Just knowing how many visitors you have is not enough.  Website metrics can tell you if your visitors are engaged, how are your visitors finding your site and where do they come from. Analytics provides deep information on what your visitors are doing and how engaged they are, and the new Google Analytics has even more sophisticated analysis tools built-in.

The problem many business people encounter is that there’s too much technical/web information and its difficult to correlate this data with business goals and sales objectives, so way back in 2009 I wrote Interpreting Analytics

Please feel free to download this, but if it doesn’t answer your questions, please  let me know what other information you think it should include…

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1. Checkout the new Google Analytics Click New Version next to your Google ID (top left...

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Google +1 can be seen by logging in with your Google ID and as you search they appear in organic and paid search (Adwords) results

Significantly,  +1 Metrics reporting has now appeared in Google’s WebMasters Tools
For folks outside of the SEO industry, Google’s WebMasters Tools (WMT) is the definitive Google control panel for websites, allowing a registered user to view website stats, issues and errors and even suggestions for improving its Google search performance.

Google +1 is a new ranking factor
There have been regular updates to WMT over the years, and these often provide insight into how Google is tuning its ranking factors; but the +1 metrics addition to WMT has nothing subtle about it with a +1 Search Impact page that will let you see exactly how +1′s affect your site’s performance in search results

The WMT Help + FAQ goes on to address topics like:

• How does +1 affect search results?
• Does +1 affect my site’s performance in search?
• How will the +1 button affect my traffic?
• Will +1’s from my site show up in search results?
• How does the +1 button affect my ads?

Google +1 and your AdWords campaign
Not convinced about the impact of +! yet ? Did I mention that +1 also appears on Adwords ads ?

It would seem that your campaign or even individual ads will be impacted, most likely through the Adwords Quality Score
This is turn means it will effectively cost you more per click if your ads are not getting a few +1′s especially in really competitive campaigns

In summary, Google  has used its considerable influence to “encourage” the use of its own social voting system.
If you want online exposure through organic or paid search it looks like you’ll now have to play the +1 game…

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I find it much easier to slice and dice the keyword data in excel so routinely download from the Keyword Tool in CSV format.
Here’s a typical example of keywords plotted using Local Search Terms data.

The Google Keyword Tool on the other hand reports the nominal Local Monthly Searches as 1,300 searches per month while we can see that in Aug 2010 the top terms where searched 2,400 times – a significant difference!

Until recently Google’s Keyword Tool provided the Local Search trend data and during an upgrade  it suddenly disappeared. This was a major issue for Aussies as the only alternative was Google’s Insights for Search. Sure its a nice tool but the issue I have is that it cant work with relatively low search volume keywords – and sadly in Australia that’s nearly everything!

I was impressed to see in the AdWords forum (the Keyword Tool is actually an Adwords facility)  that due to end-user feedback the Search Trends data was re-introduced, but as it happens subtly stashed away.

To reveal the Local Search Trends data in the Google Keyword Tool you’ll need to:

• Be logged in on a valid Adwords ID
• Select your country in Locations and Languages
• Click Local Search trends in the Columns dropdown
  If you don’t see the Local Search Trends option something’s gone astray  in the previous steps

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Ill do a review when I get a micro-second spare…

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If you enjoy the raw speed and uncluttered efficiency of Google’s browser Chrome you’ll find the PageRank extension very helpful when you are trying to track down the best links for your site.

Down load it here on Chrome Fans  http://www.chromefans.org/chrome-plugins/chrome-pagerank-status-extension.htm

If you’re not sure why you should be checking out PageRank then you should read
Google PageRank | The web page quality score.

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Google Alerts is a very useful tool that allows you to keep a close watch on anything new on the internet, and in the business world, monitoring what folks are saying about your business is REALLY important!

Its pretty simple to use; You type in the phrase you want to monitor & Google Alerts will email you if it encounters a new mention of that phrase while its traversing the internet

If you enter a commonly used phrase  you run the risk of being inundated with lots of irrelevant information.

So  Ill share a tip on how to avoid getting lots of  ”false Alerts” while  we explore the new preview feature:

Lets assume I’d like to monitor new references to my business Succinct Ideas so I fill in my Google Alerts form llike this:

However, when I click Preview I see that I get heaps of irrelevant matches….

…so I add quotes around my search phrase i.e. “succinct ideas” which gives me a much more relevant result.

Now I can scan quickly through the more relevant matches to see that an article directory has kindly ripped off one of my Internet marketing presentations from 2009 and offering it from their site.  Copyright notice?  What copyright notice?

The final consideration is how quickly do you need to know someone is talking about you/your business ?

The appropriately named How Often drop-down lets you select as it happens, daily or weekly alert delivery to your email.

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The new update to Rank Trackers ver 5.1  now displays Visits using API integration into Analytics
Of course this means that you need to be tracking the site in Analytics, but frankly I think that’s a no-brainer.

What this means is you have a single console that you can see #searches KEI & how many visitors you’re getting for an individual keyword.  A nice extra feature would be to split it into organic and paid searches tho’

Ive been using RankTracker for about a year now and I strongly recommend it anyone serious about tracking multiple websites  search engine ranking.  Its much quicker than other products Ive used, doesnt upset the search engines and the onboard KEI calculations helps focus your attention on the best opportunity keywords.

Im also run scheduled tracking on over 250 websites currently, and it doesnt have any problems at all

Im most impressed with the  way Link Assistant  have continually added new features too- Analytics Visits the most recent

Nice work Link-Assist! www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker

p.s It’d be nice if you could set preset templates for Aussie search engines & KEI source tho’ rather than having to change everything from the US default each time  :)

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Defects! What defects?
Well some website defects may not be obvious but its apparent that simple issues like  broken links are having a negative impact on a website’s organic ranking in Google.

The challenge is finding these and any other issues  but thankfully there’s a couple of useful tools to do just that:

WebMasters Tools

Google WebMasters Tools includes a range of diagnostic facilities that allow you to examine things that the Google crawler GoogleBot may have had an issue within your site.
Check out the Diagnostics menu and you will find information on crawl errors (ie broken links  and more) and even suggestions on how to improve your website
Here’s a great video from Google introducing WebMasters Tools

For more info on WebMasters Tools checkout: www.google.com/webmasters

W3C Validation Tool
The Wold Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a standards body that manages technical standards in internet technologies.
There is controversy about W3C standards applicability, especially by Web Devs who have suffered because of display inconsistency across various browsers.

There is a good chance that a W3C non-compliant website wont be considered to be a “good user experience” either.

Its easy to check if your website complies with various standards by using the W3C validation tool.
Resolving W3C issues can be complex however and may require technical assistance.

Website Crawler
Website crawlers traverse your site discovering all about it, in a very similar way that search engine crawlers or ‘spiders’ do.

A good crawler like the GSiteCrawler (download for free here)   will discover and report broken links.
Fix them and re-crawl the site!
A Web Dev’s technical help might be required here too.

The bottom line is to focus on the ‘good user experience’ which includes a defect free website for an optimal Google ranking…
…but don’t forget about the other 199+ factors that influence ranking as well

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The renewal notice email from their domain registrar was apparently lost in the continual deluge of inbox spam; the Domain registrar decommissioned the domain when they had not received a renewal payment and the website simply disappeared off Google’s ‘radar’

This is not an uncommon issue as I described back in early 2008 in Website calamities – Where has my website gone?

The client first noticed they couldn’t receive emails, then with the help of their web dev realised their website had also disappeared, then horror of horror they had also lost their much loved #1 Google ranking for their target term.

Before Google Caffeine this probably would not have been so commercially severe. I recall several cases over the years where ranking had at worst a minor glitch after a website disappeared for a few days (always due to domain renewal oversights ), but it seems now that the additional speed Caffeine has injected into Google that not only are website found faster so is removal removal from search results.

For those interested in operational details:

Google WebMasters Tools didn’t alert me although crawl errors do show “domain not found” on the fatal day. I was really disappointed by this as WMT has previously alerted me to more trivial activities; but this is critical and I would have valued an alert on this!

The site still appears in the site:<domain> search so its still in Google’s index. Rank Tracker shows the site as sitting consistently at Google #1 since late July then plummeting out of the first 100 within two days of the domain de-registration.

We are now 7 days past the domain outage and although the site is operational it is still not ranking at all…

Understandably the client is not happy as this ranking outage a significant commercial impact.

Fortunately their forward thinking Internet Marketer has more than one site ranking for their target terms  :)  So it appears that having more than one appearance in target search results is not only a great way to increase traffic, but is also a great contingency in ranking outages too!

Cheers

Pete

PS See this update to find out how long the site was out of ranking….

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The ‘issue’ only arises after the clients engage an internet marketer, who will want to access the site’s Analytics information to better understand the website’s history and traffic characteristics.

Analytics enthusiasts like myself will refine the Analytics settings for improved reporting, specific investigations etc which requires Admin access, and this is where the problem emerges.

Granting Analytics Admin to enable these refinements, also provides access to all profiles;
ie the web dev’s others client’s in that Analytics account.

This is not desirable from either the web dev or the internet marketer’s perspective, and as a result admin rights are not typically granted. This in turn impedes the internet marketer’s ability to deliver services.

Solutions
A simplistic approach is to create a new Analytics account for the client and abandon the web dev’s profile; however this effectively means losing historical web traffic data.

My preferred approach is to use two Analytics accounts in tandem:

• Retain the original account with the client/Internet marketer having read only access
• Create an additional Analytics account that is ‘owned’ by the client, with admin rights granted to the internet marketer.
  Analytics provides the ability to feed web tracking data simultaneously to two independent Analytics accounts – handy hey!

This approach:

• Preserves the website history so it is accessible by all interested parties (web dev, client & internet marketer)
• Places the ownership of web traffic data back with the client (where it should be!) This allows the client to retain their internet statistics even if they move to another web dev or internet marketer.

Checking your Analytics account
You can readily determine if the Analytics ‘account’ on your site is one of many sub-accounts by inspecting the UA number which looks similar to “UA-628649-1″ .

The final section (-1 in this case) indicates the Analytics profile number.
If the profile number is larger than the number of websites you have (eg 15) , then it is likely this is your web devs Analytics account and you are actually one of many profiles or sub-accounts within it.

Summary
In summary web traffic data is an important piece of data about your businesses, so I recommend that you take control of it and ensure you ‘own’ it.

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