Quick Quiz: Google Analytics
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Categories: General |
The 3 Most Important Google Analytics Stats
Google Analytics (GA) is far and away the most popular free analytics tool currently available. And for good reason. However, all the data available through GA can be a bit overwhelming so we’re sharing the three most important analytics that you should be looking at and how those analytics affect the decisions you make for your website.
Visits and Unique Visitors
What It Measures: “Visits” measures the number of times your site has been visited during a specific period of time. “Unique Visitors” or sometimes “Absolute Unique Visitors” is the number of people who have visited your site during a specific time period. Visits will be equal to or (more often) greater than Unique Visitors because inevitably some visitors will visit your site more than once during your time frame.
How to Use It: This can be the most satisfying (or disappointing) metric you look at. It answers the burning question, “How many people are coming to my site.” But don’t stop there. Compare the peaks in your visits with marketing efforts you are doing off site. Typically you’ll see a visible bump in traffic on days where you send out an eBlast, get a mention in a newspaper or blog, or perform some other promotional effort. Lining up your traffic with your marketing efforts will allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns and help inform decisions on what marketing efforts are worth investing in in the future.
How to Improve It: Remember, there’s no such thing as foot traffic on the web. People won’t just stumble across your site while walking down the information super highway. Some popular ways to drive traffic to your website:
- Send out a marketing email
- Improve your sites performance in search engines like Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Advertise on search engines or websites your customers/clients might frequent
- Get your site or company mentioned in the press
- Set up a Facebook or Twitter account with regular updates about your organization with links to your site.
Traffic Sources: Search Engines, Direct Traffic, Referring Sites
What It Measures: This is usually viewed as pie chart showing how people are getting to your site. The three main sources of traffic are:
Search Engines: Visitors who find your site by performing a search in Google or other search engine. They may have been searching for your company name, or they may have performed a general search on a string of words (called “keyword phrases“) that are mentioned on your site.
Direct Traffic: Visitors who either type in your website address into the URL bar or click a link from an email that takes them directly to your site.
Referring Sites: Visitors who get to your site by clicking a link from another site. For instance, if your company is mentioned in the Chicago Tribune and the Trib includes a link to your website in the online version of their article, you will be able to see exactly how many people came to your site by clicking the link in that article.
How to Use It: This is another great way to see what sorts of promotional efforts are working. It can also give you the reality check on the impact of coverage in certain media. You may be ecstatic to find you were mentioned in a national publication, only to look at your stats and realize that the local industry newsletter actually drove three times more traffic to your site. This can help you focus your PR efforts in the future. Additionally, Facebook, Twitter and other social media show up in these stats so it’s a great way to monitor the impact of your social media outreach.
How to Improve It: To improve traffic from search engines consider hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to help you research keywords and optimize your site for those keywords. To improve traffic from referring sites, consider hiring a public relations consultant who can pitch stories to traditional and online media. You can also place ads on related websites and approach organizations you partner with about placing reciprocal links on each other’s sites.
Keywords
What It Measures: The words people are typing into search engines like Google and finding your site. In the example above 45% of the traffic to the website chicagotap.org comes from the top 10 keywords listed above.
How to Use It: Use this report to gain insight into what visitors are looking for and to gauge the success of your SEO efforts. Let’s say you are considering retiring a product line, but when you look at the keywords, you realize that searches for the product name is bringing in 20% of your natural search traffic. Even if the product isn’t selling well, it may be bringing in traffic to your site that results in the sale of other products.
In the example above, ”Idella Reed Davis“ is number three on the report above. She is a tap dance teacher with Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP). Knowing that she is by pulling in more traffic per month than any other teacher’s name may be an incentive for CHRP to continue to bring her back to teach classes and workshops.
Getting new visitors through search engines is most valuable when you are pulling in people who wouldn’t have found you any other way. If someone is searching for you company name, it’s important that you come up, but that’s not going to result in new customers. That’s only going to bring in people who have already heard of you. Look for strong keyword performance on words related to your core products or services – for instance, someone who finds the CHRP website by typing in ”Chicago Human Rhythm Project“ means they have already heard about the company. But someone who finds the CHRP website by typing in ”tap dance lessons“ is a completely new lead and the website is providing value as a marketing tool, not just a point of sales tool.
