Google quietly reported on Google+ that you can now erase the properties of Google Analytics from inside your analytic's account.

Google said in the past this was not permitted in view of the way the records, properties and profiles were related. Presently, Google said "we're eager to bring this extra adaptability and consistency to our clients, which is the first in an arrangement of enhancements to overseeing erasures in Google Analytics."

Steps To delete a property are mentioned below via image :

Link Source : Seroundtable

Marketing is more complex today than ever. Much of this is due to the progress we've made in technology.

More data means more choices and more ways to interpret success. That's why today, marketers need trusted data more than ever.

In the age of keyword "(not provided)," SEO technology companies are working hard to provide options marketers can use to bridge the gap. One such option comes from gShift.

Search Engine Watch recently chatted with Chris Adams, co-founder and CTO of gShift to talk about the state of "(not provided)" data, what SEO professionals and content marketers should be looking for in terms of data features, and how gShift is helping marketers uncover lost keyword traffic.

Today, There's Uncertainty in Data

The unfortunate reality today as a result of secure search in terms of content marketing and SEO is that it's hard to have meaningful conversations, Adams said, when the majority of keyword traffic data is hidden.

The "(not provided)" traffic is leading marketers to use the word "probable" all too often.

"The word 'probable' is bad in a sales conversation," Adams said. "We need to arm these agencies with better information."

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) doesn't provide all the answers. Adams said it's OK to get a snapshot in GWT, but it's not a thorough picture of what's happening on the website. It needs additional analysis.

In fact, Adams shared 10 reason why Google Webmaster Tools isn't a foolproof Plan B for secure search:

1. You should be tracking multiple engines, geographic locations and local. Google Webmaster Tools doesn't allow this and only shows average rank.
2. You should be tracking competitors. GWT doesn't allow this.
3. GWT is an average rank over 90 days. New content won't be tracked quickly nor new keyword phrases or keywords that aren't yet ranking.
4. GWT uses universal results. That means if your image is ranking No. 1, the data doesn't mean that your Web page is ranking in the Top 10.
5. GWT limits data. It doesn't show all of your results. This would have a big impact on sites with average visitor traffic and most B2B websites.
6. GWT doesn't differentiate in Web presence data. Is it a video, your Facebook page, a press release or your latest blog post that's ranking?
7. GWT doesn't give you page-level rank data.
8. GWT doesn't give you daily ranking data.
9. GWT only holds on to data for a rolling 90 days. If you want to benchmark data with your clients, you will need to store that data. gShift stores this data for you.
10. Google+ Local listings don't show up in GWT.

Rank Data Continues to Be Essential

Rank data today is very valuable, Adams said. In fact, it could be more valuable than it was before 100 percent secure search was launched, he added. But all rank data isn't created equal. Adams walked through the varying levels of that data:

• Telling a marketer that somewhere, something ranks No. 3 is first base.
• Second base is showing which page is ranking.
• Knowing multiple pages are ranking for the same term is third base.
• And a home run is knowing the entirety of rank across the Web, including rank for Twitter, YouTube, website pages and more.

"The website is not the center of the universe anymore," Adams said. "We need to understand how all of the results are working together to increase visibility." This is a major differentiator of gShift's tools, he added.

When asked about personalization factors that could influence rank data, Adams said, "You'll never rank in personalized search unless you rank generically as well." As a marketer, Adams said he would make sure his content ranked first in a non-personalized way.

How gShift is Helping Uncover Keyword Traffic Data

Next, Adams showed me a demo of how gShift is working to provide data in a "(not provided)" world. The following screenshot shows a sample home page that had 373 organic search entrants. Sixty-nine percent of the keyword traffic was hidden due to secure search, but Adams said gShift was able to identify 96 percent of the site's traffic.

Here's how:

Adams said it starts with the knowledge that the home page ranks No. 1 for the term "barrie condos." Next, the tool would check for estimated search traffic in a given month. In this case, the volume was 207.

Through published click-through rate data from other sources, Adams said sites will typically experience a 36.4 percent CTR when in the No. 1 position in the search results. Doing some simple math from these variables, gShift can estimate this site had 75 people coming from that keyword, "barrie condos."

But the person using the tools still has to apply discretion to the data. Just because you're ranking No. 1 for a term, doesn't mean it's the right term to follow if it has no search volume. So the key is doing the digging to uncover the gems.

