Blog

Twitter says it tripled the number of staff handling abuse reports within 6 months

Twitter-stock-15
Feed-fb

Twitter has a rampant abuse and trolling problem — even its CEO knows it. But the social network claims it has made some big strides to mend this issue

Twitter says it now receives five times as many abuse reports than it did six months ago, and has tripled the number of staff reviewing those reports within the same time period

The company also announced on Thursday that it was rolling out new procedures to deal with rule-breakers. However, it didn't describe the changes in much detail

"These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users, but they give us new options for acting against the accounts that don't follow the rules, and serve to discourage behavior that goes against our policies," Twitter said in a blog post ...

More about Twitter, Social Media, Apps Software, and Social Good

By |February 27th, 2015|Apps and Software|0 Comments
Read More

My Favorite 5 Analytics Dashboards – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KitsapKing

Finding effective ways of organizing your analytics dashboards is quite a bit easier if you can get a sense for what has worked for others. To that end, in today's Whiteboard Friday the founder of Sixth Man Marketing, Ed Reese, shares his five favorite approaches.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Hi, I'm Ed Reese with Sixth Man Marketing and Local U. Welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things in terms of Google Analytics -- the dashboard.

So think of your dashboard like the dashboard on your car -- what's important to you and what's important to your client. I have the new Tesla dashboard, you might recognize it. So, for my Tesla dashboard, I want navigation, tunes, calendar, everything and a bag of chips. You notice my hands are not on the wheel because it drives itself now. Awesome.

So, what's important? I have the top five dashboards that I like to share with my clients and create for them. These are the executive dashboards -- one for the CMO on the marketing side, new markets, content, and a tech check. You can actually create dashboards and make sure that everything is working.

These on the side are some of the few that I think people don't take a look at as often. It's my opinion that we have a lot of very generic dashboards, so I like to really dive in and see what we can learn so that your client can really start using them for their advantage.

#1 - Executives

Let's start with the executive dashboard. There is a lot of debate on whether or not to go from left to right or right to left. So in terms of outcome, behavior, and acquisition, Google Analytics gives you those areas. They don't mark them as these three categories, but I follow Avinash's language and the language that GA uses.

When you're talking to executives or CFOs, it's my personal opinion that executives always want to see the money first. So focus on financials, conversion rates, number of sales, number of leads. They don't want to go through the marketing first and then get to the numbers. Just give them what they want. On a dashboard, they're seeing that first.

So let's start with the result and then go back to behavior. Now, this is where a lot of people have very generic metrics -- pages viewed, generic bounce rate, very broad metrics. To really dive in, I like focusing and using the filters to go to specific areas on the site. So if it's a destination like a hotel, "Oh, are they viewing the pages that helped them get there? Are they looking at the directional information? Are they viewing discounts and sorts of packages?" Think of the behavior on those types of pages you want to measure, and then reverse engineer. That way you can tell they executive, "Hey, this hotel reservation viewed these packages, which came from these sources, campaigns, search, and social." Remember, you're building it so that they can view it for themselves and really take advantage and see, "Oh, that's working, and this campaign from this source had these behaviors that generated a reservation," in that example.

#2 - CMO

Now, let's look at it from a marketing perspective. You want to help make them look awesome. So I like to reverse it and start with the marketing side in terms of acquisition, then go to behavior on the website, and then end up with the same financials -- money, conversion rate percentages, number of leads, number of hotel rooms booked, etc. I like to get really, really focused.

So when you're building a dashboard for a CMO or anyone on the marketing side, talk to them about what metrics matter. What do they really want to learn? A lot of times you need to know their exact territory and really fine tune it in to figure out exactly what they want to find out.

Again, I'm a huge fan of filters. What behavior matters? So for example, one of our clients is Beardbrand. They sell beard oil and they support the Urban Beardsman. We know that their main markets are New York, Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest. So we could have a very broad regional focus for acquisition, but we don't. We know where their audience lives, we know what type of behavior they like, and ultimately what type of behavior on the website influences purchases.

