Stats Reloaded

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has become one of the industry’s most powerful Internet Marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers and website owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting and marketing initiatives. Previously dubbed Urchin, Google Analytics is a robust web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.

Simple and easy to use, anyone can start benefiting from Google Analytics in just a few minutes. Just add some basic code onto your website, and you’re ready to begin monitoring visitor trends.

After basic set-up, marketers can track important statistics like visitor referrers, navigation paths, page views, geo-location data and browser type. Know where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, emails, blogs or affiliates. Know which cities, states and countries your primary visitor traffic resides in, so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.

While hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some Marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor email marketing campaigns. Track, evaluate and analyze results using colorful graphs and charts. Google Analytics makes it easier to identify trends, improve usability and increase your return on investment.

Email Marketing Campaign Set-Up

Using Google Analytics, email marketers gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign. Send carefully targeted, relevant messages, improve revenue opportunities and enhance your business reputation.

To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant website files. Once you’ve created a Google Analytics account and placed the provided code into your website, you’ll need to add parameters to URLs in each email marketing message. These denote which visitors arrive as a result of each email marketing campaign.

While some email marketing products, like StreamSend, add these parameters automatically, it takes just a few minutes to set it up manually.

Google Analytics looks for a few basic values in each link, namely the campaign source, campaign medium and campaign name. To set-up these values manually, simply change the parameter names shown in parentheses below:

1. Campaign Source (utm_source). This identifies the name of your email marketing system, such as StreamSend. If you don’t use an email marketing system, you can label your campaign source ‘Email Marketing’.
2. Campaign Medium (utm_medium). This identifies the campaign instrument used. In the case of email marketing, your medium is ‘email’.
3. Campaign Name (utm_campaign). This identifies the name of your campaign. The Campaign Name helps you differentiate between various campaigns or unique messages within each. Most Email Marketers use their message subject line or other identifying value for this parameter. Using this process, campaign managers can monitor in-bound visitor traffic for any destination URL, whether a main landing page, a product page or other sub-page.

Example: Main Landing Page

• Before tagging: http://www.example.com/
• After tagging: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject

Example: Sub-Page

• Before tagging: [http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home]
• [http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home&utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject]

Tracking Email Campaign Results

Once an email campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting website traffic. Find out which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your website, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival. Then adjust campaigns, body text layout and other variables to improve results over time.

To view campaign results:

Log into your Google Analytics account.

1. On your Dashboard, click ‘Traffic Sources’.
2. View your ‘Top Traffic Sources’ or click ‘View Full Report’ to see all traffic sources.
3. Locate and click the link identifying your email marketing Campaign Source. In our example above, your Campaign Source is your email marketing product, i.e. StreamSend, or ‘Email Marketing’.

On your Campaign Source page, Google Analytics provides details on the number of visitors generated by your campaign, the number of pages they visited, average time on your website, percent of new visitors to your website and the average bounce rate.

Campaign managers can also drill-down using the segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems and visitor activity, like the most popular landing and exit pages. Each results page provides the means to drill-down even further and fine-tune your data.

Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities e-commerce firms have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, Email Marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages, design and layout to their audience’s preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping cart abandonment, improve landing page effectiveness and keep visitors on your website even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most of your visitors exit. Use today’s robust delivery and tracking tools, and make each message count.

Author: Dan Forootan
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Wordpress plugin expert

Whats the difference between web stats and web analytics? Its a question we hear all the time. Well web stats can give you lots of information on traffic, search engine referrals and page downloads but they can be difficult to interpret by the average business user. Web Analytics on the other hand gives detailed information on visitor behaviour and is a much richer source of information for marketers.

Typically web analytics solutions collect session information for every visitor to your website. This data can then be analysed pretty much in any way you want. So you can find out which search engine and queries people are using to find you. But you can also study the behaviour of those users who went on to sign up to your service or make a purchase. Users can be segmented and followed through the site to identify patterns of behaviours. These patterns of behaviour can then help to identify which pages or content produce most sales or show up usability issues which cause users to exit your site.

Combine this with ability to overlay visitor data over a live copy of your website and you have a really powerful tool for developing your web strategy. Perhaps you have a button on your homepage that you want visitors click on and download a demo piece of software? The click through rate on this button is probably an important metric for your business. Does your web stats package tell you what the click through on this button is? Web analytics will not only tell you this but also allow you to track this metric over time. May be you decide to make the button more prominent or change the call to action. The analytics can tell you whether these changes have worked and suddenly youre developing your site using objective information with a clear business strategy in mind.

If you manage some pay per click campaigns you are probably tracking the average cost per clicks you might even be using Google Conversion Tracking to give you some idea of the return on your advertising investment. Most web analytics packages can do this for Adwords and Overture but also for email campaigns as well so that you know which campaigns are the most profitable or effective in achieving your business objectives. However the real advantage over conversion tracking is that web analytics tells you what the visitor gets up to between the landing and final check out page.

