SoCal Websites

You Asked For it, You Got It. New Features Added to Google Analytics

Woohoo! Clickable Links for referral pages and 500 rows of data just implemented into the new Google Analytics.

Google is to be commended for quickly responding to the outcry for these improvements. The former, though, has been an issue for a looooong time, and it was a pretty big oversight to not include this in the GA 2.0 rollout. The latter, I think, was just a mistake on their part. The old Analytics had more rows, and the GA team underestimated how many people maxed out their views (and I’m one of them!).

So login to your Google Analytics account and check out the new features. There’s more, too, but those were the two I really cared about…

In the past, I’ve used Web Position Gold, but it has always bothered me that the software was not available on the Mac platform. Enter Advanced Web Ranking.

I’ve downloaded the 30-day trial. So far, it appears the features are comparable to WPG, and running it on my MacBook Pro rather than my old Vaio laptop is such a relief.

I’m going to give it a thorough going through before I make any decisions. There are a lot of free tools which together probably make up what this one program does. The automated reports and emailing features, however, may make it worth the purchase price.

Google to Report URLs for All AdSense Ads: “All AdWords users in the U.S. and overseas will be offered customized reports telling them where their network ads have displayed.“

(Via ClickZ News.)

This is excellent news. I’ll report back on how this information positively impacts the marketing optimization for our clients, and I’ll predict right now a rise in conversion rates of 3-5% within the first month.

By identifying which sites are useless clicks and banning those sites from ads appearing, the cost per conversion will go down, and the conversion rate will go up.

You Don’t Need Web Analytics: “

How many saw that headline and heaved a sigh of relief? ‘Oh good,’ you thought, ‘one less thing on my to do list.’

Web Analytics World has 21 reasons that you do not need web analytics. Any of these sound like you or your clients?

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
• You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.
• Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.
• Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.
• Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links visitors find appealing.
• Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.

(Via Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim – Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant.)

With Google Analytics being such a great price… free, there’s little excuse for not having top-notch analytics available for your site. Whether someone actually analyzes the data or not, at least it will be there when someone realizes the need.

Of course, there’s arguments to be made for having your analytics from the server rather than a javascript in the code. If you have cPanel, like on our servers, you have analytics built into your administrator. We still often use Google Analytics for our clients, but the server-side stats also provide the 404 not found errors and occasionally checking Google Analytics against the server stats can show if the tracking code has been installed properly on all the pages it is supposed to be on.

If you haven’t upgraded to the new WordPress 2.2 yet, you can now do it through Fantastico. Login to your cpanel (yourdomain/cpanel) and you can upgrade in just a couple of quick clicks.

As always, be sure to backup your database prior to upgrading and thoroughly test your blog after the upgrade has been completed!

If you are experiencing problems with Google Analytics (Problems started Tuesday around noon and have persisted to the time of this post, 2:22 PST May 23), you can access your data by using the old interface.

Evidently there’s a problem right now with getting the stats into the new Dashboard. This should be resolved with no loss of data since the data is obviously being collected (as it would not appear in the old interface if it were lost altogether).

I will comment when I see Dashboard working again.

Google Analytics provided a much needed improvement to their system this week.

As a user since the beginning of Google Analytics, I can tell you that these new improvements are intuitive and provide easier ways to get the information you need.

Among my favorite improvements are the “Dashboard,” a customizable overview of your site statistics, the extensive scheduled reports via email, and a more intuitive organization to the navigation in the left column of the Analytics page.

Check it out.

JavaScript Fix for ActiveX

IE 7 changed the way it dealt with ActiveX, and if you have straight coded your object and embed tags in HTML, you need to change it to using JavaScript to call it.

Apple has provided a couple of different methods, I used Solution Two on a site very recently.

This fix works, and it is very simple to implement.

After my recent purchase of a Treo 700p on Verizon’s network, I was anxious to see how well the broadband internet shaped up against my broadband at home. The results are in.

I won’t be using my Treo to connect to the internet from home or in the office, but the speed is pretty darn good. I’m impressed. With this service, I do not have to look for a coffee shop or restaurant with wi-fi, I can just pick a place and hack away on my laptop. The good kind of hacking away, of course

To test it out, I went to abc.com and watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Just for kicks, I put it in the “big” mode as it requires a little more bandwidth. I watched the entire episode without a hitch.

I have not given it a thorough test with upload speeds, but an initial test confirmed the disappointing time compared with the pep of the download. Uploading the exact same file from my home broadband to the exact same server was 10 times slower on Verizon’s EVDO.

Uploading is a minor issue for many users, but it does mean heavy-duty uploading should be put off until a better connection can be reached. And the slow upload time means guys like me could never seriously consider using it as my primary internet connection. I will test it with Skype and Gizmo Project and see if internet telephony is adequate on EVDO.

That being said, for the time when maybe I’m killing time waiting for traffic to die down or find myself out of town, I would not hesitate to use my Treo as a modem. It’s worth the unlimited data package to have the convenience.

By the way, I’m on a MacBook Pro, so yes, it’s Mac friendly!

This is a safe and recommended upgrade for WordPress via Fantastico. This blog was upgraded without issue in a few seconds via Fantastico in cPanel.

Enjoy!