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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Migrating or designing your website?

Use caution as an innocent design refresh may actually compromise your site’s SEO which can be commercially  damaging. Ive got an article in the works, but noticed this one from Josh McCoy from Search Engine Watch which certainly raises some good points on the subject.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2070968/SEO-Website-Redesign-Relaunching-Without-Losing-Sleep

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The No 1 ranking spot provides the lion’s share of click through traffic  at 36.4 %

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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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What is even more unbelievable is the amazing array of Analytics tweaks and custom tracking ‘extensions’.

For example, Analytics doesn’t report a couple of key pieces of info ‘out of the box’ ie

• where do visitors go when they leave your site?
• what has been downloaded from my site?

To answer these questions you would normally add special Analytics scripts to every link etc Tedious!
Good Web Practices has a nifty script that dynamically captures site exits and PDF and other downloads in Analytics – well worth a look.

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Because of the important nature of referring traffic this module extends the Traffic Sources Overview to focus explicitly on where referrals are coming from.

Business Interpretation

Referring websites are just as important to your business as off-line sales referals;

YellowPages Online and other internet directory sites should also appear in this category if they are being used as part of your online promotion.

This referral data along with metrics like Pages/Visit will you to evaluate these sources as viable contributors to your business promotion.

If you don’t recognise the websites referring business to you, then make the effort to establish a relationship with them;you might get even more referrals!

Analytics for business people

This is one of a series of articles to help business people extract value from their Analytics reports.

• Visits & site usage
• Traffic Sources
• Referring sites

Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?
Leave me a comment

Cheers
Pete

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This chart shows the fundamental web metric, Visits displayed over the report period.

Visits should be slowly increasing because you’ve been working hard to get more prospective clients to your website. It is quite normal for traffic to ease during weekends and holiday periods in a business website.

Site Usage

Business Interpretation

As with any advertising, the business needs to gain exposure to prospective clients.

A healthy level of visits is paramount; particularly increasing over time.

Weekends, public holidays even school holidays can impact website visits

A good portion of new visitors who represent new prospective clients is also key.

The Pages/Visit signals the level of visitor interest and is particularly useful in later report modules to make judgments about the value of traffic sources etc.

Analytics for business people

This is one of a series of articles to help business people extract value from their Analytics reports.

• Visits & site usage
• Traffic Sources
• Referring sites

Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?
Leave me a comment

Cheers
Pete

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Actually it is really what visitor activity tells you, and the only way to ‘hear’ this is through interpreting website statistics.

In this case the client had a temporary parking web page while they underwent the arduous task of implementing a new website.

Recently installed, Analytics (my fav web metrics tool) revealed that the site was attracting visitors from searches nicely aligned with this client’s business and in their target geography. Great news!

The bad news was Analytics revealed these visitors were immediately abandoning the site, apparently unimpressed with the parking page.

Until I revealed this today the business had no idea how many sales opportunities it had lost, and as you would expect, the website refurbishment is now a top priority.

How may sales leads are you loosing because you can’t hear what your website telling you ?

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But how do you decide which paid search services your business needs, and importantly how do you decide which service provider to use ?  Could you DIY paid search ? Not sure? Read on.

What is Paid search?

Paid search displays an advert to someone who has just searched for your products and services on the internet.

Paid search even allows you to display those ads in a targeted geographical area i.e. you can only show your ads in SA, or just SA and Vic or just Australia or even globally.

IThere’s two great things about paid search for small biz:

Get a slice of the action – however small
Unlike commtting to a print advertisement that you can only afford to run once, paid search allows you to set the budget you’re comfortable with, and you the exposure proportional to that.

You get to play with the big boys; at least for the time your budget allows.

Just the facts Ma’am
Adwords gives you access to high quality information about your target market that you can even use in your off-line advertising:

Paid search facts

• Google owns internet search in Australia with over 95% of all searches conducted on Google.com.au. For maximum exposure it makes sense to use Google’s AdWords paid search.
• Paid search = Auction:
  Paid search is literally a keyword auction. You bid to show your ad when someone searches on a keyword. If they click on your ad then you pay a click price. If they don’t click you don’t pay. What value! Imagine if you didn’t have to pay for the brochures that clients didn’t read!The prospective client is automatically taken to your website where they can find out about what you can sell them that they where just searching for.

