5 Reasons to Use Google Analytics

First of all, what is Google Analytics? It is free tool offered by Google which enables you to closely analyze the traffic that comes to your website.  As a brief introduction to its features, let’s look at five reasons why it can help your business:

1.  You can see how long your visitors are spending on your site (bounce rate).  This can help you analyze if your site is “sticky”, in other words, is your website holding your viewers interest long enough for them to consider becoming a customer or inquiring more about your services?

2.  Tells you exactly how many visits you’ve had to your site, down to the day.  This can help you see trends in your traffic hits, especially how it might coincide with any on-or-offline marketing techniques, such as email newsletters, postcards, or an event you may have presented to.

3.  Figure out what keywords your audience is using to find your site.  The helps you improve the searchability of your site (search engine optimization), improve your campaign if you are using Google AdWords or any other paid search, as well as offer you a lot of insight into your business and your overall marketing efforts.

4.  Find out which pages drives the most page views, which helps you figure out the most or least effective pages on your site.

5.  Find out what traffic sources drove visitors to your site.  Did they come from a search through Google or Yahoo, or did they type your URL right into their browser, or get referred from another site?

6.  I know it’s supposed to be five reasons, but I’ve gotta throw in this one:  The Google Analytics tool is FREE!

I’ll share an example of just one great piece of information that I’m gleaning from using Google Analytics on my own website.  When I look at the data gathered under the category “Referring Sites”, I’m learning that Facebook is the number one source of all visitors who are referred from links on other sites to my website. 

The reporting shows me how many visitors have come from Facebook, and how long they stay on my site, and which pages on my site they visit.  This tells me that Facebook is a very effective tool in marketing my business. 

I can also tell from the Referring Sites reporting that it is effective for me to take the time to submit my website to free directories, because I’m seeing those directory sites on the list, and I can see that those visitors are spending a good amount of time on my site. 

This is just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to valuable information that you can get from Google Analytics.  Camille Winer Design & Marketing can help you figure out which features of Google Analytics will help you the most. We also help get you set up to start rolling in, managing and organizing the data. Contact us for more information.

What’s In A Name?

You may have noticed –– Camille Winer Art & Design has become Camille Winer Design & Marketing.  I’ve kept my graphics and my name there because I don’t want to invent the wheel.  I just want to be true to the work that I’m doing. 

When I started this business over 5 years ago, I came to it with a background in fine art and also in design. It was hard for me to think of these as separate.  I was doing a variety of projects, from hand-made projects like custom hand-letter pressed invitations, photo albums and boxes to all of my digital work doing web and graphics.  My foundation of color, composition and concept has greatly affected my design skills and my exposure to layout, typography and graphic elements has inspired some of my artwork.  In fact, I have a graduate degree in book & paper arts, which unites art and design perfectly.

Since then, there has been an integration of Internet technical expertise and a focus on web presence that has greatly expanded my business activities.  When I first started I was helping people just get that web page up, or a postcard out. Now I’m helping businesses build community around their websites through many dynamic web features, blogging, integrated Internet/print marketing and more. I’ve decided it’s time to update the name to reflect this.

Love My Job

It doesn’t get any better than this.  Right now I’m sitting, enjoying a cup of green tea and listening to some beautiful lullaby music by an artist that I am creating a CD jewel case design for. 

A lot of the time I prefer designing for the web because I get such immediate results.  But I have been doing a lot of websites lately, so I am welcoming a break in that by doing some print design again.  It reminds me of just how much I love laying out objects, art, text and forming a color palette. 

Also, I love doing CD’s because they are so personal to the client.  It’s not just about a business, but it is someone’s passion, creativity in music that I get to try to translate into a package.  It’s really fulfilling.

Stay tuned to see the finished piece!

Camillebook

I’m BACK after a long time away from the blogs.  I want to blame Facebook for that.  I just discovered it a few months ago and tend to go there when I have a few minutes.

Oh, and I did just have a baby 7 weeks ago!  Pretty good excuse, eh?

Anyway, I have actually been inspired by Facebook to begin blogging again.  I just love how easy Expression Engine makes it for me to form new blogs and to publish to my existing ones any time I want.

I’ve also just upgraded my site from the Expression Engine trial to a full version (like the kind I’ve been building on everyone else’s site!), and I’m inspired to do some things with my site that I haven’t been able to do, like possibly create an email list and create some fun regular emails to send out to clients.  That’s my current vision, and one I hope to fulfill in the coming months.

But for now, back to work on a client’s site that I created years ago, and I am now upgrading to a full version of Expression Engine, so that they will be able to manage their own site and expand their capabilities.  Fun!

How I Fell in Love with Expression Engine

You may be as alarmed as I was to discover that I get really excited about a content management system. But I do.  There are some open source CMS’s that I’ve tried.  But the one that I was originally introduced to by fellow business owner Alison Rodriguez of Wedding Chicago, who uses it from the client side to update her site and write her blogs, is Expression Engine. I’ve come to understand that the inexpensive fee that is charged for the lifetime use of an install of EE is WELL worth it.  They system is so clean, well monitored, updated and user friendly – and the support of the administrators and community is amazing.

I spent about a 1/2 year (and part of that time nauseated in bed from pregnancy!) training myself by building a site in Expression Engine, and spent a good deal of my time scratching my head and reading the how-to and technical forums, but each time I learned something new I was like a kid in the candy store. I was just so excited at what I could achieve. I would literally jump up and down and clap hands – real dorky, I know – and exclaim that the makers of EE gave me another reason to love my job as a web designer and developer.

So, this is the reason I’ve created a blog for EE.  Aside from just gushing about it from time to time, I decided to make a dedicated place to document some of the finer points of the system.

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