How to verify that Google Analytics is capturing data properly

With 90+ standard reports, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and plenty of other amazing enterprise features, I’m not breaking any new ground here by saying that Google Analytics is a great web analytics solution. It has always bothered me though, that without live tracking it can be difficult to troubleshoot, diagnose problems, confirm that you properly set up your eCommerce conversion tracking or some other custom JavaScript implementation. Waiting 8-12 hours to see if data is still being collected, or if your “test transaction” is being reflected in your reports is no way to work in an enterprise environment.

Read more…

MailChimp is a funny email marketing company. They have gone out of their way to make the language and the feel of their site relaxed, yet their documentation and features are thorough. There is something reassuring to me to see a company that has a rich offering, doesn’t take themselves too seriously, and has far less hand waving than most other email marketing services. They offer a free trial that gives you full access to their services and the ability to send over 600 emails. Read more…

I enjoy using Mosso servers to host my marketing blog and many other client sites. I started using their “hosting cloud”  technology shortly after they launched and with only a few hiccups in the beginning, they have performed amazingly well.  Since Mosso is on a cluster (Cloud server) I do occasionally run into problems. One of which I documented regarding how Mosso messes up up the comment IP address in WordPress 2.6. Well I updated my blog to WordPress 2.7, which is great but that IP address problem came back. The old solution didn’t work so I did some digging around and this is what I found. Read more…

If you have a website, you are more than likely quite interested in who is visiting that site. If you have a sales team, they are probably even more interested in which companies are visiting. It can help determine a prospects level of interest, whether they have responded to marketing collateral, and which products or services they are most interested in.

Problem

Unless you can get your visitors to identify themselves (fill out a form, sign up for a service, etc.), their visit is going to go completely undetected; however, it doesn’t have to. Read more…

…or is Twitter really broken?

I am fairly new to Twitter, but  I am not new to marketing. I have been posting regularly, trying to add value and trying to contribute to the community. When people started following me, I was honored. I would carefully examine their Bio, their latest tweets and links to see if they added value. If they did add value I would follow them back. If they were not in my space or a space I was interested in, I wouldn’t follow them. Throught the day I would notice my follower stats would rise and fall. What was going on? Were they not interested in what I had to say or did I say something that was offensive? I have to admit I felt a little self-conscious. Well, it turns out that a lot of people on Twitter will only follow you if you follow them back–they are gaming the system. Read more…