• Bidding:
  Its an auction, so if your bid is too low your ad wont be seen.
  If you bid too much you are wasting money.
  If you bid for searches or ‘keywords’ that don’t clearly represent a customer, then you’re wasting your money.Poor bidding can burn money and get zero results if you are not careful.

• Keywords:
  Cultivating a selection of successful keywords is the most important component of a successful paid search campaign. This is followed closely by creating compelling adverts that entice searchers to click and visit your site.

• Tuning:
  Most search term volumes fluctuate over time. Some are seasonal (i.e. Christmas), others follow fashion, fads even current affairs (i.e. green house). If you don’t proactively manage your bids and keywords over time your campaign will drift out of tune and will either waste your money or stall altogether.

Setting up Paid search

Actually setting up paid search is really easy! Well at least setting up a basic campaign is.
But if your market is already strongly represented online, suddenly it gets much more challenging.

There is an arsenal of AdWords tuning tools and 3rd party products to help you be more competitive.

DIY

It is quite viable for self-motivated and marketing savvy individuals to create a paid search campaign. There’s lots of online help and Google even has a ‘Starter edition’ to make it even easier for you.
Go to www.google.com/adwords and register.

If there’s not much competition in your online marketplace then this is probably all you need to do to dramatically increase the number of sales leads to your website. So do it!

If you find your campaign is not working or it seems to be ridiculously expensive for a click then you probably need assistance from a professional.

Paid search specialist

There is a growing number of good providers (& sadly bad ones too!) offering paid search support, even your web developer maybe able to assist you in setting up an AdWords campaign and getting you going.

Assessing Paid Search results

AdWords includes a very useful management console that shows the status of individual keywords and ads over time. The system can even email you regular reports to keep you informed.

Google Analytics is Google’s free website traffic tool.
Analytics provides cross medium (AdWords paid search and organic search) data, and the ability to comine and compare is extremely valuable.

I routinely use paid search to research optimal keywords to improve the website’s organic performance.
Paid search’s immediatecy means you get quick results.

The data is live not historical (like predictative tools) and you are using your target client base to test it – an online focus groupof throushands of clients – Wow! Paid search data  has enormous creditability.
Its marketing gold!

You can do all of this and much much more, but only if the Analytics and AdWords accounts are linked.

Paid Search traps

These are some of the major issues I see

• Changing rules for paid search
  In an effort to improve its paid search ‘relevance’, Google is penalising paid search campaigns that have a poor quality score which mainly relates to the target website’s landing page. This signals the end of the simple paid search campaign era and heralds the need for a broader internet marketing strategy that balances paid and organic search to avoid the penalty of inflated click prices.

• Bundled fees = poor information
  Paid search providers who bundle their service fee with click fees mask ROI information and so inhibit your ability to evaluate and tune individual keywords, or even the campaign.

• Fixed fee packages
  Paid search providers with fixed fee prices somewhat naively assume a constant keywords click price. You will either pay too much per click or the keywords will be under budgeted and therefore ineffectual.
• Analytics & AdWords linkage
  You need to link AdWords to Analytics to assess the quality of keywords and ads in your campaign.  If your provider won’t allow you access they are hiding something; most likely their profit margin for their bundled campaign.

Where to from here?

Research: Your online marketplace.

Search for the generic terms that describe your offerings or the problem they solve in Google.  See how many AdWords ads are displayed on the right hand side under ‘sponsored links’.

There are only eleven positions available so if they are already occupied then there’s already competition for that keyword.

Do it: Set up a paid search campaign

If you don’t have time or the interest use a Paid Search provider or internet marketer.

Measure: Your website’s performance

Add Analytics to your website so you can critically examine its paid and organic performance

Assign: Your website a sales budget

Treat your website like a sales person. Set a budget and demand results.

Investigate why if it fails to meet the budget. You may have to invest to get results.

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But with the growing realisation that online success starts with a quality sales-focussed website, these standards are not only relevant, but can provide a competitive edge for your website.

