Top 5 Amazing Web Analytics and SEO Infographics
Infographics has taken web marketing and information distribution by storm. I am sure you have come across similar awe inspiring graphical representation of data. You can find spectacular infographics almost everywhere, and it is hard to avoid them.
It is interesting that web analytics is all about data but very fewer infographics have been created on web analytics concepts. Here are some of the most popular web analytics and seo infographics.
#1. Unica Anlaytics – The top in the category of the web analytics infographics, this Unica infograph explains the web analytics process and how use it for campaign optimization.
Source: http://lp.unica.com/infographic/
#2. UXD Stress Fields – A super cool way to show how tech, web development and business decision makers can work together. Web analytics cannot operate in a silo, and it is absolutely important to connect your tech and web development team with the business analyst.
Source: http://informationarchitects.jp/the-spectrum-of-user-experience-1/
#3. SEO FAQs guide – This highly popular seo infographic can be used to learn the basics of search engine optimization in few minutes. Kudos to the designer who has incorporated the small on and off page optimization nuances with such clarity.
Source: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2010/04/13/seo-in-pictures-our-seo-infographic/
#4. Actionable Analytics - Here is a simple display of web analytics measurement framework. The designer has captured all the facets of buying cycle and connected it with the web measurement strategy.
Source: http://actionable-analytics.com/2009/07/how-to-build-a-digital-measurement-framework/
#5. Google’s Analytics - A dark humorous way of showing how much data Google captures through different analytics measurement techniques. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics software and is one of the key tools of Google’s data capture portfolio.
Source: http://smashingcrunch.com/images/fear-google-true-power-of-analytics-user-data-infographic
Original Source: Onlineschools.org
Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.
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Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports
Google vs Bing: Advanced SEO Analytics
Search marketing is my second passion after web analytics and getting analytics insights on search/seo is pretty cool. Rand Fishkin (seomoz CEO), did a great presentation on search analytics comparison of Google and Bing at SMX Advanced Seattle. The session was about using data to show what are some of the key influencers of ranking in Google and Bing.
Bing being a key competitor to Google is not different atleast algorithmically as far as the ranking factor goes. There are striking similarities on the criteria used for ranking between Google and Bing.
TLD Extensions – Top level domains with .gov and .org extensions have the highest possibility of ranking higher in both Google and Bing. The most interesting part is .org is rated higher to rank than .com and it is quiet surprising.
Tip – Grab .org extension for your site and build a community on that domain or redirect to your .com domain.
Keyword in Domain – A website with target keywords in the domain name has the highest correlation with rankings higher on search.
Here is a quick example of my blog ranking higher in search because of the keyword in the domain.
Tip – Buy domains with your target keywords and build micro sites with unique content on those domains.
Keyword in subdomain – Sometimes it is harder to get a keyword rich domain and another alternative is to go for a keyword filled sub domain. Data shows that Google gives some important and Bing does not factors this in their SERPs ranking.
Tip – Stay away from creating too many subdomains to gain higher ranking in search. Create sub domains only if you feel it is required from user point of view.
On page keyword usage – Both Bing and Google ranking analysis data show a small correlation between on page keyword usage and ranking. Alt image is useful to search ranking in some cases, and so is putting keywords in the url.
In the example below, the website webhostingsearch.com has the word “dedicated server hosting” 10 times on the page in comparison to webhostinggeeks.com (3 times) and it still ranks lower. The reason is webhostinggeeks.com has over 2000 unique links to the page and webhostingsearch.com has only 246 unique links to the page.
External links - Having a small number of links from multiple websites is 10x better than having a large number of links from the same website. Websites rank higher if they have diversity in link sources and there is a high correlation for this in both Google and Bing.
Tip – Diversify your link building strategies to multiple avenues. Build social links along with content links and viral links.
Length of url – Data shows that shorter urls rank higher in search than longer urls.
Tip – I have seen that blog links with longer url tend to rank higher in search, and clearly Google and Bing have different set of rules for different types of sites. This could be because blog links are generally longer. It is ok to have longer blog post links but keep your website links short because it helps users remember the url easily.
Anchor text – The number of unique links with anchor text influence the ranking of a website. Having anchor text diversity is as important as the link diversity.
Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.
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Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
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Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked!
Myths exist in almost every industry and web analytics is not free from it. There are several myths in the web analytics industry, and we will debunk them one by one in this post.
#1 Web analytics is accurate – Web analytics is all about direction and insights. It is funny that we are still worried about the accuracy of analytics reports. We can spend days arguing with the marketing and sales managers on why the reports are accurate even though we all know that web analytics can never be accurate. Instead of focusing on this let’s start focusing on insights.
