Hello SEO’s, PPC’ers, Digital Marketers, and Internet Enthusiasts –
Remember when Facebook started? I do. I was still on MySpace and in high school – I couldn’t wait to get my college .edu so I could get an account. They made people wait, and slowly opened the social network to more and more people to create demand. First Harvard, then ivy leagues, then top colleges, then all colleges, ect ect… You can contribute some of Facebook’s success to starting out and limiting users. Once you tell people they can’t have something they just want it more. Then fast forward 5 years and Google wanted to get into the social media game. I remember Google announcing it and I was so pumped to get one, and then I did a week later… and so did everyone else. And then after checking it out, people moved back to Facebook.
But Google is now pushing it on to us whether we like it and with help from our favorite brands and celebrities. You might have noticed a new thing in Google this week. On the right hand side of the SERPs above the ads is now some pretty…pretty…pretttty good real estate. There’s box that will show you the top Google+ results. However these results aren’t placed there because of some fancy algorithm they are there for other reasons which I will explain in this blog post.
Google+ is making your brands advertise for them
The new episode of “This Week in Tech” was one of my favorites of all time – they talked very extensively about “Google plus your world” and had some awesome examples that got me thinking about Google alternative motives. The first example was when they searched for “Cars” and got this:
Wow, Ferrari and BMW are both displayed at the top of the first page for such a competitive keyword? I don’t have them in my circles and I don’t talk about them on Google+ (I’m more of an off road truck kind of guy) so why are they there? They are there because they are car companies that have the most followers. (At time of writing General Motors is in 2,532 circles and Ford Motor Company is in 4,266 circles.)
So then my marketing degree kicked in, and it sparked, I think I know what they are doing! They are making companies start advertising their Google+ pages and thus advertising Google+!
Ok so how did I get to that conclusion? Let’s backtrack here, Ford and GM are definitely some of the automobile industry dominators who are usually on top of their marketing game, so once this comes on their radar they are going to want to beat Ferrari and BMW out of their spots in order to show up on the first page.
But how will they do that?
By getting people to add them to their circles on Google+.
And how do they get people to add them to their circles?
The same way people get Facebook likes – marketing campaigns. Give the public a reason to “like” them/ add them to your circles. So that could be giveaways, deals, exclusive offers, and concept cars pictures. Just cool stuff that we want to see and get that we can’t anywhere else.
So let’s say Ford and GM start dumping all this money into their Google + pages.
But they think, if no one is following us on Google+ how do we get the word out?
Advertise these exclusive offers on their Google+ page on their website and across their competing social networks! (The Ford Facebook fan sites have over 6 million fans across their different pages and General Motors has over 3 million across theirs).
In summary, by having these exclusive offers, to get followers, in order to have their company name show up on the top of page for the search term “Cars” (that is searched locally 45,000,000 times a month), they have to also promote Google+ itself, and get their fans, follows, and visitors of their far greater networks to sign up for Google+. And the more people that sign up the more information about you Google gets! Genius!
Google+ gets celebrity endorsements
Here’s another example from Danny Sullivan’s post on Search Engine Land. Just like the Cars search term showing the Google+ pages for Ferrari and BMW it shows the same for “music” and “movies”. Here’s what it looks like for those search terms:
Just like your favorite car company’s celebrities are singers and pop stars are brands, and their management team market them like a brand. The more they are in the public eye the more famous they are. So I think that you will see a lot more celebrities start showing up in Google+ thus more people joining Google+ to follow them. In fact, Lady Gaga who has the largest twitter following and over 46million Facebook fans did not have a Google+ page last week until Sunday when she created one. Did she start a Google+ page just to be more in touch with her fans? I think NOT! She wants to beat out Britney and Snoop for that spot. And she is doing just what Google wants her to do, advertising Google+ on her other networks and basically telling her fans and followers “Hey, I’m on Google+ you should come join me, if I [Lady Gaga] am on it, it must be cool!”
Just wait, I am predicting a sudden shift in Google+ users because there is going to a fight for those top when entertainment key words are used.
But what does this mean for SEO?
First it means that you better have a Google+ page and start thinking about it more and more. You are going to need it, if you want to achieve page one domination in the future. Also the Google+ accounts that show up on the right hand side, as far as I can see, are only based on the amount of circles you are in. Personally I think that’s a little messed up, and contradictory to Google’s algorithm for search results. They have over 200 factors to rank sites organically and even have a complex formula for the ad rank quality score (thanks for the ppc info Aaron!). But for top of the page real estate it’s only the amount of circles you are in? C’mon Google, your better than that. I tried the searches logged in and out of Google+ and even tried it in incognito mode and got the pretty much the same results. If you refresh the page a couple times you will see some other accounts but they are still the top people in the Google+ field and not ranked on relevance. Another test I did was I logged into Google+ and added both Ford and GM to my Circles and refreshed the “car” SERPs and still got Ferrari and BMW. I even tried a branded search for Cyangenmod (the brand name) the community based firmware for Android and it didn’t even rank 1st for its own Google+ page.
Ya, its #2 but when I refresh it doesn’t even show up – for a branded search?! (And look at the organic results, why is their Google+ page showing up ahead of their Wikipedia page? I can bet that the wiki page gets a lot more traffic and has a lot more links then its G+ page. But organic social results are a whole other story for another post.)
What do you do you think about the new Google+ integration have you noticed anything funny or odd about the accounts that show up for different search terms? Do you like the changes in social search? If so, please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments box. And don’t forget to follow me on twitter.
In addition to some awesome carved pumpkins, Google gave users and advertisers another Halloween treat this year- Why These Ads. Why These Ads, is Google’s latest attempt (and perhaps a dig at Facebook) to give users a more personalized search experience. These links, which appear above top and side results, give users the option to control their search experience by opting out and blocking advertisements.
Upon clicking Why These Ads, users are given a few options. Below I’ve given a quick explanation of the available options:
1. Block- If a user chooses to block an advertiser, they are not shown any ads from that advertiser or any other ads which link to that website. As of now, users are eligible to block up to 500 advertisers total.
2. Opt Out- If a user chooses to Opt Out of advertisements, Google no longer uses additional information (demographics, location, past searches, etc.) to personalize that user’s search. (These options can be set at a campaign and browser level) Users can still be shown ads, however, the targeting might not be as precise. Additionally, if a user chooses this option they lose the ability to block specific advertisers.
Now, that we have an understanding of what these options are, I want to discuss what effects these Opt Outs & Blocks could have.
Now, that we have an understanding of what these options are, I want to discuss what effects these Opt Outs & Blocks could have.
Blocks
I think it is a given that no one likes to be blocked. While advertisers won’t know who blocked them, it doesn’t seem fair that if blocked, there is nothing advertisers can do outside of creating a whole new account on a whole new website, if they hope to reach that user again. In addition to this, there is something else that bothers me about user blocking, and it relates back to my good old friend, Session Based Matches.
As you may have noticed in my rant on Session based matches, I don’t think Google is always the best at personalizing. I mean if you’re showing me a sales training ad, when I searched for eye exercises, I’m going to be annoyed as both a user and an advertiser. Maybe even to the point, where I’d contemplate blocking the sales training ad. However, what happens if later on down the road, I am looking for sales training, and because I blocked that advertiser, I might be missing out on something great. Sure I could unblock that advertiser, but will I remember how to do that?
Additionally, as noted in Google’s explanation of Blocked advertisers- the particular ad blocked and any additional ad that blocks to that site will no longer appear in Gmail or Google Search. So if I block the-art-institutes.info because I found their cooking class to be irrelevant, am I also blocking their media arts, fashion classes ads which are mentioned on the same landing page domain? What if this would have been a relevant site for a “fashion class” search?
I’m sure these aren’t the only possible issues with User Blocking, but these two stood out to me. Thankfully though, there is one positive, Google confirmed that the number of blocks will not affect Ad Rank or Quality Score which let’s face it, is pretty necessary. Otherwise, advertisers would just attack their competitors with blocks.
