Use Google analytics avoid the flaw - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 11

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, thanks for joining us again for another fun-filled edition of our eWebStyle Podcast. My name is Chris Burrs. I'm owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager of eWebStyle. Just for a little housekeeping, you can send us an email at podcast at e-webstyle.com. Make sure you send your comments. Today is a We Don't Need Your Stinkin' Money Podcast. That's right. We don't need it down in Texas. Well, you can keep it all. Our governor turned down $555 million of federal stimulus money. And amen to that. We don't need it. We have our own program in place. We're supporting him. Actually, I don't know all the details. But I'll take it. If someone has to take it, I'll go ahead and take it. If we happen to lose our job, we think $550 million would be just about right for us. Fair compensation. That is definitely fair compensation. We are not the only state to refuse money, but we are the biggest state to refuse money. And that's something that matters. There's a famous bumper sticker in Texas for those of you who are not in Texas, which are, I was not born in Texas, but I got here as quickly as I possibly could. Very true. Very cool. Yeehaw! And the rodeo is in town. Oh, the rodeo is here. So we'll have to try and catch that. We're city folk, believe it or not. And there's a huge rodeo, and we like to put on brand new, freshly pressed jeans and go out there. Yes, and 10-gallon hats, because you are required to have one if you live in Texas. So briefly about our previous podcast, we were talking about Google Analytics. We were raving about everything they do. We talked a little bit about them not having API, and we made our second podcast mistake. Ooh, dun-dun-dun-dun. How did that get past our editing room? I don't know. Ooh, where is our editing room? Maybe that's how it got past the

editing room. We mentioned last time that Google Analytics does not offer an automatic emailing report, and it was our editing room quickly pointed out afterwards that it is actually available. But it's not something that we do, right? Because we give that personal attention, you know, deliver it to our clients, because they'll read it. Yeah, we print them out, and we actually go through either at the end of this podcast, towards the end of this podcast, or in the following podcast. I'm going to go over what I specifically look at in Google Analytics, maybe to give you some idea of what you should be looking at, because Google Analytics is so valuable, and it's so hardy that you could get lost in what is it that you really should be looking at. So just so you know, you can schedule, and I'm sure I haven't looked at this feature because we don't use it, but I'm sure with the quality of Google Analytics that you can schedule a daily report, a weekly report, you can schedule different reports at different times, and customize your reports and have them directly emailed to you. As we discussed before, we find with ourselves and with our clients that an email is too easily dismissed, especially if you're doing them frequently, it's better to take something and drop it on somebody's desk, than they're actually going to realize the value of our service, and look through the details, and really understand where and how well their website's doing. So enough said about our minor mistake, let's move on. One thing we wanted to point out is, Google Analytics will allow you to track as many websites as you want. So if you've got 20 websites, you can track that all in one account. Just be mindful that there is a limit of 5 million page views per month. And if you bump into that, there's other things that we can do to help you, so let us know, we'll help you with that. We've got lots of notes. You can

kind of scour the internet for different tips and tricks about Google Analytics. The reality is a lot of them are a little too technical for this particular podcast, so we're going to skip a lot of those. But something that we like to track is we can actually, with Google Analytics and some code from Google Analytics, you can actually track very specific things like file downloads. I think we mentioned briefly last time, outbound links. Did we mention that? Yeah, I believe so. So you can track outbound links and more. This is right on the edge of our teaser, which is there is a flaw in Google Analytics, and I am using the word flaw liberally. But this is touching on that, and we'll get to that a little bit later. But just know that you can put in code and, for instance, if you've got a, where does this fit in? If you've got a web page, and on that web page you've got a link to five different podcasts. Wow, we might actually have one of those. Or eight different podcasts. Eight different podcasts. Then you, if somebody clicks on those podcasts, Google doesn't really know that those podcasts are being downloaded, unless you put code on the URL link, which links to that file. Did that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So unless you tell, you specifically tell it to track this, the download of this file, it will not. Correct. And we'll get into that detail and ways around that here in just a minute. So it's nice to be able to track those things, because if you do have a page, you can say, okay, well, everyone seems to listen to podcast number eight. They, whatever reason, didn't like podcast number one. Or whatever description I have trying to entice people to listen to a particular podcast is not very effective, or it is really effective, and we could change the text on the other descriptions for the other podcasts and make that more clickable, because clickable is good, just in

