It’s been a big few days.

First up, it was my Dad’s 80th birthday & the family got together over the weekend in Sydney to celebrate together. It was a big commute from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland (for a Saturday lunch) but so worth it. Hats off to niece Melissa, who travelled all the way from Perth! There’s something about family events like this, that bring 3 1/2 generations together, that put some perspective back in our daily lives.

Next, it was Anzac Day last Friday. If you’re not from Australia or New Zealand it’s hard to explain the importance of Anzac Day, but it’s one of those ‘come together’ national events that just seem to grow bigger and bigger with each passing year. Even now in 2008, with the last of the WWI diggers gone, it brings a tear to the eye to think about what they (and combatants in the intervening wars) had to go through and live with in the name of the country. I think of Anzac Day as a ‘coming of age’ celebration, the first overseas conflict where Australia participated, not as a British colony, but as a nation in her own right. [Read more →]

This post is the fifth in a series discussing the effective use of AWStats alongside Google Analytics. If you like what you read, consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.

Let’s dive straight into AWStats. I’m going to assume you have AWStats operational on your web hosting account, and that you know how to access the AWStats dashboard. If not, check out my earlier post which should have all the details you need.

Here’s what the dashboard looks like:

First thing you notice is that the dashboard is divided up into two columns. On the left side, you have an independently-scrollable menu that gives you access to every report AWStats can produce. To be honest I never use this – everything is also available from the right side, where the actual data is, and because there’s context to the links you have a better idea of what it actually means.

By the way, you website these stats are drawn from is shown in the top left corner – for the purposes of this exercise I have blanked it out (client site, and all that). [Read more →]

Yesterday I spent the grand sum of $9.95 on Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets eBook, now in its 4th update. It’s only just been released and with Joel’s reputation and longevity in the Internet marketing community, it was definitely something I felt I should check out.

However, I very nearly didn’t buy it. Even at that low, low price. I’ll tell you why later, but for now I want to concentrate on what this eBook offers.

Why You Should Buy This Book

Up to now, I had not seen any particularly great resource covering Google’s Adsense program. In fact I had pretty much given up on Adsense. The few sites I had used it on were generated about $10 a month in revenue, and Adsense is so ‘everywhere’ on web sites I just didn’t see that the effort was worthwhile. I also experimented with some ‘made for adsense’ (MFA) sites when this strategy first came out a couple of years ago They worked really well for a few months, but have now faded away to the point where I rarely even bother to check them.

What this ebook shows is that I was doing it wrong. [Read more →]

Pere Tubert Juhé

<rant>

Like any other stat packages, AWStats is only valuable when it gives you information you actually do something with. With every piece of analytics data – whether or not it comes from AWStats, Google Analytics, Webtrends, Omniture, Mint, Woopra or whatever – you need to ask yourself “Knowing this information, what changes can I make to my web site to make it better?”

If the answer is “dunno”, then don’t waste your time and attention on it.

Not everyone has the same information needs, so what’s useful for you may be ‘dunno’ data for someone else. The art is in the detail (tips hat to Somerset Maugham), and if you are serious about using analytics to incrementally improve web site performance, you need that detail.

What’s that again? Use analytics to incrementally improve web site performance?

Explanation: Web analytics has the potential to close the feedback loop between cause and effect.

Typically a cause is something that’s on your web site, or a web-based process, that customers need to interact with in order to transact business with you. Web analytics can (for example) show that part of the process is faulty (such as high abandonment halfway through filling out a form). With this information, you redesign the form, abandonment rates drop, and sales go up.

One (previously unknown) cause of low sales is a poorly designed form. Analytics shows the form may be to blame. Web master responds by redesigning the form. The effect is that sales improve.

That is how analytics closes the feedback loop. But as a web site manager, you need to know (i) what analytics data is important, and (ii) what to do with it.

Problem is, every analytics package offers reams of ‘dunno’ data. So much so, that volume overrides common sense and buries the important stuff. So my goal over the next few posts is to go through AWStats in detail, so you can figure out whether any particular piece of analytics data is useful in your particular case. I’ll try to do the same with other popular analytics packages, as well.

One other point before I finish my rant – I haven’t yet seen an analytics package that provides all the information you’ll ever need. My preferred two-set is AWStats and Google Analytics, but there are good alternatives to these. And there are lots of situations where business success strongly correlates with one or two chunks of analytics data (improve the data, improve the business), so that time spent on understanding the full picture is time poorly spent. If you can just make sense of those few pieces of valuable data and adjust your web site or marketing strategy accordingly, then analytics will have closed the feedback loop and served you well.

</rant>

In my next post in this series, I will finally start discussing the AWStats dashboard (teaser – t’ing’s ain’t exactly what they seem).

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Nine days ago I published a short cryptic post that had a few people at work scratching their heads. Why I mention this is that it was wholly composed in Microsoft Word 2007, and published direct to the Stratify web site. Since then every post I’ve written has been published the same way.

How It Works

To be totally honest I upload it as a draft, then make my final adjustments direct in WordPress. This is not because of any deficiency in Word, it’s just the way I like to operate:

• Generally I write posts ahead of time & set them to become publicly visible at a future date. Easy to do in WordPress, but there’s no facility for this in Word. My work schedule doesn’t give me regular time every week, so I try to bang ‘em out when I can and let them publish over a period of time.
• I use the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin, which (among other things lets me set different titles, page slugs, and post headings). This lets me tinker with these important elements to see how search engines respond over time. Word doesn’t give me access to these extra fields, nor would I expect it to.
• Finally, I like to use the ‘More’ tag in my posts, which lets me put an extract on the home page and the full article on the post’s real page. This is a keyword density thing I aim for on the home page, so that a single recent post on one topic doesn’t dominate posts further down the page. [Read more →]

This post is the third in a series discussing the effective use of AWStats alongside Google Analytics. If you like what you read, consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.

There’s a few simple ways to discover if your web host has provided AWStats for you as part of your hosting package. In this post I’ll cover off each of them. [Read more →]

This post is the second in a series discussing the effective use of AWStats alongside Google Analytics. If you like what you read, consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.

Evan, the first commenter on my previous post, gave me a virtual kick in the butt for getting too technical. So Evan, I hope this post helps you understand a little better what a log file is, and what it can be used for. [Read more →]

This post is the first in a series discussing the effective use of AWStats alongside Google Analytics. If you like what you read, consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.

As long-time readers know, I see a lot of value in log file analyser stats packages like AWStats. Google Analytics gets all the attention these days; even so, there’s information buried in your log files that Google Analytics can’t get at. And even if it could, it’s incapable of extracting any useful information from it because Google Analytics is a fundamentally different tool.

So what are the important differences? Let’s explore this for a minute. [Read more →]

If you’re reading this, it was published using Microsoft’s new “Blog Post” function inside Word 2007.

Welcome to all the new visitors from the Sunshine Coast Daily newspaper! There’s a lot of content on this website so grab a coffee and take your time to browse. I’ve put this post together to explain what Stratify does, and what we can do for your online business.

Questions? Call 1300 72 49 71

Most Websites Don’t Perform

The overwhelming majority of websites, even some big flashy corporate ones, go day after day with virtually no visitors and no obvious business benefit. For all the effort, time and money that went into their production – they simply waste a great opportunity for more business.
[Read more →]