Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

GaugeCon started on Thursday March 8, 2012. This is their second conference held in San Francisco, CA. They always time it after the eMetrics Conference, which I understand is fabulous. The event kicked off  with a fabulous keynote speaker, Dan Siroker the founder of Optimizely which I will get into later. What is most impressive is his past experience as a product manager at Google, then leaving Google to be the Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

His keynote speech was Beat the Back Button: How to Optimize for Engagement

The focus was on testing different landing pages he went through a few examples and shared lessons he has learned;

• Lesson #1 Define quantifiable success metrics
  One place to start – visitors flow identify the bottle necks in your funnels online
• Lesson #2 Less is more reduce choices you offer online
  Less boxes more people will sign up, example as simple as to  removed  the confirm email box
• Lesson #3 Words Matter – Focus on your call to action
  Donate button experiment
  Know what your viewers are looking for and use those words as your call to action
  Changing  “submit” wording to what they are actually doing can make a big difference in engagement
• Lesson #4 – Fail Fast, meaning if you are failing do it quickly make changes and move on
• Lesson #5 Start today – He discussed the following products to help with this processry these products
• Website Optimizer
• Ominture Test and Target
• Optimizely.com can change the website for testing different versions
  Needless to say I was wowed by Optimizely and it takes a lot to wow me. But the drag and drop features and the perceived simplicity of making changes was impressive. I would definitely take a good look at his product.

Slides located at: bit.ly/optimizelybestpractices

Google Analytics is a free tool for analyzing the activity on a website. When I say activity I mean where the hits to your website are coming from. Google Analytics (GA) is getting more powerful all the time, the google team is doing a great job of adding new bells and whistles all the time. If you have a business and are marketing your website you should have some kind of analytics tool installed. Since GA is free it makes it very desireable.

Some of the basic information included in GA is:

• number of visits
• number of page views
• pages visited
• bounce rate
• avg. time a visitor spends on your site
• % of new visits
• Where are your visitors located by Country, State and City

But recently Google added some great new features that make it even more powerful than before. What I love is how well it is now integrating with your AdWords Account. These new tools are in beta:

• Custom Reporting for designing your own reports to drill down and get the exact information you need for your buisness
• Advanced Segments make comparisons of different segments of your business, such as visitors that are organic vs. paid, number of visit and what keywords are they using.

Not sure how to use Google Analytics or these great new tools. Below are three videso created by Google  explaining Custom Reporting, Advanced Segments and Motion charts. After watching these brief videos I had a better understanding of how they worked and a real good jump start.  They are short so give them a whirl. And if you have not installed some kind of Analytics tool on your website, make it a priority to better understand how your site is performing.

#1 Custom Reporting in Google Analytics
Learn how to create custom reports in Google Analytics that show the information you want to see, organized in the way you want to see it.

#2 Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
Learn to create and use Advanced Segments in Google Analytics to isolate and analyze specific parts of your traffic.

#3 Motion Charts in Google Analytics
Learn to use Motion Charts in Google Analytics to analyze your data in five dimensions.