Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring traffic to and within your website, but it can also appear overwhelming at first glance. There’s such a wealth of information available through Google Analytics but unless you know what you’re looking for and how to access that data, you won’t get much out of implementing an analytics package like Google Analytics.

Last week Google debuted an upgraded version of Google Analytics (v5), and anyone with a Google Analytics account can now view the old version or the new version. In order to access the new Google Analytics, simply click on new version next to your email address on the top right corner of the page. While Google is still in the process of pulling all the old features over to the new version of GA, the new version seems to be working just fine and there are even a few new features to go along with the redesign and reorganization.

You could spend months learning all the ins and outs of Google Analytics, but here are some of the most important things to look for when you’re tracking visitors on your website using Google Analytics.

The Basics

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

When you first log into Google Analytics you’ll see the Visitors Overview that includes stats like Visitors, Pageviews, Time on Site and Bounce Rate. The Visitors and Unique Visitors numbers are important because it lets you know how many people have come to your site during the time frame you’re looking at and you then know approximately how many of those visitors have been to your site before. Pages per Visit lets you know the average number of pages each visitor goes to while on your site. Don’t think that just because you have a high Pages per Visit number it means your visitors are happy with your site and they’re getting what they wanted from your site. I’ve seen instances where a campaign caused Pages per Visit and Time on Site to drop, but have dramatically increased conversion rates. As much information as Google Analytics provides you, it still requires old fashioned individual user research or surveys to find out users sentiments.

The term Bounce Rate can be confusing. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that only view one page (the page they landed on first) and then exit your blog. In general, you want as low a bounce rate as possible, but much like the Pages per Visit and Time on Site metrics, a bounced visitor isn’t necessarily an unsatisfied visitor. If your website is more informational in general (many Local, State and Federal Agencies have more informational than sales or conversion goals), a higher bounce rate might not be a bad thing. But for most organizations the goal of your website is likely to sell a product, ticket, room night, service or something along those lines. If you notice high bounce rates for pages where you’re specifically selling an item or asking the user to take an action (sign up for an email newsletter or download a whitepaper), you should make some modifications to the page that could help lower the bounce rate.

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I’ve written about Foursquare, the most popular location-based social media game, a couple of times before, but I wanted to write about how to actually get started with Foursquare. How to create your account, how to connect your mobile phone and how to get started checking in.

What is Foursquare?

Foursquare's Newbie Badge

First of all, a brief explanation of Foursquare. Foursquare is a location-based social media game that allows you to check-in at different locations when they’re out and about. You earn points for each time you check in at a location and you can also unlock custom badges that tell your friends about some of the things you’ve done. If you check in at a particular location more often than anyone else, you’re considered the Mayor of that location.

Friends that follow you on Foursquare will see where you’ve checked in and, who knows, maybe they’ll join you at the coffee shop while you’re relaxing there in the evening. You can also leave tips at each location when you check in. Want to let your friends know about the appetizer they should order at the new restaurant in town or let them know where the best place to park for a Colts game is? Leave a tip and anyone on Foursquare can view it.

Still confused? Here’s a quick video from HowCast that explains Foursquare in a nutshell:

Why should I use Foursquare?

Part of the reason to use Foursquare is the same reason you use any other social media platform; to connect with people you know. The difference with Foursquare is that you’re broadcasting what you’re doing while you’re doing it and you can see what your friends are up to at the same time. Foursquare’s real benefit becomes apparent when you’re in a new city. Are you in Chicago for a conference and looking for a place to eat dinner? Fire up Foursquare to see what the locals recommend. By checking in and leaving tips at the places you frequent, you could provide just the help a visitor is looking for.

Create An Account:

Creating your Foursquare account is simple. Go to Foursquare.com and click on the big Join Now button. Fill out the standard account information; name, email, current location, etc. then head to the next step. You can easily add your Twitter or Facebook friends who already have Foursquare accounts and you can invite other friends who haven’t yet signed up for Foursquare.

Connect Your Phone:

Now that you’ve got a Foursquare account, you need to connect it to your mobile phone. Foursquare makes this very easy if you have a smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or an Android-based phone). Simply visit Foursquare.com on your mobile device and download the app for your phone. The Foursquare apps available for each mobile device are simple and easy to use, just fire them up and enter your login information to get started.There are also a host of other applications that allow you to check in with Foursquare, but the easiest thing is to download the official Foursquare app for your phone.

If you don’t have a smartphone but you can access the internet on your phone, you can still check-in by visiting m.foursquare.com. If you don’t have a smartphone or a web-enabled phone, it’s time for you to upgrade . Seriously, though, you can check in by sending a text message if your phone can’t connect to the internet.

