Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which means retailers are pulling out all the stops to prepare for their own important tradition, Black Friday sales.  Most brands have already started online campaigns to get customers excited about the upcoming sales.  Brands offering online deals and using the web to promote their sales is nothing new.  Cyber Monday, the online equivalent to Black Friday, has been an extremely successful component of holiday sales for some time.  Last year’s Cyber Monday sale set the record for the “heaviest spending day in e-commerce history” according to TechCrunch.  What is new is the increasing number of brands working with social media agencies to find creative ways to incorporate a social element into their holiday sales.

 

One of the many ways that marketing analytics can help you develop a smart SEO plan is by telling you which keywords bring the most visitors to your site, and more specifically which keywords bring in the customers who are the most engaged in your site.  If you’ve looked at your keywords report in Analytics recently (and you should!) you’ve probably noticed a larger than usual number of visits entered as (not provided) and may have wondered what that means.  Last month Google began automatically encrypting searches from people that are logged into their Google accounts.  According to Google’s blog post on October 18th, this means that “When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site.”

 

 

 

 

The holiday season is about gift giving and with the steady increase of online sales, whether you are marketing a small business or a large business, it is vital for stores to have an online presence this holiday season.  Many holiday shoppers research products and prices online before going into the store or buy gifts online to escape the holiday crowds.  If you have a retail store, you know that this is the time of year where you make the most money.  Most retail stores make 25% to 40% of their yearly profit in November and December.  That means that it is important to get good traffic to your site during the holiday season.  One of the best ways to do this is to use Google AdWords.