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Understanding Google Analytics

October 16th, 2011

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When setting up a web site you should have a way to track its success. Besides obtaining user feedback you need to have web site analytics set up on your site. Web site analytics will help you determine what type of traffic is coming to your site, from where, what technology they are using, what pages they are viewing, etc. These reports are important to look over. If everyone comes to your site and then leaves when they come to your home page, this tells you something is wrong with your site.

There are many types of analytics, both free and expensive. First you should NEVER use hit counters that display on the site itself. That can have a very negative effect on your business if people see you are not getting a lot of traffic. Many people use Google Analytics. It is a free service and has many items it tracks. This can be used and set up by anyone and does not require technical knowledge.

Other analytics software is AWstats which is free and Web Trends which has a hefty price tag. To use something other than Google Analytics is requires technical skills since it needs to be installed on the physical server. Some hosting services will have something already set up for all their clients.

Below is a brief overview on how to interpret your reports.

Unique Visitors – The number of visitors within a designated timeframe making one or more visits to the site.

New Visitors – The number of visitors that visit a site for the first time during the report time.

Page Views – The number of times a page was viewed by an individual during a reporting time.

Entry pages – These are very important. They determine how visitors are arriving to the site.

Exit pages – This is the last page the visitor is on before they leave the site. This does not tell you where they went after they left your site or if they click on a link on your site which took them away from your site.

Bounce Rate – It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

Referrer Type – This shows you were the person came from if they did not directly type in your web site address. There are three types of referrers – internal, external, and search. An Internal referrer is when you have a link on a page to another page within your site. An external link is when another web site has a link to your web site and the user clicks on it. Final a search referrer is when a visitor comes to your site from a search engine.

Social Analytics – With everyone using social media companies want to know how to determine the ROI of their social media. To date there are no good methods to track social media.

Google Analytics now will show you what service provider (Internet ISP) the visitor is using. They recently added a mobile section to their reports. In this section you can see what types of phones are being used to view your site along with which carrier. This will have a great impact on what direction you take for your web site and mobile devices.

Google Analytics has a lot of information in their reports. These reports can be emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly. When you view the reports online you have a lot more options to view the data in different ways.

Analytics can be hard to understand at first but the more you examine them the more informed you will be to make critical decisions on the direction of your web site.

Tracking Exit Clicks on Your Web Site

September 22nd, 2011

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Recently I was asked about tracking what external links were clicked on a certain page which listed a long list of schools. My initial thought was Google Analytics must track this. I looked through all reports in Google Analytics. To my surprise Google Analytics does not track this information by default. They do track exit pages but not which links a user clicked on to leave your web site. After a lot of research I found that this is something people are starting to erally look for but is not implemented in many services. This is a service that Google is looking to provide in the future but there is no set date on when it will be part of their strandard reporting.

Google Analytics is capable of tracking exit clicks but you need to make some changes to the code on your pages. There are a few steps you will need to take inorder to track edit clicks.

Step 1 – Add this code to every page

Asynchronous Code

OR

Traditional (ga.js) Code

This should be placed after the standard tracking code snippet, to ensure the tracking object is loaded and retrievable.

Step 2 – The code below needs to be added to EVERY link you want to track. This is where it can become very time consuming to track every external link on your web site.

<a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">

The example above uses the category label Outbound Links. This is a useful way to categorize all outbound links in the Event Tracking reports. It sets the specific name of the website as the second parameter in the call. With this structure in place, you could then see Outbound Links as one of the event categories and drill down to see which particular outbound links are the most popular. Be sure to use return false for the onClick handler, because without that statement the browser will follow the link before the recordOutboundLink method has a chance to execute.

Step 3 – In your Google Analytics report you need to locate the Event Tracking section. This is where these links will be tracked. What you enter in the code of step 2 is what they will be called. So make sure there is says "example.com" in the onClick make sure you put something descriptive.

If you are using DotNetNuke this only works when you are tracking links in the HTML module. You can not use this code in any other modules unless you have access to the source code and can separate out internal and external links. You also need to put the code in step 1 on the skin of the site.

Low down on Banner Ads

September 6th, 2011

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There are many ways to advertise online. One of the more common types is displaying advertising. Displays ads are graphical, banner-like images that appear on web pages and within emails. Display ads are so popular because they allow you to visually impress upon your potential customers the value of your service or product. Display ads have been the standard for companies with strong brand recognition for many years. They can be helpful to raised awareness. Display ads accounts for billions of dollars in the web economy.