Start Checking In:

Now that you’ve downloaded your Foursquare app, you can start checking in at your favorite locations. Load your Foursquare app and start checking in and leaving tips. If you’re don’t have a web-enabled phone, you can still check in via text. Send a text message to 50500 (like this: @ Ace Bar ! Playing skeeball)

If you’ve been online at all in the last 45 days, you’ve likely seen Facebook’s new Like (or Recommend) button on websites all over the internet. In April Facebook released Open Graph (check out ReadWriteWeb’s excellent summary here), which, in short, gives websites – large and small – the ability to integrate some of Facebook’s social features into their own sites.

One of the most useful bits of Open Graph is also among the easiest to implement on your website or blog. Facebook’s universal Like button can be added to your website with a single line of code and can dynamically added to your self-hosted WordPress blog with a simple plugin.

Facebook’s new universal Like button allows users to click that they like or recommend a website. That information is then sent through to your Facebook profile so your friends can see that you enjoyed the site you were visiting. By making it so easy to share things you enjoy with your friends, Facebook has helped increase the viral nature of sharing links.

Install the Facebook Like Button on your Website:

Facebook offers a host of social plugins that you can install on your website or blog, with varying degrees of programming knowledge, but the easiest option is checking out the Facebook Like Social Plugin page. You’ll want to use this method if you’re simply sticking the Facebook Like plugin on your static homepage. If you have a blog and would like the Like button to be on every post, see below.

On this page, simply fill in the website that the Like button will live on, choose your layout style, whether or not you want the plugin to show faces of people who like your site, the width, the verb you want to use (either Like or Recommend), the font you want to use and the color scheme. Then click the “Get Code” button and you can copy and paste the code into your website wherever you want the button to appear. This provides you with an easy way to include Facebook’s new Like feature on your website and can help your web traffic as people Liking your page.

Install the Facebook Like Button on your self-hosted WordPress blog:

If you’re self-hosting a WordPress blog, there are a number of plugins you can use to put the Facebook Like/Recommend button at the bottom of each post, but I use the SNV Facebook Like Button plugin. It’s simple, customizable and works like a charm! As you can see on the Social Mediarology main page and each of the posts, a simple Recommend button shows up below each post. Click it and a link to the post will be fed to your Facebook Profile for your friends to see.

Facebook has made it very easy to add some of their social features to your website or blog. Both the website code and the WordPress plugin include the number of people who clicked the like button, so you can see just how viral your content is becoming!

If you want to implement even more of Facebook’s Social Plugins, check out their Social Plugins Developers page. Have you implemented Facebook’s Like/Recommend button on your site yet?

Twitter and Facebook have changed the way that many of us communicate. Not only do we communicate with our friends and family differently now, but we consumer news and other media differently. We interact with current and potential customers differently. We get breaking news from Twitter and Facebook, not from the evening news. It’s because of this that it’s so important to know how to best share that information. Twitter and Facebook are the two largest social media sites in the country and each site has created simple ways to communicate important information with your friends or people who follow you.

Sharing on Twitter: Retweeting

On Twitter, there are a few different ways to share, or Retweet, information. The first way to do it is through what I’ll call the “classic retweet.” Seen below, the “classic retweet” simply consists of copying and pasting the message that someone else posted, and adding an “RT @username” to the beginning of the message to let people know you’re sharing someone else’s message. In this case, both @VisitIndy posted the message and @TCMIndy retweeted it before we did:

This “classic retweet” has been around nearly as long as Twitter has and was a practice that grew organically from Twitter’s users. Recently, Twitter implemented an official Retweet function, seen in the image below:

You can see the underlined Retweet link in the image above. If you wanted to retweet the message that @ThisIsIndiana posted, simply click on the Retweet icon and you’ll share that message with your followers.

You can see the Retweet icon () next to the status update. In this case, @VisitBtown clicked on the Retweet link to share @IIB‘s message with their followers.

However you choose to share information on Twitter, retweeting is a useful way to share important updates with your followers. You can use these retweeting techniques to spread the word about different events going on in your area, sales going on at local establishments or state-wide promotions to help inform your followers about what they can see and do in Indiana.

Sharing on Facebook: Shares and Mentions

Sharing information on Facebook isn’t always as easy as clicking a Retweet button and being done, but in some cases, it can be!

If you like Visit Indiana on Facebook (see Quick Update below), you can easily share any of our photos, blog posts, links and anything else that has the share link as seen below:

When you click on the share link, you’ll be presented with an overlay window like the one seen below. You can then insert your own message and when you click the Share button, the message and link/image/post you shared will show up on your wall.

Sharing content in this way is extremely easy and can dramatically increase the reach of your content. Once your page has 10,000 fans (I know, that’s a lot of fans!) you’ll be able to see detailed sharing statistics in addition to the information you can currently view with Facebook Insights.

One last feature I’ll talk about is the use of Facebook Mentions. Similar to the way you can mention @VisitIndiana in your tweets on Twitter, you can also now mention people you are friends with or organizations you like through Facebook.

Quick update – Right when I was in the middle of writing this post, Facebook changed the way they refer to organizations’ fans. From now on, you can “Like” pages rather than become “A Fan”. This appears to be merely a semantic difference, but we’ll start referring to our fans as people who “like Visit Indiana”. For consistency’s sake, we’ll also refer to “Fan Pages” as simply “Pages”

In the image below, you can see I mentioned both Tastings Indianapolis and Conrad Indianapolis. This message was posted on our Visit Indiana Page, but since it mentioned Tastings and the Conrad, it also showed up on each of their pages! This is a great way to spread the word from your official page, rather than from your personal profile.

The only caveat here is that in order to mention an organization, you have to personally “like” their page. In other words, if you manage the Madison Indiana Facebook Fan Page, buy you haven’t personally “liked” the Visit Indiana Fan Page yet, you won’t be able to mention us.

It’s really easy to mention another organization or person in your status updates. Simply type the @ symbol then start typing the name of the person or page and a list will pop up for you of all people you’re friends with and all pages that you “like”. You can see in the status update below that it’s very easy to include mentions in your Facebook status updates.

It’s really easy to share information via Twitter and Facebook and these techniques will give you even more flexibility to share the information you want with the people you want.

One of the best ways to engage your Facebook Fans is to provide some “Fans Only” deals or content. Einstein Bros. Bagels gave away a free bagel coupon to all of their fans and they offer members-only discounts on a regular basis. This certainly creates good will with your fans and gives them the feeling that they are appreciated.

With a little bit of HTML knowledge, you can easily create “Fans Only” content and deals on your Facebook page. Your first step is to install the Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application on your Fan Page (see image below). This will allow you to create a new tab or box where you can display your Fans Only content.

Search for "Static FBML" and add this app to your page.

Once you’ve added this application, you can modify the name of the tab/box and customize it with your content. I’ve included a short example below to show you how to get started. You can put links, images, printable coupons or any number of things in the FBML box using standard HTML. In fact, many of the big name Facebook pages, like Honda and Einstein Bros. Bagels use HTML and FBML to spice up their pages.

Fans Only Coding on Facebook

Everything between the two highlighted bits of code is only viewable by your page’s Fans. Now you can really thank your fans and give them special content or deals. You can place images in the Fans Only portion in addition to standard text and links so you can truly customize your page for fans.

The image above shows what your fans will see when they view your page. If someone who isn’t yet a fan, they won’t see the “$119 – Sundaes & Smiles Hotel Indigo – Columbus, IN” link.

Special thanks to John Haydon’s How To Create an Incentive for Visitors to Fan your Facebook Page post for the inspiration to write this one.

Groundswell

My brother gave me a great gift for my birthday this year. He gave me Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Forrester Researchers Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I first heard about the book back in April at TIA’s TravelCom 2008 conference in Chicago. Charlene Li was one of the speakers and her session was titled: Welcome to 2013: The Changes in Technology and Consumers that Will Affect Your Business.

Her session was one of the most enlightening at the conference and it really lit a fire in me to begin working on more social media initiatives or the “groundswell” as she calls it.

This is a book that is a must-read for anyone thinking about getting into social media, and that should be every single one of you.

Not only does the book do a great job of explaining what the groundswell is, but it also gives you a breakdown of several different “groundswell technologies” – many of which I talk about here on the Tourism Tech Corner – including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS, blogs, wikis and more.

One other benefit of the book is that, as Forrester Research employees, Li and Bernoff include solid numbers in the book that you can bring to your board of directors when you’re intersted in diving into some of these groundswell technologies. It might seem a bit silly to read a book about social media seeing as how it changes so quicky, but Groundswell was published this year, so it’s surprisingly up-to-date. That being said, you can be sure that the groundswell technology penetration percentages have climbed even since the printing of the book. I just read in the book last night that 8% of US online conusmers use RSS, and I just read that Forrester’s newest research puts that number at 11% now.

If you’re not quite ready to put down the money for the book, you can check out a PDF excerpt at the Groundswell website or read (and subscribe to via RSS) the Groundswell Blog. This is a book that won’t disappoint you.