Posts Tagged “analytics”

Posted by randfish

Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I'm finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.

Some of these are obvious and well known, others are obscure and brand new. All of them solve problems – and that’s why tools should exist in the first place. Below, you’ll find 20+ tools that answer serious issues in smart, powerful ways.

#1 – Generating XML Sitemap Files

The Problem: XML Sitemap files can be challenging to build, particularly as sites scale over a few hundred or few thousand URLs. SEOs need tools to build these, as they can substantively add to a site's indexation and potential to earn search traffic. 

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Google Sitemap Generator

GSiteCrawler
GSiteCrawler: Downloadable software to create XML Sitemaps

Google Sitemap Generator
Download a few files from Google Code and Install on Your Webserver

Sitemap Generator
Looks like Google Webmaster Tools, doesn’t it? :-)

Both GSiteCrawler & Google Sitemap Generator require a bit of technical know-how, but even non-programmers (like me) can stumble their way through and build efficient and effective XML Sitemaps.

#2 – Tracking the Virality of Blog/Feed Content

The Problem: Even experienced bloggers have trouble predicting which posts will "go wide" and which will fall flat. To improve your track record, you need historical data to help show you where and how your posts are performing in the wild world of social media. What's needed is a cloud based tracking tool that can synch up with the Twitters, Facebooks, Diggs, Reddits, Stumbleupons & Delicious' of the web to provide these metrics in an easy-to-use, historical view.

Tools to Solve It: PostRank Analytics

PostRank Analytics
PostRank’s nightly emails keep me wracking my brains for better blog post ideas

PostRank sends me nightly reports on how the SEOmoz blog performs across the web – numbers from Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook and more. By using this, I can get a rough sense of how posts perform in the social media marketplace and, over time, hopefully train me to author more interesting content.

#3 – Comparing the Relative Traffic Levels of Multiple Sites

The Problem: We all want to know not only how we're doing with web traffic, but how it compares to the competition. Free services like Compete.com and Alexa have well-documented accuracy problems and paid services like Hitwise, Comscore & Nielsen cost an arm and a leg (and even then, don't perform particularly well with sites in the sub-million visits/month range).

Tools to Solve It: Quantcast, Google Trends for Websites

Quantcast
If a site has been "Quantified," no other competitive traffic tool on the web will be as accurate

Quantcast
Since both sites are "Quantified," I can be sure the data quality is excellent

I've complained previously about the inaccuracies of Alexa (as have many others). It's really for entertainment purposes only. Compete.com is better, but still suffers from lots of inaccuracy, data gaps, directionally wrong estimates and a general feeling of unreliability in the marketplace. Quantcast, on the other hand, is excellent for comparing sites that have entered their "Quantified" program. This involves putting Quantcast's tracking code onto each page of the site; you're basically peeking into their analytics.

Sadly, Quantcast isn’t on every site (and their guesstimates appear no better than Compete when they don’t have direct data). Fortunately, one organization has stepped up with a surprisingly good alternative – Google.

Google Trends for Websites

Google Trends for Websites allows you to plug in domains and see traffic levels. Much like AdWords Keyword Tool, the numbers themselves seem to run high, but the comparison often looks much better. Google Trends has become the only traffic estimator I trust – still only as far as I could throw a Google Mini, but better than nothing.

#4 – Seeing Pages the Way Search Engine Do

The Problem: Every engineering & development team builds web pages in unique ways. This is great for making the Internet an innovative place, but it can make for nightmares when optimizing for search engines. As professional SEOs, we need to be able to see pages, whether in development environments or live on the web the same way the engines do.

Tools to Solve It: SEO-Browser, Google Cached Snapshot, New Mozbar

SEO Browser
_
A longtime favorite site of mine, SEO Browser lets you surf like an engine

SEOmoz on SEO Browser
_
Poor Google; that’s all they see when they crawl our pretty site

SEO-Browser is a great way to get a quick sense of what the engines can see as they crawl your site’s pages and links. The world of engines may seem a bit drab, but it can also save your hide in the event that you’ve put out code or pages that engines can’t properly parse.