Keywords, Hummingbird, and the Future of Data

With Google Hummingbird allowing the search engine to potentially find the same page from multiple queries types or asked in different ways, I wondered how it would impact targeting a phrase like "barrie condos" versus "condos in barrie" when all roads could lead to the same destination.

Adams pointed me to a post on gShift's blog where they talk more about this, and stated that while Hummingbird is the future of search, and centered on voice search and the mobile era, it's really about lending a certain level of comfort to Google users that the search engine will still find the right content for them, no matter how they search.

But it doesn't mean people still aren't searching in an old-school fashion, Adams said, for example [barrie condos] or [condos in barrie]. And gShift will continue to report on the distinction between the two because Google is still providing the data on the differentiation between those phrases.

"Google may start to group phrases together in the future due to Hummingbird that say there's 300 monthly searches overall for a category of phrases," Adams said. "They may get to that level, but they're not doing that yet."

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Competitive intelligence is incredibly important for analyzing and tracking your competitors, whether it's in SEO, PPC, or social media.

What follows is an account of how I used public social media data to dissect Dove's global strategy to show you that if I can do it, anyone can.

The following exercises, using only public data, took me about 3 hours to complete. While I only scratched the surface of the analysis and insights that are possible to glean from this data, it shows how much you can learn about an industry, a company, or a competitor by carefully dissecting their social activity.

A few notes:

• I don't work for Dove or Unilever (Dove's parent company) and have no "special" or admin access to any of its social networks.
• Nor do I work for any of Dove's competitors.
• I used only tools that are available to everyone, both free and paid.
• I tried to state the time it took me to complete each step in the analysis, but it's only an estimate as I worked on this project sparsely for quite a while.

Step 1: Where is Dove?

Time: 5 Minutes

The easiest way to find Dove is to search for it on Google. My personalized search returned this result:

This tells me that Dove has multiple, competing brands, but since I'm not here to analyze their SEO, I clicked through to the dove.us link to find out their social networks presence and participation.

At the top of their navigation, Dove includes the social networks that matter to them.

The brand might be on other social networks, but it's obvious from the position on the page that these four are the networks that really matter to them, so I will focus my analysis on these four:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram

Step 2: Collect Data for Your Analysis

Time: 15 minutes to 2 hours

Collecting Basic Data

Beyond just the profile URLs, I wanted to collect some basic stats about each of those networks. Information like number of followers/fans, number of posts, number of "friends" (users the brand follows), so I built a basic table to summarize and present the data.

	Facebook	Twitter	Google+	Instagram
Followers/Fans	20,911,970	112,000	692,614	6,349
"Friends"	N/A	8,961	?	0
Number of Posts	?	15,300	?	27
Latest post	Today	Yesterday	Two days ago	Two days ago
Other	415,916 PTAT		853,820 G+
Notes	Have Global Pages	Have multiple identities	Link to the UK site	Link to YouTube from their profile

This was a good start and I already found some interesting points I noted to analyze further later. I started keeping a running list of questions and comments about my findings.

Collecting Activity Data

I wanted to add more color to the basic stats as well as collect more notes, so I went to Simply Measured (full disclosure: I am Director of Marketing for Simply Measured) and created a data collection for each of the networks separately.

I expanded my table to include the activity data points.

	Facebook	Twitter	Google+	Instagram
Activity (Last Two weeks)
Posts/Tweets	32	170	6	6
Posts/Tweets per day	2.3	12.1	.4	.4
Post by Type
Normal	N/A	158	0	N/A
Video	1	0	0	0
Photo	27	7	6	6
Link	0	5	N/A	N/A
Article	N/A	N/A	0	N/A
Status	4	N/A	N/A	N/A

I went back to my list of comments and added some notes on activity.

• Activity on Twitter and Facebook is higher than Google+ and Instagram, although audience on Google+ is bigger – do they see better engagement on Twitter?
• The brand seems to be favoring Photos – do they perform better for them?

Collecting Engagement Data

I wanted to start answering some of the questions that started to come up, like do the brand see better engagement with photos? So I added engagement information to my table.

