I think you know that I love web analytics. With data about your visitors, you can make strategic decisions based on information, not on guesses. You can tell whether your new promotion works or not. You don't end up making decisions on the basis of a conversation with one person who feels strongly (and I think we all know that businesses do that with startling frequency).

But that doesn't mean that analytics always give us a full and accurate picture.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether anyone is actually trying to deceive you or not. Most businesses -- or at least most of the businesses I work with -- don't see a lot of malicious messing around with their web results. Instead, they see anomalous results requiring some kind of explanation. Here are some of the surprises you might see, and what they might mean:

• Surprising direct traffic. Direct traffic always deserves a closer look. If you have a simple, obvious URL (lucky you!), people may be just as likely to type it into the address bar at the top of the screen as to type it in at a search engine -- even if they've never visited you before. My friends at Onsharp (Onsharp.com) get lots of direct traffic, and it's fair to assume that many of those visitors are guessing correctly at the web address of their local web firm. But lots of direct traffic, or surprising patterns or changes in direct traffic can also mean that your staff hasn't been filtered out of your analytics properly, or that someone has been working on your website. Ask around the office before you start formulating any new strategies in response. 
• Self referrals. We've seen several examples recently of sites getting a lot of referral traffic from themselves. In one case, there were thousands of visits a month, so it was worth tracking down the path. Usually, you can safely ignore it. It's usually a shopping cart, a place customers check in -- some part of your website that involves some engineering.
• Surprisingly limited visits. One case last summer really stands out as an example of this. A website reported receiving exactly the same number of visits every day for months. It looked to me as though the code was installed on all the pages, and indeed when I kept saying, "This can't be right," the engineers all reported that everything was as it should be. After weeks of tweaking, we discovered that the analytics were picking up only the activity in the administrative part of the site -- where the business owner had a very methodical routine. More recently, we've been struggling with a site that seems to have visitors only on the homepage. Further examination shows that this is not the case -- so we're having to look at the analytics and figure out what the error is.

When seeing this kind of odd behavior at your analytics reports, be sure to consider that you might have technical issues. Once that possibility has been eliminated, dig deeply into your data-- and your real world information sources-- to find the explanation.

Labels: Google Analytics

I've been doing annual reports. Traffic is the starting point for all of them, and of course everyone is happy to hear about their increases in traffic. Me, too. My traffic is up 198.92% over the same time last year. But don't stop there. Ask yourself a few more questions:

• Is it business, or is it just traffic?

I have one client who had an increase of 370.95% in 2009, compared with 2008. But he only serves local clients, and his local traffic increased by a mere 44%. That extra traffic is fine -- there can even be side benefits, such as a general increase in web visibility and prestige that could increase conversions -- but his basic traffic info suggests a higher level of success than we're really seeing.

• Are you seeing the trends?

The client below had a nice percentage of increase between 2008 and 2009, but really it's better than that. 2008 was essentially flat, while 2009 shows an upward trend (ever since they hired me) that is likely to continue if we continue making good decisions. The reality here is better than the percentage of increase would suggest.



The client below has a fairly new site, and the percentage of increase isn't that impressive yet. But the line on the graph is heading upwards. We might want to speed the process up, but the general trend suggests that we're on the right path, and shouldn't make a complete change in strategy.

• Have you broken it down?

Here's my chart for traffic from search engines.


If I look at my traffic over the whole year, I have a fairly smooth and steady increase, like the ones earlier in the post. But breaking it down by source shows a different story. My direct traffic is relatively flat. Search traffic shows a temporary peak in May when I was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, and then a nice increase between July and August that stayed high till the typical holiday drop --and even then was considerably higher than it was to begin with.

Here's a site, launched this summer, that shows completely different profiles for its three sources of traffic:





I haven't been working on this site since its launch, but if I were, I'd need to be aware of the different paths visitors were following.

When you look at your site's traffic for 2009 and make your online marketing plans for 2010, be sure to look closely enough at your traffic data to get the information you need for strategic decisionmaking.

Need more basic info about website traffic? Here are some posts you might find helpful:

Website Traffic
Learn from Your Traffic Sources
Detective Work at Analytics

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing, traffic

When you look at your web analytics, there are some basic things you'll want to examine:

• traffic -- you usually want to see it increasing steadily.
• traffic sources -- you'll want to notice what's bringing traffic and what's showing the highest conversion rate, so you can do more of that; you'll also want to catch any surprising results here, and see a steady increase in the number of different keywords bringing you visitors.
• interesting patterns -- you can often tell a lot about who you're reaching by noticing patterns in visitor information, heat maps, and traffic.
• spikes and changes -- you always want to find out what happened to cause these, so you can respond strategically.

But notice that most of these things you notice involve finding out more. And hooking up what you learn with real world information to see the full implications, too.

Recently, Josepha noticed that one of our education-related clients had regular small spikes on the 15th of the month -- teacher payday. Our hypothesis here is that teachers are using personal funds to shop there, not just school or grant funds. This means that some more personal approaches might work well.

Another client showed an apparent drop in visits to a particular page -- until we looked back and found a completely artificial rise in visits to that particular page, caused by the webmaster's failure to filter out worker's visits to the site. The page in question had been the subject of a lot of debate and discussion the previous month, so there were a lot of visits by workers.

Another client had a big increase in overseas traffic -- which turned out to be from a European equivalent to StumbleUpon. After thorough checking, we ignored it, thus saving the company from a lot of wasted time looking into serving overseas customers.

Moral of the story: look further when you see something interesting going on, and make sure that you know what's really going on.

Labels: Google Analytics

We're continuing with our series of posts for people with new websites, or who are generally new to Google Analytics. Yesterday, we saw how to get in to look at the data, and had a look at the Site Usage section of the dashboard. It's good to have a look at that information on a regular basis.

The other part of the dashboard that you ought to get familiar with right away is the Traffic Sources section. You can click on the words "Traffic Sources" in the navigation in the upper left of your dashboard, or on the pie chart in the main section of the dashboard, which looks like this:





I wrote a post on the basics of traffic sources a few months back, so I won't repeat it, but I recommend that you click on that link and read it if you're new to Analytics. Essentially, the Traffic Sources section of your dashboard tells you how people found your website.

The pie chart example above is an established site with a nice amount of traffic. Myra Grayson, who has so kindly allowed us to keep a diary of her new website's progress, doesn't yet have that kind of traffic, and she has a different proportion of sources, too:



The established site has about half of its traffic from search engines, a bit more than a third from direct traffic, and much less from referring sites. Myra's website gets two-thirds of its visits from referring sites, and only a little bit from search engines.

The best balance of sources depends on your business, your goals, and a number of other factors. However, the fact that Myra gets very little search traffic so far shows that the search engines need to be alerted to her existence. We're currently doing a basic linkbuilding campaign for Myra's new site, so we'll expect to see the proportion of visitors from search increase. Visits from direct traffic may increase, too, though for a variety of reasons that might not be a major traffic source for Myra's site.

Let's have a look at her top referring sites:

• graysllandacres.blogspot.com (referral) 21.88%
• facebook.com (referral) 17.97%
• rebeccahaden.com (referral) 10.94%
• art.uark.edu (referral) 6.25%

Myra has 16 different referring sites right now (that number will increase as she gains more links), and four have sent her multiple visitors. Google Analytics tells how many visitors have come from each source, and what percentage that is of the traffic -- in this case, of the total traffic, but you can also see what proportion a given site provides of your referred traffic.

We can see that 21.88% of Myra's visitors are coming in from her blog -- a good blog is a good source of traffic, so we're glad to see that. She has people coming in from her Facebook page, too. It's likely that social media will be a good choice for her site. Even though the amount of data we have right now is small, Myra can already get some sense of what strategies she might choose to pursue to increase her traffic in the future.

She also has people coming from my website and from the designer's website -- those are the other two domains listed as referring sources above. Those people probably aren't customers for Myra. It doesn't hurt to have those visitors, but the fact that they send traffic doesn't mean Myra should try to get more links like those.

As she gets more visitors and more data, Myra will be able to use the information from Google Analytics to make decisions about her website, her marketing strategy, and even about her business.

Labels: Google Analytics

Myra Grayson's new website, GraysLlandAcres.com, has been live for a few weeks, and she wants to see who's visiting. Tom installed Google Analytics for her when we built the site. This is my personal favorite analytics program: it's free and it gives a wonderful depth of information.

I keep track of Analytics for some clients, but others -- including Myra -- want to do it themselves. While I do trainings for local people (like the folks at BabySmart Travel, who made cookies for the occasion yesterday), Myra isn't close enough for me to sit down with her at her computer.

So for Myra, and the owners of BabySmart Travel, and for you too, if you're wondering what all this talk of Google Analytics is about, here is the first in a series of lessons on using Google Analytics for absolute beginners.

Before you start, you have to have Google Analytics installed at your website, and you have to have access to your analytics. Ask your web master to do this for you.

#1: Get into your account. Here's the familiar Google homepage. In the top right-hand corner, you may see the words "Sign in." If so, click on them and sign in, or register. Chances are, you already have an account and you see the word "Settings" up there. Click on "Settings," and you'll get a drop-down menu. Choose "Google Account Settings."





Next you'll see a page like this one:




You'll have a list of stuff you use at Google. Your list may be longer or shorter than this one, but it's in alphabetical order, so "Analytics" will be near the top. Click on it, and you'll see your webpage (or webpages). Click on "View Report."

Now you'll see the dashboard:





#2: Get to know your dashboard. Myra is kindly allowing us to check out her dashboard, so let's look at one particular part of it. Here is the "Site Usage" section.



The blue line shows how many people came to see Myra's website. when you first open the screen, it's set to show you how many visits you've had in the past thirty days. Myra's site hasn't been live for thirty days, so she has a flat blue line until the day her site launched.

Actually, she had a few visitors in the days before it launched, while people were working on it and eagerly checking to see whether it was live and things like that. But on the first day it was live, she has a mountainous peak.

This is where she told all her friends and family to go look at her way cool new website. She announced it on Facebook and stuff like that.

Since then, she has had between 1 and 10 visitors each day. In fact, if we leave out the initial tell-everyone-to-go-look stage, she has an average of 5.5 visits a day, a fact she can discover by clicking on the word "Visits." It's in the upper left below the big blue line graph.

Here are some other things she can learn from the "Site Usage" section:

• Visits This counts the number of visits the site has received.
• Pageviews Pageviews counts the number of times someone looked at a page -- not individual people, necessarily, just the action of looking at a new page.
  
• Pages/Visit The average number of pages per visit shows how many different pages people checked out, on average, when they visited.
  
• Bounce Rate When someone comes, looks, and leaves without exploring your site further, they're said to have "bounced." The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who have bounced away.
  
• Avg. Time on Site Average time on site measures the length of time, on average, visitors stay and read. People often spend just a few seconds (12 is the widely-quoted number) deciding whether to stay or go.
  
• New Visits This metric tells you what percentage of your visitors were new people, and what percentage were coming back to see you again.

That's a good start.

Labels: Google Analytics

One of the great things about your website is that it will go ahead and work for you while you're out doing other things. It will, assuming you've done a good job with it, show the best side of your business to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That is, if you have visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You can tell by looking at your analytics. Here's your dashboard. You can see the traffic to your site in the blue line.



If you put the cursor over the little blue dots, you can see exactly which day, and day of the week each is.

Look at a couple of examples and see the difference:

This site has minor peaks and valleys. Some of the peaks are on Thursdays, some on Tuesdays or Fridays. The traffic never goes way down. This site has traffic all week.




This site has valleys on the weekends. There is an enormous difference between weekday and weekend traffic every single week. Essentially, this site doesn't work on weekends.

What difference does it make? In general, if your site doesn't work on weekends, your customers probably don't either, and they're only visiting when they work.

