So today google has launched a new website called Gmail Intervention. This website works as a tool to tell that one friend of yours that still haven’t switched to gmail. Google always comes up with interesting and fun ways to make people do boring things. For example i never spread the word about different website promotions or programs but Google has made my day today and i actually had a laugh. Good Job, no wonder innovative minds at work!

This kind of landing page that works and converts. Because its simple, funny and your doing a good thing.  Google did a good job with invitation emails witch are fun and you cant stop reading them until you read it all. Below are the email templates google offers to use when inviting your friends switch to gmail.

Straightforward: I’m here to help

I’m writing this note in order to help you. I know you’re still comfortable with your old email program, but I’d like to invite you to try Gmail — I’m pretty sure you’ll like it better. Gmail has world-renowned spam protection and innovative features that help you filter your mail, get to important messages more quickly, and search your entire mail history in seconds. You can even do cool stuff like video chat or call phones directly from your inbox.

Concerned: I’m worried about you

I’ve been your friend for a long time, so please know that when I say this, I am saying it from the heart.

I’m worried about you. Year after year goes by and you’re still using that outdated email program.  I can’t sit idly by and watch how this is affecting you and those around you, so I’m staging an email intervention and I’m committed to helping you make the switch to Gmail.

Think about it: is there any good reason not to enjoy superior spam protection, instant search, nested conversations and cool stuff like video chat or the ability to call phones directly from your inbox?      So I say to you, bluntly but lovingly: I realize change can be scary, but it’s time to switch to Gmail.  Do it for me, do it for everyone else in your life, but most importantly, do it for yourself.

I believe in you.

Outraged: You’re embarrassing me

If you had something stuck between your teeth or tissue paper stuck to your shoe, you’d want me to tell you, right?  Well, today I have to speak candidly to you about something even more embarrassing: your email address.

Yeah, I said it. It’s time to give up that email service you got when you first discovered the Internet and make the switch to Gmail.

I mean, think about it. Everyone else has tons of storage, instant search, nested conversations, even cool tools like video chat and the ability to call phones directly from your inbox.

Everyone but you, that is.

Seriously.  I’m sorry its come to this, but you’ve left me no choice but to stage an intervention. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.  You don’t really want to be the only one who just doesn’t get it, do you?

No. You don’t. You really don’t. Time to suck it up and switch to Gmail.

Preview the intervention video

Anyway the point of all this is its a proof that creative landing pages and marketing can be very effective and fun. People love it plus they  have a laugh and switch to gmail.  So Good one Google, seems like geeks can be funny

Strategies to advertise online along with their benefits.

In this blog post, i want to have a look primarily at the well known tip of the local online advertising and internet marketing iceberg. Even though, you probably know that being successful requires the use of a number of tools as well as strategies used in combination.

Below are a few online marketing strategies and methods:

1. Pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising and marketing, which is a way to improve how your business shows up in search engine results and also to provide you with the immediate read on your listing’s effectiveness and performance.
2. Search engine optimization (SEO), which requires fine-tuning as well as designing your Website to really make it a lot more search engine friendly and boost your presence in natural section of the various search engines.
3. Business landing pages – webpages that searchers come to directly whenever they are doing a search using certain keywords and phrases after which follow the link posted from the search engine.

The website landing page will take them directly to the information specified by the keywords and phrases they’ve used to come across your website page, without making them navigate to that material through your home page, which they might find too complex to follow.

1. E-mail blasts that will allow readers download, a coupon code and therefore can help you start a relationship with them.
2. Social networking 2.0 web sites like Facebook, Linkedin and Digg that may be used to build interest in your business.
This might all seem just a little overwhelming if your a begginner and only starting on with marketing online, but don’t worry. None of the tools and techniques are all that complex and difficult on their own.

The real magic – or art work in online marketing strategies, if you want to get fancy about it – is actually determining how you can combine these to produce the most effective (as well as cost-effective) online marketing strategies and campaign for your business. Regardless of what may at this time appear to be lots of work on your end, try always to keep this in mind: Unlike many forms of traditional advertising and marketing methods, internet marketing is totally measurable in real (or near-real) time.

