Our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics teaches you how to set up an account that is linked to your site and recommends a few basic metrics to look at.

Google Analytics is a free service that tracks and reports website traffic. Providing insight into the demographics of site visitors, the performance of a specific campaign, and how long people are staying on your site for, are just a few of the many things the program is capable of. 

This data gives you an all round better view of how your site is doing and allows you to understand what improvements can be made to make sure you’re optimizing different areas for maximum conversion. 

In the below tutorial, we will walk you through some basics of Google Analytics and what you need to do in order to get started.

Set up an account

If you have a major Google account such as Gmail or YouTube, you are eligible to create a Google Analytics account by following the below instructions.

This account should be only accessed by YOU. Of course, you can authorize other people to act on your behalf if necessary. However, you will not want them to take full control over your data.  

For example, ClickZ has granted me access to the company account, but I cannot change account and property settings. This is done to protect the publication and ensure that if I leave, other admins will still have access to the overall account.

In comparison, I can do whatever I want with my personal Google Analytics.

Add tracking code to your website

Google Analytics cannot work until it is linked to your webpages. When you finish setting up a new account, Google will ask you to “Get Tracking ID.” Click on the button and you will see your code.

You can always go back to your tracking information under “Property.”

This code needs to be added to every page. How to install it depends on your content type. For instance, some Tumblr templates only require the Universal Analytics (UA) code, as show below.

While some blog platforms like WordPress may ask for full script, if you build a website with HTML files, you can edit HTML and paste the code before “</head>”. 

Today many websites like ClickZ are using Google Tag Manager to implement tracking code.

Manage your site search

Once you connect Google Analytics with your website, you can set up site search to know what visitors are looking for on your website.

In “View Settings,” turn on site search tracking and enter your website name and URL. The query parameter is usually “s” or “q.” You can determine yours by searching on your own site.

For example, if you enter “mobile” into ClickZ’s search bar, you will see s= (ClickZ’s query parameters) followed by your query.

You can also contact your company’s web development department to identify the query parameter for your site.

After you save all the settings, Google Analytics will be able to track any searches made on your website.

Goal set up

Aside from site search, you should also set up a goal so Google Analytics can track important activities on your site. For example, an e-commerce platform may trigger a confirmation page for every placed order, or a digital publisher may create a “Thank You” page when a reader subscribes to its newsletter.

To set up a goal, go to “Goals,” create “New Goal,” and choose “Custom” under “Goal setup.” Then go to “Next Step” where you can name your goal (“Subscribe Success” for example) and select “Destination” if an activity ends on a “Thank You.” If your conversion goal is one step further and you’d like your visitors to watch a video clip after they have reached the Thank You page, then you can add “Event” tracking to your goal set up in order to measure this. 

Each goal type has its own requirements and can be customized to what your own KPIs are. In the example of “Subscribe Success” below, I decided to forego “Destination” and go straight to “Event” in order to measure conversions. 

Google Analytics will start measuring conversation when a described activity is triggered. You can create up to 20 goals on your website.

Basic Google Analytics metrics

You can customize many Google Analytics reports based on your needs. But in “Audience Overall,” you can find some basic yet useful stats around your website.

Take our sister publication Search Engine Watch (SEW) for instance – you can view positive changes in pageviews and sessions from last September to date. Hovering over the line will show you the number of pageviews and sessions for a particular day. (We’ve erased some of the data below as we don’t want to give away all our secrets!)

Under the graph, Google Analytics tells you more about the number of users, bounce rate, average session duration, as well as the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors.

Beneath those main metrics, Google Analytics also shows demographics of SEW’s readers, including their countries, languages, and devices where they consume content.

Other more in-depth metrics include audience report, acquisition report, behavior report, and conversions report. For example, once you have linked social media and Google Analytics, you will be able to track a particular social media campaign and get related stats under “Acquisition.”

We hope you’ve enjoyed our first installment of Google Analytics for beginners. Stay tuned for the next in the series soon!

