Online SEO Blog, Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing Blog

With so many resources spent on social media marketing these days, the job of analyzing its effectiveness in the overall marketing mix is becoming more important.

If you're using Google Analytics to track your site's visitors and revenue, you'll notice that by default you can analyze traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc, but what about social networks as a standalone traffic medium?

To achieve this level of reporting in Google Analytics and to basically tweak Google Analytics to create this traffic medium, you've got two options.

Option 1: Create a standalone Google Analytics social networks traffic profile

1. Under 'Add Website Profile' in the main Google Analytics screen create a new website profile and name it 'social networks' (always keep your original profile intact)

2. Head to 'Filter Manager' in your profile to group all the different social networks to one new medium by applying the following filter

Filter Name - social networks traffic
Filter Type - custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A - under campaign source add your social networks. For example, I’ve used:

digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia

|stumbleupon|netvibes|bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|

twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|msplinks|myspace

|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl

Field B -> Extract B - none
Output To -> Constructor - campaign medium and name it social networks
Field A Required - yes
Field B Required - no
Override Output Field - yes
Case Sensitive - no

Result - now under traffic sources > medium you’ll find a handy ’social networks’ traffic medium source which includes all the social websites previously grouped together

3. Create another filter which will exclude other traffic sources

Filter Name - exclude other traffic sources
Filter Type - custom filter then exclude
Filter field - campaign medium
Filter Pattern - type organic|(none)|direct|cpc|image
Case Sensitive - no

4. Create another filter to show the full referral path by applying the following filter

Filter Name - full referral path
Filter Type - custom filter then advanced
Field A -> Extract A - choose referral and type (.*)
Field B -> Extract B - none
Output To -> Constructor - choose user defined and type $A1
Field A Required - yes
Field B Required - no
Override Output Field - yes
Case Sensitive - no

Result - now under visitors > user defined you'll find the precise profile or URL which is generating your traffic

Use this method to schedule a handy automated email so you'll get the full picture every morning

Option 2: Use advanced segment in Google Analytics

1. Head to 'Advanced Segments' in your main Google Analytics profile

2. Create a new segment and drag the 'source' box which under 'Traffic sources' to 'dimension or metric' window

3. Open the 'Condition' drop down and under '' paste the following sources:

digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia

|stumbleupon|netvibes|bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|

twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|msplinks|myspace

|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl

(this field is limited to 256 characters)

4. Now you can start segmenting the data and compare your social networks traffic medium Vs. other traffic sources which are already segmented such as direct and organic traffic

You can use this method to compare your social networks traffic against other traffic sources by average basket size, conversion rate and much more.

Webmasters in an online webmaster forum observed an anomaly in Google's results that might indicate a new Google penalty. Which websites have been penalized and could this affect your own website?

What has happened?

Many webmasters reported that their websites lost all of their top positions on Google and dropped to position 50 and below.

The problem is that the usual metrics shows that the websites are okay. For example, one of the websites was older than two years, the inbound links did not change and the Google PageRank in Google's toolbar also did not change. Another penalized website was older than 10 years.

Why have these websites been penalized?

There were several theories in the forum thread:

1. Spam on another websites

One theory was that the websites could have been penalized because the webmaster used spammy methods on another of his domains.

Even if your websites are not linked, Google can still know that you are the owner of both websites. They have several ways to find this out, including WHOIS information and Google accounts.

2. Links to spammy websites

Your website might link to spammy websites even if you don't want to do that. Website widgets, counters and other plugins sometimes put invisible links to other sites on your website.

The server might have also been hacked and there could be a link that you don't want on your website.

3. Paid links from .edu domains

A theory that looks very likely was the use of paid links from .edu domains. It seems that there are many hacked .edu servers that host websites on which these links can appear.

Paid links from other sites might also cause problems. If paid links from .edu pages really can cause a ranking drop then this would enable your competitors to harm your website by purchasing these links for your website.

