Blog

I recently wrote about the importance of setting expectations. I explained why they’re so important, how they should be set, and how they can greatly influence our perception of success.

By default, Google Analytics provides us with nearly 70 standard reports. Add in dashboards, intelligence alerts, and real time reporting and that number jumps closer to 80. 80! That's 80 different ways to slice and dice your website's data. But wait, there's more! Most reports will visualize your data multiple ways, including as a pie chart, word cloud, comparison chart, pivot table, and map overlay.

In this installment of “Back to the Basics,” I want to share with you one of my absolute favorite features of Google Analytics: Advanced Segments. (I realize the irony in spotlighting a feature that uses the word “advanced” in a segment called “back to the basics” - just roll with me here).

The following post was recently featured on WorkIt Richmond, an email newsletter and website catering to small businesses in the Richmond, Virginia area.

In my previous article I showed several ways to measure the effectiveness of your site using web analytics. Now we want to apply those same lessons to our online marketing campaigns.

“How much money should I spend on paid search?” As someone who runs a lot of paid search campaigns, I hear this question a lot. The answer isn’t the same for everyone, and finding it can take a little work.

The Audience Overview report is the first page we see upon opening our Google Analytics. But what do all these numbers mean and why should we care?

Background

At WebStrategies we tend to design websites with a 1024px resolution with an infinite background. Why? - because we want to try and ensure the lowest common denominator of users are able to view the site at the smallest resolution which happens to be 1024px for our sites. I thought it might be time to review these stats with the new year only a few days away to better understand what my minimum browser resolution should be when building our websites in 2012. I decided to examine our Google Analytics account and discovered something interesting - its seems we might not be out of the 1024px woods just yet.

Moneyball is a popular movie out these days and it is a true story about how the Oakland A’s baseball team (and it’s GM) has to re-assemble the team and finds all of baseball's conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, the team's GM and a partner use statistical data to analyze and place value on players who the scouts say are flawed but the data says they have the ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. These new methods challenge traditional approaches to the game and the GM is scourned because they claim he is tearing out the heart and soul of the game. When you couple the premise of this movie with Wanamaker's famous quote - "I know half my advertising works, I just don't know which half" - one can't help but embrace the advantages of using the right web analytics data to optimize marketing campaigns.