Google Analytics is one of the best website traffic tracking tools on the market. And it’s free, which makes it even better. If you have Google Analytics running on your site, at some point you’ll want to see a report related to the traffic on your site. The basic report that is produced for a certain period of time contains a ton of great information about your website traffic. Once you see this report, you may want an explanation of each section of the report. Here’s how to understand what you see.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics report of your own, Google Analytics Sample Report so you can follow along.

Pages 1 & 2 – The Dashboard

This page is a general overview of the report. At the top left, you’ll see the website domain name. At the top right, you’ll see the date range for this report. If you have comparison reporting turned on for this particular report, it will show the date range that is the comparison.

The most visually impacting element on the first page is the traffic bar line graph. This shows a day-by-day graph of the traffic on your site. In the sample you downloaded above, the current month’s traffic is in blue. the comparison month’s traffic is in green.

Site Traffic

Just below the traffic bar graph is the general site usage numbers.

Site Usage

There are some terms here that need to be defined. The full glossary of terms is available here, but below are some important terms for this post:

• Visits – “A period of interaction between a visitor’s browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time. For the purpose of Google Analytics reports, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes. You can update this setting with an addition to our tracking code.” [source]
• Visitor – “A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website’s perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.” [source]
  
  
• Pageviews – “Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. This can be an HTML or similar page with tracking code being loaded by a browser, or a call to _trackPageview() to simulate a pageview.” [source]

• Pages/Visit – The number of pages a visitor viewed in a single visit or session.
• Bounce Rate - “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” [source]
• Average Time on Site – The amount of time a visitor remained on the site during a visit or session.
• New Visits/Visitor – “Google Analytics records a visitor as new when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used.” [source]
• Returning Visits/Visitor – “Google Analytics records a visitor as ‘returning’ when the _utma cookie for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.” [source]

You’ll also see a map overlay that is a visual representation of the geographical areas your visitors are coming from.

Near the bottom of the first page, you’ll see a traffic sources overview that is a pie chart of the ways people find your website. This is broken down into three types of traffic sources – search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc), direct traffic (typing your domain name into the web browser), and referring sites (clicking on a link from another website to yours).

Traffic Sources

On page two, you’ll see New vs. Returning visitor types. These terms are defined above. Next to this column, you’ll see content overview on the right side of page 2. This is a list of the most popular pages on your site during the report period, in descending order.

Now, how do you make sense of all this information?

This basic information is a good way to keep a thumb on how people are using your website. It indicates how long people stay with the site once they arrive. If the time spent on the site is very brief, it may be time to consider changing the content or navigation of the site to make it more appealing for people to stay on the site. If people find the site through direct traffic, but not through search engines, it may be worth the effort to invest some time in optimizing the website for search engines so the site can be indexed properly.

These numbers are indicators of how people interact with you online. If you have 2,000 visitors, but no contacts from those visitors, perhaps a better call to action or contact method should be in place. The numbers are great for tracking your progress and measuring success for your website.

Most importantly, the numbers outlined in the report will need to be interpreted for your organization. A non-profit organization will have different priorities for their website than a bluegrass band will have for theirs. When interpreting these numbers, you may be faced with the task of establishing goals and setting priorities for the website that are in line with the goals and priorities of your organization.

That covers the first section of the Google Analytics report. Any questions?

This spring, I made the switch from the Apple iPhone to an Android phone (Motorola Atrix). It’s been a good great move for me. I’m a huge fan of Google’s products – I use GMail, Docs, Calendar, Search, Picasa, Chrome, Reader and lots of other Google products on a daily basis. I also use Google Apps for my own business and for many of my clients.

Before I made the switch, though, I carefully made a list of the iPhone apps I used the most. Then I cross-referenced to make sure an equivalent or an alternative was available for Android. The only app that came up short was Scrabble, but by that time many of my friends were talking about Words With Friends, so that was fine with me.

