The relationship between a website and a search engine is complicated and often ambivalent. There are good days and bad days. There are benefits and frustrations. There are ups and downs both literally and figuratively. But as digital marketers, we can’t live without them.

For any relationship, they say communication is key. In the absence of heart-to-heart talks with Google, we have to take what we can get. With that being the case, the SEO insights view that connects Search Console and Google Analytics data is one of the best ways to find out what’s working in the relationship and what isn’t.

When evaluating your how your site performs in organic search, you want to measure what’s working well and look for opportunities to improve. For this analysis, Google gives you two tools, which you can now link together into one handy report.

Google Search Console, once known as Webmaster Tools, allows you to see data about your site’s positioning in organic search results. You can see clicks, impressions, and average position. You can also get information about how Google is crawling your site and review site errors that may be interfering with indexing.

In May 2016, Google released a deeper integration of Google Search Console data with Google Analytics. While Search Console integration has been available for many years, this data was always kept in its own section, separate from any data collected by Google Analytics. For the first time, data from Search Console actually appears alongside data from Google Analytics.

We all know a picture is worth a thousand words, but in some cases it’s worth a thousand metrics too. You can study numbers. Evaluate increases, decreases, rates, ratios and proportions. But sometimes, they don’t paint the whole picture. That’s why it may take an actual image to get the message.

As you’ve looked through the reports in Google Analytics, you may have come across the Treemaps report, buried under Acquisition > All Traffic. While some reports are fairly self-explanatory, it may be more difficult to figure out how to apply this data to your reporting. However, knowing how this report works allows you to visually analyze performance in a way other sections of analytics don’t.

First, it’s important to understand how Treemaps use colored rectangles to represent data. The larger the rectangle, the larger the data set for a primary metric (e.g., volume of Sessions). Colors indicate a high or low number within a data set for a secondary metric (e.g., Pages/Session). If you need a refresher on what’s what in Treemaps, we’ve covered the basics of Understanding the Treemaps Report in a previous post.

In this post, we'll delve further into how you can apply insights from this report to improve your analysis of a website’s performance.

There are thousands of marketing agencies in the United States. Depending on where you live, there may even be dozens of agencies in your immediate area or market. Today, more and more of these agencies are incorporating digital marketing to keep up with consumer demand. With so much money on the table for marketing, in an increasingly competitive space, how do you stand out in a sea of RFPs all on the hunt for ROI?

When pitching potential clients to become their digital marketing agency of choice, you need to identify the characteristics that set your company apart from others. These may include one or more of the following:

• Total years of experience for your staff and for your agency as a whole
• Level of experience working with clients in particular industries (healthcare, finance, etc.)
• Specializations in digital skillsets (linkbuilding, Google Shopping campaign setup, etc.)
• Integration of multiple digital skillsets (PPC, SEO, and content teams working together)
• Quality of work and record of success

In addition to these points, you should also strive to make reporting a key selling point for your agency.

Many agencies know how to do digital marketing. They may even do it well. But most don’t take the next step to communicate to their clients. In turn, client relationships suffer, and the agency suffers.

In this article, we’ll talk about why reporting matters and how to make your reporting process one of your agency’s unique selling propositions.

First, let’s look at how lack of proper reporting can hurt an agency.

When it comes to marketing, sometimes it makes sense to cast a wide net, and other times it’s better to use a meticulously sharpened harpoon. It all depends on what you’re trying to catch.

Fortunately, Facebook Ads give you all the tools you need to do both.

While countless marketers confess to having paid to “boost a post” on Facebook a few times, many have barely scratched the surface of getting the most out of Facebook’s powerful audience platform. Facebook lets you set goals, like putting your brand name in front of as many eyes as possible. But it also allows you to reach a precisely defined demographic on a level that even Google AdWords can’t match.

You should be taking the time to think out Facebook campaigns beyond the obvious options and format them in a way that allows you to test and improve your campaigns on an ongoing basis. In this article, we’ll cover 5 tips to help you make the most of Facebook advertising.

The idea of a more personalized digital experience is not new. We’ve seen trends toward localized search results, custom tailored marketing, retargeting that reflects our recent shopping behaviors, and email marketing that uses our names and seems to know our last interaction with the sender.

It’s as though the Internet is bending and shifting to mold itself to our unique wants, needs, and behaviors. Therefore, the latest addition to Google Analytics is not only on trend, it seems almost inevitable. The new User Explorer Report enables us to analyze the behavior of individual users.

We know, Google frequently introduces new features into Analytics and it can be difficult to stay on top of all the changes. But when new measurement opportunities become available, it’s worthwhile to spend some time with new reports. Any new section presents opportunities to find new ways to better analyze your audience. Especially this one.

Google Analytics has always shown anonymous, aggregated data. While there was the ability to view metrics broken down by subsets of individuals (all people in a certain city, new vs. returning visitors, etc.), you couldn’t see metrics correlated to one specific person. The User Explorer Report changes that, a bit. Of course, the information still is anonymous, but now you can view a history of actions for a single person. For example, you can view how many times a person came to the site, how long they spent on the site, what pages they visited, what goals they completed, what purchases they made, and more. Let’s take a closer look at this report and how you can apply it to your online marketing efforts.

Facebook has grown beyond a platform into an intricate world. We have memories, emotional states, events, groups and updates in an international, multi-generational, real-time ecosystem.

It’s no surprise that within this space we have powerful marketing opportunities. Getting the best results for your efforts means maximizing all of the options provided though the ad setup, audience targeting and customizations provided within Facebook’s Ads Manager.

The Facebook Ads Manager allows you to create, edit, and optimize your advertising campaigns within a web-based interface. While the Manager provides powerful options for customizing campaigns and evaluating metrics, the interface can also be somewhat unwieldy to learn. We’ll walk you through the process of creating a basic campaign, as well as how to look at performance.