Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions. While they haven’t been exactly addressing these questions once a week, they have at least been addressing them.

That said, if you’re really looking to buckle down and learn the In’s and Out’s of Google Analytics, I totally suggest tuning in to this video Q’s and A’s offered by Avinash and Nick. Here is a recap of the items that have been addressed to date.

Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part One

In Episode #1, published on October, 15, 2009 discussed the following items:

1. How is bounce rate calculated
2. Effect of search bots on data collection
3. Finding a benchmarking category for sites that don’t fit into any particular benchmark category
4. What is the best way to identify landing pages with high bounce rate
5. How to find new keywords to improve content performance
6. Effects of private browsing and incognito mode on data collection

Be sure to visit their blog post that goes hand in hand with the video. They include show notes and links that were referenced in this video.

Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part 2

In Episode #2, published on November, 04, 2009 discussed the following items:

1. Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
2. Ways to report total number of keywords over time
3. Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
4. Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
5. Path analysis for keyword reports — why it’s bad and what to do instead
6. How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
7. How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
8. How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)

You’re going to want to view the blog post that correlates with the video because they include links to the resources discussed in the video tutorial.

Once again, if you’re looking to finally gain a better understanding of Google Analytics and how the program can help you, I suggest tuning in and listening to what Avinash and Nick say in these videos. While they said they’re going to be posting new videos weekly, it hasn’t been consistent. But that’s ok! I am pleased that they are doing them. That said, to assure that you don’t miss any of their new videos, I recommend subscribing to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel. Doing so, will get you a lot of great information in addition to the videos Avinash and Nick are providing.

While GA is packed full of features and functionality, initially the program can seem intimidating and daunting to use. I’d like to share a few resources with you that may help lessen the overwhelming feeling of not knowing exactly how to use the program, and what its capable of doing.

The first thing you should do before anything else is subscribe to the RSS feed of the Google Analytics blog. If you’re using Twitter, you should follow them as well. The Google Analytics team seem to have put more effort into their branding compared to other official Google blogs.

You may notice that their top horizontal navigation is seamless between their blog and their education, home, product, and support pages. A matching custom orange background and their recognizable avatar have been added to their Twitter page, giving it a nice and professional appearance. Clearly a lot of energy, time, and work have gone into the Google Analytics blog, website, and corresponding social network pages.

The second thing you should do is subscribe to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel and immediately start watching the videos. At the moment, they have a total of 36. If you feel like it will take a long time to watch them, consider how long it took to create them, and also consider what the purpose is behind making them. I also recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel RSS feed so that when you do catch up watching the videos, you’ll be able to watch the current ones quickly as they become available.

The last thing I recommend doing if you want to learn more about using Google Analytics is to join their Google Moderator series called Web Analytics Question “Hour” With Avinash & Nick. If you don’t know what Google Moderator is, no problem, I wrote a post explaining about it, and how you can use it yourself to improve your own blog or website. Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions.

As you can see, Google Analytics is important. It can be beneficial for you, and Google feels it’s even more essential that you learn how to use it properly. That’s why they have gone to such extents to help you learn. That said, what other advice, tips, or tricks do you know about? Also, what are some other resources that you know about that can help people learn even more about Google Analytics? Share them with everyone else in the comments below.

Gaining traffic to your web site or blog is probably the single most difficult element to achieve. Building a web site or blog indeed has its own share of challenges; however, what commonly happens to many people is that they do finally build a very nice site but fail to get traffic to it. I don’t want this to continue happening to you. So today, I am going to show you a very simple trick that will make a world of difference for you. If all this sounds wonderful to you, then let’s continue on.

How To Prepare Data Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics is very simple and this system produces some amazing statistics. Today what we are going to do is discover which individual pages of your blog or web site are scoring the most traffic. The goal in this tutorial is to show you how to find out which pages are hot and how to improve them to make them even HOTTER! But, is that possible, you may ask? Yes! This is very much a possibility and this is exactly what I do. So today, in this article, I am indeed revealing one of my own “personal secrets” in my success with search engine marketing.

Log into your Google Analytics Account. Click on the “Content Tab” found on the left sidebar. By default, the screen will show you results from the last 30 days. That is fine, you can work with this. However, sometimes because I deal in more “seasonal” type of keywords — holiday shopping deals to be specific — I tend to narrow my results by the previous week, as well as the same 30 day period from last year. However, for sake of simplicity, let’s just leave this set to default for now. Later you can experiment with this on your own to figure out which blend is best for you and your site. Please see the above screen shot for example. You can click on this to view it in full size.

