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marți, 24 septembrie 2013

What's an UNGA?

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Today, President Obama delivered a speech at UNGA -- the United Nations General Assembly -- in New York City. The President expressed optimism at the prospects for diplomacy in solving a range of long-simmering conflicts across the globe:

"For decades, the United Nations has in fact made a difference -- from helping to eradicate disease, to educating children, to brokering peace," he said. "But like every generation of leaders, we face new and profound challenges, and this body continues to be tested. The question is whether we possess the wisdom and the courage, as nation-states and members of an international community, to squarely meet those challenges; whether the United Nations can meet the tests of our time."

Find out more about President Obama's UNGA trip.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, N.Y., Sept. 23, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon)

When Keyword (not provided) is 100 Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? - Whiteboard Tuesday

Posted: 23 Sep 2013 04:05 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

For nearly two years, marketers have been frustrated by a steadily increasing percentage of keywords (not provided). Recent changes by Google have sent those numbers soaring. The site Not Provided Count now reports an average of nearly 74% of keywords not provided, and speculation abounds that it won't be long before 100% of keywords are masked. Without that referral data, our tasks as Internet marketers become far more difficultâ€"but not impossible.

In this special Whiteboard Tuesday, Rand covers what marketers can do to make up for this drastic change, finding data from other sources to stay on top of their SEO efforts.

For reference, here's a still image of today's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday! Today I'm going to talk about this extremely troublesome and worrisome problem that Google has expanded "keyword (not provided)" potentially to 100% of all organic referrals. This isn't necessarily that they've flipped the entire switch, and everyone's going to see it this week, but certainly over the next several months, it's been suggested, we may receive no keyword data at all in referrals from Google. Very troubling and concerning, obviously, if you're a web marketer.

I think it should be very troubling and concerning if you're a web user as well, because marketers don't use this data to do evil things or invade people's privacy. Marketers use this data to make the web a better place. The agreement that marketers have always hadâ€"that website creators have always hadâ€"with search engines, since their inception was, "sure, we'll let you crawl our sites, you provide us with the keyword data so that we can improve the Internet together. I think this is Google abusing their monopolistic position in the United States. Unfortunately, I don't really see a way out of it. I don't think marketers can make a strong enough case politically or to consumer groups to get this removed. Maybe the EU can eventually.

But in any case, let's deal with the reality that we're faced with today, which is that keyword not provided may be 100% of your referrals, and so keyword data is essentially gone. We don't know when Google sends a visitâ€"Bing, to their credit, and to Microsoft's credit, enduringly has kept that data accessibleâ€"but we don't know when Google sends a visit to our sites and pages, what that person searched for. Previously, we could do some samplingâ€"now we can't even do that.

There are some big tasks that we use that data for, and so to start with, I want to try and identify the uses for keyword referral data, at least the very important ones as I perceive themâ€"there are certainly many more.

Number one: finding opportunities to improve a page's performance or its ranking. If you see that a page of yours is receiving a lot of search traffic, or that a keyword is sending a lot of search traffic (or even a little bit of search traffic), but the page is not ranking very well, you know that by improving that page's ranking you have an opportunity to earn a lot more search traffic. That's a very valuable thing as a marketer. You can also see if a search query is sending traffic to a page, but that page has a high bounce rate for that traffic, low pages-per-visit, low conversion rate, you know, "hey, I'm not doing a good job serving the visitor; I need to improve how the page addresses that." That's one of the key things we use keyword referral data for.

Secondarily: connecting rank improvement effortsâ€"things that we do in the SEO world to move up our rankingsâ€"to the traffic growth that we receive from them. This is very important for consultants and for agencies, and for in-house SEOs as well, to show our value to our managers, and our clientsâ€"it's really, really tough to have this data taken away.

C: Understanding how your searchers perceive your brand and your content. When we look down the list of phrases that sent us traffic, we could see things like "oh, this is how people are thinking about my brand, or thinking about this product I launched, or thinking about this content that I've put out." Really challenging to do that nowadays.