Opt Out
When it comes to opting out, I’m torn. Sometimes, I wish Google wouldn’t try to personalize my searches. However, sometimes I love that it does. My ideal wish would be that instead of implementing this and that, Google would just work on improving it. Maybe if Google showed me eye exercise ads instead of sales training ads when my query was eye exercises, I wouldn’t be so anti Google’s personal touch.
Initial Findings
Well now that I’ve gone on another rant, I also wanted to share some initial findings. In Wired’s blog, they mention-”Out of every 15 users who get to the ad preference manager, 10 do nothing, 4 edit specific preferences, and only 1 opts out of behavioral targeting entirely”. So while it hasn’t had a huge impact in its 4 live days, I definitely think this is something to keep on your radar.
Why These Ads & SEO?
To conclude this post, I wanted to touch on how this change relates to SEO. So if a user blocks a PPC domain it is not blocked from organic search engine result pages (SERPs), but there are certain similar things that Google has rolled to improve the user experience when navigating the organic results. In order to shed some light on these things I’ve called upon my co-worker, and SEER SEO team member, Abbott Shea.
Hello! For my SEO cameo I’m going to go over some of the things that Google has rolled out in the past year that affect us SEOs.
Block All
Firstly, a feature that Google introduced along with their Panda Update, which was rolled out earlier this year, is the ability for a user to block a domain entirely from the organic search results. When someone clicks on a result for a certain search query and then clicks back to the SERPs they have the ability to block the domain that they just clicked through to. To show this in action I did a search for “car rentals”.
You see? So I clicked through on the National Car result and clicked back, and now I have the ability to block all results from nationalcar.com in my future searches – insert evil laugh here.
Now I wouldn’t do that, because National Car seems like a legitimate resource and I’m sure they have all the answers for all my “car rentals” questions. But there are sites out there that have manipulated Google and fooled them into listing their site at the top of the results for a certain keyword without actually offering any helpful content for the user searching that particular phrase. Like this result that showed up in the second spot for “loans for seniors”, and wouldn’t answer any of the tough questions a senior citizen looking for loans would need answered.
Google Plus
One other thing that Google has done is serve up content that has been shared by people in my Google + circles or written by people in lots of Google + circles, something like 600 or more, higher up in the SERPs and with a nice photo of that person. For instance, it seems that my friends Adam and Wil have shared some articles about “link building”…
… and “wil Reynolds”. I did have to cheat a bit with my query in order to show you exactly what I was talking about, but that’s because I have only very modest sized circles (cue the violins, maestro!). The point is the same – Google is serving up relevant content that your friends/connections have showed interest in assuming that you will be interested in it too.
Really it’s not a bad assumption. This is a very brief overview of the feature, but you can find out more in Wil’s article on Google + and Rankings.
(Not Provided)
Lastly, Google has recently rolled out a feature that doesn’t change what the user sees, but does affect SEOs. They have started protecting a user’s information by grouping users that are logged into their Google accounts under the “(not provided)” umbrella in Google Analytics. This means that for a user that is logged into their Google account (Gmail, Google +, etc.) and visits our site through the organic search results, it makes it nearly impossible for us to see what KW that visitor came in on.
This drive us SEOs nuts… and then Rachael Gerson comes along and puts at ease. To see how Rachael turns impossible into nearly impossible check out her article on Not Provided in Analytics.
What are your thoughts on Google’s latest “treats”? We would love to hear your thoughts, please share below and follow Abbott and me on Twitter!
Recently Morgan wrote an excellent guide to AdWords Remarketing – Remarketing Tags 101. I wanted to follow up about custom combinations, the primary AdWords remarketing method.
Custom combinations allow you to use multiple GDN criteria to ensure that your ads are shown only to the exact visitors you want! Examples of possible custom combinations are people who:
* Visited a specific shopping cart page but not the purchase confirmation page, or
* Visited any shopping cart page but not the purchase confirmation page, or
* Visited any shopping cart page and the contact form
The possibilities are theoretically endless! You can set as many custom combination criteria as you’d like.
