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Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about visitors on your site

Here in Austin, I teach classes at a local non-profit organization that helps people start their own businesses. I’ve been teaching folks about building basic web sites, search engine optimization, and web marketing for about five years. Once – and only once, mind you – I taught a class on web analytics.

Web analytics are the statistics that a website generates about users, where they come from, what they do, when they leave, and so on. It’s incredibly valuable information for anyone who operates a web site – in fact, some kind of analytics understanding is mandatory for anyone who wants to understand their website performance.

It’s also very boring. In fact, the class I taught on analytics put everyone to sleep so quickly that I decided never to teach it again. Somewhere, there are statistics professors who can make this stuff interesting. I couldn’t, so I gave up.

But every web site owner should know at least a few things about what’s going on with their site –especially if you have an e-commerce site. And, honestly, if you can pay attention to a few key factors in your web statistics, you’ll have the information you need to make constructive adjustments.

So, grab a double espresso and get ready for the hits – and only the hits – of web analytics. If you can grasp a few simple concepts and remember a couple of key metrics, you’ll know enough to be dangerous in no time.

Start Measuring

First, you’ll need an analytics package. The most common one is Google Analytics; it’s free and most web site building packages support it right out of the box. Signing up for Google Analytics requires a Google account and enough access to your website to insert the tracking code. If putting tracking code into your website sounds like open-heart surgery to you, then call your web developer or web host and they’ll walk you through it or take care of it for you. It only takes a few minutes.

Give Analytics a few days to start collecting data, and at least a month before you really start trying to get anything meaningful out of it. The more statistics you have the better, but if your needs are urgent — let’s say users are abandoning your site in record numbers – a month of data will at least give you enough information to understand why.

The primary metric (metric is a fancy word for measurement) that most site owners look at first is the number of page views on their site. A page view is generated when someone pulls up a page on your web site and looks at it. As a crude number, page views are helpful in determining overall traffic to your site. But alone, page views aren’t a very meaningful statistic.

More meaningful measurements of site traffic actually come from the various visit/visitor numbers. A Visit is just that: a visit to your web site, whether to one page or many. It’s a single user’s experience at your site, from the time they arrive to the time they leave. This number will often be somewhere in the vicinity of your Visitor numbers, which is the actual number of visitors that came to your site during that period.

Visitors are so important that Google now calls out this number on the very first page of Analytics: “3,000 people visited this site.” Look more closely and you’ll notice a qualification in visitor numbers: the term “unique”. Unique visitor metrics are important because they throw out all the repeat visits and give you a picture of how many truly unique visitors came to your site during a given period.

What are they doing?

Once you understand how many people are coming to your site, you need to get at least a basic idea of what they’re doing when they get there. Ideally, you want people to stay on your site long enough to browse, read or buy something. This is where “time on site” or duration comes in. Obviously, if users spend only a few seconds on your site, that means they’re arriving and very quickly leaving. This is not uncommon – many people quickly leave (or “bounce” out of) websites very quickly because it’s not what they were looking for.

However, a continuous pattern of very short visits (a very low overall visit duration) probably means that there’s something wrong with the content on your site, or that many people are finding it for the wrong reasons. If your average visit duration is very low – say, 30 seconds or less – you’ll need to take a hard look at the content you’re presenting.

Visit duration dovetails nicely with “Bounce Rate”, which is a measure of how many visits result in a single page viewed followed by an immediate exit. A bounce is likely (though not always) a visitor who didn’t find what they wanted – they came to a page on your site and left. However, with more and more sites presenting a lot of vital information on a single page these days, high bounce rates are not uncommon. One way to reduce high bounce rates is to build landing pages for your products and services that encourage users to explore further with a prominent call-to-action – e.g. a “Click for more info!” or an invitation to a special offer or discount.

The last vital statistic for visitors is the percentage of new vs. returning visitors. If your goal is to bring in new customers via your website, you want a healthy number of new visits every month – that is, users that have not visited your site in the past. If you have a site where existing users must come back all the time to get new information (say, order status information) then it’s not unusual to have a high percentage of return visitors. In that case, your returning visitors might make up as much as half of your total visitors.

Now you’ve got a picture of what visitors are doing when they come to your site: How many of them came, how many of those were new, how long they stayed, and how many of them came in and left immediately. The final set of metrics you need to understand are what, exactly, your visitors are looking at when they come to your site.

Content is King

Under the “Content” menu in Google Analytics is your other vital set of statistics: information on the pages that users view. This one is pretty straightforward, but you’ll want to check it out frequently. It’s a simple list of the top pages viewed on your site, along with a percentage of total views for each page. If a page has “5.5%” next to it, that means all its views constituted 5.5 percent of the total page views during that period.

For most sites, the homepage (usually “home” or “index”) will have the vast majority of page views, unless your site is structured in such a way that a particular product or service of yours is vastly more popular than everything else on your site. The key here lies in what’s directly below that home page statistic: What are the other pages on your site that are most popular? You may find, for instance, that a product or service of yours is much more popular online than it is in other areas of your marketing presence.

What do you do with all this information? Visitor numbers should give you an idea of how your site is performing (and growing) overall, and whether or not the content on your site is appealing to visitors. Content metrics provide insight into which areas of your site are most popular. That might lead you to push a product or service harder, or it might indicate that something you feel should be popular on your site needs more prominent placement. With just a few simple numbers, you can analyze and make changes to your site to squeeze the best possible performance out of it.

– Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

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Categories: Articles, How-to

Scan this with your cameraphone – you’ll wind up at eBlox.com

QR codes are popping up everywhere these days, from store windows to packaging to magazine ads. You’ve probably seen them; they look an awful lot like a cross between a bar code and badly-pixelated artwork from a 1980s video game. They’re black and white with big squares on three of the corners and, like their more primitive counterpart, the UPC barcode, they store encoded information in that mass of glitchy-looking pixels.

More information, in fact, than the short set of numbers that a barcode can represent. Originally designed to help automate car manufacturing, QR codes—the QR stands for “Quick Response”—are now employed by marketers of all stripes to transmit a large block of information in an image, often to a phone.

The general idea is this: You see something that interests you —say, an ad, a sign or a shelf tag in a store—and you take your smartphone and snap a picture of the QR code that’s displayed along with it. Many smartphone apps can read these codes and take action on them. For instance, the Google app on your iPhone can decode a QR code directly and read the information from it (the Google app, along with many others, can also do the same nifty trick with regular barcodes).

It’s pretty cool, and there’s something satisfying about deciphering this clutter of computer-generated code into its real-world output. QR codes are also compact, can be printed just about anywhere, and require nothing more than a quick snapshot from your camera to record their information. In some ways, they’re like the quickest note you’ve ever taken.

Take Me Back

Yet if taking a picture of a strange, pixelated code seems a little bit, well, dated to you, that’s because it is. The format of QR codes is almost 20 years old, and there’s something quaint (and, to my mind, a little bit backwards) about scanning codes to get information. In this world of wireless communication, texting, instant messaging, Bluetooth and apps, it’s odd to have to take a picture of a code to get vital information about a company or product.

In fact, if you’re a geek like me, this may give you an overwhelming sense of déjá vu. Back in the late 90s, when the first internet boom was just gearing up, a product called the CueCat was released that did much the same thing – except you had to plug it into your PC in order to read the barcodes. Wired and a number of other magazines joined in briefly with the CueCat hysteria, printing odd slanted barcodes in their publications that you could scan with a cat-shaped reader (I’m not kidding) and have the information input directly to your PC. Because, you know, typing the URL of a website was such a chore – you needed a plastic cat with a cable for a tail to do it for you.

Of course, we now have smartphones with capable cameras, so you don’t need a fake feline to read the codes, and the web browser in your phone can go directly to the web site or resource that the QR code specifies. But, this leads to my primary problem with the current excitement over QR codes—do we really need them? In most cases, at least in a marketing or retail environment, they’re used to transmit very simple information, like the web address of a company. For the marketers, they do have the advantage of also transmitting that the visitor arrived via a QR code—which is great for the marketers to know, but useless for the consumer, who just wants to get information.

So, scan a code with your smartphone, wind up at a website. It’s not too hard to type the URL of a website into your phone (some of you with fat fingers might disagree with me, but still), so it’s tough to see QR codes in a marketing or retail campaign as much more than a gimmick. Mind you, I’m not suggesting QR codes or any type of barcoding are gimmicky when used in situations like purchasing, badge scanning, manufacturing, and so on. But in an ad for a beer company that takes you to that beer company’s website and nothing more? That’s a gimmick.

Which is not to say gimmicks are a bad thing. Many of them work, especially if they have a gee-whiz factor, and QR codes get people excited about what their smartphones can do. Look, it’s a scanner! The risk with any gimmick, however, is whether or not it will hold its appeal.

Should You Use Them?                   

For marketers looking to make it simple for their customers to get to their e-commerce website or download their app, QR codes are a potentially risky investment. Luckily, they’re inexpensive to implement and relatively innocuous—few consumers will be bothered by the presence of a small barcode in an ad or on packaging or signage. Still, it’s worth considering some of the threats to the long-term livelihood of this old-school technology:

1. Wireless replacements: While wireless technology might not supplant QR codes printed in magazine and newspapers, elsewhere the threat of wireless technology is very real. Google and others have put their support behind NFC (Near Field Communication), which is a technology very similar to the SmartPass gas station payment cards and security system access cards that many of your currently use. NFC and RFID (a similar system that is slowly replacing barcoding in many warehousing and distribution systems) both constitute substantial threats to QR codes as they become more inexpensive and ubiquitous. After all, if you could get information about a product just by waving your phone near it (instead of holding up and focusing your camera) wouldn’t that be much simpler? As these technologies get even cheaper and smaller, don’t be surprised to find an NFC code in your favorite magazine or in a shelf talker at your grocery store.
2. Limitations: While QR codes can store many times the information of a barcode, they’re still very limited in most forms. They’re fine for a website URL, a link to an app, or a special link to a promotion, but they’re not too useful for longer-form information. It’s best to think of QR codes as a quick way to transmit a short blast of information—at most, someone’s full contact info – but not much else.
3. Fatigue: Like all gimmicks, QR codes run the risk of becoming passé, even as they enter the mainstream. As a supplementary form of marketing your product, there’s nothing wrong with throwing a QR code onto your marketing materials. But any marketing strategy that relies purely on QR codes for user response is likely going to be short-lived.

In a strange way, QR codes are actually forward-thinking: they are geared primarily toward mobile users of smartphones. Mobile web usage is skyrocketing and there’s no doubt that a good deal of the future of marketing lies on the mobile web. If you do build QR code campaigns, make absolutely sure that your landing pages (the pages that users go to when they scan the QR code) are mobile-friendly. But I’d recommend against building your mobile strategy on QR codes—they’ll likely be replaced by more advanced technology before you know it.

– Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

Brent on Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr | Flickr

Categories: Articles

If you’re promoting your business online, you’ve probably at least dipped your toe into the vast, muddy lake of social media. Some of you may have seen success with it, while others got wind of the time and effort required to maintain a social media presence and gingerly stepped away. Since most of you deal primarily with business-to-business relationships, you may not think you’re missing much—social media often seems best suited for consumer-oriented brands, politicians and Hollywood stars.

Those of you in the “this is a bunch of worthless noise” camp might want to reconsider your position for in 2012. Two factors are making social media a critical component of doing business online. First, social media is becoming a popular venue for marketing all kinds of businesses — a place where customers expect to find current information and updates about your business. Remember when you thought you probably didn’t need a website? Well, this is becoming more like that.

Second, the tools to manage and automate social media are now mature and easy to use, so even a busy, harried small business owner can queue up a slew of updates once a month and let them rip. As a bonus, social media activity and updates can improve your search engine ranking over time – if you do it right (more on that later). And finally, of course, don’t forget that more and more of your competitors are joining in every day. That doesn’t mean you have to play catch up with everything they do, but it’s worth understanding the landscape.

What’s Out There

There are four social media platforms that matter for businesses: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. (The last one would likely bristle at being called “social media” but we’ll toss it in with the others to keep things simple.) These networks are active, have large subscriber/user bases, and have become the standard venues for promoting businesses to engaged online customers. You should become familiar with all of them, and participate in at least a few. Let’s look at them in order.

Facebook: The largest social network in the world, and a surprisingly popular venue for businesses. I say “surprisingly” because while many of us assumed that Facebook would be popular for consumer brands like soft drinks and TV networks, it’s become a hot venue for businesses of all kinds. The reason is simple: everyone is there. Hundreds of millions of people spend far too many hours of their lives on the site. It’s become, for better or worse, almost like an alternate version of the web, and millions of users see updates from companies and brands they like in their News Feed every day. True, not everyone is going subscribe to updates from business like yours. But some will, and you should be in front of them

Twitter: If Facebook is like an alternate version of the web, Twitter is an abbreviated, real-time distillation of what’s happening online. Like Facebook, Twitter has expanded from purely personal use to consumer brands and far beyond. While both Facebook and Twitter offer advertising programs, the key with both services is simply participating as a business: hanging up your sign and telling people what’s going on on a regalar basis. Not sure what to tell them? We’ll talk about that in a sec.

Google Plus: I’ve discussed this new social network recently, noting that it’s essentially a clone of Facebook. Since then, Google has added even more Facebook-like features including games and pages for businesses. It’s still unclear whether Google Plus has the momentum to unseat Facebook as the king of social networking (I’m guessing it won’t) but with over 40 million registered users, it’s worth the small amount of effort required to build and maintain a page for your business on this network. [Note: Given recent changes to Google+ noted here, it’s rapidly becoming mandatory for serious online marketers to maintain a presence on the social network. See this post for more info.]

LinkedIn: Not truly a social network like the others, LinkedIn has nevertheless added social sharing and posting features and remains a great place to stay in touch with other professionals. It’s also done an exceptional job of organizing and classsifying businesses and professionals, so listing your business on LinkedIn is a no-cost way to get your name in one of the biggest real business directories on the planet. Don’t expect a mad rush of new clients from LinkedIn, but you should be there when folks are looking.

What to Say

What should a business owner post on social networks? Simple stuff, really: Specials, announcements, promotions, information, events, tips and anything else you think might be useful to your customers. Is summer fast approaching? Post some ideas for new and innovative summer products. Give them tips on ordering in time for big events. Let them know when your next open house is.

The very same things you promote in emails, phone calls and  regular business conversations can be promoted via social media updates. In fact, the more you consider social media to be a conversation between you and your customers (and prospects), the better you’ll understand what it’s all about. True, that conversation will often be one-sided, but you want to facilitate a dialog. Your customers may not reply directly; instead, many engage passively, scanning for the things that interest them. But like any other form of advertising or marketing, having your name in front of them as much as possible is the key to getting their attention when it matters. Given that every one of these networks costs nary a dime to participate in at the basic level, why would you not want to hang your shingle out there?

How to Say It

Of course, you don’t want to spend your entire day posting to social networks, and very few of you are prepared to hire a full-time social media manager. That’s where the tools come in. A couple of years ago, some very smart people realized that keeping many different social networks updated was a tremendous hassle for normal people. These smart people built software and websites to automate the posting of updates across all your social media profiles, and you can thank them for your future sanity.

Social media toolkits typically do two very important things: First, they manage all your profiles at once, eliminating the need to visit each site. Your updates go out to all sites at once, and all your customers’ and associates’ updates are consolidated into a single window. Second, these tools allow you to schedule updates to go out automatically, on a schedule you create.

If you can sit down for an hour or two every month and build a couple of marketing emails or flyers, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to add social media updates to your marketing schedule. Just create your updates, give them a date and time, and let them roll. There are quite a few of these packages out there, but my pick is Hootsuite, which not only handles all your scheduled updates, but can even post automated updates whenever you create content on your blog. It’s free for the basic version, five bucks a month for the advanced version, and quite a bargain either way.

– Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

Brent on Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr | Flickr

Categories: Articles