Google Analytics Archives - Web Design & Development Talk

ECommerce Content Source Ordering for Product Detail Pages

Content source ordering or SOC (source ordered content) is the idea that content nearer the top of the raw HTML source code has greater weight and meaning for search engines. For instance, a paragraph of text right at the top of the HTML source has more meaning than the same passage that may appear in the footer. It is very useful for those all too common generic menus (home, about, contact etc.) that has no SEO benefit at all, yet appears at the top of every page of your site. With SOC and absolute positioning of DOM elements, it is possible to position this HTML at the very bottom of the source code, thus gicing greater weight to your page content.

The latter is not a new idea by any means, but is generally considored to be a positive practice to implement on any site.

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CRO and SEO – The Essential Relationship

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of SEO related posts at the web design forum and have been contacted by a lot of seo agencies at work (my email may be doing the rounds). The thing that I’m most amazed by is what a narrow and ultimately incorrect, view of search engine optimisation some people and companies seem to have.

Let me elaborate.

As much as I love the web design forum, some of the advice given is frankly, awful, I can’t not post a reply. A lot of the advice given is a range of generic seo quotes that people have picked from the web. E.g. ‘use headings’, ‘have a keyword density of 4%’ and ‘get backlinks’. The majority of the advice centers around simply getting people on a website or appearing for a generic, competitive term. Compare the latter to SEO’s calling me up at work (and I quote) – “there are 9,000 people searching for xxxxx every month, imagine having 9,000 more people on your site every month”.

All this is fine in theory. However, say you do manage to appear for a generic competitive term or get 9,000 new people on your site – what then. There is a high likelyhood that your boucne rate (or percentage of people who leave your almost immediately) will increase a lot.

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Enhanced Visitor Event Tracking With Google Analytics and JQuery

Google Analytics has fast become the industry standard to track a plethora of web based information about your website. Whilst being totally free and easy to setup, you are limited to tracking elements that physically render in the browser – so items such as PDF, ZIP and RSS feeds links are not tracked, this because Google Analytics has a great reliance upon JavaScript. However, tracking such links can be achieved with a small amount of extra work.

Personally, I wasn’t aware you could track specific links with Analytics and only ever considored this when a client asked ‘why doesn’t Google show me the numbers of times my marketing report (read: a PDF file) has been clicked?’ – a totally valid request that I wanted to investigate.

Use JQuery to improve Google Analytics and track downloads, RSS, Email & external links

First things first, make sure you have a google Analytics account, the latest version of JQuery and the latest version of the analytics code running on your website 🙂

As with the majority of the JQuery magic, everything happens within the doc ready event listener – this will used to capture various clicks to select elements.

Tracking Download Link Clicks (PDF, ZIPs etc.)

$(document).ready(function() {
	
	$("a[rel=download]").click( function() {
		var fileName = $(this).attr("href");
		pageTracker._trackPageview(fileName);
		return true;
	});

});

Then on every link you wish to track, simply add the rel attribute to your non HTML files as follows:

<a href="myData.zip" rel="download">Download My ZIP Data File</a>

Tracking Downloads of Specifc File Types (E.g. PDF files)

Using the dollar sign to match against links that end in .pdf (or any extension you wish to track).

$(document).ready(function() {

	$("a[href$=pdf]").click( function() {
		var myPDF = "/pdfDownloads/" . $(this).attr("href");
		pageTracker._trackPageview(myPDF);
		return true;
	});

});

The /pdfDownloads/ is used to identify and seperate report data within Google Analytics.

Tracking the click of a specific link such as an RSS feed

Simply add an identifier to your RSS feed link (in this example the link was given an id of ‘rssFeed’):

$(document).ready(function() {
	
	$("a#rssFeed").click( function() {
		pageTracker._trackEvent("RSS", "RSS Subscriber Link Clicked");
		return true;
	});

});

Tracking mailto: Link Clicks

$(document).ready(function() {
	
	$("a[href^=mailto:]").click( function() {
		pageTracker._trackEvent("Mail", "User clicked on mailto link");
		return true;
	});

});

Tidying up….

