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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.

While testing out free and open source analytics platforms (and the open-source alternative to Google Analytics) we have now integrated Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics into DzineClub. The installation was fairly easy and the system is now integrated into the website. Just the website at this stage and not the blog.

We are also using Google Analytics but The reasons why we picked Piwik as well are

• Data Ownership 
  Piwik will give us more flexibility around the data gathered and exporting it. Also we can be rest assured that they don’t access or use the data.

• Plugins and Extended Functionality
  We want plugins and Extended functionality. We haven’t included anything on it yet but it’s just a matter of time
• Real Time Tracking
  We love the real-time tracking functionality that it provides. Although you can do some workarounds around Google, but its not real-time tracking. Knowing how the website is responding to a campaign within the first 5 minutes can sometimes be a key in success and failure of that campaign.
• Hosted Locally
  It is hosted locally, so it will not go down unless our server is down. Plus because of this we can be rest assured that if a provider decides to charge for a system down the track or discontinue it, we still have the upper hand.

Here are the first 5 minutes of impressions:

1. The graphs are not as fancy as Google Analytics but very usable
2. There is an amazing Adobe Air app that lets me track what is going across the site
3. I like the plugins-report. It tells me if my users are using flash, silverlight, cookies, realplayer, quicktime, windowsmedia, java, gears, director and PDF plugins

We will be testing it thoroughly and updating the blog with what we find. Let us know if there is anything you are particularly interested in finding out.

Out of all the marketing channels, email marketing still exists as one of the most popular forms of online communication. It is cheap (basically free), can leverage the data of your users easily, provides high levels of personalisation and customisation. This results in email marketing providing the highest ROI out of any marketing channels.

However all that looks and feels good is not as it is

There are however a few considerations with email marketing. As good as it can be for you to push your brand, if not done properly it can work against you.

Previously, because of its low cost of sending and easy acquisition of email addresses (someone can easily guess an email address), a lot of spam companies have abused email marketing to send users product offers, spam and fraud emails. The result of this is that your target audience is scared and thinks that most of email marketing is spam.

How to generate trust

The first step towards successful email marketing is to generate this trust with your customers. You have to be  aware of these pitfalls and make sure that when you are communicating with your users that you proactively create a trust so that going forward your subscriber gets the content that he wants, and you have a high deliverability rate. You create this trust by good and open communication, personalising the content to their needs and letting them know how you got their details.

Things to consider if you are using email marketing for the first time

• Let your subscribers know why they getting an email. Usually at the bottom of the email you would have a messages saying  “Dear XYZ, you are receiving this email because you have subscribed to receive information from ABC company by putting your email address on our website.
• Always put an unsubscribe link on Your email
• Always put a view online link on the email
• Always test your email on multiple email platforms such as Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, entourage ETC
• If your company deals in verticals where there’s a lot of Phishing, instead of asking the users to click on a link, ask them to type in the link instead.
• Make sure that your emails are tracked from the email marketing provider so that you can see what the click through rate was
• Make sure your website is tracked properly so that you can see how the e-mail traffic contributed to your online goals.

DzineClub Email Marketing Solutions

Here at DzineClub, we adhere to email marketing best practices and guidelines. If you would like to know how we can help you push your brand further and provide you with high ROI please ask us for the quotation or feel free to send us an email at info@dzineclub.com

Paid Analytics Providers:

Omniture SiteCatalyst®

Omniture SiteCatalyst® provides marketers with actionable, real-time intelligence about online strategies and marketing initiatives. SiteCatalyst helps marketers quickly identify the most profitable paths through their Web site, determine where visitors are navigating away from their site, and identify critical success metrics for online marketing campaigns. SiteCatalyst is part of the Omniture Online Marketing Suite of applications for online business optimizations.
http://www.omniture.com/en/products/online_analytics/sitecatalyst

Webtrends Analytics

Webtrends Analytics 9 delivers the industry’s most accurate picture of what’s happening on your web site, along with the data analysis and integration tools to help you turn even the largest stockpiles of online and offline records into understanding of your customers and business.
http://www.webtrends.com/Products/Analytics.aspx

Coremetrics

Use industry-leading Web analytics to understand visitor behavior and maximize return on marketing investment. Request a personal demo.
http://www.coremetrics.com/solutions/web-analytics-1.php

Unica – On Demand Web Analytics

Unica’s NetInsight is a marketing analytics solution for scalable, advanced web analytics for today’s marketer.
http://www.unica.com/products/enterprise-web-analytics.htm

Pion Tagless Web Analytics by Atomic Labs

Pion solves your toughest web analytics challenges. Capture fuller data with less overhead. Replay complete customer sessions. Assemble profiles across the cloud. See mobile web visitors. Works with all major vendors such as Omniture, Webtrends, Google Analytics and Unica.
http://new.atomiclabs.com/pion-web-analytics/index.php

Chartbeat Analytics

Chartbeat shows you real-time traffic to your website and allows you to set alerts for any downtime or spikes in traffic.
http://www.chartbeat.com/

Free Web Analytics:

Google analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Piwik – Open Source Web Anlaytics

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and more.
http://www.piwik.com

JAWStats Website Statistics

JAWStats is a free, open-source website statistics and analytics package. It runs in conjunction with AWStats and produces clear and informative charts, graphs and tables about your website visitors.
http://www.jawstats.com

GoingUp!

The smarter way to manage your Web Analytics & SEO
With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUP! combines powerful web analytics with top notch SEO tools…
http://www.goingup.com

Clicky

Used by almost 200,000 websites, Clicky Web Analytics monitors and analyses visitor traffic in real time.
http://getclicky.com/184760

Woopra

Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. Woopra delivers the richest library of visitor statistics in the industry through their innovative desktop application.
http://www.woopra.com/

We love the Live visitor Navigation Path

Yahoo! Web Analytics:

Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analysis tool that lets you see real-time user behavior on your website with powerful and flexible tools and dashboards.
http://web.analytics.yahoo.com

Microsoft adCenter Search Advertising Analytics Tool

Microsoft Search analytics solutions help you understand user engagement and online search marketing campaign performance.
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