We knew the day would finally come and today it has. Google Analytics is now letting users opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics. It also works in all major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. The beta version of the opt-out app can be downloaded here. This is a double whammy when you consider Google has also just released SSL search which is the start of worrisome trend for the analytics professional and webmaster: The death of the referrer. Danny at SearchEngineland has a good take on it and its hard to see where this will end. What if analytics as we know it go back 15 years to just hits.

I can’t blame people for wanting privacy. Besides if you’re tech savy, you can block any web analytics easily. Heck, you don’t even need to be that technically inclined. There are dozens of plugins to make this happen. The concern I have is this: Google with their impressive trustworthy brand has just lowered the barriers for people who wouldn’t normally bother. They will get the kind of press and coverage any plugin developer would dream of. The result of which could be a mass of users who might not understand why or what they are blocking. They won’t even consider the consequences of blocking Google Analytics will have on their favorite websites. In case you aren’t aware, analytics are gold to webmasters. It is an essential tool to ensure the content created is popular to their audience. Analytics are used to sell ad space to potential advertisers and to set rates. Most importantly, analytics are used to make sure users have the best experience possible on their site. Now this can all come into jeopardy.

So what can you do? There are a couple of options. One is to pray that this announcement goes the way of Google’s other privacy tools, hidden in the Google Dashboard and hardly anyone notices or uses it. The second is to deploy another analytics program, such as Piwik or these alternatives . The last option is to consider the BETA solution called YMMV Real Websats to keep an eye on your Google Analytics Accuracy.

In the end, there is no need for panic. We have to remember that for us, these types of issues seem larger then they really are to the public at large. This does not mean we can ignore them. We just need to keep it in the back of our head: Google Analytics opt out is another variable to consider when you analyze your analytics.

Google Analytics Opt-Out Plugin and Analytics Accuracy is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

A couple of weeks we asked the question about Google Analytics: Is The Party Over When Everyone Opts-Out? Google announced the ability coming for users to “block” Google Analytics. Those using Google Analytics already have plenty to be concerned about. As Mozilla Firefox takes more share from Internet Explorer and more users install Adblock, No Script and other plugins, the quality of web stats has declined. You can deny it all you want but as more users choose to remain invisible, your Analytics numbers will become less accurate.

Its not hard to understand in a time where privacy is a great commodity, why people are choosing to hide themselves. At the same time, though, Analytics are essential to any serious webmaster who wants to cater to their audience. For those that don’t know, Analytics is more then hits. Analytics tell a story. They can play a big part in how a website operates. The information lets a webmaster know what topics/products are popular. It lets a webmaster know which pages work and which ones fail. And in some cases the ad rates a website can command is dependent on the amount of traffic it receives. So where does this leave the webmaster facing an accuracy issue?

There is a new tool that answers the challenge which we recently discovered called YMMV Real Web Stats created by Adrian Speyer. Its an open source PHP script using flatfiles, that gives you a new insight into your Google Analytics. Below is an image from a small test we ran (click for larger image):

In the example run on a sample page for during the week, we got 71 pageviews according to Google Analytics. According to YMMV Real Webstats, we really got 77 pageviews, with 6 pageviews blocked by Google Analytics. Also we learn 9 users blocked ads, and 4 had No Script. According to the tool, our Google Analytics is 91.31% accurate. While this tool is not super detailed it gives you some interesting information nonetheless. What I liked about it is it quickly gives you an idea of what plugins are used by your visitors and potentially how much info your webstats could be missing. What will be interesting to see is if they can develop the tool to take account of unique visitors, rather then page views and include an easier way to drill down to the page level. In the meantime, YMMV does give you access to the raw data (they need to work on this a bit more) so should you can use the data to make some deeper assumptions on your own.  We hope to see its development continue and look forward to seeing what the future has in store especially as Google Analytics accuracy continues to be threatened.

