Month: August 2013

Why should you use Annotations in Google Analytics?

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

Google Analytics is a tool which often amazes me. It contains so many features packed into it that it would take years simply to understand and appreciate all of them! One such feature which I do not see being used as much as it should be is the Annotations tool within Google Analytics.

What are Annotations?

Annotations in Google Analytics

Annotations are comments which you can put for a particular date. So in this picture above, I have indicated at what dates did I publish a post on my blog. I have been busy in the months of April and June!

You can see the annotations bar in the Audience Overview of your Google Analytics profile, there is a small expandable div which you need to click on first.

The thing with Annotations like most of the Google Analytics features is that in order to retain flexibility, it is an open framework. Meaning you can use it as you see fit. Which could be one reason why its not used as often as it should be!

Why should you use Annotations?

Annotations are a simple way to Attribute certain action that you did to a rise in traffic.

Annotations in Google Analytics Peak

In the figure above, there are two trends which I want to explain using annotations.

  1. One is a clear spike in traffic which fetched me around 350 hits in a day. This I am attributing to commenting on a popular gaming blog with my link (I cross referenced that with the referral traffic coming to that site and they match)
  2. The other is an increase in the site traffic, this I am attributing to the increased frequency of posts that I am publishing on this blog

So, How does one use Annotations?

Well there are multiple scenarios how you could use annotations –

  • If you are a team working together on a site, then you can decide on a format for annotations such as Dev. Post, SEM. Having this communicated across the team helps ensure that too many annotations do not clutter your dashboard and confuse you or your team members.
  • If you are a blogger like me, then simply noting the time of the day you blog will help you maintain some regularity on the blog, with a clear sight on how this is impacting your traffic.
  • If you are a marketing manager of a site and handle additional campaigns, say a product launch or a TV Commercial, then you can correlate the increase in traffic and goals on the site to that particular campaign. Remember the first step in attribution is measurement!
  • Cyclicality and Seasonality can be tracked and predicted in the future using annotations. A simple example of this in action is when I had written about the Sunday Dip.

Enough of ideas on how one can use annotations, did you use annotations before and how did you use them?

How to setup your Google Authorship correctly

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I was intending to write this post for some time now, however this brilliant infographic by Mervik Haums was available and its a great resource of tips of getting your Google+ Authorship setup.

Google Authorship Checklist

To put this in a nutshell,

  1. Ensure you have put your best DP on your Google+ profile
  2. In the post you are writing, ensure that your name is displayed as the anchor text with a link pointing to your Author Profile with rel=author
  3. In your Author Profile, have a link to your Google+ profile with rel=me

I did this the earlier day for Good Home Advisor, and it worked within the next couple of days.

PS – Google Authorship has been nerfed by Google and the data is no longer available. Just one more example in the SEO industry when everyone starts abusing a particular rule, Google nerfs it!

Why hitcounters are a waste of script?

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A simple search on Google about hitcounters would lead you to literally hundreds of different sites which offer pretty looking widgets which display a counter in your site. The question is do you think that the number really means anything to you?

What are hitcounters?

hitcounterHitcounters are simple scripts solely created for measuring one thing only. The number of hits you are getting on the site. They are included in the HTML script so that when your site loads, the hitcounter records this as an increment to the total hits on your website. Yes, if you are interested in web analytics, hitcounters are a cumulative measure of pageviews. Thats it.

There used to be a time when web analytics was based purely on parsing server log files and crunching them into numbers. During this time having a hitcounter had a great value (since you would not be required to do the heavy lifting of understanding which page had which files and then parsing the server log). This is the era when these hitcounters really flourished … in fact in the pre Google Analytics days even I had tried a couple of these hitcounters. That’s around a decade back and things have changed.

So what has changed about hitcounters?

With the onset of free web analytics programs such as Google Analytics, Clicky, Mixpanel, you can measure far many things than a simple pageviews metric. In fact the pageviews metric these days is almost meaningless. Hitcounters these days serve only as a source of eye candy on the site … an eye candy which is a sidebar/footer widget at the best or an eyesore at the worst.

There is yet a diminishing population of website owners who still brag about this metric and hence go ahead to put this script on their HTML.

Why do I have against hitcounters?

I do not have any personal vendetta against any hitcounter script. However, think about it … you are adding a script to your page … this impacts your page loading speed. If this is scripted correctly, then hopefully it will not add to your web page loading speeds … if this some random script you have found on the internet, then it might as well be a backdoor for a malware.

A cumulative number is just one data point, instead if you tracked how this is growing, then you could eek out some insights from this number. What about tracking how a user is visiting your site across multiple visits? Naah … this functionality is simply not there in hitcounters! What about e-commerce tracking? Well … not there either. As I said before, it only counts pageviews and shows it in a styled manner. That’s it.

In short, at best it increases your web page loading times. Is that silly looking counter then really worth the cost you are incurring?

My answer is a resounding NO.

I have a hitcounter on my site!

Well there are two approaches you can take. The first is to discount what I have said in my post and go ahead on that dark road.

The Dark Road - Matrix

If you go down that road, forget you ever read this post and live happily in the land where everyone counts the hits on their websites.

The best part about a cumulative metric is that it will never dip!

The other road from here is the road towards enlightenment, towards data and correct measurements. Towards Google Analytics and other tools which will help you measure each and every aspect of your site’s visitors. Here’s what you need to do to take this path –

  1. Remove that hitcounter widget from your site
  2. Register for a Google Account and go to the Google Analytics site
  3. Register your site on GA
  4. Include this code in your site’s template
  5. Start measuring!

