Analytics

I couldn’t believe it when i saw it, but here it was. A national retailer sent me the analytics reports that their SEO company was giving them. In exchange for paying this SEO company thousands of dollars per month for SEO and analytics, this retailer was getting nothing more than screenshots of Google Analytics; screenshots that showed Unique Visitors, Page Views, Time on Site and Top Content. In 2011, I never thought I would still be seeing this, but I can’t believe how prevalent it is, and how much customers accept this artificial substitute for real business-based analysis. On top of that, to simply deliver screen captures and deliver…

An interesting move from Google has search marketers reacting in anger, amazement and disgust. Google, after years of providing search referral information, has decided that users that are “logged-in” to Google will no longer have their search terms show up in website analytics. This move has marketers fuming, as this is an important metric to measure in terms of developing a clear understanding of the search words that people use to find the site and those that lead to conversions. many marketers evaluate those terms in order to better understand the visitor and build content and better user experiences. However, to make this move even more odd, is that Google…

3 of the most important elements in designing the content of a webpage are color, contrast and font size.

These three elements are amazingly useful when used properly, and mean the difference between action or ignorance. Understanding the important part that these three elements play in capturing the visitor’s attention is critical to today’s online marketing.

Google Analytics finds the Interface

Google is the most recent company to understand the critical role that something as basic as color, contrast and text size have to do with creating a successful user experience. By updating their analytics interface, they have now overcome one of the primary obstacles to gaining great data…

Release date is set for March 29, 2011

Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day

is now on the way to the printers. The release date is March 29, 2011, but you can pre-order your copy today! This exciting project was the work of over 14 months of research and development for presenting a start-to-finish guide to internet marketing. The book covers the testing of your current site or the considerations to starting a new site, and the development of marketing campaigns to extend the visibility of a business.

What Others are Saying…

Already the book has received great reviews from other peers and experts in the industry: “Matt Bailey is one of my favorite speakers…

Search Engines do not like ranking report software. Period. In the past, some search engines allowed an API access key to be used for ranking report software, and it can still be utilized today. Without utilizing the API key for the reports, you could be blocked from accessing the search engine. Software-automated queries drain resources, bandwidth, and inflates ad impressions, which is used to compute quality score for Pay-per-Click Ads. In response, Google is particularly aggressive about blocking repeated queries from the same IP address. Google would rather keep advertisers happy then overly aggressive SEO’s who check their rankings incessantly.

Personalized Search

With the advent of creating accounts at the…

Bounced visitors are worthless right? Not necessarily, they may be loyal to you, and visit many times.…

I know that there are a lot of people who are wondering if they should make the switch to Google Analytics, and I would say, yes. I was one of those people for a long time. I used Clicktracks (now Lyris) since the day I started analytics, and always resisted GA. It has only been within the last few months that I have really started to use GA extensively, and not only that, to like it. Google does bother me a little bit with the amount of information that it has on the millions of people using it. Giving Google access to my analytics only increases its knowledge, and we…

Part 1: Analytics: Is it Fun or Easy? Part 2: Ambiguity is Opportunity

Part 3: Segmentation Finds Motivation

Why Segmentation? Segmentation is the principle that people come to the website for many different reasons, they enter at many different points, the see different pages, and are looking for many different pieces of information. Basically – you can’t treat all of your visitors the same way, neither in the marketing and content nor in the measurement and analysis. As John Marshall of Market Motive (who also developed ClickTracks) famously said, “people are not cattle.” Therefore, we should not treat them as such. Aggregate = Inaccurate Funny enough, when we build reports on aggregate data (page…

Part 1: Is Analytics Fun or Easy

Part 2: Ambiguity is Opportunity

Hamster-Wheel Analytics From Part 1, setting goals is the first and only place to start when developing an analytics strategy. Otherwise, the analyst or the website marketing manager will spend the majority of their time developing reports with numbers on them. The rest of their month will then be spent justifying why those numbers are higher or lower than the previous month. Without goals, there is simply no direction. Large numbers become the goal, and people become enamored with large numbers, even though everyone knows that more visitors is not necessarily the goal. Qualified visitors are the goal . This is hamster-wheel…

Part 1: Is Analytics Fun or Easy

Part 2: Ambiguity is Opportunity

Hamster-Wheel Analytics From Part 1, setting goals is the first and only place to start when developing an analytics strategy. Otherwise, the analyst or the website marketing manager will spend the majority of their time developing reports with numbers on them. The rest of their month will then be spent justifying why those numbers are higher or lower than the previous month. Without goals, there is simply no direction. Large numbers become the goal, and people become enamored with large numbers, even though everyone knows that more visitors is not necessarily the goal. Qualified visitors are the goal . This is hamster-wheel…