If you're an online publisher using Google Analytics, I'm sure you've heard this before: you need to use custom variables so that you can really segment and measure your audience.

You also most likely are currently working on migrating to Google Tag Manager in order to make your life easier.

So how do you implement them together? What follows is a step-by-step guide for installing publisher-centered custom variables using Google Tag Manager.

I am going to assume, that you already have Google Tag Manager installed in your site and that one of your tags is the asynch GA js. If you don't, read this first.

Google's Justin Cutroni recommends adding seven custom variables for publishers. This article will go in detail and breakdown how to install four of them:

• Category
• Content Type
• Publication Date
• Author

These four custom variables at the most basic level gets you a good idea of your overall site performance. Once you add these data points, you can also get closer to information that other publisher-centered analytics tools such as Parsely track.

Let's jump in!

3 Things You Need to Know Before You Begin

• These custom variables should be implemented on the page level. For all the custom variables mentioned above, the value changes as the user goes from one page to the next. For example, a user might read an article by author one and then click on a link that goes to an article by Author 2. This is true for all the custom variables aforementioned
• You're going to need a data layer. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The best and only way to have these custom variables on your site is via data layer. If you want to read more about this, here's an article that gives a good explanation of how data layers work.
• You need the help of your front-end engineer. If you don't know this yet, you will, a good analytics person is always good to his or her front-end engineers.

Ask your front-end engineer to create a data layer that contains the four custom variables we want to add: Content Type, Author, Category, and Published Date. Direct them to the developer documentation on adding data layer for Google Tag Manager. There are two key things to check in the developer implementation:

• Make sure that the data layer comes before the Google Tag Manager code (we inserted ours before the /head tag).
• I like keeping my values in small caps, this eliminates any potential duplicate entries that could be created due to any weird capitalizations.

Check out the way we set up the data layer in one of our sites. The data layer in the source code for that page will look like below.

Note: pagetype is our data layer entry for content type

How to Add These Custom Variables as Values in Google Tag Manager

1. Create 4 Different Macros

You will need one for each data point that is pushed to data layer. Below is my Author macro as an example. You will need to create one macro each for content type, author, category, and published date.

2. Edit Your Existing Google Analytics Asynch Tag in GTM

• You don't need to create a new GA Asynch Tag.
• Add the four new custom variables in GTM based on your data layer.
• The final implementation in GA Classic Tag should look something like this, the Value is the Macros you created in step 1.

3. Create a New Version of GTM

I like to name my versions based on what changes I pushed in the version.

4. Preview Version to Make Sure the Tags and Custom Variables are Firing Correctly

I love using the preview function of GTM to check if what I implemented will work. You can see the preview button on the top right of every version you create in Google Tag Manager.

5. Publish the New Version of Google Tag Manager

You will start to see your new data points flow through after a few hours.

Once you have completed this setup, here are some examples of additional insights you can now access:

Isolate the Increase/Decrease in Traffic to a Specific Content Type

In the example below, I was able to drill down that it was article content type that caused the decrease in sessions. You can now drill down to # of articles published for the time period and get a better understanding of what may be causing the traffic to decline.

Uncover Pages With Errors by Tracking Your 404 Pages

Uncover More Insights on the Performance of Your Authors

This is where an advanced Google Analytics implementation can get you similar insights you have to get from signing up with other data providers such as Parsely.

You can drill down to the number of articles, each author writes for the month, the number of pageviews per post, and the categories each author is writing about.

This table was derived from using data for author and published date.

This is Just the Beginning...

There are so many other possibilities of additional analysis points once you have these custom variables set up. I'd love to hear your ideas and get more conversations going on publisher specific Google Analytics setups.

 Apple Inc, Google Inc and Facebook Inc have made significant progress in adopting renewable energy sources to power their Web services, the environmental group Greenpeace said in a report on Wednesday.
But energy-hungry data centers operated by some of the Internet industry's top companies remain overly reliant on carbon-emitting coal and gas, the report said.

Apple Inc, which built an on-site solar panel farm and fuel-cells at its North Carolina data center and has procured renewable energy directly at its other three facilities, earned the highest marks on the "scorecard" of Internet company data centers that Greenpeace issues every two years.
Greenpeace rated Apple's efforts in transparency, renewable energy policy and renewable energy deployment with an A grade in each category, compared with a mix of D and F grades two years ago when the group released its last report.

At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon.com Inc's Web Services business, which Greenpeace said operates at least 18 data centers around the world, was singled out for being among the least committed to renewable energy, earning F grades in three out of Greenpeace's four categories.
Some Internet companies "have refused to pay even lip service to sustainability and are simply buying dirty energy straight from the grid," said the report. "Those companies, most notably Amazon Web Services, are choosing how to power their infrastructure based solely on lowest electricity prices."
Amazon disputed Greenpeace's assessment of its data center operation, saying that the report's data and assumptions were inaccurate. Amazon said in an emailed statement that data centers in two regions in which it operates use "100 percent carbon-free power" without elaborating.

Data centers, multimillion-dollar facilities stuffed with racks of tightly-packed computers, are the heart of the fast-growing Internet industry. The facilities store consumers' email and other personal data, and help deliver popular online offerings such as Netflix's streaming video service and Facebook's photo-laden social network.
A large Internet data center requires energy capacity of as much as 80 megwatts, which would be enough to power about 65,000 U.S. homes, according to Greenpeace spokesman David Pomerantz.
The increasing prevalence of Internet services means growing demand for electricity in the coming years, Greenpeace said.

Six major Internet services companies - Facebook, Apple, Google, Box, Rackspace and Salesforce.com - have committed to making their data center operations 100 percent based on renewable energy, according to the report. Those commitments are putting pressure on utilities to offer wind, solar and other forms of renewable power, Greenpeace said.

The report looked at 19 companies that operate more than 300 data centers combined. Greenpeace used information provided by the companies and utilities to estimate what portion of a company's Internet infrastructure is going to be based on renewable energy, which it refers to as a "Clean Energy Index."
Renewable energy credits, which a company can purchase to meet clean energy goals, were not counted.
Apple's Clean Energy Index was 100 percent, while Facebook and Google were rated by Greenpeace at 49 percent and 48 percent, respectively.

Google has been a leader in committing to renewable energy, with procurement deals to purchase wind power from utilities in several states, Greenpeace said. But with 13 data centers, compared with Apple's four, the company faces a bigger task in shifting its overall energy usage to renewable sources.
Amazon Web Services, which Greenpeace said operates more than 10 data centers in the Virginia area, had a Clean Energy Index of 15 percent, according to Greenpeace. (Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Mohammad Zargham, Bernard Orr)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2014. Click For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp

It's been quite a year for SEO folk everywhere.

As 2013 shutters its doors and 2014 beckons, it's an opportune time to reevaluate, reassess, and revisit SEO tactics.

In the spirit of a New Year's Eve edition, I'm presenting some of the most popular (according to the US Government) New Years Resolutions through an SEO lens, in the hope of spreading some good cheer and great strategy along with a very happy new year to you and yours!

Without further ado... below are the top 10 SEO resolutions for your 2014 success!

1. Drink Less SEO Kool-Aid 

In the SEO world, there's a fire hose of information. It's easy to drink the Kool-Aid of popular industry experts.

Although there are some folks who are worthy of quoting and following, I'd lay off the hard-liquor-high until you've actually tested "expert" recommendations and seen the results for yourself.

It's easy to get intoxicated with the SEO practice du jour, but it's sobering when you're trying to justify a bad outcome to a client by saying, "but [enter SEO expert name here] said it worked for [enter big brand website name here]."

---

2. Eat Healthy SEO Fare

The Internet is fueled by great content, and the healthiest of content is unique, valuable, authoritative, and share-worthy.

Google's Matt Cutts said recently that 25-30 percent of the content on the web is duplicate. Although that might make you feel a little peckish for some long form articles, you need to focus on the best in healthy snacks; link-inspiring user-generated content, educating prose, expert opinion, multimedia munches and share-demanding content desserts.

---

3. Get a Better SEO Education

With great resources like Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land,Moz, and Google themselves, there's no reason not to better educate yourself as to the trends and updates in the SEO industry.

Set up an RSS feed of your favorite resources and spend the first 15 minutes of the day reviewing, interacting, asking questions, and learning a little more about the constantly evolving landscape of search, social, display and paid search.

The future is cross-channel attribution, and learning more about more is a sure way to stay on the cutting edge and in demand.

---

4. Get Your Site Fit, Lose Excess Code Weight

2014 is sure to (finally) be the year of mobile, right after the year of mobile that was 2013. And if your business relies on localized, mobilized, and focalized customers, then a mobile optimized site is a necessity!

To get your site fit, focused, slimmed down, and ready for a mobile push, get implementing responsive web design, a specialized mobile site, or app based experience. Whichever you chose (and Google recommends in most cases a well-engineered responsive site), make certain to trim excess code, optimize images, squeeze scripts, and lighten server loads to deliver the best (and fastest) mobile experience you can.

