We received dozens of entries to our Web Analytics World Holiday Contest and would like to congratulate our winners: Nicole Rawski (Geary Interactive) and Rob Sullivan (NASN Licensing).

Below I have posted some of my favorite web analytics tips/best practices that I received during the contest.

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Post several incoming links on various website, social bookmarking, blogs, forums. Q&A sites etc each week. Make sure they are not spam and always adding value to the site. Use Google Analytics to see which one do and do not generates traffic. Do more of the processes that works.

Mukul Verma
President, Global Unlock

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Decide what you want to accomplish and your business goals before looking at your analytics. Once you have a business goal in mind you aren't just looking at a bunch of numbers, but attempting to pull relevant value from the numbers. Web Analytics into actual business valuable intelligence is one of the hardest things to do, but once you have mastered it you will bring much more value to your company.

Kyle James
Marketing Consultant, Hubspot

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If you use Google analytics (but I'm sure this will work with most any analytics package) you can create multiple profiles to group sites. For example, we have hundreds of websites geared towards local shopping in Canada and the USA, so we have analytics on all these individually. But I wanted to be able to measure performance country wide, so I created another Google analytics account for each country - one for US and one for Canada - I then inserted the Google analytics codes for Canada on all pages on all Canadian sites, and the US code on all pages for all US sites.

When you look at the source of my pages, you'll see 2 Google analytics UA codes. This is why - so I can not only get city specific performance, but also country wide. I can then segment this data how I like.

Rob Sullivan
Sr. Strategist, NASN Licensing

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We are using Omniture for our client to prepare weekly and monthly reports. For that we have to extract data from multiple reporting suites and then combine into one report which usually takes lot of time. To save time we prepared Dashboards which get delivered every week to our mailbox. We put that dashboard on one sheet of excel file. All the referencing from there is done to Dashboard ( Referencing we have to do once). As a result we are able to cut 70% time on creating reports.

Gunjan Aggarwal

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To really gain insights about the visitors on your web site, be sure to not only segment new and returning visitors, but where the visitors are entering and what source brought them there. Are the entry pages effective? Look at the bounce rates for the top five entry pages, then see what keywords are being used to drive visitors to those pages (if you don't have any other campaigns driving traffic to them, otherwise analyze those campaigns). Do the keywords make sense or is time to review your SEO strategy. First impression and contact is key to keeping a visitor on your web site to perform the desired action you want them to perform.

Nicole Rawski,
Digital Media, Geary Interactive

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Determine visitors location based on IP or Geo targeted ad campaign (such as Google Adwords Geo Filtering) and then present testimonials from the same region. The concept is that people connect with similar people; in our scenario the similarity is geographic location. Someone from New York immediately relates to other New Yorkers. The concept can be applied to any location.

Real World Example: Insurance site identifies visitor from being from New York and shows testimonials from New Yorkers with their name & location.

Analysis: Compare call to action response data between New York visitors who saw a geo targeted testimonial versus New York visitors who saw a non geo targeted testimonial (such as a testimonial from someone in California or Florida).

Mark Simon
SEO Specialist, Miva Merchant

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