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Search Engine Marketing, New Sangavi, Pune (2026)

27/09/2013

Google Expands AdWords Conversion Window Settings

In a small but significant change, Google is doing away with the 30-day conversion window in AdWords. Now advertisers can customize the conversion window from 7 to 90 days.

Extending the window up to 90 days is good news for marketers whose sales cycles typically take longer than 30 days after an ad click or for those advertisers focused on luring repeat buyers back to the site and want to track performance on that metric.

Advertisers with shorter sales cycles that don’t want lagging conversions to cloud their attribution data, can opt to shorten the window. Some may wish for an even shorter window (Facebook, for example, allows for as short as a one day window), but it’s a step in the right direction.

You can make edits by going to the Conversions tab under Tools and Analysis. As a guide to setting your conversion, AdWords provides a link to the Search Funnels conversion time lag report which shows the time it takes your customers to complete a conversion after clicking on your ads.

18/10/2012

Google Analytics vs. Omniture: Independent Analysis

[This is a guest post written by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal.] We get asked the “GA or Omniture” question often enough that we decided to offer up this analysis as a buyer’s guide to the marketing executive or CEO. So how well does a free product stack up against one costing six figures?

The main selling points of Omniture are engine-independence and paid support. Conceptually, there is something to be said about using a third-party tool to manage your spend across multiple engines. At the same time, the primary engines have formats (API and bulk loading) that make it easy to export and import campaigns.

In this regard, the gap that used to be there a couple years ago is now closed– and then there are cheap tools like SpeedPPC that quickly multiply and distribute campaigns across multiple engines. Omniture’s SearchCenter integration with the platform is in marketing only– true product integration is a long ways off and not likely, given that it’s already been a couple years in the making (data warehouse export is still not working), and that Adobe bought Omniture.

Google Analytics doesn’t offer paid support. While there are a few GAC consultants that Google authorizes (they have to pass a test for certification– harder than the AdWords qualification), and there are some PPC/Analytics training sessions sponsored by Google– there is definitely not the kind of support/consulting you get from buying software. Many corporations prefer the idea of paid software and are comfortable with that model of having an account manager they can call up with questions, plus a block of services hours for implementation and report development. That said, you might ask Omniture about their support offering and ask a few clients that are peers of Global Sources to inquire about the support they get.

Campaign reporting. GA allows for multiple dimensions– in particular, motion charts, advanced segments, and the various multi-dimensional views that are metric specific. I believe Omniture is inferior in this regard because of GA’s ability to visualize data in cross-tab (pivot) and related view formats. In other words, it’s easier to uncover trends in GA than by hunting through Omniture.
Integration. This is usually a red herring across most Internet marketing companies. The most important integration in analytics and PPC software is that of CRM interaction (salesforce.com, Eloqua, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, etc..) and offline conversions. This almost always requires some custom work, since every company has a different underlying data model (which they should), as well as a different sales funnel and attribution scheme. The collection, integration, and weighting of this data is not an out-of-the-box software module, but an exercise of sophisticated marketing analytics. Online conversion tracking is relatively simple for all enterprise-level analytics tools, whether using a method like Google URL Builder or cookie tracking. Google has a significant advantage in tracking activity from and on Facebook, despite the marketing efforts put forth by Omniture.

Funnel tracking. Omniture does allow for multiple paths. Our viewpoint is that the more sophisticated method is to measure event-level attribution (page or click), rather than force the analyst (you) to have to define each particular path to analyze. The traditional methods of slice-and-dice is a needle in a haystack approach — you should prefer your analytics tool to do the legwork to tell you what combinations of pages lead to a conversion or a poor user experience. We are not aware of any clickstream analytics tool that does this out of the box. With the number of combinations of attributes events, and pages possible, you need click level data and a correlation algorithm to pull out the right combination of trends to view. You cannot do this out of GA yourself, because you’ll need the raw data to calculate. That said, log file parsing is probably the most practical solution here if you want to go that far in analytics, given that Omniture doesn’t know how to do it (we’ve had multiple calls with their top people and they are stumped).

