Currently viewing the tag: "site"
Improving Site Performance with Google Analytics
SEO is a web pages’ key strength. Any website requires search engine optimisation keyword research to reach its full potential. As a first step, you must work hard to identify the most appropriate wording to meet your business objectives and ensure better web coverage in comparison to your competitiors. It is necessary to do extensive research on keywords, don’t just try to make a guess at what keywords might work and what won’t.
Although SEO is very much a process of trial and error, there are ways you can reduce the risk of having a stab in the dark and come up with a successfully optimised site. By doing the homework in defining your keywords, implementing them correctly throughout your site along with building a strong linking infrastructure, you stand every chance of featuring highly in search rankings.
Once you are obtain high rankings for your chosen keywords, the next thing is keep yourself there. Too many companies sit back and think the hard work is done. Search engine rankings are highly competitive, with competitors looking to out rank each other. The important thing is to understand where your site is succeeding and areas for improvement. How can this be done? The only way to truly keep on top of the competition is through Analytics.
Google Analytics is a tool to analyse the performance of your websites through a real time data stream of statisical data. This allows the immediate determination of the drop in traffic, words people use search to find your site and where they navigate to after landing on your start page. This information can then be used to hep refine and adapt the your website.
Google Analytics can help you identify areas of sites that are in need of development. It may be that the website receives a large amount of traffic, but has a high bounce rate of 80% for example. This is where you can go to search and find exactly what it is that is causing your visitors to leave. Sometimes it is something as simple as a bad link, while in other cases, there may be copy or design problems. Google Anayltics can help you identify such problems and get you back on track.
Basically, use your SEO Analytics problems as the troubleshooter. Starting search engine optimisation can be good, but will become obsolete in no time if you do not seek to develop and improve through time. Analytics’ job is to ensure that minor errors are found and resolved to ensure your website performs as it should.
Just like updates to SEO, the analysis must be regular and potential issues resolved. A few days worth of missed traffic can cause serious problems even for small sites. Take advantage of analytics to ensure your site is fully optimised throughout.
Chocolate Lime provide Google Analytic Reporting with all website design packages.
Simon is part of the design team @ Chocolate Lime.
Chocolate Lime Web Design are based in West Lothian, Scotland. Chocolate Lime provide company logo design, highly functional, clean, search engine friendly websites tailored to reflect the image of your business
Article from articlesbase.com
How To Use Google Analytics To Help With Google Site Placement
Google’s AdWords network has become one of the biggest online PPC ad networks. Millions of users everyday around the world are exposed to ads from Google. How many of those are your ads, and how many out of those millions are seeing them?
If you are using Adwords then you are probably already running a search campaign, but are you on the content network?
If you aren’t, well, why not?
You’re missing out on the opportunity to exponentially expand your reach to customers around the world that you aren’t getting to by using search. Using Google Analytics to help you refine your Google site placement within the content network can maximize your results from a content campaign.
There are thousands and thousands of sites to choose from on the content network, but you can choose the sites where you want your ads to appear. It can be overwhelming when you’re first trying to figure out what your campaign will be. There’s more than one way to manage your content campaign with the goal of optimizing your results.
The issue that you will face as a newbie to the use of the Adwords Content Network is this:how will you decide on which pages to place your ads? In Google Analytics there’s a very useful tool that helps you with exactly that issue.It is the Google Placement Tool and to get very focused campaigns it is a very use product.
Using the referring sites report in Google Analytics, you can see all of the sites that sent visitors to your site. These are usually people who are writing about your site, such as press, articles, blogs, forums, or other online publications. A lot of these referring sites are part of the Google content network, and you’re able to run advertisements on them.
So why not run your content network ads on these sites? They’ve already proven to have an audience interested in your product or service. This is a super-easy way to get access to a highly targeted audience without any extra cost.
To achieve this you’ll need to use the Google Placement Tool. You start by importing the list of referring sites into your AdWords campaign, and then export the referring sites list into a .csv. Next, you copy the list of sites, and then paste it into a placement targeted campaign that you’ve already set up in AdWords.
That is really just about all you need to do to start running a highly-targeted campaign on sites that are already talking about you. Since it takes so litle time to do, usually only about 5 minutes, what reason could you have for not trying it out?
Another way to maximize your content network campaign is by using AdWords Digger, It searches and ranks sites based on your criteria, from which you can then pick and choose and import into your AdWords placement targeting list. It’s also completely free. Check it out at http://www.adwordsdigger.com Marketers College can help you learn about PPC advertising.
Article from articlesbase.com
The Google Analytics Beta: Improving Profits through Web Site Analytics
Web site analytics, for those who might not be familiar with the term, is the tracking of various performance metrics for a given web site. The metrics themselves can range from the simple (and relatively useless) count of “hits”, i.e. requests for a given resource such as a single web page, image file, etc., to the measure of far more complex interactions. These complicated interactions can be totally arbitrary; for example, you might want to know the number of orders from visitors who came from a search engine and scrolled at least halfway down a long sales page.
That assumes, of course, that you can figure out how to configure all that tracking, interpret the results and afford the monthly fees for the providers of the service. The cost issue is apparently solved: Google Analytics (http://google.com/analytics) is currently free in its beta version, and early indications are that it will remain so. However, a word of caution is in order: The Terms of Service referenced on the Google Analytics home page seems to indicate that Google can and will make use of your site’s data, at least in aggregate form (that is, mixed in with everybody else).
In many minds Google is starting to become a Big Brother-like presence on the web, hence its motives are suspect pretty much by definition. Personally, I consider my site’s aggregate data a fair trade for the value I will extract from their software, but you will have to make up your own mind. If you’re not bothered by Google knowing as much about your web site as you do, then Google Analytics looks very promising. It is a smart, easy-to-use implementation that hits the sweet spot of web analytics.
The Sweet Spot: Easy Yet Powerful
The sweet spot I’m referring to is really the point where most of us live. We don’t have the technical know-how to configure the most complicated tracking scenarios and even if we could, we don’t have the analytical savvy to make any sense of the data. Google has found the sweet spot by making tracking configuration quite easy, and providing pre-cooked role-based reports that provide lots of information you may not have even realized was readily available. In short, you can get an awful lot of strategic data for very little effort.
Configuration
Let’s walk through setting up a simple and common scenario: We want to know how well our sales letter is converting web site visitors to customers. Where Google Analytics shines is how much valuable data it automatically gleans from just such a simple test.
Google calls a tracking scenario a “profile”. Although you can include URLs from many web sites in a single profile, it is easiest if you organize things such that a profile is fundamentally the same as a web site.
As part of setting up your profile, you provide the URLs of all the pages for which you want data. Google then provides you with a JavaScript snippet to include on each page. The snippet is self-contained and requires no editing. It contains a Javascript include and the following line:
urchinTracker();
It really couldn’t be easier.
You can put the snippet anywhere inside the body tags of your web pages.
Next, you want to specify a “goal”. The goal in our case is sales; we know that the goal has been achieved when the customer reaches our thank you page. Therefore the URL associated with the goal is that of our thank you page. More sophisticated goals can involve defining a “funnel” of multiple pages; this can be extraordinarily useful in identifying a weak spot in a more complicated sales process.
At this point our setup is finished! You then need to just let your site run and accumulate statistics for at least 24 hours.
Reports
When you return and select View Reports, you will see an amazing array of statistics at your disposal. The first thing you’ll notice is a pop-down menu with several roles, namely Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster. Each role has a suite of pre-cooked reports likely to be of interest to someone in that role.
We’ll focus on the Marketer role; when you choose this option you’ll see the Marketing Overview by default. It includes four charts:
1. A line graph showing raw page views over time
2. A pie chart showing the proportion of returning versus new visitors
3. A world map showing the geographic distribution of visitors
4. A pie chart showing the visitor counts based on the referrer, i.e. Google, Blogger.com (for my blog), etc.
The Marketing Summary report is a numerical chart that shows the top five referrers, the top five keywords used by searchers, and the top five campaigns. A campaign is indicated by a code that you attach to a URL. Even so, by default you get several campaign totals. These default campaigns are:
Organic: Indicates visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing.
Referral: Indicates visitors referred by links which were not tagged with any campaign variables.
Not set: Indicates visitors referred by links which were tagged with campaign variables but for which the campaign variable was not set.
Direct: Indicates visitors who typed the URL directly into the browser.
The next report of interest is Overall Keyword Conversion. Since we have indicated a goal of “sales” and linked it to our thank you page, the Overall Keyword Conversion report is able to tell you which search engine keywords result in the most sales. This is a really useful and potentially profitable report.
The Campaign Conversion report shows which campaigns are creating the most sales, the Conversion Summary produces total visits and total goal percentages.
Finally, the Entrance Bounce Rate is an interesting report that also has valuable data, even in our simple scenario: It provides the list of pages for which customers land and then leave right away. For some pages, our product download page for example, we expect a 100% bounce rate. For others it can illustrate a weak or problematic page.
Google Analytics provides an astonishing amount of data for very little effort—and no cost (so far, anyway). Although there a few advanced reports missing from its arsenal, it makes the bulk of the web site measurement you’ll want to do very easy indeed.