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Meaning you can find out very quickly just how well your efforts work, which components perform much better than others, what type of customers you appeal to, as well as what specifically about your advertising and marketing catches their attention. Best of all, since your internet marketing is something you are able to modify on virtually a
moment’s notice, you can easily adjust, improve, or otherwise tinker with it as soon as your analytic measurements tell you what to do more of and what to leave behind. These essential tools can help you be more effective with you online marketing compaign, and do their best when use all of these tools together.

How to start up with Local Internet Marketing

Did you know that ninety-four million adults in America searching online every single day that’s just about one-third of the total United States population. Sixty-three percent of those men and women use search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing to find things they need online. And sixty-four percent of People in America make use of Internet search engines as the major way they search for local businesses.

So given all these numbers, the conclusion is pretty obvious: If a person is actually searching throughout the internet for local products as well as services and your business isn’t displayed on the first page of search results, that customer will almost certainly click with someone else.

That customer could have been and should have been yours. With Internet transactions generating a great deal of business, you probably assume that small business owners and local businesses are already all over the internet. But guess what? They’re not . . . just yet but the numbers growing every day. The U.S. Small Business Administration has reported that of the twenty-four million small businesses it keeps an eye on, only forty-four percent are currently making use of Website pages, search engines and online directories to advertise their products as well as services. And when you remove the top ten or so metropolitan markets, that percentage of current small-business Online advertisers drops just like a stone.

Main point here: A tremendous amount of room remains for a savvy small business owner just like you to make your business presence seemed on the Web. Therefore what can explain this rather unusual situation in which customers are hanging out someplace that small business advertisers aren’t? Unquestionably, one huge reason is that to the majority of people, the idea Internet marketing seems just too complicated and even intimidating.

Best left to the experts, whoever they may be. We’re the first one to admit that Internet marketing can be a pretty complex undertaking. Internet has its own rules, its very own customs and secrets, and most importantly, its own technology. And the latter changes constantly.

What exactly does local really mean?

Strangely enough, defining local as in local business isn’t all that simple. For example, that fast-food franchise just down the road might be affiliated with a multi-national corporation, however at the same time, it’s a long-established part of the town’s business local community, and so is it local or not? We’d say indeed but we want to focus on local private owned businesses that need help the most.

The secret to understanding the complex topic of the Internet – and finding out how to put it to work for your business – is a matter of breaking it into smaller, manageable, digestible chunks. And suddenly, local Internet marketing isn’t all that complicated anymore.

The first step in installing Google analytics on your website is to create Google analytics account. Google analytics is simply like one of the other great services like gmail, adwords, chrome that utilize overall Google account. So it might be confusing when talking about Google account versus Google analytics account. Don’t avoid I will walk you through the process and we will go over differences in detail later in this post.

If you don’t have Google analytics account yet you’ll likely will find yourself in one of the three categories.

1. You dont have any prior google accounts at all and view starting from scratch.
2. You have Google account such as Gmail or Igoogle but not adwords or
3. You have Google account that is already associated with adwords account but not yet a Google analytics account.

Let’s take the third one first because it’s critical to get it right from the start. If you already have Adwords account so you want to feed your Google analytics account via that Adwords account or it may cause issues later when you want them to talk to each other. So the first income going to do is actually will go ahead and log in to adwords.

Once you in their click on reporting tab in top menu and then Google analytics link.

At this point since you don’t have Google analytics account yet it’ll ask you few questions. You can either create free Google analytics account or if you already have one you can link it here. If you already have one then we will address linking in a diffrent post. So for now will assume that you don’t have one and you can go ahead and click on create my free Google account and click continue.

Okay that’s pretty much it at this point you already added to Google analytics onto your Adwords account and launched into the new account, new profile creation process I will walk you through this process the second but I want not talk about different point first.

For the rest of people who are not Adwords users when you go to http://google.com/analytics you will be faced with the welcome screen if you don’t have any you just click sign up now button then you will go through standard Google account creation process and remember you can use your existing e-mail here such as the corporate e-mail it doesn’t have to be a Gmail account.

So once you’ve filled out that form and everyone now has a Google account we will log in.

So whether you created in your account or you just added analytics account to your Adwords, at this point we are all on the same page.

Now on the new account sign-up page input to your website URL and view give an account name that means something to you. Then select your country select your time zone and click continue.

Then put in your contact information select your country then go through and read agreement service agree to it select the check box and as far as account creation goes that’s it. The only step left is to add tracking codes on to our website which we will do in the next post.

In order to understand how to install Google analytics and to interpret what our reports are showing us it’s important to talk about the basics of how Google analytics works. Let’s look at the typical website visit for example let’s say a person on a laptop and they want to visit your website so they open their Web browser and the your website files are hosted on a standard web server just waiting for the browser to request them.

And when the browser makes that request, that the request logs to server logs. When Google analytics were born because exclusive software that was server or data center and prosses does request logs from the server. There are a lot of problems with running your own analytics server. You need servers themselves databases data center space and highly skilled admins to run it all and keep things secure. Which can be very costly and time-consuming.

The way Google analytics works is based on the current generation of web analytics tools, and as a small but important difference from a old one file-based systems. When the Web server returns page back to your browser it has embedded javascript which is actually the code that runs Google analytics. That Google analytics code snippet collects data from your browser and send it directly to databases of Google very powerful datacenter.

So when you and I go and log in to Google analytics we open that reporting interface of Google analytics and that is connected to Google database it actually has nothing to do with your web server that hosts your website. Other than the fact that your pages have that javascript snippet included. No that takes about three hours from the time the visitor sees the your web page until that data information shows up in our reports. Although lately Google has made some great strides here it’s actually not common to see that they do show up in under an hour.

There are three main advantages to a system like this.

First:is accuracy utilizing features on the browser like cookies makes it much more accurate.

Second: is cost, all of the cost of maintaining hardware, database, bandwidth, datacenters, and IT resources is handed and paid for by Google. Which is nice considering that they give it all away or free.

Third: is globally distributed infostracture. This helps your page load faster but also brings reliability to the googles network product.

After all how many times did the come to google.com and had it not load. Over all it’s a great step from old days of Web analytics because it’s far easier, we get more accuracy and all that far less cost.

I was talking in understanding segmentation post, we can use that segmentation functionality to evaluate performance. Say for example which traffic sources performing better, this is very important to know often all.

If you have one source converting at 94% and one at just 28% obviously one is more valuable to you than another or is it. Just like averages and aggregates lie we need to make sure we don’t consider metrics and isolation. We consider full context of the number we’re seeing to truly understand what’s going on. Now clearly in this case if I’ve have to choose one or the other I will take 28% any day over 94%. 28% from 80,000 is a lot and 94% of 17 is very little.

But context is about much more than just Web metrics, we tend to get so focused on that that we forget other aspects of our business that is interrelated. For example we have a lot of travel related clients some are in Hawaii and I can tell you that their website will convert a lot differently on a day that is sunny than on the day when it’s raining. So we wouldn’t want to include the changes we made to the site that they were a disaster and we should revert them right away without realizing those numbers into context of this external weather event.

And more than merely understanding why our performances that way, if we savvy about our analytics we can actually use that to our advantage. For example one hurricane Nina was blowing over one of our clients resorts with style huge spike in traffic, now digging into our analytics we found all due to hurricane Nina initially there was some concern that this was effectively bad press that would do damage to the brand. But some creativity allowed us to react and take advantage. For example in Hawaii resorts its common for hurricane guarantee. In this case the hurricane offers the chance to come back during better weather with all kinds of upgrades and freebies.

So by changing the homepage from the picture that is sunny paradise we should put a huge flash page all about hurricane Nina then they would be able to salvage that traffic, generate new stories in the press and get many folks associate in their mind the guarantee that their brand not just the scenes of horrific hurricanes all because they knew how to use analytics to their advantage.