And D: uncovering keyword opportunities. We could certainly see, "this is sending a small amount of traffic, this is doing some long-tail stuff, heyâ€"let's turn this into a broader piece of content. Let's try and optimize for some of those keyword phrases that we're barely ranking on." Or, we have a page that's not really addressing that keyword phrase that we're ranking on. We can address that. We can improve that.

So I'm going to try and tackle some relatively simplistic ways, and I'm not going to walk through all the details you would need to do this, but I think many folks in the SEO and marketing sphere will address these over the weeks and months to come.

Starting with A. How do I find opportunities to improve a page's ranking or its performance with users when I can't see keyword referral data? How do I know which page people are coming to? Thankfully, we can use the connectionâ€"the intersection of a few different sources of data. Pages that are receiving search visits is a big one, and this is going to be used throughoutâ€"instead of looking at keyword-level data, we're going to be looking at page-level data. Which pages received referral visits from Google Search? Thankfully, that's still data that we do get, and that'll likely stay with us, because we can always see a referral source, and we know which pages are loaded. So, even if Google Analytics were to remove that, I think a third-party analytics provider would step in.

Pages receiving search visits plus rank-tracking data can get us a little close to this, because we can essentially say, "hey, we know this page is ranking well for these five or ten keywords that we have some reasonable expectation that they have keyword search volume. They're receiving search visits, and yet they're not performing well, or they're not ranking particularly well, so improving them should be able to drive up our search traffic, improving their performance with users should be able to drive up our conversion rate optimization.

Optionally, we could also add in things like Google Webmaster Tools or AdWords data; AdWords data being used on they keyword side to fill in for, "hey, what's the volume that a keyword is getting," and Google Webmaster Tools data to be able to see a list of some keywords that maybe are sending us traffic. Dr. Pete wrote a good post recently about the relative accuracy of Google Webmaster Tools, and while unfortunately it's not as good as any of the other methods, it's still not awful, and so that data is potentially usable.

This will give us a list of pages that get search visits, or are targeting important search terms, that rank, and that have the potential to improve. So this gets us to the answer to this question. This used to be really simple to get at, now it's more difficult, but still possible.

B. Connecting our SEO efforts to traffic growth from search. I know this is going to be tremendously hard, and this is probably one of the biggest tolls that this change is taking on SEO folks. Because as SEOs, as marketers, we've shown our value by saying, "look, we're driving up search visits, some of it's branded, some of it's unbranded, some of it's not providedâ€"but you get a rough sense of this. And you really need that percentage: "What percent of the traffic is actually you going and getting us new visitors that never would have found us, versus branded stuff that's just sort of rising on its own." Maybe it's rising because of efforts that marketers are making: investments in content, and in social media, and in email and all these other wonderful things, but it's hard to knowâ€" it's hard to directly map that.

So here's one of the ways. Optionally, we can use AdWords to bid on branded terms and phrases. When we do that, you might want to have a relatively broad match on your branded terms and phrases so that you can see keyword volume that is branded from impression data. That gives you a sense of, "what's the trajectory, here?" If we're seeing it grow, we can identify "oh, that's not us driving a bunch of new non-branded new keyword terms and phrases; that's our brand search increasing." So we can sort of discount that, or apply that in our reporting effectively. If we see, on the other hand, that it's staying flat, but that search traffic overall is going up and to the right, then we know that's unbranded.

Optionally, if we don't want to be bidding and spending a lot of money with Google AdWords and trying to keep our impression counts high, we can use things like Google Insights or even downloading AdWords volume data estimates month-over-month to be able to track those sorts of things.

Certainly one of the things I would recommend doing even prior to this change is tracking rankings on buckets. Buckets of head terms, versus chunky middle, versus long-tail; so phrases that are getting lots of search volume, a good amount of search volume, and very little search volume. You want to have different buckets of those, so you can see, "oh hey, my rankings are generally improving in this bucket, or that bucket." Same with branded vs. non-branded; you want to be able to identify and track those separately. Then, compare against visits that you're seeing to pages that are ranking for those terms. We need to look at the pages that are receiving search traffic from those different buckets.

Again, much more challenging to do these days. But, any time we see the complexity of our practice is increasing, we also have an opportunity, because it means that those of us who are savvy, sophisticated, able to track this data, are far more useful and employable and important. Those organizations that use great marketers are going to receive outsized benefits from doing so.

C: How do I understand and analyze how searchers perceive my brand? What are they searching for that's leading them to my site? How are they searching for terms related to my brand? Again, we can bid on AdWords terms, like I talked about. You can use keyword suggestion sources like Google Suggest, Ubersuggest, certainly AdWords's own volume data, SEMRush, etc. to see the keyword expansions related to your brand or the content that's very closely tied to your brand. And internal site search data. You've got a search box up in the top-right hand corner, people are typing in stuff, and you want to see what that "XYZ" is that they're typing in. Those can help as well, and can provide you some opportunities that lead to D.

D: How do I uncover new keyword opportunities to target? Of course, there's the classic methodology that we've all employed, which is keyword research, but usually we compare that to the terms that are already sending us traffic, and we go look and say, "oh, okay, we're doing fine for theseâ€"we don't need to worry." Now, we need to take keyword research tools and add some form of rank-tracking data. That could be from Google Webmaster Tools despite its mediocrity in terms of accuracy. We can use manual rank dataâ€"we can search for it ourselvesâ€"or we can use automated data.

One of the criticisms for all rank-tracking data is always, "but there's lots of personalization and geographic localizationâ€"these kinds of things that are biasing searchesâ€"how do I see all of that?" And the answer is, well, you can't really. Personalization is going to fluctuate things. It may be sort of included in the Google Webmaster Tools data, but as Dr. Pete showed in his post, it looks a little funky right now.

For localization, you can add the geo in the string to be able to see where you rank in different geographies if you want to track those. That's something you'll be able to do in Moz Analytics and probably many of the other keyword tracking tools out there, too.

Optionallyâ€"and this is expensive, and I hate to say this is Google being evil, but this is probably what Google wants you to do when they give you "(not provided)"â€"which is run AdWords campaigns targeting those keywords, so that you can see new expansion opportunities. Areas where, "oh hey, we bid on this, it sent impressions, it sent some traffic, it looks like it's worthwhile, we're not ranking for it organically," and again, you can see that through your rank-tracking data or through pages receiving visits from search, and then targeting those terms.

So, a lot of this data, and a lot of these opportunities are retrievableâ€"they're just a lot harder. I will sayâ€"this is somewhat self-promotional, but I think one of Moz's missions and obligations as a company to the search marketing world is to try and help replace, repair, and make these processes easier. So, you can guess that over the next 6-12 months that's going to be a big part of our roadmap: trying to help you folksâ€"and all marketersâ€"get to this data.

For now, these methodologies can and should be helpful to you, and I expect to see lots of great discussion about other ways to go about this in the comments.

Thanks, everyoneâ€"take care.

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Seth's Blog : Deleting 'must have' features

Deleting 'must have' features

One way to invent a new category is to delete the must have features that others insist a product or feature or design has to have in order to be worth something.

Another way is to build in features that others say can't possibly appeal to more than just a few.

• Email to a friend •

luni, 23 septembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Illusion of Prosperity: Deflating the American Dream; No Recovery in "Real" Income
Europe Hooked on Easy Money Too: ECB President Draghi Threatens Another LTRO, Sings Praises of Excess Liquidity
Reflections on Conspiracy Theories and Sensible Accounting by Reader "Alice", 89 Years Young; True Meaning of Banking Safely

Illusion of Prosperity: Deflating the American Dream; No Recovery in "Real" Income

Posted: 23 Sep 2013 12:20 PM PDT

In The Morning After; Price Discovery is Zero; PUT on the Bond Market? Is Inflation Really Under 2%? I posted a chart with a caption of "wages" but the corresponding chart showed "income".

The post is now fixed, but newer data has come in, and Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives has updated charts that I would like to share.

click on any chart for a sharper image

From Median Household Income Growth: Deflating the American Dream, by Doug Short.

What is the single best indicator of the American Dream? Many would point to household income growth. My study of the Census Bureau's data shows a 600.7% growth in median household incomes from 1967 through 2012. The ride has been bumpy, but it equates to a 4.5% annualized growth rate. Sounds impressive, but if you adjust for inflation using the Census Bureau's method, that nominal 614.2% total growth shrinks to 18.8%, a "real" annualized growth rate of 0.39%.

But if we dig a bit deeper into the method of inflation adjustment, the American Dream looks more like an illusion, as in "money illusion".

The data for the charts is from Sentier Research. Sentier uses the CPI as the deflator for computing their real household income data series.

The above chart goes back to 1968. It shows that income growth since 1968 is nearly all inflation. Closer scrutiny shows "real" income growth has been negative since the year 2000.

Incredible Shrinking Income

Please consider this chart from Real Median Household Incomes: Another Monthly Decline by Doug Short.

Real median incomes are down 7.3% since 2000. That means at least half of the population is worse off now than 13 years ago!

Think the CPI is a flawed measure? Doug Short has a comparison using different deflators, including the Alternate-CPI from John Williams' Shadowstats.

Doug comments "The Alternate CPI is a rather bizarre outlier. What this deflator is telling us translates into something like this: The 1967 median household income of $7,143 chained in 2012 dollars would have had the purchasing power of $185,588."

By the way, a close look at the above chart shows that the Williams' deflator is 72% since 1989, not all the way back 1967!

Although it's easy to believe CPI is off somewhat, "bizarre" is a polite description of how far off Williams is in the other direction. And Williams' views of hyperinflation in the US and when it is likely, go far beyond bizarre to the point of absolute ridiculousness.

No Recovery in Real Economy

While Bernanke can talk of "recovery" things started deteriorating badly, not in 2008 but all the way back in 2000. The stock market is back to previous highs, but the real economy sure isn't.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Europe Hooked on Easy Money Too: ECB President Draghi Threatens Another LTRO, Sings Praises of Excess Liquidity

Posted: 23 Sep 2013 10:21 AM PDT

ECB president Mario Draghi is in on the no-normalization act along with the Fed. Of course, a mere reduction in asset purchases by the Fed from $85 billion a month to $75 billion is not even a baby step towards normalization.

Anyway, it's liquidity full throttle in the Eurozone as well because Draghi Says ECB Will Offer More Long-Term Loans If Needed.

"We are ready to use any instrument, including another LTRO if needed, to maintain the short term money markets at the level that is warranted by our assessment of inflation in the medium term," Draghi said in response to questions from lawmakers in the European Parliament in Brussels today.

Euro-area money-market rates rose to a level that Draghi described as "unwarranted" in July after the U.S. Federal Reserve signaled that it would begin to ease stimulus and signs emerged of a recovery in the 17-nation region. While those rates have since declined, excess liquidity in the financial system is approaching the 200 billion-euro ($270 billion) level the ECB has previously signaled as a lower limit.

In his opening remarks at the hearing, Draghi said while repayment of central bank credit is "certainly a sign of normalization, the resulting reduction in excess liquidity can reinforce upward pressures on term money market rates."

As the buffer of excess cash held by the financial system falls, the rates that banks charge each other for liquidity can rise as they shoulder more risk.

In Praise of Excess Liquidity

LTRO stands for Long-Term-Refinance-Operation. Here is a simple, easy to understand explanation: The ECB is willing to offer unlimited loans against questionable collateral, at excessively low interest rates, to any bank that wants them.

