It’s spring time again, and if you’re doing some business cleaning and improvement now’s a good time to consider learning about Customer Analytics.

Customer analytics is a great way to get rid of useless clutter in your life by eliminating the need for monthly traffic reports, and replacing them with useful customer analytics reports.

“But wait!?! – Aren’t traffic reports important? I need to be able to tell my boss how much traffic we’re getting…

Google Analytics users are part of a passionate community. Many of you go beyond using the product and actively seek a connection with Google team members and other GA users to stay at the edge of what’s next. For example, more than 80,000 readers subscribe to the Google Analytics blog through our RSS feed, our videos on YouTube have been viewed more than 3.5 million times and well over 100,000 people follow us on Twitter…

This infographic displays the transfer of share ownership after Facebook goes IPO. We also take a look at some of Facebook’s astounding numbers surrounding their recent performance as a social networking giant.

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++ Click Image to Enlarge ++Source: Facebook: Dissecting The IPO (Infographic)

Some Facebook Statistics To Tweet:

• The friendliest place on earth is Facebook with over 125 billion friendships…

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Do you want tasty data that helps you grow your business? Of course! Tasty data helps you take action by figuring out how our customers behave. It helps you grow your business.

But we need to keep our data clean.

Unless you’re careful, you can corrupt your Google Analytics data. Your clean tasty data will become dirty not-so-tasty data. Which means you won’t be able to learn anything about your customers…

I recently saw a video on FBEvolution.com about using a squeeze page (aka email lead generation landing page) on your Facebook fan page, which I’ll be adapting for the Advanced SEO book fanpage.

In it, Ryan Deiss shares a case study on his landing page getting the name and email of 50% of the people who clicked like.

He incentivized the like with part 1 of his free report, and incentivized the email optin by upselling folks to get part 1 AND part 2…

General Motors,  in a widely reported Facebook-IPO-week #Fail bail, is quitting their social media agency of record and abandoning Facebook Ads.  We understand the former, but not the latter. The most common reason for Facebook Ads failure, or in any channel for that matter, is a serious misunderstanding of the channel.

Hey there Mr. and Ms. online marketer. What would YOU do with about 24 billion paid Facebook Ads impressions, served to the largest sampling of humans on earth with the end goal of selling GM cars? Would you target social ads broadly, run promotions, attempt to drive users to external landing pages for one-touch car-building conversions, gradually raise up a new generation of brand-friendly customers and/or socialize users for later marketing efforts? How tightly would you segment users? Would the campaigns be part of a deeper, multichannel and long term strategy?  Would you expect to sell cars after one, two or three direct response FB Ads touches?   Would the 10 million bucks be worth spending compared to less quantifiable buys like television ads, radio or print brochures? Would you track results holistically, shooting at appropriate KPIs after setting realistic expectations?   Well, if you’re General Motors, apparently the answer is none-of-the-above… no, no, no, no, and no (at least not anymore)!

As an agency, all hinges on our client’s willingness to look at appropriate long-term KPIs informed by predictive modeling on the front end, serious targeting grids, bleeding edge creative and analytics monitoring in a reasonable attribution model…

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Interested in learning how to use Analytics to make better decisions for your business? Here’s your chance; join us next week for two webinars.  We’re partnering with the Learn with Google team to present an introductory session on Getting started with Analytics, and a more advanced session covering one of the most requested topics – Digital Attribution & Conversion. Here’s a little more detail on what we’ll cover:

Getting Started with Google Analytics
Level of content: Beginner
Covers the basics you need to get started with Analytics…

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Marketers today have no shortage of data. In fact, there are more than 40 million online touch points measured every minute by Google Analytics. Technology advancements are helping marketers understand their customers more across channels and devices, and better analysis tools are finally making that massive amount of data accessible and actionable. This is fueling what we see as next generation measurement…

Inside of 15 minutes, anyone with a decent amount of traffic to their own site can completely CORRUPT your Google Analytics data. It’s easy, simple, and once the data is corrupted, you can’t fix the data that’s already been collected.

I’m going to show you exactly how to hack Google Analytics. Then I’m going to tell you how to protect yourself.

And as a super secret bonus, I’ll show you how to get the attention of a fellow marketer if you’re applying for a job, trying to close a deal, or just want to show off your Google Analytics chops…

You can segment your email list by what page(s) they visited.

That means you can use your email marketing for “retargeting” aka “remarketing.”

Retargeting is an increasingly popular marketing tactic that targets prospects based on their having already visited your site (or a specific page, depending what pages include your retargeting-cookie-dropping code)…

A lot of digital analytics focuses on direct response (conversions, leads, etc.). But there is an additional valuable, and sexy, focus of our marketing we don't give enough analytical love: Branding!

It is sad that we spend so little time on brand analysis, primarily because 1. there is such little accountability to brand marketing and 2. it is such a strategic part of any business.

So let's fix that problem in this blog post…

While looking around for AdWords alerts, I discovered a very handy time-saving feature in AdWords called Rules. You can use AdWords Rules to automatically pause low-CTR ads, high-CPA keywords and likewise auto-manage other aspects of your account that don’t require human judgment.
Like this post? Get a free chapter from my book, on the right.
Here are some things you can do automatically with rules without having to manually make the changes online or with AdWords Editor (whose interface sadly won’t let you setup rules):

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This post originally appeared on the Google Analytics Japan blog.

Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking allows online merchants to measure items sold and tie those results back to their digital marketing activities. But did you know that it can also be used to track non e-commerce activity?

Nissan Motor Company does just this. Nissan operates in the automobile industry, and owns a network of websites designed to help consumers around the world decide which Nissan vehicle they would like to purchase…

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More data is always a good thing right? More data means more information and more accurate decisions. More data means we’ll be able to build our business faster.

Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.

Not all data is helpful. Some of it is worse than worthless because it tricks us into believing we have answers when we don’t. But when you focus on data that helps you make decisions, everything else in your business gets easier…

At the end of 2011 we announced the Google Analytics Core Reporting API as a replacement for the Data Export API. We also announced a 6 month deprecation period for the Data Export API version 2.3, after which all v2.3 queries will return a v2.4 response. Well, it’s almost been 6 months since the announcement was made. If you haven’t already moved to our shiny new APIs, and we know there are quite a few of you out there who haven’t, we urge you to get movin’ or risk your application not working come June…

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Keith Hagen of ConversionIQ is set to speak at the next Conversion Conference in Chicago. He graciously agreed to an interview ahead of the show.

Click here for a $100 discount on Conversion Conference. You’ll see the discount code listed in the upper right after the click.

1) What’s the topic of your presentation? How did you come up with that?

The topic is “Testing What Matters” and it arose from a conversion I had with another CRO and were talking about how all these massive corporations (like the ones we had both come out of) have the best testing tools and are testing, but not getting results, and how it was due that fact they just don’t know what to test…

Did you know that companies that take on a structured approach towards conversion optimization are twice as likely to see a large increase in sales?

Given this, you’d think more companies would test and run experiments. Yet 61% of companies do less than 5 tests per month.

My gut tells me the reason for this is MOST companies are too caught up in the “business as usual syndrome”, and they rarely take a second to stop and think about really focusing on conversion optimization…

Many developers save time by using the Google Analytics API to automate Analytics reporting tasks. For example, you can use the API to create a dashboard to report data across multiple profiles. The Google Analytics App Gallery includes many 3rd party solutions that do this.

What if you want to build something quickly that’s custom-tailored  to your business? You would typically have to spend time learning the API, figuring out how to handle authorization, then deciding how to integrate this data with a visualization library…

Simply mind blowing numbers by Instagram. Check out this infographic to learn about this startups’ blazing success.

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++ Click Image to Enlarge ++Source: Instagram By The Numbers – Infographic

Sources

• TechCrunch – Instagram Captures 100,000 Mobile Photo Addicts In Less Than A Week
• The New York Times – Instagram Quickly Passes 1 Million Users
• DigitalBuzz – Infographic: Instagram Facts & Stats
• Ecorner – From Stanford to Startup
• Business Insider – Instagram: 5 Million Users, 95 Million Photos, 4 Employees
• Fast Company – What Instagram Plans To Do With 150 Million Photos And Faster Growth Than Flickr
• Scribbal – Instagram Hits 10 Million Users Less Than One Year After Launch
• Social Fresh – Instagram Becomes The Largest Mobile Social Network
• Gigaom – Instagram: 150 million photos shared
• CNET – Instagram for Android grabs 1 million downloads on first day
• Media Culpa – Instagram now growing faster than Flickr
• Pingdom – http://royal…

Link Building Tips VIDEO Remember the phrase “you can tell a man by the company he keeps” (and yes, it probably also applies to women)… well to me, effective link building is the search engine equivalent!  Get this right and you should be rewarded , get it wrong and your site pages could well be [...]

Click on the title to view the entire article in Web Analytics World

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Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience1? With about half of all Americans now owning a smartphone2, it’s time for businesses to meet user expectations by delivering a mobile experience as good as the desktop experience. In short, it’s time to step up to the plate and build a site optimized for the mobile web…

Improving the number of conversions and the amount of traffic are powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal and imperative when growing your site revenue. But often increasing average order value (AOV) is a weapon that gets overlooked and rejected like an ugly duckling.

Why Should You Try To Increase Your AOV?

For most ecommerce operators, the reasons for increasing AOV are pretty obvious…

Nearly every site out there has a pageview and time on site goal enabled. They’re easy to set up and they make us feel great. We can say that our site has a 55% goal conversion rate just by enabling these two goals. We’re measuring engagement (like everyone says we need to) and we have a super high conversion rate. We must be doing a fantastic job.

Technically, Google Analytics pages/visit and visit duration goals do allow you to measure the engagement of your site…

The product page may be the most important page on your website. It’s the point at which the user decides whether they’re buying or walking. And while the shopping cart gauntlet looms beyond, the product page is where the magic of an ecommerce sale begins. The thing with product pages, however, is they’re part basics and part nuance. More importantly, it’s often these nuances that are overlooked, and can kill the conversion rate of your product page…

Have you ever wondered which other pages on the web link to your own? Wouldn’t it be nice to know which sites are talking about your content, and in which context? Well, a problem no more: now you can see all the backlink URL’s, post titles, and more right within the new Social reports.

The concept of trackbacks, a protocol by which different sites could notify each other of referencing links, first emerged back in 2002…