Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon is one of the industry leaders in keyword ranking software and one of the most established. The software itself is abundant with features allowing you to track and monitor large amounts of keywords. Working in the world of SEO, AWR is an essential tool that has the capability to manage hundreds of projects with ease and reliability.

Weather your choice of operating system is Linux, MAC or Windows, Caphyon has it covered and porting from one system to another is easy with the database import/export tool. Setting up a project can be completed in a matter of minutes with the project wizard, the part that takes the time is choosing from the extensive list of search engines included in their database. AWR is able to check results in search engines from virtually every country across the globe and even includes the ability to check YouTube and AdWords results too. Determining the keywords that are important for search is a key factor for any website, and with AWR and you don’t have to leave the program to research into which keywords should be relevant to yours. The recently added keyword research tool will allow you search for multiple keywords, and it also includes a keywords suggestion tool to give you a little more help where necessary.

From an SEO company’s point of view, AWR is ideal because it allows you to completely customise the reports, thus saving time from copying and pasting the results into company branded documents. AWR’s report manager offers many options for creating bespoke reports, allowing you to import logos and headers, change layouts, alter display structures, include graphs and much more. The scheduling in AWR is very comprehensive and gives you the option to specify what projects you want to run on what day and at what time. Projects can also be programmed to run singularly or in groups, with the option to select which reports will be generated after a project has run. Another big time saver is the automatic emailing and/or ftp uploading of reports upon completion of an update, allowing you to send the reports directly to your clients.

The way the software manages data allows you to compare a site’s current position to previous runs, thus enabling you to visually show a change in search engine ranking performance. This is a great feature for an SEO company to use, so you can show where you have done a good job by visualising the benchmark compared to a report run after your work has been implemented. This is a sure fire way to show your worth and demonstrate to your clients a return on investment. The software also has the ability to track competitor’s websites, which can give you a more comprehensive overview of where a site is in relation to it’s biggest rivals. This again is really good for SEO purposes, to show how you have elevated a site above it’s competition.

One of the biggest bonuses the software offers are the frequent program updates released for it. At times the little pop-up box may drive you nuts, although it does show how on top of their game the development team are. Search engine information is also updated on a regular basis, so you can be sure you will always have the most up to date engines available to utilise and that the results returned will be reliable, because as the search engines change, AWR adapts.

Having used several other website ranking packages that are available on the market, none of them have been as feature rich or reliable as AWR and for an SEO company with hundreds of clients, accuracy and reliability is absolutely essential.

If your site utilises Google Checkout, then you can use Google Analytics to track buyers through the transaction/conversion process. The first required step to begin tracking Google Checkout orders is to enable e-commerce reporting in Google Analytics. All this involves is changing the radio button for ‘E-commerce Website’ from no to yes on the Google Analytics profile in question. For a more in depth explanation on how to achieve this please see the E-Commerce Tracking In Google Analytics post on this website.

The following Google Checkout pages provide Google Analytics data:

Login (/login.html): The ‘Login’ page is the first page the buyer is taken to after clicking on the Google Checkout button. It details the items from the buyer’s order and allows the user to either sign in to their existing Google account or create a new account for themselves.

Place Order (/placeOrder.html): After logging in to their Google Checkout account, the user is presented with the ‘Place Order’ page. This page displays the items in the order and lets the buyer select a shipping method, delivery address and payment option.

Order Confirmation (/purchaseComplete.html): Once the order has been completed, the ‘Order Confirmation’ page is loaded. Messages about the order are shown here along with a link back to the originating store.

Each of these pages is reported separately in Google Analytics, allowing you to add them as part of a conversion process goal or to check out the statistics for these pages individually.

Overview: It is what it says it is, an overview of your site’s e-commerce activity. Revenue is the value of purchases. Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that resulted in a purchase. Transactions shows the number of purchases and the Average Order Value is the average revenue generated from each of these purchases. Purchased Products represents how many different products (SKUs) were sold.

Total Revenue: This is determined by the number of purchases and the average purchase value. Some ideas to help maximise your sites revenue include; Purchasing targeted advertising and writing effective adverts. Making sure that your site’s landing pages are relevant to what was stated in your advertising. Simplifying the conversion path to help improve abandonment rates from the checkout process.

Conversion Rate: The rate at which visits to your site convert into purchases. By tracking this metric over time you can effectively determine whether your marketing efforts and website are becoming more or less efficient at generating customers from your site’s visitors. Conversion rates vary a lot between businesses (Even between those that are within the same industry), so this is most useful as a company-specific measure.

