With this information you now have the power to create re-directs to altered URL’s or to block sites that are spamming your website. This is yet another step Google takes to get the internet tidy and clean, giving you information you would probably never get unless you are keeping up with your 404 logs.

With this information I was able to correct some broken links that were introduced during the migration of my blog from dasBlog to WordPress and the upgrade from older versions of WordPress to the latest version.

Google Webmaster Tools 404 Not found 1

Google Webmaster Tools 404 Not found 2

 Follow me, visit Google Webmaster Tools and get these problems solved !

If you add the WT.srch=1 parameter a destination URL will look like: www.omtrends.com/?WT.srch=1 This Query Parameter only tells WebTrends that the visitor came from a Paid Search advertisement, nothing less and nothing more.

To determine which Paid Search program was used (ie. Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing), WebTrends will capture the Referral information also. So if this visitor came from an AdWords campaign, WebTrends will see a Referring URL like http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4EGLC_enNL238NL238&q=visual+workstation+hbx and translate this into “Google AdWords”, with help of the file keywords.ini:

[Google AdWords]
ID1=.google.com
KeywordIndicator1=q= 

As you can see WebTrends will capture the q= parameter to retrieve the keywords. These are the keywords the visitor used in Google.

So for instance, if I search for “visual workstation hbx”, I might see iMETRIX in one of the Google AdWords advertisements. WebTrends will pick up the Search Phrase “visual workstation hbx” and report this in the out-of-the-box report Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid). Alrighty! you think?

Not really WebTrends reports on the Search Phrase the visitor searched on, not the phrase you are advertising on. This means that you cannot match your WebTrends reports with your Google AdWords reports. Let’s say you are advertising Broad Match on the word “HBX” and the user searches at www.google.com on “visual workstation hbx”. Google AdWords will report a clickthrough on the word “HBX” while WebTrends reports “visual workstation hbx”. There is no way to match both reports and if you didn’t know about this – you should have had a lot of discussion with your Google AdWords Professional already.

So now we know that  your reports probably aren’t displaying the data you think they are displaying. Let’s fix it rightaway!

We are going to use a Visitor History parameter. WebTrends has 4 available for you; WT.seg_1, WT.seg_2, WT.seg_3 and WT.seg_4. These Visitor History are meant to be used for segmentation purposes but actually can be used for anything you would like to store. A great advantage of using a Visitor History parameter is that it will store the information in a database so that if a visitor visits your site on day 5 of the month through Google AdWords and converts 20 days later, WebTrends will be able to report on this. If you’d use a regular parameter, ie. kw=<keywords>, WebTrends will only be able to report on behavior of the specific visit that has this information.

Ok I assume you are not using the WT.seg_1 yet, so we will add it to your URL. The value will be the keyword that you are advertising on at Google AdWords, resulting in this Query Parameter to be used in your landing page URL: WT.seg_1={keyword:nil} Google AdWords will automatically replace {keyword:nil} with the keyword you were advertising on. In this example it will eventually look like: WT.seg_1=HBX. More information about Google AdWords Keyword Insertion can be found here.

As you can see we also use the WT.mc_id campaign parameter. We add this to see which overall campaign performance in our campaign overview report. The gclid parameter is being added by Google AdWords because of the Google Analytics auto-tagging of AdWords destination URLs.

Eventually, when you would click on the Google AdWords adversitement, the destination URL will look like:

http://www.imetrix.nl/producten/Visual_Sciences.stm?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=PRHB&WT.seg_1=hbx&gclid=CKemrfi56I8CFQuuQwod6hU4Dw

Google actually supports these irritating sites as they probably generate a lot of advertising Dollars for Google. There is no specific content found on the site so what’s your next step? Right, you either click one of the links or leave the site by typing the correct url. The term Google uses for these sites is “Parked domain sites“. The advertisements are called “Domain Ads“ and will also appear in your Google AdWords reports as “Domain Ads“. Two example sites:

http://wwwyourtube.com/
http://www.madonnashop.nl

 Interestingly, when creating a Placement report in Google AdWords, the URL’s of these Domain Ads  are hidden. They simply show as “Domain Ads” in your report. I think Google does this as these Domain Ads or  are highly lucrative and they know advertisers will add negative sites to their campaign or even stop advertising on the Content Network when they notice their Dollars are being spent on these sites.

In this screenshot you see that Domain Ads have a very high CTR.