So really think from a marketing perspective, "How do we want to measure the acquisition to the behavior on the website and ultimately what does that create?"

These are pretty common, so I think most people are using a marketing and executive dashboard. Here are some that have really made a huge difference for clients of ours.

#3 - New markets

Love new market dashboards. Let's say, for example, you're a hotel chain and you normally have people visiting your site from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Well, what happened in our case, we had that excluded, and we were looking at states broader -- Hawaii, Alaska, Colorado, Texas. Not normally people who would come to this particular hotel.

Well, we discovered in the dashboard -- and it was actually the client that discovered it -- that we suddenly had a 6000% increase in Hawaii. They called me and said, "Are we marketing to Hawaii?" I said no. They said, "Well, according to the dashboard, we've had 193 room nights in the past 2 months." Like, "Wow, 193 room nights from Hawaii, what happened?" So we started reverse engineering that, and we found out that Allegiant Airlines suddenly had a direct flight from Honolulu to Spokane, and the hotel in this case was two miles from the hotel. They could then do paid search campaigns in Hawaii. They can try to connect with Allegiant to co-op some advertising and some messaging. Boom. Would never have been discovered without that dashboard.

#4 - Top content

Another example, top content. Again, going back to Beardbrand, they have a site called the Urban Beardsman, and they publish a lot of content for help and videos and tutorials. To measure that content, it's really important, because they're putting a lot of work into educating their market and new people who are growing beards and using their product. They want to know, "Is it worth it?" They're hiring photographers, they're hiring writers, and we're able to see if people are reading the content they're providing, and then ultimately, we're focusing much more on their content on the behavior side and then figuring out what that outcome is.

A lot of people have content or viewing of the blog as part of an overall dashboard, let's say for your CMO. I'm a big fan of, in addition to having that ,also having a very specific content dashboard so you can see your top blogs. Whatever content you provide, I want you to always know what that's driving on your website.

#5 - Tech check

One of the things that I've never heard anyone talk about before, that we use all the time, is a tech check. So we want to see a setup so we can view mobile, tablet, desktop, browsers. What are your gaps? Where is your site possibly not being used to its fullest potential? Are there any issues with shopping carts? Where do they fall off on your website? Set up any possible tech that you can track. I'm a big fan of looking both on the mobile, tablet, any type of desktop, browsers especially to see where they're falling off. For a lot of our clients, we'll have two, three, or four different tech dashboards. Get them to the technical person on the client side so they can immediately see if there's an issue. If they've updated the website, but maybe they forgot to update a certain portion of it, they've got a technical issue, and the dashboard can help detect that.

So these are just a few. I'm a huge fan of dashboards. They're very powerful. But the big key is to make sure that not only you, but your client understands how to use them, and they use them on a regular basis.

I hope that's been very helpful. Again, I'm Ed Reese, and these are my top five dashboards. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

By |February 27th, 2015|MOZ|0 Comments
Read More

7 tips and tricks to get the most out of eBay search

Ebaysearch
Feed-fb

eBay is the world's biggest yard sale. Millions of bargains wait for you on a daily basis, but sifting through the chaff to find the wheat can be exhausting, time-consuming and extremely dull.

But don't worry — we have seven tips and tricks that will raise your eBay search game to ninja level.

Read on for our handy hints, and you'll be the proud owner of that elusive '90s David Hasselhoff action figure in no time.

1. Search item descriptions.

e1

Image: eBay

eBay's default search looks at items' titles, but you can also search within items' descriptions. For example, if you're looking for a pair of skinny jeans with a zip fly, it's unlikely the seller would have added that detail in the title of the listing. However, she may have added it in the more detailed description ...

More about Search, Ebay, How To, Shopping, and Features

By |February 26th, 2015|Apps and Software|0 Comments
Read More

Google AI destroys human opponents at ‘Space Invaders’

Space-invaders
Feed-fb

Computers already have bested human champions in Jeopardy! and chess, but artificial intelligence now has mastered an entirely new level: Space Invaders.

