I was recently working on a site that needed to redirect 4907369 domains to one new site. We had to figure out an easy way to track all of the 301 redirects in Google Analytics.
After researching the subject and having issues finding solid answers, I decided to post a solution with 2 options on how to create a simple tracking referral system in analytics.
The first option, also known as the “formal” option, is to tag the redirect with an abundant amount of referring data, “?utm_medium=link&utm_source=redirect&utm_campaign=oldsite.com”. An example redirect domain link would be, http://www.newsite.com/?utm_source=redirect&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=oldsite.com.
In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments.
I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor sites. There are not many options that provide realistic data when comparing site traffic. Alexa.com and Compete.com are the two “best” options for traffic rankings currently. Compete also gives you an estimated number of visitors, as does Quantcast. You will notice large deviations in the data for some sites, but that is expected as traffic estimation is difficult.
I spent the last week going through a site that has been up for over a year. I went through the site as the customer. What I found was scary:
Product confusion.
Poor Search results.
Differing messages to members.
The great part about working with a startup is being able to make changes and shift strategies quickly. The bad part of working with a startup is being able to make changes and shift strategies quickly. Every startup I have worked with does bug testing before a release. The problem is adding new features or lines of business to a site can have a snowball effect beyond bugs. In the consulting industry it is called the “customer journey”.
When was the last time you experienced your site from the users perspective?
The more you add to a site the more disjointed it can become. If you have ONE action your site performs, it is hard to mess it up. If you provide multiple actions, and involves a user base that needs to join, it can get crazy.
With all of the options on the internet, and the ease to copy websites, you can’t afford to provide a poor experience. Think of Friendster losing ground to MySpace and Facebook. On the other hand, if you find a site with a good idea and poor execution, well…you know what to do.
If you have tried to join the beta for Microsoft’s new Gatineau Analytics Tool without any luck, I have good news. The new beta round is starting, the only catch is you have to be an advertiser with adCenter, the Microsoft version of Google Adwords.
This might be a small obstacle if you currently do not use paid search for your startup, in which you might want to wait for the public release. Here are a few words from the adCenter blog:
“With the Gatineau beta, you can learn more about where your visitors come from and easily measure your marketing campaigns across any medium and from any traffic source.
Features include:
Click and visitor tracking reports
Marketing campaign reporting and conversion tracking
Unique demographic and geographic information from your site visitors
Of course, Project Gatineau is a beta service so we are still adding features and working hard to improve.”
Visit the Gatineau page to sign-up for the new beta.
As of Saturday the 29th of September, Google Analytics has only been counting roughly 15% of my PPC (adwords) traffic. At the same time my direct traffic has doubled. I’m not positive that GA is counting “paid traffic” as “direct traffic” but I do know that all of the tracking scripts have not been changed during this time (I have auto-tagging enabled so that is not the issue for you GA experts).
Check your traffic statistics daily to find shifts in your traffic.
This is a common issue that all internet marketers need to be aware of. If these shifts go unnoticed, you could be making important business decisions on bad traffic data that you should have caught.
If anyone else is experiencing such an issue please let us know.
As new screen shots of Microsofts up coming analytics software named Gatineau are being released, we are still anxiously awaiting an invite to the beta. Reports from around the blogosphere are the beta should launch sometime this week.
Startup Hustle is looking forward to a competitor to Google Analytics. The more data points you can use in your analytics research the better. Plus we want to see if Microsoft can provide a better challenge with Gatineau that it did with adCenter.
If you are interested in being part of the Gatineau beta, sign up here.
I love HitTail. It is a fantastic SEO tool and the best part….it is free. If you dont know what HitTail is, it is a web based program that will tell you which search terms lead to your site and keep track of the long tail for you. It also has a live section that will show you which websites lead a user to your site (it updates live as a link it clicked that lands on your site).
The free version is limited to 100,000 visits per month. So, conventional thinking would lead you to believe that once you hit that limit, HitTail would stop tracking for the rest of that month and restart next month….oh no. If you hit the limit you either have to upgrade to the $50 a month package or they will end the use of the service for you. Here is an email I got from them today:
I spent the morning going through Google’s new Report which show you where your content ads are displayed (Adsense). I just read a blog article over at the PPC Book that described exactly how I felt. A large number of the poor performing sites are not disclosed but are show as “Domain Ads”. Some of the most clicked URL’s that don’t convert fall under “Domain Ads” (surprise, surprise). Since Google does not show you the domain, you can not block the domain in the campaign setting.
So the entire reason to produce a Placement Performance Report is transparency, but they hide URL’s ….makes sense.
I wrote a post last week about using CrazyEgg to analyze landing page performance. Techcrunch broke the story that CrazyEgg has a new feature called “Confetti”. The new feature will pinpoint exactly where a user clicked and feeds you where they came from, their OS, screen size, browser and time before clicking. It is another feature that makes CrazyEgg a great (free) product.
If you have tried to join the 
