Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations. A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report. There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views : followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu. Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination. You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table. The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source. That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Originally posted here:
Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations. A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report. There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views : followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu. Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination. You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table. The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source. That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Excerpt from: 
Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations. A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report. There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views : followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu. Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination. You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table. The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source. That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Read the rest here: 
Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations. A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report. There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views : followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu. Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination. You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table. The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source. That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Read more:
Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations. A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report. There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views : followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu. Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination. You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table. The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source. That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

More:
Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations. A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report. There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views : followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu. Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination. You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table. The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source. That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Go here to see the original:
Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

by Jennifer Laycock   Earlier this week, I explained the concept of micro goals in regards to social media and why it’s so important to track such a large collection of seemingly insignificant numbers. I walked you through both the universal micro goals and how to establish campaign specific micro goals. Today, it’s time to look at how those numbers can be of value to us over the span of a social media campaign. Looking for What Works and What Doesn’t The single biggest benefit of tracking things on the micro goal level is the ability to quickly identify the areas of your campaign that are performing well and the ones that aren’t. Micro goals are all part of the wonderful world of metrics and each of them acts as a clue in the mystery of campaign results. Making sure each of your metrics lines up carefully with your campaign efforts and goals will go a long way toward equipping you with the information you need to refine your campaigns. Finding Problems within a Campaign Let’s say you’ve just launched a new piece of viral content on your blog and you’ve pushed it out via social networks. The content is aimed at educating your target audience about a new product offering and does it via a creative and entertaining video you’ve hosted on your blog.  You launch the content, seed it with influencers and watch the traffic start rolling in. Traffic spikes and sales don’t just stay flat, they drop. What happened? If you have established and kept tabs on a set of micro goals for your blog, the story may tell itself. On the surface, the campaign looks strong. Traffic, links, social mentions are all up, leading your team to celebrate with nice graphics like this: But if you dig a little deeper and look at all of your micro goals, a different picture begins to emerge: Despite the uptick in traffic and links, we see a distinct decline in engagement related metrics. Time on site has dropped, the number of pages per visitor has dropped, comments are down and less people are converting. Each of these micro goals matches up with a drop in sales. It’s also enough data to make us go back to our campaign and ask ourselves what might have led to this combination of metrics. Match What You Know with What You Planned In this instance, we can go back to the original campaign idea and look at it from the perspective of the metrics. There was clearly interest in the video because we see a rise in traffic. The content clearly resonated in terms of word of mouth, because we see strong numbers of social shares and a nice increase with links. When we take a second look at the content, however, we might realize the $250 price point and the fact that it’s an add on accessory to a $700 piece of electronics gives us a naturally small target audience. That means that while the video we’ve created has broad appeal, we’re not focusing in on our targeted audience. For our next campaign, we’ll want to focus more on the specific needs of our target audience and focus less on getting a broad launch and more on reaching into targeted communities. Variations in Metrics Tell us Different Tales Of course different metrics on your micro goals might help you come to different conclusions. Let’s say the video was for a brand new cell phone battery extender that cost $20, fit on a key ring and delivered an extra hour of battery life to a phone. This is the type of product nearly anyone can use and the price point qualifies it as an impulse buy. In this case, perhaps our metrics look something like this: You’ll quickly notice our metrics are up across the board with the exception of our conversion rates. We’ve got moderate increases in links, traffic, social shares and comments. We’ve got zero movement in our conversion rates. We’ve got a very strong increase in time on site and pages viewed per visitor. This tells us something. On the surface, everything looks good. The problem here is that a huge jump in pages per visitor and time on site simply does not mesh with zero change in sales. There’s simply no reason why an increase in targeted traffic that has demonstrated an interest in the product via their use of the site wouldn’t result in conversions. This means we need to go back and look more closely at the site itself. More than likely, the issue here is about usability. Ask a friend to watch the video and take action. You might be surprised to find out they can’t locate an order now button or they’re hunting for shipping prices and giving up in frustration. A few quick fixes to your interface may result in a sudden jump in conversions and a slight decrease in time on site and pages per visitor. You Can’t Fix it if You Don’t Know it’s Broken Of course the above examples are only looking at the micro goals for your blog. This same type of examination in other social media outlets and even across the board for your campaign can often give you a completely different perspective on the success (or failure) of your campaigns. Stop looking solely at traffic or conversions to determine the success of your campaigns. Sometimes it’s a lack of RSVPs or a dramatic increase in social shares on a specific network that clue you in to the changes you need to make. Either way, if you aren’t gathering data, any decision you make will be based on your best guess rather than supported logic. Take a look at your campaigns and dig deeper into the metrics of you campaign. You may be surprised at what you learn. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Read more here: 
Using Micro Goals to Fine Tune Your Social Media Campaigns