User tagging. Omniture does allow for more variables to be stored. You’ll want to consider what use cases you have that cannot be solved via an advanced segment and parsing urls. If you’re interested in Omniture’s solution, please read the chapter in their implementation guide — it’s a confusing read, but they do allow collection of personal data. Google doesn’t allow collection of such data for privacy reasons. Not sure about auditing requirements — any certification of data accuracy would have to rely upon click-level data out of your logs, which Google can’t do (unless you have the old urchin, which is not recommended).

Goal tracking. Google has recently expanded from 4 goals to 20 goals. Most companies misuse goal-setting, as they confuse segments and points within the funnel as goals. The more goals you have, the more complex the attribution. It’s hard enough to do attribution when you have only 1 goal and many events for which you have to allocate credit — now try matrix attribution with many goals and many events. To the best of our knowledge, almost nobody has single goal attribution down, so matrix attribution is not even in the vernacular of analytics yet.

Page overlays. Cool tool with wow factors for both GA and Omniture– but usually not usable because of tracking problems and multiple links on a page that have the same URL. On the latter, let’s say that on a particular page, there are two links to get to another page (a topnav and a footer nav link)– if they have the same destination url, you won’t be able to tell which one drove the click. We have rarely found the visual overlays to offer accurate data.
Data freshness. Generally a 2-10 hour delay on Google.

Data freshness is most important is when you have events that require real-time optimization. Keep in mind that PPC data may be on a full day lag and you’re limited by your weakest link. Thus, if your web analytics is only 30 minutes behind, but your PPC and CRM are 4 hours behind, you’re really 4 hours behind (or you’re making inaccurate decisions). Further, the concept of statistical significance is such that you have to gather enough data to determine what’s going on. At Yahoo!, we decided that a 3 day reporting delay (because we needed 2.5 days to crunch attribution) was worth the trade-off in speed versus effective optimization. You’ll have to decide what data you really need at what frequency.
Independence. Several of the government agencies we have talked to don’t use Google Analytics because open source is considered off-limits. Some major advertisers don’t use GA because of the potential conflict of interest in having your analytics being tracked with the place you spend your money. And there are the “tin foil hat” and anti-monopoly people that in general don’t believe you should have your analytics, PPC, landing page testing, mail, and so forth with the same company. Given practical realities, we don’t think this is an issue right now.

Effectiveness. Google AdWords is going to have more effective (effective meaning increasing profits, as opposed to allowing you to create more reports) tools than 3rd party tools– they have to, because they have the advantage of more data. Case in point– the Conversion Optimizer of Google versus any bid management tools. With the exception of folks like ClickEquations (market leader who is good, but not great), in our opinion, nobody yet has a sophisticated method of bid management.
Omniture vs. Google Analytics comparison

Another potential plus for Omniture is that they’re releasing tools to manage Facebook PPC campaigns via their API.

Whether these tools are robust and take advantage of social targeting is yet to be seen, given that advertisers who blindly copy their PPC ads to Facebook don’t meet with success. They are also interacting with Facebook solely via the API, which is quite limited versus what’s available in the web interface or other third party tools that communicate by other methods.

Net-net, you can do mountains of comparison and research on web analytics tools. There is plenty to be said about the GA vs. Omniture debate. Our advice is to start from your goals and then decide, as opposed to what most people do, which is to create a wish list of every possible feature they might ever use and see who has the most checkboxes. That approach will lead you to the wrong solution, as most of the nice-to-have features you’ll never use.

The act of defining your goals, optimizations to directly improve such goals, and the reports to diagnose when you’ll take such optimizations is a re-statement of the process that BlitzLocal uses in running campaigns— that is metrics > analysis > action. If there are any metrics/reports that are not actionable, they are a waste of time. Metrics are about what has changed significantly since last time, analytics is about why, and action is what you’re going to do about it.

Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, an Internet marketing firm specializing in Facebook and PPC campaigns. He is an international speaker and author.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of aimClear LLC or aimClear Blog.

08/10/2012

The EMD Update: Google Issues “Weather Report” Of Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match Domains

The head of Google web spam fighting team Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that Google will be rolling out a “small” algorithm change that will “reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains” from showing up so highly in the search results.