As far as I know it’s not possible to create a site exclusion to exclude Domain Ads. Stop fooling us, Google!

I have had some busy weeks lately. Last week Fulton Yancy from Visual Sciences visited our office for a HBX Analytics training. Fulton Yancey has previously worked for WebTrends and since we work with the WebTrends software extensively he has been able to give us a good understanding of the differences between HBX Analytics and WebTrends. It actually made me forgive the fact that HBX Analytics is an ASP based service instead of hosted-yourself.

Visual Sciences 

This week my colleague and I flew to London to have a Visual Sciences training for Visual Site at the EMEA Partner Certification days. This training was our first real handson experience with the software where we could actually work with it. Our first experience was at the partner day in Hoofddorp last May. We absolutely love the products, it is such an high level analytics tool you just have to have it when you see it. After the 3 days of Visual Sciences brainwashing After the training we did an examination which was quite demanding actually.

Google AdWords

My Qualified Google AdWords Professional certification is about to expire in November. That means that I will have to re-examinate soon. Actually since iMETRIX saw the light two weeks ago this couldn’t be a better moment to browse through all new features that have been added to Google AdWords over the past two years. Some things that come in mind are advertising on Google Maps, mobile ads, the AdWords editor software, Website Optimizer, Google Analytics etc. etc. I can imagine a lot of people who are not using Google AdWords every day will get lost somewhere and won’t be able to get all out of the system.

Certificate in Digital Marketing

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the digital marketing plan I had to make as my first assigment for the IDM Certificate in Digital Marketing certification. I have been working hard for it but managed to output a digital marketing plan on time and actually I was happy with the result. Last Friday I received my mark and I’m happy to tell that I passed this first assigment. YAY!!!

In the past it wasn’t easy to see where your ads were being displayed. But with this addition to the Reports section you exactly see which sites displayed your AdWords advertisements and what your results were for each site. This way you can easily remove sites from your campaign that eat your money and spend it elsewere.

With a flight trip of 14 hours to and from Bangkok - Thailand in front that should be enough of time to spam my both brain sides with a lot of new information about SEO. Unfortunately my assumption wasn’t justified. The book seems to be written for people who are completely new to search marketing. It takes your hand and uses a lot of words to explain relatively simple things. After some pages I decided to skip everything I didn’t already know and actually I was at the end before I knew.

Unfortunately I just can not reccommend this book unless you are really new to the world of left and right brains If so, buy the book at Amazon: Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day

Just add this to the robots.txt:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

See http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_robots

Both absolute and relative number of visits through Search Engines are still on the rise. The chart below shows you number of avarage daily visits on the site and through search.

	Visits	Search	Search%Visits	Change%Prev
June	432	71	16,49%
July	372	55	14,90%	90,39%
August	389	65	16,79%	112,69%
September	363	63	17,38%	103,51%
October	385	92	24,00%	138,10%
November	423	114	26,92%	112,16%
December	449	108	24,06%	89,37%
January	597	159	26,60%	110,57%
February	590	171	28,95%	108,81%
March	619	192	31,06%	107,31%
	Google	Google%Visits	Google%Share
June	55	12,71%	77,13%
July	46	12,48%	83,77%
August	56	14,47%	86,17%
September	53	14,59%	83,95%
October	81	21,01%	87,53%
November	105	24,83%	92,22%
December	98	21,75%	90,39%
January	145	24,21%	91,01%
February	158	26,73%	92,35%
March	179	28,85%	92,87%

The number of visits through Google has already tripled. Note that December is a bad search month. This is the only month in which traffic from search has declined.

Besides this, Google’s PageRank has increased from 3 to 5. This means that in general results from this site have better positions than it used to have.

Introduction:

Once Internet search has brought a customer to your site, his next step will be using your site search box or navigation on your site. Are you watching what happens and making the most of his visit? Or does your interest in your customer end when he reaches your site?

Customer activity that begins on an Internet search engine doesn’t end at the entry point to your site. You should sustain attention to visitors until they have either completed their objectives or abandoned them. Site search and the information it offers can help you determine how to surpass customer expectations and also reduce the number of frustrated visitors. The site search box itself is a tremendous gift to you from your customers: they are telling you exactly what they want, in their own words. They are inviting you to make your best offer. But in order to hear them, you need a plan for monitoring and managing the seeker experience.

WebSideStory – The Other Search.pdf (421.31 KB)