Setting Your Site Up For Analytics – Sprudio.net – Site Review – Part 1
A lady named Elena left a comment on my blog last week mentioning that she had purchased some directory links due to my recommendation. We had some back and forth and over the course of our conversation, I asked Elena if I could write a review of her site Sprudio.net and point out some things that I would recommend changing.
Elena readily agreed and this will be the first of a series of posts where I will point out some issues on her site that I would correct. However, before you read my post checkout my disclaimer.
Disclaimer: I'm in no way claiming to be an expert where SEO is concerned. I'm reading all I can and testing as much as possible, but I'm a long way from being considered an authority. However, there are a few things I feel confident about that I'll be offering my advice on, but if you disagree, leave a comment and lets discuss it.
In this post, I'm going to be pointing out an important point that Sprudio.net got right. When I visited the Sprudio.net home page, the first thing I did was look at the source code and search for a good analytics program.
Sprudio is using Google Analytics. I've written mixed reviews of Google Analytics in the past, but that had nothing to do with the performance or capabilities of the program. I was just cautious about handing all my site stats over to Google. However, my opinion has changed and I'm now using Google Analytics on every site I operate.
The purpose of installing a good analytics program is simple, before you can formulate a plan to get where you are going, you first have to figure out where you are. A good analytics program should give you a detailed report of how visitors are finding your site, what pages they are looking at, and which visitors are converting into buyers. Google Analytics offers all these features.
One thing I couldn't determine from the source code on Sprudio.net was if the shopping cart was setup to record conversions. If not, it almost defeats the purpose of having analytics. It's great to see how visitors found your site, but the most important thing is to figure out which visitors convert into sales.
If you find yourself in this situation, Google has a great article on setting up Google Analytics for e-commerce tracking.
Tags: analytics, google-analytics, log analyzer, site analytics, site stats, Sprudio.net, web stats
I have analytics for shopping cart but Google Analytic doesn’t record all the sales. May be it is not working right, because my analytics are on my php pages, or because Google Analytics has flaws. It does not record all the visitors. But can this affect my page rank?
Your thoughts about this will be very important for me.
Hi Elena,
I just wrote a second post about your site and included some keyword research data. I still have 2 – 3 more posts to go. You’ll be able to find them all at this link.
http://www.brentcrouch.com/category/internet-marketing-projects/sprudionet/
A problem with analytics isn’t going to cause you to loose page rank or penalize your site in any way.
Analytics shouldn’t have a problem with the php pages. I use Analytics on several php based e-commerce sites with no problem.
Are you saying Analytics is recording some of your sales and not others? If so, this could be a difficult problem to track down. If you would like, I could put you in touch with the programmer I use. He is an ace when it comes to setting up Google Analytics with e-commerce sites.
The biggest disadvantage of not having e-commerce tracking working properly is you will have no idea which keywords are valuable to you and which are not.