Who are the Exact Visitors You Want?
This will vary for every site. If an e-commerce website sells many products, that site could use custom combinations to advertise complimentary products to people who already bought a related good. If your conversion goal is a lead form which can only be filled out once, you wouldn’t want to show ads to people who already filled out the lead form. A good rule of thumb to use is – if you need to tailor who sees your ads according to what they did on your site, custom combinations are great!
Prepare Before Creating
Custom combinations are combinations of audiences (audiences are usually one or multiple remarketing lists but we’ll get to that later). Before setting up custom combinations, first set up remarketing lists (refer to Morgan’s article for how to set them up) for each page you may or may not want to target.
Once your remarketing lists are set up, decide which pages you want people you remarket to see and not to see. Don’t use a one size fit all approach. You can and probably should set up multiple custom combinations. Use the information you have on what remarketing visitors were doing on the website to create value propositions, ads and landing pages. Offer complementary products. Alleviate checkout concerns. If you know they didn’t get past the credit card payment page but you take PayPal as well; say that you take PayPal on the landing page. Leverage all the information you have!
Creating Custom Combinations
Go to the campaigns tab, shared library, audiences and select a new audience – a custom combination.
Once you’re in the custom combination interface, give your combination a name and description which explains exactly whom the combination targets (see below). If you’re out sick you’ll want your colleagues to know what the combination is. If you have lots of custom combinations you may forget yourself.
When creating a custom combination you can target visitors who are in all of the audiences selected, none of the audiences selected, or are in one or more of several audiences selected. You can and usually should apply multiple audience types – fully utilize all information to make great audiences.
Audiences are selected from three fields – remarketing lists, interest categories and other custom combinations. Hit the select audiences drop down menu to choose from one of three fields.
* Interest Categories – This is usually not used for remarketing; but, rather, so you can target categories in the GDN. For remarketing you don’t want to use this unless you have a huge cookie pool you want to trim down and/or for budget restriction reasons.
* Remarketing lists – These are the individual pages you want to target or not target and have already set up as remarketing lists. This is generally the best place from which to create audiences and custom combinations, as well as to block converted users from seeing remarketing ads (if you’d like to do so).
* Custom combinations – You can also use other custom combinations as part of a new custom combination. I don’t recommend layering custom combinations on more custom combinations. You can very quickly start confusing yourself as to who you’re actually targeting. Create a new custom combination rather than layering onto another one, even if it costs time. You’ll save yourself headaches in the long run.
Generally it’s best to stick to remarketing lists when creating audiences. You can use remarketing lists not just to target by page or website activity but a host of other factors including time. This is called delayed retargeting.
Set up another audience (not custom combination – we’ll get there) from the same remarketing tag with different time lags (say 30 and 120 days). Do this by choosing the ‘select from existing tags’ option and setting the membership duration to different time periods.
Now you’ve got two remarketing lists and can set the custom combination with the 30 day audience as a ‘none of these audiences’ and the 120 days as ‘all of these audiences’. In this scenario, you will be targeting everyone who saw that page less than 120 days ago but more than 30 days ago. This might be desirable if you sell products which are seasonal – for example in northern regions you could offer boots in October to those who bought sandals in August. Remember to use that information in your ads and landing pages. Save the settings and then apply to the ad group in the appropriate audiences tab.
You’re ready to go – launch and optimize! Hopefully custom combinations can improve your remarketing efforts. Please comment and share your thoughts and experiences with custom combinations and remarketing in general, and stay tuned to the SEER blog for more remarketing posts!
Well, yes. Just because you read about a change, doesnt mean youre affected. It is always best to check your own numbers when you consider any of these type of changes. And as Brett covered in his post last week, GA can give you deceptive results. The nice thing is, you can often find these anomalies within the GA data itself with a little digging.
