Google Analytics--New and Improved!

Wow. I hate to seem like such a slavish admirer of Google, but they just do great work. Google Analytics has just been given a major redesign/upgrade, and it is smoking! Much easier to read and interpret, it is even more focused on the needs of marketers and business owners. Is it as powerful as Omniture or HBX? No, but it's far easier for the average person to get actionable data from than either of those applications. Did I mention it's free?

If you've been wasting time pulling data out of the old version of GA to present it to a business owner or client in more "user-friendly" form, stop. Remind them how to sign into their GA account and have them take the tour, and then let them use it themselves. It's so intuitive and non-threatening, anybody can use it. Use that time you now spend moving numbers around in Excel to make some more money.

How Can I Tell Which Change Was an Improvement?

If your conversion rate has been falling, and new keywords and creative aren't moving the needle, you probably need to improve your landing pages. Landing pages are the pages your prospects land on when they click on one of your ads online.

Unfortunately, most people don't put much effort into landing page optimization. One of the reasons is that without the right tools, doing meaningful A/B comparisons between 2 versions of a page has been impossible for all but the biggest companies.

For those willing to spend a bit of time at it, Google has now put a real-time testing tool into our hands, free of charge. It's called Google Optimizer, and you should give it a try.