All web analytics reports are directional and getting insights is the key to web analytics success. Focus on direction, build trends, and apply statistical significance to the trends to get meaningful takeaways.
#2 Site Visitors delete cookies – It is extremely important to understand the difference between the first and third party. First party cookies are cookies from the host domain i.e. your domain. Top analytics tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends) all install first party cookies in order to measure the repeat visitors. The deletion / block rate for first party cookies is atleast 50% lower than the third party cookies.
Having said that, studies have shown that web analytics software cookie (first or third party) will be deleted no matter what. This is the truth about the tag based web analytics industry, and we have to accept it. This does not mean that we should stop trusting the reports and ignore them. The analytics reports are power packed and actionable because it can provide you insights if you follow the direction. As mentioned above the directional aspect of web analytics is unmatched.
So, stop worrying about cookie deletion rate and focus on the trend.
#3 Users disable Java scripts – A major myth that goes around the market is about the blocking of the java script and thus prevent the execution of analytics tags. Java is an integral part of web and disabling java on the web browser can limit the accessibility to a large number of services on the internet.
Still not convinced? Here is a good study conducted by few developers showing why only 3-5% of the users disable java scripts.
#4 Google Analytics data for search ranking - Google analytics data is not used by Google to evaluate search rankings. Here is a quick video from Matt Cutt’s (head of Googles webspam team). In this video, Matt debunks the myth about Google using GA data for SEO or search ranking.
#5 Data addiction = actionable insights – Are you lost in data collection, integrations, and data obsession? If you are a pro analyst then you know that data dump, web integrations, data warehouse are critical issues. Please don’t get carried away by data addiction and focus on analytics priorities. Ask yourself “what is the most important and high priority task / project for you in next 5 days/ 5 months.?” Is it business growth insights or painstaking integrations? Is it few key recommendations to your management or never ending analysis?
I agree, analytics integrations can sometimes make your job lot easier but in most cases integrating your CRM and analytics tool is painful. Use excel reports and MS Access for connecting the dots. Leave the integrations for your web developer and business intelligence teams.
#6 Analytics code hampers site performance – I cannot deny that java scripts can increase the web page load time. However, there several options available to minimize the code impact on the site performance.
1. Open a Google webmaster tools account. Google has recently added a cool web performance measurement tool in the webmaster tools. It is the only free tool that measures your site performance relative to other sites on the internet and displays your historical performance in a trend line.
2. Install Yslow and Google page speed Firefox plugins. These plugins can instantly provide you detailed reports on how you can improve your site performance.
3. If you are using Google analytics then switch to asynchronous tracking. Asynchronous tag allows the browser to continue loading the web page while the tag is loaded in the background. This decreases the page load time.
4. For other analytics solutions, limit the use of onclick function to reduce server call connections. Tag only those pages that can provide insightful and actionable data.
#7 Unique visitors are absolutely unique – Your unique visitor reports are not really unique. It varies depending on the time frame you are looking at. You will have different data for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly unique visitor reports because of the way unique visitor is calculated. Using visits report with new and returning visitor segment will provide you more insights that you can ever imagine from unique visitor reports.
#8 Time on page is accurate – The time on page can only be calculated if the web site visitor navigates to another page on the same website. What this means is you will never be able to figure out how much time a web visitor spent on the last page of the website. Stop worrying about the time on page metric and focus on conversion and task completion. A task completion could be clickling the link to the next page, subscribing to RSS feeds, clicking the buy now button or anything that page is motivating the users to do.
#9 Free Analytics = Enterprise Analytics – Investing in paid analytics solution is not a bad decision atall. You might have been motivated by someone on why you should never pay for analytics. The truth is far from accurate. Google Analytics is one of the best free tools out there, but it does not provide enterprise level capabilities that are required for advanced business analytics.
Here are the top 5 reasons why paid enterprise solutions win over free solutions-
1. Support – Paid solutions comes with support hours so you don’t have to spend time fixing analytics issues.
2. Custom Metrics – Paid solutions allow you to create custom metrics on the fly. You can create your own task completion and conversion metrics.
3. Multi-dimensional Timeline – Advanced solutions like Omniture Discover and Coremetircs Explore allows you to compare data from more than two time segments. Google Analytics can only provide two dimensional timeline comparison.
4. Analytics integrations – Web integrations become easier with the enterprise analytics provider because of their partnerships with email, crm, live chat and other service providers. Usually they provide integration hours or detailed documentation.
5. Campaign Attribution – Enterprise analytics providers store all the data on the data warehouses. The data can be accessible anytime and both first and last click is captured in most cases (depending on your settings). You can use this data to design a campaign attribution dashboard and allocate funds efficiently.