case you didn't know. Another thing, and a lot of people may not have realized this. When you go to a website and you type in www.e-webstyle.com, a page comes up. And if you look in the address bar where you just typed in that www.e-webstyle.com, you'll see that it just sits there and it has a slash. And, but you're seeing a page. And then if you go in, and on our particular page, if you type in www.e-webstyle.com slash index.asp, that is our actual home page. So with the slash and with the slash index.asp, you're showing the same page. Google actually records that as a different page. And it kind of makes sense, because Google's tracking the URL, and the URL is in fact different, even though it shows you the same page. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I, for one, I mean, this is actually news to me, because I would think, you know, I'm thinking the actual, I'm looking at the exact same page. But I would notice how sometimes at certain websites, they would have the index on the end of the site, sometimes they would not. And I'm thinking, hey, I'm looking at the same page, but, you know, that is true indeed. The URL is different with the actual, the index.html on the end of it. So it's definitely a separate URL. So you can define a default page for your profile, and then Google will now start to track that the same. So how is that valuable? Well, oftentimes people may come to your homepage from an external website, and they'll come to, you know, in our case, it might be www.e-webstyle.com slash without anything after it. By the way, and here's a little tidbit you probably didn't know. If you don't put the slash after a URL, you actually create two server hits. There's two transports of information, because the first thing that happens is it goes to the server, and then the server says, I think what you mean is a slash, because the technology requires that slash.

So then it comes back and says, yes, I did mean the slash. So if you're putting links in your website, HTML links, you actually want to end them with a slash unless it's a particular page. So if you're sending them to a directory, it should end with a slash. If you're sending them to a page, it should end with that page. So you come to our home site, and you've got just the slash, and then people may traverse our website and then click a home button, and then when they come to the homepage, it's going to be the index.asp. So now you've got potentially two, well, you have two hits of that page. Google is going to track them differently, and one of them means one thing and another means something else. So that's a reason why you might want to keep it separate. The other is that somebody who now, the person I just described, copies the URL and puts it in their blog. Well, that URL now has the slash index.asp. So really it is an inbound link, and you really should just combine those all together. Hopefully that made sense. I feel like I'm making sense today, but I'm not exactly sure. So you can go into Google Analytics, and you can define the default page for a particular profile, and that will merge those two pages so that the slash, and in our case the slash index.asp, are now considered the same page. Voila. Exciting. Actually, that's a little boring. All right. So we need to get into something else. We can do this quickly. This is fairly technical, but Google Analytics inherently tracks 20 search engines. If you want to add other search engines, and we really don't have a reason why you would do that, but there may be a reason. I can make up some reasons, like you're looking at a particular, this would be more in terms of a directory. So let's just say you're in the medical field, and you know that there's a directory that

does well in search engine placement, and you don't want to use our service. You want to use Google Analytics, and you are going to have a link in that directory, that medical directory, then you can actually track how that came to you, what were the search terms for that medical directory, etc. And the way you do that is just by adding a piece of code in your tracking code that you put on your particular websites. So, um... And you know, directories is the only thing I could actually think of that would, and why someone would want to do this. Directories, you know, there are... With vertical search engines, kind of be in that same boat. Yeah, there are some nuanced vertical search engines that, um, that you might want to track in more detail, uh, because what happens is, is you may have the full URL, and the full URL of the referring website may have the queries in it, it's just not going to be broken out. So, when you get into Google Analytics, and you're looking at what search terms brought traffic to my website, it's not going to include the ones that we're talking about that you could add. So, uh, if you think you're getting a lot of traffic from a medical specific website, or from a plumbing specific website, with Joe the plumber, he hasn't... He hasn't been running in a while. Welcome back, Joe. Um, whatever it may be, whatever the particular type of search engine you may, may be working with, then, you know, if you know you're getting a significant amount of traffic, you certainly want to know those key terms, because, you know, key terms, content is king, key terms are the emperor. I don't know what kind of analogies we've put together. But you want to know how people are getting to your website, so you can focus on that, so you can learn from that. Um, and so that does have significant, uh, significant value. Um, something nice that Google Analytics does, is it

allows you to compare dates. Uh, so you want to compare Wednesday of last week, to Wednesday of this week, you can do that. And that's, that's pretty useful, because maybe you ran some sort of campaign on Wednesday of last week, and you didn't this week, and you want to know, hey, are my numbers worse, better, same, what, what are they? If they're the same, maybe you shouldn't do that campaign again. Uh, or you should totally do the campaign again, but totally change it up, because, uh, it wasn't that effective. Um, you can actually, you know, break that down into weeks and months, um, and that has some, you know, when you're looking at a lot of Google, Google analytical data, it may not be readily apparent that your traffic is increasing or, or decreasing. So when you start breaking it down by month and by week, and you look at it on a whole week by week basis, then it really starts to become, it can become easier to see that you're actually, your traffic is increasing. And I say increasing, assuming that you're using our service. Yes. Because if you are using your, our service, your traffic is, in fact, increasing. Increasing. Um, and, and that's really valuable. We use that. The reason it gets a little sloppy if you're looking on a day to day basis is, you know, there appear, depending on what business you're in, there are days of the week that are dead and there are days of the week that are hot. You know, if you're a sports page, Monday is a big day because everyone's checking out the sports page afterwards. I think this would also apply to like seasonal businesses. Yes. You know, certain seasons, your business is going to, your business will fluctuate depending on the season. If you're running a seasonal business, you may want, not want to compare, you know, October to September because, you know, September, no one's thinking about Christmas. Yeah. By October, maybe, you know, after, after, after, um, Halloween, they

start thinking about Christmas. So it's not really relevant to compare October to September. It's relevant to compare October to the previous October. And you can do that with Google Analytics. That's really, uh, really powerful for that because you always want to be analyzing, comparison, comparing, uh, are you growing? Are you not growing? What, what's actually happening, happening with your business? Um, Google Analytics does have the great capability of, uh, what, of monitoring what's called flow. Or path. What, where does somebody go through on your website? Do they start on, if they start on your homepage, do they typically go to, um, some other, one specific page and then to another specific page. It can also track people in, in an e-commerce situation. Are they moving towards a target? Uh, the target can be anything. I said e-commerce, but the target can be, are they moving towards the form where they fill out information and get it submitted? Are they moving towards, uh, a download where they can download, uh, a podcast if you really want them to download a podcast? Are they moving towards, um, a free PDF file where you want them to get that PDF file so they have it for the records and the, and that speaks really well of your business? Or in e-commerce situation, are they moving towards closing that shopping cart, moving towards that thank you page? That's what we usually target ours. As soon as they hit the thank you page that comes after a purchase, then you know that you've achieved your goal. That's a great goal to have to set up in Google analytics and you do set up goals in Google analytics. So that's really good tracking. Um, if you notice that, that people will traverse three or four of your sites and then bounce three, excuse me, three or four of your pages and then bounce, you want to follow that path and see, you know, kind of replicate that experience. What are they doing? They're coming to the homepage. They're going to these

cool pictures. They're looking at this video and then they get to this boring text page and bounce. Okay. Well now you've got some understanding of what's interesting to them. So you change out the boring text page for another video or you change it out for, um, another audio file or whatever. So that's, there's a lot of power there. Um, there's a lot more than you can just go into and to one 30 minute podcast. Um, people can probably spend years of experience. You know, I understand it as you can kind of do, it's like directing traffic and I really like this feed. And when I, and I talking to new clients and to me, there's so many parts of SEO and it's getting on the first page of Google. And to me, this, this is like the meeting in my opinion, the meat and potatoes of SEO is, is directing traffic where you want them to go. You're getting tons of hits and that's great, but they could be bouncing. They could be doing this, that or the other, but are they doing what you want them to do? And that's kind of how I, uh, will explain it to a new client. Do you want them to make a purchase? You know, and e-commerce definitely you probably want them to make a purchase. And I think it's really cool that you can, um, I guess direct that traffic, you know, where you want them to go. I think that's just an awesome feature, uh, and a very, and a very important feature of Google analytics to any website. So when you start talking to customers and, and start saying, okay, you know, you've got your website and I'm, I'm the sales manager, I'm pitching to you, uh, getting you on the first page of Google and even beyond getting you on the first page of Google, what is it that you want your customers to do once they get to your website? What's kind of the typical feedback you get from, uh, from a

