The following steps outline how to add users to a desired account/property/view in Google Analytics.

Full administrative permissions will  have to be granted to your digital marketing agency in order for them to take full control of the account.

Adding Users

(taken from Google)

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Select the Admin tab and navigate to the desired account/property/view
3. In the ACCOUNT, PROPERTY, or VIEW column (depending upon whether you want to add the user at the account, property, or view level), click User Management.
4. Under Add permissions for, enter the email address for the user’s Google Account. (Be sure that all four permission settings are check when adding Administrators to an account)
5. Select the permissions you want. (More about this below)
6. Select Notify this user by email to send a notification to each user you’re adding. Click Add.

Be sure to access User Management under the ACCOUNT column when adding users with FULL Admin permissions. Anything else will NOT provide full access at the account level.

User permissions

(taken from Google)

The post How to Add Users to Google Analytics appeared first on Clix.

On one hand, I like Google because they have provided small companies amazing opportunities and tools to succeed through marketing themselves on the internet. Google does this by providing entrepreneurs and startups cheap infrastructure and applications such as Google Drive and Gmail. Google has additionally provided, My Business Profiles, Adwords Campaigns, and organic search engine results that allow for new ideas and companies to be found as soon as the enter the market.

On the other hand, I don’t like Google because they are a mega corporation that owns nearly all of our digital footprints and buys killer robot corporations like Boston Dynamics. (While this is funny, I’m not sure it fits with the tone of the post.  It’s ultimately up to you, but I tend to avoid anything that isn’t specifically relevant to my topic.  It’s funny, but that could also detract from the overall points…idk its up to you)

I digress…

The internet and search engines have provided users with the ability to instantly cross compare prices on similar products. This has resulted in a sort of commoditization of many products and services, especially hotel rooms and airline flights. The digital travel marketplace as a whole is a global arena where millions of buyers search for travel services at rock bottom prices. This means, buyers are comparing hotel rooms with little or no differentiation between them, and this forces hotel and airline companies to compete almost exclusively on price. This “rush to the bottom” is what I am calling the commoditization of the travel industry.

(The reality of the situation is that most people who are shopping for hotels and flights make their choices based on price are looking to rent a box with a lock and a shower – not an award winning Bed & Breakfast vacation getaway.)

Here is my point.

Where there are systems of data and money to be made, Google is waiting. Just as they’ve done with maps, video, stock quotes, and more… Google is now showing signs that even hotel reservations will be able to be booked without ever leaving a Google-owned property.

Recently Tnooz.com published an article explaining how Google’s hotel finder prompted them to book the hotel from the SERP using their Google Wallet settings. (Notice the label “You are booking with Hotel Rouge on Google”)

Let’s Get This Straight

They completely cut out every middleman.

Here is another example. If you search for a hotel in Putney Vermont. Google returns the geographically relevant hotels, aggregates reviews from all over the internet, displays pricing and accommodation information, and then prompts the user to close the sale within their own digital property.

This is huge, and here’s why: Imagine for a moment you start searching through Google for items like Converse shoes, blue ray players, or a pair of sunglasses. Then, you start clicking on the products lsitings.

When you eventually find the cheapest price for your trusty black Chucks, you then check out via your Google Wallet right there in listing. Google takes a cut of the profit and the “online retailer” is now just a third party logistics provider and simply ships the product to you. Talk about some major vertical integration…

The post Is Google Becoming An Online Market Place? appeared first on Clix.

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Google clearly believes that to be true as they have enlisted the services of a camel to further develop their Google Street View Trek of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis.

Google’s camel, reportedly named Raffia, is the first animal to ever dawn one Google’s Street View cameras, said Joyce Baz, spokeswoman for Google in the Middle East and North Africa.

“In the case of Liwa, we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way,” said Ms Baz.

