Since the introduction of personalized search and Google giving much more importance to the user behavior of a website, it has become more important to know how your visitors are interacting with your site, knowing about things like Unique Visits, Returning Visits, Bounce Rate, Time Spent on the site etc can all help you to determine how your website will rank in the Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

Although it is possible to get a basic report of a website’s visitors and referring sources from the website’s server logs, use of advanced website analytics is becoming more and more essential in order to understand what users are doing once they land on your site. We love Google Analytics at Fluid Creativity – it’s free, easy to install and provides a comprehensive report about the visitor behavior on a site, giving detailed information on the following areas:

• Direct Visits – This defines the number of visitors coming to the site by directly typing the URL in the browser.
• Search Engine Referrals – This indicates the number of people reaching your site through the search engines. Data is usually available for major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. This report is accompanied by the keywords against which the site showed up in the respective search engines.
• Referring sites – These indicate visits to the sites from other websites. Users may reach a site through website links, affiliate links, articles, web-newsletters etc.
• Bounce Rate – A bounce rate is defined as the number of people abandoning or “bouncing off” a page within a specified time limit. The time limit is set up by the analytic software and hence varies for each analytics.

All of this information is invalubale in judging your website’s overall success in interacting with their end users, and can be used to improve your website’s usability and your overall internet marketing campaign. By analysing this information you can get an insight into what users like and dislike about your site, helping you to improve the sales figures once people have found your website. What’s more, analytics data can be filted to provide your with only the information you need in a given report, to help avoid the setting in of “analysis paralysis“.

Fluid Creativity can help you analyse your website’s visitors, looking for patterns and problems in the statistics to help you improve your website’s performance. Get in touch today to discuss your website analytics options.

So after a weekend boning up on Analytics trivia thanks to Google’s Helpcenter and Conversion University, James and I took the exam today. And guess what – we passed!

And here’s the proof – if proof be needbe – two brand spanking new Google Analytics Individual Qualification certificates.

Looks like they’ll need to be updated in 18 months, but that’s fine and dandy – I’m sure there’ll be plenty more to get our heads round by then! But in the meantime you can be confident that, when you’re dealing with Fluid Creativity, you’re dealing with a company that will not only help you to increase your traffic, but to understand and react to it.

With the prevalance of so many social media outlets, it can be overwhelming to follow what is going on.  On an individual basis, it may not matter to you if you end up using some sites more than others.  However, for brands and businesses it is now more important than ever to have an online presence and in this domain it is vital to have as many users, subscribers and followers as is relevantly possible.

For us regular online socialisers, Google has recently rolled out it’s Social Search which appears to aggregate search results relevant to us based on our online social profile.  Whether companies will be able to adapt this to their online strategy is yet to be seen so in the meantime what other means do they have of monitoring their online campaigns?

Many would argue that the only ‘metrics’ that need to be monitored is whether your brand is being talked about and whether your sales are up.  I agree with this to an extent however there are plenty of factors that can be examined when your online strategy fails to bring a return on investment:

Web Analytics

• Visitors/Unique Visitors -  don’t get these two mixed up.  The number of visits that your website has had will give an overinflated view of how popular your site is.  Some of these visits will have come from some people visiting more than once.  The number of unique visitors will give a clearer picture of popularity.
• New Visitors – measure the percentage of new visitors to your site to indicate the spread of your campaign’s influence.
• Returning Visitors – we all know that ‘content is king’ so a measure of repeat visitors will indicate how useful, interesting or functional your website’s content is.
• Page Views Per Visit and Bounce Rate - Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive on one page and then never stick around to check out more pages.  A very high bounce rate indicates that there is something fundamentally wrong with the page (poor layout and design, error messages, accessability problems, etc).  If visitors don’t leave immediately then the average number of pages that people are browsing will be indicated with the Views per Visit metric.
• Number and Quality of Backlinks – a high volume of links to your site isn’t necessarily an reflection of the quality of your website.  Links from high quality, reputable websites are a much stronger endorsement of your product.
• New links to your site – the rate at which you acquire new links to your site will be a good indicator of interest in your site.
• Improved search engine rankings – the higher your website appears for certain search terms (particularly competitive terms) the more likely you are to attract a higher volume of relevant traffic.
• Increased Conversions – this is a good way of measuring the quality of your product and also how good the design and functionality of your site is.

Blogs

• Number of Subscribers - if you have something interesting to say, people will want to subscribe – simple as that!
• Number of Comments and Trackbacks – a high level of engagement and interaction with your blog is suggestive of quality content.  Trackbacks from other blogs and Twitter will show how many of your readers like your blog enough to spread the word.
• Frequency of Visits – this is another good indicator of how good your content is.  If you consistently have something interesting on your blog then people will eagerly return to see what else you have to say!
• Conversion rate – it is up to you to decide what consists of a conversion when it comes to blogging.  Perhaps it’s RSS subscribtions, file downloads, video views, product downloads or product sales.  On the other hand it could be pretty much any of the suggestions on this list!

Social Media ROI

• Influence - how is your social media exposure influencing opinions and attitudes?
• Engagement – are people interacting with your site?
• Bookmarks on Delicious - a high number of bookmarks on the popular social media bookmarking site, Delicious is a sure fire indicator of popularity.
• Twitter mentions/retweets – companies have been embracing Twitter in increasing numbers as it is simple to keep track about what people are saying about their brand although it is just as easy for negative views to be propagated as it is for positive views.  Just ask Ryanair.
• Number of Twitter Followers – this is a nice simple metric to measure how popular your Twitter profile is.  The most popular accounts on Twitter tend to be those of celebrities who engage with their followers.  It can be easy to fall into the trap of just ‘tweeting’ out your latest deals and offers.  The most successful brands on Twitter go out of their way to interact with their followers.
• Thumbs up on StumbleUpon – in a similar vein to Delicious, a large number of thumbs up on a StumbleUpon article will not only indicate popularity, but will also be a good way to exert influence on a wide audience.
• Amazon Reviews – the great thing about Amazon is that it allows customers to review products, allowing potential buyers to make a decision as to whether to purchase.  If you feel that your online presence is strong, then perhaps it is the product itself that is flawed or perhaps expensive compared to those of your competitors.
• Google Blog Search Links – if you have something that is worth talking about then a good way to find out what people are saying is via Google Blog Search.  The popularity and simplicity of blogging means that it is extremely easy to gauge the cross section of opinion.
• Facebook (Group) Members - like Twitter followers, if your Facebook following is substantial then you know that you are doing something right.
• Positive/Negative brand mentions – not only should you be keeping track of influence, you should be noting whether it is for the right reasons.  Positive mentions are of course flattering, but negative opinion will give you clear indications of where you should be improving.

Email Marketing

• Number of Emails sent out – very simply, the more emails that are going out the more chance they have of reaching the right audience.
• Delivery rate – you will be able to calculate the number of emails received by deducting the number of bounced email from the number of emails sent.  Do bear in mind that some email spam filtering software will stop even some legitimate emails from getting through.
• Actions - are people opening any links upon receiving your emails?  Keeping track of the click through rate will be an indicator of this.
• Unsubscription rate – the rate at which people are opting out of your mailing list may give you an indication as to the relevance of your product, or perhaps the means in which you are engaging your customers.

Online Survey

• Customer satisfaction – offering an online form for customers to fill in will be a good way to gauge feedback on your campaign and affinity for your product.  Such forms can often been seen as a chore to complete so it could be worth offering some sort of incentive for doing so.
• Referrals – an increase in the number of referrals you are receiving is a good indicator of influence.  Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

Virals

• Number of views on YouTube/Vimeo – people enjoy being entertained and informed.  A good viral video will spread like wildfire, often generating hundreds of thousands of views withing the space of a few days.
• Brand/company mentions in media - if your video is one of the few that gets a massive following then it will likely get picked up by the many media outlets that regularly report on popular online videos.  As they become less relevant and immediate, newspapers in particular are always looking for ways to fill column inches and regularly have features on what videos are popular.