Walking round Times Square last week, its 23-story billboards reminded me of the extravagant uselessness of peacock tails. It’s an advertising arms race for our attention, locked in an ever-escalating stalemate of mutually assured distraction. Despite passing through it three times, I can remember only one advertisement:

Sure, this advert is big, but it’s not its size that’s impressive. It’s how it’s different that stands out. Charmin have spotted that the 150,000 “eyeballs” that pass through Times Square each day aren’t worth squat, but that 150,000 daily butts are. It’s a demonstration of how advertising matters and how, even in the clutter of Times Square, it’s possible to stand out. Not by being bigger, or brasher or brighter, not by sticking to the measures that your competitors define, but by being different, by choosing a different axis to be judged on, by redefining the rules.

As Seth Godin says, you should create purple cows: products that are remarkable. Products that people want to talk about. But no matter how hard you try, your cow doesn’t always end up purple. Sometimes you’re stuck with a product that is merely good, or a product that people simply don’t want to talk about. Like hemorrhoid treatment. What do you do then?

You create a remarkable advert, and you interrupt as many people as you possibly can:

No facts, statistics, details or testimonials here, just a great story that makes you smile.

Interrupt people when they want to be interrupted. Here’s the nozzle at a gas pump in the UK. At the time I saw this, gas in the UK cost the equivalent of $9 / gallon. That’s $200 for a full tank. This advert succeeds because it’s an unexpected, witty and welcome interruption.

Create adverts that tell stories. Here’s an advert, part of a series, for Air New Zealand that I saw in San Francisco:

This tells a story in two frames. It states the beginning and an end but leaves the middle up to us. What exactly happened to that woman in New Zealand? Who did she meet, what did she drink, where did she go? You could squeeze a whole movie in between those two frames.

The new conventional wisdom states that interruption marketing is dead. We’re so bombarded by billboards, t-shirts, pop-ups, television and magazines that we’ve developed an immunity to advertisers’ messages. There’s no point even trying to interrupt us. You’re just wasting your money.

I disagree. It’s hard to interrupt us, but it can be done. Not by being loud, but by being different. Be witty, tell a story, and tell it to us when we want to be interrupted, and you can leap out from the clutter.

Neil Davidson is co-founder and joint CEO of Red Gate Software. His blog is at http://blog.businessofsoftware.org or you can follow him on twitter

But why is the shopping cart section so important?

Give it a little thought – how many of your conversions came directly from your website and how many from other websites directly in the shopping cart? That’s what we were also thinking :) - given the fact that many purchase leads enter directly into your shopping cart, it must be integrated with the rest of the website - e.g. the buyer should be able to see a “Contact” button, a link to a “Homepage” etc.

The main goal for a customized shopping cart is, of course, getting more conversions. This can be achieved very easily if you have the right tools to do it.

eCommerce providers usually give you a default template for your shopping cart. This is noticeable when you enter a website, click on the “buy” links and you get a totally different layout for the website. Some eCommerce providers, including Avangate, offer you advanced customization options for the shopping cart.

This customization can be done at both appearance level (colors, fonts) but also at the functionality level by changing the number of different pages displayed in the ordering process, text, input fields and so on.

Let’s look at some of Avangate’s shopping cart customizations. Notice that all of them have kept the original website appearance and other custom elements:

Caphyon customized shopping cart

caphyon.com - the shopping cart states clearly that Avangate is the authorized vendor, minimizing trust-related problems.

Dvdfab customized shopping cart

Dvdfab.net – notice the additional options and the cross-sell section (”Recommended additional products”) on the bottom of the page.

Markzware customized shopping cart

Markzware.com – offers multiple options for the shopping cart and also gives customer support information – notice the additional options and the cross-sell section (”Recommended additional products”) on the bottom of the page.

Oxygen customized shopping cart

Oxygenxml.com – a relatively simple shopping cart with cross-selling and discount options.

VSO customized shopping cart

Vso-software.fr – displays payment methods, security certifications and gives the opportunity to use discount coupons.

