Chances are, if you’ve got a website, then you have some kind of analytics installed. If not, you should. How are you going to tell where your traffic is coming from and how much of it you are getting?
You’ve also likely heard by now that Google Analytics is free. Indeed it is. Totally. And you can use it to gather all sorts of useful information about your site visitors. But is it enough? Can you survive on Google Analytics alone?
I think for new websites Google Analytics is enough. You really want to see how your site grows over time. But as your website grows and you take on more search traffic from a variety of sources, you probably want to use an alternate analytics services to compare your metrics.
I’m not saying you should replace Google Analytics. You can keep it installed. There’s nothing wrong with it as a service. But there’s no perfect metrics package.
The point really is that you want to corroborate your data, especially the actionable data. By comparing the numbers you get from two or more analytics sources, you ensure that you are getting accurate data. It’s actually more actionable when you can get reports and actionable data from more than one source. Wild fluctuations between the two can be analyzed and judged according to reality and your expectations.
Google Analytics is good, but I wouldn’t rely on it completely forever. Your SEO is more important than that.
Site speed has been an important metric for webmasters for a time now. Recently, Google announced that they have added a site speed metric to its Google Analytics product.
This is good news for webmasters. No longer do you have to guess at how fast your site is loading. And you don’t have to go out and buy a third-party tool to figure it out. If you’ve already got an Analytics account with Google, just login and take a look at your Site Speed Report.
The Overview part of the report gives you a pretty good look at the important information that you should measure. It includes analytics for
- Average page load time by browser
- By country/territory
- By page
These are important overview metrics, but if you want to drill it down even further, then you can do that too. You can view site load times in three ways including Performance, Explorer, or Map Overlay simply by clicking on the appropriate tab.
Intelligence Reports are reports that analyze your website to highlight any variance in your statistics. You can receive alerts when variations occur. You can also view Site Speed metrics in your Intelligence Reports inside your Google Analytics account.
Google is a company that is constantly improving its products. Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that anyone can use, and I’d add that it is perhaps the best analytics tool on the market. There is really no need to pay for analytics when Google provides it all for free.
So what are you waiting for? Do you know how fast your website is loading?
Is there a way to fail at Facebook? All Facebook thinks so. They published an article outlining 5 ways you can fail at the largest social network online. In a nutshell:
- Don’t understand your audience
- Don’t be imaginative
- Don’t track your marketing
- Don’t build relationships with your fans
- Don’t hire social media experts
Of course, these points could apply to any type of social media marketing. But I think they are all golden.
The first step to success at any endeavor is to understand your audience. Fail to do that and you might as well not make any products.
Secondly, in this century, marketing must be innovative and imaginative. Social media marketing in particular must rely on a trigger effect: Make it interesting, keep their attention, and drive your audience to take action.
Tracking is another important aspect to any type of marketing. Many social media marketers seem to be of the mindset that tracking and analytics in social media is impossible. It isn’t. It’s also necessary.
And if you aren’t building relationships with your fans, then what are you doing on social media? Just saying.
Finally, let the experts do what they do best. You focus on your core business and let the social media experts focus on theirs. There’s no better way to succeed.
You can count on one thing for sure: Social media is going to keep getting better.
Here’s a fun fact: Twitter has recently acquired Backtype.
So what does that mean?
Given that Backtype owns Backtweets, the Twitter analytics service, it can only mean one thing. Twitter is headed for a major innovation that will involve the use of analytics for its users.
If you are a current user of Backtweets, then you’ll be allowed to continue using the service for free. New signups, however, have been put on hold. So here’s the question: How long will new signups be on hold and when will the new Twitter-run Backtweets go full time? Also, will it be a paid service or free?
My bet is that Backtweets will offer a free version, but there will be a paid version for businesses, and if you are business Twitter user it would likely be in your favor to pay for the analytics so that you can measure the effectiveness of your tweeting.
Another thing that is likely to happen is the integration of short URLs with analytics. You’ll have to be able to track and measure the click-throughs on your links whether they are short URL links or long URL links, and if short URL, you’ll need to be able to track and measure your effectiveness whether you use Tinyurl, Bit.ly, or another service. Backtweets might also be able to offer analytics for Facebook and LinkedIn as well.
What do you think? Is this a good acquisition for Twitter? Will it improve your social media marketing efforts?
One of the most useful website analytics tools is a heat map.
A heat map measures your traffic and its actions by showing you a colorful representation of that traffic. For instance, the hottest part of your website – the part where most of your traffic is navigating toward – will appear in red. Still hot parts of your website, but less hot than the red, will appear in yellow. It gets cooler from there.
Let’s say you decide to use a heat map and discover that you have a page on your website that shows the hottest part of the page to be on the top right, but a link that you really want your visitors to click on is on the top left side of that page. Based on the information you see on the heat map, you should move that link over to the top right side of your page so that you can increase the number of visitors who click on it. More than likely, after you move the link, you’ll see that click-throughs have gone up.
Heat maps are an essential tool of metrics that any website owner can use for improving website development. You simply watch your visitors, see what they do, then tweak your website to match their expectations. Pretty simple.
If you are a Twitter user then you can rejoice. By the end of the year Twitter is planning to roll out a real-time analytics tool. How useful will that be?
