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Everything is great about analytics but over time analytics loses its value because of these two problems

• It is hard to access
• You do not know what actions to take based on the reports

 

Making Analytics easy to access

We’ll look at how we can solve the first issue on this post, being hard to access.

Google Analytics has a great way of setting up alerts and scheduling of sending reports that makes it easy for you to access data. The problem with things being sent to you is that you are not motivated to view them. For me, my analytics reports land on my inbox once every 2 weeks and I barely look at them. What I really do to view what my visitors are doing is use custom applications that read analytics data and I can access information that is important for me through these. Here are a bunch of applications on iphone and Adobe Air that you can use to keep track of your analytics.

For this post we’ll mainly focus on free applications:

 

Google Analytics – Adobe Air applications

 



Polaris for Google Analytics

Polaris is a cross-platform desktop widget for Google Analytics. With 8 standard reports it’s the easiest way keep your data always instantly available. The rich interface and swift navigation make it a pleasure to use.
Download Polaris for Google Analytics here

 



TrakkBoard Adobe Air Application for Google Analytics

Trakkboard allows you to compare and view reports on single or multiple Google Analytics accounts form one dashboard. You do not need to log into Google Analytics and can create multiple dashboards for the data you are comparing.

Download TrakkBoard for Google Analytics here

 

Piwik – Adobe Air applications

Desktop Web Analytics for Piwik

If you use Piwik Analytics, Desktop Web Analytics for Piwik is an amazing app to visualise your analytics. You can set up multiple profiles so that you can view multiple analytics accounts. There is also a live tab where you can view what users are doing live on your website.

Download Desktop Web Analytics for Piwik here

For every order on your online ecommerce store/shopping cart, you should be tracking

On an Individual Basis

- what keyword and search engine got you the sale
- how many products did the customer look at before deciding to purchase with you
- What other products did the customer look at when purchasing that particular product
- was it a new or a repeat customer
- what affiliate website or geographical location did the customer come from
- What additional pages do they go to before making a purchase (terms and condition, support, postage etc)
- what items did they search for on the site

On a group level

- what is your most successful landing page (entry page)
- what page do you have the most exits from
- What is your overall average time on site for product pages
- What is your overall average time on site for category pages

What do you do with this data

- For keywords generating higher sales, run a SEM campaign with those keywords
- Invest in marketing in geographical locations and affiliates which are giving you sales
- If the customer looks at a higher number of products before purchase, put similar products on the product page as recommendations
- Try and convert more new visitors into customers by having information such as postage, product material, terms within easy reach.
- Fill up your inventory with products corresponding to search queries that resulted in no results
- Remove distractions once they click on checkout and make it an easy process. Only put information such as support/terms and make it so that you wont have to click or go away from the page

 
DIY Online stores and shopping carts from $750 + GST.
Includes advanced reporting and 5 minute setup.
Talk to us at info@dzineclub.com

If you are using Google Analytics and not tracking your outbound links, you might be not getting enough intelligence on your website. Here are some of the things that outbound link tracking can tell you

How many times someone has clicked on your email link (in contact us) compared to how many emails you have received.

If you have a high number of clicks, but a low number of enquiries, it might make sense to create a contact us form and use that instead.

How many times are your PDFs getting downloaded

Have you got documents in your website. If any of your PDFs have a very high demand, it might make sense to ask the user for their email address before they can download the PDF. This way you are capturing more data about your visitors

Are you sending a lot of traffic to your affiliates

You can essentially track if you are sending a lot of traffic to your affiliates and if you are, and if they are turning into sales or enquiries, you should charge commission on that traffic.

Outbound links tracking

Even your general outbound links (such as maps, review sites ) etc, you can track them to see if any of your investments are turning into action for you.

Want to get more intelligence from your website and use that to improve your business?
Talk to us info@dzineclub.com

Lately we’ve been talking to a lot of small business owners who have the same questions about improving their online business. One of the bigger ones is

How do I improve my listings?

Here is what you can do today to improve your listings:

1. Break down your website pages into smaller pages and optimise the titles on them

The more pages you have, the bigger you look and have more options of changing titles on those pages to target Search Engines. If you have a page, that is longer than 2 pages, break it down.

