If you are serious about your online marketing success, then you have to become familiar with Google Analytics. This free data tool will measure many aspects of your website traffic. It can also be used to understand other channel traffic like your blog,  Facebook and YouTube sites. In this post we will cover two basic data views you MUST know in order to understand the 1) characteristics of your visitors are and 2) what activity your blog or website visitors accomplish in a visit. Once you are logged into Google Analytics you can view data or setup a new property.  A propoerty is a website or blog ... any URL you want to measure traffic on. ADMIN Screen To add or edit a property look at bottom left of the screen for the ADMIN icon that shows a gear. That will display this screen where you can choose the best button to continue your work. Link to full image of " Google ADMIN Screen ". When you first login to Google Analytics you see the screen below. ...

This video shows how to connect your Google Analytics video with your YouTube channel so you can easily analyze your YT visitor traffic.

Running a business on the web is morphing. Are you keeping up? It wasn't too long ago that you could get a web site up and running with quality SEO, Search Engine Optimization, techniques and you were good to go.  That effort would insure you are going to appear as an organic listing on the first page of Google search results. While that is important, and still very achievable, you are going to see your online inquires decline if you slack off on activity to build your business reputation. There are a number of factors for this. The big one is that, while Google is the biggest search engine, there are other web sites people search to find a product or service they want.  Recents studies, by PEW, show that more than half of all internet users conduct research online before making a purchase. A few of those heavily popular sites are Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, LinkedIn, and there are others. In the old days your marketing plan was buying yellow page ...

Let's take a look at how to set up a customized marketing campaign using a landing page on your web site. In this technique, customized business application focused on marketing, I will describe how to setup a custom landing page that links to destination page on your web site with a free Google Analytics (GA) account. The destination page denotes a marketing action you want your customer to accomplish - fill out a request info, view a page, watch a movie, or upload/download a file. Design Your Marketing Process Here we go in a step by step description to design and implement this technique. #1 Make a specific web page or blog post that has your marketing information. Typically, this is called a landing page. There are some good (paying) services that will automate landing page creation for you, but you can easily make one your self. Or, hire me to do it (shameless plug).  Here is a landing page for a local roofing service: http://skyeroofing.com/Coupon/ #2 Next, ma...

Get more kick from your Facebook (FB) posting when you create a <b>customized marketing campaign that integrates marketing in FaceBook</b> (FB) with your web site. This is an easy way to provide specific information to potential clients. Your post in FB will include a link to your web site. That link in your post creates an inbound link to your site of a PR 9+.  Be sure to use a natural link, not a shortened link. Nowadays, your FB post(s) is circulated to only people in your network. FB has diminished global advertising in posts.  Instead, to advertise/circulate your post to the world, you have to "boost" it which costs money depending on the parameters you pick and the budget you allow for each post 'boosting'. In this technique, implementing a customized business application focused on marketing, I will describe how to design a campaign that tracks how many people click the link in your FB post, and where they come from (geographic), and other info th...

Organic links  are the bread and butter to expanding your web site traffic. They are not a quick fix like the golden arches, but the rewards are very significant. Organic linking  is the development of  hypertext  links between web sites with or without an explicit agreement to exchange links. Organic links are more likely to appear in a context relevant to the subject of the target document, which makes them useful for  search engines  like  Google search  that rank pages according to their links. In my opinion, one of the best ways to measure to overall success of your SEO campaign is to look at your organic SEO traffic. Rank just isn’t a good SEO metric for a variety of reasons including the increased personalization of search, the impact of social signals on the search results, the effect of local SEO on search results and more. A site’s rank changes too frequently to be a viable method of measuring your long tern SEO succes...