6 Essential Google Analytics Features for Every Retailer

Google Analytics can help focus your business on its most profitable areas, and can also help attract more customers while spending less money in the process.
Here are six valuable features that Google Analytics can provide your online retail operations. With these tools, you can make your operations more cost effective, and spot new, lucrative opportunities.

Tracking Outbound Links

Understanding where your traffic comes from is one thing. But being able to see when — and where — it's going is another.
To track outbound links, first check the “Yes, an E-commerce site” button in Google Analytics. From there, install the necessary tracking code. There are excellent plugins for this for popular platforms and frameworks. You can install them on your site quickly and easily. If you need raw coding, Axllent.org has an excellent outbound tracking guide that provides the code, tells you what to do with it, and where to put it on your website. In short, if you can follow directions, you can start tracking your outbound links today.

Ecommerce Tracking

Google Analytics can actually track your sales. This is an incredibly useful tool because it puts all of your sales and conversion metrics in the same place, and lets you compare them alongside the rest of your data. But it doesn’t come easy — unless you’re using popular platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Cart66, which all have plugins to simply copy and paste your tracking codes. For custom coding, you may need professional assistance. Ask your shopping cart provider about this.
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Clicking the option "Yes, an E-Commerce Site" in Google Analytics.

Goals

"Goals" are like Ecommerce Tracking, but more thorough. Goals are essentially conversion tracking, but you can identify many different things as conversions, instead of just basic purchases. If you’re aiming for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, click a link to an affiliate, or just follow a link to a special web page, you can create goals and then track.
Setting up goals is easy. Search Engine Land has an excellent primer for it. Just create a goal from a basic metric, like pages visited or time on page. You can also track specific conversion funnels, with the goal set at the final confirmation page after a purchase. For advanced goals, there is a little code to implement. But it’s not difficult, even for the technically challenged. Once you have goals set up, Google Analytics provides graphics to show your progress and help you see where you can improve.

Custom Campaign URLs

Do you wish you knew where your traffic was coming from, across all of your various promotions? Google Analytics can help you identify visitors that come from special promotions, and all other sources. Using Google’s URL Builder, you can customize links using URL extensions that won’t affect your website’s performance.
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Google Analytics' URL builder.
Though the finished URL looks complicated, the idea is simple: You’re giving each URL a special tag, or campaign code, that identifies it and separates it from the rest of your traffic. For example, when creating a link to your website that you want to share on Facebook, append something like “/?utmsource=facebook” to your URL. For email campaigns, the URL could be “/?utmsource=email” — and so on. Tagging your URLs will help you sort your traffic into logical groups, to understand where it's coming from so you can measure how effective your campaigns actually are.

Exclude Internal Traffic

To make sure your analytics aren’t skewed by your own repeated visits, there are a number of ways to keep your internal visits excluded from your own site’s metrics. Hallam Internet Limited offers simple directions to block your own IP address.
If you’re more technically savvy, you can give your computer a cookie from your website that includes a variable that tells Google Analytics to ignore your traffic no matter where you are. InfoTrust offers a good explanation of how to do this.

Advanced Segments

"Advanced Segments" is a powerful tool to separate your traffic into highly focused groups. You can track repeat traffic to learn more about what your loyal customers are doing, or keep tabs on related traffic sources to gauge your relative performance, or simply customize a report to show you more on whatever is helpful to you. The point is to find actionable data within specific key categories. I addressed this previously, in "Using Google Analytics Advanced Segments to Find Actionable Data."
Setting up an advanced segment is easy. Under "Standard Reporting," click the Advanced Segments button and you can start separating traffic by many different variables and traffic factors. Once you’ve found the factors to focus on, you can create a dynamic analytics segment to refer to any time, providing a more detailed look into how your visitors behave, where they comes from, and what they are up to.

by Jaime Brugueras

The Basics On How TO Start Making Money With Adsense

Adsense is considered as one of the most powerful tool in a website publishers arsenal. It enables a person to monetize their sites easily. If used properly, it can generate a very large and healthy income for them. However if you are not using them rightly and just maximizing the income you squeeze from it, you are actually leaving a lot of money on the table. Something all people hate doing.

How you can start earning money with Adsense can be done easily and quickly. You will be amazed at the results you will be getting in such a short period of time.

Start by writing some quality content articles which are also keyword incorporated. There are a lot of people given the gift of being good with words. Writing comes easy for them. Why not make it work in such a way that you will be earning some extra cash in the process.

There are actually three steps to put into mind before you begin writing your ads and Keyword search. Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrase. Select the ones which you think has more people clicking through. This is actually a keyword selector and suggestion tool that some sites are offering to those who are just their Adsense business.

Writing articles. Start writing original content with keywords from the topics that you have achieved in your search. Take note that search engines are taking pride in the quality of their articles and what you will be writing should keep up with their demands.

Quality content site. Build a quality content site incorporated with Adsense ads that is targeting the subject and keywords of your articles and websites. This is where all that you’ve done initially will go to and this is also where they will prove their worth to you.

The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care. Try to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that surfers look first when they visit a certain site is the top left. The reason behind this is not known. Maybe it is because some of the most useful search engine results are at the top of all other rankings. So visitors tend to look in that same place when browsing through other sites.

Some of those who are just starting at this business may think they are doing pretty well already and thinking that their clickthrough rates and CPM figures are quite healthy. However, there are more techniques and styles to generate more clicks to double your earnings. By knowing these techniques and working them to your advantage, you will realize that you will be getting three times more than other people who have been previously doing what they are doing.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across a number of site on a site by site, page by page, or any other basis you wanted. You should be aware oft his capability and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your Adsense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most rather than those who are being ignored.

Another thing you should know. Banners and skyscrapers are dead. Ask the experts. So better forget about banners and skyscrapers. Surfers universally ignore these kinds of ad formats. The reason behind this is that they are recognized as an advert and advert are rarely of any interest that’s why people ignore them.

To really start making money with Adsense, you should have a definite focus on what you wanted to achieve and how you will go about achieving them. As with any other kind of business ventures, time is needed coupled with patience.

Do not just ignore your site and your Adsense once you have finished accomplishing them. Spare some time, even an hour, making adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites to quickly trigger your Adsense income.

Give it a try and you would not regret having gotten into Adsense in the first place.

John Ugoshowa.(http://www.selfseo.com)

7 Steps to Better Ecommerce Marketing

Effective marketing rarely happens accidentally. Successful campaigns are most often the result of good planning and execution.
Planning a marketing campaign can provide an excellent opportunity to focus on a business's unique marketing problems or challenges and the proper actions required to address those very problems or challenges.

Regarding Marketing Planning

Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs simply don't know what a marketing plan is or how it should look. Is there a form one can download and fill out to ensure complete success? Not really. Are there marketing recipes to follow that include search engine marketing combined with pay-per-click ads and a blog post or two? Not exactly.
Instead marketing planning varies greatly from organization to organization or even campaign to campaign. What follows are seven steps that may help ecommerce merchants make better marketing plans. Apply these steps as they make sense in the context of a particular campaign.

1. Know Where the Business Is

Marketing is frequently thought of as "those activities involved in the process of selling products or services to customers." But another possible definition — or perhaps restatement of the definition — might be "those actions required to move a business from its current state to a desired state."
For example, imagine an online store that sells $10,000 worth of digital widgets each month. That store would, however like to sell $20,000 worth of widgets. The store's current state is "sales of $10,000," and its desired state is "sales of $20,000."

Marketing represents those actions required to move a business from its current state to a desired state.
In the example, it is marketing that moves the retailer from its current state to its desired state — i.e., to double sales.
In application, a good marketing plan should begin with a thorough understanding of the business's current state. What are current sales and inventory levels? Are new products available? What is the business's cash flow or available marketing budget?

2. Know What the Opportunity Is

In marketing textbooks, one will often find the term "total available market" or "TAM." The TAM references the revenue opportunity for a particular product or service. It describes the value of the entire market.
It is unlikely that a single business will have the ability to sell to the entire market. That business will, instead, have some share of the available market. An increase in revenue or sales frequently represents an increase in that market share.
When developing a marketing plan, consider what kind of opportunity may exist. Is the TAM for a particular product or segment growing? Are there opportunities to gain market share.
Knowing how large or small an opportunity is will help with goal setting later.

3. Know Who the Customer Is

Recently, a major clothing manufacturer specializing in work wear and outerwear profiled its typical customers. This manufacturer aggregated information about the customers' ages, occupations, locations, hobbies, and favorite places to shop. Similar customers were grouped together and represented by personas with names like Mike, Matt, and Mary.
The manufacturer then shared this data with many of its retailers, including brick-and-mortar stores, pure-play ecommerce merchants, and multi-channel retailers. This kind of customer information can be very useful.
The Mike persona, which was a 40-year-old, blue collar worker earning around $65,000, was the only customer type shopping at relatively small specialty stores. This fact helped the marketers at those specialty stores do two very different things with their marketing plans. First, they aimed at strengthening relationships with Mike persona customers. Second, they looked at other similar personas, which were not currently shopping at specialty retailers and sought ways to win them over.

4. Have S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Once a marketer has taken stock of a business's current state, studied the market to understand the available opportunity, and researched customers, it is time to define the desired state or the goals that marketing is supposed to achieve.
There is an acronym, S.M.A.R.T., that can help a marketer set good marketing goals. I've addressed S.M.A.R.T. previously, in "Setting SMART Goals and Measuring Success."
Put simply, marketing goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

5. Choose Reasonable Tactics

Once a S.M.A.R.T. goal has been created, it is time to select the specific tactics or actions that will move a business from its current state to its goal or desired state. These tactics will be things like creating a special landing page, sending emails, posting on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, publishing content, or purchasing pay-per-click ads on Google, Bing, or similar networks.
Each tactic selected should be responsible for achieving some part of the goal. As an example, if the goal is to get $10,000 in new monthly revenue, pay-per-click ads might be made responsible for producing $2,000 in new sales while a multi-part email tactic might be responsible for another $2,000. Other tactics would need to make up the remaining $6,000 in new sales to meet the goal.
Reasonable tactics are those actions or advertisements that help achieve the goal while remaining within budget or time constraints.

6. Create a Schedule or Calendar

Every tactic in the marketing plan and every goal milestone should be laid out on a schedule or calendar. This schedule will first help to coordinate tactics avoiding overlap or other potential issues.
Second, the schedule will help with execution and measurement, since the marketer will know ahead of time which tactics are coming up and, presumably, what must be done to execute those tactics.

7. Build in Room for Change

A good marketing plan also should assume that some tactics will change during the course of execution and accommodate those likely changes.
This does not mean that the planner should seek to figure out possible changes in advance or be unwilling to commit to some tactics. It suggests, instead, having some margin or room in the plan for change.
The plan should spread marketing investments out so that there will still be room in the budget — in terms of money and time — if new opportunities arise or if some tactics underperform.