StartupBooster.com » startup tools

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Can Help you Track your Web and Online Success

Guna — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:58:11 +0000

As mentioned in my previous article web giant Google is attempting to become more social with the launch of their upcoming Google+ service, Google’s most recent attempt at success in the social media sector. However Google does not only want to innovate the way you use social media, they want to help you manage and track your online success using the social media already out there.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools have added new tools for tracking information like tweets, likes and +1s in your website’s traffic with the ability to then analyze that information. The basic features of these new tools include a “+1 Metrics Section” which provides feedback on the impact of the +1 Button on a search. The analytics then show how these +1s affect your website’s (CTR) click through rate, tracking the amount of +1s per page visited. This tool then maintains an accurate graph, so you can track the data over time.

To go along with those new tools Google also added the Activity report and Audience report features to their improved Webmaster Tools. The Activity report displays how many +1s your website pages have received. While the Audience report takes it a step further and displays geographic and demographic data about users that have +1′d your website.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature in the updated Webmaster tools is the new Social Plugin Tracking tool for Google Analytics. This tool compares the impact of different types of social actions on your website. It tracks +1s as well as other social network actions like Twitter tweets and Facebook Likes. These social Plugin Tracking features are broken into three categories, Social Engagement, Social Actions and Social Pages. Social Engagement tracks visitor behavior such as, time spent on your site, pages viewed etc. Social Actions tracks the numbers of actions done on your site including, +1’s, tweets and likes. Social Pages compares your page to others based on the number of social actions they receive.

For people who have their own websites, myself included this is a great tool. Not only does it track your web success as per the number of likes, +1’s etc. It provides data outside the Google network delving into Facebook and Twitter. While information such as the demography and geography of your visitors is an extremely valuable tool to have as you can see exactly who your audience is so you can better appeal to them. Fellow entrepreneurs and web enthusiasts out there, let’s use this knowledge to empower ourselves and our websites and ventures to new, unseen heights! Because as they say: Knowledge is power.

Panabee: A Faster Way to Compare Information and Products

Guna — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:25:10 +0000

Are you tired of having to open too many browser windows to search for a “keyword” or a “product”? Have you been searching for a tool where you can view search results from multiple sites such as eBay, Amazon, Flickr, Google, Bing, etc on a split screen side by side? I want to introduce you to Panabee, a new search tool that you can use to compare search results within a single browser window.

Panabee gives you the option to compare search results from multiple sites within one browser window. You can run a search query for “startupbooster” and Panabee will return a split screen window with results from Google and Bing as shown below. If you don’t like the results from Google or Bing, you can choose other search engines on Panabee and it will return results from that specific engine.

Panabee also has a tool bar on top of the split screen page. In that tool bar, you can choose to continue your search for the same keyword on another site. In order to demonstrate how useful this site could be for you, I ran a search for “camera” on eBay and Amazon at the same time. The results are shown in the image below.

This tool can really be handy for many of you so you don’t have to open and close multiple browser windows. I was contacted recently by the founder of this wonderful site. Clarence Hu asked me to review and introduce this new tool to my readers. I had a chance to ask Clarence a few questions. I’ve posted them below:

What is your vision? (what are you offering to your visitors?)

We are offering a faster way to search and compare information.

What is your business plan or model?

We will generate revenue through sponsored ads.

Why did you start this website?

We started Panabee because we often need to search multiple sites (e.g., Bing and Google, eBay and Amazon, Flickr and Google Images, Wal-Mart and Target) for the same query. We found this task annoying. Google is great 90% of the time, but it doesn’t return perfect results all the time. For these other times, we wanted a quick and simple way to search trusted sites.

How are you planning to market it?

We will target four user groups: journalists, bloggers, shoppers, and marketers. We believe these four constituencies most benefit from Panabee’s ability to search the same sites repeatedly (e.g., blogger needs to search image sites for images or reference sites for company/general information). From there, we will leverage word-of-mouth and launch sponsored ad campaigns.

When was the site launched?

July 2009

Why is your site different than your competitors?

Panabee differs from traditional search engines because we show the site directly, and because we offer a side-by-side view. With other search engines, page indexing may be outdated, but because Panabee shows the underlying site (e.g., eBay, Amazon), search results are real-time and are guaranteed to be reliable.

Please visit Panabee.com and support our entrepreneurs. If you like this tool, please bookmark it and shre it with your friends and family.

How to Get to Know Your Visitors: Data Collection and Analysis

Guna — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:26:00 +0000

Everyday you receive hundreds of visitors from all over the world. You can’t shut down your website while you go to sleep and then reopen it like you would with a retail business. Who are these people and why are they coming to your website? If you don’t have answers to these questions, you are missing out on the opportunity to make more money. In other words, you are flushing money down the toilet and you don’t even know about it.

Few days ago, I’ve discussed why it is important to know your customer to be successful. In this article, I am going to discuss how you can get to know your customer/audience.

With features such as the comment system, feedback forms and or user registration on your website, you may already know about some of your visitors. This is a very small number compared to the number of visitors you don’t get to interact with. These are the folks that you are really missing out on. They are your true potentials that will allow you to make lots of money. They hold the key and you need to do everything you can to get to know them. In order to be an effective marketer, you need to be proactive and get to know your audience.

By getting to know your audience, you can improve your content, you can shift your sales pages, you can introduce new products and affiliate programs, you can improve your ratio of conversation, you can improve your marketing strategy and eventually you can make more money.

In order to understand your audience, you can take the approach to collect all possible data about them and then analyze the data to improve your game. Therefore, I will take you through data collection in three steps: one to collect useful data with existing tools, collect data using statistical analysis and finally go one step beyond to get data directly from the visitors. This article will only focus on collecting data. In the near future, I will elaborate on how you can use this information to more than double the amount of money you make today.

Collect Data with Existing Tools

Like I said above, you already have a few means to collect data on users that visit your site. Most of these data is collected in the backend system you may be using. For example, if you run a blog on wordpress, your wordpress system will collect information on those who leave comments, feedbacks and user registration. This data is very important because this tells you the kind of people that you have successfully converted to participate on your site.

Comments

You have to be engaged with your users to successfully build a profitable website. You need to follow the comments that are left behind by visitors. You should respond to comments and sometimes you should take their comment and generate content from it. You should then give the credit to the user for providing you with an idea to generate that content. This will allow you to learn more about existing users but it will also encourage new users to participate.

User Registration

If your site allows user registration, it will allow you to collect as much data as you want about that user. Many websites tend to keep the user registration forms short so they can encourage users to register. However, once they register, most websites allow users to update their profile, etc. This is where you can get more detail about users. This information will help you to target your marketing efforts.

Feedback

Many sites have feedback forms on their website. I am not sure how many of them take advantage of the feedback they receive from users. If you don’t have a feedback form or a contact us form, make sure you create one. Not a lot of people will send feedback but those who choose to send feedback, you will definitely get lots of useful information that you can take advantage of.

Statistical Analysis

If you are not using a traffic analytical tool such at the Google Analytics, you should get one right away. Most of these tools are free to begin with; hence you should take advantage of it. This sort of tool provides you with a lot more information about visitor patterns. They provide you with information far beyond what you may need to improve your marketing strategy. I am going to focus on a few key features of these tools so you get a sense of what to look for.

Source: Robert Robles

Traffic Source

Knowing where your visitors are coming from is important so you can focus more and more on improving the strategy to drive even more people from the same source. This is where you find out if your marketing strategy is successful in driving visitors to your site. If you spend time promoting your website on Twitter, you will see the amount of traffic coming from Twitter with these analytical tools. This information tells you the interests of your audience.