As you’ll see in the list below, I use my phone for much more than playing Scrabble – it’s an essential part of my business toolkit. Here are the apps I recommend:

• ACS Church Life (church membership database)
• Amazon.com
• Bible (LifeChurch.tv)
• Battery Indicator
• Cloud Print (Connects with Google Chrome’s Cloud Print Service)
• Dropbox (I can’t recommend this one strongly enough)
• Evernote
• Expensify
• Facebook
• Flash Player
• Foursquare
• GMail
• GoDaddy.com Mobile Domains
• Google Books
• Google Docs
• Google Maps (the navigation feature of this software is AMAZING)
• Google Reader
• Google Voice (only useful if you have a Google Voice account – get one here)
• Grocery IQ
• HootSuite (hands down the best Twitter client I’ve used mobile or desktop)
• Kindle
• Mint.com Personal Finance
• NPR Podcasts
• PayPal
• RunKeeper
• Skype
• SwiftKey Keyboard (I’m just starting to use this one, based on the recommendation of 13,000 reviewers)
• Vlingo Virtual Assistant (The more I use this app, the more I like it. The newest version for Android 2.2 and higher has an InCar mode that will read email and text messages to you, all the while listening for your voice commands. This app will see more and more screen time from me.)
• Webroot Mobile Security Basic
• Words With Friends

And there you have it, that’s a list of the apps I use regularly and will recommend to any Android user.

The original article appeared in the May/June 2011 issue of Cityview Magazine. The version here is complete with links and a little more information than was in the original.

You’ll need two things to stream Tennessee sports audio to your iPhone.

The first is an app that can use an audio source. FStream is a good one. Find it and install it on your iPhone.

The second is an audio stream source. Use this source:

http://st1.webradioworld.net/tunein.php/wecofm/playlist.asx

Now, four steps:

1. Copy the source from above.
2. Open FStream and go to Favorites.
3. Click “Edit”, then “Add new webradio”.
4. Give it any name you want, paste the source into the URL field. Encoding doesn’t matter. Hit save.

That’s it. Now, you can go to the Play tab of the FStream app and click on the stream. It should start right away. I have a solid stream even on a weak Edge connection on AT&T.

CNET compared two of the most popular voice-over-ip (aka VOIP) services available – Google Voice and Skype. Each service offers its own advantages, and I have my personal favorite, but watch the video below to see who CNET chose as the winner in this contest.

Today the new iOS4 is released for Apples iPhone and iPad. This is a free upgrade. I love free stuff. There are some great new features you should know about in this update.

Here are just a few:

• Multitasking
• Folders
• Improved Email
• iBooks

If you’re ready to update to iOS4, be sure to use iTunes to backup your iPhone/iPod/iPad first. Then check for updates. When the update is available, iTunes will let you know and walk you through the process. I was able to upgrade a little early, thanks to these instructions from Jason Powell.

An excellent walkthrough of the features of iOS4 is in the video below.

In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 1“, we established that Windows PCs are often targeted because of their large market share and that the brand of your computer makes no difference because viruses, spyware and malware occur at the software level.

In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 2“, we considered browsing and clicking habits that can be harmful for your computer and your privacy.

Let’s look at two different types of software that can help protect your computer.

Internet Security Suite

There are some tools available that can help secure your Windows PC as well. A question that is often asked of me is, “Which antivirus software is the best?“. My answer is always, “I can recommend a certain product, but you need to know that no security software is bulletproof. They will all let some things get through.”

It’s important to understand that antivirus software offers only a certain type of protection. So if you go to download one of the free anti-virus software packages (AVG, Avast!, and Avira are all popular), they will offer anti-virus only protection. In order to get a quality level of comprehensive protection from a single piece of software, you’ll need to pay for it.

PC Magazine has a good run-down of the best software for 2010 here. They rate Norton and McAfee above the rest of the suites in this particular review. On more than one occasion, however, I have had major software issues with both McAfee and Norton, so I typically recommend another software package.

In my experience, Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 offers the best value, features and pricing. I use this software with many of my clients and have had good results without inhibiting the computer’s performance. It’s around $80, which covers three computers for a full year. Contact me to get this software installed on your computer.

Consistent Environment Software

Wouldn’t it be great if your computer was exactly the same every time you turned it on? One software package makes that happen.

