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Finally… Google Analytics to Provide Real-Time Reporting

By David Jackson in Featured

Like millions of other website owners, I use Google Analytics to analyze my website stats. And while I actually like GA a lot, it isn’t perfect. My biggest pet-peeve with the software is the fact it doesn’t provide real-time results. It has a lag time of at least an hour or two before you can view most of your data, and a full 24-hour lag time on full data reporting. With all the brilliant engineers Google employs, that particular flaw has never made any logical sense to me.

That negative aspect of GA has been bugging the heck out of me for years. Well, finally, that’s all about to change and fast.

How fast? By the time you read this article or shortly thereafter, GA will be providing real-time analytics. All I have to say is, it’s about time!

Google Analytics Announces Real-Time Reporting

On September 29th, John Jersin of the Google Analytics team announced:

“Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.

Do You Know As Much As Google Knows About Your Website?

By Steven Johnson in Featured

Google knows that to retain their reputation as a superior search engine they must provide results better than anyone else.

What can YOU confirm in regards to how prospects navigate your site? Do you have website statistics installed so that you can see the same things Google does?

Google knows exactly how long you stay on a website, effectively your “vote”, in helping Google determine relevancy for future searches. Google knows how popular your site is by how many sites have a backlink to your site, in effect, the internet’s “vote” for your site. Google knows how relevant your site is; they “read” the content like a human.

Putting site analytics in place will give you the exact data you require. For instance, how many unique visits your site has received, where they came from, who sent them, how long they stayed, what they viewed, and which pages caused them to exit. Once you gather these analytics, patterns will be evident.

Most website owners know absolutely nothing about the data regarding their site, making it impossible to make sound decisions concerning improvements. A few keep track of hits received by using a counter, but that is not nearly enough data to determine an appropriate alteration.

In order to make proper modifications, you need to know about site visits. For example, which days of the week does the site receive the most hits? What would be the reason?

Where was the traffic created, through referring sites, search engines or direct visits? Which keywords were typed to locate your site? Which websites directed them to you?

Do you make it simple for visitors to bookmark your site?

Which path brought in the most traffic? Do you capture visitors’ attention with information which has significance and is interesting? What was the number of pages viewed?

Which pages were most popular? What was the length of time the page was viewed? Which browsers are most popular?

Internet Explorer? Firefox? Is your site presenting correctly on each and every different browser? Is there support for your features, like Java?

This is case in point of the least amount of statistics you will require. Next, you should find out how many visits you are receiving from returning traffic vs. new ones. Of the new ones, how many people immediately clicked off your site? (This is your bounce rate.) A significant bounce rate tell you that traffic is finding your site revolting or that you are bringing in the wrong audience. For those visitors who return, are you revising information to keep your site interesting and fresh? Does anyone visit from smartphones? This is the highest growth market in the Internet’s history. Which smartphones are being used most; for example, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and have you optimized for smartphones so that users have the best viewing experience?

Google knows, so should you.

If you do not have analytics installed, go to Google and they will provide the information on how to do so. If you cannot make the time to examine and investigate the data, employ someone who will. If you do not know what Google knows, it will cost you time, lost revenue and overall ROI on your web presence.

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Wetcatwebs.com, Inc. is a cutting-edge website design firm specializing in effective web and smartphone strategies that produce measurable results by delivering a powerful online presence and tremendous exposure. Find out more about SEO and generating qualified leads at => http://www.wetcatwebs.com

Essential Marketing Metrics for Small Business Owners

By Jennifer Davey in Featured

As a self-employed professional or small business owner, time is your most valuable resource. It can be tough to juggle business with life and create balance. The best way to make the most of your time is to implement metrics. Metrics will allow you to measure the results of your actions so that you can better manage your available time.

Below, I have provided a list of key metrics that I urge all my clients to track. Any metric you track should be easy and quick to compile and review. Be sure to check your metrics weekly. This lets you know very quickly when something is awry and keeps you from getting too far off your business success roadmap. This is a good task to give to your virtual assistant, if you employ one. You should be able to compile and review this material in about 15 minutes a week.

Website Metrics: (My favorite – Google Analytics – It’s free!)

