Avoiding Decision Fatigue During Software Development

In this article, Ben Northrop shares suggestions for how to avoid decision fatigue during the software development process. One way to avoid poor or deferred judgement is to schedule decisive meetings early in the day to ensure that meeting-holders are on top of their game. Likewise, meeting objectives should be organized into clear and approachable bites, simplifying solution sets to be as manageable as possible. Finally, possibly the best recommendation of all: bring candy.

Insight: Simple efforts to ensure productivity and avoid stagnation can have immeasurable impact on project success and overarching team morale. Not only is the advice applicable for software development, it also holds potential value for any organization that depends on group efforts in the achievement of creative, task-oriented goals. It is key to know when people are at their best for a task, and engineering that task to be as streamlined as possible and readily taken on.

The Internet: A Series of Tubes

With this infographic, FastCo Design depicts how online data travels around the world via a “series of tubes”. Color bands are used to represent the cable connections that enable the global information exchange, providing a easy-to-read and visually-appealing diagram. The map was crated using the Global Bandwidth Research Service’s analysis and insights into bandwidth use and subsequent channels of exchange.

Insight: In creating this graphic, TeleGeography successfully minimizes a wealth of complex communication data into basic colored lines and links. Visually striking in its simplicity, this map shows the power of design to communicate advanced ideas in the most approachable format possible.

Right Now Reports in Google Analytics

Google has begun rolling out a new feature to its Analytics users in the form of ‘Right Now’ reports, a reporting feature that measures the behavior of users in real time. ‘Right Now’ reports analyze traffic on a minute-by-minute basis, and also show how many active users are connected to a site at any given moment. Uses for Google Analytics’ new real-time measurements include measuring social media impact immediately and  ensuring campaign tracking is properly implemented before launching a campaign.

Insight: The addition of real-time data tracking to Google Analytics makes the platform more valuable for digital media managers or social media strategists who are interested in seeing results immediately. This new feature, along with features added to the newest iteration of Google Analytics, make the platform as valuable for social media tracking as it has been for traditional web metrics reporting.

Finding Success in the Cloud

In this article from The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal explains that the freedom of usage that defined personal computing does not extend so fully to the world of the cloud. There is no doubt that these services offer some great advantages, such as the offloading of application overhead to remote servers, which in turn allows larger applications (such as Facebook for iPhone or Google Docs) to be served almost completely over the internet. Unfortunately, at the same time, cloud services are limited in terms of how much change is ‘acceptable’. Likewise, if new features are rolled out improperly, the risk for massive backlashes is substantially higher.

Insight: As users, we must acknowledge that our online tools are often not something concrete which we own, but constantly evolving entities, which are not entirely under our control. As developers, we must be conscientious that people feel that the tools we make are “their” tools, and when we make changes, we change their experience.  We must be careful about what changes we make and how quickly we make them to help prevent a “my mom cleaned my room” reaction in the user-base.

Calculating the Cost of Patent Trolls

In this article, Ars Technica discusses calculating the cost of a patent troll: a small company that produces no products, but purchases software patents for the purpose of combined licensure and litigation. It is believed that such companies have cost innovators upward of $500 billion, and in turn, disincentivized the progression and creation of new software products. To those in the technology sector, this is a disturbing trend, as the patent system was initially created to inspire innovation, rather than allow for its manipulation.

Insight: Software creators are faced with two main options: to cease in their innovation efforts or fight against patent manipulation. Regardless, for real change to take place, government intervention may be required, suggesting that changes to patent legislation may be on the horizon.

Using Google Analytics to Identify Problems & Opportunities on your Website.

Google Analytics’ “In-Page Analytics” feature, formerly known as Page Overlay, allows users to visually identify which objects on a given page get the most attention and which ones do not get any. This feature is great for user experience troubleshooting to determine what components on a website require optimization for maximized conversions. Are visitors fully utilizing the detailed navigation menu, or instead using other call-to-action tools displayed on the page to navigate? Use In-Page Analytics to determine what works best for your website and your customers.

Insight: Measuring and reporting on conversion rates can be frustrating if customers seem unresponsive to carefully planned promotional pages – especially with e-commerce, as a missed conversion translates directly to lost profits. Using In-Page Analytics, along with other UX tools from Google, such as Browser Size, a Google Labs program, can help put the developer or Internet marketer in the position of the user to determine what is hindering conversions in an easy-to-understand, visual manner.