Google Cached Snapshot
_
I wonder if Googlebot ever gets tired of blue, purple and gray…

Google's own cached snapshot of a page (available via a search query, as a bookmarklet, or in the mozbar's dropdown) is the ultimate research tool to know what the engine "sees." The only trouble is that it works in the past only (and only on pages that allow caching). To get a preview, SEO Browser or our friend below can be useful.

Mozbar User Agent Switch
The mozbar lets you dress up like Google whenever the occassion is right

One of Will Critchlow's feature requests in the new mozbar was the ability to switch user agents, turn off javascript and images and, in essence, become the bot in your browser. Luckily, he also forced us to place a gray overlay in the right-hand corner that alerts you to the settings you've changed and gives you an easy, one-click "return to normal." Browsing like a bot = solved!

#5 – Identifying Crawl Errors

The Problem: Discovering problems on a site like 302 redirects (that should be 301s), pages that are blocked by robots.txt (here’s why that’s a bad idea), missing title tags, duplicate/similar content, 40x and 50x errors, etc. is a task no human can efficiently perform. We need the help of robots – automated crawlers who can dig through a site, find the issues and notify us.

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Xenu, GGWMT

Xenu Link Sleuth
Mmmm… Parallel Threads

Xenu Link Sleuth 2
She canna hold on much longer cap’n!

We’ve already covered GSiteCrawler in this post, but for those unaware, it can be a great diagnostic tool as well as a Sitemap builder. Xenu is much the same, though somewhat more intuitive for this purpose. Tom’s written very elegantly about it in the past, so I won't rehash much, other than to say – it shows errors & potential issues Google Webmaster Tools doesn't, and that can be a lifesaver.

GGWMTools Crawl Errors
Doh! I think we messed up some stuff when KW Difficulty relaunched :(

Google Webmaster Tools is extremely popular, well known and well used. And yet… lots of us still have crawl errors we haven’t addressed (just look at the 500+ problems on SEOmoz.org in the screenshot above). Exporting to Excel, sorting, and sending to engineering with fixes for each type of issue can save a lot of heartache and earn back a lot of lost traffic and link juice.

#6 – Determine if Links to Your Site Have Been Lost

The Problem: Sites don’t always do a great job maintaining their pages and links (according to our data, 75% of the web disappears in 6 months). Many times, these vanishing pages and links are of great interest to SEOs, who want to know whether their link acquisition and campaigning efforts are being maintained. But how do you confirm if the links to your site that were built last month are still around today?

Tools to Solve It: Virante’s Link Atrophy Diagnosis

Virante's Link Atrophy Tool
Does that mean Stuntdubl & SEOmoz are "going steady?"

This tool comes courtesy of the great team over at Virante, and it's a pretty terrific application of an SEO need and Linkscape data through the SEOmoz API. The tool will check the links reported from Linkscape/Open Site Explorer and determine which, if any, have been lost. Many times it's just links off the front page of blogs or news sites as archives fall to the back, but sometimes it can help you ID a link partner or source that's no longer pointing your way in order to facilitate a quick, painless reclamation. The best part is there's no registration or installation required – it's entirely plug and play.

#7 – Find 404 Errors on a Site (without GG WM Tools) and Create 301s

The Problem: Google's Webmaster Tools are great for spotting 404s, but the data can be, at times, unwieldly (as when thousands of pages are 404ing, but only a few of them really matter) and it's only available if you can get access to the Webmaster Tools account (which can stymie plenty of SEOs in the marketing department or from external consultancies). We need a tool to help spot those important, highly linked-to 404s and turn them into 301s. 

Tools to Solve It: Virante’s PageRank Recovery Tool

Virante's PageRank Recovery Tool
3.99 mozRank for ~0.00 effort

The thinking behind this tool is brilliant, because it solves a problem from end to end. By not only grabbing well-linked-to pages that 404, but actually writing the code to create an .htaccess file with 301s to your choice of pages, the tool is a "no-brainer" solution.

#8 - See New Links that are Sending Traffic (and Old Ones that Have Stopped)

The Problem: Most analytics tools have an export function that, combined with some clever Excel, could help you puzzle out the sites/pages that haev started to send you traffic (and those that once were but have stopped). It’s a pain – manual labor, easy to screw up and not a particularly excellent use of your precious time.

