What’s New?
Google has done quite a lot to the old version of Analytics. The interface has been completely redesigned and is now faster than ever. There are also multiple dashboards that allow you to create a custom dashboard for each department. You can track Event Goals and you can even configure two-minutes of play time on a video as a goal.

Google has also unveiled more powerful reports, New Term Cloud visualization, the ability to link Adwords and Adsense accounts, In-Page Analytics and users of the old platform can easily migrate custom reports to the new platform.

New Google Analytics Features
Google has also included a number of innovative features to the new platform:

• Google Analytics Real-Time: Yes, Analytics finally offers real-time reporting that shows you exactly what is happening on your website ‘right now’. The reports are constantly updated and each pageview is reported within seconds of occurring.
• Multi-Channel Funnels: Do you want to know which channels your customers are interacting with prior to converting? Now you can with multi-channel funnels. You will be able to see which channels were interacted with during the 30 days prior to converting and the conversion path data also includes interactions with many media channels. These media channels include clicks from paid and organic searches, social media networks, affiliates, etc.
• Mobile Reporting: This feature lets you know how your mobile visitors are interacting with your website. You can even determine which mobile devices your visitors are using so that you can optimize your site for those devices.
• Reports: Google Analytics now offers a report email scheduler and PDF exporter.
• Flow Visualization: This is probably the most impressive of all of the new features offered by the new Analytics platform. Flow Visualization graphically shows you how visitors are navigating through your site. According to Google, this sophisticated tool was designed by completely re-imagining and redesigning the navigation tools that were available with the old version.

Google Analytics' Powerful New Flow Visualization

Google Analytics has been ahead of its time for some time, but now the platform is heading even further into the future. With a faster interface, state-of-the-art features and plenty more, there is no better way to keep track of your web traffic, conversions and everything else web-related.

Blue Riot Labs is WordPress Web Development company at the foot of the Rockies; Denver Web Developers.

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2012-02-27 Example Rankings Report

New Fully Customizable Header
The new Twitter brand pages feature an expanded header image area that allows you to display your logo and tagline much more prominently. The current layout causes the logo to look cramped and sometimes it’s hard to make out words or designs. With the new layout, there’s no mistaking what company the brand page belongs to.

Featured Tweets
If you want to highlight a specific tweet, you can cause it to stick at the top. Usually, a tweet is buried within minutes. But now, you can extend the shelf life of your individual tweets. What’s more, featured tweets will auto-expand, which allows you to embed a video or a photo from YouTube or Flickr.

Streamlined Responses
The new brand pages allow you to separate @replies from @mentions, which makes all the ‘Twitter noise’ much more manageable.

The new Twitter brand pages aren’t available for everyone yet. They’re still being rolled out, but if you want to see them in action you can look at several big name brand names that are using them. The Coca-Cola Twitter page is a good example, or you can check out the Nike and Disney Twitter pages, just to name a few.

New Layout For Easier Navigation
Besides brand pages, Twitter is also unveiling a new layout for regular users and businesses alike. This new layout is designed to help beginners who may not be familiar with Twitter lingo navigate the platform more easily.

So will Twitter’s new brand pages be used heavily by online marketers who may already have Facebook and Google+ brand pages? That remains to be seen. Twitter seems a little late to the party and the platform is still way behind Facebook in the numbers. But these are exciting features. For one, multimedia is taking a much more front-and-center approach, which means that Twitter is paying attention to the content that is being shared heavily on its platform. And for marketers this is especially important. With sticky videos and photos on your brand page, your promotions, campaigns and multimedia will be seen by more people than ever.

What do you think about the new Twitter brand pages? Do you plan to use the new brand page layout in your marketing campaigns when the feature becomes available to you, or do you have so much going on already that social marketing fatigue starting to set in? Let us hear from you in the comments section below.

Not Ready
Your customers may not be ready to commit. What do you do about it? You can try to entice them with a better deal. Auto popup windows that offer a discount on their purchase or free shipping seem to work well. Entice the customer to buy and he probably will.

High Shipping Prices
Your customers may be ready to make their purchases, but the cost of shipping may stop them from committing. If after checking your site’s analytics you feel that high shipping prices are costing you sales, consider other options to help save your customers money.

Comparison Shopping
If your customers are bouncing because they want to see if a competitor is cheaper, beat them to the punch. It’s easy to put a comparison chart on your site showing that your website offers the best deals. Of course, your website will have to actually offer the best deals for this to be effective.

Saving for Later
If your customers are abandoning their carts early, they may be biding their time. They may not be ready to commit later, but they may want to save those items in their cart for when they are ready to buy. This is where follow up becomes very important. Nurture your customers and make it easy to remain in the backs of their minds. When they are ready to buy, let them know that their items will be waiting in their carts when they’re ready to return.

Too Much Information
Some customers abandon their shopping cart because the sales process asks for too much information. Customers these days don’t like it when they feel as though they’re being data mined. Ask for only the basic information you need to complete the transaction and that’s it. You may also want to study competitors’ check-out forms to see what types of questions they’re asking.

Confusing Checkout
Don’t make your customers jump through hoops to buy your products. Your customers should be able to make a purchase with minimal clicks through your site. And make use of breadcrumbs so that your customers can always go back one or more steps in the online shopping process.

The above shopping cart abandonment problems can be avoided by simply focusing on the needs of your customers. Make it easy for your customers to buy from you and try to pass on savings whenever possible. This will decrease shopping cart abandonment issues and increase conversions, guaranteed.

Educate and Inform
To help you attract more leads, try offering your audience information related to your products and services. Maybe teach your customers how to use your products effectively or you can provide tips and tricks to make your products or services more efficient. The use of e-books and e-reports work well and your potential customers should be able to download the material easily from your site, after entering their contact information of course.

Make It Easy
To increase your conversion rates, make it easy for your leads to become subscribers. Don’t ask fifty questions, as most people don’t have that kind of time or patience. Instead, just ask for their email address or at most their name a phone number.

Track Your Leads
You should be tracking the conversion of your leads, whether it took one day or it took three months. This usually requires the use of software, such as provided by Blue Riot Labs partner Net Results. By tracking your leads from initial contact to conversion, you will have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.

Have Solid Goals
Before you put any time, money or energy into your lead generation campaign, make sure you have clear objectives set with realistic expectations.

Nurture Your Leads
As you know, there are many stages to the buying cycle. A new lead may not be interested in buying now, but that person may want to buy from you three months from now after they’ve conducted the proper research on your company and products. Nurture your leads over time and you’ll be more likely to generate loyal customers and repeat buyers.

Multiple Opportunities
Don’t think of each lead as a single sale. Each lead you generate can convert into multiple opportunities with the use of techniques like cross and up-selling. Instead of turning a lead into just one income stream, it’s always better to generate multiple revenue opportunities for every lead you generate.

Follow Up
Internet users want information right now, not later. As soon as you generate a lead, follow up with that person right away. It is best to contact a person within the first five minutes of initial contact if you want to qualify and convert that lead into a buying customer.

Online lead generation is critical if you want to corner more of the online market share from your competitors. But as we head into 2012, these tips become more important than ever. The online world is changing drastically and quicker than ever and these tips will help to keep you ahead of the fold.

And remember, you can automate your marketing so that you always know exactly what your leads are up to no matter where they’re at in the buying process.
Do you have lead generation tips you’d like to add as we head into 2012? Let us know in the comments section below.

Organize Your Fans
Google+ allows you to separate your fans into circles, allowing you to provide customized and highly targeted content to specific types of people. Your audience likely has divisive opinions, wants and needs. Separate your audience into various circles so that they always get what they’re looking for.

‘Hangout’ With a Bigger Audience
With Google+ Hangouts, you can have on-camera chats with your audience, putting a live face behind your brand. Sure, Facebook has Skype, but that only allows communication between two people. With Hangouts, you can have face-to-face chats with as many people as you want, which will give your brand much more personality. Michael Dell of Dell Computers, for example, recently toyed with the idea of using Hangouts for customer service and sales purposes.

Track Who Is Sharing Your Content
With the +1 feature, you can see who shared your video, your article, blog or anything else. This allows you to see firsthand what your audience responds to and what they don’t quite respond to. You can then tailor your future content to fit your audience’s needs exactly.

Integration With Other Google Services
Google+ has made it really tempting to switch from Facebook, as your profile and notifications are all there in your Google search page. You can also share content with your audience without having to switch from the search page. If you are already using Gmail, Google Docs, Search and other Google services, you will find using Google+ to be quite handy. Plus, you can bet that Google+ will have a significant influence on search engine results now and in the near future.

Less Noise
Facebook is filled with news updates and birthday announcements and of course there is your friend Sally’s dentist appointment that she’s nervous about. Google+, on the other hand, provides relevant content without all that clutter and noise. Content is much easier to find, since the search engine functionality is built in, and then you have the fact that there are only 40 million or so Google+ users as opposed to 800+ million Facebook users. While Google+’s numbers are bound to increase, chances are Google will still work hard to provide relevant content without all the confusion.

5 Tips for Optimizing Google+ for Business

1. Compelling ‘About’ Tab
Your ‘About’ tab is what others see in the search results and during Google+ searches. Make your About tab compelling so that people will want to click on your profile to learn more.
2. Choose Main Image Carefully
Your main profile image (Or images. You can select more than one.) should be professional and easy on the eyes. After all, your image is often going to be your first impression with any new visitors to your profile.
3. Hangout With Your Audience
Put some personality and interactivity behind your brand by engaging in face-to-face Hangouts. Use your creativity and imagination and show your audience that you are nothing like your competitors.
4. Be Helpful
Instead of pushing your offers every chance you get, offer helpful tips, tricks and advice. If your audience sees you as caring and helpful, they will be more likely to stick around and come back for more. And don’t forget all the +1s you’ll get for your content.
5. Comment On Like-Minded Posts
Find others in your field and leave engaging comments. Try to get a meaningful discussion going. This will create more exposure for your brand and people will begin paying attention whenever you post.

If you don’t yet have a Google+ business page, I recommend heading over there and signing up now. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, by signing up and harnessing the power of Google, you will get a nice leg up on the competition.
Have you tried Google+ for business? Have you seen success with it? We’d love to hear your story.

The Wrong Landing Page
Even if you have the best ads in the world, if you send your visitors to a crappy landing page, you’ll experience a higher than normal bounce rate. Your website should have professional design and the information should be easy to find. Furthermore, make sure the ad sends your traffic to the appropriate page. Sending your ad traffic to your home page will only force them to search for what they came to see, and few people, if any, are going to take the time to do that.

Setting Too Low of an Advertising Budget
It is wise to try and save money when you are just starting out with PPC marketing, but starving your PPC budget will only cause your ads to show up intermittently. Your customers may need to see your ads a few times before they choose to click-through and buy. Make sure your ads are showing up when your searchers do, and you can do this by setting an appropriate budget that always shows your ads at the appropriate times.

Bidding Too High Or Too Low
When bidding on keywords, if you go too high you may end up getting into a bidding war with other PPC advertisers. And if you go too low, your ads may not show up on the first page of the search results. Experts recommend bidding enough to achieve positions four through seven. Then, you can optimize to try and reach the top spots. This will help you keep your cost-per-clicks down while improving your conversion rates at the same time.

Trying to Predict Search Behavior
Some PPC advertisers think they know when and how their searchers operate. Instead of trying to predict this behavior, consult your PPC account reports. By analyzing this data, you will get a better idea of when and how your ads should be displayed. It is always best to have your ads running as much as possible so that you can get an accurate assessment of when traffic peaks and when people are ready to buy.

Pay-per-click marketing puts your ads in front of the people who are looking for those ads. But it is easy to become overwhelmed. By keeping away from the above mistakes, you will experience better click-through rates and higher conversions for your advertising dollar.
Do you have any PPC tips you’d like to share, or mistakes you think advertisers should stay away from? Let us know in the comments below.

