DiscoverTec Blog

Smartphones, tablets, and computers run our lives these days. In very little time technology has exploded in the market and now, many people cannot imagine a life without it. To understand how we got from back in the dark ages (which really wasn’t all that long ago) to where we are today, it is important to understand how technology evolves.

One of the most important things to check at least once a week are what search terms are being triggered by your keywords. You can get a partial list of search terms by navigating to a specific Adgroup in Adwords, clicking on the Keywords tab and selecting Search Terms from the sub-navigation.

When not analyzing the latest traffic data or sifting through a list of search terms, I find myself meticulously piecing together small beads to resemble video game sprites from the 8 – 32 bit era of gaming (I just now realized how boring I am). From spilling hundreds of beads on the carpet to warping plates beyond the point of recognition, I thought I’d share some wisdom I’ve gathered over the years of making Perler bead projects.

When running an Adwords campaign, it’s important to know the different ways you can target search terms. Having a list of broad keywords may lead to wasted ad spend, while having a list of exact keyword matches might be creating low volume returns; be sure to know which match type makes sense for your campaign.

While knowing information about different dimensions and demographics inside Google Analytics, there’s very little out-of-the-box data you can gather from specific elements that exist on a webpage. Elements like buttons, download links or anything else interactive have to be manually accounted for with events.

Setting up a Google Analytics account is something you’ll want to get right the first time. If you’re unfamiliar with the process, there are a few details which can cause problems.

One of the most important filters you can place within your Google Analytics view is the IP address filter. Something that many people forget to block is traffic from their own computer, be it their work computer or the one they use at home. Having personal traffic data mixed with actual customer data can create misinformation about user behavior and skew your data.

One of the first steps to starting any marketing campaign or optimizing a website is to do keyword research. But which keywords should you target? There are a few easy sources you can immediately draw from to get an idea of what your content should contain.

In the previous sections, identifying referral spam traffic and eliminating referral spam traffic were covered. So what else is there? While it may seem easy to monitor for new, spam sources, some months might see a heavier flow of junk referral traffic than others. It wouldn’t be uncommon to only have 2 new junk sources to filter one month, then the next month have 7. Therefore, it would be prudent to add a filter to reduce the amount of potential new spam sources; helping managing them on a month to month basis.

Part one covered how to identify spam referral sources within Google Analytics. This part will focus on how to filter them out from appearing in future data. Even with a filter in place, historical data cannot be change, so it’s important to know that a filter will only work for data that is collected after a filter has been put into place. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get clean data from a spam-ridden referral section.