Web Analytics Consultant | Webanalytics Expert Chennai India

Search Analytics and Google Https | Future of Web Analytics is in ?

2010-06-07T04:32:00.000-07:00

Google's new secure search engine https://www.google.com to hinder Search Analytics.

The search query and referrals details would be blind to all web analytics tools when an users searches through https://www.google.com. This critical piece vital information enlightening marketers would be lost.....for users arriving at your website through https://www.google.com.. Read More Search Analytics and Google Https

Google Analytics Certification Value and Merits Compared to Omniture Sitecatalyst / Web Trends / Core Metrics

2010-03-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

Good news on the web analytics front!

My friends Prateesh and Muthalagu working for Comodo Security Solutions have been awarded Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) Certification today. Considering the growth of Google analytics as an Enterprise class web analytics tool and it ability to compete with Omniture Sitecatalyst / Web Trends / Core Metrics, this is a honorable achievement.

Google Analytics Certification of Muthu

Google Analytics Certification of Prateesh

Congrats - Prateesh and Muthalagu!

Major Drawback of Google Analytics when Compared with Omniture and CoreMetrics

2010-02-23T21:21:00.000-08:00

Google analytics has a major drawback on its ecommerce reporting part. It always gives credit to the keywords or referrals used by people last time when they visited the website.

This is a major issue because the ultimate objective of an ecommerce site is sales. Knowing the keywords and referring sources that reasoned the sales is the foremost valuable thing for a website owner, a great clue for repeating the sales.

Websites using Google analytics will get only the keywords and referring sources used by people who purchased the product, the last time they visited the website.. Can Google Analytics maintain it Enterprise Class here also ? YES IT CAN. Here is a way to track the first click with Google analytics..thanks to Patrick Altoft, Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3 for providing a simple hack to help Google Analytics maintain its high standards against Omniture and CoreMetrics.

Read the full post here..
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3.

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3.

Google Analytics Discussions on Important topics in a Video

2010-02-23T20:45:00.000-08:00

Avoid spammed pageviews in Google Analytics
Gather ecommerce tracking variables on 3rd party shopping carts.
Issues popping up on maintaining campaign information on 3rd party shopping carts.
Competitors links showing up in your referring sources
Locate Singapore in map overlay of Google Analytics
View referring URLs in the campaign report
Google Analytics $Index metric.
Event tracking and bounce rate

Watch the video presentation on all the above mentioned important topics in Google Analytics.

US Federal Government Approves Google Analytics | Best Recognition for the Great Enterprise Tool (FREE)

2010-02-18T03:49:00.000-08:00

Google Analytics gets the best recognition for the greatest insights it can shower to enhance the performance of websites. GOOGLE ANALYTICS HAS WON A PLACE IN US FEDERAL GOVERMENT WEBSITE in its apps.gov web site.

apps.gov web site is a place where US government agencies and services could find approved cloud computing applications.

Congrats Google Analytics Team for adding another feather to your cap!

Free Enterprise Web Analytics Tool Google Analytics vs Ominiture Site Catalyst | WebTrends | ClickTracks

2010-02-17T01:29:00.000-08:00

Google Analytics is a free enterprise class web analytics tool. Every page in the website has to be tagged with the javascript code to track and improve the performance of websites.

Benefits:

Excellent tool to track and report on all visitor interactions.
- Know what your visitors are doing and understand their behaviour
- Gather knowledge on improving your website interms of design, navigation, content, relevancy etc.
- Track the performance of your marketing campaigns
- Track PPC campaigns (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Adcenter, Miva etc.)
- Track conversions to find ways for improvement
- Increase ROI with the great insights provided by the tool

Features:

- Crystal clear geographic reports
- Tracking internal site search
- Automatic Adwords integration by turning on 'Auto Taggin' in Google Adwords account
- Paid and free keywords performance
- Tracking the performance of marketing campaigns.
- Integration with Adsense
- Track up to 20 goals in a single profile
- Ecommerce reporting
- Tracking Mobile visitors
- Tracking performance of videos (Event Tracking)
- Flash tracking
- Tracking Social network applications
- Custom dashboards report
- Advanced segmentation
- Custom report
- Intelligence alerts
- Multi-dimensional analysis
- Funnel visualization
- Click stream analytics via navigational summary
- Entrance path analysis
- Referral sources report
- Tracking clicks on buttons,links,banners,images,videos,flash etc.
- Tracking form pages
- Hourly campaign performance
- Hourly keyword performance
- Track multiple sub-domains in a single profile
- Track multiple domains in a single profile
- Track multiple domains and sub-domains in a single profile
- Identify the best performing pages
- Identify poorly performing pages
- Click heat mapping via Site overlay
- Email campaign tracking
- Banner campaign tracking
- Compare your websites performance with other websites in the Internet
- Integration of Google Website optimizer to carry out A/B testing and Multi-variate testing
- ABOVE ALL- ABILITY TO CUSTOMIZE THE CODE TO GET THE DATA YOU REQUIRE

Security of your data:

Google stores all your data in their server. The data would never be disclosed / shared with anyone, Google assures this! Since World-class tool is offered for free why to pay big bucks to subsribe for Omniture site catalyst / Web Trends / ClickTracks which do not have more features than the mighty Free Google Analytics.