There are a few drawbacks to the banner ads. First, they are sold on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions). This can be a drawback because unless you have strong brand awareness or are using very finely tuned target marketing, your ad may appear out if place. For companies like Microsoft it does not matter where their ad shows up. We all know their company. If you were selling tea and your ad showed up on a fishing web site it will seem very out of place. Luckily for advertisers this method is being phased out. Most companies are moving to a CPC (cost per click) pricing scheme.

Banner Ad Formats

Leaderboard Ad – These are placed at the top of a web page and should have a very strong brand message in them. The size is usually 728px wide and 90px tall.
Rectangle Ad – These ads can be placed in the content of the page or they can be popups. They should place an emphasis on strong call to action.
Skyscraper Ad – These ads are placed along the right side of the page and are much longer in size. They are becoming very popular..

Knowing where your ad will be placed is very important in determining what message you will display.

There are a few keys to designing a good ad:

The file size should be less than 40KB.
When you have animations in the ad keep it to 3-4 slides that take 15 seconds or less to complete.
The font should be 16pts at a minimum.

Techniques

Targeting – When setting up your banner ad you should make sure you work with a vendor that allows you to target specific user demographics like locations, gender, education, interests, etc. You need to find a balance between no targeting and targeting too much. The more you target your ad the more expensive it will be.
Budgeting – You should have a strict budget for your ads. This will enable you to obtain more value from your ad. It is a good idea to have at least monthly budgets if not daily budgets because this allows advertisers to throttle the traffic and distribute the traffic throughout the monthly.
Bidding – When dealing with pay per click you will be bidding on the position of your ad in search engines. You need to be careful with this since it can become very expensive. Bidding for the first spot is not recommended. You are better off bidding for the second or third spot, which will keep the cost reasonable. Your main goal is to have a bidding strategy that will generate the highest ROI. If you focus on obtaining the first position, you will be spending a lot on users who are just looking and nor serious buyers. You want to keep a close eye on your bidding and adjust it as needed.

Avoid SEO Death

September 4th, 2011

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There are so many tactics to help get your web site higher in the search engine ranking. There are also tactics out there that can get you blocked from Google or other search engines. These tactics are called "Black Hat SEO". You want to make sure you stay away from them. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.

Obtaining links from link brokers
Links to sites known for spam
Frequent server downtime or site inaccessiblity
Excessive repeating of keywords
Hidden text – This is when you hide text by changing its color to match the background of the page. This way the average users can not see the text but the search engines can.
Cloaking – This is when a different page is displayed depending on who is coming to the site. If a user comes they get your home page and if a search engine is indexing your site another page comes up.

Google+

August 15th, 2011

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In the age of social networking no one wants to be left out especially Google. Until now there has been no competition for Facebook. Google has developed Google+ or sometimes called Google Plus. Google+, a social network operated by Google, launched on June 28th, 2011 with integrations across a number of Google products. This site is Facebook’s first real competitor. Currently Google+ is in a public trail state. Google likes to open its new products up to public testing but limit it to a certain amount of users. They used this same method when they first started Gmail. Within a few hours Google+ reached its limit of testers. Currently no one else can create Google+ account until Google opens it back up to the public. Google+ wants to move social media from a platform that facilitates conversation and content sharing to a mechanism that can deliver much deeper social experiences.

Google+ will be interesting to watch to see how it competes with Facebook. Google does have the advantage here since it can learn from the mistakes that Facebook has made. Google also plans to integrate Google+ analytics data into its Google Analytics system. This will be a huge benefit to businesses.

So what does Google+ do? Much the same as what Facebook does with just different names and interface. Google+ already has an application for the IPhone and android phones.

Circles

One key element of Google+ is a focus on targeted sharing within subsets of your social group, which Google calls “Circles”. Circles are simply small groups of people that you can share with, each with names like friends, family, classmates and co-workers. These are similar to Facebook’s “lists” you can create containing your friends.

Photos/Multimedia

Google+ has a section specifically for viewing, managing and editing multimedia. The photo tab takes a user to all of the photos they have shared, as well as the ones they are tagged in. Google+ includes an image editor, privacy options and sharing features. Facebook does not have an image editor.

