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I’ll admit I have never heard clients express concerns about Google Analytics, but I suspect that’s because they don’t know which questions to ask or what to look for in a website analytics package. That’s why it’s a good idea to check with a qualified consultant for guidance and support when choosing, implementing, and interpreting an analytics program.

In their effort to answer the more difficult questions from people like me, the GA team posted a list of the “Top Ten Myths About Google Analytics” on their blog. Of course, some of them are a little salesy (#10 in particular), but it’s still helpful information for some clients that need a little more evidence in their decision-making processes.

Here are the myths:

1. “You get what you pay for.” Google Analytics is free, which means the system is down a lot.
2. Google Analytics is basic and doesn’t have any “advanced” features or metrics
3. Google Analytics only supports third-party cookies
4. Google Analytics is not really accurate
5. It’s not possible to export your data from Google Analytics
6. With Google Analytics you can’t control your data
7. There is no professional support for Google Analytics
8. Google Analytics does not support A/B or multivariate testing and isn’t well-integrated with other tools
9. You can’t segment data in Google Analytics
10. You have to spend a lot of money to get “real” web analytics

Now read the original post for the truths.

It’s that time of year again. Daffodils are sprouting, trees are budding, and crickets are chirping. Tax day is over. You did remember to pay your taxes, right?

Most people take advantage of the nicer weather to do some spring cleaning around the house. Your website is no different. Chances are after a hectic holiday season and the excitement of a new year, your site has developed a few cobwebs of its own. It’s time to air it out and get it ready for prime selling season.

Here are five simple ways to clean up your website to get it ready for spring.

Prune Dead Links

Scan your website for “dead links”. These are links to pages that no longer exist on your site and generally result in a visitor seeing an error page (a “404″ in web-speak). This can cause momentary confusion and a poor user experience.

You can find dead links on your site by looking at the “URL Not Found” report in Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t signed up for this service yet, you should do so immediately. Additionally, you (or your webmaster) can check your server logs to see which pages and files on your site are returning 404’s. Eric Lander has a great tutorial on log file analysis. Start there.

Sweep Away Outdated Content

Review all of the content on your website and ask yourself this question on every page:

Does this page help my visitors accomplish their task?

Many websites have old or outdated content that no longer serves the intended purpose. Perhaps it was part of a seasonal promotion or a landing page for a marketing event. Maybe some content been replaced or made obsolete by new pages.

Whatever the reason, take this chance to redirect those old pages to more relevant or timely pages on your site. Use a 301 “permanent” redirect so that search engines transfer the link equity of Page A to Page B. Or, simply freshen up the older content by re-writing or updating the references.

Analytics Check-Up

Is your site analytics package configured to track and report on conversions? Check to make sure that your tracking code is properly installed on all of your pages and that your goals are configured correctly to provide the right information in the right format. If you are using Google Analytics, start with the Help Section. If you have a paid analytics provider, look through their documentation for conversion tracking and reporting. Lastly, if you are still relying on basic log file analyzers, consider upgrading to a reporting suite that can at least track conversions.

How about your conversion rates themselves? Is there room for improvement over last year? Are you getting the info you need to make informed decisions? Think through how you want to measure your success this year and in this economy. Do you have all the right pieces in place to get the information you need?

Evaluate Processes and Personnel

Do you have the right people on your SEO team? Is SEO represented during the appropriate touch points in your strategic, creative, development, and launch processes? Check to make sure that your website team is including your optimization plan during their work cycles.

It’s too easy to prioritize SEO out of the tactical implementation of website updates, so use this spring cleaning as an opportunity to re-incorporate the SEO strategy into your daily operations. If you are planning a site redesign or transition to a new domain, a little pre-planning will insure that your transition goes smoothly.

Analytics 0.1

One of the most common web analytics mistakes I see people make is self-counting. This means that their analytics package counts visits and pageviews from their own internal traffic. This oversight can result in serious flaws in your metrics. Luckily for you, it can easily be fixed.

If your business relies on accurate measurement of website traffic and conversion metrics, internal traffic could be muddying the waters and making it harder to determine your site’s true performance. How? Consider the following scenarios. How many of these have you done in the past month?

• Your staff directs customers to your website by visiting the site themselves to copy a page’s URL or piece of content.
• You regularly visit your own website just to make sure it’s still working.
• You load your website while talking to customers on the phone so you can look at the same screen they are.

Excluding Internal Traffic in Google Analytics

If you run Google Analytics on your site, you’ll want to set up a filter to exclude traffic from your company’s IP address (or series of IP addresses, known as an “IP Range”). Follow the steps listed on these pages to create a filter and exclude internal traffic data based on your IP range. There is even a handy regular expression builder if you are among the 99.9% of the population that is intimidated by them (myself included!)

Excluding Internal Traffic in Omniture Site Catalyst

If you use a high-end analytics suite such as Omniture Site Catalyst, you might find this blog entry on building segments useful. You can use this feature to create a custom segment for visitors from your IP range and exclude them from your reports.

Although more complex, in my experience this functionality is similar (but superior to) Google Analytics’ custom segments feature.

Now What?

The changes are not retroactive. Only traffic from that moment forward will be filtered. If you just set up your analytics filters to block your internal traffic, you can expect to see your overall web traffic decrease slightly. This may concern some people that focus solely on visit and pageview data.

If so, gently remind them that web analytics are most useful when tracking conversion events, whether that’s a sale, download, newsletter signup, lead, or any other trackable event. Because there’s less overall traffic but presumably the same number of conversions, your conversion rates may even go up!

The beautiful thing about “The Long Tail” theory* is the randomness of the keywords that somebody, somewhere actually typed into a search engine.

For example, within the past year people have reached my website after searching for the following (seemingly) random keyword phrases:

• “when somebody have a lot of negative what should they do”
• “want to know about how will marketing working in the future”
• “industry standard methodologies and tools for collecting, calculating and reporting on service level metrics”
• “compare video conferencing, databases, intranet, extranet, spreadsheet”
• “book series on how to build and survive without electricity”

Strange, right? To the person searching for them, however, these aren’t random searches. They represent a specific need or intent.

In each of these cases, Google decided my site was relevant for their query. These may not represent keywords that I set out to optimize for, but in aggregate keyword phrases of 3+ words supply a significant portion of most website’s organic search traffic.

*The long tail theory states that a small subset of keywords receive huge amounts of search volume while millions more are searched less frequently individually but account for more search volume in aggregate.

Look Beyond the Head

Most people focus on the “Head” terms that drive the most traffic. These are the most prominent and typically the easiest to comprehend, and the first to draw questions from your client, boss, or sales team about why you aren’t ranking well for those keywords.

Diving into the Long Tail of your keyword list can yield valuable information about how people are finding your site. Chances are it’s through keywords you might never have considered. Think about adding some variations of these keywords to your Paid Search Marketing campaigns or list of targeted keyword phrases for SEO and watch your site traffic increase in places you never would have expected.

Find Your Long Tail Keywords

Log in to your website analytics suite. You are running analytics, right? Find the report that tells you which organic search keywords sent traffic to your site over a given time period (6 months to 1 year should provide enough data).

In Google Analytics, that report is found here:

Filter out the “Paid” keywords so that your paid search campaigns don’t skew the data. Next, sort the remaining organic search keywords by visits in ascending order so that the keywords that only sent 1 visit are at the top:

Scroll down and look for interesting keywords from your long tail. What do you see? Leave a comment if you think you can top “industry standard methodologies and tools for collecting, calculating and reporting on service level metrics”.

Are Stanford student interns responsible for approving Facebook ads? It seems that way, considering I launched a test FB ad campaign today to support a fun side project site (RichmondWiki.org) and noticed the following referring URL in the RichmondWiki.org Google Analytics Referring Sites report:

stanford.intern.facebook.com/intern/ads/review.php (doesn’t resolve, probably only open to certain IP ranges)

Here’s a screenshot:

(click for larger)

I’m not the first to notice this, and there’s some speculation that “intern” is short for “internal”, but I’m not so sure. Why would Facebook buy the cow when they can get the milk for free? There must be dozens, if not hundreds of Stanford students that would gladly work for free to add “Facebook” to their resume.

That Job Must Suck

I can certainly understand wanting to jump on the Facebook bandwagon while still in school to try to land a job with one of the hottest properties in town, but I can only imagine that repetitively reviewing ads, clicking through to the landing page, and approving or denying them must get really old, really fast.

Then again, based on some of the ads I get served on Facebook, maybe it’s not such a boring job for a college kid after all.

Really?

Anybody know anything more about this? Am I jumping to too many conclusions?