2. Add your website to to Business Directories

Add yourself to Free Australian Business Directories. We don’t see a lot of advantage in adding yourself to a paid one unless you are trying to be a featured business.  We recently put up a list of Australian Business Directories here:
List of Australian Business Directories

3. Add your website to vertical specific Business Directories

Do a search on Google for your vertical specific Business Directories and list your website on them. Also Vertical specific online magazines, portals allow you to add yourself as a service/product provider

4. Share links with complimenting Businesses

Find out any local businesses that compliment your business and link to their website and ask them to link back to you. What’s even better is that if they put a little blurb around your business so that visitors to their site already have an idea about what you do. This will also look good from a Search Engine like Google perspective. Make sure you do not over do this or you might actually lose your listing.

5. Start a Blog

Think of a niche topic around your business and start a blog. Start putting down your thoughts and your product/service information on the blog. Make it more informative that product-based for best results.

6. Start Search Engine Marketing

Start putting a bit of money on Search Engine Marketing. Start a Google Adwords account and start out with $100 budget for a month and see how you go.

Please note that your site needs to look good compared to other sites for you to get any leads. Do a search on Google and view the pages to see how other competitors are working.

7. Put a reporting System to track and analyse

Because doing all these things take time and in some cases money, you need to make sure that you are tracking all your efforts to make sure that you are getting results back. We recommend using Google Analytics to track to see if you are getting more visitors to the site because of these efforts.

Next time we’ll tackle the second most popular question “How do I get more customers?”

The Live Plugin for Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics gives the following information for your visitors if you enable the live plugin.

Date:
Date when the visited

Time:
Time of Visit

IP Address:
IP address of visitor

Location:
What Country the visitor came from

Internet Provider:
Who was the internet provider

Pages per visit:
How many pages they visited

New/Returning Visitor:
New Visitor or Returning Visitor

Visit duration:
How long they stayed on site

Referrer URL:
What traffic source they originated form

Keywords:
If they used a Search Engine what keywords they used

Operating System:
What Operating System they used

Browser:
What browser they were using

Plugin:
What plugins they had installed

• java
• flash
• quicktime
• realplayer
• windowsmedia
• silverlight
• gears
• pdf
• director

Traffic flow:
What actions they took on the site? what pages they started with and what pages did they flow into

Our staff have recently been certified as Google Analytics Qualified Individuals. That means that our knowledge about Analytics matches the requirements set by Google themselves.

One of the things we had to do to get the Qualification was complete Conversion University that takes you through all the ins and outs and setting up of a good Google Analytics system on any site.

The test was fairly hard with 70 questions and 90 minutes of time. We would not recommend doing the test unless you have read through the university slides at least a few times and can remember code snippets as well as set up information.

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Want to implement or improve your Google Analytics?

DzineClub can help you really dig into your visitor behavior and give you information on what to do to improve your site for better effectiveness and higher conversion. Contact us at info@dzineclub.com for a quote. Mention this blog post for a special price

Advanced Segments in Google Analytics are very powerful. This allows you to drop your website visitors into separate buckets/segments and view reports around those particular segments.

An Example of Advanced Segments in Google Analytics is

All Australian Users who have been to the site before

For DzineClub, these are high value customers for us. So we analyse this segment to see what they are doing. Some information that we can now find out about them are

- where did they originate (this will help us target more on that source so that we can generate more loyal and local customers)

- Goal Conversions (how is the goal conversion on our local and loyal visitors)

- What pages do these segments go to

An interesting fact for us was that our Australian Returning Visitors segments browsers were majority of Firefox and Chrome browsers. So we can assume that they are a bit more tech savvy and we can provide content which could be a bit technical.

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics software in the world. Google analytics/reporting tool is free and provided by Google. Google Analytics is hosted by Google. Google Analytics allows you to track multiple websites that you run/operate.  For each of those websites you can then

• Track your Visitors, their attributes and how they interacted with the site
• Track your traffic sources and where your visitors originated from or how they found your site
• Track your Content, how often it was viewed, which pages were viewed etc
• Track your Goals that you have associated with your websites
• Track ecommerce if you have a shopping cart
• Track your email marketing, Google Adwords, Search Engine Marketing Campaigns

Here are the main areas of Google Analytics

Google Analytics Dashboard

The dashboard contains all of your custom reports in one location. When you set up your account, it automatically has the main reports on the dashboard already. You can remove the ones that are not relevant to you and you can add any report you like that are more important for your particular business. Dig deeper when setting up your dashboard and compare past results on your reports.