- Metric: Keywords used to find your site.
- Why it’s important: This lets you know if the keywords you are using in your articles and blog posts are pulling the “right” kinds of traffic to your site, and it lets you identify topics that are trending upward.

- Metric: Your current website traffic in relation to last week and last month.
- Why it’s important: This gives you a sense of how your efforts are unfolding over time. If you’re getting a lot of new visitors this week or this month, then it means you’re on the right track.

- Metric: The percentage of visitors to your site who sign up for your mailing list or newsletter.
- Why it’s important: This tells you whether or not your call-to-action is effective or is in need of tweaking. It may also give you ideas for how to play with your layout. (In other words, does moving the sign up box up, down, left or right affect the subscription rate? You might be surprised.)

- Metric: The number of repeat visitors to your site.
- Why it’s important: If you have many people who return to your site repeatedly, it means that people view your content as high-quality and relevant.

- Metric: The dollar value of every visitor to your site (i.e., the value of sales divided by the number of unique visitors).
- Why it’s important: It keeps you from spending more per visitor than you can earn.

- Metric: The number of people who became clients or who bought something.
- Why it’s important: This tells you your conversion rate (the percentage of your visitors who purchased something), and it lets you play with your marketing tactics to find ways to raise your conversion rate.

Newsletter Metrics: (My favorite -AWeber for its metrics)

- Metric: The percentage of people who looked at your newsletter.
- Why it’s important: This tells you whether or not your subject line is compelling, which subject lines seem to do better, and which don’t work at all. If your subject line isn’t compelling, no one is going to open the newsletter to read it.

- Metric: The percentage of people who followed the call-to-action in your newsletter.
- Why it’s important: It tells you which calls to action are effective and which need work.

Marketing Campaign Metrics:

- Metric: How your leads are generated – which of your marketing techniques pull clients to you?
- Why it’s important: It lets you focus on the marketing techniques that are most effective for drawing in new customers.

- Metric: Which marketing technique drew in the best-converting leads, and which were most profitable?
- Why it’s important: This lets you focus on the most profitable marketing techniques and set aside the ones that don’t earn as much.

- Metric: What are the results of your marketing leads? Do people download reports? Do they purchase something? Do they become clients?
- Why it’s important: This gives you a clearer idea of what your target market is most interested in and what they are reluctant to do.

Tracking these metrics will help you spend your valuable time on marketing tactics that work!

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Small Business Coach and Marketing Strategist, Jennifer Davey, is the author of the “14-Step Formula for Getting Clients, Building Your Business and Making More Income”. Watch her training video “1 Thing You Need to Know to Be Successful at Getting Clients”. http://jjscoaching.com

Google Analytics Decrypted

By Derek Jansen in Featured

While Google Analytics is probably the most important tool you will ever have at your disposal as an internet marketer, it is, no doubt, rather daunting at first. Not to worry though, here’s what you ABSOLUTELY need to know…

Upon logging into Google Analytics, you will be greeted by a colorful looking dashboard (if you have more than one website, just select the one you want to look at). The dashboard is broken up into the following sections:

o Site Usage
o Visitors Overview
o Map Overlay
o Traffic Sources Overview
o Content Overview

Site Usage

This section essentially covers the traffic/usage element of your website’s metrics. Most importantly are visits, bounce rate and average time on site. “Visits” is the total number of visits to your site (by humans, not spiders) over the time period specified (top right hand corner). “Bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who visit your website, and leave almost immediately (ie, non targeted visitors). An acceptable bounce rate varies from industry to industry, but try to keep it between 30% – 45%. “Average Time on Site” is as it says – is the average time each visitor spends on your site. You want to try increase this figure over time and get visitors to “hang around” – using video is a great way to achieve this.

Visitors Overview

On the surface, this is a simple line graph, providing a display of how many visitors you’ve had over the time specified time period. Click on the “view report” link for more in-depth details on these visitors.

Traffic Sources Overview

The goldmine of Analytics data – where is my traffic coming from. This displays the relative percentage of traffic originating from either search engines, referring site or direct visits. Ideally, you’ll want to increase your search traffic (either organically or using PPC) over time. Once again, clicking the “view report” link will provide in-depth data on the sources. Check who’s referring the most traffic and see if you can capitalize on it. Also, have a look at the keywords that you’re featuring for in search engines and consider optimizing for them (if you haven’t already done so).

