In my previous post, I reviewed how to get started using Google Analytics. In this entry I will discuss how set up and use custom reports.

Custom Reporting

Custom Reporting is a powerful tool that allows you to quickly analyze any metrics of your choosing by nearly any dimension.

Creating a New Custom Report
Clicking on the “Create new custom report” link brings you to a page with lots of blue and green boxes. Anything in blue is referring to a metric, and anything in green refers to a dimension. The easiest way to think about metrics and dimensions is to think of metrics as numbers, and dimensions as text. Anything that can be represented by a number, like pageviews ,or bounces, or clicks, is a metric. Anything that can’t be described by a number, like visitor language, or keywords, or sources, is a dimension.

Custom reports tell you the metrics for a given dimension. If I want to know how many visits came from Europe, I select “Continent” as my dimension, and “visits” as my metric. You can also define subdimensions, which become the dimension that the metric is analyzed against once you click on an item from the primary dimension. In my example, logically I will select “Country” as my subdimension. When I access the report, it tells me that I had 50 visits from Europe. I click on Europe to drill-down to specific countries, and I see that England accounted for 49 of the 50 visits.

Sample Custom Report Structure
I want to know how many purchases my Google ads are driving, and how much it is costing me -
I select “Goal Completions” (assuming you set your goal to be a purchase), “CPC”, “Cost”, “CTR”, and “Cost per conversion” as my metrics, “AdGroup” as my dimension, and “Keyword” as my first subdivision.

Multiple usability studies have proven that today’s online users visit a website for two primary reasons: to get information and/or to accomplish a goal. In general, they are not reading for leisure, nor are they online to appreciate fancy writing or admire complicated graphics. Simply, they want to access content as quickly as possible and interact with the site, as needed.

Studies also show that website users interact differently with a monitor than they do with the printed page. Web users skim content, ignoring our ingrained left-right viewing habits in order to drill down more quickly. They also read about 25% more slowly on screen leading most users to scan a webpage rather than read it word-by-word.

Writers may be tempted to upload the same lengthy content contained in an annual report or firm brochure because they want to communicate as much to the reader as possible. Unfortunately, doing so is a surefire way to lose your online audience. Instead, you must write copy specifically for the online environment keeping in mind these ten essential rules:

• Know Your User. Identifying your target audience is essential. While this should be fairly obvious, make sure to write for your constituents, not the internal organization itself. All copy should be written at an appropriate level for the audience void of acronyms or jargon that may not be obvious to all target users.
• Be Concise. Get to the point, and remember users are not there to savor your fine writing skills. The general rule is to use approximately half as many words as you would in print. Aim for:
• Short headings: 4 – 8 words
• Short sentences: 8 – 20 words
• Short summaries: 30 – 50 words
• Short paragraphs: 3–10 sentences; 40 – 70 words
• Short pages: 2-3 paragraphs
• Use Headings. Since users skim webpages, they look at headings and subheadings first, then scan for hyperlinks, numerals and keywords. Make sure to use prominent headings and subheadings to partition your content.
• Use Lists. For optimal readability, keep sentences short and use bulleted or numbered lists where possible. (Just don’t use lengthy bulleted items!)
• Put Key Facts First. Begin with the most critical information, including Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. Remember, web users are impatient, so you should prioritize your content. If you must include lengthy descriptions or documents, place them deep in the site and provide links where appropriate.
• Be Casual. Always write in first or second person whenever possible. Use “you” and “we” in a more conversational style, as appropriate. Remember, the more formal, the less inviting.
• Use the Active Voice. Never use the passive voice when you can use the active voice. The passive voice creates dull, lifeless content.
• Consider the Site Structure. With a proper website structure, your users should know precisely where they are on your site at all times. Still, it is good practice to write web copy that helps readers understand how each page relates to other content elements.
• Encourage Action. Ultimately, you want your website to encourage action, whether it’s registering for a newsletter, providing contact details, or buying your product or service. Always write copy that incites a call-to-action turning passive readers into active participants.
• Edit, Edit, Edit. A good rule of thumb is to edit your copy by 10% even at its last draft. Ask yourself, “Is my message condensed to as few words as possible?”, “Is my content formatted for easy readability?”, “Is this copy necessary at all?” Make sure to edit your content thoroughly before and after you upload it to your website (pre-launch, of course).

My previous post introduced Google Analytics. In this entry I will discuss how to start using the analytics tool. You may want to open Google Analytics in a separate window while you read this.

Overview

Every journey into Google Analytics starts in the same place: the Google Analytics sign-up page. Sign up, and follow the directions. Google needs a bit of code on your site to do the tracking, so if you don’t know how to edit your site’s HTML, you’ll need to enlist assistance. Note that if you plan on using Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking, event tracking, or virtual pageview features, your code needs to be installed differently on particular pages. The specific instructions are beyond the scope of this post.

From here, the Google Analytics road branches and the possibilities are endless. This post will give you a quick tour of the interface, and will then outline a few sample uses.