You should also disable the clicked element to prevent multiple event recording and provide feedback. To do this, simple add the following at the start of each piece of code – disbabling the element and changing the cursor to an egg timer (although you could display a small graphic to make things look prettier):

$(this).css("cursor", "wait");
$(this).attr("disabled", true);

How to Deal With Difficult Clients Using Split Testing

Sometimes you can be in the process of trying to tell a client that their idea simply won’t work. Be it a flimsey campaign idea of extra design element that you know through experience will not work and produce the desired KPIs for a client project. You can even show the client links, articles and examples of why their idea will fail to deliver results. However, if this is potential or existing client they are likely to go elsewhere, to a company willing to follow their every word without consideration – I have come across web companies who will do this.

Recently an existing client came to me asking why his site isn’t showing up when people search for a particular long tail search term. Now, his existing site used a pretty awful content management system that didn’t even allow him to set his own pages titles or meta descriptions. Furthermore, he was lacking inbound links, which people ranked above him did have. This all sounds simple and straightforward but even after I had explained (in quite clear and non technical langauge may I add) the merits of good SEO and one page content the client simply wouldn’t accept this as a solution. He had his own short term and less costly solutions – basically revolving around the the idea me resubmitting his sitemap page to all the major search engines each day. I’m not debating that submitting a sitemap isn’t a good idea, because it is. However, the client’s main KPI for this project was increased site enquiries.

After much discussing this we had both come to a bit of an awkward silence – not a good thing if you’ve ever experinced this in client meetings. For some reason I remebered back to my unoversity days where I had read something about split testing (or A/B testing) – where you can turn a negative situation into a positive one.This is quite a delicate situation to be in as it can damage your client relationship quite quickly.

The idea was to use the client’s idea for a period of time and my idea for a period of time. At the start of this I would install Google Analytics (I was tempted to use Google’s website optimizer, but decided against it) and let the statisitics do the talking – as a no one can argue with statistics.

This method has been very useful previously when demonstrating the merits of creating a dedicated landing page for Google Adword campaigns, but can be used anywhere if you’re willing to a little bit extra.

This method is beneficial for the following reasons:

The client’s idea are being dismissed as wrong (however right you think you are)
You are showing the client that you care enough to demonstrate your ideas
Occassionaly the client will back down as soon as you explain your plan of attack
It prevents those awful awkward silences
You have a real world example to use in your other client meetings
You are speaking the clients language in that you are demonstrating how your actions lead to increased conversions
You are being direct, which I personally think is alwasy a good thing – as such statistics are often a huge eye opener for clients
If and when the client comes to the same conslusion as you, they won’t blame you

There is always the arguement that the client is the client and that it’s all business at the end of the day. However, I personally pride myself on doing things properly. Others will say just get on with, do what the client wants and forget about it – you can only offer your opinion. This is a good point but can still damage your client relationships when they return later on and you need to charge them again. It all depends if you require long or short term client relationships – as they are definately an investment.

Tracking Twitter Performance Using Google Analytics

If you use the ever popular twitter there’s a high chance you’ll be linking to your company webiste or personal blog in your tweets or profile link. As the aim is use twitter as a marketing tool to drive traffic, you can use Google Analytics to track the link you placed the twitter profile – just like an email campiagn or PPC advert

If you use Twitter as a marketing tool to drive traffic to your site then you should treat it in exactly the same way as you would a newsletter, a PPC advert or a banner and track each Tweet’s performance beyond simple click data. How many visits do you get, how long do they stay on your site, how deep do they go, what is the bounce rate like and how much revenue do they generate?

The benefit to ‘tagging’ this link is that Google Analytics will record more than use basic click data – you can record a whole host of advanced user data such as how they navigate your site and length of visit. By default Google will track such links, but traffic from services such as bit.ly will be dumped into the direct traffic area of Google Analytics. The steps to get the latter up and running are quite simple:

1: Go to Google’s URL builder to generate an url . Enter the following information:

Website URL: your website address

Campaign Source: enter a relevant source here to identify your campaign E.g. twitter

Campaign Name: enter a name used to identify the campaign, this is used to identify the campaign in Google Anlytics E.g. twittertracking

2: Click generate URL and something similar to the following will be created: https://www.web-design-talk.co.uk/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twittertrack

3: If posting to twitter you can paste this URL directly in the tweet box, as twitter will automatically shorten this url.

4: After approximately 24 hours data will appear in your analytics account. Simply navigate to Traffic Sources. If you’ve used the same terms to build the url as above you’ll see an entry called ‘twitter / social’. You can also view information by navigating to Traffic Sources > Campaigns where you can click the campiagn name (‘twittertrack’ was used in he example above).