18th June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments
Campaign tracking is fundamental to measuring the success of your online marketing efforts. Whether you use email newsletters, Facebook pages, twitter, link shares, or traditional online search ads you absolutely must be tagging your links properly. Doing so allows you much more control over the referring source data that you can later use to cross-segment » Read More
18th June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments
Google Analytics tracks a lot of data about the structure of your website and how your users interact with it, but (thankfully) it can’t know everything. If there is some data you want Google Analytics to know about your users that it doesn’t collect by default you should be using Custom Variables. In this article » Read More
18th June, 2010 - Posted by caleb.whitmore - 2 Comments
This worksheet provides an easy means of planning Goals and Goal Scores. The worksheet includes sections for each of the four available goal sets in Google Analytics, fields for describing the business purpose of each goal, defining the score and weighting it in importance, defining the goal match pattern and defining up to 10 goal » Read More
18th June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - 3 Comments
Analytics collects a lot of data default, but all that data is based entirely on users taking actions _between_ pages (clicking links, submitting forms, and general page navigation, etc). But what if we want to track data about actions the users take _within_ our pages? That’s where Event Tracking comes into play. AJAX load events, video » Read More
3rd June, 2010 - Posted by caleb.whitmore - 5 Comments
As discussed in many chapters within the book, campaign tracking within Google Analytics is a powerful feature that all marketers should use. Tracking custom campaigns is as easy as appending campaign tracking tags to the end of your advertising destination URL’s. That’s it – no setup within Google Analytics, and, what you put it in » Read More
3rd June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments
Query parameters are those words which come after the ? in the URL. For example, in the URL www.example.com/uri?first=string&second the word first and second are a query parameters delimited by ? and &. These are common ways of constructing dynamic websites but sometimes they get in the way of proper reporting. The query strings might » Read More
2nd June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments
Google Analytics communicates with its servers through standard HTTP protocol. Fortunately for us we can intercept the messages it passes to do some advanced troubleshooting. Using the tools linked below look for GET requests starting with __utm.gif . The information appending to this request contains most information collected by Analytics from your users’ website visits. Live » Read More
2nd June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments
Perhaps one of the most useful features of modern Content Management Systems, or CMSs, is the ability to easily integrate new features via plug-ins (also called modules or add-ons depending on the CMS). Here are some SMO and SEO plug-ins for our favorite CMSs: for Wordpress: Google XML Sitemap Creator – This plugin will generate a special » Read More
2nd June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments
Content Management Systems are the building block of any modern website. They make it easy for non-IT people to post blogs, edit pages, uploads photos, and generally modify the website without getting their hands dirty in the code. Many CMSs have many hundreds of thousands of man-hours already built into them by the open-source development community. » Read More
3rd May, 2010 - Posted by Administrator - 12 Comments
We’re excited to announce the official launch of the book, Performance Marketing with Google Analytics. It’s been a whirlwind of work to bring this to print. While the book is heading to bookstores near you and already available on Amazon.com (see at right), thanks to the team at Google Analytics we have been able put » Read More