With out web analytics you are pretty much driving your website blind but for a relatively small investment you can get the full dashboard plus satellite navigation.

Whats the difference between web stats and web analytics? Its a question we hear all the time. Well web stats can give you lots of information on traffic, search engine referrals and page downloads but they can be difficult to interpret by the average business user. Web Analytics on the other hand gives detailed information on visitor behaviour and is a much richer source of information for marketers.

Typically web analytics solutions collect session information for every visitor to your website. This data can then be analysed pretty much in any way you want. So you can find out which search engine and queries people are using to find you. But you can also study the behaviour of those users who went on to sign up to your service or make a purchase. Users can be segmented and followed through the site to identify patterns of behaviours. These patterns of behaviour can then help to identify which pages or content produce most sales or show up usability issues which cause users to exit your site.

Combine this with ability to overlay visitor data over a live copy of your website and you have a really powerful tool for developing your web strategy. Perhaps you have a button on your homepage that you want visitors click on and download a demo piece of software? The click through rate on this button is probably an important metric for your business. Does your web stats package tell you what the click through on this button is? Web analytics will not only tell you this but also allow you to track this metric over time. May be you decide to make the button more prominent or change the call to action. The analytics can tell you whether these changes have worked and suddenly youre developing your site using objective information with a clear business strategy in mind.

If you manage some pay per click campaigns you are probably tracking the average cost per clicks you might even be using Google Conversion Tracking to give you some idea of the return on your advertising investment. Most web analytics packages can do this for Adwords and Overture but also for email campaigns as well so that you know which campaigns are the most profitable or effective in achieving your business objectives. However the real advantage over conversion tracking is that web analytics tells you what the visitor gets up to between the landing and final check out page.

With out web analytics you are pretty much driving your website blind but for a relatively small investment you can get the full dashboard plus satellite navigation.

To find out more about how web analytics can help your online business go to http://www.ju2.com

Author: JMA Williams
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: PCB Prototype & Manufacturing

14 November Google released a new service with the name Google Analytics. Google Analytics is basically a rebranded version of Urchin, a web analytics service that Google purchased a few months ago.

Web Tracking Analytics Services

Like other web analytics services Opentracker.net, shinystat.com, or truehits.net Google Analytics is a service that tells you where visitors to your site are coming from, what links on the site are getting the most traffic, what pages visitors are viewing, how long people stay on the site, which products on merchant sites are being sold and where people give up in multistep checkout processes. The difference between these tools or website analyzers is that Google tracking is not done in real-time, they use a system what’s similar to log analyzers. That mean it will not measure human behavior or what’s done by the visitor.

Google Analytics vs Other Website Tracking Services

Another difference between Google Analytics and other web tracking services is that Google Analytics is free and unreliable. Google Analytics doesn’t work with Safari and Mac OS X. In order to view a Google Analytics report on Mac OS X, you have to be using a Mozilla based brower, IE. or Firefox. But for sharing your data with the company, Google doesn’t require you to pay directly for their web analytics service.

But unfortunaly if you want to open an account with Google Analytics you will get this answer:

New account signups are temporarily suspended. If you want to be notified when signups re-open, please enter your e-mail address on our signup page. Thank you!

Should you use Google Analytics or should you pay for a better service?

Google already knows a lot of things about you. If you also use their new tracking service or log analyzer system, you will tell Google how much you earn, when you earn it, which products you sell, how often you sell them, how much you spend for ads on other sites and you will reveal much more information about your personal online business and company details.

Ask yourself if you want Google to know that much about you and your company. Do you really want to share your revenue information with Google that also wants your advertising money? Do you want to share your revenue information with any other company at all?

Google officials have declined that they will use the data to better understand how much you are willing to pay for ads, based on conversions. They also claim that they do not plan to tap into the data as a means of improving regular search results or to identify bad sites. Nevertheless, these things are easily possible if you use Google Analytics also your ranking would be in danger. Google engineer Matt Cutts even writes in his blog: “Blackhat SEO companies may be leery of using Google for analytics, but regular site owners should be reassured. That sounds as if Google might actually use the information for other purposes.

Think twice before using anything that is free

While Google’s new analytics tool looks great at first place, you should think twice before using this tool. The market power of Google can make your business highly dependent on Google if you decide to use all of Google’s services. The more Google knows about you, the better they can get your cash. If a company in the real world asked you to tell them everything about your interests, the shops you visit, the news papers you read, your full address and telephone number, your revenue and a lot of other information, then you probably wouldn’t give that information to the company.

When it comes to Google, many people reveal information they wouldn’t even tell their family or friends. Be Aware.!

Author: Billy Horner
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable Multi-cooker

Web Analytics tools such as Web Trends and Core Metrics have been around for some time. Smaller companies and individual site owners were excused for not making use of these tools, given the lack of a necessary budget. However, ever since Google purchased Urchin’s tool, and repackaged and rebranded it as a free tool known as Google Analytics, site users have had no excuse to not make use of Web Analytics. Not only is Google Analytics free, but installing Analytics can take as little as 5 minutes, and it can be done in 3 easy steps.