But please note that none of the web analytics tools are error free.

Tagging Email Campaign Links for Measuring the Success of the Campaign

2009-03-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

Do you send out email campaigns regularly? Are you able to track the effectiveness of your email campaigns?

If your answer is 'Yes' for the first question and 'No' for the second question.. then you would find this post helpful.

Tagging email campaigns links would supply you with the statistics of visitors activities after they enter you web pages by following the link in your email campaign. Campaign tags can be created very easily using Google's URL builder tool and tracking the visitor stats can be done using Google analytics, a free and powerful web analytics tool.

Understand your email campaign prospects behavior using Google Analytics.

Using email marketing solutions like Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, VerticalResponse and AWeber will automatically tag your campaign links.

Remove Duplicates Created by Tracking Parameters Using Canonical URL Tag

2009-03-07T07:30:00.000-08:00

Using tracking parameters is an excellent way for tracking visitors from paid advertisements.

Tracking parameters facilitates distinction of paid advertisements from other traffic sources. But an issue could pop up anytime while using these parameters in the form of search engine indexing both your urls which includes your original url as well. This is as if you are having a duplicate url for your main url.

Putting a 301 redirect from duplicate url to original url would eliminate your chances of tracking the paid advertisements. So what are you going to do now? Don't worry there is way to fix this issue. Adding a canonical url tag to your duplicate page by specifying the original url can wipe of all your concerns.

By including a canonical url tag you are informing the search engines about your original url. Search engines not only leave out the duplicate page from its index but also transfers all the search engine metrics to the original url.

Track Mobile Visitors Using Google Analytics

2009-02-24T22:38:00.000-08:00

Mobiles support WAP enabled browsers and the support given to full browsers (supports HTML & analytics tools) is less.

Google analytics tracks visitors from mobiles that supports full browsers (supports HTML & analytics tools). Google analytics reports visitors from iPhone, the T-Mobile G1, and other mobile devices with full (HTML) Internet browsers. To know whether a particular mobile supports full browsers check the manufacturers website for information.

To eye on the iphone visitor report in Google analytics select "Visits from iPhones" in the Advance segments drop down. By default Google has created the segment for easy glance at the report. I am glad that Google is getting geared to enter the mobile web analytics market to compete with the top mobile analytics vendors such as Bango, Mobilytics etc.

Comon Google! You can capture the mobile analytics market......

Reference Links:

What re Full Browsers

iPhone and Mobile G1

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-many-of-your-visits-are-from.html

Track Phone Calls and Live Chat Using Google Analytics

2009-02-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

Transperancy of Google Analytics makes it the number one free & best web analytics tool; the market has ever witnessed. Due to the immense popularity of GA more and more companies have made up mind to integrate their products with GA.

Mongoose metrics and LivePerson have integrated their products with GA.

To track conversions occurring on the website we look for the completed online forms,orders placed pages etc. But how do you track the conversions that happens offline. For example a customer pick up the phone and dials your company for seeking information or for placing an order. Now wipe off your worries and give an astonishing look at Mongoose metrics.

Mangoose metrics sells low cost toll numbers and gives you insights on the full numbers of dialled calls to your company in your Google analytics profiles. Each call is reported in GA as a visit!!!!!

LivePerson is a customer support live chat tool. It reveals the intentions of visitors chatting with the customer support persons. Below are the metrics that would be reported in your GA profile.

1) Conversion rate.
2) Geographic region of the LIVE chat.

3) Sources and keywords report.

4) Reverse Goal Path Report- Navigation path of visitors

Reference URL:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/two-cool-integrations-telephone-leads.html

Top and Popular Google Analytics Hacks and Filters Set Up Instructions

2009-02-15T07:59:00.000-08:00

Top and Popular Google Analytics Hacks

Google analytics is a robust and flexible free web analytics tool. Even after having the capability to compete with the best paid web analytics tools available in the market; Google analytics is offered free of cost.

