Archive for the ‘Google Analytics’ Category
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
Ok first up I have to say that we are all fans of Google Analytics here, with good reason: it’s zero-cost, its rich array of features: brilliant reporting capabilities, the ability to slice and dice the data in almost every conceivable way, the slick ajax-ified interface, and the support for advanced stuff like advanced segmentation and something that I really love using on e-commerce sites – goals and funnels, and for the nerds among us – filters.
- The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
- The data is not yours – it’s Google’s – and for all of the clean image that Google has (”don’t be evil”), forgive me when I say that I prefer to have my own copy of my website trend and visitor data.
- Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript snippet in your pages, but search engine spiders (”crawlers”) don’t execute JavaScript when they load your site’s pages, so their visits aren’t logged by Google Analytics. So when spiders from GoogleBot, Inktomi (Yahoo), Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Ask and Baidu crawl your site, you know absolutely zero about it from looking at your GA reports.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: crawltrack, googlebot, search engine spiders, Seo, slurp inktomi, website crawler statistics
Posted in Google Analytics, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Google have added a new tool to their already impressive array of search engine features and tools which can give you a great insight into how keywords relate in respect of real searches conducted on Google. One of the uses that this tool has is that it can really help you to structure your AdWords campaigns for maximum clout, helping your Quality Score and therefore your cost effectiveness and hence your profitability.
The name of the tool is Wonder Wheel and is available under the “Show Options” link to the top left of the main search results pane. Check out the screenshot below to see how to access it. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Google Search, Google Wonder Wheel
Posted in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Ok here is a post on how to do something extremely useful and ultimately profitable on an e-commerce site (online store) which was built on Zen Cart (or any online store system for that matter).
This can give you a crystal-clear view of what pages in the checkout process of your online store are literally losing you sales hand over fist. This post is an adjunct to an earlier post on this blog which is at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/.
Once you can then see which culprit pages are scaring your customers away (just as they have taken out their credit card), you are thus armed with the knowledge of which pages need changing in order to boost your conversion rate and therefore your sales. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Checkout Abandonment, Conversion Optimisation, ecommerce, Funnel Visualisation, Google Analytics Funnel Setup, Google Analytics Goals, Head Match, online store, Website Optimisation, Zen Cart
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Google Analytics, Zen Cart, e-commerce | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Ok so one of the most important things that you can do on an e-commerce website is to analyse how your pages are performing, especially in relation to your checkout process. This can give you a birds-eye view into which pages on your site (if any) are causing customers to abandon the checkout process just as they are about to take out their credit card. This scientific analysis of page performance reaps many long-term benefits and is a must for any site where the sales are not being clocked up despite a decent amount of site traffic.
In a blog post back in March, (“First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts” I wrote about a friend of mine who has an ecommerce website which had a fair bit of traffic but not many sales.
Since then we put a Google Analytics Goal Funnel in place on the checkout funnel pages to examine what site users were doing when they got to the point of checking out on the site. A screenshot of a one-month view of the funnel is below. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Checkout Funnel, Conversion Goals, e-commerce, Funnel Visualisation, Google Analytics, Ireland, Scientific Marketing, Zen Cart, Zen Cart Optimisation, ZenCartOptimization.com
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Google Analytics, Zen Cart, e-commerce | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
This post is very worthwhile reading, especially if you live in a country with a small population like Ireland, and want to figure out how to effectively set-up a Google AdWords campaign from scratch, using a deep keyword list.
One of the challenging things about setting up an AdWords campaign which is geo-targeting the Republic of Ireland only is that a lot of the third-party keyword tools out there have little or no keyword volume for searches performed in Ireland so therefore aren’t nearly as useful as they would be for analyzing say UK or USA audiences. You could use data collected from these high-volume countries to build out your keyword lists but, from my experience, often this does not reflect the search trends for Ireland.
So for this reason amongst others I have often set about building out a good deep keyword list for a campaign as the wider related keyphrases and synonyms are getting so little search volume in Ireland that they were virtually inconsequential.
So, in steps, here is what I find myself doing: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adwords, Google AdWords, Ireland Campaign, Keyword Data, Keyword Groups, Keyword Ideas, Keyword List, Keyword Tool, Keywords, Ppc Management, Republic Of Ireland, Research Tools, Search Terms, Search Trends, Search Volume, Synonyms, Third Party
Posted in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
A good friend of mine has a small family business which they are looking to expand despite these troubling times, and have a very nice e-commerce website which they launched in 2008 to that end. They are located in Co. Cavan just on the Fermanagh border, and have a .co.uk domain parked on their .com so as to service the UK as well as Ireland and beyond. They got a very good site build for them by a local website company here in Cavan, my friends over at Web Edge (Irish Web Developers – http://www.irishwebdevelopers.com). The site was built on Zen Cart and got a major upgrade recently which saw some significant SEO improvement features being introduced with the new version of Zen Cart in the upgrade.
So anyway, my friend mentioned to me that he wanted to get an AdWords campaign going in order to get some traffic to the site and generate more sales as business from the website have been slow. I remarked “ah, ok, well how many visitors are you getting to the site per day at the moment?” to which he looked at me perplexed and replied “don’t know!”. So we hopped up to the computer and logged into his Google Analytics account.
We were presented with the Google Analytics dashboard: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Website, Co Cavan, Competitor, Conversion Rate, Dashboard, Family Business, Friends, Good Friend, Google, Google Analytics, Ireland, Irish Web Developers, Money, Pageviews, Seo, Traffic, Troubling Times, Uk Domain, Zen Cart
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimiser, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, e-commerce | 1 Comment »
