Google’s Webmaster Tools unleashed a pretty cool tool today to help you improve your websites load time. The tool is called Site Performance, located under the labs portion in the Webmaster Tools.
Looking at my own graph, it appears they have been tracking average load times since the end of July. For this site, the average load time is 2.4 seconds. Something I’m pretty happy about, but wouldn’t mind finding a way to bring it even lower. Continue reading »
Back in October I mentioned Google Analytics new feature Advanced Segments, and how you can use it to track visitors coming in through email. Here is the post: How to Use Google Analytics to Track Your Email Campaigns. Since then I have become a big fan of this new feature, and as far as I am concerned, they can take the beta icon off it now. Below are a six of my favorites, and thanks to Google, they make them easy to share.
To add these to your Google Analytics account simply click on the link and then save it by clicking Create Segment. See screenshot below on how to save. Continue reading »
Are you worried about your website traffic dumping on Turkey Day? If you live in the United States, or get lot of U.S. traffic you might expect it. The reality is though, it’s just another day, and don’t be surprised if you actually get more traffic than expected.
Looking at my own stats for a few of my sites, I found Thanksgiving played an insignificant roll in web traffic or it’s following days.
Looking at 2008′s benchmark from Google Analytics, traffic appeared to actually go up for most sites. This was based on an sites similar in size to 500 pages. Looking at benchmarks by category here is a list of the categories ordered by largest increased Turkey Traffic first. Continue reading »
Another Google Analytics post, but this one is to announce a cool new feature that Google added. Located right underneath the Dashboard on your analytics report you will now find, Intelligence Alerts. Easily watch, and optionally get emailed if your important target numbers or goals are not performing as planned.
Like custom reports you can create your own alerts, but Google has already made several of them for you to copy into your own reports.
Templates that Google has already created:
Do you include your website link in your email signature? I would hope so. Do you have a mailing list where you email your subscribers on a regular basis? As well, I hope so. Do you really know how effective your email campaigns really are though? When sending out emails there are a couple of easy ways to track their effectiveness. You can link to pages specifically designed for emails, or you could simply make the link include some sort of identifier. Unfortunately, those methods only track the email that you send out. What if someone shares your site through email that you didn’t send? Are you tracking those?
With Google Analytics you can track not only your email campaigns, but what others are emailing while referencing your site. Know how viral your site really is! It’s all done with Google Analytics Advanced Segments, and I will include a link to share this filter with you at the end of the post. Continue reading »
Looking back at a years worth of data for this blog, and comparing it to the previous, I wanted to know what types of marketing worked best. It seems that the best thing that I can do for this site is to simply keep posting new content.
After looking at the stats I saw many sources come and go. A few marketing methods appeared to work, but not at a level I was hoping or expecting. I have three sources of traffic, direct, referring, and search. When looking at Google’s analytics to do the comparison, make sure you don’t just click on Traffic Sources. Click on Traffic Sources, and then click on each source for their stats; Direct, Referring, Search. This will show percentage of growth based for each source. If you were to just click Traffic Sources the percentages are comparisons to total traffic growth, and it may mislead you. Continue reading »
For those of you that use Google Analytics for your website, you may have noticed the new addition to the view bar. It’s the Pivot function. This little button can work wonders. It is a fantastic tool for quickly seeing where your visitors are coming from, and to see what’s their favorite content from those sources.
Back in September I wrote this post: Targeting Sources for Better Visitors. That post was about getting more page views by tapping into the right audience. Using Google’s new pivot option, you could drastically improve your understanding of your audience. Continue reading »
A common occurrence and necessity is to spend more time working on the home page compared to other pages of a website. Many experts will tell you that you can’t forget your other content, and smartly so. Search engines like Google sees each page of your site uniquely, and your contact page could actually bring in more visitors than your home page. This is all often the case, but I wanted to know by how much.
So I did a little study using Google Analytics reports from ten different sites. The sites are completely random in industry, and in type. Continue reading »
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