Digital Roundup: July 10th – July 25th

And now for our second instalment of what has been going on over the past few weeks. We have been talking a lot as usual and have come across some interesting news and cool tips that the best in the business have been blogging about. So here goes.

Digital News: July 10th - 25th

Analytics Therapy: How To Find (And Deal With) The Really Crappy Stuff On Your Site

This post was written by Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Studios. As the title indicates, this post gives you information on how to find, analyse and deal with really crappy content on your site. Andy brings up three points that outline how to tell if a page on your site is any good. The first point he makes is that the content is easy to find. The content must be useful to the readers and build trust. And lastly, it must be relevant to your business and help conversions. This content is usually easy to detect if the content is a blog post or an email but if it is just a page this can be more difficult because of the lack of social integration.

With Google Analytics you can find which content can be deemed “crappy” and deal with it. See an example below:

If you need direction on how to get to this point in analytics see Andy’s original post.

Once you have this information you can see that these pages have extremely low traffic. You will have to decide whether these pages are important for you to keep. If they are, they should be revamped to make the content more captivating.
Number #31 in the image has a few visitors spending a decent amount of time on the page. You may want to give this content better promotion but you may not have to write the content for it again.

Google Analytics: Content That is Being Shared & What You’re Missing by not Looking into This Data

This topic was covered by a couple of different posts that we discussed in our #DigitalNewsMeeting which is tweeted live by @aroth26.
Let’s begin with a post by Justin Cutroni of Google where he shares a social sharing custom report that outlines how and where users are sharing content, which channels drive the most traffic, who is actually sharing your content and more.

Social Sharing Custom Report

Before you begin to obtain any data from this custom report you will have to add a piece of code which you add to the analytics snippet;

Using the async javascript snippet, the easiest way to call this method is to use:

_gaq.push([‘_trackSocial’, socialNetwork, socialAction]);

And if you’re using the traditional snippet you’ll need to use this syntax:

var pageTracker = _gat._createTracker(‘UA-xxxxx-y’);
pageTracker._trackSocial(socialNetwork, socialAction);

You can find a tutorial on how to use social reports in Google Analytics to Analyze Specific Blog Post or Content by Glen Gabe of G-Squared Interactive. This tutorial begins by isolating a specific blog post or piece of content that you wish to target . Once you have selected which page you are wishing to analyze, (Traffic Sources > Social > Pages > /desiredpage) the primary dimension will be social referral and you will see a list of social networks by the number of visits from each network. If the social network is one of the data hub partners then this will also be displayed in the results.
You can drill down this information even further by selecting social network and action as the primary dimension. This will then show you for the network you select the number of posts, shares, comments, etc and this is just the beginning! When you delve even deeper into the wonders of social in analytics, you can see specific conversations that people are having, view their profiles and the ripple effect that they have on what activity they reacted to. You can then use this information to help find influencers in your niche. Google Plus ripples give the most data (I wonder why)  which can be additionaly useful in order to see how your content was shared and make it easier to find influencers, links to each public post, view shares over time, etc.
There is more information on the original post but this covers what getting social with Google Analytics can provide. Social reporting is clearly important to understand the impact of social traffic, what is being shared and who is sharing it.

Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites

I am going to briefly outline what we read recently on a Google Developers guide to optimizing your site across multiple platforms. The three most popular implementations of JavaScripts for smartphone/tablet-optimized sites are; JavaScript-adaptive, combined detection and dynamically-served JavaScript. The page on developers.google goes into further detail on what these implementations are and the requirements.

JavaScript-adaptive technique is not a problem since all code is sent to every device and the device that the page is loaded on decides which section of the code to run.

With combined detection and dynamically-served JavaScript all you need to do is provide a user agent in the header so that Google crawls the site for all variations of the coding.

Official: Google Panda 3.9 Refresh

Barry Schwartz as always was on top of Google’s latest Panda update. He tells us that there is not much talk in the forums regarding this update, however speculates that we may be in for a big one next time as we are running out of numbers. “3.9 and now what?” with that being said, there is another post that correlates nicely with this post, written by Jeremy Morgan titled:

Why The Best SEOs at MozCon Aren’t Worried About Tonight’s Google Panda Update

Jeremy outlines that the reasons the best SEO’s at MozCon are not worried is simply because SEO should embrace the changes that Google makes because when they decide to make one the only option is to try and gain from it. This means that one should keep within the guidelines that Google sets and focus on content giving people a reason to use your site. Make sure that you are cleaning up your pages and doing all the on page optimization you can think of, obviously without overdoing it. Engage with your fans/customers/users with social media since this is fast becoming the way to interact and gain authority in your niche. Scrap any and all black hat or paid link plans as these are becoming easier for Google to spot.
If you are doing the right thing, then you’ll win too!

How To See Which Companies Visited Your Site With Google Analytics

Yousafe Sekander of Elevatelocal wrote a great little post explaining that you don’t need to pay an outrageous amount of money to get data on which companies have visited your site. If fact it is actually quite simple. All you need to do is in analytics, go to Audience > Technology > Network. By default, the primary dimension would be set to service provider. If a company uses branded aliases or if they are connecting through their own network then you will see them in the list. You can set second dimensions to see the city they visited from or medium to see whether they came from organic, cpc, email, etc.

I hope you have enjoyed this installment of the Digital Roundup. Comments are welcome as always 🙂

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Gideon Wellins

As the Head of International SEO I manage and oversee the team and campaigns here at Angora Media.

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