Hangouts

“Hangouts,” is Google’s new group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chat room. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” Friends can then join the hangout as long as they have been placed in a circle that was invited by the person who created the Hangout.

Google Search Results

Google has begun integrating Google+ into search results with public Google+ posts now appearing in Social Search. Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. Social Search integration is only the beginning for Google’s plans for combining its search engine and social network. Google intends to have real-time search with Google+ data and will launch a search engine for Google+ posts.

Games

Google+ has not released its game line yet. Just like Facebook it will have games users can play online. Unlike Facebook the games will not automatically appear in everyone’s news feeds. They are turned off by default.

Sparks

Sparks is Google+’s online sharing engine. You put in a list of things you are interested in. Then you will have a constant feed of articles and videos related to these topics that you easily share with your circles.

Time will tell where Google+ goes. So far it has received lots of great reviews. Google has the advantage because you can integrate email, social media, office applications and much more in one system, where Facebook is not tied to any other applications. With all this I wonder if we really need another social media giant. Most people can’t keep up with Facebook let alone another social media site. If Google+ takes hold which it looks like it will this will add another layer on to businesses to maintain more social media sites.

Web Browsers – What is the difference?

August 15th, 2011

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Did you know there are many web browsers out there and they are all different? Each one has its pros and cons and is more suited for different types of users. There is a lot more to browsers than just displaying web pages. There certain pieces of software or web sites that only work in certain browsers. This has gotten better over the years but is still a problem today.

Statistics show that Internet Explorer still is the top browser but FireFox and Google Chrome are fast creeping into Internet Explorer’s market.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer (IE) is developed by Microsoft. It is shipped on all PC computers in the US. This is why it is the most commonly used browser around. This browser integrates nicely with all MS Office products which other browsers do not do as well. There are many web sites that are coded in a certain way (Active X scripting) that only work in IE. This is why many users and companies want/make everyone use IE.

The downside to IE is that it is the most popular browser so all the hackers target it. They know that this has the widest market share so if they make viruses that work in IE, so they get the most impact of their virus. Viruses can come from security holes in IE, popup windows or even just going to a web page that has a virus in its code. I have seen web pages that have one line of code that is only activated when someone comes to their web site using IE.

The new Internet Explorer 9, adds hardware acceleration for graphics-intensive sites and a privacy tool to prevent tracking of your Web activities by marketing sites.

FireFox

Firefox is developed by Mozilla. This browser can be downloaded – http://mozilla.com. FireFox has the second largest market share in the browser world. It really replaced Netscape many years ago. At times FireFox pushes Microsoft to change its ways and adhere to web standards. It has been good competition for Microsoft. FireFox does not have all the bells and whistles that IE has like the favorites down the side or the scripting capabilities on the developer side.

The huge benefit to FireFox is that it does not get the viruses that IE does. It also takes up less resources on your computer. There are many plugins for FireFox. One of my favorites is the ability to sync your bookmarks on any computer you own. So my bookmarks on my desktop and laptops automatically sync up over the internet. I never lose them either. As a web developer Firefox has many add ins that make my job much easier.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a fairly new edition to the browser world by Google. Its popularity is making it a leader in the browser market. This browser can be downloaded – http://www.google.com/chrome/. The benefit to this browser is it is a slimmed down browser. It has very little user interface just like the Google search site. Chrome is designed to be fast in every possible way. It's fast to start up, fast to search and load web pages, and fast to run all your web apps. It does not have the virus attraction that IE has.

Another advantage to Chrome is – Have you ever had a web site crash your browser? With Chrome each web site runs separately so if a web site crashes it does not crash your entire browser and you lose everything you had open. Only the one tab where the web site crashed is lost.

Google's Chrome, which may be the fastest growing browser in history in terms of market share, is also the most frequently updated. It's already at version 10 after just two and a half years. Chrome offers syncing, but on top of this it adds some pretty useful features—its Instant feature starts displaying a page from your history before you even finish typing in the address box. And the browser comes with built-in viewers for Flash and PDF content, saving you from having to install separate plug-ins.

Safari

Safari is mostly used on MAC computers and mobile devices. Though Safari exist predominantly in Apple/Mac world, there's no reason Windows users can't use the unique extras it offers. Its "Reader" view cuts all the ads and unnecessary items off a page you just want to read the text on, and the Top Sites page offers a stunning 3D gallery view of your most frequently needed Web locations.

References on browser stats

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