SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

Google analytics is one of the most commonly used web analytics program today. While most of use it how many of us are actually aware of its full potential. This wonderful free analytics platform has got some really good features which if used effectively can provide great insights to marketers and business. Filters in Google Analytics is one such extremely powerful feature. Are you using it ?

Filters in Google analytics is one of the most powerful feature that allows for a lot of customization and manipulation of the data. Filters are applied to the data that is received in a Google Analytics account to manipulate the final data to provide more accurate information. They allow you to include, exclude, search and replace data in addition to the options for creating custom and advanced filters.

In this article we will discuss some of the Filters that you must have, if you are using Google analytics for tracking and website performance.

How to Create a Filter in Google Analytics
You can access the Filters from your Profile Settings page in Google Analytics. Just click “Add Filter” to add a new filter to a profile.

RegEx in Google Analytics
RegEx or Regular Expressions are extremely important when it comes to creating these filters. Regular expressions are special characters that match or capture portions of a field, as well as the rules that govern all characters. You can read in details about the RegEx used in Google Analytics here .

Google Analytics Filter to Exclude Internal Traffic

Every website gets a fair share of internal traffic that is visits by webmasters, marketers and other members of the team who are part of the same business. It is important to exclude this traffic from your analytics data as otherwise you would have an inflated traffic count.

Google analytics provides a predefined filter for this, after you have clicked on the “Add Filter” on Profile Settings page it would take you to the “Create New Filter” page. On that page..

1. Name for your Filter


2. Select “Predefined Filter” from the radio buttons


3. Under Filter Type, select “Exclude” in the First drop down box, “traffic from the IP addresses” in the second drop down and “that are equal to” in the third dropdown.


4. A box would appear below, where you need to put your / your client’s IP address that you want to exclude


5. Save Changes and you are done .

Filter to Exclude Multiple IP addresses or a Range of IP Address ?

This is a very likely situation when your client has multiple offices in different locations and Google Analytics provides a solution for that as well. In such cases, we will have to use a “Custom Filter”.

1. Instead of “Predefined Filter” ( as in Step (b) above ) select Custom Filter radio button.


2. A new set of options would appear, select “Exclude” radio button.


3. In Filter Field drop down select “Visitor IP Address”


4. In Filter Pattern, you will have to mention the IP addresses, or the range of IP addresses using Regular Expressions , commonly referred to as Reg Ex.


5. Example 1 - if you just need to exclude two IP addresses – 65.42.34.123 and 72.42.35.125 – your Filter Pattern would read as below
   65\.42\.34\.123$|^72\.42\.35\.125$


6. Example 2 – if you need to exclude a range of IP address - 65.42.34.1 - 65.42.34.25
   Your Filter pattern would read as below
   ^65\.42\.34\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$

Google Analytics All Lowercase Filter

This filter is effective if your URLs are available both in uppercase and lowercase format. Google analytics in such case would treat these two as two different URLs and your data for the same page would be split between the two. The all lowercase filter converts all URLs to lower case.

The picture below explains how to set it up.




Full Referral URL Filter for Google Analytics

This is a marketer’s bliss :) While Google analytics tells you which websites are referring traffic to you it doesn’t really show the exact complete URL that is the referral source. If you are getting tons of referrals from a huge portal, it can often become difficult to identify the complete URL of your referral source. With this filter you would be able to see the full referral URL for your site.

However, this would require you to move a step further and not just use a Custom Filter but an Advanced Custom Filter. The picture below shows how this is set up.




You would be getting the resulting data from this filter under User Defined Section in Visits.

These are just three of the common Google Analytics filter that you must apply if you are using GA. There are many more filters that can be used for various purposes and to get a lot of valuable information besides the great insight that GA provides by default.

Before we end, one word of caution. Applying filters can make dramatic changes to the data in an account because it effects the data that is collected by GA. It is advisable to create a separate profile and then apply the filters to it and observe the data in both (with and without filters) profiles for initial few days to ensure that the filters are working as intended. Also, keep in mind that applying filters would affect future data and would not have any impact on the data that is already there in your account.

In case you would have any specific question or requirement about Google Analytics implementation feel free to contact me.


Related Posts:
Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics Setup & Ecommerce Tracking
Measuring Impact of online marketing on offline presence
How to Improve Adwords Campaigns with Analytics

Labels: Filters, Google analytics, Web analytics

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

Isn't it extremely common to ask your family and friend's for suggestions before buying any product ? It has been so for ages and now with the increasing use of social media the same process has come on to the Internet. The social media platforms and communities are becoming big time influencers in online purchase process.Recognizing this, while many retail websites are trying to incorporate community features and build up a community around themselves, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are taking this a step further.

Social platforms and communities play a major role through out the buying process. At the start of the buying process consumer interest in a product or service can be fueled by a special offer promoted by a brand through Facebook or Twitter. Consumers might also develop interest towards a product when they discover it through recommendations in social shopping sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive etc Typically before making a purchase most people look for reviews and this is when they are influenced by user generated reviews on retail websites and product review sites. Again post-purchase, customers today often connect with the retailer's customer service agents through social networks like Twitter, also customers often resort to communities like forums to learn about product usage and help. So all through the process from, initiating the customers interest in the product to providing them with after sales support the social media platforms are playing a crucial role.

Recognizing this potential of social media and also understanding the fact that people are spending more and more time on social networks, retailers are doing their best to enhance their social presence. In fact at this point when retailers are just working to make their presence felt by serving compelling content to their fans / followers/ friends , it might not be long when they would offer a complete e-commerce experience within social platforms itself.

Unless we have a sudden change in the social media dynamics with the entry of some new networking platform, Facebook would probably take the cake in this evolution. There are a number of reasons to support this.

a) Facebook already offers a high level of interactivity for brands. Once an user becomes a fan of a brand the brand can post updates about special offers and other compelling content which gets posted to the fan's wall.

b) Applications like Facebook Connect allow users to bring their friends along on a shopping session for feedback

c) Advanced Facebook apps are being developed that allows retailers like 1-800-flowers to offer a virtual store front within Facebook itself, allowing customers to complete their transaction process without leaving Facebook.

The e-commerce experience has already changed a lot from what it was a few years back to what it is today and given the way things are going it can be safely predicted that in the next few years E-commerce would complete its evolution to be Social Commerce.

Is your business ready for it ?

Related Posts:
Dell Boosts revenue with Twitter
How to measure success and benefits of Social media campaigns
Social Media Optimization - Two More Rules for SMO
Britney Spears Hiring Social media manager

Labels: E-commerce, Facebook, Facebook apps, Social Media

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

I came across a news on Yahoo yesterday and found out that the web has got a new buzz about a mysterious man who seems to appear in the dreams of thousands of people across the world. Sounds Weird ? - Check out the details at Thisman.org. With the type of interest that everyone of us have about weird and mysterious stuff it is not surprising that this story would go hot on the Internet.

Now while some people are actually taking it seriously and are expecting to uncover some really mysterious psychological phenomena, there are also enough voices that doubt it to be a marketing gimmick. Keeping this in mind, I thought of digging into the issue a little and here's what I found.

a)The website mentions that the incident initiated when a "well-known psychiatrist in NY drew the face in 2006. It also mentions during the course of the events she forwarded this picture to other psychologists whose patients also identified the face to be in their dreams. - However, the website does not specify the names of any of the psychologists .

b)A quick look at the Who Is Records for the domain show that this domain is registered by some Andrea Natella from a Guerilla marketing agency in Italy. Check the screen shot below



c) The website mentions that its purpose is to connect people across the world who have dreamt of this man but on the site there is no option provided by which users can connect to each other. There is no proof that thousands of people have actually dreamt of this man, other than the declaration made by the site authorities.

d) Also there is no well defined contact information on the site. All you have is a contact form. If its actually a psychological research case, isn't it natural for the site to provide details of doctors who are leading the research and should be contacted in case someones identifies the man ?

e) Also , the website sells Tshirts, mugs, magnets etc with the ma's face on them. Don't you think this is too silly an ecommerce activity to be associated with a serious psychology research case ? I don't think a professional doctor would ever think of this, rather it smells of some savvy internet marketer.

