Saturday, January 7th, 2012

How to use Google Analytics to Drive more Traffic to Your Website

There are probably thousands of articles on the web talking about Google Analytics, such as how to use the free reporting tool, how to set up Google Analytics for your website, and what Google Analytics reports you can take advantage of. This is all great information, especially for novice website designers. What I think is missing is the most critical piece of information, which is “How do I analyze these Google Analytics reports in order to actually make impactful changes to my website?” In this article we are going to answer that question, as well as, provide you with some examples of taking certain data from Google Analytics, analyzing it, and then using it to make changes to your website and/or website marketing.

Analyze Your Website on a Quarterly Basis

Tools like Google Analytics allow you to check your website traffic data as frequently as you’d like. I definitely recommend keeping an eye on your Google Analytics reports daily or weekly. With that said, we all know that checking your reports and actually taking time to analyze them are two different tasks. This is why I recommend that every website owner take a full day each quarter to analyze their reports and implement any needed changes to their website based on what the data is showing.

What Website Data should I be Paying Attention to?

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It’s easy to get lost in Google Analytics. There is SO much data that you can analyze. Not only is there a ton of data, but the ways in which you can slice it up seem almost endless. Every website owner is going to have different reports to focus on, but there are a few main data points that all website owners should be aware of during their quarterly reviews:

  • Traffic Sources – Keywords: Knowing which keywords are driving the most quality visitors to your website is crucial. You can begin optimizing more of your website around these keywords in order to capitalize on those searches.
  • Traffic Sources – Referring Sites: Understanding which websites are sending the most quality traffic to your website will allow you to focus more effort and time on those sites, and less of your time on under performing websites, moving forward.
  • Visitors Overview: How much of your website traffic is new visitors versus returning visitors? Knowing this might help you phrase content different or run certain marketing programs geared towards one type of visitor versus the other.
  • Content Overview – Top Pages: Having an idea of what pages are performing best will tell you what content your visitors are interested in. Produce more of that!
  • Visits: What days do you have the most traffic to your website? Knowing what days visitors are coming to your website allows you to publish new content or launch promotions on those days in order to capture the most attention.

Now that we have an understanding of some of the most important reports to analyze for your website, let’s dig into each of them to provide examples on how you can use the data to make real impactful changes to your website and website marketing.

Use Keyword Reports to Optimize Your Website

find keywords google analytics

Knowing which keywords to optimize your website with is crucial in attracting the right visitors. Here’s how you can utilize the Keyword reports in Google Analytics:

  1. Go into the Traffic Sources Overview section of Google Analytics
  2. Find your Top ten performing keywords and make a list of those keywords
  3. Go back through your website and begin infusing them into your website content
  4. Use them as anchor text for your URLs
  5. Name your images with your top ten keywords
  6. Add title tags and Alt tags to your images using your top ten keywords
  7. Create a list of new blog topics that you want to write about and be sure to infuse your top ten keywords into those articles

By analyzing your Traffic Sources – Keywords report and following the steps above you will significantly increase your website traffic for those specific keywords.

Once you have completed this first main Keyword optimization during your Quarterly review, go BACK through your Keyword report and sort the results by Average Time on Site. Find five keywords that might not be driving a lot of traffic to your website right now, but the traffic that is coming to your site from those keywords tends to spend a lot of time on your site. These are your “growth keywords”. Repeat the steps above using these keywords to see if with a little more use throughout your website they can produce more traffic.

Spend more Time on the Websites that Refer the most Traffic to Your Website

what sites send the most traffic to my site

Knowing which websites (or social media channels) around the web that are referring the most traffic to your website is critical. As a website owner you only have so much time in the day to market your site. It’s best to use that time wisely. Follow these steps in order to analyze your traffic sources and make impactful changes to your website marketing:

  1. Go into your Traffic Sources report within Google Analytics and review the Top Referring Sites data
  2. Ask yourself, are these the websites that I assumed would be near the top? Are these the websites I’m spending the most time using in order to drive traffic to my website?
  3. Start trying to figure out why some sites are near the top of this list, while others are near the bottom. Perhaps one of the websites near the top is a site that you recently wrote a guest blog article for. Contact the owner of that site and see if you can write another article for them.
  4. Is LinkedIn outperforming Facebook? If so, you may want to tweak the amount of time you spend on both social media sites, with more time being devoted to LinkedIn next quarter instead of Facebook. This strategy can be repeated for all social media sites that you use.
  5. Is Banner Ad ‘A’ outperforming Banner Ad ‘B’? If so, perhaps you want to cancel Banner Ad ‘B’ and ask for more space on the website that’s hosting Banner Ad ‘A’.
  6. Is there a website that you don’t recognize that’s currently sending a lot of traffic to your website? Reach out to the owner of that website and see if you can partner with them in some way in order to capitalize even more on all of the traffic they are sending your way.

