Ask the Right Questions and Get The Most From Google Analytics

Google Analytics is arguably one of the company’s most beneficial tools (and they have many) for Internet marketers. Yet the majority of users hardly scratch the surface when it comes to exploring the true functionality of the tool. It seems that many are just put off by its apparent complexity. This is a great shame as you do not need to be a logistician, data technician or a Google insider to reap great benefits from the information contained therein.

Google Analytics can seem to be quite daunting at first glance, but if you spend an hour or so just surfing around within the site it will start to make sense. Google makes it relatively easy to implement the necessary tracking code on your site and they have a number of question and answer resources available to help you ensure that it is all set up correctly. If you have a number of different sites, it is worth taking time to ensure that you set up your accounts well in the first instance, as this will certainly help you navigate down the road.

Many people seem to struggle to come to terms with what Google Analytics is really trying to tell them. You can get as much information out of this program as you could ever want, but don’t burden yourself with trying to analyze every conceivable area. Rather, focus on what is really important to you.

You can set up a number of goals and events, enabling you to follow what happens according to triggers that you set up on your website or elsewhere. If you have an ad campaign or article marketing campaign you will hopefully have distinct landing pages within your site, enabling you to categorize visitor arrival points. You need to be able to see what happens when visitors arrive at those pages, where they went from there or whether they moved through your shopping cart to your payment pages, for example. If you notice that they do not go anywhere else once they arrive at your landing page, but just leave, a phenomenon also known as a high bounce rate, then you need to consider whether the content of your landing page is truly appropriate to the trigger that sent them there in the first place.

The program will allow you to break down your visitors according to their geographic source, of great interest to you if you are geo-targeting your campaigns. You can see which keywords are being used most by visitors who arrive at your site, enabling you to create marketing campaigns accordingly.

Google Analytics should be your friend and not something to be scared of. You owe it to yourself to educate and use this remarkable and free intelligence to your benefit.

How do you get the most from Google Analytics?

Adam Toren

Take Google Analytics to the Next Level

Testing and tracking are two of the most important parts of any Internet marketing campaign, yet a large number of people choose to ignore, partly because they don’t fully understand how to go about doing it and partly because they are too engrossed in just trying to get hits and conversions. There are a variety of programs and solutions designed to help you analyze the traffic that your website receives, but Google Analytics is not only the best known, it has an amazing amount of features at no charge to you.

Because of its power and usability, programmers have been hard at work coming up with options to enhance GA, some of which recognize that in its original form the package may be difficult to understand, hard to access and due to its “invisibility” may prevent the account holder from seeing valuable events or trends as they are happening. We all have serious constraints on our time, yet there are certain tasks that we should never overlook and should maintain on a regular basis – tracking and testing and referring to your GA account included.

One of the most highly recommended plug-ins is simply called Better Google Analytics and is in common with many such plug-ins, best accessed through a Firefox extension. This plug-in makes the original much more user-friendly and easy to navigate, incorporating a search option and making the goals and funnels features more intuitive. You will need the Greasemonkey Firefox plug before you activate.

If you find yourself coming to the sudden realization that you have forgotten to check your GA performance over the last few days, you may be interested in a script that could prompt you when something unusual happens. To get e-mail alerts from GA, install this script. You can specify certain parameters, including a drop in visitors or a sudden page count increase, triggering an e-mail alert to your inbox. If you are managing a number of sites you can be very specific and only receive reports from certain ones. Sometimes it is important for you to be aware of an episode asap, allowing you to react accordingly.

Site Scan is a very simple and generally free service, enabling you to receive a complete audit of your GA installation. Simply enter your URL and e-mail address and you will receive, in short order, a diagnostic. If certain pages are not being tracked, you can act.

Everyone loves the iPhone these days and now you can get an app for GA as well. This will enable you to view your statistics from multiple accounts and if it encourages you to keep in touch with your performance more often, we’re all for it.

Over at Google Conversion University, our Californian friends are intent on giving us the lowdown about GA. You can log in here and take a number of IQ tests with the aim of making you a more knowledgeable user. You are able to refer and experiment within your own account as you go and if you still scratch your head whenever “analytics” is mentioned, this is a great place for you to go, enabling you to take your exploration to the next level.

How do you keep track of your GA performance?

Adam Toren

How to use Twitterfeed Effectively

Twitterfeed has long been one of our favorite Twitter tools and is certainly one of the most productive. The guys who run it are very proactive as well and are constantly tinkering and updating its makeup. They boast 350,000 users, including the White House and recent changes to the architecture mean that feeds will be published faster than before.

In a nutshell, Twitterfeed can take your blog posts via RSS feeds and publish them to Twitter automatically or at intervals that you specify. One of the more exciting recent developments includes an integration with the tongue twisting Pubsubhubbub protocol, which promises real-time publishing of posts for those who have Blogger sites and soon, WordPress sites.

You should use Twitterfeed to provide thoughtful, informative, on point post notification to your followers. Develop a process here and don’t just blindly set up feeds into your RSS feeder, spewing out a variety of posts with questionable value for your particular followers.

You need to be sure that your RSS feed makes sense and one way to do this would be to use your Google Reader account to pick and choose which posts you want to share. If you use the Reader feature selectively you can set up an RSS feed just for these selectively-chosen posts and tell Twitterfeed that you want that particular RSS feed to be used. In this way you are hand selecting information that you want followers to see and they will come to view your creations as much more valuable.

While you will undoubtedly only post very good information to your own blog and would be delighted for your Twitter followers to see this, remember that there’s a whole lot of information out there that you don’t know about and which you will in turn find cool and worthy of distribution. Make it a point of searching every day through a whole variety of other informative and keynote blog sites using your Google Reader. By using the aforementioned Twitterfeed set up you will be able to educate yourself and be seen as the provider of top quality material by your avid followers.

Note that Twitterfeed can also automatically publish to Facebook as well and the analytics package enables you to see how many people click through. Special tags are incorporated into each post Twitterfeed publishes and Google Analytics can interpret this information to help you see how your strategy is unfolding.

Do you Twitterfeed?

Adam Toren