New report includes

• Campaigns
• Keywords
• Day Parts
• Destination URL’s
• Placements
• Keyword Positions &
• TV Ads

Day Part: It can help to identify which campaign is performing best in which part of the day (Day Parts has hourly reports)

Under Placements: now I can analyze placement engagement metrics

Keyword Positions: This report is same as we have seen in Google webmaster. Performance of keywords at different positions

Since I am not running any TV Ads no idea how good this is.

But sure this is good to analyze and improve overall account performance.

Will try to add more after having more hands on it.

What are AdWords Search Funnels?

AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:

Why are these useful?

“Search Funnel enables us to create a better experience for our customers by helping us understand how they search for our products,” said Beth Hirschhorn, Chief Marketing Officer from MetLife, the largest life insurance company based in the United States. “It is an important tool to help de-code consumer shopping habits and thought processes, which we can relate back to our online as well as offline advertising.”

By showing which ads your customers clicked on before ultimately converting, Search Funnels give a more complete picture of the value of your keywords, ad groups and campaigns. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

An online vacation service called Flyaway Vacations is running AdWords campaigns for vacation packages in Hawaii. Their ads link to a site where visitors can book any or all parts of a package that includes flights, a hotel, car rental, and surf lessons. Suppose that on March 10 someone searched for “hawaii vacation” and clicked on an ad for Flyaway’s Hawaii package. A click was registered in their AdWords account. Then, two days later, the same person searched for “flights to hawaii” and saw another ad for Flyaway, but didn’t click. An impression was registered in Flyaway’s AdWords account. Finally, three days later, the same person searched one more time, this time for “flyaway hawaii.” This time they clicked the ad, visited the site, and purchased the Hawaii vacation package.

Instead of showing only a purchase conversion for the “flyaway hawaii” keyword, Search Funnels will show an assist click for the keyword “hawaii vacation” and an assist impression for the keyword “flights to hawaii”. Testing the value of assist clicks and impressions is important for evaluating and understanding the true value of all of your keywords.

Search Funnels not only help you understand the keywords seen by converters, they also show you those that weren’t seen. For example, in the Flyaway campaign, it’s possible that another keyword, such as “hawaii surf lessons,” didn’t contribute any assist clicks or impressions, or last click conversions, indicating that this may be a keyword that’s providing little conversion value. Assist information is an additional data point you can use when making strategic budgeting decisions, from the campaign level down to the keyword level.

Search Funnels also show the “Path Length,” or average number of clicks and impressions prior to conversion, which can help you understand and target repeat visitors. Additionally they show “Time Lag,” or the amount of time it takes a customer to convert after seeing or clicking on your ads for the first time, which can help you determine lead time for seasonal campaigns. These breakdowns can help you understand your customers’ behavior and create strategies around that information.

Over the next few weeks, the Search Funnels beta will be rolled out gradually to all accounts in the ‘Conversions’ section under the ‘Reporting’ tab. To activate them, you must either have AdWords Conversion Tracking running or import goals or transactions into AdWords from Google Analytics. Keep in mind that Search Funnels are only available in your AdWords account (not in Google Analytics), and will only show data for keywords that show up in at least one conversion path. Search Funnel data is currently limited to search ads showing on Google.com, for ad impressions and clicks within 30 days of the conversion.

Links to this post

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AdWords Search Funnel

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AdWords Search Funnels Released

The videos of all the talks from the Singapore event are now available. Each session was kept deliberately short. Each video is a good length to watch during work, on break, or at home, enriching your Google Analytics knowledge in convenient bite-sized portions.

Source: Solutions for Southeast Asia blog

I think there are many occasions where you may want to exclude a website or portion of a site from search engine crawling and indexing.

There are several ways to prevent Google, Yahoo!, Bing or Ask from indexing a site’s pages.

• Using robots.txt file :A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages. (All respectable robots will respect the directives in a robots.txt file, although some may interpret them differently. However, a robots.txt is not enforceable, and some spammers and other troublemakers may ignore it. For this reason, we recommend password protecting confidential information.) You need a robots.txt file only if your site includes content that you don’t want search engines to index. If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don’t need a robots.txt file (not even an empty one).

