Latest posts made by Ben_Alvord
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RE: Huge increase in US direct visits to a UK site, why?
Try applying this Advanced Segment, which will segment out your metrics showing only the traffic which originated from America:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XGA6--mISZqq4AT60sJBRQ
Once the advanced segment is applied, you can look around on various reports and try to see if you can find anything which seems out of whack.
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RE: Safari Has Top Browser in Google Analytics?
Could also create two Advanced Segments, one showing traffic only from Safari, the other showing all traffic except from Safari, then compare the metrics to see how the Safari traffic differs from that which is not Safari (assuming it does).
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RE: How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
You might want to try escaping the question mark, so:
/?specifications
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RE: Google Analytics e-commerce tracking on multiple pages
The syntax of the GA ecommerce tracking code would be the same on different pages of your site. When the documentation refers to 'multiple trackers', it's talking about if you want to log the ecommerce transactions into 2 separate GA accounts.
So for your question, same JavaScript code on all receipt pages is what you want.
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RE: Queries vs Keywords
Sorry about that, I misread your question.
I wasn't really sure of the answer once I reread your question, but I did find this link from Google Support after digging around a bit: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1213138
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RE: Queries vs Keywords
This is because of Google's (fairly) recent change in reporting of search referrals within Google Analytics. If the user who visits your site is using Google under SSL (so with a https prefix), their search term is hidden and shows up in Google Analytics as (not provided). So when you look at the list of search queries in GA, you are only looking at the queries that people searched for when they weren't accessing Google through SSL. Everything else gets lumped into (not provided).
In Webmaster Tools though, you're able to see ALL of the searches, even the ones from HTTPS searches. That's what creates the discrepancy.
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RE: Divs Vs Table for styled data\
My opinion would be that DIV-based markup is the better choice here. As you said yourself, it's not really tabular data, so in using DIVs you can use semantic markup which is a positive for SEO.
You could improve/cleanup the markup of that data though, by:
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Use
,
,
tags. Even the bolded text in the lefthand column are basically headers for the text in the righthand column.
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You should remove the empty class="hr">tags, which I assume are in there to create the horizontal lines. It's nit picky, as if you remove them, you'll need to add a 'wrapper DIV' surrounding each row, so you won't really be cutting down on the code used that much. But having empty tags that are only there for presentation purposes is generally frowned upon. You could create the same visual effect by using a border or by using a background image (if you want the line to not fully extend across the row).
That's all pretty nitpicky coding stuff though. For SEO purposes, I think the only thing that might have an affect is using the <hx>tags.</hx>
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RE: Can trackingcodes in your url be seen as duplicate content or break other rules?
I would handle this situation using the URL parameters screen within Google Webmaster Tools (shown in the attached screenshot). You can add URL parameters into the screen and set them to have 'no effect', which means when Google indexes your site, whatever URL parameters you're set to 'no effect' will be ignored by the spider.
webmaster-tools.png
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RE: Google Analytics Tracking Pixels for Third-Party sites???
If the partner site would allow you to add code to their thank you page, you could have them just add your existing Google Analytics tracking code to that page and then page views of thankyou.html would start showing up in your Google Analytics.
The problem with that though is that it will show ALL page views of thankyou.html, not just the page views that originate from referrals from your domain. So this would only work if you are sending traffic to a page on the partner's site that is exclusive to your domain.
You could actually set up a custom report in GA to show only page views of thankyou.html where the referrer is your domain, but you'd have a bunch of additional page views mixed in with your data that have nothing to do with your site.
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RE: Bounce Rate at 45% - How to Improve?
You might also want to consider using Google Analytics virtual pageviews and custom events for tracking of interactions on your site which are not tracked by default. This would include things like:
- Download of PDF or other 'non web page' files.
- Social media interactions ('likes' and 'shares')
- Clicks that show/hide content elements with CSS and/or JavaScript
Tracking these interactions in Google Analytics will lower your bounce rate, though obviously you would not actually be improving the user experience of your site. I think though, that having your bounce rate be affected by meaningful user interactions on your site like these will give you a better sense of what your 'true bounce rate' is (meaning, the percentage of users who come to your site and literally do nothing).
Best posts made by Ben_Alvord
-
RE: Divs Vs Table for styled data\
My opinion would be that DIV-based markup is the better choice here. As you said yourself, it's not really tabular data, so in using DIVs you can use semantic markup which is a positive for SEO.
You could improve/cleanup the markup of that data though, by:
-
Use
,
,
tags. Even the bolded text in the lefthand column are basically headers for the text in the righthand column.
-
You should remove the empty class="hr">tags, which I assume are in there to create the horizontal lines. It's nit picky, as if you remove them, you'll need to add a 'wrapper DIV' surrounding each row, so you won't really be cutting down on the code used that much. But having empty tags that are only there for presentation purposes is generally frowned upon. You could create the same visual effect by using a border or by using a background image (if you want the line to not fully extend across the row).
That's all pretty nitpicky coding stuff though. For SEO purposes, I think the only thing that might have an affect is using the <hx>tags.</hx>
-
RE: Queries vs Keywords
This is because of Google's (fairly) recent change in reporting of search referrals within Google Analytics. If the user who visits your site is using Google under SSL (so with a https prefix), their search term is hidden and shows up in Google Analytics as (not provided). So when you look at the list of search queries in GA, you are only looking at the queries that people searched for when they weren't accessing Google through SSL. Everything else gets lumped into (not provided).
In Webmaster Tools though, you're able to see ALL of the searches, even the ones from HTTPS searches. That's what creates the discrepancy.
-
RE: Can trackingcodes in your url be seen as duplicate content or break other rules?
I would handle this situation using the URL parameters screen within Google Webmaster Tools (shown in the attached screenshot). You can add URL parameters into the screen and set them to have 'no effect', which means when Google indexes your site, whatever URL parameters you're set to 'no effect' will be ignored by the spider.
webmaster-tools.png
-
RE: How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
You might want to try escaping the question mark, so:
/?specifications
Blog Posts
4/4/2013
This post describes a method for overwriting the dreaded keyword (not provided) with the keyword which you have inferred that (not provided) represents.
2/14/2013
This past year, while saving up for my wedding, I completed a large number of freelance Google Analytics jobs. In doing so, I had to deal with many different problems which arise when you are working on Google Analytics accounts for a large number of clients. This post details some of the solutions I found.
1/10/2013
How to track your clicks and create a custom event in Google Analytics for your image and video views via Fancybox.
After twelve years working in web development and online marketing at agencies, I've made a transition to the client-side at Mendix.