Hodgeman Web Design » Knowledge

Top 10 benefits of using Google Analytics for your website tracking

hodgeman — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 03:24:48 +0000

More accurate number of actual users
By only measuring the number of visits to your site by web browsers, you get a more accurate picture of the number of humans to your site compared to automated bots (e.g. search engine spiders) which can inflate your stats.
Detailed stats on visitor sources
See where in the world they’re coming from and via which sources: direct, referring, campaign or search engine.
Optimise content
See what pages get the best traffic, longest time on page and lowest bounce rates and site exits. Tweak or get rid of poorly performing content to streamline your content offering.
Track website events
Track links to external websites, downloads and on-page interactions (print, email, bookmark etc.)
Campaign Tracking
Create a custom tracking code (url) for any link to your website, so you can measure which campaigns drive the best visitors.
Goal Tracking and Funnels
Time on site, pageviews, visiting a specific page, downloads and purchases. See which traffic sources have the best conversion rates. Analyse and optimise the sales funnel to increase conversion.
Operating System, Browser, Mobile and Connection
View how much traffic you are getting from various platforms, including mobile tablets and smartphones. See common browsers and screen-resolutions to best optimise your content.
Compare historical data
View and compare trends across all data across any length of time. Use this information to better understand customer online behaviour.
Reports by email
Setup and send appropriate custom reports (via multiple formats) to those in your organisation that need to know certain things, a huge time saving.
It’s free to use
All of this and more in a powerful yet simple to use package. Besides this blindingly obvious fact, it’s almost becoming an industry standard analytics tool for websites.

Key aspects of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

hodgeman — Sun, 08 May 2011 23:33:09 +0000

There are lots of companies out there claiming to guarantee you first page placement in the organic search engine results pages (SERP).
It’s not all smoke and mirrors as they might make you think, there are three main things to get right that have the greatest influence over your organic search engine rankings, they are:

Site structure/architecture

Ensuring entire website can be readily accessed & crawled by search engine spiders.
Good text:code ratio meaning page is not bloated with excessive code.
Required tags (Title, Metatags, H1) are defined and unique to each page using the keywords and key-phrases you wish to rank for.

Quality Content

Ensuring appropriate content is present in the right amounts and in the right places for search engines to index & readily interpret.
Focus on only 1 or 2 primary keywords / key-phrases per page.
Other relevant sites will want to link to useful content because they think it’s worthwhile.
If your intended audience likes it, then the probability is that search engines will too.
If pages are updated periodically with new content, then search engines and site visitors will keep coming back for more.

Inbound Links

A key aspect of good organic ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) is quality inbound hyperlinks, linking to your website.
Enhancing a website’s reputation by securing inbound links from thematically relevant and authoritative sites.
60+% of SEO success depends on it.
Use key-phrases in the linking text you want to rank for and link to the specific page that has that information.
Ideally linked from a web page of higher Google pagerank than your own.

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Top 10 tips on using Google Analytics

hodgeman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 01:40:04 +0000

The top 10 tips for Google Analytics as outlined by Nick Guebhard, Search Operations Manager from Surefire Search

1. Track website events

Track on-page events using either:

Event tracking
Virtual pageviews

Examples of events you can track:

Links to 3rd party providers.
Email links
Brochure downloads
Form interactions
“Print this page” clicks
“email this page” clicks
“bookmark this page” clicks
Facebook “Likes”

2. Setup Goals and Funnels

3. Consider e-commerce tracking

Why?
Connect actual revenue to different traffic sources and marketing activities.

4. Tag non-adwords marketing campaigns

Example of campaign tagging at the end of URL:

http://www.mywebsite.co.nz/destinations?utm_source=autumn%2Bnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Autumn%2Bin%2BNew%2BZealand

5. Annotate important events

Uses:

Explain peaks/troughs
Mark campaign start and end dates
Mark site changes
Mark changes to GA tracking code
Mark important events

6. Setup dashboards

Find the reports that you use on a regular basis and add them to your dashboard

The new GA interface dashboards are better:

Build your own widgets
Filter data

7. Monitor bounce rates

Bounce rates may be the first indication that:

A marketing activity is not working for you.
Your content can be improved

8. Setup custom reports

9. Embrance advanced segments

Common tourism examples:

Visitor country (setup for each main country)
Traffic source (add segments for different marketing activities)
Site section visitors (e.g. accommodation, activities, tours)

10. Be/Find an Analytics Ninja

Visit GA regularly
Investigate your data – drill-down, segment, slice and dice
Do the free GAIQ online course (Google Analytics Individual Qualification)
Act on your data!