Archive for the ‘Google Analytics’ Category

Google Analytics Launches Real-Time Traffic Reports

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Google Analytics is launching real-time site traffic reporting, so you can stare at your screen all day and watch your site traffic grow in real-time.

Personally, I don’t understand the benefit?

Now, I understand the desire for post-facto real-time analysis. For instance, it would be helpful to see what hours in the day most of my audience is watching the recorded video information sessions on my site. Because then I could make sure my live chat staffing was on call when they would be most wanted.

Perhaps I’m just unimaginative, but I can’t figure out what you would do with real-time analysis, except create yet another tab in your monthly Google analytics report that no one will read – because it’s relatively impossible to take action upon.

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Twitter Launches New Analytics Tool to Justify Itself

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Recent analytics studies have shown that Twitter is being unfairly prejudiced in most reports. After all, the 140 character limit on Twitter means that if you want to share a link on Twitter, you often can’t fit it. Hence the evolution of bit.ly and other link shortening services. But here’s the problem. These referral services often take Twitter’s credit as the referral.

For instance, let’s say you share a bit.ly link on Twitter that links to your site. If you look at your site’s referring traffic, Twitter doesn’t get credit for the referral. Bit.ly does.

Perhaps because of this, Twitter has released their own Analytics API, hoping to help Webmasters understand the importance of the growing social media juggernaut. In essence, Twitter is adding their own t.co URL to any third-party URL shortener to ensure they get credit for the referral.

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Google Analytics Adds Multi-Channel Funnel Reporting for Crazy People

Friday, August 26th, 2011

Google has added five new reports to their Google Analytics reporting today, called Multi-Channel Funnels.

I can’t exactly imagine who was asking for this. It’s such crazy deep analysis that only PPC experts are even going to be able to understand it, but for those PPC gurus, I suppose it’s Christmas morning.

Until now, Google Analytics credited the last gateway source with a purchase referral. For example, a visitor clicks on an online ad, which brings you to your site, and he buys a set of golf clubs. You credit the ad with that sale referral. But, that might have been that visitor’s 5th visit to your site. And we’re only giving credit to the referral that resulted in the purchase.

Most people would probably say, that’s ok. Google wouldn’t have it. So now, these multi-channel funnels will tell you exactly how searches, ads and site referrals participated in the conversion.

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Posted in Google, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Pay Per Click Management | No Comments »

Google Has Blogs For Everything Except Google+

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

Google has blogs for everything, except the one thing they seem to be banking their entire future on.

I personally RSS subscribe to Google’s corporate blogs on search engine optimization, analytics, AdWords, gmail, webmaster and mobile. But, the one I want to subscribe to the most doesn’t even exist. There is no official Google+ blog. And I wonder why that is?

There is an official What’s new in Google+ site. But, this isn’t really  serving the same purpose. It’s not providing too many tips and tricks as to how to best utilize the Google+ social network. Is this an intentional iterative design choice by Google? Are they moving away from the traditional blog/RSS format? Seems surprising for a company that owns Blogger?

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Google Analytics vs. Compete

Monday, June 20th, 2011

As the Internet marketing tool, Compete, is becoming more and more popular, it’s getting lumped in with other analytics providers, such as Google Analytics.

But, Compete, is about more than just your Internet traffic. It’s about online U.S. traffic altogether. Segmented profiles. Audience analysis. Competitive behavior. They call it, “Competitive Intelligence”.

Google Analytics offers a cookie-based approach to analyze the utility and productivity of your Website. Compete uses a panel-based approach in order to better understand your online audience profile. They’re different tools. Google Analytics is free, and helps you understand how to optimize your current user experience. Compete is a bit pricey, but can help you understand how to beat out your competition in the search engine world.

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Google’s In-Page Web Analytics

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Web Analytics can be hard to analyze, and even harder to explain. But, Google just made things a whole lot easier with new In-Page Analytics.

Typically, a business will ask their SEO provider for metrics like page views. Maybe bounce rates. If they’re super-advanced, maybe they’ll understand the importance of tracking conversions. But in the past, your answers always required numbers. And a story via spreadsheet is never very interesting.

But now, users can view data superimposed directly over their site. And once you see it, you’ll be blown away. The technology is actually pretty easy. Google Analytics tracks the path your guests take on your site. So, with In-Page Analytics, you can see which links and pages are getting clicked on the most often. When you see that the 2nd link in your list gets 75% of the clicks, why not make it easier to give your users what they want and move it to the top? It’s little decisions like this that Google’s In-Page Analytics will make easy.

Keep in mind that In-Page Analytics is still in beta, and will improve over time.

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Goo.gl URL Shortener Now Available to the World

Friday, October 8th, 2010

Forget bit.ly. Forget ow.ly. Embrace goo.gl.

Why? Because you don’t need a separate URL-shortener analytics tracker anymore. Yes, it’s nice that bit.ly tracks your click-throughs. But, with automatic integration to your Google Analytics, Goo.gl automatically jumps to the leader in this URL-shortening space.

Now, if you don’t track with analytics, use whatever you want. Whatever integrates with your Twitter application or other application that has you shortening URLs for brevity or character-saving sakes.

But, once again, Google is making things easier for the rest of us. Just make sure you’re logged into your Google account. Jump on to goo.gl. Track clicks. And track them over time. Easily. Instantly.

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Posted in Google, Google Analytics, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »

Twitter Announces Free Analytics Dashboard

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Twitter has announced they will be releasing a free analytics dashboard later this year. This will help Twitter users, primarily local businesses, understand exactly how other people are interacting with their tweets.

The Twitter team behind this new tool? The same ones behind the analytics explanation company, Trendly, that Twitter acquired this past June. The magic behind Trendly? Well, most companies are technically “tracking” their Website analytics. But, Trendly helped companies understand exactly what the numbers mean.

And that’s great news for this new Twitter release. Supposedly this solution will help you see, not only which tweets are spreading, but which users are most influential in your network. Because having some famous celebrity re-tweet your message is really cool. And when you see how many followers they have, you think it’s great business, too. But the problem is, their followers aren’t your market. So, getting a better handle of exactly which tweeters are mavens and connectors in your industry would be a great feature, and would surely help users make smarter tweeting and relational decisions in the future.

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Posted in Google Analytics, Social Media, Twitter, local advertising | No Comments »

Google Analytics For Pay Per Click Management and Search Engine Optimization

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Implementing Google analytics to your website is necessary to supplement your pay per click management and search engine optimization strategies. Google analytics is a free tool that will let you know your website performance and rate on investment (ROI) with an easy laid out platform. You will learn where your traffic is coming from, where they go, and how much time is spent on the site and/or web pages. To implement Google analytics, you take a small bit of code, and place it on every page that you want to track on your website. Some people do not want to track some pages on their site, like about us, history, management team, etc, but we recommend that you do, because then you get complete and thorough data.

After the code has been implemented, you are going to get data within 24-48 hours, and if you have someone providing internet marketing consulting or if you do it on your own this is crucial information, because you will see keywords that are converting well, while others perform poorly. Quite often, keywords that you believe to be your “money-makers,” do not perform as well as others in your list, and you need to manipulate your strategy. Google analytics is one of the first things we look over to see how the account is doing, and implement it if not being used. If you are not using Google analytics, it is time, because you are not getting the most out of your ppc bid management.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

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Posted in Google Analytics, Pay Per Click Management, Search-Engine-Optimization | No Comments »