By default on the dashboard you get the visitors report, the site usage report, visitors overview, map overlay, traffic sources overview and content overview.Visits and Site Usage Report

These reports give you a line graph of site visits for the last month. On this particular site the blue line indicates the visit for this month and the green line indicates visits for the month before that so that you can compare. On the Site Usage statistics it shows you

-  how many visits you had for the month (compared to last month)
-  how many page views did you have in total (also compared last month) and this calculates the pages/visit
-  Bounce rates (visitors only visiting one page) compared to last month
-  Average time on site compared to last month
-  percentage of new visits (visitor loyalty)

Then its followed by




Visitors Overview

How many visitors you had for the month (not compared to last month) 

• What language do your visitors use
• What network locations are they coming from
• What browsers are the using to view your site
• What screen colours are they using
• What is the visitors screen resolution while viewing your website
• What kind of plugins do they use – such as java or flash
• what internet connection speeds do they use

Map Overlay

They say a picture tells a thousand words. A quick visual guide into where the visitors are coming from. The map overlay can go deep into suburb/city level.

Traffic Sources Overview

• Where are your traffic coming from, what search engines
• What affiliate sites and sending users to your website
• What keywords they are using to find your site
• How successful are your SEM campaigns

Content Overview

• What are the top pages on your site
• Navigation analysis: how visitors found your content
• What entrance path they are using to get to your content and how are they flowing from there. So at Dzineclub, we can click on our services page and see how the traffic flows from that page > meaning what are users most interested in
• Top exit pages – where are your users dropping off

Site Search Reports

• What are your visitors searching for in the site
• What keywords are users searching on your site

Event Tracking Reports

• What custom events are you tracking
• What links they are clicking on
• Download tracking
• Events in Single page tracking

Goals Set up and Tracking

• Funnel Visualisations
  Tell how many users went to your quote, contact us page and how many completed.

Looking – this is what most people do.

They monitor their blog. They look at the latest post and see how many people viewed it, where they came from, where they found the blog.

They monitor their social media – how much something got retweeted, how many fans on facebook pages, how many followers on twitter.

Then they go about generating and sharing new content with a little thought on the back on the mind saying – generate more content and I’ll get more traffic.

Looking and Learning

What a lot of people don’t do is that they don’t learn from what they have written. They don’t learn from what they see in reports in their blogs and social media.

Individual Post Analysis

Every blog post that gets viewed should be analysed for why it was viewed. You need to know what particular search query drove the user there.  You also need to make sure that what they are searching for, they can get the answer on your blog posts.

Trend Analysis

Look at a range of posts and see why some of them are more popular than others. This should give you an idea of what your users want. Instead of now just generating new content, generate content that is more relevant to these active users.

Group your posts together and see how the groups are performing

Group or Categorize your blogs and compare how each category is performing against the other. See which categories are getting fuller and which ones are empty. Are you filling up categories for products/services that you don’t want to offer.

Flooding is not a good strategy

Unless you have a big content generation team and lots of time in your hands, flooding your blogs and social media with content is not a good strategy. Spend your time wisely choosing the topics, making sure your target market likes those topics and finds it helpful and then push them out. Once you do, look at their behavior and learn from them.

A Blog is not just about informing people, it is also about learning from them

One of the features that we love after using Piwik web analytics for DzineClub Website is the live plugin/feature. This allows us to see in live and real time where our visitors are coming from with what attributes, how long they are spending on the site and what actions they took on the website.

Using Piwik Web Analytics, we can see for example our latest visitor was from France and came through Google Search Enging searching on Social Media Marketing. He/She spent 3.5 minutes going through roughly 6 pages on the site.

This also gives us a better information on our Paid Search Engine Marketing so that we can see on an individual level, how our various Search Engine Marketing campaigns are working out for us and improve them as required. The Live plugin for Piwik – open source web analytics allows us to look at that information at that granular level.

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Interested in Analytics solutions for your websites??

DzineClub can help you strategize and implement analytics solutions (Google Analytics, Piwik Web Analytics) on your websites based on your requirements. Please send us an email at info@dzineclub.com for more information.