Guest post by Hernán Gonzalez.

Experienced marketers understand added benefits are what make a sale and features are what provide value. That meant that campaigns with lots of bells and whistles were assumed to be more productive. Each accent added to a brand’s “wow” factor and more updates meant more sales would soon follow. However, the creation of modern day analytics tools has changed the marketing environment from hopeful anticipation to anxiety. Today, added benefits can actually be measured and thus, there is no longer a good reason to pay for features that won’t deliver.

Clients are now able see how much ROI they receive real-time. While this may useful, it also means that if metrics don’t add up, businesses are more likely to return to agencies asking why a campaign is underachieving. At that point, should the agency be responsible to change the site design, content and layout until performance rates are higher? Good Question.

The answer lies in better consultation practices, workforce preparation and adaptation. Even the most seasoned agencies can have trouble achieving a balance between all three on the first attempt, hence the need to include revision fees in the initial budgeting consultation. Clients and agencies alike understand the value of these services, and after all, there wouldn’t be a point in investing in them unless a profit was guaranteed sooner or later.

Marketers should no doubt place as much value on the results as their clients, since a reputation can easily be created or ruined depending on the success of a campaign. What can be done to eliminate concerns about metrics for both parties? The responsibility falls on to the agency, yet clients can at times be too fast in making their own evaluations in regards to what the resulting numbers really mean. For example, a site may convert fewer visitors into subscribers, but the percentage of customers out of those conversions is higher. The click through rate from Facebook may be high, but few products are being bought.

Determining whether a third party or the agency itself should interpret these statistics should be an important part of negotiations. Not only will establishing the importance of metrics assist in showing the agency’s concern for a campaign’s success, but it will help clear the air regarding the extent of their role in adapting to ever-changing analytics. Clients should be educated so that they recognize the difference between attractive statistics versus those that actually matter. A few primary attributes should serve as the basis for determining what’s worth a call for agency resources, such as monitoring actual sales as opposed to casual “Likes” on a Facebook page.

Despite the need to deliver measurable results, less tangible values should not be overlooked. Although they don’t provide monetary worth in and of themselves, “Shares” and page views could translate into the establishment of a broader customer base and increased media attention. Brand exposure and visibility are difficult and complicated things to measure, it not completely impossible. The benefits of both can help lead to more endorsement, brand reach and eventually may provide the exact sort of concrete worth clients are eager to see.

As long as a solid plan is established and agreed upon by the agency and client, marketers must return to the basics through the discovery of their customers’ existing problems or areas of growth. By confirming the results businesses are after- higher click through rate or conversions – marketers can set goals that are within reach and provide improved results. The most significant area of this practice is in the avoidance of cutting costs until ROI has been confirmed. While agencies should and do continue to adapt to the changing marketing landscape, they also need funding to maintain the resources needed for updates based on metrics’ fickle nature.

Hernán Gonzalez is Creative Director at Dutch Monaco.

The measurability of the web can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the data should allow companies to monitor every activity, every campaign, to evaluate based on solid data what’s working, what’s not, and where to expend budget, time and effort to improve results.

On the other hand, the sheer volume of data and variety of measurements can lead to “analysis paralysis” and confusion over which metrics are truly important and what response or changes to current activities should be implemented or prioritized.

Fortunately, there is help. When it comes to questions like which web metrics are most important, how to scrutinize Google Analytics reports for actionable data, how to create custom reports or evaluate social media ROI, and how to improve SEO, reduce bounce rates or measure YouTube success, these 18 articles and posts on using web analytics to improve marketing performance offer invaluable assistance.

What You Can Learn from Bounce Rate & How to Improve It by KISSmetrics

Frequent best-of honoree Kristi Hines defines bounce rate, explains why it may be a problem in at least instances (e.g., if your goal is just to get visitors to call an 800 number to learn more—not to have them browse your site), how to determine bounce rate by page, and what steps to take to reduce bounce rate and make your site “stickier.”

How To Track Mobile Visitors In Google Analytics by Local SEO Guide

Andrew Shotland concisely explains how to use Advanced Segments in Google Analytics (GA) to separately track mobile visitor behavior on your website—or even create specific segments by device (e.g., iPhone vs. Android).

10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics by Search Engine Land

Noting that “in the end, ROI needs to be justified in order to keep the flow of budget and resources moving to each individual marketing effort,” Andy Komack identifies “quick and dirty” SEO success metrics to track, including (his least-favorite) keyword rankings, keyword diversity, and inbound link count.

35+ tips and tricks for sexier Google analytics reports by Webdistortion

Paul Anthony passes along his collection of tips, tricks and reports to get at the wealth of data GA really collects, for example a drill down report which “shows what content draws people in, and from what sources and mediums. Find it under custom reporting,” along with a list of helpful plugins and scripts that extend GA.

Analysis of Online Marketing Campaigns Effectiveness from A to Z by Search Engine Journal

In this amazingly detailed and extensively illustrated post, Roman Viliavin demonstrates how to establish web-based objectives for marketing, sales, customer service and web development, then track progress and results through GA reports, concluding that “You don`t need to buy expensive tools of web analytics because a free tool Google Analytics can solve 99% of problems.”

Time On Site & Bounce Rate: Get the real numbers in Google Analytics by Brian Cray
***** 5 STARS

Brian Cray eloquently explains how GA can systematically over-report bounce rate and under-report time spent on your website (“Bob enters your site, loyally reads an article for 2 minutes and 13 seconds, saves it to his browser bookmarks, then leaves. Can you see the problem? Bob never interacted with the webpage. To Google, this is a bounce”), then provides a simple javascript that can correct the problem. Brilliant.

The New Google Analytics Available to Everyone by Google Analytics Blog

Trevor Claiborne highlights some features of the new (as of late last spring) version of GA, including the ability to create an additional dashboard to focus on important metrics, set up an Event Goal to track interactions like downloads and video engagement, and graph and compare any two rows over time. But personally, I still prefer the old version.

How to Use Advanced Segments in Google Analytics to Isolate SEO Problems [Tutorial] by Search Engine Journal

Glenn Gabe explains what Advanced Segments in GA are, how they work, how to set up an Advanced Segment to track and analyze the online behavior of traffic from a specific source (such as organic search), and possible next steps to take once you are able to isolate and examine this data.

Google Analytics To Add Search Query Data From Webmaster Tools by Search Engine Land

Barry Schwartz reports on the addition of Google Webmaster Tools data to GA: “It will add a new section under ‘Traffic Sources’ named Search Engine Optimization with sub-sections for Summary, Queries and Landing Pages…you can also use this data to create deeper reports through the advanced reporting features, so you can compare impressions to clicks to conversions directly from the search results.”

Creating Custom Reports in Google Analytics by PPC Hero

Bethany Bey steps through the process of creating a custom report in GA using metrics (the columns in a GA table) and dimensions (the rows), from creating a new report and naming it to selecting your dimensions and metrics, and specifying who has access to view the finished report.

4 Steps to Measure Social Media ROI with Google Analytics by Search Engine Watch

Nathan Linnell outlines a process for measuring social media ROI in GA. It starts with using GA’s campaign tracking capabilities, about which Nathan notes “you need to ensure you’re always using campaign tracking on any links you put out on social media sites that point back to one of your sites. It’s a fairly easy process, but one that can be a bit tedious to manage at the outset.”

11 Analytics Metrics That Are Actionable by The Daily SEO Blog

Paddy Moogan provides his list of metrics that are actionable, or as he puts it, “Metrics that help you get stuff done.” Included on his list are the percent of visitors who view product pages (improve navigation and internal site search to impact) and branded vs. non-branded search traffic (“Measure non-branded keywords and see which ones convert best, then focus on increasing rankings for these”). While the post is ecommerce-focused, much of the information will be helpful to B2B marketers as well.

The Seven Performance Metrics that Matter Most by eMarketer

According to the book Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success by eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey and Vipin Mayar, EVP of McCann Worldgroup, “There are only seven metrics that are critical for performance measurement across digital channels. While countless other metrics are available to marketers, these seven are the ones that marketers should seek to master.”

Google Analytics Changes the Rules of the Game by iMedia News

Brandt Dainow explains how changes made by Google in August of last year impact reporting in GA, specifically how these changes would increase reported bounce rate, increase reported visits, decrease reported new visits, decrease conversion rates and reduce reported pageviews per visit—all without any change in actual traffic or user behavior. I haven’t noticed any impact on the scale Brandt reports, personally, on our client results.

New SEO Reports in Google Analytics Now Here by The Daily SEO Blog

Cyrus Shepard takes a look at three types of SEO reports in GA—query reports, landing pages reports, and geographical summaries—and explains what each report is really measuring, along with “Pro Tips” on how to capitalize on the data provided to improve SEO results.

