google analytics

Website Traffic

Understanding Website Analytics

How to Get Started with Testing and Tracking

Testing and tracking are two skills any online marketer or business owner needs to learn if they want to succeed.

What Tracking is and Why It’s Important

Tracking can be put simply as “understanding how your visitors behave.”

By properly tracking your user behavior, you can learn a lot about how people interact with your site. You’ll learn things like …

  • How many people come to your website
  • Which pages people read carefully and which pages they just leave
  • Where people come to your website from
  • How many of them buy, how many of them click through
  • Which of your newsletter sign-up boxes actually work
  • Etc.

If you want to build a great website that generates real money, understanding how your customers behave is crucial. That’s what tracking allows you to do.

What Should You Be Tracking?

There are a lot of things you should be tracking. Here are some of the most important factors, what they are and why they’re important.

Website Traffic – This is the most basic metric that every webmaster should know. How many people are coming to your website? Ideally, this number should be going up over time.

Page views – How many page views do you have? This number is less important than your visitor number, but, if you plan on using advertising as a way to make money, you want to work on increasing your page count.

Simple tactics like splitting your articles into 3 pages where they click “next” to continue can double your page count and thereby double your revenue.

Traffic Sources – Do people type in your URL in their domain bar and land on your site? Or do they find you via search engines? Does most of your traffic come from Google, Yahoo or MSN? Perhaps most people really just come from 3 referring sites?

The data may surprise you. For example, if you’ve built a brand for yourself from speaking, most people may actually already know about you by the time they land. Your SEO strategy may not be nearly as important as your public speaking strategy.

Or, you might find that 90% of your traffic comes from Yahoo. Sure, they have ten times less traffic less than Google, but if you’re ranked top 3 in Yahoo and on page 4 in Google, it only makes sense that Yahoo will bring you most of your traffic.

By knowing where most of your traffic comes from, you’ll be able to better spend your time on increasing things that are already working rather than spin your wheels trying to get things that aren’t working to work.

What People Type In to Get To Your Site – Often time’s your site will be ranked for keywords that you would have never expected. The keywords people type in to get to your site may be completely different than keywords you were optimizing for.

Most tracking software will be able to tell you what people actually typed into search engines to get to your site. You should review this list periodically to see if you can find any “gems” of keywords to intentionally target in the future

Opt In Rates – Out of every 100 people who land on your website, how many sign up?

Your newsletter is one of the most important assets to your business. Most people won’t buy the first time they land on your site. Instead, they buy as they build more and more trust for you over time. Having a newsletter allows you to stay in touch with your visitors over the course of weeks, months and years rather than just the one time they land on your site.

Tracking and optimizing your opt in rates can help you exponentially grow your business.

Conversion Rates – Out of every 100 visitors, how many people actually pull out their credit cards and buy?

Naturally this is a number you want to test and improve as much as possible. If you can get a 1% conversion to a 2% conversion, you’ve doubled your income without having to double your traffic.

What Country Your Visitors Are From – You might be surprised. Often times traffic comes from a combination of the U.S. and Europe, though occasionally you’ll have a website where most of your traffic comes from other countries.

For example, a PDF Search site was originally built for random internet users who wanted to find documents. Its site owner discovered however, that the site was being used primarily by students in India to find sources for research papers.

Once he knew that, he was able to cater his site even more for his audience and improve his income.

Wouldn’t you love to increase your income by tweaking your site? Make sure you learn more about Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

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Website Traffic

Why Use Google Analytics?

google analytics

This is guest post by Courtney Chowning

There are many different types of website analytic programs on the Internet today. Each one of them offers different features with different price tags. Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the most popular website statistic programs currently available. For numerous reasons Google Analytics is also my web analytic program of choice.

Here are just a few of the reasons I think you should be using Google Analytics:

  1. It’s free! There is no cost to use Google Analytics and you can monitor as many websites as you want under the same account.  Plus it’s super easy to allow someone else one time access to view your stats if necessary.
  2. Set up goals. Within Google Analytics you can set up a goal to follow your product funnel and track where your customers leave the site in the purchasing process or how many customers actually follow through with the sale. Goals are technically just page views, but it allows you to view the data you want in a logical and meaningful way.
  3. Link to your Adsense account. If you run Adsense campaigns you can easily link your Adsense account to your Analytics account in order to better under how well your ads are performing and the long term result they have on your website.
  4. Site Overlay Map. With the site overlay map you can easily view which areas of your site gets the most clicks.  Is it the area above the fold?  Do links in your sidebar get clicked?  The Site overlay maps displays your site along with small boxes at every link telling you how many times that link has been clicked.  This is always a quick and visual way to see how your ads, affiliates links, or product links are converting.

From monitoring every aspect of your website’s traffic, visitor loyalty, site referrals, to keywords, Google Analytics provides everything you need to know about your readers and blog stats. Familiarizing yourself with Google Analytics and all that it can do will help you make the best decisions for your website and ultimately your readers.

I invite you to join me in a Google Analytics Workshop on August 30, 2010 where I will teach you how to use Google Analytics to help increase your readership and profits.

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How To

How to Install Google Analytics

google analytics

You probably know by now that in order to grow your internet business you need visitors, and lots of them. But what if you have visitors to your site, but not making money yet?

Do you know how your visitors are finding you? Which pages they enter your site through? Which pages they are leaving from? All this information is important and can make or brake your business.

Google Analytics is free and will give you a lot of information about your site. Here is a quick review of how to install it on your sites.

Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to get started. If you already have a Google account, you are all set to go. If not, get a Gmail address.

Once you are logged into your Gmail account, you’ll see this:

After that, it’s really just following the prompts you see on the page.

Here is what you’ll see after clicking on the sign up button:

Fill out your website URL, name , etc. and aftyer you agree to the terms of service, you’ll get some code you need to upload to your site.

Here is how it looks right after you signed up:

Placing the code on your site

Once you arrive at the code, highlight & copy it, then go and place it before your </body> tag on all of your website pages. If you have a static site, you’ll need to use a multi-file find and replace tool, like Dreamweaver of FrontPage.

If you have a WordPress site, it’s as easy as editing your footer.php file and you are all done. You still need to see if your data is flowing. Go back into your analytics account, click on “edit”, and you’ll see a link that says “check status”. Click on that and you should be all set.

Then, after a day or so, you can start seeing data come in that will help you make the right decisions for your business. Don you have any questions? Let me know.

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