One of the mysteries of the huge increase in direct traffic this month coming from IE7 browsers was solved when it was determined that AdRoll retargeting was one of the focuses of the spam bot. However, the issue is a lot more widespread than initially believed. In an email to The SEM Post, Stephanie Sibal […]
Archives for July 2014
You Can Now Filter Bots & Spiders in Google Analytics
While there have been complicated workarounds for discounting bots in Google Analytics, Google has never offered a way for users to automatically filter various bots. However, with more bots executing javascript, which executes the Google Analytics script on the page, it is definitely causing some users’ data to become skewed, particularly if they get hit […]
Where Do They Get All Those Wonderful Toys? A Twitter Ads Refresher
Twitter Ads has been my personal muse for some time now, and that notion hasn’t slowed down one bit. Why? Much like their counter parts at Facebook, the Twitter Ads team continues to innovate and drive their advertising platform forward. Seriously, I catch myself mumbling, “where do they get all of those wonderful toys!” The […]
Google+ Account No Longer Required For Hangouts & New Google Apps For Business Support
One of the requirements for Hangouts on Air that annoyed some users was that users who wanted to participate had to sign in with a Google+ account and made it hard for businesses to easily use it as a platform for online meetings. Google has dropped this requirement now and users will only need to […]
Quality Score: 7 New Things You Don’t Have to Worry About
Recently, Google released a provocative new White Paper on AdWords Quality Score, setting the industry mildly abuzz. Google rarely releases supplementary information about its formula beyond the formal information in its core help files. Perhaps Google is simply “clarifying” how Quality Score works in order to cut through a sea of misinformation. It was a […]
Image Search Startup Madbits Acquired by Twitter
Twitter has acquired Madbits, an image search deep learning startup based out of New York. Over this past year, we’ve built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. […]
AdRoll Retargeting Bot Attack Behind the IE7 Traffic Surges
Earlier this month, many people began noticing a huge surge in direct traffic on many websites, but primarily coming from an IE7 browser and from within the US. This direct traffic was well outside of the ordinary but it was also skewing analytics data for many webmasters. Barry Schwartz was the first to publicize the […]
Product Reviews & Ratings Changing in Google Shopping & Product Listing Ads
Google is adding new product ratings into Product Listing Ads. They are using a five-star rating system for ads appearing on Google.com and Google Shopping at google.com/shopping/ Google is implementing the ratings as they feel it will drive more traffic to Product Listing Ads and during their testing, they found it increased the CTRs. This […]
Google Domains Invites Available Through Google Employees
Google Domains is edging closer to being available to the public. Several Google employees were making invites available to people in their circles on Google+ (you can easily find more people handing out invites). John Mueller is the most visible Google employee offering invites to SEO types (although he is now out of them). This […]
Lifting the Veil on Those Secret SEO Chats: State of the Industry
I’m watching an interesting SEO debate unfold in a secret SEO chat-space. There are about 80 people involved, many of them well known in the industry. They have an open channel with each other where an ongoing daily conversation has lasted several years. Over the last hour, an intense conversation has covered the relationships between […]