Windows Steady State, developed by Microsoft allows a computer’s administrator to configure other users for a consistent environment on every login. It’s free and compatible with Windows XP and Vista (sorry, Windows 7 users!).

Basically, here’s how it works: a user can login, browse the internet, download files and even adjust settings just like usual. Then when they log out, all the settings revert back to the way they were before the person logged in. This software is very useful on a computer that a family with children may use, or in my case, a computer lab with multiple users.

Other helpful features of this software are timed logouts, software restrictions, and user permissions. If these sounds fancy, I assure you that Windows Steady State makes it very easy to understand and adjust these settings.

With a little common sense and the right software, your Windows PC should operate smoothly without much effort on the part of the user. It may not be bulletproof, but the overall experience will be better than if no protection or safeguards were put in place.

There is one option still to consider when using a PC. We’ll take a look at that in Part 4.

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In “How to Secure Your Windows PC – Part 1“, we established that Windows PCs are often targeted because of their large market share and that the brand of your computer makes no difference because viruses, spyware and malware occur at the software level.

To protect your Windows computer, the first and best rule of protection is to use your head and be pro-active in your browsing and clicking habits. This typically means two things:

1. Only visit websites that you know can be trusted
2. Use caution when clicking on links in e-mail that are unsolicited

Let’s look a little closer at #1:
How do you know which websites can be trusted? There is a difficult tension here – if you visit only the sites you already know, there are many useful and informational websites out there that you will miss in an effort to be cautiuos. But, if you go out willy-nilly and click on every site that comes up in the search results, your computer will get infected with malicious software sooner or later.

So the answer lies somewhere in between. More experienced users can take a little more liberty in clicking on unknown sites, but naive or less experienced users will need to be more careful when visiting unknown websites.

The truth is that malicious websites will do their best to look like a legitimate, reputable website. But these same sites will do damage to your computer that can be difficult to recover from.

Let’s look a little closer at #2:
E-mail is also a popular way to direct people to websites that are harmful not only to your computer, but to your privacy. If you get an e-mail from a financial institution, never click on the link in the e-mail. Instead, go to your browser to access the institution’s site directly.

It is very possible that the legitimate-looking e-mail you just received will direct you to  a “phishing” site that will extract your login information and allow someone else to access your accounts and information.

In Part 3, we’ll consider two types of software that can help protect your computer from viruses and spyware.

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According to NetMarketShare.com Windows PCs hold a market share of just over 90% of all operating systems. Because the market share of Windows is so large, these systems end up with more problems than any other type of computer on the market.

It’s not necessarily that Windows (XP, Vista, 7) is a bad product (okay, so Windows Vista was pretty bad). But with a market share so large, Windows is what people work with the most, so there are bound to be issues. Since Windows is also the biggest target, more malicious software is developed to bring down Windows machines as opposed to, say, Macintosh or Linux machines.

It’s important to note that both Macintosh and Linux are susceptible to viruses and spyware, but fewer cases of spyware exist for these operating systems because of their smaller market share (4.5% and 1% respectively).

Additionally, any Windows computer, regardless of brand (HP, Toshiba, Acer, etc.), is just as prone to viruses and spyware as the next Windows computer. If a computer acquires a virus or other malicious software from browsing websites of ill-repute, you should know it is not HP’s fault (or Toshiba’s, or Acer’s for that matter). Consider a real-life example:

Let’s say you have a Hewlett-Packard laptop running Windows 7. You get an e-mail forward from a friend promising wealth and fortunes by clicking on a link (you didn’t know this until later, but snopes.com determines it’s a fake). After clicking on this link, your computer won’t open Internet Explorer anymore and Antivirus Soft is asking you to pay $49.95 to get rid of 119 detected viruses.

First, you should know Antivirus Soft is malicious, illegitimate software – under no circumstances should you pay them a single penny. Second, this scenario would have played out the same way if you had a computer by any other name. The brand of computer simply doesn’t matter when it comes to software issues.

Now, armed with this understanding, the posts that follow in this series will help you to protect your computer from a number of issues related to software, saving you both time and money in the future.

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