Installing Google Analytics is quick and easy. Simply create a Google account if you don’t already have one, then visit the Google Analytics website and sign up using your Google account. Follow the simple sign up process and copy paste the code to your website.

Here are the steps for installing Google Analytics, explained more in depth.

1. Create a Google account if you don’t already have one.

If you have a Gmail or some other account with a Google service, then you technically already have a Google account. You can skip to step 2. If you don’t, you’ll have to create a Google account (which is quick and easy, just Google “create Google account”). If you have a Google AdWords account and you want to use the same login for Analytics, simply login to your AdWords account and click the Analytics tab at the very top.

2. Visit the Google Analytics website, click the Sign Up Now button, and follow the easy sign up process

The Sign Up involves 4 simple steps. The first 3 steps involve simply filling out your website and contact information, and signing a user agreement. The last step involves adding the Google Analytics tracking code to your website.

3. Copy paste the code you are given, just above the closing body tag.

The tracking code is how Google Analytics tracks user behavior on your site. This is why it’s important to have the code on every page (just before the closing body tag). Ideally you’ll have a template or a master page where you can add the code in one spot. If your pages are completely independent of one another, you’ll need to make sure you add the code to every page.

You’ll be given the option of using either New Tracking Code or the Legacy Tracking Code. Many of Google Analytic’s new features will only be supported with the New Tracking Code so there is little or no reason to use the Legacy Tracking Code at this point.

Once you’ve pasted Analytics tracking code to your website, upload the changes, and click “Check Status” in the Analytics Settings window. Google will verify that the Analytics tracking code is running on the website you entered. Once Google has verified that the code is running, expect to see Google Analytics metrics within hours.

Author: Chris Casarez
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Electric Pressure Cooker

Where do your website’s visitors come from? Is your website attracting the right or the wrong types of customers? Is your website equipped to provide what your content offers? If you own or manage a business or informational website, ask yourself these questions and then don your detective garb and start thinking:

When it comes to improving your website, is there a surefire way to measure your next-step priorities?

Elementary My Dear Watson

Your website priorities will usually include the tasks it takes to get qualified customers or informational respondents to your website. In order to do this, it is important to know what the right online visitors are looking for and whether or not you are making your information available to as many qualified visitors as possible. How can you do it? Elementary my dear Watson. Start with web analytics.

Start with Web Analytics

You can find clues to the origins and buying habits of your website’s visitors if you know what to look for. Many web analytics solutions are affordable even for small-scale e-commerce sites and can provide visual maps and diagrams of your online visitors’ habits. Generally, website analytics solutions are also reasonably priced and the Google Analytics solution—though perhaps not the most sophisticated quietus (what solution really is?)—is at the very least free and effective in terms of providing valuable visitor data.

A Website Analytics Disclaimer

A disclaimer for website analytics solutions is that they certainly can’t take the place of you and your ability to plan well. All website reforms based on website analytics data should naturally focus on meeting the goals (whether monetary or informational) that you have for your website, and should in addition assist and prompt website visitors to take some sort of online and measurable ACTION.

Tip 1: Marketing More Effectively with Website Analytics and Keyword Origins

You don’t always have to know where your visitors are coming from if you know what they are looking for. A website analytics solution allows you to gain a glimpse of the wants and needs of your online (and very invisible) customers. How does it work? A website analytics solution provides keyword traffic source information. This information when applied to SEO (natural or organic search optimization) or PPC marketing campaigns can be like data written in gold!

Look for a web analytics solution that provides the following keyword origin data:

• Keywords and keyword phrases used (via search engines) to access your website
• The amount of visits that originated from each respective keyword phrase
• The average time that visitors spent on your site in relation to each respective keyword
• The number of pages viewed per visit
• The percentage of those visitors who bounce (leave the website after only one page view)
• The percentage of those visitors who are new visitors

Some website analytics solutions may include additional features that can be beneficial for your website but those features mentioned above may be all that you need to make some well needed changes. Theses changes might include the creation of new keyword based landing pages (or articles), or the redesign of pages or content that are specific to any given keyword.

Tip 2: Marketing More Effectively with Website Analytics and SEO/PPC Management

A keyword campaign is like a kid. It has to be watched. If your keyword campaign, like many, is a conglomerate of both PPC and natural (organic) search marketing techniques, you can use your PPC campaign as a doorway to faster revenue, while centering what remaining revenue you can spare on the generally more reluctant natural results marketing, which in the end is actually designed to create more perpetual and more lucrative ROI. The origin markings within a website analytics solution application for organic or natural result referrals may look something like this:

• yahoo/ organic
• google/ organic
• msn/ organic

Understanding PPC origins can be a bit trickier. For instance, they may include origins that look something like this:

• pagead2.googlesyndication.com / referral

Within the Google Analytics website analytics solution for instance, they will in fact be marked as a referral (not paid) but you must be cautious because the term referral can indicate any number of online origins. Sometimes, recognizing PPC referrals simply comes with time, experience and a bit of research (i.e. Google (this is a verb) portions of the origins data to find out more).

Even if your website is for purely informational purposes it’s important to stay abreast of website analytics information. It provides clues to the origins and habits of your online users and provides road maps (once deciphered) to website improvements that can help you achieve the goals you have for your website.

Author: Marci Lynn Crane
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: How Electric Pressure Cookers Work

Web analytics not only has become a more recognized tool for Website owners and online business sites, but it is becoming an indispensable marketing asset.

The importance of understandable site traffic reporting is apparent. Knowing what your visitors are doing, what pages they frequent, where they come from, and other such relevant data, has become vital and necessary information for growing and surviving in today’s Internet market. Web Reporting and Analytics has become much more than a log file filled with endless lines of data meant for IT specialists. Today’s reports are far richer than merely “page hits” or simple visitor tracking numbers. They have become a core tool for e-commerce, and are seen as a valuable companion in marketing everything from a “fan site” to a corporate blog. And this is even more true for real-time analytics, where you can see all the data as it is happening.

In the beginning of the analytics awareness explosion, there were several analytics services that were predominately aimed at hard-core e-commerce or large corporate sites. Now there are a a growing number of services making their marks. These new, or “next generation,” analytics companies are focusing on a more user-friendly approach.

Who is the best among them? Which one is right for you? The first thing to consider is, what one is easiest for you to analyze and use…which one saves you time, money and headaches while providing in-depth information on your site visitors? This review will look at a few popular services and compare their pros and cons.

Google Analytics – google.com/analytics – Hosted solution; no software to download

The analytics “shot heard around the world”, this service centers its value on being a support for Google AdWords. It is easy to get started, and requires no downloads. It works through the insertion of a small “snippet” of code placed in the HTML of your site pages.

It is not really fair to say, “You get what you pay for,” because this service is filling its niche. There were many much-publicized problems with it in their beginning, but those have been remedied, and now I would say the “price” makes it a real bargain. I can’t say it is enough on its own; I would want a more appealing and broader service, but it makes a good secondary analytics service or companion to another service for those who like the PPC details contained apart from their site details.

Highlights: Great for pay-per-click tracking and reporting. They have a clean layout. Ideal for IT-type users and other techies and those who want to tie in with their Google services.

Lowlights: Being IT slanted in their reporting, they are not as appealing to non-technical users. Data is definitely not current and not real-time, so no up-to-the-minute reporting ability with Google Analytics. Not very comprehensive or quick to use.

VisiStat – visistat.com – Hosted solution; no software to download (offers 7-day free full-function trial)

Their newest release reveals a definite vision, maturity and direction for this very popular newcomer. Their highly user-friendly model is more “Website Performance Management” than strictly traffic analysis, and they are well suited for analytics novices as well as IT professionals, especially focused on business, marketing and sales management. VisiStat makes a solid companion service along side other, more complicated analytics services, and for small and mid-size business and e-commerce sites, they serve exceptionally well.

They offer good online help information and have exceptional customer support. VisiStat is fresh, innovative, uncomplicated and very easy to use… what I would consider the poster child of “next generation” analytics. It is services like this that will define the future of analytics, and VisiStat has become the model for the rash of new analytics upstarts that are popping up everywhere.

Highlights: As a service geared toward business users of Web traffic data, I was quite impressed with VisiStat’s dedication to keep the reports simple and very easy to understand. I like the graphical layout and the departure from the standard graphs and pie charts of many of the other services. I was won over by the live data feed they call a Statcaster, and their advertising campaign manager (AdCaM) is an easy and logical way to track all advertising online under one umbrella. The individual LinkTracker allows you to monitor links (outbound and internal), as well as onsite downloads of all types. VisiStat impressed me with their attentive, dedicated customer service, and the fact that they really listen to their subscribers.

Lowlights: There are several reports that are still in beta versions, but they are functioning and pretty bug free.

WebTrends – webtrends.com – Software and hosted options

Their powerhouse reports are designed for enterprise-level businesses and Web marketing and analytics professionals. They offer several package options with reports targeting various industries. For large e-commerce and multi-national corporate Websites, WebTrends is the reigning ruler.

WebTrends is among the higher priced, and has complex reports. It would not be the service of choice for smaller businesses or analytics novices…or for those who want to go in, get a quick look at their site status, and get out. But for large corporate or e-commerce sites with a marketing department that needs very detailed data, they are a popular choice.

Highlights: Great consideration has been made to provide very specific industry focus within their service packages. For full-on, hard-push, dedicated marketing, their reports provide good detail and valuable reporting. Focused on marketing strategies, they provide a white paper and guide information area with helpful pointers and educational tips.

Lowlights: Many small business users will find the reports overwhelming and a lot of information that is not needed, especially for the price. It is difficult to find pricing information on their site, and demos and tours cannot be accessed without registration first. Frustrating to find answers readily for those on a budget or new to analytics. Also, data is not real-time.