Draghi wants to build back up the "buffer of excess cash" by any means if interest rates do not go where he wants them to go.

Heaven forbid that any baby steps towards normalization reduce "excess liquidity" causing interest rates to rise, either in the US or Eurozone.

The largest global-coordinated financial gambit in history shows no real signs yet of slowing down.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Reflections on Conspiracy Theories and Sensible Accounting by Reader "Alice", 89 Years Young; True Meaning of Banking Safely

Posted: 23 Sep 2013 01:19 AM PDT

I received several emails regarding my post on Risk-Free Banking and Fractional Reserve Lending that I would like to share.

Reader Alice who travels the world at a ripe young age of 89, says ...

Hello Mish

It is wise always for professionals to stand aside from conspiracy theories, There is no sense compromising the future because the past misread the tea leaves.

Bernanke is doing what he was appointed to do....keep the money coming for the US Government to spend, thereby monetizing all expenditures no matter the purpose.

The growing call from citizens for some form of fiscal sanity is beyond the purlieu of the Fed. It never was established to settle accounts, or keep them within bounds.

The founder of modern international finance, Amschel Rothschild, gave the aims and direction of his enterprise simple instruction when he declared he cared not what governments did, all he wanted was the right to control, print their money. Governments took him at his word and his business grew exponentially so he must have been doing something right or as Lloyd Blankfein said "doing God's work!"

Bernanke knows Obamacare may be "defunded" and other excesses curbed, and he doesn't like that. His stewardship of the Fed is not to maintain status quo but to expand its power, its "credit" base worldwide, to continue the momentum his predecessors started. He doesn't have to curry favor with politicians, since they love to spend and he provides the means to do so across national borders and in all commodities sold worldwide. So long as that function maintains any semblance of order, the Fed goes on and on, gathering more followers in every year.

I would love to see a return to "sensible accounting" but I am hard pressed as to what constitutes "sensible" these days. When I began investing, one looked at the real property on balance sheets. In today's tech driven world, the definition of value is more cloudy than ever before, especially since all transactions and exchanges are literally fabricated from thin air and deposited in "The Cloud".

The third dimension is printing money as if it was a magic wand to create everyone's dream.

All I know is that when I travel the world, (and I do every year) I see people who have never lived so well in any other time in history, including the poor and downtrodden. I know the American Century has something to do with that but I also know the British Empire had almost the same effect in its time at bat and I am waiting to see what happens, progresses next.

Alas, I don't have much time to assay such things. At coming of age at 89, I may have to settle down here in Florida in my small villa and get reports second hand.

I do love your approach and you can be assured I will be reading you as you write.

Thank you,

Alice Maxwell

Moral Hazards

Reader Rick comments on the moral hazards of Fed policy.

Hi Mish

The title of Megan McArdle's article is "Banking Without Risk Is Impossible", yet she supports a policy that creates moral hazards. Instead of a system where both parties take a risk, one party is off the hook. This leads to bad lending policies because there are hardly any consequences to bad lending policies.

Rick

Indeed, as it stands banks are always bailed out at taxpayer expense, the very epitome of "moral hazard". In effect, the Fed encourages excess risk taking, and bubbles are the inevitable result.

True Meaning of Banking Safely

Reader Bruce pinged me with his thoughts on teaching his children the true meaning of "risk-free".

Hello Mish

I have tried to educate my children on this very subject. We as a family are working our way to being debt free.

This is the only way I can see to bank safely. We have purchased rental property, business property, and are in the process of paying off our last home. We are also building up a large cash reserve (aware that inflation takes it toll).

We also have gold reserves, and liquid assets.

Owning property free and clear, especially income property, gives one options that those with mortgages don't have.

Bruce

Thanks to all who wrote regarding fractional reserve lending (whether I commented or replied).

And also thanks to many of those who commented on Attack of the "Digger Bees".

Yes, I knew that "digger bees" (yellow jackets) are not bees but wasps.