Content Overview

This area simply shows you what your visitors are looking at (the “/” means your home page). You may be surprised to see that your visitors are spending a lot of time on your internal pages, which means you’d better ensure that the content is top notch!

And that is the Google Analytics dashboard in a nutshell. As long as you understand what these main metric represent, you will be able to fiddle and figure the more complex metrics out along the way. It’s amazing how much rich data Analytics provides, and best of all, its free!

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Derek Jansen is the founder of Nitch – an SEO implementation and SEO training company. www.Nitch.co.za

How To Discover A Free Web Site Traffic Counter

By Anthony Harris in Featured

If you’re looking for a free web site traffic counter, you really don’t have to look very far. There are many websites that provide this service to you. If you’re not familiar with the basics of a free web site traffic counter, here’s just a brief explanation. You sign up for a free account, enter in your contact details or whatever other information required, and you are given a code which you can then paste into your website so that the program can retrieve the necessary data. If you want the number of website visitors to your site to also be shown to your web visitors, you can choose a code for that. And often times, you can choose a specific graphic of how you want the counter to appear. Or, if you don’t want that information shared (like in the instances of newer websites), then you can choose a code that will make it invisible.

Here are just a few of the traffic counters out there.

Let’s start with Google, for one. They offer a service called Google Analytics. Now this service is completely free if you are a Google Adwords customer and you’ve paid your bills. If you are not a Google Adwords customer, the service is free until you reach five million pageviews per month per account.

Stat Counter is another service which is offered for free until you reach one and a half million pageloads per month. The price then goes up from just nine dollars per month for 1.5 million to 7.5 million pageloads, 19 dollars for between 7.5 million and 15 million, and 29 dollars per month for over 15 million.

Free Stat Counter, as the name implies, is free. However, you do pay a price for that, if not in actual dollars. This service includes a sponsor link that is built into the code you display, so they generate revenue from advertising, but you might now want the sponsor information on your site.

Website Hit Counters offers a great variety of counter graphics to choose from, in all sizes, shapes and colors. This service also adds a sponsor into their code that either links back to Website Hit Counter’s website or the sponsor. This informative site also offers good resources, tips services, guides and information for webmaster. Free Hits Counter is yet another free stat counter. This is a very basic site, with a few counter designs to choose from. Just plug in your site information and you are ready to go. This site is also free because the counters are sponsored by advertisers who receive a small link.

If you do decide to go for one of the free web site traffic counters, make sure that you do not alter the code (for example, to take out the sponsor link) as this violates their terms of service.

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Learn How to get up to 19 Checks Per Month, Earn Upwards of $519.17 Per Day, and Personally Sponsor 107 Reps into YOUR Primary Business in 60 Days or Less Marketing 1 Simple Website! Click Here To Get Access Now! www.thenewbizsuccess.com

Is Google Analytics The Best Way To Record Website Visitor Statistics?

By Shirley Crichton in Featured

When you’ve set up a website and you’ve gone live to the world, the first thing you’ll want to know is who’s been visiting your site and how did they like it. So, how do you check your website visitor statistics, the number of visitors, where they came from, what they did on the site, etc?

Well, you need to use some form of visitor tracking, which is a piece of code that you add to your site that does all that for you. The code will link to a tracking facility and record statistics about your visitors and where they go on your site.

Probably the best known and most widely used is Google Analytics. It’s free and it’s available at Google.com, all you have to do is sign up for an account.

When you put in your information, Google analytics will generate a specific code for your site, which you can paste in to the page you want tracked or into your main website template. It’s really simple to do in HTML if you’re using a blog or content managed system, or it will take your webmaster just a couple of minutes to do it for you.

Then, once the system has been running for a few days, you’ll get an incredible amount of useful information on the performance of your site. Some of this information is very detailed and will be of more use as you get more experienced with the site and your marketing campaigns but, for now, you’ll probably find that the dashboard showing an overview of your site performance is enough to start with.

The dashboard comes up when you sign in to your site’s account. Shown on it are the key results that you can use to assess your site’s performance and each element on the dashboard can be expanded to show more and more detail within that element.

The first element is a graph showing the number of visitors each day, usually what most people initially want to see. For more detail, you can pick alternative statistics like what percentage were new visitors, how long they were on the site, how many pages they viewed and how many left without viewing a second page (the bounce rate).

This is the information that will tell you how many people you’re getting to your site and how interesting they’re finding it when they get there.

In the content overview window, you can find these statistics for each of the individual pages on your site. Here, there’s even more detail available, for example, which page visitors entered or exited by, or which keywords they used to find that page.

When you look at all this information, at first it may just be too much, but, as you experiment with it, you’ll find that it contains the feedback you need to make changes to your site and content, so that visitors stay longer and view more pages.

Also on the dashboard you’ll find a map showing the visitor numbers by specific countries. This map gives you access to your detailed visitor statistics on a country by country basis, so that you can target your content more specifically.

The last element on the dashboard is the traffic sources report, which shows the percentage of traffic coming to your site directly, through referring sites and via search engines.

If you are regularly writing articles or getting links from videos or other sites, (all very effective and free ways of increasing your traffic), then this report will be of great interest. As well as showing the total percentage/number of visits through referral sites, it will also show, in more detail, every site that is referring traffic to you and the number of visitors coming from each one. This information is essential to gaining a really good picture of how your article submission sites or individual referral links are performing.

As you will see, Google analytics is an indispensable free tool which will become more and more useful as you develop your site and begin using paid methods to bring in traffic.

When you’re at that stage, you can start setting targets and using the more advanced reports available to confirm that you’re getting positive results for your expenditure and actually making a profit. But more on that in another article.

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Shirley Crichton is a UK information marketer, passionate about sharing what she has learned with people new to this often confusing world . Do you want to learn more about getting your internet marketing business started and profitable? Claim your free and comprehensive 95-page report ‘Online Marketing Made Easy’ at www.ShirleysOnlineMarketing.com to give yourself a head start.

Should You Worry About Your Bounce Rate?

By Lucy Beer in Featured

A low bounce rate is often cited as a hallmark of a good website – 40% or lower is typically heralded as the goal – signaling that visitors are engaged with your site and finding useful content. A high bounce rate is often assumed to mean that your site is not doing its job. In reality, bounce rate means different things for different sites and the emphasis you place on it will vary according to the type of site you have and its goals.

What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

The definition from Google’s Analytics help pages is: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

When is Bounce Rate a Relevant Metric?

- If you have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site.
- If exploration of your site is important to your goals.
- If you are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers.
- If yours is a retail site and you want people to shop around and make purchases.
- If your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content.

How to get Started With Google Analytics

By Frank Breinling in Featured

To access Google analytics go to www.google.com/analytics.

Set up a Google account – If you do not already have a Google account you will need to set up an account to continue -click on the link “Sign-up Now” and complete the requested information.

Once your have established an account, login. Click on the “Sign Up” button and you are on your way. It is important to note before proceeding that you must be the owner of the website that you are wishing to track or have the permission of the website owner.

Blog sites such as WordPress often will have resources that will allow you to place code on your particular Blog page(s).

Setup Google Analytics - You will be directed to a couple of input forms that will ultimately provide you the coding to produce tracking data for your website.

- General Information – On this page you will be asked to submit your website’s URL, a name to serve as a domain identifier and finally your country and time zone. (You can elect to identify your locality based on your physical location or your target audience/primary user location.)

- Contact Information - This will simply request your name and your physical location.

- Accept User Agreement – Naturally, Google will request that you approve their Terms of Service. If they are acceptable to you check the box and click on “Create New Account”.

- Add Tracking – Finally, Google Analytics will produce a Javascript code for your domain. This should be added to each page of your website at the very end of your page coding between and .

Tracking your website – Once you have inserted the information onto each page, you will return to the Google Analytics page. Click on the link for the website you are wishing to review. This will bring you to the main “dashboard” and provide a wide range of general information including – daily usage, bounce rate, new visits, geographic locality of users, most viewed pages, etc.