Taken metrics into context is important in lots of ways. The CEO of the automobile company is ecstatic showing up this chart going down and showing how much money they were losing everyday. So what was he happy? Because he wasn’t losing as much as they expected to lose and not as much as their competitors were losing.

Keeping the date in relative context is always important. And you can imagine how marketing manager for this big hotel next to Ifle tower, bidding on keywords and ranking in the search engines just got whole lot tougher for a Hilton in Paris a few years back when searches on Paris Hilton suddenly got way more popular. And the point here is it has nothing to do with the website or the campaigns and analytics or even their business. In fact on the online keywords searches and we hear this all the time oh they are not our competitors, they just have the same name or we just share the same keywords umm well that you are the competition online. We called this accidental completion and it’s important to realize your competitors off-line have little to do with your competitors online.

In this graph above is two aspects of analysis that are critical to making correct decisions about our site. You can guess what industry this is well its actually travel as well not in my house booking travel is usually involves my wife and i doing some research if we get a chance but we actually not just booking until we both get a minute to sit down confirm and look at the calendars etc.

And this always seems to work out on Sunday night when there is no big plans and we actually have a few minutes. But just because it’s how it works in my house I can’t make the mistake think in my personal bias is the same as all my clients.

In fact it looks like based on this conversion graph but that’s not the case at all. Above graph tells me most people are role in to work on Monday morning and say I can’t handle this I need a vacation so they jump online.

So the key here is that the size of our personal bias cloud the data. We also need recognize the prevailing trend in our industry such as days of the week. We certainly don’t want to compare how are compaign did that run on the Sunday and the one that ran on the Monday. Because unless it was the massively different, monday will win every time and we will conclude the wrong thing.

Those trends are more than just the days of the week but seasonal as well. For example one of your keywords where you saw a huge spike around the beginning of July view assume that your new Adwords compaign did that? Ofcourse not, the searches go up for every one around that time because it’s fourth of July and that’s reasonably obvious though.

But what if we sow even a bigger spike earlier like in November, could’ve been from Halloween. Well we know the first step in the analysis is segmentation as i was talking in a previous post and we immediately see that all the traffic is coming from India and centered around happy diwali  keywords which like our Fourth of July causes the spike in fireworks searches.

Now this trend wasn’t initially obvious to us but by using the tools available we can understand whether we can claim success due to our marketing compaing or due to simply arising tied that floats all boats and have essentially nothing to do with our actual site or marketing. Now the key here is understanding these trends will allow us to compare apples to apples like at external factors and keeping our data in context.

Anyway now it’s time to go stretch your legs is been some time since you started to read this post so take a break and check out the following post.

~ Veto

Segmentation is the first step in true lab analysis and we have tons and tons of ways to segment visitors in Google analytics. We will look trough each of these in details throughout the posts. But for now I want to touch on type of segments we will be looking at. One of the most common differentiate that comes to mind when we think of different groups of visitors to our site is where they from. There plenty of ways for us to break down how different users from different parts of the world into output our site. And traffic sources are another critical important segment.

How many conversions came from this morning e-mail blast and how do we compare it to our Facebook campaign.  We also want to out that visitors who do certain things on our website. The traffic segment that completes that is the provision my checkout is certainly different segment then does who came in and immediately hit the back button. And I’d like to know more about what made them have such a different reactions. We will see that we  can analyze the amount of traffic that don’t initially come to mind when we talk about Web analytics.
Such as traffic from newspaper, TV, radio,print campaigns,direct mail and so on. It’s very important to be able to identify and analyze how these segments perform. One of the ways we can segment is buying tent and the keyboard type into search engines can give us some insight into that intent. But variations of similar searches can indicate very different groups of people with different motivations and intentions visiting your site and those keywords can play an important role on our segmentation analysis.

And the depending on that motivation the landing page when you hit and arrive on our website might be very successful or not. And thus the ability to segment by landing page can be quite revealing. If you split testing your ads, and by the way if you are not then you should be, because we want to understand how one segments perform vs another. Even things like what type of browsers you use can shed light on that visit. After all what do you know on the large percentage of Safari users? Mac users right? And Mac users is certainly a different segment, in fact Apple ran an entire campaign focusing just how different that segment is.

