As an example, let’s say that you have a site that sells obscure comic books. The site panders to items like parallel spin offs or fan favorites like Lobo. You’ve got tons of these, all in mint condition. People who are fringe comic book collectors really enjoy your site for shining some light on less than popular characters and series. Some traffic enjoys it so much that they actually talk about your site on their blogs. These people may be fan boys, but are their blogs?

Well, they may enjoy comic books, but they have other passions in life so they talk about all sorts of content, such as basket weaving, entertainment watches, photos of cats and dogs, or just about anything else you can think about. The thing is the majority of your backlinks aren’t from people who also sell comic books. Those people don’t want the competition that could occur from linking to you.
So you have all these backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with comic books. Along with the fact that you have some great content on your site, this set up allows you to rank rather well for some nice key phrases in Google. Are these backlinks not relevant? Now it would be beneficial to acquire more relevant backlinks from authoritive sites, but you shouldn’t dismiss some links that at first glance seem irrelevant.

I’m not suggesting spammy links. What I’m stating is that you need to delve in a little more when researching where your links are originating. A lot of people out on the Web keep too much of a laser like focus on research when they should  widen their gaze. They may be able to find an untapped resource in what initially looked to be worthless.

With that out of the way, have you ever found an untapped resource that on first glance you thought was worthless? Let me know in the comments below.

Make Sure you Set up a Master Account

You’re going to want to set up and test a decent amount of items with Google Analytics. The thing is that you’re not always going to do them correctly, trust me. By setting up a master account you can rest assured that your data will never be skewed while you use other accounts to test out filters, funnels, goals, etc.

Make sure you set up filters

Filters allow you to direct traffic in a way that gives you a more realistic scope of the traffic and conversions happening on your site. I wrote a nice little post entitled Four Google Analytics Filters You Should Be Using . By setting up filters you’ll have a nice start and may be surprised by what you thought your traffic was compared to what it really is after filtering out useless or repetitive data.

Use Google Analytics to Monitor Organic Keyword

You may have already provided on-site optimization to your site. The real benefit from this area is realized when you can’t always keep up with keyword research. Google Analytics will allow you to see the terms visitors used before selecting your site. Looking for anomalies of terms not often associated, or never thought about, with your site can be a way to focus a new page or product towards these individuals. Further research should be taken before committing to making changes, though. Still, you can grab a list generated by GA and it takes some guess work out of the equation.

Check Your Stats in a Regimented Time Frame

I suggest looking at your data weekly and compiling that information into a spreadsheet to help you see rising or declining trends in a number of areas. If you haphazardly look at the data GA provides it becomes meaningless again. By generating several months worth of data it will allow you to make decisive actions and to combat any specific problems that may occur.
The key is to not rush it. Take your time and learn at your own pace. You’ll have a master account set up to combat any mishaps that you might cause while changing settings, filters to provide you more reliable data, a greater grasp on your organic key phrase traffic, and a growing complied list of data to help you make decision in the future.

Have a Web Analytics related question? Leave a comment and we can discuss!

If you weren’t out grilling and enjoying the suppressive heat of the summer you might have already heard the news through TechCrunch on Saturday about Google, not Google Ventures, investing over 100 million dollars to Zynga for the secretive and upcoming Google Games launch. If you’re unfamiliar with Zynga they are the company responsible for crippling middle aged women’s lives.

Yes they are the creators of Farmville. The move is odd considering Zynga’s closely intertwined with Facebook. Still the ability to contend with Facebook, something Google has wanted to do for awhile, is probably why Zynga has already raised around a half billion dollars. With that kind of capital you can be sure Google is ready to take a stab at the social media market.

Despite the haughty nature of Zynga’s past discretions, Google stands to generate a decent amount in the first quarter of 2011, projected sales for Zynga alone are 1.0 billion. With the ability to have users logged in to play games will allow Google to begin tracking data that previously was only possible by Facebook. A huge amount of people, 15 million unique visitors in May alone, are invested in these games and continue coming back month after month. With money, visitors, and information like that it’s no surprise Google wishes to jump in the ring.

It’s clear why Google would want to tap into the social media market but I’m just not sure if it will, ultimately, be ethical. We are getting to a point in technology where one company could conceivably hold a monopoly in almost every facet of information acquisition throughout the Internet.