In that case, your website can be an all-business kind of place. You can use the jargon of your industry. You should be serious enough that your customers' bosses can walk by and see they're working.

You might also be able to increase your traffic, and perhaps your sales, by posting something interesting on weekends, or even offering special offers only on the weekend.

If you have traffic all week, then people come to you whether they're working or not -- or they work weekends, too. You may want more of a Web2.0 feeling, a community aspect, a fun area. You should make sure that your site accommodates amateurs as well as pros at whatever you do. Or, if you're in an industry where people work on the weekends, you might want to take advantage of it by offering those weekend specials if your competitors don't.

It's just another useful piece of information about your clients.

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing

Does this look familiar at all?

Maybe not. Even if you use Google Analytics to keep track of traffic to your business website, the Browser Capabilities section may be a part that you ignore.

You'll find this under "visitors" at your dashboard.




The colorful pictures above show the Screen Resolution, one of the choices under "Browser Capabilities." It's chock full of numbers, so if you aren't a numbers kind of person, you'll have skipped the whole thing.

Look back at it now. You'll notice that the largest number of visitors to the example site use a screen resolution of 1440x900. That's what I use, too.

If you're not sure what this means, then go to the control panel or system preferences panel of your computer and you can not only find out what screen resolution you use, but also change it around and see what that means. If you use Windows or Vista, you find the control panel by clicking on your Start icon, which is oddly enough the thing you use to shut down the computer. If you use Mac, your Apple button will take you to System Preferences.

So what? Well, if we look up at the charts again, we see that more than a quarter of the visitors are using a screen resolution of only 1024x768. There are even a few people who are using 800x600, which is like an antique computer of some kind -- or people with limited vision making their screens easier to read. There are also a few people -- those 320x396 people -- using mobile devices.

The most obvious application of this information is to design. On this example site, the designer and I were thinking about the header. There were some issues when I looked at it on my screen -- but when he showed me how it looked at the lower resolution, I saw that perfecting it for me -- and the 31.43% of the site's viewers who match me, plus the other 6% or so who use higher resolutions -- would cause issues for the 60% or so who use lower resolutions.

But this can also tell you something about your visitors. How many of them visit you on mobile devices may say something about the age or affluence level of your visitors. It may also say something about how visitors use your site -- do they look you up while they're out and about to find directions to your shop or to check out the conversations? Are they checking facts while in meetings? Or are your customers only coming to see you from their office computers?

The operating system your visitors use is another piece of information you can get. Here's our example site's breakdown:



The blue part is Windows: just over 64% of the visitors use Windows. A third of the visitors use Mac, and the little orange sliver is iPod.

This looks like an ordinary slice of well-off professional people using their home computers.

Here, for comparison, is an IT company I work with:


The blue section is still Windows -- a huge majority. Macs are the 10.37%, but the orange slice is Linux. There are also some skinny slivers of other things that are hard to see, but they add up to an amazing 80 different operating systems, including not just Chrome and Flock but Android and all kinds of other stuff, too.

The people visiting this website are probably mostly at work. And chances are they're IT guys. So the content of the second site can be much more techy than the content of the first site.

Have a look at your visitors' Browser Capabilities next time you're in Analytics. You may be able to get some insights into your visiting population that will help you not just with design, but with the kinds of blog posts and special offers you need to be creating, and the places you ought to advertise, too.

Labels: Google Analytics, SEO

When you look at your dashboard at Google Analytics, one of the bits you should always notice is the Traffic Sources. The first view you have is a pie chart showing how your visits are distributed among Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, and Other.



Here's what those terms mean:

• Direct Traffic is people typing in your address or going straight to it from their bookmarks. Sometimes lots of direct traffic means that you have an easy to remember URL (good for you!) and it's just as simple for people to type it in as to search. Sometimes it means that you haven't filtered out your staff. If you have a high proportion of direct traffic, check to see whether it's new visitors, in which case you've got a good URL and people looking for you by name. Lots of direct traffic from return visitors is good news, too, of course, but filter out people working for you before you make plans based on that.
• Referring Sites is what you get when people follow a link to your website. This lets you see what kind of links send traffic, so you can build more of those. It also lets you know when you've gotten featured at Stumbleupon or Digg. And it helps you find sites that have linked to you without your having requested it.
• Search Engines refers to people who found you by typing something in at a search engines like Google or Yahoo or bing.
• Other is anything else, often email (though that can also show up in Referring Sites).

Click on "view report" under the pie chart and you'll get more detail:


You can see that these two examples show different patterns. The one above shows fairly steady traffic from all three sources. The one below doesn't have much direct traffic, but it's fairly steady through the week, while Referring Sites and Search Engines rose at the end.



As with most patterns, changes are often the most interesting thing. When you have your quick look at your analytics each day, changes should be what you're looking for. When you see a change, find out the reason for it. If it's a good thing, do more in that direction. If it's not so good, then it's time to change your strategy.

Bear in mind that the pie chart is about percentages. An increase in search traffic can show that your SEO efforts are paying off, or it can show that more people are looking for one of your keywords, or it can show that your direct traffic fell because you got around to filtering out the people who work on your site.

At the Traffic Sources report page, you can look at lots more data. For example, you'll see the Top Traffic Sources, which is a list in order of popularity of your traffic sources. You'll see the top five on the main page, and you can click on "view full report" to see all of them.

Google is very likely to be your #1 source. For most of my clients, a major referring source comes next. Direct traffic is usually in the top five. For many, social media such as blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook turn up here.

Again, changes are what you want to notice. When I see a directory in this list, I suggest thinking about a paid ad at that directory. When I see a new source move into the list for the first time, I run right over and check its conversion rate for the site's goals. The information here can help you make well-founded strategic decisions.



The Traffic Sources report page is also the starting point for lots more detailed information. You can narrow down your focus and see where your direct traffic is geographically, or all the referring sites and their conversion rates, or what keywords people are using to reach you (you can use your keyword data strategically, too). You can also check the performance of your adwords campaigns from this menu.



Explore the Traffic Sources page. You'll find it a useful resource.