Now what we have here is a simple snap shot of the individual pages that have received the most traffic within the last 30 days. You can see this section circled in red in the screen shot above. The next step I do is click on “View Full Report.” If you are following along with me, please do this now. After you click on view full report, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Once again, please click the screen shot above to view in full size. Now this screen shot is called the Google Analytics Top Content Performance Report. It will show you exactly which individual page(s) are receiving the most traffic and why. If you look closely you’ll see little “Arrow” icons to the left of each web page listing. You can click on these and a new page or tab will open up direct to the page that is scoring all the traffic.

You can do that now, if you’d like; however what I would like to do is actually click on the blue underlined text of each page. In this example, I am going to click on the /wal-mart-photo-center-vs-walgreens-photo-center.html listing. At this time, please follow with me and click your #1 most visited web page on your site. When you do, your current web page will update to a new screen. This screen will look something like this:

Once again, please click the above image to view in full size. This is called your Google Analytics Individual Page Content Detail Report. This report will give you quite a bit of information about this paticular web page. The element that we are concerned with is where the traffic is coming come (i.e. social network, search engine, direct referral, etc.).

Now at this time, please click “Entrance Sources.” By doing this, we will then discover where majority of the traffic is coming from. This is VITAL to know, because depending on where the traffic is coming from will dictate how we go about using strategy towards modifying the page to allow us even more traffic in the future. And real quick, what I mean by that is this. If more traffic is coming from the StumbleUpon.com social networks, it would be better for us to promote our StumbleUpon social network profile. If traffic is coming direct from Google, it would be better to promote a mailing list option or a RSS feed subscription sign up form. Please click “Entrance Sources” and you will see a page that looks like this:

Once again, please click the above screen shot to view full size. In this example above, you will see the StumbleUpon.com delievering the most traffic to this page. Second place is Reddit.com, third place is Google. Now, real quick… I want to talk to you about Social Network Traffic. This is VERY temperaory traffic. Meaning you will indeed only get a few days of “Burst Fire” Traffic from social networks. Social network traffic has a very SHORT shelf life.

Depending one how much time you want to invest on each of your individual pages, you very well may want to modify these pages twice. Once, to capialize on the social networking traffic and then once again about a week later to finalize your final edit towards a very fine tuned search engine marketing campaign towards increasing traffic.

With that said, in this example, I am going to bypass doing anything with the “Burst Fire” traffic I am getting to this page and focus on Google. As you can see, Google is the 3rd most popular source of traffic and quickly this will soon become #1.

At this time, please click “BACK” on your browser. What I would like to do now, is show you HOW GOOGLE IS SENDING ME TRAFFIC TO THIS PAGE. Please stay focused becausee this next step is CRUCIAL towards the goal at hand. After clicking back on your browser, click on “ENTRANCE KEYWORDS”. Here is a screen shot of what this page looks like:

Now, once again, please click the above screen shot to view in full size. Ok, folks… this is where the money is at. We have now hit jackpot. What we have in front of us is the “Answers” to HOW GOOGLE IS GIVING US FREE TRAFFIC. This report gives you a complete list of exact phrase keywords that people search for in order to find your web page. There NOW is absolutely ZERO mystery!

What Can We Do With This Data?

This data is worth more than gold! The reason being is the fact that you have totally UNLOCKED keywords and phrases that are delievering you free traffic to your web site. I have said this once, and I will say it again many times, in order for you to be highly successful in the business of search engine marketing, you have GOT to have skills or software that allow you to predict which keywords and phrases are HOT. It is all about keyword predictibility. Nothing less and nothing more.

With this list of keywords and phrases, I can then go back to my web page and better optimize, add to and rebuild the content on this page. Further research of these keywords may show my page being listed on page 3 or page 4 of Google and by going back and enhancing the content and improving my keyword saturation, I can then achieve page 1 on many of these popular search terms.

In my previous post, I mentioned how it is very important is it for a business to start a blog. If you have a blog, you could then add these keyword phrases as tags. Tags are additional pages that can be built with the snap of your fingers and instantly you have additional pages that get indexed in the search engines and are automatically optimized for the keyword or phrase you are trying to target.

I hope that you enjoyed this tip today. Stay tuned as I am going to do it again and show you how you can use Google Insights, yet another free tool by Google, that will once again, give you yet another blend in discovering and predicting keywords and phrases that you can use towards increasing traffic to your web site or blog.

For now, please share your feedback with me by leaving me a comment using the form below. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help answer them for you.

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