Hello Friends,

I should be sleeping right now, but I read something that I had to briefly write about. I was just in Vegas last week, presenting on how to future-proof your SEO strategy and I mentioned keeping an eye on Google / Yahoo etc using data on your site in helping them determine relevancy for SERPS.

At the time I didn’t have any examples of this happening for Google Analytics and I still don’t.

But The Google Blogoscoped post I linked to above & this one here from Marketingpilgrim discuss how now you can “choose” to share your Google Analytics content with Google so they can use the data for other products. I would think it is a no brainer for them to use this data to improve SERPS someday (i.e. spam sites aren’t sticky, so sites with low time on site could see a negative tick mark in rankings - Oh I can’t wait for the day when real data is one factor used in helping determine who ranks where.)
By choosing to share your data with Google (yes this is an opt-in program, read the FAQs) you will also get data from Google on how you compare in your industry to other sites (who are using Google analytics AND opt in). By the looks of things the data points you’ll be able to compare your site against others include:

• Visits
• Bounce rates
• Time on site
• Pageviews
• Pages per visit
• New visitor percentage

For those of you seeking competitive information back in November of 2006 Laura wrote about using some tools to spy on the competition. I have used the fireclick index in the past when clients ask about trends and benchmarks. It will be interesting to see how this compares, if you look really closely at the firclick data, you kind of say,
“OK so what am I going to actually do with this information?” Will this go the same way? I hope not, I hope the verticals are more finite, the fireclick verticals in my opinion are too broad.

Well anyway, If the data points above are any indication, where I think this data makes great strides over what is out there are in the following 3 areas:

1. You finally get real numbers, Quantcast, Compete, Alexa, etc are all questionable in the accuracy of the data. Quantcast data is much better when publishers use their quantified program.
2. “New visitor percentage” will allow you to tell the velocity by which your competitors are ramping up efforts to attract new visitors, right now Quantcast, Alexa, Compete, etc are not equipped to give you an idea on if your competitors site is just getting more visits from the same people or from a totally new set.
3. “Bounce Rates” will be huge, if you can see that you are on the bottom of your industry group for bounce rates, you could look at your top competitors, check their pages to see if they have Google Analytics page tags installed, and if they do, you could then review their sites to see what they are doing different / better.

The issues I can see already are:

1. Could I set up Google Analytics on an old domain, that is in my industry, but I don’t use anymore to get access to industry benchmark data, but not actually opt in my real site, allowing me to get access to data while not contributing to giving good data to the system.
2. The above issue immediately leads to another issue, garbage in, garbage out. If people try to use alternative domains to get access to the competitive data benchmarks then they are polluting the industry benchmark with poor data, thus decreasing the value for themselves and others. I hate people who do stuff like this, bit there is money to be made on the web and people will find opportunities to exploit a great opportunity like this, where in theory everyone that shares their data gets something out of sharing.

But the Google teams are known to be pretty sharp people, I’m looking forward to seeing this rolled out.

GO GOOGLE ANALYTICS - Even TECHCRUNCH’s Michael Arrington wants your data shared.

UPDATE: Googleblogoscoped has updated their post with screencaps.

First off let me say I hate referring people, I feel extremely personally responsible if things don’t work out, yet sometimes folks press me. I love referring the people who I know deliver, but that list gets harder and harder to add people to.

Anyway, I referred a company whom we couldn’t take on for SEO to someone I knew for a long time, and had consistently performed and I TRUSTED to take great care of someone we referred. This person impressed the company and the company paid a small deposit to get started.

The referral has disappeared, but luckily this “person” twitters all the time, so in theory he’s been ignoring the client for some time, and holding on to their $$ while they’ve been listening to some great songs, wishing happy birthday, working out, etc all within the last 2-3 days. This client has not been able to get in touch with this person for 2-3 weeks, and neither have I.

My sentiment went from “I hope you are OK”, to “Obviously you are OK, but you are too busy working with your interior designer to give a damn about me or someone I referred you to whom you have taken money from.”

Just one less person I can send potential prospects to!!
Lesson: If you are ignoring people via e-mail and phone (we all HAVE to do this for a few hours at times to focus on something) stop Twittering Dummy, it makes us feel pretty crummy knowing every little thing you are up to that matters more than getting back to us, I’m on 3 days and counting. Thanks!

SEER Interactive now has its own YouTube channel to provide SEO advice! We’ve had the SEO video of Wil “Crushing SEO Myths” on our homepage and received a significant number of requests to have shorter videos available. I guess you don’t all want to sit through over an hour-long SEO tutorial! (I’ll confess: I watched the entire thing before coming to work here.)

We listened to your requests and responded with fifteen short SEO video tutorials on YouTube. Each video is under ten minutes in length and deals with a different SEO topic: keyword research, competitive tools, link building for SEO, SEO best practices, and much more.

After the rollout of the Placement Platform, Google Adwords is again proving that they are extremely focused on being innovative in the ever-changing online advertising space. The latest addition to Adwords advertising is the IP Exclusion Feature. Adwords has taken things a step further with allowing advertisers to have control over their advertisements, which is always a welcomed feature by the advertisers. Advertisers have always had the ability to control placements of their ads in terms of choosing language settings, geo-targeting settings, site exclusion settings, etcetera however now with the addition of the new IP Exclusion feature advertisers also have the ability to specify IP addresses where they do not want their ads to show. This is an amazing breakthrough in the online advertising world that will help to prevent click fraud. Advertisers however, should not get overly aggressive with implementing this new feature, as it may result in blocking a ton of relevant traffic.

As BizReport suggested, this feature may contribute in battling the click-fraud that advertisers face but usually do not have much control over. Click-fraud can be identified when an ad is receiving an excessive amount of clicks from the same IP address on a continual basis.

2 Ways to effectively use the IP Exclusion Feature:

Blocking Competitor IP addresses
Blocking IP addresses from competitors could potentially aid in less click-fraud, which in turn may enhance the validity of reporting from Adwords by registering more of the quality clicks versus reports containing the fraud clicks and the quality clicks.

Fortune 1000 companies … Exclude yourselves
Blocking internal IP addresses could also aid in preventing the accidental clicks caused by employees and agencies constantly checking the status of their PPC ads. We saw this happening firsthand with a client of ours. They found that 75% of their clicks on their branded keywords were from their own employees! Another feature Adwords provides for checking Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for employees and agencies to carefully avoid the accidental clicking can be found here.

The downside of IP exclusion is that if you block an IP address that uses a proxy, you may have succeeded in blocking the 1 or 2 people suspected of click fraud, but you may also be blocking hundreds and thousands of legitimate, quality clicks at the same time.

The IP Exclusion Features allows an advertiser to block up to 20 IP addresses per campaign. The IP Exclusion Feature can definitely serve as a benefit to Adwords campaign, but before you decide to enable the feature, be sure you have done your homework on the IP addresses you are about to block and the feature doesn’t backfire on you!