Labels: Google Analytics, SEO

Labels: ecommerce, Google Analytics, online marketing

'The trouble with Google PageRank," said the fellow who had designed the website I was consulting on, explaining why he was resisting the idea of installing Google Analytics, "is that it tempts people to write stilted, unnatural stuff on their websites."

It's true that people are tempted to write stilted, unnatural stuff on their websites. Some even give in to the temptation. One of the local web design companies here where I live has a homepage that says something like, "If your Fayetteville business needs a website for Fayetteville business or any surrounding Fayetteville area business..." It does sound stilted. Stupid, even.

Other firms react to the temptation in other ways. One of the competitors of Fargo web design firm Onsharp has a bizarre paragraph that goes sort of like this: "If you want to find our website, you can find it by going to your favorite search engine and typing in 'Fargo web design, Fargo web designers, Fargo web firm, Fargo...'" This is a more creative version of the above, but no less stilted and no more natural.

Does this have anything to do with PageRank? It has never been suggested that keyword stuffing (that's what you call that kind of content) improves PageRank. Google has never recommended keyword stuffing. Installing Google Analytics doesn't lead to keyword stuffing.

Good web content is written with the search engines in mind. We have to remember that they are robots, and not able to interpret complex allusive stuff. They need to have the keywords -- the things humans will type when looking for your page -- right up there where they can see them and understand them with their robot brains.

We also have to remember that the search engines don't shop with us. When humans come to your page, they don't want to see stilted language. Even if they have never heard of keyword stuffing, they're going to notice that something odd is going on at your page if you're doing it. If they have heard of keyword stuffing, they'll recognize it and know that there's something shady going on.

This is true, but again, it has nothing to do with Google. It has to do with shady practices. Some people are tempted to indulge in shady practices. Since Google's PageRank is a measure of trustworthiness, there's no reason to suppose that shady practices will improve your PageRank. People who take up keyword stuffing can't honestly say that Google tempted them to do so.

What does the picture at the top of this post have to do with SEO? Nothing. Keyword stuffing also has nothing to do with good SEO practices. If you're considering hiring a web firm that uses this tactic, resist that temptation.


Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, keywords, web content

One of the things you can learn by looking at your Google Analytics is where your visitors are when they come to your website. Just click on "Map Overlay" at your analytics dashboard, and you'll see a phrase like "3213 visitors came from 92 countries." You can then look closer and see the region, state, or city your visitors were in.

If it's a personal website you're looking at, you can respond to this with, "Wow, cool, people from Hungary come to see me!" If you've got a business website, this information can be more useful than that.

First, consider whether you can actually sell goods or services to people from 92 countries. If you have local business -- a brick and mortar store, a service that requires your physical presence, things like that -- then it may still be cool to have visitors from 92 countries, but you want the great majority of your visitors to be local. If they're not, then you need to do more linking with local sites, to encourage your actual customers to visit your website.

One company I'm working with right now sells chocolate. They're happy to ship, but not to tropical countries, and not to subtropical states like mine except in winter. So a preponderance of visitors from hot places would tell us that we're not focusing on the right geographical areas in our marketing.

If you have a national or a global reach, you can still benefit from the information. The school supply company I work with serves the entire country, but school calendars differ from one state to another. Seeing when New York's teachers start their Back to School browsing lets us target our marketing and plan for staffing and stocking needs -- if we relied only on the data from the local brick and mortar store, we'd miss those opportunities.

Watch for changes, too. A sudden spike in visitors from Milwaukee? Then you need to find out what happened there -- a radio show? a local mention of your name in the paper or of your product at a workshop? Find out so you can repeat the effect.

Finally, you can look more closely at a particular population's activity once they reach your website. Is the content your visitors from India choose to look at different from that most popular with your visitors from the UK? Do some countries have a higher conversion rate than others -- and if so, might you want to focus efforts on them rather than on the people who look but don't buy? Or do you just need to tweak your message to increase conversion from that other location?

The map overlay doesn't need to be a daily check, but it should be something you look at before your next marketing strategy meeting.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing

I hope you use your Google Analytics regularly. They can tell you lots of useful things.

One thing that not everyone knows is that Analytics will show you what people click on at your website.


This is where you'll find that option: at your dashboard, under Content, with the label "Site Overlay."

Click on that, and you'll be able to see where your visitors are clicking at your site.



At my site, I can see that 17% of my visitors click on my "Clients" page. 10% click on my "About" page,which is just the right number. If I got any surprises here, it would tell me that something was off with my design.

This is easier than going through the Navigation summary, and great for quick checkups.

Try it on your own web site, and see what you can learn.

Labels: Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics, you'll recognize this as the basic navigation bar from your dashboard. Click on "Traffic Sources" and then on "Keywords," and you'll see a list of all the words and phrases people used as search strings when they were going to your website.



So, we can see that -- in addition to more obvious things -- someone typed "technological ineptitude" into Google, saw the page below, and clicked through to my blog post about making your website friendly to less tech-savvy people. More than one person, actually. I never aspired to be #6 at Google for "technological ineptitude," but I am, and people come visit me after typing that in. I don't pretend to know what they were looking for, but I hope they found it here.




The keywords are listed in order of frequency -- that is, the number of people who typed in that word or phrase at a search engine and then clicked on your page. Within a particular frequency, they're alphabetical. So all the phrases that fourteen people used will be together in alphabetical order, and then all the ones that thirteen people used, and so on.

While there can be some amusement value (I'm still wondering why that client of mine has "bar pizza" in his GA keywords list), you can actually learn some very useful things from this metric in your analytics.

Take the case of Courtney and Wise, upscale Sydney house painters. When I started working with them, these were their top ten GA keywords for a week:




While a few people found them by looking for "painting services," after that they were getting visitors who wanted information about art. The person looking for "animal art" or "art easels" isn't looking for someone to paint a house.

Here's last week's top ten:



While the folks looking for "house painters, usa" aren't Courtney and Wise customers, the great majority of people reaching the website now are looking for the business, or for house painters around Sydney.