Google analytics is a page tagging tool, just adding few lines of codes to the web pages is enough to get a detailed visitor statistics in your Google analytics account. Google analytics has got powerful filters and these filters makes this product an even better web analytics tool.

Following are the usefulness of setting up filters & adding additional lines to the Google analytics code:

Top Google Analytics Hacks:

(1)Include my website traffic only
Your GA code is vulnerable to be copied by others to have in their websites. This would make your GA reports show not only the data belonging to your domains but also others. The only way to avoid this is to have the following filer.

Filter set up steps:
Enter Filter Name: Include My Site Traffic
Filter Type: Select Custom from the drop down menu
Choose Custom Type: Select Include from the radio buttons
Filter Field: Select Hostname from the drop down menu
Filter Pattern: Enter ^yourdomainname\.com$
Choose Case Sensitive: Decide whether you want the filter to be case sensitive or not

(2)Expand the list of search engines in your GA reports and also get the list of keywords triggered.(Please note that Google only recognizes a set of search engines).

Code to include in the webpage:

pageTracker._addOrganic("search_engine_domain", "query_parameter_name");

If you want to track the search engine clusty.com and the query that leads the searchers to your website. Open your browser go to Clusty.com and type a query "web analytics." The following would be the search URL you would be seeing.

http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=web+analytics

The line of code to be added along with the GA code in the webpages has been mentioned below.

pageTracker._addOrganic("clusty.com", "query");

(3)Label your visitors
(4)Finding Google Image search keywords.

Filter set up steps:
1)Click "Add new filter for profile.
2)Specify a name for your profile.
3)From the drop down select custom filter
4)Select Include below the custom filter
5)Select Referral from the filter drop down.
6) Add the follwing ^http:\/\/images\.google\..*$ to the filter pattern field.
7) Mark Case sensitive as 'No'.

Thats ALL.. Click Finish! Check for the data after 24 hrs.....

(5)Full view of regional search engines.

(6)Identify you full set of keywords enabled for broad match keywords.
Google analytics do not show the keywords triggered for the broad match bid terms. This is indeed a cause to worry since people would trigger unrelated keywords to reach your website and walk back empty handed because of umpteen variations of the broad match term. Even the search query performance report in Adwords will show only part of keywords triggered for broad match term and labels rest of keywords as "Unique queries." You could be wasting hell lot of money for the unrelated keywords enabled for broad match term. You can block the unrelated keywords using "negative match" by knowing what are all the keywords enabled for broad match keywords.

To make this a reality you need to set two filters in your desired profile and you can see all the keywords triggered for your broad match bid terms.

Filter set up steps:
1) First Filter Creation Set Up Steps:
Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (\?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Medium: (cpc|ppc)
Output To -> Constructor: Custom Field 1: $A3

2) Second Filter Creation Set Up Steps:
Field A -> Extract A: Custom Field 1: (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A1)

(7)Track your 404 pages
(8)Identifying identical links in Site overlay
(9)Track PPC Referring websites
(10)Receive details of Souce, medium and keywords for transactions.
(11)Track clicks to downloads.
(12)Import GA data to your CRM sysytems.
(13)Track Full Referral URLs.

Filter set up steps:
1)Click "Add new filter for profile.
2) Name your profile
3)From the drop down select custom filter
4)Select Advanced from the radio buttons
5)Field A -> Extract A: Select Referral from the drop down menu and enter (.*) in the text field. (.*) is specified to receive the full URLs.
6)Field B -> Extract B: Just Leave it blank.
7)Output To -> Constructor: Choose User Defined from the drop down menu and write $A1 in the text field.
8)Field A: Select Yes
9)Field B: Select No
10)Override Output Field: Select Yes
11)Case Sensitive: Select No

(14) Exclude internal visits.
Find your IP address and set filter to exclude it. Please make sure to escape the full stops with backslashes.

Filter set up steps:
Filter Name: Exclude Internal IP Addresses
Filter Type: Select Exclude "All Traffic From An IP Address" from the drop down menu
IP Address: IP Address or IP Address Range

(15) Track multiple domains & subdomains

Filter set up steps:
Name: Full URI
Type: Custom filter - Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Hostname > (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Request URI > (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Request URI > /$A1$B1

We also need to tweak the GA a little bit to track the top level domains and sub-domains.

(16) Track Ecommerce Transactions
(17)Google analytics can tell in which search result pages your keywords are ranking.

Follow the steps in the below portrayed screenshots. Click on the screenshots to zoom it.

Mobile Web Analytics Bango

2009-01-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

For the first time you can get real time, accurate information about key metrics such as the number of unique visitors to you and an independent comparison of the success/conversion rates for all your mobile marketing campaigns.

There are two implementations:

1.Campaign tracking which enables you to get a independent measurement of
all your mobile marketing and advertising campaigns and their success.

2. PAGE TRACKING which enables you to track what users are doing on your
mobile sites, who your visitors are and where they are coming (similar
to Google Analytics but for mobile).

Bango Analytics gives you answers to the following questions:

· How many unique visitors had you had (rather than just visits)?

· Which country and operator are your visitors from?

· How many times have they visited your mobile site?

· What content do they like?

· Which search engine or advertisement have they come from?/Best ROI

· How much money have they spent?

Read the review of Bango mobile web analytics tool.

Review of Mobile Web Analytics Tool Bango

2009-01-19T04:01:00.000-08:00

Mobile analytics tools are slowly emerging in the market.

It seems that marketers have understood the importance of analyzing visitors from mobiles to their websites. Traditional web analytics tools doesn't have the ability to give statistics of mobile visitors due to technology incompatibility. What I mean is that " most of the mobiles do not support Javascript and cookies used by web analytics tools" to render the visitor metrics.People accessing websites through their mobiles are gradually increasing day by day. This means a small percentage of sale is happening through mobile users. The present small percentage has every potential to climb up over a period of time.

Not considering the behaviour of mobile users will be costly miss to the online companies. 'Bango' is a simple and robust mobile web analytics tool. Well, good tools come with a price and so is 'Bango.' Bango offers a 30 day free trial period. Marketers can make use of this opportunity to see 'how this mobile analytics tool can help them to increase the conversions'.

I have listed below the features of Bango:

1. Visitors with site analysis

2. Unique visitor count

3. Most accurate data in real-time

4. Independently measure campaign effectiveness

5. Powerful APIs for integration

6. Measure mobile visitors to PC websites

Bango have a similar installation process of Page tagging softwares.

Bango provides one line of small code having the gif image. The code has to be added to the home page of the website; just above the closing body tags. The normal page tagging tool requires you to add the same code to add the web pages of the website. But the mobile web analytics tool Bango needs you to create unique ?page= argument for each page of the website for you to identify the pages while viewing the web page statistics.The argument should be added to the line of code you added to the home page and then placed in each of your webpages.

For example:

The above codes are for tracking web pages. To track the links the webpages you have to provide the link title and the url in the respective fields and click on the create a Bango tracking link.

Bango would create you an URL, copy this url and replace the original url with this Bango url. Thats it! Behind the scenes Bango will redirect to your original url whenever your website visitors click on the link.

The Bango url will look like this:

Your website should be WAP enabled to present your site well for mobile users. WAP enabled websites fit perfectly in the tiny mobile display screens facilitating your web visitors a happy browsing/shopping time.

Related Links:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3629590
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Web_Analytics
Bango Mobile Analytics PDF
Upgrade to Bango Mobile Analytics Package

Comodo Instantssl Certificates

2009-01-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

Comodo Instantssl certificates are robust SSL certificates issued by Comodo which itself is a Certification Authority (CA).

People looking out for SSL certificates trust Comodo Instantssl at par with Verisign SSL certificates. The trust gained by Comodo Instantssl as a Certification Authority is enormous and it can easily outplay its competitors in the SSL certificates market. Comodo Instantssl has donned the cap of a highly reliable and trusted SSL certificate that can be purchased instantly without any hassles in the issuing process. The process of issuing certificates include verifying the legitimacy of the websites and number of other factors.

Comodo Instantssl certificates are priced competitively. Comodo Instantssl enhances security of the website and increases the conversion rate of the websites.

Comodo Office Pongal Celebrations

2009-01-15T07:33:00.000-08:00

I celebrated a memorable Pongal festival along with my colleagues here at Comodo India office on Jan 13.

Comodo India office is the linchpin of Comodo headquarters located in New Jersey, USA.

Please read the interesting posts about office pongal celebration from the below links.

1) Pongal Celebration
2 Office Pongal Celebrations

Google Adsense Optimization Guide

2009-01-07T02:51:00.000-08:00

Linking your Adsense account to Google analytics account is the best way to improve the performance of your Adsense ads. Below are the benefits of linking Adsense account with analytics account.

1) Find out the traffic sources of visitors who click on your Adsense ads and optimize your content. Similarly identify the geo location of your visitors and the webpages and carry out the optimization activities.

2) Gift your website visitors a wonderful user experience by improving the web pages where visitors spend very less time. Google analytics may look like a very simple and less powerful tool for those who judge the tool before signing up to use the tool. Once people signs up and starts using the tool their entire negative perception towards the tool vanishes away in seconds and here is where admiration starts booming eternally.

