Internet Marketing Blog

I recently have been creating Google Analytics goals for a client whose profile is set up to show full domains. The goals corresponded to particular pages, for which the instructions say to exclude the domain. Doing so will not allow the goals to fire. Instead include the full domain as it appears in the All […]

We have recently developed a new tool, our Google Analytics Tag Validator, to help diagnose issues constructing URLs for advertising and tracking. If you’re tagging landing page URLs for AdWords, adCenter, Facebook advertising, and so on, this tool will help make sure that your composite URLs are properly constructed. Among other things, it alerts you if […]

The Google Retail Advertising Blog recently posted sales cycle statistics for a variety of consumer products. At the low end, shoppers took an average of 7 days to purchase pet supplies, while they took 16 days for electronics. The data did not include purchases larger than home appliances like cars or homes which presumably take […]

When you create online advertising of any kind, it is possible to “tag” the ads in a way that website analytics software like Google Analytics and WebTrends can provide additional information about these traffic sources. For example, tagging can make it possible to tell exactly which ad among several provides the most online purchases or […]

Adobe is buying Omniture, a leading provider of web analytics and analysis provider.What does this mean for online marketers and our clients? This struck me as an odd combination until I started digging a little further into recent history of these companies and the direction of application development. Adobe makes software such as Acrobat, Dreamweaver, […]

Bounce rates are commonly used as KPIs for all kinds of websites since they show the “stickiness” of a site for new visitors. If people leave the site right away (high bounce rate), either the landing page is under-performing, or the wrong kinds of visitors are going there. However, having a low bounce rate may […]

Over the years we have managed a lot of pay-per-click campaigns for a variety of clients. Some of them have a thorough understanding of conversions, while there are still a lot that don’t. It is still surprising to find companies that only measure the success or failure of their AdWords campaigns (or less often Yahoo! […]

Why reinvent the wheel? If you have an online store based on Miva Merchant, you’ll probably want to know where your buyers are coming from. Miva Merchant 5 does not include this capability by default, and it can take a good working knowledge of both Miva and Google Analytics to create your own solution. Or, […]

Google recently announced the launch of the Google Analytics API. While most businesses won’t ever make direct use of this service, it is likely to have a substantial impact on the web analytics landscape through the advent of new, more sophisticated tools for website owners. The API allows 3rd parties to develop applications and services […]

Yahoo Sponsored Search provides tracking URLs if you click on Administration, then Tracking URLs. When enabled, they append various parameters to your ad URLs so that downstream tracking will show information about ad clicks. The two most useful parameters are OVKEY and OVRAW which together provide substantial insight into how well your campaign focuses on […]