Your Actual Image Impact May be Minimal
At SEER, we started to see some increases in July around the time of Panda 2.3 & the image referral change. We didnt want to dismiss these increases as image referrals without checking our own numbers first. After reviewing about a dozen clients who experienced visit increases, I noticed that the image referral impact for most of our clients was very minor! Despite the dramatic look of the referral drop graphs, many clients had a very small amount of traffic in this area. Consider this:
Yes, an 80% drop is good confirmation of that dramatic drop graph, but wait a minute, thats only 47 visits that potentially shifted to Search. This particular site had about 48,500 search visits those weeks. That is a 0.10% impact. Most of our clients had impacts like this or even less.
Looking at Trends to Measure Real Impact
Of course, we did have some clients with a larger impact within the images that we didnt want to dismiss. To look at these, I stacked the Organic Google Search Visit numbers with the Image Visit Numbers in Excel. Notice that the net effect is still up.
Using Unique Visitors to Assess Panda & 12-Pack Impact
Applying a similar concept, to look at the impact of the 12-pack I created a very simple custom report that looks at Unique Visitors first by Source, then drills to Keyword. (If you dont want to make it yourself you can use mine.)
With just one week of data, we see the site brand is getting a slight boost, and brands they carry are taking a slight hit. Our overall Google impact is about 1% so far, but to really draw any conclusions well need a few more weeks living with the 12-pack.
Check Your Numbers
As I said at the beginning, this post started because we were checking our own numbers against the issues brought up by other bloggers. Every client we looked at had a different impact for each of these 6 changes in the last 30 days. Once youve checked your numbers, leave a comment below and let us know what youre seeing.
Google call extensions, in beta since 2010, were released in July 2011 to all North American advertisers. Call extensions are a feature where Google displays a Google Voice number next to an advertisers ad. The caller is then routed to the number of the advertisers choice, with the number set at the campaign level. Buried in the second to last paragraph of the Google blog post was this quote, a bombshell indicating that there may be a future change to Ad Rank calculations based on call extensions.
In a future release, we plan to incorporate calls into Ad Rank calculations, which determine an ads position and cost per click. At that time, youll be able to influence your ad position by specifying a bid per call greater than $1.00 USD. This will parallel the way that click through rate (CTR) and max CPC bids can influence Ad Rank today.
Ad Rank currently equals Quality Score (QS) times CPC bid. Google shows ads by their ad rank (highest ad rank first, 2nd highest second, etc). It’s an ultra important statistic which defines how and where ads are shown. Any potential changes to it need to be carefully monitored by AdWords advertisers.
While we haven’t seen the exact details on how ad rank could change yet, being able to bid more for calls and rewarding that higher bid by increasing Ad Rank is great for any business that makes or can make sales offline. But what about advertisers without offline capacity? Last year Search Engine Land reported the top ten AdWords advertisers, and a number of them (Expedia, Amazon, eBay, Living Social) have online only platforms. This is to say nothing of the thousands of websites which use AdWords and lack call center support. Companies without call extensions might be at a competitive disadvantage in the bid auction to those with call extensions that Google has said might be able to improve their Ad Rank by bidding more for calls.
It’s ultra important to note that Google can and does change its mind quite frequently. A change to the Ad Rank formula hasn’t happened yet and Google might find a way to avoid penalizing advertisers who don’t use call extensions. However, if this change happens, regardless of whether or not it’s fair to online only advertisers, it would make call extensions much more important. If call extensions become a core part of AdWords that influences Ad Rank, changes to improve call extensions are very important. AdWords could make three changes that would dramatically improve call extensions:
1) Call Metrics Day Parting – Enable advertisers to show phone numbers only at certain hours of the day (probably when the business or call center is open). Currently if call extensions are enabled they show whenever ads are showing. At 3am it makes sense for a retailer to run ads to their website to make online sales but calls to their brick and mortar locations might be a waste of money.
2) Better Reporting. Call extensions numbers are routed through Google so that companies can’t collect the numbers and call people back. However, Google could provide some aggregate data without individual records. Even very basic statistics like the total number of calls from each area code or country code would help.