ClickTracks – clicktracks.com – Hosted and software options

This service provides four “package” options. The first three are offered as hosted and software choices. Their variety should suit almost anyone who is familiar with Web analytics reports and interested in extensive e-commerce data. ClickTracks is a professional, very polished service, with levels designed to reach a broad customer base. I liken them to being a “superstore” of analytics, with good features, detailed reports, and almost anything the shopper could want, with many demos, trials and examples. Once you get through all the options and find what you want, the service is solid. ClickTracks could be a good choice for larger e-commerce sites and those with a need for very detailed product analysis that do not require current, immediate (real-time) data.

Highlights: Very good click path detail and ROI reporting; very nice interface. I like the search engine reports, especially being able to see the site how a search engine “bot” sees it – very helpful from an SEO perspective. Their graphics are nice and quite interactive — a few rungs above boring pie charts and graphs.

Lowlights: So many choices that it takes awhile to look them over, and every package and option has its own price. Reports will require some learning for small businesses that are just venturing into web reporting and analytics. Also, several reports are based on log files only, which can be useful for those with some IT experience, but again, will take some education for non-tech staff. Reports run slowly at times, and they do not offer real-time data.

Author: Cherie Davidson
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable pressure cooker

Web analytics is a quantitative indicator of behavior of visitors to a website. Simply explained, web analytics involves identification of visitor, analyzing the reason of visit and tracking his/her movement within your website until the time he/she leaves the website. In essence therefore, web analytics provides a clear picture of the performance of a website so that the website owner can devise strategies to maximize acceptability of the website.

Web analytics mainly comes in two flavors in terms of collection of visitors’ data. The first concerns collecting data from server logfile, and the second by tagging each webpage with javascript. A third web analytics method is a combination of the two whereby more relevant data can be produced than what is possible with either of the two methods.

In this article, we will briefly define some popular web analytics terms, moving on to comparing the two methods before outlining why studying web analytics is beneficial.

Key Web Analytics Terms

‘Hit’ denotes a request for a file from server and is recorded only in logfile. ‘Page View’ means different for the two web analytics methods. While tagging script considers the whole page as one request, the logfile on the other hand will record multiple hits (one for each file, including images, .js and .css) within a single page-view.

A visitor is one who requests for a file to be shown. Once again, while server log will record several files for each visit, the page-tagging script will only consider the page as a whole seen by the visitor. In either case, the web analytics data will clearly identify if the visitor is new (new or unique visitor) or has come before (repeat visitor).

Other Information

Both web analytics methods will be able to gather several other important information, notable among which are as under.

1 The length of time a visitor spends in seeing a website.

2 The keyword phrase used to arrive at the website.

3 The unique IP address and therefore the country from where the visits generated.

4 The arrival and exit pages.

Logfile vs Page Tagging

Data transfer to and from web server is always recorded in server’s logfile with clockwork precision. Since early days, realization dawned that it is possible for a suitable program to extract logfile data and arrange them in a meaningful display. That is how web analytics came into being. Today most servers come equipped with web analytics programs such as Webalizer, Awstats, etc. which analyze raw logfile data and portray valuable visitor information in easy-to-follow graphics.

Between the two web analytics techniques, namely logfile analysis and page tagging, certain differences exist. Here are the main ones.

1 Logfile analysis is usually already available in the server. Page tagging is an outsourced option, which means that visitors’ data is captured by provider’s remote server. You can view them only in provider’s website. Google Analytics and ClickTracks are examples of page-tagging web analytics.

2 Since page tagging requires javascript to be installed on every webpage, there is always a possibility that some visitors’ browsers do not allow the script to run. Not so with logfiles.

3 Logfiles enter transfer of all files, including images and scripts, and therefore certain parameters like hits and page views are not as accurate as with page-tagging web analytics.

4 While logfiles record visits by search engines, page tagging does not.

5 Logfile web analytics record failed visits too. Page tagging takes a request into account only when a webpage is successfully displayed.

Benefits of web analytics

Web analytics is a constantly available feedback from your visitors. Footprints that they leave in the wake of their visits are a great pointer of relative strength and weakness of your website. It is only from web analytics that you get to know which keyword phrases are most relevant to your web content, which pages are visited most, length of visits, incoming links, demographic profile of visitors and so on. If ever you wanted a trusted aide to comment upon your website’s performance, the answer lies in installing a suitable web analytics program.

Author: Joshua Mabilia
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Smart cooker

Budget, especially for smaller organizations, is often a major factor when researching which Analytics package to implement on a given website. There are business owners who continually push off the purchase of analytics until their company is financially ready to make the leap and online commitment; or until over inflated marketing projections prove to be just that, and mistakes need to be quantified. Something that the majority of business doesnt seem to realize is the immense insight and knowledge they are missing out on by waiting.