In this journey you will come across many hurdles and questions, however on this road you will find other travellers who will have mastered those hurdles and they will be more than happy to help. Have fun and enjoy developing a richer understanding of web analytics!

Go Google+ for higher SERPs on Google

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

Once you launch a site, the work is not done … in fact the work of a webmaster has just begun! One clear metric for the success of your site (especially early on) is site traffic. Over a period of time as your site matures and you get a better sense of what drives your site, you will tend to discard this metric, but initially it is always traffic.

Search as a major component of Traffic

Traffic Split for kidakaka.com
Screenshot from Google Analytics on the traffic source split. 82% search, 14% direct and 4% referral (I have to drive this up!!)

One good component of traffic is search, traffic that comes searching for content relevant to your subject. Yes! There are people out there who are actively searching for things about which you want to write!! Right from narrow niches such as Pathare Prabhu Recipes to broad gulches such as Being Awesome in Excel.

For content rich websites, Search is a major component contributing to the site’s traffic. For example, 70% of my site’s traffic comes from Google Search! This is actually higher than what I wanted it to be and I try to bring it down by driving traffic via other sources, however I will always want a good fat 40-50% traffic coming to my site via search.

In fact when I started working on my site on a regular basis around 6 months back (as part of my new year resolution), I hardly realized that it would make such a big difference to the traffic split.

How to acquire Organic traffic?

There are a lot of agencies out there who promise that they will ensure that you would start ranking on your set of keywords. Here’s a starter for post for those who want to get into SEO, go read this and stop paying agencies a lot of money for barely scratching the surface.

If you want to acquire organic traffic, then write good content … write about things that move you, about things which you are passionate about. Write from the heart, and forget about those grammatical mistakes. If you have a friend who is a grammar nazi, get him/her to review your post later on.

Ranking that Content higher on Google

So now that you have a stream of content on your site, how to ensure that people who are searching for your subject matter actually end up finding your website?

This is where your friends and social circle comes in!

Sharing your content with friends and getting them like/+1 the content is a social signal that search engines read. This acts like a testimonial for your site in the eyes of the search engine.

See this for yourself, take one article on your site and like this on Google+. Then search for this article via your friend’s Google id … note the before +1 Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) and the after SERP.

Google+, you have my attention

Here is a list of things that you need to get setup on with Google+ –

  • Setup Authorship on Google – This will link your Google+ profile to the content you create. It also ensures that your Google+ profile pic is displayed besides the content you write and this gets shown when someone is searching for the content that you have written. Stats provided by Google on this suggest that linking Authorship will get you a 30% boost in your organic click-through rates Authorship_of_Kidakaka
  • Be active on Google+ – Make this a part of your daily routine. Google+ is good for content discovery, try and meet new people on Google+, focus on increasing the number of people who are in your circles and who have you in their circles. This will increase the visibility of your content on Google for at least those people. In case if you have had some interaction with them, then chances are they would want to read what you have to say about the subject that they are currently searching!
  • Get those Google+ Shares – To initially start off, ask your friends to share your site on Google+. This works. It does wear down on your personal equity, but what are friends for if not to help you out :-D

Don’t simply take my word for this. Even Moz (erstwhile SEOMoz) says that there is correlation between Google +1s and Higher SERPs. In layman’s terms what this means is that the more +1s on Google+ your article gets, the higher will it rank on Google.

So get on this network and start using Google+! Instead of wasting time liking lolcats on Facebook, try and use your spare time

WordPress Security Plug-ins

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

I had earlier written about the top 5 Plug-ins that I use with WordPress, and I realized that I had not talked about any Security Plug-ins!!

So let me share this out in the open with all of you, I like all the other webmasters value security … very, very much. Why? Well, it keeps my mind at ease knowing that my site is a bit secure from all the malicious entities and bots out there looking to spam my site.

Having said that puts my mind at ease, I do use a security plug-in with my blog (you are most welcome to check – Do not take this as an open invitation and consent to do intrusion on the site though !!).

This is a beautiful visualization that I found on the interwebs, and thought that I might re-share this with all of you. In case if you do not use a WordPress Security plug-in, please do so at the earliest! In case if you do, check the below infographic to see whether your plug-in makes the top 10!

WordPress Security Plugins

Deep Pooja: The House Cleaning

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Please do not confuse this with Diwali, Deep Pooja is an esoteric ritual celebrated by Maharashtrians. This day also coincides with the gastronomic Gatari as well. As we all know what follows Gatari is a month of diet control (much like Lint for Christians or Ramzan for Muslims), where we try and avoid eating non-vegetarian food.

So why take this diet?

There are multiple reasons why this diet is part of annual ritual for many Maharashtrians.

  • It helps cleanse your system with a month of vegetarian diet
  • That one month coincides with the breeding season of the fish, thus giving nature time to replenish the resources that we consume in a year
  • It also gives you a reason to celebrate and eat, drink and be merry

This will go on till Ganesh Chaturthi, post which the month long fast is broken.

What is Deep Pooja?

Deep Pooja is the cue to the community to do house cleaning of all the lamps in the household. In the days before electricity, the light provided after sunset was using oil lamps. The bigger and richer the household, the more lamps they used. Deep Pooja was the day when all the lamps in the household were cleaned of all the grime and oil residue, and thanked by the household for providing them with light.

Of course, with every festival such as this, there is specific Pathare Prabhu cuisine such as Umbar.

So do we thank Electrical Switches and Tubelights now?

Nope. At this point of time, pragmatism kicks in. Yet, all the lamps in the household are cleaned and made ready for their use (Ganpati, Diwali). We are yet to start thanking Electricity and service providers (yes, when I thank Reliance, that’d be the day!!). However, we still do house cleaning during this time and that is what this day should represent.