Four Hidden Gems Within Google Analytics by MediaPost Search Insider

Ryan DeShazer reveals details of four “hidden gems” in GA V5: events as goals, customizable dashboards, advanced funnel analysis and rank-at-the-time-of-click using custom variables (which would account for the different rankings visitors may see for the same keyword and web page based on personalized search, regional biases, and new +1 results). An interesting set of features, but not for the faint of heart.

The Analytics Measurements You Must Track by Single Grain

Sujan Patel recommends a set of metrics to measure and act upon on a weekly basis, divided into three categories: on-site statistics (e.g., bounce rate, average time spent on the site), social networking measurements (amount of website traffic received from social sites, number of RTs or shares) and conversion numbers (opt-ins, cost per conversion).

YouTube Launches New and Improved YouTube Analytics by HubSpot Blog

Corey Eridon details YouTube’s recently revamped dashboard overview (“You’ll still be able to see a summary of your views, videos demographics, and popularity by region…but now your dashboard will also display overall channel performance, engagement, and how people find and view your videos. You can click into each report to see more detailed information”) and explains why it’s important for marketers to measure video performance.

gShift Labs is the first (at least that I’m aware of ) integrated software package for managing web presence optimization (WPO). Given that WPO is the fusion of SEO, social media, interactive PR, and online reputation management, that’s a tall order. But based on a good look at the product, gShift has a great headstart on meeting the challenges of this discipline.

Unlike pure SEO management tools (e.g., Web CEO, SEO Powersuite), social media monitoring tools (e.g., Radian6, Alterian SM2), or inbound marketing suites (e.g., HubSpot), gShift isn’t a point solution, but a single integrated tool to manage all aspects of WPO.

What sets this software apart is its approach as much as its functionality; the people behind gShift understand that SEO, online PR, social media, PPC advertising and other tactics are each pieces of the larger web presence puzzle. They aren’t silos, but tactics that need to be used in a coordinated manner to maximize and optimize an organization’s online presence. gShift is the first software built from the ground up with that approach in mind.

Features

gShift enables marketers or agencies to track unlimited websites, web pages, social media accounts, external pages (e.g. media mentions), competitors and countries. The only limit is on keywords tracked, which is the basis of gShift’s pricing (see “Limitations and Concerns” below).

The software doesn’t provide a way to automatically segregate branded from unbranded search keywords (which would be nice), but this can be set up manually using “Campaigns.” Campaigns are gShift’s method for creating different keyword groups to track (e.g., by product line, country, competitor, etc.). The ability to show country-based rankings (e.g., U.S. results for a company.com site, Canadian results for a company.ca site) is helpful.

gShift automatically tracks organic vs. paid vs. mobile (an increasingly important segment) traffic and goal conversions for each. Yes, you could do this from Google Analytics (GA) as well (in fact, gShift pulls a fair amount of its reporting data from GA) but gShift presents it all in one spot, attractively graphed out.

Backlinks remain a key component of SEO. gShift displays backlinks by site, backlinks by page (very helpful), backlinks by competitor, and even provides a list of “recommended backlink” sources. For your website, gShift will display your top backlinks by authority and referral visits, along with changes in backlinks over time.

For your competitors, the software identifies their target terms (anchor text in backlinks), top backlinks and ranking. From a pure competitive research standpoint, gShift isn’t quite as robust as a tool like SEMRush (which provides AdWords keywords and click costs in addition to complete target organic keywords), but it does offer significant integrated functionality nonetheless.

The ability to track external pages is another nice feature. gShift enables you to set up external pages to track in different categories: Press Releases, Blogs, social media accounts, videos, and shortened URLs (e.g. bit.ly URL links). It also finds and shows you “other pages in your pool,” referring pages you may not know to track. The software displays traffic, conversions, bounce rate, social shares and search rank on assigned keywords for all of these pages. Again, most of this data (other than search rank) could be pulled from GA, but gShift makes it much easier and faster to track these metrics.

SEO is a core element of WPO, and gShift covers this pretty well. It provides daily rank checking (but charges weekly—see “Pricing” below), with comparison to the prior day’s, week’s or month’s rank highlighted in green (improvement), yellow (no change) or red (decline). The tool offers page-level auditing (specific page+keyword combination), showing what’s done and supplying recommendations for optimization improvement across a wide range of attributes (meta tags, keyword density, alt tags, headings, code fixes, etc.). Helpfully, gShift also rates the relative difficulty of each recommended task.

For any given keyword, gShift will show the top ranking page on your site by search engine (though it won’t identify the page with the highest internal gShift score for that keyword, which would be another nice feature). gShift has partnered with WordStream for its integrated keyword research functionality.

In addition to the keywords you are tracking, gShift will display recommended keywords from GA as well as all keywords that have produced at least one goal conversion. What’s more, gShift recently announced capability that gives search marketers a pretty good idea of what’s behind the “not provided” keyword data in GA, by showing you which pages are being accessed along with the top keywords driving traffic to those pages.

gShift features extensive social media tracking capabilities as well, pulling analytics from Twitter (e.g. number of mentions and retweets), LinkedIn and YouTube all into one spot. For your videos on YouTube, gShift displays rankings for those videos on specified keywords with YouTube’s search function as well as Google rankings for those videos by keyword phrase.

Again, most of these social media metrics are freely available, but gShift saves the time and effort of tracking them all down from their native sources. gShift currently provides about 75% of the data available natively from the top social networks, with more metrics on the product roadmap (e.g. expanded LinkedIn metrics are anticipated to be added within the next 30-60 days).

The power of gShift lies in its efficiency for reporting (GA-type site data, social media metrics, and ranking plus performance of external assets like guest posts or news releases all in one tool), its SEO improvement functionality, and its actionable on-site and off-site metrics. Reporting is flexible; gShift enables administrators to add explanatory or analytical text comments to virtually any metric within a report.

Few (if any) other SEO and/or social media management tools provide the type of detailed data about a blog post, web page, external article or news release that gShift does because other tools don’t “ask the right questions.” Competitive tools tend to be more siloed, while gShift takes a web presence optimization-centered approach.

Background

gShift Labs co-founders Krista LaRiviere and Chris Adams come from a digital marketing and software development background. In the early 2000s, they developed the Hot Banana web CMS product, which was acquired by email service provider Lyris in 2006.

Future Plans

gShift aggressively updates the product with new features. Among plans for coming releases are “engagement signals,” which will display, for example, how many people have commented anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) about a specified blog post or other piece of content.

Competition

gShift’s closest competitor is possibly SEOmoz, a powerful SEO suite which just recently added social monitoring. From a straight SEO standpoint, it’s hard to beat the deep functionality of SEOmoz. However, what gShift may lack in depth in this area, it makes up for in ease of use and overall user experience. Put another way, gShift is arguably a better tool for marketers looking for reporting on site and external asset performance, and optimizing those assets for improvement. SEOmoz provides more raw technical data for hands-on webmasters.

Limitations and Concerns

Backlink checking is limited to the “top” 500 backlinks for any site, page or competitor. For internal site pages, that’s generally more than sufficient, but home pages on even moderately popular websites can have far more than 500 backlinks. There’s no way to know what’s missing (other than using a separate backlink checker tool).

The internal keyword tool shows monthly volume, but doesn’t indicate ranking difficulty—a key oversight. It does little good to know how popular a keyword phrase is without also knowing if it’s feasible to try to rank for that phrase. This should be high on gShift’s list of features to add, but for now, users will have to utilize a separate tool or technique for this function.

Pricing

In my opinion, gShift’s pricing is a tad high (for the SMB market) and the model is unnecessarily convoluted. The software is priced on the basis of “keyword rankings” (KRs). A KR is one keyword, on one website, in one country. And each keyword rank is automatically checked on a weekly basis, so a single keyword consumes four KRs in a month (or five in some months, one would suppose).

gShift’s baseline Small Business package (500 keyword rankings at $99 per month) sounds pretty reasonable, until you realize how quickly that can add up. 100 keywords, checked against one website in one country consumes 400 KRs per month. Add all of those keywords to one other country and that’s another 400 KRs. Check 20 of those keywords against three top competitors and that’s another (20 x 3 x 4 =) 240 KRs. In order to really make inroads into the SMB market where this product fits best, the pricing should ideally be somewhat lower and a whole lot simpler.

Bottom Line

While gShift Labs doesn’t necessarily provide the single best tool specifically for SEO management, or backlink checking, or keyword research, or social media monitoring—it is the only software currently available that combines pretty darn good functionality in all of these areas in a single platform.

gShift Labs is the first software vendor to approach SEO, online PR and social media as parts of the integrated whole of web presence optimization. Small to midsized businesses in the B2B space who want to maximize their online footprints and opportunities to be “found” when prospects are searching for what they offer should definitely evaluate gShift Labs.