guy? Are they, are they like, wow, I never thought I could do that. That is exactly the typical response. Cause most, I think most people are so concerned about getting one, getting a website to getting people to that website. Or I'd probably say first is getting the website to, they want to get on Google and for at all, they don't even know why they just know they want to get on Google. Um, and it's almost where, and it's almost, you really have to educate them. Okay. Being on Google is awesome. Getting tons of traffic is awesome. But if it doesn't do what you want, if the traffic doesn't do what you had hoped it would do, and wanted to do, it's pointless. Um, and a lot of people don't think, okay, well I can, you know, I can actually tell them what to do. I can guide them down a, a path that I want them to take to make a sale, to fill out my form and, um, give me their email address, get a contact to, yeah, to, uh, pick up the phone and call my secretary or to do whatever. So a lot of people, I'd say most people don't, that I speak with don't even go that far. They just think, let's get a website, let's get it on the first page of Google. And that's awesome. It's, it's a great goal. Um, but there is more to it than that. And that's why I think that the traffic, uh, tracking the traffic and following the path that a visitor takes is really the meat and potatoes of SEO. And, and we like to sit down with our clients on, on either a quarterly, quarterly or a biannually basis. And we'll use reports like that to say, you know, here's what's happening. Everything's a bounce on this page. Nothing's a bounce on that page. What can we do? And really to sit down and, you know, what you're really talking about is, is what are your calls to action? And I

think the reason that people don't think in terms of calls to action is because traditionally people think of their webpage as a brochure. And, and as a brochure, it's incredibly valuable because it's a brochure that's available 24 hours a day, instantaneously. You know, if you get somebody on the phone or, or somebody hears of you through somebody else, uh, then they can get on your website and find out all of this wonderful information about you. And that's great. And, and you definitely want to do that. But this is an interactive media. You know, we have the ability to do things beyond just giving them information. We can start, we want to interact with them. And what do we want? How do we want to interact with them? We actually want to guide them with our call to action, which is create a specific contact that a salesperson can follow up with, or create a specific sale, or create a specific event, whether it's, you know, downloading a PDF, listening to an audio file, um, you know, whatever it may be. And, and your industry is different. You know, a call to action for a rap artist, he doesn't necessarily want your email and phone number. So he can call you and ask you to buy a CD. If he's smart, he wants your email so that you can become part of his email list, uh, or his fan club, his or her. Um, but you know, it's a slightly different call to action than, you know, for instance, for our business, you know, when somebody comes to our website, we really want them to submit a form. Um, we want them to be engaged on the website and educating themselves and to pick up the phone and call, call us. And so those are our three calls to action, uh, on our website. And I have a, I have a question when you said, you know, a lot of websites they use as a brochure. My question is, when is the last time you put

a brochure in someone's hand and it made a sale? Just from the brochure. You know, I assume that there was some, you know, what's going to make a sale of some sort of pitch to that person. And that's what your website needs to do is to pitch, have that call to action and pitch your product services, whatever it is to, to the visitor, not just, you know, a brochure, you know, it's the followup to the brochure. There you go. There you go. Right. Yeah. So you, you hand the brochure because people kind of expect it. And while you're handing them the brochure, you're getting their business card in exchange, uh, and you're setting an appointment. So here I'm giving you this information. I'm probably giving it to you because you're busy and you just want something. And if you're busy now, when are you not going to be busy? And when can we schedule that? So that's when a brochure is most effective. Setting a brochure on a counter at, uh, at a store is typically not that effective. It just, you know, you may get a call a year or something. Um, and I, and I've, you know, as entrepreneurs here in multiple different businesses, we haven't experienced anything beyond that. The real, um, value of that brochure is when you can hand it to somebody and create an appointment. Same with a website. You want to put that in their hands and create something, create a point of contact with them. Yeah. Cause everyone has a brochure or everyone has a website that's got content on it and, and information. But like, what is your website? What is your brochure doing? Are you're, let me take that back. What is your website doing to take the next step? Like you said to, uh, to get the appointment or to, to get some information or to, to, to go to the next step of, of whatever it is you want them to do. I'm hoping that makes some sense. No, I mean, it makes,

it makes really perfect sense. And, and, and this is really indicative of what I believe is one of the fundamental differences between eweb style and a lot of other SEO companies out there. Cause you know, again, just like you said, it's great to get lots of traffic to your website and the value that we bring, cause we can do that. And there are other companies that can do that. The value that we bring is, okay, great. Now that we have all this great traffic, what kind of analysis are you doing? What kind of effort are you putting forth to turn that traffic into income? Right? That's what we really want. Maybe this should be the turning traffic into income podcast. There's so many names. Really? We'll just have a podcast of names one day. Yeah. If you've got any great names for our podcast, you know, goofy guys on the, on the mic or whatever. It's like every 30 minutes. Send it, send it to us. That's podcast at e-web style.com. So I think we've gotten a lot into that in, in really kind of segued again into the value of e-web style that e-web style brings to a business. What I want to talk about now is the flaw. Dun, dun, dun, dun. The actual flaw of Google. And again, I, I said earlier, the flaw is, is really, I'm using the term liberally because to be fair, there's no way Google could actually even track this information. We spoke earlier about how Google, on your own website, you can put code to allow, that tells Google that your, that your visitor is now downloading podcast one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, or eight, or whatever it may be. The challenge is, is what if I know the link to the podcast? And I just email that link to Paul and say, Paul, you got to listen to these goofy guys. They're hilarious. And it's informative. And we need to incorporate XYZ plan into our business. And when he clicks that, it actually

