Watch out for the World Cup Effect in your Google Anaytics!

Whether you are a soccer fan or not: You may have noticed that there is the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa! Twitter already had to struggle with a huge traffic due to soccer fans tweeting like crazy about recent matches and the Vuvuzela trumpets – But what impact will have the Soccer World Cup for your site´s traffic?

soccer & web analytics

soccer & web analytics

If your business model is not directly related with soccer and your target markets are in countries that participate in the World Championship you will very likely see traffic drops during the important soccer matches.

To quickly measure this you can do a hourly traffic analysis with your Google analytics.

With just 6 simple steps you are able to figure out how the FIFA World Cup affected your websites traffic:

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The Most Popular Quality Assurance Testing Mistakes

You want to upload a bunch of new features and some bug-fixes to your site? Great! You want to avoid nasty side-effects and make sure that it works the same way like it was planned before? …then you will have to do a lot of testing!

Opening new pages with old browsers like IE4 can be fun :-)

Opening new pages with old browsers like IE4 can be fun :-)

Basically this Quality Assurance Phase should take place 2 times:

One time in a test-environment before the deployment to the production server and once again after the new web is live!

To maximize the efficiencies of your testing take care not to do the following mistakes that might lead to wrong observations, unnecessary time-waste or you will end up in overlooking faults:
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Google Visitors Special: Interesting Queries And Answers

It is always very interesting to take a look at the keywords that your visitors used in their Google search to find your website – and not only to analyze the SEO performance of your website. Some keywords actually can tell you quite a lot about what your visitors were really looking for on your site. Continue reading

How SEO Will Affect Your Product Planning Right From The Beginning

There are some very important interferences of SEO (search engine optimization) with the web product management that you need to know before developing your new product. No matter if you think about hiring (external) SEO consultants once the website is online, there are some aspects of SEO that you will have to keep in mind right from the start of creating an online product strategy. Continue reading

111+ Web Analytics Tweeter You Must Follow

Twitter is a really powerful tool to get in touch with other internet people. In the last time I was looking for web analytics experts in Twitter and found an excellent resource at the Blog of Rich Page. Even more interesting people I found while doing searches in Twitter and Google. Please let me know If I missed somebody in this list and tweet me. I want to keep this list up to date and I will update it from time to time.

Web Analytics Experts in Twitter:

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Pageviews vs. Visits vs. Visitors

In my opinion it happens too often that these important web analytics terms get mixed up or misunderstood. Sometimes even people that work in the internet industry seem to get confused. Whenever you have doubts if your conversation partner understood these terms right, you should better explain these differences again! See below the official definitions, where i have marked the parts with [!] that are in my experience most often misunderstood. Continue reading

Basic User Stream Analysis With Advanced Segments In Google Analytics

Advanced Segments are very useful for comparing different user streams and illustrating them with graphs. You can find a good explanation how you can create this segments with Google Analytics at the official Google Analytics Blog. The following questions you should always answer in your traffic stream analysis: Continue reading