About Himanshu Sharma

The founder of optimizesmart.com, Himanshu has more than 12 years of experience in web analytics and digital marketing. He provides a popular web analytics training course on optimizesmart.com and has got more than 700 students.
Learn more about Himanshu Sharma
Read Himanshu's latest articles
Have a question? Contact Himanshu here

How to Create Universal Data Layer for Google Tag Manager

July 21, 2015 by Himanshu Sharma 5 Comments

Do you see yourself creating and modifying data layers every time you implement a new tracking via Google Tag Manager?

If yes then this article is for you. I will show you how to create universal data layers that will save you from adding/editing data layers over and over again for different tracking requirements.

Let us suppose you are currently using enhanced ecommerce tracking via GTM and now you also want to implement dynamic remarketing via GTM.

Consequently you have to make changes to your data layers. The volume and type of changes that you actually need to make depend upon the CMS and shopping cart you are using as well as your tracking objectives. But you have to make changes.

[Read more…]

Google Analytics Custom Alerts which you must always use

January 20, 2015 by Himanshu Sharma Leave a Comment

It is extremely difficult to keep an eye on significant variations in your website traffic or any of your marketing campaign/traffic source manually and that too 24/7. Here is where Google Analytics custom alerts keep handy.

A lot has been written about GA customer alerts but unfortunately there is still no widespread adoption. Either marketers are not aware of what they are or they are just plain lazy when it comes to implementing them.

A custom alert from Google can help you in minimizing the impact of a bot attack.

A custom alert from Google can help you in quickly fixing a broken shopping cart.

A custom alert from Google can help you in quickly finding a search engine penalty.

A custom alert from Google can help you in quickly fixing completely broken website tracking.

A custom alert from Google can also help you in keeping your client or saving your job.

[Read more…]

Google Tag Manager Best Practices

August 26, 2014 by Himanshu Sharma 1 Comment

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a powerful tool to add and edit measurement tags without much intervention from the IT department. It is also much easier to use than directly hard coding tags on a website.

But creating and managing tags, macros and rules within the GTM still require certain skills. If you are not sure about how to best use the GTM, you may end up with a long list of unmanageable tags, rules and macros in your account or in worst case may end up breaking the website functionality and causing significant financial loss to your client/company.

Following are the best practices for using Google Tag Manager:

[Read more…]

Why most Marketing Campaigns Fail and how yours can Succeed

February 18, 2014 by Himanshu Sharma Leave a Comment

Image of words used in internet marketing Marketing campaigns fail mainly because they are executed without any well defined strategies.

By well defined strategies I strictly mean;

“the strategies which have been written down on a piece of paper and posted on a whiteboard/wall of your office for everyone to see and for you to act as a daily reminder.”

“If the strategy is not written down then it is just an intention, a delusion of strategy”

These types of intentions and delusions aren’t marketing plans, never could be and they are quickly forgotten/abandoned once you stop consciously thinking about them every single day.

According to a study from British Journal of Heath Psychology, 91% of people who wrote down their intentions to do exercise every week, ended up following through, compared to only 39% of people who didn’t write down their intentions.

There are over 100 studies which have shown that just by writing down your intentions/ideas and deciding well in advance how, when and where you will take specific actions, you can double or triple your chances of achieving your business and marketing goals. [Read more…]

How to report Organic Keywords Performance in the world of ‘Not Provided’

September 9, 2013 by Himanshu Sharma 7 Comments

According to NotProvidedCount.com, the website which tracks the data of not provided keywords, the average percentage of ‘not provided’ Google traffic is around 60% at the time of writing this post.

And according to the same website, the not provided traffic will reach 100% on 29^th April, 2014.

While I take these numbers and calculations with a pinch of salt (and expect the same from you because of the small sample size used in these calculations), it is not really a “news” for anybody in the digital marketing industry now that the ‘not provided’ keywords traffic is rising each month.

The rise of ‘not provided’ keywords is gradually eating away the contributions made by both your branded and non-branded keywords in generating traffic and conversions.

As a result the value of your SEO efforts is being diminished by Google. Today I am going to fix this problem for you. I will show you how you can report your organic keywords performance in the world of ‘not provided’ keywords.

The first thing that you need to remember is that ‘not provided’ traffic is the traffic coming from some keywords. It can not be the traffic coming from some other referral.

The second important thing to remember is that the not provided keywords are organic keywords.

So we have got two valuable insight from ‘not provided’:

Not provided traffic is keyword traffic
Not provided traffic is organic traffic.

What we don’t know about not provided traffic is how much of the traffic is from branded keywords and how much is from non-branded keywords (and of course the actual keyword referrals) .

So it would be safe to conclude (in theory) that not provided traffic is neither branded nor non-branded. It is simply a different type of organic traffic called the ‘not provided traffic’.

So we have three different types of organic traffic:

Branded Keywords Traffic
Non Branded Keywords Traffic
Not Provided Keywords Traffic

As the traffic from ‘not provided’ keywords will increase, there is a strong possibility that the traffic and conversions from both branded and non-branded keywords will decrease over time.

So if you don’t report the traffic and conversions from ‘not provided’ keywords, you won’t be able to report the accurate picture of your SEO efforts.

Not provided traffic will continue to eat your branded and non-branded keywords traffic and conversions, and over time, you may give the impression of running a poorly optimized SEO campaign to your clients.

So here is my solution.

Create three different column charts which shows the traffic and conversions coming from branded keywords, non-branded keywords and not provided keywords.

Create one more column chart which shows the traffic coming from all of the keywords (branded + non-branded + not provided).

For example:

To get the number of branded, non-branded and not provided keywords you need to create and apply advance segments/filters to your ‘organic search traffic’ report in Google Analytics.

Once you have applied these advanced segments/filters (which can filter out branded, non-branded and not provided keywords), you just need to count the number of keywords sending traffic for each month and note it down in your excel spreadsheet.

For example:

In order to count the number of ‘not provided’ keywords sending traffic to your website, you need to apply ‘landing page’ as the secondary dimension.

For example:

I have saved these three different customization of organic search traffic report as ‘shortcut’ reports so that I don’t need to apply advanced segments and filters every time.

Note: You can learn more about the various shortcuts in Google Analytics from this post: Google Analytics Shortcuts: Tricks, Tools, keyboard & APIs

Ideally the total number of keywords which send traffic to your website must increase every month. This is a sign of a healthy SEO campaign.

And the last chart on ‘total keywords sending traffic’ exactly solves this very problem.

No matter how much the volume of not provided keywords increases over time, you can always analyse and report the true value of your SEO efforts if you can report the relative changes in branded, non-branded and not provided keywords as well as the total number of keywords sending traffic and conversions to your website.

So if branded/non-branded keywords traffic is going down then look at the volume of not provided keywords.

Is there a correspondence increase in the volume of not provided keywords? If there is, you know where the branded/non-branded traffic ended up. If there is not, then you know the SEO campaigns are not performing well and it is not the fault of rise in not provided keywords.

To learn more about ‘not provided’ keywords analysis, check out these two posts: