Let’s take a quick look at some of the metrics you find on your Traffic Sources report and what they mean.

Direct Traffic: This is the number of visitors who typed in your URL directly or clicked on a bookmark in their web browser. These tend to be people who know about your business, and probably have been to your website before.

Referring Sites: Other websites that are referring visitors to your website are in this category. Whether is a link, a blog post about you, or a banner ad, these websites are linking to you and referring traffic. Identifying who is referring traffic to your website is vital. This gives you the opportunity to establish a marketing relationship with some of your best referrers.

Search Engines: This category includes two major components of your search engine marketing strategy, organic search and PPC traffic. Visitors who found your website through organic search went to a search engine like Google or Bing and searched for something related. Traffic to your site through Organic Search is one of the best types of traffic you can receive. If a visitor is able to find your site by searching for a related term, the chances of that visitor converting into a lead, sale or other desired outcome is much higher than most other traffic sources. The second component of search engine traffic comes from PPC or pay-per-click advertising. PPC is another important component of search engine marketing. It allows you to place ads on the search engine by paying for certain keywords. When visitors go to a search engine and type in one of your targeted keywords, your ad has a chance to appear based on your bid (we will be covering PPC campaigns in the coming weeks)

Other: This category includes traffic from sources such as emails or special links that you set up and tag with campaign variables.

By understanding what these numbers mean, you can determine how your marketing efforts are affecting your outcomes. Are you getting most of your traffic from email newsletters? Are they coming from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Or are your visitors finding you on search engines like Google or Bing? These numbers can help you take action to either improve a campaign, tweak an SEO strategy, ramp up social media efforts, and to plan your next move. Learn what changes to make in Part 3: Taking Action!

The Discovery Communications Group is an award-winning, fully-integrated marketing agency located in Salem, NH, that specializes in web design, search engine optimization, and social media marketing services. DCG also provides printing and mailing services to meet every advertising need, servicing clients throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Google Analytics offers fully detailed results so you or your webmaster can easily determine what search engines and visitors are expecting from your site. Thus, you can tune your site to perform better, meet search engine standards and reach more customers effectively.

Sounds great, right? But so many of us don’t even know what all the data means in the first place! At Discovery Communications Group we look at these numbers everyday for our the companies we work with. It helps drive a lot of our strategies for clients and helps us make tweaks and edits so our clients continue to see results. So to help the average user decipher Google Analytics we have put together a three-part series on the basics of Google Analytics.

Part One: Navigating the Dashboard

The Dashboard gives you the overall usage numbers for your entire website. It allows you to choose a time period and see the trends over that duration. This is very useful to get a general snapshot of how a website is performing over a week, a month, three months etc. But what do all those numbers mean?  It’s not as scary as it looks! Below is a basic description of each data point on your dashboard.

• Visits: this value is the number of times someone interacted with your website.
• Bounce Rate: One of the more confusing terms for people is actually quite simple. Bounce Rate is the percentage of visits in which the person left the site immediately. Either they hit the back button, closed their browser, or just went to a different website like their home page or a search engine. This tells you that the visitor got to your site and immediately didn’t think they would find what they were looking for there.
• Page Views: This value is the total number of pages that were visited by all the visitors during the specified time period
• Average Page View: This gives you an idea of how many pages were looked at during each individual visit. For most websites this tends to average between 3 and 5 pages. However, it is important to note that when looking at the analytics for a blog, people typically will only view one page.
• Average Time on Site: I believe this value to be pretty self-explanatory.
• Percentage of New Visits: Again, very self explanatory. This value is the percentage of visits in the specified time period that were from visitors coming to your site for the first time.

It is important to note that these statistics have more weight for different types of websites. For example, the bounce rate and the average time on site are not good measures for a blog because typically a visitor will come to the site, read the latest blog post and leave quickly. However, if this is your company’s website, you definitely want to know what all of this data is.

We hope you have found this overview of the data found on the dashboard of Google Analytics helpful. To learn more about Google Analytics check out Part Two: Traffic Sources.

The Discovery Communications Group is an award-winning, fully-integrated marketing agency located in Salem, NH, that specializes in web design, search engine optimization, and social media marketing services. DCG also provides printing and mailing services to meet every advertising need, servicing clients throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Martin Kupp, program director at the European School of Management and Technology, Berlin, introduces three core concepts to unleashing creativity on both the personal and collective level on The Economic Times blog post.

Make the Secrets Productive

Kupp refers to artist Joseph Beuys’ (1921-1986) philosophy, “Every human is a creator when he strives for introspection with his self.” With this philosophy in mind, one needs to be aware of their general latent creative capabilities. Individuals must strive to discover which dimensions of their creativity are mostly formed. Beuys says to ask yourself and risk the debate; Those who desire to foster creativity in their organizations must take this challenge.