If you’ve been hesitating to use Twitter because you don’t see any way to measure your results then I’m sure you’ll agree that an analytics tool that measures real-time results could be quite valuable. But it all really depends on what the tool will measure.
There have been third-party analytics tools that have focused primarily on numbers of followers, retweets, and similar results. But I’m hoping that Twitter takes it a step further. I’d like to see which links are getting clicked on and how many clicks those links are attracting. That would probably be the most useful metric for any serious Twitter marketer.
Social media has reached an age that it can now be taken seriously. Twitter is a part of that movement along with Facebook and LinkedIn. But without a proper metric, or a tool that measures useful data, then the tools are not really helpful. That’s why I’m particularly excited about the prospect of a Twitter analytics tool.
Do you see this announcement as encouraging? Why or why not?
Before you begin a pay per click campaign it is always a good idea to get a PPC evaluation, which is a way for your PPC manager to see what you’ve done, how it’s affected your ROI, what worked, what didn’t, etc. There are 5 key elements to a good PPC evaluation.
- Website Evaluation – There are certain aspects to your website that are important for consideration when you use PPC to drive traffic to it. First is usability. Do your visitors find your website usable or is it difficult to navigate? How about conversion optimization? Are your landing pages ready to receive orders? And we’ll also take a look at your page load times to ensure that your PPC ads have a high quality score.
- Existing PPC Accounts – Do you have existing accounts? How effectively were they managed? What potential issues are there in those accounts, what are your missed opportunities, are you targeting the right keywords, etc.?
- New PPC Accounts – You’ll need to outline your PPC strategy, estimate your average cost per click on each keyword, set your monthly budget, and define your marketing channels.
- Google Analytics Account – Do you have one? We’ll set one up for you. You also need to set goals and establish lead funnels.
- Custom Pricing – Finally, you’ll need to get your pricing set for your campaigns. Not a one-size-fits-all budget, but the cost for your campaign.
If you’ve been struggling with PPC and you’re ready to take on a campaign that will be successful, get a PPC evaluation.
One of the more difficult kind of campaigns to measure the ROI for is a social media campaign. Twitter can be included in that.
One of the things that makes Twitter so difficult for measuring ROI is that there is not analytics program that integrates with Twitter for that purpose. At least, there hasn’t been. Not until now.
Twitter has acquired an analytics company, which should make a lot of social media marketers happy. But until Twitter announces that analytics is available for businesses that want to measure their marketing results, we can’t say how effective it is. It may be something that businesses will have to pay for (remember, Twitter is looking for a monetization plan).
But is it important to measure the ROI of Twitter? Understand that Twitter is a tool and you cannot measure its ROI any more than you can measure the ROI of a hammer when building your house. You measure the ROI of strategies, not tools.
When it comes to Twitter, measuring ROI is as important as measuring ROI for anything else. But to do it correctly, you need to first have a strategy. Do you have a Twitter marketing strategy?
To truly be successful at any kind of marketing you have to be able to measure your results. Without actionable metrics you cannot make the changes to your PPC campaigns to make them profitable. Therefore, analytics is the most important aspect of your PPC campaign.
You not only need to be able to measure the traffic to your landing pages, but you also need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your PPC advertising. That means you’ve got to know your conversion rate, both your overall conversion rate as well as the conversion rate from your PPC ads. Segmentation of your results is paramount to a truly actionable metric.
So how do you achieve that? There are a number of ways to get the best analytics results from your PPC campaigns.
- You can create a separate landing page for each PPC ad or campaign
- Make sure that your PPC ads are optimized for different keywords than your other advertising efforts
- Keep a close eye on the times that your ads run and the number of visitors and results you get during those times
Without knowing how effective your PPC campaigns are you’ll never be able to improve your results. Metrics is key to your success.
Analytics has recently been upgraded. Here is an overview of the new features:
Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts
Using an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine, Analytics Intelligence monitors data patterns over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Significant changes in data trends and insights you may not have noticed are surfaced directly in your account. You can also create your own Custom Alerts that monitor your selection of dimensions and metrics that can be sent by email or displayed in the Intelligence reports.
Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals
You can now track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile. Measure user engagement and branding success on your site with Time on Site and Pages per Visit goals. Set up your first Engagement goal in minutes.
Expanded Mobile Reporting
Google Analytics has expanded support for mobile websites and tracking for iPhone and Android mobile applications tracking. Adding server side code to your PHP, JSP, PERL, or ASPX mobile websites enables you to track non-Java-Script enabled phones. For mobile application developers, access the SDK and technical implementation details here. You’ll also be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section.
Unique Visitors Metric
Include the Unique Visitors metric in your Custom Report or Advanced Segments to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) visit your website. You can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.
Advanced Analysis Features
Dive deeper into your data with Pivoting, Secondary Dimensions, and Advanced Table Filtering. These combined features enable you to perform in-depth, on the fly data analysis within your account.
Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates
Share the URL link for an Advanced Segment or Custom Report with anyone who has an Analytics account. Sharing the link will automatically import the pre-formatted template into the person’s account. Also available now is the ability to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports by profile.
Multiple Custom Variables
Custom variables provide the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics to collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. Define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (member vs. non-member), session attributes (signed in or signed out), and by page-level attributes (viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site.
