Learn to master the world of Google Analytics with these terrific posts.

Adding Notes to Google Analytics Timeline

Did you know that in Google Analytics, you can easily make annotations for big events happening to your website?  I am going to share with you the very simple way I made note of all my recent website designs in just a few steps. 

Find Your Site’s Best Keywords in Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers a lot of good information, but not everybody knows how to read it.  Today, I will show you how to compare your best performing keywords that bring people into your web site and compare it to the average traffic of your website.

Free Google Analytics Training from Google

While checking out what it takes to become an authorized Google Analytics consultant, I stumbled across a series of videos online that anybody can use to get to know their own Google Analytics account a little better. 

Site Usage in Google Analytics

I have been using Google Analytics since its debut, and love it as a stats tool.  I probably use it more than I have any tools built into a hosting account.  Some people might be overwhelmed by some of the terms though, so to break it down I thought I would take a look at the first thing you see, the Site Usage section.

What to do When You Find Yourself Getting Popular

Looks like my post-Firefox 3 bump in stats is starting to come to an end for Firefox Facts.   While the madness was going on (one post got up to 80+ comments!) I came up with a few tactics to try to milk the proverbial press cow as long as I could.

Popular Posts via Google Analytics

How does one pull up the most popular links on their web site or blog using Google Analytics? This one took me a little while to figure out, but finally found the right way and the quickest steps on how to get this done. I love Google Analytics more so than some of the other web site statistic scripts out there.

Is there anything else about Google Analytics that drives you batty? Leave a comment and let me know. I will try to answer your questions or give you more detail in a future post.

Google Analytics offers a lot of good information, but not everybody knows how to read it.  Today, I will show you how to compare your best performing keywords that bring people into your web site and compare it to the average traffic of your website.

To get started, you will want to login to Google Analytics, go to your site’s profile.  Next, on the left side of the screen click on Traffic Sources and then Keywords.  This will take you to the Keyword Overview screen for your domain.

Now, you can see your most popular keywords.  This screen shows all the paid and non-paid keywords people use to find your website. By default, the keywords are sorted by highest to lowest by how many visits they have brought to your website.

Click on the comparison view to see how individual popular keywords compare to the website average.

So if I were to start advertising, I would want to target some of these better keywords for my website, such as “paint.net tutorials” and “wordpress alternatives”.  Even when you take advertising out of the picture, you could also say these would be good areas to focus on when it comes to future articles or tutorials.

Hope that helps you out when using and trying to understand Google Analytics on your own.  By understanding which keywords out perform the site average, you can see where you might need to shift your attention to in future marketing or website development.

Often our web site statistics we gather are there to help us do better, but very rarely are we rewarded for them doing well.  GoingUp! is not only a great new web site analytics tracker, but it will also pay you back in return.

Having a good web site analytics package is key to having a successful web site.  You have to know what your visitors like, what they don’t like, and where you could improve.

What type of information will GoingUp! track?  It does just about everything:

• Complete Web Site Stats
• Keyword Position Tracking
• Actions and Goals
• Google PageRank Tracking
• Recent Visitor Maps/Locations
• Heat Maps
• Page Optimizer Tool

Plus it features a customizable dashboard that will help you pull up all the data you need to see, right off the bat.  GoingUp! integrates popular analytics and search engine optimization tools in one easy-to-use interface to see how your website is performing from all points-of-view.

• Free Web Site and SEO Tools from GoingUp!

So where does the payback come from, that I mentioned before?

GoingUp! now lets you earn points while using our web analytics tracking. Soon, you’ll be able to use these points for premium services such as search engine promotion, keyword rank monitor and more. Plus, you can even turn your points into cash or prizes.

That is a unique spin that will defiantly entice a few to give it a shot.  The best part about it all, is that it is free to try – so why not give it a spin?

You can learn more about or sign up for GoingUp! at GoingUp.com.

RescueTime – It is a web-based time management and analytic tool for knowledge workers who want to be more productive.

FreshBooks – One of the best tools to easily and quickly track your time and invoice your clients.

Cashboard – Time tracking, invoicing, estimates, and online payments done your way. Cashboard does it all, and does it for free.

Motismo – a simple time tracking solution for creative professionals.

LiveTimer – This is a flexible and easy to use online time tracking service. It can be used by anyone on the Internet to track time for billing purposes or to improve accountability and productivity.

TrackMyPeople -This system is entirely web based meaning you can access your teams data everywhere in the world allowing you to easily track your employees time spent on a project or just analyze a graph for optimization.

Torch – This application allows you to communicate simply with your colleagues, clients and suppliers.

FreeTimeManager – FreeTime was conceived and developed by a team of designers who were looking for a simple yet logical real-time management solution.

BubbleTimer – A personal time management solution that helps you spend your time on what’s most important to you.

If you are looking for more time saving solutions, be sure to check out the previous list of ten application to help you get more time back.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Want more subscription options? There is always the special subscription links page where I hide all those neato buttons that allow you to subscribe using every form of subscription this side of the wacky Web.

First thing you need to do is point your browser towards Yahoo! Pipes and click on “Create a Pipe”. After doing that you will see a big confusing interface you can not make heads or tails from. Don’t worry. Just click on “Fetch Feed” and drag it over to your right (onto the grid).

Next you will want to click on the “+” graphic next to URL to add more feeds to the list. Click it once for every feed you would like to group together as one.

After that, you will need to sort your mega feed by date, so it looks like a regular ol’ RSS feed. To do that, click on “Operators” on the left sidebar and then drag and drop “Sort” onto the grid. Don’t worry if this looks messy, you don’t get any points for making it look nice yet.

On the box that says “Sort” you are going to want to select “Publication Date” on the drop down box. In the next drop down box you see (to the right of the first one) you need to select “descending” as the order you would like your feed to be displayed. That will cause all of the newest entries on your feed to be displayed at the top.

Next, you see that little circle under each of the boxes you have created? You need to connect them all together so they will work as one. Start with the “Feed Fetch” box. Drag the little circle down to down to the top of “Sort”. If you did it correctly you should see a blue line connecting the two now. Next click on the circle under “Sort” and connect it to the circle on top of “Pipe Output”.

Your almost done! In the upper right corner you should see a button that says “Publish”. Click that. A new box will come up and give you a lot of information to fill out about your feed. You can name it, put a description and some keywords. After doing that, click “Publish” at the bottom of that box.

Now click on the link that says “Back to My Pipes”. If everything was done correctly you should now see your newly created pipe listed there. Click on the name of your pipe and you can see a lot of information about it. The next thing you want to do is hit the “Run this Pipe” link.

Now you should see a Web page representation of your mega feed. Click on the link that says “Subscribe” and you will be given a list of options to choose from. There are a great number of ways you can keep up to date with this feed.

The one you pick is up to you. Here is the final product for the mega ego feed that I created! Neat, hu?

So now you have your own egotistical RSS feed to keep track of all of your different posts to all these different places. Even if you don’t have as many blogs or write at as many places as I do – you can still make use of this tool. You could combine your del.icio.us links and your Flickr feeds to keep track of your favorite links and photos. You could get the RSS feeds for all your friends’ blogs on MySpace and make one feed to track them all. The only limit is needing an RSS feed and your imagination.

+ Now Learn How To Plug That UGLY Feed Address Into FeedBurner!