by Jennifer Laycock Every now and then I find myself on the phone with a potential client trying to talk them into putting our conversation on hold and giving my Search Engine Guide’s Associate Editor Stoney deGeyter  a call. Why? Because they’re in a position where they need to focus on both search engine optimization and social media to build a successful site, but they only have the budget to do one at a time…and at this time, they need to put social media on hold and focus on search engine optimization. As much as I enjoy working with companies to build sustainable social media strategies, the truth is my services are not always going to deliver the best bang for their buck. There are times when it simply makes more sense to focus on search engine optimization. In fact, making the right choice of where to start your marketing efforts can be essential to generating the additional revenue needed to invest in BOTH Social Media and SEO. If you’re in the position of trying to figure out where to start, here are three key ways to decide search engine optimization is your best starting point. (On Thursday, we’ll take a look at when it’s best to begin with Social Media.) Clue #1 When You Have an Established Web Site, but No Traffic Let’s say you’ve been doing business online for several years. You have an established web site and you’ve been using it successfully to generate leads or drive sales. You have a nice amount of traffic and fairly good conversion rates. You’ve just reached a point where you’d like to increase business and your existing efforts aren’t cutting the mustard. This is a good time to bring in a search engine optimization expert. A good SEO will be able to sort through your analytics and match what they find to solid keyword research in order to determine the most effective way to get your product in front of potential customers who may be looking for it. They can build off the foundation of age and credibility you’ve established to seek out new clients and get your site in front of more targeted searchers. When this is the case, investing your money in search engine optimization to pick up the customers who are actually looking for (but failing to find) your product or services, makes the most sense. Clue #2 When Your Product or Service has a Research Based Sales Process There are some products people fall in love with at first sight. We call these “impulse buys.” There are other products that require a fairly lengthy research process before a purchase is made. These are the types of products that align perfectly with search engine optimization. If you sell a product that costs more than $25 and that has competition from other similar products, you likely fall into the realm of research based sales. This means people will start with broad searches (i.e. portable dvd player), move on to information gathering purchases (i.e. best portable dvd player under $100) and finally search with a specific product in mind (Phillips PET741B/37.) For these types of products, it’s absolutely essential to make sure your site is properly optimized. If you’re not connecting with these customers at multiple points during the research process, you’re highly unlikely to connect with them when it comes time for them to buy. Clue #3 When You Sell Something People Already Want If you’re spending tons of money on offline advertising (billboards, radio, tv, print, etc…) but your site isn’t properly optimized, you’re making a huge mistake.  In fact, if you sell any product that’s already well established and popular, but you aren’t getting the type of traffic and sales you’d hoped for, it’s probably a good idea to focus on SEOing your web site before you do anything else. A quick trip to a free keyword research tool can be very revealing when it comes to this clue. If legions of consumers are searching for the very thing you’re selling…search engine optimization should be your first stop in the world of online marketing. If it’s not, you’re simply leaving customers sitting on the table for your nearest competitor with a marketing budget to scoop up. The Best Internet Marketing Campaigns are Integrated In an ideal world, every company would have the budget to invest in a truly integrated online marketing campaign. They would be focusing on search engine optimization, analytics, paid search, social media and online reputation management. The teams for each of these specialties would be working in tandem to test, refine and launch the most effective campaigns possible. Since this isn’t always possible, it’s important to focus your funds in the area that delivers the strongest and fastest reward. This will often enable a company to increase sales and profits enough to justify investing in the next item on their marketing list. Ideally, this cycle continues until you’ve got a strong marketing presence in all areas of the web. Until then, invest those first funds wisely. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

See the original post:
How to Know When Your Site Needs SEO Before Social Media

Last week, we shared a video on how to get the most out of your automatic alerts . Now that you’re familiar with automatic alerts, you know that Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that monitors your traffic and posts alerts when it sees something unusual. Now we want to tell you about “custom alerts.” With custom alerts, you can add on to this capability and tell Google Analytics to also watch out for specific things that you know you’re interested in. Custom alerts can be used in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to know where and when to incorporate them into your workflow. This week’s video, also below, shows how to use custom alerts as a campaign management tool . The idea is that, when you set up a new campaign, you set up alerts that help you manage the campaign — for example, alerts that trigger when revenue from the campaign increases or decreases. Campaign management is just one of the ways you can use custom alerts. We’d love to hear how you’re using them. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Original post: 
Analytics Intelligence Tips: Custom Alerts

Last week, we shared a video on how to get the most out of your automatic alerts . Now that you’re familiar with automatic alerts, you know that Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that monitors your traffic and posts alerts when it sees something unusual. Now we want to tell you about “custom alerts.” With custom alerts, you can add on to this capability and tell Google Analytics to also watch out for specific things that you know you’re interested in. Custom alerts can be used in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to know where and when to incorporate them into your workflow. This week’s video, also below, shows how to use custom alerts as a campaign management tool . The idea is that, when you set up a new campaign, you set up alerts that help you manage the campaign — for example, alerts that trigger when revenue from the campaign increases or decreases. Campaign management is just one of the ways you can use custom alerts. We’d love to hear how you’re using them. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

The rest is here:
Analytics Intelligence Tips: Custom Alerts