Learn more about web analytics at http://midnightmarketer.com. Ross Lambert founded Midnight Marketer, a newbie-friendly community of web marketers. He is also the author of Sonic Page Blaster (http://spbsavestime.com) and Ross’s Guide to the Masters of Marketing (http://saleslettergenius.com).
Article from articlesbase.com
If you could only choose one metric to look at, Bounce Rate might be your best choice. Learn why in this entertaining and informative segment from Avinash Kaushik. www.google.com
Google Analytics Tutorial: Getting The Best Out Of Your Web Site
Businesses are all about decisions, and informed decisions are the thin line of difference between success and confusion. This concept goes for the Internet and websites too, and any tool that provides you with information about your website is a Godsend. Analytics engine is one such simple to use and free tool that gives you web statistics. Here is a short tutorial that will help you harness the true potential of Google.
Step 1 # 1: Making an Account
Analytics software system is a free tool provided by Google. Making an account is convenient and simple. All you need to make a Analytics engine account is a Gmail e-mail id. Once your Gmail e-mail id is set up, you can go to the Analytics engine website and sign up your website for Google Analytics.
Step # 2: Installing the Tracking Code
Once you have signed into Analytics engine, you will be redirected to a page which has links to the analytics reports of your website. If you have not installed the tracking code on your websites, click on the Add Website Profile link.
If this is your first time on Analytics engine, and you have not installed the tracking code on your website or any of its pages, choose the “Add a profile for a new domain” option. Once that is done, scroll down and type in the URL of the home page that you wish to install the tracker to.
Select the time zone you are in and click Continue. Once this is done, the Analytics engine will automatically detect whether the tracking code has been installed on the website or page that you provided them with. Choose any of the code given below (best way is to press Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C) and paste the copied code into the website and webpage that you would want Analytics engine to analyze.
Make sure that you install the code anywhere before the End Body (/body) tag. Click Continue. The pa
ge will now show the webpage, website or websites that you have installed the tracker code to. Click on the View Reports link to go to the The System Dashboard.
Step 3 # 3: The Dashboard
The Dashboard is your Google homepage. Through this page, you can access almost any information you would require about your website, or even any page within the website. Once you have signed into the The System website, you will be redirected to the list of website profiles, that is, the analytics reports of any and all websites that you have installed the Google Analytics tracker code.
Once you are on the Dashboard, you can view the following analytics about your website:
Site Usage: The site usage column gives you the relevant information about the traffic for your website. The Visits column tells you the number of visits and unique visits in a given time frame. You can also know about the number of page views per visit at the Dashboard.
You can also find out the Bounce rate of your website or webpage. Bounce rate is the number of visitors to your websites who browsed away from your website directly from the landing page or the home page. Analytics engine also tells you the exact amount of time one particular user has spent on your website. It can also calculate the percentage of new and unique visits on your website.
Traffic Sources Section: The Traffic Sources Section tells you more about the traffic of your website, and explains it further. You can get information about all the traffic sources for your website. You can also divide your traffic from direct traffic, Search Engine traffic and Referring sites. Google Analytics can also give you traffic related information regarding your AdSense account if you have one.
Katia Lorenzen discovered Google Analytics while doing research for a new article. More information about this indispensable tool and a Google Analytics tutorial can be found here: http://www.Analytics411.com.
Article from articlesbase.com
After trying to use several web site optimization solutions, I decided to write my own. I am even hosting it in the Amazon EC2 cloud. www.taguchisplittest.com
After trying to use several web site optimization solutions, I decided to write my own. I am even hosting it in the Amazon EC2 cloud. www.taguchisplittest.com
Question by Queuejares Tiyuvy: Do “site statistics” tell a website owner the URL of the page I was viewing prior to visiting their site?
Here’s my concern: I visit the blog of a person, let’s say its a casual acquaintance. He’ll probably guess that it’s me from my IP address since he know the company where I work and doesn’t know anyone else at this company. However, would he be able to figure out that I had been looking at some kinky webpage just before typing in his URL?
I don’t mind if my friend knows that I look I look at his blog, but I don’t want him to know that I also look at foot-fetish sites (or whatever).
Best answer:
Answer by mti2935
if you clicked a link from the previous site to get to his site, then it may be possible for him to pick up the site that you were at previously if he is using a tracker (this can be picked up through javascript using the document.referrer property).
But, if you didn’t click through a link to get to his site – i.e. you were simply at the previous site, then you typed the address of his site in the address bar – then you have nothing to worry about. In this case the address of the previous site cannot be picked up by any kind of tracker that he might be using.
What do you think? Answer below!