If your business is participating in social media, dig into Google Analytics to uncover actionable insights that will immediately improve your social efforts. We’ve identified three ways Google Analytics can supercharge your social media initiatives. Optimize Social Traffic. Create an advanced custom segment to look at the percentage of traffic that came to your website from social media versus other places and what that social traffic did once they got to your site. Google Analytics is a powerful tool. Tweet with them. MORE >>

Many of the same principles apply to optimizing a blog for search as for optimizing a business website : use keywords in the body copy, post titles, subheadings, permalink URL, image alt tags and meta tags. But a blog also presents additional opportunities for search optimization beyond those that apply to standard websites (which is why Google loves blogs ). Nearly every industry has its own specific directories and syndication sites as well; for example, B2B Marketing Zone for B2B vendor and influencer blogs, and Social Media Informer for social media-related blogs. MORE >>

This session, part of eduWeb2012 , gave the audience a quantitative and qualitative overview of how institutions have adopted analytics to inform their marketing decisions. Karine Joly share the main results of the 3rd yearly survey on the State of Web and Social Media in Higher Ed 2012 , trends, emblematic success stories and useful resources. Top analytic tools: Google Analytics (97%), Facebook (62%, not growing as much as Google Analytics is), YouTube (40%, big uptake from last year). Full-time staff are beginning to be hired just for analytics. MORE >>

In Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing , Lee Odden provides the definitive guide to SEO and its extension into social and content marketing for the new, more sophisticated world of search and web presence optimization. “Audits are a key part of search engine optimization, allowing marketers to access the current state of the website in ways that identify any conflicts or inefficiencies for search engines.” ” •  Content isn’t just the job of marketing and PR. MORE >>

'There’s no question that web analytics are vital, but even Shakespeare acknowledged that one can have too much of a good thing.  In an environment where nearly everything that happens online can be measured, the challenge for marketers isn’t gaining the ability to measure even more factors, but rather the clarity to focus on measuring what matters. How can you measure all of the sources that contributed to a conversion–not just the last click? Which Google Analytics (GA) metrics are most important? MORE >>