Aspdotnetstorefront offers lots of great search engine optimization opportunities (including the ability to pretty quickly add Google Analytics tracking to the entire site) which is one of the primary reasons that Beacon selected it as our go-to eCommerce platform many years ago.

However, the resources to set up these items are scattered about a bit, so I thought I’d note specific links I find useful when discussing these topics with clients and/or developers. Hope they are helpful and please be sure to include your own suggestions in the comments section below!

Online User Manual

• Google Analytics and eCommerce Tracking– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-441-google-analytics-and-ecommerce-tracking.aspx (Version ML8) and http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-1035-google-analytics-and-ecommerce-tracking.aspx (MultiStore)
• Submitting your Site to Google Sitemaps (Versions ML8 and MultiStore)– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-436-submitting-your-site-to-google-sitemaps.aspx
• Submitting your Sitemap to Yahoo! (Versions ML8 and MultiStore)– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-437-submitting-your-sitemap-to-yahoo.aspx
• Search Engine Optimization– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-505-seo.aspx (Version ML8) and http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-1029-seo.aspx (MultiStore)
• A/B Testing with Google Checkout– http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-747-ab-testing-with-google-checkout.aspx

Forum posts

• SEO in ASPDNSF– http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.com/showthread.php?t=17028
• Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking– http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.com/showthread.php?t=16236

Blog posts

• The Token Analytics Article– http://blog.vortx.com/analytics/the-token-analytics-article/

• Analytics: What’s the Deal With All These Numbers? – http://blog.vortx.com/analytics/analytics-what%E2%80%99s-the-deal-with-all-these-numbers/

• Google Analytics and AspDotNetStorefront– http://blog.vortx.com/analytics/google-analytics-aspdotnetstorefront/

Analytics are great and very important for helping get your site a better ranking and being recognized. It’s also great for seeing what people are most interested on your site. Understanding the gathered information can help guide what’s most important on your site to fit the customer or client needs and maximize your site to its fullest extent.

There are analytics for tracking pages to see what page gets the most hits. Other analytics include tracking files such as PDFs, images, documents and other files you want tracked. Many sites also use onclick tracking for site web forms and specific links. For instance if you have a contest going on, you may want to track how many people are using the form or clicking on certain links in the contest to see what works best.

Using different aspects of analytics can improve your site value, increase revenue and make it stand out in search sites, such as Google and Bing. Our SEO team is partnered with Google to bring the best and up-to-date analytics setup that is available. Click here for more Google Analytics information.

Even as a child, I loved measuring things: shoe sizes, my height, the volume of non-regular polyhedroid solids—you name it! That’s why I get so stoked about Web Analytics…or maybe it’s the third cup of Joe I’m currently downing. Either way, they’re critical to your business success, analytics I mean.

You need to have some sort of analytics package on your Website. If you don’t, you’re basically driving a car with no dashboard and blacked-out windows in the middle of rush-hour. Amidst the screams of innocent bystanders, you may think to yourself: “Wouldn’t it be great if I had a clearer idea of where I was actually going…”

Quite.

So aside from appeasing your own burning curiosity, here are a few reasons why you should install Google Analytics today.

It’s Free, so Why Wait?

You may be thinking about starting a Website redesign, which is great! But don’t wait to install analytics. At the very least, you can add Google Analytics tracking code to your current site. It’s very simple to do, and depending on the complexity of your site, can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. Oh and by the way, it’s free to use.

I don’t advise waiting because you need to start establishing benchmarks now. Was a redesign really effective in bringing in more traffic? Without any analytics whatsoever, you won’t know. And don’t worry, you can easily transfer your tracking code to the new site.

It’s Like Having a GPS for Digital Marketing

Google Analytics is a great tool and measures a trunk-load of things from Website traffic, to what browsers people are using, what search engines they used, what sites they came in from, how long they spent on your site, what pages they viewed, how many of them were on mobile devices, where your visitors are located *breath in* how many visitors are new versus returning, and the list goes on.

With this easily accessible information, you can start answering questions like:

• How are most of my customers finding me?
• How effective was our Facebook campaign?
• What keywords are people using to find me?
• Where are my customers from?
• What are the most popular pages on my site?
• What devices are people using to view my site?

Knowing the answers can help you decide things like whether or not to get a mobile site, what platforms to develop an app for, develop content that excites and engages your customers, optimize your SEO strategy, and much more. If you do Pay-Per-Click advertising, you can also tie Google Analytics into your AdWords account to track your customer’s entire lifecycle from click-through to purchase.