There are a lot of lessons here. The first is that simple traffic doesn't tell you enough. Of course you want traffic. Increased traffic is pretty much always a good thing. However, Courtney and Wise could have thousands of people visiting them while looking for art over the fireplace, and expect very little new business.

By looking at their keywords, I could see that they needed a much tighter focus, and much more relevant, targeted online marketing strategy, to make their website useful to their business.

By looking at their keywords now, they can see that we've succeeded in accomplishing this. If we hadn't, then we'd know we ought to do something different for them.

If you use a blog, your keywords can tell you what topics are most useful to your readers, or most successful in reaching new readers via search. You can see below one week's top keywords for my lesson plan blog. People reached my blog that week through about 2500 different keywords, yet it's pretty clear that fairy tale lesson plans and activities were a favorite.




Fairy tales are always a favorite for the blog in question. So, while I write there about everything from science to classroom technology to music, I make sure to keep fairy tales a frequent topic. I also make sure to keep those fairy tale lesson plan posts updated, with usable links and so on, since they continue to bring me traffic for years.

If for some reason I wanted to change the focus of that blog and bring in different kinds of traffic, keeping an eye on my keywords would allow me to fine-tune my efforts and make sure that I met that goal.

You can also search for a particular word within your results -- handy if you have thousands of words and phrases on the list. Since people might approach a topic from a number of different angles, it's good to be able to find all the variations. So, when I wanted to know whether people were looking for lesson plans using Sketch Up, I was able to answer my question even though folks used phrases ranging from "Sketchup lesson plans" to "class activities for google sketch up." Knowing that there were some people interested in the topic told me that it would be a useful topic to write on again.



Your GA keyword list can give you even more specific information if you use the "Dimension" menu. Click on a particular keyword from the list, and you can find out more about how people used that word. In the example here, we can see that a high proportion of people using one particular keyword this week were from Indianapolis. Seeing this, we want to find out -- if we don't already know -- what happened in Indianapolis this week to catch so many people's attention. Whatever it was, we'll want to repeat it.

Explore your keyword list some time. You may find, as I did, that people visit you with surprising things on their minds -- not just technological ineptitude, but "2 scary things" and "strategies for avoiding piracy" are on my list -- but you'll also get some useful information.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, keywords

Littlefish IT Support reports that UK studies show only a third of small and medium sized businesses have an SEO plan of any kind.

I haven't found US studies on the subject, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the proportion was about the same.

You need a plan.

I was sitting down with colleague Tom Hapgood yesterday looking at some websites and Analytics. First we looked at his new site on a documentary film. His Analytics showed that people who were specifically looking for the site and knew what to look for were finding it. The keywords showed that people arrived by looking for the name of the film, the names of people involved in making the film, and so on. Visitors clicked through from news reports about the film, and there was direct traffic as well -- people typing in the URL.

That's stage one. Your customers can find your website.

Then we looked at a musician's website. This is a portfolio site, built by Shan Pesaru to use for demonstrations in SBDC seminars rather than for promoting the musician in question, so it doesn't get a great deal of traffic. But we can see from the site's Analytics that people find it by looking for the kind of thing this musician does, as well as looking for her specifically. That is, they find her by looking for "mezzo soprano" or "classical singer." They also click over from links at websites about singers.

That's stage two. People who ought to be your customers but aren't yet can find your website.

We could have looked at the Analytics for this blog, though we didn't, and we'd have seen that it's at stage three for search: people come here from searches for all kinds of things relevant to what I do. People who find me by looking for my name, sometimes spelled in some creative way, or by looking for "search engine marketing 72703" are probably clients or possible clients. People who visit here looking for "compelling content" or "how to use Google Alerts for SEO" may not be shopping for my services right now, but they might remember me in the future when they are.

The person who came looking for "Tim Graves llamas" was probably disappointed.

We didn't look at the Analytics for this blog. We looked instead at those for a client on whose new website design we're working. His current website's Analytics show pretty clearly that people finding him on the search engines have to have inside knowledge. His referring sites are not public sites. The few keywords people use to find him include his company name and his own name, but otherwise are random and not useful -- like the llamas mentioned above. Everyone gets a few of those, but a preponderance of lost people visiting your website says that you don't have a plan for SEO.

The details of your plan will vary, naturally. The best plan for you depends on your field, your level of authority in your field, what you're selling or promoting, your budget, the skills and talents you have available to you, and lots of other factors.

But at the very least, you should have a plan that covers these three steps:

• Make sure that people who are looking for you and your company can find you.
  
• Help people who need your goods and services but don't know about you to find you.
  
• Help those who aren't shopping right now but are interested in what you do to find you.

If you don't have a plan like this, I can help you. If you do have a plan, good for you -- you're already way ahead of those who have no plan.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, keywords, online marketing, SEO

Labels: Google Analytics

One of my clients has had a bit of online luck: an article at her website was bookmarked at one of the big bookmarking sites, and she's getting thousands of visitors a day from it. Views for that particular page are up 91,600%.

I'm calling this a bit of luck because that's what it is. The client in question is off on a cruise, the page has been at her website for years, it's been bookmarked before, but this time it just somehow caught people's fancy and traffic is taking off.

You can find advice on how to try to fake this effect elsewhere. I don't think that faking things is ever good business in the long run, but I'll tell you how to be poised for this kind of good luck, and what to do with it when it happens.

• Have good content. A keyword-stuffed ad or computer-generated article isn't going to go viral. What's more, if you have good content at your website, your visitors will find it useful and come back to visit you again, which is the whole point, whether you get that 15 minutes of internet fame or not.
• Have a call to action. I've seen this happen before. One occasion was when a lesson plan at my educational blog suddenly caught on. I was amazed. It was a last minute Leap Day lesson plan, on February 29th, and I figured it would be a help for a few teachers who had forgotten to prepare. I was in-house at the time, and my colleagues and I stood there and watched thousands of visitors arriving and wished we had been selling something. If my client weren't on a cruise, or someone else had access to the page in question, she could quickly add a contact form offering a subscription, or at least a button saying "Enjoyed this article? Visit my bookstore!" with a handy link. The best plan is to have an opportunity for conversion on all your pages, just in case. (The client is going to find a wi-fi cafe at her next port of call, you can be sure.)
  
