First, cut through the geeky jargon, learn what Analytics reveals and decide, not dither, if you want your website to do more for you and, more importantly, your visitors. Analytics gives you tons of vital statistics about your site – for free – which can be leveraged only by understanding it and following up with the right decisions.

Spending as little as an hour or two a month to understand and monitor Analytics reports can make a big difference on the bottom line. Focus your attention to the behavior of your most important pages, such as the contact us page. If Analytics tells you visitors are exiting this page at a high rate then it may be because the page looks more like a tax return versus a simple form fill. Evaluate the marketing campaigns and determine which ones are bringing value or draining your budget. You have the means to find out. But the end goal is to take corrective action.

What you decide now will pay off in real time with long-term results. Speed, however, can be a double-edged sword and one has to be careful in exercising it while making decisions. For example, your Analytics reports shows that your marketing campaign hasn’t yielded a single conversion in the last four hours. Does that mean it is gate-closing time for this campaign? Of course not. You can’t jump to conclusions. Consider various related factors such as multiple metrics and dig deeper into the numbers. Metrics are not proxies for performance, and they tend to cast a spell on us. When is the data interesting, and when is it actionable? This needs to be addressed carefully before making decisions on your data. But once you do the decision making will be that much easier.

If you are not sure what the data is saying or how to take corrective action then leverage the plethora of online support out there complete with helpful screenshots, audio, video and straightforward recommendations to hand-hold you through the process. If you are questioning your data then chances are another website owner has probably already experienced the same question. Besides, everyone seems to have an opinion so see what the popularity does then trust your gut instinct.

Remember, web analytics is a developing language and one that is being taught to and learned by a growing population. With the rapid development of e-commerce coupled with the ever-expanding international exchange and cooperation, the need to understand the data and make decisions becomes more and more urgent if one is to succeed online.

Is Your Message Mixed?
Make the site’s goal loud and clear. If you are selling French perfumes online, push it to the forefront of the site, rather than splash images that do not call for measurable and tangible action.

Blend Your Design With Content
Too much design, too little content, is like gloss that ends up as gross. The content has to be populated the right way, across the shell, homepages, section pages and interior pages. Don’t be mesmerized by design, but don’t give it a cold shoulder either. Form should follow functionality, and not the other way round.

Ease of Navigation
How does your navigation link work? Is it easy to use or a potential trap for visitors? A visitor should not feel challenged. He should be able to go where he/she wants on your site, quickly and easily, period. Using a search box on the site is the way to go, to get your visitors to their product/service directly.

Do Not Ignore The Shopping Cart
There are a million shopping carts out on the web, so you should know how to pick and choose the right one with the right fit for your site. Default shopping carts are best avoided; always go for a branded shopping cart, to lend credibility and confidence to your purchaser. You cannot be too careful when it involves your customer’s money!

How to Remain in Style –  Always
On the web, today’s trends are passé tomorrow. It’s the perils of e-commerce evolution. So how do you retool your site’s design that might look archaic sooner than you think? Redesign your site? But it’s like a journey without end. The trick is to realign, not redesign. Think up ways to realign your site’s features with changing trends on the go.

Be Consistent
Everyone loves to experiment, but don’t throw consistency out the window! In the hands of a professional web designer, your site will wear a consistent look – standard formatting of fonts, links, colors, etc. This is lost when you do the edits or touch up the site yourself, banking on your rudimentary knowledge of simple HTML by adding new content pages. A small change leads to inconsistent formatting – which might put off a visitor.

You Have Got Mail
You may have experienced this before: Impressed by the touch and feel of a great looking site, you look to see up the owner’s phone number – and you get lost, making you wonder for a moment, that the customer (the site owner) may be in hiding! Don’t make the simple mistake of sending your prospects hunting for your contact. Put your phone number/contact details in a prominent position.

Cash in on Merchandising Opportunities
Never miss up on an opportunity to make that extra dollar. Merchandising opportunities abound for your website, such as cross-sell, multiple add-to-cart, and other direct call-to-actions.

Practicing the above, especially as you foresee future growth and create a larger bouquet of offerings, will get you on your way to becoming the successful, prosperous site you once thought you had.

In this context, Internet advertising has brought in some much needed respite to business owners when it comes to advertising. It is a clear mark up over traditional modes such as radio and television. The foremost of these is the availability of data for both advertiser and a publisher, the person who is hosting the advertising, as both are privy to the number of visitors that have been exposed to the advertisement (e.g. impressions) and the number of clicks on the advertisement. For advertisers advertising on a search engine, such as Google (the publisher), for example, then the AdWords interface will provide this data.

However, advertisers tend to be clueless when it comes to conversions such as leads, sales, sign-ups - actions that happen ON the site after the click. Regardless of the pricing model, whether it be CPM (cost per 1000 impressions), CPC (cost per click), or even CPA (cost model where the publisher gets paid only when a visitor performs a pre-decided action on the advertiser’s site), tracking conversions becomes an important piece of the puzzle.

So how does conversion tracking happen? Well, like everything else in the world of technology, it’s a matter of using code, in this case conversion tracking code. Conversion tracking code is usually generated by the publisher (i.e. AdWords) which the advertiser then integrates into the web page which confirms the action. For example, if the action is a newsletter sign-up, the advertiser would add the code on that page of his website which displays the “Thank you for signing up” message. The conversion tracking code would keep track of the number of times visitors went from a landing page to the thank you page.

In most cases, advertising may includes a third party - a neutral, impartial technology provider who hosts the advertiser’s ads or creatives, and keeps track of the number of visitors, clicks, bounces and conversions. The neutral party becomes a very important entity when a publisher is running campaigns of more than one advertiser and the advertiser is running campaigns on more than one publisher. In this case, the third party should ensure the integration of the code.

Tracking conversions thus, may dispel the notion of the skeptical advertiser mentioned above. From not knowing which half of the money spent on advertising is wasted, the advertiser may now concede, at the very least, to know which half was wasted.

Social Media for Business in 10 minutes per day

1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time.

2) Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check your Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3) Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your Company Page’s Facebook Insights.

4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer.

5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others (2.5 minutes): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites.

Lesson: Centralize your searches tools!

Tributes Page

Social Media Confirmation page

Today the Pearl of Wisdom Mother’s Day campaign went live!  The campaign, “Give Mom a Free Pearl of Wisdom!” allows users to write tributes to their mom’s or favorite mom’s.  The Pearl of Wisdom Campaign will send the first 500 moms a complementary Pearl of Wisdom Pin to spread the word about preventing Cervical Cancer.

Visit the site and place a tribute today: PearlofWisdom.us/MothersDay

The Pearl of Wisdom website is in Drupal and we implemented this special campaign in Drupal.  It incorporates forms, searchable tributes, and social media.

The confirmation Page encourages visitors to Tweet about Mother’s Day Campaign or post a link to her/his Facebook Status.  We are also driving traffic to the campaign through Facebook Pay-per-Click campaigns.

The Pearl of Wisdom is the global symbol for cervical cancer prevention. The first 500 women who are honored will receive the free Pearl of Wisdom pin along with a Mother’s Day card that informs her whom the pin is from and contains important cervical cancer prevention information. The card will also include a link so she can view her personal online tribute.

Participants can submit a Pearl Tribute at www.PearlofWisdom.us/MothersDay. Submissions will be accepted from April 8 to May 4, 2010.  All submitted Pearl Tributes will be displayed on the Pearl of Wisdom campaign’s website.

Post Campaign Recap

At the end of the campaign we will be able to track very specifically where visitors came from and is they filled out the tributes.  Other user actions that are being tracked: mentions on twitter, if users leave the site to tweet and update their Facebook status.  All this data will help the client decide where to invest their marketing dollars in the future.

Fortunately, the tools analytics offer has adapted to the complexity of websites, which is no longer about getting visitors but rather turning those visitors into customers. For most websites, that could mean a visitor purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter or even reading/commenting on a blog post. Regardless, it all starts with understanding visitor behavior. Whether they know it or not, the people who visit your website are doing you a favor by helping you improve site performance, telling you what’s working or not working and growing your business. There’s a whole area in Google Analytics dedicated to visitors. Here are some key performance indicators (KPI) to understanding visitor behavior.

1. Time on site: Time spent on site is calculated by generating time stamps on a visit to every page and then calculating the difference between the last and first time-stamp of a visitor session. In case of a bounce, time on site and time on page are both reported as 00:00 minutes. Because the time on page cannot be fetched for bounces and exits, the reported values are not 100% accurate because the data for exited and bounced traffic on a page is missing.

2. Average Pageview: Average pageviews per session is one of the most used KPIs as it’s a quick indicator of website engagement. This is a ratio of the number of pageviews the average web visitor views per session. This a ratio and not a metric so it can be compared between segments, varying time frames and across multiple sites or sub-domains.

3. Bounce Rate: Google Analytics defines a bounce as any visit where the visitor views only one page on the site, and then does something else like clicking on a link to a page on a different web site, closing an open window or tab, typing a new URL, clicking the “back” button to leave the site, or perhaps the user doesn’t do anything and a session timeout occurs. Furthermore, there’s been studies that correlates bounce rates with search engine rankings. Although these studies are not conclusive, they do serve as a warning that high bounce rates may be a very good indicator of a poor site experience.

4. Funnel Visualization: This report allows you to create a custom path that you want the visitors to your website to take before they reach your designated goal. This can be used for both e-commerce and lead generation websites. If your shopping cart abandonment rates are high, you can see what page visitors are most likely to drop off before making a transaction. Then take action to change or fix this page so that visitors are more likely to continue with their purchase.

You don’t necessarily need experienced professionals to identify behavior patterns.  Simply utilizing the above KPIs will help you identify and understand visitor behavior, which will, in turn, assist you in improving your website’s overall performance.

This is similar to time based goals except you are tracking goals when a visitor exceeds (or doesn’t exceed) a certain number of pages. The same conditions apply, meaning greater than or less than and the number of pageviews you would like to set up as a goal for each visitor.

URL Destination Goals

Identifying a specific URL destination has alway been the traditional method of tracking goals in Google Analytics. To define a goal in Google Analytics, you specify the page that visitors see once they have completed the activity. For an account sign-up, you might set the “Thank You for signing up” page as a goal. For this type of goal, you can even enable a funnel to see where visitors have dropped off in the process. The trick here is determining the type of “match” for your URL. Google has three to choose from. I recommend visiting the following URL for more information on match types - http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en_US&answer=72285&utm_id=ad

Downloads

The process of establishing website goals begins with identifying and then tracking specific events on your website. Alas, most analytics programs, Google specifically, give us the ability to track a wide variety of events visitors take on websites and then act on those results to improve upon your website’s performance.

The first of the two-step process begins with you, the site owner, asking questions in order to determine what event it is you would like to track. For example, if you have an e-commerce site then you would probably want to know how many sales were  generated last week or last month. That seems obvious. But, have you ever wondered how many people are clicking on Product A on the products page? For non-e-commerce related sites, you might ask yourself whether people are opting-in your recurring e-newsletter or downloading the latest e-newletter in PDF format.

Event tracking really depends on the specific goals and needs of your site, and what you want to track. Nonetheless, you should be tracking some type of event because when a visitor interacts with a video player or game on your website, no pageview is generated, thus making it difficult to measure.

Here are some common events that are tracked that do not generate pageviews:

• Clicks on links that take the visitor to another site
• Clicks on an image or button (ex. Facebook icon or ‘shop now’ button)
• Banner Ad clicks
• File downloads (ex. PDF)
• Page widgets
• E-commerce activity/shopping cart purchases
• Member functions (ex. tracking new member sign-ups, log-ins, etc.)
• Flash, Ajax and Javascript related contentPlay button on a video or audio

Tracking specific events, the second part of the process, is relatively easy. If you are using Google Analytics, then all you need to do is call the_trackEvent() method each time you want to register an event such as how many clicks to an external link or video downloads.  For example, if you want to track how many people clicked on the “follow us” Twitter icon/link on your web page then the code would look something like this:

The “Home”, “Follow” and “Twitter” identifiers represent the category, action and label so you can view the specific results for this event right in your Analytics account. It’s really that simple. For more information on setting up event tracking in Google Analytics visit:  http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

Remember, event tracking is there to help improve your overall online sales and marketing goals and allow you to have a better understanding of your visitors’ actions. Now, isn’t this a resolution worth sticking with?

January is Cervical Cancer awareness month.  The Pearl of Wisdom Organization promotes Cervical Cancer Awareness.  This January they are running a special campaign “Take the Pearl Pledge to Prevent Cervical Cancer.”

This year, more than 11,000 U.S. women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer. And more than 4,000 will die.

>> Now, Take the Pearl Pledge and help protect yourself from this preventable disease!  Please also share the pledge with the women in your life.

Please also share the Pearl Pledge on Facebook and Twitter.  In setting up this website for them, we were able to integrate all forms of Social Media to spread the word including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging.

10 Stupid Things Entrepreneurs Do To Mess up Their Businesses by Chris Shipley on December 20th, 2009

1. Do Think Like a Gupp, not a Small Fish

If you want to be a big business someday, think like a bigger business now, not “just a small business.”

2. Do not Confuse Vision and Focus

Have a Clear Vision, and execute it.  Now “Focus is how you get there.”

3. Do not Confuse activity for focus

“Lots of activity doesn’t necessarily mean lots of progress.”

4. Do not Fall in Love with Technology instead of your Customers

“While dedication to technical excellence is admirable, in  a startup it’s the wrong target for your affection.  Instead, fall in love with your customers.”

5. Don’t just Focus on Fund Raising Instead of Building a Business

“But even in the best of times, the best way to raise capital to build your business is to build and sell products and services that people want to buy.  In fact, nothing catches the interest of VCs like money coming into the company.Consider that raising venture capital is a time-consuming activity.  Consider how you might otherwise use your time.  Developing a product?  Talking to customers?  Building strong channel partners?  Then consider this: what brings more value to your company: building PowerPoint presentations for Sand Hill Road or building your company?:

6. Don’t Fail To Measure

7. Don’t Ignore Yellow Lights

8. Do Hire Good People

“Smart founders hire great people. Period.”

9. Don’t Neglect the Details

“A little time and a few dollars spent with a bookkeeper and lawyer in your earliest days will save a lot more time and money later when you need clean books and protected IP to make your case to investors, customers, and partners.”  This will also help you not to sink all your time in administrative tasks.

10. Lose Site of Your Values

“Every company has a culture.  It’s either accidental or deliberate.”

>> Read the Whole Article Here