The new feature was not visible to me until just now where I noticed it’s activated on one of our clients:

What do you think about it and the effect it would have on the CTR of organic results?

That form was definitely helping to get more organic traffic to our local businesses, as it appeared above the top 10 organic results and not instead of them.

Today, while searching for one of clients keywords I’ve found a major change in the appearance of the map, which appeared above the organic and the map listings appeared blended within the top 10 search results instead of above them.

The thing is that when scrolling up and down the page, the map is hovering the Paid results on the right side and the organic results are even more emphasized than ever.

What do you think about the change? will it remain? how can google improve the local business results page?

This service used along with “user list criteria” to display ads to users that have previously expressed interested in your website. Currently there are three types of user lists:

A “remarketing user list” contains the list of users that have triggered a specific conversion event on your website.

A “logical user list” contains the set of users constructed by logically combining existing user lists.

“External remarketing user lists” expose user lists created using the DoubleClick platform and are only available for certain advertisers.

Read more on this service

We’ve also included short code snippets showing you how to manage LogicalUserLists.

All code snippets included in this post are based on the AdWords API DotNet Client Library, other client libraries also include code examples and support for remarketing.

// Get the UserListService.
UserListService userListService =
(UserListService)user.GetService(AdWordsService.v201008.UserListService);

try
{
// Add user list.
UserListReturnValue retval = userListService.mutate(new UserListOperation[] { operation });
if (retval != null && retval.value != null & retval.value.Length > 0)
{
UserList tempUserList = retval.value[0];
Console.WriteLine("User list with name \"{0}\" and id {1} was added.",
tempUserList.name, tempUserList.id);
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("No user lists were added.");
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("Failed to add user lists. Exception says \"{0}\"", ex.Message);
}

The new feature is using what many people considered to be a lost cause, in terms of SEO, the Tweeter.

If you’ll notice in many search results, where you’d usually see a box with related posts / articles, you can see next to many of them a link that says how many people have shared this news / post / article in tweeter.

Since Google had decided to call this feature “Shared by” and not “Tweeted by”, I can assume it can or will show more locations where the item had been shared and probably in the close future.

SES Chicago - Tween Count in Google

The Bid Simulator reaches a new level – Inside AdWords

A few weeks ago, we announced the launch of Estimated Top Impressions in the bid simulator. Today we’re announcing another improvement: the ability to view bid simulations across keywords in an ad group at once. With this launch, we hope to give you a faster and more scalable way of making bidding decisions across keywords in aggregate.

The ad group level bid simulator provides simulations for two types of changes:

1. Applying a single bid to all the keywords in the ad group.
2. Updating the ad group default bid (this only impacts those keywords that do not have their own keyword-level CPC bid and use the ad group default bid).

If you’re like many advertisers and manage your bids at the keyword-level, it may be worth taking a look at ad group level bid simulations: You could be surprised to find out that, in some cases, you could have achieved similar or better results had you managed your bids by using a single ad group default Max CPC bid.

The Bid Simulator reaches a new level – Inside AdWords

Unique Visitors

Okay but what if you want to know how many unique visitors visited a specific page or part of your website. All you need to do is go to the Custom Reports section and create a new report. Add the “Unique Visitors” metric, and the “Page” dimension.

Unique Visitors on Pages - Report Creation

Now create the report and by default you will get a list of the top 10 pages of your website, by unique visitors. All that is left is to filter the report according to the page or group of pages you want. For example, you want to know how many unique visitors visited an area of your website that has pages starting with “/new_section”. Enter that in the filter field below the report, and there it is:

Unique Visitors on Pages - Report

In my case I got 24,582 Unique Visitors that visited all pages that contain “/new_section”. Here is an interesting point: You can also see how many unique visitors visited each of the pages that matched the filter.

The new updated section is now consisted of 3 sections:

1. Who links the most
2. Your most linked content
3. How your data is linked

Does Google really want us all to have a better understanding of our ranking factors?

Until today I assumed that Google Webmaster Tools, are helping mostly with on-site related factors, but this step makes Google Webmaster Tools a much more relevant tool for SEOs.

What do you think?

Even More Reasons to Join the Sitelinks Party – Inside AdWords

Let’s say I land on Page A of mysite.com, spend 20 seconds there, then move on to Page B of mysite.com, spend 40 seconds there, and then move to Page C of mysite.com, spend 10 minutes there just reading but then close my browser. Since that is the last page on the visit, and there is no trackPageview call on a Page D, GA doesn’t know how long I spent on Page C, and records the time on that page as ZERO – 00:00:00 ! So for this visit scenario I will get:

Google Analytics - Time on Site Calculation

So if I’m looking at a Top Content report for mysite.com, specifically on the Avg. Time on Page metric for Page C, will Google Analytics include the 00:00 time pageviews when calculating that metric? The answer is NO !

Have a look at the following custom report on a separate tab (I added some text in red) when checking out the next calculations:

Google Analytics - Time Metrics Report

This report will demonstrate how GA calculates Avg. Time on Page (for a specific page) and Avg. Time on Site:

Avg. Time on Page = Time on Page / (Pageviews – Exits) = 668,252 / (17,309 – 12,103) = 128 sec.

Avg. Time on Page is actually the average time visitors spent on that page, except for when they exited from that page. So pageviews where an exit occurred are not factored in the calculation.

Do you want to factor in the pageviews where the users exited your site? You’ll have to make some assumptions. Let’s say you assume a user who exits the page spends 10 seconds in it in average. You can then calculate manually a new metric:

True Avg. Time on Page = Avg. Time on Page inc. Exit Pageviews =

(Time on Page + (30 * Exits)) / Pageviews = (668,252 + 10 * 12,103) / 17,309 = 45 sec.

Now that’s a huge difference from the original 128 sec. (35% of it!!!)  GA shows you, if you wanted to know more accurately how much time in avg. ALL users spend on that page! Including the ones who end the visit to your website on that page…