Note that it’s recommended that any permanent customization should be made with prior testing. Suppose you want to personalize your shopping cart, but you don’t know whether to have a single page or a multi-page checkout flow. You could do some A/B testing at first in order to see which converts better. In this case, you display the single checkout page to half of the potential buyers and the multi-page option to the others. You can get help for this from the eCommerce provider - the Avangate platform, for example, incorporates an A/B testing module, so it’s easier for the software vendor to optimize the conversion rate.

Here are some of the most important benefits you get by having the possibility to customize the shopping cart:

• Select a checkout flow that best suits your conversion rate – single/multi page checkout process, show or hide some elements etc.
• Personalize the appearance of the shopping cart – fonts, links, buttons and other graphical elements.
• Fully control your shopping cart pages – include various web widgets, scripts and technologies, include your own input fields in the ordering process, display other products from the database at the time of purchase (cross-selling) etc.

So, if you’re wondering why your conversion rate is low, you should check your shopping cart and see if it isn’t the primary element that makes potential buyers to think again.

Product images, screenshots, your beautiful team members, catchy images for your website content, corporate images, logos, icons, you name it – all your online images should join forces and work for your website success, rigorously planning to embrace the new era of universal search.

If you want to get the most out your images though, just sitting and watching how pretty they are won’t help you too much. You need to optimize your images to get faster loading times and attract more traffic to your website. You can do that by paying your highest respects to search engines rules. This article presents most common techniques of optimizing images for image search engines like Google Images, Yahoo Images or Live.

Let’s get practical now:

1. Image file name

Insert your desired keyword in the image filename, which also describes the content of the image. You must do this because, currently, search engines do not “see” images, but “read” their titles, filenames, alternate attributes , descriptions and so on.

For example, change you image name from DSC00004536.jpg to keyword.jpg. And if you’re wondering which one is best: word1-word2.jpg or word1_word2.jpg, go with the first one, because some search engines don’t consider the underscore (”_”) a words separator.

2. Image alternate text

Make sure the search engines fully understand your tribute by adding alternate <alt> attributes to your images. The alternative description should also include an expressive keyword for your image.

3. Image title

Yes, the image also has a title and using the attribute guarantees that on mouse over the title of the image is visible, unlike the “alt” attribute that is not fully supported by all browsers out there. This recommendation is more of a usability issue than a SEO one, but don’t underestimate it – deep down inside, search engines want to be treated like human beings. Well, maybe not human, but beings for sure, artificial intelligent beings that is.

4. Image file size

Keep it as small as possible, so that PDA users as well as users with slow internet connections may get the same intended, fast experience. The optimal image size is 20-100kb and the best resolution would be 300×400 px and 72dpi. It is also recommended to set the image size as part of the corresponding tag for the image.

5. The URL of the image

What is the best URL for you image? Again, Google recommends you place all your images in a folder named “images”, “pictures” or something similar, so that the final URL of your image will look like: /images/image.jpg
While you’re at it, make sure you don’t block access to the image-containing folder in your robots.txt file.

6. Get the full option “htmlised” image

• Specify your image height and width in pixels or percent – using the width and height attributes;
• Properly align your images - it is recommend to do this directly in the CSS style.

Other attributes to be defined directly into the CSS styles:

• Image border;
• Hspace and vspace – set the horizontal and vertical space around the image. Please note search engines recommend to place relevant content around your image, that is related to the image and its description.

7. Placing the images in the page

It is best to place your images in context. This means that the more relevant the text around your image, the better the ranking will be for your image.

You do know that it is not advisable to insert vital information – like contact details, address and so on – as images, don’t you? :)

Now that we have finished what we might just call a HTML tutorial for OnPage image optimization, let’s see how images can be optimized OffPage for better rankings in search engines.

Let’s get physical:

If you’ve followed all the steps above, you now have a fully functional image, ready to be indexed and bring benefits to your business. The next thing you should do is tell the people out there about it, because this is the most important part of your image optimization. First of all, make sure you activate the enhanced image search option in Google Webmaster Tool.

Let’s take as example a photo that is attached to a post on this blog on usability gurus and see why it is on the first page of image search in Google, as well as on regular web search.