3) Discover the kinds of ads that have more possibility of getting clicked and optimize your web pages for those kind of ads.

Now you would be willing to know how to get your Adsense account integrated with your google analytics account.

Here are the simple steps to do that.

1) Open your Adsense account.
2) Look out for google analytics invitation link for integration on the "overview" and "advance reports" page.
3) If you do not see an invitation link; well you could receive the invitation link in the near future.
4) For those who can see the invitation link, please click on the link.
5) Subsequently you will asked to create a new analytics account or link to an exisitng account.
6) Choose the appropriate one and proceed forward. Thats all now you have your Adsense account integrated with Google analytics account.
7) Rush to your Google analytics account to perform the optimization effort.

Please note that your Adsense login should be the administrator in your analytics account.

Google Adsense Integration with GA
Google Analytics Enterprise Class Features

Comparison of Web Analytics Tools

2008-12-24T00:29:00.000-08:00

I noted down some stand out features and compared it with couple of web analytics tools.

Please find below the feature comparison of ClickTale with HaveaMint, CrazyEgg and Google Analytics.

Features of HaveaMint:

Movies of visitor sessions :No
RSS Notifications:Yes
Heatmap:No
Mouse moves vs Mouse clicks:No
Details of every link in web pages:No

Features of CrazyEgg:

Movies of visitor sessions :No
RSS Notifications:Yes
Heatmap:Yes
Mouse moves vs Mouse clicks:No
Details of every link in web pages:Yes

Features of ClickTale:

Movies of visitor sessions :Yes
RSS Notifications:Yes
Heatmap:Yes
Mouse moves vs Mouse clicks:Yes
Details of every link in web pages:Yes

Features of Google Analytics:

Movies of visitor sessions :No
RSS Notifications:No
Heatmap:No
Mouse moves vs Mouse clicks:No
Details of every link in web pages:NO

ClickTale, HaveaMint and CrazyEgg are all paid page tagging tools and the prices are fixed according to the visits/pageviews the website is receiving. Even a non-Adwords customer are can track up to 5 million page views per month using Google analytics.

Review of 'Woopra' Web Analytics Tool

2008-12-16T02:08:00.000-08:00

Woopra is a revolutionary on demand web analytics tool. It clubs the features of a customer support software and usual web analytics characteristics.

I was really amazed by the visitor tracking ability of customer support softwares. These tools not only facilitate to chat with website visitors when they initiate the chat but also assists organisations to initiate chat from their side. Visitors movements can be tracked completely using the chat support softwares.I dreamt to get my hands on to the customer support tool to get more insights on the visitors behaviour inaddition to our web analytics tool.

Woopra has combined the features of chat support software with web analytics features. Isn't Woopra a revolutionary tool in reality? I am sure you are nodding your head in Concurrence!

I am really thrilled to see Woopra coming out of beta phase. Woopra is a page tagging web analytics tool offered by iFusion labs LLC. Please read the features of Woopra furnished below.

1) Woopra renders websites visitors statitics to you LIVE in a comprehensive manner.

2) Chat support features gives the visitors the flexibility to request for assistance by clicking on the chat button. Web masters can initiate chat from their part to persuade the visitors to purchase their products or services.

3) Statistics on all the usual web analytics metrics.

4) Visitor tagging ( onclick code)

Since Woopra is in its beta stage only limites invitations are being sent out to try their tool. Woopra can be installed very easily. Here are the simple steps.

1) Sign up for Woopra Web analytics tool.

2) Log into your Woopra account and Click on members tab.

3) Add your website.

4) Enter the invitation code( if you have received one)

5) Copy the Javascript snippet code and include it in your web pages.

6) Download the appropriate version of Woopra for your computer.

7) Install the downloaded software in your system.

8) Open the Woopra software from your system and enter your member 'username' and 'password.'

9) Experience the spectacular "LIVE" statistics of your website visitors.

The USP that sets Woopra apart from the existing web analytics tools be it a page tagging tool or log file tool is the "Live Visitor Tracking Functionality."

Click here to register with Woopra.

Review of "Click Tale" Web Analytics Tool

2008-12-15T07:29:00.000-08:00

Web analytics is a nitty-gritty for online marketing. Click Tale is a useful web analytics tool for online marketers. Click Tale do have a fabulous feature wherein it records the visitors activity in the website. This is an unique selling point(USP) of Click Tale and this feature makes it stronger as a web analytics tool vendor to compete with it competitors.

Click Tale is a page tagging tool and offers free and paid services. The pricing is based on number of pageviews received by websites.

In addition to creating movies of visitor sessions Click Tale has got the following features.

