If you’re running paid search campaigns in Google AdWords, and you don’t already use the Dimensions tab, you’re missing out on a ton of useful data. Rolled out in mid-2010, the Dimensions tab is one of the most important components of the AdWords UI. It allows you to view data for an entire account or specific campaign(s) that can be used to better target your customers, decrease wasteful spend, and improve conversions. At PPC Associates, our Production team relies heavily on the Dimensions tab to pull detailed reports on campaign behavior across different time periods or geos, and to better understand how and where our ads are being shown on both the search and content networks.

The Dimensions tab is located on the right-hand side of the tabs list in the AdWords UI. If you can’t already see it, click on the drop-down arrow at the end of the row to bring up the menu of available tabs.

Once you’re in the Dimensions tab, go to the “View” drop-down menu to see the types of data available. The screenshot below shows the main menu; for Time, Conversions, and Reach and frequency you have additional options, such as Day of the week, Day (date in time), Week, Month, Quarter, Year, or Hour of day.

So now that you know where to find this, how are you going to use it? There’s a ton of good stuff here, and obviously not all of it will be relevant to every campaign. If you’re not using track-able phone numbers in your ads, for example, the “Call details” option is not going to have any data for you. If your campaigns are only running on the search network, you won’t have any automatic placements to review. But take advantage of what you can. Here are a couple of examples of how we use the Dimensions tab at PPC Associates:

1)      Day parting. We usually run two types of day parting reports: day of the week and hour of day. You can pull the data separately, or you can use the advanced segmentation feature in AdWords to break it down by hour of day for each day of the week. Once you have the data in Excel, use conditional formatting to easily spot trends in campaign performance. This can then be used to optimize the campaigns; for example, you may choose to increase bids during time periods with high conversion rate and low CPA, or decrease bids when the opposite is true. If there’s a clear drop in performance during specific days or hours of day, you may even want to turn campaigns off during these low-performing time periods. In the sample data below, it’s clear that the hours of 5 am – 8 am do not perform well, whereas the hours of 4 pm to 8 pm have high conversion rates and low CPAs.

2)      Search query review. Being able to see the actual queries that cause your ads to show is powerful, both for finding terms you don’t want to show up on and getting new ideas for keywords. We all know that running keywords on broad match – or even modified broad match or phrase match – opens up a campaign to a wide range of search queries, many of which might not be relevant to what we’re advertising. The “Search terms” option in the Dimensions tab will let you see the queries triggering your ads. Use this data to promote high-performing queries by turning them into keywords with targeted ads, and also to scrub out unwanted terms. This is especially important when your campaigns include a lot of general keywords. Just imagine how many irrelevant queries you can get matched to when bidding on “will” (as in last will and testament) keywords. The screenshot below shows just a few out of thousands.

Clearly this is a very broad overview of the Dimensions tab and the ways you can use it to optimize your campaigns. There are a lot of different ways to use the data, and the “Customize columns” and advanced segmentation options let you slice and dice the data in innumerable ways. No time like the present to get in, start some tests, and figure out how to improve your campaigns with the options on hand.

-  Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily of Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

Here’s a brief overview of some of the changes you’ll notice:

First, Google says one of the new benefits is the ability to see search data from the original Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool.
What you’ll notice immediately  is the new keyword box. It now allows for a keyword search to be performed with a combination of keywords, a URL and  a category.

You can also compare your keywords by match type using one or more match types at the same time. For example, I can get both sets of search data for a broad search term and an exact search term at the same time just by checking both boxes under the match types.

The change that I’m most excited is the new “starring” capability. This allows you to star keyword ideas, which then saves them while you search for new ideas. Gone are the days of having to download your selected keywords between searches!

In addition, you can now download starred keywords only, all results, all keywords for certain queries or keyword ideas in bulk.

Finally,you have the ability to search within terms using the “more like these” option. So you star or select your keyword phrases that you like the best and search within those phrases to find even more related keyword ideas.

For SEOs these changes will definitely help when conducting keyword research for clients.  We’re excited to see future updates to Google’s keyword research tool!

If you like free SEM tools like the Google Keyword Research Tool, definitely check out Schipul’s SEM tools.

What’s included in this premium account?

The premium package includes a number of exciting upgrades and new features including more insights and around the clock support from a Google Analytics expert.

Some of Google Analytics Premium’s new features:

• 24/7 live support
• custom training and support
• lifted data limits
• attribution modeling
• more custom variables
• data collection & reporting guarantees

“Premium is everything you need to give everyone in your business the ability to make better data-driven decisions to move from data to insights to action faster than ever.”

Along with this release, Google reassured current users by stating they will continue to develop and enhance the free version of Google Analytics that we all know and love.

In Webmaster Tools, you can manage different types of sites:

• a plain domain name (schipul.com)
• a subdomain (www.schipul.com/staff or blog.schipul.com)
• a domain with a subfolder path (schipul.com/people/ed-schipul/)

Before this update, only links that started with the exact URL of your site would be categorized as an internal link. Google acknowledges that most people consider schipul.com and www.schipul.com as the same site these days, with or without the “dubdubdub” (aka www). So as Google loves to do, they are adapting to this change. If you add either the schipul.com or www.schipul.com URL versions as your site, links from both the www and non-www versions will correctly count as internal links. Subdomains will now also be included as internal links.

In their blog post, Google included this nifty table to further explain the changes being made to internal vs. external backlink organization in Webmaster Tools:

So what does this mean for you?

When you cross-link subdomains they will be considered as internal links and not as external links or inbound links. Keep in mind, the number of internal links pointing to a page tells search engines how important a specific page is.

