My name is Paul Prewitt, I'm a marketing and communications professional specializing in e-marketing strategies in Higher Ed. I am the Electronic Communications Coordinator at the University of Arkansas Alumni Association and manage all electronic communications and marketing efforts for alumni & friends.
Next up is the Task Completion score (comparable to Goals in Google Analytics). This is probably the most significant score you can get on the tool as it helps answer tell if visitors completed the goal they came to the site for.
Last up is probably the most complicated portion of the survey but also the very best part too. The "purpose" distribution helps us tell "why" a visitor came and if it was successful visit. Not only based on our predefined purposes/goals but also allowing for the user to define their own.
Although the free version is lacking in exporting tools for the data a little time on ones part and all the collected qualitative data can be pulled out in a usable form. After we get all the data pulled out we can run it through a Tag Cloud generator like www.tagcrowd.com and start learning what is really important to our visitors.
Also, we can see the top user defined purposes (for those not completing their task) for September 2008. The top three are: scholarship, information and alumni.
The above two clouds can defiantly help us to determine what is important to our site visitors and possibly what we should be promoting in the months ahead. Also the clouds can be generated for each of the specific purpose responses (open-ended comments collected).
The most common reason for a redirect is a "Short URL" this is merely turning a really long/confusing website address like www.dartmouth.edu/~alfund/ into something like www.dartmouthcollegefund.org. These are also known as a "Print URL" as they are much easier to "print" on publications or tell someone on the phone. Also a redirect can be used to help show partnerships with other programs like www.uclalumni.net/MasterCard.<?phpSo there you have it now we can track all sorts of redirects both to our site and going to a partner site. Also, since I'm going to be writing a MySQL version of the above script soon if you've got tips, ideas or want a copy just let me know.
//Tracking the User First
$mail_body = "Redirect: ".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."\n".
"IP Address: ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."\n".
"Date & Time: ".date("l, F, j, Y h:i:s A")."\n\n".
"Referer: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
mail("you@school.edu", "redirect name", $mail_body, "From: Redirects <redirect@school.edu>");
//Redirect the User Next
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.draftmotif.org");
?>
In short the above states that URL Redirects cannot be done by the visitor's browser. That means that the HTML Meta Refresh & JavaScript options are out (don’t use them). However, it does say that you are permitted to use Server Level functions to perform URL Redirects. That leaves us with two options:Redirect /OldDir/old.php http://site.com/NewDir/new.phpPre-Executed Server Pages (ASP or PHP):
Redirect /link http://www.MerchantDomain.com/affil.cgi?12345
<?phpThe last important thing to make sure is that your Redirects are giving back the right HTTP Request responses (aka the 404, 301 or 302 response). This will make all the difference in getting search engines to update your links.
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://http://site.com/NewDir/new.php");
?>
First off let’s make sure that we set the appropriate date range along with selecting a particular industry for comparison. Otherwise you will be looking at an even larger group of sites then you would probably want (all sites sharing data of a similar size).
Next up is the golden “Visits” which drives the benchmarking service along with the “Bounce Rate”. But what exactly does it tell is? Surprise I’m beating the benchmark... looks like my marketing efforts are working (hey you are reading this). Yet, it looks like my articles and site design is lacking since everyone leaves after reading the particular post.
Then we come up to the “Pageviews” and the beloved “Avg. Time on Site” statistic, which helps continue the assessment that marketing is working but that maybe it’s not the right type of marketing. Then again people do tend to skim through information online. However, compared to the available data users are spending more time reading so I guess I’m doing good with my articles (let me know what you think in the comments below).
So now we come to the last currently available benchmark data the “Pages/Visit” and “New Visits”. Well assessment confirmed looks like my site is not doing to well at passing visitors from one article to the others. But at least it is grater than 1 page/visit. Also, compared to others my site has a greater new visits percentage but this is a good thing since my site is still so new. Hopefully, it will soon come to an even match (after all this is a resource site and return visitors are the goal) with a slightly positive percentage. Remember that for most sites (not portal/Facebook sites) 70% new is typical.What does it mean to share my Google Analytics data anonymously with Google and the benchmarking service?Key point to notice is the anonymity of your site and the collective category combination. Therefore, no one would be able to directly compare University A to University B.
If you only choose the anonymous data sharing option, Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form. Google will use this anonymous data to improve the products and services we provide you and enable benchmarking in your account.
How many sites are in each category?So basically you cannot do benchmarking comparisons unless there is at least 100 other sites (that assumes the minimum of one site per account – and I’ll tell you that I have more than one site in my account) to compare against.
There are a minimum of 100 accounts in each benchmarking category. The number of actual websites can vary since a single account can contain multiple websites and we are always in the process of accepting more participants for our benchmarking service. Therefore, each category can have anywhere from 100 to hundreds of thousands of websites per category.
How do I choose which industry vertical to compare my site against?Yes, although you might be in the Educational industry you can compare to other vertical industries of “sites of similar size”. Although, I’m not sure what good it would do.
To change the industry vertical you want to compare your site against, navigate to the category picker from the Benchmark report.
What does "sites of similar size" mean?Well there has to be some limitations in beta! So now we come to the first and biggest down side – we cannot compare to “larger or smaller” sites currently. At least we have something to look forward to.
Based on the number of visits each site receives, sites of similar sizes are grouped together under three classifications: small, medium, and large. This way, you can compare yourself to other similarly sized sites. You are not able to view benchmarking data for sites in other size classifications.
Why does my benchmarking data appear to refresh over time?All in all Google plans to make this service grow and improve over time. This leads to the last question...
We regularly adjust the benchmarking data to help ensure that it is representative of participating sites and relevant for its users. Some of the factors we take into account when we reclassify the data are changes in the site's content and number of visits. We group sites with other similarly sized and categorized sites, so we check the latest number of visitors for each site to adjust the benchmarking data accordingly.
Benchmarking data is also affected by the number of sites that opt in to the service over time. As more sites participate, a wider variety of categories is available for you to compare your site against.
How much does Google Analytics cost?So why do I suggest the free version? Well when you think about it if you are actually getting over 5 million pageviews a month then you probably already have a good marketing mix and if it doesn’t include AdWords why not just add it. Plus the free hosted version offers faster updates and less recourse (staff & server) on your part.
Google Analytics is absolutely free! We're very pleased to be able to offer this web analytics solution for no charge, allowing anyone with a website to track conversion data, analyze the flow of visitors through their site, and identify elements of their site that could be changed to improve visitor retention.
This free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month - however, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited pageview tracking. In addition, Google Analytics is completely integrated into the AdWords front-end and with your AdWords campaign, making it easy to track your AdWords ROI.
So let’s start the Tricks!Automatically inform Google when you update your pages: Google Webmaster Tools provide you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. To get started, simply add and verify your site, and you'll start to see information right away.
Discover your links and see how users are reaching your site: View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with our new link reporting tools.
Enhance and increase traffic to your site: Learn which queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.
Find out more about the cool tools and get started at http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/.
You’ll also notice that it improves the readability of the results on the search engines page; although not our original intention this only helps the end over find the right page and sends more valuable clicks to your site.
Well if you haven't heard link exchanges are against almost every know search engine out there... but that doesn't mean that links back to your site are not useful. This is probably the more complicated portion of SEO these days. Avoiding link exchanges while still having other sites link back to you when appropriate.
Personally I always found those Captchas an annoying waste of time when I was trying to fill out a form. Therefore as a designer I decided not to use them and came up with this idea instead. I should probably point out that this is not a totally new idea all my own.if (!empty($_POST['formElement'])) {2) CSS Standards:
put code for spam bot submission here or just error out.
}else {
put code for good submissions here.
}
The only other part is to use CSS Standards to hide the form element from valid site visitors, or show that they should not fill in the form element.Thus, at the end of the day we've made one less thing for our good site visitors and pot the extra work on the spammer.
As you can tell the site is built using the phpBB and mxBB systems to create a monster portal fourm site. Along with the enhancements made to add the chat rooms and some of the other features this site took off like a rocket within the niche market. The layout is a hacked version of the Smooth Blue template - so I don't take all the credit.
Along with those guidelines the site was to include a monthly specials page and multiple photo tours (photo galleries). Additionally the site was to be SEO Optimized for spray foam.
The site was to showcase all the professionals within the Pettus Law group along with their services. While not providing any legal advise via the website.
The idea was to have the photo gallery part on the left side and the ability to click to a larger full picutre from the previw images along with multiple pages to the gallery. The main photo at the top was a randomly changing image with a different saying for each one. We had a rates section although there was no online billing scheme for the site at the time.
We started this site with the simple idea of patriotic colors (red, white, and blue). The site was also to include an email list sign up tool, and used a drop down menu. Along with these the site was also required to show off his stand point on particular views (which we did through the random photo at the top).
The site was then realigned (reworked) by me to include a listing of his wife's (Linda) handcrafted knives as well. Along with that we added the ability for purchasing knives via a PayPal shopping cart, which turned out to be a great addition to the site.
However, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. Before we new it we had a fully featured website with photo gallery, faqs, and a parts line-up with prices. Along with the Quick Tips section which now days would be done via an RSS feed.
After that the site follows after what would be considered a typical musician's site. It had all the cool features of the times like: artist photos, awards, the album listing with sample clips, and even reviews from the critics.
Along with that there was a request to keep the site 'artsy' and show the appeal of the downtown Fayetteville, AR where the store was located (it has since then moved).<?phpSo how does that help prevent email phishing...? Well currently most email bots and crawlers don't actually crawl the rendered version of a website but rather they crawl the code (which is this case would look like junk. So as you can expect eventually they will get smart enough to beat this option too... but I'd rather not require the end user to have JavaScript enabled at this time (although it will eventually come).
# $strEmail. The E-mail address to encode.
# $strDisplay. What will be displayed in the browser. If omitted it takes the e-mail address as it's value.
# $blnCreateLink. Set to true to creates a link. Set to false (and omit $strDisplay) just displays the e-mail address.
# call the function like so asciiEncodeEmail("you@doh.com","you@doh.com","you@doh.com");
function asciiEncodeEmail($strEmail,$strDisplay,$blnCreateLink) {
$strMailto = "mailto:";
for ($i=0; $i < strlen($strEmail); $i++) {
$strEncodedEmail .= "&#".ord(substr($strEmail,$i)).";";
}
if(strlen(trim($strDisplay))>0) {
for ($i=0; $i < strlen($strDisplay); $i++) {
$strEncodedDisplay .= "&#".ord(substr($strDisplay,$i)).";";
}
$strDisplay = $strEncodedDisplay;
}
else {
$strDisplay = $strEncodedEmail;
}
if($blnCreateLink) {
echo "<a href=\"".$strMailto.$strEncodedEmail."\" title=\"".$strEncodedEmail."\">".$strDisplay."</a>";
}
else {
echo $strDisplay;
}
}
?>
function safeAddress($emailAddress, $theText, $theTitle, $xhtml, $isItSafe) {And hopefully one day we will get to where we no longer need to take such methods and that email phishing will be a thing of the past. But until then we must combat the SPAM Arms Race with all that we can.
// Version 1.5 - by Dan Benjamin - http://www.hivelogic.com/
// set $isItSafe = 1 to get escaped HTML, 0 for normal HTML
// set $xhtml = 1 if you want your page to be valid for XHTML 1.x
// you can call it like this:
//<?php echo safeAddress($entity, $linkText, $titleText, 1, 1); ?>
$ent = "";
$userName = "";
$domainName = "";
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($emailAddress); $i++) {
$c = substr($emailAddress, $i, 1);
if ($c == "@") {
$userName = $ent;
$ent = "";
} else {
$ent .= "&#" . ord($c) . ";";
}
}
$domainName = $ent;
if ($xhtml == 1) {
$endResult = "<script type=\"text/javascript\">
<!--
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:$userName@$domainName\" title=\"$theTitle\">$theText<\/a>');
// -->
</script>";
} else {
$endResult = "<script language=\"JavaScript\" type=\"text/javascript\">
<!--
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:$userName@$domainName\" title=\"$theTitle\">$theText<\/a>');
// -->
</script>";
}
if ($isItSafe) {
return(htmlentities($endResult));
} else {
return($endResult);
}
}
Licensed by Creative Commons. Designed by Adii. Sitemap. Converted to WP-Polaroid Blogger Template by eBlogger Templates
