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Comparing Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools


Web Analytics TV with Nick & Avinash continues with episode #10. This time the hosts discuss:
  • Tracking un-subscriptions with negative values
  • Sources of keywords outside of Paid Search to help site optimization
  • Tracking form validation with Google Analytics
  • Why Exit Rate is 0% in the Google Analytics navigation summary report
  • Comparing Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
  • Best practices for tracking PDF downloads
  • Getting the full referring URL in Google Analytics
  • Sharing custom reports with advanced segments
  • Best way to find keywords from mobile traffic

How to Receive Top Rankings for Facebook Pages in Search Results

Facebook pages are popping up as quickly as websites and blogs, in fact I am often seeing organizations push users to their Facebook page due to the built-in social interactivity of Facebook pages. With the majority of our online experiences still starting with search, whether it be on Google, Bing or Facebook, there are many factors that will help boost a given Facebook page to the top of the results. Below are some of my speculations:
  • Total Number of Followers: You can consider this the same as back links, the more ‘votes’ your page receives, the more authority it gains.
  • Content Posted: The fresher the content, with regards to wall posts/pictures/comments, the greater likelihood of search spiders continuously crawling the content.
  • Relevancy of Content: Does all the content that is posted within the page help improve its overall theme?
  • Big Brands: Large organizations will receive a bump just because they are top of mind to users and therefore they receive precedence in search results
  • URL: Does your Facebook page’s URL contain relevant keywords related to search queries?
  • Number of ‘Shares’: Is the Facebook Page so compelling that people absolutely have to pass it along to their friends?
  • Age of Page: This one is pure speculation, but could there be benefits of having an older Facebook Page vs. a brand new one?

Facebook Climbing Around the World

With Facebook growing to well over 400 million users, their rise is happening all around the world. For instance, outside of China, Iran, Japan and Russia, Facebook has reached the top 20 ranked sites across many of the top online nations. Google is basically #1 across the board with Twitter climbing on many fronts as well.

144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com – May 2010

comScore recently released their monthly numbers in regards to online video usage and rankings for the month of May. Below are some highlights from the release:
  • Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month (101.2 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 46.0 million viewers (7.3 videos per viewer), and Vevo with 45.6 million viewers (9.4 videos per viewer).
  • The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Joost Video Network (by Adconion Media Group) with 35.2 percent penetration of online video viewers, BrightRoll Video Network with 24.4 percent, and Tremor Media Video Network with 21.2 percent.
  • 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
  • 144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (101.2 videos per viewer).
  • The average Hulu viewer watched 27.0 videos, totaling 2.7 hours of video per viewer.
  • The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.

66% of Small Businesses Plan to use Behavioral Targeting

Yesterday AWeber Communications announced the results from a survey of more than 2,500 small businesses regarding email marketing and social media marketing efforts. Highlights can be found below:
  • Email marketing continues to bring significant value to businesses with more than 82 percent of respondents planning to increase their email marketing efforts over the next year.
  • The more social media grows in popularity among consumers, the more attention it will receive from marketers. Almost 70 percent of small business marketers are employing some sort of social media tactics and a majority (77 percent) indicate that integrating email marketing and social media is either “very important” or “moderately important.”
  • The most popular tactics at the moment involve spreading content onto additional mediums such as sharing email newsletters on Twitter (36 percent) and delivering blog posts via email (35 percent).
  • Nearly 50 percent of respondents indicated that behavioral targeting increases their conversion rates either significantly or moderately.
  • More than 66 percent of respondents indicate they intend to use behavioral targeting as well as sales tracking in their campaigns over the next 12 months.
  • 54 percent of respondents indicate they intend to use Facebook as a tool to help build their email lists
  • Nearly 20 percent of respondents indicate that integrating email marketing and social media increased customer loyalty
  • Almost 12 times as many respondents said that email marketing ROI is more easily measured than social media ROI (61.46 percent versus 5.28 percent)

