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Analytics upgrade gives even closer website scrutiny

October 22nd, 2009 by Pete

Google has upgraded Analytics to V4 with a host of new features to enable even closer scrutiny of your website’s performance.

This industrial strength yet surprisingly free website metrics system can help you understand more about how your site is performing and give clues on how to improve it to ultimately make it a viable contributor to your business sales activities.

The upgrade includes:

• More sophisticated goal tracking
• Better table filtering
• More flexible reporting
• A threshold based alerting system

Read more…

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Analytics for business people | Referring sites

August 25th, 2009 by Pete

Referring Sites

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

Business Interpretation

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

  • They bring prospective clients to your site
  • You are being ‘recommended’ by the referee
  • 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.

    Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?

    Leave me a comment

    Cheers
    Pete

     

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    Analytics for business people | Visits & Site Usage

    August 25th, 2009 by Pete

    Visits chart

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

    visits

    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

    Visits

    The number of visitors to the site
    Note this is not a direction correlation with visitors because if one visitor came to the site three times this represents 3 visits.

    PageViews

    The number of times a page was viewed or displayed
    If during a visit, a visitor viewed a particular page 3 times then this represents 3 page views

    Pages/Visit

    The average number of pages viewed in a visit
    This is a key metric as it represents the level of visitor engagement with the site.

    Bounce rate

    Represents the portion of visitors who leave the site immediately after visiting it i.e. they ‘bounce’ straight out of the site

    Average time on site

    Average period of time that visitors spend on the site

    % new visits

    The portion of new visitors to the site

    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.

    Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?

    Leave me a comment

    Cheers
    Pete

     

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    Google Webmasters Tool | Top search enquiries

    August 24th, 2009 by Pete

    Top Search Enquiries is highly useful data that can provide valuable insight into how well your website is performing.

    At a simple level it shows how you site ranks for various recent searches in different countries’ Google.

    The data is displayed in two sections; Impressions and Click Throughs

    Impressions

    Impressions

    • % shows the portion of the top 100 searches this represents

    • Query is the search that someone used

    • Position is the highest Google ranking averaged over a week

    So in this case 15% of searches for internet marketing featured the Succinct Ideas site and in those searches on average if ranked #15.

    Click Throughs

    Clickthrough
    Click Throughs shows how many searchers then visited your site, and confirms the proportion, keyword and ranking

    Filtering

    This report can be filtered to individual Google country of origin and for a selection of time intervals.

    Interpretation

    Top Enquiries provides a harsh reality check about search results that your site is being listed in, and begs the questions:

    Keyword selection

    Do these searches represent business opportunities for your business ?

    - Are they unrelated to your business

    - Are there too few searches to attract viable traffic volumes?

    Ranking

    Is your site’s ranking too low to attract viable traffic volumes ?

    Conversion

    If you site appears in search results why does no-one click on your SERP ?

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