Blog Archive

Last Thursday, Google announced they would roll out two new reports across Analytics accounts over the following days. Today, November 21st, most accounts should have access to the reports “Visitor Flow” and “Goal Flow”. The two reports are only available in the new, beta version of Google Analytics.

Google defines the Visitor Flow report as “a graphical representation of the paths visitors took through your site”.

The report is comprised of “nodes” and “connections” and defaults to a starting node of “Country”.

The report is quite intuitive, so we won’t spend any time regurgitating information you can learn yourself, but two quick tips for navigation:

Two of the most important buttons on the report are small brackets on either side of the home icon in the upper left corner. These brackets allow the user to scroll  horizontally through the entire series of visits. Also important is the small “cog” icon at the top of the flow diagram. This allows the user to filter the assigned metric by keyword or regular expression.

It is important to note for clients with larger traffic levels that reports with over 100K visits use sampled data, so the numbers are not precise.

The reports themselves are located under Standard Reports, Visitors, Visitors Flow and Standard Reports, Conversions, Goals, Goal Flow.

Nina Hale is thrilled to announce the newest member to our team! Meet Angela Needham, our Search Intern. With some real-world SEO experience and an enthusiastic attitude, she’ll be a search guru in no time. Learn more about Angela in her own words:
What is your educational background?

I graduated this past May from Augsburg College. I majored in Marketing and minored in International Business.

What lead you to search Marketing?

My dad has his own hardwood flooring company which was hit hard by the recession. To generate some business for him, I created a website for his company. We used AdWords for a few months while we worked on improving our ranking in the organic results. Our focus now is on SEO, which I love since it allows me to be both creative and strategic when optimizing his site.

What’s your favorite part of Thanksgiving?

Bragging that my ancestors came from the Mayflower. I haven’t looked at the lineage recently but William Brewster, the preacher of the ship, is my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (that is a rough estimate on the “greats”).

Biggest Facebook snafu to date?

Say what you will, I am a huge Britney Spears fan. When I went to her concert this summer, I changed my profile picture to a picture of Brit a week before the concert. The following week, I had an interview at a brand consulting firm. They asked me what I thought my Facebook profile picture said about me. When I realized they saw it when it was a picture of Britney, I didn’t know what to say. But everything happens for a reason because if it wasn’t Britney and if I got the job, I wouldn’t be sitting here at Nina Hale today.

Welcome to the NHI team, Angela!

A post from Annie Bunkers

We all know the importance of mobile advertising. More and more consumers are browsing and making purchases from their mobile devices than ever before. It’s even estimated that as much as 44% of last minute holiday shopping this year will be performed on smartphones and tablets[1] Advertisers now have even more incentive to develop optimized mobile sites for their business; Google just recently announced that mobile sites or landing pages will now factor into the overall quality score of mobile ads.

To put it simply, you’ll need to have a highly optimized mobile page specifically for your mobile campaigns in order to maintain a competitive presence with mobile search traffic. The idea is to improve user experience for mobile users and in turn, will result in more traffic at significantly lower costs. By building a mobile page or site for your business, you’ll be able to prioritize your main goals and provide relevant information that would be useful for someone on the go.

Read more about Google’s announcement on the Mobile Ads Blog Here: http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/09/mobile-website-optimization-now-factors.html

Use the Google Mobile Site Creation Tool: http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/06/mobile-ize-your-business-with-google.html

Our founder, Nina Hale shares some insights regarding the Cavalia ticket scams.

Video courtesy of Kare 11, to read the full article, click here.

We were able to get almost the whole team down this year to the State Fair. Roxy and Stephany couldn’t make it. Here are some highlights.

Nina Hale Inc is happy to welcome Luke Schlegel, Senior Account Manager, to the account management team!

He brings a unique talent for everything ranging from client relationships, strategy, coffee drinking, and the capture of albino squirrels.

Luke is also the pioneer and chair of the Nina Hale Safety Committee because let’s face it, every company needs a safety committee.

Learn more about Luke in his own words.