Liwa Desert:

The Google Maps blog describes this region of different-colored sands as “one of the most breathtaking landscapes in the world.” Liwa lies approximately 62 miles south of the Persian Gulf coast and 93 miles southwest of the city of Abu Dhabi in the Al Gharbia (Western) Region, on the northern edge of Rub’ al Khali desert. It sits around 23°08′N 53°46′E and stretches about 62 miles east-west, along an arch curved to the north. The population of the Liwa Oasis was last counted as 20,196, in 2005. The Liwa Oasis is best known for its date plantations, sand dunes ranging from 80 to 135 feet high, and its history dating back to the stone age.

Watch Googles Video Intro:

Explore Liwa with Google Maps – Google اكتشف ليوا مع خرائط

The post Google Hires a Camel for “Street View” appeared first on Clix.

This lack of attention leads to several gaping holes, causing advertisers to lose money on irrelevant clicks. There are several easy changes that small business owners can make to save money.

Let’s Break It Down:

Campaigns:

Campaign settings are some of the first decisions you make about your AdWords or Bing Ads account.

1. Location: Target your ads only to the locations surrounding your business. It won’t do you any good to pay for traffic in California when your law office operates specifically in Little Rock, Arkansas. Google provides various options for location targeting. You can include locations by city, state, zip code, or radius from an address. There is some debate on the benefits of utilizing excluded location targeting. Personally, I find that a combination of the two is effective.

Note: If you imported your Google Adwords account to Bing Ads, you will need to manually adjust the location settings in that account, as they do not transfer.

2. Language: Unless you speak multiple languages and provide customer service in those languages, select English.

3. Network: I’f you’re not a graphics wiz planning to utilize the Display Network to its fullest potential, stick to the Search Network. If you want to utilize images and focus on branding over clicks, the Display Network may be for you. Whichever you decide to use, make sure that it is a conscious choice that matches your search advertising goals.

4. Additional Settings:

– Ad Schedule:  Whether you operate a 24 hour emergency clinic or a dental office that is only open from 8-5, you can schedule your ads to meet the search needs of your customers. Perhaps you only want to show ads during your office hours when someone is available to answer the phone. Maybe you want to show ads only on the weekends. Whatever your scheduling desire, Google gives you the option to target your ads based on day and time.

Making mistakes in settings is completely normal for new advertisers. Fortunately, the campaign settings are easily editable.

Ad Groups:

One of the most significant issues I encounter with ad groups is the lack of a highly targeted theme. There is no worse feeling than logging into an account with a single ad group.

1. Create Themed Ad Groups:  Your ad group is the place that connects your keywords to your ads. Using a single ad group means that Google can not distinguish which ads are most relevant to your targeted keywords. In this form, any ad in your account is eligible to appear with any keyword.

Suppose you are a law firm with practices in both family and criminal law. If you use only one ad group, you are potentially paying to show ads for a criminal defense lawyer to someone who is searching for a divorce attorney.

Keywords:

1. Avoid Single Keywords: I once hear of an account in which the advertiser was trying to acquire relevant leads for a children’s boutique by targeting the broad match term “kids”.  The mistake here is two-fold. First, “kids” is a decidedly non-specific term. There are thousands and thousands of ways the word “kids” could be incorporated into a search term, and very few of them relate to purchasing quality children’s clothing from a local boutique. Second, using a broad match search term means that the keyword is eligible to appear in a variety of variations of that term. This contributes to a lower quality score and less relevant traffic.

2. Be Specific: As in the example above, non-specific keywords can increase your costs and lower your conversion rates. Long-tail keywords such as “motorcycle accident defense attorney in little rock” or “car accident injury attorney Ft. Smith Arkansas” are more likely to result in clicks than “motorcycle accident” or “accident attorney”. The more specific the search, the more relevant the searcher. Your potential customers should know exactly what you can do for them before clicking on your ad.

This is not what you want your customers to ask.

3: Include Geographic Keywords: If you are marketing to customers in a local area, including location keywords can increase your relevancy to searchers in those areas. For example, searchers may be more likely to click on an ad for the search “restaurants in St. Louis, MO” than “steak restaurants”. This local relevancy increases the odds of conversions for the searchers who select your ads.

