Online Marketing | Web Training Wheels

How To Deal With Google Analytics Spam Data

There are 2 primary kinds of spam data you’ve probably seen show up in your Google Analytics reports. In some cases you may not have even realized it was spam:

1. Spam sites in your referral reports

It looks like this:

These are just a few of the hundreds of spam URLs you might see show up – share-buttons.xyz (actually, lots of sites with the .xyz extension), free-social-buttons, free-floating-buttons.com, copyrightclaims.org are some other common ones, but there are soooo many! Those kinds of sites look pretty dodgy from the outset and might ring some alarm bells.

3 Actionable Ways To Use Google Analytics

Online Marketing

The good folks over at MemberPress (an awesome and powerful membership plugin) were kind enough to allow me to write a post for their blog recently. "3 Actionable Ways To Use Google Analytics" takes a deeper look at what can be…

4 Essential Online Marketing Resources

Figuring out WordPress and getting your website up and running is just the beginning of having a successful site. What happens next is where the real work begins! As a website owner you’ll need to know the fundamentals of online marketing – search engine optimization, conversion optimization and all kinds of other skills to help you generate traffic and business with your site. With Google constantly changing and new developments happening all the time, it’s tough to keep abreast of what’s going on. Here’s a few of my favorite resources for keeping up on online marketing from those who are already finding success.

Effective WordPress Sidebars – Part 2 in the Conversion Series

How To Make Your WordPress Site Conversion Friendly: Part 2 – Effective WordPress Sidebars

Sidebars are one of the best places to put your calls to action. Widgets make your life easy and almost every theme has ’em! But we need to exercise some self-restraint when working with sidebars to make them effective.

Control Your Sidebars!

The reason you need to control your sidebars is so that you can tailor the content based on the area of the site the user is in. Some themes may have already baked in a way for you to choose different sidebars on different pages so that you can have different widgets accordingly. But many have one sidebar that will display the same set of widgets on every area of the site. If you want to get really refined about the conversion process you’ll need more control.

My favorite plugin for this is Display Widgets which I discuss over here

If your theme does not give you a way to choose a different sidebar per page, you need to go grab yourself one of the plugins listed.

What Should Go In Sidebars?

Sidebars often become the dumping ground for all the stuff you want people to see but can’t fit anywhere else. But less is more in this case, and more is just…..diluting and confusing. So try to keep sidebars lean and mean. The very top of your sidebar should house the most important elements. What those elements are will vary according to your business, what you are selling (if anything) and what your conversions are (see part 1). Here are some ideas.

How To Make Your WordPress Site Conversion Friendly (A Series)

Part 1 – Defining Your Conversions and Calls To Action

Mastering the use of WordPress is just one step in making your online presence effective and successful. Your website is going to be in a state of refinement until you’ve really figured out what works and what doesn’t. However, those folks that aren’t designers or developers tend to leave a lot of important decisions about how their website functions up to the developer of whichever theme they’ve purchased, and that’s not always a good thing. For example, just because every theme has a carousel on the homepage, doesn’t mean it’s an effective strategy for your website. Theme developers are trying to sell you a theme, so their objectives are different than yours when presenting a theme demo. Oftentimes people buy into the beautiful presentation of a theme without fully thinking through how it will affect their business goals. Your job is to create a website that has your own objectives in mind – you are going to be guiding your visitors on a path that you have determined.

Get More Out Of Google Analytics – 4 Gems You Might Be Missing

Google Analytics is a super-powerful tool and most people only scratch the surface. Here’s a few cool features to check out that you may not have discovered yet.

Do You Need A Better Mobile Strategy?

Talk of responsive design, mobile apps, mobile plugins etc are all the buzz right now, but what will be the best strategy for you? If your site is not responsive, will it be worth investing in a responsive design, or should you just use a WordPress plugin to cover your bases?

Well one way to find out is to look at the mobile report within Analytics to see how many people are even trying to access your site from a mobile device. You’ll find this report under the Audience tab on the left. Click on Overview and you’ll see a simple breakdown of how many visits came via desktop vs mobile devices. Currently Analytics doesn’t distinguish between tablets and smartphones – both are ‘mobile’.

Click the pie chart icon on the right to get a nice visualization of what percentage of visitors use a mobile device.