Keyword/Search Term

This is the best tool to find out the interests of your visitors. If people are coming from search engines, you should be able to track down the keywords they searched for before they reached your site. This piece of information is “key” because you can continue to focus on improving your content so you can drive more people to your website. This tells you which keywords are working for you and which aren’t. Knowing this information, allows you to focus on improving the ones that are not working for you.

Time on site/Bounce Rate/Loyalty

Finally this information tells you how much they love your site! So all of the above tools provide you with information as to who they are and where they come from. This information tells you if your website is sticky or not. If you find that the numbers low for these three key elements, you need to make adjustments to your website and the way you present your content. Lots of people may be visiting your site, but if they don’t stick around to read what you have to say, then you are wasting your time.

Content/Page Views

In order for you to distinguish between what is working and what is not working on your site, you need to dig into users interest a little bit further. This tool will tell you where the users are spending more time within your website. This tool will provide you with information that you can take advantage of to improve the content on your site. If you see users spending more time on one particular page within your site, you may want to consider changing the design and look of other pages OR work on improving contents on other pages. In other words, you can at least find out what sort of information on your site is drawing the most attention.

The above are just a few key features of analytical tools. You can use other features if you wish but the above features should be sufficient to let you know what is working on your site and what is not working. It will also tell you why people are coming to your site.

Get Data Directly From Your Audience using Polls, Surveys and Other Features

As your business grows, you may have the need to get to know your visitors even more. In order to get more details, you can implement the following tools.

Source: 6Smarketing

Polls

Polls are quick and are painless for people to complete. It usually takes a few minutes for someone to complete a polling question. Therefore this approach is easy to implement and probably will have more participants. You can choose how often you want to run a poll on your site to better understand your audience. You can plan out a polling strategy that spans our over a number of months. Then hit the users with a series of questions every week (or however you prefer) that will better inform you of who they are and what they are looking for once you’ve completed the full questionnaire.

Surveys

Surveys are sometimes difficult to pull through. In my experience, it is very difficult to get people to participate on a survey because it takes more time for them to complete a survey than a poll. However, a survey can be targeted and it will provide you with the best information once completed. You should plan out your survey so it will convince the user to complete it. You should try to keep it short in order to increase participation. You should also think about giving away a free product in return for them to complete a survey. This will motivate the visitors to participate.

On Site Features

With Web 2.0, it is very simple for you to create features that are embedded within your site that will allow user interaction. By following the user interaction, coupled with statistical analysis of content served, you can collect a lot of information about users. You can build features that will fulfill your need to improve the game. For example, if you want to know what sort of products and services will better serve your audience, you may want to build an interactive tool that asks for people to click on products they like. By collecting that data, you will know which product ranks to the top. Once you have that information, you can either create a product that you can sell on your site or signup for an affiliate program and offer that product on your site.

The intension of this article is to provide you with a quick glimpse of available tools to get to know your audience. The features and tools explained in this article are just to get you started. You can be creative and come up with many other features that will help you improve your marketing strategy and eventually allow you to make lots of money with your website.

Startups – How to identify Niche Markets

Guna — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:01:05 +0000

Before you start making money online, you need to be good at identifying niche markets or niche opportunities. It is true that the internet is creating wealth for a lot of people. What you read on many sales pages around the topic of “making money online” are somewhat true but without knowing your specific target audience, you will waste your time and money.

On my previous post, “what are you doing online today“, I’ve discussed with you about why people go online everyday. The Ruder Finn’s Intent Index broken down the reasons in seven different categories. The seven categories are Learn, Have Fun, Socialize, Express Yourself, Advocate, Do Business and Shop. They further broken down the main categories into sub categories and provided more details on why people go online. If you haven’t read my article, I would recommend that you read it before you proceed further.

What is a Niche Market?

A niche market is a subset of the mainstream market. The subset should be a distinguishable area of the overall market. This niche audience will have similar characteristics – i.e. same occupation, lifestyle, etc. Basically your audience will have the same interest therefore if you were to target a product of interest to them and market it well then you are bound to be successful.

The difference between mainstream marketing and niche marketing is that you know your customer and you know who and what kind of people will buy your product. If your product is targeted for the mainstream then you are just shooting the arrow in the air and hoping that it will hit something – that’s right, you are just counting on anyone to come and buy your product. Hence, if you are buying paid advertisement and you place your ad in the wrong section, you will again waste your money because you did not know that particular group of people will not buy your product. This is why a niche market is more cost effective and easy to do business with.

How to identify a Niche market?

Basically the secret is to identify a small market that is profitable. If you are going to start a blog site and you have interest in the environment then you may want to target other people with similar interest. You can further divide the environmental group into, renewable energy, saving the planet, no to coal and nuclear for energy productions, save the forestry, recycling, etc, etc… That means you are further narrowing the focus of your blog – which is a good thing because you can then become an expert on that topic and provide valuable content for your audience.

Therefore in order to identify a niche market, you have to first start off with some research. Above I’ve discussed about the 7 reasons why users go online. Your research should basically answer the following three questions:

what is the demand in a particular sector/niche?
who will be your competitors and what are they selling? and
how will you monetize in that particular sector/niche?

You can use the following free tools to help find the demand and the competition:

Start off with a Google search – run a simple Google search for some keywords within the niche market that you are researching. Analyze the results and the sites that come up on the first page. Then analyze all of the advertisers that uses Google Adwords program for the same keyword. You can find the advertisers on the right hand side of the Google search results page. Both of this information will give you some sense of what is selling and who is selling it.
Go to Amazon.com and search for the same keywords and do the same analysis.
Go to ClickBank.com or other affiliate network and search for the same keywords and complete similar analysis.

With the above research, you can see who is selling and what type of products are being sold in a specific industry. This will help you identify the need in that particular niche market.

Once you identify the niche market, you can then setup your website and focus on writing good content for the niche audience. Quality content with good advice will eventually attract the audience over to your site.

What are you doing online today?

Guna — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:04:23 +0000

Yesterday I came across a blog posting by Darren Rowse who has pointed out to a research study called Ruder Finn’s Intent Index. This is an ongoing research study that is aimed to understand the reason why people go online – their intent of logging in to the internet.

I found it very interesting and wanted to share it with you because like me, many of you are always thinking about starting a new online business. As I do, always looking for an opportunity to jump in – like a hungry warrior. I am sure you will find this information very useful for your next venture so you can target your business toward a particular niche.

Here is a screen shot of the latest results.

I am sure most of you have heard that information and knowledge is money. This study points out that 96% of the time a person go online to educate them self, 89% go online to do research and another 79% go online to keep informed (newspapers watch out!). These three categories fall under the main category of “Learn”. They study was divided into 7 different categories – ranking from highest priority to lowest.

- Learn

- Have Fun

- Socialize

- Express Yourself

- Advocate

- Do Business

- Shop

As I mentioned above, the highest ranking criteria is “Learn”. Information is power when it comes to online and this is why many bloggers are successful today – they are able to fulfill the needs of many people.

Also you can see that “pass time” was the most responded criteria – that everyone who responded to the survey said they go online to pass time. Well if you can come up with a startup to help people pass time, then you will do just fine. Also keep in mind, passing time for many adults is to read new things!

I am sure you as you think of new ventures, you will find this research information useful. Targeting your business to the right audience is important for success. You need to know where to find them and how to get them to your site. This sort of research is really priceless because it provides you with information as to who your customers should be but you still need to do your own research as to where you can find them. So when starting an online business, know who your customers are and know what sort of interest is out there for your product.

So what are you doing online today?

StartupBooster.com » startup tools

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Can Help you Track your Web and Online Success

Related Posts

Panabee: A Faster Way to Compare Information and Products

Related Posts

How to Get to Know Your Visitors: Data Collection and Analysis

Related Posts

Startups – How to identify Niche Markets

Related Posts

What are you doing online today?

Related Posts