FTC Disclosure: gShift Labs provided no compensation in any form for this review.

Ultimately, as Olivier Blanchard has pointed out repeatedly, social media marketing has to demonstrate an ROI (though he acknowledges the questions have to be made more specific). In the b2b world, the “R” is generally leads (website call-to-action conversions) with some monetary value applied to them.

But it’s crucial to the social media ROI debate to recognize that “R” is an end-of-the-process measure. There are numerous in-process measures that may be impossible to tie directly to ROI, but are nonetheless critical in producing that final “R” value.

Consider automobile manufacturing as an analogy. There are an abundance of measures, from machining tolerances on shafts to the temperature in the paint room, which are vital to track during the manufacturing process. The C-level folks may not know or particularly care what these numbers are, but if those values are off, they will affect quality, which impacts rework and warranty claims, which impact manufacturing and repair costs, which impact the ROI of each vehicle.

Similarly, in social media marketing, there are numerous intermediate “process” measures that don’t fit into an ROI equation, but which are vital in optimizing social media efforts in order to minimize “I” and maximize “R.” These metrics don’t represent the goals of social media marketing in and of themselves, but are critical measures to help optimize processes to achieve the ultimate objectives.

Here are 46 intermediate metrics (and two final measures) to help marketers evaluate the success of their social media programs and optimize their associated processes. Most of these are easy and free to track.

Nine Blog Metrics

• • Overall traffic
• • Traffic quality (e.g. bounce rate, average time spent per visit)
• • Most popular posts (indicates topics with highest interest)
• • Search traffic
• • Social media/network-referred traffic
• • Other key sources of traffic (e.g., company website, newsletters, syndication sites)
• • Number of RSS subscribers (regular readers)
• • Number of email subscribers
• • Top visiting organizations (measure of targeting effectiveness)

Six Twitter Metrics

• • Total number of relevant followers (exclude the inevitable spammers and oddballs who seem to be attracted to any active Twitter account)
• • Interaction (@ mentions)
• • Retweets (reflects both level of engagement and quality of shared content)
• • Most tweeted links (i.e., which content is most popular with followers)
• • Influence (e.g., Klout and Kred scores)
• • Brand and mention tracking (e.g., from HootSuite or other social media monitoring tool)

Six LinkedIn Metrics

• • Number of company followers
• • Recommendations on products or services
• • Page views (of LinkedIn company overview)
• • Unique visitors
• • Click-throughs (on product links)
• • Followers by industry, function and company

Five Facebook Metrics

• • Number of Facebook page “Likes”
• • Friends of fans (indicates an organization’s total potential reach on Facebook)
• • Number of people talking about you (the number of unique people who have created content about the company page on Facebook in the past week)
• • Weekly total reach (the number of people who have seen one of the firm’s messages on Facebook in past week)
• • Most popular posts

Ten YouTube Metrics

• • Number of subscribers to the company channel
• • Total number of video views
• • Change in views and subscribers over last 30 days
• • Engagement measures:
•      » Likes / dislikes
•      » Comments
•      » Shares
•      » Favorites added or removed
• • Top videos, last 30 days
• • Playback locations (e.g., regular YouTube page, company channel, mobile device, etc.)
• • Top traffic sources

Two Google+ Metrics

• • Number of people / organizations in company circles
• • Number of people / organizations that have company in their circles
• • Note: Google has indicated that it plans to introduce more advanced analytics for Google+ soon

Ten Company Website and Cross-Social-Network Metrics

• • Total social media-generated visits to the company website
• • Lift in direct visits (an imprecise but correlated measure)
• • Lift in branded search visits (another imprecise but correlated measure)
• • Major social network visits by source
• • Traffic quality by source
• • Most-viewed pages by social media visitors
• • Top visiting organizations (all social media sources)
• • Top visiting organizations (by major social network)
• • Lead conversions (all social media sources)
• • Lead conversions (by major social network)

If you’ve utilized the first 46 metrics to continually monitor and adjust your social media activities, the final two—the real return on investment for b2b marketers—should validate and quantify the value of all your hard work.

One of the great advantages of online marketing is that it’s measurable to far greater degree of precision and richness than older media like broadcast and print. The depth and breadth of measurement afforded by online tactics can also be a weakness however; not everything that can be measured needs to be, and many metrics are mere “noise” with little value in terms of insight or actionability.

How do you filter out that noise and focus on the measures that provide real guidance for improving online business results? Which tools and plugins are really useful for extending the capabilities of Google Analytics (GA)? What common analytics mistakes should you avoid? How can you use GA to track visits to a Facebook page?

Discover the answers to these questions and others here in eight of the best guides to web analytics of last year.

5 Simple Google Analytics Tips You Should Be Using by The Daily SEO Blog

Detailed instructions for five helpful GA tips; most of these are pretty basic, though setting up expressions for searches and filters is a fairly advanced technique.

Google Analytics Enhanced with SEO Site Tools by Wisdom IT Solutions

A concise explanation of how to use Google Chrome and the SEO Site Tools plugin to view social media statistics in GA.

30+ More Google Analytics Tools, Apps, Hacks, Tweaks and Other Resources by SEOptimise

Tad Chef follows up on his fantastic initial list of 30+ Google Analytics tools and resources with this new list of tools (e.g., TrakkBoard), how-to articles, mobile phone apps, add-ons, plugins and resources. This will keep data junkies busy for a while.

6 cool things YOU can do with Google Analytics Custom Variables by Distilled Blog

Six ways to use GA’s custom variables feature to track metrics like cumulative actions (e.g., how does the conversion rate for frequent blog commenters differ from other visitors?) and ecommerce shopping cart drop-offs. Interesting, but definitely not for beginners.

The 9 Most Common Google Analytics Mistakes by Timberline Interactive

While a few of the mistakes that Tom Funk identifies here are specific to ecommerce sites, most apply more broadly as well, e.g, failing to test, failing to properly tag non-Google paid search campaigns, and one I’ve seen a few times—failing to track on-site search. This last area can be a rich source of data for keyword targeting, future content development and navigational changes to improve the user experience.

The Power User’s Guide to Google Analytics Hacks, Tips and Tricks by WordStream
***** 5 Stars
17 SEO and web analytics experts including David Harry, Vanessa Fox, Ian Lurie and Bryan Eisenberg share some of their favorite tips and hacks in this extensive online guide to GA, for example: how to track engagement and goal conversions by keyword.

How to Build a KPI Tracking Dashboard Using Woopra by aimClear

In his usual highly detailed and richly illustrated fashion, Marty Weintraub steps through how to create a KPI-tracking dashboard (to track, for example, conversions by referring site) using Woopra, a moderately priced, real-time web analytics package.

How to Add Google Analytics to a Facebook Page Tab by SitePoint

Alyssa Gregory lays out a quick and relatively easy three-step process for adding Google Analytics tracking to a Facebook page tab, while noting that Google Analytics is now the analytics package of choice on 56% of all websites.

There’s a great scene from the original Cannonball Run in which one of drivers hops into his Ferrari convertible, rips the rearview mirror off of the windshield, tosses it out and then says to his startled co-driver, “What is behind us—does not matter.” In the world of analytics, all information is, by its nature, backward looking (you can’t measure what hasn’t happened yet). But it isn’t the historical measures themselves which are of interest to analysts, rather the trends they reveal and path(s) forward they illuminate. In short, to be valuable, analytics must be actionable; they should provide hard data to clarify what you should keep doing, what you should stop doing, and what you should do differently.

Learn more about creating custom reports in Google Analytics, improving site conversion rates, interesting tools that extend the capabilities of Analytics and more here in some of the best articles and blog posts on web analytics from the past year.

Google Analytics 101, Part 1 by Search Engine Watch

Frequent best-of contributor Ron Jones provides an excellent introduction to Google Analytics for newbies, and even intermediate users may learn something new here.

Eyes on the Prize with Custom Reports by Google Analytics Blog

Sebastian Tonkin provides step-by-step instructions for creating custom reports within Google, such as a report showing the conversion rate for visitors from a specific geography or traffic source.

Web Analytics and Segmentation for Better Conversion Optimization by SEOmoz

A detailed tutorial on using the Advanced Segments Tool in Google Analytics to gain insights into measures such as differences in conversion rates based on content viewed: sure, that popular blog post drew a lot of traffic, but was it productive traffic? Advanced Segments can help answer such questions.

6 Tools Every Google Analytics User Should Have by ROI Revolution

For technical analysts, Shawn Purtell reviews six—actually seven—Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey scripts and other tools that enhance the functionality of Google Analytics. One example is Social Media Metrics, a tools which “allows you to see social media and link bait statistics for your specific pages.”

Is Yahoo Analytics Better than Google’s? by ECommerce Guide

David Needle reports results of a CMS Watch study which gave higher marks to Yahoo’s analytics tool in a couple of areas, including higher default pageview limits for larger enterprises, and the ability to access and view raw data, which would “let you continue to maintain a historical record instead of starting over” if you ever move to a more robust paid analytics platform.

Polaris Puts Google Analytics On Your Desktop by I’m Just Sayin’

A brief but helpful review of Polaris, a free Adobe Air application that delivers eight of the most popular Google Analytics reports straight to your desktop without logging in. A slick, quick way to stay current on your web traffic stats.

New AdWords ID Data in Google Analytics API by Google Analytics Blog

Alex Lucas explains how to combine data from Google Analytics and Google AdWords to “get a (more) detailed picture of the performance of…ad creatives and keywords.”

New Google Analytics Features Can Help You Track Your Social Media Success & Failures by Social Conversations

Li Evans showcases several new features recently added or planned for Google Analytics, such as new goal tracking types, custom variables, mobile apps tracking and custom alerts.

100 Ways To Measure Social Media by MediaPost Social Media Insider

What metrics can be tracked in social media? David Berkowitz offers up his list of  “100 thought-starters.” Some are easy (e.g. numbers of fans and followers), others are more challenging and may require more sophisticated tools, but it’s a great list for generating ideas.

Here’s a brief review of some of the best posts written in 2008 about web analytics. The articles here will show you how to use web analytics more strategically as part of your marketing program design, use some of the new advanced features in Google Analytics, and investigate alternatives to GA that provide unique views of website traffic.

Are Your Analytics Reports Breaking News or Listing Facts? by FutureNow

Melissa Burdon advises marketers to act like investigative journalists—ask the tough questions, dig for the story behind the story—rather than beat reporters who just report the who, what, where and when.

What To Expect From Your Web Analytics Tool (Web Analytics Series, Part 2) by NxtERA Marketing Blog

Elana Anderson presents a five-part framework to help companies maximize their investment in web analytics tools to develop integrated, customer-focused marketing programs. Her model outlines a progression of stages from site analysis (available to anyone using free tools) though optimization, targeting, and finally integration—a stage about which she writes “no one has nailed this one and that gives us all something to aspire towards.”

Two Alternative Solutions for Site Analytics by Web Worker Daily

Samuel Dean reviews two alternatives to Google Analytics, opensource web analytics software Piwik and the modestly priced Visitorville. Both are real-time (unlike GA) and both offer unique ways of viewing and analyzing website traffic. What’s more, as Dean points out, “In addition to being useful, these alternative site analytics solutions are fun.”

Google Analytics: Advanced Segments – Beta Feature by limeshot design

Here’s an excellent guide to using the Advanced Segments tool added to Google Analytics last November. While GA still lacks some of the features of high-end analytics packages, it is steadily encroaching further onto their turf with the addition of sophisticated new features. The post details how to use Dimensions and Metrics to set up filters, apply these to default reports, and even perform comparisons. As a real-world example, I recently used Advanced Segments to create lists of the most popular organic search phrases used to find the Spanish language version of a client website (trickier than it sounds, as the Spanish site was a virtual copy of the English site created through MotionPoint rather than a physically separate website), by month.

Using Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation to Get Proper Ad Scheduling Data by SEOptimise

On the topic of the Google Analytics Advanced Segments tool, Richard Fergie provides more detail and walks through an example of how this GA feature could be used to analyze conversions by day part in order to maximize the profitability of AdWords bids.

Review: Google Insights Can Help Merchants Optimize PPC/SEO Campaigns by Practical eCommerce

Armando Roggio reviews another relatively new tool from Google, Google Insights, a free research tool which “provides detailed search data that can help online retailers improve their pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization.” Roggio shows how the tool can be used to help marketers determine the most effective marketing messages and discover new markets, as examples, but he also carefully explains the limitation of the tool.

50 Resources for Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics by KISSmetrics

Derek Collins has compiled an impressive and extremely useful list of tools to help web analysts get more out of Google Analytics. The list is also helpfully divided into different groups of resources including resources for beginners, tips & tricks, plugins & hacks, and new/advanced features.