<span class="pro_member_name">Trevor Harwood</span>

Designer: Wordpress, Joomla, HTML Email Marketing for small businesses.
Seattle, Washington

Biztalk » Community-wide general discussion »

Posted by Trevor Harwood, Seattle, Washington | Oct 03, 2009

Biznik newbie: One thing every business should be doing but isn't

Hi everyone, I'm a new member here and thought I would introduce myself by sharing a pet peeve as a web developer working with other businesses.

Companies not having an Analytics package installed

Doing this will provide your company with valuable data on:

Who is interested in your product, and how long they stay on your site.
Where they live.
Even their income brackets.

You can then use this data to modify your content, do A/B tests and increase your conversion rates and ROI.

The process of implementing this on your companies site or blog is completely Free and takes 10 minutes of your time to setup.

The easiest solution is to go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an account.

After walking through the account setup they will present you with a small bit of code to copy and paste into your sites html.

If you are having trouble with this step Google offers a help guide here:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=10976

Smashing Magazine has an excellent resource available: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/16/a-guide-to-google-analytics-and-useful-tools/ If you are interested in learning how to integrate the service into your Adwords account, Wordpress and other advanced features of the service.

If you already have a Google Analytics account and are interested in gathering additional data on your visitors. I would also recommended looking at these services:

Crazy Egg:
Provides heat map overlay of visitors interactions.
Quantcast: Give you information about visitor demographics, income, gender, etc.
Clicky: Analytics package that you can watch in real time.
Social Meter: Track your popularity on social networks and bookmarking sites.

And to track any RSS feeds i normally use Google's Feedburner (which can be tracked in google analytics)

I'm looking forward to meeting and interacting with you on Biznik and I hope that this post will convince you of the merits of implementing an Analytics package on your site.

Best, T

10 Bizniks have posted replies

Posted by David Krafchick, Seattle, Washington | Oct 04, 2009

We have had an Analytics page since the beginning and have checked it every few days each week to see what's happening on our site.
Posted by Trevor Harwood, Seattle, Washington | Oct 04, 2009

@David

That's great to hear. I like getting proved wrong.

I am curious if you have found its value mostly in seeing what pages people have visited on your site, or have you used it more extensively to target customers or do A/B testing on your sales pages?
Posted by Richard Gabel, Issaquah, Washington | Oct 04, 2009

Using analytics can be a real eye opener. I found that all that blog material I was putting out to increase traffic did just that. Unfortunately from 5 continents and 49 states that I had no interest in reaching.

Helping small businesses grow!
Posted by Lindsay Berger, Stillwater, Minnesota | Oct 13, 2009

Hi Trevor,

Thanks for this helpful information. While I do have analytics installed on both my blog and website, I find that Feedburner is not accurate in most cases (I know I have more people subscribing and looking at my blog than it indicates). Have you had this problem?

Also, I'm interested in hearing more about A/B testing. I totally get its value and understand how it works in theory, but what logistically do we need to know in order to set up and implement an effective split test?

I wish you a great day and look forward to hearing your insight!

All the best, Lindsay

Get marketing copy that won't put prospects to sleep.
Posted by David Krafchick, Seattle, Washington | Oct 13, 2009

I look at the visits, which pages they go to, how long they stay, referral sites, which countries, just to name a few.

From this we gather what's working, what adjustments to the site, etc. We just launched a new version of the site a few months back, so I am tracking it more closely.
Posted by Jeri Lucas, Kirkland, Washington | Oct 14, 2009

You are so right Trevor. I have a auto repair shop and need to know who is finding me, where they are from and what pages the looked at and for how long. I am making all my networking and marketing efforts to focus on my website. I want to get rid of my direct mail advertising as soon as possible. Analytic is a god send for a low tech. like me. Visit my sight if you get a chance. And welcome to Biznk

Fixing them all
Posted by Howard Howell, Seattle, Washington | Oct 14, 2009

Trevor... Thanks for the good information. I have Google Analytics but I am an Analytics dummy when it comes to actually using the tool.

I would welcome you to create a class for dummies like me to offer to our Entrepreneurial Junkies group. If you want to do it as a tele-webcast, I would be willing to host it. ...Howard

Helping YOU Sell YOUR Expertise
Posted by Ken Peters, Phoenix, Arizona | Oct 14, 2009

I've been tracking the traffic to my site and blog with Google analytics for sometime and have found it to be, well... "interesting".

Often, the info leaves me with more questions than answers. Plus, it drives me crazy to see analytics that say someone logged onto my site for 00:00:00. What the heck is that!?!? :)

Nocturnal Design Studio
Posted by Trevor Harwood, Seattle, Washington | Oct 15, 2009
@ Richard

It can be very entertaining to look at the logs and see how people discovered your site and what keywords they were looking for.

I am almost always surprised at what content is the most popular on my sites. Plus you never know, the Seychelle Islands might hold the next hot business opportunity :)

@Lindsey

I have heard of Feedburner showing some inaccurate results in terms of subscriber numbers. I think this is because they get some of their data from third party services like FriendFeed, Google Reader, etc.

There is an interesting conversation going on over at A VC blog on subscriber numbers that you might find interesting to check out.

As for A/B and multivariate testing this can obviously range from testing simple subject line changes to full scale graphic and layout variation testing. If you are looking to implement a basic solution Google offers an easy to setup solution found here. A few other resources to get you started with your a/b tests include:
@Howard

Thanks for the invitation, I will think about doing a telecast on analytics and a/b testing if people show enough of an interest.

@Ken

I would not get too upset about the weird time on site numbers with Google Analytics. I believe this is calculated by them taking the time stamp of when the first pageview on a website occurs, and subtracting that from the time stamp of the visitors second pageview on your website.

If your visitor doesn't go to a second page on your site is it has nothing to subtract from, so it reports a 0:00:00 as the time on the site, when in reality they could have been a very engaged user.

I would recommend setting up specific goals using the built in tools to measure and test your customers actions over time, and compare them rather than just the initial numbers they give you.

I would also make sure that your sites loading speed is adequate and is not the cause of people abandoning your site. A good place to check this is to run your url through this free web page analyzer tool. It will tell you if any particular item is slowing down your site.
Posted by Ken Peters, Phoenix, Arizona | Oct 16, 2009

Trevor

Thanks, I'll look into that stuff a little deeper.

Nocturnal Design Studio