Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

If you’re serious about building a business online you need a good web analytics package. In the past decent analytics packages were beyond the reach of most small to mid-sized web operators but today you can get professional level reporting from Google Analytics for FREE.

I won’t be able to cover all the things you can do with web analytics in this short post but suffice it to say if there’s anything you want to know about your visitors, Google Analytics can help you figure it out. Here are just a few things we’ve used our analytics to determine:

• Where should we focus our marketing efforts? Google Analytics helps us understand which traffic sources generate the most pageviews per visitor so we can apply our marketing dollars appropriately. A couple months back we decided to give Facebook ads a try and saw that our Facebook-referred visitors viewed 50% more pages than similar campaigns. Since we saw the ads were more effective we increased Facebook spending while decreasing spending on our other campaigns.
• Where do our visitors live? With Google Analytics you can drill down to a country / state / city to see how many visitors you site receives from a given location. We use this information to guide our new content creation and tweak ad campaigns to target certain geographic regions.
• What keywords are visitors using to find our site? This is super important and informs our search engine optimization strategy. Often the results can be surprising and can lead to new insights into your market or industry.
• How is our site performing in terms of transactions? With Google Analytics you can set up various goals to track such as purchases, new user registrations, etc. We look at these closely and make changes to the site to see how they affect our goal metrics. Not sure if the new checkout page on your site is an improvement? Consult the analytics to see how your conversion rate has changed.

Using an analytics package is crucial if you want to better understand and grow your online business. Just remember, analytics alone won’t get you to your goals - it’s just another tool to help you make decisions.

Google Analytics helps you visualize your online traffic with a simple to use interface.

We don’t really like classifying Review App as a piece of software since software alone is never a complete solution. As such we’ve tried to stay away from talking about Review App in terms of what IT can do and instead focus on how WE can help you build a successful online consumer review website. But we understand if you’re curious about the features included in the Review App software - heck, the features page is usually the first page we hit when we’re shopping for software!

So now, for your convenience, we’ve posted a list of the features included in every Review App project. Just click the ‘Services‘ tab at the top of this page and scroll down to the ‘Review App Features’ heading. Here’s a little taste:

• License includes initial installation, configuration, template creation, and customization allowance
• Accepts user generated content of all types: listings, reviews, photos, and more
• RSS feed with links to latest approved online submissions (listings, photos, and reviews)
• Dynamically generated meta descriptions, page titles, and keywords
• Highly flexible and robust template system with access to raw data output
• Customizable system messages and email templates
• SEO-friendly URLs enabled at the click of a button and customized by section
• Business rules honed over 10 years of managing successful consumer review sites
• Built using open source technologies: PHP, MySQL, XHTML

And those are just the basics. Click through to read more about user management and user-generated listings, review, photos, and more - then contact us to talk about getting your Review App project started!