Archive for February, 2011
Posted on February 28, 2011 by Robbin Steif
Lots of digital ink has been spilled over Twitter sins. Tweeting what you ate for breakfast today, etc. But that doesn’t compare to these three sins:
Making social plans in plain view of all your followers. Yes, I know, you want to show off that you are friends with important people. Yes, some will look up to you. But ultimately — it is rude. Or as my mother used to say decades ago, if you aren’t going to invite everyone in the class, don’t discuss your birthday party in school.
Retweeting the nice things that people say about you. Isn’t it wonderful that they say nice things about you? Do you really have to tarnish it by retweeting it and horror of horrors, blushing? When people retweet and write “blush,” they are really saying, yes I know, what I am doing is obnoxious, so I will pretend to be embarrassed. Even if your list of followers is so much bigger than theirs is — you diminish the value of their fine work.
Publicly thanking important people for calling out your name/blog/site in their tweets/blog/video etc. Of course, it is lovely to thank them. A nice little email works. A direct message might be possible. For that matter, “@bigshot, thanks” does the trick. You can even use the bread and butter note that my mother taught me about so many years ago. But when you publicly thank a big name for a shout out, you are really saying, “Look who thought I was important enough to talk about me in his/her tweets/blog/video!! Aren’t I important?”
Here’s what I don’t hate: People who say, “Read my post. Come to my webinar. Check out my new tool.” While too much of that isn’t great, I really see that in a different class than the above three categories, i.e.not so awful. So why are they different? First, they don’t say, “Read my post, the most excellent in the world.” (Or at least, not that I’ve seen.) Second, they don’t wrap their self-promotion in the guise of humility, in the guise of just politely thanking bigshot for the shoutout, in the guise of just making plans. Those who tweet, “Read my post” are honest about it.
Robbin
View Comments (9 Responses) | Categories: Social Media, Twitter
Posted on February 22, 2011 by Robbin Steif
Since I spend my days looking at resumes and cover letters (I had four open positions, but am finally starting to figure some of them out), I wanted to write what the job search looks like from the other side, especially when it comes to our field, Internet Marketing.
Now, some of you have it great. You’ve got amazing credentials and can write your own ticket. But there is a big group of people who just want to get into the field.
IMO, the hardest part is getting to the interview. Once you are there, you have the opportunity to wow the company with how great you are. But until you get into the door, you are just another piece of paper. So here are some ideas:
Network. Not an exceptionally exciting or new idea, but it is surprising how well it works and how few people take advantage of it. The first person I ever hired at LunaMetrics came to me through an intermediary whom I trusted. Note, I had already chosen (in my mind) the “successful candidate” and I threw all that thinking out the door when my friend suggested this potential. And how about going to all those Web Analytics Wednesdays, or attending local SEMPO events? In our fair city alone, there are three competitive SEO groups where you can network.
Research. If you are really interested in a job, go read that company’s website. Follow their employees on Twitter — after all, you are an Internet person, right?. They would probably love to hear from you on their FB page. Understand who they are before you approach them for a job, because otherwise, you are just another piece of paper.
Get experience. Yes I know, it is hard to get experience without experience. On the other hand, there are a lot of websites that need your tender loving care, go get experience with them. Look into summer internships. What about accreditation – the AdWords badge requires that you manage a certain amount of money over a certain amount of time, but anyone who has fifty bucks and can study can take the GAIQ test. Without experience, your piece of paper is too easy to screen out.
Decide what you want to do. I see so many resumes where people say, I am the webmaster and I do SEM and then SEO and GA and social media and and and. It is lovely to be flexible (and very necessary in a small company like ours), but when I am looking for an SEO expert, I probably don’t look to someone who does a little bit of everything. (Go ahead and disagree.)
Stop blathering about how great you are and start showing how great you are. I must get one resume every day that says, “I am uniquely qualified for this job.” I’d love to get a cover letter that says, “I’m interested in your company and the job, I think I have the right experience and qualifications, but I do have a number of questions.” After all, in this most interactive of all worlds, why should the job search be so one way?
Be creative. Although we don’t do graphic design, I did find this great graphic design resume in the Creative Commons part of Flickr, at the top of the page. How cool is that?
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on February 17, 2011 by Dorcas Alexander
There’s no telling what people will write when you give them a big blank box to say whatever they want. With KISSinsights we ask our visitors, “What did you come to our site today to do?” The answers range from the predictable “read a blog post” to the unintelligible “jhbjhbjhbjhb” (on second thought, that looks like someone’s initials)! And lots of folks use the space to ask us all kinds of questions about analytics.
Let’s take a stab at answering some of those questions, shall we? I’m no Watson, but I’ll try to avoid answers like “What is Toronto?” when the category is “U.S. Cities!” Today’s category is all about visitors.
New Visitors – What’s a good number?
One person came to our site “trying to analyze if 75% of users who visited only once… is a good result.” Hmm. It depends, right? I wanted to say that’s not very good, but then I looked at the LunaMetrics data. We had 76% visits from New Visitors in the past 30 days!
In fact, Google Analytics seems to think it’s a good thing if % New Visits goes up, because it color-codes those increases green. (As opposed to Bounce Rate going up, which it color-codes red.) So what’s the real story here?
The real answer depends (like all your analysis depends) on what kind of site you have and what goals you have for your site.
To answer that question for your site, pose some more specific questions (related to outcomes, of course!) such as:
- Are those New Visitors doing something you want them to do?
- And how does that compare to what your Returning Visitors are doing?
Look at your Goals and apply the default segments for visits from New and Returning Visitors. For example, one of our goals is to have someone fill out our Contact Us form. We want them to hire us. If you have a similar kind of lead generation component to your site, does it matter if those visitors return once you have their contact information?
On the other hand, for many types of sites you want visitors to come back again and again. Whether it’s to read your latest articles or buy your latest products or support your fundraising efforts.
But it still comes down to outcomes. How much are you spending to bring all those New Visitors and is what they do worth the cost? Segment again to examine traffic from paid search, SEO, or other campaigns. And see which efforts are paying off.
Unique Visitors – Watch your step
Another person wanted to know “how to run a report in GA for daily unique visitors.” Hoo boy, let me try to negotiate this minefield. Here’s a map you may find helpful: “Absolute Unique” and “Unique” Visitors in Google Analytics.
Like many things, there’s more than one way to view unique visitors. You can always go to the report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Absolute Unique Visitors. By default you’ll see a bar chart showing the daily unique visitors for each day in the date range you’ve selected. Unfortunately you can’t segment this report (it’s one of the few where advanced segments are disabled), and on top of that, its layout can be misleading.
First, you can’t add up the daily unique visitors and get the monthly unique visitors, the number at the top of the chart. Because the same person could be counted once Monday and once Tuesday (or any number of days), but will only be counted once for the entire month. And ignore the percentages next to each day, since the denominator for those is the aforementioned misleading sum of the daily unique visitors!
Try this instead – create a custom report, dropping “Unique Visitors” into the metric slot and “Day” into the dimension slot.
You still can’t add up the daily unique visitors to get the number at the top of the chart, but you can segment this report any way you like.
Another advantage of the custom report is that the calculation of uniques may be slightly more accurate than in the Absolute Unique Visitors report. Remember that Google Analytics is actually tracking browser cookies, not people. Here’s the technical explanation for how Unique Visitors are calculated, from the minefield map I mentioned earlier.
So why can you segment a custom report based on Unique Visitors, but you can’t segment the Absolute Unique Visitors report? Since the metrics are calculated differently, they may also be stored differently and in a way that makes it easier and faster to produce a segmented report. But I’m just guessing. Perhaps I should submit the question to Web Analytics TV?
