As usual, the month of December has been a hot and happening stretch of time for business strategists who have busy brain storming sessions on how to take advantage of the massive traffic for ecommerce sales and for the increased holiday demand. There are special promos offerings, coupon codes, contests and several other tactics of drawing customers with free shipping offers etc. In the midst of these, you can easily loose focus of the long-term business goals.

Pause a moment and let us examine top tips that would help you achieve increased email marketing conversions as we enter 2011.

1. Proper Tracking
   You need all the facts in place before your email marketing optimization can take place. Without proper tracking, you don’t have a means of ascertaining whether the changes you made impacted the results. Conversions are the most essential metric you can track
2. Redesign Your Email Layout
   Perhaps you’ve been using the same email layout for the past 12 months, 6 months or even 2 months. It is important that you experiment with new email layout designs, testing them with a segment of your database. You may be wasting money using a poor email marketing template.
3. Extensive Testing
   The test should start out simple, carrying out basic split tests on your subject line. Then, venture into the layout and design of your message with the testing. As soon as you decipher these variables, go ahead and test other areas which may not be aspects of the real email – however, they affect the outcome substantially. You can achieve untold results by testing the message segmentation, email sending time as well as landing page variables.
4. Segmentation Increase
   A lot of people are yet to start implementing segmentation; if you are among them, ensure that implementing segmentation becomes a priority to you as we approach 2011. Email marketing has grown to become a cooler and increased personalized communication medium, especially with the advent of social media as well as tracking – the engine that moves this personalization is segmentation!
5. Captivating Content
   It is appalling that most email senders do not have the skills and quite surprisingly, most of them do not take a serious note of fresh and captivating content. Ensure that this year you experiment with relevant, conversational and captivating content in place of the graphic-heavy email layout.
6. Get Fresh Subscribers
   One of the email marketing changes you should embark on in 2011 is list growing. Ensure that all hands are on deck for this task in your company (whether large or small). Your team members should take advantage of every opportunity – on the phone, at the register, in person etc and work towards growing your database.
7. Consider Outsourcing  Your Email Marketing
   If you notice that the other techniques (1-6) are not producing results (probably because you are not implementing them rightly), then consider outsourcing your email marketing to any email marketing company with an established

One of the most excellent tracking and analytics software tool around today, is the Google Analytics. Majority of the leading sites now employ Google Analytics in tracking down their visitors. If you check through the sites that rank high on Google, virtually all of them have the Google Analytics set up. Do not underestimate the utility of this valuable tool, just because the software is obtained and used at no cost. If it is correctly used, Google Analytics can offer you what it takes to transform your website from the ‘usual’ to an ‘unusual’.

The number of reports you gain access to with Google Analytics is quite astonishing. It can be used to optimize your website performance and hence your sales and profits.

How to Set Up Google Analytics

If you look ahead to receive the most desirable website statistics, then it is compulsory to correctly set up Google Analytics. You may follow the below given procedure:

• Sign up for Google Analytics if you haven’t done that yet
• You will be prompted to include your website.  Do that and subsequently paste the provided tracking script on your site pages one after another.
• Next, click on Analytics Settings; have the website profile edited and establish goals for your website. Ensure that you add the thank you page – this is where your visitors are taken to following their completion of your online product purchase form; this step is very crucial and makes a better level of reporting detail available.

Now that tracking code is in place on each page of your website and you have set up your conversion goals, just commence with the analysis of your website in order to enhance its performance.

Essential Analytics Reports

The reports outlined here are very essential in understanding the source of your traffic and the manner in which they interact with your website.

• The Top Traffic Sources:
  you can access this report at Traffic Sources and it will give you information on where your traffic is coming from. The tool generally shows you referring sites, search engines, paid ads and others. When you know the exact source of your traffic, this will help you determine where to target your resources so that you can achieve maximum leverage.

• Keywords:
  to access this report, go to Traffic Sources, then to keywords. This will display keywords that web visitors are searching for – on Google and other search engines to get to your website. Having a solid knowledge about the keywords that are generating your website conversions will help you refocus your SEO to such result-oriented keywords.

• Search Engines:
  the search engines report reveals the search engines that are driving traffic to your site. If your website optimization is Google-based, it very possible that most of your traffic comes from Google. The search engine reports help you know which search engine to focus your SEO efforts on.

• Top Content: you can access this report from the Content Menu; it will reveal the most widely sought after pages of your website.

There are other numerous Google Analytics Reports as well, that are quite valuable and helpful.

If you want to expand your reach, then you need to grow your RSS feed subscribers. Make the right input and effort to market your RSS feed; this way, you can increase adoption and reach out to people with the message that your RSS feed contains.

Validating Feed
Ensure that the feed is formed appropriately. Improperly formed RSS feed will not gain readership, and aggregators will not be able to compensate such RSS feeds. You can take advantage of certain desktop and web-based feed validation tools to ascertain if your RSS feed is formatted appropriately or not. When you edit the feed, ensure that you invest few more minutes to validate the feed.

Promote Your Feed Properly
When you do all that is necessary to promote your RSS feed properly, you will be rewarded with an increased number of people subscribing to your RSS feed. RSS feed requires promotion and marketing just like your website.

The following tips will aid you in promoting your feed:

1. RSS Auto Discovery
   The header of your web pages should feature RSS “Auto-Discovery” tags. A good number of people who read RSS feed have built-in tech that automatically detects feed. Ensure that your web pages have auto-discovery tags properly put in place. With this tool, visitors will instantly and automatically detect the availability of RSS feed for the content.
2. Submission to RSS Feed Directories
   Embark on submission of your RSS feed to different RSS search engines and RSS directories. A good number of visitors would scout RSS feed directories to see if they can find topical feeds to suit their needs. You can attract new audience through this technique.
3. Feed Icon
   Your web page should feature a standard RSS feed icon which should also be visually appealing and easily noticable. The placement of the icon should be above the fold on your web page. The essence is to enable a web visitor to instantly see the icon without scrolling up or down, right or left. Be sure that your RSS feed icon is linked to the RSS feed’s URL. Ensure that the icon is spread all over the web pages so that a visitor can subscribe to your RSS feed from any of your web pages.
4. Alert Your Email List of RSS Feed Availability
   Where you have a recent email subscription list, don’t forget to notify your subscribers that an RSS feed is available.
5. One-Click Subscription
   To help your site visitors subscribe quickly and with ease, provide a one-click subscription alternative to RSS feeds.
6. Spread the Message about the Availability of RSS Feed
   Employ every communication channel you’ve got to inform people that RSS feeds are available. Integrate your RSS feed details in forum and email signatures, also include a ‘mention’ in your product or company newsletters.
7. Send Press Release
   Use a press release to announce the availability of an RSS feed for your website content. Ensure that you give details of the kind of information featured in the RSS feed, and describe the benefits or assistance that the RSS feed will offer to those who are interested.

Educate and Explain
Since RSS feed is still fairly new, not everyone knows what benefits it has, look for an avenue to educate and explain this technology and how it can be subscribed, to potential visitors. This can go a long way to substantially grow your RSS adoption.

RSS Content
RSS feed content can be wide range of things; there are useful tips to this effect;

1. Captivating content
   Ensure that your content will compel subscribers to yearn for more of what you have to offer.
2. Your content should be focused
   Ensure that the feed does not stray from the theme, keep it specific and focused
3. New Content
   Create new content as regular as possible
4. Detailed Analysis
   Check logs to help you determine the topics that interest readers most so that you can expand on such segments by including extra items that take the topic to another level.
5. Avoid Ads
   It is important that you avoid inserting ads or content that is self-serving into your RSS feed. If you must advertise, do it sparingly and ensure that ads are balanced with quality content.

]]> http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/web-analytics/increasing-rss-feed-subscribers/feed/ 0 http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/google/changed-in-the-google-algorithm-how-it-affects-your-ranking/ http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/google/changed-in-the-google-algorithm-how-it-affects-your-ranking/#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:36:53 +0000 admin http://aceinternetmarketing.ie/?p=478

Google has recently changed three elements in its search and rankings algorithms that change the way results pages are displayed for all users. While it’s great news for searchers, it may not necessarily be the best news for you, the website owner.

Longer snippets, fewer visitors
For queries consisting of three or more keywords, Google will now show extended snippets instead of the previous very short snippets that might not show enough information to help the searcher choose a site. The rationale is that users are inputting longer, multi-word queries in an attempt to make their searches more complex and targeted. Sound reasoning when one is searching for something specific and doesn’t want to waste time being shown irrelevant content.

The longer snippet shown contains more information for the searcher. Google provides more relevant information to the searcher and the information in that longer snippet could very well contain the complete response to the user’s query. The result might affect you as follows:

Users might get answers to their query in the snippet itself and not bother to click through to your website

Users might begin to use even more long tail keyword searches and complex key phrases in order to get more detailed result snippets, bypassing the keywords you’ve created for your page

Longer snippets in the search results will take more space on the page and on the screen moving the later results down and decreasing the number of results the user can see at first glance, thus making very high ranking even that much more important

To make matters more challenging, Google also ignores meta tag descriptions when it creates these longer snippets, so you must have a call to action in your page titles.

More Related Searches Below Results
Google displays other related searches that might help users refine their queries at the bottom and sometimes at the top of each page of the search results. If you test for, e.g, “water testing,” each page will display “water testing kits,” “water testing labs,” “pool water testing,” and a host of other terms at the end of the list of results on that search page. Therefore, once again the importance of optimizing your pages for different keywords and more targeted and relevant key phrases is critical.

Do not concentrate on only one single keyword. If you do not cover a wide range of relevant key phrases, Google will not see your page as completely relevant to the topic and certainly not if a complex, targeted key phrase was used in the search to at the beginning. The more relevance your page can show, the more likely you can entice visitors to click through to your site.

Local Results for local IP Addresses
Google now targets its results for some keywords based on the searcher’s IP address so that a search for “Italian restaurants” for example would produce a list of restaurants near that user’s location rather than results from another city or state.

The good news: you should be able to more easily get higher rankings for local searches. While getting listed high in the rankings for your topic may be difficult if you’re competing with all national listings for your product, you may get a much better ranking if you only need to compete with relevant results in your local area.

Be sure to submit your website to Google Maps. With that feature, searchers in your local area can find you quickly.

If you are primarily a local business, ensure that your page’s title tag also includes the business name, your search category, and your city.

Optimize, maintain relevant key phrases on your pages, and make it easy for users to find you through Google maps and good inbound links. Get your best possible rankings by giving Google the best tools to point users your way.

Web Analytics is otherwise known as visitor tracking or visitor analytics. It provides the foundation for effective online business and marketing through precise analysis. Web analytics involves the process of tracking and monitoring of individual visitors to your website. It is important for the webmasters to perform to know about the visitors and their activities through web analytics. At AceInternetmarketing, our services on web analytics help the webmasters to optimize their websites and online marketing campaign.

Web analytics has been currently accepted as the scientifically adequate method of gaining information to optimize online business performance. Real-time measurement of web traffic helps the webmaster and the executives of all level to systematically develop their strategies to maximize their internet marketing. Website visitor analytics provides the webmaster a detailed view of visitors interacting with the site.

Web analytics is the process to know about-

* The number of visitors and page views you have
* Who are the visitors to your website and where are they from
* How long the visitors stay on your site for
* Which are the pages that they viewed
* What are the most/least popular pages on your site and why
* How most of the visitors find your site and which site sends maximum visitors
* What are the browsers that the visitors use
* What are the product and services of the website that are looked for by the visitors
* What keywords or key phrases has most visitors-to-sales conversion
* How your site performs in comparison to its competitors

At Aceinternetmarketing we analyze the links through which visitors come to your site and perform session tracking process to bring a unique identification number to each customer. All these above information are significant as they provide tidbits about the website traffic and their performance. Webmasters always need these data for web analytics or visitor tracking to enhance their own performance for a better online business. Visitor analytics is the way to update the webmaster about the visitors to their sites. It also makes them plan their strategies to update and optimize their sites.

It does not matter what is the size or type of your website, the vital thing is to understand your website and the visitors you are getting to it. Our range of services on web analytics will help you know and measure your website and traffic.

Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing the behavior of visitors to a website. It is known as visitor analytics or visitor tracking as well. Web Analytics provides details of your site’s performance and visitors’ activity with your site. Web analytics plays a major role for an effective online business through measurement and analysis of market.

At Ace Internet Marketing we provide the service of web analytics for your website irrespective of its size. It is essential for you to keep track of your website’s performance to achieve your online business goal. Our service on website analytics provides you the information about the visitors to your site and the way they interact at your site.

We follow the three basic forms of web analytics:
- With the server web log files we generate information about who visited to your site, where they were from and what exactly they did at your site. This is termed as log analysis.
- With session tracking process we bring a unique identification number to each customer and track the Id throughout the visit.
- We perform on page tracking by inserting a piece of code in your page.

Visitors tracking can help you give the following information about the behavior of the visitors at your site:

• Which region the visitors come from?
• The duration of their stay on your site.
• What are the pages that they view?
• Which are the most or least popular pages within your website and why?
• Which of your products and services on your site is most sought after?
• The websites that send maximum visitors to your site.
• The keyword or key phrases that give the most interest-to-sales conversion.

We offer the service of visitor tracking to let you know who, how and when any visitor comes to your site. We analyze the links through which visitors come to your site and the search terms that takes your site to the top positions. You can let us help you in the service of website analytics to keep record of your site’s performance and visitors.

For further information contact us on 1850 50 30 50 for a free consultation or complete our online forms.

Avinash Kaushik’s new book Web Analytics An Hour a Day has been on my bookshelf for a couple months (not for lack of interest, but rather because I was too busy with the launch of our new site, my web analytics course, holiday and family visits). Finally I got a chance to sit down with it over August and give it a proper read. A few observations:

What I loved:

1. The structure of the book works for both a beginner or more advanced analytics reader. There’s a place for everyone to get started and a lot of great actionable ideas you can use today.
2. Avinash is truely a customer focussed guy. I loved how throughout the book he puts the visitor/customer first and really wants you to understand that in order to get the most from your data, you need to be constantly trying to understand your visitor’s intent.
3. Throughout the book he tells you “how” to do stuff. Take for example p. 147 where he suggests a deep dive into search engine related traffic, then proceeds to show you a model you can use. While I would have liked more of this (and at times more detail or additional examples), the “how” is rarely seen in many analytics books.
4. “Month Two” of the book – the whole chapter is great. Trust me, read it.
5. “Month Three” on Search (internal and external). Lots of suggestions here worth applying to my day-to-day work (look out Taylor).
6. His reminders to “never present metrics without context”. Something I first heard from Eric Peterson.
7. “Month Eight”, in particular the section on path analysis.

What needed more explanation or could have been better:

1. Bounce rate (Percent of traffic that stayed on your site for fewer than X seconds). I’m a big fan of bounce rate (I measure as Single Access Visits to a page / Entry Page Visits to the same page). Avinash recommends the use of time, not number of pages, to compute bounce rate. The challenge I often have with this is that I don’t have a site with visits less than 10 seconds/30 seconds/1 minute and the determination of the time increment to use can be a challenge itself and for the new analyst. Looking at clickstream and outcome data to determine the threshold (as suggested on p.144) is unclear. Would have liked some more insight into making this selection.
2. The six-sigma section was a bit dry. Robbin Steif had a similar comment on her LunaMetrics blog the other day.

What I learned

1. While we’ve been tracking content effectiveness and monitoring changes, I do need to more attention to my top 10 entry pages and leverage them to highlight promotions/campaigns.
2. I need to do a better job incorporating other data sources into my analysis (e.g. call centre data, CRM, etc.)
3. SEO – leverage your internal search key phrases
4. BONUS: While reading a section on conversion rate and viewing one of my reports, I discovered was calculating conversion rate for our site incorrectly in the report.
5. I have a lot still to learn as an analyst, but that’s exciting.

In closing

* Kudos to Avinash donating his royalties on the book. As someone who formerly worked in publishing I still think he should have self-published it in a PDF format like Eric’s Big Book of KPIs or 37Signals Getting Real — he would have likely raised more money.
* I really liked the book. I kept wishing Avinash was sitting next to me available for questions, ready to take over my keyboard and mouse and show me “how” he does his work. Perhaps one day I’ll get that chance.
* BTW Avinash: is that me on p.348?

Website Analytics is the process of tracking, collecting and analysing data about the visitors to your website, Ace Internet Marketing Web Analytics will provide you an accurate statastic of your visitor to the site and related other informations.If you would like further information on this service or any of our other services or like to avail of a FREE Consultation please call us on 1850 50 30 50 or email info@aceinternetmarketing.ie

Author: Scott Baldwin
Reissued Article: http://www.benry.net

Clarifying the issues involved in managing and measuring Web analytics is critical to e-business success. My goal isn’t to recommend one product or another. I want to arm you with the right questions so you can make up your own minds.

The four basic factors we use to evaluate the best provider follow, with a little added detail. They’ll help you determine which is the solution that best meets your needs.

Evaluate Needs

* What do you need to measure? This depends on your Web site’s objectives. Once they’re determined, focus on what level of insight the product supports for your business strategy. Without clarity about business requirements, no solution will provide meaningful data.

* Software package or ASP? Factors to consider include volume, cost, and technical integration. Does your company have the ability to implement technical applications? Don’t base this decision on upfront costs alone. You’re making an ongoing investment in hardware, as well as managing and distributing the information.

* If considering an ASP-based solution (Java bug or tag), how many pages on your site must be tagged? Are the cookies from a third party? Can visitors be tagged with first-party cookies? Perhaps your site can’t implement cookies at all (an important privacy concern). Will you have problems loading pages completely if the provider’s servers are having their own problems?

* How often do you require updated reports? Are real-time reports a necessity?

* You don’t want thousands of reports (that’s information overload). Differing reports meeting marketing, IT, and executive needs are probably necessary. Is available report data enough to help you make decisions? Can you dig deeper into report data should the need arise?

Don’t think only of today’s needs. What’s required down the road? Today, it may suffice to know conversion rate by search engine. Tomorrow, you might be sophisticated enough to analyze conversions by keyword.

* How accurate and reliable are reports? Running different programs on the same logs often produces different results. What methodology is used to interpret data? Will you need to access older reports for comparative purposes at a later date?

* Is the analytic solution compatible with your current site configuration? Does it accurately measure dynamic content? Can it analyze parameters in dynamic URLs (e.g., if the URL is www.yoursite.com/products.asp?category=4&product=95&option=3, can the software report more than www.yoursite.com/products.asp?) and decipher the parameters? Can you filter visitor segments in and out of results (e.g., internal users)? Can a visitor session occur across multiple servers and still be measured? Does the product work on different types of server platforms?

* What are the options and costs should you add more servers in the future?

* Based on current revenue, how much can you afford to spend for a metrics solution on a monthly or annual basis?

Product Breadth and Depth

* Is the solution scalable? Can it handle increasing volume load? Will you recognize any latency in pages loading? Does it have a redundancy center? Are there customizable degrees of insight and analysis?

* How fast are reports produced? If you want a particular report for a non-predefined time range (e.g., first half of the month), can the software analyze the data independently of your time frame? If not, you may wait twice as long for reports.

* Is the interface easy to use? Don’t settle for the snazziest GUI. An interface that looks terrific may limit the level of insight and depth of reporting. There’s often a tradeoff between insight and ease of use. If the product alone determines what’s important for you to know, it probably will be easy to use.

* Are reports and terminology in plain English? Can information be presented in other languages if that’s a requirement?

* Is the solution configurable based on your custom infrastructure? Does it have an open API you may need to tie in your CMS or CRM solution?

Support

* Have you tested the provider’s technical support? What hours is it available? Are there associated costs?

* Does the provider offer education services and/or training, online or off-?

* Is there community support around the product, such as user groups or customer feedback sessions?

* Are installation services offered?

Company Track Record

* How stable is the company you’re considering? Is it profitable? How long has it been in business?

* Is Web metrics its core business?

* Is there a simple way to test the product without a long-term commitment?

* Is the company clear about pricing, or are answers ambiguous?

* Is there ongoing commitment to research and development?

* How often are updates and new versions of the solution released?

Jim Novo, with whom I wrote an e-metrics guide, says:

Instead of constantly having fights about the technology, let’s get more people using it intelligently and successfully. Let’s talk more about “how” instead of “which” software or Web site analytics will be the next CRM: all about the software, instead of what can be accomplished with it. Back in 1998, I used a primitive, engineering-focused log analyzer and used some key direct marketing principles to create metrics that helped me increase the conversion of visitors to buyers.

Any analytics solution is a tool. Imagine a paintbrush. You can use that brush to paint your house or to create a painting. You can paint a mess or a masterpiece. The primary variable is you and your capacity to use the tool.

Ace Internet Marketing have a range of Web Analytic Service that can help you to measure the visitor traffic on your web sit and prepare a Web Promotion Strategy which will help clients to generate quick revenue.

Book a free no obligation Analysis of your Website,
call us on 1850 50 30 50 or complete our FREE Website Review form

Author: Bryan Eisenberg
Reissued Article: http://www.clickz.com