-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Archives
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- March 2011
- November 2010
Categories
Meta
Tag Archives: analytics
Google Ads Success: The Metrics You Need to Watch
The post Google Ads Success: The Metrics You Need to Watch appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Measure the Performance of Your Google Ads Your marketing budget is limited. When you decide to invest in paid marketing like Google Ads, you need a way to track how well it’s working. Luckily, Google does a pretty good job of providing helpful analytics that make it easy to figure out your ROI and look for ways to improve your campaigns for better results over time. What You Can Learn from Google Ads Analytics Google understands the importance of analytics, so they make sure businesses that advertise with them get the data they need to properly track the success of each ad and campaign. With Google Ads’ client reports, you’ll be able to see: Clicks – The number of times people clicked on each of your ads, and the number of total clicks for each campaign. This is the main metric that lets you know whether your ads are doing their main job: getting people to notice your link and convincing them to click through. Click-through rate (CTR) – How the number of clicks compares to the number of times your ad was shown. Impressions – How many times your ad was seen. Impression share – This is Google’s calculation of how your impressions compare with the number of times your ad could potentially have been seen based on how many searches met your criteria. It lets you know if spending a little more could make a big difference to how often your ads show up. Average position – If your ad shows up alongside a few other PPC ads, gaining the top spot will be more valuable than being second or third. This tells you where in the listing your ad shows up on average. If you’d prefer to be higher, then it pays to spend more. Average cost-per-click – Because Google Ads uses a bidding pricing model, the amount you pay for each click will depend on how competitive your keywords and placements are at any given moment. This metric lets you know how much you’re generally paying for each click. Quality Score – Google wants to deliver good, relevant ads to its searchers. Therefore, in addition to budget, their program looks at how well your ads are performing and determines a quality score that influences how often they’ll show up and how much you pay. Converted clicks – Clicks are nice, but ultimately you want each person clicking to take an action such as signing up for your email list or making a purchase. Google Ads will help you track how many of the visitors who come to your website through an ad follow through with the actions you desire. Conversion rate – This shows the comparison between the number of clicks and the number of times they lead to your desired actions. Average cost per conversion – Google makes it easy for you to figure out how much each conversion is costing you by providing a comparison between the amount you’re spending on ads and the number of conversions they’re bringing you. These metrics will teach you how to recognize what works best in your ad campaigns and how your spending pays off in specific terms. Get More By Linking Google Analytics to Google Ads Google Ads provides you with a lot of good data, but you can get even more valuable information about the success of your ads by connecting your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. Where Google Ads tracks how people interact with your ads, Google Analytics provides a wealth of data on what people do once they’ve clicked through to your website. When the two accounts are linked, you’ll start to see some of the data from Google Analytics in your Google Ads account and vice versa. (First, you’ll need to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site. Here’s how to do that. ) For example, in Google Ads, you’ll start to be able to see: Bounce rate – How often visitors who click on your ad leave your website before moving to another page on the site. Pages per session – How many pages and which one visitors go to after landing on your website from an ad. Average session duration – How long your PPC visitors typically spend on the website before leaving. % New sessions – How many of your PPC visitors are coming to your website for the first time. In addition, you’ll be able to connect the data for conversion tracking you’ve set up in Google Analytics to the data you have in Google Ads, to better see the full journey your PPC visitors take from the time they click on an ad to when they take the actions you’ve determined are most valuable. And the data that Google Analytics tracks on demographics and user behavior from your site visitors can be used to further strengthen your remarketing efforts in Google Ads. Basically, the more information you have and the better you’re able to connect it, the more you’ll be able to refine your ad campaigns to get the results you want. Track Your Results with Expert Google Ads Management Advertising with Google is often a great way to reach a new audience and get more visitors to your website. But you can get so much more out of your advertising when you make use of the data Google provides to learn as you go and make your campaigns continually better. Want to get more out of your Google Ads campaigns? Learn about HostGator’s Google Ads services. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost
Tagged advertising, analytics, campaigns, data, management, number, performance, ppc management, success, vodahost, web hosting
Comments Off on Google Ads Success: The Metrics You Need to Watch
How to Add Google Analytics to Your WordPress Site [Step-by-Step]
The post How to Add Google Analytics to Your WordPress Site [Step-by-Step] appeared first on HostGator Blog . If you have a business, your website is a gold mine of information that tells visitors if your brand if right for them and suits their needs. If you want your site to increase your conversions , however, you need to keep tabs on its performance regularly. It’s also important to know how visitors interact with your website so you can continue making tweaks that suit their needs. Your WordPress website is as good as stale without tracking its progress in Google Analytics. Nearly 28 million websites rely on Google Analytics to keep their businesses afloat and give customers what they want. The key to running a successful business is knowing the customer so well you hand them opportunities before they realize they need them. With Google Analytics, you’ll have access to the data you need to know your customer. Setting up Google Analytics on your WordPress website is simple and doesn’t take much time at all. Here’s how to get started. 1. Know What Data You’re Looking For There are several reasons to use Google Analytics , but the main one is that it keeps you in tune with your visitors so you can give them what they want. To get the most out of it, you need to know what you’re looking for. It doesn’t make much sense to scour data and statistics when you aren’t quite sure what your numbers should be or what to look at. It’s essential to have a clear understanding of how your audience interacts with your site so you can continue creating content they’ll enjoy. Tracking your metrics is the best way to do this. Keep an eye out for these particular metrics: Bounce rate Acquisition overview Unique visitors Returning visitors Page views Session duration or engagement There’s an entire plethora of information you can gather from looking through your analytics. With Google Analytics, you can: See what blog posts perform the best and get the most shares so you can continue to create similar content you know will be useful. Track your bounce rate and see where visitors are leaving your site so you can figure out how to prevent that from continuing and instead focus on increasing page views. Visit your landing pages to see how well they are or aren’t capturing new leads. You can also decide the best times to post content , how people find your website, what browsers they use, and more. All of this information can aid you in creating a high-converting web experience for your site visitors. It’s always a good idea to A/B split test different components of your website if you aren’t reaching the conversion rates you predicted. You can create these tests right in Google Analytics to understand how you can achieve your goals faster. 2. Set Up a Google Analytics Account First, you need to either create an account with Google or use an existing one. Then, sign in to your Google account. Go through the following screens to continue to sign up for your Google Analytics account. Next, enter your account information. Google will ask you whether you’d like to track a website or mobile app, so make sure it’s under the Website tab. At the bottom, click on Get Tracking ID . This is a code Google uses to track your site information. Then you’ll want to accept the Terms of Service as well as Additional Terms. When you click Accept, you’re directed to your Analytics dashboard. Congratulations! Your Google Analytics account setup is now complete. You’re going to end up copying and pasting your tracking ID code into your MonsterInsights plugin settings. This will allow MonsterInsights to read and receive Google Analytics’ data so you can see it from your WordPress dashboard. 3. Install MonsterInsights for WordPress To set up Google Analytics straight to your WordPress dashboard, you need a plugin like MonsterInsights . The value of MonsterInsights is that it brings your Google Analytics data straight to you, in your WordPress dashboard. That means you no longer have to sign in to a separate website to view your site traffic and performance. First, you need to download and install the MonsterInsights plugin . From your WordPress dashboard, upload the plugin and select Install Now . Click Activate Plugin so your MonsterInsights plugin is added to your website. Now you need to authenticate your MonsterInsights account. Hover over the MonsterInsights button in your WordPress panel and click Settings . Authenticate your Google account so that it’s integrated with your WordPress website. Once you connect your MonsterInsights account, it will redirect you to sign in with your Google account. Click Complete Connection . From the MonsterInsights button in your WordPress dashboard, hover over it, and click Reports . Now, your MonsterInsights analytics is connected to your WordPress website and ready to view reports! The great thing about setting up MonsterInsights is it takes mere minutes to set up. Just a few clicks and filling out information and you’re able to see all your site’s data straight from WordPress. It’s convenient for you so that you can make quick, informed decisions about your website or business for the best results and highest conversions. Get Started with MonsterInsights Setting up your website for Google Analytics will be the best thing you do for your website. When you know how visitors are interacting and engaging with your site, you discover how you can serve them better so they can move further down the funnel and eventually become loyal customers. There are endless benefits when tracking your site’s progress and Google Analytics paired with MonsterInsights is the best way to do so. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost
Tagged analytics, conversion, customer, goals, hostgator, hosting, monster, monsterinsights, plugin, web hosting, web hosting tips, wordpress-hosting
Comments Off on How to Add Google Analytics to Your WordPress Site [Step-by-Step]
The Best WordPress Plugins Every Blog Needs
The post The Best WordPress Plugins Every Blog Needs appeared first on HostGator Blog . When you build your blog with WordPress, it’s easy to customize it and add cool features with plugins. But which plugins? You can choose from more than 54,000, which is kind of a lot. To help you avoid choice overload, we’ve compiled what we think are the best must-have plugins for new and growing bloggers, especially bloggers who want to gain subscribers, raise their social media profile, ace SEO, and more. WordPress Mailing List Plugins for Blogs Building an audience is the main goal for most bloggers, whether they’re creating a community for fun or profit. The cornerstone of audience-building is building an email list, so you can let your fans know when you publish a new post, launch a contest, or have something else to offer them. E mail Subscribers & Newsletters by Icegram is a free WordPress plugin that gives you a shortcode snippet to paste into your posts and pages wherever you’d like an opt-in box. As you add subscribers, you can use the plugin’s dashboard to view, import, and export contacts, create welcome and update emails, send test emails, and integrate with a third-party email marketing service like Constant Contact. WordPress Social Sharing Plugins for Blogs Add to Any lets you add social share buttons to your blog that look good on any device, load fast, and connect your content to more than 100 social networks and messaging apps. Want to see what’s getting shared and who’s following those links? Add to Any also integrates with your Google Analytics and Bitly accounts. Add to Any is free, so you don’t need to upgrade to access all its features. Do you have an archive full of posts you’d like to share again to reach new readers and build your subscriber list? The free version of Revive Old Posts will automatically share your old posts to Facebook and Twitter so you can get more mileage from your content. You can choose the sharing schedule, the number of old posts you want to share, hashtags, and other elements. The Pro version adds sharing for LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Both versions of Revive Old Posts support link shortening services like Bitly and Rebrandly. WordPress SEO Plugins for Blogs When people search for the topics you blog about, can they find your blog? Even great content can be hard to find if it’s not formatted, indexed, and optimized for search engines to understand. That’s why bloggers who want to rank well in searches typically add a few plugins to make that happen. We’ve blogged before about how schema.org formatting can help you generate rich Google search results for your reviews, recipes, articles, and other content. You can do this manually with code, or you can add the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets WordPress plugin to your blog. This free plugin supports 9 common schema formats, including articles, people, recipes, reviews, and videos. When you install All In One, you get a dashboard that walks you through choosing how your snippets will display, where you’ll add the snippets on your site, and how to test your snippets to make sure they look good. You’ll also want a plugin to help Google’s search engine crawlers understand what’s on your site. You can install the Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin to handle this. However, if you’re also going to install Yoast SEO , you may want to use its XML mapping tool instead. (It’s not a good idea to use both at the same time.) Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins out there, and the free version offers a lot of tools to help you optimize your blog. For instance, Yoast helps you optimize each post for a keyword or keyphrase that you want to rank for, shows you how the post will look in Google search results, tells you how readable your post is before you publish it, keeps you from accidentally duplicating content within your site, and updates regularly to keep pace with Google’s ongoing improvements. If you have a large or fast-growing blog, you can detect and fix site-indexing crawl errors by connecting Yoast to your Google Search Console account. WordPress Performance Plugins for Blogs Jetpack is the Swiss Army knife of WordPress plugins, and it can tackle a lot of tasks for you, like scheduled social media posting, statistics collection, and performance improvements. Jetpack also adds its own layers of security to your WordPress blog. When you’re ready to start making money from your blog through ads or direct sales, one of the paid versions of Jetpack can help you with those tasks, too. As your blog grows, it can take longer for your pages to load, especially if you include lots of images in your posts. To avoid this slowdown, which can raise your bounce rate and affect your search rank, compress your images. The Smush Image Compression and Optimization WordPress plugin can handle this for you. You can “smush” images in batches of up to 50 or smush them individually, without losing image quality. (And yeah, pushing the “smush” button is fun.) If you want detailed analytics of your site traffic, the Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights connects to your Google Analytics account and deploys your analytics tracking code for you so you don’t have to paste in the snippet yourself—all for free. Then you can see your Google analytics in your blog’s dashboard. A good backup program is insurance against blog catastrophes. Updraft Plus helps you automate site backups, store your backups in the cloud, and access them easily when you need to restore your site or move to a new host. The free version lets you automatically send your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, your email, and other cloud services, and it makes it easy to restore your site even if you’re not tech-savvy. (Or, you can upgrade to an automated daily backup for your blog with CodeGuard . CodeGuard packs in additional security features with data backups for up to 5 websites.) Set Up Your WordPress Blog WordPress plugins can help you get the most out of your blog, but they can also impact your blog’s performance. Maximize your blog’s functionality and its performance with a managed WordPress hosting plan from HostGator. You’ll enjoy 2.5x faster load times, automated backups, and more. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
Why Your Online Store Needs Omnichannel Marketing
