for my clients
Thu, Apr 22, 2010 @ 8:42am | by Cindy
Not everyone comes through your front door. A landing page is the first page a visitor encounters on your website, how that visitor enters your site. We typically expect this to be the home page, and most often it is. Why?
- It's the shortest address for someone to remember and type in.
- It's the address we advertise.
- It's typically where other sites link to on your site.
- It's where your visitors expect to find the latest news.
There are also unique landing pages created for advertising campaigns, the ones with that short and un-linked URL as discussed earlier.
But there's more you can learn from your top landing pages. Using Google Analytics, go to the Content section, then view your Top Landing Pages. Using the Advanced Segment drop down at the top of the page, check the boxes for All Visitors, Returning Visitors and Search Traffic. It will now display not only the total number (All Visitors), but also the proportion of visitors who were returning to your site. If they are repeat visitors returning to a particular page, they may have that page bookmarked. (Remember, we're looking at the first page a person sees on your site in unique visitor sessions, not how many times a visitor looked at that page in one session.) We don't know for sure how they arrived at this page, but we know it is important enough for them to know how to get to this page directly. What does that tell you about these pages? Perhaps you should pull the most current news/content from the top landing pages and include it on your home page.
Now analyze the search traffic segment. This should correlate with your top search phrases as mentioned earlier. Again, this identifies what people are looking for, and what they expect to find the most interest of on your site.
You'll also notice a column about Bounce Rates. A "bounce" is defined as a single page visit. For your returning visitors who went directly to this page, a high bounce rate isn't uncommon. They came to this page because they knew that was where the information they wanted was located. They found it, they left. It's disappointing they didn't spend more time on the site, but not entirely unexpected. Search engine traffic tells us more. If someone is using a search engine, they may not be familiar with your site. If they landed on a page and then left your site without looking around at other pages, this is where you'll want to focus some effort. You want visitors to explore your site if they are unfamiliar with you, so look at the top landing pages by search traffic, and if they have a high bounce rate, add elements to those pages that cause your visitors to explore further. Add cross-marketing features ("people who were interested in this item also found these useful"), coupons, promotions, and obvious links to related pages. You may need to improve your navigation links on these pages: are they difficult to see?
Wed, Apr 21, 2010 @ 10:39am | by Cindy
Have you ever wondered what keywords and phrases your visitors are searching with? Your website statistics will tell you, mostly. If you're using Google Analytics, look at the Traffic Sources; here you'll find a list of keywords and phrases most commonly used to send visitors to your site, along with their popularity.
If most of your keywords are variations on your name or business name, you can assume those visitors were most likely looking for you but couldn't remember your web address.
What about missing keywords? If the keywords used are a good start but there are other appropriate search terms that aren't making that connection, those terms are most likely being searched on but aren't bringing up your site. At this point you need to let your webmaster know which terms aren't working that should be, and find ways to get them on your site. More on how to do this in a future post.
Another way to use your traffic sources data is to see what your visitors are looking for. For instance, the primary purpose of this blog currently is to share my knowledge with my clients and to answer questions they frequently have. However I've also blogged about my iMac, and I'm finding that's what people are searching on. That's not necessarily a problem as my clients are given the direct URL to my site and therefor shouldn't be using search engines, but I am finding it quite interesting how many people are viewing my iMac saga as well, based on their "iMac" search words.
Tue, Apr 20, 2010 @ 8:39am | by Cindy
Another very useful piece of information you can glean from your website statistics is how visitors are finding your site. For instance, are they typing the web address in directly, or finding it via a search engine or some other site? This data is useful because you can track which sites refer traffic.
If you're using Google Analytics, all of this and more can be found in the Traffic Sources section. On the overview page is a simplified pie chart displaying Direct Traffic (those who typed in your address or clicked on a bookmark/favorite), Searc Engine traffic, and other Referring Sites. This last group contains visitors who came by clicking on a link to your site from some non-search engine site, such as a directory, a colleague's site, Facebook, etc. Please note Twitter is often not listed here due to the funky way they shorten URL's. I'll write more about this in a future post, it's enough for now to know that Twitter links often appear in the "Direct" category, so don't be frustrated if you don't see them listed as highly as you expect.