Google scientists have cooked up software that can do better than humans on dozens of Atari video games from the 1980s, like video pinball, boxing and Breakout. But computers don't seem to have a ghost of a chance at Ms. Pac-Man.

The aim is not to make video games a spectator sport, turning couch potatoes who play games into couch potatoes who watch computers play games. The real accomplishment: computers that can teach themselves to succeed at tasks, learning from scratch, trial and error, just like humans. ...

More about Google, Entertainment, Gaming, Tech, and Artificial Intelligence

By |February 26th, 2015|Apps and Software|0 Comments
Read More

Become Intelligent: Use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to your Advantage

54ee755b2a3dd6.97664050.png

Posted by Martijn_Scheijbeler

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Everybody remembers being in college, writing down activities in a logbook, hoping the hours they worked on a project were enough for a sufficient grade. After two years as an online marketer/SEO, I realized what makes writing down activities so important.

The intent of this post is to save you from making the same mistakes I made. If you're working for a brand, you probably want to make sure you're on top of all your KPIs, but few of us are able to carefully track our valued metrics 24 hours a day.

So in addition to providing you with some useful insights into why it's so important to write down everything you do, I'll also give you some useful tips on how to get this started with the tools you likely already use. Most importantly, I'll show you how to keep track of drastic changes in web traffic and user engagement.

How Meta Robots & XML Issues Impacted My Perception of Web Analytics

To give you an example of why it's useful to keep track of what you and your team are working on, let me take you back to an incident I experienced roughly two years ago. My team tested an upgrade for functionally, but forgot to check the involved technical SEO elements. After a massive drop in keyword positions for all of our top (landing) pages, we did our best to retrace our steps. In the process, we discovered we had implemented the META robots noindex tag on all pages. I'd love to say I'm joking, but our drop in search traffic says otherwise.

I think you get the point—and that it's probably best if I don't tell you about the time that we returned XML to Google instead of proper HTML—record everything. To this end, I'm going to share my insights into what I like to track on a daily and weekly basis via Google Intelligence Events, and share occurred events with our team, using the annotations of Google Analytics for our sites. I'm also hoping to hear your ideas on anything I'm missing so that we can learn from each other.

Rebecca Lehman made a great start back in 2011 with this, but in the past years a lot of new metrics and dimensions have been added to Google Analytics, making it easier to keep track of even more changes.

What are Google Intelligence Alerts?

Analytics monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations, and then automatically generates alerts, or Intelligence Events, when those variations occur. - Google Analytics Help Guides

Google Analytics provides you with predefined alerts that guide you through certain changes in engagement, traffic or visitor data, but they are hard to notice if you're not looking at your web analytics on an hourly basis. However, you are able to add custom intelligence alerts that update you of any changes that are important to you (e.g., when your traffic increases by 10% day over a single day). The tool makes it possible for you to respond faster to changing data, and you can also use it to keep your colleagues up to date.

Google Intelligence Alerts enable you to monitor your web analytics in many different ways, but they're not without their disadvantages. Let's look at both sides of the argument:

Advantages Disadvantages
You'll be notified within 24 hours. You're not able to share intelligence alerts with your colleagues.
If you live in the US, you can get texts message alerts of important changes. If you don't live in the US, you can't receive text messages.
You can keep track of almost every metric and dimension in Google Analytics. Setting up a large number of alerts is a time-consuming process.
You can use your intelligence alerts in multiple properties as they belong to your personal Google Analytics account and data.

Note: The email reports from Intelligence Alerts have a certain delay. Hopfully Google Analytics will improve this delay in the future, but for now it's the best we have to work with.

Why is this useful for you?