With all these points noted, I am pretty sure that this is not a psychological phenomena and it is basically a well laid out viral marketing strategy, may be for some book, films etc. Probably, if they would have been a little more elaborate and careful about domain registration, and the contact information, it could have actually passed on to be real.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

Labels: guerilla marketing, thisman.org, uncovered, viral marketing

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

Well, real time search has been a nice topic for discussion for quite some time now amongst the search enthusiast, there has also been a lot of speculations if Google is going to acquire Twitter or not. With all that happening Google has officially announced in their blog yesterday that they have got into an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in relevant search results.

Including Twits in real time updates on search results would definitely enhance the user experience to great extent particularly for certain time and place sensitive searches. While it is not something that they are launching immediately, they are definitely working on how they can smoothly integrate Twits with Google search to offer an overall better search experience to their users.

Google have sighted an example related to weather conditions in a ski resort, while that is definitely a good possible use, I think once the Twitter and Google search integration becomes complete we might get to see some more interesting info like the following :

a) Traffic conditions in street : people often tweet when they get stuck in traffic somewhere

b) Real time updates on any event / accident via Tweeples who might be present at the spot

c) Special offers that are exclusive to Twitter users now would start reaching more audience , example: @Dell

d) Updated Flight information right from Google search results page via Twits - a la @JetBlue

e) Movie Reviews ; Short and crisp feedback on movies, very common in Twitter.

These are just some of my random thoughts on how things might change once this integration is complete.

Also, the SEO in me is thinking about a different aspect. Will Google be respecting links that a website gets from Twits while deciding on the organic rankings ? For those of you who would like to pic your brains on this, here is a small piece of information..

Bit.ly, tinyurl.com, Su.pr - some of the popular URL shortening services used in Twitter actually offers a 301 redirects to the main URL :)

If not as tradition links, is there going to be any direct correlation between Twitter mentions for a website and its organic rankings ?

What do you think ?

Labels: google search, Real Time Search, Twitter

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

Excel is probably one of the most powerful applications that we use day in and day out, often without realizing its full potential. For all search marketing professionals and particularly the ones that specialize in Paid search campaigns on platforms like Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search and Adcenter – Excel is probably one of the most used tool.

While there are too many ways that MS Excel is used in SEM campaigns right from the keyword research phase to campaign optimization and reporting, on this article I will focus on just one extremely useful feature of MS Excel that is used / should be used by all search marketing consultants and professionals.

Pivot Tables as per MS Excel’s definition is “A Pivot Table report is an interactive way to quickly summarize large amounts of data. Use a Pivot Table report to analyze numerical data in depth and to answer unanticipated questions about your data”. If you have not used this tool before and have managed any search account with more than 50,000 keywords, you must be super excited by now on reading this definition. Now let’s look at how Pivot table can help with search marketers in managing paid search campaigns.

The first thing you should keep in mind is that you don’t need to Pivot all data. Use Pivot tables only for data that you need to analyze and get meaningful information. This particularly effective when you need to shift/ change columns, rows, add / remove filters in the same report to get your required information. An ideal example would be if we try to analyze a keyword / placement report from Adwords.



Now from this report we can see a lot of information in terms performance of each keyword or placements and using the sort and filter functions we can also get some more information like the top performing keywords in terms of CTR / clicks/ cpc etc and few other information. Now what if we try to get a few additional information like..

Yes, you can answer all of these by going back to the report console in Adwords and pulling separate Network level, ad group level and Campaign level reports for each, but a simple Pivot Table can help yo to get answers to all these questions right from the Keyword / Placement Report you downloaded initially. Let’s see how..