Cutts said this will impact 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. He added it is “unrelated to Panda/Penguin. Panda is a Google algorithm filter aimed at fighting low quality content; Penguin is one aimed at fighting web spam.

This should come as no surprise, as Cutts said a couple years ago that Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank well when they shouldn’t, in some cases.

Likely over the coming days, you will see shifts in the search results where many sites that may rank well based on being an exact match domain may no longer rank as high in Google’s search results.

Exact match domains mean domains that match exactly for the search query. For example, if I sold blue widgets and owned the domain name www.bluewidgets.com, that would be an exact match domain.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean sites with keywords they hope to rank for in their domain names are now doomed. Rather, the change aims to target low quality sites that might be riding on on the basis of exact matching.

08/10/2012

Breaking News: Panda Update and EMD Algorithm Rolling Out Now
Buckle up, folks – it’s been a busy week for search. The folks at Google and co. have thrown webmasters yet another curve ball – and this one comes in the form of tandem algorithm updates. I write for quite a few tech blogs, and I just reported on the exact match domain (EMD) update a couple of days ago. The interwebs have been ablaze with folks who’ve already felt the fury of the new algo’s wrath, and I have been glued to my keyboard reporting the news. Then, tonight, I stumbled upon this breaking announcement on Search Engine Roundtable: Hmm. Interesting. Of course, if you’ve been in the world of SEO for even a short stretch of time, then you are fully aware that Google never makes hasty algo changes. Everything is carefully engineered, vigorously tested, and heavily premeditated. To be sure, the overlapping timing of the EMD and the new Panda update are no accident. On that note, let’s look at what changed, reactions ‘round the Web, and steps Big G is taking to keep its agenda under lock and key.
The EMD Update – How Things Went Down

Okay, so first let’s deal with the exact match domain update. Things started heating up when Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, sent out a couple of tweets on September 28 announcing the change. Here’s one of them:

Cutts EMD Update Tweet
As you can see, the EMD update is a completely autonomous beast. It’s not part of the now-infamous Panda or Penguin updates and refreshes. It’s an independent algoethm. You know how SEOs have advised you for years to buy exact match domain names? Yeah, that’s what this update is fighting back against. Perhaps it’s the end of an era. Here’s a little more insight from the team over at Search Engine Land:

This should come as no surprise. If you follow SEO news regularly, you may recall frequent off-the-cuff threats from Cutts and co. aimed at thin affiliate or AdSense websites bearing EMDs. They’ve been warning us for years now. Well, it’s finally come to pass, and many people who have made a healthy living off ranking these kinds of sites are now in the throes of restructuring their business model.

I spent hours reading of their woes. Well-known webmasters who have built empires manufacturing and ranking niche sites with EMDs are wailing en masse – it’s a veritable bloodbath out there. People are claiming 60 – 100% of their portfolios have tanked overnight. The silver lining? It’s still early, and as with any Google update, it will take some time for the dust to settle and the real winners and losers to emerge.

A Panda Falls atop the EMD Update
Then, the plot thickened. Search Engine Roundtable announced that Google confirmed a Panda update began baking into the index on September 27. It’s not your ho-hum data refresh, either – it’s one of the big ones… an update for the algo in its entirety. That means that old and new websites alike will be affected by the change without so much as touching their existing website content. Fun. Here’s the official quote that Matt Cutts issued to SER shortly following the rollout:

“Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 9/27. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday 9/27, but the full rollout is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example).”

Remember, Panda is all about on-page issues. Your website content, your URLs (hello!), your H1 tags… all that good stuff. I find it highly interesting that G coupled a massive Panda update with this new EMD algorithm.

Do you smell a trend here?

All the webmasters I came across who were bemoaning drops in the SERPs seemed to have one thing in common – their websites were chock-full of 500-word wonders, complete with regurgitated data, keywords galore, and less-than-stellar prose. It’s still all about the quality content (now more than ever), and the bottom line is that outsourced copy for $5 a pop will sink you faster than a boat with a hole.

