Using ClickTracks

Written by Philippa Gamse, CMC


Part 1: Getting Started

If you're just getting started with ClickTracks, you'll find it's a very versatile tool. It presents information by overlaying it on your actual Web pages. It also allows you to create reports "onrepparttar fly" so that you can look at your visitors' behaviour on your site in very different and detailed ways.

But if analyzing Web metrics is new to you,repparttar 105920 charts, figures and mass of potential data can still be quite overwhelming. It's helpful to have some starting points and questions in mind as you studyrepparttar 105921 reports so that you can findrepparttar 105922 most useful information.

This article offers some ideas and examples to spark your thinking:

Navigation Report

This report shows you (among other things) how many visitors clicked on each link, and how long they spent on this page.

If you have links that receive few or no clicks:

* Isrepparttar 105923 link image orrepparttar 105924 link text too small? * Is it in a colour that doesn't show up well or could pose problems for visitors with visual impairments? * Is it badly placed or hard to find onrepparttar 105925 page? * Is it too far down? - checkrepparttar 105926 time spent onrepparttar 105927 page to get an idea of whether * visitors are reading most or all ofrepparttar 105928 content. Remember thatrepparttar 105929 first screenful ofrepparttar 105930 page hasrepparttar 105931 best chance of being seen.

If none ofrepparttar 105932 above seem true:

* Isrepparttar 105933 link text confusing - perhapsrepparttar 105934 wording is different or not included on other pages? * Isrepparttar 105935 link not attractive or engaging to your visitors? * Or, isrepparttar 105936 content behindrepparttar 105937 link simply not of interest?

Links that receive many clicks:

* Shouldrepparttar 105938 content behind this link be highlighted even more on your site, since it is clearly of interest?

Placements to think about:

* If you have an internal search engine on your site, is it linked in a prominent place on each page? * Featured products or other items - can you increaserepparttar 105939 clicks that they receive by improving their position?

Time spent onrepparttar 105940 page:

* Doesrepparttar 105941 average time on this page seem too short, especially ifrepparttar 105942 page is long? - checkrepparttar 105943 number of visitors who are exitingrepparttar 105944 site from this page. If a lot of people are spending a short time on a page and leaving, consider splittingrepparttar 105945 content across more pages:

* This can be especially helpful, e.g. when displaying a list of items for purchase - showing each on a separate page allows you to track which offerings arerepparttar 105946 most interesting to visitors, and to highlight them better

* Shortening pages also reducesrepparttar 105947 risk that visitors will miss items further down if they choose not to scroll

Search Report

This report showsrepparttar 105948 keywords and phrases that brought visitors to your site, broken down by individual search engines.

Which keywords or key phrases are most effective for you:

* Which search words or phrases drawrepparttar 105949 most traffic?

* Which search words or phrases result inrepparttar 105950 most time spent on your site? These arerepparttar 105951 visitors who are most engaged in your content, but what were they looking for when they came to you?

* Are there any surprises? Sometimes search engines pick up keywords from your site copy that you may not have thought of as significant - these can be valuable information about how your visitors describe or think about what you offer. A lot of demand for something on your site can give you ideas for enhancing or expanding your products and services.

Which search engines arerepparttar 105952 most effective?

* If your site is optimized for one search engine in particular, is that engine bringing you traffic? If you're paying for search engine optimization (other than pay per click), is your service providing a justifiable return on investment?

* If you have very effective keywords on one search engine, can you improve their position on others?

* Do you recognize your non search engine referrers?

* How are you linked to? Arerepparttar 105953 references to you legitimate? Are there sites that link to you that you're not comfortable with - either because they're not describing your site offerings correctly, or perhaps you simply don't want to be associated with them!

* Should you thankrepparttar 105954 referrer? Often, sites will link to you without letting you know. If you appreciate them for doing this, you can create an even stronger -and potentially more profitable relationship.

For help in creating specific ClickTracks reports, see Part 2: Labelling Options. For help in using ClickTracks to evaluate your "must-see" pages, see Part 3 of this series.

Part 2: Labelling Options

ClickTracks allows you to segment your visitors in many ways usingrepparttar 105955 "Create Labels" tool. You create instant reports to answer questions aboutrepparttar 105956 patterns of specific types of visitor, and track their responses to your site.

Here are some ideas for using this option:

Comparing Search Engine / Non Search Engine Traffic

Visitors come to your site either from search engines, from other sites that link to you, from e-mail marketing messages or e-zines, or perhaps from their own bookmarks.

Userepparttar 105957 ClickTracks "Create Labels" tool, and select "referred from any search engine" as your criteria to track all search engine visitors. Then, create another label usingrepparttar 105958 same criteria, but select "Inverse" to identify allrepparttar 105959 visitors not referred from a search engine.

Now you can investigate:

Are search engine visitors more responsive to your site than those who find you in other ways:

* Which type of visitor spends longer onrepparttar 105960 site?

* Which type of visitor is more likely to reach one of your "goal" or "must-see" pages? (see Part 3 of this series for more on this topic).

If you have very specific keywords, then probably search engines will produce your most valuable traffic.

Amsterdam firm of webwriters reveals how they got their PR-3 listing in Google

Written by Angelique van Engelen


Case study into ContentClix keywords reveals -how we got listed inrepparttar search engines -achieved PR-3 listing in Google -and several PR-1 listings in others;

This a shameless marketing article but we're hard faced enough to take onrepparttar 105919 odds you're going to read it A-Z. It isrepparttar 105920 story of how we ended up inrepparttar 105921 top echelons of major search engines.

The website in question is www.contentClix.com . this one. We -the five of us- live together in a big, crooked house overlookingrepparttar 105922 lovely canals in Amsterdam and when we don´t play table tennis, we write long, short, medium and stupendously superfluous copy for a variety of international websites who generally are onrepparttar 105923 lookout for content that´s crisp and freshly European.

Short sentences for instructional copy. Long ones that everyone can still get their head around byrepparttar 105924 timerepparttar 105925 last i has been dotted forrepparttar 105926 rest.

We ourselves did not set out to reach top rankings in any overly organised way. That's why we had so much fun doingrepparttar 105927 research intorepparttar 105928 issue. And we've become totally addicted to finding out what arerepparttar 105929 best tools out there to really go about achieving effectiveness.

To be entirely clear,repparttar 105930 contentclix web presence is nothing more than ten pages, with a total of 19 incoming links as of today. We have not purchased expensive keywords nor did we advertise ourselves anywhere or use any seo gimmickry.

So here we go, this is our report of our post-search engine listing internal inquiry into our mysterious jackpot hit. ContentClix has a list of 22 keywords. (ContentClix, content clix, clix, content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copywriter, creative labs, creative writing, story writing, editorial, editing services, journalism, reporting, freelance writer, freelance writing, writing resources).

We chose these initially because we feel they describe our business accurately and we think that these arerepparttar 105931 words that spring to mind first when you are looking to find a bunch of copywriters like us. We included our name because somebody said we had to.

ContentClix is a bland name. On purpose, because we believe that having a posh name is stupid, an overly arty one pretentious. After weeks of not being able to decide, one early Monday morning following a frantic work weekend because we´d missed deadline after deadline for a big account, all five of us agreed that having a practical, functional name would remind us to put in some work hours while we are here.

(We were going to be named 038 at first but it appears to be a number quite well known in chemistry, referring to a mineral known as ´strontium´ which in this country´s language is like ´shittium´ in English so that was a no no, mostly regretted by our office molecule clixy who is responsible for our blog,repparttar 105932 url we´ll advertise soon enough.)

How did we find out where we actually ranked inrepparttar 105933 search engines? We ran a search on a tool that's most widely used by professional seo's to check backlinks to websites. It's called www.marketleap.com. A very appropriate name forrepparttar 105934 venture, because it made us literally leap.

Another site offers free google page rank checks and probability checks of your site. This is what it said about us: "Results: Your current Google PageRank is 3. Based on our calculations, we predict your future PageRank afterrepparttar 105935 next Google update will be 3, an increase of 2.63%". That was enough for us to be totally intrigues as to how things actually work in reality withrepparttar 105936 search engines. Call us dopey, but our expertise lies in writing sales texts, not search engines.

Using a trial version ofrepparttar 105937 keyword specialist boyz at www.wordtracker.com, we set out on our quest to see what's so special about them. Wordtracker usesrepparttar 105938 parallel browsers dogpile and metacrawler to simulate queries that people run onrepparttar 105939 largest search engines.

Each time a user types in any ofrepparttar 105940 keywords, a spider ofrepparttar 105941 real life engines will be actively looking forrepparttar 105942 terms and somehow this signal is picked up byrepparttar 105943 metacrawlers too and counted by wordtracker software. It has a database with around 368 million searches fromrepparttar 105944 last 60 days. These are some ofrepparttar 105945 combinations ofrepparttar 105946 keywords andrepparttar 105947 rankings they yield.

In quick succession, we ran these 10 arbitrary tests:

1) Enteringrepparttar 105948 first half ofrepparttar 105949 string of words intorepparttar 105950 search box:

ContentClix, content clix, content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Yieldedthisresult:->Page 1 in Lycos, Hotbot and Alta Vista!

2) Since not many people will have heard of us it's not likely they will be typing in our name inrepparttar 105951 search engines, so we took out our name fromrepparttar 105952 list: content clix, content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Result:->Page 1 listings on Allrepparttar 105953 web and Yahoo.

3) We getrepparttar 105954 hang of it and reducerepparttar 105955 words one by one from then onwards yields this, even more surprising

content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Result:-> Allrepparttar 105956 web, Alta vista, Hotbot, Lycos

4) We are starting not to believe our eyes here. Cutting out my what we thought to berepparttar 105957 most vital words (content and clicks within comma's) keywords:

clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy,

delivers these astounding results: -> Page one rankings on: Allrepparttar 105958 Web, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos Pro

5) The bonanza goes on:

writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Results -> Page 2 Altavista, Hotbot and Lycos.

Cont'd on page 2 ==>
 
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