If you’re considering using an analytics platform other than, or in addition to, Google Analytics, it can be a bit difficult to determine what the best alternative will be. Search Engine Land compiled a great buyers guide to enterprise web analytics tools, but what if you’re in the market for a free to mid-level tool, or don’t even know yet exactly what type of software you need? Analytics Software Solutions Below is a brief overview of 25 analytics software options (and one add-on) that should give you an idea of what each tool costs and what functionality each offers. Before you chec [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Google is introducing "The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" analytics report today, a new benchmarking tool that provides insight into the various elements impacting a single campaign. You can learn more about it in a short write-up at our sister site, Marketing Land: New Google Analytics Path To Purchase Report Provides Benchmark Data On 11 Different Industries. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Stats: General | Stats: Search Behavior

I always start marketing interviews with a phone screen of some variant of the following question: "Let’s say this is your first day at Urbanspoon and I show you the following data. We’ve just launched an A/B test of that I’d like you to evaluate. [The example can be almost anything you want to test different results for – from almost any search element, PPC campaigns, email subject lines etc. In this case, I’m using a PPC example.] Imagine you are running two different ads on a campaign with 50 kewords. We’ve been running Ad A for a while and have 17,235 impressions and 272 click [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | In House Search Marketing | Search Marketing: General | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

More than a year has passed since search engine upstart blekko launched, yet Web marketing analysts using digital media measurement tools like Google Analytics won't have seen any traffic attributed to blekko in organic search marketing reports. Instead, traffic supplied by blekko will show up in a referring websites report. It is possible to properly attribute blekko search traffic referrals by implementing advanced Web analytics configuration techniques. Is the extra effort worth the trouble? Certainly investors are betting on blekko. In late September, blekko received an addition $30 [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

What is the first report you look at when you get access to a new Google Analytics account? Do you start by looking at the Dashboard, Ecommerce report, Content report, Traffic Sources or any of the technical reports? Psychology has shown that many of our day-to-day behaviors are deeply related to our personalities, beliefs, and cultures. In the same spirit, I believe we can learn about people's professional inclinations from their analytical behavior. Google Analytics & A Tour Of Jerusalem Recently, I presented at a Google Event in Israel on the subject of Analytics and Testing. Follo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | Search & Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

There are plenty of social analytics tools, but the most full-featured ones are often too expensive (i.e., geared towards enterprise-level users) and the inexpensive ones usually offer limited functionality. And then there's Topsy Social Analytics, which was just launched this morning and immediately becomes one of the best free Twitter analytics tools I've seen. There are a number of ways to use it and, if you click that link to check it out, don't be surprised if you spend the next hour there. How Topsy Social Analytics Works With Topsy Social Analytics, you can analyze domains, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Top News | Topsy | Twitter

Many search marketers have experimented with call tracking and measurement as a way to capture online-to-offline consumer activity and determine which ads and campaigns are generating calls. But there has also been debate about whether unique phone numbers required by call tracking harms SEO especially for local advertisers. Some new developments in the field make a compelling argument for call tracking and analytics, at the very least among enterprises or large advertisers trying to generate calls to call centers. Search marketing platform Kenshoo earlier this summer introduced what it cal [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | Search Marketing: General | Search Marketing: Landing Pages | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing | SEM Tools: Keyword Research | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | SEO: Local

One of the most important online marketing tools is the referrer string. Little known to most web surfers, this is effectively the Caller ID of the internet. It allows web site owners and marketers to know where visitors came from. It's crucial marketing data, and data that might be going away. What's The Referrer? When you visit a web page, by default, every major browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome...) reports the last page that you viewed before clicking over to the current page you're viewing. IE, what page "referred" you to the current page. This information is known as the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features: Analysis | Firefox | Legal: Privacy | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Top News