The post Why Your Online Store Needs Omnichannel Marketing appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your online store is up and running. You’ve got a blog, an email list, and social media accounts on the platforms where your ideal customers spend the most time. You’re marketing your store through lots of channels, but are you coordinating those efforts or missing opportunities? Omnichannel marketing can help you connect all your marketing pathways for better results. Here’s a primer on what omnichannel marketing is, how it can help you grow your business, and how to begin. What Is Omnichannel Marketing? Despite the “omni” in the name, omnichannel doesn’t (and shouldn’t) mean marketing in every channel in existence. And it’s not the same thing as multichannel marketing, which is—you guessed it—marketing in multiple channels. Instead, omnichannel marketing creates a single, holistic view of customer behavior by collecting and analyzing data across channels to create customized offers and consistent customer experiences in every channel where they encounter your business. For businesses, the benefits are more and better data for more effective promotions, more conversions, and a greater likelihood of attracting the kinds of shoppers who make more purchases. SAS found that consumers who shop in more than one channel spend “ three to four times more than single-channel customers do .” Imagining Omnichannel Marketing Here’s a simple way to think of the omnichannel approach to building customer relationships. Let’s say the owner of your favorite restaurant knows your name, your favorite table, and your partner’s favorite dessert order. When you see her in your neighborhood, she always says hi and asks how you’re doing. That’s roughly analogous to an omnichannel customer experience—the restaurant owner always recognizes you and keeps up with how you’re doing and what you like, even when she’s not actively trying to sell you dinner. You’re probably going to dine at her place often and enjoy it. But what if she only sometimes gave you a warm welcome at the restaurant and didn’t recognize you at other times, or made it weird at the grocery store by telling you about her restaurant like you’d never been there? How likely would you be to dine at her restaurant again? That’s the kind of awkwardness and lost business that omnichannel marketing can help avoid. Think about how your marketing channels work together and where you can improve. How Can You Make Your Marketing Omnichannel? The first step is to gather all your data in one place, or as few places as possible, so you can get a good view of how people find your store and shop there. Using the same payment service provider across all your sales channels—web, social media, in-store—can go a long way toward setting up your omnichannel marketing situation. That’s because payment providers (like Square) collect data you can use in your marketing efforts. This omnichannel sales data can help you get started by providing the same types of data in the same format so you can easily track customers’ purchase behaviors in each channel. It can also streamline your loyalty program so customers can earn and use points online and in-store if you have brick-and-mortar or pop-up locations. Once you’ve got your sales data centralized, check in on your web and social media analytics. Google Analytics is the best-known tool for website traffic analysis , and you can use it to analyze your email and social media data, too. To keep things simple, you can use a WordPress plugin like MonsterInsights to bring your Google Analytics data into your WP dashboard . You can also use the Google Analytics tracking code for your site in your marketing emails. For example, Constant Contact walks its users through the process of adding the code , checking links for known issues, and gathering data from email campaigns to see who’s opening your emails, what they click, and what they buy. Google Analytics can track your social media traffic, too. Neil Patel’s walkthrough of Google Analytics’ social media reports is filled with details you can apply to your omnichannel marketing program. Maybe the most important thing is that Google Analytics can report on conversions sorted by your goals. And it breaks down conversions into last-interaction and assisted categories, so you can see whether a particular visitor from social media to your site bought during that visit or later on. With all of this traffic data and your sales data, you’ll have a better map of how all your channels work together (or don’t yet) to bring customers to your social media channels, your email list, and your store, and what those customers do along the way. Then it’s time to start refining and testing your efforts so that the journey from potential customer to loyal customer is as easy as possible. For example, you can use your data to improve your customer segmentation for more highly targeted and specific email and social media campaigns. You can also use this data to create more effective retargeting ads —another way to ensure that your customers and site visitors see the things that interest them and make them want to return to your store. The Omnichannel Marketing Takeaway Discussions about digital marketing and data analytics can get very detailed and technical. If you’re interested in going down that path, there’s a world of information online for you. If you’d rather keep things simple, here’s the takeaway: Omnichannel marketing uses data from all your channels to show you where your customers go and what they do so you can get to know them and keep up with them. Omnichannel marketing uses data from all your channels to make your customers feel recognized and welcome through personalized and targeted email, social media, and other campaigns. Omnichannel marketing tools that collect and analyze your data are inexpensive or free. With good data and and a carefully thought-out omnichannel approach, you can give your customers what they want, earn their loyalty, and grow your business. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost
Tagged analytics, business, channels, goals, highly-targeted, hostgator, omnichannel, online, store, web hosting
Comments Off on Why Your Online Store Needs Omnichannel Marketing