Lesson 12 - Marketing Tools & Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there for analyzing traffic on your website. With a little bit of setup, it will give you an enormous amount of information about who is coming to your site, what they're looking for, and how they're getting there. Google Analytics is absolutely free to use.

Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your site and how they interact with it. You'll be able to compare the behavior and profitability of visitors who were referred from each of your ads, keywords, search engines, and emails, and gain valuable insight into how to improve your site's content and design. However large or small your site, and however you drive traffic to it - whether it's unpaid search, partner sites, AdWords, or other cost-per-click programs - Google Analytics tracks it, from click to conversion.

These are the kinds of questions that Google Analytics can help answer:

For Executives:

• Which marketing initiatives are most effective?
• What are accurate traffic patterns/trends on my websites?
• Which customer and customer segments are most valuable?

For Marketing Professionals:

• Where are my visitors coming from and what do they do on my site?
• How can my website convert more visitors into customers?
• Which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions?
• Which online ad or creative is the most effective?

For Content and Web Developers:

• Why do so many people leave my site without doing what I want?
• Are there website design elements that are turning visitors away?
• What site content are people most interested in?

In order to use Google Analytics, you'll need to set up an account with them. This will provide you with a unique identifier to add to your site. You can only access information about your own site; you can't access information for other sites unless the site owner explicitly grants you access. The only people with access to your information will be people you grant access to.

If you have not experienced Google Analytics it is a good idea to go to the help page to read the 'Getting Started' guide, 'About Google Analytics', and 'Installing the tracking code', and anything else that you are interested in.

So, what does Google Analytics do? It allows you to gather, view, and analyze data about your website traffic. By embedding Google's basic JavaScript snippet into your pages, you see which content gets the most visits, average page views and time on site for visits, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, and more. You can also use the simple administrative interface to set up goals and filters to control what data goes into your reports based on your business needs.

Example

Since I have a Google Analytics account we will use it to look at some of the features Google Analytics provides. When I log in a page comes up showing an overview of information about all my sites, number of visits, bounce rate, average time on the site.

We will look at the Informaticus site. First, we click on Informaticus which will bring up a profile of the site.

Clicking on 'View Report' brings up the Dashboard information about the site visits, where in the world the visitors are from, traffic sources, and site usage.

The image below shows the Dashboard.

For comprehensive overview about Google Analytics view this great video that Google created.

Create your Google Analytics Account

Now you are ready to create your account and set up your site. Here is a list that you can follow, though not an exhaustive checklist, it will get you up and running so that you can become a power user.

1. Understand the Website
2. Analyze The Website
3. Create a Google Analytics Account
4. Create and Configure Profile(s)
5. Setup Internal Traffic Filter
6. Add Tracking Code to Website
7. Link Google Analytics Account to AdWords Account (if applicable)
8. Setup Goals and Funnels
9. Configure E-Commerce Tracking (if applicable)
10. Configure Site Search (if applicable)
11. Tag Advertising Links
12. Create/Update Privacy Policy
13. Test on a Development Server (whenever possible)
14. Setup Filters
15. Implement on live site
16. Review and Update
17. Grant Access to Other Users
18. Setup Scheduled Reports

For an in depth discussion of each of these steps visit this FutureNow post.

For more information, how to insert tracking code, and everything you need to know about Google Analytics go to Google's Help.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the act of optimizing a website (in terms of code, content and links) to increase traffic from major search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. This will help your site rank highly in popular search engine results. The following are steps recommended by iPower.

What Do Search Engines Look For?
Search engines index content on the web with computer programs called "bots," which move through websites by "crawling" from link to link. In order to provide the most useful search results, search engines assess pages in terms of:

• Relevance: The relevance of content on a site depends on how closely it matches a search query. A site's content is considered more relevant when the queried terms appear in the title or headings of the content and HTML tags.
• Popularity: A website's importance is measured by the number of times other sites link back to it. These are called backlinks, and when they come from a highly respected site, like the New York Times, for example, they carry more weight.

Six Ways to Boost SEO
There are lots of ways to improve how high your site ranks on major search engines, and we've highlighted six to get you started:

1. Add Unique Content to Your Site
   Brainstorm keywords that your audience might use to find you. Anytime you add content to your site — blog posts, product descriptions, an "About Us" section, etc. — it should be rich with those keywords. Unique, quality content also gives other sites reasons to link to you, and building backlinks is part of the popularity factor search engines pay attention to.
2. Place Keywords in Key Places
   Those same keywords should appear in your page titles, headings and subheadings (in terms of content and code). However, that doesn't mean you should cram them anywhere you can. Use them where they're relevant, and if they aren't relevant in certain places, replace them with words that are.
   

   TechTarget's Definition of Keyword Stuffing:

   Keyword stuffing is the practice of inserting a large number of keywords into Web content and meta tags in the attempt to artificially increase a page's ranking in search results and drive more traffic to the site. A keyword is a significant term that is relevant to the content in question.

   Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical SEO (search engine optimization) technique at best and an attack technique at worst. The practice is often used to drive traffic to fraudulent or malicious websites. Keyword stuffing in content is known as spamdexing. Keywords may be hidden in content through a number of methods, such as matching font color to the background, setting font size to zero or putting it behind an image. Words and phrases used for keyword stuffing are typically relevant when visible to the reader but when keywords are hidden they are often just a list of common search phrases, such as sexual terms and celebrity names.

   According to Google, keyword stuffing is not only unethical -- it's also ineffective. Meta tags are no longer used to rank websites, so keywords placed in that field are ignored. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms can help identify not just when terms are irrelevant but also when they are out of context or overused. Furthermore, if hidden text is detected in content, Google may remove a site from its index and it won't appear in search results at all.

   Google offers some advice: 'Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.'

   You can go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in keywords and phrases and you will be able to see how many people searched for those keywords or phrases and it will show you similar keywords that you might want to add.
   

   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

3. Create a Sitemap
   Sitemaps can improve SEO by displaying links to pages on your site that search engine bots might miss otherwise. Structure your site's pages from broad to specific, and try to keep them no more than three clicks from the homepage. Google Webmaster Tools, available via your control panel, explains how to create sitemaps and submit them to Google.
4. Add Links with Strong Anchor Text
   When linking to relevant sites, tell your readers where you're sending them. The anchor text (the wording displayed in a hyperlink) should closely match the URL you are pointing to. For example, here are two ways to link to www.ipower.com/
   product/googlewebmastertools.bml:

   Strong anchor text:
   "Check out Google Webmaster Tools."

   Weak anchor text:
   "Check out Google Webmaster Tools, here."

5. Submit Your Site to Search Engines
   Included free with your hosting plan, SubmitNet's SEO tools allow you to submit your website to popular search engines. Gold and Platinum plans offer competitor analysis, meta tag generation, and more.

References and Resources

• Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Help
• Google Analytics Tour - video
• FutureNow - Google Analytics Tutorial
• SEO

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Copyright © 2010 - 2011 Robert D. Cormia - December 14, 2010