No internet marketing blog would be complete without an Google Analytics rant.

It annoys the heck out of me!!

I know it’s very powerful, it can help you analyze your website and see where people are abandoning sales, etc.

But to me, Google Analytics is like the genius who can do complex calculus but can’t add 2 + 2.

Here’s what I mean: GA is all about telling you what percentage of visitors did X, how many went to Y, etc. but it can’t give you any specifics. It can answer ‘how many’ but not ‘which ones.’

For example, I set up a goal of reaching the sale confirmation page on my site.

I could see that I got 3 sales over a month. Great!! So I sat down with Google Analytics to try to figure out where these people came from so I could beef up that source.

To me, this seems like an obvious piece of information someone would want. But do you think there’s an easy way to get that info out of Google Analytics? Nope!

None of the goal conversion reports have a button or option for Show Source. Instead you have to try to guess where the visitor came from and then run the report from that angle.

Hmm, I thought, maybe they came from an organic search. So I went into Keyword report. Ok, so I could see that two of the keywords it showed me have a goal conversion.

But what about the remaining sale? Did it come from PPC? Nope. Referrals? Nope. You see the problem here. Even though GA knows this info, it doesn’t just tell you. You have to guess correctly to find out for sure.

At first I thought I was just being thick. I am after all a very newbie GA user. But after searching the web, I found a lot of people who asked this same question, how to relate goal conversion with source. And there was never an answer.

The closest I could get is to do a custom report and show the metric of Goal 1 Completion and the Dimension of Traffic Sources/Source. Aha, this shows me that 1 came from Google, 1 from MSN, and 1 from a website where I have a banner ad.

To see the keywords I have to add a submetric of Keyword, which means that for the Google and MSN results I have to drill down to see the keyword.

Again, this is such an obvious piece of data that people would want to see. Why goes Google Analytics make us jump through hoops to get it?

Another thing I was trying to do (ok, this is a little complex) was to assign a unique id to each visitor and then use GA to get some info related to that number.

Why would anyone want to do that? Because I was passing that number to my affiliate network and showing it on commission reports.

In other words, I knew that #2839 bought something from a vendor which gave me $22.50 in commissions but I wanted to know more about that person. What keyword did they search for? What browser did they use? What time of day did they come to my site?

I figured out how to do the hardest part of this, or so I thought: how to set Google Analytics’ User Defined Variable to be a unique number for that visitor. I thought the easy part was going to be running reports. But I was wrong. No such GA report would show me the value I set along with any source info.

As a matter of fact, I got so excited when I first discovered this new Custom Report feature (still in Beta). I thought that at last I’m going to be able to create reports with exactly the columns I want!

Alas, no, that would be too obvious. The best you can do is select a ‘dimension’ and a ‘metric’ to show, which means you can see a single piece of information for a visitor, but if you want any thing else, that would be a submetric that you drill down for.

I could see a list of all the ids for the visitors, but I had to drill down to see keywords. But you can’t export all the drill down detail, you can only export what you see on your screen at one time.

Here’s another complaint: since I have Analytic tracking code on every single page of my site, don’t you think GA would be able to show me all the pages someone visited? Why can’t I choose a single visitor (such as one of the people who reached goal 1) and see a trail of all my web pages he went to?

Google Analytics has all this info. Why can’t I see it?

So my conclusion is that Google Analytics is great for big corporations who want to know generalities and don’t have any inclination to get involved with specifics. But for me, it’s frustrating that it can’t tell me some really basic and obvious data on my visitors.

But it is free, which I why I use it. If I ever make money on internet marketing, I’ll get an analytics tool that is a little more user-friendly. I’ve heard good things about Hypertracker.

Posted by susb8383 under Google Analytics | 1 Comment »

So far I’ve been following the AffiloBlueprint instructions pretty closely. The only thing I did differently was making my content be posts instead of page in Wordpress. I’ve been watching the videos in order and trying to do at least some of the homework assignments.

Weeks 1 - 5 were all about setting up your website; picking a niche and keywords, putting content up, and optimizing your pages to convert. Done that.

Week 7 is about newsletters and I’ll have to put this off until I can afford an AWeber account. (By the way, again he’s right on the money with his recommendations. I did a very thorough review of some of the more popular auto responders and AWeber came out the clear winner).

Weeks 6 and 8 are about getting organic traffic via backlinks and web 2.0 techniques. I’ve decided to skip this for now and jump right ahead to week 9: advanced tweaking of your website and week 10 - 12: PPC.

