Analytics

Have you tried using Facebook marketing for your business and been unsuccessful? Are you like the millions of business owners trying to generate sales from Facebook ads but not seeing a positive ROI?

Since Facebook’s launch in 2004 business owners have been doing all they can to harness the power of the social network to generate money. Now with over 1 billion users on the site, the pressure is on to capitalize on this highly targeted group of users and turn their social browsing into spending!

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Many of us are looking at bloated Google Analtyics tracking data because it is counting visits to our website’s domain from people that are within our own organization.

There are 2 main ways to handle this issue. The good news is that with the latest version of GA, there is now a simple setting where you can exclude traffic from. After logging into GA, click on the Options gear icon in the upper right orange bar. Then Click on the Filters tab. At that point you will be able to Create a New Filter. Once you do that, you will get the screen below and you can select from 3 different ways to exclude traffic from your site:

• A domain
• Individual IP addresses
• to certain sub directories

Click on image to see full size version

The second way to accomplish this task, and if you’re not yet upgraded to the new version of GA, then the best way to exclude traffic is by setting a cookie on individual users’ machines. You can then use Analytics’ filter to ignore visits from all machines that has this cookie set.

1. Add the code below to a page on your website that is private, where only employees have access to that page. When a user goes to that page the 1st time, the cookie will be set on the users’ machines.

2. Create a new filter with the following settings:

• Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
• Filter Field: User Defined
• Filter Pattern: r7898787 (your cookie name)
• Case Sensitive: No

 Now you’re set. You have 2 different ways to accomplish the same goal of excluding internal company visitors from your GA website traffic.

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With social media marketing playing such a big role in companies’ marketing efforts, it makes sense that the marketers need a separate Google Analytics report to traffic traffic only from social media sites.

The good news is that this is relatively easy to setup. Since Google Analytics can analyze different traffic mediums such as direct vs. organic, you can add social networks as a separate traffic medium.

Here is how:

1. Go to ‘Advanced Segments’ in your main Google Analytics profile
2. Create a new segment and drag the ‘source’ box which under ‘Traffic sources’ to the ‘dimension or metric’ window
3. Open the ‘Condition’ drop down and paste the following sources:

Now you will have a custom segment to track only traffic from social media sites!

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With everyone posting content on their Facebook Fan Page and tweeting on Twitter, the question soon arises: How do we know what traffic from these social medial sites is due to a particular campaign we are running and how much is from our normal social media activities? In the world of Google Analytics, we call this segmenting traffic. In order for marketing professionals to be able to know if their campaigns are driving traffic and sales, a method must be found to track visitors from Facebook and Twitter and know if they are coming from our specific campaign. The good news is that there is a relatively simple way to modify your wall your posts and tweets so that Google Analytics can now track which marketing campaign they resulted from:

• Use a URL Shortner – You can include any GA tracking parameters in a full URL and then plug that into your favorite URL shortener such as Bit.ly.When you do that, the full URL with the parameters can be tracked by GA and your problem is solved!
• Example: If your full URL is: http://www.seo4anyone.com/blog/article.html?utm_campaign=fall-giveaway&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-site then you simply paste this URL into Bit.ly and it will create a new URL that looks something like: http://bit.ly/qKOpWR
• Implementation Results: So when you now paste http://bit.ly/qKOpWR into your Twitter tweet or post in on your Facebook Fan Page Wall, you will now be able to see exactly how much traffic came to that page from this particular Fall Giveaway campaign.

If you need help constructing the URL parameters, you can use Google’s handy wizard to help you construct the long URL easily.

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A lot of people ask me why their site won’t rank #1 on Google. They think that just because they were prom king back in 2002 that their website deserves to treated like a king as well. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t care too much about your personal history. But Google does care about your domain’s history. The older your domain is, the more chance you have a trustworthy business. Further, the  older the domain, the more chances other people linked to it. So its all connected… like a web..

Below are the top 10 reasons why your site won’t rank #1 on Google:

1. Your Site Doesn’t Have Enough Quality Content.
2. You Put In Large Chunks Of Content All At Once and Never Update It.
3. You Engage In ‘Cloaking’- Your Site Shows Different Information To Search Engines Than It Shows A User.
4. Your Site Has Duplicate Content.
5. You Practice Keyword Stuffing.
6. You Have ‘Doorway Pages’ Made Ad hoc To Attract Search Bots.
7. You Link Out To Sites That Are Devalued By Google. Porn, Gambling, Tobacco Are Bad.
8. Your Domain is Brand New
9. Your Server is So Slow You Could Deliver the Content by Hand Faster.
10. You Are Still Using Flash to Display Your Content.

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