Analytic Reference

Terms:

Visits - a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity, usually 30 minutes.

Absolute Unique Visitors – how many visitors (people) came to your site, counting each person only once for the entire time period being reviewed.

Example: Now, let’s say that I discover your site on Monday, January 5, 2009, and visit every weekday that week (once a day, always from the same computer, always from the same browser.) If I set my calendar to include the full week, GA sees five visits, one new visit, and one Absolute Unique Visitor. (The good part is coming.)

However, the web analyst could set his calendar to worry about only Wednesday, January 7 and Thursday, January 8. For those two days, we will see: two visits (one each day, right?), one unique visitor and NO new visits.

Why not? Remember that I discovered the website on Monday. When I visited on Monday, I was new. GA puts a cookie on my browser at that point, and every time I come back, I am considered a returning visitor.

Unique Views – Unique Views are the equivalent of “Visits” to a single page. For example, if 1 person viewed a single page 100 times during the same visit, that page would show 100 pageviews, but only 1 “unique view”Pageviews – a request made to the web server for a page

Average Pageviews – The total number of page views divided by the total number of visits during the same timeframe.

Algorithm: Page Views / Visits = Average Page Views per Visit

Bounce Rate – When someone is at your site and bounces away to a different website
Example: I land on your website, glance at the information on the page then I decide to go to a different website.  However, if I had landed on your website, glanced at the information then clicked a link/tab on your website – then there is no bounce rate.

New Visits – people visiting the site for the first time ever!

Benchmark – Compares your website to other similar sites.  Either by size of website or by category.

Direct Traffic – does include bookmark traffic and typed URLs, but these days (unless you are very strict about your campaign tracking parameters) it can and does include all kinds of other stuff. All it really means is that the session started without a referrer being passed by the user’s browser

Referring Sites – when a customer is on www.a.com and clicks on a link on www.a.com that links to your website. The link could be text, an image (banner ad) etc.

Search Engines – Google Analytics has a list of common search engines that it checks for.  Visitors that find grainglogix.com on yahoo.com for example will be put in the Search Engine section not referring sites.

Landing pages – The first page that a visitor sees.  This isn’t always the homepage.

Exit pages – The last page a visitor viewed before leaving your website.

Section Features:

Intelligence (Beta) – Currently not being used.  This section allows you to setup Google Analytics to email an alert when certain metrics are met.

Example: Email me (and others) when visitor traffic from Minneapolis is greater than 60 visitors per day.

Visitors – where information about each visitor is collected.  This section will tell you important information such as:

1)bounce rate (are people sticking around?)
2)visits (how many people are coming to our site?)
3)time on site (how long are people sticking around?)
4)browser capabilities (what are people using to visit our site?)
5)map overlay (where in the world are the visitors?)
6)benchmarking (how does our site measure up?)

Traffic Sources – gives details on how visitors found your website.  Some people will directly type in your URL (grainlogix.com), others will perform a search on google with a keyword.

Adwords, Ad Versions, and Campaigns are currently not setup for your site.  These are different features that could be enabled but require additional setup and sometimes a fee.  For example, Adwords is feature that Google offers where you can create paid ads on google.com

Content – collects data on where visitors are entering and exiting your site, and the most popular pages.  This section will help tell you where you may need to adjust the content.  For example if a product page is a top exit page, then we should review the page and visitor information to see why that page is a top exit page.  However, some pages in a website are considered exit pages.  Some exit pages might be, locations (Dealer/Rep locator) page, contact page, terms and conditions page.

This section also has In-Page Analytics.  This feature will bring up a page of your website and display how often each link is clicked.  This section can help with the layout and content of a site.

Site Search and Event Tracking are not being used at this time.  Current sites that have Analytics do not have internal search engines.  Event Tracking might be a feature we include to track how many times an informational PDF is downloaded from the site.

Goals – Generally this section would be used on an e-commerce site to track visitors through the check out process.  However, we can use this tool on non e-commerce sites.  Using this features means there is a “path” you want visitors to follow.  Without analytics, this couldn’t be done, but goals actually track the “path” and show you how many visitors completed path, how many didn’t complete the path and where did they go instead?

I have setup a sample of a Goal on this website. I would like to see a better Goal setup that would, for example, track how many visitors on the GL10 Truck Auger continue to the GL10 Accessories to the Dealer/Rep Locator (as there is a direct link on the GL10 Accessories to the Locator).  A Goal that is tracking a path only needs to have two pages but can have more.

Goals can also track Pages/Visit and Time On Site.

Beginning steps to setting up a company blog

Benefits of a Business Blog:

#1 Anybody in the company can contribute.  No Technical expertise needed to write the blog.
#2 Engage end users by encouraging them to leave comments.
#3 Fresh content will result in higher search engine results.

Writing a Business Blog tips:

Select a subject matter that will interest a specific audience (that may turn into customers).  Write to create relationships with the audience.  Provides a great opportunity for the blog to be keyword rich which  increases search engine results

Blog is a marketing toolkit to promote the company.

 Things to consider when starting a Business Blog:

i) What do you want to do with your Business Blog?
Make sure that you have a clear vision of what you want to do with your Business Blog are you using it as a customer service tool, as a marketing or branding method, to promote a particular product or service, as a market research or product development tool or any number of specific uses it is well suited to. Going through this process will ensure it has focus and will not become a jack of all trades and master of none – the more focused it is, the more successful it is likely to be.

ii) Who is your target audience for your Business Blog?
Avoid trying to make it be all things to all people it isnt possible. Once again focus is important, so decide on your target audience and write the blog for them with content they are looking for and a style that they will warm to. If you have lots of different groups that you wish to appeal to then you might be better off setting up separate blogs to cater for each of these specific areas.

iii) What results are you looking to achieve?
What goals do you have for your Business Blog and just as importantly, how are you going to measure them? There is going to be time and effort involved and you will be looking for specific results at the end of it – therefore, from the start, its good to know what results you are looking for. So decide on the criteria you want to work with and how you wish to measure them.

Following on from these, there are a number of other areas which are sensible to consider. Some are technical in nature while others relate to the running of the blog and its promotion.

iv) Look and Feel of the Blog
If you are using it as part of your website, then integrate the look and feel with that. Theres no need for your visitors to really know that they are on a blog – remember its the benefits that blogs offer that is important, not the technology. If it is on a separate domain, then design your Business Blog with the image you want to portray but dont use the default template that the blogging software provides. Why? Default template = zero differentiation!

v) How will it integrate with your other marketing activities?
Blogging is an excellent marketing tool, as well as having being strong in other areas. However, it is not a magic wand to cure all marketing ills, so it is necessary to decide how to best use it in conjunction with your other marketing, business development and customer service activities.

vi) Who will be blogging and how often?
If you are a small business or individual, then the decision about who will be blogging will be a straightforward one. For a larger organisation, the decision will depend on what the blog is focused on and hence who will be the best person to write with knowledge and passion about it. As for how often you should blog, frequency isnt as important as consistency so try to post regularly and keep your readers informed. As a caveat, however, you should be posting at least twice a week to give yourself the best chance of success.

vii) How to deal with comments?
Receiving comments on a blog is one of the more satisfying aspects of blogging because it shows that you have engaged your readers enough for them to want to comment. Some companies, however, view it with dread because of possible comments being aired which are not entirely positive. While I would always recommend being open to and responding to comments, the decision ultimately is in the hands of the blogger.

If you have thought through these elements, then you will be in a much stronger position to set up your blog and concentrate on writing the posts and building your readership with a strong base in place.

The Four Must Have WordPress Plugins

Have you been thinking about setting up your own WordPress site? Talking to other WordPress users, the general consensus is it’s easy!  All you do is install and start blogging. Well that is true but everyone who sets up a WordPress site should be familiar with plug-ins.

Plug-ins are what I call enhancements to WordPress. They are like extra tools to make your site better, custom and SEO friendly.  Only two plugins come with a standard installation and even these plugins can be removed if you don’t want or need them.  Plugins are completely up to you. In this blog entry I’m going to discuss the four “must have” plugins.

The first plugin I recommend is Askimet. This plugin comes standard with every WordPress installation. Askimet works to block spam comments on your blog. Activating this tool is pretty straight forward. In the plugins section, click Activate under Askimet. Then go HERE for your key (this does require you to signup).  Keys for Personal Blogs are free and non-personal keys are between $5-$15 per year. After submitting basic information for your type of blog an email is sent to you with the key.  Back in WordPress there will be a red box at the top t of the page asking for the key. Enter the information and you’re done. Your blog is now protected from spam comments.

The rest of the plugins I’m going to refer to do not come pre-installed on WordPress. You must find them and install them manually. Don’t worry this process is easier than it sounds.  There are two options for installing plugins.

1.       In the WordPress plugin page, there is a search for additional plugins box. Type in the name of the plugin you want, click search and select install on the plugin you were looking for.

2.       Outside of the WordPress admin console, locate and download the plugin you want. Then FTP the unzipped files to yoursite.com/web/content/wp-theme/plugins. Login to the WordPress Admin Console, navigate to the Plugins page and there is your plugin.

The Social Networking plugin that I recommend installing is AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button. This plugin adds a button to your blog posts that allows readers to share the posts on multiple Social Networking sites (like, twitter, facebook, etc) It’s a great way to let users help you get your blog noticed.

There are two SEO plugins that I would suggest to every blog user; Meta SEO and Google Sitemap Generator. Meta SEO helps you manage and add meta tags to your blog posts. After activating this plugin you’ll notice a new category in the left navigation of the WordPress Admin Console “Meta SEO”. This is where you manage your tags. To add tags to posts, either add a new post or edit an existing post. Scroll down beneath the content area of the post and you’ll see new features called Meta Keywords, Meta Tags, and Meta Descriptions, which is where specific post SEO information goes.

The other plugin, Google Sitemap Generator, does just that; it appends new posts information to an existing sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.zip file. Before this plugin is activated, you need to create a blank sitemap.xml and a blank sitemap.xml.zip files to upload to your site. Place these files here: yoursite.com/web/content/. Activate the plugin and submit this xml file to Google Webmaster tools.

I have recommended four basic and very helpful plugins that every WordPress site should have; Askimet, AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button, Meta SEO, and Google Sitemap Generator. Although there are thousands of plugin out there, from my experience these four are the foundation to improving your blog.

Do you use any plugins similar to these? What are your core plugins?

Search Engine Optimization Starter Tools

SEO (search engine optimization) is essential to generate and manage website traffic.  There are many questions about enhancing your website’s traffic with SEO. I’ve picked four great starting points to improve your SEO situation.

1.      Robots.txt is a simple text file that helps manage search engine crawlers indexing your site and what to crawl or not to crawl.  Search engine spiders are programmed to look for this file.  The suggested location for the robots.txt in the same directory as your index file; generally the root directory.

Having your entire site crawled is not always necessary.  Keeping crawlers away from unfinished pages benefits the site by preventing unfinished work displaying in search engines.  Other areas of a site that isn’t necessary to index would be the following: directories with thank you or error pages, files that contain sensitive data (but not sensitive enough to password protect), and doorway pages.  Setting up a robots.txt is a convenient and easy way to improve your website ranking and protect your site from being labeled as a “spam” site.

How to write robots.txt: http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/adv_tech/robots.htm

2.      Sitemap.xml is a file that allows crawlers to index your site on a more advanced level.  This XML file “draws a map” of your site enabling search engine spiders to help accurately rank sites and perform more accurate searches.  Creating a sitemap.xml file can be done multiple ways.  There are free sitemap.xml generators for smaller sites and Google Webmaster Tools can generate maps for larger sites.  Once the file is created it is recommended to make an entry in the robots.txt file that informs spiders where the sitemap.xml file is located.

Robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Free Sitemap.xml generator: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

3.      Google Analytics is a free tool that has multiple uses.  One feature is seeing which keywords are actually creating user traffic. This will allow you (or your marketing team) to improve keyword optimization.  The better keywords you have the more web traffic you’ll have, which in the retail world can lead to more sales.  Another feature is viewing which pages are getting the most traffic, which pages are creating high revenue, and which pages have a high bounce rate.  Knowing page traffic will tell you where you should place important information and which pages need to be reworked.  The last feature I’ll be talking about is who are your website visitors?  Google Analytics will track new and returning visitors, geography location and referral sources.  Understanding the geography of your visitors allows you to make smarter web decisions.  For example, you wouldn’t sell snowmobile parts if your biggest audience is located in the Southern United States.

Google Analytics Tools: http://ezinearticles.com/?5-Benefits-Of-Google-Analytics-In-A-Search-Engine-Optimization-Campaign&id=925838

4.      Google Webmaster Tools is a free tool that ties all the previous information together.  From submitting your sitemap.xml, analyzing the robot.txt file, and improving your Inbound Linking Quality Score; why wouldn’t you want this tool in your toolbox of tricks?  Instead of waiting for a Google to find your site, you can submit information to Google.  Submitting information also gives you feed back of any errors and status updates with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools can be integrated.  When you setup Google Analytics you can submit this information to Google Webmaster Tools, putting more information in one spot.

Google’s ranking algorithm uses Inbound Linking Quality Score, which can be improved with relevant keywords in anchor texts.  Google Webmaster Tools gives you the ability to see your Quality Score and analysis needed to improve this score.  The benefits and features of Google Webmaster Tools are endless.  So why wouldn’t you use this free and easy to setup tool?

Google Webmaster Tools: http://ask.enquiro.com/2008/why-you-should-use-google-webmaster-tools/

So there you have it.  Four easy and free tools to help you get started with your SEO adventure.  There are many SEO options, some are free some are not.  Finding what works best for you depends on your goal, target audience and resources that you’re willing to use.