32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011

To start things off on the right foot, SEOmoz has provided a great list of tips to keep your search marketing campaign fresh in the New Year. The list covers a number of classic black hat techniques, including basics like stuffing and hiding keywords on-page, as well as “sketchy link building.” Additionally, the list also covers the topic of quantity vs. quality in the SEO realm. Overall, the list is a good place to start for SEO beginners who may have been misinformed by the wealth of SEO “tips” published as late as ten years ago that still, ironically, rank well in search results.

Insight: One of the problems with SEO information online is the credibility and relevance of the material published. SEO tactics change from day to day, so outdated information is easy to come by. SEOmoz’s blog is an extremely valuable source for up-to-date SEO case studies and tips, and can help ensure your agency isn’t implementing year-old tactics that penalize your website in search engines rather than help bolster rankings. Reflect on the list of bad practices and compare to your own SEO tactics to ensure a strong and successful campaign.

How to improve your site indexation

The best place to start when submitting and working with a Sitemap is Google Webmaster Tools. This tool gives you a great indication of how Google views your website, and if its search spider has any problems crawling and indexing. The best way to quickly improve your Google page indexation is by submitting an XML Sitemap to Webmaster Tools. The Sitemap provides Google with a list of the pages that should appear in its index, as well as the weight, or importance, they each have in relation to each other. Google will not miss an important page nested within the site, or give it less authority than you would prefer, as you can dictate what you feel it is worth. This case study, provided by SEO guru Bruce Clay, will help get the most out of your site’s indexation.

Insight: As opposed to paid search marketing, which is something you have direct control of, search engine optimization is something you affect. By making changes to your site, you can affect the way search spiders view it. Using a Sitemap is one of the few ways in which you can direct and dictate to a search engine how you want your site to appear in search engines. Correctly implementing an XML Sitemap lets you specify what pages are most important, and which should be restricted from search engine indexes.

Social Networks to Capture 11% of Online Advertising Spending in 2011

According to eMarketer, U.S. Internet marketers will spend $3.08 billion to advertise on social networking sites in 2011. This represents a 55% increase over what was spent on social networking sites in 2010. Overall, the social networking spend represents 11% of what online marketing professionals expect to spend on all online advertising in the country over 2011.

Out of all the social networks, Facebook is the one that will most likely take the biggest share of those ad dollars. Facebook pulled about $1.86 billion in 2010, and eMarketer expects that number to at least double in 2011.

Insight: Many online ventures survive solely on Internet advertisements and pay-per-click ad placement – such as Google, the search behemoth that built the AdWords / AdSense platform that supplies as much as 97% of its total revenue. If online advertisers are taking more of their money to social networks, Google needs to make sure it continues profiting off its golden goose.

10 Useful JQuery Plugins For Images

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries in use today. It gives developers great flexibility and has an incalculable amount of implementations and uses; however, some of the most impressive uses involve displaying images. Implementing a tasteful jQuery plugin for images on your blog or website can take the design from modest to impressive in no time. In this article, ten of the most helpful image-based jQuery plugins are reviewed and compared. Featured jQuery plugins include coda sliders with impressive transitions, face detection tools, and a background image resizer that keeps your background image in the preferred position and ratio, no matter the browser setting.

Insight: Implementing a new coda slider is one example of a quick and easy way to give your website a refresh without bending over backwards to do a full redesign. Web Design Ledger’s list of ten impressive jQuery tools for image display gives web designers a great set of plugins to choose from that will instantly give your site a new look.

Linking AdWords Campaigns to Google Analytics Accounts

As both are Google products, linking an AdWords account to an Analytics account is fairly simple and straightforward. However, there are a few caveats.

Google Analytics includes in its organizational structure ‘Accounts’ and ‘Profiles’. An ‘Account’ can include several different ‘Profiles’ to better segment, through filters, the tracking on a web domain.

A best practice when installing tracking code for a client, is to have a separate Analytics account for each individual website. Only one AdWords account can be linked to an Analytics account, so pre-planning and organization is paramount. At Mudbug Media, we set up an individual Analytics account for each client.

Because multiple website Analytics profiles can be included within a single Analytics account, it is easy for someone unfamiliar with web analytics to find themselves having to create a new Analytics account for a long-running website, and possibly losing the site’s historical data.

Choose Destination URLs with Care

Recently, I ran into a puzzle trying to link an AdWords account with the corresponding Analytics account. As far as I could tell, the campaign was linked to the Analytics account properly, and the Analytics AdWords report was recording clicks; however, the Paid Search segment was showing no visitors.

