That’s right, Goo Goo over Google Analytics, and excuse me for the lack of better phrases, was definitely on point. The event hosted by Social Media Club – Los Angeles was streamed live to over 46,746 people (108,807 total views) on TechZulu.
Update: Watch Video Below!
Below is information on what we learned. Check back on Monday to see the video of the event in its entirety.
1. It’s easy, 5-minutes easy, to setup Google Analytics – As John Shiple mentioned…it’s easier than going to your local café and ordering coffee. Many content management sites such as WordPress and Blogger make it so easy to track the behavior of your visitors by allowing you to copy + paste a tracking code in the headers or footers of your site. You’ll be collecting analytics data in no time!
2. Having the Right Goals in Mind – Many people focus their energy towards driving large volumes of traffic to their site, which is great, but what you do with that traffic is even more important. Is your bounce rate high? Are you experiencing a drop-off on certain pages? Google Analytics tracks all that. By making your conversion goals more deliberate and spelled out such as “collect an email”, “add an item to shopping cart”, “spend X dollars to buy my product”, and “confirm sale” , you greatly improve your metrics and are more enabled to make more informed decisions to improve your company’s online marketing campaign and overall bottom line.
3. Tracking Inbound Traffic – Learning where your traffic came from and how they got there is just as important as what they do once on your site. So make sure you code your links to be human-readable. Use us for example; we over here at Highly Relevant like to comment often on interesting social media blogs found on Mashable as well as other blogs regarding online reputation management. In this case, of commenting on Mashable we would use the http://www.highlyrelevant.com/social-media-marketing.html as s opposed to http://www.highlyrelevant.com/online-reputation-management.html.
This helps online users on Mashable know we are part of the social media community plus it also helps us determine where most of our traffic is coming from – social media blogs or online reputation management blogs.
4. Need Help? Don’t fret. GA help is Everywhere – The panel members provided the following resources:
- Avinash Kaushik – the GURU of Google Analytics has a blog on the subject: Click Here.
- Google’s Conversion University has a bunch of training guides. Here’s the link: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/
- Google Analytics works within Facebook. See this link: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/
5. Creating Funnels –Funnels are great (and illustrative) tools for building the steps towards your company’s goal. They also show you how to identify your user drop-off rate at each step. Essentially, if there’s drop-off for every step you will want to limit and simplify the number of then in order to successfully convert into sales.
A special shout-out to the very informative speakers– You guys were great!
Check them out on twitter to see what other projects they are working or if you have any questions.
Serena (Host): @serena
Erica: @SnowboardWomen
Alex: @aybecker
Andrew:@andrewhahn
John: @FreelanceCTO
Are you finding yourself really confused by Analytics?
Are your tweets not helping your company’s bottom line?
Fortunately, Alex Becker, Co-Founder & President of Highly Relevant and panel member of Social Media Club Los Angeles, along with a few of his friends want to help you take your online media strategy to new levels.
Join us on Tuesday, February 23rd from 7-9:30 pm as we jump head-first into one of easiest ways to measure online social media efforts—yup, Google Analytics.
Location: Mahalo (902 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, CA)
Featured Speakers Include:
John Shiple, CTO of Ultralive
Known within the industry as General John Shiple is the founder of Startup Army and one of L.A.’s most sought after CTOs. He’s been making huge waves in the internet world since its birth. In 1994, he became a founding member of HotWired’s engineering team – the first commercial magazine website on the internet. He’s had his hands in many other big projects such as redesigning the front-end of GeoCities (then the 4th largest site on the web) and introducing pop-up ads to the world (yep, that’s his fault but it was and still is kind of a big deal).
Alex Becker, Co-Founder and President of Highly Relevant
[www.linkedin.com/in/alexybecker]
Alex Becker, actively involved in online marketing since 2004, began as an Affiliate and Product Manager for a pair of multi-million dollar affiliate programs while still a student at University of Indiana – Bloomington. After graduating in 2006, he made the full-time transition to interactive content and became the SEO manager for Spine-Health.com, a position previously occupied by Ben Parr, the current co-editor of Mashable.
Alex teamed up with Rex Freiberger after working with him at DONE! SEO to form Highly Relevant. For more information on Alex, please check out his Chicago SEO blog.
Erica Forrette, Event Moderator, Online Marketing / E-commerce Expert
[www.linkedin.com/in/ericaforrette]
Erica online has online marketing experience dating back to 1999. She has experience on the brand side, vendor side and even the agency side. She currently oversees the online marketing efforts and analytics for Internships.com. In the past, Erica has worked as a consultant for lead generation and e-commerce site projects, Senior Manager of Online Acquisitions at PacSun.com, Director of Marketing for Adapt Technologies, and the list goes on. She’s a much achieved online marketing professional and we are very happy to have her as this event’s moderator.
Additional Speakers TBD, including:
Andrew Hahn of Luxury Link and Familygetaway.com
[www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhahn]
Link building is the most important factor in getting top rankings in the Google Search results. Back in the day, the more back links you had to your website the higher your rank was in Google. This was, in theory, a good way of prioritizing the top 10 rankings that Google displays for a given search term, but this ALL changed with the advent of social media and blogging.
Since back links were so important in getting top rankings in Google people soon realized that they could begin spamming blogs and leaving comment link farms on thousands of sites and soar to the top of rankings. Google had a problem, their formula to protect top rankings was misfiring. Change was necessary and came in the form of a “NoFollow” tag.
What is a NoFollow Tag?
A Nofollow tag is a simple piece of code that you put in a link. Here is an example:
This link is passing strength to the Los Angeles SEO page it’s linking to.
This link is NOT passing strength to the Los Angeles SEO page it’s linking to.
Why Do NoFollows Now Matter?
Google originally introduced the nofollow tag to combat spamming and the like. Now, Google, Yahoo & Bing seem to be rewarding websites who are actively commenting on blogs, forums and other web properties that don’t pass strength through these social media links. BUT THEY DO PASS STRENGTH. Social networking profile links, blog comment links and forum signatures now matter — again. The difference is that you need to keep at it and be participating in relevant, authority/industry blogs/forums.
NoFollows Matter: A Case Study
Below is a screen shot that shows Highly Relevant’s top 10 back links. As you can see, 5 out of 10 of the back links are social media blog comments — Including our #1 back link being a blog comment on Chris Brogan’s site.
Too often, websites don’t emphasize exactly how, where, or why users should sign up, call, or purchase a product or service from their website. In this article we discuss the often overlooked aspect of converting hard earned website traffic. Read more
In online marketing circles, social media marketing is the current cool kid on the block, and with good reason. Social tools can give companies a powerful medium to engage customers, develop their brand, and humanize themselves in a way that can be difficult without in-person interaction. And weíre strong believers in incorporating social media elements into our SEO strategies. That being said, we believe there is significant straight up, Warren Buffet-style value in good old-fashioned search engine optimization. Here’s why. Read more
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