Web Analytics Usability Testing Software » Internet Marketing

5 Promising Free (or Nearly Free) Web Analytics Tools

Nick Kurentz — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:19:22 +0000

ListFormula.com If you’re an Internet marketer, you need to test everything you do, and the way to find out whether your squeeze pages, sales letters, and blogs are working is by tracking. This usually involves putting a snippet of code onto your page so that the tracking system can follow its process. It’s rarely difficult, if you know anything at all about HTML, but testing and tracking for lead generation and sales are definitely two activities you cannot afford to overlook. http There …

Website Bounce Rates: What is Too High?

Nick Kurentz — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:29:46 +0000

A colleague recently asked me what I thought about a 44.82% bounce rate, if it seemed high, and if it could cause suspicion for advertisers.

A “bounce” occurs when a web site visitor enters a particular page and then leaves the site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.

In actuality, the bounce rate can be quite arbitrary depending on the website. For some, a bounce rate of 44% is quite high. I have a client who sells modular homes and she has a bounce rate of about 15%. If she goes up to 20%, she starts panicking.

Another client who sells recycling containers once gave me a bonus when I got his bounce rate under 50%. It was previously about 65% and I saved him about $550/month.

Still another client, a dryer vent cleaning specialist for whom I’m just doing SEO work, has a bounce rate of about 65%. Here’s the reason: he’s a local business whose site is so well optimized, it comes up for searches all over the country. When they see that he only does business in Hampton Roads, they leave. His bounce rate for local traffic is much lower.

However, my colleague has a client who is experiencing a 44% bounce rate with a local news site and is concerned that this number is not good for advertisers.

This probably is true, but the website analytics would have to be analyzed to know for sure. It could be that most visitors are clicking on a story they Googled and then left after reading it. A high bounce rate on Google referrals would confirm that. For my colleague, a close look at page popularity could actually reveal an opportunity to convince advertisers to invest more advertising on the top 5 pages–prime real estate if the pages are getting lots of traffic.

The key is website conversions. If the site is converting a fair portion of its traffic, a high bounce rate is less important. It’s even less important if those conversions are turning into high revenue. For example, if a real estate agent is spending $1000 per month on paid search marketing and turning that into $30,000 in profit, a bounce rate of 60% is irrelevant.

The best approach is to look at it holistically. Baseline the bounce rate, analyze the data, set a goal, and work to lower it. Your site analytics will reveal many important factors that will tell you where you are wasting money or where you are missing the target.

Analytics

Nick Kurentz — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:13:49 +0000

So now there is Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics. What are the differences and which one is best for you? First we will talk about what analytics is, the technology behind it, and how you benefit from it.

Web Analytics

Web analytics measures website visitor’s behaviors when arriving to your website. This information measures the performance of your site so that you can use it to improve upon key factors to increase responses and determine future marketing campaigns.

Technology

Both Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics use page tagging which is a small invisible image through JavaScript. With this it passes along image requests as well information about the pages and the visitor itself. The service assigns a cookie to the user which identifies them for each and every visit.

JavaScript automatically runs every time the page is loaded. Additional information can easily be added to JavaScript. Page tagging can report on interaction such as clicks, how someone uses Flash movies and MouseOver.

How this is all implemented is by a hidden snippet of JavaScript code that the user adds to every page of their website. This code collects the data and sends it back to the data collection server for processing. With Google the processing takes place hourly. They do note that it can take up to three to four hours of time. Yahoo processing is within minutes.

Google Analytics:

The Internal Site Search This show how many visitors search your site, what they looked for, and where they end up.

Benchmarking This shows your site usage metrics and whether they underperformed or outperformed those of your industry vertical.

Trend and Date Slider You need to compare the time periods and select date ranges to not lose sight of your long term trends. This tool is for just that.

Ecommerce Tracking Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords. You can also identify your revenue sources.

Funnel Visualization Find out which pages result in lost conversions.

Site Overlay With this tool you can see traffic and conversion information for each and every link.

Email reports You can schedule personalized report emails that contain the information that you want to share.

GeoTargeting Find out where your visitors come from and find where your most productive geographic markets are.

AdWords Integration You can also buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business.

Yahoo Analytics:

Executive Dashboards With these you can View key performance metrics within customizable executive dashboards and set goals. Then you can track your progress and meet specific needs.

Custom Reports You tailor your reports with the Custom Report Wizard. With these you can add categories for customs fields.

Advanced Campaign Management Management to track and optimize your marketing campaigns regarding CPC, CPM, CPA and your ROI. You can also organize your reports and analyze your campaign results.

Real-Time Segmentation Analyze how different groups of visitors respond to each of your pages and the visitors themselves.

Live Cost Analysis You can compare search engine price information for optimizing your ROI.

Merchandise Reporting Identify the purchase of products and create reports with this feature.

Scenario Analysis Track your visitors through every step for analysis of the visitor.

Comparative Reporting Check your website from one month to another with reports.

Advanced Path Analysis Identify the most popular paths that you visitors take in your website.

Marketing Workflow Management With this tool you can do several things such as monitor site changes, and system outages. You can also create email alerts and share reports with others.

Which Is Best For You?

At this point Yahoo Analytics is only available for Yahoo! Small Business customers who host e-commerce sites with Yahoo!, as well as to advertisers who work with Yahoo! Custom Solutions and Yahoo! Buzz Marketing.

Yahoo! Web Analytics will be implemented in stages throughout the rest of 2008 and into 2009. So this is not fully functionally for everyone.

On the other hand, Google Analytics is. If you have a Yahoo! Small Business you are in luck and may be able to use Yahoo! Web Analytics. I would still recommend using Google Analytics as a tool. Everyone should be using the power of Google Analytics.

Author: Sandi Baker http://letusgetitdone.info