Free And Easy Web

Using Analytics - What it means. A Simple Explanation

2010-08-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Using Analytics to Optimize Your Marketing on the Web
James Cunningham, Information Technology Manager, CNE
Thursday, August 26, 2010 | CNE Tech

On August 26th, 2010, I held a CNE Tech Series seminar entitled "Using Analytics to Optimize Your Marketing on the Web". During this three-hour presentation, I covered the basics of analytics, including metrics, how they relate to site and email design, and how to create effective surveys...

The following post is intended as a companion piece to this Tech Series seminar, but serves as an excellent foundation to use as a reference while identifying how to incorporate using analytics into your strategic planning.

Website Analytics: Basics

Log Files

The word "blog" is derived from "web log", but strangely enough, web log meant something else long before social media exploded.

A web log maintains the history of page requests for a website, and is collected automatically by the server. Information about a request to view a page, including IP address, date/time, and more are typically stored for review.

Log Analysis Solutions

Web logs are extremely dense with information, and the sheer volume of data makes it infeasible to easily use for analytic purposes. To tend to this issue, web log analysis solutions were developed, that would automatically parse the log file and allow for concise reporting.

These days, there's really only one route I recommend for nonprofits: Google Analytics. A single line of code added to your site opens up a wealth of free analytic tools that really can't be beat. However, many web hosting companies provide their own analytic tools without requiring any implementation on your part. Either way, the following information applies to any solution that provides log file analysis!

Website Analytics: Visitor Trending

The most commonly used set of metrics fall under what's called "Visitor Trending", and demonstrates an overview of your site's traffic...

Visits
- How many separate sessions someone started on your site. Sessions usually require page requests to be initiated by a user within a given time period to be maintained, otherwise a new session begins.

Absolute Unique Visitors
- How many unique individuals started sessions, as opposed to total sessions created. This will allow you to ignore multiple visits from the same person, to give you an indication of how large your audience is.

Pageviews
- How many individual pages (or other items) were loaded.

More to come...

Surveys

Collecting and understanding user behavior data is just one component of using analytics to adjust your web marketing strategies. The second component is surveying your users, to find out what they like, what they dislike and what features they'd like to see. Regrettably, behavior doesn't necessarily follow opinion, so marrying the two is important when plotting changes.

Solutions Available

Constant Contact
- Free for 60 Days
- $10.50-$12.00/month Pre-Pay for Nonprofits
- Integrated with Email Marketing

Survey Monkey
- Free Basic Plan
- $200/year ($16.66/month) for Pro Plan

Zoomerang
- Free Basic Plan
- $199/year ($16.66/month) for Pro Plan
- $599/year ($49.92/month) for Premium Plan

Survey Construction Best Practices

According to an article provided through InfoPoll, a survey solution provider from the late 90's...

"Words are often used in different ways by different people; your goal is to write questions that each person will interpret in the same way. A good question should be short and straightforward, while the overall questionnaire should not be too long, use plain English and the question shouldn't be difficult to answer."

Their recommendations are fairly straightforward, but critical to a successful survey.

1. Write a short questionnaire
2. Use simple words
3. Relax your grammar
4. Assure a common understanding
5. Start with interesting questions
6. Don't write leading question
7. Avoid double negatives
8. Balance rating scales
9. Don't make the list of choices too long
10. Avoid difficult concepts
11. Avoid difficult recall questions
12. Use Closed-ended questions
13. Put your questions in a logical order
14. Pre-test your survey
15. Naming your survey
16. Cover memo or introduction

For an explanation of each item, read InfoPoll's full article here.

Understanding Statistics

Most survey tools provide automated calculations and visual aids, such as graphs, to allow for easy interpretation of survey results. However, having a basic understanding of key terms will provide you with the means to transform survey results into actionable items...

Mean
- Better known as the average, found by adding up all the values in a set of data and then dividing that sum by the total number of values.

Median
- Comparing the mean against the median can show how widely the values in your data are spread apart. Just sort all values from largest to smallest, and the one in the center is your median.