#10 Dedicated web analyst is not required – Paying $100K to your enterprise web analytics provider and expecting them to provide you all the answer is not going to work. Web analysis is the core of online marketing and without proper analysis and recommendations your business could come to a dead end.
Even though I love enterprise analytics I cannot stress enough that a dedicated analytics team is a must. Intelligent recommendations may be the future of web analytics but without an expert eye to decipher data and implement recommendations you won’t get results.
Hiring a web analytics expert is more important than investing in paid analytics tools and services. Period!
Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.
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Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
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Facebook vs Google & Google Analytics – Final Round??
Facebook is yet to crack the code of internet advertising that Google has mastered for years. In its most recent attempt to win the online advertising battle and woo businesses, Facebook is about to release some of the coolest features available on the face of the earth for advertisers.
1. Super Local Marketing
Currently, being called as mobile + social is a uqniue way of advertising locally. This new advertising channel will allow the local advertiser to measure the effectiveness of their campaign all the way to physical action i.e visit to a local restaurant / coffee shop to make a purchase.
Google is trying hard to make local advertising more effective. Using data from public reviews is useful, but it still does not provide physical conversion measurement.
Facebook is getting ready to announce the intelligent social ads that could potentially be a breakthrough in local advertising. The concept opens up a whole new way of looking at conversion data and yes it definitely is not going to be your traditional GA goal conversions. It definitely opens up new web analytics measurement possibilities.
2. New Ranking Algorithm
This one seriously aims at Google’s age old core competency – The ranking algorithm. Google has always used links as the core of its ranking algorithm and its page rank metric was developed using link data. However, it is interesting to note that not all links were created manually.
Facebook has decided to go a step further and exploit web user data for calculating website rankings. It is currently testing a new feature that will take the Facebook share button functionality to next level.
The new button will include a feature called “like”. At the frontend it might look like a cool new way to express your feelings about a website but at the backend it will send data to Facebook servers using Facebook connect. This data will go through a series of mathematical calculations and the system will decide the new web rank / site authority.
3. Facebook Analytics
Waging a war against Google should not be limited to search. Google has an endless list of useful products and services and Facebook is ready to battle on all front.
Facebook Insight might be another major announcement at the F8 summit. The concept of data capture is similar to the web analytics solutions where the data is shared through an image beacon file. This allows developers and users to measure events triggered during an API call.
Do you think that Google should be worried about these new features?
Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.
Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
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Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports
Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports
Most marketers and analyst are too concerned about the best metrics to focus on to get actionable insights. Obsession for metrics does not always guarantee results. It is equally important to exclude the worst metrics from your analysis. Yes, you heard it right, these metrics can suck your time and lead you nowhere.
Unique Visitors
The first one is one of the most talked about metric: “Unique Visitors”. Unique visitor has been called by various names in different analytics package. Some call it absolute unique visitor and others like to call it hourly/daily/yearly/decade/centuries unique visitors (see below you guessed it right 
. Quite honestly, it does not matter what you call it by definition a unique visitor is a “statistic describing a unit of traffic to a Web site, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report.” (courtesy: wikipedia.com)
Key benefits
This metric helps building rapport with your field sales team (because it is so common no kidding).
The second benefit is it allows building cool reports like hourly/daily/weekly visitors that you might rarely use.
Third benefit is your websites unique visitor number could change if you change the date range. You will have a different unique visitor value for day/week/month/yearly unique visitor. What is the point of using a metric that creates confusion instead of providing insights?
My advice is to use visits metric report with new and returning visitor segment instead. This will provide you more information than any form of unique visitor report can.
Overall bounce rate report
Bounce rate can be the coolest metric only when you apply it to the right report. Overall site bounce rate report is total waste of time because it will not give you any directional data. It might be a good metric to tweet about if you have nothing else to say.
You could be getting a low bounce on your worst performing pages / campaigns and high bounce on the high converting pages.
Bounce rate can be super charged if you apply it to the right reports. Most Google Analytics reports have bounce rate as one of the default metric.
Apply bounce rate to get most actionable data from the following reports-
1. Keywords report – Keywords report provide insights on what keywords are driving targeted traffic to your website. Our goal is to identify the keywords with higher conversion and high bounce rate (40% or more). The default view of the keywords report in Google Analytics will not provide both the bounce rate and the goal conversion rate metric in the same screen. The trick is to export the excel version of the keywords report. This report will provide the conversion and the bounce rate data side by side. Find out the landing pages for these keywords and test multiple landing pages.