What is the W3C standard?

A web page is mainly software and when visiting a site, we see that software’s output on our browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Safari etc.) Your website’s W3C declaration informs the browser how to interpret and present the website’s output.

Over the years there have been a few generations of W3C standards as website technology has evolved, so it’s very important to specify the correct W3C standard that matches your website for the optimal outcome.

It’s much like knowing which type of fuel to put into your car (leaded, unleaded, diesel etc) If you use the wrong fuel, then the car is unlikely to run optimally, and may even breakdown.

It’s the same with websites and browsers. If a site claims to be constructed using a particular W3C standard but contains standards related defects or doesn’t even have a standard; the site may not be displayed how it was intended or may fail to display completely.

Impacts of W3C non-compliance

Your website may look OK to you, but it may look completely different on other browsers or browser versions. This is a well known and very frustrating aspect that web developers have to continually deal with called cross-browser compatibility.

Avoiding browser compatibility issues is the under-lying objective of the W3C standards.

As an illustration of the extent of browser variations a website has to accommodate, the Succinct Ideas website had visits from 9 different browser types with 43 individual software versions in just 6 months!

Browser compatibly issues can prevent your website’s menu system from working properly; obscure important content, or even make the entire site impossible to view on particular browser versions.

The problem is you can’t even see those defects to make an assessment of its impact on your prospective client unless you use that specific version of that particular browser.

Sales prospects will not invest their valuable time if your offerings are displayed in an unusable or distorted arrangement. The visitor’s poor online experience also creates a negative impression of your organisation which further prejudices your sale opportunity.

A non-compliant website will not only undermine your business’ creditability, but it scares sales leads away that you didn’t even know you had! It’s a sales prevention website!

Testing for W3C compliance

W3C have made assessment easy by providing a free validation tool: http://validator.w3.org/

Enter the website address and the validator will test the web page using the W3C standard the site claims to comply with.

If the validator reports no doctype found then your site does not even declare a W3C standard.

The validator results include references information on how to resolve any issues encountered, although much of it is deep geek.

How to get W3C compliant

W3C compliance is something your web developer can do when building your site if they know it’s important to you, and of course it is!

Depending on your website’s technical sophistication, achieving W3C compliance may be as simple as setting options in the web development tool (i.e. Dreamweaver etc) before publishing the site; or it may involve an extended debugging session requiring deep technical knowledge on HTML and W3C standards.

Which W3C standard?

Speak to your web developer to determine which W3C standard best suits your site. Each W3C standard version comes in two forms ‘strict’ and ‘transitional’.

In my view it is better to fully comply with the less disciplined transitional standard than to not comply with the more onerous strict standard.

Technical folks may object to this, but we are focussing on complying with the W3C standard for a sales objective, not technical perfection.

Edits can lead to compliance issues.

W3C compliance issues can creep into your site through edits and additions so it is important to retest W3C compliance following these modifications.

No W3C standard at all?

Many sites I encounter have no W3C declaration at all. These sites unfortunately run a real and genuine risk of inconsistent display over a variety of browser types and so the opportunity for compromising potential sales and business reputations is real.

The W3C badge

If demonstrating W3C compliance is important for your business, the W3C validator provides details on how to display a W3C logo on your compliant web pages.

Where to go from here

1. Assess each page in your site for W3C compliance
   If there are issues, take them up with your web developer for resolution.
   Note that if your website brief did not specify W3C compliance then it is not reasonable to expect this to be a warrantable issue.
   
   
2. Re-test W3C compliance when web site edits or modifications are undertaken.
   
   
3. Have your website tested in the browser and version editions that visitors are using to ensure it displays fully and as intended to your target audience.
   Source the list of browsers and browser versions being used from your website activity statistics. NB Typically Internet Explorer represents around 80%, Firefox 15%, Safari and others the balance.
   
   
4. Specify W3C compliance for your next web site design specification to ensure you are maximising the sales opportunity for your website from the ground up.

If your business has a quality based culture, you will understand the value of operating a standards based website.

Even if you don’t, you will still draw comfort from the knowledge that visitors to your website will enjoy a consistent view of your online business no matter which browser they use.

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