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I've been through something like this once, and, unfortunately, even with substantive ad spend, it took a lot of time and effort to get an AdWords rep involved. You have a couple of choices: (1) Complain very loudly, including Twitter and Google Webmaster Forums. Yes, it's not the ideal solution, but it works more often than it should. (2) Contact anyone you can at AdWords and try to get rep time. I'll tell you what we did - I'm not saying you should do it, but desperate times, etc. We went to a Google Analytics meet-up and got a few cards from Googlers. Then, we emailed all of them. Since they were out of town (for the meet-up), we got their vacation auto-responders, so we emailed all of their bosses. This continued until some VP got so annoyed he demanded someone assign us a rep to shut us up. Look, I'm not proud of it, but that client got their ban lifted.

It definitely can, I saw once a site that had hundreds of redirects and it was definitely slowing the site down as they had to run through all the redirects first on the server side to see where the user should be forwarded to.

Thanks Joel. I have a laptop and at times, the distinction between google adwords and organic seems faint. Nevertheless... I think you're right. To the unsophisticated, not sure they make note of the differences, when they don't know there's a difference in results. I agree... there's good synergy when you can get ppc and organic working...as they say in real estate...location, location, location... when you see those results repeatedly on the same page... it has impact. Thanks.

Hi Again, The (Not provided) category isn't showing up in March 2011 because they only started obscuring data from logged in users in October of 2011. This might account for at least some of the traffic difference between 2011 and 2012. I think this is the blog post that they announced the change via: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html You can potentially get some idea of what terms the (not provided) traffic is coming in on by looking at the landing page. You can also use PPC data, but I'm a little fuzzier on how that is done as AdWords isn't something I use a whole lot of.

http://www.google.com/trends/?

thank you. this was very helpful.

It would be best to use A/B testing (by Google) to figure out where the traffic changes are taking place. This is done by using a utm_content variable in the URL tag. Here is the link: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=55589 If you are running Adwords then the Website Optimizer is a good place to start.

My memory is a bit vague here but it should put you in the right direction. When you choose to embed videos there should be an option for "play related videos" or something similar. Make sure to not select that box. It should add a parameter to the URL along the lines of "&rel=0". For advertising, if you are a YouTube partner channel, then you can disable ads on any of your videos. Otherwise, as long as you do not include any copyrighted material in your video I believe you are ok. This includes the audio track.

Sorry. Didn't mean anything by that. Lesser quality didn't mean poor quality. YOUmoz has great content. The main blog has even better content. And there are exceptions to every rule.