• Out of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones in use, 1.08 billion are smartphones
• Smartphones comprise 27% of all mobile phone use
• 3 billion mobile phones are SMS enabled
• 86% of mobile web users are watching TV while using a mobile phone
• 1/3 of all mobile phone users access Facebook from a mobile device
• 91% of all mobile internet is social related
• By 2014, mobile web should overtake desktop internet usage

Looking at these numbers, one thing is clear. Mobile web is here to stay and SEO professionals can no longer afford to ignore this fast-growing audience. Let’s just take a look at a few of the ways mobile web marketing is changing SEO forever.

Image Searches: There are several mobile apps that allow mobile users to search the web using images they take on their phone or even with photos taken that instant. For example, if you are looking for a particular gift for a loved one and you see it at the store, only it’s too expensive, you can take a picture with your phone and you can instantly find that item somewhere else close by for less. Are your site’s images optimized for this form of search?

Type-Searching: Desktop users take no time at all to type out a long keyword phrase. But try doing that on a standard mobile type-pad. Instead, mobile users are starting to search for shorter keyword strings. This means that mobile users are relying far more on predictive text or on search engine suggestions. How will this affect the way you optimize your site and go about link building in the future?

Going Social: SEO is all about sociability these days. If you want to connect to your audience and remain relevant, mobile web is where it’s at.

Geo-Targeting: Many phones come with GPS technology these days and many apps are using the user’s location to enhance the phone’s functionality. Google, for example, often gives you local search results first before any others. But with mobile phones being used in multiple locations, search results are likely to fluctuate more on mobile devices than on any other. If your website’s local search page isn’t optimized or complete, you may want to put this at the top of your list of things to do.

The Immediacy: It is said that 70% of mobile hotel bookings were for same day check-ins. And 38% of mobile flight bookings were for trips departing within 10 days. Knowing this, will you consider changing the offers or content you show to your site’s mobile visitors?

You can expect mobile web use to continue to expand as new technologies emerge to make things simpler, faster and more accessible for users than ever. What do you think of this current trend? Have you altered your SEO efforts because of the mobile web phenomenon?

Of course, you will need to actually go above and beyond so that you don’t get any bad reviews or comments in the process. However, if you offer quality services and great customer service and you are anxious to start receiving all the positivity you can get, here are five tips to help you encourage your customers to make their voices heard.

Link Review/Comment Profiles On Your Site
Many businesses are now leaving links to Yelp and other review/comment-oriented platforms on their websites. By providing links to these sites, you can control the review process. And you can also encourage your site visitors to leave reviews and comments merely by asking. You can further make incentives for the review process by suggesting that you will put select reviews/comments on your website.

Don’t Ask for Positive Reviews
While it is ok to ask your website viewers to leave a review or comment, you shouldn’t ask for positive ones. It may backfire on you. Just encourage reviews and comments period and let your customers decide how well you are doing. As long as you are providing quality and great customer service, you should do fine.

Follow Up With Customers After the Sale
It is always a good idea to contact your customers right after the sale is complete. This way, you can correct any problems the customer might have before you get any bad reviews. Then, once the customer is satisfied, you can ask for a review that will surely be positive.

Make It Easy to Complain
If you put a complaint form on your site and you respond to complaints quickly, your miffed customers will be less likely to leave a bad review/comment. If you do get a complaint, don’t be defensive and don’t be rude. Just take care of the problem and focus on creating a satisfied customer. If you go the extra distance to make sure the customer is happy, that person will be more likely to leave a glowing review about your business.

What If You Do Get a Negative Review or Comment?
If someone decides to really lay into your business online, don’t panic. Never let your emotions get the best of you. Instead, respond to the review or comment in a positive way. Focus on contacting that customer and resolving the issue. If the review is anonymous, fix the issue if possible, especially if it has to do with the way you do business. Some reviews are based on nonsense and lots of people like to be ugly when the internet affords them anonymity. Don’t feed the trolls. But do work on satisfying everyone you do business with. When it comes to reviews and comments, remember: if you are good to your customers, they will be good to you.