Average Order Value: Tracking changes to this metric as time passes helps to track site performance where products and services are being interchanged, switched or actively marketed. It can also be useful to see if cross promotions are working.

Product Performance:

Product Overview: This report details how each product purchased is performing. It shows the number of items sold, the revenue generated, the average price and order quantity. It is also possible to drill down into this report for more detail.

Product SKUs: Essentially this is the same as the Product Overview report, but the information is for the product SKU rather than its name.

Categories: If you have identified your products as being part of a category, then this report will show you how each particular grouping of products is doing.

Transactions: A list of all the transactions that were tracked on your website. Should you need it audit your transactions, then this report can be really handy.

Visits To Purchase: How many visits occur before visitors make a purchase from your site? This is a valuable insight into your sales cycle as it shows the totals for the number of visits made when a sale was completed. The number of transactions and the percentage of all purchases are shown for each grouping of visit quantities.

Days To Purchase: How long does it take before visitors make a purchase from your site? This is again valuable as it shows totals for the number of days it took for a sale to be completed. This once again shows the number of transactions and the percentage of all purchases for each grouping of how many days it took to complete a purchase.

Method 1: Where the checkout process is initiated on a sub-domain, the following line of code that is underlined and in bold, needs adding to the standard tracking code on both the store site and the shopping cart pages. (“UA-xxxxxxx-x”) will of course be replaced by your site’s unique tracking number and (“mystore.com”) needs to be replaced by your domain name.

<script;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”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“mystore.com”);
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Method 2: Should the checkout process be initiated on a separate store site, i.e. not on or part of your domain, then the following line of code applies. The code that needs to be added to the standard tracking code on both the store site and the shopping cart pages is shown underlined and in bold. (“UA-xxxxxxx-x”) again represents where your unique tracking ID will be.

<script;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”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“none”);
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Below this code, the links from your site that go to the secure site need to use the ‘_link’ method. This can be achieved by making existing links that should be similar to:

<a href=”https://www.securecart.com/?store=parameters”> Purchase Now </a>

change into:

<a href=” https://www.securecart.com/?store=parameters” onclick=”pageTracker._link(this.href); return false;”>Purchase Now</a>

The above code provides links for users who do and do not have JavaScript enabled. It should be noted that the apostrophes need to be escaped with a backslash where they appear in the link or link text.

If information is sent to your shopping cart using forms, then you should use:

<form name=”post_form” method=”post” onsubmit=”pageTracker._linkByPost(this)”>

Important: If your pages include calls to ‘_trackPageview’, ‘_link’, ‘_linkByPost’ or ‘trackTrans’, then the Analytics tracking code must be placed in the page code above any of these calls. These cases allow for the tracking code to be placed anywhere between the opening <body> tag and the JavaScript call in question.

Instructions for e-commerce tracking can be found in the E-Commerce Tracking In Google Analytics post on this website.

Step 1 was straight forward enough, however step 2 can be a bit trickier. The second step involves some coding and requires knowledge of how your site processes transactions. To start with, you need to ensure that the standard Google Analytics tracking code is included within the receipt page of your website in the usual way. Next, somewhere beneath the normal tracking code on the receipt page, the ‘_addTrans’ and ‘_addItem’ functions need to be called. The Call to ‘_addTrans’ needs to occur first, in order to establish a transaction. This is then followed by the call to ‘_addItem’ for each item purchased by the visitor.

‘_addTrans’ takes the following arguments: Order ID, Affiliation, Total, Tax, Shipping, City, State, Country.

‘_addItem’ takes the following arguments: Order ID, SKU/Code, Product Name, Category, Price, Quantity.

The whole process is concluded by taking all the information collected by the transaction object, packaging it up and submitting it via the ‘_trackTrans’ method to Google Analytics.

Further information about e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics, including an example implementation, can be found by clicking on ‘E-Commerce Tracking’ under the ‘Links’ section of this site.

When using frames it is recommended that the Google Analytics tracking code be included within the <head> section of the frameset page, since these pages don’t have a body section. The code should also be placed directly before the </body> tag of each child frame that you wish to track statistics for. If the tracking code is installed within a <noframe> tag, then the browser won’t execute it, so no data will be recorded.

Any of the JavaScript functions used by Google Analytics, such as ‘link’ or ‘linkByPost’, first need to be defined by the ga.js file upon page load. If they are called beforehand, then they will not be executed. This means that the main Google Analytics tracking code must be inserted before any calls to the functions in question. A good way to avoid issues with this scenario is to implement the main tracking code at the end of the <head> section of the site code.

There is a possibility that other custom JavaScript code on a site that is being tracked may interfere with the Google Analytics tracking code. If this is the case, then it is suggested that the tracking code be positioned in the <head> section of the website, after any title/meta tags.

Should your site require an alternative positioning of the Google Analytics code, it doesn’t automatically mean that it needs to be installed in the <head> section as detailed in the examples above. Inserting it in other locations on a page can work out fine, just so long as the main tracking code runs before any functions that may be dependent upon it. A good example of this type of implementation is E-Commerce tracking.

The Google Analytics tracking code is specific to each profile in an account, which is why it is accessed via the ‘Profile Settings’ page for each individual Analytics profile. The code shown below is an example of what the JavaScript will look like. The “XXXXXXX-X” in the example represents the position of the unique Google Analytics account number automatically assigned to your website profile.

<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-XXXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Once you have the code, copy and paste it into the bottom of your website content, before the </body> tag of each page you are planning to track. If a common include file/template is utilised, then you can enter it there to save manually copying it into every page. There are instances when the tracking code could/should be inserted elsewhere on a page, but this doesn’t occur that frequently and wouldn’t necessarily be considered as part of a basic implementation of the Google Analytics code.

When you’ve finished installing the tracking code and have updated your site’s pages, you should start to see data arriving in your Analytics account after approximately 24 hours. Although it has been known to take longer for data to appear in some cases. You can use the ‘Check Status’ function in the Analytics profile to see if the installation was successful and if the account is now awaiting or receiving data.

To begin the Google Analytics sign up process, go to http://www.google.co.uk/analytics/ and click on ‘Access Analytics’. Use either an existing login or your newly created Google account login information to sign into Google and you will then be presented with a getting started screen. Click on ‘Sign Up’ to continue. Next comes the main part of the sign up procedure, first you need to choose http:// or https:// dependant upon whether or not your site is hosted on a secure server. Second, enter your site’s URL and name your account. Google defaults the account name to that of your domain, but you can change this should you wish to. Finish this section by selecting the country or territory you’re located in and the time zone. Click on ‘Continue’ to move on.

The next stage allows you to specify your contact information. At the very least you need to enter your country or territory and again click ‘Continue’ to proceed to the next step. We’re nearly there now, all that remains is to read/agree to the ‘Google Analytics Terms Of Service’ and edit your data sharing settings if you want to. Finally when you’re ready, clicking on ‘Create New Account’ will do just that and direct you to the ‘Analytics: Tracking Instructions’ page. The code provided is is the snippet of JavaScript that needs to be copied into every page on the website that you wish to track. You can either add the tracking code now, or copy, paste and save the code somewhere else for when you’re ready to utilise it later. Don’t worry if you misplace the code since you can go back into your account and retrieve it as and when required. Clicking ‘Finish’ will complete the whole process and navigate you to the main ‘Analytics Settings’ section of your account.

Google Analytics however, is not your average professional analytics package. It may be slightly less flexible in some areas, but it can be just as powerful. Google Analytics is designed to be easy to use, implement and integrate with other Google products such as AdWords. At a basic level installation of Google Analytics is relatively straight forward, it just involves inserting a snippet of Java Script into all the pages you wish to track on a website. Should you wish to delve a bit deeper and utilise some of Google Analytics’s more advanced features, then the setup can get a little trickier, although it’s usually not beyond the capabilities of your average website administrator.

A page view is counted each time a page on the website being tracked is loaded or ‘viewed’. With Google Analytics a page view can be counted when any web page with the correct tracking code is loaded, or if the ‘urchinTracker’ event code executes. An ‘urchinTracker’ event can be implemented in order to simulate a page view to be included within Google Analytics reports.

A page view only counts in analytics if the tracking code was executed and the information about this view was sent to the tracking server. If a visitor reloads the page after viewing it initially, then this will be marked down as an additional page view. If a user navigates away from a page to another page on the same website or even an alternative site, then in the event that they return an additional page view will be generated as well.

A unique page view is different because the page views generated by the same user during the same session are aggregated. The unique page view metric represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times. Essentially, views to a page are only counted once during each user session and the total number of these sessions is shown as the number of unique page views for the particular page.