You can receive more detailed information by clicking on various menu items. Detailed information will include specifics like what browser your visitors were using, by what means they accessed your page (directly, search engines, etc.), what keywords were used when accessing via a search. Google Analytics offers an area for users to establish goals to focus on specific areas of interest and particular campaigns.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool which offers the user such a wide range of in depth data the greatest risk is becoming overwhelmed by the amount of information received.

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Here you can check out everything there is to know about SEO Analytics, http://seoanalytictips.com – And here I will show you how to get loads of FREE targeted visitors to your website Twitter Traffic Train

The Power of Google Analytics

By Frank Breinling in Featured

Internet marketing efforts need to be tracked so you know if you are using your resources wisely. Google analytics is a good, free tool you can use to track traffic sources, conversion rates, etc.

Make sure you have Google analytics or some other type of analytics installed on your website.

Traffic Sources

You want to know where your traffic is coming from and where it is not coming from. This will help you allocate your resources properly. Google Analytics is able to track where your site visitors are coming from, where they go on your site, etc.

A few examples of where your traffic may come from:

- Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc)

- Pay-Per-Click campaigns

- Twitter, Facebook, etc

- Articles and press releases that include links

- Websites that have your links

- Etc.

Having this information can help you have a more effective Internet marketing plan.

Easy Come, Easy Go

It is easy to find out where the traffic comes from and what page they leave from. Both of these pieces of information are valuable. Knowing them can help you identify if your Internet marketing strategy is working.

The page people enter your site on is important. You want to make sure they arrive on your website on a page that has a focused message for what they are looking for (most websites have multiple entry points, each focused on a different search term). Pay careful attention to what page your visitors land on and make sure it is well designed and well written.

The page visitors leave your website on is also important because it may identify a problem with your site. If you find that a certain page is the primary exit point you want to see if there are any technical or other issues with that page that make people leave your site.

Conversion Rates

Though it is important to learn about where your traffic is coming from it is more important to know where your sales are coming from. Conversion rates in Google Analytics are tracked by traffic source. You can see where your actual buyers are coming from so you can put more emphasis on those resources.

Google Analytics is important to add to a website. Learn about your website traffic, conversion rates and more so you can make important tweaks to your Internet marketing strategy. It’s free to use so all you have to do is go for it.

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Frank Breinling is a recognized expert in Internet Marketing. Here you can grab info product ideas cashyourwebsite.com, his newest Project about Blogging you can find here, xdreamblogging.com

Outdated Google Analytics Tracking Code Could be Costing You Thousands

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Do you run an ecommerce site? Do you use Google Analytics code on your pages? Does your site contain secure pages that start with https? If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then you’ll probably shudder in horror when you read this.

Tom Critchlow of Distilled – a search agency in the UK – has written a guest post for the Google Analytics blog that demonstrates how using outdated Google Analytics tracking code on your secure pages can be costing you THOUSANDS of dollars.

Tom explained how he noticed a glitch on the analytics report of his client’s ecommerce site that involved users of Internet Explorer 8. These users had a significantly lower conversion and revenue rate on the site, in comparison to users of other browsers and IE versions.

Turned out Tom’s client was using the old Urchin version of the Google Analytics tracking code on every page. The old code included a call to a non-secure .js file that triggers a security warning pop-up in the Internet Explorer 8 browser.

Browsers like Chrome and Firefox don’t display a security warning but Internet Explorer 8 produces the following warning when users transition from the non-secure (http) pages to secure (https) pages on a web site.

The error looks like this:

Not surprisingly, the error was causing almost all visitors browsing with Internet Explorer 8 to abandon the shopping cart process and this was costing Tom’s client an enormous amount of revenue, estimated to be in excess of USD 150K per month.

A 5 minute fix to the site saved Tom’s client an estimated 1 million dollars per year. What was the fix? Simple. Installing the new version of the Google Analytics tracking code.

The new Analytics tracking code is asynchronous, meaning that it can track a single domain, or more complex sites with multiple subdomains, database driven pages, php pages or just top level domains.

The new tracking snippet offers:

* Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
* Enhanced data collection and accuracy
* Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

If you are using older versions of the Analytics tracking code, Google recommends you login to your Analytics dashboard, download the new code and transition your pages over as soon as possible.

Now you have an added incentive to transition – if you run an ecommerce site, the new code might not just save you page load time but thousands of dollars too!

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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