flexible and easier to submit. [As a reminder, a Google News Sitemap is a file created by publishers which gives you even more control over the content you submit to Google News].

We’re currently in the midst of an exciting transition period and need your help to avoid interruption in crawling your content.

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Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is an integral part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
The purpose of SEA is to drive traffic to your website from search engines such as Google or Yahoo by achieving the best possible placement in the paid search results.

The ‘best’ place in SEA is determined by your goals which could be to maximize ROI (return on investment), exposure or click-throughs.  Read full story

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Google does not use Keywords META Tag

Google has revealed today that they do not pay any attention to the Keywords META tag on webpages / blogs for search engine rankings.

The official announcement by Google’s very own Matt Cutts stated that over the years Google have seen a huge proportion of websites / blogs who merely keyword stuff their META tags or “lift” the same META tags from other popular websites.
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A Life Sciences Social Media Survey

I have been accumulating anecdotal information about companies,organizations and institutions that use social media tools like

Facebook,

Twitter,

YouTube etc.

I decided to attempt to conduct an informal survey  to determine whether or not the life sciences sector is adopting and embracing social media to meet its objectives (whatever they may be). Read full story

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