• Have Analytics installed. My client knew about this opportunity because she is one of my clients. I watch her Analytics, and when I saw the traffic coming in from the bookmark, I alerted her and made suggestions for ways to turn these chance visitors into happy customers. Otherwise, she would never have known. Whether you use Gooogle Analytics or another type of site analysis tool, make sure you're keeping an eye on your visitors. That way, you can respond appropriately to bits of internet good luck.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, SEO

A client asked me a very good question: "Remember in the last couple of months when people searched for election bulletin boards, we came up third in Google? Can we make that happen with other products? Explain that process to me."

This client is still on the front page for that phrase. In fact, here are the top keywords for her catalog this month, according to Google Analytics:

1. election bulletin boards
2. halloween bulletin board
3. election bulletin board
4. election bulletin board ideas
5. presidential election bulletin boards

Later on, she has "presidential bulletin boards," "bulletin board election," and then this little grouping:

33. election bulentin boards
34. election bulletin board set
35. election theme bulletin boards

That's not all!

54. "election bulletin board"
55. 20 drawer mobile organizer
56. 20 weekly word study poetry packets scholastic k-1
57. 2008 election bulletin boards
58. 2008 presidential election bulletin board

Skip down a bit more:

97. bulletin board for election
98. bulletin board for elections
99. bulletin board halloween
100. bulletin board ideas for election time

One hundred is enough. You can see that among the top hundred keywords people used to visit this online store's catalog in the past month, 15 were about election bulletin boards. Since she has had visitors to 1,261 different pages of product, that's noticeable.

Now, I need to tell you that this client has a small store in a small town. She's not a giant chain. Her webmasters recommend that she work only on the keyword "Arkansas teacher store." But I say that, when someone in a completely different state looks for an election bulletin board, they might just as well get that bulletin board from my client as from a giant chain. And she has been shipping her election bulletin boards all over the country, too.

Looking at the Navigation Summary for just one of the election-themed bulletin boards she offers, we can see that the vast majority came from Google, searching for one of those keywords. Another significant proportion came from Google images.

Many people in SEO belittle the Google image search. People who use image search, they figure, are just coming to steal a picture, or maybe to look at it for a second. They're frivolous searchers, not real customers. I beg to differ. If you want to buy a bulletin board, an image search is a great way to find one.

And if you do a Google image search for "presidential election bulletin boards," my client's catalog is the #1 result.

Now, presidential election bulletin boards aren't going to be a big seller again any time soon. We don't want to use these phrases in the client's homepage meta language or add them to the memorized keywords she now uses in all her materials. These are temporarily important keywords. We now want, as she says, to do that with other products.

In her case, we'll want to get Thanksgiving bulletin boards, Christmas bulletin boards, probably gingerbread houses -- I'll have to ask her what she wants to sell most of in the next few weeks.

The thing is, bulletin board sets are a commodity. Any teacher store can sell you pretty much the same ones, at the same price. True, my client is particularly sweet and fun and has a really cute dog in her store, so you have good reasons to buy from her, but the search engines don't know that. They have no reason to serve up her store for a bulletin board instead of someone else's. My job is to give them a reason.

Here's how:

• Make the target items featured products at your catalog, or use whatever other methods you have available to you to make them stand out a bit. This often depends more on your particular ecommerce solution than on what's optimal, so we'll leave it at that.
• Get those target items into some useful content somewhere on the web. You can write articles, mention them in your blog, ask other bloggers to review them for you (plan to send one along to the blogger in question), or post about them at social media sites. This method works best if you do a good job on the posting and put it somewhere that actual customers who actually want the item visit. Since I write an educational blog, and also a store blog for this particular client, I ran several posts on election lesson plans at one and election bulletin boards at the other.
• Do your SEO for that content. Since I know there are lots of election lesson plans on the web at this time of year, including plenty at sites like PBS.org with whom I don't really try to compete, I went for the long tail. I've been on the front page for "Preschool Election Lesson Plans" for three months now. It's a useful post, too, and has had 2,964 views, plus of course subscribers reading it on feeds. Don't discount the value of narrowly-focused content.
• Include links, and pay attention to anchor text. I use anchor text like "election bulletin boards." I add pictures, and use alt tags with them like "election bulletin board." Not the name of the store, not "teacher supply store" (though I'm happy to say that this client is #5 at Google for that useful phrase, right under the multi-million dollar chains), not the product number. I use the keywords people are going to use to search for those products. The links go to the items at the catalog. This will drive traffic as well as telling the search engines that you have those products at your catalog.

When you do this, the search engines notice that you have the products in question. They figure they might as well offer searchers your election bulletin boards as anybody else's. You get to the top of that page for those searches.

Then you move on to the next target. Remember, we're not talking here about your basic, foundation keywords. We're talking about which of your many products you want to focus on next month. Not that the advice above won't work for your foundational keywords, too.

But think about it: if my client's store is high on search for election bulletin boards and Hallowe'en bulletin boards, is it so surprising that she's the only small rural store on the front page for "teacher supply store"? Doing this work for your temporary keywords -- seasonal items or special offers or topics you're focusing on right now at your blog -- pays off in the long run for the overall strength of your website.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, keywords, linkbuilding, SEO

Every morning between morning tea and hitting the gym, I check all my clients's Analytics, and of course mine, too.

When you first installed your Analytics or other site meter, you might have gone every day. "Look!" you thought happily, or perhaps even said to coworkers, "I got 17 visitors yesterday!" Or, "Oooh! I've had visits from 93 countries this month!"

After a while, the entertainment value lessened. You were still seeing about the same things, after all. Maybe the lines on the graphs were going steadily up, which was nice, but even that loses its power to thrill after you've been looking at it for some weeks. You cut back to a weekly glance at the dashboard... then maybe you just checked in occasionally... And now perhaps it's been a long time since you looked at all.