---

5. Manage SEO Stress

As SEO professionals, I'm not sure we're ever not stressed with Google updates, client requests, deadlines, and migrations where redirects were "overlooked" by tech teams, but that leads to the best stress management recommendations: stress testing every recommendation and implementation! Twice. At least.

SEO isn't an exact science, but it is something that requires technical savvy, sophistication, and strategy to ensure alignment with search visibility goals.

The best way to manage technology stress is to test, test, and keep testing, everything from user site engagement, to site usability, to server stress tests, to guarantee an optimal onsite experience.

Managing stress is easy... you just have to plan to do everything perfect.

---

6. Give Up Bad Habits 

Everyone has vices, easy "go-tos" when the going gets tough; the link schemes, overseas outsourced content, or short cuts for short-term gains. Now's the time to resolve to "never puff again" by implementing long-term strategies via sustainable tactics to ensure online success.

Go cold turkey and you'll find the world of fresh thinking (and fresh air) opens up, and you can return to the fundamentals of:

• Understanding the customer's journey.
• Creating content that connects with individual intent.
• Leveraging engagement to drive loyalty, visibility and discover-ability.

Give up the bad habits, and adopt a fresher, longer-term outlook!

---

7. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The popular resolution to "reduce, reuse, and recycle" might very well be made for eco-friendly reasons, but applies equally well to your website content strategy.

Panda bought us thin content awareness, and recent messages in Google Webmaster Tools underscore the need to reduce or remove content that isn't user-focused, user-useful or share-worthy.

As for reusing and recycling, for content that connects with core intent (and context), your focus should be on intelligent repurposing of content copy, content elements, content themes and content ideas, to create unique and aligned articles, rejiggered for different platforms, mediums, formats and audiences.

No piece of written content is an island. If you aren't promoting worthy content in the most appropriate formats across your social channels, then 2014 may not be your year!

---

8. Save SEO Money 

Many folks look to the New Year as a time to be frugal, put some cash away for a rainy day, and generally be more careful where they spend.

The goal for SEO professionals isn't to save money. Rather, it's to leverage data, metrics that matter, and broad analytics to spend smarterand/or justify budgets and efforts.

Although the initial outcome may be more less money in the bank, investing in data-informed areas of opportunity will almost definitely pay off in the long term, through additional revenue, valuable insights and happier customers.

---

9. Take a Trip to an Industry Conference

I can't put a value on the information, networking or camaraderie I've experienced through some of the great industry events I've attended (including SES conferences!) It's one of the easiest ROIs in SEO to return from 2 or 3 days of intensive learning and impart the knowledge gained to work colleagues and your boss.

Taking a little trip doesn't have to be expensive either. With conferences that offer East and West Coast venues (and everything in between), inexpensive airfares when you book in advance, and advanced conference ticket deals, you'll find the value of taking a learning trip gives you the tips, knowledge, and tools to help both your site or your clients sites succeed.

---

10. Help Other SEO Folks

It's simple. Give back!

For those starting out in search, you have a unique perspective and valuable insights in the questions you ask. For those seasoned folks, it's important to realize that your experience has value to the industry as a whole.

Some of the best information I've learned has been from both these groups, beginners asking hard questions, and SEO pros sharing a trick I hadn't thought of. In a season of giving, write a blog post, conduct a webinar, share some survey results, or take an SEO newbie under your wing to share the wealth of knowledge!

---

Here's to 2014!

There's no guarantee you'll keep your SEO resolutions this year. In fact, StatisticBrain.com says that less 10 percent of people actually successfully achieve their resolutions. But that's way better odds than the lottery (which, incidentally, I resolve to win this year).

Happy, safe, and healthy New Year to all!

Twitter finally released its S-1 IPO documentation this afternoon and will be seeking to raise $1 billion. The company has not yet set a price for its stock.

The company currently has 200 million active users, the S-1 says, and 500 million tweets a day, but with only 100 million daily active users, lower than some have estimated. In addition, tweets have appeared on over one million other websites as embedded tweets, and there were 30 billion online impressions of tweets in 2013′s first quarter alone.

“Since the first tweet, our users have created over 300 billion tweets,” Twitter says.

---

However, even though the company has grown top-line revenue significantly over the last years, from $28 million in 2010 to $253 million in the first half of 2013, Twitter is still not making money. For 2012, the company lost $79 million, and for the first six months of 2013, the company lost $69 million.