	Facebook	Twitter	Google+	Instagram
Engagement (Last 2 Weeks)
Total Engagement	34,069	3,146	613	1,663
Per Post	1,002	18.5	102.1	277.2
Normal	N/A	1.2	0	N/A
Video	161	0	0	N/A
Photo	1,121.4	23.3	102.1	277.2
Link	0	6.4	N/A	N/A
Article	N/A	N/A	0	N/A
Status	347	N/A	N/A	N/A

Looking at the data I pulled for Dove, it seems like posts and tweets that include photos get a higher engagement per post/tweet, which would justify the high number of posts with photos but would put into question the lack of tweets with photos. So I added more points to my list.

The key points I've noted were:

• Facebook is driving very strong engagement for the brand and averages over 1,000 engagements per post.
• Photos are a strong driver for engagement.
• Engagement per post on Google+ and Instagram is strong, but the brand's posting frequency is low – might be an opportunity.
• Is this a factor of audience size? How do they stack on engagement as a percent of audience?

Collecting Audience Data

Next I needed to collect data about the audience of Dove. Audience data is a little harder to get without authentication, but there's still some data we can glean from the public interaction like geo-location, device usage, and time of engagement. Since the audience data is harder to present it in the table format, so I just collected the data and noted the main points about the findings in my list of comments.

I added my main notes to my list and moved on with my data collection.

• Brazil is an important region for Dove as evident by the fan distribution as well as growth rate of fans in Brazil.
• Southeast Asia is showing strong audience growth and might be a strategic initiative for the brand.
• As far as Twitter goes, the U.S. dominates in terms of engaged audience but Germany is an interesting find in terms of engaging countries.
• No special findings on device usage, pretty typical compared to overall trend.

Collecting Content Data

As far as collecting data on content, this is where there's almost no limit to what you can collect. Social media content is public and you can collect it manually, use the networks APIs, or use a solution that will do it for you.

Since the posts are public, you get everythingwith them and the APIs are pretty good at sending the right information to help you decipher it and use it to analyze the data.

For Dove, I used Simply Measured to pull all 214 posts, tweets, Instagrams, and Google+ posts.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram

Step 3: Analysis

Time: 1 to 6 hours

I now have all the data and a good starting point for my analysis. I wanted to start by answering some of the questions I listed in my notes and then dive deeper into the elements of the data that I thought would produce the biggest insight.

When you don't have a hypothesis you're trying to prove or deny, the exploratory nature of such analysis requires you to follow your intuition. The process of collecting the data helps with highlighting the aspects of the data that might raise some flags, but you want to be careful about any confirm biases, looking only for the evidence that proves your point. Try to stay objective in your analysis and truly answer the questions you come up with, you might be surprised by the results.

In this case, I listed all my questions first and gave answers to all of them:

• Have a Facebook Global Page - how many child/local pages? Answer: Dove has 69 child pages with a total of 20.8 million fans.
• Do they see better engagement on Twitter? Answer: Their total engagement as well as their engagement per post is lower on Twitter than it is on Facebook. But their engagement-as-a-percent of fans on Facebook is 0.16 percent while on Twitter it's 2.8 percent. This can explain the highest post frequency on Twitter.
• The brand seems to be favoring photos – do they perform better for them? Answer: Unclear. Photos are the most common post type across all networks for Dove and therefore seem to be driving the best engagement, but when looking at Facebook, video posts have generated the highest engagement per post. From analyzing the quality of the photos, it's also apparent that they invest in professional photography to make the photo posts more engaging. This level of investment can also explain the lower post frequency on Facebook and Instagram compared to Twitter where not all the posts (tweets) have been photo tweets.
• Is engagement a factor of audience size? How do they stack on engagement as a percent of audience? Answer: Instagram seems to be the most successful channel to generate engagement compared to their audience size. Even with a relatively small audience they are able to generate high level of engagement, both total and per post. The visual nature of their posts, heavily leaning on photography, lends itself well to the typical user behavior on Instagram.

After answering the questions I listed during my data collection, I decided to focus the rest of my analysis on the content of Dove postings across the networks. I wanted to see if there's a strategy around cross-channel promotion or if they treat the different networks separately.

I started by analyzing the most frequent keywords used in each network during the two weeks of my data collections and pulled a sample set of posts. I found that on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, there was a high usage of the various variations of the word Beauty.

• Twitter: The keyword Beauty and the hashtag #BeautyIs were included in 26 percent of the tweets in that time period.
• Facebook: The word Beautiful was part of 6 percent of all the posts, second only to the word Dove.
• Instagram: The hashtags #Beauty and #Beautiful were included in 26 percent of all comments, and 4 out of the 6 posts during that time period included the hashtag #BeautyIs.

In addition, looking at the most engaging tweets, posts, and Instagrams, in the top three on each of those networks, the hashtag #BeautyIs was included, so I pulled the those posts to better analyze the content strategy of the brand.

Instagram:

Facebook:

Twitter:

#BeautyIs loving each and every detail that makes you unique. Share YOUR unique beauty by using #BeautyIs. pic.twitter.com/HYsoltnWYU

— Dove (@Dove) March 8, 2014

Interestingly enough, on Google+ Dove included no mentions of any of these keywords or hashtags. There was also no resemblance to the visual style of the photos on the other networks and it seemed that the posts were targeting a different audience with a different message.

In 4 of the 6 posts on Google+, the majority of the post was actually text, almost like a short blog post with a supporting image, rather than an image as the centerpiece with supporting text.

To learn more about the hashtag #BeautyIs, I analyzed when Dove started using the hashtag to understand the origin of the campaign. I found this post on Twitter:

Dove shows Selfie short at Sundance Film Festival http://t.co/lPQ3VDfoDH @sundancefestnow #BeautyIs

— BrandRepublic (@BrandRepublic) January 21, 2014

This kicked off the #BeautyIs campaign across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, a campaign that is still running.

Step 4: Findings & Recommendations

Time: 30 minutes to 2 hours

• Dove uses Facebook as its main social network to engage with users across the globe. The brand uses Facebook Global Pages infrastructure to create a localized experience in the different regions.
• Facebook serves as its core social network but the brand utilizes all the other networks to engage with its fan base and customers through the networks of their choice.
• The brand uses photos as a primary tactic to generate engagement. The photos are professional and in high quality but in most cases feature "real" people.
• The brand uses hashtags as a main way to connect and "tag" a campaign. The hashtags shows up in the posts but also in the actual photos, extending the impact of the hashtag beyond just the functionality it provides on the networks, but as an additional branding component.
• At the beginning of the year, the brand has kicked off an integrated, cross channel campaign dubbed #BeautyIs with a short film released in Sundance film festival. The campaign features pictures of "real" people, emphasizing the concept of real beauty.
• The brand uses the social networks to promote the campaign and encourages users to share their perspective on what #BeautyIs. This campaign has shown high engagement levels across all the social networks as evident by the increased engagement on posts including the hashtag as well as the percent of comments including the hashtag or variation of the phrase Beauty.

Conclusion

I made the various reports I used to collect the data and analyze it public and you can access them below:

• Twitter 
• Facebook Global page
• Google+
• Instagram 
• Facebook US

Can you find out more about Dove's social strategy? Try it for yourself to practice your competitive intelligence skills. I would love to hear what you find. (note: you can utilize the export to excel option to get the entire dataset and run even deeper analysis on the data)

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

If you use AdWords, then you're undoubtebly familiar with the AdWords interface and the reports it has to offer and possibly also use Google Analytics for many other areas of analysis on your website. But have you considered using the AdWords reports within Google Analytics rather than in AdWords alone? There are a number of benefits to having this data here, which I'll cover in this article.

The key points being:

• Users without access to AdWords can assist with analysis (although for some this is a disadvantage).
• Just a few select reports to highlight key pieces of information that can get lost in the AdWords interface itself if you aren't very experienced in it.
• Easy access to search query data.
• Keyword positions and day part information made more accessible.
• Data shown from multiple AdWords accounts if you have linked more than one to that profile.

Available Reports are Available and What They Do

You can find the following AdWords reports in Google Analytics under Acquisition.

Important note: If you haven't already, to take full advantage of this report you must link your AdWords and Analytics accounts.

Campaigns

This report (not to be confused with the Google Analytics Campaigns report, which can also be found under Acquisition, and contains data from any Campaigns you have tagged) is limited to only AdWords campaign data. The core stats include cost data from AdWords, as well as Analytics specific data such as visits, new visits, bounce rate, pages per visit, and conversion rates.