Bees, as many readers pointed out are generally docile. I like bees actually and put out a "humble bumble" home and nests for mason bees.

We are looking into the EpiPen antidote system, because this is now the third stinging event regarding yellow jackets on my property.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Damn Cool Pics

Photos of Eight Month Pregnant Lea-Ann Ellison Lifting Weights

Posted: 23 Sep 2013 09:32 AM PDT

35-year-old Lea-Ann Ellison from Los Angeles has posted these pictures on Facebook. Most people think that it's inappropriate for her to lift weights two weeks before she is due to give birth. Lea-Ann Ellison replied: "I want to thank everyone for their kind and supportive responses! Haters will hate and it's ok. My life is not their life thank goodness!"

Gamer's Girlfriend

Posted: 23 Sep 2013 08:55 AM PDT

I don't know the story, but the girl is pretty.

Speaker Boehner has a choice to make

Hello --

Right now, Congress has two jobs: to pass a budget that invests in the middle class and to pay the bills it has already incurred.

But instead of doing their jobs, a few reckless Republicans in Congress are so obsessed with refighting old political battles over Obamacare that they're threatening to shut down the government and stop paying the country's bills.

On Friday, these House Republicans voted to shut down the government unless the Senate and the President agree to defund Obamacare. This week, instead of playing those games, the Senate is set to send a simple budget resolution back to the House -- one that keeps the government open for a few months while leaders continue to work on a budget that creates jobs and cuts the deficit in a balanced way. That's a reasonable solution.

But some Republicans still care more about scoring political points on Obamacare than keeping the government open and our economy moving forward.

This kind of up-to-the-final-hour brinksmanship is beyond irresponsible, and it could reverse the hard-earned economic progress we've made by creating another crisis. Unfortunately, we've watched them run this play before, and we know what it looks like. Two years ago, these Republicans held the economy hostage, and as a result our credit rating was downgraded, the stock market plummeted 17 percent, consumer confidence dropped like a rock, and businesses stopped hiring.

That's why it's time for GOP lawmakers to pass a simple budget resolution that doesn't defund Obamacare and move on.

We need your help to spread the word so that Americans know what's going on, so forward this message to your friends and family.

In the five years since the financial crisis began, the American people have pushed the economy forward. Over the past 42 months, businesses have added 7.5 million jobs. American manufacturing is growing again, and the auto industry is back. We've reformed Wall Street so that no company is ever again too big to fail and created the toughest consumer financial protections this nation has ever seen. We've cut our deficit by more than half, made the tax code more progressive, and reformed our health care system.

Today, there is record demand for American products abroad, and our tech companies are booming. The housing market is coming back -- sales of existing homes are up by double digits and new foreclosures are down to the lowest levels since the start of 2006.

We need to keep building momentum. So we're asking Congress to join the President in creating a better bargain for the middle class, and give up on manufacturing a new political crisis. For that to happen, reasonable Congressional Republicans have to stand up to a few extreme members of their party for the good of the country and our economy.

From the day he took office, President Obama has been open to any good idea when it comes to the budget, as long as supporting middle-class families remains our North Star. Republicans won't extract concessions over the full faith and credit of the United States.

Will you help spread the word? Share this message so that people know what's about to happen to the economy if Congress doesn't act.

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Pfeiffer
Senior Advisor
The White House
@Pfeiffer44

P.S. -- Want to learn more about where we are five years after the start of the financial crisis? Check this out.

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marți, 24 septembrie 2013

What's an UNGA?

When Keyword (not provided) is 100 Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? - Whiteboard Tuesday

When Keyword (not provided) is 100 Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? - Whiteboard Tuesday

Video Transcription

Seth's Blog : Deleting 'must have' features

Deleting 'must have' features

More Recent Articles

luni, 23 septembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Speaker Boehner has a choice to make

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

marți, 24 septembrie 2013

Video Transcription

More Recent Articles

luni, 23 septembrie 2013

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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