4: Negative Keywords: If you’re not adding negative keywords, you should be. Inevitably, searches will slip through the cracks and you will find that your ads are showing for keywords that weren’t exactly what you had in mind. Negative keywords give you the ability to prevent your ads for appearing for these related terms. For example, for a client who is a wedding planner, negative keywords would include wedding-related items such as dress, cake, honeymoon, and more. While these words are all related to the general search topic of weddings, they are not relevant to the wedding planning business.

Bonus: Negative keywords can also prevent you from appearing for searches including your own name (Why pay for a click when they’re already looking for you?) or those of your competitors.

Wrap It Up:

These small adjustments that occur when you are setting up you account can save you money without excessive managent or data analysis. Working with a PPC Agency or Online Marketing Team can help you expand upon these basic principals, as well as break down the data to get the most conversions possible.

The post Ad Words Edits: Save Money By Fixing These Common Mistakes appeared first on Clix.

When you consider that Google’s search algorithm gets updated almost twice a day on average, that’s bound to happen. But sometimes it’s the little changes that can make a big difference either in the way search rankings are affected, how people search, or how search results are presented. One recent addition is of the last variety, a tiny place to the right of search results that highlights Google+ activity with a Recent Posts section.

In fact, the integration of Google+ with Google’s search has been going on for a while now, but always on the sly, with little additions here and there. In fact, even on Google’s own page on the subject, they have to use a digital magnifying glass to show where the Google+ links are hiding in search results.

Wait, hold on, what is Google+ anyway?

Google+ is Google’s own social network. From the time it was first introduced it has been an experiment. For example, the “circles” feature is an easier way to control what you see from others and what they see from you, as opposed to Facebook’s ‘friends’ approach.

But the whole thing never really caught on. Now, however, Google has been integrating so much of its features into Google+ that it’s becoming a significant part of search, meaning businesses are starting to take notice. For example, now that Google Places has been made a part of Google+, it’s essential that your business listing on Google+ gets verified. Additionally, activity plays a big role on any social media channel, but independent research suggests that Google favors Google+ when it comes to search (as you would expect).

Source: Moz (Click for full-size)

So businesses are being strong-armed into using Google+?

More or less.

But it’s not so bad. Since Google still controls around two-thirds of the search market, all of these little changes increase your visibility, making it easier for potential customers to get a feel for how good of a resource you are.

Let’s look at a couple examples:

First, let’s stick with Google’s example of National Geographic. If we type National Geographic into Google, we see a list of results from National Geographic’s own website, its YouTube channel, news, etc. But on the right there’s a box specifically for National Geographic (from the Knowledge Graph).

(Click for full size) (my highlighting)

Surprise! Part of that Knowledge Graph is Google+. There’s a button to “follow” their page, a link to their page with their number of followers, a link to their Wikipedia page, and, yes, below all of that, Recent Posts. These aren’t recent posts to a blog on their website, but recent posts to their Google+ page. But remember, you can always share your activity such as a new blog post on social media. So if you post something new on your website, link to it on Google+. That way when someone searches for you, your new material is right there in front of them.

Now for the exception: This box currently only shows up when searching for a specific business or entity like National Geographic, not something general like “nature magazines.”

That’s great for a huge international magazine, but what about my local business?

The exact same thing happens for local businesses. Remember Google’s “carousel” feature I told you about a while ago? When you click on one of the carousel results, it alters the entire search to search for that specific result. To use the example I used in the earlier post, clicking on one of the results for “donuts in Chicago” will change the search so you get results only for that specific donut shop.

And guess what? That box on the right pops up. If the business has a Google+ page, you will see much the same information as we did for National Geographic, perhaps including Recent Posts. But depending on your business, you may have other information, such as hours, price range, reviews (now with a 5-star scale!)…

The information in the box for this donut shop is quite different from National Geographic. (Click for full-size)

Some of this information is also the same for a service-oriented business like a law firm. Here’s an example from one in Seattle chosen at random.

(Click for full-size)

See the reviews? The photos? The recent posts? All of that is pulled from this firm’s Google+ page.

Go ahead, Google yourself and see what your results look like.

Well, great. Another social media page to manage.