The Overview Page

When you first log into Google Analytics, you are brought to your Overview page. This page shows you all of the websites your account is tracking, as well as some basic stats about your websites’ traffic and visitor behavior. The overview page is useful if you are managing multiple websites or want some quick stats, but the magic begins when you select a website and click “View report”.

The Dashboard

You are brought to the page referred to as the Dashboard. The point of the Dashboard is to give you a heads up display of all the statistics that you really care about. It is fully customizable, so you can add or remove stats or reports to your heart’s content. From here you can easily email or export your full dashboard report via the links on the upper grey bar.

Date Ranges

On the top-right of the page, you will find a box with a date listed. Clicking this box allows you to define the range for which your website’s statistics will be displayed. If you want to know how many visits you had in May, select the full month of May, and your dashboard will tell you.

Analytics even allows you to compare all of your statistics between two different date ranges. Just mark the “Compare to Past” checkbox, and highlight the comparison date range. Analytics will now show you the percentage difference between the two ranges next to your statistics. These comparisons may be the most valuable feature of Analytics, because numbers in isolation can mean very little. Knowing how many visitors your site had is useful, but knowing how that number is changing week-by-week is even better. It is the changes and trends in your website’s statistics that should guide your site modifications.

Intelligence

The second tab on the top-left navigation menu brings you to the intelligence page. Intelligence is a handy feature of Analytics that automatically alerts you to dramatic abnormalities in your website’s statistics. This feature is great for users who don’t want to check their analytics every day or week.
Let’s imagine that we have a website that averages 10,000 visits per week. Unbeknownst to us, our hosting service has been experience problems in the past week, and our site has been down about 50% of the time. Traffic drops to 5,000 visits, Google Intelligence emails us, we conduct an investigation, and we switch hosting services.

But this feature can have more important functions than just serving as an alarm for major problems. With custom alerts, we can tell Google to alert us when something important (that we define) happens.
For example: We have an advertising account set up with Google that automatically buys $1,500 of ads per week. We don’t want to pay for ads if every user who clicks on them immediately leaves our site, so we tell Google to alert us when the bounce rate of our ads surpasses 50%. Now, without ever checking analytics, we can rest assured that our ad dollars are not being spent in vain.

Visitors

The visitors page is your guide to the behavior of your website’s users. You can see where your users are from, what browser they are using, the speed of their connection, the time they spend on your website, whether or not they have been to your site before, and much much more. This page also contains a Benchmarking feature, which you can use to compare your website’s statistics with those of similar sites. There is a lot of information in the visitor page. Explore around to discover it all.

Traffic Sources

This page contains all the information about how people get to your website. It tells you whether the user typed in the exact web address (direct traffic), linked through from another site, linked through from an ad, or found your site using a search engine. You can even see exactly what keyword searches led to your site. This source information is paired with visit statistics, so that you can determine which sources refer your best visitors.

Content

The Content page gives you access to information about your websites individual pages. Here, Analytics can tell you how many users viewed a particular page, what percentage of users exited the site on a particular page, or how many users entered the site through a particular page. Knowing your top exit pages is an important first-step towards increasing your visitors’ interaction with your site. You can use Analytics’ Visualizer feature to see graphs of the number of exits from a each page divided by the number of total pageviews. If one particular page has a higher ratio of exits to pageviews, changing that page may help keep users on your site.

Goals

“Goals” is an extremely valuable tool that allows you to track actions of interest, such as downloads, purchases, or submissions of a contact form. Once you setup your goals, Analytics can start tracking your goals’ conversions, and you can start to analyze the behavior of your converting visitors.

For example: We are now running an online store. We setup the “Thank you for your order” page as goal that will let Analytics track our purchases. We can even tell Analytics that each goal conversion is worth $17.50, our average profit made on a single purchase. We can now analyze the visits that resulted in purchases. We see that almost all of the visits that resulted in purchase originated from two ads that we have been purchasing through Google AdWords. Furthermore, Analytics can even tell us how much we are making or losing off of our ads by keeping tabs of ad costs and conversion rates.

Once you have setup one or more goals, you can use a valuable feature called Funnels. Funnels are typical paths that visitors take through your website to the eventual completion of a goal. Once you have created funnels, you can see exactly where visitors “drop out” of the funnel, that is, you can see at what stage of the goal completion process visitors leave your site.

In my next post I will talk about a more advanced feature of Google Analytics…custom reporting.

Overview

A website is more than just images, hyperlinks, and code. It is a cohesive entity with which users interact in complex ways. To understand how a website (and your bottom line) can be made better, one must first understand these interactions. There are many tools that can help get this job done, but Google Analytics is arguably the best, and better yet, it’s totally free.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (Analytics) is an advanced free analytics tool from Google that computes, records, and displays statistical data about your website and its users. Want to know how many visitors you had in the month of May? Analytics can tell you. Want to know how many people in Poland downloaded your e-book last Friday? Analytics can tell you. How about the percentage of people that actually bought a box of widgets after clicking on your online advertisement? Analytics can tell you that too. If you’re running an e-commerce site, Google Analytics can even track your transactions to determine how your best customers find your site, and to calculate your existing customers’ loyalty. The capabilities of this powerful tool are seemingly endless.

Why are website statistics important?

Think about the last time you went to the doctor. Doctors need to understand how your body is working, so they take a look at the body’s statistics: pulse, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, etc. Only after looking at these statistics do they understand what courses of action will make the person better.

The same is true for websites. Blindly making changes to your webpages and advertising strategies is tantamount to trying to cure a specific illness with a randomly selected surgical procedure; It can often cause more harm than good. Statistics give direction, and without direction, change is meaningless. Let’s take a look at how Google Analytics can provide some incredibly valuable direction.

Example:
An online store has seen a 20% reduction in sales this past year. They must increase sales by the end of the year to stay afloat.

The non-statistical solution:
The management of an online store assumes that they need drive more visitors to their site in order to increase sales. They increase their online ad spending.

The statistical solution:
The management of an online store looks at their site’s statistics and are surprised to find that, despite the decrease in sales, the number of visitors to their site has nearly doubled since last year. Furthermore, they discover that a large number of visitors who had products in their shopping carts left the site without a purchase when they got to the checkout page. They decide that the currently confusing checkout page needs to be redesigned. Furthermore when they look at the statistics for their online ads, they see that nearly 80% of all visitors who enter their site through ads, leave almost immediately. The management decides to rework their ads.

Result:
Even a basic understanding of analytics could spare an online store from spending more money on an ineffective solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.

Conclusion

Google Analytics can tell you nearly everything you would like to know about your website. The information it provides can direct evidence-based changes to your site to increase traffic, enhance your conversion rate, or simply make your users’ experiences more enjoyable. Installing Google Analytics on your website is easy, requiring just a cursory understanding of HTML and Javascript. Consult a professional if you are ready to use Google Analytics’ more advanced features, as these require a greater level of technical knowledge.

In my next post I will give an introduction on how to start using Google Analytics.

Typography is the art or process of printing with type. However, in modern usage typography includes all manner of non-printed letter forms such as websites, eBooks, electronic billboards, and even textiles. Through the use of type, a person can visually tell a story using little to no imagery. This post is intended to teach you about the anatomy of type and to help you better understand what to look for when choosing your next font.

First, the basics …

Typeface vs Font, What’s the difference?
A typeface, also called a font family, is a set of fonts designed with a stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinate set of glyphs. A font is a complete character set of a typeface at a particular size, weight, and style.

Serif vs Sans Serif, Which one to use?
Serif letters are drawn with features at the ends of their strokes. The serifs are the little feet we see in fonts like Times. These are some of the oldest type designs. The feet along the baseline help guide the eye from left to right, making them very ‘readable’ fonts.

Sans Serif (french for “without serifs”) are letters drawn with straighter lines and no feet. Their larger letterforms make them very legible, but can cause greater eye strain when used in long runs of text. Helvetica is considered the quintessential sans serif font.

The Anatomy of a Letter

There is a standard set of terms to describe the parts of a character. These terms, and the parts of the letter they represent, are often referred to as “letter anatomy” or “typeface anatomy.” By breaking down letters into parts, a designer can better understand how type is created and altered and how to use it effectively.

• Baseline – The baseline is the invisible line on which characters sit. While the baseline may differ from typeface to typeface, it is consistent within a typeface. Rounded letters such as “e” may extend slightly below the baseline.
• Meanline – The meanline falls at the top of many lowercase letters such as “e,” “g” and “y.” It is also at the curve of letters like “h.”
• X-Height – The x-height is the distance between the meanline and the baseline. It is referred to as the x-height because it is the height of a lowercase “x.” This height can vary greatly between typefaces.
• Cap Height – The cap height is the distance from the baseline to the top of uppercase letters like “H” and “J.”
• Ascender – The part of a character that extends above the meanline is known as an ascender. Note that this is the same as extending above the x-height.
• Descender – The part of a character that extends below the baseline is known as a descender, such as the bottom stroke of a “y.”
• Serif – Fonts are often divided into serif and sans serif. Serif fonts are distinguishable by the extra stroke at the ends of the character, known as a serif.
• Stem – The vertical line of a “B” and the primary diagonal line of a “V” are known as the stem. The stem is often the main “body” of a letter.
• Bar – The horizontal lines of an “E” are known as bars. Bars are horizontal or diagonal lines of a letter, also known as arms, and are open on at least one side.
• Bowl – An open or closed circular line that creates an interior space, such as in “e” and “b.”
• Counter – The inside of a bowl.
• Leg – The bottom stroke of a letter, such as the base of an “L” or diagonal stroke of a “K.”
• Shoulder – The curve at the beginning of a leg of a character, such as in an “m.”

Great Examples of Type-Only Design