I realize that taking one monopoly, Facebook, and creating a competitor is healthy but we have to look at a possible conclusion – Google wins. They then have the ability to not only define API target marketing, like Facebook does, but could possibly utilize search results to populate that marketing as well. Awkward and even more invasive than technology is already.

I know I sound like a Luddite and perhaps I’m being overtly paranoid; Google may once again offer a streamlined, cool, superior service. It is debatable to what extent one company should be allowed to hold such personal information from so many different facets. Additionally, for a company so invested in creating viable spam free content it’s surprising that they would work with a company accused of the very thing. Only time will tell as Google Games is slated to launch later this year.

But there’s a catch:  most of us have no idea where to even start.

If you fit into that category, there’s good news. You’re far from the only one.  And, there’s further good news (yes, even more).  This article will give you the background you need to start squeezing some potential out of the social media craze, will provide you with a sample plan, and will show you that it’s not even that hard.  Bold promises … let me try to deliver before you get antsy.

Before we start, let’s kick things off by reviewing …

Some Background

Back when traditional media was the only way to get your message out, the choices were very limited.

You will no doubt have noticed that, along with it’s many wonders, the Internet is an untamed messy and confusing mess, especially when you’re trying to make it bend to your will by, say, getting a small fraction of its zillions of users to visit your website. Since that particular challenge is the one we would now like to address with social media, let’s make a list of all the possible ways that people can make their way to your website:

• Direct. Typing your site’s URL into their Web browser (or clicking on a bookmark).
• Referred. Clicking on a link to your website that is on some other site.

Well, that’s pretty much it, isn’t it?  We’re simplifying things by looking at really low-level stuff, but these really are the only common ways to get to a website.  We won’t talk much about direct visitors here, not because it’s not worth discussing, but for the sake of limiting our scope.  But let’s take a closer look at referred visitors (people who come to your site from links on other sites).  If we make a list of possible link sources, it turns out to be a lot longer than the short list above:

• Spidering search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
• Search directories (dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, about.com)
• Local search engines (Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, MapQuest)
• Social Networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook)
• Microblogging services (Twitter, identi.ca, Jaiku)
• Social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg)
• Blogs
• RSS feeds
• And the list goes on …

Suddenly, we have what feels like an infinite number of choices.

These are just places where a link to your website could be, so we could write a LOT more of them.  We won’t go into the details here, but some of these things even reinforce each other, for example, the more links exist to your website in general, the better your site will do in the big search engines (part of how they determine how well you’ll do in search results is based on how many other websites link to your site … very smart, sort of an informal vote on how good your site is).

So, the more links there are to your website, especially links in relevant, targeted places, the more people will come to your site.  Assuming your website is GOOD (good design, navigation, information architecture and, most importantly, content), this is probably what you want.

Many of you may have noticed that a great deal of the places listed above, from which we’d like to see links to our website, seem to fall under the category of social media.  Ah ha!  Now we’re getting closer to the topic of this post.  Here’s what a little Googling tells us that social media is composed of:

• Concept (art, information, or meme).  This is  your content!‏  Think of this as the passenger we are delivering.
• Media (physical, electronic, or verbal)‏. We’re talking about the Web, so our media will be electronic.  Think of this as the highway that will deliver that passenger, your content.
• Social interface (intimate direct, community engagement, social viral, electronic broadcast or syndication, or other physical media such as print).  ‏This is the vehicle that will deliver your passenger, your content.

The first item, the concept, is up to you.  It’s the content you want to deliver.  For our discussion, the second item, the media, will be electronic, web-based media.  So, that leaves us with the last item, the social interface, the vehicle in which you’ll be delivering your content, to consider.  In fact, every one of the link sources we listed above that you identified as social media is a different social interface, and there are a LOT of them (check out AddThis’s services page for their latest list, most of which fall into the social media category).

Let’s tally up what we’ve got so far:

• We want to deliver our content by creating lots and lots of links to our site.  Links from places that are relevant to what we want to do and that fall along a spectrum of ways of accessing our content are preferred.
• There is a huge number of social media services that can do exactly what we want, and people are using the crap out of those services, however …
• It’s all too much, how do I pick where to focus my limited time?!

Let’s get to work on that last question with …

A Basic Social Media Strategy

We want to employ every relevant service we can to get our content out to the right people.