Yes, but it doesn’t have to be such a chore! Software like Hootsuite can make your life a lot easier by allowing you to post to all of your social media pages at once. You can even schedule posts.

And if you already use Clix for SEO, we’re here to help or take care of it for you!

The post Recent Posts from Google+ Now in Search Results appeared first on Clix.

Carousel? What’s that?

Instead of appearing in a list, many searches for local business categories now appear in a kind of slide show at the top of the page.

Let’s look at an example. Type, say, “donuts in Chicago” into Google. Notice how all of the local results now appear at the top of the page, while sites that would normally rank higher than local businesses–such as Yelp and Urbanspoon–now appear in a list below. (If you don’t get a carousel when you search, here’s what it looks like.)

Now, try mousing over a result in the carousel. See how the result is highlighted on the map below? You can use this small map to zoom in or move to another area, which will then affect the carousel’s results. Try zooming in a couple clicks or clicking and dragging the map to see how the results change. Cool, right?

Next, click on a carousel result. This will take you to the search page for that specific business where more details are listed, such as reviews, price range, contact info, etc.

Clicking on a carousel result alters the entire search

You said this is still in testing. What’s wrong with it?

Honestly, a lot.

1. For starters, the carousel doesn’t seem to appear on all browsers and device types yet. You may have noticed this when you tried the above example.

2. It’s currently unclear how the carousel results are ranked. It seems like the businesses with the higher rating score on a 0-30 scale (the same one Zagat uses) are clustered more towards the left, but this isn’t always the case. And on that note, the Zagat score seems to be based on Google reviews alone unless it says “Zagat” next to the score (another way in which Google is pushing Google+), so it’s possible that reviews from other places or more traditional ranking factors are also at play.

3. Not all business categories or locations have a carousel, at least not right now. For example, the search “donuts in Chicago” that we used above has a carousel while “swimming pools in Chicago” and “donuts in Columbia, MO” do not.

4. That Zagat rating score a is confusing to some users, and is inconsistent with Google’s current map search, which shows ratings on a 5-star scale. It’s unclear whether the Zagat scale or the star scale will be used on the carousel (and on Maps and Google+) once the new Google Maps is rolled out for everyone.

5. It takes at least two clicks from the carousel to get to the business’s website. Instead of being listed in the box to the right when the carousel image is clicked, the website appears on the list to the left. In the old search, an address and a phone number appeared with the result, without the need for an extra click.

What does this mean for my business?

—The carousel could potentially have significant effects. Even with its kinks, the carousel greatly increases visibility for local searches, even for businesses which may not have ranked well before.

—Since they are front-and-center, reviews are going to be even more important.

—Because the review numbers Google is using (at least for now) are based on Google+ reviews, Google+ presence just became even more crucial.

The post What will Google’s ‘carousel’ mean for local search? appeared first on Clix.

Non-Profits:

In the last year Google has made some improvements to the search function, including the addition of non-profit’s information. The slow roll out provides more information about non profit organizations right on the search page. Notably, the categories and tax deduction codes are included. Not all organizations have been included at this time, but Google is working to expand the list.

The Other New Feature:

In case call outs in search weren’t enough, Google has also expanded Knowledge Graph into movies on Android tablets. Prompted by facial recognition, the feature appears when media purchased within the Google Play store is paused. The greatest limitation to this feature is, obviously, its limited ability. IPad owners are unable to access the features, and they are only applicable to media purchased from Google. Curious about the miscellaneous actor on screen in the Netflix app? Too bad. You’re still going to have to look up his Wikipedia page for more information. 21st Century Problems, right?

Outstanding Issues:

There are flaws, of course. Google isn’t perfect. The goal of Knowledge Graph is to predict searches intent and provide reasonable results. In the arena of “reasonable” they’re remarkably successful.

Let’s say I’m searching for my favorite show between Kardashians seasons: Married To Jonas. I know I’m looking for the E! series. Google, on the other hand, evaluates the search as a question for Knowledge Graph purposes, and returns selections for both Danielle Jonas and Kevin Jonas as individuals. The organic results nail what I’m looking for with links to the series on E! and relevant social media sites. The series is not, however, mentioned in either of the Knowledge Graph selections. Short of knowing what exactly I was thinking when I typed the search Google carries out the results successfully.