How to Improve It: There are many ways to improve keyword performance – that is the art and science of SEO. It’s a complicated process that should be highly customized to your company and business goals. We suggest you work with an SEO consultant (like Astek’s very own SEO guru, Tom Lynch). If you are looking to educate yourself on DIY methods, the Astek blog has many articles on this subject. Feel free to explore!
Rapid Conversion Landing Pages: Doorway Pages = Bad!
Don’t take my word for it – read what Google Webmaster Central has to say.
Rapid Conversion Landing Pages
There are no short cuts to search engine rankings…
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Categories: General |
Get the Most Leads from Your Website
This month we’re discussing Web analytics and how they can help you construct your website in the manner that will best enable you to reach your goal, whether it’s to generate leads, sell products, express thought leadership, or anything else. There are numerous design and strategic decisions involved in each of these. To help you get started, I’ve provided a simple outline of things to consider.
1. Establish your goals. You must know what you want to get from your website before you talk about how to design or build it.
2. Have a clear call to action. If you want people to buy something, don’t be afraid to make the “Buy Now” button prominent. If you want people to contact you for more information, put your phone number on the top of every page.
3. Study your analytics to figure out what kind of people are visiting your site. You’ll know from where they came, for what they searched to find you, and all kinds of other goodies.
4. Start with a wireframe storyboard to establish the strategy and hierarchy of your site before getting into the design and graphics of it. Using your goals established above, create a rough sketch of the most important elements on the page starting at the top. People still read left to right, top to bottom, so they will see everything “above the fold” before clicking or scrolling. And if they don’t see what they are looking for, they might not look any farther.
5. Design to build trust. Use trust icons such as affiliations, awards, memberships, ratings, partners, and certifications to create immediate recognition of brand value for the visitor.
6. Focus on benefits not features. Every successful company does many things well, and we often focus on listing our features. However, focusing on the actual benefits or value you bring to the table creates a much more compelling point of differentiation. (Thanks, Mr. Schmooze, for that one)
Using this process should help you establish your goals at any stage in the Web design process. The more information you have going into it, the better you’ll be able to communicate your goals with your Web consulting partner.
Here is an example of a landing page we designed for a client’s pay-per-click ad campaign in the data center business to give you some ideas:
Brent D. Payne Session at SES Chicago – Excellent!
Attended SES Chicago this week. Checked out Brent’s (SEO Director Tribune) session on News Search Optimization. I’m the one with the hair. Not long for me though. SEO does this to a man.
Really good session, lots of tactical details – very informative stuff. For me - his session alone was worth the entire ticket price.
Analytics Tools: Service vs Server
There are two main classes of analytics tools: those provided by a third party service, which use a litte javascript code on all your site’s pages to send data to the service; and those that run on your web server, analyzing the logs which record every request and response generated by traffic to your site. There are advantages to both approaches, and in an ideal world your site is covered by both. Astek puts Google Analytics (a third party service) on all our sites, but also has the ability to analyze any site’s logged traffic with Sawmill server software, and to make reports from both available to our clients.
But what’s the difference? The main difference is in how the two approaches get their data. Service-based tools only record hits when their javascript code is executed from the pages where you put it on your site. So it you won’t get any hits from people who have javascript turned off. That’s not a big concern for most sites, but it’s something to be aware of. Also, it’s up to you, or a company like Astek if we build your site, to make sure that the analytics code actually gets onto every page in the site. Often sites have a global template where analytics code can be placed once for all pages, which is the case for Astek’s Webany CMS, avoiding this pitfall.
Free PPC Calculator: Estimate Paid Search ROI, CPL, & CPA
I put together an excel spreadsheet with formulas that will help you calculate your Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition and more for a pay per click program.
(scanned for viruses and it is virus free)
Do your keyword research and plug in your estimated page-one cost per click for any keyword and see where you will end up with some very conservative conversion metrics.
It is based on some assumptions but you can enter all your own data.
The formulas are based on a PPC campaign generating leads for a monthly repeating revenue model. The example is an apartment lease. All the cells will do the calculating for you just start entering the data you know.
Hope you find it useful and feel free to shoot me comments for improvement or what else you would like it to do. And if you are an excel or otherwise ninja feel free to edit and improve and post back for sharing.
Yep your adwords account interface does some of this, and there are lots of high-end software applications out there that will do The rest of this (and lots more) but not everybody can afford the high-end stuff.
If you get stuck feel free to give me a call.
I put together an excel spreadsheet with formulas that will help you calculate your Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition and more for a pay per click program.
Click the Excel Button to Download the File
(scanned for viruses and it is virus free)
Do your keyword research and plug in your estimated page-one cost per click for any keyword and see where you will end up with some very conservative conversion metrics.
Lots of assumptions but you can enter all your own data.
The formulas are based on a PPC campaign generating leads for a monthly repeating revenue model. The example is an apartment lease. All the cells will do the calculating for you just start entering the data you know.
Hope you find it useful and feel free to shoot me comments for improvement or what else you would like it to do. And if you are an excel or otherwise ninja feel free to edit and improve and post back for sharing.
Yep your adwords account interface does some of this, and there are lots of higher end software applications out there that will do the rest of this (and lots more) but not everybody can afford the high-end stuff.
If you get stuck feel free to give me a call. 773-486-6666
HTML5: the Flash Killer Cometh(?)
Just in case you hadn’t heard: Steve Jobs doesn’t like Flash. The iPhone and the iPad don’t support Flash, at least not out of the box, and that’s not going to change.
Now, I’m a PC user from way back who’s always had a healthy skepticism for Apple’s glossy and over-controlled (to my mind) user experience. And I’ve also been an occasional Flash developer for many years and I’ve had a lot of fun building things like video quiz games, animated title sequences, computer displays for stage shows, et cetera. You throw in Flash’s scripting language ActionScript and there’s not much you can’t do with the old boy.
But things change. I recently came into possession of a MacBook Pro and I sort of love it. I also find that one of the things I used Flash for the most often: slide-shows, I can execute more easily using JQuery. In short: I find myself agreeing with most of Jobs’s points about Flash.
Here at Astek we’ve been talking about HTML5 a bit lately. What is it? It’s the next iteration of the W3C’s web content standard. When properly implemented, it will allow a browser to do all sorts of things that it used to require Flash to handle and it will do it in a standard, openly developed manner. One of the main jobs it will take over is media playback.
<video width=”800” height=”600” src=”move_clip.mp4”></video>
Embedding a video is that easy.
Drawing is now supported using a new element called the Canvas tag which can be used via JavaScript with many of the vector-based methods that designers are used to in Flash.
There are a lot of cool demonstrations out there of what HTML5 is capable of – I’ve posted links below to a few of them. BUT to try them out you’ll need an HTML5 compliant browser. Not surprisingly Apple’s Safari has some of the best support for HTML5 at the moment along with Google’s Chrome (thanks for the reminder, Crowe). Also not surprisingly is that Internet Explorer 8 has pretty much NO support (although IE9, only available in Beta at the moment, is supposed to be pretty compliant). In between those ends of the spectrum Firefox and Opera are pretty good.
Also keep in mind that ALL implementations of HTML5 are fairly new and there’s always a chance one of these pages might slow down or even crash your browser if they get too busy.
BALL POOL
Spawn lots of objects and then handle the physical interactions between them? Check!
AUDIOBURST ANIMATION
Trippy little dem of simple animation and audio. Move your mouse pointer across the canvas and watch the particles swirl.
BROWSER BALL
Really clever example of not only the <canvas> object but of communicating between browser windows.
BIOLAB DISASTER
A fun little 8-bit style side-scrolling game. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t Flash.
CONTRASAURUS
Another game with a quirky sense of humor. A good demonstration of HTML5 and of how awesome a dinosaur with a machine gun can be.
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Categories: General |
3333 Days and Counting: Internet Explorer 6
THE RULE BOOK
The World Wide Web Consortium.
Sounds ominous, right?
W3C for short.