2. Top Landing page – The top landing pages report can be segmented into paid vs non paid search traffic. High bounce paid search landing pages are low hanging fruits. Find out all the high bounce pages for paid search campaign and divert the traffic to more relevant pages after successful split testing. Similarly, identify the organic search landing pages with high bounce rate and add relevant content.
Time on Page
Time on page metric could have been the best metric to measure content effectiveness only if the time on page calculation was done correctly. The time on page can only be calculated if the web site visitor navigates to another page on the same website. What this means is you will never be able to figure out how much time a web visitor spent on the last page of the website.
So, what should be the most productive and insightful way to measure time on site related data? Quite honestly, just stop being obsessive about the time on page metric and focus on the conversions instead.
Here are some questions that you need to ask yourself -
1. Does this page have a high bounce / exit rate?
Yes
Identify the paid search keywords with high bounce and divert this traffic more relevant pages.
No
Great
2. Is the page a key driver to the path to conversion?
Yes
Great. Drive more traffic to this page.
No
Identify the paid search traffic landing on this page and divert it to better performing pages. Optimize the page by addding relevant content to this page. Drive relevant paid search traffic to this page.
3. Is the page located at the right place in the site architecture?
Yes
Great.
No
Move it to a better location on the website and 301 the old url to the new page.
Do you agree that these three reports / metrics are the worst metric? Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.
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Google Analytics and Instant Service Live Chat Integration
Web Analytics integrations are often the most challenging part of web analyst job. The benefits of analytics integration are huge but when the rubber hits the road things get messy. If done correctly, web analytics integrations can close the campaign attribution gap. You can get all the data you need to effectively optimize website and campaign performance.
In this post, we will discuss the end to end integration of Google Analytics (GA) with Instant Service (IS) live chat solution. Integrating a chat tool with an analytics solutions can provide you all the chat conversion data in the analytics reports.
Instant service (IS) is one of the fastest growing live chat solution and their default setup does not capture on page data. You will not be able to identify the pages, campaigns or referral that lead to chat. Instant service reports will only provide you with the post chat start data. Interestingly, the chat solution is designed for quick and easy analytics integration.
Step#1. Requirements
GA provides three options for custom variables i.e. page-level, session-level and visitor level. We will be using three GA session-level custom variables and trackpageview function for the integration. Session-level custom variable will allow us to track chat metrics per visitor session. There are no special requirements as such on the IS software except you will need admin level access to your account.
Step#2. Metrics / Events Setup
We will be tracking the following events & metrics inside of GA through this integration.
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Invitation offered – Number of times the chat popup was offered to your site visitor.
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Invitation accepted (proactive chat) – Number of time the chat was accepted by the visitor.
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Invitation declined – Number of time the chat was declined by the visitor.
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On page chat clicks (requested chat) – Number of time the chat was started by clicking a chat button on the website
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Referring url (IS_referrer) – Referring url of the chat visitor
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Page name (IS_pagename) – URL of the page where chat started.
Step#3. Code and scripts Installation
To begin with, you do not have to be a programmer to write the codes for this integration. Below is the list of all the codes you will need to capture the data.
a. URL parsing scripts – These are php scripts that allow you to capture the referring url and page name for any page on your website. The captured data is stored in variables and later copied into GA custom variables when chat events are triggered. These scripts should be added anywhere between the <body></body> area on each webpage or inside the include file.
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<?php $IS_referrer = getenv(“HTTP_REFERER”); echo $IS_referrer; ?> (script to capture referring url)
<?php function IS_pagename() { return substr($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],strrpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],”/”)+1); } echo “The current page name is “.IS_pagename(); ?> (script to capture page name) |
b. Reactive Chat script (capture click based chat data) -The script below when added to the website will allow you to capture reactive (click based) chat data in GA. When a web visitor clicks the chat button the clicks will be registered as a page view in GA.
Notice how we are passing the page name (IS_pagename) and referring url (IS_referrer) to GA custom variable. This will allow us to link the web data to the chat metrics.
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<script > function track_chat_button() { var s=s_gi(s_account); pageTracker._trackPageview(‘Chat/Button/Clicked’); pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, IS_pagename, IS_pagename, 2); pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, IS_referrer, IS_referrer, 2); } function agents_not_available() { document.getElementById(’smartbutton’).innerHTML = ‘<a href= “” MsoNormal” style=”margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;”>’return false;”><img src=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/chat_button.gif”></a>’; return true; } function agents_available() { document.getElementById(’smartbutton’).innerHTML = ‘<img src=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/email_button.gif”>’; return true; } document.write(‘<img src=”https://rs.instantservice.com/resources/smartbutton’ + ‘/YOUR ACCOUNT ID/DIVISION ID/available.gif?’ + Math.floor(Math.random()*10001) + ‘”style=”width:0;height:0;visibility:hidden;position:absolute;”‘ + ‘onLoad=”agents_available()” >’); </script> |
c. Proactive chat script (capture popup based chat data) – The proactive chat codes should be added in the custom java script section of IS admin console.
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function ii_executeOfferedEvent(param1, param2, param3) |
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function ii_executeAcceptedEvent(param1, param2, param3) |
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function ii_executeDeclinedEvent(param1, param2, param3) |
Step#4. Reading Anlaytics Reports
Allow 24 hours for Google Analytics to populate the reports. You will be able to see the data in the following reports.
1. Top content Report
Apply filter page containing = chat to see how many times the invitations were offered, accepted and declined. Using page = page name custom segment you will be able to see the chat performance for each page on your website.
2. Custom Variables
Custom reports will provide you all the referring url data associated with each chat event. Using referring url and page name you can optimize the chat popup rules to maximize performance and improve the chat conversions.
Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.
Here is a list of other helpful blog posts on this blog-
Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments Troubleshooting Website Traffic drop with Web Analytics
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps
Web Analytics Scan Update
Thank you. Your support and feedbacks have helped us identify and fix the issues in the web analytics scan app.
Here is a quick snap shot of all the beta release to date. Feel free to share your comments, insights and thoughts to improve this free web app.
Beta 1.3 – Released 3/17/10
* Full support for Omniture Analytics
* Bug fix with certain pages not being scanned for Google Analytics
* Few small bug fixes
Beta 1.2 – Released 02/28/10
* Added excel download option for download reports
* Added email delivery option for getting reports delivered by email once the scan is complete
Beta 1.1 – Released 02/22/10
* Frist beta release with support for 5 analytics software (Google, Omniture, Coremetrics, Yahoo and web trends)
Measuring Content Effectiveness with Omniture SiteCatalyst
Producing a ton of content and not knowing if web site visitors are consuming it can sometimes be really frustrating. Avg. time on site and time on page metrics can provide some insights into how engaging the web content is. These metrics are good to get a high level view of content usage and are still not enough to provide actionalbe insights.
What if there was a way to find what part of the content on any given page is consumed? What if you can generate a report that shows if your headline and first paragraph are able to drive visitors to read the next part of the content?
Omniture recently announced a cool new plugin for their SiteCatalyst analytics tool. This plugin allows users to view the percentage of content viewed on any given page vertically.
The plugin is totally free for current SiteCatalyst customers. You can find the plugin code on the Help -> Supporting docs -> Implementation -> Plugins section of SiteCatalyst help section.
Here are step by step instructions on how to install this plugin.
#1. Add a new traffic/property variable.
Admin -> Report Suites -> Edit Settings -> Traffic -> Traffic Variables
#2. Set the new s.prop value to the percentage page viewed function. This variable will record the percentage of the previous page viewed.
#3. Create another s.prop traffic variable. This variable will be used to store the previous page value. Adding this variable will allow us to combine the page name with the percentage page viewed value metric.
#4. Prepare the code for implementation. This is how your final code should look like.
#5. Copy the code in the s_doPlugins() function located in the “Plugin Config” area of the s_code.js file.
(Click here to download the code file)
#6 Finally, copy the following code in “PLUGINS SECTION” area of the s_code.js file and allow SiteCatalyst to populate reports. You should see two new reports inside the Custom Traffic section.
(Click here to download the code file)
Here is a quick screen shot of how the final Custom Traffic report should look like.
Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.
SEO Implications of Google Analytics Data
Web Analysts are always cautious when it comes to data sharing. Especially, when giving the data to Google in exchange of their free tools including Google Analytics.
If you are on the same boat and worried about losing your rankings then here is a quick video from Matt Cutt’s (head of Googles webspam team). In this video, Matt debunks the myth about Google using GA data for SEO or search ranking. Quick and informative!
Web Analytics Success Story: The Omniture Way
Here is a link to one the most inspirational web analytics success stories of our times. Josh James, Omniture co-founder and now the SVP & GM of Adobe’s Omniture Business unit reveals his success secrets.
The Inc.com article explains how he went from being a small town web designer to selling Omniture to Adobe for dollar 1.8 Bn. Some of the most interesting things that you can learn from this story are -
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Josh’s first commercial when he was just 4
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Life in Tokyo as a Mormon
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His first business venture
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First stab at web analytics
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Omniture’s failures and successes
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Adobe’s Omniture Acquisition story
Truly, an inspirational story that teaches us how to never lose hope and be persistent in life. Enjoy!
