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Top 5 Amazing Web Analytics and SEO Infographics

Sameer — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:54:04 +0000

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.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps
Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports

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

Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked!

Sameer — Sat, 15 May 2010 20:39:34 +0000

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.

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.

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

Web Analytics Scan 2.0: Instantly Check Web Analytics Tag Errors

Sameer — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:24:01 +0000

Web Analytics has completely transformed on how we look at website performance measurement. Web metrics like bounce rate, page views and time on site have become the key focus of the web measurement vocabulary.

Even though there has been a fairly large amount of technological updates in the web analytics industry, the basis of the technology is still the good old java tag. Missing the java tag one or more pages of your website will result in loss of tracking and potentially impact your marketing dollars and profit.

Here are some of the most common reasons on why one or more pages on your site might be missing java code -

1. Added new page/pages

2. Updated existing page

3. Include file is corrupt

4. Added a new site section

5. Infrastructure changes including addition of a new web content management system.

Introducing Web Analytics Health Scan 2.0

Web analytics health scan is a powerful web based tool that allows you to quickly scan your website and identify the pages with missing web analytics tag. Web analytics health scan currently supports top 5 web analytics solutions including Google Analytics, Omniture, Yahoo Analytics, Coremetrics and Web Trends all in just one tool. The best part is there is no need for any code installation, plugins or downloads and did I mention it is completely free!

Watch this 28 second video to see how it works and continue reading this blog post to find out how to use the web based tool.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is how you can instantly scan your website and identify error pages-

1. Go to WebAnalyticsHealthCheck.com

2. Enter your domain in the box.
3. Select your web analytics solution from the drop down menu.
4. Hit Enter.

Within seconds, the web analytics health check scanner will scan your web pages and report back all the error pages. You can either wait until the scan is completed and download the excel report, or you can have the report delivered to you or your developer by email.

Once you have the report you can easily fix the error pages and gain back web tracking.

I hope you will find this tool useful. Please share your thoughts, insights and comments so we can make further improvements to this tool.

Web Analytics Scan 2.0: Instantly Check Web Analytics Tag Errors is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

5 Tips for Negotiating A Winning Web Analytics Contract

Sameer — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:36:05 +0000

If you are a web analytics manager or a senior web analyst then one of your job responsibilities is to negotiate analytics contracts. Like any other technology vendor contracts, the web analytics contract contains a multiple level of intricacies. Some of the technical jargons make it really hard to sign a good contract.

In this post, I am going to provide 5 powerful tips to pull a winning contract and become a hero in your organization. These tips are time tested and proven to work. I have personally used them to significantly reduce our enterprise analytics software cost and get more value add services on top of it.

#1. Request for Proposal (RFP) to multiple vendors

Always make sure to send out the request for proposal to multiple vendors. Getting multiple vendors to compete with each other puts you in the driver seat of negotiating the contract. You can use one contract to negotiate the terms on others. I would even inform each vendor that you have sent out RFPs to multiple vendors.

#2. Server calls

Even if you are a killer ninja negotiator, and you feel you have negotiated a low price contract for your organization. This still does not guarantee you will be paying less.

One of the most important line items of the web analytics contracts is the annual server calls volume. Your analytics account manager / sales rep may try to convince you for a lower server call volume so don’t book yourself weak. I use a “5x rule of thumb” to calculate the forecasted server calls volume because it allows you to scale easily. Here is the formula -

New Contract Annual Server Call Volume =

Total server calls for the highest traffic month in last three years (traffic from all tagged sections of your website and campaigns) x 5 x 12

You could definitely go higher than 5x multiple, but you should never go lower than that.

#3. Length of the contract

The length of the contract is another lever that your vendor could use to charge more money. As a best practice you should always sign only a 12 month long contract, unless it’s free.

If you are concerned that you could lose money if the web analytics package prices go up then let me assure you that the prices of basic web analytics software are forecasted to go down. The reason behind is the increase in competition and exponential growth of the free Google Analytics solution.

Additionally, short term contracts allow you to shop around for better and more powerful solutions.

#4. Support hours

This is the most interesting piece of your analytics contract. You could pay a ton of money unknowingly for small issues like an account reset or lost password. Always negotiate to get free support if not then atleast try to get 10 hours of free support each month.

#5. Implementation & User Training

Most enterprise level analytics implementation and integrations are complicated. Your analytics vendor may charge you extra for new integrations or implementations. Always ask your vendor to train your web developers on web analytics implementations.

Lastly, negotiate a free live training package for all the web analyst in your organization.

In most medium to large business organizations, contract negotiation is done by procurement. If this applies to your organization then you can provide these tips to your procurement manager.

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

Here is a list of other helpful blog posts -
5 Web Analytics Predictions for 2010 and Beyond
Troubleshooting Website Traffic drop with Web Analytics
Top 5 Coolest Web Analytics iPhone Apps

5 Tips for Negotiating A Winning Web Analytics Contract is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close

Sameer — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:15:43 +0000

Here is the most comprehensive list of all the top posts from my blog and other popular web analytics blogs on the internet. These are organized in order to give you a complete start to end training on how to perform web analysis like a pro on your website to improve conversion, reduce bounce rate and provide exceptional user experience.

Enjoy !

Getting started

1. What is web analytics?

2. Benefits of web analytics for small business.

3. How to install free Google Analytics solution on your website in 60 seconds?

4. Why bounce rate is the most important metric ever?

5. Most basic metrics of all: Visits & Visitors.

6. Top 5 web analytics reports.

7. Cookies: Fundamental of web analytics tracking.

Intermediate

1. Perform expert web analysis in 5 minutes.

2. Concept of daily, weekly, monthly unique visitors.