Using the Referral Sources report in Google Analytics will help you become more efficient with your marketing time and more effective at driving traffic to your website.

Run a Contest for New Visitors, Say ‘Thank You’ to Returning Visitors

Analyzing your Visitor Profile through the Visitors Overview report in Google Analytics will let you know how much of your traffic is composed of ‘New Visitors’ and how much of your traffic is composed of ‘Repeat Visitors’. You want to encourage new visitors to become return visitors, as well as, continue to attract even more new visitors. Here are a few ways that you can take your data from the Visitors Overview report and actually use it to improve your website:

  • Post some sort of a ’Thank You’ message somewhere prominent on your website for returning visitors OR send out the periodic ‘Thank You’ email to your email list just letting your supporters know you appreciate them.
  • Do you have an e-Commerce website? Give repeat customers a discount on their next purchase.
  • Create a ‘FAQ’ page to help new visitors quickly understand your website and how to use it
  • Make the ‘Contact Us’ page as prevalent as possible in case new visitors have questions and need to contact you
  • Create a survey for returning customers to capture information that you think will help you provide more value to them in the future
  • Run a contest to encourage new customers to get engaged with your website/brand

Produce More of the Content Your Visitors Like

most visited pages on my website

Understanding what content is resonating with your visitors will help you come up with new content topics for the next quarter.

  1. Go into the Content Overview section of Google Analytics and navigate to the Top Pages report
  2. Find the top 5-6 pages visited over the past 3-6 months
  3. Think about what information is displayed on each of those pages and determine what information the majority of your visitors are looking for
  4. Develop a Content Plan for the next quarter, comprised of topics that you think are most relevant based on your findings above. A few ideas might be:
  1. Write blog articles around popular topics
  2. Focus social media efforts in promoting those top pages or discussing those top topics
  3. Write an eBook expanding on some of those topics that your visitors are finding valuable
  4. Shoot YouTube videos around those topics and embed them into your Top Pages

Producing more of the content that your visitors are finding valuable will keep them coming back, get them to share your website with their friends, and attract new visitors.

Publish New Content, Contests, and General Website Updates on High Traffic Days

Are the weekends a popular time for your website or do most people visit your website during the week? Knowing what days are high traffic days for your website and what days are low traffic days for your website allows you to be much more strategic in regards to publishing new updates to your website. By analyzing the Visits report in Google Analytics you can see which days seem to generate the most traffic. Make a list of your high traffic days and then start taking advantage of those high traffic days in the following ways:

  • Publish blog articles on those days
  • Begin and end contests on high traffic days
  • Spend time on social media during those days
  • Publish events to your website
  • Make architecture or functionality updates on low traffic days

Knowing when, and when not to, publish new information to your website can drastically alter the number of views your new updates receive. Be smart about when you publish new content, news, events, etc. Use the Visits report in Google Analytics as your guide.

Turn Google Analytics Reports Into Impactful Changes for Your Website

Google Analytics is great. The website data provided by Google Analytics can help website owners learn a ton about their website. With that said, unless website owners take time to review and analyze their reports on a regular basis, and then take time to use that data to make changes to their website, they are missing out on the biggest advantage that Google Analytics provides. Google Analytics provides you with a blueprint for giving your visitors what they want, when they want it. Be sure to take advantage of that.

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Friday, January 6th, 2012

Why Aren’t Chromebooks Saving Password Changes?

chromebooks

There’s something weird going on with Chromebooks – the Google-branded laptop computers powered by the company’s web-based operating system Chrome OS. They’re not saving the password changes you make to your Google account. Basically, if you change your password, shut down your machine, then reboot, the Chromebook will ask you for your old password instead of the new one.

The problem has to do with Google’s sessions being persistent (that is, they don’t log you out), and leads to a relatively minor security threat. Meaning, if someone was to take advantage of this threat, they would need physical access to your Chromebook. In the grand scheme of things, that puts this threat on the low-end of the risk spectrum. However, because Chromebooks are pitched as low-cost, secure, easy-to-use alternatives to traditional laptops for businesses and educational institutions, it’s important to highlight issues such as this to make the community aware.

Also, I just think it’s annoying.

Having experienced the problem myself after a tip from my former colleague Audrey Watters who covers the edu-tech space at Hack Education, I reached out to security professionals to determine its severity.

Roel Schouwenberg, the Senior Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, who will also be speaking on the topic of Chrome OS security at the upcoming RSA Conference 2012, looked into the problem. He found that the reason this is occurring is because your Google password is used for local authentication, too.

“This is why you can log onto your Chromebook even when it has no Internet connection,” he explains. But when you change your Google password, that change is not immediately communicated back to the Chromebook, even though the new password is active for all your online services.

This is the case even if you change your Google Account password on another device. The old password is stored in Chromebook’s local authentication, so the computer will  ask for the old one. In order to workaround this issue, you have to sign out of your Chromebook session on the device while you’re online, then sign back in to force the sync of the new password that’s already active elsewhere.

But security-wise, an attacker would have to know your old password and have physical access to your Chromebook in order to be a threat. And even then, there isn’t much of a threat: you still have to re-authenticate with any Google service before getting connected to, say, your Gmail or Google Docs, for example.

So while you could call this a security issue, it’s really more of an annoyance. From an I.T. support standpoint, however, I could see this being a hassle for Google App admins who have to help users who can’t figure out why their new password doesn’t work. (One thing I learned from my handful of years in I.T.: no one is immune from experiencing password reset issues. Having passwords that don’t immediately update even when you’re online, would only compound the problem.)

In online discussions of the issue, folks who didn’t force the refresh on their own (you know, normal people), reported seeing sync delays of 24 hours even up to four days or a week. That seems high, though, and it’s hard to know how long these delays are normally without further investigation (underway now).

For what it’s worth, much of this behavior (using the password for local authentication, for example) is by design. That’s why Chromebooks work offline. And a lot of the confusion here could be minimized simply by having a better UI (user interface) and flow for walking you through the password change process.

But really, if you change your Google password, and your Chromebook requires your Google password, then the end user’s expectation is to use their current Google password.

It’s kind of one of those non-issue issues, but something that’s indicative of how far Chrome OS still has to go to be a competitive alternative to traditional operating systems: they’re still working on the login, folks. The login!



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Thursday, January 5th, 2012

25 Best Infographics Of 2011 That Are Still Relevant Today

The year of 2011 went very fast for us in the development world and I am sure some of you accomplished important things for your career during this year. But besides our personal achievements, the whole industry managed to reach something that was unthinkable around 10 years ago. To show you how the web progressed during the past year, I collected a series of infographics from the internet and hope, by the end of this article, you will realize what huge potential this year of 2012 has. Most of the images are not in full here, so you might want to click on them and read the whole infographic for an overall understanding of the presentations.

1. 60 seconds on the web

This one shows what happened on the web during 2011 in a timeframe of 60 seconds, if we minimize the whole year to it. 600 new YouTube videos, almost 700,000 search queries on Google and Facebook status updates and close to 100,000 tweets should say enough about what power the internet holds nowadays.

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2. Disruptive Companies

It is easy to see how Apple, for example, disrupts today’s web. The iPhone and iPad start to replace the computers and old phones and always bring new ideas to the table.

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3. Instagram’s Fun Facts

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4. User Generated Content

Nowadays people say “Content is King” and after reading this infographic you will see why they mean it. There is so much content on the internet that is really difficult to keep up with, therefore we have to sort out the things we are interested in and only follow those.

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5. App Store Info

Want to see some interesting information about the apps in Apple’s Store? Then this infographic is for you.

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6. Foursquare Reaching 10 Million Users

This is an animated .gif and you might want to see it in full.

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7. Spam

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8. How Busy are Americans

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9. Facebook Relationships

This infographic is not only about Facebook users, but also about their relationships. Very good to understand how Facebook works for us and how we interact with the others.

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10. Bugs in your Open Source Code

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11. Twitter History

If you tweet a lot, you probably already know some of these, but otherwise this is an interesting read about the records on Twitter and some other statistics. It is not only for 2011, but includes some events from last year.

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12. Farewell to Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, the former genius and Apple co-founder, died in the latter part of 2011. This infographic is more or less dedicated to him and tells us the important milestones in his life.

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13. iCloud

Apple’s new technology is shown and explained in this infographic.

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14. iPhone Users and their Security Concerns

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15. Online Hiring through oDesk in the Bay Area

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16. Future Social CEO

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17. Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line

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18. How does Google make a Profit

If you still ask yourself where does Google, a free service, make its money from, then this infographic will definitely provide an answer to you.

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19. The Life of a Facebook Photo

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20. Differences Between Mac and PC Users

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21. The Apple Products Tree Since its Foundation

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22. Online and Offline Marketing

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23. Social Media Marketing and its Effectiveness

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24. The StartUp ToolKit for Online Entrepreneurs

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25. A Day in the Life of a CEO

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