What should you do now?

We think that it's likely that Google is working on its paid link filters and that paid links from .edu domains and other sites are the reason for the problems.

Stay away from paid links. Google doesn't like them and chances are that your website will get problems if you use them. Better focus on high quality organic links.

Gmail is always coming up with newer things to attract many and also to increase the traffic onto the site. The Gmail Labs have started with a new option for the users by bringing up a Google Search box into the Inbox of Gmail. The search box can be seen just below the Labels section along the left margin when it is activated. You can find it to be a real good advantage of using everything just in a single interface.

Gmail Labs have another feature for ease of the users which is the drag and drop one and with this you can easily fix the search box at any position inside your Gmail interface. This helps in moving it according to your own taste and comfort.

You might be wondering whether the search results might hinder the present page or the mail box you are working at. But, there is nothing to worry as the results would come up in a new window which would certainly come up along the end of email.

The search box also includes certain options like “Send by email”, “Reply with results” and lot more which can be utilized to the maximum. This would vary from one account to another depending on what is being done at that time with the mailbox.

You might be wondering why many of you are not getting this function and how it can be activated right. You just need to go to the Settings section and move onto Labs. Here you can find all that you need to activate the Google Search box in your Gmail. Isn’t that a simply step?

Just try out for yourself and feel the difference as you will never ever switch onto some other email accounts!

The latest one at the search market is the yellowSpaces and is a massive venture to make the entire thing run in local hands for each and every user. They have joined the already present giants of search engines, including the mapping sites, yellow pages publishers, city guides as well as other Local.com teams to make the entire service local, friendly and economical for the users searching for data. As you think, this is of course a very hard and invasive market where the survival of the fittest runs out to be the first thing of fact. More and more large entrepreneurs are coming up in this very field and the sustenance depends on the satisfaction from the user side and this can be made possible through advertisements.

YellowSpaces has termed out to be one of the user-friendly and the most meaningful searches found out to meet all the needs of people out there. They are known to be working along with the Localeze, who are known to be one of the greatest online content manager groups providing comprehensive listing profiles. Their search platform is the best and has also made 16 million local businesses to this very phenomenon.

Apart from all this, we can also call it to be one of the best local search companies using the new Confidence Score from Localeze. This can be talked as one of the largest and overall ranking given to the YellowSpaces relevancy algorithm.

Fresh from the second Searchology Event, Google announced three new enhancements to its Search Product - Search Options, Search Results Snippets, and Google Squared. The first two features are definitely useful especially for users who are too lazy to formulate specific search strategies to filter their search. While the third feature is rather vague as to what it really is at this time.Google Search Options

This new feature consists of categorized filtering options for determining how you’d like your current SERPs be displayed. It generates different views of the SERPs based on certain criteria.

The available search options include

• Viewing search results from Forum discussions, online video sites, or product review sites, time-bound search results that can be filtered by the most recent, past 24 hours, past week or past year,
• Timeline view which displays a historical graph with corresponding search results arranged by timeline,
• The wonder wheel view which displays a rather odd graph and the search results listed on the right side of the SERP,
• The usual related searches views but this time the related searches link is displayed on top of the SERPs,
• Image search view highlighting search results with accompanying images
• More text views which is simply the previous minus the images

Search Results “Rich Snippets”

This is a useful search results feature but would depend on the cooperation of site owners and developer to be successful. Rich snippets are more particularly useful for search results containing product and service reviews. It shows snippets of the reviews without clicking on the link first. These feature however relies on microformats and RDFa standards to mark up site HTML which can be easily adopted by web publishers in order for Google to organize search results into structured data. More information about the rich snippets can be found at the rich snippets help page.


Google Squared

The last new feature announced by Google is rather vague and confusing as to what it really is. Google describe it as:

Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We’ll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.

So, I guess we have to stay tune for more Google announcements regarding this search feature or product.