• Using the robots meta tag: To entirely prevent a page’s contents from being listed in the Google web index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag. As long as Googlebot fetches the page, it will see the noindex meta tag and prevent that page from showing up in the web index. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

• Using the URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools
• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. This will tell Google that the page is gone and that it should no longer appear in search results. you can even use 301 permanent redirects
• Password protect sensitive content: Sensitive content is usually protected by requiring visitors to enter a username and password. Such secure content won’t be crawled by search engines. Passwords can be set at the web server level or at the application level. For server level logon setup, consult the Apache Authentication Documentation or the Microsoft IIS documentation.
• Don’t link to pages you want to keep out of search engines

Quikr offers a web-based classifieds platform that addresses the needs of local communities in 40 cities across India. More than 8 million consumers visit Quikr every month to buy, sell, rent or find things ranging from electronics to cars to real estate to jobs, and everything in between. Quikr is the largest player in its market and the company has experienced explosive growth in the last year due in part to the increased purchasing power of the rising middle class in India.

“We are impressed by Quikr`s tremendous growth,” said Niren Shah, managing director, NVP India. “This investment is a testament to the fact that Indian consumers are passionate about the experience offered by the Quikr platform. The company is pursuing an extremely large opportunity with a unique business model, and we look forward to partnering with Quikr to help further grow the company in this rapidly growing market,“ he added.

Pranay Chulet, CEO of Quikr, said, “We are excited to add a firm like Norwest Venture Partners to our group of marquee investors and look forward to taking Quikr to new heights from here on. The NVP team brings great pedigree in the global internet business  – that experience, combined with Niren`s credentials, further lends force to the Quikr movement and strengthens our leadership position in the market.”

The new shopping tool for India gathers information about products and prices automatically by scanning millions of Indian Web pages and extracts product names, prices and images.

With the help of this new technology, Google users will receive information from more than 30 thousand Indian Internet sites enabling them to research a variety of products in just one page.

Vinay Goel, Google India (head of products) said,”This new tool is designed to help users make decisions faster and find deals online enhancing their research experience.”

According to Google’s research shows that, online search is an integral part of the product purchase decision process made by Indian users.Consumers on an average spend 35 per cent of their time researching for products online before they make a purchase decision.

Google which has a market share of about 80 per cent in the Indian search market has also introduced a new feature called sharping to refine the online search.

The new feature makes the web search results page more relevant to the specific type of information a user is looking for, he added.

You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.

503 (Service unavailable) – The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance). Generally, this is a temporary state.

HTTP status codes

When a request is made to your server for a page on your site (for instance, when a user accesses your page in a browser or when Googlebot crawls the page), your server returns an HTTP status code in response to the request.

This status code provides information about the status of the request. This status code gives Googlebot information about your site and the requested page.

Some common status codes are:

• 200 – the server successfully returned the page
• 404 – the requested page doesn’t exist
• 503 – the server is temporarily unavailable

You can also check complete list of HTTP status codes W3C page on HTTP status codes for more information.

301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:

• You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it’s a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. You can also use Webmaster Tools to set your preferred domain.
• You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.

Watch a video on 301 redirects.

To implement a 301 redirect for websites that are hosted on servers running Apache, you’ll need access to your server’s .htaccess file. (If you’re not sure about your access or your server software, check with your webhoster.) For more information, consult the Apache .htaccess Tutorial and the Apache URL Rewriting Guide. If your site is hosted on a server running other software, check with your hoster for more details.

Related FAQ’s:

• Value of backlinks for 301 redirected sites
  I had a site at 2 different domains say mysite.com and mysite.gr. None was redirected and both had different backlinks. I have now decided to 301 redirect the mysite.gr site to mysite.com site. My question is this: Will the backlinks of mysite.gr now have any value to mysite.com? I am not talking about traffic, I am only talking about backlinks in terms of seo, that is link juice and pagerank. Do i have to build them again for mysite.com this time? Or will they add value to mysite.com even though the links are for mysite.gr since mysite.gr is 301 redirected?

Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Organic search results?

Your aim is to make the transition invisible and seamless to the user, and to make sure that Google knows that your new pages should get the same quality signals as the pages on your own site. When you’re moving your site, 404 (File Not Found) errors can harm the user experience and negatively impact your site’s performance in Google search results.

Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is: 301 redirect

A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, “Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on,” as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, “Hey, this is only a temporary redirect–so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?” In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.

Steps to follow:

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or sub domain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.
• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.
• If you’re changing your domain because of site re branding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.
• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).
• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.
• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.
• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

I admit it, moving is never easy – but these steps should help ensure that none of your good web reputation falls off the truck in the process.

Related topics

1. 301 redirect
2. 404 errors (File Not Found)

Tools:

1. Link checker: Xenu