Also, inbound links refer to external links or links that come from other sites.  They  have more clout because other people are linking to you. So let’s say someone is cross-linking to your sub domain URL, (blog.schipul.com), your domain (schipul.com) will receive more clout because it’s an inbound link. Of course, we all want more clout.

Which is better for SEO? Schipul.com/web-marketing vs. Schipul.com/web_marketing

According to Search Engine Land, Google and Bing handle dashes and underscores in URLs differently.

Google’s Matt Cutts, recently released this YouTube video update on the Underscores vs. Dashes question.

“Join on the Underscore, Separate on the Dash.”

Google says it’s better to stick with the dash to separate keywords in a URL. If you’re starting a new website and its brand new, Google encourages you to use dashes. This will allow you to add more easily searchable keywords into your URL and may help improve rankings.

However, if you have a website that’s successful in page rankings and has been around for a while, don’t worry about it. Underscores are fine to use for established websites. Cutts says the amount of impact it has in Google rankings is “relatively low” and he does not recommend going back and rewriting every single URL to use dashes because it’s just not worth it and may cause problems.

Do Dashes vs. Underscores Make a Huge Difference in Google?

Cutts states, “It doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s what we call a second-order effect. It’s not a primary thing that makes a huge difference.”

What About in Bing?

A Bing spokesperson responded to Search Engine Land by saying they do not differentiate at all between dash and underscore in their URL ranking features.

What Should Webmasters Do?

If you are launching a new site, then go ahead and use dashes in your URLs, in order to keep your keywords separate. According to Cutts, “when Google sees an underscore in a URL, it joins what’s before and after into one term.” However, if you have an existing site and using underscores in your URLs, don’t change them to dashes because it can cause technical problems and can impact your search rankings.

How to submit a URL Using “Fetch as Googlebot”

In Google Webmaster Tools, select the URL of the site which you want to submit. Once you are on the dashboard for that website, click Diagnostics in the right hand side menu.

Once the drop down menu expands, click “Fetch as Googlebot.” Then click fetch once you have entered the URL you wish to submit to Google. If the URL has been successfully fetched, you will see a “Submit to Index” link appear.

Photo Credit: Google Webmaster Central Blog

After you click the “Submit to Index” link, a dialog box will appear (like the one pictured below) that gives you the option of submitting the sole URL, or the URL and all of its linked pages.  We recommend the latter, “URL and all linked pages,” especially, for newly launched websites.

Photo Credit: Google Webmaster Central Blog

Google places a maximum limit of 50 individual URL submissions per week, per URL. If submitting URLs with linked pages, the maximum drops down to 10 submissions per month, so submit carefully. The fetch as Googlebot page will always give you an updated count of your submissions and how many you have remaining.

Key takeaways from the Intermediates Google Analytics webinar:

• Email notifications are available for any website you are tracking.
• Goal setting is highly recommended.
• Learn about funnel and funnel reporting.
• Learn how to set advanced filters to your Analytics reports.
• Of all the reports Google Analytics offers you, which metrics should you be caring the most about? Visits, visitors, traffic sources, and conversions.

If you need a quick recap of Google Analytics basics, take a look at this Intro to Google Analytics presentation.

We’ve got a number of fantastic upcoming training webinars that we hope you’ll check out.

Here’s a few of the Schipul webinar events coming up in August:

• 8-4-2011: Intro to Drupal – Learn basic content management and site editing through Drupal Software.
• 8-10-2011: Intro to Social Media for Business – Learn the ways your business can benefit from participating in online communities and social networks.
• 8-18-2011: Intro to Web Analytics – Learn the important basics of web analytics.
• 8-24-2011: Facebook Fan Page Optimization – Learn about taking your Facebook fan page to next level with this SEO for Facebook webinar.

Be sure to click the link and register for any or all of these great webinars for free!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the Schipul events on our calendar and remember SchipulCon 2011, our exciting web marketing conference, is taking place October 6-7 in Houston, TX. Register today!

Places pages will still link to these third party sites for a more well rounded search experience but only after showing Google user reviews. Google will no longer integrate the actual reviews from any other consumer rating websites into the page or the Place rating system. Take a look at the photo below to see what this looks like.

Another important change to note is that Google is now emphasizing a call to action at the top of companies’ Places pages with two new buttons encouraging users to “Write a review” and more easily upload photos from places they’ve been.

Having stellar, yet genuine, user reviews are a great way to bring in business and encourage new customers to try your services and check out your business. Places photos also do a lot to help your search engine optimization efforts. Not only do they give your customers visual insight to your company, they also get indexed in Google images. In order to optimize your Places presence, encourage your happy customers to write reviews directly on your Google Places listing.

Expect more Places pages upgrades to roll out soon. Google also notes forthcoming advancements for increased user personalization of local searches, as well as platform and device flexibility.

For more information, view Google’s official statement on “The Ongoing Evolution of Place Pages.” For more do-it-yourself SEO tips from the Schipul SEM team, visit our DIY SEO page.

With the roll out of the new Google +1 share button, chances are you will want to add this snazzy button to help optimize your website or blog. Installing the Google +1 share button is very simple.

Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js“></script>

Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render:

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

The button should look something like this on your website.

You can go here to create a custom +1 button and/or access some very helpful Google +1 button FAQs.

I tried to keep the theme not only how to use Analytics, but what to do with the numbers once you get them. In short, how to use Google Analytics to make Business decisions.

Decisions like:

• “Do we need a mobile site? What about a mobile app?”
• “Which geographical regions to we need to focus marketing on more?”
• “Are our Social Media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn driving people to our site? Are those people converting?”

The slides are posted on Slideshare.com/qcait and embedded below:

Big thanks to CultureMap Social Media Editor and former Schipulite Fayza Elmostehi for inviting me – it was a great group!

The next topic in the series is June 29 on Location-Based Applications – More info available here!