I) Renders Information on "how far visitors scroll down" to read web pages in the form of "Scrolling Heat maps."

II) Details of interaction with each and every link in the website. It even shows the hesitation time, hovers and average hover time taken to click a link.

III) Most of the companies using web analytics tools confront with the problem of tracking and analyzing form pages.But ClickTale is exceptional here in the way it identifies problems in the online form by supplying sufficient information to optimize the form.

IV) Screen resolutions, window sizes, window resizing, window sizes PDF under "Dimensions."

V) Countries, languages, browsers, platform under "Demographics."

VI) Page open period and activity time & load times below "Intervals."

VII) Pages/visitor, mouse moves vs mouse clicks, JavaScript errors and Tags beneath "Visitor activity."

Interested in trying out ClickTale, then click here to sign up for free initially.

Web Analytics Tools to Measure Online Business Performance

2008-11-30T01:38:00.000-08:00

Web analytics is the study of online behaviour of visitors.

To know how successful is a website, web analytics tools are highly important. Only when you understand 'how your visitors interact with your website you can measure your online business performance.

For every online business there should be some actions they expect visitors to take to sustain and excellence. These actions could be mere clicks to the website, filling in online forms or purchasing products.

There are two types of web analytics tools available in the market. They are log file analysis softwares and page tagging tools. Irrespective of which type of web analytics tools you choose, you can measure your websites performance using the following e-metrics.

E-Metrics:

1) Visits
2) Unique visits
3) Pages/Visit
4) Avg. time on site
5) Bounce rate
6) Exit rate
7) Country, city
8) Keywords
9) Sources
10) Navigation path
11) Entrance path

Here are few steps to measure your websites performance:

1) Track all the pages that Visitors tread while moving towards the penultimate conversion pages.

2)Identify your checkout conversion page and observe the navigational path taken by your customers.Compare the actual conversions naviflow with the above stated step.Through this we can ascertain the successful path that lead to conversions.

3)Now you would be having the figures of "how many visitors moved to the penultimate conversion page and how many got converted into customers.

Segregate the visitors moved to just the penultimate sales conversion process and exited as group I. Segregate the visitors who completed the conversion process as group II.

Analyze group I to identify the stumbling blocks. Pick up each every page pursued by the visitors. Start your analysis using the following KPIs viz. bounce rate, exit rate, keywords, sources, navigational path, entrance path etc.

Review of ClickTracks Logfile Analyzer Tool

2008-11-29T07:24:00.000-08:00

ClickTracks is a good log file analyser tool that comes at an affordable cost. Below are the four major valuable reports ClickTracks can render..

1) Navigation report.
2) Search Report.
3) Site Overview report.
4) Visitor labelling.

1)Navigation report

Navigation report contains three parts. They are website view, page analysis & path view.

The website view allows you to navigate to any page just like you type websites in your browser.Website view displays information on how frequently visitors click on each link.

The page analysis frame displays further information about the page currently displayed in the website view.The page analysis frame presents further information related to the current page in the website view.Below are the metrics displayed in the page analysis frame.

1.Visitors that see the page
Here we can see the total number of visitors that saw the currently displayed page.Of all visits to your website, this shows the percentage that viewed this page. Please note that a single visitor will not be counted more than once if they hit the page numerous time in a single visit. In the parenthesis after the percentage, the first number shows the number of unique visitors to this specific page, and the second number represents the total number of unique visitors to the site.

2.Average time at this page.

3.Average time to this page.
Shows how long it took visitors to reach the page from the moment they hit any page in the site.

4.Visitors entered at this page.

5.Exits from this page (as % of page views)

The path view details the pages visitors were on prior to the current page in the website view and also list the pages they visit next.

The percentage and colored bar underneath each hyperlink on the report indicates all traffic to this page, what percentage clicked on each link.

2) Search report.

Search report lists the keywords and search engines that referred visitors to your website.Along the left side are the
search terms that were used, and along the top are various search engines. Cells that are darker indicates the greater number of referrals.

3) Site Overview

Site overview provides information in a more traditional table format.

1.Total number of visits to the page.
First is the total number of visits to the website. Visits are not unique to an individual; one individual might generate several visits.

2.Average pageviews

3.Top search queries
Here are the top keywords entered into the search engines that generated referral to the website. Unlike those on the search report, the search terms on the site overview are not separated by search engines.

4.Top Referrers
These are top websites with links that referred visitors to your website, for eg:- a search engine, or an online campaign.

5.Pages with most visitors

6.Top entry visitors

7.Top exit pages

4) Visitor labelling

Visitor labelling shows segmentation of the visitors by their behaviour. This can be done by on-demand basis. Group of visitors are tracked under visitor labelling. There are several predefined ways of grouping, or labelling visitors.

