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Google Analytics offers a huge amount of data, and an almost endless array of options for analyzing that data. That's a great thing for data-driven marketers such as ourselves, but for many businesses, that can be overwhelming and is frankly more information than they will ever need. There are a handful of critically important metrics that every business should be reviewing to identify the overall health of their website, and our recent broadcast focused on those.

I over heard a couple of guys chatting about the never ending battle of the Content Management Systems and thought I'd make a quick post. I wonder does it ultimately boil down to this, or is there more to it than meets the eye?

Going through some of the finer points in Google Analytics - Conversion University caused me to ask "why don't more people embrace the richness of web analytics data?" I think about some of our clients and many people I run in to who are struggling to be effective marketers and then I look at the power of the data you can get from Google Analytics. I just shake my head in amazement that more aren't embracing the data.

Studies have shown that those who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them. Maybe it's because something written down will nag at you more - keeping it top of mind. But also likely is how establishing a goal - or end objective - gives what you do a sense of purpose. Having something clearly defined and written out holds you accountable. "Are we achieving this?" Yes or No. "If we're not achieving this yet, are we doing something to get us closer to achieving it?" Yes or No. Answering "No" twice means we're failing. Failing to achieve and failing to do better.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc. Twitter is simply a waste of valuable time - at least that's what I used to think. Chris Leone, our resident Social Media Mad man, battered on me for long enough trying to convince me that Twitter was more than just a way of skipping my work duties and that there is some genuine value to investing time therein.

I was looking around for a nifty way of examining load issues on clients sites. I wanted some way of quickly pin pointing which images/files were causing the issue (or the delay was even being caused by site file sizes in the first place!). I discovered a cool little site called Pingdom that did the job. Simply enter a URL and even check the save URL box. Pingdom drills down through your file load times and display in KB each different component of the page. It also gives you an outline summary of basic info about the site, how many images, style sheets, plugin, redirects, external objects etc. Simple and neat it does what I needed! But Pingdom is more than just that, it is also an uptime and performance monitoring system. The system lets you know if you site has gone down, gives you uptime reports, response time reports and connects nicely to Twitter, SMS and Email to alert you if troubles a-brewing.

Clients often are confused about the roles served by domain name registrars and website hosting providers. Both are necessary components in having a live website, and failing to keep active accounts at both can have unfortunate consequences such as having a website go offline, email services halted, or even losing a domain name to another party.

We use BaseCamp from 37signals for general work time tracking, including project development. Over time there can be a large amount of data accumulated, and there is a nifty way it can be consolidated and used for project analysis. In essence, export the time data out of BaseCamp and use the power of Excel to make summaries and graphs. In this way, you can easily see items such as:

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

Many (and by now I HOPE most) sites have some form of web analytics implemented; be it Clicktale, Webtrends, Yahoo, or the ever popular Google Analytics. Many business owners or internal marketers speak of their web analytics like a grandmother speaks of her new computer: "It's looks complicated. What do I do with it?" For something that's free and relatively easy to install, it's no wonder so many have it. The reality is most don't harness its true power, but only scratch the surface - the equivalent of using your brand new Macbook Pro to only check Facebook.