10:30am – After my whipping I got back up on my chair and we progressed into our daily chores. Shortly after Lee received a phone call from the client www.WilliamsAntiqueMirrors.co.uk he opened up the site and as I looked over his shoulder I wondered how on earth they were going to increase the looks of this site? I have taken a picture of the website today and once the website is live with the new changes I will be writing a separate article on this particular site. You can see what the site looks like today:
The last project I looked at for the day were the analytics for the website www.wineware.co.uk. At the moment, Fresh Egg uses Live Stats to track all their Web Analytics. Up to this point the only analytics program that I have been familiar with is Google’s Analytics, which is a free service. As I started to look through the Live Stats results I was expecting to see some nice graphs showing increases in conversion rates over time. When it came down to it, there weren’t any really nice graphs like there are within Google Analytics. I had to bust out my calculator and do some number crunching. We were looking to find the conversion rates for the last 5 month period of time. We were getting ready to add the customer charter in the checkout process and wanted to know what the conversion rates were before we added it, so that we could compare the differences.
After comparing the 2 analytics programs (of the features that I was using) I started to question Lee why he wasn’t using analytics for the sites? Analytics provides some really nice graphs and the numbers that I was crunching are already completed for me within Google’s system. They also provide me with some awesome graphs. Their program is real easy to navigate and understand. Towards the end of the day Lee sent me an email giving me permission to add Analytics to the site. He also mentioned that Ammon was very much opposed to using Google Analytics, so I know that we are going to have to face Ammon tomorrow when he gets back from his trip.
At the end of the day, Analytics would have saved me about an hour of time. But, I do want to point something out, Google owns Adwords, Analytics, and Checkout. There are plenty of other tools that Google provides that gather information on your websites every day. By adding another tool to your website you are providing Google with a much bigger picture of your website. I am sure I will be talking to Ammon about this tomorrow to hear his explanation on why he is anti-Analytics. At this time SeoMoz has asked for volunteers to compare all the different web analytics programs now available. It will be interesting to see how this turns out:
Web Analytics Project
The Ultimate Analytics Comparison Project Needs Your Help