The shares that Twitter is offering exclude 44 million options with an exercise price of just $1.82, almost 60 million restricted unit shares still outstanding, plus almost 15 million shares dedicated to the complete of its recent MoPub acquisition, and 8 million shares reserved for future equity-incentive uses. The company’s total outstanding shares total 472,613,753.

Twitter says that 75 percent of its monthly active users come from mobile devices, and 65 percent of its revenue is on mobile, echoing recent reports from Facebook that mobile monetization is growing extremely quickly.

Twitter may be losing money, but it clearly has cash on hand, and cash to expand. The company has $164 million in cash and equivalents, plus another $210 million in short-term investments, and yet another $382 million in working capital, for total assets — with property and equipment — of just under a billion dollars: $964 million.

In its filing, Twitter is telling the world that it can be the “content creation, distribution, and discovery platform for the Internet and evolving mobile ecosystem,” combining the elements of public data, real-time information, conversation tone, and massive distribution. The resulting value proposition for advertisers, the company says, is: unique ad formats (its suite of promoted tweets, accounts, etc.), interest targeting, viral global reach, real-time advertising, pay-for-performance, and the extension of offline advertising, as on TV.

In the future, Twitter will be adding geographical expansion, more mobile apps, and more platform partners to drive the growth of the ecosystem. In addition, the company will be improving its targeting and ad platform capabilities, and adding new advertising formats.

While Google has changed how it updates its search algorithm over the years, one thing has remained constant: a whole lot of ensuing backlash from search engine optimization (SEO) experts

Hummingbird, Google’s latest update, is no exception. Officially launched last week, the new algorithm represents the biggest change to Google’s search functionality in 10 years — a fact that, perhaps understandably, has gotten more than a few SEO experts worked up.

But Hummingbird is more than SEO — and it’s also more than just search. Here are a few takeaways.

It’s all about mobile

One of the most telling things about Google’s recent updates is that the company chose to illustrate them with images of its mobile app, not its desktop site. That’s no accident. More than anything else, Google over the past few years has been focused on making it easier for you to pull out your phone, ask Google a question, and get your answer as quickly as possible. Hummingbird is just an extension of that.

This, again, is why Google’s focus on voice search is so important, and why it’s so intent on making it easier for users to have conversations with its search engine, Siri-style.This shift in focus comes as a result of some very clear trends. Mobile users need search results faster, and they need them to be immediately relevant. As we’ve noted before, the more mobile and less interface-heavy a form factor is, the less tolerant people are of bad experiences and unhelpful or spammy search results. This is as true for smartphones as it is for upcoming devices like Google Glass.

To sum it up, it looks like this:

• Mobile is the future, so Google should be attuned to answering search queries in the most mobile-friendly way.
• People tend to be conversational with their mobile searches (“Where can I buy a new pair of underwear?”)
• Ergo, the future of Google search is mobile-focused and question-oriented.

It’s about meaning, not just keywords

Core to what Google is doing with Hummingbird is a shift in focus away from keywords and towards intent and semantics, which are infinitely more relevant to users. While the Google of a decade ago was focused on delivering search results based solely on queries, the Google of today is drawing insights from a variety of other signals — location, social connections, and even your previous searches.

In other words, stuffing your webpages with SEO-friendly keywords isn’t going to cut it anymore. Or, as Google search guru Matt Cutts likes to put it, the Google of the future “is about things, not strings.”

It’s a natural evolution in search

Hummingbird is a part of Google’s natural evolution away from pure search and more towards predictive intelligence and natural language processing. If you want to understand where Google wants to go, take a look at Google Now, which pulls together data from all over to deliver you information that you didn’t know you needed.

That idea, coupled with the always-listening, and always-present Google Glass, should give you a pretty clear idea of how Google wants you to interact with it in the future: constantly, quickly, and transparently.

There aren’t any clear losers…yet

What’s funny about Hummingbird is, unlike other recent Google algorithm updates, there aren’t any clear losers this time around (at least as far as people can determine so far).

“No one seems to have generally lost traffic, unlike some other algorithmic changes, which often produce vocal ‘losers’ and silent ‘winners,’” SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan told VentureBeat by email.

Consider the results of 2011′s Panda update, which was all about lowering the rank of so-called ”low-quality sites,” some of which saw their traffic cut by as much as 50 percent. Hummingbird, in contrast, is pretty harmless.

While SEO experts are still trying to figure out whether the arrival of Hummingbird means they’ll have to change their strategies, Sullivan says the general SEO advice remains the same: “Have good, descriptive content, and you should be doing all you can be doing to tap into long-tail searches,” he wrote.