Darn It Jim! I’m a Business Owner, Not a Math Nerd

Not to worry because we are! We have a whole department that can drill down the data and come up with some pretty killer recommendations. We offer some great consulting too.

But even if you don’t have a hefty marketing budget, keep in mind that you can access your site’s data at any time. So even if you’re six months or so away from doing anything with your marketing plan, get analytics now so you or anyone you hire can have the data they need to identify where you need improvement. The benefit far exceeds to cost to implement. And once you bring on the experts, they can make the proper configurations to get the most out of it. But you should at least start establishing a baseline performance level to improve upon, and don’t worry, you won’t have to stare at a bunch of spreadsheets to get a sense of how well your site is doing: Google puts it all in simple graphs, and I do love graphs.

Ever had an issue where you want to track unique events (or virtual pageviews) within Google Analytics from a template file?  For example, on an e-commerce site, you may have a series of product pages that use the same ‘add to cart’ button from either an include file or some kind of reusable wrapper.  You may want to track each ‘add to cart’ click as a unique event for that specific product, not just the product section as a whole.  Since the actual JavaScript snippet for event tracking can only be placed into these file once, this would seem to post a problem.

Here’s the Solution.  In this case, we are going to use the URL of each page to serve as a unique identifier for the event tracking.  If the URLs are not unique among the pages where you want the event tracked, there is a slightly more complicated solution that you can contact me on Twitter for.

In the <head> of the pages that you want tracked, place the following code snippet (or save this snippet as a JavaScript file and reference it):

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--
	function passID()
	{
		var fullURL = parent.document.URL;
                var uniqueID = fullURL.substring(fullURL.indexOf('XX'),
		fullURL.indexOf('XX')+3);
		return uniqueID;
	}

//-->

</SCRIPT>

This snippet will grab a 3 character unique ID out of the page URL on which it appears.  Simply replace the XX in the code above with the 2 characters that precede the unique ID in the URL.  If the ID is only one character long, then you have it.  If it is 2 characters, replace the “+3″ above with “+4″.  If it is 3 characters, replace the “+3″ with “+5″, and so forth.

Note: If XX appears multiple times in URL, you will want to make it longer than two characters to ensure that you get the identifier that you want.  Just make sure to adjust the ending portion of the substring accordingly.

Now that we have our unique ID, the rest of the event tracking is easy.  For your onClick or onSubmit event, the tracking code for GA usually appears as:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label']);

With ‘Category’, ‘Action’, and ‘Label’ each being strings that the coder enters to display in Analytics.

In this case, we’re just going to make one adjustment:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', passID()]);

‘Label’ has been replaced by passID(), the function we created in the <head> of the page for the uniqueID.  You could also replace ‘Category’ or ‘Action’ with the passID() function as well, but I think ‘Label’ makes the most sense as these pages are going to be similar in nature coming from the same template file.

That’s it, the unique ID will now show in the label section of GA.  Feel free to contact me with any questions and I’d love to hear about any case studies where you use this.

- EJW, follow me on twitter: @ejwestksu

Linking out sometimes gets the short shrift to conserve PageRank to internal links. But linking out can give your web page something that is important to the search engines. The appearance of a page’s quality, credibility and salience.

Two quotes that back up this claim:

“In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”  – Matt Cutts

“Writing descriptive anchor text, the clickable words in a link, is a useful signal to help search engines and users alike to better understand your content.” – Maile Ohye

So, in much the same way that the PageRank algorithm found it useful to score target pages from anchor text, the text in the  anchor text quite frequently relates to the description of the page content and is used to gather information about that page. More specifically, the anchor text is used in improving page categorization or classification of a page.

Is linking out a ranking factor? Some seo’s suggest it does not influence rankings. Others say yes.

But it appears that Google is giving the anchor text more credence than just the regular text in the content and not just for the pages that they link to.

In my opinion, web-page classification has become more sophisticated and faster since Panda.  Panda has improved the accuracy of  classifiers that use both anchor text and content on the page.

This applies to both internal and external links and influences the  co-training algorithm.

As a result, you may want to follow a few do’s and dont’s:

Do’s:

• Do create descriptive text links that are related to the page category
• Do link to pages of high authority on related topics with your keyphrases in the anchor text
• Do surround the text link with normal language

Don’ts:

• Don’t link out using a large number of unrelated links
• Don’t repeat the exact same keywords in the text links (use Google Sets instead)
• Don’t link out to a page that looks spammy

Well sadly, this is my last blog post at Beacon.  It’s been a great 10 weeks.  I really have enjoyed my time here.  Looking back, I can’t think of anything negative to say about my experience.  I want to take the chance to kind of do a recap of my time here.

When I came in the first day, I will admit that I was pretty nervous.  I hadn’t really had a lot of exposure to the kind of work that Beacon does so well.  I knew what most of the terms were from talking to a friend of mine who has been doing similar work.  However, the WMS team here helped me learn the skills I needed.  Everyone took time to show me how to do certain tasks and helped me with understanding the clients I worked on as well as what needed to be done for each client.  As the weeks have gone by, I have grown more confident in doing SEO work, managing social media campaigns, and working with PPC campaigns.  I know that I still have a lot to learn in these areas, but Beacon has given me a strong foundation on which to build.

I know that people traditionally think of internships as being filled with a lot of grunt work.  Getting coffee, running errands, doing tasks that no one else wants to do themselves.  That is far from the case here at Beacon.  As you can tell if you have been following my blog posts thus far, I have been an equal member of the WMS team.  I have shared the same responsibilities as everyone else.  I’ve done the same tasks for my clients as they did for their clients.  Often times, interns don’t get to offer advice and feedback during meetings as it is intended that they learn by watching.  Again, this is not the case at Beacon.  The WMS team meets weekly to brainstorm ideas for clients as well as share interesting articles or other helpful information and tools.  The leading of the meetings rotates each week and regardless of the fact that I am an intern, I led the meeting twice during my time here.  I also contributed equally with the team as much as possible.  I will admit that I often did sit back and listen during meetings.  I know that I do not have nearly the amount of knowledge or experience in this field, and as such I wanted to try to learn as much as possible when everyone was together sharing ideas.

Looking back, I have gained a lot of valuable experience.  There are several tasks and projects that I was able to work on and contribute to during the 10 weeks.  I can honestly say that anyone who is looking for an internship should consider Beacon.  The atmosphere, company culture, and employees all lend themselves to a great work environment.

Thank you to everyone here!  It’s been a great experience and I have learned a lot from you all.

Yesterday Google made a post about their new +1 project available here http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html and how sometimes these new features don’t really have much impact until you are able to view the data associated with those features.   Well that is what Google wants to make available to website marketers, managers, and owners by providing report data in two separate locations.  The first is in the Google Webmaster Tools account and the second is available in your Google Analytics account.

The first new report in Webmaster Tools is the Search Impact report.    Google provided an example report which you can see below.  The most interesting thing that catches my eye is their primary focus on CTR and how this new feature affects that.    I’ve been saying for some time that Google is placing a lot more weight on the CTR as a factor in determining your search engine position for an organic search.   You can find a relevant post here.   http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/google-seo-factors-2011/

This new report will allow you to measure the change in CTR associated with this feature.   The higher the number of +1s the higher the position, the higher the CTR, the higher quality.  It looks like this new feature is going to play a significant role in Google’s Organic ranking algorithm over the next several years.    For the longest time Google had to rely on other websites “casting their vote” for another website’s authority in the form of links.  This is what the Google algorithm was based on and what made it so successful.   It was also what spawned a new industry of link building and manipulation of the results.

Google appears to be shifting from a website’s vote of importance to more of a personal vote of authority by allowing users themselves to cast their vote in the form of their “+1″.   Their is no doubt that spammers will begin strategies to manipulate this but for the time being it appears that the web is evolving and understands that what people say is important is better than what a set of codes or website says is important.

So how do you make sure you take advantage of this and get a leg up on the competition?    Google provides the information you need in your Google Webmaster tools account.   Once you are logged in, you will need to click on the new Social link in the left navigation and then click on the “add +1 button” at the top of the reports pages.    It’s a simple set of codes that references the primary JS file and the other to actually display the button.

Once you have the +1 button installed and are using it to it’s full potential,  you will want to see how the users who have given you their vote of confidence interact on your website differently.   Do they bounce less, access more pages, convert higher, spend more money, or any of a number of questions you might have?   Well Google Analytics will help you answer these questions by automatically including these statistics in your UI with three new reports.  Their is a social engangement report that segments your social users similar to a custom segment, then there is a social sources and actions report which allows you to see who does what actions from which social network.   And then their is the Page report that allows you to see social metrics associated with pages so you can get specific with your data and tie it to specific content.