Not necessarily, industry experts say. Although mobile apps offer a convenient way for users to access a large variety of services, there’s a tremendous amount of information they need to navigate through browsers, according to Sastry Rachakonda, chief executive officer (CEO) of iQuanti, a digital marketing company that specializes in search.

“Will people stop searching because of mobile apps? I don’t think so because they need information,” Rachakonda says. “SEO and SEM will still be there, but what will change is how SEO and SEM are done. Mobile data gives you the opportunity to largely improve the quality of search. The more data, the better search outcome you can deliver.”

Vikas Gupta, director of marketing at data company Factual, agrees that search behaviors will remain. He believes that SEO has become an abstract concept for the manner in which marketers optimize themselves to be found digitally.

“I think the way people traditionally look at SEO, which is effectively optimizing for blue links, will continue to change dramatically,” Gupta says. “It will become less important for a specific set of search behaviors, such as local search, that is very fragmented across different mobile apps including Apple Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare and so forth. But SEO will remain important for some search behaviors, like business-to-business sales type of search.”

While Rachakonda and Gupta don’t think SEO and SEM will disappear soon, they both point out that mobile apps have become a real threat to Google, the number one player in search. As more people buy things on Amazon, select restaurants on Yelp and book cabs on Uber, they won’t need Google to be an intermediate. Even Facebook’s virtual assistant can handle some search tasks, Factual’s Gupta adds.

The search giant is aware of mobile app’s threat and has taken action. Google has been working hard to optimize search results or mobile display, in addition to integrating search with other mobile app experiences on Android through “Now on Tap” and aggressively indexing mobile app content. But while its search app can reach 50 percent of the U.S. mobile market, according to comScore, Rachakonda thinks Google has to do more.

“Google built a search engine primarily for desktop, but now search behaviors have changed. They are not the same as someone going to a search bar on desktop,” he says. “I think Google is aware of this change, as it has been making lots of mobile efforts like encouraging HTML5 and indexing apps. Google may have forward-thinking business plans, but it’s difficult for the company to completely transform its business model.”

As the conventional search model is transforming, what could be an ideal search format for a mobile world? Nobody has a good answer at the moment. But Gupta believes that the best format should be highly intelligent.

“If you look at what Google Now or Microsoft’s Cortana is trying to do, the idea is that a user does not actually need to tell a device anything, while the device can predict what the user would be interested in and send them information accordingly,” Gupta says. “What is the easiest way to get the most accurate answer? If you can develop search products that solve users’ pain points and offer more convenience than the existing solutions, you will win in the long run.”

Homepage image via Shutterstock

The first big update to Docs is Android-only integrated search, which is available in the app’s “Research” tool. This feature is not new to desktop users, but it is now making its way to mobile. The tool allows users to search for images and text-based content in a split window. If users want to save a piece of information, they can tap a new “insert” button and add it to their Google document.

Vikas Gupta, director of marketing at data company Factual, thinks that this search feature offers mobile users a convenient experience. “It’s making a common behavior – doing research when you are writing something – much easier, especially on a mobile device,” he says.

“While running multiple tabs or side-by-side windows isn’t terribly difficult on desktop with a lot of screen real estate, it’s incredibly painful to work across apps on mobile, so this brings research functionality into the document itself,” Gupta adds.

Another big update is voice typing in Docs. This dictation feature is built upon Google’s voice-recognition technology and will be available in 40 languages. Users can simply tap and start talking when they access Docs on desktop, or on Android and iOS devices.

Meanwhile, Docs will provide a “see new changes” button to let users see all the edits in a document since the last time they opened it. If users are working on a document with multiple people, their changes will be highlighted in different colors.

Aside from the above nifty enhancements, Google has also created new templates for Docs, Sheets, and Slides, a refreshed user interface for Forms and a new “explore” feature in Sheets that automatically generates charts out of the data in the spreadsheet.

Homepage image via Shutterstock

While the old Google colors are still there, the company has migrated from a serif font to a sans-serif font. The company is also going to replace the little blue “g” icon with a four-color “G” that matches the logo.

Today’s change reflects the way Google interacts with its users across Search, Maps, Gmail, Chrome and other own-and-operated properties, noted Google in a prepared statement. “We think we’ve taken the best of Google (simple, uncluttered, colorful, friendly), and recast it not just for the Google of today, but for the Google of the future,” it said.

From a branding perspective, Adam Padilla, president of agency Brandfire, thinks that Google nailed the logo redesign on several levels. “The most important is the retention of Google’s hard-earned brand equity. The logo itself will not be unfamiliar to the spectator, with its capital G, and highly recognizable primary color scheme,” Padilla explains.

“The new Google logo does what a great logo should do: it communicates an idea. Simple sans-serif letterforms indicate that the company is ‘streamlining’ its operation and narrowing focus. Furthermore, the tilted lowercase ‘e’ injects a measure of whimsy and a human element that gives the logo ownability,” he adds.

Others also give the revamped logo a thumbs up. Michael Dub, partner at marketing company DXagency, thinks it is better than the old one and more authentic to the Google brand, as it suggests a more “efficient” brand that is “clean” across multiple platforms and devices, especially mobile.

“I prefer the new logo including its use of enhanced colors. Its smaller size will enable it to render more effectively on lower bandwidth connections as Google continues to expand to new and less tech-enabled parts of the world,” Dub says.

He adds that with the creation of Alphabet, it will become increasingly important for Google to differentiate its core search business from Alphabet’s “more ambiguous and ambitious initiatives.”

As Google develops more products, Brandfire’s Padilla suggests that the company should specialize and launch strategic sub-brands, and simultaneously move back toward its roots as the world’s most preeminent search engine.

“Google Plus, Google Maps and other properties should revisit the notion of separating a bit from the parent brand, and own each space in turn. For instance, Facebook owns Instagram, but it isn’t called FacebookGram. By keeping each niche served by a different sub-brand, Google will free itself to enter even more markets without risking dilution of its parent identity,” Padilla says.

The reasoning behind this decision is that an ad group typically brings together related ads and keywords under a common theme, so it should share the same display domain for all ads. Bing will allow URLs hosted in the same site to include subdomains sharing the same domain.

For example, for the site www.test.com, an ad group can encompass www.test.com/test1, www.test.com/test2.aspx and www.mail.test.com because those URLs share the same top-level or root domain of “test.com.” That said, URLs such as www.sample.com, www.test.co.uk and www.test.mail.com will not be allowed because they don’t have the same root domain.

When Bing rolls out this policy in August, the company will start disapproving non-compliant ad groups and send the message below to rejected ads:

This amendment will be global and will apply to ad groups across countries and languages.

*Homepage image via Shutterstock.

With the new format, which Google rolled out today in Chrome and the YouTube app on Android and iOS, viewers can explore every angle of a video by dragging their mouse or moving their phone to shift their point of view. The 360-degree video ads are especially convenient for mobile users because they can simply move their phones up, down, left or right to watch different parts of a clip.

Major brands like Coca-Cola, Stella Artois and Nike have been experimenting with 360-degree video ads on YouTube, which have led to better engagement. For example, Coca-Cola’s 360 video celebrating the 100th anniversary of the brand’s iconic bottle design outperformed standard in-stream video ad view-through rates by 36 percent.

Today, Bud Light became Google’s first business partner in the U.S. to launch a 360-degree video running in TrueView ads. The series of ads features three different events from Bud Light’s “Whatever, USA” festival on Catalina Island, California, this past May.

Video and mobile are becoming increasingly central to the likes of Google and Facebook. At Cannes this year, Facebook debuted immersive and personalized panoramic ads to show what the company’s mobile future could be.

In order to scale video, Google advertisers can set up campaigns for 360-degree videos running as TrueView ads in AdWords. The ads can only be created with one of the following 360-degree cameras: Ricoh Theta, Kodak SP360, Giroptic 360cam, or IC Real Tech Allie.

Homepage image via Shutterstock.

In the pilot program, TAG will leverage Google’s database of data center IP addresses and then enhance it based on broader industry intelligence. Google’s shared blacklist can help identify bots that are being run in data centers but usually avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List. These bots are hard to detect because they masquerade as human visitors by using User-Agent strings that are indistinguishable from those of typical Web browsers.