Suppose you want to see how the visitors that actually bought the product behave on the site compared to general population. First, select "reached check out or other goals." This wizard allows you to select any page of your site from drop down menu. If you are interested to see people who have purchased the product behave, select the checkout page.

Now a label has been assigned to this group of visitors. Click 'go" to re-analyse. You now have a color coded visitor label showing your segmented visitors.The percentages and totals shown on the new label reflect the visitors that satisfied the action you identified, in this case those visitors that hit the checkout page. The new label shows of all the visitors landed on the checkout page- or bought something 'what percentage clicked on each link.' The visitor label now show the information about particular group of visitor on all reports.And on site overview, you can see specific information about this visitor.

By examining the behaviour of visitor groups you value most, you can target your site to these most important users. group.

Click here to get more information on ClickTracks.

Review of WebTrends8 2008

2008-11-29T00:05:00.001-08:00

The presentation of emetrics in WebTreds Analytics8 is awesome. Even a newbie to web analytics can easily understand the complete behaviour of website visitors by having WebTrends analytics tool. The problems most companies using web analytics tools confront is the inability to make decisions to improve the website conversions. But WebTrends is an exception in the way it facilitates easy decision making for improving website conversions.

WebTrends renders the following features to measure the performance of marketing.

1)Performance Dashboards
2)Interactive Reporting Console
3)Business Intelligence Integration
4)Custom Reporting
5) 5-Point Scenario Analysis
6)First-Party Cookies

1)Performance Dashboards provides accurate benchmark KPIs. "What if" scenarios in Perfomance dashboards facilitates identification of focus points in Marketing.

2)Interactive Reporting Console assists each and every member of the company to filter, drill & query the emetrics to realize their business results.

3)Business Intelligence Integration provides you with the capability to use any business tools.

4)Custom Reporting aids you in generating advanced reports to measure your marketing performance.

5) 5-Point Scenario Analysis portrays the point at which your website visitors are dropping and why they take such actions.

6)WebTrends uses WebTrends First-Party Cookies.

Read more about WebTrends8 here.

Comparison of Google Analytics & Web Trends

2008-11-27T08:15:00.000-08:00

How WebTrends is different from Google analytics

1. Google is targeting small and medium business.
2. The product is hard-coded one size fit all tool.
3. Customer support is through e-mail only with an SLA of 1 week, where WebTrends is 24X7 support with 1 hour of SLA. And database available in webtrends itself is a solution for most of the problems.
4. The service is free to Google Adwords customers. The non-Adwords customer are limited to 5 million page views per month
5. A license allows customer to create up to 50 profiles. The report will be surface level. In WebTrends you can create unlimited user and unlimited profiles.
6. As part of the license agreement a customer agrees to be used as a marketing reference in google’s material – No question asked.
7. No customizable reports- In webtrends we can tailor the report according to the user and department as decision making is streamlined.
8. This is not possible with google- campaign reporting to depth, Content group, Full path analysis, Unique visitor tracking for campaigns.
9. WebTrends has real time analysis.
10. Can create our own template, Customizable dashboards, Smart view reports, Full campaign drill down.
11. Apart from this we track user by 1st party cookies.( First party cookie is the small amount of information stored in users browser when a person request for a page first time. When next time he visits the page, with that that cookie ID he will be identified as repeated visitor). Also we have 4 other options to track visitor according to your requirement.
12. Your data is not safe as google have access to your Data.
13. You can not have your reports for long period for comparison of the report ( Ex: report of 2008 March and 2006 March). This kind of report is essential for growth metrics. Date comparison you will find on spot in webtrends where in google you have to pick and see.

Read the head to head comparison here Google Analytics vs WebTrends.

Search Marketing Guide

Log file analysis tools Vs Page Tagging Softwares for Measuring and Improving Success Metrics

2008-11-22T23:38:00.000-08:00

The internet has changed the speed at which marketing was travelling. Prospects are interacting with your website every minute and innovative marketing programs are launched every day.

The measurement of success is the key metrics for all the marketing programs launched. How do your prospects behave in your website? What action do they take? Are they proceeding to purchase your services or products? Why your prospects are abandoning the purchase of products or services?

Unless you analyze and measure the interactivity of your website prospects you cannot eliminate the hurdles encountered by your prospects. It could be a small hurdle in the path way of your prospects, you may not be able to understand it with your naked eye. For this you require proficient web analytics tools which can give you proper insights of your prospects behaviour.

There are two types of web analytics tools available in the market. They are

1) Log file analysis tools.
2) Page tagging software.

