Erich Stauffer

Tag: Google Analytics

  • How I Use Google Analytics for Business

    There are 6 main areas that I check in Google Analytics to get a feel for how a site is performing, where the traffic is coming from, and what the people are interested in.

    Audience Overview

    2014-04-08 09_29_03-Audience Overview - Google Analytics

    While some may view these as “vanity metrics”, they give you a baseline comparison month over month and year over year for how your site is trending over time.

    To give you some context, a starter site should aim for 200 visitors a month, then 200 a day. A good bounce rate (user visits one page and then leaves) is less than 60%.

    Acquisition Referrals

    2014-04-08 09_32_38-Referral Traffic - Google Analytics

    There are multiple views under Acquisition (overview, channels, traffic), but I focus on “All Referrals” as it is the most specific category. It lists specific referring sites.

    Organic Keywords

    The other category under Acquisition I review often is “Keywords > Organic”. It can give some insight into what search terms people are using to find the site.

    If your top keywords are your brand name, don’t fret. Congratulate yourself. That’s a sign of success. It means people are searching for your brand name specifically.

    Search Engine Optimization Queries

    If your top Organic Keyword is “(not provided)” you can still get the keyword information as long as your site is connected to Google Webmaster Tools.

    Under Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries will tell you the keyword, impressions, clicks, and average position for each search query.

    Site Content

    Under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, Google Analytics lists the top pages on the site by pageview, time on page, and bounce rate.

    I use this in combination with the keyword data for content marketing to determine what to write about when creating new blog posts and pages.

    Advanced Analytics

    There is much more that Google Analytics can do from A/B testing to automatic reports to goal and conversion tracking to automatic alerts.

    If you are interested in learning more about the insights Google Analytics can give your business, contact me or leave a comment below.

  • Top Posts and Keywords for December 2012

    In this 714th post, I discuss my top content, keywords, and income for this website.

    Ecclesiastes 3:5 says that there is, “A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away (NLT).” Since 2007 I have been purchasing domains for speculation or use, but lately I have been condensing the total number of domains I own. Most of the time I roll them into this blog, but this led to a big pile of disjointed posts that had no real, central meaning. I recently spent a day consolidating the post categories down to 9 main categories + 1 called “Tweets” and then redesigned the homepage to showcase the last 3 posts with a thumbnail + the most popular posts + the last 5 posts from the 9 main categories. This is how I overcame the problem. Looking back, the solution seems simple, but there was a lot of work in eliminating and combining categories for hundreds of posts + the custom programming of the home page to do what it’s doing “automatically”.

    Here is a List of Former Domains Included in ErichStauffer.com:

    • mapstrings.com
    • managingactions.com
    • lostpost.net
    • professionaltechnologyconsulting.com
    • geekhand.com
    • watershawl.com
    • telablue.com
    • yourscor.com
    • white-roof.com

    Audience Overview

    The spike in traffic you see at the left edge of the image above is from combining all posts from the old Watershawl site into this blog. As you can see, the traffic didn’t continue and tapered off, despite leaving the posts in place. Total visits were 2,268 with 2,077 being unique. There were 3,504 pageviews with 1.54 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 75.13%, which is slightly higher than last month. Most people used Chrome (25.5%) followed by Internet Explorer (22.5%), Firefox (20.9%), and Safari (18.5%). Most visits were from New York City (166) followed by Fishers, Indiana (35), San Francisco (33), Chicago (26) and Indianapolis (25). Internet Explorer being topped by Chrome means that the addition of new technical content on mobile devices and query strings has attracted a more technical crowd compared to last month.

    Top 10 Content

    The three posts to fall out of the top ten were Arnart’s Erich Stauffer Fake Hummels (45), Collegeclub.com Email (49), and My CEO Heroes (6).

    Top 10 Keywords

    VINTAGE ARNART CERAMIC FIGURINE- BOY PLAYING BANJO BY ERICH STAUFFER

    • erich stauffer – 55 visits
    • collegeclub.com – 39 visits
    • forward text messages to email – 22 visits
    • college club website – 13 visits
    • erich stauffer figurines – 13 visits
    • arnart imports – 12 visits
    • erich stauffer collectibles – 11 visits
    • collegeclub email – 10 visits
    • erich stauffer figurine prices – 10 visits
    • erich stauffer 8515 – 9 visits

    Despite the new, technical content from Watershawl.com, the only change in the top keywords was the addition of “forward text messages to email.”

    Top 10 Sources

    Erich Stauffer on Twitter

    • google.com – 102 visits
    • t.co – 38 visits
    • m.facebook.com – 10 visits
    • google.co.uk – 7 visits
    • facebook.com – 6 visits
    • watershawl.com – 6 visits
    • google.com.br – 5 visits
    • iphoneunity.com – 5 visits
    • google.de – 4 visits
    • google.pl – 4 visits

    I was pleased to see Twitter (t.co) in the mix this time and I am sure this has mostly to do with my testing of the Tweetily plugin to automatically and randomly send links to old WordPress posts.

