Track Downloads with Google Analytics

December 11th, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

Ever wanted to know how many times a PDF was downloaded from your website?  Or maybe you need to track now many people watch your company video.  Whatever the case, there’s an easy way with Google Analytics.

Here’s how it’s done.  Let’s say you have a page with a link to a .pdf document.  The html link would look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/subdirectory/document.pdf”>Download PDF</a>

In order to make it so Google Analytics can track this PDF and post the results in the Top Content section of analytics, all you need to do is replace the sample url above with the following:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/subdirectory/document.pdf” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/subdirectory/sample_document_name’); “>Download PDF</a>

Now, lets say that you have downloads all over your website and you need to track each one.  Well, you still need to use the above code as the html link, but in order to make it easier to track each of these in the Top Content section, you’ll want to make it appear as if each download is located in the same folder – see below:

  • (’/downloads/sample_document_title’)

Notice that I replaced the actual location /subdirectory/ with /downloads/ – this makes it easy when looking through Google Analytics to find everything that was downloaded, even if the files are actually in different directories or sub directories.

I actually just finished setting this up for a client that has roughly 30 downloads to track.  They have white papers, power points and other such media that is physically located in different folders with no standard naming convention.

In order to make it easier for them to find what content had been downloaded, I used the following structure:

  • (’/downloads/catalogs/sample_catalog_name’)
  • (’/downloads/whitepapers/sample_whitepaper_name’)
  • (’/downloads/ppt/sample_ppt_name’)

Now, when myself or the client goes into Google Analytics, we don’t have to remember every directory or sub directory that may have had a downloadable item – in the traffic stats, they all appear as if they are in the /downloads/ folder.  So, a simple ascending or descending sort aligns all /downloads folders so they are easy to see.

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Posted in Google Analytics

Holiday Shoppers – Online Security Is A Concern

November 18th, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

A recent poll by National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) shows that security questions cause a loss of sales for online retailers.

More than 63 percent of the people that were polled, said that they didn’t complete online transactions because of concerns over the security protocols of the website. Several reasons were given as to why they chose not to complete the purchase:

  • 62% simply were not sure the site was secure.
  • 46% were worried about providing the information requested.
  • 41% said the site requested more information than necessary for the transaction.
  • 32% said it wasn’t clear about how the site would use personal information

The responses given in this poll offer some good insight into what the general public is looking for.  First and foremost, make sure there is obvious “secure site” logos throughout your website, especially on product and information gathering pages.  Second, keep it simple – don’t request more information than necessary, don’t ask them to opt in/out of a newsletter, don’t ask for feedback.  Above all, be sure and tell you audience that their information will not be sold, leased or shared in any form outside of your direct company.

{ read the full report }

Bottom line, use a little common sense – fraud is on the rise and people are concerned – do everything you can to eliminate those concerns but most of all, don’t misuse trusted information.


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

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Posted in eCommerce

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Using Canonical Links To Prevent Duplicate Site Content

November 10th, 2009 by Trevor Walter 1 comment »

Do you have a problem with duplicate content on your site?  If your site suffers from duplicate content problems due to dynamically generated url’s that include session id’s, category markers, product id’s, etc. then you might have a problem when it comes to ranking well in the search engines.

As most people know, the search engines, especially Google, like to steer clear of content that has been duplicated somewhere else on the web or within a website.  And, when optimizing a database driven site it can be very hard to build static url’s without duplicating previously created dynamic url’s.

With canonical links, you can eliminate the problem of having dynamic and static pages with the same content.  If you have site categories that tend to share the same data (ie. computer desks and office desks), you can use canonical links to tell the search engines which one is the most important and which to ignore.  The great thing – this doesn’t affect the functionality of your website.

Here’s a quick example of how canonical links work:

  • URL 1: http://www.yourdomain.com/product.php?cat_id=52
  • URL 2: http://www.yourdomain.com/product.php?sessionid=1234
  • URL 3: http://www.yourdomain.com/product/widgets.php

Assuming that the above URL’s all display the exact same content, and for the purpose of good website optimization, you’ll want to use the URL 3.  So, how do you tell the search engines not to worry about the content on URL 1 or URL 2?  Simple – use a canonical link url in the <head> section of the pages you don’t want ranked.

All you need to do is use the follow url structure just inside the opening head tag:

<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/product/widgets.php”/>

If you want, you can even use a relative URL path such as:

<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=product/widgets.php” />

If you use a <base> link in your page, all relative paths will resolve to the base URL.

Want more information on Canonical Links – check out Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

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Posted in Website Optimization

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Help Google Build Better Google Maps

October 7th, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

Stan Schroeder over at Mashable.com breaks the story on Google’s desire to build a better map system and they are asking for help from the public.

Stan writes, “The team behind Google Maps today reports several interesting improvements to the service. First of all, they’ve created a new base map dataset, which includes several publicly accessible geospatial government-created datasets, with information pertaining to toll roads, bridges, road networks and the like.”

>> Read Full Article

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Posted in The Social Web

Google Crawls Your Google Docs

September 22nd, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

On September 18th, Google announced that they will start crawling any published Google Docs that are linked to from a public website.  Those docs will not only be crawled but also indexed which means they could appear in search results.

I’m not a Google Docs user, in fact, anything that can give Google more access then they already have with the data on my computer, is in my estimation “Not Good”.

One thing we know is that whenever Google gets its hands on data, it loves to share it with the world, despite copyright laws or trademark laws.  Just look at their Google Books program – rather than obeying copyright laws, it indexed tens of thousands of books and published them online.

Rather than getting permission from the various authors guilds and writers associations, they just posted the material which lead to a 3 year court battle where the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers eventually settled with Google and agreed to let them post those books online.  Copyright Laws Be Damned!

I can promise you that at some point in the future, any content you post to Google Docs will show up online, despite the fact that you never published it or linked to it from a publicly crawled website.

Just be careful, don’t use Google Docs for sensitive data – remember, once something is posted online, it is there forever.


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

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Posted in Search Engines

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Melting Polar Ice Caps Expose Hundreds of Secret Arctic Lairs

September 21st, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

ZACKENBERG RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND—Claiming it to be one of the most dramatic and visible signs of climate change to date, researchers said Monday that receding polar ice caps have revealed nearly 200 clandestine lairs once buried deep beneath hundreds of feet of Arctic ice.

>> read full article

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Posted in Funny Sutff

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Attract Customers with Twitter

September 21st, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

My last post relating to Twitter, gave a simple how-to strategy for posting your products on Twitter.  But, what if you don’t sell products but rather a service – what then?

Well, don’t fret – sharing information on Twitter is easier than sharing products.  You’re an expert in your industry, you know everything there is to know about the services you offer and you can spend hours telling people why they would benefit from hiring your company.  Right?

With Twitter, you can post short (140 character) tweets that I call “solution tweets”.  You probably already know what problems your customers encounter, therefore, you know what questions they would ask if they had the chance.  All you need to do is start addressing those problems with a few simple question and answer tweets – see example tweets below:

  • Tweet Question: Not getting good leads with your pay per click program or maybe it’s just costing you too much?
  • Tweet Answer: Try dropping the competitive keywords and use long-tail search terms instead.  Need help finding long-tail terms? Call me – 866-862-8135.

If you first post the question and then immediately post the answer and you do this on a regular basis, people will start following your tweets, trying your suggestions and eventually contact you when they find they’re in over their head or don’t have time.

Here’s the key to the success of this strategy – Don’t feed people bull and don’t waste their time.  The more specific your question / answer is the more receptive people will be to your posts.  Remember, you’re setting yourself up as “the industry professional” so give them information they would normally have to pay for.

Like a weekly podcast, the more consistent you are with your tweets, the bigger audience you’ll have.


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com ::  www.fmgconsultants.com

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Posted in Twitter

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Use Twitter to Sell Products

September 2nd, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

Twitter, one of the hottest micro-blogging tools online, offers a great way for you to sell products.

Anyone that has spent anytime on Twitter knows that a lot of the tweets you see are less than useful.  Most people tweet everything they are doing all day long and to be honest, no one really cares.  But, there are a few that post useful information, however, most of that information is for service based industries.

So, what if your in a product based industry?  What options are there for you to help you get product offerings out to potential customers?  Well, with Twitter, you can micro-blog (tweet) your products and using a 3rd party site such as TwitPic, you can tweet product photos also.

What’s Needed To Tweet Products?

The first thing you need to do is setup an account with Twitter – it only takes about 5 minutes.  Once your account is setup, you can modify color schemes, add a logo, include a link to your website and create a one-line bio.  If you’re creative, you can even design a Twitter background that is able to display so much more about your company, products, etc.

Here are a couple of tweeters that follow me – notice their backgrounds:

If your browser window is expanded wide enough, you will see data on the left of the screen with some of these people.  Not a bad way to do a little extra advertising on Twitter.

Once you have your Twitter account setup and the design looking good, all you have to do is start posting links to your products.  Of course, you’ll want to write something catchy about each product link – example below:

Get the idea?  It’s not hard, only takes a few minutes of time each day and before long, you will have a bunch of people following you and clicking through to your site.  A recent poll stated that roughly 70% of people following you on Twitter will click on a link if you include it in a post.

How Can You Connect With People On Twitter?

Connecting with people on Twitter and creating a loyal following is pretty easy.  Mostly you just need to start tweeting and people will naturally find you.  But, there are some other things you can do such as using Twellow, a directory of every person on Twitter and searchable by name and/or category.

Just last week, I setup a Twitter account for a client that sells t-shirts.  A lot of their shirts are sports related so a simple search on Twellow for various sports related terms turned up a few hundred individuals.  All I had to do was click the “follow” button on their Twitter account and before long, they started following my client.  See, it’s common courtesy that when you follow someone, they in turn follow you.

Want To Do More Than Just Tweeting?

How about using a Twitter advertising service to help get your product out to more people?  There are lots of Twitter Ad providers out there and most of them are probably reputable but one that I came across the other day has really caught my eye.

Be-A-Magpie, a Twitter Advertising Network, has a large group of “tweeters” that will spend time tweeting about your products to their followers.  The great thing is that through this large network of tweeters, they are able to identify members that tweet specifically within your industry, therefore, they viewing audience is better targeted and more likely to click to your site.

magpie_sketch_01

So, what are you waiting for?  A few minutes of your time may yield hundreds or thousands of additional clicks to your site.  And who knows, you may have fun at the same time.

Drop by Twitter, setup an account and get tweeting!


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

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Posted in Twitter

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Must-Have Twitter Tools

August 25th, 2009 by Trevor Walter 1 comment »

I know most of you already have these tools in your Twitter arsenal but for those that are new to Twitter, here are a few sites and Twitter tools you need to know about.

  • Twellow – a great directory of Twitter users; search by name or category.
  • Be A Magpie – a great way to advertise on Twitter or make a little money tweeting.
  • Qwitter – emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter.
  • Future Tweets – schedule tweets to be sent at later times.
  • Group Tweet – send private messages to a group of friends or colleagues.

Be sure and embrace Twitter – it can be your best friend for both personal and business.


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

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Posted in Twitter

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Caffeine: Google’s New Search Technology

August 12th, 2009 by Trevor Walter No comments »

On Monday, August 10th, Google officially announced a new search technology they will be releasing in the near future.  The new technology is called “Caffeine” – that gives me the jitters just thinking about how this could effect ranking results.

According to Google, “For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

So, once again we come to the question, “How Does This Affect Me?”.  Well, that’s a great question!  No one knows for sure what changes this will cause to current keyword positions or what optimization changes will need to be implemented, if any.

Google does give us access to test the new search and from what I can tell, 99.9% of the keywords I tested came up in the same positions as the standard Google search.  That’s a good thing because Google is not known for rolling out improvements to its search engine.

I want to caution everyone – just because the results seem to be similar, doesn’t mean they will stay similar.  There are people reporting huge differences between Caffeine and standard search but there could be any number of reasons for that, the least of which is the change in search technology.

We will be watching and testing the new search engine as long as we have access to it.  Once it is launched, which will be at Google.com and won’t appear any different in looks than the current search, we will be testing heavily to see if the launch itself caused any changes to keyword positions.

If there are any changes that need to be made to your search engine optimization campaigns, we will send out a newsletter explaining what those changes will be and the time frames for making them happen.


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com

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Posted in Search Engines

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