In July, we received many questions about Google Plus One, Google’s Panda update and PPC advertising. If you have any questions you would like answered during our Monthly Marketing Q and A sessions, leave them in the comments below or click here to email us a question.
Google Plus One
Does Google Analytics track +1 activity?
The new version of Google Analytics tracks +1 activity. After you login, go to the social tab under visitors where you will see three sections: engagement, action and pages. Engagement measures the performance of visitors who interacted socially with content on your site (i.e. liking a post) vs those who did not. Action looks at the types of social actions (Facebook Likes, +1s) and breaks them down by percentage and pages looks at the content that is generating social interaction.
How do you track Google plus one in Webmaster Tools?
You should login to Google Webmaster Tools where you will notice a +1 panel on the left side. It allows you to measure three items search impact, activity and audience. Search impact looks at URLs that have been +1’d and calculates the before and after change in CTR. Activity looks at the number of +1s over a given period of time and audience looks at the number of unique users that have +1’d content on your site.
Google Panda
Was there another Panda update in July?
According to Search Engine Land, Google released a small Panda update on July 23rd. Google claims that they release hundreds of updates every year and sites that see sudden traffic drops shouldn’t automatically blame a Panda related change for their loss of traffic.
Are any other sites trying subdomains to recover from Google’s Panda update?
I can’t find any other sites penalized by the Panda update that have been doing subdomain testing, but I would imagine that they would want to keep their testing a secret. Earlier in July, Hubpages reported that they were testing the use of subdomain and had seen traffic return to pre-Panda levels for specific authors. The logic is that since each author is on a subdomain (ie WordPress.com hosted blogs), Google will then treat each one differently and correctly credit high quality content and still devalue low quality content. The company has yet to transition every account to a subdomain, but newer content is now published on authorname.hubpages.com. It will be interesting to see if other article sites that were hit hard follow the same format.
Can Google detect derivative content?
Google can direct copied or low value content uses document level classifiers and comparing new content to existing content in their index.
PPC Advertising
What is the ratio of organic clicks to ppc clicks?
I have heard it quoted from 60/40 to 70/30 in terms of the ration of organic to PPC clicks for any given result. However it is impossible to determine an exact ratio because of the number of ads for a particular search, whether the search has multimedia or large map results, the time frame of the search (whether a visitor needs immediate gratification or is just browsing) and how compelling ad copy and title tags are written.
What are the most expensive PPC keywords?
According to Spyfu the 10 most expensive keywords are:
- miami injury lawyer – $47.94
- lung association car donation – $43.93
- credit card transfer balance 0 – $41.30
- degree education master online – $37.54
- masters degree in criminal justice online- $35.14
- business apply credit card – $34.91
- chicago auto accident attorney – $34.26
- austin tx auto insurance – $33.17
- online master education degree – $32.22
- online associate degree in business – $31.74
From experience I can definitely say that mesothelioma and cerebral palsy related keywords should also be included in the top 5 but they may not be on the list because of the way that SpyFu gathers their information.
What industry has the most expensive CPC?
Wordstream recently released a report of the most expensive PPC industries that determined insurance (life, home, auto) was the most expensive industry. Rounding out the top five were loans, mortgage, attorney and credit.
Indexing Questions
Will google reindex co.cc sites?
As of today, Google has yet to reindex any of the millions of sites hosted on co.cc. Site owners could file a reconsideration request for their individual subdomains but any site owners that had legitimate sites hosted on co.cc should probably get their own domain or move existing content to another free hosting platform like WordPress.