Tag Archives: data

Google Ads Success: The Metrics You Need to Watch

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Hosting

The post Google Ads Success: The Metrics You Need to Watch appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Measure the Performance of Your Google Ads Your marketing budget is limited. When you decide to invest in paid marketing like Google Ads, you need a way to track how well it’s working. Luckily, Google does a pretty good job of providing helpful analytics that make it easy to figure out your ROI and look for ways to improve your campaigns for better results over time. What You Can Learn from Google Ads Analytics Google understands the importance of analytics, so they make sure businesses that advertise with them get the data they need to properly track the success of each ad and campaign. With Google Ads’ client reports, you’ll be able to see: Clicks – The number of times people clicked on each of your ads, and the number of total clicks for each campaign. This is the main metric that lets you know whether your ads are doing their main job: getting people to notice your link and convincing them to click through. Click-through rate (CTR) – How the number of clicks compares to the number of times your ad was shown. Impressions – How many times your ad was seen. Impression share – This is Google’s calculation of how your impressions compare with the number of times your ad could potentially have been seen based on how many searches met your criteria. It lets you know if spending a little more could make a big difference to how often your ads show up. Average position –   If your ad shows up alongside a few other PPC ads, gaining the top spot will be more valuable than being second or third. This tells you where in the listing your ad shows up on average. If you’d prefer to be higher, then it pays to spend more. Average cost-per-click – Because Google Ads uses a bidding pricing model, the amount you pay for each click will depend on how competitive your keywords and placements are at any given moment. This metric lets you know how much you’re generally paying for each click. Quality Score – Google wants to deliver good, relevant ads to its searchers. Therefore, in addition to budget, their program looks at how well your ads are performing and determines a quality score that influences how often they’ll show up and how much you pay. Converted clicks – Clicks are nice, but ultimately you want each person clicking to take an action such as signing up for your email list or making a purchase. Google Ads will help you track how many of the visitors who come to your website through an ad follow through with the actions you desire. Conversion rate – This shows the comparison between the number of clicks and the number of times they lead to your desired actions. Average cost per conversion – Google makes it easy for you to figure out how much each conversion is costing you by providing a comparison between the amount you’re spending on ads and the number of conversions they’re bringing you. These metrics will teach you how to recognize what works best in your ad campaigns and how your spending pays off in specific terms.     Get More By Linking Google Analytics to Google Ads Google Ads provides you with a lot of good data, but you can get even more valuable information about the success of your ads by connecting your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. Where Google Ads tracks how people interact with your ads, Google Analytics provides a wealth of data on what people do once they’ve clicked through to your website.  When the two accounts are linked, you’ll start to see some of the data from Google Analytics in your Google Ads account and vice versa. (First, you’ll need to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site. Here’s how to do that. ) For example, in Google Ads, you’ll start to be able to see: Bounce rate – How often visitors who click on your ad leave your website before moving to another page on the site. Pages per session – How many pages and which one visitors go to after landing on your website from an ad. Average session duration – How long your PPC visitors typically spend on the website before leaving. % New sessions – How many of your PPC visitors are coming to your website for the first time. In addition, you’ll be able to connect the data for conversion tracking you’ve set up in Google Analytics to the data you have in Google Ads, to better see the full journey your PPC visitors take from the time they click on an ad to when they take the actions you’ve determined are most valuable. And the data that Google Analytics tracks on demographics and user behavior from your site visitors can be used to further strengthen your remarketing efforts in Google Ads. Basically, the more information you have and the better you’re able to connect it, the more you’ll be able to refine your ad campaigns to get the results you want.   Track Your Results with Expert Google Ads Management Advertising with Google is often a great way to reach a new audience and get more visitors to your website. But you can get so much more out of your advertising when you make use of the data Google provides to learn as you go and make your campaigns continually better. Want to get more out of your Google Ads campaigns? Learn about HostGator’s Google Ads services. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Filter Spam Bots in Google Analytics [Step by Step Guide]

Posted on July 15, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Filter Spam Bots in Google Analytics [Step by Step Guide] appeared first on HostGator Blog . You know how valuable Google Analytics is and you’re ready to take all the insights it can offer to improve your website’s performance. But as you pull up the Acquisition data to see how people are finding your website, you notice some strange entries.  Chances are, this means that you’ve become a victim of spam bots. What Is Google Analytics Referral Spam? Spammers will do anything to drive more traffic to their websites. One of the tactics they’ve employed to this effect is finding ways to show up in Google Analytics, hoping that website owners will click on a site to see why it’s sending traffic their way. Google Analytics referral spam used to be much more common, but Google works hard to keep those spammy sites from showing up in your data. Nonetheless, many websites will still see some results in their Google Analytics data produced by spam bots. If you care about getting accurate data about your website’s performance—and you should, because it’s the only way to understand what’s working—then you need to filter spam bots in Google Analytics.  Here’s a handy guide on how to do just that.   How to Filter Spam Bots from Your Google Analytics Results There are two main types of filters you should set up to capture most referral spam from bots. For both, you have the same first few steps.  Getting Started 1. Keep an unfiltered view. When you make any technical change, you always want to have a backup. In Google Analytics, that means keeping an unfiltered view . This provides you with data you can use for comparison with the filtered results you get, to make sure they’re working. And it provides you with a view you can revert back to if one of your filters doesn’t work right. To do this, go to the Admin section in Google Analytics by clicking on the Gear icon in the bottom left corner. Click on View Settings in the third column.  Click on Copy View, then name your view Unfiltered , or something similar.   2. Click on Filters under the View column. With that done, go back to main Admin page by either clicking the back icon or the gear icon again. Click Filters in the View section (Note: this is different than All Filters in the Account section). 3. Click +Add Filter.  Click the red “+add filter” button. Then move onto the next section for the specific filters to create.  2 Google Analytics Filters to Set Up Valid Hostname Filter A valid hostname filter is the best way to filter out ghost spam. These are the spam bots that manage to ping your Google Analytics without ever actually visiting your website. Ghost spammers use automated scripts to send traffic to random websites, usually using a fake host. By telling Google Analytics how to recognize a valid host, this type of filter cuts the ghost spam from your analytics view.   1. Find your hostnames in Google Analytics.  A valid hostname is anywhere that you’ve legitimately set up Google Analytics tracking. That includes your website, most obviously, but also services like marketing tools you use and payment gateways. You can find a hostname report in Google Analytics in the Audience section by selecting Technology , then Network . Select Hostname as your Primary Dimension . Set your date range to go back at least a year. Scan the list to identify your valid hostnames. You should be able to recognize these as your own domain name, and any tools you use and knowingly allowed access to your Google Analytics tracking. Anything you don’t recognize or don’t manage yourself is probably spam.  If there’s an entry you’re not sure about, do some Googling. For example, Google Web Light isn’t something I manage directly, but it’s a service Google provides to load speedier pages on mobile devices with slow connections. That makes it legit.  2. Create a filter listing your hostnames. Back over in our Add Filter screen (scroll back up to the Getting Started section if you need a reminder), name the filter something like “Valid Hostnames.” Select Custom under Filter Types , Include in the list of bullets below that, and Hostname from the dropdown menu.  Under Filter Pattern, list all your valid hostnames in this format: yourdomain.com|hostname2|hostname3|hostname4  You want to fit all of your valid hostnames into one filter here—you can’t create more than one filter that includes hostnames.  3. Test your filter.  Before you click save, take a few seconds to test the filter out and make sure you configured it right. You can use the Verify Filter option right there on the page to run a basic test and see how the filter would affect your data for the past 7 days. Note that, if your website doesn’t currently get that many spam hits, 7 days might not be enough of a sample set to show a difference. Once you’re confident your filter is accurate, click Save .  Crawler Spam Filter The other main category of spam bots that show up in Google Analytics is crawler spam . These are bots that actually do visit your site. They leave a correct hostname, so won’t get caught in your valid hostname filter. Instead, you need to exclude these from your analytics.  1. Find the crawler spam in your analytics. To start, identify the crawler spam that shows up in your analytics now. In the Acquisition menu, choose All Traffic , then Referrals . Change your date range to include at least a year. Now browse the list of websites to look for any that appear to be spammy.  Some will look immediately suspicious. For example, display-your-ads-hereti.info jumps out in the list above as probably spam. But for anything you’re not sure about, do a Google search for “what is ” and you can usually get your answer for whether or not it’s spam. If the list here is long, it’s probably not worth your time to try and filter out every single spam bot, but if there are a main few sending a lot of fake traffic to your site, make note of them to include in your filter.   2. Look up common crawler spam lists. In addition to the spam examples you find in your own analytics, you can find pre-created filters that list many of the most common offenders on sites around the web (such as here and here ). These will cover many of the spam bots that may not have hit your website yet, but could.  3. Create a filter (or multiple filters) listing the crawler spam. Back in our Add Filter screen, name your filter something like “Referral Spam.” Choose Custom as your Filter type, click on the Exclude button, and select Campaign Source in the dropdown menu.  For the pre-created filters you find, you can simply copy-and-paste them into your Google Analytics. For any you manually create, use the same format you did for your hostname filter: Spamname|spamname2|spamname3 Since you have a limited number of characters you can use for each filter, you’ll likely be creating several different filters in this step. Be sure to give them each a unique name. 4. Test your filter. For each filter you create, take a minute to test it. If you’re satisfied it’s accurate, click Save . Filtering Spam Bots on a WordPress Site Setting up filters within Google Analytics can feel pretty complicated. But if you have Google Analytics set up for your WordPress website, you have an easier solution you can take advantage of: plugins.  There are a number of WordPress plugins devoted to blocking referral spam, including: Block Referrer Spam SpamReferrerBlock WP Block Referrer Spam Stop Referrer Spam You can block a significant amount of spam from your analytics simply by choosing one of these plugins, installing it to your WordPress site, and activating it.  If you’re not on WordPress now, but liking the idea of a simpler process for filtering spam bots, the first step to setting up a WordPress site is investing in WordPress hosting . Many aspects of designing, managing, and maintaining a website are easier with WordPress, so for website owners without extensive tech skills, it’s worth considering.  Google Analytics Spam Bots FAQs Those are the main steps you need to know to filter spam bots in your Google Analytics. But if you still have questions about Google Analytics spam bots, here are answers to some of the most common questions people wonder about.  1. How do I detect spam in Google Analytics? First things first, don’t click on the link! If you visit the website itself, the spammers are getting what they want from their shady tactics.  Instead, either do a search for the website in quotation marks, e.g. “99-reasons-for-seo.com” or a search like “what is 99-reaons-for-seo.com.” That will ensure Google doesn’t take you to the spammer’s website—the thing we’re trying to avoid here—and instead you’ll see results from other websites about it. If the website’s a known source for analytics spam, someone’s probably written about it.  2. Why does filtering spam from my Google Analytics results matter? Website analytics are a rich source of information about what your audience responds to. They can show you what your website gets right now, and reveal areas for improvement. And they’re your best way to track the success of your online marketing activities so you know what tactics are worth the investment. Referral spam clouds the accuracy of your analytics. It puts you at risk of misinterpreting the data you have, because the data itself isn’t accurate. You don’t want to spend time and money on tactics that aren’t working because a spam bot makes you think a particular page is more popular than it truly is with your audience. By cleaning up your data, spam bot filters ensure your analytics deliver insights that are more accurate and useful.  3. Can I clean past Google Analytics data? These filters will mean you get cleaner data moving forward, but they won’t be applied retroactively. Your historical data will still include inaccuracies caused by spam bots. But, seeing the comparison between your analytics before and after applying the filters can help you make an educated guess about how much of your traffic was due to bots. You can take that into account when analyzing the data you have to help you get closer to an accurate picture.    Gain Clarity by Skipping the Spam Google Analytics is one of the most valuable tools available to every website owner. While you can’t completely avoid spammers online (they have an obnoxious skill for being everywhere), you can control the influence they have on your website data. Applying the right filters and plugins to your website analytics will rob spammers of their power, and give you back the accuracy you need to build a stronger website for your audience.  Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Backup Your Website & Why It’s Important