But even beyond the operating system know that folks who took the time to install the Firefox or chrome is at least savvy enough to do so and also cared enough about their browsing experience to take the time to customize it versus just to using default like Internet explorer by the way not a big fan. Some times it seems the made it so secure that its hard to use it.

We can also get a port that tell us things like the connection speed screen resolution and other segmentation information that will help us design the site that will be optimized for our user base. See there are many types of segmentation built right into the there are reports and we just scratched the surface as I will write more on this topic there will be only few situations where we don’t utilize the segment of some kind or another.

We are writing series of analytic training. For complete category of posts on Analytic Data and How to use it please visit Analytics Category.

Hope it’s been useful to you and please comment your feedback on this! We would love to hear what you think about this post

~ Veto

This information is often worse than no information, in this post I want to demonstrate two things.There are many people here in the Vollkin who are handy with Photoshop but also that averages can lie. Even if the underlying data is 100% accurate.

For example if I told you that I was very involved with charitable giving lately and we were delivering Christmas presents for children.
How involved? If you believe in numbers from NORAD my partner and I personally delivered presents in average over 750 million homes per year. And it’s quite exhausting cause to do that flew in average 36 million miles, exhausting indeed.

And for the moment let’s agree for go discussions that my partner existence and focus on my stats. My math is accurate but if the statements are actually misleading, considering the fact that Christmas last year fell within a week due date to my son’s birthday so you can bet I wasn’t out delivering presents 1000 miles away, in fact I barely left the house. But then spent 750,000 houses and 36,000,000 miles is still true because my partner did all the work and I just taken the credit being the average.
It’s maybe not actually example but see similar types of this phenomenal all the time in web analytic where averages can lie and mislead even the numbers are completely accurate.

For example if you have 100 visitors to your site and 99 of them than do thing but a next one spends $1000 would it be accurate to say that on average visitors to their site tend to spend $10 per visit? Well yes technically it’s true but it leads us to conclude the wrong thing entirely in our analysis of visitor behavior. Averages and abrogates have their place, the most often the real insides lie when we can segment out the roots of visitors and behavior then we can see who really driving success and who just using averages to take the credit.

Goals are the fundamental concept of any analytics package and without goals you have nothing more than a fancy hit counter. Goals will allow us to validate quality traffic from poor performing traffic in other words in order for us to say that that site A is sending you much more available traffic then site B, we need some criteria that we can base that on, and that’s where our goals come in. This all will become clear once we examined the anatomy of the website visit and their role that analytics can play in that avaluation.

The first step is to attract traffic this is really obvious and it worth fast majority of online marketing is devoted. There is many options to get visitors to your website, some paid like Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter, Ask.com, Facebook Ads even below cost or three options like organic search engine traffic or e-mail targeting cost the time, efforts and resources which are often more precious than money.

We also have to consider all of the off-line marketing where to publish our website address and hope that the customer will pull up our website next time they hop on the web. There is no doubt that a lot of effort goes into getting visitors to our site and traditionally this is where almost all off our focus has been. We mistakenly believe that if we get enough visitors to our website some how that going to be good enough. But that just dropping them off on the front page of our website and hoping is not enough. We need them to actually take that next step, whether that’s put something in their shopping cart, download coupons, find our phone number so they can pick up the phone and give us a call and not all the visitors behaved the same, you need the stretch of the imagination. There is high performing traffic and low performing traffic and everything in between. In order to analyze which sources in terms of traffic is available we need to track what those visitors doing when they are on the site. What content works, how are they using the site that ultimately figure out how to segment and understand why they doing what they doing.

Finally we are going to measure how many folks and to which segments of those people reach that final step and convert, whether it’s putting money in your bank account or filling out that lead form, forget to tell our analytics exactly what our successful visitors by setting goals and calculating our conversion rate on our goals. One very important point about goals is not to overlook intermediate course, we are often so focused on that last step, either it’s shopping cart checkout or other last step that we forget about  all the factors in between that contribute to the sale to take that next step.

