Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2

Google Analytics Visitors Section - Broken down

As you might expect, the visitors section gives you visibility in to “who” is visiting the site. When I say “who” I don’t mean the names or addresses of the visitors, but demographic information such as the browser they are using, their language, location, internet connection speed, computer operating system, usage patterns...the list goes on.

So how does this impact your internet strategy? If you see that there are a ton of spanish speakers visiting your site, it might be in your best interest to have a professional translate your pages so that you can appeal to this audience. Remember that getting visitors to your site is only one half of the equation. Keeping them engaged and ultimately converting them into a customer is what really counts and that is where the real hidden gems of the visitor section come in to play.

Web User engagement

Online User engagement is a key piece to the internet marketing puzzle. Sure search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) campaigns may drive users to your site, but without the content, tools and structure in place to create user engagement it is highly unlikely that they will explore the site, contact you or purchase something. At some point, I promise to share some ideas for improving user engagement, but today’s conversation is about how to measure your current user engagement status.

There are a few key indicators that I pay attention to the Visitors section.

1.Bounce rate - the bounce rate is the percentage of users who immediately left your site without exploring any additional pages than the one they landed on. I think we’ve all been in a position where were we were looking for something in Google, followed a link we thought looked promising and immediately hit the back button because the site didn’t live up to our expectation. Whether it was based on content or the professionalism of the site, something caused us to throw up our internal red flag and get out as quickly as possible. If you are suffering from a high bounce rate, you’ll need to make some educated guesses as to what might be causing this, attempt to fix it and monitor the bounce rate for results. There are no silver bullets, but being able to test something and gauge the results is an effective way to make incremental improvements.

2. Average Page Views / Time on site - I group these two together because they go hand in hand. Obviously the more pages you read the longer you’ll be on the site, but what if you have a high average page view on the site and low time on the site. This indicates to me that your users are interested in your content, but what you have isn’t enough. They are simply browsing through hoping to find something that obviously isn’t there yet. I would try to improve the amount of quality content on the site and see if you can get users to spend more time on each page. If they are willing to spend time to read pages on your site, this is a key indicator that they are engaged and you are effectively building a trusted relationship with this customer.

3. Visitor Loyalty - average number of visits per user within a specific date range. Visitor loyalty tracks how many users are coming back to your site. Most users do not make a decision to work with a company on their first visit. Just like us, they want to check out some competitors and do a little homework to make sure you are the right fit for their needs. Being able to identify that they are coming back means that you are making the first cut. They came and left, but now they are back, either to take a deeper dive or hopefully do business with you. If you are seeing a huge amount of 1 time visitors, it sounds like you aren’t effectively marketing your products or services. Spend some time researching some of your successful competitors. Is there anything they are doing differently that you could learn from?

As you can see, the visitors section has a lot to offer. I encourage you to explore this section and see if you can identify some areas you can focus on improving. Try making some changes and monitor the results. Soon you’ll see that you have more control over these numbers than you think.

Online Marketing steps up during tough times

I talk to business owners all day and a current trend I’ve noticed is how many business owners are losing sleep at night trying to figure out how to maintain their marketing efforts during these tough times. The answer for many is shifting their dollars into online marketing as opposed to traditional channels such as tv commercials, radio ads and their monthly yellow pages spend. Let’s face it, the phone book ads don’t guarantee the steady stream of customers they used to and when times are tough its easy to see that huge monthly spend as one of the first things to cut. Advertising on the web is cheaper, more flexible and extremely measurable.

Let’s look at why Internet marketing is king when deciding how to efficiently spend your advertising budget.

Online Marketing is Affordable

With pay per click options you call the shots. All services allow you to set a budget and will continue to deliver clicks until to you get there. I’ve seen clients spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month and get the results they were looking for, it really is a great solution for any budget.

Pay per click spend allows flexibility

Many traditional marketing methods lock you in to monthly or even yearly contracts. Online marketing allows the flexility to adjust your spend on a daily basis should you see fit. If a campaign is going particularly well, you can boost your spend and take advantage of the trend with the push of a button. Imagine being able to adjust the size of your print ad on a daily basis based on what your sales are telling you. This is the kind of flexibility online advertising allows, so why not take advantage of it?

e-mail campaigns equal customer retention

Sure everybody loves new customers, but did you know that it usually costs twice as much (time and effort) to gain a new customer than to increase revenue from your current customer base? Many business owners realize this and are carrying out e-mail campaigns that target their existing base of customers. Remember, these are people who already have enough trust in you to do business once, chances are they’d be happy to do business with you again--just remind them.

Truth in numbers

In today’s online world--everything is tracked and measured. As you’ve learned from my first two Google Analytics tutorials, you have a huge amount of visibility into who came to your site, how they got there and what they did. More specifically, you can see who came from your paid clicks and online ads and whether or not you converted them. There is no other type of marketing that can give you this type of assurance as to where your money is going, this is what you need when you are making a conscious effort to track your ad dollars.

Since web marketing is relatively new to the marketing world, it’s adoption by older small businesses has been slow since most business owners stick with their older techniques that “have brought them this far”. I recommend taking a look at what online marketing has to offer. Once you take away all the mystique and buzz around it, you’ll find that it is clearly a more efficient way to invest your money.

As always if you have any questions or comments about the articles above, let me know and I’ll do my best to help.

Anthony Rivera | Web Strategist
520.622.3731 x118

Google Analytics Tutorial Part 1

Why are web analytics important to your internet marketing strategy?

