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.