I’ll admit it, I’m nitpicking here.

Overall, Knowledge Graph has made it easier to get information quickly, without filtering through a list of search results. The changes to the way we search will continue to evolve in 2013 with the use of both Knowledge Graph and Facebook Graph Search. Look for more information about Facebook Search next week!

The post Knowledge Graph: One Year Later appeared first on Clix.

Often times we get the question, “Should I invest in Pay Per Click or Search Engine Optimization?” from clients, prospective clients, inquirers, passersby, and next door neighbors (ok, maybe not your next door neighbor!). In most – if not all – cases we recommended a combination of both PPC and SEO. We can’t help it! PPC is instantaneous. We want our clients to be an option out of the gate, while we help them build their organic presence!

Many business owners understand the importance of being one of the top organic search results in Google by now. Unfortunately, some business owners overlook the advantage of being both a paid and organic option. At Clix, we use analogies to make sense of EVERYTHING. In this case, would you rather throw one hook in the water or two or more hooks?

According to Google Think Insights, having both an organic and paid presence can dramatically improve your site’s traffic and CTR. In 2011, Google conducted an experiment and paused search ads on over 400 Adwords accounts in four different countries. Their findings were significant.

Google discovered that 89% of ad clicks were incremental to clicks on organic search results. This means that these organic visits would not have happened without the company investing in PPC and being a sponsored result. Simply, organic clicks would not have made up for the absence of paid clicks.

Below is a Google infographic that illustrates their results:

The post PPC – Accounting For Clicks You’d Never Get appeared first on Clix.

Google Hangouts have been used in the past for NASA events, political promotions, and hot topic news discussions. While on the radar of the public, the Hangouts have not generally held widespread appeal until recently. The events appeal to a wide variety of demographics and have the potential to draw more national attention to the platform.

The Internship Google Hangout Debut

February 13th Google engaged in a shameless display of self promotion, debuting the trailer for The Internship- a film set at Google- on a Conan O’Brien hosted Google Hangout. The 30 minute hangout included the trailer premier, discussion with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson (the stars of the film) and live questions from viewers using the #theInternship hashtag.

As a member of the SEO community, I personally can’t wait to see this movie. It’s clever promotion campaign just adds to the film’s appeal to the online community.

Fireside Hangout

President Obama will settle in to answer viewer questions in a follow up to his State Of The Union address on February 14th. The Fireside Hangout is described on the event page as: “the latest in the series… a 21st century take on FDR’s famous radio addresses.”

The event mirrors that of the 2012 Fireside Hangout which addressed similar themes. The timing allows the Obama administration to target younger demographics as well as provide the last word on the STOU. The platform has been used before by President Obama and Vice President Biden, but the White House Google Plus presence in general does not appear to be of high priority.

You may remember that following the 2012 election the Obama campaign took to social media to celebrate and posted messages of victory on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Google Plus, meanwhile, remained silent. The Hangout marks Obama’s first significant foray back into the site since the reelection.

Image via WhiteHouse.Gov

You can tune in to the Fireside Hangout on February 14th at 4:50pm EST and keep up with the discussion using the #firesidehangout hashtag.

International Google Hangout

On February 22, 2013, NASA will host a publig Google Hangout with the crew of the International Space Station. This will be the first Google Hangout hosted with the ISS according to NASA’s announcement. 3,407 users are currently planning to attend. Commenters on the event page have suggested the Hangout is an opportunity for teachers to connect their classrooms to a greater learning opportunity.

Prior to the event video question submissions may be submitted via YouTube. On the day of the event the crew as well as astronauts and members of the NASA team will answer text questions in real time from Twitter and Google Plus using the #askAstro hashtag. Question will also be read from the wall of the NASA Facebook page.

Users can sign up to attend the Hangout and ad it to their calendars here.

The post Google Hangout Events: Fireside Chat, Trailer Premier, and Space Station Hangout appeared first on Clix.