And as usual, you can create all kinds of drill down reports by adjusting the dimensions and other report features to create a custom view into your website user’s social behavior.    We don’t currently have a ton of data in these reports yet because they are so new so we are still playing around and seeing what we can discover.  There is surely more to come about this and I will post some updates to new posts as am sure this is going to be a hot topic for some time now.



School may be out for the summer, but it is back to the basics this week for our Beacon blog!  Since many of our customers are unfamiliar with all of the tracking capabilities Google Analytics provides, I thought it would be a good idea to differentiate the tracking custom variable options.

Custom variables are small tags you can put into your GA tracking codes that help you identify and define additional segments within your current website visitors you already review with GA.  This will allow you to get a closer look how certain, more specific groups of visitors are migrating through your website.    There are three custom variables you can define.  A page variable lets you set it at an event or page view.  A Session variable lasts each time the visitors is on your website.  And lastly, a visitor variable lets you watch that particular computer or phone over time. When creating your custom scripts to track your custom variables, you need to define the four key parameters of index, name, value, and opt_scope like this _setCustomVar (index, name, value, opt_scope).  Below is the explanation that Google provides for these specifics:

• index—The slot for the custom variable. Required. This is a number whose value can range from 1 – 5, inclusive. A custom variable should be placed in one slot only and not be re-used across different slots.
• name—The name for the custom variable. Required. This is a string that identifies the custom variable and appears in the top-level Custom Variables report of the Analytics reports.
• value—The value for the custom variable. Required. This is a string that is paired with a name. You can pair a number of values with a custom variable name. The value appears in the table list of the UI for a selected variable name. Typically, you will have two or more values for a given name. For example, you might define a custom variable name gender and supply male and female as two possible values.
• opt_scope—The scope for the custom variable. Optional. As described above, the scope defines the level of user engagement with your site. It is a number whose possible values are 1 (visitor-level), 2 (session-level), or 3 (page-level). When left undefined, the custom variable scope defaults to page-level interaction.

These variables allow you to see more in depth, but they also limit your scope of visitor engagement.  Let’s say you have a shoelace website, and you have been noticing that a lot of your customers are adding items to their cart, but the actual revenue numbers after the sales have been complete do not match the amount in the initial cart baskets.  We can use logic to figure out that people are removing items from their cart before checking out.  By placing a session level custom variable in the tracking code, you can then have the ability to know (not guess!) the number of sessions where your website visitors removed an item from their carts and learn from their session trends how they are making their decisions.

Despite the fast paced world of SEO, many decision makers and analysts have a hard time dealing with change.  It is my goal to help you feeling more comfortable with the updated version of GA (still in Beta mode), because whether you like it or not- the older version will be going away.

The newer version allows for users to create up to 20 custom dashboards, each with up to 12 widget sections to be used.  The four types of widget options are metric, timeline, pie chart, and table.

• Metric: Shows the value of a metric and an information graphic of that metric over the selected time period
• Timeline: A graph of any metric over time. You can also compare two metrics in the same graph.
• Pie Chart: Best suited for displaying breakdowns of a metric by a certain dimension. E.g., Visits by Browser Type.
• Table: Think of this as a mini-custom report. You can show one dimension with two metrics and up to 10 rows of data in a table.

The option to have 20 customizable dashboards each with their own ‘quick stats’ widget sections is extremely beneficial for agencies and organizations with multiple people looking at a multitude of metrics.  It will provide faster results when filtering and has a clean looking user interface.

Another cool feature getting a lot of positive press is their new interactivity goal tracking within the reporting feature.  This allows you to have GA track file downloads to improve your products. Charts of your statistics can be analyzed over time on graphs, and a simple toggle between multiple profiles cuts down on confusion when going through the site.

Embrace change, especially when the benefits are great my analytics friends!  You can currently switch back and forth from the current version to the new version of GA by clicking on the option displayed in the top right ‘quick clicks section.’

Need a lift in online sales or inbound leads? Now’s the time to get more from your website by taking advantage of this special introductory offer.  For only $1875/month we’ll put together a custom web marketing plan that will effectively reach your target clientele through multiple channels.

If you’re interested in learning more or want to speak with us, click here.