85% of All Brand Purchases are Made by Women – Says Unicast Report

Earlier this week Unicast released its “What Women Want From the Web Report” Summer 2010 revealing the preferences, intentions and activities of women online this summer. The report discusses Unicast’s recent national online survey of 516 women, and provides detailed analysis and demographic breakdowns. Below are some of the highlights:
  • The most popular online activities for women this summer: 76% plan to connect with
    friends and family, 67% will keep up with the news, 64% plan to shop for sales/compare prices, 59% intend to entertain themselves (play games, listen to music or watch TV/movies), and 48% will research travel/vacations.
  • Women age 18-24 are more inclined to use the Internet for most activities, and also
    more receptive to online advertising in various formats, particularly more interested than women overall in localized information, surveys, social media formats and exclusive downloadable content.
  • The most popular ad content is for sales and discount codes – 46% of women notice
    these, followed by creating/submitting an entry to win a prize – 31%. About one in four women notice an ad with localized information, like area movie listings.
  • Women notice ads for items they’re already interested in – 56% of women planning to
    look up entertainment options this summer have noticed an entertainment ad in the past month and 46% of women planning to research travel have noticed a travel ad.
  • Women with children in the home tend to do more activities online than those without children, including listen to music (62% vs. 42%), watch TV or movies (56% vs. 46%) and look up entertainment options (60% vs. 40%).
  • Women that visit blogs notice online advertising far more than overall respondents, but this is a small group with just 13% of women planning to visit a blog this summer.

9 Twitter Apps Worth Another Look

Twitter has refined the way of communication where even the limited characters reflect the absolute expression of the people. The real time exchange of information and the potential substance in the ever counting Twitter stream, Twitter has emerged out as the Google of the social media world. As the Twitter fever hits the globe hard, it becomes very important to discover the simplest way of managing your twitter profile and growth in the Twitter ecosystem and a gamut of twitter apps slot in just perfectly to feed your need. All of us probably have our personal favorites when it comes to choosing the perfect Twitter app for ourselves. Hence this time, keeping aside my perspective of the most useful apps, I chose to put down the list of the top Twitter Apps as per audience preferences and polls at the 101bestTwitterapps website. I parsed through the list and the top apps looked quite interesting. 

Tweetshare Tweetshare as the site says is the Facebook fan page taken to the next level. Certainly it moves beyond Facebook to blogs, YouTube and so on where users can share content and receive feedback on their work by creating Twitter Pages around their content or brand. It works in a very simple way.

Tweetshare turns every comment about your content into a tagged Tweet that is shared with the Twitter community, virally promoting your content.   Tweetshare thus integrates your content directly into the Twitter stream.


ComTweets is like Linkedin in Twitter. More precisely, it is a community for businesses on Twitter where companies and organizations come together under one hood to interact and communicate amongst the coworkers. Sign in with your company email address and soon you will be connected to your co-employees. You may then share messages, comment on other’s posts, also interact with customers and use the tool for marketing your brand or products.

TheCadmus Cadmus gives relevance the prime spot in its service model. To elaborate, Cadmus is a real time service that can be used to manage the Twitter stream (also Friendfeed and RSS) by displaying the most relevant content since the last time you logged in to your account. It therefore removes the clutter of the old posts clogging up the streams and also draws out the trending topics that are hot amongst the people you follow keeping you updated all the time eliminating the chances of missing out any conversation.

Twaitter One of the most widely used Twitter apps for business is used by companies to promote their products and interact with their customers. With a number of features like tweet calendar, managing multiple accounts through Ping.fm integration, forming groups, multi-account management and so on, TwAitter is a potential player in the business app market. They even offer a translator to post tweets in any language of your choice.

Twitterfeed Almost all of us are well aware of this app, as TwitterFeed offers the most seamless way of automatically managing the feeds from your website posting them directly to social networks. It also keeps track of these feeds providing real time stats to analyze the performance of your Twitter marketing.

Twitterlive Twitterlive falls along the along same lines as Twitterfeed and allows users to post the feeds automatically to Twitter, track the clicks and collect real-time traffic data.

SpokenTwit Why write updates when you can speak and tweet? That’s exactly what this Twitter app allows users to do. All you need to do is register your phone number that will be used for tweeting and chirp around. The spoken tweets will display in your twitter stream.

Nsyght This app allows users to aggregate, share, and search their twittersocial graph in real time. Nsyght also supports threaded discussions, email alerts, inline video and photo display, and support for other services like Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Vimeo, Delicous, and Last.fm.

Buzzom Buzzom is a one stop solution for all your needs giving the best of features to manage your Twitter account i
n the most efficient way. Finding people from the gigantic list of Twitter users could have never been made so seamless. Buzzom is the only known Twitter app to offer people search based follow. Automatically grow your network by following the people that match your interests, follow back those who follow you or flush ones who don’t.

The premium version takes the Twitter experience a step ahead by allowing users to view their twitter performance through stats, scheduling tweets to stay active on Twitter even when they are not available, managing the direct messages and spam easily and posting updates to different social networks from one place. 

A very new feature of the brand management gives businesses an opportunity to launch their Twitter campaigns and monitor their performance amongst their target audience.