Creately is an easy to use Online Diagramming software - purpose built for team collaboration. Powerful features and an intuitive interface make Creately ideal for teams working together on everything from Business Diagrams, Strategy Maps, Flowcharts, Web Mockups to UML designs.
Here we share our experiences and lessons learnt building a web-company.
Finally time for the next post in this series. I know its been two months since the first one, and sorry for taking this long! Better late than never, and here we go! If you’ve missed the first one on Visitors Map Overlay, stop right here, and go read it.
We’ve mentioned the importance of Map Overlay in the first post, and this time its all about Goals in Google Analytics! Lets see what Goals are, why they’re important and how we set them.
What are Goals in Google Analytics?
Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
By setting up Goals in Google Analytics, you can measure how often the desired tasks are completed, and this is called the conversion rate.
Before implementing Goals, identify what your website’s objectives are, and what visitor actions they correspond to. A goal can be anything from completing a contact form for generating leads to completing a purchase for driving revenue.
There are multiple ways to define goals, and here’s a great article written by Ian Spencer that gives more tips on Goals in Google Analytics.
And now, the Goal Funnel?
Accomplishing a Goal involves a sequence of steps. The sequence that leads up to the completion of a Goal make up the Goal Funnel. For each Goal, you will need to setup a Goal Funnel and like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action on a specific page.
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
This would direct you to the Plans & Pricing page, where you’d be expected to choose a preferred plan, then click on Sign Up to make the purchase. Once you complete the purchase, you’d be sent to the Thank you page (this marks the Goal). Now, this means the desired task is performed and the Goal is accomplished.
However, on the other hand if the website visitor only goes up to the plans page, and opts to leave without signing up. Then the Goal is not met and it’s considered to be abandoned! Thus, Goals and Conversion rates are important to measure the performance of a website.
We refer to the whole sequential process as a funnel - many people start at the top and fewer end up coming out to the bottom by accomplishing the Goal.
Check out the flowchart below to see the steps that correspond to a measurable action on different pages -
How to Set up Goals
Setting a goal is very simple. If you have administrative access, you can sign in to your Google Analytics. Then go to Analytics Settings and select a profile, click on edit, choose an unused goal ’slot’, and click on edit again.
You’ll need to then follow the steps and decide what your goal is and how you’ll be declaring a goal, then click to finish and you’ll start measuring the performance for your website.
Check out this video for more details on Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics
Today, I’m writing the first post in a series that will guide small business owners and entrepreneurs in understanding the important customer data that Google Analytics provides. We’ll look at where to find the data in Google Analytics and how this information can be useful to your business.
Google Analytics is a great tool for analyzing the traffic that shows up on your website. This will give you fantastic insights into who is coming to your web site, all the other related pages, and how they’re getting there. It displays so much useful information, and with just a little training, you too will be able to use Google Analytics for your business. We won’t go into the details of how to setup Google Analytics for your site - but here’s a great article on Mahalo that shows you how to set it up for free.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
The Map Overlay displays Visits as the metric in the default view with the countries rendered in varying shades of green. Countries with the darkest shade of green indicates the greatest number of visitors in terms of website traffic. While some other countries have no shading at all, this indicates the site has never had a visitor.
The metric displayed on the map can be changed from Visits to Pages/Visit, avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goal Conversion Rate. You can also drill down to see more detailed information within specific regions, either by clicking on individual countries on the map or selecting a different Detail Level. Look at the image below for an example of an Overlay Visitor Map drilled down to the Country/Territory detail of Brazil.
Are you wondering how Google knows which country a visitor comes from? Well, the answer is no rocket science, Google simply looks at the IP address of every visitor to determine from country/place in the world they are coming from. In the map of Brazil above, it tells us that Sao Paulo is the largest market in Brazil, followed by Rio de Janiero.
More interestingly, an Advanced Segmentation feature is now available in Google Analytics. This enables you to analyze subsets of your traffic. You can either choose from the pre-defined segments such as “Paid Traffic”, “Visits with Conversions”, “Referral Traffic” or create your own custom segments and then compare up to four segments develop a great understanding of your customer’s behaviour on the site.
