Data analytics is a valuable resource for your content marketing efforts. Analyzing data can tell you a lot about your audience. Professionals often start successful marketing campaigns by using data to develop audience personas. When you analyze your readers, you can group them into certain types according to factors like what they already know about your product and how they feel about the economy. Suddenly, you have a useful way to develop content that targets different groups of people. [Read more…]
When Your Blog Attracts the Wrong Readers, What You Can Do About It
Editor’s note: This post was written by Ioana, a trained architect, with a longstanding passion for writing and technology. Ioana always manages to impress with her exceptional work. She is a delightfully talkative person and she can always lift everybody’s spirits with her upbeat personality.
You’re crafting compelling and engaging articles, your content marketing strategy is rock solid, and the page-views are increasing at a steady pace. For most marketers, this is the dream. But something doesn’t feel quite right. These precious followers are not converting, or they’re not reaching your set goal.
Why is that? Despite their best efforts, marketers and writers will sometimes attract the wrong kind of readers, and for most, this seems like such a disheartening obstacle that they give up all-together. [Read more…]
Google Analytics for Bloggers Who Hate Numbers
Analytics: an exercise in number-crunching, or a pain in the neck? It depends on how familiar you are with the term and how much value you place in measuring website traffic. Analytics is the catch-all term for collecting, reporting, measuring, and analyzing data off the Internet in order to understand and optimize the information for the benefit of e-commerce.
There are plug-ins out there that measure traffic and give web masters an idea of how much users are being driven to a site, therefore giving a good idea on how effective a marketing strategy is, something that web marketers need to know. However, this sort of information isn't as important for a blogger who simply wants to know how many people are visiting their site. That sort of thing still may be nice to know, but it's not as critical.
MomentFeed Receives $1.2 Million In Funding, Assists Geo-Location Based Advertisers
Location based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and even Facebook allow users to check-in at their locations, share information about those places and find where their network of friends are hanging out and now advertisers will be able to take advantage of that information in a more manicured way thanks to MomentFeed and their recent round of funding that has brought the company $1.2 million.
In the most simple of terms MomentFeed allows company’s with more than one location to manage their various location based campaigns with ease. For example Macy’s may offer different specials at all of their stores throughout the United States and now they can examine how those Foursquare or Gowalla campaigns are converting sales for their stores.
The program works by pulling in merchant location data from Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and Gowalla and then giving an easy to examine view of check-ins, deals and specific specials by location. The program also offers Factual’s location data so cross-service inquiries can be examined.
By examining how locations are converting using different services a store can adjust their campaigns. For example Macy’s could determine that Facebook Places is converting better at their New York store while their Chicago locations receive more love from Foursquare users, leaving them to adjust their campaigns to whichever platform is acting most favorable for their needs.
The LA-based startup received their new funding round from a handful of investors that include DFJ Frontier, DFJ JAIC, Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Walter Kortschak and Raplead founder Auren Hoffman. [Read more…]
Sunday Morning SEO: Stats to Consider for SEO
One of the things I’ve been trying to do recently has been to combine my stats analysis with SEO. Stats analysis and SEO are both powerful marketing strategies so I thought combining them could definitely improve my blog.
Most bloggers just look at their visitor count but if you dig a little deeper in your stats program, you can find data to help you make good decisions about your blog. [Read more…]
Move Over Google Analytics, The WordPress iPhone Stats App Has Arrived!
When it comes to keeping up with the latest traffic stats for your WordPress blog, iPhone lovers had very few options outside of a host of Google Analytics—until now.
Menial (who is located in the UK) has developed an iPhone app called “Statistics For WordPress” that lets users of both flavors (self hosted and WP.com fans) to use the native WordPress.com stats package to monitor their traffic.
I was able to snag this app at $2.99 before it inflated to $4.99, so if you are wondering if this app is worth the extra $2, here are some pro’s and con’s before you consider spending more money within Steve Job’s playground. [Read more…]
Blog Design: What You Don’t Know About Your Blog Audience Can Hurt
I had an interesting discussion with a client last week about when and how to implement a new blog design. She wanted to warn her readers that a change was coming, and take a few months to implement the changes step by step.
We talked about the process and created a timeline for the slow unveiling of the site design, a smart decision for those with a large audience, especially when making dramatic changes to the site’s navigation and content handling. Some audiences can handle it, and love design changes, but some can’t. They just don’t respond well to change.
We talked a little more about her readership, covering some basic web analytics such as where her readers come from, how they access the site (through the front page, single pages, tags and categories, or through aggregators, email or feeds), and I stumbled upon some stunning facts that shifted the entire game plan.
While her site gets a steady stream of visitors, several thousand a day, only 10% return. Of those, only three percent return to the blog at least once week. Honestly, that’s about 9 people a week.
This changes everything. [Read more…]
Analyze And Track The Competition
Collis Ta’eed, of Envato fame, has a great post up on The Netsetter, about analyzing and tracking the competition. This is something that is a lot easier today, with all the great services online, than it was five years ago. If you’re serious about knowing what your competitors are doing, you really should check this one out.
Is Google Analytics Slooowing Down Your Blog?
If you use Google Analytics to track visits to your blog, you might be surprised to know that you may be experiencing severely retarded (no pun intended) page load times, at least in Europe. That’s according to a recent study conducted by Royal Pingdom.
The folks at RP found that during peak hours of Web usage in Europe, the Google Analytics Javascript loaded nearly twice as slowly – 97% slower than usual, to be precise – as it did on average in Europe during all hours of use.
in general, GA actually loads slightly faster in Europe than in the US, but it also experiences a much greater percentage rate of slowdown in Europe during peak hours relative to its average performance.
As Royal Pingdom puts it: “[W]hile the European load times are significantly faster on average than the North American ones, the performance is much more uneven over the course of the day.”
The difference between the maximum and minimum load times for North America is 27%, but in Europe the difference is 97%.
See the Royal Pingdom post for several intriguing data graphs supporting their conclusions.
Update: I’ve clarified above that the figures above refer to load time during peak hours relative to average load time, and that GA actually loads slightly faster overall in Europe than in the US.
Do you think Google Analytics is worth the trouble? Why or why not?
Google offering UK Analytics users £75 of AdWords advertising
This may well have been doing the rounds among other publishers, so apologies if this is old hat to some, but today I received an email from Google offering me £75 of AdWords advertising.
I’m a UK blogger using Google Analytics. The email begins:
Dear Google Analytics User,
As a Google Analytics customer, we know that you care about the quality of traffic coming to your website, so we wanted to introduce you to Google AdWords. AdWords works by placing targeted advertising alongside Google’s search results.
To help you get started with AdWords we’ve sent you a voucher for £75 of Google AdWords advertising. The voucher is risk and commitment free, so start advertising today and drive more traffic to your website.
