We do it for our clients and regularly encourage them to look at their data always and often. Reading analytics tells a story about your business online and possibly a little about your business in general so it makes great sense to spend a bit of time with it. Of course we don’t do it as often as we should for ourselves but it’s about this time that I like to have a good look back at our data to see how the year played out online for us. I’m always a little surprised at how well our site does
Google Analytics
Analytics has always been an important part of what we do. It’s the foundation of our campaigns whether for an SEO strategy, PPC or website redesign project. Analytics tell us a lot about what we do, who our client really is (sometimes more than our client does), helps us plan, helps us adjust and ultimately guides us. It can do a lot or it can do a little depending on how you use it. We have our favorite customizations to help us work more efficiently. Personally, I’m a fan of things “at a glance” and the Dashboard section has been
We have previously discussed the ominous (not provided) that shows up in Google Analytics after Google decided to withhold the search data of users logged into Google account. Rather than come down on one side of the debate, Dave Davies‘ blog post for Search Engine Watch has some useful tips and ideas on how to use the features in Google Analytics to extrapolate some of the missing data. One of his hypotheses is that those who are logged in are going to have a different analytics profile than those who are not logged in. I have pondered this as well,
We recently mentioned that Google announced that they will be encrypting Search for Google users who are logged into their accounts and we are now starting to see some real impact from that. Some clients are being affected more than others. Ultimately it’s not a huge issue. Yes it’s absolutely annoying and frustrating but not the end of the world kind of stuff. If you’re the type who likes to go into their analytics account or you may notice on some of our reports that one of your keyword search referrals says (not provided). Some may have more for this
Through our connection with hosting company Voxel dot Net we sometimes get a call to help out with things that don’t directly relate to hosting. A few months back, such a call came in the form of MjsBigBlog.com. MJ runs a great blog focusing on American Idol and other reality TV shows, and the magic of her blog is her highly active community. In the past year or two they’ve contributed about 1.1 million comments (those are the approved and registered users, mind you – not all the spam comments the rest of us get!). Whew! Moving to Disqus After