Tools to Solve It: Enquisite

Enquisite Links Report

I love the ability to look across the past few months and see the trend of new pages and new domains sending links, as well as identifying links that have stopped sending traffic. Some of those may be ripe for reclamation, others might just need a nudge to mention or link over in their next piece/post. This report is also a great way to judge how link building campaigns are performing on the less-SEO focused pivot, sending direct traffic.

#9 – Research Trending/Temporal Popularity of Keywords

The Problem: Keyword demand fluctuates over time, sometimes with little warning. Knowing how search volume is impacted by trending and geography is critical to SEOs targeting fields with these demand fluxes.

Tools to Solve It: Google Insights, Trendistic

Google Insights
Hmmm…. Maybe we should launch Open Webmaster Tools next?

Google Insights
We need to make it out to India & Brazil more often, too!

Google Insights is great for seeing keyword trending, related terms and countries of popularity (though the last of these we’ve found to be somewhat suspect at times). However, sometimes you’re really interested in what’s about to become popular. For that, turning to trend sites can be a big help.

Trendistic

Although it doesn't yet have a "suggest" feature to help identify terms & phrases that may soon become popular searches, it does help establish the "tipping point" at which a buzzword in Twitter may become a trend in web search. As we've discussed in the WhiteBoard Friday on Twitter as an SEO Research Tool, finding the spot at which search volume begins spiking can present big opportunities for fresh content.

#10 – Analyze Domain Ownership & Hosting Data

The Problem: When researching domains to buy, considering partnerships or conducting competitive analysis, data about a site's hosting and ownership can be essential steps in the process.

Tools to Solve It: Domaintools

DomainTools
We should make sure to re-register this domain…

Long the gold standard in the domainer’s toolbox, DomainTools (once called whois.sc) provides in-depth research about a domain’s owners, their server and, sometimes most interestingly, the other domains owned by that entity. BTW – they’re spot on; SEOmoz owns about 80 other domains besides our own (though we only really use this one and OpenSiteExplorer right now).

#11 – Investigate a Site/Page’s History

The Problem: What happened on this page last month or last year? When conducting web research about links, traffic and content, we all need the ability to go "back in time" and see what had previously existed on our sites/pages (or those of competitors/link sources/etc). Did traffic referrals drop? Have search rankings changed dramatically? Did a previously available piece of content fall off the web? The question really is – how do we answer these questions?

Tools to Solve It: Wayback Machine


Before 2005, we were on a different domain!

SEOmoz in 2005
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If you remember this version of the site, you're officially "old school"

Yeah, yeah, you've probably heard of the Wayback Machine, powered by Alexa's archive of the Internet and endlessly entertaining to web researchers and pranksters alike. What might surprise you is how valuable it can be as an SEO diagnostic tool, particularly when you're performing an investigation into a site that doesn't keep good records of its activity. Reversing a penalty, a rankings drop, an oddity in traffic, etc. can consume massive amounts of time if you don't know where to look and how. Add Wayback to the CSI weapons cache – it will come in handy.

#12 - Determine Semantically Connected Terms/Phrases

The Problem: Chances are, the search engines are doing some form of semantic analysis (looking at the words and phrases on a page around a topic to determine its potential relevance to the query). Thus, employing these "connected" keywords on your pages is a best practice for good SEO (and probably quite helpful to users in many cases as well). The big question is – which words & phrases are related (in the search engines' eyes) to the ones I'm targeting?

Tools to Solve It: Google Wonder Wheel

Google Wonder Wheel
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Nothing about "Yellow Shoes?"

We don’t know for certain that this is a technique that provides massive benefit, but we’re optimistic that tests are going to show it has some value. If you’d like to participate in the experiment, take related phrases from the Wonder Wheel and employ on your pages. Please do report back with details :-)

#13 – Analyze a Page’s Optimization of Images

The Problem: When image search and image accessibility/optimization is critical to your business/client, you need tools to help analyze a page’s consistency and adherence to best practices in handling image dimensions, alt attributes, etc.

