Analytics tools: Don't just stop with Google

When organizations start out with their web analytics plan they start at the basics: Google Analytics. The basics are great, nothing wrong with using Google Analytics as a means to track your customer behavior, and enable yourself to pull deeper insights on buying behaviors of customers. In a previous post I wrote about the differences between Google Analytics and another analytics provider: Adobe Analytics. One takeaway from that post was that organizations need to look at their website, audience, and analytics goals when determining what tools are best for their situation. In this post, we'll look at an ecommerce website that is leveraging a plethora of tools to meet their web analytics needs.

Keyword Hero is the savior your website needs

For organizations both big and small knowing where your website visitors are coming from is critical. Website referral sources are important in understanding the reach of your site, and determine the effectiveness of your marketing channels. In a recent blog, we discussed the importance of referral metrics for your site, and now we'd like to dive in to a specific shortcoming in Google Analytics' reporting and what you can do to resolve the issue.

According to Internet Live Stats, more than 3.4 billion Google searches occur daily. A small handful of those searches are people who end up on your website. Seeing the search terms that users are typing in can provide good perspective on how relevant your site is in online search and provide direction on how to improve your search engine optimization. One problem: most of the data in Google Analytics can't be read due to a Google-enacted security feature. Encrypted searches are causing an overwhelming percentage of organic searches to be classified as (not provided) by Google Analytics. Because of this issue, large amounts of data are being missed and hindering marketers. One company, however, believes that they have found a solution to the (not provided) problem: Keyword Hero.

Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics: What’s right for you?

Imagine this: You’ve just started a new job as a marketer at a national retail company and you’ve been tasked with overhauling the company’s marketing strategy. You note that the organization needs a web analytics tool to track the effectiveness of the new marketing strategy. After all, all good decisions are data-driven. You bring this idea to your boss, and the question is brought up, “which analytics platform should we choose? There seem to be quite a few.” You pause, you hadn’t considered anything other than Google Analytics. Not satisfied with the answer you’ve given; your boss has tasked you to research what analytics tool best fits the organization’s needs. This isn’t an uncommon scenario for all marketers, especially those working to get a company’s analytics off the ground. This post will guide you through the decision-making process by comparing two prominent analytics options: Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics through a series of relevant factors. At the end, it will be up to the marketer to decide what platform fits his or her needs best.

Steps to create an effective social media strategy

If you’re a business, social media is a vital tool to reach and engage with your target audiences. The issue, though, is that creating and managing a social media strategy can feel like a daunting undertaking. Where should we set up accounts? How often should we post? Do I need to respond to customers? Often, marketers get bogged down in the logistics of running social media accounts that they lose sight of the purpose of their social media strategy. In this post we’ll answer some of the basic, but critical questions to setting up, and managing, a comprehensive social media strategy. If at any point in these steps you question whether you’ll be able to manage these components, then you may not be equipped to manage an effective social media strategy.

Page views per visit: How engaged are your visitors

Some web metrics are evolutions of each other. Visits and page views are foundational web analytics that are critical to understand, with pages per visit/session as an evolution of visits and page views, and referral paths and goals as a “final” evolution of those foundational metrics. Think of these three metrics as all relating to understanding whether or not your target audiences are reaching your desired pages/steps online. In this blog post, we’ll examine page views per visit and how it can be applied to achieving your business objectives.

How to leverage website referral traffic

An important way to ensure that organizations are maximizing their web analytics capabilities is by focusing on the ways that metrics can be applied to measuring the effectiveness of business objectives. The first two blog posts will feature two common web metrics and how to apply them in business scenario. The first post is on Website referral traffic.