Patricio Robles says, “Even the smallest of organisations are using web analytics to improve their business, and Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools available today. Google Analytics might be free, but it’s a robust tool that can meet the needs of many businesses large and small. So where should beginners start? Here are seven tips. KISS Google Analytics has powerful capabilities and many go unused by even the most experienced users. For beginners, Google Analytics can be downright overwhelming. Fortunately, getting real value from Google Analytics doesn’t require... [...]

Jane Morgan says, “Want to avoid lumping all your earned editorial links and marketing campaigns into one murky bucket of clicks? Connect Google Analytics with Google AdWords for automatic conversion tracking. For everything else, there’s manual campaign tracking. Without manual tagging, your social, email and other marketing activities show up as referral or direct traffic. As marketing pioneer John Wanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Manual campaign tagging enables you to figure out which half. The following... [...]

Jeff Sauer says, “We analyze the performance of our content every day. Sometimes it’s subconscious, like when we check the number of tweets we get from a new blog post. Other times, we make more conscious efforts, like reviewing performance metrics in Google Analytics. This feedback—both formal and anecdotal—informs what we do next. It influences future blog posts and validates our strategies. Reviewing content performance on a regular basis has been key to the growth of many online publishers. We should all be taking note of these successes as we build our own content marketing... [...]

Claudiu Murariu says, “What happens when you take two of the top online platforms in the industry and allow them to play together nicely? On our right, we have Salesforce. Salesforce proudly positions itself as the number one customer relationship management platform and does a stellar job of following the path a lead takes in becoming a customer and a repeat customer. On our left, we have Google Analytics, one of the best web analytics services out there. It does a great job of providing an accurate image of what is happening on your website from the moment an anonymous user arrives to... [...]

Ed Reese says, “Finding effective ways of organizing your analytics dashboards is quite a bit easier if you can get a sense for what has worked for others. To that end, in today’s Whiteboard Friday the founder of Sixth Man Marketing, Ed Reese, shares his five favorite approaches“. My Favorite 5 Analytics Dashboards – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Martijn Scheijbeler says, “Everybody remembers being in college, writing down activities in a logbook, hoping the hours they worked on a project were enough for a sufficient grade. After two years as an online marketer/SEO, I realized what makes writing down activities so important. The intent of this post is to save you from making the same mistakes I made. If you’re working for a brand, you probably want to make sure you’re on top of all your KPIs, but few of us are able to carefully track our valued metrics 24 hours a day. So in addition to providing you with some... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “Google Analytics users will now see a notification if their website has been hacked. In the same way website owners receive malicious software alerts via Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics users will now get automatic notifications letting them know when malicious software has been identified on their site”. Google Analytics Now Displaying Malware Notifications Marketing Land  [...]

Derek S. says, “With many Internet professionals working on multiple accounts at the same time, mistakes, like in the form of wrongly deleted information, are bound to happen. Google Analytics has introduced a new feature to help users recover their deleted data called Trash Can. This new feature, a safety net of sorts, allows users to reclaim lost or accidentally deleted information. In order to reclaim their lost information, users simply select the Administration tab followed by selecting the Trash Can. Once users have navigated to this point they can choose which items they wish to have... [...]

Ginny Mrvin says, “Google says that only 1 in 5 marketers successfully completes the remarketing set up process in Google Analytics. Whether it’s tagging problems or other implementation challenges, a 20 percent success rate is a pretty good indicator that the process isn’t user friendly for most marketers. To improve that success rate, Google has released “instant activation” of Advertiser Features for users in Google Analytics. The fine print (or no print on the announcement, actually) is that this instant activation only applies to Universal Analytics users. Standard GA version... [...]

Chris Abraham says, “Looking for an alternative to Google Analytics? Want to understand your traffic, get a deeper view? Open source contender Piwik Analytics may be your answer. Piwik is the leading open source web analytics software, used by almost half a million websites (est. 460,000). It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the languages they speak and so much more. Piwik is an open source alternative to Google Analytics“. Take Charge Of Your Stats: Piwik Analytics Vs. Google Analytics Business2Community.com  [...]