It would appear to allow the functionality to set trigger points for the website in relation to the traditional Google Analytics metrics and dimensions. It looks like it could be useful for setting indicators on pages when things are working as part of tests etc – has a change altered the bounce rate by a certain degree etc. Could also be useful for inputting monthly revenue targets and ask it to email out when a channel reaches target, or when conversion falls (useful if you’re testing a new booking engine on a website) etc.

Am away to test mes about with this for a bit and will post back any findings etc.

Click here to go to the Google Analytics training at the Google Conversion University.

The change has been using PPC to amke learning about how to improve the effectiveness of other Internet Marketing channels.

Step One – Abuse PPC to Gain Knowledge

Test every keyword you want to optimise for and every page you think it may be appropriate for. Then use this data to measure, test, refine! You’re investing in the future not just in sales. If you find a keyword has great volume but no sales think about why this is. Could well be the page your sending traffic to isnt great – could just be the keyword is useless or you have broad search on for a keyterm like ‘insurance’. Even if you get no conversions you’ve learned something.

Step Two – Reabuse PPC for Conversion Tweaking

So you know where and what to point – so you know where you should be monitoring your SEO campaign. Next get onto conversion and start testing your page layout! Get booking forms, calls to actions, font sizes, web layouts etc all tested and keep results for every test.

Step Three – Get Your SEO Flying

Get your SEO flying. Get your good links, fantastic content and a strong following of incremental visitors and sit back and enjoy the money that you’ve earned by using your PPC budget tactically.

Step Four – Retest, Reabuse and Realign your PPC campaign

Get your PPC budget reinvested in new terms and turn off old campaigns as pages get SEO rankings. Every penny you spend from now on in PPC is only one tactic within your internet marketing arsenal of techniques You are no longer relying on your PPC to drive sales and giving Google, Yahoo and MSN your money.

Get started, get testing, get PPC down to being a tactic and not a strategy and if anyone tells you PPC is an investment remember they could be right – but only where PPC is used as part of a wider strategy and the tactic for your PPC is for you to learn how to make more money. Its your money spend it wisely and make every non-earning penny earn you more in some other way.

Here endeth the Gordon Gecko Post of the month.

At various times we’ve had Matt Cutts suggesting that we’re all too hung up on supplementals and even that Google might remove the supplemental indicator from the site: command results

SpiderwritingSEO

So Guess whats happened – yep Bill the harbringer of doom and advocate of burning everyone who created IE at the stake was right. I’ve just done site: commands on fourteen sites and no Supplementals are showing! God whatever next – showing indeterminate numbers of backlinks with the link: command, making an related page search related:, or even better getting everyone to believe everyword that Matt Cutts say (OK so they managed all these things already).

So now guys you have no idea if a page is in the supplemental index any more. Next thing you know Google analytics will break for a couple of days and then we’re all kinda stuffed (bugger that happened too). Damn that Google and their inability to help us make sites better for the right reasons. Am sure it’ll all be sorted soon but knowing the ratio between supplemental pages to non-supplemental pages was a great insight into the strength of a website.

Supplemental results are dead – long live SEO Post Update:

Just got the following update from Bill via Yahoo! Instant Messenger:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/supplemental-goes-mainstream.html
Bloody idiots!

Way to go Bill!

Google Analytics, for all its strange reporting levels, is free and is quite good at what it does. I don’t trust it fully but as a simple way of introducing people to what analytics can do and as a way of determining trends within your site it can be useful. One of the good ways of using it is to create filters so that your website information is presented in a way that you can understand most easily.

What are Google Analytics Filters

Google Analytics filters allow you to change the way that aspects of your website are displayed to make your website analysis more intelligible for yourself.

Accessing your Google Analytics Filters

To access your Google Analytics Filters you first login to your account. From there select the ‘Access Manager’ Option at the bottom of the page. Click on the ‘Add Filter’ link and you’re away to building your first filter.

Just give the filter a name – if you make the filter name easily relevant to what you are going to be doing with the filter so much the better – spent half a day changing filter names from filter 1, filter 2, filter 3 etc that had been set up in an account to make it far simpler for me to use.

Google Filter Options Drop Down

The first three options in the drop down menu marked ‘Filter Type’ are pretty self explanatory; ‘Exclude all traffic from a domain’, ‘Exclude all traffic from an IP’, ‘Include only traffic to a subdirectory’, and you’ll have no problems with these.

The fourth option,’Custom’ is where we get interesting and we start using regular expressions.

Google Analytics – What are ‘Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions, commonly known as “RegEx” are a set of key combinations that are meant to allow people to have a large variety of control over what they are searching for. RegEx is used a lot under Unix, and is common between many programs.

www.cis.ksu.edu/~bhoward/vi/vi90.html

In essence these allow you to write rules that will change aspects of what is inputted to a system into a new version, if you use .htaccess files on your server you’re likely to be used to these.

My next post, assuming my guest bloggers get their finger out and write some good stuff, will be a run through of how to write your first custom filter in Google analytics.

If you have any suggestions as to what you would like to have a filter do that would help you. Send me a comment and I’ll have a look into making my post use your site as an example.