Its the same old argument: spend a dollar today or two dollars tomorrow. Put that simply, the answer seems obvious; yet everyday, another person throws his hat into the e-commerce ring, purely on the speculation of Google-like fortunes, some great M&A buy-out, or that mythical IPO of triple digit shares, without considering the concept of checks and balances.Having analytics on your site is something that doesnt take long to pay itself off. In fact, I’m pretty confident in saying that by delaying implementation, you’re probably losing more money through your site in lost revenue opportunities than you’re “saving” by putting it off. So smarten up, and start paying attention.

All site owners should be aware that there are options available to them, free ones! Google Analytics, StatCounter, and now ClickTracks all provide an analytics solution that users can employ without any outside cost and minimal internal IT resources, especially if the analytics are implemented right from the design stage of the site and built right into the site templates. After a reasonably simple setup, users can view real data and start using numbers to make educated marketing decisions instead of flying blindly into the wind.

In the rest of this article I will be talking about analytics solutions that are available for free, their features/limitations, and how you can begin collecting the right data.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics became available late last year and quickly became the hottest thing on the internet. Because of its immense popularity, users have to sign-up and wait in a queue until they receive an invitation to download. On average it takes anywhere from several weeks to months to get an invitation. Everybody wants to be popular, and Googles inability to meet demand is the biggest con for its analytics software.

I was granted access about a month ago and was very impressed by the depth of the reporting available. Some standard reports are Campaign/Conversion Tracking, Visitor/Geo Segmentation and executive dashboards. Google loves to integrate all their products, and as a result users have the ability to see metrics for their Adwords accounts inside their analytics suite. Other cool features include an administration area, which is built on top of a very intuitive user interface that allows for the management of users, websites, IP filters, and accounts. The report data is not up-to-the-minute and can sometimes take up to a couple of hours to update, which for most users, is accurate enough.

Google Analytics can be set-up and running within a couple of minutes. Google generates a block of JavaScript that you have to copy and paste onto all the pages of your website. Conversion tracking requires users to specify each step in their conversion process by entering in a corresponding URL. E-commerce tracking gets more advanced, but there is sufficient documentation to walk you through it.

StatCounter

StatCounter was one of the original online analytics packages, maybe thats why the home page has a PageRank of 10. Although it has fewer bells and whistles than Google Analytics, it still provides a simple interface with useful reports. The biggest drawback of StatCounters free version is that it has a log size of 100; this means that detailed statistics such as path analysis and referrals (as well as other metrics) are limited to a small number of a users latest pageloads. This means that if you website is already getting a large volume of visitors, StatCounters free download may not be the right product for you, but if you are already getting those kind of numbers, you should be able to pony up for the full StatCounter package.

StatCounters report suite includes the usual page views report, repeat and first-time visitor tracking, but really kicks it up a notch with its detailed analysis of Visitors Path and Visitor Activity. The reports lack a visual punch, but for a user who is looking strictly for the data, it does the trick.

Similar to Google, StatCounter generates a block of JavaScript for users to paste onto the pages of their entire website. However, in the free version, there is no way to set up additional tracking for conversions, campaigns, or e-commerce. In other words, StatCounters free version is an ample beginner analytics package, but as your online activity escalates and you start to make some real money, you are probably going to want to upgrade in order to keep your competitive advantage.

ClickTracks

ClickTracks free version was recently released, but has definitely created some buzz in the industry. The analytics software is targeted towards helping users understand their visitors in order to increase ROI.

This Version, known as ClickTracks Appetizer, comes with a standard interface, but also includes behavioral segmentation, campaign tracking (including PPC), and conversion tracking in order to help users make the best decisions for their search marketing campaigns. A cool perk theyve started is the announcement of Web Analytics Day where they turn on advanced features such as funnel reporting and advanced visitor segmentation. I think this is a great way to entice users to upgrade to advanced versions of ClickTracks, and its showing in their increasing market share.

So there you have it, three good options to help you make educated decisions for your website. So dont let your website sit untracked as time passes by, do yourself and your business a favor and sign-up for an Analytics package right away, even if youre blindly holding out for a more robust package and freer budgets in the future.

Analyzing something as simple as Top Exit Pages can help you pinpoint why users are dropping off your website. By tweaking these pages and keeping visitors on your site, you can help increase things like revenue and conversion rate (I think this is the primary goal for every businessperson). Keeping track of the right metrics through Analytics software will make all the difference in your future online success, because, as any marketer will tell you, understanding your customer is tantamount to making any money in business.

Author: Manoj Jasra
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Pressure cooker

Are you finding it difficult to keep track of your site’s performance in the search engines? Aside from having to download software that offer to keep track of your website’s SEO performance, Google now has a newly integrated service especially for SEO people out there concerned with their web site’s performance.

This Google tracking service is known as the Google Analytics. It is a powerful service that keeps track of your web site’s success on organic and paid search results. Google Analytics gives you better understanding on how your web site’s web visitors react on your site. It gives you no-holds barred and detailed experience of your web site visitors.

You will also be aware and know what key words users in relation to your web site frequently use. You will be educated on the best link text that brings in the most prospects.

True to its name, the Google Analytics shares with you analytical data that will help you greatly on being aware about your web site visitors and target visitors’ preferences.

Google Analytics provides free information about the way visitors to your site interact with it. By taking a good evaluation of Google Analytics, webmasters will realize how it is an invaluable tool they can and should use especially if they do not have some form of visitor tracking solution.

Google Analytics shares with you which of your SEO campaigns deliver the best ROI or return on investment. If you are not confident on the software you use in finding out your internet marketing results, Google Analytics is good in tracking down results of your internet marketing campaigns. Now alongside the Google AdWords, you can be certain of obtaining significant information about your web site.

Google Adwords is an equally powerful service for placing your web site in search results based on certain key words related to your site. Google Adwords take note of your major web site’s key words and efficiently guarantees that your web site appears in search engine results.

Google Analytics was once named as Urchin visitor tracking by Google. It was last November 16, 2005 when Google renamed this service into Google Analytics. It is free for everyone’s use and those who have signed up during its early stages are offered with a completely new set of significant and consequential information regarding your web site visitors.

Still, those who are late in signing up for this service can wait until Google offer new sign-ups to the Google Analytics system.

Google Analytics works with tracking codes that will guarantee to track down important user information for you. It uses codes in the destination URLs that facilitates the web site visitor tracking mission by Google Analytics.

Here are some of the most important reasons why you need Google Analytics as part of your website visitor tracking and have it on your site:

1. Its functionality equals most expensive visitor tracking services, even if it is free.

2. The service is your solution to identify where visitors leave your check-out or sign-up process. Identifying this will help you make amends and modify your sign-up process that is user-friendly. You will then be prevented from losing leads

3. Utilizing Google Analytics will help you identify the pages and links your web site visitors click on most. You will also know which page your visitors spend most their time on. You can therefore improve these pages properly and position them and their link texts appropriately.

4. Wondering the previous site your web site visitor logged on to before coming to your site? Google Analytics will tell you all about it.

5. You will also be provided with the most popular keyword users type in the search bar of the search engine in finding web sites associated/related to your website. Knowing these popular keywords is a great boost for your SEO efforts and performance, even on other search engines.

6. Google analytics conduct visitor segmentation. It classifies new and returning web site users, their geographical information and the referral source they use. This provides you with invaluable insight if you are planning on a setting up a new online business.

7. For search advertising results, Google Analytics and Google Adwords guarantees you with end-to-end visibility

8. You can even track other non-search-engine marketing media

9. Overall, Google Analytics provides you a very cheap service on gaining more customers, if you utilize its results.

Like most search engine services, Google Analytics has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Its setup is very straightforward. You do not have to waste time waiting for results

It is quite flexible, provides great solution and a wide range of significant and valuable reports

You can login once and track multiple sites. You have more than one web site to track.

Google tracking makes it possible to track campaigns even on other media

You need not be confused of the A/B ad testing

Its integration with all marketing media so as you can use only single portal to track multiple campaigns is ingenious

You will get In-depth reports on site navigation of users you never dreamed you could have

It also has Ecommerce tracking features

However, Google Analytics package falls behind two very important features most search engine marketers need. This is the ability to track down individual user activities and trace activity back to an individual user level. Another is the ability to track fraudulent online activities so as your site will be safe from it. Even if there are the eCommerce tracking features, it cannot completely provide this important tracking capability.

These free web site analytics solution, is Google’s statement regarding their supremacy among other search engines.

Author: Mary Murtha
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Wordpress plugin Guest Blogger

For most modern organizations, the Web site is now much more than just the company’s online face. It can be brand builder, revenue generator, customer service point, and so much more. Getting the site up is only the beginning; the business has to then understand if the target audience is getting the information it needs, examine the benefits delivered to customers on literally every page, and use all the gathered information to continuously improve the experience for end-users. This is why Web analytics is so important.

Today’s enterprises compete in a dynamic market: every investment in the online presence has to be justified. Studying and understanding user behavior will allow organizations to continuously streamline their online space, take quick business decisions and, in the long term, justify the costs incurred.

As Web analytics are being increasingly integrated with Content Management Systems (CMS), cutting-edge businesses now have the opportunity to simplify and rationalize the process end-to-end – all the way from content creation and publishing to tracking and analytics.

Web Analytics: Quick Definitions
There is so much data that can be gathered from a Web site. With every visit, visitors or customers allow you to study their browsing patterns; you can also monitor traffic, transactions, usability and even aspects like server performance. Web analytics help collect, compile and review all this data, thus providing Web managers with a crucial tool to ensure the effectiveness of the enterprise Web site and monitor conversions almost continuously.

Web-based analytics typically consist of standardized analytic tool boxes through which users’ can generate and view reports through a desktop or web browser. The data generated can be analyzed, graphically displayed and delivered to product development, manufacturing and senior executives who can make adjustments in real time as appropriate.

So, Is It Really Simple?
According to Eric T. Peterson from Web Analytics Demystified “Web analytics is complex enough that companies hoping to better understand their Web sites using this technology must be committed to working for success. Web analytics is not magic, the applications are often difficult to use and desire will never replace a demonstrated effort to learn and use Web analytics tools.”