In the old days, the choices were limited on how to get your content out.  Now they are nearly infinite.  Let’s outline a plan that will narrow those choices down in a rational way:

1. Prepare your content.  First thing’s first – you’ll need to figure out what you want to deliver.  How to do that well could be the topic of a lot of discussion, but let’s assume you have a primary content vehicle.  For the sake of this example, we’ll call it a blog, but it could very well be a company website or even content on another website (maybe you’re trying to promote your YouTube account page, for example).
2. Pick your social media tools.  Picking the right tools requires knowing something about your audience, a little research, and a little time.  Resources such as AddThis’s services page (which was mentioned above) can help you learn what’s out there, how much various tools are being used, and how the social media landscape is change.  We’ll use some of the more popular services here as examples (the specific services are discussed below), which will be good starting points, but you’ll need to continue researching this constantly changing area.
3. Prepare your social media tools.  Many tools require some usage both to get familiar with them and to create an account with enough activity to make you a credible or effective user (for example, social networking sites require connections with other users, social bookmarking sites should have a few bookmarks setup in your account, and so on).
4. Launch your campaign.  Once everything is in place, it’s time to use the services you have chosen and gotten ready in order to focus on one thing: getting links to your content in front of as many different, relevant people as possible.

Example Social Media Campaign

Let’s give this a try with a hypothetical example.  We’ll assume that you are launching a new blog for your organization, and that you’ve done your homework preparing good content and getting the thing in order for the world to see.

Now you’re ready to prep and launch your social media campaign.  We want to implement the strategy above such that it does the following:

• Employs other blogs, microblogging, RSS feeds, social networking and social bookmarking to deliver your content.
• Can be turned into an efficient process.
• Can be performed by members of your marketing staff who do not necessarily know everything about the business.
• Is effective!

Step 1: Prepare

For this example, we’ll pick popular services that fall into each of the categories above and take a quick look at each:

• Other Blogs. Part of your campaign will include posting replies on blogs that are relevant to your content which 1) are useful contributions to the discussion, and 2) occasionally link back to your content as a resource. It is crucial that you do this well, such that you are never seen as posting simply to create links, so you’ll need to stay involved in the conversation even when you do not have content to link to. We have found that the best way to do this is to get an RSS reader (if you don’t know what this means, check out the tour on http://reader.google.com/) and sign up for blogs that are related to your industry.  This is also an excellent way to keep up with your field, so it’s a double value.
• Microblogging.  Although there are other tools out there, Twitter and Facebook (Facebook does much more than just microblogging, and is also very popular social networking tool that I’ll discuss below) seem to be on top of the field now.  Create accounts for each (you’ll need to create a fan page in Facebook, not a regular user) and get familiar with how they work.  In Twitter, it is important to use the tool as you wish it to be used for your content … seek out relevant business profiles and “follow” them.  Chances are, many of them will follow you, and these will be the people who get your “tweets.”  Tweet about interesting business-related things, such as links to upcoming events your organization is holding or links to interesting, relevant articles.
• RSS Feeds.  Make sure your blog’s RSS feeds (all popular blogging software has RSS feeds built in) are signed up with popular services such as Feedburner that will help you get the feed out to as many people as possible.  If you need to brush up on RSS, just search Google for “rss tutorial”.
• Social Networking. I mentioned creating a Fan page for your organization above on Facebook, which is a good idea.  The other social networking tool you’ll use is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which is a great tool for anybody in a position that’s even remotely sales-related.  LinkedIn has become the social network tool for businesses, and you’ll be surprised to find out how many of your contacts are using it.  Create an account, find out how to automatically show your blog’s posts in your account, and start building your network of connections.
• Social Bookmarking.  You’ll pick a couple of the more popular social bookmarking sites, Digg and Stumbeupon, get signed up, and get familiar with them.  In fact, you’ll get the whole staff to create accounts and get familiar with them, because you’ll need their help when it’s time to launch our campaign (be careful, social bookmarking services are somewhat addictive … you are guaranteed to find some interesting, silly or obscene links to send to your friends after just a few minutes).

There are a lot of references to various social media tools above, and not enough space to even scratch the surface of each one here, so you may need to do a bit of research until you’re comfortable with them.  Once you’re ready, let’s move on to …

Step 2: Launch

Now that everything is in place, let’s launch this campaign.  Since our primary content vehicle for this example is a blog, we’ll assume that you’ve just published a new blog post, and will use each of the tools above to promote it:

• Other Blogs. You’ve done a good job keeping up with relevant blogs in your industry, and you’ve been participating in an intelligent way that contributes to the discussion.  Now you’ll continue making contributions by finding issues being discussed on those blogs that your content answers, and replying with a link back to your content.  Remember, you MUST keep these posts useful and relevant.  Anything less and you will quickly move from contributor to spammer.
• Microblogging.  You’ve been adding followers and tweeting about interesting things.  Now you’ll send a tweet about your latest article on Twitter, and make a status update on Facebook with a link to your latest work.
• RSS Feeds.  Your new article should be automatically available on your RSS feed, which you have carefully registered with services like Feedburner such that they get out to the largest audience possible.
• Social Networking. You’ve got your network of connections built up now, and you’ve got your blog hooked up to your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts such that new articles are instantly visible to your whole network.  So, if all goes well, your new blog post will show up here automatically.
• Social Bookmarking.  You and your co-workers have been using one or two good social bookmarking tools, creating bookmarks and looking at others.  Now it’s time to create a publicly available bookmark to your latest article, or to give it a thumbs up in Stumbleupon.  Get everyone to do this, and hopefully others will find your content just as you’ve found theirs.  Remember, in tools that allow others to rate your bookmarks and show them based on popularity (which most have some mechanism to do), a bookmark to a bad article will be seen by very few people, so you need to have confidence in your content.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve successfully used the Web’s newest and most popular tools to do a little work for you, no doubt you’ll want to keep it up, monitor your success, and get better at it.  Here are some tips:

• Put a process in place. In order for you to keep it up, somebody must be in charge of your social media / online marketing campaign, and they must have a clear list of things that they do on a regular basis.  Here at NuRelm, we have an employee who is in charge of implementing a strategy that is very similar to the one above.  She sends around a weekly report telling us exactly what she did in each area noted in the bullet list above.
• Monitor your success.  Do you have a good way to monitor traffic to your website, including visitors, which websites they came from, how long they stayed on your site, what geographic region they came from, and so on?  If not, check out Google Analytics, which is a free tool provided by Google that provides extremely detailed website tracking (somebody must install it on your site, but this is quick and easy).

We’ve just covered the basics of what it might take to fire up a social media campaign in your organization.  Please feel free to provide your two cents in terms of feedback, suggestions and comments below.

• Google
  • Search box, with searched words, remains prominent at top
  • Option to view an “advanced” search page
  • Total number of results shown at top
  • Ajax-driven auto-complete for typed follow-up searches
  • Sponsored links at top and right
  • Paginated results
  • Results titles are large, bold, and hyperlinked
  • Searched words are shown in bold in a page snippet, in context
  • URLs shown in a different color under each result
  • Each result allows options to view “similar” and “cached”
  • Visited links are in a different color
  • Related search phrases listed at bottom
  • Search box with search terms repeated at the bottom
  • “Show options” link opens a sidebar for further filtering of the results
• Bing
  • Very similar to google but has some differences
  • Lists the user’s “search history” in the sidebar
  • The history to be cleared or turned off
  • The search history remains intact
  • Pagination unit at the bottom of the results page is more user-friendly
  • Pagination rolls over when moused
• Yahoo
  • Yahoo’s search results page includes a couple of JavaScript-driven enhancements
  • Ajax-driven slide-down unit that appears below the search box when a search query is being typed
  • “Search Pad” which allows the user to record notes on searches
  • “SearchScan” to help protect from harmful websites
• Youtube
  • Easily-accessible filtering options near the top of the search results
  • YouTube search result page lists detailed information
    • Including a thumbnail preview
    • Running time of the clip
    • User rating
    • And age
    • Also if a particular item is part of a series
• Twitter
  • Offers a very clean, intuitive JavaScript-driven interface that includes “Realtime” results
  • Their page also offers a list of “Trending topics” and a “Search tip”
  • Additionally, Twitter gives the user the option to refresh the page after it detects additional results in real time
• Digg
  • Each result on the Digg search results page includes the number of comments that have been posted for that particular story
  • In addition to other features that are unique to Digg, including “share” and “bury”
• Delicious
  • Lists search results in a very simple, list format that includes tags associated with each result
  • Plus the number of times the result has been bookmarked
• Amazon
  • Allows for the results to be sorted based on a variety of methods, including “Bestselling” and “Avg. Customer Review”
  • Amazon’s results page indicates if a book has the “Look Inside” feature
• Ebay
  • eBay’s search results page  allows for easy filtering via tabs at the top
  • eBay also has the option to view the thumbnail preview images in a different size:
  • Other features unique search results page are the options to change the amount of items displayed per page and the ability to go directly to a specific page by entering a number into a text box
• Flickr
  • Flickr  displays results by default in a simple grid-based format
  • Flickr also allows the images to be displayed either in a detail-heavy list-style view or inside of a Flash-based slideshow gallery
• Photobucket
  • Photobucket allows filtering of search results by “Most viewed” and “Most commented”. It also includes a link strangely titled “Follow”, which allows the user to enter their email address to receive notifications when the results for a particular search term are updated. A more appropriate title for this feature would be “Subscribe”, or similar.