Mode
- The mode is the value that occurs most often in your data. Used to identify the most popular selection.

Range
- The lowest value and the highest value represent the range of your data. This provides insight into the extremes of your data.

Standard Deviation
- A complicated calculation that reveals how data is clustered through the use of a bell curve graph. A high standard deviation means selections are more distributed; a narrower shape on the graph shows less distrubtion and more conformity.

For plain English explanations, including equations and graphs, I recommend checking out Robert Niles' introduction here.

http://www.thecne.org/newsitem.php?id=182

Google analyst: U.S. Internet needs to get faster

2010-02-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

Google analyst: U.S. Internet needs to get faster

By John D. Sutter, CNN

February 8, 2010 8:02 a.m. EST

Google analyst: Broadband connections are "essential infrastructure when it comes to economic growth."

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

CNN.com talks with Derek Slater, a policy analyst at Google
Slater says the Internet in the U.S. needs to get faster to spur business
The Internet could reach speeds of a gigabit per second, he says

Mountain View, California (CNN) -- Google long has been an advocate of a single Web, one that's free of government censorship and barriers to information access.

That's not the reality in today's world however.

Governments from China to France put various roadblocks in the information superhighway to serve their interests, filter speech or protect copyrights.

And high-speed Internet connections haven't reached all corners of the globe -- not even all parts of the United States.

To learn more about this split between Google's idea of an all-access Web and the reality today, CNN sat down recently with Derek Slater, one of Google's policy analysts.

Slater declined to comment on Google's negotiations with China. The search engine has threatened to pull out of the country after the Gmail accounts of some human rights activists were hacked. Since this interview, it has been reported that Google is working with the National Security Agency to prevent similar cyberattacks.

But Slater did offer insights about increasing today's sluggish Internet speeds and why a unified Web can change peoples' lives.

The following is an edited transcript:

CNN: What are you expecting from the broadband talks in the United States?

Slater: Earlier in the year the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] started its proceedings to create a national broadband plan, and in our view that's a great step in the right direction, to make the U.S. once again a leader in broadband.

The Internet was essentially invented here, but over the years we've fallen further and further behind in speed, deployment, penetration.

And we think it is essential that there be a national goal to have fast, affordable and open access to the Internet.

CNN: What aren't we doing that we should be?

Slater: It's a combination of classical and jazz. So there are certain things that we need to do in order to bring faster connections to all Americans, to make sure there's really, truly universal service, and updating the ways in which we do that.

Broadband is the dial tone of the 21st century.--Derek Slater, Google

RELATED TOPICS

But there's also a range of experimentation that's going to have to go into this.

It's a really difficult challenge to think about how are we going to move not just a step further in terms of the speeds that we're getting today, but a leap further. How are we going to get to 100 megabits per second, a gigabit per second, to homes?

There is no silver bullet there. Instead, it's going to take encouraging creative solutions. Some of them will come from the public sector, that is, some of them will involve municipalities or governments. Some of them are going to come from the private sector. And some of them are going to be a mix.

CNN: What are the ideas that Google has submitted to the FCC?

Slater: One is that community institutions can serve as hubs to improve adoption within communities. Schools, libraries, health care facilities can be local and centralized points where people from the community who aren't familiar with Internet access or don't have access to it can get access, and we can help achieve universal adoption. ...

One other one that we had talked about was encouraging deployment of multiple strands of fiber to peoples' homes. That's because the biggest cost of broadband is digging up the streets, running cables into peoples' homes and so-on.

CNN: Zooming back a bit, why is broadband [high-speed Internet] important for the average person?

Slater: Broadband is the dial tone of the 21st century. It is essential for participation in civil society and political processes. It's also essential infrastructure when it comes to economic growth and innovation, and job creation.

It's also to this century what the beginning of national highways and the electricity grid was for the 20th century. It's going to be an input into a broad range of economic activities.

So, as we fall behind, that's also falling behind in our global competitiveness and our global ability to grow our economy and compete as an innovative country.

That's why this is a national issue, and that's why broadband is different from average consumer goods.

CNN: Why is an "open Internet" important to the globe, or to developing countries?

Slater: At this point the benefits of the open Internet are really indisputable.

We've seen unprecedented innovation come from that. Not just companies like Google, but all sorts, both commercial and not. The net is also essential to free expression and creativity. It's democratizing the ability for everyone to speak and create. It puts a printing press and a megaphone in everyone's hands. That can reach billions of people potentially all over the world.

That sort of democratization of creativity, of innovation, of free expression, is essential to us all, essential to our economy and our society.

You can look specifically at the way the Internet today is transforming the way small businesses operate. Through both Google and other platforms they can advertise their businesses, make people aware of what they're doing online, which they couldn't do through traditional media as easily.

CNN: Are there limits to how much the Internet can improve peoples' lives?

Slater: Faster broadband is not a cure-all to everything, but we see every day how it is improving our economy and benefiting our society. ...

I think improving broadband infrastructure can improve peoples' lives in a number of core areas that are important to our society.

Health care. Improving medical treatment. Imagine if someone in rural Montana could do a medical consultation over the Internet with an expert in New York City. Imagine the same thing if we were talking about a student in Iowa [who] could do a distance learning course with somebody miles away, and in that way could improve education.

CNN: In watching the first weeks after the earthquake in Haiti, have you thought of any ways tech infrastructure or the Web might be used to help build that country back up?

Slater: That's a really interesting question, and I don't have a great answer off the top of my head. I've only seen parts of [the news coverage], but it's been amazing to watch all of the sites that have sprung up to get funding to Haiti. ... Google set up a site to help drive funding there. It's amazing how quickly that stuff can just take root and spread quickly throughout our society.

It reminds me in certain ways of the protests in Iran. It was so quick and easy for people there to start snapping photos and tweeting. And that information diffused and spread throughout the world in a very quick way and a way we've never seen before.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/08/google.policy/index.html

How to Change What Comes Up About You in Google - Oprah

2010-01-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

How to Change What Comes Up About You in Google

By Farah Miller

Illustration: Monika Aichele

We know that the Internet is a vast, untamed wilderness, but it turns out that you have more control over your little plot of digital ground than you might think. Here's a starter kit for creating an online profile from scratch—or overhauling the one you've already got.

Be vigilant. Typing your name into Google isn't (just) an act of vanity—it's part of what Internet experts call reputation management. (When googling common—or commonly misspelled—names, include relevant information such as your company or hometown.) For a summary of the info about you that exists online, visitPeekYou.com or Snitch.Name. If you discover a link with sensitive private data (your Social Security number, for instance—it happens!), you can try to erase it using Google's URL Removal Tool (Google.com/webmasters/tools/removals). But you'll likely have better luck if you initiate human-to-human contact with the site in question. Go to the Contact or About page, find an e-mail address or—preferably—telephone number for its webmaster, and respectfully make your case.

Own your name. Say you're a teacher with a disgruntled student posting nasty comments about you on RateMyProfessors.com, or a job-seeker whose first Google result is a fiery opinion piece you wrote a decade ago for your college newspaper—not a first impression you want to make on a prospective employer. To push cringeworthy links lower in the Google rankings, register with the major social-networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn), create a Google profile (Google.com/profiles), and even consider purchasing your own URL ($1.99 per year for new domain owners; GoDaddy.com). "Search engines tend to rank pages about an individual that the person actually 'owns' higher than something by a third party," says Scott Skurnick, a search engine optimization executive in Los Angeles. The negative content won't disappear entirely, but take heart: Experts say most searchers never even make it to the second page of results.

Next: How to network online

Be human (not a spam bot). Blogging and other forms of social media can be narcissistic time-wasters, sure, but they can also be potential gold mines for job seekers and budding entrepreneurs. Just ask Luisa Weiss, who parlayed her recipe blog, The Wednesday Chef, into a dream job as a cookbook editor, or Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine retailer who used Twitter to promote his Wine Library video blog and leveraged the exposure into a seven-figure book deal and a new career as a marketing guru. "A lot of entrepreneurs use their blog or Twitter page the wrong way," Skurnick says. "A company will only post about its new products, or journalists will pop up only to announce a new article. They're not being human." Treat your posts, tweets, and status updates as an ongoing conversation that reflects your voice and personality. And don't forget the essentials: your name at the top of the site, a Contact button, and a carefully crafted About page.

Start networking. If you do take the plunge into blogging or maintaining your own site (get started at WordPress.com or Tumblr.com), link to well-established sites related to your field of expertise, and ask friends and contacts to link to you. Search engines generally prioritize sites ending in .edu and .gov, so if you have contacts in higher education or the government who will link to your site, the connections may boost your Google rankings.

Know your terminology. Say you're starting a daycare center: When writing copy for your business website, you'll want to know if potential clients will more likely search for "daycare," "childcare," or "babysitters." To research the answer, go to Google's Keyword Research Tool ( Google.com/sktool). And pay attention to your "anchor text," the underlined words that users click on to visit a different page. Click here means nothing to a search engine, but Find a childcare provider says a lot.

O, The Oprah Magazine

http://www.oprah.com/article/money/career/201001-omag-online-profile

Free, Easy, and FAST way to find answers to anything....

2009-08-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

Q. thank you!
I have to wait till tomorrow to talk to (former) subscription form company to let me enter in and get the back up info so I can copy/paste my first thank you message autoresponder, so I don't brake my brain to recreate it.
They sent me an e-mail on how to do it, and I can't figure it out.

A. Right!

Some companies specializes in techiegeekgoobedee doo :(

(Maybe staffed by young arrogant male jock geeks who are quite impressed with themselves.)

OR you could subscribe (if you still have your account open with said unnamed company) with an alternate email and get the autoresponder message directly. Then you could copy and paste it into your feedblitz autoresponder form.

You can see what I did if you subscribe at http://ILoveForGIVEness.com

You will get an autoresponder email to confirm. Then you can an autoresponder that takes you to a free blogger page url I put up where I give the link to my free forgiveness meditation audio (you might like it :). PLUS, I can easily change the info on this blogger page anytime I want to quite easily... FREE AND EASY - No Webmaster required :)))

I can hardly wait to see what you create!

I have recently discovered that the easiest way to get real people answers is to just submit my question to a google search box. REAL people answer in REAL people language in all kinds of forums.

Pat

Learn MORE at

http://FreeAndEasyWeb.blogspot.com

HOW to make AUTORESPONDERS on FEEDBLITZ

2009-08-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

Hi Pat,
I just subscribed on feedblitz, and I am lost in space! I am trying to find how can I set my first message for my autoresponder etc, and I am not sure what to do.
Any suggestions/
Please?
M

A.

OK.. For AUTORESPONDERS:

I just googled "how make an autoresponder on feedblitz"

This link came up

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1RNCN_enUS334US334&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=how+make+an+autoresponder+on+feedblitz

Lots of choices to read through and find one you can follow :)

Pat

MORE INFO & TIPS on how to make a splash on the web for free

http://FreeAndEasyWeb.blogspot.com

How to ADD a SUBSCRIBER SIGN UP BOX from Feedblitz to your blog or webpage

2009-08-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

Hi Pat,
I just subscribed on feedblitz, and I am lost in space! I am not sure what to do.
Any suggestions/
Please?
M

A.

1. Yes... go to NEWSLETTERS (their lingo for sign up forms)

Click on NEW.

Follow through the Q & A's to the NEXT SCREEN... where you can enter your URL (your web address of your site.)

NOW, your website is listed on your Feedblitz account.

2. Now, to to FORMS.

At the TOP OF THE PAGE you will see NEW.

(Since you only have one URL listed, that will probably show by default.

IF you have more than one website url, you will have to choose which website you are working with from the little drop-down menu on the upper right of your screen.)

Next, you will see

HTML Subscription Form Code

So go through all the Q & A's.

I think it is best to skip all the options... and just get the plain jane default version of the form.. at least for beginners. (Later you can get fancy if you like and play around with the basic form... but I don't think it is necessary. Less is more in my opinion... both for you making the form as well as for your soon-to-be subscribers filling out the form.)

(You can always edit your choices later as you get more fluent with how Feedblitz works.)

Once you get to a box with some code to copy and paste on your website in the appropriate place you will now have a SIGN UP BOX on your webpage.

If you get stuck here, you can call your domain host if they offer that support, OR your webmaster, OR your geeky friends. OR do a google search on YOUR QUESTION: That will usually take you to forums where people answer this and similar common questions.

Congratulations! You can now start building your goldmine - your list of subscribers who want to hear from YOU!

As you play around with all the features in feedblitz, you will realize how much marketing power potential you now have in your hands.

Thanks for the question. I will blog the answer at

http://FreeAndEasyWeb.blogspot.com

Pat Crosby

Does google pick up blogspot sites? Will people find me on blogger?

2009-07-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Q. From Reader:

Thanks for sending this Pat. you are sweet and generous ... I will play around with this and see. maybe it can be a temporary location for information about my offerings... one concern is if people google my name, will it come up?

*****

A. Answer from Pat:

Google picks up on a few things:

1. Key Words

2. Activity --- articles and posts you create and publish online, + # of hits to your website.

In the beginning you won't get very many - if any - hits.

So KEY WORDS and ACTIVITY will help Google find you.

IF you are just using your webpage like an online business card/brochure for current clients, no problem. You can put a picture, contact info, a little bio, and something interesting to help referred and new clients decide if they would like to utilize your gifts and services and buy your products.

IF you want NEW USERS to find you, you have to utilize all the web promo tools you have the time and inclination.

You can test this out for yourself. Just google my name "pat crosby" and you will see all the stuff that comes up... and all my sites are built on blogger platforms.

As an aside, I have found some people in other countries have trouble clicking on

http://ILoveForGIVEness.com

But if they click on http://ILoveForGIVEness.BLOGSPOT.com - it usually opens.

(Bear in mind that different parts of the world and different countries sometime block domains... such as Iran and China have blogged some domains.... savvy kids get around all the blocking, however. Where there is a will... the way opens up.)

*****

When you create your BLOGGER HEADING... which will best be your name (use your name as a brand is recommended by most if not all internet marketers... you own it, don't need to trademark it, etc. etc.) add key words in the BLOG DESCRIPTION.

In your BLOG DESCRIPTION - (Part of the Header), add the key words you want google to find you... this will be based on what people search for... such as healers, NY, Reiki, etc. etc.

I think it is smart to start with blogger free web pages :)

It takes awhile to get the hang of all this web stuff. Blogger makes it free and easy. And you have no overhead while you are learning. Later... you can always purchase a .com address and redirect it to your blogger address.

OR you can copy and paste your code from your blogspot onto you new domain host.

People who have tried to run their own regular websites have reported TWO PROBLEMS:

1. Difficulty in changing items on the website... have to be pretty tech savvy.

2. Expense of hiring someone else to do it for you.

Thus, people who have formerly used .com websites are now deciding to use .blogspot.com websites... Much easier, and saves a ton of webmaster expenses.

So unless you are big time web presence, blogger should handle all your web needs.

****

If you want an audio interview like I made for Maria Corbett

http://MariaCorbett.blogspot.com

I would be happy to make that sound file and give you the code to put it up on your website - as a courtesy :)

OR, you can get your own audio recording account HERE

http://patcrosby.byoaudio.com /

IF you want to get your OWN audio recording account, kindly use this link... as I get a little referral fee to help offset my time for giving you all this great info for free :)

Thank you!

*****

Personally, I tried a few domain hosts. I am now very happy with http://GoDaddy.com

Most web hosts seem to agree. GoDaddy is #1 and their customer support is outstanding.

I can't say that for other so-called "Customer Support" services from other web companies.