3) Link Places Pages, Call Extensions and Location Extensions. Google places and location extensions listing usually match each other because Places and location extensions can be linked together.
In contrast, call extensions can be contradicted by places accounts which confuses visitors.
While linking call extensions, places and location extensions may be difficult to execute (how can Google know how many calls are made without routing the call through Google Voice?) there may be ways to do it. It’s worth investigating, confusing information on a SERP page is not good for Google’s users, advertisers or businesses who set up a free places page.
Because call extensions may soon be a component of Ad Rank, AdWords advertisers need to pay very close attention to upcoming changes. Google also needs to focus on improving call extensions, which as currently organized can send phone calls to brick and mortar locations when they’re not open, give little data for reporting and optimization and call extensions presentation on the SERP’s can confuse visitors. Call extensions should be a key area of focus for everyone involved with AdWords. Stay tuned.
Anyone whos ever used AdWords knows that Google has decided to put a few case study-esque images on the login page. For the longest time it was just an ad for Romis Boutique, but lately Google seems to have expanded their coverage to a few other industries. Great pictures, and they seem like great businesses. But, are they great ads…?
Strava is built for cyclists. Awesome, I like to ride my bike and wear stretchy pants too! I can compete and share and ride those are fun things. I can try it for free, thats good too! But can someone do me a favor and tell me exactly what Strava is?? Id be willing to bet Mark from Strava is getting a whole bunch of irrelevant clicks from curious cyclists just trying to figure out what the product does.
As it turns out, Strava develops some pretty advanced ride tracking software and it looks really cool. Too bad you have to click and read around the site to find that out.
Eclecdish. Thats a darn clever name! And Im all about organic cooking too nobody likes eating pesticides. But senor Ecledish, are you really bidding on the keyword organic? What happens with someone whos looking for organic apples. Or pants. Or blueberries. Or anything thats not related to catering
Also, take a close look at the ad. The ad is focused on organic wedding catering, but the word wedding isnt in bold. That means that Eclecdish is either bidding on the word catering alone, or some other non-wedding catering keyword. If Im searching for graduation caterers and this ad for Eclecdish comes up, Im very unlikely to click, much less call Jeff for a quote. Oh, and that better be a tracked phone number.
When developing your own campaigns, always make sure to stop and think if the keywords/ads are hitting the audience that’s most likely to use your service rather than just going after words that might represent your business.
I didnt know there ever was a standard for wallets. After taking a gander at the site, it looks like Dynomighty is actually doing some pretty cool stuff. Batman wallets, fundraising for Japan, free shipping; all awesome things. Why not mention that in the ad and make it pop a bit?
It’s important to make your business stand out in the ad copy, whether it’s through price, special offers and promotions, or any other unique value proposition. After all, there are more than just a few advertisers offering new wallets.
Patana from Friache needs to hang out with Jeff from Eclecdish. He bids on the catering, she bids on yogurt. Sigh at least theyre both organic, right?
Adam, its awesome that youre growing LiveWire online using AdWords. Its a great, marketing tool, completely accountable and you know exactly where all of your money is going. But shouldnt you try a few other channels too? What happens if a Google-bomb explodes or if you get banned for selling illegal black market circuit breakers? If your entire business depends on another entity over which you have no control well. Just dont do that.
Oh, and is no part of LiveWires ad bolded? Always make sure to have at least the high volume keywords of an ad group in your ad to increase relevance quality score and overall ad relevance.
Ahh Romi. For the longest time, Romis Boutique was the only ad shown on the AdWords login page. That gave me quite a bit of time to develop critiques. Rather than be witty and paragraph-y, Ill just bullet out feedback here:
What happened to sales when you doubled site traffic?
I looked at Romis site theres nothing about gifts there
Nobody makes money from customers checking out the wares.
Can I order from the site or not? Im confused.
Wait a second is Romi bidding on boutique?!?
All joking aside, these images all represent real businesses and real people – I applaud them for using Paid Search! It’s a great advertising medium for just about any business, whether youre a small clothing boutique, an organic caterer, a wallet manufacturer or a developer. However, just about everyone else is utilizing Paid Search too. Its important to follow best practices and make your business stand out from the competition.
Always remember kids; keep your keywords relevant, your ad copy fresh & unique and drive quality clicks!
Hey everybody, this is Chris and I’m a developer here at Seer Interactive. Today, I’m going to show you how to use the Google Analytics debugging tool to make sure your GA changes and code changes work without needing to wait 24 hours for the data to show up. We’ll be using the Google Analytics Debugging Tool. So let’s just get started!
On the left hand side of the screen here, I have the webpage in question and on the right hand side near the top, I have the HTML code for the webpage and at the bottom, I have my Apache log. So, when I go to the page and refresh it, I can see some stuff happening. We’ll see the HTML run, grab a picture, and try to grab the favorite icon. But we don’t have one, so it’s not there. No big deal.
Let’s take a quick look at the HTML first down here, somewhere on line 121. This is our Google Analytics code. It’s the top half of it that sets up the account and starts to track our page views. The second half is actually at the bottom. You’re allowed to split it. That’s OK.
This is our form. Somebody fills in the form, hits the submit button, and it sends them off to a PDF file. What we want to do is track when somebody hits that submit button and gets a PDF. That’s what we want to track.
So, to do that, you’ll need to get the Google Analytics debugging tool. To get that, just type in “google analytics debugger chrome” into Google. (Or just follow this link) And I think it’s the first link. Yup. There it is. Go ahead and install that plugin and what we need to have it turned on so I’m just going to right click on it and turn it on. (Correction: left click!) My plugin is already turned on so I’m ready to go.
Now that I’m ready to go, I’m just going to hit refresh one more time. Alright. Great. And I’m going to right click on any part of the page and click on inspect element. The first thing it’s going to do is send me to the elements page. We want to click over to the consoles page.
You can see that this consoles page shows us everything that’s happening with Google Analytics. So here’s our tracking code, and there it is, our tracking code as reported by Google Analytics. _trackPageView, and there it is again it’s tracking our page view. The rest of this stuff is just information parsed out from this giant URL. The hit ID, the referring URL, page, time, session time, local time, what my browser is, you know. Things of that sort.
What we’re going to be doing is filling in the form and what we want to see is our virtual page view show up at the bottom of this list as soon as we hit that submit button. So again, we’re looking for our tracking page view, this URL, and looking for it way down here at the bottom. So let’s go try it out!
Type into the form. Test, test, test, and my email address which is very much not a real email address, but that’s OK, and hit submit. It should show up here. Now, this is going to show up pretty quick because this is going to refresh and immediately go to a PDF which means all this stuff on the screen is going to go away. But I’m going to rewind the tape (video, actually) so we can actually see it and I’ll show you how it works.
So we hit submit now. Boom! There you go! Did y ou see it? You might have missed it. That’s OK. You’ll notice that before we hit submit, it did actually go to the form, register through the 3rd party data collection stuff for the form, and gave us back the PDF. So we know that the form itself worked and I’m pretty sure that our tracking worked too. But I’m going to rewind the tape (aka, the video) to check to make sure that works.
So this is ScreenFlow. This is the program I used to record this video but what I’m really interested in seeing is slowing down the time and watch the processing that’s happening.
So I’m right here, right at the point where we are about to hit the submit button. I’m going to scroll this over a little bit until maybe about… Hit submit now? There it is! I hit submit and we can see our tracked page view and our URL registered with Google. It actually sent the tracking beacon.
You’ll notice it hasn’t actually refreshed the page just yet. If I scroll a little bit further… there it is. It just refreshed the page, it grabbed the PDF, all of our information (on the screen) is gone and you’ll see the browser … just about here … there it goes… renders the PDF.
And that’s it! So now we definitely know this works so we can probably push this out to the real website and I’m pretty sure it’s going to work now.
So that’s it. Hopefully, it will help you guys out without having to wait 24 hours. Talk to you later!