downloads that file immediately. But he didn't click the link on our page that had the, the, the, the code. So Google would know that that file was being downloaded. He just clicked a link that links directly to that file. And when he does that, that file comes down to him and Google doesn't know. And there's actually really no way for Google to know unless the link that we sent Paul had code in it. And, and we're, we're became painfully aware of this particular issue with Google analytics when we started working with our podcast. So now we've got a podcast sitting out there. And the way iTunes work is works. It's very easy for people to continually download our podcast, but they're just downloading our podcast and we don't know. And the solution to that is something that we've talked about in the podcast before last, which is Webalyzer because Webalyzer will track. We're actually using AW stats now. And I wanted to pull that up just so I'm familiar with another reporting tool. AW stats is pretty powerful. It's well used throughout the internet community. And you know, if you have an option to use it, it's great. And, and it also does track particular downloads of files. And the reason that is, is because Webalyzer and AW stats use the logs of your server. So there's one device on the internet. Well, there's two devices on the internet that know that Paul downloaded that file. That's, well, there's a whole bunch, but the real key ones are his computer knows that he went to that link. And the server, our web server that served up that MP3 file to him also knows he did it. And it are, the server records it in its log files. And AW stats and Webalyzer are really just statistical analysis is, analysis I of, of the log files. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. So now what I'm thinking is, okay, why, when does this become important? Well, obviously it's going to become important if you

have a podcast or maybe a video on your website that you want to be able to track and see if maybe you're putting up different podcasts, which one are people listening to, which one they're not, which one are they not. A video, an instructional video or of some sort. Joe, the plumber, I'm, I'm going to teach you how to clean your own pipe, your sink or whatever, or something. That, those are two examples that I could think where I would definitely want to track, um, how many people are downloading. Exactly. Because I want to know, hey, is this worth my time? Am I going to keep doing this video if no one is downloading it? Or should I change it? So give people what they're looking for. Here's, here's another great example. So maybe you have, um, you, you, you've incorporated PayPal. Uh, I think we mentioned this kind of example where you're selling the business opportunity of washing windows and what's the process, what's the equipment you need? How do you knock on doors? How do you approach people and say, I'm going to do your windows and how do you price it? So you've put all of this into, uh, a nice little PDF file and you're selling it for 15 bucks on the internet. And you, your process is, is that after they go through PayPal, they go to your specific page where they can download it. Well, that download of the PDF is a link. And somebody could take that link and send it to somebody. And if you don't have it protected, other people could be downloading your PDF file. If you're looking at AW stats or Webalyzer and you're seeing that a hundred people are downloading your PDF file every week and one purchased it, then you know, uh, either the guy doesn't know how to, you know, keep his PDF file on his local computer and has to download it every time he wants to read it. Not very likely. Or he's given your link away, um, or

posted it somewhere and people are going directly to that link. So that's a, that's a great example. And, you know, we end up having to do code here, uh, to protect files for some of our clients so that, um, that a link can't be given away and that people have to have, you know, to have to get the right access. They have to have a username and password. So, um, that's a great example of where you'd actually want to track that. So, uh, the next thing that I'm going to do is we're going to look at, uh, look, I want to like step by step. Here's what I look at Google. Uh, we'll talk about a particular account, what I look for in it and what, you know, what excites me, what I'm not worried about, what I'm worried about, all of those things. And I think that's going to be very instructive because it'll give you an idea of what you should be looking at. Um, and again, I'm totally open for comments because maybe I'm missing the boat on something. I've been doing this a while, so I'm hoping that's not the case, but send us your emails at podcast at e dash web style.com. I'm actually going to do that next time. Teaser. Another. Next time we'll go through Google and I'll show you exactly what I do on Google, uh, what I look at and why. And, um, you're going to be really excited and happy that you joined us next time. So until then, I'm Chris Burris. This is Paul Hanson. Bye bye for now. She's going to set me free. Dream. She's my.