Group 3 Solutions » Analytics

Kansas City Job Opening: Search, Social, Content Specialist

Darrin Widick — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:57:11 +0000

If you think populating meta-tags, stuffing keywords on a web page and “submitting to all the search engines” are the keys to a client’s digital success, this may not be the job for you.

But if you like helping clients increase their digital visibility via legitimate SEO/SEM techniques, robust content creation and on-target social media marketing, then you’re the Specialist we need to talk to. Our search marketing team is expanding, and we’re looking for a dynamic digital marketer who is also a good fit for our expanding company. We’re especially interested in your ability to research and recommend keywords to target, recognize on-page optimization opportunites, create visitor-friendly content, study and decipher Google Analytics and report results to clients.

From manufacturing to health care, hospitals to service firms, our clients cover a wide range of industries. What about you? What have you accomplished in managing PPC campaigns, writing blog entries, managing social campaigns, optimizing sites? Let us know how you can help us help our clients succeed. Email us.

Search Engine Market Share

Darrin Widick — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:30:16 +0000

Is Google’s market share 70.6% or 80.4% or 64.9% or 66.1% or 78.2% or 77.8% or 76.7%?

The answer is: Yes …

… depending on which stats you believe. With a range of 65% on the low side and 80% on the high, there’s a pretty large gap in the numbers. So when clients ask how their monthly search engine traffic distribution compares to the average, which numbers should we compare them to? The ones that say Google, Yahoo and Bing have 65%, 19% and 9%, respectively, of the market, or the ones that say they have 80%, 9% and 9%?

So we thought we’d try to establish an “Internet Average” of the market. We took market share numbers from six different companies, added in our own numbers based on observations of sites we monitor, and came up with this table.

Granted, each company has a different universe of searches from which it draws, and uses different methods of calculating its numbers. So this certainly is not a scientific process. But we do think it strikes a happy medium from the low to the high across Internet statistics. And we think it provides a nice baseline to which folks can compare their own traffic numbers.

Here’s where we pulled the data:

WordPress Plugin: WordPress.com Stats

Brad Kelley — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:29:00 +0000

Continuing our series on helpful WordPress plugins we use and recommend for our clients…

WordPress.com Stats

If you’re already using Google Analytics for WordPress (see our post on Google Analytics for WordPress) then you already have a ton of information about your blog’s traffic. So much information, in fact, that it may be hard to get a bird’s eye view. That’s where WordPress Stats comes in. Simply give it your WordPress.com API Key (see our post on Akismet for detail on this) and in return you’ll get a dashboard item telling you the quick and dirty version of what’s happening on your site, with a wealth of additional information just clicks away. And don’t worry about server load: WordPress Stats is a hosted analytics solution just like Google Analytics. Great stuff.

Check out the WordPress Stats plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself.

Other Great Plugins to Explore

There are lots of great plugins that we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks (FeedBurner Widget, Flickr Feed Gallery and NextGEN Gallery for example). Which ones would you recommend? Post below in the comments or drop us an email and let us know which ones you find most useful. =)

Tracking Downloads in Google Analytics

Brad Kelley — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:44:21 +0000

The next time someone tells you that you can’t track downloads in Google Analytics (like links to PDFs, movies, or other assets that don’t reside on an actual page) tell them they’re full of crap. =) Provided you’re using the newer ga.js method you are golden. Check it out here.

The one gotcha is that the ga.js code can’t be at the bottom of the page, which is non-typical, and could increase page rendering times. The reason Google’s ga.js code goes at the very bottom is to prevent the latency of connecting to Google from adding to the page’s render time. Since the code is now at the top of the page, there’s no way to avoid the (admittedly only potential) latency problem.

But hey, you can track your document downloads! =)

Update: Also works for offsite links.