With the Advanced Segmentation features you can also create new segments with the Segment Creator. Simply drag and drop dimensions and metrics into the boxes to create a visit segment. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to data, and compare the segment performance. By setting up an advanced segment for just “Sign-up from Sao Paulo” for instance, you could drill down and analyse the behaviour of the users who signed-up from Sao Paulo.
Check out this video for more details on how the Advanced Segmentation works.
The geodata collected through Analytics helps to identify lucrative geographic markets and identify new locations for potential marketing campaigns. Targeting specific users geographically will undoubtedly increase the success of your business. I hope you’ve learnt the importance of the Map Overlay and how it can help you reach customers from around the world.
It’s been three happening weeks for us here at Creately! Ever wondered why? Yes, the addition of Creately to the Google Apps Marketplace. Creately has been doing really well with it and has helped many businesses around the world to improve their visual communication and collaboration. This has caught Google’s eye and yesterday we were mentioned on the Official Google Enterprise Blog.
This post highlighted the five best apps added to the Google Apps Marketplace that are helping small business owners run better businesses. Read what Google’s got to say here<.
We’d love to hear from all of you using Creately on Google Apps how we can make Google Apps Integration work better for you. If you haven’t still added Creately to your Google Apps account, add it now with a few simple steps. Here’s a short video on how to install Google Apps on your account.
And when you’ve started using Creately in your Google Apps setup, don’t forget to leave us a review on the Google Apps Marketplace.
Google with their new communication and collaboration platform - Wave
Both are exciting products but I think you’ll see a fundamental difference in the philosophy of these companies by better understanding the nature of the products.
Bing - The Decision Engine?
From the video of Bing, it seems that they are aggregating services, and trying to build something that is the be all and end all of search. Its power comes from the orderly aggregation and presentation of information sources from across the net. Reminds me of windows and MS’s suite of applications. Very silo-ed, a lot of effort and maintenance in building out the product. Decision Engine - I don’t know.
The MS approach usually offers less in the way of consumer choice - but you’re promised a nice suite that works together. But as we all know, MS more often than not screws this up. This is normally Apple’s forte. We’ll see how it goes with Bing though. One piece of advice for MS - change the logo for Bing please. ‘Uninspiring’ would be an understatement.
Google’s Wave
Google on the other hand is opening up the platform and wants the rest of the Internet to join in on the ‘platform’ to help finish the product.A very Google approach for solving this really big problem. Google’s core premise is that it is a search engine company, it’s way of looking at things is that the Internet has a lot of good things out there, we will help you bring order to all that chaos to make money. Same with Wave, which is targeted squarely at the developer community. The Internet is home many cool applications, we’ll open-source the core, let others add it to our platform, index it all, and make a buck. You win, we win. You can check out the video on TC or read a short preview on RWW, if you dont have the patience.
Google’s approach casts a wider net, a simple solution with more generic applications. The user would typically get a wider choice but it can end up getting a little complicated. It all comes down to how good the defaults and quick-start features are in the app. Google’s done a decent job of it so far so I’m thinking they’ll pull off Wave pretty well.
What’s DNA got to do with it.
Interesting to note how these two companies ‘think’ from today’s announcements. I think a company’s first product defines what their DNA is.
It’s basically the difference between how a Operating System company solves a problem and a Search Engine Company solves a problem.
MS’s solution seems to be - Try to cover all the bases so the end user can easily get stuff done within the confines of its paradigm. An OS company.
Google’s is - Reuse whats out there to create value for the user. A classic Internet paradigm, perfect for a Search Engine company.
Both companies have these recurring themes across their products and services. IMO, MS is going to lose the game on the Internet unless they adopt Google’s thinking of ‘open’, reuse and contribute.
No matter how much resources you have inside your company, the rest of the world is going to have more of it. Might as well figure out a way to use it for your advantage rather than let them be your competitors.
Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
Two big announcements today from the two big tech giants.