Measuring Website Success

Weekly Links Roundup – Signup Forms, Contact Forms, Google Tag Manager, KPIs

May 4, 2018 by Debbie Campbell

The top website and marketing links of the week.

Looking to grow your email list? Start at the beginning by sprucing up your signup form – and pay special attention to #11, the privacy statement, with GDPR coming up in just a few weeks.

Building the perfect contact form, from a more UX-based perspective.

If you use Google Tag Manager, this post from Sucuri about how GTM is being targeted by hackers to deliver malicious code. The take-home is that *any* external script, even those from Google, has the potential to be a problem. Minimize their use as much as you can; the more you have, the bigger impact on site load time, at a minimum.

Finally… How do you know if your website marketing efforts are paying off? You can use a tool like Google Analytics to look at traffic and visitor behavior, sure, but what exactly should you be measuring? Learn how to define and measure appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business.(If you’ve never listened to one of Paul Boag’s podcasts, I highly recommend them).

Weekly Links Roundup – Website Problems, Nofollow, Android vs iPhone, Local Competition

October 27, 2017 by Debbie Campbell

The top website and marketing links of the week.

I’m on a constant campaign to get my clients to overcome these common problems that hold their websites back. Mobile-unfriendliness, low-quality (or mostly absent) content, free website builders, and lack of trackable conversions are always issues that can be fixed to make your site a more powerful marketing tool.

What is the “nofollow” tag, and when and how would you use it? Learn how to use nofollow to avoid passing linkjuice to sites that may be in any way questionable.

Here’s something interesting (if a bit clickbait-y): did you know that research suggests that iPhone users spend more on online transactions than Android users? See what’s behind this and how you might use it in your marketing efforts. Make your own decision as to its validity!

Finally… if you’re in a battle for customers and conversions with other local businesses, learn how to perform a basic local business competitive audit. This can help you identify why Competitor A is doing better in Google Search than you are.

How to Get Rid of semalt.com in Your Analytics Reports

February 5, 2015 by Debbie Campbell

semalt.com is not real traffic.

If you check your Google Analytics reports, chances are you’ll see lots of referrals coming from semalt.semalt.com or a similar domain. Semalt claims to be an ‘analytics service’ but what they really do is muck up the statistics in your analytics reports by artificially inflating the page bounce rate (you’ll see the bounce rate from this referrer is 100%). Typically bounce rate is between 30 and 70%; if it’s going up dramatically, check for semalt.com in your referrers list.

How to Block Semalt Using .htaccess

This is the way I do it, and it’s worked on all my own WordPress sites; this seems to be the most reliable way to handle the problem. To use this method, you’ll need an FTP connection to your hosting account. Download the file .htaccess to your computer (it’s in the root directory of your WordPress installation).

Open up .htaccess in a text editor and add the following:

# block visitors referred from semalt.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

Save .htacess (making sure the file name stays exactly the same) and upload it to your site, overwriting the old file. That should do it.

Other Ways to Block Semalt

If editing a file isn’t your cup of tea, some sites suggest adding semalt.com as a filter in Google Analytics. However, this has not worked for me; I had to use the .htaccess method to get it to go away completely.

A third possible method is by adding an exclusion in Google Analytics. To do that, open the View Settings for your website property and look for ‘Bot Filtering.’ Tick the checkbox, then Save your new settings. It will block known bots from your site reports. I have not used this myself though, so can’t speak to how well it works.

Note: at this time I’m also seeing a lot of traffic from the referrer buttons-for-website.com, this is another spam referrer you may want to block using the same methods above.

Getting more out of Google Analytics

February 4, 2012 by Debbie Campbell

I install Analytics tracking code on all sites from Red Kite, yet I know that most clients never go past the dashboard to see what’s going on. Here’s a great set of references for beginning Google Analytics users.