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Backup Your Website & Why It’s Important appeared first on HostGator Blog . You probably already have regular computer backups in place. You may manually back up all your important files to an external hard drive, or you may have found a way to automate the process. Do you do the same thing for your website? Backing up your computer helps prevent data loss if anything unfortunate occurs—like your computer gets damaged or hacked and you need to reinstall your OS and start from scratch. Just as your computer is susceptible to online threats, so is your website. Perhaps even more so. Beyond taking the necessary security precautions to protect your website , you’ll also want to regularly backup your website. That way, if something unfortunate does occur, you won’t have to completely start over. Instead, you can simply restore your site from a previous backup. Below you’ll learn what an online data backup service is, why you’ll want one, and the benefits it’ll bring you, so you can decide which website backup service is best for your needs. What Is a Website Backup? Simply put, a website backup is a copy of all of your website data. What the backup storage encompasses will depend upon your online backup provider. As a general rule of thumb, the more data that’s included in the data backup, the better. This is especially the case if your website runs on a content management system like WordPress, where you’ll need all of your site’s files, content, media, and databases to get it up and running again. How Often Should You Back Up Your Website? Like computer backups, website backups should also be done on a regular basis. It won’t do you much good to restore your site from a backup that’s a few years old. The best case scenario is either daily or weekly backups. Whether you go with daily or weekly depends on how often you update your website. If you only publish a single blog post per week, and that’s the only update you make to your site, then weekly backups will suffice. Why You Need to Backup Your Site It’s hard to imagine what losing all of your website data feels like until you’ve gone through it yourself. Regardless, it isn’t a fun experience. More importantly, it’s something that’s completely avoidable with the right online backup software behind you. Here are three unfortunate situations that could occur when you don’t backup your site: 1. You Lose All the Work You’ve Done Building a website takes a ton of time and energy. This effort only multiplies the longer you’ve been running your site. Could you imagine losing years of work on your website overnight? All the customizations you’ve done to your site. All of the content you’ve created. All the time spent getting everything just right. If you don’t have any backups to restore from, then you’ll have to recreate all of this from the very beginning. Or, if you hired someone to make customizations to your codebase, then you might have to hire them to do it all again. 2. Loss of Site Revenue During Recovery If your site has been generating revenue via content, products, or services, then you run the risk of all of this being lost. If your site is content driven, then you’ll have to create all of this content from scratch. If you run an eCommerce website, you’ll have to completely recreate your product pages, category pages, and more. When your site is offline, any existing revenue will completely stop until you can completely restore your website. Depending on how much data you’ve lost this could be a long time—especially if you’re a small business or solopreneur and you’ve created every piece of content yourself. 3. Loss of Time During Site Rebuild You should spend time growing and managing the day to day of running your website, not having to re-do tasks you’ve already done. Imagine the frustration of trying to re-do years’ worth of work. Some sites that have been running for years will have hundreds of blog posts or product pages. If you haven’t done a single backup since starting your site, then you’ll have to create all of this again. If it took you years to do once, then it might take you years just to get back to your starting point. Of course, this is the worst case scenario. With regular website backups, this nightmare won’t happen to you. How Website Backup Services Work Online backup companies help to simplify the process of backing up your website. By way of example, let’s talk about an online backup service for documents, like Dropbox. If you have a Dropbox account, you drag and drop files into the application, and a copy of your files are stored on a cloud server. It’s pretty seamless, but it still requires you to select which files you need to back up. This is great for documents and other media files, but backing up an entire website is a bit more technical in nature. Websites have a ton of moving parts and a variety of files required just for your website to load the right way. Forget to backup a crucial file and your website might not load properly. If you’ve ever played around with the code of your own website, then you’re probably familiar with how changing a single line of code can bring your website offline. Yeah, not fun. When you use an online backup service, all of this is taken care of for you. You’re not the one individually backing up every website element and file yourself. The service does it automatically in the background. This helps to ensure that every single file is backed up and you can easily restore your site if the need arises. Once you choose your online website backup software of choice and configure it to your website, you won’t have to touch it again. Just select the website you’d like backed up, and choose the frequency. The application will then run in the background, silently backing up data in your site to your preferred guidelines. This helps to take the headache out of backing up your site while giving you a safe and secure backup if you ever need to restore your site to a previous version. 