Posts Tagged ‘analytics’

What Is A Heat Map?

Friday, May 27th, 2011

If you are new to Internet marketing or website development, or you just simply have stuck to the basics, then you might wonder what a heat map is and how it can help you improve your website and lead to greater revenues. Even increase your ROI.

A heat map, in simple terms, is a graphic picture of your website traffic and what that traffic does on each page of your website.

Represented by colors, a heat map can show you the “hot spots” on each page of your website. It can show you where the most mouse movements occur, which indicates where users’ eyeballs travel, and even which links are clicked on the most. You can then use that information to improve your websites SEO and overall content mix.

Let’s say you discover that on almost all of your pages, the most viewed area of the page is the top right corner. Let’s say that, furthermore, the most clicked link on each page is the banner ad in the top right corner that offers site visitors a free download of your e-book. What does that tell you?

It should tell you that whatever information you provide in that e-book is deemed valuable to your site visitors. It could be a good opportunity to provide more in-depth information about that content. Perhaps it’s time to publish and market a more in-depth e-book on the topic that you can sell to your site visitors and e-mail list.

What if, on the other hand, the most viewed part of your website was the top left corner and the most clicked link on your home page was a link at the bottom of the page that led visitors to your About Us page. What’s that tell you?

If you have links in the top left corner of your home page that are not getting clicked on as much as the links at the bottom of the page, then you probably have something wrong with those links or the content that surrounds them. Maybe you should reword your anchor text. Or maybe the content surrounding the link should do a better job of leading your visitors to take the desired action. Maybe the call to action itself isn’t working.

Heat maps are valuable tools that measure many factors at once. If you are serious about making your website stand out, then you should be using heat maps.

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Posted in Tracking & Analytics | 2 Comments »

Time To Measure Page Load Speed

Friday, May 6th, 2011

For a couple of years now, Internet marketers have been debating the importance of page load speed. It is almost near consensus that Google finds page load speed important. A recent announcement that Google Analytics can now track and report page load speed should put any doubt to rest.

This is important news for a number of reasons:

  1. First and foremost, a slow loading website or landing page can affect your conversion rate. If this concerns you, then you should measure your page load speed and determine whether or not it is affecting your conversion rate. If so, figure out a way to speed up your website’s load time.
  2. You can check your site’s load time across multiple browsers. If your website loads slower in Internet Explorer, for instance, than it does in Chrome of Firefox, then you should take a look at your code to see why that is.
  3. Does geography play a role in load time? It could. By measuring your load time against geographical patterns, you can determine whether your website is too slow for a particular region. If so, can you fix it? If not, perhaps you should consider a new website that targets that specific region.
  4. You can now ask yourself if certain parts of your website load faster than other parts. Does your video section have a problem loading fast? How about your web-based apps? Check it out and fix the problems.

I believe Google uses page load speed to determine search engine rankings. This announcement all but confirms that. If not, then they will likely be doing so at some point in the future. But even if they don’t, you should have your own reasons for checking page load speed. Your site visitors expect it.

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Posted in Tracking & Analytics | 2 Comments »

Twitter Is About To Become 100 Times More Valuable

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Online marketers can now rejoice. Twitter users especially. Some time this year, which is now drawing to a close, Twitter is expected to roll out a free – yes, you read that right, free – analytics tool. You can read the announcement here.

Now, let’s get this straight. We’re talking about a free, real-time analytics tool for Twitter. What are the implications of that?

No. 1, I don’t agree with WebProNews that

if a little odd since this would be an easy way for Twitter to earn money.

WebProNews doesn’t say it outright, but the implication is clear: Twitter would profit more from charging for the service than by offering it for free. I don’t agree.

Google Analytics is free and the search engine makes hand over fist from its pay-per-click ads. I think Twitter is doing the right thing. What I expect to see happen is a flood of new business users rushing to make the most of the Twitter opportunity, veteran Twitter users to jump on the analytics bandwagon on Day 1 and by the second month of service to be offering information products for the rest of us on how to use Twitter Analytics to earn a profit for your business and for Twitter to subsequently – maybe some time next year – to introduce its own pay-per advertising service.

Well, maybe not on that last one. Twitter already has a sponsored tweet service. I’m sure that the free analytics tool will be useful to sponsors in determining the effectiveness of their sponsored tweets. It’s possible that Twitter will roll out its sponsored tweets platform in the near future and that the service will explode all over the real-time net. The potential for profit for Twitter is enormous.

So far, only Facebook has challenged Google in terms of real competition online. Twitter could be – and likely will be – the next big competitor to challenge Google’s dominance. And its free analytics tool will be a big part of that. Watch for Twitter’s traffic to rise dramatically.

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Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »

Why Are You Using Social Media?

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

Cynthia Boris makes a good point. If you can’t measure the effectiveness of your social media then why are you using it?

This is the dilemma of the modern marketer. Social media has proven to be an effective marketing channel for a lot of marketers. But so has television. That doesn’t mean the medium is a proven marketing channel for everyone who uses it. Any marketing channel requires a knowledge of its use that consists of strategies and tactics that have worked for others and that might work for your situation. Without a solid grounding in marketing principles and your market niche, your chances of succeeding in any marketing channel are pretty slim.

Even then, having the ability to measure your results is necessary if you want to gauge your effectiveness. And that’s what social media has lacked for the most part.

Yesterday, we talked about a new addition to ShareThis – social media analytics. And Twitter has had third-party analytics tools available for it for quite some time. Many marketers report they use traditional tools like Google Analytics and Omniture. These are fine. The bottom line is to use something that will give you a visual on how your marketing efforts are panning out.

Remember this maxim: What you don’t measure you can’t change. So measure your results and the next time someone asks you why you are using social media, you’ll have an answer.

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Posted in Social Media | 6 Comments »

ShareThis Adds Social Media Analytics

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Since social media has become popular there has been a huge problem for marketers – measuring results. How do you measure your results and analyze the effectiveness of your social media campaigns? It’s been a big challenge.

Finally, ShareThis adds analytics for social media marketing.

The analytics are centered around two very important marketing concepts:

  • Audience Index
  • Reach

The Audience Index is the measure of your audience’s influence compared to that of other websites generally and those within your niche. This metric also allows you to see how influential your audience is or, rather, how you engage with key influencers on your site. It is important to know how well you connect with key influencers because those are the people who will pass on the benefits of your product or service to their audiences and influencers generally have large audiences. That’s why they are called “influencers”. It’s an important part of your audience segment.

Social reach is a metric that deals with how widely your content is distributed and shared. It measures how far your content travels and the resulting return in traffic based on those shares.

Both of these metrics have the potential to help you gauge how effective you are in reaching your target audience and whether or not you are reaching the right influencers based on your niche. As far as social media analytics go, this is a step in the right direction.

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Posted in Tracking & Analytics | 3 Comments »

Local Businesses Can Now Track How Searchers Use Google Maps

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Google announced earlier this week that it has incorporated some tracking and analytics data with its Local Business Center. This is good news for local business owners because analytics information is very important for measuring how your business is doing online. Specifically, information that local businesses can track include

  • The number of impressions your business listing receives as a result of a Google Maps search or Google.com search
  • How many actions users took while interacting with your business listing
  • Top search queries people used to find your business listing
  • Zip codes used to find directions to your locations

This information is valuable information for a local business. And even better, it’s actionable data, meaning you can make sound business decisions based on this information. By discovering what the top queries are for people finding you in your local area, you can go on to build more web pages targeted the keywords that are right for your business. And if you know which zip codes people are traveling from you can use that information to help you plan future business locations. You can also see if people are interacting with your business listing multiple times with one impression.

This is great information. If you have a local business and you’ve been wondering how you can track some of these things, now is the time. Learn more about LBCs analytics tracking here and here.

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Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

Is Your Bounce Rate Too High?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Your bounce rate is the number of people who land on your website and don’t click through to another page. Your analytics package should tell you which pages have a high bounce rate. Pay attention to this number because it is a negative and you need to do what you can to reduce the bounce rate.

Instead of looking at your average bounce rate across the entire website, which isn’t very useful, look at the bounce rates for your individual pages. Most websites have high bounce rates (somewhere around 70%-80%), but you don’t have to. You want to get that bounce rate below 50% if possible. Find out what your site visitors are looking for and provide them with information that will help them achieve it.

Bounce rates differ from industry to industry too. Are your site visitors just looking for information or are they looking to buy a product or service. If they are looking to buy something and all you have is information then you’ll get high bounce rates. If they are looking for information and you have products or services to sell then you will have high bounce rates. If either of these is the case then you are likely targeting the wrong keywords and phrases or you are not making the right offerings. It could be a combination of the two. To fix it, do a little deeper analysis of your site visitors’ needs and tweak your web pages to provide that or create new web pages and drive your visitors there.

Your bounce rate is a very important statistic and says a lot about what your visitors really need. It all starts with web development and builds from there.

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Posted in Tracking & Analytics | 4 Comments »

Online Marketing Boot Campe – Sign Up, Fall In

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

If you have $2,200 laying around then you might want to consider taking the Online Marketing Boot Camp. This looks like one action-packed week.

The boot camp will cover analytics and pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and a host of other must-have information on Internet marketing. Speakers will come from Google, EPIK, and elsewhere from around the world. It looks like the bulk of the training will be on Google Analytics, but there should be some useful information on the other topics as well.

I get no commission if you sign up. The downside is travel and hotel expenses. The boot camp will take place in Burlington, Vermont and run for four days. But the knowledge and information you gain about Google Analytics and Google AdWords (the boot camp is sponsored by Google) from experts like Avinash Kaushik appear to be invaluable. Only 70 seats are being offered so you better get in early because it looks like they’re going to sell quickly.

Get more information on the Online Marketing Boot Camp here.

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Posted in PPC for Small Business, Tracking & Analytics | 1 Comment »