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.

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 5 Amazing Web Analytics and SEO Infographics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

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.

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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Google vs Bing: Advanced SEO Analytics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

#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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#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.

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 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked! is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

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 -
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Facebook vs Google & Google Analytics – Final Round?? is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

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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Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

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 -

• Josh’s first commercial when he was just 4
• Life in Tokyo as a Mormon
• His first business venture
• First stab at web analytics
• Omniture’s failures and successes
• Adobe’s Omniture Acquisition story

Truly, an inspirational story that teaches us how to never lose hope and be persistent in life. Enjoy!

Web Analytics Success Story: The Omniture Way is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Here are some of the actionable insights -

• Automate display campaign management
• Track display view through conversions
• Develop better campaign attribution model
• Effective & efficient ad spend

I have acquired special permission from Adobe to allow my blog readers to directly download this informative case study. Enjoy reading and please share your feedback, comments and tweets

Case Study: Using Web Analytics to Optimize Media buy is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

In this post, I will talk about my version of the web analytics predictions for the new year 2010.

#1. Web Analytics becomes Multi Channel Analytics

Web analytics has evolved from being a niche segment of the online marketing world to become a big piece of the web optimization pie. 2009 was the turning point for web analytics with free solutions like Google Analytics becomes more beefier and the shocking acquisition of the Omniture Inc. by Adobe systems.

Web Analytics is definitely not a standalone system anymore. I remember when Omniture co-founder Josh James announced in their 2009 summit, that “we are a web optimization company”. He was clearly trying to reposition his company from being a pureplay web analytics company to a web optimization organization.

In 2010, web analytics will play a bigger role in multi channel analytics. Offline marketing initiatives will be closely integrated with web analytics tools and systems. Partner and referral marketing will be aligned with analytics systems to provide a holistic view of the marketing & sales performance.

#2. Enterprise Analytics Companies will offer free / almost free Analytics solutions

Google Analytics entered the enterprise analytics battle with full throttle in 2009 when they announced several new advanced features. New features such as analytics intelligence, annotations, mobile reporting, and custom variables became instantly successful. Google’s strategy of leveraging the analytics guru Avinash Kaushik’s brand evangelism paid off big time.

In order to survive and thrive in 2010, enterprise analytics solution providers will offer free basic web analytics software as a value-add with a high dollar online marketing package. Companies will focus more on services side of the analytics technology to acquire new and keep existing customer until someone comes up with a highly advanced analytics solutions (prediction #4).

#3. Mobile Analytics 2.0 will become the new buzz word

In a fascinating post at the search engine land website, Joshua Odmark explained why this is the best time to focus on mobile marketing. Here are some of the staggering statistics mentioned in his post-

• 93% of the U.S adults own cell phone.
• Revenue generated from mobile channel totalled $1.6 billion in 2009.
• 5% of the top 500 online retailers offer mobile sites.

This exponential growth has already resulted in availability of mobile analytics tracking in popular web analytics tools. 2010 will be the year when mobile analytics will evolve from being a cookie based technology to pulse based real time analytics. The new analytics technology will be based on the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number. This is an absolute unique number tying each subscriber back to their service provider.

Mobile analytics 2.0 will be beyond normal pages views, videos / mobile app usage. It will rely on the capturing the unique pulse data that a mobile phone emits to the nearest cell phone tower. Commonly known as the cell phone ‘heart beat’ this pulse carries the IMSI number. The mobile phone pulse is always active even when you are not using the phone, unless the phone is switched off.

The data from each pulse is stored with the phone service provider. Imagine the possibilities of using this data for behavior analytics. This technology will allow companies to get the entire social graph of a consumer. Personal information like their favorite hang outs, best friends, favorite restaurant and lot more will be accessible. This does sound scary and it will soon become a reality even after the rising concerns about privacy.

#4. Integration of Predictive analytical tools with Web analytics

Predicting the future outcome using historical traffic data has always been a fascinating topic for me. You are not alone if your senior management asks you to prepare a web traffic and conversion forecast model. Analytics providers will soon incorporate a predictive analysis system like SPSS into the web analytics logic.

For web analysts, that will mean greater success will day to day analysis and will make them a hero in their organization. For marketer managers, that potentially means greater success with marketing campaigns and higher roi.

#5. Automated Web Analytics Integration Technologies Emerge

Integrating web analytics software packages with CRM, adserver, and sales software has always been a pain in the neck. The promise of a “seamless integration” by the vendor falls flat when the rubber hits the road. The core issue is that the web analytics providers try to sell a one for all solutions for integrations. They fail to understand the intricate details of technical infrastructure of each organization.

Analytics providers will soon develop more sophisticated integration technologies to provide truly seamless integrations. This would allow web analyst to focus on actionable insights without getting their hands dirty .