In a previous post, I discussed the importance of using behavioral targeting to increase your conversion rates. I also wrote about how to use Google Analytics to understand personas of the users who visit your site. This post will present a fast and easy way to get your behavioral targeting (BT) process up and running. Although any discussion of BT can sometimes turn into a PhD-level conversation, it is really important to pluck some low-hanging fruit to convince executives that it is a worthwhile journey. If you do, your path will likely be paved with gold. Recently, BTBuckets, a free [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | Google: Website Optimizer | How To: Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Following my last post on behavioral targeting, which was an overview of the field, I will provide a more hands-on approach in this post. To briefly recap, behavioral targeting involves creating multiple "personas" that represent multiple users of your site, and using analytics to create a unique experience for each persona group based on observed and predicted behavior. The first step to a successful behavioral targeting process is finding the right targets. It is not always obvious which users should be "bucketed" together. Creating effective buckets requires knowledge about the site and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Behavioral targeting (BT) has been the buzzword of the year for the last two years in the web analytics field. But is BT really all that important and valuable to the companies making use of it? The answer is usually yes. And does it take a team of PhDs to implement BT for a website? The answer is usually no. In this and a following post I will explain the value that behavioral targeting offers, and show how a marketer can make use of BT to make the website experience richer for users, and increase conversion rates. According to Wikipedia, there are two principal types of behavioral target [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features: Analysis | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Two rockstars have emerged in the web analytics field to date. We all know who they are: Eric Peterson has demystified analytics for us, while Avinash Kaushik has helped us take it one day, or dare I say, "an hour a day," at a time. And one of them says web analytics is easy while the other one says web analytics is very hard. So who is right? Why web analytics is easy Yes, it's true. Web analytics is easy, according to Avinash Kaushik. It's actually incredibly easy. Assuming that the desired outcomes of web analytics are changes that will positively impact your site and your bottom lin [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Search marketers can learn a lot from scientists. Scientists spend their life testing things, one after the other, incessantly trying to discover new interactions between atoms, molecules, viruses, bacteria, etc. One of the greatest scientists of all time, Albert Einstein, said, "A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it." Want everyone to believe in your website? "Experiment" with it—in other words, test it and tune it for optimal performance. Websites are laboratories, not sculpt [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search Marketing: Landing Pages | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Last year Google Analytics released a few new features, among them the Motion Charts. The feature is based on software developed by Gapminder, acquired by Google in 2007. According to the Google Analytics blog, "Motion Charts provide a multi-dimensional, over-time analysis of the data in your report." This feature provides a powerful way to visualize data in five dimensions: x-axis, y-axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, and time. In fact, if you choose metrics that are combinations of more than one metric, such as conversion rates (number of conversions divided by number of visits) [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Choosing the analytics tool you will use to track what's happening on your web site can be a time-consuming, expensive, and incredibly frustrating experience. There are a number of good candidates to choose from and each touts an impressive feature set that promises to significantly improve everything about your web site. But while there's a lot of hype about what these tools will do to improve your life, it's important to remember that you're not actually choosing an analytics provider, you're choosing a reporting and data gathering system—in other words, a very pretty database. I can't str [...]

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Earlier I posted that Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based tracking tools might be undercounting visits from Twitter. I've done some more digging, which supports the case. In my test, Twitter seems to have sent 500% to 1600% more traffic than log files or hosted stats packages like Google Analytics might show. How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think is my earlier article that explains how I'd often seen big gaps in how many people apparently clicked on a tweeted link as measured by Bit.ly versus how many page views that Google Analytics was showing. To test th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features: Analysis | SEM Tools: URL Shorteners | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Top News | Twitter

Over the past year, I've seen many people report that Twitter can send tons of traffic to a web site. Certainly I've seen first-hand how Twitter has become one of the top non-search referrer sources for Search Engine Land and for some other sites I oversee. But as much as you think Twitter is driving traffic, it might be sending even more that you're unable to measure. One key culprit may be that a large number people view web pages using mobile Twitter applications such as Tweetie. Click on a link from a tweet in some of these applications, and they load web pages using their own br [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features: Analysis | SEM Tools: URL Shorteners | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Top News | Twitter

As promised, Google Analytics is now logging traffic from Microsoft's new Bing search engine into the "search engine" traffic source category, rather than in the "referring sites" category. As a result, Google Analytics users can now see for themselves whether all of Microsoft's Bing marketing is producing more traffic for Bing, which in turn is generating traffic for their web sites. Looking at our Search Engine Land stats, Bing's a big winner. For the past three days, it has sent more traffic to us than Yahoo. Here's Bing: June 12 is only a partial day, so it's really June 8 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Stats: Popularity

How your PPC efforts are tracked can have a significant impact on the programs performance. Javascript-based tracking systems used by most web analytics systems typically lose 10 – 30% of the sales driven by paid search. Find out why and how to plug this hole.

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Paid Search | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Yahoo's slow rollout of Yahoo Web Analytics continues with news today that its now available for free to certain Yahoo search and display advertisers. Here's how Yahoo explains some of the benefits of its analytics tool in today's announcement: "Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you’re not likely to find in other free analytics tools, including demographic and behavioral insight on your website visitors, near-real-time reporting, and visibility into as many as 50 different types of actions that take place on your site." It's available to any Yahoo advertiser that works w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | Yahoo: Web Analytics