Why am I doing this instead of following the order of the lessons exactly?

One of the marketing experts I’ve followed pretty closely is Perry Marshall. If you ever get on his email list, try to attend any free teleseminar he offers; they’re great.

One story he tells is an excellent analogy to building a website. I’ll summarize:

At the same time the Wright brothers were trying to be the first men to fly, Samuel Pierpont Langley was attempting the same. He was in the limelight with tons of funding and press coverage while they were lowly bicycle mechanics operating on a shoestring budget.

Langley was convinced he had finally done it and he invited all the papers to witness the historic event. As they watched, his magnificent contraption rose majestically up in the air and…crashed into the Potomac River. It was a major embarrassment.

Meanwhile the Wright brothers did successfully build the first flying machine that could hold a person, as we all know.

Langley’s approach which resulted in failure and Orville and Wilbur’s that achieved success had a very, very important difference that can be related to creating a website.

Langley thought that if he built a big enough engine, he could make anything fly. He spent a lot of money to have an enormous engine constructed.

The Wright brothers instead concentrated on the plane, not the engine. They studied birds and even built the first wind tunnel. After creating a glider that would fly just by running down a hill with it, popping on a relatively small engine easily gave it enough power to carry a man.

So how does this relate to website development?

The website is the plane and traffic is the engine.

Perry states (and I totally agree) that the first thing you should do is build a website that can fly, i.e. convert. You tweak and test and tweak and test so that your website converts with a small amount of traffic. Then you add on the engine (traffic) after you’ve already got a big conversion rate, resulting in larger and larger profits.

If you do it the other way around and concentrate on getting traffic before you have a converting website, you’ll get lots of people who come to your site and then leave without buying anything. I’d rather get 10 visitors a day where 1 visitor buys than get 1,000 visitors a day where nobody buys.

So based on this approach, I’m going to concentrate on getting my website to convert with a small amount of traffic first from PPC. Then once I hone that, I’ll add on the backlinks and the web 2.0 to get more people to it.

Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »

Well, I’ve sort of hit a wall in my homework assignments.

I was cruising right along until I got to the part about creating content. Writing has always been my least favorite thing (except in elementary school, when all my teachers said I was a great writer. Go figure!)

I had been very diligent in writing a new article every day and setting up the pages as was outlined in the Affiloblueprint videos.

I got through about eight articles that way. But they were all either product reviews that I could write based on the sales page and other review sites, or articles for beginners in the niche.

So now I’m faced with coming up with content that is neither.

Mark recommends hiring an elancer to ghost write, but I’ve been reluctant to do this because, well, I’m pretty broke.

So as a result, my adding content has ceased.

I jumped ahead to the PPC videos (skipped the homework for weeks 6, 7, 8, and 9) but he starts out that lesson by saying why he waited until the end to talk about PPC. Why it’s much better to have your site all set up first. Sigh…

Well, I guess if I’m really going to give this a fair review, I should follow the steps and do the homework in order.

So I guess I’m off to elancer for the first time.

Incidentally, elancer is probably a good place to find niches in the first place. Just look at the other jobs that people are outsourcing in the Ghost Writing category.

Later….

Well I bit the bullet and posted a job on elance.com for someone to write me 5 articles in my niche. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be; they really walk you through every step.

But after I did this, I found an easier way.

In Mark’s training video he mentioned what elancer he selected when he was looking for someone to write his articles. So even though I had already posted my job on elance, I found their website.

The website itself was good, I though. A lot of big, clear graphics and good use of white space. And their per-article price for ghost writing was probably cheaper than I’d end up paying at elancer.

But their ecommerce piece was a little poor. Instead of having their own merchant account, their Add to Cart button goes right to Paypal. So there’s nowhere to put in details of what you want to hire them for before you give them money.

Also most of their services had no price listed. The only way to see the price was to add it to the cart and see what Paypal was charging.

So I sent them an email asking them a couple of things, half expecting to never hear from them (another post I found online said that someone had been trying to email them for months, but that was written in February).

Lo and behold, the owner emailed me back within minutes.

I decided to give them a try and I paid for them to write me 5 articles. According to the owner, the turnaround should be 2 days. And their price is $12.00 per 500-word article.

I’ll post the website of the company a little later…

I’ll also mention that I decided to go with my original instincts and jump right to PPC before completing the other lessons (getting backlinks, Web 2.0, newsletter, etc.).

Why? Because of Perry Marshall’s Wright Brothers story.

But this post is already too long….

Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »