I’m always excited to learn about useful browser extensions, and Google has released a gem for its Chrome browser. The Google Analytics Tracking Code Debugger is an easy to use tool for web developers, internet marketers and analytics junkies. The simple to install Chrome extension will provide one with an easy to use debugging tool to make sure that they have correctly deployed the free Google Analytics code onto their website. Google Analytics is the perfect product for cost conscious businesses to measure and manage their online marketing initiatives like the deep pocket firms using Coremetrics or Omniture. On this blog you will find excellent articles concerning Google Analytics, take a few minutes to explore these, as well as our webinars and white papers.

Once you have installed the extension, you simply turn on and open the Chrome javascript console via Control-Shift-J and you will see “Tracking beacon sent!” this lets you know you have Google Analytics code on the page. The information following will reveal the Google Analytics account id, version and other data helping you to verify a successful deployment of your Google Analytics.

We truly, madly, deeply love having multiple options to choose from here at MoreVisibility. So when my colleague Emily MacNair forwarded me a recent post on the Google Webmaster Tools blog about a shiny new option for website owners to verify their websites, my Friday was made!

Website owners can now verify their websites using the new “async” Google Analytics Tracking Code, which makes a website owner’s life a lot easier.

Previous to this announcement, a website owner would need to add a meta tag to their site’s source code, upload an HTML verification file, or add a DNS record to verify a website with Google Webmaster Tools. Now, if the email address that’s used to log-in to Google Webmaster Tools has Administrative Access to a Google Analytics account – AND – the website is using the new “async” Google Analytics Tracking Code, a website can be verified without code-bloating meta tags, extra HTML files or DNS entries.

If you’re an administrator on your Google Analytics account and if you’re using the new “async” code, then all you have to do is click on Verify as shown in the image above.

Thanks to the Google Webmaster Tools team, you now have one additional reason to update to the new “async” Google Analytics tracking code, other than the new code being lighter, faster, and technologically superior to the previous code models.

Go and upgrade today – and verify your website while you’re at it .

Wikipedia defines attribution as a “journalistic practice of attributing information to its source.”  In analytics, it’s the struggle to understand which of your marketing efforts truly have a positive effect of your top and bottom lines.

It seems simple enough, you send an e-mail or run a PPC campaign and you get a sale.  Your web analytics platform tells you that you sold 7 widgets in one transaction and the visitor who made the purchase came from a Bing PPC campaign that was fired by the keyword “blue widgets”.   That sounds simple enough:  A click in Bing led to a $100 sale.  Not bad.

In reality, most sites do not have easy, one-visit conversions. Let’s dig deeper.  Using your web analytics tool, you are able to see that this new customer has come to your site five times over the last month.  With five touch points to the site; should Bing really get all the credit?

In Google Analytics, the last click that led to the sale gets full credit and this is known as last-click attribution.  If you don’t consider this truth, you are doomed to lower quality decisions regarding your marketing.

In Google analytics, there are a couple of options to help you get to more meaningful data:

1. You can modify the Google Analytics Tracking Code to, by default; give full credit to the first touch point with your site. (GATC is the snippet of code that is placed on every page of your site.)
2. You could use custom variables and unique landing pages for each marketing effort.

The first option may work if you are only interested in the first way someone became aware of your site and you have a short sales cycle.  If, on the other hand, you have a long sales cycle and many marketing channels, this method can be less effective.  For example:  If you use this method, someone that visited your site 6 months ago via Twitter and forgot that you existed;  but then  made a purchase after an organic search would have the value of the transaction attributed to Twitter and not your SEO efforts.

Using custom variables and unique landing pages allows you to “tag” visitors as they respond to your marketing.  It’s not perfect, but it can help you develop a better picture of what’s generating revenue for your business.  Let’s revisit our example from above, where on the fifth visit someone made a purchase via Bing PPC.  Remember that we attributed the sale to Bing.

If you used custom variables and unique landing pages, the picture could look something like this:

Visit 1 was from a display ad via the Google Display Network

Visit 2 was from Google PPC keyword “widgets”

Visit 3 was from your re-marketing campaign on the Google Display Network

Visit 4 was from Facebook

Visit 5 was the Bing PPC ad for “blue widgets”

So what you initially thought was a $100 sale on a $4 keyword in Bing has become a much more robust picture of how your multi-channel approach is paying off.  You can decide for yourself how much weight or credit each channel should receive.  Regardless,  you now have a much better understanding of how your marketing is performing and can make better decisions on which channels are deserving of your marketing spend.

We here at the Analytics & Site Intelligence blog at MoreVisibility don’t spend as much time as we should talking about pay-per-click. After all, pay-per-click advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s only getting larger by the click.

Recently, Google AdWords announced a new keyword targeting option for advertisers globally called Modified Broad Match; this announcement coming on the heels of a re-branding effort for their Content Network, which is now called the Google Display Network.

With modified broad match, advertisers can further refine their keyword search audience without having to use phrase or exact match. Regular broad match (or, non-modified broad match) is still the keyword matching option that will allow advertisers to cast the widest possible net on Google search and their partners. Advertisers bidding on a keyword like “brown shoes” using regular broad match will have their ads appear for search queries such as “formal dress shoes”, “men’s brown shoes”, “wingtip shoes for men”, and many other variations. Advertisers who choose to use modified broad match will allow themselves the opportunity to capture misspellings while blocking out possibly irrelevant search queries by inserting a plus-sign symbol in front of every word in the search term the advertiser bids for.

If you have a large number of keywords in your campaigns, inserting a plus-sign symbol in front of every word of every search term would be a monumentally boring and nightmarish task to complete. Since this isn’t your first rodeo, you already know that using Google AdWords Editor saves you time, energy, and lets you make changes across multiple campaigns or ad groups offline without having to toggle between campaigns like you have to do on the live web interface. It’s also a great way to make sweeping changes to your keyword match types, specifically, from broad match to modified broad match.

To show you an example, let’s say that you wanted to make the switch from broad to modified broad, and you wanted to use a plus-sign symbol in front of every word within all of your keywords. First, you’d want to log-in to open AdWords Editor and download recent changes (ALWAYS download recent changes before doing anything in AdWords Editor). Next, click on the keywords tab and highlight all of the keywords using the CTRL + A function on your keyboard.

Next, click on the link at the bottom of the AdWords Editor interface that reads Replace text. This will create a pop-up window like the one in the image below. You’ll want to find the space character (one hit on your keyboard’s space bar) in keywords, and replace it with a space and the plus-sign symbol. Click on Find Matches to update your keywords.

What you should see after you click on Find matches is plus-sign symbols between each word of your keyword. However, you may wonder what you should do about one-word keywords and the first word of every keyword, since those won’t have plus-signs in front of them. For all of those instances (and to fully change all keywords from broad match to modified broad match), click on the Append text link, which is right next to the Replace text link on the bottom of the interface. Then, do what I did in the following image (select “Keywords” and enter in the plus-sign symbol underneath it, while ensuring that you’ve selected Before existing text) and you’ll be good to go:

Of course, don’t forget to click on Post Changes while making sure you select All Campaigns when you’re finished in order to post your changes live to Google AdWords. You wouldn’t want your quick, efficient work to stay offline, would you?

This chart, from the Google AdWords Blog Inside AdWords, visually explains how modified broad match differs from the other match types that are currently available.