Tools to Solve It: Image Analyzer from Juicy Studio

Juicy Image Analyzer 
Doh! We need to add some dimensions onto our images.

It’s not the prettiest tool in the world, but it does get the job done. The image analyzer will give any page a thorough evaluation, showing missing alt tags, image dimensions (which can help with page rendering speed) and informing you of the names/alts in a thorough list. If you have image galleries you’re aiming at image search optimization, this is a great diagnostic system.

#14 – Instant Usability Testing

The Problem: Fast feedback on a new landing page, product page, tool design or web page (of any kind) can be essential to smoothing over rough launches. But tools aren't enough – we need actual human beings (and not the biased ones in our friend groups or company) giving fast, functional feedback. That's a challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Five Second Test, Feedback Army

FiveSecondTest
It can’t be that easy, can it?

FiveSecondTest
Wow… It totally is! Here I am helping give feedback to a local geek squad.

FeedbackArmy
Users are easier to come by than we think

Both FeedbackArmy & FiveSecondTest offer the remarkable ability to get instant feedback from real users on any page, function or tool you want to test at a fraction of the price normal usability testing requires. What I love is that because it's so easy, it makes that first, critical step of reaching out to users a low barrier to entry. Over time, I hope systems like these help make the web as a whole a more friendly, easy-to-use experience. Now there's not excuse!

#15 – Measure Tweet Activity to a URL Across Multiple URL Shortener Platforms

The Problem: You've got your bit.ly, your j.mp, your tinyurl, your ow.ly and dozens more URL shorteners. Between this plethora of options and standard HTML links pasted into tweets, keeping up with all the places your URL is being shared can be a big challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Backtweets

BackTweets
Tweeting links in the middle of the night is fun!

Bit.ly can track bit.ly and many other services offer their own tracking systems, but only Backtweets is aggregating all of the sources and making it easy to see what people are saying about your pages no matter how they encode it. Now if only we could get this to integrate with PostRank and Search.Twitter.com and Trendistic and make the interface super-gorgeous and have it integrate with Google Analytics… and… and…

#16 – BONUS: Determining Keyword Competition Levels

Bonus! I mentioned last week in a comment that I'd make a post about the new Keyword Difficulty Tool. Since this post is all about tools anyway, I figured I'd toss it in and save you the trouble of clicking an extra link in your feedreader.

The Problem: Figuring out which keywords have more/less demand than which others is easy (and Google does a great job of it most of the time).

Tools to Solve It: New Keyword Difficulty Tool

The real problem was that our previous keyword difficulty tool attempted to use 2nd order effects and non-direct metrics to estimate the competitiveness level of a particular keyword term/phrase. While it’s true that more popular/searched-for keywords TEND to be more competitive, this is certainly not always the case (and in fact, SEOs probably care a lot more about when a keyword has high traffic and relatively weak sites/pages in the SERPs more than anything else). The new tool attempts to fix this by relying on Page Authority (correlation data here) and using a weighted average of the top ranking sites and pages.

Keyword Difficulty
Running five keywords at a time is way better than one
(we’re working to add more – promise)

Keyword Difficulty Scores
The best bet here looks like "best running shoes" – relatively lower difficulty, but still high volume

Keyword Difficulty for Best Running Shoes
Oh yeah, looking at the top positions, a few dozen good links and some on-page and we’re there

Reversing the rankings is never easy, but parsing through KW Difficulty reports certainly makes it less time-consuming. Watch out for the scores, though – a 65% is pretty darn tough, and even a 40% is no walk in the park. At last, I feel really good about this tool; it was suffering for a good 18 months, and it's nice to have it back in my primary repertoire with such solid functionality.


I’m sure there are plenty of remarkable tools I’ve missed and there are likely questions about these problems, too. Feel free to address both in the comments!

p.s. This was written very late at night and I need to be up and on a plane at precisely butt-o'clock tomorrow morning, so editing will have to slide until Jen wakes up and gives this a good once-over. Sorry about any errors in the meantime :-)

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Tags: analytics, facebook, google, ideas, interesting, internet, search engines, twitter

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Webmaster Level: All

We’ve got good news for site owners who are frequent users of the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools: we’re now providing more detailed data for each individual search query. We previously just reported the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now you can click on a given search query in the Top search queries report to see a breakdown of the number of impressions and the amount of clickthrough for each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query. Impressions are the number of times that your site’s pages appeared in the search results for the query. Clickthrough is the number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site. In addition to impressions and clickthrough numbers, you’ll also see a list of your site’s pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query. As we went about increasing the amount of data available, we also implemented measures to increase the detail of the data overall.

It used to be that you could only see Top search queries data for your site’s top 100 queries. We’ve significantly increased the number of queries we show. Now if your site ranks for more than 100 queries, you’ll see new pagination buttons at the bottom of the Top Search Queries table allowing you to page through a much larger sampling of the queries that return your site in search results.

Previously, if you wanted to visualize your Top search queries data you could download your site’s data and generate your own charts. To save you some time and effort, we’re now generating a chart for you, and displaying it right within the page.

The Top search queries chart includes a date range selector similar to what Google Analytics offers. So now if you really want to see what your site’s top search queries were for a particular week in the past, you can see the data for just that slice in time.

Finally, for sites that have numerous keywords that change frequently, we’ve added the ability to search through your site’s top search queries so that you can filter the data to exactly what you’re looking for in your query haystack.

We hope you enjoy these updates to the Top search queries feature and that it’s even more useful for understanding how your site appears and performs in our search results. If you’ve got feedback or questions about the new Top search queries, please share your thoughts in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Tags: analytics, google

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​Within the next two weeks, Google Analytics will be performing a system upgrade. This upgrade is to further increase the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics to meet the demand of an increasing number of enterprises using Google Analytics. Rest assured your website traffic data will be unaffected and there will be no interruption to data collection or processing. All reports will be available and accessible to users. However, for some limited hours, users will not be able to perform administrative account actions such as opening new accounts, creating or modifying profiles, setting up filters and goals, managing user access, etc. The specific system upgrade times will be posted in the Google Analytics administrative interface. If you anticipate a need to make account changes during the next two weeks we encourage you to make them as soon as possible to ensure smooth operations during the system upgrade.
We are proud to see the continued growth in Google Analytics and are committed to delivering the unparalled reliability and scalability that users have come to expect from products running on Google’s globally renowned infrastructure.
P.S. Google Website Optimizer will also be undergoing a system upgrade. All running experiments will continue to run and collect data. However users will be unable to create or modify experiments. Read more on the Website Optimizer blog.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Tags: analytics, google

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

Google News The analytics ninja is not dead, but with Avinash talking more about SEO analytics and SEOs like Rand talking more about web analytics, 2010 has brought with it increased cross-pollination between analytics experts and SEOs.

This blog post is for the analytics driven, SEO savvy, search samurai looking to implement tracking code best practices and take advantage of some useful Google Analytics plugins.

The focus of this post is on Google Analytics, but many of the concepts are also applicable more generally, no matter what web analytics platform you’re using.

Tracking Code Basics

Asynchronous Tracking Code – Even before the asynchronous tracking code was rolled out, I was a believer in putting the GA tracking code in the header, rather than before the closing body tag, which is where Google recommends placing the tracking code. With the announcement of asynchronous tracking code, which loads in conjunction with the page as opposed to sequentially, however, you can now have your cake and eat it too. You can get the benefit of your data not being compromised by slow page load times and also keep from getting push back from the developer that implements your tracking codes.

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {    var ga = document.createElement('script');    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' :         'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);  })();

</script>

Expanding Goal Limitations – Without setting up goals, your GA account is a glorified hit counter. So it’s imperative that you set up goal or eCommerce tracking (if not both). When setting up your GA goals in your analytics settings, you can either use the expanded goals, which allow you to track up to 20 different URLs or engagement metrics per profile. It’s important to realize, however, that you can also set your goals up so you can track hundreds or even thousands of goals. All you have to do is set up a logical hierarchy where the root of your goal URLs trigger your goal events. For us at SEOmoz, this might mean we have a tool run goal event triggered with /goal/tool-run – yet we also have the added granularity down to the individual tool level should we ever want to see which tools are being run the most or to segment traffic based on visitors who ran a particular tool.