Stay tuned for another upcoming category of questions gleaned from our KISSinsights. And feel free to leave your own questions (or insights!) here in the comments, too.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on February 16, 2011 by Jonathan Weber
The Google Analytics dashboard doesn’t give you a lot of options. You click the “Add to Dashboard” button in a report and you get what you get: depending on the report, it might be a pie chart, or a graph of the metric over time, or the top 5 rows of the report. It’s OK for a quick snapshot, but it’s not very customizable. In fact, there are lots of third-party tools to build a better dashboard.
But the GA dashboard just might be better than you think. A few of us were sitting around the table at LunaMetrics yesterday and the topic came up, and we made a few observations of how useful the dashboard can be.
1. Save a filter
You already know you can navigate to any of the reports and add them to your Dashboard, rearrange them, and get rid of the ones you don’t want.
But did you realize that if you filter the report (using the containing/excluding filter at the bottom of a report, or the Advanced Filter), when you add that report to the Dashboard, that filter is saved? For example, if I filter the Keywords report to exclude “luna” (to show just our non-branded keywords) and then add the report to the Dashboard, I see just the non-branded keywords.
This means, for example, that you can have multiple Top Content reports in your Dashboard, each filtered for different sets of pages. Or multiple Keywords reports, each filtered for different keywords.
The not-so-nice part is, the label of the report doesn’t say anything about that, just “Keywords” for all of them. See #4 below for a trick to help in this department.
2. Drill down
If my business is selling widgets in a storefront in Schenectady, I probably don’t need the world map from the Map Overlay report on my Dashboard.
But fortunately, I can drill down at whatever level I like — continent, country, state, city — and add the drilled down report to the dashboard.
This works for any report: drill down to a specific traffic source, a specific page, whatever you like.
3. It’s a permalink to the report
The really nice thing about #1 and #2 is not just that you get the report on the Dashboard. It’s that “View Report” link at the bottom of the widget, which takes you directly to the report. It’s a good way of saving reports you go back to over and over. Instead of taking 5 clicks to navigate there and apply a filter or drill down, you get there in 1 click straight from the Dashboard.
4. Name reports better with Custom Reports (kudos to John Henson for pointing this one out)
Using a Custom Report allows you to change the name of the report so that instead of seeing “Top Content” for multiple reports, you could see “Articles by Tim”, “Articles by Tom”, etc.
By simply recreating the report you are interested in as a Custom Report, you can name it whatever you want. For example, you could create a Custom Report named “Articles by Tim”, filter that report to only show Tim’s articles, then add it to the Dashboard. Then create another Custom Report (which may well be exactly the same except for the name and filter) named “Articles by Tom”, filter that report to only show Tom’s articles, and add that to the Dashboard as well.
What you end up with is a much easier to read Dashboard report. The titles are much more descriptive and easier to identify.
5. Apply an Advanced Segment across lots of reports at once (kudos to Dorcas Alexander for this one)
Advanced Segments are great for looking at just the audience that you’re interested in, and especially useful because you can use them across almost all the reports in Google Analytics to see just that audience. But if I want a summary of information, I might be stuck applying that Advanced segment and compiling data from several different reports.
You can also apply Advanced Segments from the Dashboard to see a quick view of all the reports segmented at once. This can make getting the picture of what your segment is doing that much quicker and easier.
6. Export and email the Dashboard
Instead of maintaining emails for multiple reports (even with the “Add to Existing” feature, this can sometimes be a pain), you can also just choose to email the Dashboard report, and you get an attachment with data from all the reports you’ve added to the Dashboard. Now, if you want to add a report to your scheduled email, just add it to the Dashboard and you’re done.
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Usability
Posted on February 2, 2011 by John Henson
Many of our older posts include example JavaScript snippets, but usually (since they are “older” posts, after all) they don’t include the Asynchronous version. We’ve been asked to update one of these posts, so we have.
The post “Pittfalls of Tracking to Multiple Accounts in GA” has been updated to have some Async examples.
Let us know what other posts you’d like to see updated.
-LunaMetrics
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Announcements
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