If you don't have Analytics or don't know whether you do or not, check out the article "Understanding the Google Analytics Dashboard". It will explain the main things on the dashboard: how many people came to see you, where they came from, how they got there, and what they did once they arrived.

Having a daily look at your dashboard is like checking your site's weight or blood pressure or whether its nose is cold. You get a rough general idea of its health. In less than a minute you can see how many visits you're getting on average, and you can use the "Compare" function in the top right-hand corner to see whether your traffic is up or down. You can see which pages are most popular and whether most people find you through search or by typing in your address.

Once you've gotten an idea of the overall health of your site, though, you may want to look at other things when you make routine checks.

Let me suggest a couple of deeper examinations that can be truly useful. I've added screenshots to these descriptions to help you see how to find the information. However, since Analytics is confidential, I'm using screens from one of my own blogs, not from the websites being discussed. The data won't match, but you can find the right buttons on your own dashboard, and I won't be sharing too much information.



Navigation Summary lets you look at a particular page and see how people respond to it. Under "Content" on the dashboard, click on a page you want to learn more about. To the right of the screen you'll find "Navigation Summary." Click on it and you'll see a page like this one, which shows where people came from to the page in question and where they went next.





At my SEO website, for example, the most popular page is my homepage. Most people go look at another page, and the largest number of them go to my second most popular page: my list of clients. It's a partial list of the people I've worked with. The Navigation Summary page tells me that no one starts out at that page. Everyone goes somewhere else first. Nearly half go right to this page from my homepage, and the same percentage go on to "Services" from the clients page.
Why? Well, if you go to my Clients page, you see this header with navigation buttons along the top.



Here are the buttons, from left to right:

Welcome
Blog
Clients
Services
Contact

So it appears that lots of people visiting my website use the buttons from left to right to visit all the pages. Sure enough, if I check the Navigation Summary for the "Services" page, I find that about 60% came from "Clients" and about 40% head on over to "Contact." 96% of the people who go to my "Contact" page went from the "Services" page.

There are differences in the numbers, but this is still the largest number in each case; the majority travel through all the pages from left to right. There are iconoclasts. There are people who go straight from the homepage to "Contact." But the majority just follow the navigation buttons.

I've gone into a lot of detail to make this clear and you may be thinking it's obvious that people would naturally do that. You read English, you tend to go left to right.

Checking other websites, though, I see one where visitors mostly go to the homepage and then leave, one where they travel evenly to one of the other nine pages linked at the homepage, and one where just about everyone goes to the catalog.

When you make design decisions about your website, this information can help you. Are you putting your strongest sales pitch on your "About" page when only 8% of your visitors ever go there? Are you adding excellent content that shows up well in the search engines -- and then no one makes it from that page to your homepage? You need to know these things.

The Navigation Summary shows you people's routes in terms of the pages they visit, but the Map Overlay tells you where people are coming from in terms of human geography. There is a map on the dashboard which shows by the depth of color of the countries which nations are sending traffic to you. This can simply be interesting to know. One of my clients is a speaker and writer who travels internationally. Seeing visitors from Finland might make her perk up a little, thinking about a visit to Finland in her future. I like to see international visitors, too, since I have an international clientele.

But my clients who are housepainters and decorators in Australia have as many different countries visiting them as I do, and it isn't good news. Not that they mind having people from Germany visit them, but they just aren't going to be dropping by to paint their houses. They've been doing some linkbuilding lately. They need to find out which links are sending international guests, and which are sending actual customers.

Here's how: click on "View Report" under the map on the dashboard. Click on the place you want to learn more about. In this case, I'm going to click on Sydney, the town where the painters are. Now I choose "Dimension," a drop-down menu from which I select "Source." It's right beneath the word "territories" in the picture below.




I can now see just how the people in the town of Sydney found my client's website. These are the useful, traffic-sending links. Seeing that an ezine article sent several people from the United States just tells me not to bother writing ezine articles.

Any time you're focusing on the regional long tail, use Map Overlay>Dimension to narrow down your view so you don't get misled.

There is so much information in Analytics that you can see something different every time you check it, so you might as well add it to your daily routine. That doesn't mean that you want to spend time idly wandering around your results. Are you trying to answer some particular questions about your website? You can ask me, and I'll tell you how to find the information.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, linkbuilding, web design

Blogging can be great for your website. It can send you traffic, bring the search engines over to visit you more frequently, increase your visibility in your community, and encourage your regular customers to hang out at your website more.

Done well, blogging can have enormous benefits. Done badly, it's a waste of time and money.

What's the difference? Just follow these rules and you'll see benefits:

• Have good content. I'm really not talking about topics or writing style here. There are blogs I read for their excellent writing, others I read for their useful information, and still others that I read because I like the writers and want to know what they're up to. You and your customers also have varied reasons for choosing which blogs to visit, and tastes differ. But neither humans nor search engines will be fooled by ads disguised as blog posts. They won't send traffic, they won't garner you any links, and they won't do any good things for your business. Google's diagram below makes it pretty clear how they look at those low-quality links. If you're paying someone to do this for you, or taking time out of your workday to do it, just quit right now.

• Post regularly. Irregular, infrequent posting causes you to miss out on a lot of the SEO benefits of blogging, which have to do with frequently updated content. What's more, human visitors won't keep coming to visit you if there is usually nothing new going on when they visit. Most good blog directories won't even let you list your blog until it's had three months of regular posting. If you're going to go to the trouble of setting up and blog and linking it to your website, you have to blog regularly or hire someone to do it for you.
  
• Watch your traffic and make sure your blog is doing what it should. As always, there is some time involved here. You can't put your blog up on Monday and decide on Friday that it isn't worth doing. It can take longer than that for people to notice you, not to mention the search engines. However, blogging is ephemeral, and should give some indication fairly quickly of what kind of results it will provide. With Google Analytics, you can see who comes to your website from your blog, where they're located, and what they do once they arrive. If you want local traffic and your blog sends you international traffic, if you want people to shop your catalog and your blog is popular but sends no one to that catalog, or if your blog just hasn't caught anyone's fancy in the months or years that it's been up and is still only getting visits from your friends, then you are getting signals that tell you to change your strategy.
  