In May, Google’s blacklist filtered 8.9 percent of all clicks on DoubleClick Campaign Manager alone. Without filtering these fraudulent clicks, click-through rates would have been inflated, leading to a big financial loss for advertisers.

“By contributing our data-center blacklist to TAG, we hope to help others in the industry protect themselves,” Vegard Johnsen, product manager of Google ad traffic quality, wrote in a blog post.

Other leading companies that participate in TAG’s new program include Facebook, Yahoo, Quantcast and Rubicon Project.

“We are committed to working on collaborative technology with other industry leaders who share our belief that a clean, well-lit and high-quality advertising marketplace is in the best interest of not only advertisers, but publishers and consumers as well,” says Dr. Neal Richter, chief technology officer for Rubicon Project.

The new program is complementary to TAG’s Fraud Threat List that was announced in May. The TAG Anti-Fraud Working Group will soon release a set of principles for public comments that will be incorporated in the final program. The ad-fraud tool will be available by the end of 2015.

Homepage image via Shuttestock.

This article was originally published on ClickZ.

On Monday, the company integrated updated search capabilities into its desktop experience. In June, Search Engine Watch reported that Instagram allowed users to search for posts based on hashtags, locations or specific accounts within the app. Users can now do the same on Instagram.com.

In addition, links to hashtags and locations will redirect users to a landing page that shows the top posts around a specific topic, based on the number of likes. Previously, users could find a specific post on Instagram.com only through direct link or from a user’s feed.

According to Instagram, the update is designed to provide a consistent user experience across desktop and mobile. The company added that in June alone, embedded Instagram posts generated more than 5.3 billion impressions, so it’s important for the platform to improve discoverability on desktop and give users more ways to find content.

Homepage image via Instagram.

The company’s Q2 digital marketing report shows that organic search visit growth has improved in recent quarters as paid search click growth has slowed. Total organic search visits rose 12 percent year-over-year in Q2 2015, with smartphones producing the vast majority of organic search visit gains.

Google has a relative strength in mobile, having generated 89 percent of mobile organic search visits in Q2. In comparison, Yahoo represented 7.1 percent of overall mobile organic search visits, while Bing produced just 4.1 percent.

Although mobile devices now represent more than half of Google searches, advertisers are not yet ready to spend as much on mobile traffic as they do on desktop, according to the report. RKG data found that phone and tablets produced 43 percent of Google search ad clicks in Q2 2015, which is below the 47 percent share of Google organic search visits.

Of course, organic search and social sharing are closely related. Mobile devices generated 61 percent of sites’ social media visits because Facebook pushed out fixes for iOS and Android to reduce the amount of traffic that did not pass a referrer to site owners.

A closer look at different social media platforms shows that Facebook generated around two-thirds of social media-driven site visits in Q2 2015, up 9 percent from the previous year. While Pinterest generated an average of 18 percent of social site visits, the platform often produced a higher share for retailers making concerted efforts to leverage the site.

When house-hunters search address on their mobile devices, they will be able to overview key information about that property, including its location, pictures, and price, among other details. They will also be able to see schools associated with that address, as well as similar homes nearby. If they want to know more about the house, they can simply click on icons for sites like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.

Bing has also integrated school information to serve users who want to know more about education options in a new neighborhood. When users search for a local school, they will see the GreatSchools rating in green and community score at the top. Users can also see the school’s national and state rankings, as well as its enrollment, student-to-faculty ratios, and academic indicators.

Health care is another consideration when users move to a new area. In order to provide the right doctor information, Bing has partnered with companies such as LexisNexis, Doximity and Vitals. Now, mobile users can easily find clinic locations and their contact information, as well as a specific doctor’s background and patient reviews.

Bing has also enhanced its local search capabilities for a better dining experience, giving users a carousel of options and rich information, such as Yelp reviews and links to book on OpenTable, to find the right restaurant.

Homepage via Shutterstock.