    Income Stats

    Amazon Associates Affiliate Program: 82 Items Ordered – 78 Items Shipped – $150 Advertising Fees
    Google Adsense: $127 Estimate

  • Top Posts and Keywords for November 2012

    In this 667th post, I discuss my top content, keywords, and income for this website.

    Occasionally I’ll do an analysis of my blog content and share it out for others to learn from what I’m doing. Dukeo does this with his monthly blogging stats so I’m thinking about doing it more often, maybe monthly. We’ll see. Here is my attempt at a monthly blog statistics analysis based on data from Google Analytics, Amazon Associates, and Google Adsense.

    The spike in traffic you see at the right edge of the image below is from combining all posts from the old Watershawl site into this. Watershawl was averaging over 5000 unique visitors a month with two posts, “Syncing Outlook Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks with Android Using Gmail” and “How to Auto-Forward Text Messages to Email in Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and the iPhone” getting around 2000 unique visitors each. No doubt these will be the top 2 posts next month. Interestingly, they were originally written for my Geek Hand site, but were folded into Watershawl earlier this year so this is actually their second move. I’ve got a redirection plugin up on Watershawl to redirect traffic to Erich Stauffer for now.

    Total visits was 1,544 with 1,417 being unique. There were 2,383 pageviews with 1.54 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 74.61%, which is really high. Most people used Internet Explorer (28%) followed by Chrome (24%), Safari (19.5%), Firefox (18%). Most visits were from the United States with most visitors being from California (128) followed by New York (94), Florida (72), Illinois (61), and Texas (58). Indiana had 38 for comparison. Judging by the use of Internet Explorer, the high content of Florida visitors, and the penchant for Erich Stauffer figurines, I’d say I have an older visitor base that is not interested in what I want to talk about most of the time (more on that later).

    Top 10 Content

    Of my Top Posts of 2011, the only one to fall out of the top 10 is “How to Delete a Digg Submission“. Regardless of how much I try to write about business, technology, and entrepreneurship, “the organism will do whatever it pleases.” My response to that in the past has been to ‘write more of what people are already looking at’ and sometimes I end up creating an entirely new site out of my most popular content, as I wrote about in Analyzing Actions in September of 2009. One post on Youtube Query String Parameters was turned into an entire site, which was later sold for $145. I did the same thing with the How to Stay Alert and Focused post. I’ve since made a new ‘query strings’-type site called Map Strings that gets most of it’s traffic from How To Run Google Maps On the Kindle Fire EDIT: moved the site here starting on 1/6/2013.

    Top 10 Keywords

    • erich stauffer (68)
    • collegeclub.com (31)
    • erich stauffer figurines (17)
    • what happened to collegeclub (14)
    • eric stauffer figurines (12)
    • erich stauffer figurine prices (11)
    • mexican cat (11)
    • arnart porcelain marks (9)
    • collegeclub email (8)
    • erich stauffer figurine (8)
    As you might expect due to the domain name, I get a lot of traffic for the keyword and variations of, “Erich Stauffer”, the Arnart Import’s fake Hummel figurine artist I was named after. Second to that, people are still crazy about Collegeclub.com and seem to still wonder where all of their stuff went when it went belly up. Like them, I was interested so I did some research, found out, and shared it on my blog. I just didn’t think that all these years later it would still be some of my most popular blog posts. The “mexican cat” gets linked to a post called “Smarty Cat” through Google Image Search and that is also the reason “My CEO Heroes” ranks well – people are searching for an image of Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks.

    Top 10 Sources

    • google.com (89)
    • facebook.com (19)
    • qian8ao.com (11)
    • google.co.uk (10)
    • dogpile.com (4)
    • google.ca (4)
    • m.facebook.com (4)
    • google.com.br (3)
    • iphoneunity.com (3)
    • answers.yahoo.com (2)

    I have a pretty active Twitter account so it’s somewhat of a surprise to me to not see Twitter in the referral list, but I did get one (1) referral from Twitter, ranking it at #49. Qian8ao is a “Free Expense-Tracking Application and Personal Finance Community” in China. I’m not sure what link they have pointing to me as Google Analytics can’t resolve it properly and my go-to Google searches aren’t revealing anything, but I’m guessing that it’s not page visits, but a hot-linked image that is causing the count. I post links to this page via my Erich Stauffer Figurines page and the Erich Stauffer page. I have used Yahoo Answers as part of my SEO process successfully for a number of years.

    Income Stats

    • Amazon Associates Affiliate Program: 72 Clicks – 0 Items Ordered – 0 Items Shipped – 0 Advertising Fees
    • Google Adsense: $12.74 Estimate

     

  • How to Find Your Top Keywords in the New Google Analytics

    If you’re like me, you had trouble originally finding where the top keywords were in the new Google Analytics dashboard. It used to be under Traffic Sources > Keywords, but now it’s under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic.

    Google Analytics Organic Search Keywords report shows Site Usage with Keyword, Visits, Pages/Visit, Average Time on Site, % New Visits, and Bounce Rate as the default metrics. Most of the time its best to have high Visits and a low Bounce Rate, but not always.

    When you’re reviewing your keywords, look for problems people are trying to solve, issues their having, or products their trying to find. If you’re not solving these problems, know the answer to these issues, or sell what they’re looking for, these are opportunities for you to grow.