The Active Form of Thinking

Kupp refers to the “Three I’s of Creativity”. Actively thinking is the key to the creative process.

• Inspiration: very beginning, the moment when the first spark of an idea ‘clicks’
• Intuition: sense and feel the impact of the idea
• Imagination: the ability to communicate the idea in a compelling image or story

Imagination is the core ability of leaders these days. In order to create a strong, clear image to guide people through complex situations a leader must have imagination and vision.

Collective Creativity

“As leaders we can give space and form to quality if we start to orchestrate the creative potential we are closely working with,” says Kupp. Being able to foster this creativity and leadership in one’s organization will boost innovation in return profits.

It creates a new understanding of leadership, and that means managers have to actively think about ways to orchestrate creativity within the company. Managers have to identify and test shared beliefs, values and visions, define the project clearly and find the appropriate business model for the venture.

The Discovery Communications Group is an award-winning, fully-integrated marketing agency located in Salem, NH, that specializes in web design, search engine optimization, and social media marketing services. DCG also provides printing and mailing services to meet every advertising need, servicing clients throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Although one of the most important things may be taking a step back and looking at the big picture before deciding on the correct course of action, I am amazed at the number of excuses that are available to avoid this crucial activity. Once an overall strategy is agreed upon, the building blocks can be separated and prioritized. You can then delineate certain goals for particular projects and determine how those efforts relate to one another while providing mutual lift. This is where the real value and magic live.

Implementation, while necessary to be accomplished with utmost care and attention to detail, is really just a string of interrelated functions. Performing the tasks, doing what needs to be done, in a timely and efficient manner, is very important. But, (you knew there was a “but” coming) doing the work must always follow from the strategic intent.

When strategic intent and excellent creative ability are joined together, you get to live and function at an entirely different level. Strategic Creativity is the supercharged synthesis that occurs when thoughtful strategic intent and award winning creative design is combined with an innate understanding of human nature and a clear knowledge of how certain demographics are likely to respond to particular messages. It is a source of raw power, engaged energy, and pure magic.

- George
@GEW on Twitter
President of the Discovery Communications Group

Manny Ramirez has been a big part of the recent success of the team, winning the World Series MVP in 2004. Manny played with about a 50% effort for the last month of his stay in Boston in order to force Red Sox management to make a trade. The day that he was finally unloaded to the Los Angeles Dodgers had the effect of a force 7 earth quake hitting the greater Boston area. It is October 5, 2008, as I sit and write this blog post. The Trade happened over 2 months ago, and the story still dominates the airwaves of sports talk radio in Boston.

Yet, from a purely marketing standpoint, the Manny Trade was not the biggest thing that happened that day in Boston sports. August 1, 2008, the day that Manny left the Red Sox, was also the day that Gordon Edes resigned from the Boston Globe and Steve Buckley left the Boston Herald.

Both of these men are highly regarded sports writers and covered the Red Sox on behalf of their respective newspapers for many years. The interesting thing about the departures is that both of them opted to continue their careers as writers in the on-line sports reporting medium. Edes signed on with Yahoo! Sports while Buckley moved to WEEI.com.

This is huge! It says volumes about where the world has come from and where it is going. Newspapers are on the decline and have been for a while. Advertising revenues are down 5.6% in 2007 according to Investment Business Weekly via VerticalNews.com, but the trend was on an accelerating pace in the final two quarters. Internet display advertising continued to grow by 15.9% in the same time period. Newspaper editorial staffs are being laid off and seasoned reporters are being replaced by syndicated articles that can easily be accessed on line if you so desire.

The world of advertising is rapidly changing. The default type of thinking that leads to “put an ad in the newspaper” must change and give way to a more strategic approach to ad spending. There are more choices and maximizing ROI, driving results that are measurable and can be traced to particular campaigns and expenditures, is something that needs to be given serious consideration.

Strategic thinking requires more time and energy. It means that you must look at the entire picture and make your advertising and marketing expenditure decisions with extreme care. You may need to seriously consider venues that are fairly new to you and somewhat intimidating. It is important to explore every possible avenue as you create a fully integrated, multi-level strategy, that is designed to produce the results you desire.

George Wallace
President and CEO

The Discovery Communications Group is an award-winning, fully-integrated marketing agency located in Salem, NH, that specializes in professional web design, search engine optimization, and social media marketing strategy. DCG also provides printing and mailing services to meet every advertising need, servicing clients throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts.