No matter your experience with web design, data measurement, or blogging, you’ve most likely heard of Google Analytics. To sum it up, Google Analytics (or Analytics as we will affectionately call it from this point forward) is a powerful tool that is used to measure various web site statistics, such as visits, number of page hits, and your most popular content. Basically, when you review your Analytics report, you can learn a lot about the functionality of your site and the people visiting it.

The only complaint that most people have about Analytics is that it takes too long to track down valuable data.  If you’ve interacted with Analytics before, you might even shy away from regular use because of the amount of time it takes to pull and process data.

After this article, time won’t be an issue. In fact, you’ll be able to pull and analyze your essential stats in less than five minutes. So, if you’re like me, the tips in this article might allow you to have time to grab that tall mocha frap you’ve been craving before heading to your off-site web analysis meeting.

The Essential Data

Once you’ve logged into Analytics, you’re going to want to pull the most essential information before anything else. This will let you find out the most information in the shortest amount of time. Here’s a quick tour through the essential content you’ll find in your Google Analytics stat sheets:

Visits: You can access your site visit stats through the summary screen that appears as soon as you load Analytics but you’ll probably want to see it in more detail. To do this, select the report for your site using the “View report” option and click on the “Visits” link under the Site Usage section. This will allow you to see your visits by day and Analytics also tells you the percentage of total visits that came through on that specific day.

Pageviews: The number of pageviews your site receives is quite different than the number of visits. Pageviews are the number of pages that are accessed by your community, not the number of visitors to your site. Dividing these two numbers can help you find out how many pages are being viewed per visit. For example, if you have 2,000 pageviews in a month and only 1,000 visitors, it’s safe to assume that on average, each visitor accessed two pages.

To pull your pageview data, simple click on the “Pageviews” option in the left menu bar. (It’s under Visitor Trending.)

Visitor Loyalty: Knowing visitor and pageview stats are considered valuable information but they are nothing if you don’t know your visitor loyalty. The visitor loyalty stat shows you the number of times a visitor has arrived at your site. Analytics breaks this down by number of visits, not user. This data will shed some light on how many people diligently visit your site and it paints a more accurate picture of your community.

The Visitor Loyalty data is shown by clicking the “Visitor Loyalty” option on the left side of the page.

Top Content: The last of the “need to know” Google Analytics information is your top content. When you have an understanding of your top content, you can begin to find themes in your writing and what appeals most to your audience. To find the top content for your site, navigate to the Content heading in the menu bar and select “Top Content.” As you can see below, the top content for Folk Media revolves around how-to articles and DIY instructions. This is our niche and seeing our top content only re-enforces what we’re doing.

Other Measurables

The information outlined above is simply a starting place for you and your business. There are other things you can measure to dig into your site, your visitors, and how you’re meeting their needs.

Some other information includes:

Bounce rate: The bounce rate listed on most of the pages represents the percentage of people who leave, or bounce, from your site after viewing only one article. In the content section of Analytics the bounce rate represents the percentage of people who navigated to another site after reading a specific article. The lower the bounce rate the better.
Average time on site or page: This one is pretty self explanatory and although it doesn’t seem valuable, it can be very useful. When you see the average time listed, go to the specific page and attempt to read your content aloud and time yourself. Depending on how fast you read the content, you can judge how much information your users digested. If you read the article in three minutes but the average person only spent two minutes on the page, you can safely assume that they only made it through 66% of your content. What went wrong? Why did they stop reading?
Traffic Sources Overview: How your visitors get to your site is almost as important as their visit and the content they view. The good news is that Analytics show you how your visitors arrived at your site. Using the Traffic Sources Overview section (available on the menu bar under Traffic Sources), you can see if your customers are arriving to your site via search engine, direct URL, or referring sites. Once you have a grip on this data, you can push marketing and ad campaigns to appeal to a great number of your customers.

Honestly, the list goes on and on but since I told you that all of your information could be gathered in five minutes or less, that’s all we’re going to cover in this post. However, more information on Google Analytics will be arriving next week. I’d like to go over a few action steps…

• Set up a Google Analytics account and download the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. The plugin will make it easy to link your site to Google Analytics.
• After a few days, check out the information given for your site. See if any of your assumptions match up with the data shown.
• Brainstorm other stats or data that you’d like to learn about. If you set up your account (which should be done since it was the first action step…) play around with what is measured. Email me any suggestions for future blog topics. We’d love to cater our content to you.
• As always, please share this article via your favorite social media network.

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Eric Alpin is the Associate Editor of Folk Media and works for a telecommunications company in Baltimore, Md. He is a social media enthusiast, blogger, writer, and student with a passion for leadership and self-development strategies and techniques. Find out more about Eric on Twitter.

*Photo by miamiamia

This article was written by guest blogger Chris Tompkins.

Do you have a Google Adwords campaign that is a total stinker? How about a great click rate on your ad but the conversion on your site is less than stellar? Believe me, we have all been there. This can be especially true if you have many different products you are trying to promote in different ads and then visitors become confused and don’t stick around on your site. It can really leave you pulling your hair out.

This is why I suggest trying out a landing page. If done correctly, it can maximize your conversion rate and your budget. Rather than “clicking through” to your website, you will send viewers to a dynamic product/service specific landing page.

A landing page (also known as a “squeeze page”) is a web page that is best used to convert leads from media and online advertising, direct mail offers, methods of promotion. You might consider using a landing page rather than your website because the landing page will sell or promote a specific product or service – the item your visitor is interested in. For example, rather than featuring all of the services you offer at your toy company like your website would, your landing page would focus only on your strategy board games for teens.

Here are some quick tips about setting up your landing page:

• It should be hosted at a different domain than your business (so instead of www.thetoybox.com/teenstrategygames, the landing page domain would be simply www.teenstrategygames.com).
• Since you are not confined to the design structure of your website, you have full freedom to create a new layout and design.
• The copy is written to be much more compelling and sales oriented than your business site and blog in order to convert a prospect.
• Offer at a minimum one or more incentive(s) to drive conversion.
• Your landing page will contain (sometimes numerous) opt-in boxes that support conversion.

The most important part of the landing page is arguably the copy. When writing the copy for your landing page, keep your Google Adwords advertisement handy. Your landing page needs to be the natural progression from the prospect clicking on the ad to reaching your “landing page.” Remember, in this day and age, “bait and switch” techniques are old hat.

Make sure that your headline reflects the message on your ad. For example, if your Google ad says about “The Secret to Wrinkle Free Skin” then the headline on your landing page needs to be “Want to Learn the Secret to Wrinkle Free Skin in 7 Days?”

Make sure that your landing page is full of valuable information that builds the credibility of you and your business. Make liberal use of quotes from famous clients, testimonials, video, graphs, press coverage, awards…basically anything that makes you stand out among the crowd. If you have a lot of this information to share, it could result in a long page – but not to worry. Even with longer pages, the effects can be astounding. In the same manner, short and powerful landing pages can be just as effective!

Since your page is built around an offer, there are two things you need: an attractive incentive and opt-in technology. Free evaluations, free consultations, eBooks, eCourses and reports can work wonders in terms of attracting consumers.

For a short, one screen landing page, one opt-in box is sufficient. As a rule, for every screen length, you should add one and a half opt-ins to the body copy of your landing page. This is a good measure as to how many times you should request this information. Don’t worry if it seems redundant. People scan the copy on landing pages, so many times they will not read every word you have written. With that in mind, you want to make sure you don’t miss one opportunity to generate a lead!

However, remember that nothing is full proof. You must keep a close eye on the effectiveness of your pages. A simple headline tweak, color change, or testimonial addition can swing the conversion rate either way. View your landing page as a “real time” experiment and make sure to install Google Analytics to track the activity. Measure one week against the next, and tweak where needed. Also, note that there is no such thing as too many squeeze pages. If you have 100 products, you can make 100 squeeze pages. Overall, the goal is to be as targeted and completely aligned with the messages of your marketing plan.

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Chris is the CEO of Go! Media International, LLC – an integrated marketing firm specializing in cutting edge social media strategy and online marketing campaigns. Chris is a fundamental supporter of education in the online marketing technology sector (for companies and individuals) and speaks at national and international conferences alike. If you’d like to find out more, visit his blog or follow him on Twitter.

*Photo by PinkShot

A Folk Media insider John Lucchetti alerted us today about the new Twitter Business accounts. Apparently, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone is talking up the idea of having paid business accounts featuring advanced tools like analytics and tracking.

Stone said, “This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we’ve seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores… we want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics.”

“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

If Twitter moves to empower businesses by offering paid accounts with metrics, I think we will see a huge growth and surge in business users.

My advice is for your business to begin using Twitter now while it is still in it’s massive growth phase. Plus, It is an easy way for your company to get onto the screens of the millions of mobile devices around the world.

As a business owner – would you pay for more features on Twitter?

Get the book “21 Days To Twitter Leadership” The Step-By-Step Guide On How To Twitter, Get Twitter Followers And Position Yourself As The Leader In Your Industry In Less Than 10 Minutes Per Day.