3 Benefits of Using an Online Backup Service If you don’t know how to backup your website , online backup services can greatly simplify the process. All you have to do is sign up for a service and the rest is taken care of for you. You don’t have to worry about remembering to backup your site, or even securing your backups the right way. All of this and more will be taken care of by your online backup service. Here are some of the biggest benefits you’ll realize from using an online backup service: 1. Backups Are Effortless With an online backup service, you don’t have to think twice about whether or not your site is going to be backed up. All you have to do is sign up for the service and the rest is taken care of for you. Cloud-based backup solutions are very efficient. Instead of having to manage your backups yourself and ensure they’re properly stored, the entire process happens automatically behind the scenes, and your site’s files and folders are stored securely on a remote server. You also don’t have to worry about the maintenance, or physical protection of your data storage devices as well. All of this is taken care of by your website backup provider. Usually, your website data will be stored across multiple different storage locations as well, in case one becomes corrupted, or damaged in some way. 2. Enhanced Security Protocols If you’re manually backing up your site and using a basic storage solution, then your levels of security won’t be as high as what a cloud backup solution can provide. Simply using an HDD backup can open your files up to all sorts of risks like data corruption, storage malfunction, physical damage, and more. Even if you’re regularly backing up your site, it’s no use if you can’t actually access your data. Online backup services not only have multiple layers of security to protect your files, but they’ll be stored on redundant servers. This means that copies of your site’s files are stored across multiple server physical servers. It’ll be near impossible to get this level of security and data recovery when managing your backups yourself. 3. Speedy Site Recovery One of the biggest benefits of using an online backup service is being able to restore your site to a previous version in an instant. With quick website recovery and data restoration times it’ll be like your site never took any damage in the first place. When you’re managing your own backups this will be a much slower process, especially if you don’t have the necessary technical skills. A lot of online backup services will also offer technical assistance for restoring your site or even have one-click recovery options. This is a must-have for website owners who don’t want to go through the technical process of restoring their sites themselves. Choosing the Best Website Backup Service When you’re looking for a solid website backup service there are certain features you’ll want to keep an eye out for. The last thing you want to do is choose a low-quality online backup service. Here are three key features you’ll want to keep an eye out for when choosing a backup service: 1. Off-Site Backups You want your backups to be protected from hackers and hardware failure. This means that your backups need to be stored in an off-site protected location, not just on a traditional website server. Look for an online backup service that offers off-site backups as part of their service offering. 2. Automated Backups If you have to create your backups yourself, then you’ll probably never get around to it. Our lives are busy, and you probably have a handful of website-oriented tasks you’re trying to complete every day as well. The last thing you’ll remember to do is backing up your website. Plus, it’s a simple enough task that it’s easy to put off until “tomorrow”. With automated backups, you don’t have to think twice about backing up your website. Just sign up for a service, create a backup schedule, and the rest is taken care of for you. Automation is one of the most important aspects of an online backup service. Without automation, the task probably won’t get done. 3. Redundant Backups Another very important feature of your online backup service is redundant backups. This is where your website files and folders will be stored in multiple server locations. Or, you’re having backups of backups made. This ensures that a single event won’t bring down your backups or storage, and you have multiple lines of defense, instead of a single point of failure. Introducing the CodeGuard Backup Solution If you’re already a HostGator customer then you should probably consider CodeGuard as your preferred backup solution. Think of CodeGuard as a time machine for your website. Have a website update that goes wrong? Or, your site gets hacked and your site will barely function? Or, maybe your site is going haywire for no reason at all? In one-click, you can restore your site to a previous version that functions how it should. CodeGuard is equipped with features like: Daily automatic backups (or whatever frequency you prefer) One-click restore of your entire website, or a single file that’s been corrupted Email alerts for any unauthorized changes that are made to your website 24/7 website monitoring and scheduled scans The ability to backup multiple different websites in a single storage space Download a zip version of your entire site for manual backups (if you want even more stored versions of your site) If you’re already hosting your site with HostGator and looking for a backup solution, then CodeGuard is a no brainer. It immediately integrates with your existing web hosting plan, so configuration is a breeze. Just choose your backup plan, select the websites you want to save, and this tool will do the rest. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of why website backups are so important , and something you must do before an unfortunate incident occurs. With a solid website backup solution behind you and an experienced web hosting provider to rely on, you’ll protect the future of your site from any risks that are lurking online. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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GTT-only server needed

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Hosting

Hey folks, we’re looking at adding GTT to one of our data centers; we’d like to check them out with a machine anywhere in the US (East Coast… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1761119&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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GTT-only VPS needed

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Hosting

Hey folks, we’re looking at adding GTT to one of our data centers; we’d like to check them out with a VPS anywhere in the US (East Coast pre… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1761101&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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