1. Image filename: usability-start-300×261.jpg
2. Image alternate text: usability gurus
3. Image title: usability-start
4. Image file size: 28.74 KB
5. URL: http://blog.avangate.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/usability-start-300×261.jpg
6. width: 210px; height: 183px
7. Placing of the image: well, I think this is its strong point, because it belongs to an article about usability gurus, that contains the keyword both in the title and content of the post.

There are plenty of other opportunities to promote your images in your link baiting efforts, online reputation management or for better results in universal search.

In a previous post I’ve written about the benefits of using Flickr for your website images. Some argue that Flickr is getting less tolerant with using it for business purposes, but nevertheless, there is no strong reason why you should not give it a try anyway.

And if you’re looking for sources of images for your content, you may start with any of the three recommendations below:

1. 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
2. Sources for free images recommended by Search Engine Journal
3. A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images

What else do you think that “the all mighty” (Google) would be pleased with?

So I went a little deeper into it and, after some tricks and implementations, I decided to share the findings with you. So here goes my second article for the series: 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about your visitors. If you missed the first one about visitors that lost their way, check it now.

This post tries to answer the following questions:

• What’s wrong with the data I already have?
• How to tweak it?
• How to use the new reports?
• What actions to take?… at least a couple of examples :)

What’s wrong with the data I already have?

First of all, referring sites are of all kinds and sorts. It just isn’t fair to put all of them together. Imagine if you couldn’t get paid keywords differentiated from organic searches keywords. How happy would you be then? Brian Clifton’s implementations are just about great as long as you are interested in the major trend, but it just isn’t right to put Twitter (haven’t tried twitter yet?)and LinkedIn in the same pot. Users coming from these 2 social networks can be segmented and therefore treated differently.

What we need is a way to get both trends, therefore, see how you are doing lately on social networks and which social network gets you better value: should you spend more time on Facebook or Twitter?

And here is even more: Google Analytics now allows you to compare up to 4 segments between them. Here’s something cool to compare: Social networks vs All Visits vs Paid visits. I did that and the results I got were amazing. In my case, the Bounce rate for Social Networks was under 40% and way lower than the global bounce rate. However, only 4 conversions occurred from social networks. At least I know what needs to be improved. :)

How to tweak it?

For the tweaking some technical implementations are needed, but that’s why I am here.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Get into the Analytics Dashboard of any of your websites or profiles. In the right upper corner you will see the Advanced Segments Beta button. Press it and click on the Create New Advanced Segment link.
2. Once you get in the Advanced Segment Creator, fill it up just like in the following image.

Here is what I added in the first Source Value Box:
linkedin\.com|facebook\.com|twitter\.com|forums.digitalpoint\.com|delicious\.com|en\.wikipedia\.org|discuss\.joelonsoftware\.com|digg\.com|stumbleupon\.com
I created the second and the third source segmentation settings in order to cover all blogs and forums.

Just before you save the settings click on the Test Segment button to see if everything looks good. Remember, red is for errors! :)

That’s it. Just follow the above 2 steps and you get a great new report. Let’s take it even further (I like this cause it gives me a good insight even without looking at the data). Check out the following image:

Just clicking on the test segment on the above setting I see that only 8 users got to start a registration form. None of them finished it. I heard many industry people saying that social networking traffic doesn’t convert much, that social networks just provide booms of traffic for short times and so on.

I am not actually going to buy that and I’ll do my best to provide great experiences for all of these users coming from the social networks. What one needs to do is to figure out a neat way to approach this type of traffic. They might not be your buyers, but they surely might be the Sneezers (people voicing out about your products or company).

How to use the new reports?

For a start, don’t look at the data just as it is. Compare it with all your traffic and, why not, with the paid traffic. Organic searches are a good alternative just as well. It’s less than 3 seconds to get really cool data: just choose the segments to compare and this is what the Site Usage dashboard section will provide:

It’s not very difficult to spot that the paid traffic the websites get is around 20% higher than the traffic coming from social networks. However, all the other numbers look much better. More time spent on site, lower bounce rate, more returning visitors for social networks. I know for a fact that this website has invested similar time on both paid traffic as well as article and blog posts writing.

Looking only at this, one would advise to quit on the paid traffic and focus all your efforts on good quality content distribution. You mustn’t hurry. Don’t forget to check out the conversions as well. In this case, while it has a high bounce rate, paid traffic brings also a pretty good conversion rate. Actually a very good conversion rate, as the ROI is quite good.

What I would suggest to this website is to try to benefit from the results it got from the social networks and use similar strategies to lure in the users coming from paid traffic. They might not be buyers, but you should give them the means and reasons to remember you.

The next thing I suggest is to go and look into how every social network contributes to your numbers. Check out the following report:

In the above case, stumbleupon.com proves to be the best friend for the selected website. So, how come you get so many visits from Stumbleupon? This social network doesn’t have a neat tool to discover how a certain domain is doing on it (Twitter has this) so I just go to google.com and search for the following query if I want to discover all the users sharing pages about my company:

site:stumbleupon.com inurl:yourbrandname

Take the top 10 communities that bring traffic towards your website. Login to your account and start interacting with the users already creating buzz around your blog, products or services.

I’d stop here but there is only one more thing I would like to show you. I can’t help it.

So far, we studied the trend of social networks traffic, what social network is of best value for you, but we didn’t talk about content. Content is king, especially when talking about social networks.

Going to the Content Overview, you will be able to see what pages are most visited by users coming from social networks. In other words – what users consider hot on your website. Besides giving you an idea of which article topics work and which don’t, with a little Greasemonkey hack you can get to see exactly who loves you and who doesn’t.

Clicking on all the links above will get you directly to the social network you are interested in and see all the reviews or votes and the users that gave them to you. If this isn’t actionable data, then what is?

What actions to take?

1. Make sure the buzz around you doesn’t get out of control. Bad reviews are really bad when you don’t know about them. If there is a community around your products, make sure you are part of it… no matter how many accounts you have to manage or what your rank inside the company is.
2. Always do better. Check out what is the most loved topic in social networks about you, see the comments it gets and, based on that, write even better and greater content. Listen to the community. Most of the times it really is loud and clear.
3. If social network traffic does not bring you customers, find a way to bring value to you. Give them a free and really cool tool and next time somebody asks them if they know somebody who sells a product like yours, rest assured they will talk about you. And if you come up with a neat tool, don’t forget to track it.
4. Google Analytics Data is only a hint of what is out there. It just provides the directions. Follow them. The real data you get from there not from Google Analytics.

So far, these are my 2 cents on social networks traffic tracking. How do you track social networks and what do you look for? Is there an action you took that really made a difference to the final results?

Stay tuned for the next thing that you (probably) didn’t know about your visitors.

For those of you who’ve managed to avoid Twitter, or dismissed it as some pointless flakey time waster, here’s a few current facts you should consider:

• Twitter usage is skyrocketing. In October alone, Twitter experienced a 25% climb in traffic, according to comScore, bringing the number of active Twitterers in the U.S. alone to 1.45; worldwide in September it was 5.6 million.
• Twitter has just about retired the “fail whale”. While in the first quarter of 2008 Twitter had more than a few crashes, those issues have been resolved, as this chart from the Royal Pingdom Blog shows:

• Companies - both micro and not - are being wildly successful using Twitter as a way of providing online customer service (read marketing). More about two examples of that next.

What’s going on here?

So how is it that a funky way to post 140 characters at a time has grown 16-fold in one year? It’s called the Cluetrain Manifesto. Way back in 1999, four really smart people decided it was time to nail what the new digital reality meant for marketing and advertising to Mainstream Advertising’s front door. Their 95 theses spell out why mainstream media right to interrupt every other human activity was eroding under Internet pressure.

Here’s the gist (do yourself a favor and read the full Manifesto): Markets are conversations. It doesn’t matter where that conversation happens, be it between bloggers, in social networks or on services like Twitter; the conversation is the market and companies better get a clue fast.

The first six theses break this down further:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

Sounds like a working definition of Twitter to me.

Show me the Money

Let me walk you through two examples of how savvy online entrprenures are making use of Twitter. Let’s start with Peldi Guilizzoni, the founder of Balsamiq Studios and creator of Balsamiq Mockups, a great Adobe AIR app that I and other startups have learned to love for mocking up screens. In a nutshell, Peldi has running as a background task in his workday a constantly updating RSS feed from search.twitter.com of keywords that relate to his product.

“When someone tweets something relevant, and I feel that my tool might help them, I tweet back with a link”, Peldi said in this post. “I have had an incredible success rate with this direct way to advertise my Mockups tool.”

Now Peldi has refined this technique further - and you would be well advised to read the rest of his post or listen to my interview with him before proceeding.

But here’s the killer point: In less than five months, Basalmiq has taken in it’s first $100,000 of revenue, Peldi has quit his day job and Peldi has garnered some really great press, including being interviewed on the highly IT popular net@night podcast.

Now granted, given the way Conversation works on the web, microISVs and startups have a built-in advantage: we can’t help but be real human beings and not anonymous corporate pseudo-people. So that means only microISVs and startups can get value from Twitter, right?

Nope. Consider Zappos, an online shoe store.

“Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has amassed more than 6,000 followers, and uses the service to give away shoes, meet customers and send out mass invites to company happy hours. Thanks to his encouragement, more than 400 employees now use the service,” from this AdWeek post.

Now Zappos prides itself on it’s online customer service. Maybe your ISV won’t or can’t do the same. But in an age when Conversations are Markets, can you afford not to be on Twitter in 2009? I think not.

Our goal was to cross organizational borders and introduce constituents from all sides of the software publishing world outside the constraints of day-to-day business.  We had people from major software publishing and technology firms such as Intuit, Symantec and Phoenix Technologies mixing with service providers such as Acutrack, TrialPay, Nalperion and Uniloc.  We even had a few new friends from Google, Yahoo! and Ernst and Young join us.

Apart from a few marquee names, the majority of the audience was represented by small to medium sized ISVs looking to expand their reach and customer base and learn about new opportunities.  With the current market situation it is crucial for small business to seek out new avenues for growth- but with limited resources how exactly do you accomplish that?

Networking events such as these provide opportunities to not only meet the community and some of the companies you already work with, but they provide a true environment for people to think outside the box and mix with potential new partners and customers.  Some of the conversations I either participated in or over heard during the evening included topics such as physical fulfillment and boxed delivery, eCommerce (I wonder who that was…), how to get into the major retailers, licensing and activation, localization, taking your business to Europe and much more.

In a social environment people lower their guard and start having conversations. These aren’t pre-planned pitches, there’s no research on Google to “find the fit”, and most of the time you don’t know where the person you’re talking to spends his 9 to 5 until after you’re engaged.  Conversations start and people start wondering “how can we work together?”  More importantly, people start throwing up different ideas and brain storming suggestions.  Many of us face the same challenges in our business lives and given the opportunity to share solutions or experiences, will jump at them.  Why re-invent the wheel when your new friend has already been there and is willing to share how he solved it and made it through?

When Daniel and I first started thinking about having such an event we were a little daunted by what it would take to pull it off, and just what the return would be.  We took a chance and tried to unite people from all ends of the ISV food chain under one roof.  From my perspective the night was a great success and I want to thank everyone who attended and helped make it possible.  We look forward to hosting a similar event each quarter, and if you’re interested in helping us make it happen please let me know.

See you at the next event in 2009!!!

Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.

Here are the key findings of my personal research:

• most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
• just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
• very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
• more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.

Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?

Join us for an informal gathering in Mountain View!

If you’ve met with one of the Avangate guys or gals, then you probably know that this year we worked hard. We attended lots of conferences, had presentations, booths and wrote a lot of white papers and other articles. But you should also know that we also like to play hard and relax with our friends and partners.

That’s why I’m happy to invite you at the Casual Drinks with Avangate - Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at the Tied House in Mountain View. It’s the perfect time to come meet the Avangate US team and schmooze with other people from the software business. The event will be hosted by Casey Potenzone, VP Sales, and Daniel Nicolescu, Business Development Manager.

Discovering the fan part of your partners and mingle with software people seems like having a good time to me. Or at least because it’s easier to explain what you do to people that talk the same business language like you do, it should be a relaxed, informal schmooze. Of course I also happen to know that Daniel is an excellent wine expert so it’s always nice to be around him at parties ;)

If it sounds like fun to you too, register now here.

You cannot afford to lose page rank, valuable links or loyal visitors, in a word, you should not lose more than you win with the new version of the website.

If you’re reading this, I know that you are in a hurry, because deadline is probably pretty short ahead of you, so make sure you go through this checklist before the commit of the new website:

1. No broken links, no 404 errors

Let XENU be your best friend today. Download it, install it, just enter the URL of your site and let Xenu do his job (it’s free). Fix all the 404 errors, do as many 301 redirects as you need to, and then do the checking again and again, until Xenu says it’s ok :). Also, the mod rewrite should be made in a user friendly manner, so as to generate readable URLs. Just to make sure, don’t forget to create a user friendly customized 404 page.

As Google itself suggests, you should also be rechecking manually all the internal links, just to make sure visitors get the experience you intended for them.

2. Get the same experience on all browsers

Check your site on all possible browsers out there, or at least on those used by your visitors, according to your Analytics data. Browsershots can do that for you, so you don’t need to install anything. Just type the URL in there and make sure you refresh the page once in a while, so that the session does not expire.

3. Add the new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

According to Phil Thompson, this will help you get indexed much faster. While you’re at it, make sure you also submit the sitemap.xml to YAHOO and MSN as well.

4. Insert the Google Analytics code on every page

Oh, Google! You can’t forget it, cause you can’t live without it. Are you sure you got it right? Use Sitescanga to see that you have no errors with this one.

5. Check the website loading times

Maybe you forgot some large images into your code or just messed up with you CSS files. Don’t ignore it, waiting means abandoning! Use this web based tool for website optimization. Also, it is recommended that your pages are not larger than 50Kb, so as the search engines crawlers may easily download and go through your pages.

6. Got PDFs? Are they optimized?

If you’re not sure, check out this article on how to optimize your PDFs.

7. Does your website work without JavaScript?

Just disable java in your browser and see how it goes. If your browser does not allow you to disable JavaScript, you can use this Mozilla Addon that allows you to only disable JavaScript for one URL.

8. Check the errors in your forms

Make sure you’re not missing some testing text. Errors should be as user friendly as possible. And make sure you send the automatic emails from an address you’re not ashamed of. And the text that goes into the email. And don’t forget the “thank you for filling in my form” page.

9. Is On Page SEO done?

I mean titles, meta descriptions, keywords, robots.txt implementation, sitemap.xml on site, no more than two h1 and h2 tags on a page, alternate text for images, validated HTML code, sitemap.html, nofollow implementation on the logo, on the duplicate links and useful links such as login, signup, terms and conditions, link titles, etc.

10. Favicon there?

Are the RSS links in the header? Did you update the copyright notice? Can visitors contact you?

The suggestions above do not comprise an exhaustive list, of course, but with your help maybe it can become one. So, go on, it’s your turn to comment below - do you have any suggestions, any advice that might prevent us from wasting our redesign efforts?

What is “Actionable Data” and how do you track it?

Unfortunately, the answer is not as easy as I would like it to be. With the help of Avinash Kaushik I got access the other week to the new Segmentation feature in Google Analytics (GA). I played with it a full weekend, doing advanced segments, but when I got to show it to my colleagues on Monday, all I was able to share were very neat tips and tricks. And I got the following remark from: “Wow, really cool… but how does it help us”?

So, this is what Actionable Data is for me: data that helps me improve my website. Before looking at data, I first ask myself: What do I need help with? Is the conversion number to small? Am I spending too much money on AdWords? Should I invite more bloggers to try our products and if yes, which ones?

There are two main reasons I log in into the Google Analytics Account:

• To make sure that the trend didn’t change unexpectedly. The new Google Analytics Dashboard is really helpful, but it would be great if we could configure the metric to follow, not just choose between the 4 provided by GA. I spend little time doing this.
• To try and answer “how to” questions when I need help. This gets me spending more time and it sure requires more attention on my side. But I obtain at least partial answers. I mean don’t ever even try starting an A/B testing without consulting your analytics data!

Ok, I admit, I am a GA geek, so I also login just to play with the data. It’s tremendous fun and helps me discover every corner that GA has to offer.

But getting back to Actionable Data and the 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about your visitors. We will do this one at a time. Today I’ll share with you just a warm up – one of the first things I have implemented here at Avangate:

Employing the Google Analytics code to track 404 error pages

Let’s get over the technicalities fast. The web is full of such resources, so there are 2 ways of doing this: the easy way and the Brian Clifton way (which is great nevertheless).

The easy way: Add the following tracking code to your 404 Customized Error Page:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” :”http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-XXXXX-X“);
pageTracker._trackPageview(”/404-error”+location.pathname);
</script>

Don’t have a customized 404 error page yet? Check out this tutorial on how to create one. Also, don’t forget to replace the UA-XXXX-X with your Google Analytics ID in the above added tracking code.

In your Top Content you’ll be able to identify 2 things: all the people getting to a 404 page and what URL they have typed in.

The Brian Clifton way is a little bit more complex, but it is extended to the tracking of all possible server errors. Mainly, we should make sure that we use the word ‘Error’ in the title page for each error category and with the help of a filter rewrite the URL that is recorded by Google Analytics. In the end, we can get the same result as above. If you want to get more details on this method, you can find them in Brian’s book or just mail me and I should be able to help you with the implementation details.

If you are to declare war to broken links, visited or not by web users, June Dershewitz provides 3 great tips on how to find them or just try Xenu, a great free tool for discovering error pages.

Reading the Data in Google Analytics

404 will always happen. But it can happen less and the less the better. My suggestion is to check for errors on a monthly basis or whenever there are special events like site redesigns, new sections or taking down certain parts of the website.

Create a segment in the new Google Analytics to check for 404 errors

Let’s go for the easiest way and eliminate all the noise. Create the following segment in your Google Analytics. Don’t know how to create a segment? Check out this video tutorial.

After you apply the new segment, the only data that shows in your Google Analytics Profile is about all those visitors who got to a 404 error page in their adventure on your website.

Go to Content > Top Content overview and only select to view the error pages that users got to, by limiting the report to”/404-error/” pages in the Find Page field just under the report:

Now that you’ve done that, click on any error page from the list. You’ll get to a report just like this one:

So, what do I use this report for? What can I learn from it?

1. Which external websites have misspelled an URL to any of your web pages: Go to Entrance Sources for that.
2. What pages in your website have broken links: Go to Navigation Summary
3. What users do after getting to a certain broken link: Go to Navigation Summary or Entrance Paths
4. What pages that do not exist anymore in your website are indexed in Search Engines? What keywords users searched to get to that page. How many visits did it trigger? Go to Entrance Keywords.

What Actions can you take after getting all the above data?

1. Find all the broken links in your website and correct them.
2. Find out why Search Engines have indexed a 404 page and use a 301 redirect to lead the search engine to the right page. Log into your Google Webmasters Tools to find more information about other 404 pages that might be indexed without the users landing on them.
3. Are users quitting the website in large numbers after getting to a 404 error page? Optimize the page so that it keeps users on your website. Check out this collection of 404 pages and see how others have dealt with this.
4. If users don’t quit, do they actually land on the page they were initially interested in? If not, test some ways to help them get what they want. Look for good examples on the Internet.

Check back from time to time to see if anything has improved. If you don’t have trouble now, it doesn’t mean you never will. 404 pages are most of the times out of your control. Get back to check your 404 statistics on a monthly basis.

The above actions are just a couple of examples. The thing with taking actions on actual data is that it always depends on the information you get. There is no magic formula. However, the above illustrated example should provide at least a couple of glimpses on how am used to doing it.

This is just the first post in a series of how to take action on the data you get from Google Analytics about your visitors. For the next time, I will try to hustle a very neat trick proposed by Brian Clifton in a recent post, so stay tuned.

Also, if you would like me to tackle a special report or if you have challenges in understanding a certain fact about your users or how to get data that will help you take decisions on a certain fact, just comment below.

And of course, please share with me, how’s your error tracking going so far? :)