Twenty years ago, when most people didn’t even know the Internet existed; you might have guessed that it was the name of some secret organization in a political thriller. A cabal of faceless schemers bent on world domination like SPECTRE in the old James Bond movies.
In real life the W3C is the organization that maintains most all of the standards for generating Web content on the Internet. The rules for how basic Web markup languages like HTML, XML, CSS, etc. are meant to work are all maintained by the W3C and accessible on their website.
But despite that impressive and wide reaching job description AND the weightiness of their name the W3C is a toothless institution. “Web standards” you see are actually “Web Suggestions” and it’s obviously not against any law for a Web browser to be out of compliance with them. If noncompliance WERE a crime, almost (almost!) every Web browser would be serving time, at the very least on misdemeanor charges.
There would however be among this prison population of minor offenders a true hard-case: a prince of crime with the proverbial rap sheet as long as your arm.
INTERNET EXPLORER 6
To be fair Internet Explorer 6 actually has, in the grand scheme of things, a worse problem than the miserable way that it implements common Web standard formatting rules. It’s also one of the least secure browsers ever made. Microsoft spent years patching an endless list of newly discovered security “vulnerabilities.” At one point the cyber-wing of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommended that computer users drop IE6 altogether.
But to a Web designer the true crime is the way that IE6 butchers our layouts by mysteriously doubling the margins between some items, treating areas of a page as though they have text in them even though they’re completely empty, displaying certain images incorrectly, etc.
Now there ARE methods (or “hacks” in less delicate terms) around all of these bugs but they clutter up perfectly well-behaved pages with extra code and not all of these bugs are easy to catch, especially if you have a Web page that uses a significant amount of JavaScript for interactivity. Web developers can spend hours testing, diagnosing and fixing problems related to cross-browser compatibility.
Well, you might ask, why doesn’t Microsoft just replace this dysfunctional excuse of a browser with a newer, better-behaved version? Of course, we already know the answer to that question. They did. Twice. Three times if you count the soon-to-be-released (and, by some accounts, very well behaved) Internet Explorer 9.
So… What the heck?
THE BROWSER THAT WOULD NOT DIE
IE6 was released on August 27, 2001. Let’s think about that for a second. Two… Thousand… One… As I write this IE6 is exactly 3333 days old.
How many nine year old software versions do most of us use with any regularity? In software years nine is ancient. And yet statistics show that IE6 (as of September 2010) is still the third most common browser in use on the Web.
There are a lot of reasons for that longevity. At the time IE6 was released Microsoft had already taken an 80% share of the browser market. It’s only real competitor was Netscape with 6%. It was also bundled with Windows XP which, by the end of 2003, would become the most popular operating system in the world, which it remains to this day.
So a buggy, quirky product had a massive share of the market and people wrote A LOT of software for it. In particular many companies invested heavily in Web-based applications that, it turned out, couldn’t be run on any other browser. These applications are still used by thousands of thousands of corporate office workers and the cost and potential heart-ache of upgrading a system that massive and firmly-entrenched is not appealing.
THE LAST GASP
Over the last few years there’s been a slowly building tough-love campaign on the part of the largest Web companies to rid the world of IE6. If you hadn’t noticed Web pages are becoming more like full-blown computer applications every year and IE6 can’t keep up. Google, YouTube (which is owned by Google) and Facebook (which between them account for a mind-boggling amount of Web traffic) have all curtailed IE6 support.
Microsoft itself, while still pledging some support for the short term, will be dropping support for IE6 along with Windows XP in 2014.
Similar to the change to digital television that happened recently, there’s going to come a day when IE6 users turn on their browsers and get nothing but “static.” And Web designers can heave a collective sigh.
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Categories: General |
Map of Online Communities
Like maps and charts? Interested in online communities? Well, this is a sort of fictional map representing the “size” of all significant players in the online social media world. The area each one takes up on the map corresponds to the author’s understanding of their “volume of daily social activity”. He admits that it’s a little imprecise, but I think it’s still pretty cool. This is from xkcd, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” In 2007 the author did a similar map, but based on estimated membership size. Click the image above to see it in its entirety. Then click the image again there to see it full size (it’s BIG), and pan around to see the details.
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Categories: Fun, Social Media, Web |