Working with Google and Antonio, Mudbug Media’s SEO and Analytics Specialist, we identified the culprit. Our destination URL was a redirect, and therefore was not triggering the Analytics javascript. Simply switching the destination URL for our AdWords ads solved the problem, and now the visitors are being tracked properly.

Tracking ROI

It is important to link AdWords campaigns to Analytics accounts because AdWords visitor behavior is essential to ROI tracking. AdWords reporting will provide insights into how the campaign is performing, but that is only half of the story. The advanced audience segment ‘Paid Search Traffic’ provides insights on how the visitors behave on the site. A high CTR is great unless the landing page has a high bounce rate – then it’s ineffectively spent money. What percentage of a website’s visitors comes through the AdWords campaign? Is the client paying for the majority of a site’s visitors?

Linking AdWords campaigns to Analytics accounts shows the conversion rates of AdWords visitors. Are AdWords visitors buying products from a website? How much is spent in AdWords per sale? Through linking a site’s determined conversion behavior to the AdWords campaign, Google can optimize an AdWords campaign for conversions. Google will place the most optimal ad for the most optimal keyword in the most optimal position for a sale.

Identify Your Culprits

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” is an advertising adage attributed to department store merchant, John Wanamaker. One of the most valuable aspects of online advertising is the ability to measure how advertising is performing, what methods are converting consumers into customers, and how much each new customer costs. Linking AdWords campaigns to Analytics tracking allows an advertiser to modify AdWords campaigns to perform at peak return.

“Make your data tell a story: find out more about Mudbug Media’s Web Analytics services.”

Credits: ”Photo courtesy of Marketing Sherpa“

The Meeting

It all started in 1995, when Larry Page, a University of Michigan graduate, visited Stanford University and took a tour of the campus. His tour guide that day was Sergey Brin, a Ph.D student.  During their first “meeting,” sources say that the two disagreed on most everything. One year later, Larry and Sergey, now both Stanford computer science grad students, found themselves working on a search engine called BackRub – named after the web’s structure of “back links.” This search engine was a “web crawler,” engineered to traverse the web by “clicking” on links. BackRub operated on Stanford servers for more than a year, but because it required so much bandwidth, the “Google guys,” as they were later known, were forced to take it down.

The Name

In 1997, Larry and Sergey got together and decided to rename BackRub. After brainstorming for a while, they picked Google—a play on the word “googol”, a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.  The use of the term reflects their mission to organize all the information on the web. After confirming domain availability through a quick search of a domain registration database, Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.

Google, Inc.

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was one of the few that saw true potential in Larry and Sergey’s project. In August 1998, he wrote a check for the amount of $100,000 to an entity that didn’t exist at the moment: a company called Google, Inc. 

With this initial investment, and after managing to attract other investors, they got the ball rolling and opened their first “corporate headquarters” in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. While still in beta, The Google search engine was already getting 10,000 queries a day. In September 1998, Larry and Sergey hired fellow doctoral student and friend, Craig Silverstein, as their first employee.

In 1999, Google moved to a new corporate location in Palo Alto, California with a total of eight employees.

Google’s Mission

Google’s mission has always been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The innovative company is always looking for the next innovation that will improve our everyday tasks, making technology easier and more useful. Google is constantly doing changes that the end user may never notice, but that ultimately, make our lives easier.

Since its inception, Google has continuously pushed innovation on many levels, leading the vanguard in emerging web technologies and initiatives meant to make the Web faster and more accessible. Listed below are just a handful of the landmarks in Google’s history

Google Milestones

2000

October– Google AdWords launches with only 350 customers

December – Google Toolbar is released

2001

March – Google.com is available in 26 languages

July  – Google Image search launches, offering access to 250 million images

August  – Google opened first international office, in Tokyo

2002

May – Google partners with AOL
September  – Google News launches with 4000 news sources

2003

January – American Dialect Society members vote “Google” the “most useful word of 2002”
December  – Google Book Search launches.

2004

February – 6 billion items indexed
March  – Google Local introduced (Later, combined with Google maps)

2005

February – Google Maps goes live

March – Acquired Urchin—later Google Analytics

April – Google Adwords released “Site Targeting”

June – Unveiled Google Earth

August – Google Talk Launched

November – Released Google Analytics

2006

April – Google Calendars launched

May – Google Trends is released

June – Oxford Dictionary adds “Google” as a verb

October – Google acquires YouTube

2007

February  – Google Mail (Gmail) becomes available for everyone

May  – Google Street View debuts within Google Maps

2008

April – Google Website Optimizer launches in beta

September – Google Chrome becomes available for download

2009

March – Google Voice released to existing Grand Central users
June – Google Places gets a new dashboard

2010

August – Google Instant is released
September – Google TV is presented to the world.

Google Right Now

Currently, Google has offices in dozens of countries, providing the iconic search experience in more than 110 languages.

Google currently has the largest search engine market share in the world, and Google Maps has revolutionized the way people travel and look for local information. Additionally, Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Chrome, Android, and Google TV, the newest consumer endeavor, have changed how businesses work and how many individuals live their lives. Coming down the pipeline are incredibly exciting innovations, such as cars that drive themselves and voice recognition and translation for everyday use. Google will continue pushing the envelope and encouraging innovation within stale industries to make technology work for us, and not the other way around.

• How much money each page on your site earns you
• How much money these same pages lose you
• Why visitors seem to convert at different rates throughout the process
• How to maximize conversions all along the way

Google Analytics delivers a wealth of tabular data and pre-formatted reports that can quickly inundate you with interesting information about your website. While the data is valuable on its own, it becomes much more insightful when sorted and organized in a way that is meaningful to your business objectives. Google Analytics’ goal reporting allows you to look at your data in a more strategic manner, and makes it incredibly easy to determine the success rates of particular pages or diagnose on-page conversion issues.

Setting up goals with Google Analytics sounds simple in theory – choose an end point, enter the points in between and collect the data. Unfortunately, implementing something that sounds simple is never as easy as it seems.

In this post, we’re going to map out from start to finish how to successfully utilize goals to report on the most important features of the website, however you define them.

Step 1: Giving the goals a purpose

Goals can be defined in the following manners:

• Engagement – how long are visitors sticking around to view my content, and how many pages do they view?
• Destination – do visitors reach the pages I need them to?

Every website is built with goals in mind. Whether it’s purchasing a product, watching a video, creating a username, or something more specific, goals should be used to report on methods of “conversion” that already exist on your website.

Goals depend on the function of a website. On e-commerce sites, the main goal is the sale of items. A sale can be quantified as a pageview of the confirmation page (“Thanks for doing business with us!”). If you’re looking to promote your business through a video, your goal may be to keep visitors on the page for 3 minutes or more. If you’re looking to sell ad space on your site, you may want to increase the number of pages per visit and track traffic growth. As long as there is an activity, a goal can be tracked.

Step 2: Defining the Goals

Once you’ve determined what your goals are, you must quantify them. If your goal is for visitors to be heavily engaged with your blog, you can set a goal of five pageviews in the blog profile of your website. If you’d like visitors to watch a video, the goal should be staying on the site for a specified amount of time or generating a virtual pageview each time the video loads. Because of the flexibility inherent in Google Analytics, you can be creative as to how you track a goal.

Goals of Engagement

Goals measuring engagement are easy to set up and can instantly tell you whether visitors find your content interesting enough to remain on site for the allotted amount of time, or view the minimum number of pages necessary for conversion.

Examples of engagement goals include:

• Pages/Visit
• Time on Page

Destination Goals & Funnel Visualization

Engagement goals are helpful in understanding how engaged your visitors are. However, what is even more insightful is tracking the paths of visitors to determine when they begin to make steps toward completing the goal and where they fall out. This is done by establishing a destination goal and visualizing the traffic from step one all the way to the conversion page.

Visualizing a destination goal as a funnel is a lot like merchandising. Store owners can compare product placement and sales figures to determine why certain products are flying off the shelves and why others are taking up valuable inventory space. Funnel visualization helps you do just that with your online store or web presence. By visualizing each step of your goal and how visitors entered or left the funnel, it’s easy to make an assessment about the usability of each step along the way and determine which elements on each page work to your favor or against.

To set up a destination goal, you need to choose your conversion page and determine the necessary steps along the way. The easiest way to do this is to act like a new visitor accessing your site for the first time and going through all the motions of converting to a valuable customer. Be sure to take notes along the way.

Destination Goal Example

A simple set of steps for a destination goal could be:

• shinytoys.info/
• shinytoys.info/product/killer-widget.html
• shinytoys.info/purchase/payment-information.html
• shinytoys.info/purchase/shipping-information.html
• shinytoys.info/purchase/complete.html

Regular Expressions & Google Analytics

Oftentimes destination goals become confusing or difficult to implement – specifically with dynamically generated content, such as a shopping cart. Luckily, Google Analytics utilizes regular expressions to establish rules for every step in the conversion process. Regular-Expressions.info defines regular expressions as “a special text string for describing a search pattern. You can think of regular expressions as wildcards on steroids.” Regular.Expressions.Info is a great resource, as it features everything you need in a concise, findable way.

One simple use of regular expressions is to match email addresses in a “Contact Us” form so that the user must enter an address that matches standard format of address@domain.com. Specifically, with Google Analytics, regular expressions can be utilized in a number of ways such as creating a rule to track only pages that lead to a conversion.

The following regular expression helps illustrate how these rules can add flexibility and logic to your funnels:

((great)*grand)?((fa|mo)ther)

The above expression can match the following strings:

• great grandmother
• great great grandmother
• great great great grandmother
• great great great great grandmother (etc.)
• grandmother
• mother
• great grandfather
• great great grandfather
• great great great grandfather
• great great great great grandfather (etc.)
• grandfather
• father

In the shopping cart example above, you can use a regular expression to define Step 2. Because you want to track goal conversion for every product and not just for the killer widget, you can use a regular expression to specify that step 2 should catch any pageview for pages within the /product/ folder. To do this, you can use the regular expression “.*” This combination matches any page within the folder so you can be sure that all your products will be counted in the funnel.

Make sure to check your regular expression after writing it to ensure it matches the strings you need.

Putting Money Where Your Web Presence Is

Goals and funnel visualizations are one of the easiest ways to put context to the numbers and figures Google Analytics collects, and can inform the ongoing strategy behind your site. Making sense of all the pageviews, bounce rates and other metrics can pay off big time, as well as help convey the success of your site.

Make your data tell a story: find out more about Mudbug Media’s Web Analytics services and more to take your site beyond brochure-ware and into a money-making machine.

After you enjoy these awesome links, Tweet, write on our wall or leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

Marketing

How to track Google Instant in Google Analytics.

Instant Elements: Tom Lehrer’s “Elements Song,” with Google Instant.

And how about YouTube Instant?

Eight tools to help you manage social media content overload.

Programming

Programming tips I wish I knew earlier.

How to debug your jQuery code.

Custom styling of the SELECT Elements.

Check out our delicious tags to see what else we’re looking at.

With Google Analytics, one can divide site visitors into very granular segments including, but not limited to visitors by: device (Mobile visitors), Language, Hour of the Day, and even Days Since Last Visit. These metrics can be combined, mixed, and matched to create very specific audience segments.

Creative Design from Google Analytics

Analytical data from Google provides insights into regional consumer preferences. Examining Custom Segments of site visitors by country, state, or city, and then overlaying which products were most viewed and purchased by those segments, can guide print design. For example, if visitors from City A repeatedly view and purchase one product, then media placements in City A should feature that product. Google Analytics City segments are so localized that ad placements in City A can feature one product, while ads placed in Suburb of City A can feature another.

Another way Google Analytics can guide creative is through keywords. Keywords provide a wealth of information into how potential customers reach a website. Consumers using ‘branded keywords’ to reach a site indicate their decision to use that brand. Category keywords driving purchases on a site indicate successful SEM efforts, well structured landing pages, and weaker brand loyalty. These insights can guide offline creative by identifying where to place the creative emphasis – on the product, price, or brand.

Media from Google Analytics

Google Analytics can also guide media decisions. As previously mentioned, the device used by consumers to access your site is trackable through Google Analytics. Research may indicate a strong mobile audience that might be better reached through mobile ads, apps, or other majority-mobile outlets such as Twitter. Likewise, poor search engine traffic numbers may suggest the need for increased SEO or Paid Search efforts. How consumers reach a website is as important as what they do once there.

Clearly, Google Analytics provides a plethora of data regarding website use. However, it is the analysis of that data that generates actionable insights into consumer behavior and gives the data value. These insights are not limited to recommending modifications to a website, as they can also be used to drive a variety of decisions regarding the presentation and media mix of a brand.

More Information on Google Analytics.

Here’s a look at some of the sites Chris and Antonio turn to regularly for tips, analysis of current events and inspiration.

Search Engine News

Search Engine Land – This site has tons of valuable material covering Google, Bing & search industry news, as well as the yearlong PPC Academy series.

Search Marketing Now – This site offers webcasts, whitepapers and resources for online and search engine marketers.

Google Resources

Google Webmaster Central Blog – Google’s official blog for news on crawling and indexing websites for the Google index.

Inside Adwords – Google’s official blog for news, information and tips on AdWords.

Official Google Analytics Blog – The best source for information on updates to GA as well as tips.

Google Analytics Application Gallery – The Official Google Application Gallery featuring several great web applications built using the Google Analytics’ API.

SEM Implementation

Open Graph – Facebook recently created the Open Graph protocol to bring the rest of the Web to Facebook in an effort to rival Google’s web footprint. Additional metadata allows a site to rank within Facebook, and it also increases content share-ability by having site visitors publish site content, such as blog posts and news stories, to their friends via their News Feed.

Asynchronous Tracking – Google recently updated their Analytics Tracking Code and this blog gives step-by-step instructions on how to migrate to the new code.  The main benefit of asynchronous tracking is faster load time, which has recently become a factor of Google’s search algorithm.

LunaMetrics – LunaMetrics has accumulated a wealth of information and resources over many years of working with Google Analytics and Website optimization, and they like to share the most useful tips on this site.

Local SEO Resources

Local Search Rankings – Regionalized SEO comprises a large part of our SEO focus, so this particular blogpost offers tips for optimizing Google Places and Google Local Business Listing.

Local Search Optimization – This one is specifically for Google Maps and Google Earth.  It contains information regarding the utilization of KML within XML Sitemaps, an advanced SEO technique beyond standard issue, local SEO.

Online Marketing Resources

eMarketer –This is a go-to site for online marketing tips, trends and statistics. eMarketer typically covers topics such as social media strategy, demographic and online trending as well as industry news and opinions. eMarketer is also a great source for charts and graphs on the above topics.

Marketing Sherpa – Similar to eMarketer, Marketing Sherpa is a how-to guide on topics, such as ecommerce, email marketing and search marketing. It is also a great source for charts and graphs on Web marketing trends.

Let us know if you find these links useful by commenting below.  We always enjoy feedback.

That’s where analytics come in.  Functioning like an online inventory system, analytics programs allow to you gather a wide range of information on every visitor to your site.  And since the majority of analytics programs are free and open to the public, there’s no reason why every website today shouldn’t employ some sort of analytical tracking method.

Here are the five most important tools that I use on a daily basis to track websites for our clients:

1. Google Analytics – A free service, Google Analytics is the real workhorse of analytics tools.  By far the most commonly used service, Google Analytics gives you click data on basic metrics – page views, unique viewers, and referral information.  It organizes it all in a layered fashion – you start with top-level dimensions and you can dig down according to whatever metrics you want to look at.  It also creates charts and graphs automatically and integrates easily with Google AdWords accounts for streamlined administration of your online marketing tactics.
2. Mint – While Google Analytics is based on dimensions such as pages, locations and referrals; Mint is real-time tracking – the Twitter of analytics.  Mint offers “Peppers,” plugins that allow you to really customize the way you track things on your site.  Google Analytics has an API, however useful plugins and third party apps are somewhat lacking at this point besides JuiceAnalytics.
3. AWStats – Free, open-source tool installed on our server that analyzes data based on the server log files.  Since AWStats is installed on the server level, it automatically tracks any websites operating off of that server, making it more reliable than Google Analytics, which is based on a JavaScript tracker that sends information based on user interaction.  While Google Analytics offers more robust information, AWStats offers reliable data to compare GA against.
4. Google Webmaster Tools- Much like we use AWStats to bounce numbers off of to get the most accurate information possible, Google Webmaster Tools helps us more faithfully understand traffic sources and other important data about the site.  These tools allow you to look at:
   • Search engine data – where did your site show up on the search results page, and is it worth it to pursue SEO if you’re already getting plenty of clicks in the fifth position front page?
   • Traffic sources – which pages have the most inbound links?
   • Most common keywords – what is Google currently associating your site with?
   • Page Load Time (part of the experimental “Labs” section) – how quickly/slowly the site is loading.  Are slow loading times becoming a problem?  This will become a bigger issue as Google begins to roll out their algorithm that uses page load time to determine placement.
5. My Brain – All of these tools are great and useful, but you need to be able to take a step back, analyze all the data and make an executive decision about how you want to proceed. A computer that can spot the most essential data for your particular set of needs and goals or personalize the overall image and usability of your site using analytic data hasn’t been invented. For that, you need your brain.