Sweeping Secrets under the Rug
So, is it really an accident that Google rolled out overlapping updates? The guys at Search Engine Roundtable say no. According to them, the double whammy will make it tough for webmasters to discern the reason for any drop in the SERPs. Did a website get hit by the EMD update? Or was it an attack on low-quality content brought on by Panda?

No, they think the overlapping was a deliberate attempt by Matt and the gang to confound webmasters, and I agree. I don’t like it either – I have niche sites myself – but I agree that confusing us was the objective. If our sites tanked after the EMD update, we’d (pretty much) know why. Now, since Panda’s running too, we… well, we won’t. Here’s a comment from the original announcement that summed the situation up best for me:

If you’re wondering what the way forward will be from here, don’t. Not yet. We’re still a couple of weeks away from the final verdict about our rankings, so hold tight for now. Once you’ve figured out where you’ve landed, that’s when it’s time to regroup. And by regroup, I mean dramatically diversifying your online marketing efforts away from Google alone.

05/10/2012

Penguin’s effect on Google search results

By Google’s estimates, Penguin affects approximately 3.1% of search queries in English, about 3% of queries in languages like German, Chinese, and Arabic, and an even bigger percentage of them in "highly-spammed" languages. On May 25th, 2012, Google unveiled the latest Penguin update, called Penguin 1.1. This update, according to Matt Cutts, was supposed to impact less than one-tenth of a percent of English searches. The guiding principle for the update was to penalise websites using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings.

The differences between Penguin and previous updates

Before Penguin, Google released a series of algorithm updates called Panda with the first appearing in February 2011. Panda aimed at down ranking websites that provided poor user experience. To identify such websites, a machine-learning algorithm by Navneet Panda[11] was used, hence the name. The algorithm follows the logic by which Google’s human quality raters determine a website’s quality.
In January 2012, so-called page layout algorithm update was released, which targeted websites with little content above the fold. The strategic goal that Panda, Penguin, and page layout update share is to display higher quality websites at the top of Google’s search results. However, sites that were down ranked as the result of these updates have different sets of characteristics. The main target of Google Penguin is spam indexing (including link bombing).

Google’s Penguin feedback form

Two days after Penguin update was released Google prepared a feedback form, designed for two categories of users: those who want to report web spam that still ranks highly after the search algorithm change, and those who think that their site got unfairly hit by the update. Google also has a reconsideration form through Google Webmaster Tools for the 700,000 sites who received an email stating their sites demonstrated unusual linking.

31/07/2012

Another step to reward high-quality sites

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we're not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer

12/06/2012

Penguin 1.1 — May 25, 2012

Google rolled out its first targeted data update after the "Penguin" algorithm update. This confirmed that Penguin data was being processed outside of the main search index, much like Panda data.

Google Releases Penguin Update 1.1 (SEL)
Knowledge Graph — May 16, 2012

In a major step toward semantic search, Google started rolling out "Knowledge Graph", a SERP-integrated display providing supplemental object about certain people, places, and things. Expect to see "knowledge panels" appear on more and more SERPs over time. Also, Danny Sullivan's favorite Trek is ST:Voyager?!

Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings (Google)

Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links (SEL)
April 52-Pack — May 4, 2012

Google published details of 52 updates in April, including changes that were tied to the "Penguin" update. Other highlights included a 15% larger "base" index, improved pagination handling, and a number of updates to sitelinks.

Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April (Google)

Google’s April Updates: Bigger & Tiered Index, Document Ranking, Sitelink Changes & More (SEL)
Panda 3.6 — April 27, 2012

Barely a week after Panda 3.5, Google rolled out yet another Panda data update. The implications of this update were unclear, and it seemed that the impact was relatively small.

Confirmed: Panda Update 3.6 Happened On April 27th (SEL)
Penguin — April 24, 2012

After weeks of speculation about an "Over-optimization penalty", Google finally rolled out the "Webspam Update", which was soon after dubbed "Penguin." Penguin adjusted a number of spam factors, including keyword stuffing, and impacted an estimated 3.1% of English queries.

Another step to reward high-quality sites (Google)

The Penguin Update: Google’s Webspam Algorithm Gets Official Name (SEL)

Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice (SEL)

Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO (SEL)
Panda 3.5 — April 19, 2012

In the middle of a busy week for the algortihm, Google quietly rolled out a Panda data update. A mix of changes made the impact difficult to measure, but this appears to have been a fairly routine update with minimal impact.

Google Mocks Me For Missing Panda 3.5 (SER)
Parked Domain Bug — April 16, 2012

After a number of webmasters reported ranking shuffles, Google confirmed that a data error had caused some domains to be mistakenly treated as parked domains (and thereby devalued). This was not an intentional algorithm change.

Dropped In Rankings? Google’s Mistake Over Parked Domains Might Be To Blame (SEL)

Updated: Google Update April 2012? Over SEO Penalty? (SER)
March 50-Pack — April 3, 2012

Google posted another batch of update highlights, covering 50 changes in March. These included confirmation of Panda 3.4, changes to anchor-text "scoring", updates to image search, and changes to how queries with local intent are interpreted.

Search quality highlights: 50 changes for March (Google)

Google’s March Updates: Anchor Text, Image Search, Navigational Search & More (SEL)
Panda 3.4 — March 23, 2012

Google announced another Panda update, this time via Twitter as the update was rolling out. Their public statements estimated that Panda 3.4 impacted about 1.6% of search results.

Google Says Panda 3.4 Is ‘Rolling Out Now’ (SEL)
Search Quality Video — March 12, 2012

This wasn't an algorithm update, but Google published a rare peek into a search quality meeting. For anyone interested in the algorithm, the video provides a lot of context to both Google's process and their priorities. It's also a chance to see Amit Singhal in action.

Video! The search quality meeting, uncut (Google)
Panda 3.3 — February 27, 2012

Google rolled out another post-"flux" Panda update, which appeared to be relatively minor. This came just 3 days after the 1-year anniversary of Panda, an unprecedented lifespan for a named update.

Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update (SEL)

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.3 (SER)
February 40-Pack (2) — February 27, 2012

Google published a second set of "search quality highlights" at the end of the month, claiming more than 40 changes in February. Notable changes included multiple image-search updates, multiple freshness updates (including phasing out 2 old bits of the algorithm), and a Panda update.

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February (Google)
Venice — February 27, 2012

As part of their monthly update, Google mentioned code-name "Venice". This local update appeared to more aggressively localize organic results and more tightly integrate local search data. The exact roll-out date was unclear.

Understand and Rock the Google Venice Update (SEOmoz)

Google Venice Update – New Ranking Opportunities for Local SEO (Catalyst eMarketing)
February 17-Pack — February 3, 2012

Google released another round of "search quality highlights" (17 in all). Many related to speed, freshness, and spell-checking, but one major announcement was tighter integration of Panda into the main search index.

17 search quality highlights: January (Google)

Google’s January Search Update: Panda In The Pipelines, Fresher Results, Date Detection & More (SEL)
Ads Above The Fold — January 19, 2012

Google updated their page layout algorithms to devalue sites with too much ad-space above the "fold". It was previously suspected that a similar factor was in play in Panda. The update had no official name, although it was referenced as "Top Heavy" by some SEOs.

Page layout algorithm improvement (Google)

Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm (SEL)
Panda 3.2 — January 18, 2012

Google confirmed a Panda data update, although suggested that the algorithm hadn't changed. It was unclear how this fit into the "Panda Flux" scheme of more frequent data updates.

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.2 Update (SEW)

Google Panda 3.2 Update Confirmed (SEL)
Search + Your World — January 10, 2012

Google announced a radical shift in personalization - aggressively pushing Google+ social data and user profiles into SERPs. Google also added a new, prominent toggle button to shut off personalization.

Search, plus Your World (Google)

Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy (SEL)
January 30-Pack — January 5, 2012

Google announced 30 changes over the previous month, including image search landing-page quality detection, more relevant site-links, more rich snippets, and related-query improvements. The line between an "algo update" and a "feature" got a bit more blurred.

30 search quality highlights - with codenames! (Google)

Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates (SEL)

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