General Web Analytics
Web Technologies
Search Engine Optimization/SEM
ClickTracks Specific

Universal Search: Good or Bad?
There was quite a buzz in the SEO community a few months ago when Google announced Universal Search. The buzz has now subsided to a low drone as people adjust to the new world order. With a few months of data logged, we thought this would be a good time to take a look at how this has really affected SEO efforts. Web analytics was made for events just like this.

Making Link Bait and Viral Marketing Work
In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. While there's no need to integrate all of them into every campaign, understanding what they are and how they work can go a long way toward helping you plan an effective launch strategy.

Is Your Site's Code Bringing Down Your ROI?
It's a well known fact in among marketers that good site design is crucial to site performance. What's not as easily understood, however, is exactly what constitutes 'good site design.' There are things you can do to help provide your site with the solid foundation it needs. In this article, I'm going to highlight some basic tips that you can implement that will enhance your overall site performance, lower your costs, and deliver higher ROI.

How to Win Links and Influence People
While there's no argument about the value of building quality links to your web site in order to help increase both traffic and search engine rankings, there is often some confusion about the best way to go about doing that link building. Reciprocal or incoming? Buying links or earning them? Using software to manage the process or doing it by hand?

Why Track RSS?
Certainly, we all understand the value a solid email list provides, but did you know that your RSS feed can yield a gold mine of metrics information? But getting good metrics from your RSS feed isn't as easy as it is when tracking email conversions. That's because many of the metrics you've come to rely on—like 'unique visitors'—can be inadvertently skewed by the RSS feed process.

Analytics According to Captain Kirk
As any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you're wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you're gonna die. That's the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn't seen any definitive proof; it's just what people said. (Remind you of your current web analytics strategy?) So, let's set our phasers to 'stun' and see what we find.

Measuring Without Hard Metrics: How to Analyze the Success of Sites that Don't Sell Directly
Everyone knows that an e-commerce web site—with a shopping cart and credit card transactions—is set up to help you effectively track the success of your site and online marketing campaigns. But what if your site doesn't have a checkout or standard revenue-generating event? Can you still get the metrics you need? Yes!

SEO: Focus On What Really Matters
Six years ago it was all about getting as many search engine rankings as we could. Then, the focus shifted to getting traffic from those rankings. And now it seems to be about getting qualified traffic for relevant searches. The reality is that if you don't stay on top of what really counts, you may be lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to the success of your search marketing efforts.

Understanding Key Performance Indicators
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, should be at the core of how you analyze and report your web site's effectiveness. By selecting meaningful KPIs to track, you can quickly become aware of changes in visitor behavior. And, with a bit of analysis, you can learn why the changes occurred.

Using Visitor Segmentation in Web Analytics
If you're using web analytics to determine the success of your online and offline marketing efforts, you already know—when it comes down to it, it's the trends, not the raw numbers that are important to understand. Simply knowing how many visitors come to your site is ineffective.

10 Questions to Ask Your Analytics Tool
Getting the most from your web analytics starts with asking the right questions. Most analytics tools provide almost overwhelming amounts of data—how can you discern what information is relevant or important, and which you can ignore? Searching through numerous detailed reports hoping to glean insights is inefficient at best. Actively seeking out answers to questions that matter to your company is critical for effective visitor and campaign analysis.

7 Web Analytics New Year's Resolutions
As we move another year into the ever-changing Internet marketplace, we'd like to offer some New Year's resolutions to help you stay focused on getting the most out of your web analytics, and to make your online marketing as successful as possible. Here are 7 resolutions that are sure to improve your web analysis in this new year and in years to come.

Know Your Geography
Does the geographic location of your visitors make a difference in their behavior and purchasing habits? You better believe it does.

Is Your Funnel Clogged with Useless Data?
If you're using any sophisticated web analytics program, you're probably familiar with a funnel report. The funnel, simply put, is a stage-by-stage view of visitors traversing your site, typically organized from top to bottom. Visitors from campaigns and other sources arrive at the top, pass through a 'qualification' stage where they're educated on your products and services, and then eventually continue on to your goal page.

Why Buyers Aren't the Only Valuable Visitors
In this two-part series, SearchEngineGuide.com's Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Laycock gives tips on using ClickTracks to help you create meaningful visitor profiles—and why these profiles are important when it comes to your online marketing efforts

Making Marketing Decisions Based on Web Analytics Data
A common urban legend claims that we only use 10% of our brains. The validity of that claim may be debatable, but here's one that isn't: Marketers use less than 10% of the rich visitor segmentation information available from their web sites. How can you push your web analytics brain to the limit?

Why Do I Have So Many Zero-Second Visits?
Does it feel like there's a revolving door on your home page? Are you noticing an abundance of short visits, zero-second visits or mass exits from your web site's front door? If so, you're in good company—these types of things are a common occurrence on many web sites.

John Marshall's Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins
Far too often, the purpose of web analytics is to produce a graph that goes up and to the right. But, good, meaningful web analytics is a deductive process; not just an effort to produce a chart. So how do you keep from sinning during your web analysis?

What is a Visitor Anyway?
"Surely you're joking," we hear you say. "Of course, a 'visitor' is somebody who comes to your site, surfs around a bit, and leaves. That is a visitor...right?"

Optimized for Readership: Bots are Important, but so are Your Readers!
Certainly, a site that is search engine optimized drives better, more qualified leads. But is that the only way? Here, Bryan Zmijewski head of ClickTracks' Web customer experience agency ZURB, reveals the strategy behind successful websites.

Web Analytics Myths, by John Marshall
Web analytics is part art and part science—one thing it doesn't have to be, however, is part fiction. Join ClickTracks' CEO John Marshall for an enlightening journey into the land of myth debunking.

Log Files or JavaScript - Which is better ?
It's a question we're constantly asked...which is a better, more accurate way of collecting data, log files or JavaScript code? We've written a quick, slightly technical article on the debate, outlining the advantages and disadvantages of both log files and JavaScript, and explaining how ClickTracks can combine both methods to glean highly accurate data.

Distinguishing Duplicated Links
A page that links to another often does so from several different hyperlinks. The most common example is a home page with a navigation bar at the top and another with text only links at the bottom. Since both hyperlinks point to the same URL, the request is identical regardless of whether the user clicks the top link or the bottom.

Seven Ways to Mine Your Data with Cookies
What's the most underused feature in ClickTracks? Its ability to track visitor information based on cookies. For most sites, the info stored in cookies can be a rich source of data that can be mined in a number of different ways. And if you take the concept one step further and actually write cookies for the purpose of data analysis, the sky's the limit. You can extract practically any information you desire from your site.