Google Analytics Traffic Sources and How To Achieve Them

There are three major ways visitors reach your website. Direct traffic, search engines and link referrals. Knowing where visitors come from helps us identify areas of opportunity. At the same we can also determine weak areas that we should exert more effort on.

Direct Traffic
This visitor traffic source refers to visitors coming to our website through bookmarks, directly typing our website URL or other means that appears we are typing the address of a website onto a web browser. Direct traffic is also mostly attributed to links coming from email marketing campaigns. Why mostly? You’ll find out below.

Continue reading Google Analytics Traffic Sources and How To Achieve Them

Common Google Analytics Goal Setup Mistakes

While keyword ranking is still a good way to gauge the performance of any search engine marketing campaign, it’s not as important as measurement of metrics that make better business sense. So there is a need to measure SEO performance through setting up of web analytic goals. I guess we’d like to measure number of sales of your products sold online as a business (and SEO) objective more than just number of top 10 keyword rankings.

So assuming we measure goals and set them through Google Analytics, we extract the tracking data, embed it into the source code of our pages, and set them up through Google Analytics interface. However, in some cases they don’t work at all. We think we did everything right, but even if we receive sales orders online, our Google Analytics report fails to detect it. This is a fairly common experience especially for first-time Google Analytics users. Now, it’s time to do some troubleshooting and fix mistakes.

Continue reading Common Google Analytics Goal Setup Mistakes

Google Agency Toolkit: Helping Agencies Create and Optimize Online Campaigns

Sometime last week, Google decided to put up a page — looks like a delicious.com account with bookmarked of Google services — containing useful Google tools that agencies can use within a certain phase of search engine marketing campaign.

Google Agency Toolkit is a collection of tools classified according to the different stages (planning, placement, creation and measurement stages) of an online marketing campaign.

Plan – Helps you uncover ideas and insights for your marketing strategies.

Continue reading Google Agency Toolkit: Helping Agencies Create and Optimize Online Campaigns

• Google Ad Planner – Helps you identify which sites your visitors go
• Google Insights for Search – Helps you find out what keywords visitors from certain countries are using
• Google Blogsearch – Helps you determine what people are talking about in the blogosphere

Tools To Help Maintain Your Website

The tasks of a webmaster is typically described as to ensure uptime ratio is at optimal levels, virtually guarantee that no broken links exist within the site and loading time is at satisfactory as well as keep content timely and relevant.

While not adding to the tasks of a weary and tired webmaster, there are more things he/she can do to improve performance of the site, and deliver better user experience to visitors. So if you are a webmaster, these are the things you can do besides those described above.

Google Webmaster
With Google Webmaster, we will be able to identify the following issues (and make necessary actions):

Continue reading Tools To Help Maintain Your Website

My Thoughts on Google Trends for Websites

Google recently launched the Google Trends for Websites. It is quite different from Google Trends (without the Websites) because the former tracks for website traffic trends over time while the latter tracks on keyword frequency over time. Both tools sport similar layout so for those familiar with Google Trends can see an almost flat learning curve with this new release. With its launch, Google Trends for Websites join the ranks of Alexa, Compete and other website traffic tracking sites.

Continue reading My Thoughts on Google Trends for Websites