Renegade Search

Here at DTC we focus on search marketing. It’s our bread and butter and what we were brought up on. Search marketing is what we know best and it’s what has made us successful. Since we started DTC, the world of online marketing has changed and it will continue to change, so we decided it would be best that we expand our service roster and become experts in other facets of online advertising. Let’s take a look at some of the opportunities beyond search that can help your business get in front of your ideal online consumers.

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Google Analytics is an amazing program. Some people think it's limited, and some conspiracy theorists think it gives Google too big of an insight into our internet activity. But for your average business or online store - Google Analytics (a.k.a. GA) is simple to use... and that is the problem. At face value GA looks like an extremely simple piece of software that is easily navigable - and it's not. By default Google Analytics gives you a 30 day window of data, and this just isn't enough time to determine if your SEO campaign is exploding, performing as expected or completely stagnant. But by taking a few steps you can see exactly how far your SEO campaign has come with just a few clicks.

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You've been working on SEO for your site for months. You've done your research, and your site is perfectly optimized for high-volume, highly-relevant keyphrases. You've gone out of your way to make sure that everything you're doing is ethical and your site should be firmly in Google's good graces.

After a few months of diligent promotion, you've greatly improved your visibility, and your site's traffic and conversions have been exploding.

And then one day, without warning, it's all gone. For reasons you can't fathom, your site has dropped off from Google results like a rock. Your traffic disappears.

If you care about SEO, this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. But if you've been working in internet marketing long enough, and you've been around enough sites, chances are that you might have seen a similar situation. But there are plenty of causes for this terrifying prospect, so the most important thing is to take a deep breath, relax, and figure out the cause of the problem. While it is always possible that something bad has happened (such as your site being hacked), most of the time the problem will be much more inocuous.

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We have been discussing Google's recent decision to encrypt searches for those signed in to a Google profile, rendering a portion of keyword referrer data "(not provided)" within Google Analytics reports. Webmasters and professionals throughout our industry utilize this information to improve a site or campaign. At the time that Google announced this decision, Google associate Matt Cutts attempted to allay fears that a large percentage of this keyword data would be lost by stating that only a "single digit" percentage of people are actually signed in while searching. Since then there has been much debate as to whether or not Cutts' statement was accurate. We decided to investigate further with a study of our own.

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In August, I wrote a post about common error pages that can be found online. As that post explains, the most common, and problematic, error page is the dreaded 404. Whenever a server spits out a 404 page, it means that the user is trying to access an invalid URL. This might be because they misstyped an address, or it may be because they followed a bad link. Whatever the cause, no site owner wants users to see 404 pages, and minimizing their appearance should be a central goal for any webmaster.

In this post, I want to give a quick tutorial on how to identify and fix 404 errors using Google Analytics. With just a few short steps, you should be able to identify how often users are accessing the 404 page, how they arrived there, and how to fix any issues.

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