Hope you enjoyed this post. Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively. Have a happy and prosperous new year

5 Web Analytics Predictions for 2010 and Beyond is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

#1. Analytics App ($5.99)

Analytics App allows you quick access Google Analytics on iphone/ipod touch. You can instantly get a snapshot of your GA account or access detailed analytics reports. One of the most reviewed GA app, analytics app allows you to create custom reports on the fly from within the app itself.

#2. HootSuite ($1.99)

Click here to view the embedded video.

After the exponential success of their web based application, Hootsuite recently launched the Hootsuite iPhone app. The iphone app is packed with same Hootsuite features like scheduling tweets, twitter list access, Twitter analytics and lot more.

#3. Omniture SiteCatalyst (Free for Omniture SiteCat Customers)

If you are an enterprise analytics evangelist and love SiteCatalyst then SiteCatalyst iPhone app is a perfect fit. The app allows you to access SiteCatalyst reports and dashboards on the go. You can also access mobile analytics data from the sitecat app. The only drawback is the app does not displays advanced graphs like funnel visualization and geo segments.

#4. Ego App ($1.99)

One of the coolest features of the Ego app is the ability to view the Feedburner statistics. The app displays statistics for several other services including Google Analytics, Twitter and Vimeo.

#4. SEM Calculator (Free)

SEM calculator has several complex paid search analytics calculations built into one app. Web Analyst often find themselves at the mercy of the SEM vendor for ppc calculations. This app increases analyst productivity by providing multiple calculations at your fingertip. When you are on the road or in a meeting, you can instantly calculate CPM, CPA, and other ppc campaign metrics.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Email me if you have any questions. Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Step#1. Analytics Intelligence (AI)

Your first step is to prepare yourself for future incidence and web traffic/conversion related issues. Google Analytics recently launched automatic intelligence alert feature. Using statistical significance analysis, the analytics system calculates and creates alerts in the “Intelligence reports” if data is out of trend.

You can also create custom alerts and setup auto email functionality when the alert is triggered. Here is a quick video on how to setup automatic and custom alerts using Google analytics intelligence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Omniture Sitecatalyt offers custom alert feature with every report. Omniture’s alert feature is more advanced because it can send you email and text messages to your cell phone.

Step#2. Prepare control limit graph

Website traffic/conversion/bounce rate can fluctuate due to multiple uncontrollable environmental factors. You could see a spike in traffic due to a press release from top competitor or you could see a drop in conversion due to technical issues. Whatever the case is, it is your job as web analyst to identify a true trend and eliminate noise from data.

To eliminate noise, we will apply statistical control limits to visits data for the last 90 days. This will allow us to identify a true drop in traffic.

Calculate your website visits upper control limit (UCL) and lower control limit (LCL) using control chart calculator.

Sample size = 90

Prepare a graph for your website visit with the control limits data. In my previous post I explained how to create the control limits graph.

The sample graph below clearly indicates that the traffic has been dropping consistently since week 3. This requires immediate segmentation of data to find out the “suspect” channel.

Step#3. Create custom segments

By default, Google analytics does not offer email, banner or other campaign segments. Here is a quick video to create custom segments in Google Analytics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Omniture Sitecatalyst offers paid search reporting feature. If this feature is not enabled then you can enable this feature from “Report Suite Manager”.

I always use Omniture Discover because you can create custom segments on the fly and perform detailed analysis.

After creating custom segments, collect the traffic data from all channels and plot a multi channel line graph in excel using weekly buckets.

The line graph will reveal the exact cause of the traffic drop. In the sample graph above, notice how total website traffic is trending closely to the paid search visits and indicating that the paid search is the cause of the drop in traffic.

Once you identify the channel it will be easier to conduct further analysis for that particular channel.

Step#4. Channel Segment analysis

Here are the questions you need to ask in order to find and fix the traffic issue with respective channels.

Paid search

a. Has there been a change to the paid search budget?

b. Has there been a change to how the budget is allocated? (day parting, weekday/weekend parting, holiday budget)

c. Are you being penalized by Google? (quality score issues, ad copy, brand keywords)

d. Have you been aggressively outbid by your competitor? (bid adjustment, keyword level bidding)

Organic search

a. Has there been a big drop in the number of pages indexed in Google? ( find the exact number of pages by using site:yoursitename.com command in Google search. You can contact Google for reconsideration of the dropped pages and in most cases they will accept your request)

b. Have you seen a big drop in ranking for your head keywords?

c. Have you recently made changes to your site linking structure?

d. Are currently involved in unethical link building practices? (please remove all the unethical and unnatural links to your website as soon as you can)

Referring Site

a. Identify the biggest traffic driving referral site and find out if they recently updated their site and missed your link.

b. Have you annoyed your social media follows by a negative comment?

Direct Traffic

a. Social media activities can influence your direct traffic.

b. Has there been a negative press about your company?

c. Do you see a drop in brand term keywords in paid and organic search?

Hope you enjoyed this post. Email me if you have any questions. Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

Troubleshooting Website Traffic drop with Web Analytics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog