As you make changes and test different things on your site, you and the people you work with will inevitably wind up visiting your own site.

A lot.

And that means Google Analytics is count you along with the rest of your users. Not a big deal if you have thousands and thousands of visitors (though it’s still not ideal), but it sucks if you are just starting out.

Your browsing is going to skew the precious data that you want to use to make better decisions about your site. You want your data to be accurate.

The solution? You must filter yourself out of Google Analytics.

There are two common ways to do it:

• By IP address
• Via a cookie

I’m going to focus on the one I think is most useful to all of you: the cookie method. Cookies are simply tiny files that are used to convey information to your web browser.

What I will walk you through in this post is how to set up a cookie that allows your website to identify you and not count you in the Google Analytics data.

Step One: Setting the Cookie

Here is what you need to do:

Create a new page on your site

This is pretty easy. Just go to an existing page, right click on it and hit “View Source.” Copy all this code and paste it into Notepad (or better yet, Notepad++), then save this as a new HTML file. Done.

Make sure it has Google Analytics code on it just like all the other pages

If you used the method I just described, the code should be on there, but make sure to double check. Oh and please use the new asynchronous code…otherwise this won’t work right.

Add one line of code to it

Look for these two lines of Google Analytics code on your page:

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Now just add this new line of code:

_gaq.push(['_setVar','pickaname']);

Where pickaname is something you pick. This is what it should look like after you’re done:

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_setVar','boomgoesthedynamite']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Upload to your server

Use whatever FTP client you want to push this new file onto your server.

Visit the page

If the file you saved in the first step was called “monkeytime.html” then you should go to yourdomain.com/monkeytime.html. You should see the page you created in step one.

Visiting the page will set the cookie on your computer—you should visit this page from any computer you want to block from the Analytics report.

If you want to double check that it worked, check your cookies in your browser and in your domain—you should see one called _utmv. Click on it and you should see the unique name you gave it (boomgoesthedynamite) in the information for that cookie.

Step Two: Creating a Filter in Google Analytics

Now that you’ve set the cookie, we have to tell Google Analytics to look for it and to throw out any visits from people with that cookie on their machines. Go to the Edit section of the profile you want to create a filter for:

Then click on the Add Filter button:

Enter the following information into the filter:

• Add new Filter for Profile
• Give your filter a name (be descriptive!)
• Filter Type: Exclude
• Filter Field: User Defined
• Filter Pattern: Enter the unique name you added to the code in Step One (boomgoesthedynamite)

That’s it! Testing this is tricky, but if you can find a page on your site that gets zero traffic (like maybe the cookie page you just created…) and visit it repeatedly, you should be able to figure out if you’re being counted or not.

If you’ll be blocking a lot of people (co-workers, etc.) using this method, make sure you tell Analytics to not count that cookie page either. It’s not a big deal and it shouldn’t impact your reports that much, but if you want to be precise you should go ahead and block it with a filter that looks like this:

Image by Gabe Photos

Before smartphones came along, mobile websites were all the rage: they allowed users to access sites on a mobile device in a quicker, more efficient manner. The font and the layout were all designed to fit onto a small screen. The page loaded quickly because there wasn’t all the extra stuff you get on a regular site.

Now that’s all changed because smartphones are essentially computers you carry around in your pocket.

But there is still a case to be made for having a mobile site.

Deadspin has one, the NYTimes has one, and even The Writer’s Coin (ahem!) has one.

The idea is to serve up your content in the most convenient way possible, depending on how users are trying to access your site.

Do You Really Need a Mobile Site?

I say yes: pretty soon everyone will have phones that are just as powerful as their home computers, so the easier you make it for them to access your site, the better.

But if you need proof, go to your analytics report. How many iPhone/Android users are coming to the site?

You can get to this report from the Visitors->Mobile->Mobile Devices menu.

What we’re looking at here is (over the past 30 days):

• How many overall visits come from mobile devices?
• What percent of overall traffic comes from mobile devices? In this case, it’s 2.25%
• Which devices are accessing the site?

This is a great example because 2.25% isn’t a lot, but it’s not insignificant. What we’re trying to figure out is if it’s worth the effort to build a mobile site for the amount of users you’re getting that are on these devices.

Even more interesting: trend this out over a longer period of time. What’s the trend? In my case, mobile traffic is going up…way up:

And even though the iPad is leading the way (which is interesting and worth digging into separately, demgraphic-wise), I still wanted a dedicated mobile site.

What Did I Do?

I’m a one-man operation so I needed an easy solution I could implement myself. That was cheap (free). So I looked around on other sites and the WordPress plugin I kept seeing was WPTouch. It’s great, gives you tons of options, and doesn’t get in the way of what users are after: your content.

Here’s what The Writer’s Coin looks like on a mobile device:

It literally took me about 20 minutes to get this going with all the options I wanted/needed. So if you’re on WordPress and your analytics report tells you your mobile traffic is increasing, I see no reason not to go ahead and give the people what they want.

Don’t forget to add your Google Analytics tracking code to the Settings area of WPTouch! Otherwise you’ll lose tracking on all those pages and it’ll look like your traffic is actually going down.

Image by Johan Larsson

I have a confession to make: learning about analytics isn’t very exciting. There are some very cool things you can do once you know the basics and can dig around an Analytics report—but for the most part I’m guess most people react to analytics with a dismissive “eh.”

Which is fine—I understand. It’s one of those things that’s hard to get excited about until you see for yourself the kind of cool data you can get from it.

SEO, on the other hand, is something everyone gets excited about. After all, SEO means more traffic and that’s always exciting.

I’ve neglected to cover the basics of optimizing a website, and it all starts with SEO. So I’m going to do a better job of covering SEO-related topics because you can’t really get a lot of value out of analytics reports if you only have 5 or 10 people visiting your site.

First you get the traffic.

Then you get the analytics.

Then you get the power.

Or something like that.

So get ready to see some basic SEO posts here at Applied Analytics so you can start driving some organic traffic (a term that I’ll talk more about) to your site(s). Once we start a flow of traffic coming to your site we can begin to apply the magic of analytics and learn some cool stuff about the people that are showing up.

You can also get started by checking out the links on the sidebar: Copyblogger’s SEO Guide and the Google Analytics SEO Handbook.

Image by smemon87

People are naturally curious. And when you’re running your own site, you become even more so. Is this working? Do people like this button? Would they like it better if it was a different color?

Questions are around every corner and rarely do we find any answers. Which is frustrating since there are no easy questions.

When you’re looking at traffic data in Google Analytics, you’ll find yourself asking the same question over and over again: why did that happen?

Whether it’s a traffic spike or the bounce rate suddenly shooting up, you’ll see something in a chart and get that curious urge to know why.

Thanks to analytics (and the information on this site…I hope), you can find good answers to all your questions about traffic spikes and changes in patterns. The data is all there—you just have to know how to get to it and how to interpret it.

That’s the whole point of this site—to help you learn how to use all the tools that in Google Analytics to do some detective work and figure these things out.

But once you do figure it out, why not leave yourself a note so you can always see it in the future?

Annotations

Google Analytics allows you to add a small annotation to your charts so you can easily add the “why” so you (and anyone else with access to your account) can see what caused it.

Let’s say the source of the spike in your chart was caused by David Hasselhoff re tweeting you and exposing all his followers to your site. Great news! You can create an annotation to commemorate this blessed event!

Here’s how:

1. Click on the down arrow below a chart.

2. A small window should expand. Click on the Create new annotation.

3. Enter the date and any text you want that’ll remind you of what happened on that day.

4. And now you’re done! The next time you’re looking at that date in your Analytics, you’ll see a small bubble that indicates an annotation. You can check it out by clicking on the down arrow in step 1.

Image by Marco Bellucci

When you own a website that you put a lot of work into, you’re probably curious about who is visiting it. You’d like to know what their favorite colors are, how much money they make, and how much of it they’re willing to hand over to you.

I can’t really help you there, and neither can Google Analytics.

But Google Analytics does do a good job of grouping people into neat groups, and that can tell you quite a bit about who they are and what they’re looking for and how you can target them.

They are:

1. Referral Traffic: This is probably where you’ll start getting the first visitors to your site. Referral traffic occurs when one website links to your site and someone clicks on that link. Think of referral traffic as an endorsement—being as we are in an election year. When one candidate (who has a lot of supporters) goes up on the lectern and decides to endorse another, lesser-known candidate that is up for election, the goal is to get some of those followers to vote for this new guy.
   Same thing with your site: when another site links to you they’re basically saying to their readers “I support this candidate.” Which is great because when you’re starting out nobody knows you and getting endorsements from sites with traffic is a great way of getting people to your own site.
2. Search Traffic: You’ve probably heard a lot about this one. I’m sure you’ve heard words like SEO, Google, and PageRank. Let’s not worry about all of that just yet. All you need to know now is that this type of traffic got to your site by searching for something in a search engine and your site came up somewhere in the results. The user felt it was relevant enough and they went ahead and clicked on it. The best part bout this traffic is that it’s free and requires very little continuous work on your part. If you’re a photographer in New York that takes pictures of infants and you specialize in black and white portraits, ideally you’re showing up when someone searches for “black and white kids portrait nyc.” There are tons of things you can do to help with how high up you rank on a search, but that’s for a later post. If you want to read more on SEO, you can check out the guides on the right or you can read the post on Off Page SEO, which incidentally has a lot to do with referral traffic.
3. Direct Traffic: This is traffic that comes straight to your site. Someone either typed in your URL into their address bar or they clicked on a bookmark to get to your site. Either way, this tells us a few things about this kind of visitor: a) they already know about your site and b) they went straight to it without any help from a search engine or endorsement from another site. This won’t be very high at first (as long as you’ve blocked yourself from your Analytics!) because nobody knows about you or your site. And if your site’s URL is something wacky like www.plsecomeandvisitpleeeaaaase.com then good luck getting any traffic at all, especially of the direct variety.
4. Other: Ah, the catch-all, ambiguous bucket known as “other.” What’s included here? Everything else, obviously, but to be a little more specific let’s mention e-mail. You may not have an email list or send any email to people, but you may eventually, and this is where it would show up. Also, if you’ve placed your URL in the signature of your email client and you send a lot of email, you might see a trickle come in through here. Whenever someone clicks on a link to your site from their Yahoo, G-Mail, Outlook, etc., then this is where the traffic will be logged.

The reason I ordered these sections as I did was because that’s pretty much how you should expect to see the traffic come in when you first start out. Hopefully you’re out there networking with other sites or people who have sites that are relevant to yours and they like your site enough to endorse you.

And if you have friends with totally unrelated websites, feel free to go ahead and ask them to mention your site, along with the ever-important link. The traffic isn’t as important (especially since it won’t be relevant to all those visitors), but the link is. We’ll cover this later, but links are the currency of the web, and the more you have, the better your site will be viewed by search engines like Google.

After all, the more quality endorsements a candidate has, the better his/her odds are of winning an election.

On a future post we’ll look at how to go beyond counting how many people from each group you’re getting and starting digging into some of the deeper stuff like whether or not the traffic is relevant to your site. The last thing you want to do is drive a ton of pottery fanatics to your photography site…unless you can create a cool angle that makes it relevant to them.

How to Take Awesome Pottery Pictures?

Anything’s possible.

Image by TheBigTouffe

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see how many people visit your site every day? All those tweaks and changes you’re making day after day: does anyone care? Is it working?

Well there is a way to find out, and it won’t cost you a thing.

It’s called Google Analytics and it’s the most popular web-analytics tool out there. It’s powerful, it’s easy to install, and it’s free. It’s so great that a lot of companies use it as their web-analytics tool, and they rely on the traffic information it gives them to make crucial decisions involving millions of dollars.

And all you need to do to get it set up is install a teeny bit of harmless code on each page of your site—it’s very easy.

So I’m sure it’ll be good enough for you and your website.

Install it on your site and the next day you’ll be able to track a whole bunch of cool stuff. Things like:

• Number of people are coming to your site
• The most popular pages
• How long they are hanging out for
• Where they are coming from
• What they are searching for on the web that takes them to your site

The amount of stuff GA tells you about your site is pretty amazing, especially since it’s free.

If you aren’t tech savvy and don’t want to worry about code and where to put it, don’t worry about it, just email your “tech guy” or whoever it is that’s running your site and tell them you want to get it up and running. They should know what to do.

All you need to do is visit Google Analytics and create a Google Account. From there you’ll answer a few questions and eventually Google will give you a tiny bit of code that is customized for your site. Send that to your Tech person and tell him you need this code “on every single page just before the </head> tag.” He should know what to do.

The next day you’ll have access to GA anywhere you have Internet access. The first time you log in, you’re going to pull a Neo and go “Whoa!”

Trust me, when you see everything that’s in there, you’re going to feel overwhelmed. It’s like popping the hood of your car and being asked to point out the differential flange.

Worry not: that’s what this site is for. It’s aimed at people who don’t know anything about GA and want to make their sites better by generating more qualified traffic (more on that later) and being more efficient.

Google Analytics can be very overwhelming for the beginner, so make sure to bookmark Applied Analytics. I will walk you through everything you need to know. And if you’ve already installed it and have specific questions, feel free to send them along.

Image by SMJJP

A data funnel is like a treasure map of your website. In order for users to accomplish the goals you’ve set out for them, they need to follow a trail of web pages before they eventually reach that goal.

If your goal is to sign people up for an email, they’ll need to visit a page with a button that takes them to a sign up page (dotted line), then the sign up page (dotted line), and then a thank you page (big, red X) that verifies that they’ve signed up.

I briefly touched on data funnels last week when I talked about the importance of goals. Funnels and goals go hand in hand because a goal means you want your users you wind up doing something specific on the site or winding up somewhere.

So think of funnels as a map of where your users are in the process of getting to that elusive goal. For those users that don’t make it to the X on the map, a funnel can show you where they are getting stuck and if enough people are getting stuck that you should do something about it.

Here is what a typical funnel looks like:

In it, you can see that 853 users hit the home page, 126 reached the RegisterLogin page, and 21 made it to the Account Success page. That means 21 of your 853 users managed to follow your map and reach the goal. That’s a 2% conversion rate and depending on what exactly your goal is, is not too bad.

What the funnel lets you do is attack each step in the process individually. Let’s say you change your homepage around and add blinking lights and flashing arrows that point to the sign-up box.

In theory, more people should notice your sign-up box now. But instead of just checking how many people have created an account and seeing if that number has gone up, you can check the funnel conversion for that first step to see if it’s made it better or worse.

Funnels give you a more nuanced look at how each part of your site is performing. Instead of just having one big gauge telling you how the overall site is doing, funnels give you a more detailed look at the different parts of the site.

Once you’ve nailed down where there are problems and opportunities for improvement, then you can tackle them exactly where users are having the toughest time and make adjustments.

Image by cameronparkins

Most people that don’t put too much thought into their websites do the following: they log into Google Analytics (GA), check and see how traffic was yesterday, maybe click into the Traffic Sources section to see if there is any pattern there to explain the drop or rise in traffic, and then go back to doing their thing. Selling widgets, blogging about cats—whatever.

But if you don’t have a defined goal for your business, then you’re not only missing out on one of the coolest parts of GA, you’re also selling your site/business short. So ask yourself the questions: what’s the goal of me site? What am I trying to accomplish?

Everything on the page (and everything you do) should be geared towards that one goal. Whether it’s selling more widgets, increasing pageviews, making more money, etc. This will also help you make tough decisions about your business by simply asking yourself “which makes the most sense to continue to achieve our goal?” You’ll know which decision to make if you let your goal be your guide.

But you have to have a goal.

And once you do, you can have GA track it for you by setting up goals. What you’ll be able to see once you’re all set up is the conversion rate for your users, which you can break down into any of the slices of traffic you want (users from Finland that use Chrome, for example) and see which users convert best. It’s the kind of insight that causes “aha” moments and can improve conversion across the board.

Not only that, you can see conversion funnels too, which are a nice graphic depiction of where in the process of achieving the goal they drop off. If you notice most users dropping off at the sign-up page, then you know there’s something you can fix there.

If you’re a blogger, the goal-setting can be a little tricky. What is your goal? It could be to have users join a mailing list, read one specific post, or something as simple as subscribing to your RSS feed. If you’re a blogger and you can’t figure out a goal for your site, use RSS subscriptions. It encompasses a lot of things: are you writing interesting content that people like and keeps them coming back for more? Are you networking and getting the word out there so that more people come to your site? Are you selling yourself enough?

Tracking RSS subscribers via Feedburner is great, it gives you a nice, overall count and a trend of how you’re doing over time. But placing it as a goal in GA means you’ll be able to find out a lot more about your users. If users from a guest post at Sidehustleblogging sign up at a much higher rate than users from any other site, maybe you should figure out what it was about that guest post or what it is about Sidehustleblogging and their readers that “clicked” so well.

Then you try to replicate it.

That’s what analytics is all about: noticing patterns and repeating them to achieve your goals. Just make sure you have a goal to begin with, or else none of this will matter.

Image by D-32

It seems like such a non-issue until you see how the conversion rate for those users sucks compared to everyone else. And all because of a simple little thing like not using Google’s latest code.

I think a lot about how this stuff (analytics and numbers) can help people and small businesses with their sites, and this post is a great example of something that’s small, easy to fix, and has a huge impact on the bottom line.

Analytics can do a lot of stuff to make you smarter about who you target, how to target them more efficiently, and how to expand your reach on the web as quickly as possible. But when it comes down to it, what we all want to do is make more money and spend less time doing it.

Nice work Tom—well done.

Anyone with a website needs to know what SEO is and how it works. That’s why I have a section called SEO Resources on the right sidebar. If you don’t know anything about SEO, I suggest you take a look at those links and also this fantastic intro to SEO from Corbet Barr over at ThinkTraffic—he does an awesome job of breaking it down to the basics.

There are basically two parts to SEO, and that’s what I want to focus on here today: on page vs. off page.

On Page SEO

On page SEO occurs when you change things on your site so that search engines (Google, for the most part) can find you. You may have heard terms like title tags, clean URLs, meta information, and H1 tags—these are all part of on page SEO. The goal is to make your website findable by the search engines by translating your content into a language the search bots can understand and “crawl.”

On page SEO is like being added to the map—people will be able to find you now. This stuff if fairly easy to put into place and anyone can do it in a few hours, depending on how large the site is and how much content there is.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO is all about the links pointing to your site. It’s called off page because you can’t control it as directly as you can the on page stuff. It’s one thing to make all your URLs descriptive, but it’s something totally different to get links. You have to work for them.

If on page SEO is like being added to the map, off page SEO is like having a huge star next to your city on that map. Something that says “this place is important and worth visiting.” When you see it on the map, it makes you think, “this looks like a place I need to check out.”

When search engines pull the content they can “see” (thanks to all the on page stuff you’ve done), they then rank it in order of importance. So if you search for “Apple,” the bots will check to see which sites have more links pointing at them and the quality of those links. That’s why if you search for Apple you won’t see anything about the fruit on the first page, it’s all about Apple the company. And Apple.com is at the very top—all because of the big-time sites that link to it (and because that’s what Google assumes you’re looking for).

As for the quality of the links, that’s a Google algorithm we don’t know the secret to, but we can see a site’s pagerank to see how highly Google thinks of a site. This number (from 1–10) essentially “grades” each site/page on the Internet according to how high it would rank in a search.

Why Everyone Focuses on On Page SEO

On page SEO is much easier to do than off page, and that’s why most people like to spend so much time on it. Webmasters, like most of us, like to focus on the things they can control. SEO is no different because it’s like math: you make the changes, follow the rules, and boom—you can tell everyone your site is “SEO ready.” Done. Sure, you’re on the map now, but it doesn’t mean anyone is going to come to your site.

Take the keyword “gadget news.” There are over 47 million sites that show up on that search—who is going to show up on that first page (which is the holy grail, by they way—the higher up you are the more traffic you’ll get)? Check it out:

Why is Gizmodo at the top? Why are CNET and Engadget next in line? Because they have kickass sites that people love. People love them so much that they will link to them all the time whenever they find a story/review they want to share with someone else.

These links are the currency of the web and are a crucial part to what SEO is all about.

Which is More Important?

On page SEO is easy. Off page SEO is hard. That should probably answer the question. The problem is that people prefer to sit around and talk about on page SEO because off page is so much harder—you’re trying to accomplish two very hard things:

1. Create quality content/products people love
2. People have to show their love by linking to you

This stuff will drive management crazy because they can’t just throw money/time/resources at the problem to solve it. It’s not one of those problems that can be solved that way. Sure, you can buy links on sites that point back to you, but that doesn’t really scale. Instead, you have to create something so cool and so successful that people with quality sites (high pagerank) link to you.

An Example

Take the writing I do on The Writer’s Coin as an example: I once wrote a guest post on GetRichSlowly (pagerank 5 to my site’s 4) that included a link back to my site. That told Google that a higher quality site (their 5) was “endorsing” this other site (my 4)—essentially bringing up my 4 a little bit closer to a 5. With enough of these links, I can get my site up into a pagerank of 5, which in theory means more traffic.

I could write 1,000 guest posts for sites with a pagerank of 7 or 8 and that would do it, but that’s very hard to do and would take me years. It’s much easier to install Headspace on my, say “OK, I’m SEO ready,” and forget about the whole thing.

And as tells Marcus Aurelius tells Maximus in Gladiator: “That is why it must be you.”

Off page SEO is far more important than on page SEO and everyone with a website should be focusing a large part of their time on it.

• It will serve a dual function of networking and getting the word out into the world
• It’ll teach you the importance of social media
• You will get more traffic
• You are more likely to stay focused on your users/customers instead of the title tags on your site

Let’s not forget that Google is all about finding the “best” result for a user making a search—that’s all they care about. So while you’re catering to Google, you’ll also be catering to the best interests of people searching the web, and that’s a good thing.

Image by Map Center at the BPL