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Direct Response Marketing
As marketing dollars dry up, targeted advertising is gaining. How do you run your direct response program? IMAGINE THIS: YOU OPEN AN ACCOUNT IN A MAJOR search engine by charging $10 to your credit card. You then place highly focused ads in the...
How To Get Instant Traffic To Your Website For Only A Nickel A Lead!
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most cost-effective methods of getting leads known to Internet business owners. It gives you instant traffic, and allows you to test your business model in real time.
At the same time, pay-per-click...
PPC Bid Management Software Showdown
If you’ve been keeping up with the search engine industry lately, you’ll know that Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a fast growing trend. Nearly all of the major search engines and directories have now integrated one type of PPC or another into their search...
Preparing Your Website For Visitors
Designing and developing a website today is not as easy as it was let’s say four years ago. There are so many elements to take into consideration and various media strategies to contend with. Color, technology, screen resolutions and cross browser...
The Business Case for SEO
It’s interesting how potential clients have preconceived notions about which aspects of search engine marketing have the most value. In fact, they tend to fall into two camps that are 180° apart. The first camp believes completely in the value of...
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Google Stats Analytics - Awesome Power & It's Free!
I happened by chance to install Google Analytics before the
enormous demand forced Google to limit subscriptions.
It's been running now for about a week and I've got to say I'm
impressed. You effectively get a high-end web stats analysis
package that would normally cost a considerable amount of money,
for absolutely nothing.
Of course there is a price to pay in another way relating to the
information Google will be collecting as they analyse people's
behaviour on the many thousands of websites that will have it
installed. There could be privacy issues and this is something
to be addressed by the wider web community.
To get started you complete the account information and then
enter a simple snippet of code onto every page you want to
monitor. I did this using the Dreamweaver master template of my
site and so had the code on every page in no time.
For the first couple of days nothing seemed to happen then the
graphs and coloured pie charts started to come to life as it
picked up the visitors on the site.
The first page you see is the Executive Overview. This has four
charts giving a basic outline of what's going on with the site.
There is Visits and Pageviews, Visits by New and Returning,
Visits by Source and interestingly a Geo Map Overlay. This has
little dots on it showing each of the main point in the world
where the visitors are coming from. I was surprised to learn I
am getting 3.3 per cent of my visitors from the Philippines for
instance.
Basically the stats are spilt into three topic areas namely:
Executive, Marketer and Webmaster. The Webmaster section could
be likened to conventional stats. It's got all the usual things
such as browser versions, screen resolutions and so on. And it
all seems very easy to understand with nice colour charts for
everything. Also some of the information is really useful as
well, such as most screen resolutions are now 1024 x 768 and I
would never have thought that 69 per cent of my visitors are
using broadband connections.
But it's the Marketer area where
things are really happening.
Google have gone to town on this one and they really want people
to understand just what keywords are converting visitors into
action.
Take the 'Overall Keyword Conversion'. This actually shows which
keywords and keyword phrases are driving quality traffic. The
system does this by analysing what each visits does from the
keyword they put in and so the more activity the more value.
The other big thing Google has done is integrate the Adwords
results right into the stats. You can do direct comparisons
between your organic search terms and your PPC terms. And not
only Adwords it can be set-up to analyse other PPC outputs as
well.
But if all this is not enough for you it's got some really
advanced features you can set-up for yourself as well.
One of these is Campaign Conversion. With this you can set up
referral link and then monitor the performance of the sources
such as a newsletter or your PPC campaigns.
The other really powerful feature is to set-up goals for the
visitors. This means you can identify some set pages people go
through for a particular process. A good example would be a
shopping cart checkout.
All you do is enter each page as points towards the goal and
then as the visitors go through the process you will start to
see the pages where visitors are dropping off and be so be able
to do something about it.
So Google Analytics seems to have great potential. It is no
great surprise that demand has so quickly outstripped supply.
But what's really powerful about it is that it makes web stats
interesting. At long last here is a package that's really
affordable and enables any website owner to really start to
understand exactly what is going on with the visitors on their
site and so make effective changes to improve every aspect about
it.
About the author:
David Howlett helps website owners and managers to take charge
of the marketing on their sites. Visit his website at: www.davidhowlett.co.uk
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