Category Archives "Website Analytics"

Why should you worry about how long it takes for your website to load?

From a user experience point of view it is never good to have your users waiting for your website to load.  Also as all good SEO firms know, Google has hinted that they might just incorporate page load time into their page rank algorithm sometime in the future.  If you want to keep your page rank at the top of the Google search, your best bet is to have a fast-loading site. …

Pop quiz:

Q: If your website get’s 600 visitors a month from search engines, how many new suspects are finding your website through search engines?

A: Unless your excluding your company name, company url, and your first & last name from your keyword statement reporting.. you have no idea!

What’s The Difference?

• Branded traffic, visitors arriving on your website by searching for your company name, are already aware of your business. They are likely looking for support, your phone number, etc.
• Unbranded traffic, visitors arriving on your website after searching for product, vertical, and solution based search terms, are finding your business for the first time and should be your prime targets to capture.

You need to segment the visitors who are searching for your brand from your reporting so that you are left with the keyword statements that a new prospect have found you for.

How to Determine the Percentage of Prospect Traffic You’re Getting within Google Analytics:

This can be accomplished the proper way or the quick and dirty way, as described below.

1. In Google Analytics, click on “Traffic Sources” on the left and then “Keywords”.
2. You should see something like “Search sent XXXX total visits via XXXX keywords”
   Write this number down, this is your “total search traffic” that we will use for calculations later.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find “Filter Keywords”.
   
4. Change the drop down from “Containing” to “Excluding”
5. Enter your company name along with every variation of your company name, company URL, your executive’s names, etc – with a pipe, |, separating each. The pipe is critical to tell Google Analytics to look for this “or” this “or” that. Take a hard look at your keyboard near the enter key if you’re not familiar with this rarely used key.
6. It should look like this now:
   
7. Hit Go
8. At the top of the page, you should see something like :
   “Search sent XXXX total visits via XXXX keywords”
   “Filtered for keywords excluding “company abc|companyabc|abc|company”
   Write this number down, this is your “total non-branded search traffic” that we will use for calculations later.
9. Refer back to the numbers you wrote down earlier and pull out a calculator for the following simple math:Number of Visitors from Filtered Search Traffic [divided by] Total Number of Visitors from Search Traffic [times] 100

   If you had 5000 total search visitors initially, before segmenting out your branded keywords, and then 1000 visitors after you excluded your branded terms, then your percentage of unbranded, new prospect search traffic would be 20%.

The result will tell you how many times, and through which keyword statements, you’re currently being found through. While these numbers will vary from site to site, we would to see at least 80% of a website’s search engine traffic to be from “new prospects” / non-branded search terms.

If you’re seeing the opposite, 80% of your traffic is coming from visitors already familiar with your company, via branded search terms,  then this is a big red flag that your SEO strategy needs work.

Many traditional marketing directors & coordinators are just starting to dip their feet into online analytics. They have Google Analytics or Omniture setup and check their stats from time to time, but are they really understanding the metrics that are in front of them? More importantly, are they efficiently utilizing their website’s analytics to improve their campaigns results and reduce their client acquisition costs?

Website analytics are a marketers dream. We invest some money, check the results, reconstruct the campaign and then try it again, constantly refining the outcome. In contrast to traditional marketing, online marketing analytics provides a fine level of control on the results you are generating.

You can make a big impact in the success of your companies website, even if you only spend a few hours a week reviewing your website’s analytics. (Not to be confused with spending just 4 hours a week on your entire online marketing strategy!) Let’s take a peak at some key metrics and Google Analytics tips. …

Measuring the activity generated by offline ad campaigns can be a difficult prospect. Considering the costs involved with direct mail, or placing television, radio, and print ads, it’s important to get a good idea of the results of your ad campaigns — and your potential ROI.

We all know that Google Analytics is a great website analytics tool for tracking website activity. But what most people don’t know is that you can also use Google Analytics to track the results of your offline ad campaigns.

The key is to use GA’s link tagging tools and web page redirects. …