I've provided you with just one example of how Intelligence Alerts can be useful. Now let me give you more insight into why it's easier for you to keep track of changes with Google Alerts. The average e-commerce store has thousands of products, each of which is likely to be impacted by seasonal preferences such as who's buying umbrellas in mid-summer. But what if it suddenly starts raining and your warehouse is running out of umbrellas? What if you could set up alerts to see if sudden product categories change in performance based on your data in Google Analytics?

Overview

Overview.png

Image: personal screenshots

On the left side of your Google Analytics Reporting dashboard you have the ability to view the daily, weekly and monthly automatic alerts that Google has already triggered for you. This overview provides the most important metrics and dimensions for your site. For example, the screenshot below shows you the change in views throughout April 2014 for one of my accounts. Naturally, by clicking on details you are provided with more details on the period.

54735e77d34135.38476750.png
Image: personal screenshots

As you can see, the detailed view shows you the metrics again so that you can determine how importance each change is to you business. In this case, the graph tells you what the per-session goal value is, so you can see the weekly progress this metric made and why it triggered an automatic alert.

Daily, weekly, and monthly events

DailyEvents.png

Image: personal screenshots

The daily, weekly and monthly events provide you with a detailed view on more specific intelligence alerts, as well as the alerts you've created yourself. (I'll cover this in more detail in the next section.) On top of this, it enables you to change the importance of the alerts, as well as the alert category, including Custom Alerts, Automatic Web Alerts and, and Automatic Adwords Alerts.
The table contains an overview of the triggered alerts based on the settings you select. The links on the right side will guide you directly to the right report, where you can take a deeper look at each metric/dimension.

HowTo.png

Google_Analytics_2014-06-17_14-32-29.png

Image: personal screenshots

Overview: In the Admin of your Google Analytics View you're able to see an overview of current intelligence alerts. Click the New Alert button at the top.

Google_Analytics_2014-06-17_14-40-47.png

Image: personal screenshots

Now you have the opportunity to add a name to the alert and select the profiles you would like this intelligence event to apply to. By selecting the time period, you will be able to compare the current day, week or month to its previous variant. By setting the alert conditions, you have the opportunity to select the metrics and dimensions that must change in order to trigger a notification.

Exmaples.png

To save you some time, I've created a couple dozen intelligence alerts. The only things you need to do are log into your Google Analytics account and make sure you're ready to get overwhelmed with weekly or daily alerts. Seriously, though, don't feel compelled to add all of the alerts. Select only those that have the most value for you and your business.

Error/panic

A couple of alerts could help you monitor the status of your site and the Google Analytics integration into the site itself. You'll likely want to know when certain tracking codes are removed and pages trigger errors:

Engagement

These alerts are ideal for publishers with lots of traffic:

Traffic sources

If you suddenly have more traffic, but don't know where the traffic is coming from, the alerts for traffic sources could come in very handy:

E-commerce

Monitoring the conversion rate for different browsers will make you aware of any problems your site has playing nice with certain browsers:

Google AdWords

If you're running Google AdWords, you undoubtedly have alerts set up. But it would be handy to know the performance onsite and to see the corresponding spend associated with it if your spend goes up or down.

Annotations.png

In the long term, Google Analytics Annotations will really help you review statistics year-over-year. If something noteworthy happens, add an annotation to the date in Google Analytics. It's fairly simple to do, and will provide you, your colleagues, your manager, etc. with an idea of what's going on with your site and why.

My favorite annotations are reports of bugs, new website features, and UX/ CRO improvements to popular pages.

Image: personal screenshots

P.S. Dear Google Analytics product managers, if one of you is reading this, please make adding annotations available via the Google Analytics Management API. It would make it so much cooler if, for example, we could add a new annotation to our data for every new post in WordPress.

TL;DR: Intelligence Alerts automatically keep you up to date on pre-configured changes in your data. With a daily email updates, you'll never miss important changes associated with your website's data, traffic or engagement.

Please let me know in the comments what your favorite intelligence alerts are and how you use them to your advantage. If you have any other tools that you use to keep yourself informed, don't hesitate to share them.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

By |February 25th, 2015|MOZ|0 Comments
Read More