    Erich Stauffer is a search engine optimization (SEO) web design firm located just north of Indianapolis. We specialize in helping business owners create great content to make it easy for people looking to solve problems to find them as the answer.

    What problems do you need solved?

  • Sales Insight from Google Analytics Service Providers

    Google Analytics’ Service Providers listing can give you insight into who is visiting your website each month.

    I was showing one of my client’s their web statistics for the month via Google Analytics and discovered that there was some useful information that I hadn’t been sharing before. When I showed them the Visitors section I drilled down through Network Properties to show them the Service Providers. While Google may have intended this to show Internet Service Providers (ISPs), if a company has a T1 or other type of prosumer connection to the Internet, the name of the business will display instead of the ISP. What that means is that the client now has a view of some of the businesses visiting their site and how often.

    For those with an active sales pipeline, information like this can be invaluable. Who better to sell to than those who have already been visiting your site? In the case of the client who helped me discover this, they found out someone at a major corporation had been viewing their web site regularly. Now, it could be anyone at that company and it could be for any number of reasons, but what it does indicate is that your web site has something they keep coming back for. When we reviewed the history of that company, they had visited almost every month for the past year. I’ve since started emailing out this page specifically as part of my monthly hosting report.

    Too Much Information?

    Depending on the amount of traffic your web site has, you may need to use the filter at the bottom of the listings (not pictured). You can either include or exclude words by using the “containing” or “excluding” drop-down, respectively. Use ‘pipes’ instead of spaces or commas to search or exclude multiple terms. For example, to exclude the most popular ISPs, you would write something like this:

    verizon|comcast|road runner|embarq|sprint|bellsouth

    Advanced Filter

    For a more advanced Service Providers search, try the Advanced Filter. Click “Advanced Filter” next to the search box, which brings up the dimension “Service Provider” with the condition “Containing” and a blank value. That much is the same, so here is the ‘advanced’ part. If you want to contain one or more values (remember to use the pipes) and exclude others, add a second dimension for “Service Provider” and choose excluding and your search value.

    But wait, there’s more. As you may have noticed, you can also add a metric for Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goals. When used together with Service Provider, you can seek and sort the visitors by number of visits, number of pages, and so on. This is a potentially very powerful sales tool and one that should not be overlooked in your web analytics.

    IP Exclusion

    If you want to exclude your own business or your webmaster’s business from Google Analytics, which can sometimes skew your data, use the IP exclusion feature. To do this, click on the “Edit” button for your site on the main profile page. On the “Profile Settings” page, scroll down the page until you see the box named “Filters Applied to Profile” (below goals). Click on the “Add Filter” link, and you’ll be taken to the “Create New Filter” page. Once there, put in the IP address(es) you want excluded and then click “Save Changes”. This will keep your business from being counted in Google Analytics. If you’re not sure what your IP address is, just Google, “What is my IP?”

  • Keyword Metrics for Success

    Research and Analysis Metrics

    Micro-niches are identified as the number one keyword receiving at least 80 searches per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally. The key is to find that sweet spot on the matrix of high traffic and low competition. To do this, find keywords which match the following criteria:

    At least three keywords other keywords within the micro-niche with similar criteria must also be identified, if not, start over.  Top ten competition for the top four keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed (usually no more than 30 days). Once you find five total keyword phrases you can begin to create a website, market, and begin testing.

    Metrics to consider are:

    • Domain age
    • # of back-links to domain
    • # of back-links to page mentioning the keyword
    • # of back-links from .gov or .edu domains
    • Exists in Yahoo! Directory?
    • Exists in BOTW (Best of the Web) Directory?
    • Exists in DMOZ (ODP) Directory?

    Need more web directories?

    If the competition has a young domain age, a low number of back-links, and does not exist in any of these directories, then the market is penetrable.  If the opposite is true, stop and start over.

    Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others.  If either is not true, stop and start over.

    If both of those tests pass, then make sure the products are giving a referral amount that you deem acceptable.  If not, stop and start over. Otherwise, you now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell.

    Marketing and Testing

    Begin by setting up a place to place your products.  This is where your marketing efforts will point back to.  It can be a Squidoo page, Blogger, or WordPress.com or WordPress running on your own domain.

    If you are using Blogspot or WordPress, install Google Analytics to track traffic.  If using Squidoo or Hubpages, there are tracking mechanisms built into the site. You can’t manage what you are aren’t measuring so track everything you can.

    Use the following chart to give you an idea of how to setup your web site for maximum keyword use and Google dominance.

    Once you have content on your primary landing pages and sub-pages, begin to create back-links to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market.  Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually by using the following syntax:

    site:.edu “post a comment” –“comments are closed” “[enter your keyword here]”

    Track the incoming page hits.  Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day.  If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

    • Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again
    • Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task
    • Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory
    • Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter
    • Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches
    • Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche
    • Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting

    If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable.  Consider selling your website on Flippa or Sedo.  You have just found one of your 1 in 8 failures.

    If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page.  If after changing all three of these variables and still your conversion rate (revenue) is below your expenses, then sell your domain and start over.  If not, you have a profitable online business.