Google’s analytics program rolled out a new feature – rather than highlighting the stats for jsut your omdinas, Google evaluates your stats against all of the domains they provide the service.
Great new info. Here’s an excerpt from the rollout letter:
Welcome to the first volume of the Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter!
This month, we are replacing the standard “benchmarking” report in your Google Analytics account with data shared in this newsletter. We are using this newsletter as an experiment to surface more useful or interesting data to Analytics users. Data contained here comes from all websites which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics. Only those website administrators which have enabled this anonymous data sharing will receive this “benchmarking” newsletter.
You may be wondering, how many websites are in this “anonymous data sharing” pool? Currently, hundreds of thousands, and we’ve endeavored to make all of the metrics here statistically significant.
The date range of comparison for this newsletter is from November 1, 2010 – February 1, 2011. Comparison is done with data from November 1, 2009 – February 1, 2010. Absolute metrics such as total # visits, pageviews, or conversions for all opted-in websites are not reported.
78) Use the Google Search Query Tool to see the exact keyword search your ad appeared for rather than the keyword in your account that it broad matched you to. How did they respond? If well, consider adding the keyword as exact match. If bad, consider for new negative keyword. This will increase reach but will also drive lower CPCs.
79) 20% of all search queries each day are new in a 90-day period. You can’t reach these searchers with exact match as you can’t second guess. Broad match accounts for one third of worldwide clicks and conversions. Successful Broad match bids need accompanying negative keywords (find them with the Query Tool).
80) Use AdWords local search placements to target local searches. Simple!
81) Use Sales (conversion) figures and CPA (cost per acquisition) to optimize AdWords. Not just CTR (clickthrough rate). Good CTR does not mean good conversion to sale.
82) Schedule your ads for the days and times that respond. E.g. do your response rates change at the weekend? At night? Friday evening? Lunch times?
adwords success e-book
Google news
91) Google’s universal results might show news, local, product, music, images, videos and now real-time results on the first page. There’s often not much room left for a standard listing. Each type of listing has its own algo.
92) When assessing your site, Google considers hundreds of factors that can be grouped into Popularity, Authority and Relevance.
93) For news sites, the following become more important than on other sites: social media buzz, clickthrough rates, link structure, freshness, content expertise, authority, newsrank, local coverage, domain mentions.
94) Google has slowed down the speed with which ranking factors are transferred with a 301 redirect.
This doesn’t always happen as, for example, we’ve recently done 301 redirects for large sites and had an instant transfer of ranking factors.
95) Canonical tag is working well when on-page factors like title tag and h-tags match.
96) Google follows nofollow links if they are on any of the following: 1. powerful social media profiles; 2. heavily retweeted tweets about topical subjects; 3. high PageRank sites with topical and high-volume (on the day) search queries in the link.
97) Keep your first paragraph close to your h1 tag. Don’t break up code within that paragraph with other HTML. All pages must have at least a paragraph of text.
98) Social and search are merging. For example, see Google’s social circle search which searches your personal social network.
99) “I’m sure I can find a PR Horny SEO”.
Addendum: Even more takeaways
100) (On job sites) Allow your job search results pages to index, but only to the point where you have a min of 5 jobs per category.
101) Load 150 items into site search results pages but use CSS/Java Script to cater for pagination and number of items the user sees. This is fast for users as they only load the page once and great for getting vacancies indexed.
102) Add current and relevant microformats to your build markup to inprove CTR in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
An article on microfrmats coming soon.
