Category Archives: Websites

Google Analytics alternative

After the Google Analytics downtime last week, I decided to check out some alternatives to track things like campaigns, trial downloads and sales. We are using AWStats for the general traffic analysis, but it isn’t effective for conversion tracking. So, after looking at some of the available options, I found Stuffed Tracker from Stuffed Guys. […]

Posted in Websites | Comments closed

Google Analytics is down

Google Analytics has been down several hours today (and still has sporadic problems). The problem was that the Java Script file that is hosted by Google and which is included in all tracked websites couldn’t be downloaded anymore. This means that all websites that use Google Analytics have been down, too. Browsers don’t render a […]

Posted in Websites | Comments closed

Adwords performance and conversion rates

I often read complains about Google’s Adwords advertising program. We had our starting problems with Adwords as well, but the situation improved a lot in the past weeks. I’m not sure why, but we got much more Adwords traffic than before. And I’m pretty sure it’s not click-fraud from Google’s Adsense network, because our visitors […]

Also posted in Business | Leave a comment

The Google Vacuum Tests

Mike Davidson has an interesting blog posting about the relevance of specific HTML tags in regards to search engine positioning. He created websites with different tag combinations to test how much valid HTML, heading tags, titles and filenames of websites affect the ranking on Google. Some interesting facts:

Having the keywords in headings such as H1 […]

Posted in Websites | Leave a comment

Measuring the success of your landing page

Some weeks ago I wrote about the importance of landing pages of a website. To summarize, I basically stated that it’s important to choose two, maybe three actions you want visitors to perform when entering a page. Examples for those actions are downloading a trial version or taking the tour of your product.
This time, I’d […]

Also posted in Business | Comments closed

Adding a newsletter to your marketing concept

We finally setup a newsletter last week. We originally intended to offer a newsletter from the beginning, but we never got around to do it. This has been a mistake I guess, since newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with potential customers and interested parties. Once they subscribe, you can always inform […]

Also posted in Business | Comments closed

Google results for software.gurock.com

After complaining about the Googlebot and our Google search results three few weeks ago, the situation has changed in the last few days. Our rankings are much better now which results in having more visitors coming from Google. This is quite unexpected since we haven’t changed anything. It might be that the blog.gurock.com site grew […]

Also posted in General | Comments closed

Our experiences with Google AdWords

Just like Eric Sink, we have been quite disappointed with Google AdWords so far. We have a lot of ads running on Google for SmartInspect, but we either get almost no impressions for the selected keywords or the keywords are so popular that Google instantly disables our ads, even when we get good click through […]

Also posted in Business | Comments closed

Get your landing page right!

Over the last few months, we’ve been steadily working on improving our website. With the aid of our website statistics we found out that most of our visitors enter our website on the main product page of SmartInspect (more than 60% last month). This is expected since all advertisement like Google AdWords and most announcements […]

Posted in Websites | Comments closed

Is MSN Search getting ahead of Google?

I just looked at our blog statistics to find out how often search engine spiders, such as the MSNBot or Googlebot, visit this site and how many pages they index. As it turns out, the Googlebot either doesn’t like our site that much or it has serious capacity problems. Compared to other search engine spiders, […]

Also posted in General | Comments closed