Do you pay for advertising on other websites? You don't need to rely on their honesty in reporting, you can look at your own referring sites to verify the number of times a visitor came from that website to yours. But wait, there's more! By creating an advanced segment that filters your logs to only analyze visitors from that particular source, you can profile the traffic that's coming from your paid advertising on a particular site. You can now see if they are spending quality time on your website, how many pages they view, which pages are the most popular, and even if they follow through with a purchase or other online call-to-action. This gives you a good indicator of whether you're spending your online advertising budget in a worthwhile marketing campaign. Pretty nifty, eh?
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 8:46am | by Cindy
My favorite part of Google Analytics is looking at what they can tell me about my site visitors. (If you're unsure what constitutes a "visit" in GA, refer back to this post here first.) Each time you load a web page in your browser by visiting that site, the logs track a tremendous amount of information about you. For instance, the IP address of your computer isn't likely to change while you're surfing the web, and Google looks to see all the pages you visit in one session. That information is then analyzed to display a total number of visits (sessions), as well as the number of unique visits - new visitors vs. repeat visitors. They also identify the average number of pages viewed per visit, and the average amount of time spent on a website.
Some useful statistics for your webmaster are covered in the Technical Profile. This part covers browsers and operating systems used, screen resolutions, Flash versions, even connection speeds of your visitors. This helps your webmaster decide what settings are optimal for your visitors. For instance, aside from 4 visits from an iPhone this past month, I know that 99.4% of my visitors were using monitors that could view pages a minimum of 1024 pixels wide, confirming my choice of designing this site to use a width of 1000 pixels. The connection speeds are important for sites with multimedia, to ensure that your visitors can quickly access your audio and video and even interactive/Flash files. You might think your 10 minute video is of vital importance, but if the majority of your visitors are still on dial-up, chances are they're getting frustrated waiting for your video to load and are leaving your site.
My absolute favorite part of the Visitor analysis is the Map Overlay, a geographic map identifying where your site visitors are located. This usually confirms what you expect, for instance my school's site visitors are mostly (85%) from the immediate area. But we also had visitors from 39 other states, the two with the most are neighboring states. So we can conjecture those are families who may be moving to the area and are looking for a good school for their children. I had a number of Canadians look at my business site this past month, and I'm working on a project with some Canadian team members. Their locations correlate to some of my Canadian site visitors. This is where it gets fun, making reasonable guesses as to who is actually looking at your website.
Tue, Apr 13, 2010 @ 8:41am | by Cindy
So you're looking at the past month's worth of data, seeing a graph of how many pages were viewed each day. What does it all mean? There are lots of interesting facts you can learn from your data which will help you improve your marketing plan.
Look for weekly patterns. Perhaps the majority of your visits happen Monday - Friday, but you don't get many pages viewed on the weekends. This tells you your visitors are looking during the weekdays, probably while at work (but we'll verify this later). Do most of your visits happen on a Monday? If you send out a weekly or monthly email/newsletter, be sure you send it on Monday when your customers are thinking about you, instead of on the weekend when they're away from email, as your newsletter will get buried in all the messages they receive over the weekend.
Want to know more about when they're looking? You can easily create a custom report in Google Analytics to show what time most people are looking at your site. On the left, click "Custom Reports" (you may not be able to do this if someone else set up your website reporting, just ask your webmaster to do this for you.) In the Metrics block on the left, look under Site Usage and drag Pageviews over to the first dotted metric box. In the Dimensions block under Visitors, drag Hour Of The Day to the first dotted dimension block, and Create Report. Now based on the timeline selected (a month by default, but you could select just one day if you wanted to look at a particular day), you can now see which hours of the day your site receives the most traffic. Google uses a 24 hour clock, 08:00 is 8am, while 23:00 is 11pm. Are your visitors looking at your site during working hours, or when they're at home? What does this likely mean about who your visitors are and what they're looking for?
