This weekend Compucall was attending Google Analytics for Professionals training at Google HQ in London.

The speaker of this event was Justin Cutroni, Director of Analytics and Testing for EpikOne. Justin has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the globe to optimize their use of Google Analytics.

An analytics industry leader, widely read blogger and author of Google Analytics Shortcuts from O’Reilly, Justin will provide best practices for analyzing and optimizing your implementation and marketing initiatives with Google Analytics.

Following the insightful sessions Justin has kindly agreed to answer a few questions in a quick and spontaneous video interview. Take into account it was shot with a Nokia E71, hence the poor sound and visual quality.

In the interview Justin explained the importance of continuing testing as a key to successful analytics strategy, in addition to his view on where is the industry going to.

Have a Google Analytics question? Please comment below…

Barry Schwartz, Ophir Cohen and Olivier Amar (L2R)

Today Compucall had the pleasure of hosting a nice SEO get together. With the arrival of Barry Schwartz to Israel, we got a chance to meet and also host some of brighter SEO minds and agencies in Israel for a few hours. In attendance was, of course, Barry of Rustybrick.com, Itai Levitan of Easynet.co.il, Mayer Reich of Rankabove.com, Gilad Sasson of Nekuda.co.il and the Compucall Staff including Ophir Cohen and myself, Olivier Amar, amongst others. There was also a great presentation by the founders of articlesbase.com and bukisa.com.

Barry Schwartz, Meyer Reich and Gilad Sasson

Itai Levitan of Easynet

Firstly, I need to thank Barry for taking some precious time out of his 7 day trip. As part of a very organized Blogger Delegation to Israel with lots of stops along the way, I’m sure it wasn’t easy.

Simon Gelfand and Eyal Halimi ArticlesBase and Bukisa Founders

The meeting started with two short presentations by Simon Gelfand. One on Articlesbase.com and the other on Bukisa.com. He explained to us his huge rise in growth, from zero to one of the main sites in each of their markets, in little to no time. He went over the business models and solid SEO infrastructures of either site. It’s nice to see such a huge website spawn from just an idea with the efforts of just a couple of people and no venture captial whatsoever.

Paid Search in Israel

Barry Schwartz then asked some interesting questions that veered towards paid search in Israel. The general consensus seemed to be that although some of the quality on certain verticals might sometimes be better in Microsoft and Yahoo, the combination of terrible platforms on both Yahoo and MSN and the lack of local offices for either of them, made their offerings here less than ideal. With the Israeli paid search market so much bigger than its population as a result of the number of Israeli companies dealing with foreign markets, both Yahoo and MSN would probably be in a much better position with local offices (as long as they ditched their present platforms and did something that more or less mimicked Googles, I mean why reinvent the wheel right?).

Google Analytics – The Future is Now!

We also touched upon how important Analytics had become in today’s companies and how no matter how far companies had managed to take their in-house analytics, then they never had the resources to go deep enough and get it right. Since both Easynet and Compucall are Google Analtyics Authorized Consultants (GAAC) we both felt that we had not yet come upon a company that had managed to get there alone. As a result it has represented a very viable avenue for both our companies to explore.

The meeting ended with some great smiles and some good catching up. Again, thank you Barry. We’ll get together again soon

Google has recently opened its GAAC program in order to create standardization of web analytics online. Only companies or people who pass a special analytics test can present in their website the GAAC logo and authorized to call themselves GAAC. Therefore, clients will be able to get professional service and know exactly what to look for when giving the access to their precious database to others.

Compucall is presently one of only two companies that received the GAAC authorization in Israel and one of 62 worldwide.

Read more details regarding our web analytics services.

Compucall is GAAC!

The upcoming change will include, among others:

*Advanced Segmentation
*Custom Reports
*Motion Charts
*Advanced Account Dashboard
*Data Export API
*Integration with AdSense

Below is a detailed review of some of these new upcoming features:

Advanced Segmentation – Visitor Segmentation Magic

In the past, real audience segmentation was only available in a handful of web analytics tools. My personal favorite has always been ClickTracks, a tool I’m actively using since 2004 (I wrote a post on its segmentation engine on my blog).

Ever since Google Analytics launched, its major weakness vs. ClickTracks has been its inability to custom segment, on the fly as well as to run analysis on historical data.
Well, something happened today folks. Google’s new segmentation engine is an amazing segmentation wizard, fast, easy to use, deep and able to go back into data from the past – simply beautiful!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Custom Reports – Google Analytics A La Cart

OMG. Simply select you’re desired KPI’s, drag them on to the page whiteboard and save – you’ve got yourself a report! I cannot imagine how much time this is going to save!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Motion Charts – Web Analytics Diamond Mining

In first look, this feature seems out of some crazy geeky labs, but come to look deeper into the philosophy – What web analytics is really about – it’s about getting the dirt off the raw data and finding the uncut diamond at its origin – how can I compare multidimensional KPI’s, get rid of irrelevant data and find my gold? simply click “visualize” and you’re on the way!

Click here to view the embedded video.

AdSense Integration – BI for the rest of us!

I saved this one for last, as opposed to the previous features, this one is not pure web analytics, but IS very much business intelligence, a tool which for many web properties may very well help open their eyes and improve both their top lines, bottom lines and user experience.

Wouldn’t you like to know which country generates users with highest eCPM for your web site? Wouldn’t you like to visualize how users click ads on your popular pages? Wouldn’t you like to see all the data in one place so you can see the holistic view of your online business? Well, you’re going to be able to do it real soon!

As mentioned, there a few other changes to the system, some visual, some practical – all will help us get more of our analytics experience -

P.S For more info on web analtics and google analytics professional services..

SEO Targeted WordPress Themes

The first and most crucial thing to consider for a WordPress blog is the theme. Not only because of the importance of the visitors first impression, but also because of how a website’s code can influence the way Google can read you. There are many themes out there, created by people of all kinds. Part of them are designers, others are programmers. Not all of the people that put these themes together took into account the significance of being “friendly” to search engines. The code has to be clean, logical and focused around the content. It is very important that your WordPress theme be CSS/XHTML validated. Although a great many “SEO WordPress themes” out there meet this basic requirement, a lot of them don’t (You can always run yours through the W3C Validator if you want to make sure your blog validates). Some themes also have content optimizing tool possibilities, such as the ability to give SEO friendly page titles and much more. There are websites that also give “SEO grades” to their themes, so make sure you don’t pick a theme with a grade lower than 85

SEO Plugins for WordPress

There are many SEO plugins for WordPress that can enhance your blog’s compatibility to search engines. The most common is the “All in SEO pack” WordPress plugin. This plugin creates an extension within your WordPress platform that lets you insert Meta tags into each post. This plugin also avoids duplicate content issues typical to WordPress and creates titles templates, so you won’t have to optimize your posts titles manually. Simple Tags is another WordPress plugin that enables you to manage the tags all over your blog.

We can’t really discuss blogs marketing without also mentioning SMO (Social Media Optimization). The Sociable plugin (and there are many other plugins) is a tool that gives your readers the possibility to submit your post to many social communities, social websites and bookmarking sites. Creating a social presence for your blog in the social community is a vital component to any blog. After all we don’t want to get into that debate of if you build them a field they will come right?

Analyze Your WordPress Traffic!

Finding out how your visitors reached you is a great way of knowing what you’ve done right and what you’re doing that maybe isn’t doing so well. If you can’t do that then you’re going to be more or less flying in the dark. Wassup lets you analyze traffic and users’ behavior on the site. If you’re hosting WordPress yourself then install Google Analytics or something paid like Clicky.

To sum things up, Design, Content and the Analysis of your blog or site is very important. However, there are marketing aspects that you have to pay attention to. Make sure your blog has social media links and presence, download several SEO plugins and check your theme SEO grade. And the most important advice is – always optimize your blog in order to stay fresh and on top.