Missed your response, yes she was. She was told that she would get better positioning (which she didn't) and receive loads of extra traffic (which she did), but none of that traffic was qualified traffic (that converts).
By the way, she does not sell a product, she sells a service (herself) and that's a little more difficult to track.
Re:Google Analytics, Casualty of Spam
by lifeisstillgood on Sunday January 11, 2015 @03:28PM
(#8871169)
So, what levels do you need to track at?
Let's say I am selling a saas service, Facebook for dogs. I advertise on keywords like "share my puppy pics". Each keyword hits a different landing page. I track users with a cookie
Is there any more or less to do?
1. The keywords you want may be worthless 2. Google/Bing/Yahoo stopped sending the keyword data about a year ago (so you have almost no insight into what keywords did what
What is important is driving meaningful traffic. This usually means increasing visits that increase revenue.
Here is the hard part, besides ecommerce sites, most businesses do NOT track at the level needed to know.
Even if you educate people, there is a tiny set that actually care to track and an even smaller set that actually put in the effort to do so.
A lot of people still care about the vanity side. "I am #1 for <keyword>"
Pay for Perforamce marketing only works if you close the loop. And even then it's a hard to do and may not be best for everyone
To me, it does sound like your friend was a victim of fraud.