Look at spikes in your daily pages viewed. Can you correlate an event to a particular spike? Maybe your newsletter or a brief email went out on a certain day. Softer spikes over several days may correlate to a mailing. Did you make a big announcement on a particular day? Do you receive more visits leading up to an event at your facility? Filter your data to show only for a particular day/date range of one of your spikes, then look at the top pages viewed for that timeframe. Are they the same top pages as you see each month, or were they looking at something in particular? Look at the search phrases for that time as well - were your visitors looking for something in particular, and does that correlate with the pages viewed the most?
Look at monthly trends. You can set GA to show you everything from the past year, and view it by month instead of day. Some months will have more pages viewed than other months - does this correlate to sales? If you promote outdoor activities, your winter months likely have less visitors, does the data reflect this? Why or why not?
Mon, Apr 12, 2010 @ 8:09am | by Cindy
Have you ever been using your computer, and become aware that things aren't quite right? Perhaps your web browser like Internet Explorer isn't working quite right, or perhaps it's your email. Maybe your computer starts freezing up or crashing and you're not sure why. Or worse, perhaps you now obviously have a virus; this could be manifested by male enhancement or pornographic ads appearing all over your computer (yes, it can happen). There's an easy solution.
From your start menu on Windows XP (hopefully it's a similar process on Vista and Windows 7), go to "Help and Support," then choose "Undo changes to your computer with System Restore." You can also get to this from the Start Menu >> Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> System Restore. Select "Restore my computer to an earlier time" and follow the directions from there out. I usually select a restore date about a week earlier if possible. Before running this you'll want to save any open work and close down all your open applications. Have patience while it restores and reboots, it takes several minutes.
Restoring your system will not affect any of your data (at least it's not supposed to, and never has for me). Your email, your pictures, music and movies you've downloaded, documents, presentations, etc. - that will all remain untouched. However if you have installed any applications since the restore date you selected, you will need to reinstall that software. This is a handy way to quickly recover your computer from virus attacks, or even periodically Windows updates that don't work as they're supposed to.
Thu, Apr 8, 2010 @ 9:49am | by Cindy
BACKUPS: If any of you have tried to log on to my website in the past 24 hours and noticed a bunch of gobbledy-gook on my site, you'll know that even well-managed sites can crash. In this case, it doesn't appear to be the work of malicious attackers or even a virus, it was just a corrupt database. Several tables were corrupted, much in the same way that random holes may appear in your clothes, or unidentified bruises on your legs. It's just one of those things that happens. Thankfully with technology, we can create automated scripts to make backups of databases and files on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It's not something you typically think about until you need it. As a professional, I've needed it enough that I set all my clients' sites and databases to backup frequently.
CAPTCHA: You've seen them, although you may not know what they're called. Captchas are those codes of random numbers and letters, typically in a distorted font that are difficult to read; the user must enter the corresponding letters and numbers into a form field before the form can be submitted. If you try to post a comment to this blog, you'll see one of these at the end of the form. The concept is that a human can interpret the letters and numbers, but a computer cannot. In my case, this was a very good thing! In the past 24 hours, I've had 59 attempts from "bots" to spam my site comments, and the captcha form stopped every one of them. Looking further back through the logs, it looks like my site receives this amount of attempts each day.
Spammers write computer scripts that search websites and automatically submit their spam message to any form they can find, such as email forms and comments. They include links in the spam message that link back to their sites, thus convincing Google that your site links to theirs and consequently increases their page ranking in the search engine. Good for them, bad for you because you end up with all sorts of male enhancement ads on your site. If you receive these spam messages via email from your website or on your website in the form of comments, ask your webmaster to install a captcha form!
Wed, Apr 7, 2010 @ 8:17am | by Cindy
You've likely heard of a "Landing Page" before, but do you know what it is? At its most generic level, it simply means the first page that people "land on" when they visit your site. This is most often the home page, but not always. If your site is fully indexed in a search engine, people may click from the search engine to one of your lower-level pages (not the top-level home page). This is why it's so important to have a navigation menu on all pages of your site, in case someone lands on a lower-level page, you want to make it easy to find out more information about your organization.
