18th May 2007

Google Analytics – Know More!

By : Admin

The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. It writes better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

Google Analytic’s approach is to show basic dashboard-type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the report set. It brings a lot of the simplicity and data visualization techniques.

Google Analytics also offers three dashboard views of data: Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster. It provides advanced features like, visitor segmentation and custom fields!

Google Analytics has been designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. It is basically a re-designed version of Urchin (a web analytics service), which was purchased by Google earlier.

Let us know more about Google Analytics:

  • It’s free for sites with 5 million pageviews/month or less.
  • It’s quick to sign up.
  • You can track all sorts of things like Flash events, JavaScript events, and PDF downloads.
  • Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you!
  • It also provides tightly integrated AdWords support, so you can view AdWords ROI metrics without having to import cost data or add keyword tracking codes.
  • Google Analytics is easy to use for novice marketers, while delivering all of the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.
  • Google Analytics delivers consistent service.
  • Google Analytics is a hosted service that runs on the same servers that power Google.
  • It saves your time.
  • Google Analytics tracks all online campaigns, from emails to keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.
  • It is pledged to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data.
  • It integrates directly with Google AdWords giving webmasters and insight into the ROI of their pay-per-click ads.
  • Google (with its Google Analytics) will have full access to the actual web stats of millions of commercial websites and will have the right to use these stats to develop new technologies.
  • Google Analytics is so customizable.

“The interface in this product has been completely redesigned to put information in context,” said Brett Crosby, senior manager for Google Analytics.

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site!

I think it’s one of the best tools out there in terms of price/features ratio!

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posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 2 Comments

18th May 2007

Can Website Statistics Really Improve Site Usability?

By : Nidhi Gupta

Do you know how usable your site is? Site usability sounds a complex term that is thrown around by high-paid web design experts, but the reality of it is quite simple: Is the user of a website able to do or find what they set out to accomplish on your website? If they came to buy something, did they find it and successfully purchased it? If the user was doing research, did he found the information he was looking for? Or if he was trying to create something using tools on your site, was he able to complete the task without getting stuck somewhere along the way?

It’s just that simple. Does your site make your users successful at what they’re trying to do? If your users aren’t accomplishing their goals, then perhaps you should take a look at your website statistics to help better understand your website’s usability.

Web statistics are excellent for understanding exactly why your users aren’t being successful. It can point out problem spots like confusing pages, broken links, or hard-to-find problems like pictures and links that are being over-emphasized and distracting your users from the elements of your site that will make them successful.

What statistics are going to tell you where your problem spots lie? This is going to be unique to each site, but there are a few good places to look:

  1. Exit pages – where are people leaving your site from? If one page is being left more than others, it should probably be examined.
  2. Most popular/least popular pages – Are these what you expected to see?
  3. Referrers – Are the search engines sending you traffic, and if so, was it for the keywords that you expected?

These are just a few examples of how statistics can be used to determine if your site’s users are getting what they want or need from your site.

Once you have a good idea of where the problems lie, then you need to set a course of action to make changes to your site. Before you are going to make large changes to the site, you’ll want to set a plan so that you can measurably compare what is happening when you make your changes and learn what works (and doesn’t work) for next time.

Here are some tips to help understand the impact of your changes:

  1. Have a baseline. Understand the behavior of your users before you start changing anything. Without a baseline, you have no basis of comparison for your changes.
  2. Change one thing at a time. Understandably, this makes the process of improving your site slower, but understanding the impact of a single change is important. If you change too many elements at one time, you’ll never know if people’s behavior changed, for example, because of the new picture instead of the new color and text on the “Click here” button.
  3. If possible, test options against each other. Often called split testing, this pits one option against another, to determine how they perform with similar amounts of traffic. All things being equal, your analytics should show you which page/image/button, or whatever else you’re testing performs better.

In the end, a web statistics package plays a very important role in determining where efficiencies can be made in a website design, and very often, quite simple changes can be made to drastically enhance the performance of a site. Be sure that the next time you’re reading your website statistics, you’re not just reading them for the numbers. Read them with a critical eye towards your website and let them tell you how to improve upon it.

Get more details at smallbusinessbrief.com

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posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 0 Comments

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