Brand recognition is a huge part of marketing. No matter if you have an online business or not, one of the things a business needs is a unique logo or graphic which allows them to be recognizable to their current clients and potential future customers. So what can you do when you want a logo or new banner ad? Sure you can try your own hand at creating it, with some time and Photoshop. You could hire a teenager you know with some skills. You could even try one of those online low cost (or free) logo generators. While those are all great solutions, if you’re serious about having a real choice with a professional unique design, we’d like to introduce you to a great website called 99designs.

Around since 2006, 99designs offers everyone (especially a small business owner) access to a pool of great graphic talent. If you’re serious about looking good its worth the investment.

Last month, 99Designs announced their new logo shop. They have over 4,000 logos ready to be purchased and customized for just $99 for a non-exclusive license, or purchase the logo exclusively for $298. After selecting the logo you want the original designer will customize the logo with your business name and within 24 hours it will be all yours.

If you wish to get something beyond logos, like a banner ad or a customized website theme,  99Designs “helps you run a design contest, where thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design to meet your needs. All you need is a clear idea of what you want designed and how much you’re prepared to pay for it.”

What we like about 99Designs is that  you get what you want at the price point you choose. This is  especially important in those instances where you do not have access to a graphic designer but you want a professional look to your project. We highly recommend you check out 99Designs for your next design project.

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.

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.

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.

You might have heard of Click Tale. It’s a great product which offers some unique tools not offered by any major analytics vendor in such a complete package:  Visitor Recordings, Mouse Move Heatmaps, Attention Heatmaps and more. They also have a free lite version which is a tad limited, but will give you a wonderful taste of the tool (scroll to the bottom of the page to find it).

Do not take this as an ad for ClickTales, because its not – we just wanted to point out an overlooked tool if your have the budget for it. For those that don’t have a major budget and might be using Google Analytics or Piwik, there is now an option. It will require some work on your part (but not much), but it will allow you to get some of the features found in ClickTales. Its an open source script called Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) from Luis Leiva which allows you to record mouse activity on Web pages and replay mouse activity in real time. Below is a screen shot of the data you can record for each visitor (but you can aggregate it, if you choose):

You can download Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) here or check the demo here.The requirements to get SMT for yourself are really basic, like it should be for all open source projects. All your Web server needs is a MySQL 5 database and PHP 5 installed with the cURL and JSON libraries. These settings are very common on most Web servers. The install process is also very easy much like WordPress, just follow the steps in the readme file. Once you are up, you will need to add the following to the head of each document you want to track:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-aux.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-record.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    smt2.record({
      recTime: 300,
      disabled: Math.round(Math.random()),
      warn:true,
      warnText: "We are going to record your mouse movements for a remote usability study."
    });
  } catch(err) {}
  </script>

Modify the code as necessary. For example you can change the warn text to something like:

warnText: "We'd like to track your mouse activity\nin order to improve this website's usability.\nDo you agree?",

Or you can change the randomness of the visitors recorded, the amount of time visitors are recorded etc.

As you can see this is a very powerful tool, but this does not replace a fully integrated system like ClickTales. Nevertheless, for the more adventurous this could be a great add-on to free solutions you are currently using. Also being it is open source and actively developed, who knows if maybe in the future some plugins will be created to make it easier to integrate with Piwik, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other CMS systems.