eCommerce Tracking – Justin Cutroni did a great job with his series of blog posts that walk through how eCommerce tracking works, installing & setting up eCommerce tracking, explaining why everyone should use eCommerce tracking, & tracking lead gen forms. In addition to eCommerce tracking, not to be forgotten is using SetVar or a custom variable to segment repeat or premium buyers. For example, say your site gets 5 sales from keyword #1 and 5 sales from keyword #2. If sales for keyword #1 are each $800 and sales from keyword #2 are $10 each, you're going to want to segment that traffic and make on-page optimizations by looking at the on-site behavior of your premium buyers who converted on keyword #1, rather than from keyword #2.  

Custom Variables for Registered & Non-Registered – One of the most powerful aspects of GA is the ability to set custom variable. Custom variables can be set at any of three levels (visitor, session, & page). The Google Analytics help documentation is particularly great, but EpikOne also has a worthwhile description on how custom variables work. The most powerful of these is the visitor level custom variable which allows you to cookie a visitor across multiple sessions. At SEOmoz, we use this to track three different member types: free members, PRO members, & canceled members. We also use custom variables to cookie at the session level.

 
Campaign Tagging & SetAllowAnchor – From widgets to newsletters to signature links in personal e-mails, campaign links should be tagged using the GA URL builder, which gives you tracking parameters that includes multiple, including required _utm values for source, medium, & campaign. In action this looks something like this:

http://www.seomoz.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=march-6-2010

When tagging your campaigns be aware that by default GA will only recognize tracking parameters if the string is kicked off by a question mark, which from an SEO standpoint can lead to diffusion of link juice and duplicate content issues. To avoid these issues, we you can kick off campaign parameters with the hash tag and modify your GA tracking code using the SetAllowAnchor attribute, so GA recognizes the hash tag as way to kick off a campaign tracking URLs. To do this, add — pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); — to your main GA tracking code between the var pageTracker and pageTracker attributes. Or, for additional documentation, read LunaMetrics’ blog post on using SetAllowAnchor, but the code should look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
    pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
  } catch(err) {}

Tagging Email – One of the most important areas you can apply campaign tagging is e-mail. And though you can get fancy and create a filter that combines email sources you should not have to do this because your campaigns should be tagged to begin with. So definitely follow what the experts say about tagging email campaigns, but I am a huge fan of bucketing your reports by segment and grouping based on conversion goal. For example, at SEOmoz we’re rolling out a number of e-mails ranging from a customer lifecycle welcome series to newsletters to follow up emails after PRO members cancel. Rather than doing one off tracking, our GA tracking is set up in a way that we can aggregate by visitor type. This allows management to quickly look at the all up numbers and see how e-mail is driving each goal area of the business: activation, retention, and re-activation.

And if you use a logical naming convention with your email tagging, such as the one shown below, your marketing team will be able to splice and dice using regular expressions to get a much more granular view of performance for each email format, type, or version:

  • Email Format:  Which types of emails are doing best (i.e. newsletters, promotional emails, system notifications, etc.)
  • Performance by Email Type: Shows the breakdown of which email types have the greatest volume and/or the lowest click through rates. And thus, where you should place your testing and optimization energy. (i.e. emails sent 1 week after sign up, promos sent in December, etc.)
  • Version Number: Allows you to test subject lines and e-mail variants to see which versions are driving the most conversions, engagement, or retention. (i.e. subject line #1, subject line #2, etc.)

Vanity URLs – If you’re running an offline campaign, such as a magazine ad, a business card run or a billboard creative, you’re not going to want to use the long URL builder parameter. You’ll likely be much better off using measuring your offline efforts with a short, easy to remember vanity URL, which, in order to keep your metrics from being skewed as a result of page load times, you’ll want to implement using a 301 redirect, rather than using meta refresh.  

