Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics, there’s a good chance that in the last couple of weeks you’ve received an email from Google regarding your data retention settings. The email states that “any user and event data that is older than your retention setting will be marked for permanent deletion”, effective May 25, 2018.

If you work with Google Analytics and regularly create reports for clients, you’ve likely struggled with how to best present the information. For many people this includes downloading the data, sorting through it to determine which portions they want to include, and then creating their own spreadsheets and graphics. Not only can this be time-consuming but it might also not produce the results you really want. In an effort to simplify this process, Google has created a new reporting tool called Data Studio.

People tend to get extremely worried when they see their site is producing a high bounce rate. In case you’re confused, bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site after only viewing one page.

The average bounce rate is 41-55% and anything over 70% is considered high and suggests that changes need to be made to the site. If your website’s bounce rate falls into the “high” category, here’s some tips that could help you improve it.

If you’ve ever looked around a Google Analytics reporting dashboard, chances are you’ve seen data that left you a bit puzzled. Maybe one of your top 10 viewed pages is “/sharebutton.to” (aka NOT a page on your site) or you have a lot of referrals coming from “abc.xyz” (sounds legit, right?). Unfortunately this is all a result of spam. No, not the delicious disgusting canned meat, but rather fake traffic caused by sites trying to gain views and rankings.

Analytics is a very important tool in measuring the SEO success of your website but if the data is inaccurate due to spam, it won’t be as helpful as it should be. The best way to make sure you are using analytics to your full advantage is to get rid of all the spam that is affecting your data.

When the Ashley Madison scandal broke, we'll admit that one of our first thoughts was, "I bet their website is getting slammed by traffic!" 

When you manage client websites and work with Google Analytics every day, you tend to think about these things (nerds!). And while the scandal is incredibly unfortunate, they are inevitably getting free PR out of it, and truly increasing their web presence, all in a matter of a few hours. I'd imagine their new visitor % and unique user data is exponentially larger than it was just this time last week.

When we dig into our client's analytics reports, we often take a look at referral traffic. While our main focus is organic traffic, it's important to keep an eye on what sources are sending traffic to your clients, since these "backlinks" can actually play a pretty significant role in SEO.

When it comes to having a successful website, you need to know what your website is actually doing. And to do that, we often dig into digital marketing tools such as Google Analytics. 

Google Analytics is an essential tool to have, no matter the size of your website. It can easily be implemented in the code of your site, and allow you to easily track everything about your website from user demographics to which pages your users are viewing most frequently. 

When most people hear the term, SEO, their first response is, "SE-what?" SEO simply means Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it's the process that web designers and digital marketers use to make your website more appealing to search engines, thus optimizing it, in hopes of appearing higher in search results.