If you’re wondering whether Google Analytics is a tool you can use for Search Engine Optimization, trust me, it is. And if you get half a chance then you should attend the Google Analytics training seminar.

Analytics is not just about tracking PPC conversions. That’s a part of it, to be sure. But analytics also allows you to track your visitors to see where they come from, where they go once they’re on your site, how long they stay, which links the click, and so on. All of this is valuable information.

Knowing and understanding the behavior of visitors on your website is one of the most important things you can do. For instance, if you get more traffic to a certain page from StumbleUpon than you do from organic searches, wouldn’t you like to know that? Sure you would. That’s valuable information.

If you can determine that a certain web page on your website has a higher than average percentage bounce rate then you can tweak the content on that page to keep visitors on your site longer. That’s what Google Analytics can do for you. It can help you make important, intelligent decisions about the content on your website.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Analytics, take a look at where the next training session is going to be and attend one.

What is the most important thing for webmasters to focus on? It is Search Engine Optimization, social media marketing, blogging, article marketing, pay per clicking advertising, directory submissions?

In my view, the most important thing to be doing is none of those. Rather, the most important thing for all webmasters serious about making money online is tracking. You really need to track your visitors, clicks, conversions, and other key data. If you aren’t tracking what is going on at your website and what your visitors are up to then you don’t know what you need improvement on.

Google Analytics makes tracking very easy. You simply insert the Google Analytics code on your website and set some goals and let the software tell you what is happening. You can track visitors, conversions, and your goals all in one system. Unless you use some kind of analytics or tracking service, you can’t know how your PPC is converting sales or whether your content is closing the sale. When you set your tracking in place then you’ll know the areas where you need improvement.

Tracking conversions is one of the most important aspects of running a business online. If you don’t know how your sales pages are operating and how successful or unsuccessful they are then you have no idea on how to improve them. That’s why tracking conversions is so important.

It’s really simple to track your conversions. The difficult part is analyzing your results. Seemingly good results can sometimes be improved upon just by tweaking your sales or landing page a little. One change to your landing page can increase your conversions by a considerable amount, but to do that you have to know what to improve and that’s where conversion tracking comes in.

There are different analytics programs you can use for tracking your conversions. I like Google Analytics because it’s free and because it’s also tied to your Google AdWords account. If you are driving traffic to your landing page with pay per click ads from Google AdWords then you can track your conversions with a simple piece of code that you add to your landing page.

Don’t confuse your conversion tracking code with your Google Analytics code, however. They are two pieces of code. You’ll need to add your Google Analytics code in order to track how much traffic your PPC ads are delivering to your pages. But you need your conversion tracking code in order to track your sales. The analytics code goes on your landing page. The conversion tracking code goes on the “Thank you” page that your visitors see when they purchase your product. That’s so that the conversion tracking code can register the sale that has just been made.

To get the code, log into your Google AdWords account and click on “Conversion Tracking” in the green bar at the top of the page. On the left side of the page, near the bottom, you’ll see a box. In that box is a link using the words “Get conversion page code.” Click on that link. You’ll have to choose the type of conversion that you want to track. Just follow the instructions in that part of the Google AdWords system. It’s pretty simple.

I bet you never thought I’d quote Guns N Roses lyrics on this blog, but since Google has issued its new analytics software, Urchin, into beta, I thought it would be appropriate.

The Google Analytics Blog has a cool screenshot of what the cool new software looks like. What I like about Urchin is that you can actually run Google-like analytics right from your desktop, which is real cool if you have uncrawlable web pages that you want stats on. For instance, if you need to analyze what goes on behind your firewalls or you have a password-protected membership site and want to see what your members are up to. It’s also useful if you prefer to store your analytics information on your local server rather than have to log in to Google every time you want to see it.

There is a 90-day free beta version available, but the cost of the software upon final rollout will be $2,995. Features include:

• More accurate geo-identification of visitors
• Cross-segmentation options similar to Google Analytics
• E-commerce and campaign tracking included (no longer requiring additional modules)
• Vastly improved embedded scheduler to more easily manage processing and re-processing jobs
  Improved user interface
• More robust log processing engine

So if you think you a real hard case tough to beat, give the new Urchin software a go.

If you are new to webmastering you may have heard of a bounce rate. But what is it? There really are two ways to define bounce rate.

1. Percentage of Visitors Who See One Page - Some analytics software define bounce rate as the percentage of people who only view one page on your website. They may stay on that one page for a couple of minutes, but they don’t go any further. They read a little bit and move on. You don’t have enough mojo to keep them around longer, therefore they “bounce” off to somewhere else.
2. Percentage Of Visitors Who Leave Your Site After A Short Period Of Time - Another way to measure bounce rate is by the length of time visitors spend on your site. Most analytics software define this amount of time as five seconds or less. Some use a minute. But whatever the length of time is, it isn’t long enough to say that the visitor has a real interest in your content.

Ideally, you want your site visitors to stick around long enough to order something. If you run a retail site, you want them to checkout. If you sell services, you want them to purchase, or come back later and make a purchase. But you want them to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. If your site is an affiliate site then you want your visitors to purchase from your affiliates. To do that, they’ve got to stick around long enough to be genuinely interested in your content.

The best way to ensure that people stick around is to give them what they want. Understand what your target market wants and provide it for them. That means making the absolute most out of your content. But it also means marketing your website to the search engines effectively. Your bounce rate is an important part of analytics and can tell you a great deal about your traffic and the quality of visitors you are getting.

Let’s face facts, not all sites need analytics. If you have a five page simple website then analytics are not for you. There is little that can be gleaned from analytics on a simple website that cannot be gleaned from a web counter on a small site.

On big sites, however, analytics come into their own. A website does not have to be a whole lot bigger than five pages for analytics to make sense. Once you start fleshing out your page with content, it is time for analytics, why? Because you want to know what works.

Analytics allows you, the webmaster to monitor which parts of your site are getting hits and which parts are not. Alexa does not cut it in this regard. The sort of information that constitutes real business intelligence is generally provided on a subscription basis. It is affordable, so it is relatively easy to bring it into your site as you begin to build it.

If you are interested in the potential that analytics can offer your site, please do not hesitate to contact us at Brick Marketing.

One great tool you can use to improve your SEO and the user experience on your website is called Site Search. Google Analytics allows you to track what your users are searching for. You can see what pages they are on when they search and where they end up. Then you use the information you gather from the analytics tool to improve the SEO of your website and the experience of your users based on what they’ve searched for on your site.

Site Search is easy to set up, but there is a free and a paid version. Which you use is up to you, but I’d definitely put it on your website, especially if you have a website that has a lot of pages on it. Some of the great information about your site visitors that you can gain from the tool are:

• Search terms they use
• Start pages
• Destination pages
• Categories they search for
• Trending allows you to see individual user statistics over time
• Segments lets you group your users and see how they act as groups

It’s the perfect tool for large websites with lots of information.

If you’re not paying attention to what visitors on your website are doing, you should. How else are you going to improve your website to capitalize on your strengths and tweak your weaknesses? Without a proper analysis of visitor activity, you are like a man trying to paddle a boat without an oar.

You should receive some basic information from your web hosting company that will help you analyze visitor activity. If not, then you should change web hosting companies. That web hosting company should include statistics about the number of visitors who visit your website, how long they stay there, which pages they visit while they are there, how long they spend on each page, entry and exit points for each visitor, and the less important number of hits your website receives.

Don’t focus on hits, however. A hit is widely misused by people who don’t understand how to analyze their traffic. A hit is simply how many times information has been requested by a server. That can include each graphic on each page. So one visitor to a web page with 25 graphics will register as 25 hits. That is terribly misleading.

A more accurate measure of traffic is the average number of visitors your receive during a certain period of time - daily, weekly, monthly, etc. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that if your traffic keeps going up in a measurably dramatic way that you have built a fabulous website. You should ask other questions like how long visitors are staying on your website, how long they are on each page, and through what doorways they enter and exit. These statistics can give you some clues as to how your website is actually performing.

For instance, if you receive 1,000 unique visitors per month and 80% of those leave your website within 10 seconds after visiting one page then you should conclude that there is something on that page that is making them leave. What is it? Maybe it isn’t the type of information they are looking for, maybe it is the aesthetic of the site, or maybe they don’t like that picture of you and your mother fishing off the coast of Panama. Your job is to figure that out and fix it.

On the other hand, if you find that 80% of your 1,000 unique visitors stay on your website for 4-5 minutes and visit 5-6 pages then you should conclude that they are finding something they like. But what? And why aren’t they buying anything? If they are staying long enough to purchase something and leave empty handed then maybe you are not making it easy for them to make a purchase. Again, your job is to figure it out and fix it.

Another important telling factor is the page into which visitors enter your website and from what source they find you. Are they Googling you and entering an internal page three tiers removed from your home page or finding your index page in a niche regional directory? That’s important to know. It could be a clue as to how you can fix your problems.

Exit points are also important. Are your visitors clicking links and leaving your site? Maybe you should close some doors. Are they staying too long on your site when they should be clicking the links? Maybe the ads you sell need to be better written.

However your website is performing, you must spend some time analyzing your traffic. Use the right tools and figure out how your visitors are acting. Are they acting the way you want them to? If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

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