1) Log file analysis tools:

As the name suggests log file analysis tools process the log files from the web server into their engine. Once the log files are processed into log file analysis tool, they generate web analytics reports. Log file analysis softwares can be easily customized.

Few examples of log files analysis tools are Web Trends, Omniture Site Catalyst, ClickTracks etc.

2) Page tagging software:

Page tagging softwares are completing different from the way log file analysis works. Page tagging softwares requires tagging of each web page in a website with a snippet of code. The snippet of code can be placed either in the head section or just above the closing body tags.

Examples of Page tagging softwares are Google analytics, SiteStats etc.

Google Analytics Case Study

2008-11-22T05:27:00.000-08:00

InstantSSL is one among the world’s renowned SSL certificate products.

Challenges: Not only the traffic to InstantSSL website was on the higher side but also the abandonment rate.

We started analyzing the reason for the increased abandonment rate. Using Google analytics we identified the top web pages(in terms of traffic)of the website and started analyzing the reason for the low conversion rate.

We began analyzing each pages in an effort to eradicate the stumbling blocks that hinder the purchase process. The first web page we picked for analysis is the index page, the mother of all pages.

Here is the analysis for the index page. We collected the metrics viz. visitors, page views, unique page views, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate and furnished it in an excel sheet. Then we gathered the information about "how visitors reached the web page using the below stated metrics."

1) Top search engines through which visitors reached the web page.
2) Top referral sites.
3) Top keywords

We further moved on to our most important part of analysis known as click stream analysis. We discovered what actions visitors are taking after entering this page either directly or from some other pages of the website. Following are the synopsis of the discovery.

1. Majority of visitors navigate to free SSL certificate page and products page. These were the actions we actually wanted visitors to take.

2. There was no explanation for our main products displayed namely InstantSSL, EV SSL, Wild card SSL & Essential SSL. In a bid to showcase the distinction between products we recommended the developers to introduce a tool tip carrying the main features for major products.

3. Even though "EVSSL" promotion links are placed at the top of the page, visitors rarely click on the links. The reason could be the 'price' quoted near the product. We recommended the developers to remove the price quote so that the visitors will click on the link to visit the page and learn more the product and make a decision.

4. Even though the anchor text for the "why Comodo" URL is colored differently from the rest of the page, the link fails to grab the attention of majority of visitors. We recommended the developers to increase the font size of the anchor text "Why Comodo" to 12 points.

We passed on to the second most powerful page of the website, the products page. Here are the findings.

The detailed description about the products from the products page can be found by clicking on the products name. There exist a Hyperlink which takes the customer to a separate page to know the features of the product. But the Hyperlink is not visible to the customer. Since the “Buy” button is more prominent visitors click on that to reach the buy page. Features of the product are not properly explained in the buy page and exit rate of this page is severely high. On the other hand very less people reach the learn page from the products page simply because it is invisible to the visitors. We were happy to have diagnosed the problem of experiencing the high abandonment rate and appreciated the insights provided by Google analytics.

We recommended the developers to introduce a “learn” tab on all the products in the products page for the customer to know more about the products. After getting an overview of the product the customer could go ahead to purchase the product by clicking the “Buy” option on the learn page. By this way we can make sure the features of the product has clearly reached the customer and the flow of the customer can also be tracked. We also recommend the developers to stick a learn more button in the buy page.

We didn't stop here we went forward to analyze the purchase page.

Features of the product are not properly explained in the buy page and exit rate of this page is severely high. Prospects look up to check for any links that could provide them the features and benefits of the products, but to their dismay they have wander through the links available in that page. We recommended the content writers to provide an idepth feature list to get furnished in the page.

We also found out that more number of prospects who have made up their mind to purchase the product move back to the products page. We wondered why visitors take such action and researched to find the answer. The reason we observed is when visitors click on the buy button in the products page they are shown a shopping cart adjacent to the buy button. This gives them an impression that the product got added to the shopping cart when they clicked on the buy button. They reach the buy page and they are asked to select number of years by changing the drop down menu. Thinking that they actually added the product to the shopping cart they click on "proceed to checkout" button. And when they say proceed to check out a pop up appears saying "Select an item to purchase" on a blank webpage and then takes the customer back to the products page. This was creating great inconvenience to the prospects. We recommended the developers to revoke the redirect and allow them to stay on the page to add the product to the shopping cart to enable them to purchase the product easily.

The conversion rate of the website has increased manifold after implementing these changes. The reason for the improved conversion rate is due to the fabulous insights Google Analytics rendered us.

More Google Analytics case studies

Do not forget to browse through the Search Marketing Guide.