Until now it’s been possible to track referral traffic from Google Plus simply by filtering to ‘plus.google’ in the referrals report in Google Analytics or your favourite analytics package.
This changed on December 3rd when Google started redirecting most traffic through a new subdomain, plus.url.google.com.
If you want to see referrals from both plus.google and plus.url.google in the same report, set up a Matching RegExp Advanced filter to ‘plus.*google’
This should filter to include all Google plus subdomains.
Something else we’ve noticed is that traffic referred from Google Plus appears to have increased in the last week for the first time ever after a continuous decline.
This is probably a side effect of the change in tracking …or could they finally have reversed the trend and started to see some genuine growth?
Google Analtyics Real-Time has given us some interesting new ways to meaure activity on our site in real-time.
However this really only makes sense if you’re able to respond in real time to the data which doesn’t fit the pattern for the majority of analysis and optimisation. If the data [...] Continue Reading…
Open Graph tags are more important than the Like button. Much more…
Some people who add Open Graph tags and the Like button to their site see an uplift in traffic from Facebook. They see lots of Likes appearing on their Like buttons and think the Like button is great.
However [...] Continue Reading…
A few weeks ago, one of our clients accidentally released duplicate description tags across all the pages in one section of their site.
They were using template based formats for the descriptions so that every page would have a unique description but the system failed and every description ended up [...] Continue Reading…
User Journey based Segmentation Matrix
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DESCRIPTION: Each user starts the journey from being a new visitor to a website. New visits are attracted by either brand or non-brand campaigns resulting in “new non-brand” or “new brand” visits. The goal is to convert new visitors into ideally “registered [...] Continue Reading…
Update: Google has confirmed the behaviour and provided detailed documentation.
The original Robots.txt syntax was pretty straightforward. You could only use the Disallow directive to exclude pages and each Disallow directive acted like a broad match at the end. This seemed pretty intuitive to most people and for a while [...] Continue Reading…
It’s been over a year since Google conducted a survey asking webmaster which features they wanted the most. Our analysis of that survey showed that people were desperate for more information on backlinks.
Google obliged by updating ‘Links to your site’ in Webmaster Tools to provide a full list of all backlinks [...] Continue Reading…
The value of using the meta keywords tag has long been contested amongst SEOs.
In september 2009 Matt Cutts of confirmed the commonly held view that Google has never used meta keywords tag. It’s unusual for Google to be this direct so apparently this issue hasn’t been easy to ignore [...] Continue Reading…
UPDATE: This technique does NOT track Google Instant as Google isn’t passing through the original query as thought. We were incorrectly picking up referrals from the old Google suggest.
UPDATE2: Google Analytics have confirmed it on their blog.
The launch of Google Instant has caused a lot of excitement and SEOs [...] Continue Reading…
Google recently added a new report to Webmaster Tools called ‘short meta descriptions’ which sits under the HTML Suggestions menu.
Analysing the data for a few large sites quickly showed that descriptions of 49 characters or less are included in the report.
So what is the impact of having a ‘short’ [...] Continue Reading…