Recently we started implementing Google Analytics new eCommerce tracking code on some of our clients website, it’s greatly improved since the last version (which only allowed you to see average sales figures) and tracks sales figures such as:
where those sales came from (a search engine, directly typed in, link on another website etc)
top selling products by both revenue and number of items
average order value
conversion rate (as a % of visitors)
E.g. sample sales graphs:
These new eCommerce stats are automatically emailed to each client every month along with regular website stats.
Over the years we have developed a fairly standard footer which has been tried and tested to perfectly suit most of our clients needs.
What’s in a footer you might ask? As you can see below, quite a lot!
‘Copyright 2010 XXX’ identifies our client as the copyright holder of all materials on the website
Copyright year automatically updates each year
Privacy Policy links to the Privacy Policy page which has clear and relevant information on storing of peoples details, website content & mistakes, copyright and more. Our clients can update this page to suit their purposes in the Extras > Privacy Policy area of the CMS Admin.
E.g. http://www.evolvedwebsites.com.au/extras/privacy-policy/p/8
‘Page updated 21 July 2010′ shows your visitors how often the website is updated. Each page automatically shows the correct date when it was last updated in the Admin.
We also send this to Google and the visitors Browser to save time and resources so they can ‘cache’ information until the date on a page changes.
‘valid HTML | CSS by Evolved Websites‘ does 2 things, it shows that the website has been built to proper web standards (valid HTML and CSS) and provides a link to our website if anyone is curious who built such a great site
Here are a few more Footers from our clients websites, they all vary slightly, but all fulfil the same purpose;
We’ve been using a really useful tool from Google to track links in our email signatures, this gives us a great insight into how many people actually click on those little ‘read more’ links we have on all outgoing emails.
OUR BLOG: Catch A Crab have just completed translating their entire website into Japanese and Korean, that’s 5 languages in total now! All using the Evolved CMS, read more…“
Step 4: Watch the results in Google Analytics
Google Analytics then shows you results under the Traffic Sources link, with ‘email_signature’ being tracked as its own source just like its own referral or search engine:
We recently took the sound off Byron Bamboo‘s website as we suspected is was putting visitors off…
I’ve compared stats to the week before we took off the sound, and the week after to see if we can find any improvements in the way people use your website
Here are the figures (green line is with sound, blue line is without sound):
In a nutshell:
Visitors are up20%, but I wouldn’t put this down to the sound…
Bounce Rate is up 3%, not what I expected.
This means 3% more people are leaving your site than the week before… FYI a normal bounce rate is 40-60%. Read more on bounce rates here.
Average Time on Site is up 2.5%
Pages per Visit a user will read is down 17%
In summary, so far (1 week only) having sound on or off makes no difference to your website visitors.
(thanks to Byron Bamboo for sharing their stats with everyone)
PS: we will post an update here at the 1 month mark, to see if we can pick any other trends over a longer timeframe…
This is a great way to quickly check how two websites stack up speed-wise, which can help us (or you) to improve website speeds by compressing Javascript, CSS files and reducing number of requests on a website.
We make a big effort with regards to speed on our websites, the quicker they load the more visitors interact with them, Google gives them a better ranking and it makes for a much nicer experience all round.
Of our 100 odd clients using Google Analytics, Catch A Crab has the best bounce rate of them all (at a wonderful 24%).
If you are wondering why this matters, the bounce rate is a good measure of how interesting your website is to visitors. If someone leaves your website immediately after visiting just one page, this is considered a ‘bounce’.
The lower your bounce rate, the better, and 24% is a fantastic achievement for Catch A Crab, who have worked hard at keeping their website up-to-date regularly, adding new languages (first English, then Chinese and soon Japanese & Korean) and attracting the right visitors who are genuinely interested in their product.
Average bounce rates vary between 40%-60% for most websites, Google Analytic’s top man Avinash Kaushik gets very excited indeed about a bounce rate of 32% (see video below).
Google describes the bounce rate as:
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”
If you’ve heard of Google Docs (like Microsoft Word, but free and online) but haven’t had a go at it yet, Google have just released a nice free demo which you can try out without a google address to login.
Evolved Websites are using Google Docs (Gdocs) for all of our business procedures, as dry and boring as that sounds, using Gdocs has been wonderful as all our team have access to the same document, in real time. We can even chat while both making changes to the document!
Some other useful features:
its free
works on any computer, even offline
choose who to share the document with, or share an entire folder
create word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, forms & drawing documents
revision history, see who made what change, and revert back to an older version if needed
I wouldn’t recommend using Gdocs yet for business stationery, the layout and styling is much too basic.
Google will change its results based on what you have clicked on, and how many times you have clicked, especially if you are logged in to Gmail or another Google service while searching Google.
Google is trying to help you find the results you want, or at least what it thinks you want. Fine for general searching, unless you are checking your website results!
To get un-biased results, you need to turn off cookies in your browser, and logout of Gmail. As this is probably quite inconvenient, I suggest using a second browser such as Opera (free, www.opera.com) and make sure it removes all cookies when closing the browser.
This will give you clean, un-biased results in Google for checking your website position.
Finding out who owns a domain name, which email is listed as the contact and what company its registered under is pretty dry, boring stuff, all the more reason to make it nice and simple!