Create a Pivot Table

Once you have the Excel data table with you, on the “Insert” ribbon, to your extreme left notice the icon that says “pivot table” – click on that. This should select the entire data range in the table and also pop up a dialogue box that shows the cell reference for the selected area and asks you where to create the pivot table ( in the same sheet or in new sheet). Make sure that the last row containing the “Total” data is not included. Click “Ok” on the box and your Pivot table gets created in the next sheet by default. ( you can choose to create it on the same sheet also but that is not advisable).

Now that you have your pivot table created, you can see the basic skeleton of the table on the page and to your right hand side you can see the list of all the column headers from your data table. All you will need to do is to select the respective column headers and put them in columns or rows as per your requirement.

Now let’s try to answer the questions…

Which are the best performing Ad groups ?

Just Drag and drop the following..

AdGroup field to Row Label Box;
Impression, Clicks and Cost field to Values box;

You will see that the Pivot has nicely summarized the impressions, clicks and cost by Adgroups.

You might be wondering why I did not include CTR and average CPC in this because that could have given an even better picture. I left them out intentionally because those would have to be calculated fields, that we will come to at a later part of this article.






Which Campaigns Generate Most Clicks ?

Same process as above, just add the Campaign label to the “Row label” box. Excel is intelligent enough to club all the Ad group data under their respective Campaigns and give you a summarized picture by campaign as well as by ad group.

You can change the order of the fields ( campaign and ad group) by drag and drop in the “Row level” box or by doing a right click on any campaign or ad group name and then “Move” > select the option that you want to use.

Which Placements are registering most Impressions and clicks ?

To the same Pivot that you had just add the “Placement / Keyword” label to the “Rows” box and the “Match Type” label into “Report Filter” Box. Now on the Pivot table Filter for Match Type, click the down arrow and select “Placement Targeted” – it will show you only the placement targeted data. You can make it further easy to analyze by sorting the data based on Impression, clicks or cost. For this, just click on any data from the column based on which you want to sort and then click on the “Sort & Filter” option to your top right. You will get a dialogue box where you can specify how you want the data to be sorted.


Search network or content network – which was more effective?

In the same settings as above from the Match type drop down on top ( Filter), select “Content” and it would show you the data for your Content Network at Campaign and ad Group level.

These are few very simple examples of how Pivot Table can be used. If you play around with the data for some time and have a logical bend of mind you can easily find numerous ways in which you can manipulate simple data tables to effective Pivot Tables that give out tons of useful analytical information.

Now let’s discuss talk about the “Calculated Fields” like CTR and Average CPC. If you put them in similar way as other fields Pivot table would tend to sum it up which is definitely not the right thing to do. So to add these fields to your Pivot table you will need to use the calculated field option.

How to use Calculated Fields ?

“Option” Ribbon > Formulas > Calculated Fields

In the Dialogue box, put the name of the field you want to calculate ( CTR) in the “Name” box and in the “Formula” field, write the formula – ensure that you use the exact headings used in your data table to create the formula, you can also do this by selecting the field names from the box below and clicking “Insert Field”.

Also, while naming the fields make small changes to it ( like adding an extra space, or adding any prefix or suffix) because Excel would not let you create a calculated field for exactly the same heading that you already have in your data table. Because you have CTR field in your data table, you will need to name the field in your Pivot as CTR1 or something similar.

You can use the same process for adding CPC to your pivot table or any other calculated field for that matter.

Calculating Average Position in a Pivot Table

To calculate Average position in a Pivot Table you will need to do a little more work. First in the data table add an extra column and put the formula “Impressions X Average position “ and drag it to have the value for all keywords. Once you have these values, copy them and then do a Paste Special > Values. Let’s name this column as AvgPosTot.

Now in your pivot table add a calculated field for average position and add the formula Avg.PosTot / Impressions . This will show the actual average position at keyword, ad group as well as campaign level.

There are too many things that can be done with Pivot tables and pivot charts and the more you play around with the data the more you will learn and develop on how best this tool can be used to analyze data and get useful information for your search campaign management. Now that I have explained the basics on how a Pivot table can help you with your search marketing data try it yourself and feel free to post any query you might have.

Labels: Adwords Optimization, MS Excel 2007, Pivot tables, search marketing, SEM campaign

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

A few days back I wrote about some reputation management tips keeping in mind the increasing demand of this service and now we have a formal recommendation from Google also on such search reputation management.

With the increasing number of name searches / ego searches being on, Google sure does receive a lot of requests every day to remove negative content about people and businesses from there index; so they have now tried to address the issue with this article at Managing Your Reputation Through Search Results .

The bottom line for the entire post summarizes to three basic point

a) Be careful about what personal information you put online

b) If a negative content is published somewhere , try to remove it from the source rather than requesting Google to remove it

c) Create positive content about your self on the net to push down negative content in the search results

While point (a) is more of a common sense thing that most savvy net users do have today, point (b) in most cases might be difficult / not applicable. So the only option that you will be left with is point (c) - that is to create positive content about yourself proactively that pushes down any negative information that Google might have for you.

Check out this specific Reputation management tips that tells you the different ways and places where you can create content about yourself to maintain a stellar reputation in the Google search results.

Labels: Advice, Google, Reputation Management

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

In their attempt to penetrate the Indian SMB market Google Adwords have decided to offer a free advertising credit of Rs.2500 for Indian advertisers ( small businesses) who have an online presence but have not used the Adword platform before.

To avail this Google Adwords promotion you will need to call 1 860 266 6622 and register your website with Adwords at http://adwords.google.co.in .

3 Steps to avail this Adwords Promotion

• Call the number 1860 266 6622
• Share your business and contact details
• Google India AdWords representative will provide the account setup support along with 1 month dedicated customer support to manage the ad campaign.

This promotional offer is available to advertisers across India and gives a hint at Google's aggressive plan in capturing the fast growing small business market in India. While major businesses have already adopted to paid search and digital media, small businesses are yet to jump onto the bandwagon. This free credit of Rs.2500 would actually go a long way for Google to secure new SMB advertisers from the Indian market.

In case you need professional consulting or help with your Adwords account feel free to contact me at saptarshi.rc @ gmail dot com

Update: Amit Agarwal posted an update on his blog on this. He actually spoke to a guy in Google India office in Mumbai who informed him that before he could avail this promotional offer he will need to give them a check for Rs.10,000 which is the minimum requirement for Google to set up the Adwords account. The credit coupon will be given only next month after they have received this initial 10k payment.

This is very much in contrary to the news that was provided earlier. It mentioned, "All small businesses with an online presence will be able to avail Rs 2500/- worth of advertising coupons by just calling the number 1860266 6622 and registering their websites with Google India Ad Words platform".

Why would someone open an Adwords account with Rs.10,000 to get a Rs.2500 credit when most good hosting companies do offer some Adwords credit ( $25- $50) with their hosting package?

Related Posts:
How to Improve your Google Adwords Quality Socre
Guide to effective Ad Copy Writing for Google Adwords

Labels: adwords Promotion, Google Adwords, indian advertisement, special offer

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

Twitter is really big now and it is still growing at an exponential rate. Users are glued to it and as I see it in most people, the tendency to Twitter is infectious. But besides the joy of Twittering what if you could make some money out of it ? wouldn't it be better ?

Well, there are tons of promises around that talks about making you reach on the web or getting you thousands of followers on Twitter, however, most of them would ask you to pay them to avail their service and or otherwise would not really deliver what they promise. I come across a lot of such "money making opportunities" like every other Twitter and was about to negate this one too but though to take a quick look and this time it I am lucky.

I came across this application called Sponsored Tweets from Izea that connects potential advertisers with publishers on Twitter and the best part of this application is that it doesn't send Tweets from your account directly - you can actually review and approve the message that would be Twitted from your account ( at times you can even write it yourself) and if you don't like it just don't approve it.