Think about the actual grocery cart, but once you’ve filled it up and got in checkout line the chances that you take that next step and pay for all those boots because you take all the previous steps that lead up to that point. We have equivalent online and so when we’re doing our Web analytics analysis tracking these intermediate steps and funnels are very valuable.

Determining our primary and secondary goals are important but not difficult,  we simply ask ourselves why do you have a website? What is the purpose of your site? What do you want them to do what they visit? If you have an e-commerce site that your primary goal is simple because you want people to check out the full shopping cart and put money in your pocket. Simple enough but don’t forget about secondary goals as well but the reality is most businesses are not e-commerce companies where they accept credit cards over the web.
This doesn’t mean you don’t have goals, many websites are designed to generate business leads. If you have a contact form on your site that is the perfect goal and a fantastic way to determine from that. Mailing lists are another great example where we can easily put in value on each goal conversion. For example if you know that you have $500 in sales for every 1000 people on your weekly newsletter, you can easily calculate how much each additional sign-up is worth. E-mail marketing list itself is a very good to track via analytics, getting people to sign up for your list and tracking the success of the visit generating when sending out those mails.

Now perhaps your goals is to get the phones to ring, there are many ways to track both the visits that reached that contact page but also placed to integrate the tracking of the ringing your actual phone system. For perhaps you know the results of a industry study, in the hands of a prospective clients most likely to influence them. Well then tracking the downloads of that study plus the white papers intermediate or soft goal.

Maybe you’re a publisher and your goals for folks to click on your ads or affiliate links, can do that too. This one is interesting because it’s often the opposite of the previous goal. If you just launch support knowledge base is very likely you trying to shift calls away from your expensive call center towards your online knowledge base. So you certainly want to manage that goal and perhaps even measure contact requests as negative goal.

Don’t forget about the other areas of your business and the website. For example many of us have a career section of our site and to go hiring can be costly and big process so many times and even associate value with a resume submission. If we know that generally it takes X amount of resumes, then we can put  value on each resume submission. That way we can validate which jobs or sites sending us quality traffic by tracking and measuring the application process on our site. You can see that there is no shortage of goals that we could track on our site. These goals are fundamental to our ability to gain insights and perform analysis.

Later blog post that I’m going to write will be how to implement goals, for now we want to be thinking in our mind.

Why do you have a site?

And what goals you going to track?

It’s been quite a big post I hope you like it. Hope it’s been useful to you and please comment your feedback on this! We would love to hear what you think about this topic

~Veto

Before we jump into the tool and the interface it’s important that we back up and think about what’s Web analytics is really all about. There is dozens of definitions out there but Wikipedia provides one that i really like “Web analytics is the study of online behavior to improve it” and the critical part is here in order to improve its section. We are not just here to look at creating pipe charts and fancy reports we need to find those insides that allow us to take action that actually improve our sites based on those pretty reports. It’s perhaps just as important to realize Web analytics is not.
Web analytics software is like an x-ray machine in this case the patient is your website and the machine is Google analytics the tool will identify what’s going on under the skin of your website just like this tax rate will detect and display the broken bones.

However it won’t end your pain and it won’t ultimately fix your problem, for it that you will need actually someone who can read and interpret the x-ray and perform the analysis necessary to actually take action and in proof this situation. This is why even the best or most expensive Analytics tools still wont do it for you, you still need smart people like yourself with the help of the tool in order to get real improvement.

After work are going to assess the entire situation, we are going to perform triage to figure out which areas need the attention first such as prioritizing the skull. After we address that up apparently maybe by prescribing some drugs to do you with the swelling we move to the next issue but it continued down the line constantly analyzing and adjusting, improving and of course optimizing. Web analytics is the process so set it and forget it is no place here for that.

We first perform the measurement, we apply analysis and learn from what we see and then we take action. Our website constantly changing, our marketing is changing, that tools themselves are changing and the Web is continually changing even the world is ever-changing.

We need to make sure our analytics process is not going to become stale but rather evolve and keep up with those changes in order to ensure our website is performing at it best always. Thanks for reading and please comment we want to know what you think about on this topic