What led you to Search Marketing?
I was working at an Catalog Internet sporting good retailer and we decided to bring our search marketing program in house. The project was assigned to me and through research and conversations I learned enough to build out and run program with a $1 million-plus budget.

Favorite Local Restaurant/Favorite Food?
I do not eat out all that often, but prefer to cook myself.  Nothing fancy, usually some form of meat cooked over an open flame.

What are some of your hobbies?
I spend a lot of time chasing around my 2-year old daughter Maria. I do enjoy spending time in the outdoors hunting, camping and fishing. I also enjoy spending time renovating and fixing up my house.

Nina Hale Inc welcomes a great new member to our team, Rachel Price. Not only have we gained another Adwords Certified search ninja, but we’re one person closer to having an official agency band.

What led you to search marketing?
Being the daughter of a computer programmer and a librarian may have its downsides (you try keeping your bookshelf organized by Dewey Decimal Classification at the age of 8), but the UPSIDE is that I observed early on the complex and seductive relationship between words & data. Not that I knew that at the time – SEM found me when I moved up to the Twin Cities after graduating college, and now I am happily steeped in match types and click-through-rates and have fallen madly in love with pivot tables.

Favorite food?
Born and bred on a dairy ranch, I am bound and determined to find out if anyone in Minnesota can make a chicken fried steak as good as we make ‘em in the Great Republic of Texas. (If I was the bettin’ kind, I’d be bettin’ no.)

What are some of your hobbies?
When I’m not wearing my SEM cape, I am playing saxophone, singing, and generally musicking around the Twin Cities with my hip hop band or any one of a handful of other talented musicians in the area.

Who would star as you in your life story?
We would have to wait to film for another 25 years, because the only suitable candidate for this role would be the love-child of Janeane Garofalo and Larry David.

Welcome to the team, Rachel!

Nina Hale is psyched to welcome Jamie Murnane, Search Marketing Manager, to our Search Marketing Team!  A recent Twin Cities transplant from Chicago, Jamie is no slouch when it comes to search.  Learn more about Jamie, in her own words

What led you to search marketing?
I have a background in journalism, and discovered search when I was hired as a senior editor for an Internet company, who, as it turned out, was trying to game the Google system by writing websites on highly-searched terms. I wrote entire sites about things like Caribbean cruises to plastic surgery. It was unsuccessful, but I had a great boss who taught me the search ropes by having me do keyword research, on-site optimization and paid ads, when I wasn’t writing/editing content.

What are your hobbies?
Reading, traveling, city biking, cooking (mostly vegan) and discovering new restaurants, as well as working out, which helps balance out the whole cooking/restaurants thing.

Favorite food?
Mexican and Ethiopian. Or Thai… or….

What do you like about NHI?
The people. I worked from home in my last position, so the friendly, fun people are a definite perk. Oh and dogs are allowed, so my pug, Stella may come visit.

 Nina Hale Inc is thrilled to welcome Brett Stone, Client Services Intern, to our Client Services team.
A recent graduate from the University of St. Thomas, Brett comes to us with a BA in Business Communications. Learn more about Brett in his own words.

What led you to search marketing?
I did research about it for a college advertising campaign and was hooked after that.

What are some of your hobbies?
I am an avid comic book reader, and the local shop knows me by name. I also enjoy everything about the Twin Cities, especially the lakes and local music scene.

What’s your favorite part about NHI?
Herman (the Horse Lamp). You can’t help but be jazzed about work when he’s the first thing you see in the office every morning.

Best ice cream in the Twin Cities?
Minneapolis: Sebastian Joe’s Raspberry Chocolate Chip.
St. Paul: Grand Ole Creamery.

Something broke in the Analytics data center over the weekend. Several clients are showing zero traffic from certain Advanced Segments in the entire month of April. Oddly enough, we could see the data last week.

The data is not lost, as we can still see the information using “Traffic Sources” reports, but our SEO reporting tool is dependent on the Advanced Segments for reporting. Our suspicion is there is a glitch in the new “Fast-Access Mode” which provides sampled data.

The glitch is affecting both the old and new versions of Analytics and we’re hoping Google fixes it soon!