Statistics may be defined as "a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty." ~W.A. Wallis

At a basic level, web analytics give you visibility into how many people are visiting your site, how they are getting there and what they are doing when they get to your site. This may seem like basic information, but having this level of insight can help you make informed decisions that will go a long way in improving your overall internet marketing strategy.

Which analytic tool should I choose?

Although there are a number of tools available to you, we recommend using Google Analytics. Not only is it a very polished product with tons of features but, in normal Google fashion, they provide the service free of charge!

Getting Started

It is very likely that you already have Google analytics installed as part of your Anchor Wave website*.

To login to Google analytics:

1. Launch your web browser and go to google.com/analytics
2. Login using your google username and password

If your website was created by Anchor Wave and you don't have a Google Analytics password, your website is probably on an older analytics software. Feel free to contact Anchor Wave within the next 2 weeks and we’ll be happy to get it setup for you free of charge.

Understanding the Dashboard

By default, the dashboard is broken up into a few key sections.

Site Usage

Map Overlay

The map overlay page displays the geographic location of your visitors. This might be useful if you are targeting specific geographic locations. It could also provide a heads up for locations you may have not considered when targeting specific locations.

Traffic Sources Overview

Understanding your traffic sources is extremely important as it gives you insight into how users are getting to your site. Clicking on 'view report' will give you a clear breakdown of which sources your users are coming from. Armed with this information you can start to measure your effort against the result. If you've spent 2 hours adding your site to various directories and are seeing little traffic from referring sites you may choose to spend those 2 hours blogging which can improve your search engine rank and have a larger effect on your search engine traffic.

This page will also show you which keywords are driving people to your site. Again, understanding this information gives you a competitive edge because you can choose to add more relevant content related to this keyword to your site, resulting in an improved ranking and more traffic from the keyword you are targeting.

Content Overview

The content overview page will show which pages on your site are most popular. This information can be used to identify the level of effort you should put into each page. In this example it's clear that the menu page is the most important aspect of your site. Is there anything you can do to make that page more useful for customers?

Stay tuned for part 2 in this series where I'll take a deeper look into the "visitor" section of Google analytics.

We're often asked this question:  What are meta tags and do I need them?

 Meta tags are HTML codes that are embeded into a web page.  These codes are not seen by the average human visitor - they exist to provide web crawlers (employed by search engines) more informaiton about the page they are looking at.  Meta tags usually contain the following:

1. Keywords - usually a comma separated list of terms and phrases that reflect what is on that page.
2. Description - a human readable sentence describing the information found on that page.

The general rule behind meta tags these days is this:  They can't hurt to have them, but nobody is all that certain how much they help.

That being said, I believe that using the same set of meta tags on every page can be a negative thing.  You're better off having different meta tags for each page.

A lot of people make the mistake of including keywords and descriptions that are general.  It's best to craft a set of meta tags that reflect the content on that page.  Each page has it's own set of meta tags.

As a priority, I'd put meta tags low on the list.  I'd first concentrate on generating good content on each page and finding before investing a boat load of time on making sure that every page and article has the worlds best meta tags.

 - http://www.smbtrendwire.com/2007/06/20/what-every-business-should-know-about-credit-cards/ 

1. Submit your website to the three search engines.

       
    a. Google
    http://www.google.com/addurl.html

    b. Yahoo (requires free yahoo account)
    http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
   
    c. Open Directory Project
    http://dmoz.org/add.html

Another free tool that can aid you in submitting your website to many more search engines:

http://www.selfpromotion.com

2. Create An Email Signature:

Add your website address and contact information to the signature of your email.  A signature is a few lines in your email after your name to give information to the reader. You can include your e-mail address, website address, ICQ/AIM number, or anything you like.

    Example:

    Dan Carson
    323-4300 office
    906-6443 cell
    http://www.mywebsite.com

If you know of anyone who is looking to buy, sell or refinance a  home, please call me with their name and phone number.  I will be happy to follow -up with them, and will honor the fact that you put my name to yours-------Dan

A few things to remember about your signature:

• Don’t use all CAPITALS
• Don’t try to make pictures out of keyboard characters.  They won’t display correctly in all email programs
• Include http:// in front of your website address.  This will make your link clickable in most email programs
• Keep it short.

3. Ask people to link to your website

Increasing the number of links pointing at your website is a logical way of directing more traffic to your site.  In bound links are reported to help with search engine optimization as well.  In years past reciprocal linking (the act of exchanging links with other websites) worked well.  Today, these types of links do not work as well for improving search engine rankings.  So... when possible try to arrange a one way link.

 4.  Start A Newsletter/Mailing List

Allow your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list through your website.  In addition, ask every client/customer you encounter if they’d like to join your mailing list.  Many will agree, however offering an incentive can increase your success.  From then on, you can follow-up.

• Ask everyone for their address and email.
• Keeping track of other details (birthdays, purchase history, hobbies) can help you build a better understanding of your customers needs and interests.
• Contact your customers on a regular basis.
• Always honor requests to unsubscribe a member of your mailing list.

Ideally, mail something to your customers every three months, even it it’s just a postcard or email with a funny message.  Your business is probably one of the lowest priorities in your customers’ lives – they WILL forget about you if you don’t keep in contact.

Keeping track of your subscribers can be accomplished with programs such as Outlook or Excel.  Sending your newsletter through email is a cost effective solution.  When your email list grows to a larger size, consider using an email management tool such as Constant Contact .

5. Talk About Your Website

Probably the easiest and cheapest way to advertise your website is to tell people about it!  Surprisingly, this is something that many web owners forget to do.

• Incorporate your web address into your “elevator speech”
• Leave your web address on your voicemail
• Invite prospective customers to visit your website for more information.