For easy reference, here is a list of some of the best practices taken from Smashing Magaine’s Article:

• User should have easy access to the search box for follow-up searches
• Search terms should be clearly indicated at the top, and in context in the results
• Related sponsored links can be included below the search box, near the bottom, or on the right
• Titles should be clickable and clearly differentiated from details
• Visited links should be indicated
• Pagination units should be visibly block-shaped and have a hover effect, to easily differentiate from one another
• Related products, tags, or keywords should be displayed in a non-obtrusive section
• E-Commerce sites should allow the “view” to be toggled between “list” and “grid”
• Advanced search options should be easily accessible
• Should allow re-sorting or filtering of results
• Where possible, results pages should have RSS feeds or “subscribe” options
• For complex interfaces, clear, easy-to-access search tips or instructions should be provided
• Sorting and Filters should be JavaScript or Ajax-driven, where possible
• Popularity or star-ratings should be shown for individual results
• Include an option to increase the number of results per page
• To monitor future improvements, request feedback from users after searches are conducted
• If results span different sections of the website, indicate this by sub-headings or other dividers

So to sum it all up when building your own search engine try to come up with the best combination for your targeted audiance. But the overall goal should be your user’s experience and usability.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room, Google, is at the top of the Internet feeding chain and seems destined to stay there, at least for a while.  Google’s innovative online marketing programs are the best deal around for businesses that want to attract a large volume of motivated visitors to their Web sites .  If you don’t already know about it, you owe it to yourself and your company to get on-board with Google AdWords – a marketing program on the cutting edge of modern technology that actually delivers what it promises, IF you know how to work the system.

AdWords is an advertising tool that a rapidly growing number of businesses and marketing professionals are using to generate highly targeted online leads for their products and services.  Adwords uses a Pay-Per-Click system, meaning that you pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad.  It’s really not expensive considering that not many keywords are over $5.00 and a lot are under $1.00.  Sounds like the ultimate advertising tool, right? It can be, if you (or your online marketing vendor) understands the numerous tricks to get your ads ranked higher and noticed by your best prospects.  For those who want to boost sales by improving their online lead generation skills, here are the top 10 useful tips for Google AdWords.

1. There should be a viable online market for what you do before you start. You can go to google.com/trends and type in keywords that you believe encompass your business. If the trend is going downhill you may want to rethink your online business model.
2. Once you know that you have a target audience, you need to figure out what they are searching for (keywords). You can use the keyword tool in AdWords to see what keywords are most popular and which ones attract the most traffic. Another helpful site is www.askhowie.com/freewords. This site shows you what the top keywords are in that market.
3. Put someone in charge of your AdWords campaign. If there are too many people working on these campaigns, you won’t be able to see what trends are happening because they will be changed too often without notice. There is a lot to know about AdWords  so it’s best to put someone in charge that will spend time researching and implementing a cohesive strategy.Tip: The AdWords Learning Center is a huge help! You can study all there is to know about AdWords in either text or multi-media format, whichever works best for you. There are quizzes for each lesson to assure that you are absorbing the information. This is a great way to begin because it helps you learn the basics quickly so that you don’t make novice mistakes.
4. Quality scores matter! You should not have every campaign going to the same page on your Web site. Direct them where you want them to go. They aren’t going to sign up for your newsletter if they are landing on the contact page. If you test an ad for a month and it has received little or no clicks, either delete or pause it, because it is affecting your quality score. Don’t bid on keywords that people aren’t using. If there are no impressions, there will be no clicks.
5. Don’t assume you know everything there is to know about AdWords. It seems easy at first, but the more you learn about it the more complicated it gets. A great resource is AdWords for Dummies.
6. The goal is not who gets the most clicks! You want people to either buy a product, become a lead, or sign up for something. You must make sure that your landing pages are interesting and full of content. Web surfers are impatient. Make sure all your links and buttons are functioning properly.
7. Writing ads can be tricky. It’s hard to tell which ones are getting traffic because of what they say. The best way to “test” ads is to do different ad variations. Use the same content but change it around a little. See what works better, such as numbers or text.  Just put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Think about what you would look for and apply that to your ads. Google automatically rotates them and shows them when the search is most relevant for that ad. Then you can compare and see which one is getting more clicks. Take your time…Rome wasn’t built in a day.
8. Don’t think you can be tricky and use keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with your ad. Google has figured you out. Your ad will be considered irrelevant and moved to the end of the sponsored list, or Google will stop showing your ad all together. Make sure your keywords match your ad.
9. Make sure your ad is relevant to your Web site. For instance, you cannot claim that you are the best at something without having a third party confirm it on the landing page of your Web site. You also cannot offer Free downloads or 50% off of a product if that information is not available on the landing site. And of course, the trick of all tricks, having something like Paris Hilton Pics as your headline will not work. Not only will you get into trouble with Google, you will be paying for clicks and no one will be taking action on your Web site. These practices could have your ad placed at the end of the sponsored list or not shown at all.
10. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If your ad is doing well, it doesn’t mean that you should only do one campaign.  If your ad is doing poorly, don’t give up. It takes a lot of time and patience to make an AdWords campaign work. The key is to switch things up until you hit the sweet spot. You’ll never know what really works until you try a little bit of everything.

1. Visitors: Analytics can help track how many people visitor your site every hour, day, week,  and month.  This can be beneficial to track results of eNewsletter mailings, press releases, promotions, etc.  Being able to visualize how many people are using your site is a key part of determining the success of any Online Marketing strategy.

2. Geography: Whether your business is local, national or international, being able to track where visitors are coming from is very important.  Analytics allows administrators and marketers  to see where people are visiting sites from based on I.P.(Internet protocol) addresses.  It is a good idea to track this kind of information so that local or regional ad campaigns can be carried out based on geographical statistics.

3. Pages: Analytics also enables marketers to gage which pages of a site are the most popular by tracking how visitors use the site and by following their most popular paths to the site.  This can also help track broken links on a site.  If an increased bounce rate happens on certain pages, it may be a red flag that something is amiss.

4. Incoming Links: A key success factor for increasing search engine rankings is having multiple incoming links to your site.  Analytics can help gage which referring/incoming links are the most valuable.

5. Keywords: Analytics lets you see which keywords are the most popular at driving traffic to your site.  This feature is a good way to judge the effectiveness of your site’s content.  By tracking the most popular keywords, you can find out if your site is sending the right message.

6. Bounce Rate: A bounce rate reveals how many times visitors exit your site from certain pages.  Being able to see where visitors are exiting can help troubleshoot issues such as broken links, page errors, etc.

7. Entrance Rates: The entrance rates on Analytics help you to track where visitors are entering your site.  If there are multiple incoming links to your site, such as to the products page, contact forms, or just the home page, the effectiveness of the content prompting visitors to click can be analyzed.

8. Goals: With the Goals feature,  it is easy to track specific parts of your site.  For example, if there is a contact form that should be filled out for interested visitors, the path to the contact form would be copied into the Goal tool.  When a visitor follows that particular path, it is called a Goal-conversion.  This is great for all important features of a site, such as portfolios, newsletter sign ups, promotional offers, etc.

9. Adwords: Another great feature about Analytics is that it works with Google Adwords.  By syncing these programs together, you can track returns on investment down to the cent.

10. Time: Analytics can also track how long people stay on the site and on each page.  Being able to track length of stay is a great way to judge how interesting the content is for each page in comparison to the rest of the site.

For more information on setting up Google Analytics, please Click Here to contact us.  For a complete tour of the free software, visit analytics.google.com.