Now for an experiment of interest:  We’d love to see some other people download YMMV Real Webstats and share their data. Once you have a chance to deploy it, come back and post your stats, your url and the audience you’re after. It will be interesting to know how accurate everyone’s Google Analytics actually is and if certain verticals have a major Analytics crisis.

How Accurate Are Your Google Analytics? is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Have you ever seen the below in a Google Search for a product or a service?

Last year Google introduced this feature under the name of Rich Snippets (or structured data). Google will recognize this information when you mark up your  HTML content with one of three formats:  microdata, microformats, or RDFa.

Once you markup the pages, you can test you Rich Snippets with Google’s handy testing tool. Once implemented, you have no guarantee that your mark up will be included in the index, but you can tell Google here you have made the change or have an interest in Rich Snippets.

So now you have the basic info, how can you get Rich Snippets  for reviews and ratings easily in WordPress? Its really simple and will literally take you five minutes. We first highly recommend you download Lester Chan’s WP-Post Ratings Plugin and follow Lester’s read me file. Please note this solution only works when the plugin is used in a post or page. Once installed, here is how you get your blog Google Rich Snippet ready. You want to add the following found in lines 3-5 to your single.php before the function for ratings found in line 7:

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<div class="entry">
<span xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" typeof="v:Review-aggregate">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<span property="v:itemreviewed"><?php the_title(); ?></span></a></h2>
<?php the_content('Read more &raquo;'); ?>
<b>Add Your Rating:</b><?php if(function_exists('the_ratings')){ the_ratings(); } ?>
</div>

The next step is to open the ratings template plugin in options and to copy and paste the below into the template area called “Ratings Vote Text”:

%RATINGS_IMAGES_VOTE% (<span rel="v:rating"><strong><span property="v:count">%RATINGS_USERS%</span></strong> votes, average: <strong><span property="v:average">%RATINGS_AVERAGE%</span></strong> out of %RATINGS_MAX%)<br />%RATINGS_TEXT%</span>

Once all the info is in, modify as you need. Test your deployment with Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool. That’s all it takes. Play around with our code above until its in the format you like. Now all you need to do it  tell Google you have enabled Rich Snippets and hopefully they add your rich content to their search results.

Rich Snippets For Ratings and Reviews In WordPress is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

As you know we are great fans of Google Analytics, naming it the best free analytics package in our test of free analytics vendors. Now comes the word that the party may be over. On March 18th, the Google Analytics team made the following announcement on their blog (our emphasis in bold):

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

Obviously it is hard to comment without more details, but this is another example where using third party software can leave you out in the cold when they decide to change the rules. We know users have for years used no-script and Adblock to block analytics packages, but a browser plugin could spread this to more non-technical users. Time will tell what happens, but we feel your web analytics are too valuable to wait. You need to evaluate your options.

Thankfully there are many options to choose from. To help here are our choices. It is not an exhaustive list, but it might help you start your search:

Best Free Alternative to Google Analytics: Self-Hosted
There are many good free webstat tools, like Statcounter, what we are looking at are Analytics tools, which provide a bit more info such as goal and campaign tracking.We are also not looking at free hosted solutions because those can disappear over-night. Our vote goes to Piwik.org which we profiled at version 0.2.3.4 and have seen lots of great improvements since. To us it’s the most like Google Analytics, so the transition will be easy. They also get extra points for the fact they are self-hosted. The other free alternative we suggest you consider is Advanced Web Stats. Both options require self hosting.

Best Value for Money Alternative to Google Analytics: Hosted
To us, the best value for the money alternative to Google Analytics is GetClicky. A quick look a the comparison chart shows why we choose getclicky.com is a great alternative. The best part is the fact, they are one of the few services that supports Google Analytics campaign tags. That means if you have historical campaigns set up with Google Analytics, you can still capture the info with GetClicky. Its also a great way to check your “Google” numbers. Their price is under $120 for the superpro package.