According to Peterson, there is also the need for committed and dedicated staff for Web analytics to deliver on the ROI promise. Finding resources with the right experience is also harder than it looks; most Web analytics professionals did not come by their knowledge from a university course – they have probably acquired it from a wide variety of online and offline publications, and simply from time spent doing the work.

Usage
According to a usage survey conducted by Web Analytics Demystified in 2007, a whopping 57% of small companies (500 employees or less) were using Web analytics tools; the midsize accounted for about 20%, and very large companies (5000 or more employees) made up the remaining 23%.

The study also found that 36% of companies had begun to use analytics for tactical and strategic decisions, 26% used it for general guidance, and only 8% were unsure about how to integrate Web analytics into their decision-making processes.

Where the CMS Comes In
To make analytics really work, it seems clear that a dedicated team is a necessity. But for most growing businesses, already stretched in terms of resources, this is very rarely possible. Many of them grapple with an even more basic challenge – managing the corporate Web site. How can a resource-starved organization ensure, for example -

That Web updates happen on time, every time?
That customers find the right information quickly and easily?
Those marketers can quickly repurpose or reuse content without worrying about design and formatting?
That subject matter experts can maintain different site sections with ease, even if they are based at different locations?

This is where the Web CMS comes in. With the right content management solution, non-technical personnel – like your marketing staff – can actively participate in managing, updating and reusing content without having to rely on your html experts. With central management, templates and intelligent workflow automation, the CMS can also boost content quality by ensuring that it passes through several approval mechanisms before publishing. Web CMS has also come of age over the past few years. Apart from allowing content creators to create and publish content as well as easily manage aspects like navigation, page layout and links, CMSs also help maintain brand values across the site, ensuring that visitors have a consistent, professional experience.

Now we come to the crux: centralized control also means you can effectively measure the success of your online initiatives. Think about it – you can create a marketing campaign with a CMS, launch it using email marketing software and use a Web analytics tool to measure results – and if the Web analytics is integrated with the CMS, you have a veritable closed-loop marketing system that can continuously improve itself: all without the need of dedicated technical personnel.

CMS and Analytics: A Winning Combination
When the CMS is integrated with Web analytics, a 360-degree view of user behavior is fairly simple to generate. You can have visibility into where visitors clicked, what they searched for, understand drop-off points (and the reasons thereof), what calls to action worked and what didn’t, where navigation seemed to be an issue, and so on.

All of this data is meaningless if not immediately actionable – and that’s where an easy-to-use CMS can make a real difference. Based on this data, it can help your online marketers quickly reconfigure, repurpose, or even redesign sections of the site to raise effectiveness levels. What’s more, there is constant feedback from the tools, allowing your teams to quickly understand what changes are beneficial. If the CMS offers flexible workflows, you can even have the CMS update your Web site based on pre-determined metrics – for example, you could automatically retire a page after it receives a certain number of views, or automatically promote a popular article to the home page.

To use another example – your existing CRM system can deliver customized newsletters or offers to subscribers who have indicated their preferences; the Web analytics tool provides the intelligence here, and the CMS helps repurpose content and launch it via a medium that is well suited to the subscriber. It is easy to see how marketing campaigns can be improved on-the-go with such a solution in place.

Web CMS offered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS; also called a ‘Hosted’ solution) offers further advantages with the fact that there is no hardware to buy and no software to install – all you need to do is rent the software from a service provider for a fixed monthly or quarterly subscription fee. The vendor then assumes responsibility for managing, maintaining and upgrading the software. Such a CMS is usually deployed very rapidly, ensuring that your Web site is aligned with business objectives in the shortest time possible. What’s even more attractive is that SaaS vendors like CrownPeak take the onus of integrating the CMS with your proprietary tools and third-party software – such as a Web analytics solution you may have already invested in.

Success Guaranteed?
With the growing emphasis on analytics, reports churned out of the analytic logs are used to determine the success of the Web site. However it is important to be note that Web site hits and page views are not essentially conversions; it is essential for companies to track trends regarding conversions before determining the success of their site.

Eventually, there is also nothing to replace quality content; the CMS and Web analytics, working together, can only help make life easier for your content creators and marketers to focus on their core competencies.

Conclusion
To ensure that a company gets the most out of the integrated Web analytics-CMS approach, it is important that the right CMS be adopted; and this can be a tough choice considering the number of options available. Traditional CMS typically calls for a larger investment in infrastructure, software and labor. In an effort to reduce costs and get quality service, more and more companies are opting for hosted or SaaS CMS. Leading hosted CMS vendors have also tied up with analytics providers to offer best-of-breed pre-integrated CMS solutions.

With e-commerce and online marketing growing, companies are increasingly witnessing a need to use their analytics tools as part of content management. It is here that the challenge lies in choosing a good integrated solution – one that is easy to use, provides the maximum number of features and delivers on the promise of good ROI.

Author: Rob Rose
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Guest blogger