Once you sign up with Sponsored Tweets ( pretty simple and fast - no long forms to fill), you can quote the price you want to get paid for every tweet that you send out on behalf of the advertiser. If an advertiser likes your profile ( based on your network, popularity, nature of tweets etc) he would contact you with his offer. If you agree and send out the advertisement message through your Twitter account your Sponsored Tweets account gets credited for the money. You can then withdraw it almost instantly to your Paypal account.

It is a fairly simple and logical process and with a company like Izea behind it this is scam proof. Like any other advertising network the price you get would depend largely on your quality as a publisher which would take into account multiple aspects. Some of the factors that I feel would be necessary for you to make good money at Sponsored Tweets would be ..

• The number of followers and friends you have. While followers are of big importance I believe advvertisers would also like to check the ratio between followers and friends.
• How active you are on Twitter - mostly judged by the number of Tweets you make, RTs you get etc
• The quality of your followers and friends - are their social media influencers in your network ? are your followers mostly from a niche/ industry ?

Also, make sure you have a Paypal account because that is the only way Sponsored Tweets pay at this point.

For advertisers, I think this is a great opportunity particularly for the ones with a tech/ web based products or service. You can get publishers to talk about your product at throw away prices and if you have a big budget you can probably get some celebrity like KimKardashian or Kendra Wilkinson to tweet about your product / service or website. You can see a complete list of Publishers under the Tweeters tab on their website.

So Happy Tweeting and hope you make some money as well !


Magpie is another advertising network that offers similar service to Sponsored Tweets however, I have heard that there payout is probably not as good as ST. Also, they would send payments only after you reach $50 mark. One good thing about Magpie though is that they allow all ad tweets to be preceeded or followed by a short notifice like "Ad" which maintains the integrity of your Twitter profile to your followers.

Labels: make money online, sponsored twit, Twitter, twitter advertisement

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

Google has always been known for its simplicity and the wonderful services that it provides (in most cases apparently for free). With the launch of Google Elements it has now become all the more easier to use the Google products and integrate them nicely within your website.


You can use this to easily integrate features like Google Custom search, Maps, News, Calendar, Presentation in to your website. While some of you might like to call this an widget, I would rather think of this as a nice container for the Google tools that would motivate more and more webmasters to use them.

These tools are pretty handy and of them all the one I like most is the conversation module. This allows your visitors to post comments directly on your website. This can be fantastic addition for those traditional website that are trying to get onto the more interactive version of the web ( Web 2.0 ) but are restrained by financial/ technical capabilities.

You can checkout the different Web Elements offered by Google here.

Labels: Google, tools, web elements, widgets

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb  

On Google's 11th birthday, 27th September 2009 Google gets a new logo with two "l" . If you have missed it on Sunday, see the logo below.

Google's birthday has moved around across many dates in September and it has often been debated how old is this search giant. While some count it to be as old as 12 years old, some tend to believe it is just 9. Actually Google's birthday depends on your perspective of what you consider to be the birth of Google.

Given below are few different perspective for Google's birthday.

Google - 13 years old
January 1996 - This is when Sergey Brin and Lary Page were working on Backrub, which later became Google.

Google - 12 years old
September 15, 1997 - This is when he Google.com domain was registered ( as per AFP)

Google - 11 year old
September 7, 1998 - When Google was probably officially incorporated

September 27, 1998 - The current official date. Back in 2005 Google announced this date to be their official birthday.

What's so Google-ish in Google's Birthday ?

Google has always been a little different from everyone else around in whatever they do and their birthday is no exception. They did an announcement in 2006 where they mentioned that Google's birthday could be anytime they want it to be. To be more specific, the page said,

"Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html"

Labels: Birthday, Google, Google logo

Share It : Digg  | Sphinn  | Netscape  | Google  | reddit  | del.icio.us  | Squidoo  | StumbleUpon  | Yahoo MyWeb