Click through to break the data down into more detail and add secondary dimensions in to break out the campaigns by another piece of information such as ad group, target keyword, ad content, or destination URL. Ad Slot and Ad Slot position could be useful here as they will tell you which campaigns do well with lower positions or which need work to improve positions.

There are limited extra dimensions here, as the focus is traffic and advertising, but another useful one is Mobile Device Category, which can help you understand the impact your ads are having on tablets and mobile phones.

Bid Adjustments

As an AdWords user, you should be familiar with bid adjustments to promote your ads more or less depending on device, location, and time of day. Taking the analysis into Google Analytics can help you understand the full picture of each different adjustment broken down by interaction and revenue performance, making this report very useful for making bid decisions based on data.

Using revenue data will be important for any ecommerce sites as the data starts to show you a picture of which ads and adjustments are giving you the best return. It could help you identify a successful time of day or location that you can give more focus on in order to tap into the good return and increase your success further.

AdWords Keywords

This report is relatively self-explanatory: it shows you the target keywords in your account. But it's how you use this report that makes it special.

The image below shows the options you have to change the report to highlight different metrics, whether interactions, goals or ecommerce, through the blue links above the graph:

There are also options to segment the data based on Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet visits, making it even easier to segment data than ever before.

Additionally, Advanced Segment functionality is available in these reports, to help you analyze different user segments or visit patterns against each other.

If you use a variety of keyword match types in your campaigns, you may want to add a secondary dimension of Query Match Type to show you this information here. This makes the data more granular, helping you improve the details within the account rather than guessing which of the targets led to those results.

Matched Search Queries

If you're an experienced AdWords user then you're very likely to be familiar with reviewing the Search Queries report. In AdWords it's under the Keywords tab, click Details, then under Search Terms click All). In Analytics, here it is bold as brass!

It shows you the actual words typed in by the user, rather than only the keywords you have chosen to target as the standard reports show. This is very insightful and rather than just using AdWords metrics and intuition to decide whether or not it might be a valuable target for your account, you can combine the queries used with engagement and revenue to spot those which will lead to the best return on investment.

Another use of this report is to see what sort of terminology is common amongst your website users, perhaps you refer to your products in a slightly different way to them, or there are new terms starting to be used that you would benefit from implementing on your website to make it more relevant.

Day Parts

Here, AdWords data is broken down by hour of the day (a.k.a., a day part), allowing you to review when your peak times are. Again, interaction and revenue data are easy to see here and you have the ability to cleanly add secondary dimensions, view the data in a pie chart, or the simplest benefit – review the graph for a visual and compare conversion rate by hour alongside visits:

Use this to help you spread your budget out most effectively throughout the day, remembering that weekends and other countries will need to be reviewed separately to gain even more benefit.

Destination URLs

This report breaks down the data based on which pages of your site you targeted in your ads. Spotting lows within the data here can highlight problems that the URLs might have, from not being relevant to the target or not working properly for users on all devices.

This report combines data from both the search and display networks. To separate these out you can apply the Ad Distribution Network dimension as a secondary dimension, this then shows which URLs were on the Content network (display), Google search network and which showed in search partner websites.

Placements

This report is broken down into three sections:

• Placement Type: To separate Automatic and Managed
• Placement Domain: Website on which your ads were shown
• Placement URL: The specific page on which your ads were shown

These help you to see results at a high as well as in detail, giving you the full picture on which to make decisions. And as with the reports I've already covered, you have the full picture of interaction in one place.

Keyword Positions

This is one of the clunkier looking reports, but that doesn't stop it being useful. The first column lists your keywords, placements, categories or other target alongside the visits generated. You then need to click on the target you'd like to analyze and boxes will appear on the right showing where the ads for this target have been shown.

The joy of this report is that you can change the drop down at the top and review metrics such as Ecommerce conversion rate by each position. This is the kind of metric you need to really understand whether or not your ads are working in each position.

Here you can see the visits by position for a specific target:

This image shows how conversion rate can vary depending on the position, however, before making too many drastic changes on this information I would always recommend reviewing it against other data to ensure you have the full picture about why the conversion rates change by slot.

Closing Thoughts

There are a lot of reports available here which by even just starting to use one you may be able to improve optimization of your AdWords account. I recommend you continue to use the AdWords reports fully, but consider the extra functionality and cleaner feel of this data in Analytics.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch