No business or person is perfect. Even if you’ve done a good job avoiding trouble and staying on the straight and narrow, sometimes trouble comes looking for you. From an online perspective, negative comments, reviews or posts about your company or products can show up in several ways.
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Image editing can be a real bear. For people who aren’t familiar with it, there are a lot of new terms to learn and the software seems complex and expensive. If you’re not a pro at Photoshop and you just need to capture, crop, or resize a few photos for your website, you might fall in love with a quick little program called Irfanview. *This guide is meant for photo editing beginners.
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Do you have common metrics that you need to report to higher ups or other departments in your company? ‘Dashboards’ in Google Analytics offers a way to filter for commonly retrieved information, and I use it to quickly provide insights that need a lot of filtering or refinement. There is information that you can easily pull out of a dashboard widget that would be difficult to get from the regular GA reports. Instead of describing how to create widgets in a dashboard, I’d encourage you to just try it out. It’s pretty straight forward, and I’d rather describe some common widget setups that can get you started on creating some useful dashboards.
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When analyzing onsite content, most people use the “All pages” report the most. It provides a good overview of how content is being used on the site, and can give insight into navigational changes. What it doesn’t do, is tell you which pages are attracting the most attention from off the site. Which pages get the most clicks from other websites, organic search traffic, or social media. Where do people start when they initially visit the page? To start, go to Content->Site Content->Landing Pages. Note: I’m using some old data here to throw off our competitors who are reading this. (Hi there!)
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For those of you who have a substantial amount of mobile traffic, separating out mobile can help provide design feedback into what your mobile responsive website should display for mobile visitors, and where mobile considerations aren’t being used by the desktop crowd. First things first, do you get a lot of mobile traffic? To check, go to Audience->Mobile->Overview, and select the pie chart view option.
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In last week’s For the Win Wednesday, we learned about filtering for branded traffic. This week, we’re doing the exact opposite to find what keywords your visitors use that aren’t your brand name. This information is super important for SEO and tracking the impact of SEO on the website.
To start with, jump over to Traffic Sources->Sources->Search->Organic. As you might remember from last week, this report tracks organic search traffic from most search engines, not only Google. You can check out keyphrase traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc, etc. We’ll use all of their data for now. Next to the filter box, hit the “advanced” link, and replace the “containing” filter with “Matching RegExp”. For Top Draw, I’ve previously filtered for those keyphrases and I know that we don’t really rank on any non-branded phrases that include “Top” or “Draw”, so we should be safe including any keyphrase that includes either of those two phrases. To quickly build a regular expression that matches either of those keywords, I separate them with a pipe ‘|’. I also add in (not provided) to get (not provided)top|draw. This filtering will give me all my non-branded traffic. If you have a lot of misspellings of your brand name, make sure to include those too.
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One of the coolest parts of Google Analytics is the Organic report. In this report, you can see the real queries that visitors used to get to your website. This data is, unfortunately, being pulled away more and more, but it’s still valuable to determine relatively how much search traffic is coming from keyphrases that use your brand or trademarked product names. This data can give you insight into brand awareness and demand online. In markets where brand awareness is very poor, users generally use non-branded phrases, while markets with high visibility and brand awareness typically see less. You can use Google’s keyword research tool to find the information I have below (use “exact match”).
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Most of the time, direct traffic is pretty boring. In a perfect world, this should only show direct type-in traffic. Realistically, it’s influenced by a lot of other things that could be tracked like links in email signatures, email newsletters, offline print campaigns, flash or obfuscated advertisements on 3rd party websites, other weird links, or new changes in how Analytics tracks certain browsers.
Triggers: drastic change in direct traffic, direct traffic higher or lower than expected. Expect ~10%-20% of total traffic to be direct, more for companies that are heavy into traditional advertising, less for companies that sell online or don’t have a strong brand.
Tactic: Direct traffic won’t show information about the source, but sometimes you can deduce the source by analyzing where the traffic goes and what the visitors do. Check out what landing pages they hit, filtering for time ranges where you see more direct traffic, or even locations where the direct traffic is coming from to help diagnose what is causing it.
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In our For the Win Wednesdays, I’ll be covering 1 new report or style of reporting in Google Analytics every week. While the GAIQ test is great for learning the inner workings of Google Analytics, I felt like there’s a shortage of help on what to look for. Basics like what a visit is will not be covered. If you need help on the basics, checkout Google’s beginner courses.
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The reality is that business blogging is not easy, nor is it a magic way to get reams of prospects and leads flowing into and out of your website. It involves a lot of hard work, but if you follow some of the tips below, you’ll be set up better for success.
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