If you hadn’t yet noticed, Google Webmaster Tools has really been adding a ton of new features. Making the announcement on the Webmaster Central blog last week, a Google rep wrote:

We previously just reported the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now you can click on a given search query in the Top search queries report to see a breakdown of the number of impressions and the amount of clickthrough for each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query.

The obvious question here might be what, if any, practical value do these new data provide?

And the answer is that it depends on much traffic and search volume your site gets.

Read More

Last week, a few of us here at Digital Third Coast attended the first-ever Stratigent Google Analytics User Conference at the Field Museum in Chicago. The conference brought together a variety of users of GA and gave us all an opportunity to interact with many of Google’s top Analytics engineers. During the days’ presentations and discussions, one exciting (and soon-to-be-released) feature kept coming up: Google Analytics Intelligence.

On a basic level, GA Intelligence will provide alerts whenever there is an unusual spike in activity from virtually any user location, page section, referrer, and so on. The feature will have customizable settings for sensitivity, meaning that users will have the option to determine with precision just what level of activity will trigger an alert.

Read More

Obtaining a listing that shows up in the prominent Google one-box or local 10-pack is becoming increasingly important for any business looking to compete in a local marketplace. Where the print Yellow Pages used to dominate the local advertising dollars, the big 3 search engines, local and national vertical directories and IYP’s are on the rise, full steam ahead.

When Google one-boxes first started popping up years ago, it was few and far between for most local based searches without a great set of tools to further improve the visibility and rankings short of adding keywords to your business name. Read More

Earlier this week Google updated their Local Business Center. Now included is some analytics data including how many impressions (how often your listing was shown), actions (driving directions to your business, clicks to your website, etc.) and which search queries triggered your local business listing.

If you don’t already have a local business listing, you can add one here – www.google.com/local/add.

Google recently announced that they will be making some changes to their referral string format which will be rolling out this week.

The old url referral string looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

The new one will look something like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
Read More

Google Analytics is without question one of the best free tools available for any website owner. I’m in there every day taking a look at search visitors, goal conversions, funnels, and everything else that can give an insight on the overall trends of traffic and search visibility. There are many times that I’ve tried using my iPhone to browse reports while in the car or on the go, but Google Analytics (GA) uses too much AJAX and Flash for things to come out in the desired manner, let alone be able to look at any date range other than the default past 30 days.

Now enters a new application called Analytics App that allows you to view all of your GA reports quickly and easily from your phone and at a mere $5.99 this is going to only take your yearly analytics budget from $0 to $5.99 for most small businesses. Read More

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has posted some new search engine market share figures…Google gained another 6% in search market share in 2008!  What? Are you surprised?

What’s even more interesting is that Google’s profits are rising as well, even in this bad economy.  Microsoft, which has never ever had massive layoffs in it’s history is laying off 5000 employees and Google actually posted an increase in profits in the last quarter of 08. Amazing.

Here’s the story:

Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized

Arguably one of the most important things to an online marketing campaign is to have some goals in place. I think that figuring out what goals to focus on can be the hardest part sometimes. Tracking them is the easy part. Here are a few ways you can start tracking some of your goals using Google Analytics.

Goal Funnels and Funnel Visualization:
Setting up funnels for goals and watching the visitor patterns in those funnels can help us see if people are doing what we would like them to do on the site.
Read More