  Let's look at some examples.
  
  
• One of my clients has a brick and mortar educational store. I write a blog for her that announces events and new products in her store. I have a fairly popular educational blog and I link to her there when it's natural and appropriate for me to do so. I also blog for her at her professional organization, with a link to her on every post. The educational blog is her main source of referral traffic for her catalog, and the items featured there are routinely among her best sellers. Both the other blogs give her links and traffic. This is a good investment for her.
  
• Another client has me blog for him some of the time and edit staff-written posts at other times. He used to post only about once a month, but is working his way up to weekly posts. His traffic has increased 101.47% (I like numbers) over the past month as frequency has increased, and his blog is sending people to his website about a dozen times a month now. He also has traffic from other blogs (including this one) that mention him for free. The traffic from his blog is international, and they visit only a page or two. His blog is not doing as much for him as it could. However, within the confines of his budget, he has a good start. It would be wise for him to earmark the first profit from his blog to invest in increasing the frequency of his posts.
• For my third example, I don't want to call out anyone in particular. I have several clients with blogs that don't do their jobs. I don't write those blogs. I mention this not because I plan to claim that's the problem, but because I want it clear that I am not the one making the decisions in these cases. These blogs have only occasional new posts. Some are poorly written. One is well written, but not strongly linked to the website. Another is well-written and well-linked, but so personal that the people who read it are highly unlikely to be customers. I've just checked these clients' analytics, and they show no visits from these blogs at all this month or last month. For these businesses, every minute and every dollar they're putting into those blogs is wasted. They should either fish or cut bait: that is, make the investment of doing a good job on the their blogs or close down the blogs and put the effort they're spending on that elsewhere.

Blogging can be a very good business move. Just make sure you're doing it the right way for your business.

Stumble It!

Labels: blogging, Google Analytics, linkbuilding, online marketing, SEO

One of my clients just went up two degrees in PageRank. Another has increased page views by 403% comparing the current fortnight with the previous one. Another had a 321% increase in sales over the same month last year.

But who's counting?

Well, I am, for one. I met with a prospective new client last week and he said, "You're very analytical." It's true. And when you're thinking about the progress of your website, it's worth being analytical.

• You can tell when to break out the champagne. If you're not keeping track of how well your website is doing, then you can't really tell whether it's doing its job or not. I've just launched my own website at RebeccaHaden.com (I've been taking care of other peoples' for years) and I was excited about having it launched. There's a spell where you're just thrilled to have your site up and visible. But that wears off. It's not a new handbag or even a new car. It has to do something for your business. And if you don't keep track, you can't really tell when it's time to celebrate.
• You can tell when to change your strategy. One of my clients designs and makes elegant handcrafted aprons. It seemed logical to go for the regional long tail with her. Turns out she lives in the epicenter of the luxury apron industry. Who knew? I sure didn't. I didn't even know that the luxury apron industry had an epicenter. Keeping track of her website's progress let us know that she needed a shift in approach.
• You can plan instead of guessing. Did you plan your site navigation based on how you guessed people might choose to use your site? Do you plan your ad campaigns based on what you guess people might click on? Do you plan your featured items based on what you guess your customers might be looking for at this time of year? If so, you would almost certainly find that your plans were all more successful if they were based on actual information. Measuring the success of various pages, items, or ads allows you to plan with greater confidence and accuracy.

So how can you check the success of your website? There are several ways to tell:

• Use Google Analytics. This is the best, most economical way to track data. Read about how to make sense of those numbers at "Understanding the Google Dashboard" If looking at charts and numbers makes your head hurt, you can have me take care of it for you. But if you have a site meter of any kind, you can see changes over time in the amount of traffic you receive. In general, more traffic is better. If you're looking for one number to watch, this would be it.
• Watch your PageRank. Google ranks all web pages according to a largely secret formula based on trustworthiness. We all start at zero, and then we work to climb up the ladder. If you are tired of Google always getting to decide everything, SEOmoz has an alternative: its Trifecta measures PageRank as well as other factors. People often complain that these measures only tell you about the past, and don't keep up well enough, but I think that the changes tell you something, even if your current PageRank isn't a good thing on which to base your self-worth. Whatever general measure you want to watch, the key is to track changes in it over time.
• Track your rank on search engines. Being #1 on Google for your keywords is a worthwhile goal, assuming the keywords are properly chosen in the first place. It's easy to see whether you are on the first page for your keyword: type it in at the search engine of your choice and look for your website. But when you are actually keeping track, then you want to see that you've moved from #99 to #48. Then you can continue doing what you've been doing. If you move from #48 to #99, then you need to make some strategic changes. If you're a client of mine, I can quickly check this for you with my special software. If not, you can search for free rank checkers and do it yourself. It'll just take you longer. Bear in mind that some situations lead to volatility in ranking, and don't assume that you can keep your place with no effort once you get there.
• Watch the bottom line. If you're an ecommerce outift, then your sales are a great way to see whether your website is performing well or not. Other cases can be more complicated. I have a client who sells her own books on her website -- but other bookstores also sell them. People may come to her website, decide to buy her books, and go do so at their local bookstore or at an online bookstore where they can also pick up that novel they've been meaning to buy. She can't tell just from her online sales whether her website is doing well or not. Another client has a local store. People will browse her website online, and then walk into the store to finish their transactions. She won't know how much effect her website really has on revenue unless she shuts it down and watches her in-store sales drop. Even with these caveats, a good website ought to pay for itself, and you should be able to see overall improvements. As my brother says, money doesn't buy happiness, but it's a good way to keep score.

So go ahead and get that bottle of champagne. Measure how things are going with your website, and keep track so you'll know when to pour it.

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing, SEO