Google Analytics Plugins

Though not on the list of must haves for the search samurai, I’m a sucker for a great browser plugin. And as ROI Revolution blogged about, there are a handful of browser plugins for GA that you might find are worth installing. Three plugins I use with varying degrees of regularity are:

Does a Page Have GA?
If you’re checking a lot of pages on your site to see if they have tracking code installed or if you want quick, at a glance reference as to whether or not a page on another site has GA tracking code, Twistermc’s GA? Firefox plugin is a great way to see if GA is installed without having to view the source code. The way it works it works is simple. If a page has GA installed, the bar chart that appears in the lower right hand corner of your browser is illuminated. If the page does not have GA installed, the bar chart is not illuminated.

Which Referring Sites & Keywords Have Changed?
Similar in concept to a custom alerts, the Better GA plugin by Juice Analytics provides a useful way to drill into your referring sites or referring keyword reports and see which sites or keywords have fluctuated the most over the last few days or week.

Better Google Analytics:
Perhaps the most robust GA plugin of all is VKIs studios’ greasemonkey script based plugin, which offers a number of bells an whistles, including page level social media data from sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (see below),as well as added functionality such as a direct entry field to access your top content report from any other report, direct links to export to Google Docs, and a half dozen or so others.  

For more comprehensive information on Google Analytics, I encourage you to read through Google Analytics’ help documentation or tapping into some of the great web analytics resources available such as Google Analytics’ Official Blog, LunaMetrics, EpikOne, & Occam’s Razor – each of which are full of Analytics tips from top-notch experts.

Also, special thanks to David Booth from WebShare Design for his help with our recent implementation of Google Analytics and also for sharing several of the insights included in this post. For more info on GA and GWO, WebShare’s Google sponsored Seminars for Success, which I attended last year, and which the SEOmoz marketing team will be attending here in Seattle on May 12-14th, are among the most educational and best valued around.

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Tags: analytics, firefox, google

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I’ve been using Google Docs for a couple of years now, for both professional and personal tasks. To be honest, I was hesitant to try it at first. After all, what does Google Docs have that other, more feature-rich office suites don’t have? But I have to say that its trademark simplicity has won me over.

That simplicity doesn’t mean that it’s limited in functionality, though. Let’s take a closer look to find out what else we can do with this seemingly lightweight tool.

Take Advantage of Templates for Quick Document Creation

Like any other office suite, Google Docs allows you to use document templates. This is especially handy if you’re in a hurry to make a document such as a schedule, business card, resume or invoice. Looking for something a little more esoteric? Google Docs has a wide variety of templates available, because most of them are user-submitted. They include a life checklist for your long-term plans, an online contact form, and even legal documents such as living wills.

Create File Redundancy and Backups

Google Docs can batch download documents into a ZIP file (via More actions > Export) if you want to make local copies in your hard drive. Personally I don’t find this method practical, especially if you want to retain the folder structure of your files.

Over on TheAppGap I wrote a tutorial on how to backup your files and retain the folder structure with a Greasemonkey script and DownloadThemAll. Just make sure that you assign the files to the right folders when you download them, so that they mirror the folder structure you use in Docs.

Apart from native Docs files, you can also upload and store other file types into Google Docs. This new feature can come in handy if you want to backup some files online. For those who use multiple computers, you might no longer have to carry around a USB flashdrive. Free users are limited to 1GB of storage, but you can buy more if you need it.

Use Google Docs to View Documents from Search Results
When PDF files come up in Google search results, you have the option to “Quick View” them, which automatically opens them in Google Docs. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Microsoft Office files. If you come across them a lot when you’re searching for reports and other documents, you might want to install the Import to Google Docs add-on by Srikant (there are versions available for both Firefox and Chrome). If you use this add-on, whenever an Office file appears in search results, an “Import as Google Document” link can be seen next to it, like the one below:


You won’t have to download those files or open another program just to view the contents — they’ll automatically be uploaded in Docs.

Web Publishing

You can use Google Docs to create online polls and surveys, as well as analyze the data via Google Spreadsheets (see this handy tutorial by Chris Pirillo). As I mentioned earlier, some templates are meant for online publishing, such as the contact form, client questionnaires and event registration forms.

For those who love metrics, you can track the visitors to these pages (as well as other publicly viewable files) via your Analytics account, too. Just go to Settings > Editing, then input your Analytics tracking code.

Do you use Google Docs? How do you customize the way you use it?

Tags: analytics, firefox, google

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