What’s a good bounce rate for my web site? I get that kind of question a lot. What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate? A ‘good’ time on site? The answer, I’m afraid, is: Better than your current bounce rate. Better than your current time on site. In web analytics, it’s best to focus on your own [...]

I’m on #seochat tonight. I’m super-excited about it, so I’ve been scribbling notes for anticipated questions. The topic, which I’ve actually talked about before, is SEO analytics. For me, there are five crucial SEO metrics. If you don’t have these, hang it up: Key phrase diversity. The number of unique phrases driving traffic to your [...]

I just finished writing The Fat Free Guide to Google Analytics. You should buy it. Now would be good. It’s chock-full of analytical goodness, including info on: Calculating the value of one visitor to your web site; Setting up goals in Google Analytics; Interpreting analytics data. I worked hard to make this a super-practical, easy-to-apply [...]

I’m scrambling to complete the SEO training portion of the Fat Free Guide for release tomorrow. In the mean time, here’s a video that’s going to be attached to the ‘Analytics 101′ lesson: An overview of four basic SEO metrics, what they mean, and how to track them in Google Analytics. Related stuff Sign up [...]

This is an updated version of a Google Analytics Tutorial I did waaaay back in 2007 or so. You know, back in the days when the American Dollar could still buy a loaf of bread in Canada. I cover unique visitors, pageviews and engagement stats, as well as referring traffic data. This new version uses [...]

Social media leads to dispersed messaging. In as little as an hour, you can end up sending out a few Tweets, hitting Facebook with updates, writing a blog post and submitting to Behance. Plus, as folks pass those links around, they may use their own URL shorteners, removing any tracking codes you’ve added. The bastards. [...]

Sooner or later, if you're a real internet marketing nerd, you're going to have to learn to read a web server log file. Sorry, but it's true. There's data in there that you simply cannot get anywhere else.  Earlier this week, I wrote about using grep to survey web server log files for SEO-related data. [...]

It’s not just you. Google Analytics is timing out, running slowly and generally being a nightmare this morning. There are widespread reports from Europe to the US that Google Analytics’ reporting interface is loading slowly. I haven’t even been able to load a report. Just making sure you know you’re not going crazy. It doesn’t [...]

The biggest mistake I see SEO’s make: They focus on keywords first and foremost, ignoring opportunities that exist right in their own analytics data. This is my presentation from SMX West 2010, where I talk about analytics strategies for SEO. It’ll help you get out of the keyword abyss. I added text so that it [...]

This post is somewhat advanced – I geek out quite a bit. If you don’t know what a server log file is, read about that, first, then come back. Yesterday I explained why, in internet marketing, attribution is a mind-sucking pain in the ass. Not very satisfying, I know, because all I said was “This [...]