All posts in website analytics

Piwi goals

It’s not only the black hat and the paranoid who are increasingly wary of Google’s privacy issues. Google Analytics has come under attack repeatedly in Europe. Recently, German government officials even threatened to ​declare Google Analytics illegal.

While I consider Google Analytics a minor threat to privacy compared to other Google products and services (like Doubleclick, Google toolbar or Google Chrome), I think there is still room for improvement.

These and other reasons made me revisit Piwik, the open source, self-hosted Google Analytics alternative.

It’s a German project on top of that, so the solution is already there. I was testing Piwik two years ago in an early beta stage. Now it’s available in version 1.1.1 and already it’s quite a powerful web analytics solution.

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Do you measure keyword temperature to improve your SEO? You don’t? Well what about keyword density? Also there are other exotic metrics​ to fool you into believing you do something for your site’s SEO. Sounds weird? Then read on. The story starts like this:

In recent days I’ve been haunted by the ghastly specters of the past.

In several cases I’ve had to do with metrics long gone or which weren’t ever meaningful in the first place. There seems to be a need for simplistic metrics that can make complex issues appear straightforward and clear.

Image by Westside Shooter.

Google Instant is the talk of the town not only in the SEO industry. While some people still hope SEO will go away most experts agree that SEO is either just changing a bit or now more important than ever due to the recent changes. So I won’t list most of the usual “SEO is not dead” posts here as I expect you to know that. I’ll focus on what the instant search results will mean for SEO, SEM and analytics in reality.

Check out the following 40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & analytics resources list. Btw. The last item is probably the best one.

Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don’t know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web.

Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics.

It’s about

  • usability
  • conversions
  • branding

among others.

Crossroads by Captain DJ.

Getting targeted traffic for a website is just the first step in a thorough SEO process. What comes next? Landing page optimization or conversion (rate) optimization/CRO follows. After all you want the visitors you get to stay on your site and perform the desired action (like ordering or subscribing).

One of the foremost ways to optimize landing pages for more conversions is A/B split testing

sometimes also referred to as simply AB testing. The concept is pretty simple. In the most basic set up you show version A of a page to half of your visitors while in the other half will see version B.

Of course in reality it’s a bit more complex.

Use Google Analytics custom segments to audit and improve search marketing

Anyone who has ever reviewed the keywords attracting visitors to a site will have seen that brand search terms usually dominate, often accounting for more than 50% of search related visits for well-known brands.

Every site has associated brands, but to paraphrase Morrisey, some brands are biggger than others. For these, isolating brand search is essential if you’re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.

It follows that it’s futile to try to review and improve search engine marketing without taking brand phrases into account, but that’s the default for the less than savvy. For marketers, reviewing their analytics it’s easy to understand since the analytics tool doesn’t readily isolate brand and non-brand phrases.

Ever since Google Webmaster Tools added the so called “search queries” data I’ve become a huge fan of them. I’ve listed the 10 Google SEO tools everybody should use in the past but to be honest I focus on three of them right now Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for SEO inspiration. The wealth of information GWB offers is like a goldmine.

The tool-set has grown over the years steadily but I was neglecting it. By now there are numerous ways to use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO. Again I will focus on three of them here and explain how to use GWB for

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Link Building
  3. CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization

This list is not meant for the average small business owner. These 46 CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization resources require web design, SEO and social media experts to implement, use or even understand them.

How do you find out whether your web designer, SEO or social media consultant or company has enough expertise to deal with them?

  • In case your web designer thinks web design is about fancy graphics, flashy animations and cool homepages s/he isn’t an expert.
  • In case your SEO consultant speaks about meta tags, PageRank and keyword density all the time s/he isn’t an expert.
  • In case your social media expert advises you to gain more Twitter followers using an autopilot tool, to submit your site to hundreds of social media sites or has no flagship blog s/he isn’t an expert either.

These people won’t be able to make proper use of these resources.

In contrast highly skilled specialists of all the three industries, web design, SEO and social media speak about conversions and ROI all the time.

Typical Twitter user: Well educated, high income, uses it for marketing and business purposes. Source.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. This time I’ll tell you something about statistics. I love statistics. Statistics make business sense. So I’m eagerly studying all kinds of statistics, especially those dealing with social media and Twitter in particular.

This time a statistic mentioned in a respectable business publication made me cringe though. It says that 25% of [American] Twitter users are black while only 12% of the US population is black. So basically this statistic is saying:

Help!!! Twitter is full of black people!

A year ago we’ve published a list of 30+ Google Analytics tools and resources. It was one of our most successful posts ever. The list has been even nominated for a SEMMY award. I’m not sure I can top that but I can provide a new list of 30+ more Google Analytics tools, apps, tweaks and other resources.

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