There’s nothing quite like opening Google Analytics and seeing real-time users spike into the hundreds. That rush hit me recently on a site that typically sees maybe 50 to 100 visitors a day. At first, it felt like a win. Then I looked closer.

I’m enjoying my vacation this week on the beach, where it’s warm. It’s been a while since I posted a search marketing post.

I thought I would use this time to highlight a feature I’ve been using for years in Google Analytics. This feature has helped me quite a bit to determine the usefulness, value, and overall web page effectiveness.

Before I dive in and tell you more about this feature, answer the following questions:

• Have you ever wanted to determine how many people are actively clicking an object on a web page?
• Have you ever wondered if people are playing videos on your website?
• Have you ever wanted to measure a user’s behavior when interacting with a web page?

These are just a few questions, but the list goes on. My point is that you don’t have to be in the dark on the questions above.

Today, I’ll show you how to answer yes to the questions and then record and retrieve data points using Event Tracking (Web Tracking) in Google Analytics.

Performing some daily reading over various blogs, I saw Brian Cray’s post, Time On Site & Bounce Rate: Get the real numbers in Google Analytics, and had to share it with the Kickstart Commerce Community. 

I know many of you utilize the free web analytics tool, Google Web Analytics, provided by Google to monitor web traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, traffic sources, and more.

Brian’s post is God-sent as it will help you to find the *REAL* Time On Site and Bounce Rate of your website.

For those not using Google Web Analytics or some other web analytics to measure the effectiveness of your website, then you are throwing away opportunity and opportunity to understand what your website does very well and what does not do very well.

A few days ago, I discovered one of my domains while watching and listening to DomainSherpa’s interview with Rand Fishkin about understanding Domains through the filter of SEO and Marketing.

I was checking traffic sources for KickstartCommerce.com via Google Analytics (GA) and noticed an expired domain I purchased a few months ago was registering a large sum of redirect traffic to KickstartCommerce.com.

You’re likely reading this article because your web traffic has plateaued or has yet to rank for highly competitive keywords organically.

Most everyone (okay, not everyone) knows the name of the game for bloggers or website owners is how much organic search traffic a website realizes.

If you’ve ever attempted to launch a website of any sort, then you’ve likely encountered difficulties and challenges in getting your website to rank across major search engines.

I’m here today to change your unsatisfactory experience into one of satisfaction and hopefully equip you to realize greater search exposure and traffic conversions for your website.

Well, everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off checking their web analytics and webmaster tools to see if their website has been hit by Google Panda 4.0 update or in strong recovery mode.

In a tweet from Matt Cutts over the weekend, it is official that Google started rolling out the Panda 4.0 update.

If you own and operate a website and been keeping tabs on SEO in general, then you know that search marketing has changed quite drastically with the latest Panda and Penguin updates over the last few years.

Don’t ask me how this happened, but I had a customer operating and measuring their SEO effort using multiple Google Webmaster Accounts.

How and when this happened, no one truly knows. But today, I’ll best guess how this confusion occurred.

For the last 11 months, I’ve consulted and performed various SEO tasks for a customer. We’ve used heavily used Google Webmaster Tools to gauge SEO progress related to their efforts and my SEO Audit efforts.

Imagine the shock when I found out that we were not looking at the same webmaster accounts yet viewing 3 separate accounts for their domain.

Yes, it happened, and my hope is that this post can prevent it from happening to your website.