Analytics

Where Your Online Business Comes From

Google Analytics recently sent me an email detailing where most people's traffic comes from.

The results were based on performance benchmarks for all their clients who subscribe to their anonymous benchmarking service.

According to Google, search engines and direct traffic (bookmarks or direct typing of a web address) make up the bulk of most businesses' traffic sources, followed by referrals and other sources.

Read more...

Why Google Analytics is Important for Business

A great infographic to help all business owners get some clarity around the torrent of data spewed out by most analytics solutions.

David McCandless from Information is Beautiful has put forth this rather elegant illustration that shows how to sort out your analytics data mountain.

The key points for me are that at the bottom is just data, which is what countless programs and services spit out for us these days.

In order to turn that data into anything useful we have to put some thought and considred design into it.

Only then can we uncover the knowledge buried within the data and start to develop some wisdom.

Or to put it anhother way, just automatically installing Google Analytics and looking at the reports once in awhile is not enough.

To get real value out of it, you need to do some brain work.

If Google Analytics is Free, Why Does it Cost So Much?

"Google Analytics is not free. It costs $10k. You pay that amount to a competent consultant to implement it and train your company. And you also have to follow my 10/90 rule and invest $10k times 90 in a competent Analyst."

Leading web analytics expert, Avinash Kaushik

Lately there's been a fair bit of discussion about what Google Analytics actually costs.

Many people have been quite surprised about what a proper implemtation of Google Analytics really costs, or that it even costs anything.

So let's look at what's involved and what you can expect to pay for professional advice and why you should most defintely do so.

Clearing Up the Mystery Over Unique Visitors

Clearing Up the Mystery Over Unique Visitors

Some of you may have discovered that there are different types of "visitors" within Google Analytics - Visitors, Absolutie Unique Visitors and Unique Visitors.

This can be frustrating when you're trying to build a picture of how many real customers are coming to your site and where they came from in terms of your marketing efforts.

I've long argued for my preference for Unique Visitors as a more useful metric. In a previous post I showed how to set up a Custom Report in Google Analytics to show that data for each marketing medium.

If you do set up such a Custom Report, you will probably find the data is at odds with other visitor data within Google Analytics.

Don't worry, As Avinash explains in the video, your Custom Report data for Unique Visitors is the one to trust. You can hear him answer my question at the 16 minute mark and explain the differences between the various visitor types.

The whole thing is worth watching as they cover a lot of great information on how to use Google Analytcs.

Better Marketing with Google Analytics

How to Create a Custom Report for Unique Visitors From All Traffic Sources

Last week I posted how I made it on to Google Analytics TV asking about tracking Unique Visitors for All Traffic Sources.

The solution was to create a Custom Report, so here’s how to do it, but first...

Why Is This Important?

As marketers and business owners we normally want to know how many individual people came to our store and bought something. Plus we really want to know what made them come to the store in the first place.

This allows us to get a clear picture of how well our various marketing and advertising campaigns are working.

From there we can calculate the real conversion rate for each marketing channel and also the ROI.

Hear Me on Google Analytics TV

Recently I became frustrated at the lack of Unique Visitor data within Google Analytics.

After scouring the Google help forums to no avail, I left a short, terse comment on the Google Analytics TV blog and to my surprise Avinash Kaushik actually answered my question.

It's at the 27 minute mark "(27:36) Where you can find unique visitor data in Google Analytics."

The reason for my coment was I wanted to find Unique Visitors for each of a client's direct traffic sources.

The answer, as it turned out, was fairly simple: just create a custom report.

Which I did and that will be the subject of my next blog post, so stay tuned.

In the mean time watch the video and indulge my 15 seconds of fame.

The Seven Habits of Highly In-effective Analytics

photo credit: 1happysnapper

A while back, I posted about online marketers paying lip service to conversion rate optimisation. Several research reports had revealed yet again that many marketers were not making full use of analytics

• If results truly matter, then why are so many marketers leaving so much business on the table?

• Why do they ignore the analytics gold at their fingertips?

With apologies to Steven Covey, here are seven observations of why many marketers ignore analytics: