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How to Change Scheduled Emails in Google Analytics

Jack Hutchinson 2 Comments

Ok, it took me ages to figure this out. Perhaps I was having an off day, or perhaps other people are having the same problems I was having in trying to find the settings to turn off a scheduled email in Google Analytics. Either way I thought I’d post a quick blog on how to do this just in case the answer is the later, and it’s not just me!

So say you have set up a report in Analytics to run daily and send you a summary of your visitors for that day, but then for whatever reason you decided to turn off this report, or possible add someone else’s email to that report this is what you’ll have to do.

First go to the report in Google Analytics that generates the email (I’m using the Audience Overview report below as an example). Then go to admin (highlighted in red on the below image).

Google-Analytics-Audience-Overview

 

Once you’re on the admin screen click on the profile that the report is running from, and select the option Scheduled Emails (see below).

Google-analytics-Admin-Menu

 

On the next screen you’ll be presented with a list of all the scheduled emails you have set up, and you can pause them, delete them or edit their contents.

Hope this helps you find this feature quicker than it took me!
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Breadcrumbs in Paid Adverts (AdWords)

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Google have been showing clickable breadcrumbs in organic listings for some time now, and it was announced some time ago that this feature would be coming to paid AdWords ads. Today is the first time that I have seen this live in searches.

Bread-Crumbs-in-Paid-Ads

As you can see in the image above the breadcrumbs are added onto your existing display URL and are all clickable. This effectively makes your advert appear much larger, and also makes you advert appear more like an organic listing which could improve CTR.

The CPC for any clicks on these links would be the same as a click on your headline or sitelink. In AdWords you can also segment your date to view breadcrumb clicks (see below).

 

If you haven’t done so already, mark up you breadcrumbs using rich snippets to achieve this affect.

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Adhering to W3C Standards in Web Design

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The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C as they are more commonly known, define themselves as “an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web”. What this effectively means is the W3C develop the standards and protocols to make the world wide web easy for everyone to use and interact with. By setting these standards the W3C are one step closer to achieving their two main goals – Web For All and Web On Everything.

Web for All

The web for all is, well, as it sounds. The idea behind this initiative is that everybody should be able to access and interact with websites regardless of location, nationality or ability. The biggest part of this initiative is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which aims to provide solutions and best practices for designing websites that are considered accessible to people with disabilities.

Web On Everything

The second biggest challenge is to make the internet equally accessible on all devices. Many of these devices we already consider, such as smartphones and tablets, but less obvious ones include television and even cars! The more devices that can access and interact with your website the bigger your potential market becomes.

Web Design Best Practice and the W3C

When designing a website you should always try to adhere to set standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This is essentially so that any website can be accessed by any browser, such as Internet Explorer, and give the results if the site was viewed on Google Chrome or Firefox. Without set standards web designers would have to code websites for different browsers which ultimately leads to conflicts between browsers and their users. I’m sure many designers still remember the “browser wars” of the 90s. Also by adhering to W3C standards your website is usually SEO friendly as most search engines take code into account when ranking them.

It is equally important for CSS to validate against standards as this defines the layout and and visual aesthetics of a website, and if your CSS doesn’t comply to standards then your site may not present in the way it is expected to!

The two current standards commonly used in website design are XHTML 1.0 ‘Strict’ (although this is gradually being replaced with HTML5) and CSS 2.1 (also being replaced with CSS3). The W3c provides tools to validate both of these standards. To validate XHTML use http://validator.w3.org and to validate CSS use http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator.

 

Links:
W3C Homepage – http://www.w3.org
W3C Goals – http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

JCH Web offer Web Design services compliant with W3C standards in Lancashire & North Yorkshire.

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The Importance of Customer Service in the Digital Age

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Unfortunately it is all too common to see businesses forget to focus on customer service when they launch an online strategy. However, with review sites becoming more and more popular as a way for consumers to vent their anger, retailers have got to ensure their customer service is spot on! You could have a perfectly optimised website and a brilliant marketing strategy but these will be in vain if searches for your brand bring up a hoard of negative reviews.

There are many review services out there and they are becoming more and more popular. Personally, I review pretty much everything I can as I feel it is important to share more experiences with other web users. That is what Web 2.0 is all about – sharing information. Two sites that I frequently use for reviews are Trip Advisor and Trustpilot, and as you can see from my profiles I review both good and bad experiences. This, in a way, makes me a little unusual as you tend to find people are far more inclined to review a bad experience than a good one, and this is where the importance of customer service comes in to play.

I was once told a happy customer could potentially win you another customer, but an unhappy one could loose you 100s. These figures are obviously not 100% accurate, but they’re also on the right track. With the growing use of social media tools a customer happy with their purchase may share a product they’ve purchased on Facebook which in turn may encourage another friend to purchase the same product, or another from that site. However, someone dissatisfied with a company may not only use Facebook, Twitter, Blogging etc. to rant about their poor experience (see my rant about E.on on Trustpilot for a really good example of a rant!) but they can also publish these negative reviews on a number of websites! Once these reviews start to build up they can have a seriously negative impact on your business!

How to avoid negative feedback

The most obvious one is provide good customer service from the offset! Ensure everything from your pay-per-click adverts to your prices is accurate and honest. Make sure your customer service team is the best you can get – customer service agents are so often overlooked as being a vital part of a business, however without them it’s surprising how quickly things will fall apart!

Secondly, listen to what your customers have to say and be open to constructive criticism. If a number of your clients complain about an aspect of your service or website CHANGE IT! When it comes to business it is not about what you want it is about what your customer wants!

Now every company will get negative reviews from time to time, it’s to be expected as you cannot possibly please everybody, but if you listen to what people are saying about your company and provide them with an excellent service from the word go you’re definitely on the right track!

On a final note about the importance of customer service I leave you with this article I read a few months ago. If you can go above and beyond the call of duty for your customers then do so – it might just pay off.

http://www.inc.com/ron-burley/4-million-complaint-call.html

 

Effective Keyword Research

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Keyword research is such an important part of optimising both your website and your pay-per-click campaigns. By targeting the right keywords you not only ensure a decent volume of traffic to your website, but more importantly that the traffic you are getting is relevant to the services you are offering.

KeyWord Research Process

Start off your keyword research by brainstorming having a think tank meeting with those involved in the project and think about how customers are going to find your site, what terms might they use and are there any variations of those terms. Try to cover as many variations as you can to create a full keyword list, and then use that list with the tools mentioned below to build out your site content or adwords campaigns.

Keyword Research Tools :

Luckily the web is packed full of keyword tools for you to use, and one of the best ones to use is also FREE. I’m talking about the Google Keyword Tool**. The easiest way to use this tool is through your Adwords account as you don’t have to enter the captcha codes making the whole process a lot quicker.
The second tool I use is also a Google one, although not exactly designed as one. This is the suggestion tool. So when you search for a term Google presents you with some (usually) relevant search terms that are frequent searches. This can be really useful in building up your long tail keyword list.

google-suggestion

Do not underestimate the power of keyword research – it may take time but it pays off in the long run.

**Replaced with Google Keyword Planner in 2013