A great Google TV episode on Analytics…

Hey folks. Here’s an awful lot of information on Google Analytics.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/11/web-analytics-tv-22-automation-episode.html

In this action packed episode we discuss:
(0:23) Best practices for rollup reporting across multiple sites (See answer below)
(0:53) Reporting secure search in Google Analytics
(3:27) Troubleshooting funnel navigation reports
(4:31) Comparing using event tracking and session level custom variables.
(6:28) Measuring how visitors who interact with a video influence conversions
(7:35) When data in Google Analytics updated
(9:55) Representing multiple date ranges by column
(11:04) Best practices for tracking widgets
(11:40) Exporting greater than 500 rows from Google Analytics
(13:43) Comparing days to purchase by medium
(15:20) Using multiple tracking codes on the same page (see answer below)
(16:25) Best practices using custom variables to track multivariate test information
(18:10) Reporting across multiple currencies in Google Analytics
(19:10) Segmenting ‘serious’ visitors by loyalty and engagement metrics
(21:32) Measuring click to call buttons in your mobile websites
(22:45) The best and most time efficient way to put Google Analytics data into a powerPoint
(23:47) Tracking cross-sells or up-sells on a product page
(26:05) Tracking multiple ids or paths per page
(26:45) Why single page website show time on site metrics
(28:27) Using the reverse page path report for analysis
(30:21) Do profile filters impact site search reports
(32:39) How to get fast traffic in your reports

Awesome Email Marketing Tips

There’s good news: targeting your email campaigns is easier than ever because of the technology available. With some assistance and a good plan you can target your emails and get a better response rate.

First, start by segmenting your audience properly. If you’ve gone through the process of setting up an inbound marketing campaign via your website, you have already done this part. However, if not, then segmenting your audience into actionable groups like, “ready to buy” or “frequent website visitor” versus just “customer” is the first step. Ideally, these segments will be set-up artfully, in a way that allows you to speak directly to a specific segment with a specific message.

Second, know that all emails are not created alike. Be prepared to create more than one at a time. You just segmented your customers—it should be easy for you to see that “frequent website visitors” need to be communicated to differently than a list of targets you purchased and don’t know anything about.

Third, choose an email program that allows you fully leverage the work you did in the first two steps. Meaning, it should allow you to create multiple campaigns and audiences at any given time. Timing is an important part of targeted email marketing. If you do not have the capability to create a campaign on demand for a specific audience, you are losing the strength behind the immediacy of email.

Fourth, measure your email results each time. It’s not enough anymore to see who opened your email—you have to be able to see who clicked on each link, whether or not they forwarded the information to someone else, if they downloaded an attachment or visited your website. Also important – who didn’t open your email? Were there any bounce-backs? This information is just as important as knowing where the click-through traffic occurred. You should be checking and fixing these errors immediately after every campaign. Ideally, you want less than 10 percent of your database to generate errors. While it is hard to give exact success percentages because each campaign is different; be it a large or small campaign—if you make a thoughtful effort to target your emails to specific audiences, regularly measure the results, and tweak the content and contact database based on the information your research turns up—you’ve taken steps in the right direction.

A good marketing consultant will also be able to tell you what success looks like for you specifically. Just keep in mind: it should work more often than not. Special circumstances notwithstanding a targeted email marketing campaign will generate leads and drive traffic to your website.

5 Great SEO Tips you can use today.

http://im-nick.com/5-sizzlin-seo-tips-you-can-put-into-action-right-now.html

SEO Tip #1: Link To An Authority Site

This is one of my favorite ways to add trust to a website. Find an authority site in your niche and give them a dofollow link on your homepage. Trust is very important in SEO, and you want to have links from related sites that Google can trust. Why would a low quality or spam site give a link to Wikipedia? They wouldn’t. However, a high quality site that wants to serve it’s readers with top notch content would link to the best content. I hope you see where I am going with this.

This is an excellent way to instantly boost your trust worthiness. But don’t go overboard with it – only link out when it makes sense. I suggest one on the homepage if you can, and a few more in the content pages of the site.

Pro Tip: If you don’t want all of your visitors flocking away to another site then change the color of the link to the same as you normal text. You can do this by giving your link a new class and changing the style of that class in the CSS file.

SEO Tip #2: NoFollow Your Affiliate Links

This is a personal preference, and honestly it won’t make all the difference in the world in terms of ranking. However, there have been cases where sites have been deindexed because they did not add the “nofollow” tag to their affiliate links. While these cases are rare you don’t want this to happen to your site.

Why would Google deindex a site because of this? It all comes down to their guidelines. Your not supposed to pay to manipulate the SERPS (search engine results pages). When your using an affiliate link it may be interpreted as a paid link since you are technically being financially compensated for putting the link on your site. Google says you can add the nofollow tag on these links just to be safe.

In case your wondering when you add the nofollow tag to a link it means your site does not pass pagerank to that site. Your site does not pass anchor text either, essentially your not giving the site a “vote” or a link in Google’s eyes.

Pro Tip: You can also nofollow pages on your site that are unimportant such as tag pages. This can help with pagerank sculpting.

SEO Tip #3: Name Your Images Using Keywords

I see people skip over this one all the time. When you upload an image to your site (say about baseball) you want to make sure your image is relevant. Well the search engines can’t physically see the image so they use the name of the image as well as the alt tags to figure out what it’s about. You don’t want to write a post about hitting the perfect home run and have your image title be giraffe.png.

This one is super easy, just change the name of the image, upload it and add an alt tag or title tag if you want. It will make sure everything is relevant and peachy. How long will it take you to do this? Even if you have 30 pictures on your site you can change the names in under an hour.

SEO Tip #4: Reduce Your Page Load Time

There’s nothing more frustrating than going to a site that loads incredibly slow (*cough* redddit.com *cough*). You will lose visitors with a slow site and it’s not good for SEO either. One of the main things to keep in mind when making a site is to make sure your image file sizes are as low as possible while still maintaining their quality; large images will kill your page load time.

If your using WordPress you can also install plugins to help your site load faster. Make sure you check out WordPress Gzip Compression and WP Super Cache. Also be weary of the plugins you are using as some will add extra HTTP requests and slow down your page load time.

Pro Tip: Page load time also a ranking factor (isn’t everything?!) so make sure your site loads just as fast as every other site on the first page for your main keyword. You can do this quite easily by using iWeb Tool’s speed test.

You also want to reduce the size of your homepage. All of the things stated above will help you but make sure you take this into consideration. Your page should be under 25kb if possible.

SEO Tip #5: Get An Extra Year Or Two On Your Domain

Did you know that Google can see when your domain is going to expire? It’s something that I personally didn’t consider for most of my IM career. It was only until I got into my first hardcore SEO battle trying to rank a fairly difficult keyword (currently standing at #3 in the SERPS!) that I realized this could be a small but important factor.

Basically it comes down to this. If your site is going to expire in 3 months then you won’t have any content on that site in 3 months so why should Google give it a good ranking? Now I’m not saying this is going to destroy your site or anything but if everyone else on page one is going to stick around for awhile then so should you. Get an extra year or two on your domain and Google will trust you that much more.

Email Marketing Tips – How often is too often?

How much is too much? How much is not enough? Your readers understand best how often they want to hear from you. They’ll definitely let you know by unsubscribing or marking your emails as spam. To prevent this from happening, consider asking your readers for a perfect frequency, test the answer heavily, and even ask those who unsubscribe for their reason with a form attached in the unsubscribe email.

Rule of thumb about email marketing:

• Anything less often than at least every other month is not often enough. People will forget about you, and the surprise of a newsletter from you showing up after a year will probably result in a surprise unsubscription.
• Anything more frequent than once a week is too often unless your subscribers specifically agreed more frequent mailings. People will get overwhelmed and annoyed by your emails, and back off even if they like your content.