Best Enterprise Alternative to Google Analytics:
This is a hard one, there is a lot of competition in this sphere, but if you have a site with a million pages a month, there are not many services that can handle you. Furthermore, the reality is at this level if your analytics are business critical, you really shouldn’t be using a free solution. It really gets down to what you need and what you are comfortable with. In our view Yahoo! Web Analytics is a great choice (see a good comparison here to Google. Keep in mind Yahoo! is has recently released a new version which added even more features. If you or your company decides to really spend some big bucks, you can also check outWebTrends as a robust Enterprise solution.

In conclusion, some have noted the opt-out will not have an impact. Personally, I am not sure — it depends on the simplicity of the opt-out and how much press it gets. If opting out of Google Analytics is really simple, adoption rates could be high. I also think it makes sense to start considering alternative analytic packages you can facilitate a smooth transition should you need to make it. It never hurts to have a “back-up” plan. Most importantly, you need a benchmark to watch your site to see if a significant delta arises in your Google Analytics and the secondary vendor you choose. To stay updated on the latest Google Analytics opt-out developments we welcome you to subscribe to our blog via email.

Google Analytics: Is The Party Over When Everyone Opts-Out? is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Statcounter announced a couple of weeks ago an update on their newest version of their tracking software. The SC4 update added two major changes. The first allowing for exit link tracking, or in other words, track the destinations of visitors leaving your site. The other was the ability to compile, download stats, as in track stats for pdf and other files available on your site. This got us wondering, what igf you were in a situation where Statcounter was not an option, and why Google Analytics did not offer something similar out of the box. In our search for answers and we found  an essential add-on for any Google Analytics implementation. Immeria started the ball rolling, with a script to to track outbound links and downloads which has now morphed into a wonderful open source project. In short, gaAddons Google Analytics implementation. Best of all, its easy to implement. The first step is download the code (we have linked to the SVN, the most up to date code). Place it in a folder and call it after the main Google Analytics script. Below is an example code, you will need to add your Google Analytics Site ID.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-XX");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/gaAddons.js"></script>

That’s it. Now just wait 24 hours, for the first couple of event to take place, and then it will appear in your report under Content >> Event Tracking. The results, will look like something below:

In short, this is an essential script for any site using Google Analytics that needs to know where users go after they leave their site, and what information they download.

Please note: gaAddons is not compatible with the new Google Asynchronous Tracking method. As Stephane Hamel pointed out earlier this year on his blog: “I intend to do a complete rewrite in a more object-oriented form that will easily support async-calls. However… this being an open-source/free project, it tends to fall lower in the list while I focus on consulting, teaching & speaking ”

Track Outbound Links and Downloads with Google Analytics is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

We wanted to wait a bit before we commented on Google’s newest release: Google Buzz. While it’s interesting as a concept for keeping in touch with family and friends, from a marketing perspective we think its something to pass on. By integrating it so closely with one’s email,  people are more skeptical to follow those they don’t know. Its also not uncommon for many users to have their social network segmented into different compartments online, and Google Buzz seems to take this away. And while Google did get 150 Million users by making Google Buzz opt-in, most of the adopters of this type of technology are already into Twitter, and have  no interest in a second account, that (for now) they need to update separately.

Then there is the whole privacy fiasco faced by Google Buzz. It has turned off many users who have opted-out and will likely never opt back in.  And as the bad press continues it does not help their case in getting users to to adopt this new tool. Google themselves took the feedback, and  made several changes. Nevertheless, some of the changes are draconian, like you can opt out of Buzz, but then your whole Google Profile is deleted.  Personally, I think Google should examine a separate domain for Google Buzz like Twitter, and make it optional for your “buzzes” to be made available in Gmail.

Nevertheless, one area of Google Buzz is making some headway. Many sites are now adding a Google Buzz button next to their Tweetmeme integration. You can see it in action at Mashable for example.  Mashable is a blog focused on social media and has over 2.3 Million followers. Actually Mashable is the perfect lab to follow the integration of Google Buzz. Below is an example of their share area for an article:

As you can see, (and all over their site), Google Buzz trails Twitter and Facebook. It might change in the future, but for now Google Buzz has not got the same penetration. We still suggest you have your brand name as a Google Account, but beyond this, Google Buzz is not something essential for your marketing plan.

Google Buzz for Marketing: Pass for Now is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

In Quebec, a province in Canada, there are strict rules about operating a website in the province. You must offer a bilingual site (French and English) to customers if you do business in the province or are resided in that province. Actually the website content must be in French, but English is optional, as French is the official language in the province of Quebec. Failing to comply with the rules, can run you afoul of Office Quebecoise de la language francaise and possible fines and sanctions.

So what do you do if you are a small business without the resource to create a French site? Thankfully Google offers you some solutions other then spending a small fortune in translation services. Below are the solutions and the scripts you need:

1- Translate all the pages

This is the more time consuming solution by if you visit Google Translate, you can enter your site text, visit your website url, or upload your documents/web pages. Instantly Google will translate your files into French. Of course this is a machine translation, but it will give you the ability to come pretty close. If you know someone who reads/writes French, this will quicken the turn around time in translating your site. We recommend you add your French pages to a subfolder on your sever (i.e http://www.yoursite.com/fr).

2- Offer Translation Tool on Index

A quick solution is offering Google’s translation tool on your pages. Just use the below code.

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en',
    includedLanguages: 'en,fr'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

3- Use .HTACCESS file to redirect based on browser language.
Using an .HTACCESS file, you can detect the language of the visitors browser. If a visitor has a French version of Firefox, Chrome or IE when coming to your site the site will be translated to French automatically using Google. If they come to with an English language browser, they will not notice a difference. All you need to do is replace “www.englishsite.com” in this code with your domain name. Sure to save file as .HTACCESS filetype.

The other option is this code which will create sub-folder for each language. English users will be taken to www.yoursite.com/en unless they are using a French browser. In this case they will be taken to www.yoursite.com/fr.

So there you go! Three quick solutions to get your site in French fast and keep your Quebec customer happy. Now you may ask why we did not offer an IP blocking solution. Unfortunately, its just not efficient. For example, you would need to keep an updated IP list for all users in Quebec. This is a major issue, because there are always new IP addresses. Furthermore how do you identify users in Quebec with ISP’s in Ontario or for that matter those visitors using a proxy?

The best solution in our view is to start with solution # 2 or 3 above, while you work on using solution #1. A we have mentioned earlier, sometimes you just have to spend the money on website design. Having a fully translated website is the best way to increase your revenue from a local market and the most professional way to present your site. Most of all, we hope the above solutions helps cash-strapped (small) businesses in Quebec (or elsewhere) facing issues in translation.

Bonjour Quebec: Quick Way To Translate Website To French is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

A great tool in your arsenal to keep track of you competition is Google Reader. If you are not aware, Google Reader is an RSS reader that allows you to read RSS feeds. An RSS feed (also known as Really Simple Syndication) is an xml file format used by web publishers to advise their audience where frequently updated works are involved—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio or video. We even use it on our website. See our RSS feed here. You can easily subscribe to an RSS Feed at most major sites by looking for RSS feed Icon ( ) and clicking on it. But what are you to do if there is no RSS feed on the site you want to track changes on? Unfortunately, the only solution is the time consuming  practice of  checking a site every time you wanted to see if something changed.

Now Google has unveiled a game changer that makes Google Reader a lot more powerful. This new feature gives anyone the ability to monitor changes to Web sites that lack RSS feeds. What does this mean? In markets where RSS feeds are not standard for websites,  for example in the B2B market, you can put any competitor Web site into Google Reader and updates will appear anytime a change or addition is made to a particular web page.

Google will create a custom snippets showing page changes (like below-click image to enlarge) that will allow you to quickly decide if the information is of interest.

As you can see, this is a powerful tool for keeping tabs on your competition when they do not offer an RSS feed. However, because this tool is so powerful, Google has offered a way for web publishers to opt-out of tracking. Nevertheless if some of your competitors opt-out Google Reader is still a quick, easy way to stay on top of your industry and trends. And of course, we also hope you will add us to your list by subscribing to our feed found here.

Tracking Your Competition With Google Reader is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

The other day we wrote about page speed and its importance. Mark8t too has  finally completed their own speed enhancements (hoped you notice). One of the things we did to change things was to upgrade our Google Analytics code to the new Asynchronous Tracking code. What is the benefit of upgrading your code? Well from what Google tells us and from what we saw you get the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

Although it is the new Google asynchronous tracking code is Beta we have had no issue and have seen some page speed benefits.  Please note using the new tracking code is optional, so don’t worry. Your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to try out the new Google Analytics code you will need to delete your old code first.  You can get started with the new asynchronous tracking by downloading it here or read the full usage guide first to see if its worth. We think you’ll agree it is.

New Google Analytics Code is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Recently, Matt Cutts announced at PubCon Vegas that there is a strong possibility a new ranking factor will be added to the Google algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads. This is part of Google’s steps to make the web faster. As Google shares, studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. We recommend to take the time before the holiday crunch to optimize your site. Not only will it allow your users to have a better experience, if your site is not impacted by the holiday season it is a quiet time to fix speed issues. To help in this endeavor there are many tools to diagnose the problem. Considering Google is so important to many marketers, the first stop should be Google’s Webmaster tools. Google has now included (in beta) a site performance tool. The performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated. Below is an example:

Google notes recently on the Webmaster Tools blog, that the idea is to bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your own site and bring specific and actionable speed information backed by data. Performance charts and tables will only show in your account if there’s enough data to do so.  Google is also providing a new tool for diagnoses called Page Speed, which you can download and use with Firebug in Firefox.

Google is not the only one with tools though. Yslow is a great add-on for Firebug in Mozilla  which also analyzes web pages. Using Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites, it can advise you why you page is slow and how to fix it. There are also many  basic speed tools which just tell you page load speed, one we like is Free Speed Test.

We also have some basic tips to get your site to load fast:

1-Beware widgets and Plug-ins.

Sometimes its great to have a cool plug-in, or a widget, but if it slows down your sites load times you have to make a choice. Recently for example, we killed the “Twit This” WordPress plug-in for Tweetmeme and we saved 4 seconds on our load time. Not a lot you think, but its noticeable.  We have spoken about this before, but it might be worth a refresher.

2- Stats but not every stat

Sure it’s important to have Analytics, but choose one or two and forget the rest. Do you really need a dozen different stat tools? Make a choice on your favourite and forget the rest.

3- Watch Your Image Size

Images are great to add to a story, but not if they hog precious load time. There are many free online image optimizers so don’t be shy to try something like this  Online Image Optimizer. It will  reduce the file size of your gif, jpg, or pngs and done right neither you or your visitors will be able to see the difference.

4- Keep you code clean

This is important. Put your CSS at the top, and put your Javascript at the bottom (if you can). Remove useless scripts. Avoid unneeded calls to a MYSQL database that you can embed right into your code. For WordPress, check out three quick tips to make it happen.

5- It’s not the website, but what runs it!

If you have a cheap host, or you get the wrong package/setup, you can cause loading problems. In short, you can get what you pay for if you don’t do the right research.

6- Always create a backup.

No matter what you do, make sure to backup your work, so you can go back. I know the advice is simple, but you’d be amazed at the horror stories.

7- Keep Learning

We don’t have all the answers. No one ever can. The real goal is to know where to look. With a quick Google search you can find other fine tips. Heck in a couple of seconds alone we found some other great tips here and here that we were not aware of . In short don’t assume you have all the answers either.

Why Page Speed Matters! is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More