Here at Allyte, we’re big supporters of local churches and non-profit organizations. This month, Allyte is giving away a website (through our new product, called Speak) and 1 year of hosting to one church or non-profit organization. Winner to be announced September 17, 2011.

Do you know a church or non-profit that could use a website facelift? Enter them in the giveaway here!

Read part 1 of “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” here.

Read part 2 of “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” here.

The last part of this 3-part series on understanding Google Analytics covers the last five pages of the sample report [download it here]. Let’s start with the map overlay.

The map overlay section is a breakdown of the countries your website’s traffic is coming from. In the sample report, the majority of the traffic came from the United States. The numbers that follow show the amount of visitors from each country, the average time they spent on the website, what percentage of the visitors were new, and their bounce rate. You’ll also see the comparison to last month in the sample report.

This information is somewhat helpful in understanding where traffic comes from, but a customized report that drills down to a more local level would be more beneficial. The report can be configured to show this data, but it isn’t configured in the default Google Analytics report, as demonstrated in the example.

The next section down is titled “Content Overview”. This is one of my favorite sections of the report because it shows the most popular pages for the website. There is also a term here that we haven’t defined yet – “Unique Views”. Google defines unique views as “pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.” [source]

For this site, the home page is the most frequently viewed page on the site, which I suspect will be the case for the majority of websites. The report shows the number of pageviews for each page down the list, and the percentage of total pageviews this number represents. It is also compared to the last month’s pageviews to contrast traffic to the previous month.

Lastly, the “New vs. Returning” section breaks down visitor types by numbers. As you can see in this sample report, new visitors outweight returning visitors by a margin of only 54. In the previous month, however, new visitors took the title. If goals are configured in your Google Analytics dashboard, these numbers will also appear here. Google has a great article about getting these setup for your Analytics account.

The sample report we used as an outline for this series of articles is the default report available from Google Analytics. Analytics users can configure customized reports that offer information that is helpful for their specific website. The online dashboard for Analytics allows for interactive reporting, drilling down through the site to display numbers that are helpful in determining how to optimize your website. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series. The information found in these reports needs to be interpreted for the purposes and goals of your website.

Thanks for reading through the series – and happy number crunching!

When Sequoyah Hills Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee was ready to upgrade their website, they wanted something that was visually attractive and easy to manage from anywhere. Allyte recommended a Joomla 1.5 CMS and left the design choice in their hands. In the end, the team chose a RocketTheme design because of its visual impact and feature set. Take a look at the final product below.

SequoyahChurch.org

I wrote about some photo resize tools not too long ago, but I learned of another tool you should know (and use!) through one of my favorite blogs. A reader also wrote to suggest another popular resource that I’d like to toss out there.

• Shrink Pic [via Lifehacker] is perhaps one of the most handy picture resizing tools when working with online mediums, such as websites and social media sites. It’s the most handy because you don’t have to think about it. ShrinkPic automatically resizes pictures you’re uploading to the web. This does a few things: 1) it decreases the amount of time it takes for your file to transfer, 2) it ensures you have an optimal (or close to it) size for web use, and 3) it conserves server storage space.Go ahead, install ShrinkPic. Your website administrator will love you for it.
• IrfanView is a very popular program that allows you to resize pictures and perform a ton of other operations on images (it even plays videos). It’s free for download at http://www.irfanview.com/, where you can also find a full list of features.

Adding pictures to a Joomla! article is really quite simple. Take a look at the video below to see how to do it.

How to Add a Picture to a Joomla! Article from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.

Take a look at this introductory overview of the Joomla! Control Panel. More videos will follow to cover each menu item in more detail.

Joomla Control Panel Overview from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.

The Joomla! Article Manager is one of the key elements of the Joomla! Content Management System. Take a look at the video here to see the basics of how to use it.

Joomla Article Manager Overview from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.