Unique Landing Pages are often used in marketing plans to measure ROI (return on investment). If you have an ad in a magazine, the yellow pages, on the radio, or even on another website, you can create a unique landing page as the call to action. Thus, when someone sees, hears or clicks from your ad, they go to yoursite.com/landing-page, giving you the ability to measure the visits to that particular page. For instance, let's say I place an ad in the Yellow Pages of the phone book. I can include in the ad, "For a special discount coupon, visit http://www.reevesdigital.com/yellow-pages." On my site, I create that landing page, but I don't put in any links to it from anywhere else on the site. I don't want anyone to accidentally stumble on to that page, I want them to get there only because they saw the ad in the phone book. Then I can measure the statistics on this one page alone, seeing just how effective it was of the course of the year. Then this tells me whether I should invest in another yellow pages ad the next year, or if I should spend my advertisting budget elsewhere. Furthermore, by including a coupon on this page, I can see not only how effective my yellow pages ad was in getting people to my site, but also how effective my web page was in converting them into a customer by how many people redeem the coupon. Over time you can tweak the message and design on your website to see what it takes to draw in more customers.
Google Analytics makes it easy to evaluate your top landing pages. If you have a unique landing page you want to evaluate, you can create an advanced segment to analyze. If you're just interested in seeing which pages are landed on first the most frequently, you can look under Content >> Top Landing Pages. This is useful in understanding which pages your customers find most useful because they either bookmark them (add them to their favorites) or it's what they're searching for and finding in the search engines.
Tue, Apr 6, 2010 @ 8:37am | by Cindy
If you're looking at your site statistics via Google Analytics, you'll notice in addition to page views, another common segmentation of your stats are "visits" and "visitors". This is very useful when trying to understand your customers and their loyalty to your business and website. Google defines them as,
Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.
The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.
The statistic "Pages/Visit" is the simple mathematical calculation of your total number of pages viewed divided by the number of visits or sessions. If your number here is under 2, then most people are either a) finding the information they need on your landing page - typically your home page, b) they are frustrated by your site and don't click around to another page, or c) found your site by accident via inappropriate keywords and didn't want to see your site at all. If your number is higher, then your site visitors are staying on your site, enticed by the home page to click to another page or more to get the information they need.
The statistic "% New Visits" gives you a good idea of how often your customers are returning to your site within the given timeframe (by default one month). A high percentage here means a lot of new people are coming to your site each month, whereas a low number would indicate your existing customers are returning to your website repeatedly.
Depending on the size of your site and your goals, you'll need to interpret these numbers to decide if your site is effective. This is one of the services I offer my clients, as well as periodically evaluating what we may need to change on your site to make it more effective.
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 10:26am | by Cindy
When we first started looking at website statistics, everyone liked to compare how many hits they received. There was frequent puffing of the chest when you could proudly state that your site received 10,000 hits last month, when a friend or competitor's site perhaps only received 2,000. Little did most people realize how useless that statistic truly is.
A "hit" is recorded every time a user or search engine requests a file from your web server. A web page counts as one hit. So does an image, a script, a style sheet, or anything else that may be called during the request. So for instance this page that you're looking at, at the time of this writing has the one page, 8 images, 1 object, 4 scripts and 9 style sheets; each one of these files is requested from the server and recorded as a unique hit when you look at the page, resulting in not 1 hit but 23 hits. If all you want to do is increase the number of hits, add some transparent images on each web page and your numbers will skyrocket.
A much more useful statistic is to look at the number of pages viewed on your site. This returns just the one hit on the actual page file, and doesn't worry about how many times the related images on your server are viewed, or how many times a script was loaded. There may be reasons to look at those numbers at some point, but in general it's the "page views" that you want to evaluate.
Google Analytics only records pages viewed, not such information as other files downloaded; furthermore, you can choose which pages you want to record. GA only records information about the pages in which you insert their Javascript. This is useful if your site has protected or administrative sections that aren't relevant to learning about your site visitors.
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