Adam Howitt Consulting Blog

You updated your website and your bounce rate dropped to zero percent or thereabouts - time to celebrate, right? Maybe.

Understanding Bounce Rates

Just a quick recap for the uninitiated - bounce rate represents the visitor who came to your site, looked at a single page and left without interacting with your website in any way. The goal of bounce rate is to count visitors who were so unimpressed that they didn't feel the need to find out any more about you or your company.

Reducing your bounce rate should be a good thing and generally is but be very suspicious of a bounce rate of zero or a drop so substantial to be practically zero if your pages never performed so well before.

Troubleshooting Bounce Rates

Note that I only said "be suspicious" and not reject them outright. All you need to do is to understand if there is anything artificially affecting your bounce rate. If you can prove that each page generates a single pageview in Google Analytics you can crack open the champagne and dance in the streets.

What are some of the factors that can lead to inflated bounce rates?

• AJAX tracking code. I've seen AJAX and jQuery code extensions that load content and send a trackpageview on document ready. In some cases if someone interacts with a dynamic section of your site, you want that interaction to be recorded as an interaction and not a bounce but if the trackPageview call occurs when the document has finished loading you'll see your average pageviews per visit jump to 2 or close to 2 for this reason. The first "hit" is real - the visitor was tracked with the normal tracking code at the end of your page. The second "hit" happened without the user touching their mouse or keyboard so you should take steps to disable this trackPageview in this instance. By all means track it if the user did something to make the content load though.
• iFrame content. If your page includes an iFrame showing content from another part of your site that also has the tracking code you will probably see similar symptoms to the AJAX description above of inflated pageviews per visit and decreased time on page to practically zero.
• Duplicate tracking code. This is probably the most common culprit I've seen. View the source code of one of your 0% bounce rate pages and search for ga.js and urchin.js in the code. Make sure you're viewing the source as displayed in your browser instead of the server side code because you'll be getting the exact picture of what is being sent to google vs. forgetting a file that get's included on the server side. To view the source code right click in some white space on the page you're testing and select view source from the popup. If you have one of each on the page or two of either with the same user account "UA-xxxxxxx-x" string you have a problem. In certain circumstances you might have two user accounts tracking a page but if you're reading this post, my guess is that you aren't at that point in your analytics sophistication!
• Third party vendor. Technically the same as a duplicate tracking code issue but slightly different. You might have a web page hosted on someone's platform like wordpress or site builder type setups. A common issue here is using built in Google Analytics tracking features provided by the vendor but using a designer's template that includes Google Analytics tracking too.

Tools of the Trade

If the tips above weren't enough to get you an answer there are a couple of tools you can use to see what is being sent to Google Analytics when your page loads

• Packet sniffers. These tools are fairly technical but your developers may be familiar with these kind of tools. They capture the web requests leaving your computer so you can review them and look for any traffic to _utm.gif. Wireshark and Ethereal are the most technical tools to use and not specifically dedicated to browser only traffic
• HTTP Proxies. Another technical tool you can change your browser settings to use an HTTP proxy that intercepts browser only traffic and will give you less background noise than a packet sniffer. I don't have any examples of these but someone in IT might be able to help
• Proxy Browser extensions. The tools I use most are browser extensions that listen to the traffic from your browser but don't require an IT degree to install and use. Firefox has LiveHTTPHeaders which works more like a proxy and shows you the traffic it is capturing. For Safari you can turn on the develop menu from the advanced preferences screen and look at the resources panel for your page looking for _utm.gif requests.
• Analytics Tools. If you are spending a lot of time on Analytics work for multiple clients or multiple internal sites, I recommend buying a copy of WASP, recently acquired by Avinash Kaushik's company (so it can only get better). As it is, it sits in Firefox in the corner and quietly reports the Analytics solutions deployed on your server including tracking mechanisms used by the advertisers if you have banners too. Click Google Analytics when you see it and it shows you the Google Analytics hits described in the most user friendly way to tell you what was sent to Google. It deconstructs the variables in a Google Analytics request to make it easier to read. If you see two tabs in the panel that pops up that both say Google Analytics you'll be able to see what is being sent. Looking at the trackPageview title should give you a clue as to what is being reported.

Still stuck?

If you're still stuck at this point, fear not! I've worked through many of these issues with my clients and I can help you get to the bottom of your issue and work with your developers to fix the problem. Send a request through our contact form and I will be in touch.

Google announced on Tuesday that as of Wednesday January 27th calls to the setVar method (used to create custom segments on your site) will no longer be counted as an interaction hit.  

What is an interaction hit?

Prior to January 27th, a call to setVar would be logged as an interaction hit meaning that if it followed a call to trackPageView, the bounce rate for that page would be 0% and the time on page would be tiny, reflecting the difference between the first call and the second call.

This change is a positive move since bounce rate has long been considered a critical measure of success of marketing campaigns from all sources.  If you drive someone to a page and they leave immediately it is called a bounce and indicates that the messaging used to lure them to your site conflicts with what they were able to see when they arrived on your site (in the 8 seconds they typically spend on a given page).  Similarly if your time on page was underreported you might mistakenly waste time optimizing a problem that doesn't exist.

Who does this affect?

A significant number of people who use Google Analytics "out of the box" won't be affected by this change as setVar is only something you implement as a conscious decision to group visitors into custom segments.  If in doubt, right click on a page on your site and click view source then look for setVar in the code (Control+F will pull up a search dialog).

Why use segmentation?

You might choose to group landing pages into custom segments so you can compare the effect of landing pages on visitor behaviour.  Another common application is to use segments to label a visitor by their perceived intent.  

I might track visitors landing on my site into segments based on source to differentiate the behaviour of visitors from social networking sites from that of other referral sources.  

Why?  The custom segments extend beyond the first visit and will only be changed if the visitor receives a subsequent segment, since the last referal before a sale is commonly accepted as the key influencer.  That said, if social networking sites deliver a lot of traffic but convert poorly into sales, I can see that trend across the larger group rather than look at myspace, facebook and twitter separately.  Similarly, the bounce rate and browsing habits might be very different so I would want to isolate this behavior from paid search to make sure I'm not optimizing to a biassed crowd.

Alternatives to setVar

Google recently launched a beta program for "Advanced Segments" located in the top right of the dashboard.  It allows you to pick from pre-defined segments and create your own.  It is a subset of the functionality provided by custom segments since it only tracks visits, not visitors, but is still incredibly useful.  

For example, you can compare behaviour on the site between browsers.  Looking for patterns here like drastically higher bounce rates could mean that your site renders poorly in one browser or actually appears broken to visitors for that browser.  

I have two segments I created to identify visitors who started on my blog and another to track visitors who began their visit on my home page.  Believe me, the insight this provides may help you divert the CEO's demands to put every new toy on the home page...

I encourage you to play with the advanced segments feature, create some segments and compare behavior against the site and other similar but distinct segments to look for trends.  If you need help with this tool, of course you can contact me through the contact form on the site or leave me a question in the comments.

Sound unrealistic?  It depends where you start from of course but one client I'm currently working with was able to turn up the heat through some simple changes to an estimate form pivotal to his business.

My client, Auto-Transporter.com, ships cars around the US for people relocating or just heading south for the Winter. The goal of his website is to get visitors to submit an estimate form to his sales team.  He came to me looking for help developing a profitable Google AdWords campaign but I believe that is the last step of any optimization project, never a beginning.  Here's why.

If your site converts 10% of your visitors and you get 1000 visitors a day you'll get 100 leads.  To double your leads with Google AdWords you'll need double the traffic.  Every day.  One thousand clicks at a typical cost-per-click of $1.50 is going to cost $1500 per day, $45,000 per month.  It's not sustainable for most businesses and depending on your experience with AdWords, you may end up attracting clicks from visitors outside your target audience, resulting in lower than expected conversions.

The best way to get an additional 100 leads is to double the conversion rate of your site from 10% to 20%.  The same 1000 visitors a day now yields 200 leads and, since conversion rates tend to be consistent (for most businesses), you'll pay once for the work and reap the rewards day after day with no extra expenditure.  If you run the same Google AdWords campaign after optimizing your site you'll have four times as many leads!

Just to be clear about conversion rates staying the same - it depends on what you do to market your business.  A hugely succesful marketing campaign that provides more information than your website does is likely to drive a spike in conversion rates but it masks the issues on your website.  Seasonal businesses are another exception but for the most part let's go with the consistency theory for the sake of argument.

Improving Conversion rates

Okay, so how did we impact conversion rates?  We started by ensuring that every page in his site was tagged with Google Analytics to help get a clear picture of what was happening on his site.  After confirming that the tracking codes were in place we waited a week to gather some meaningful data.  After all, it's hard to know if you've improved something if you don't measure it!

In our next meeting we used the data to decide how to track the goal of estimate form completions as a goal in the Google Analytics reporting interface.  We created a two step funnel to capture data about the number of visitors who saw the estimate page vs. those who submitted it successfully.

Another week passed as we collected the data to begin a meaningful discussion.  The funnel showed us that 25% of  visitors would submit it, or put another way 75% left without submitting the form.  Think about this for a second.  75% of people didn't do what he wanted them to do.  

The goals in Google Analytics are smart enough to know that a visitor who saw the form, clicked around on the site and then came back to submit it is still a succesful visit and a conversion.

Why do people leave?

There are many reasons why people leave sites and I'm sure you can think of others but some I have come across are:

• Not ready to buy: Does your form alienate people who aren't ready to buy?
• Form is buggy: Is it broken somehow in one or many web browsers?
• Confusion: Is it confusing in the way it is laid out or are the questions confusing or hard to answer?
• Restrictive: Do the options you offer as pre-selected answers to questions cover everything people might want to select?
• Intrusive: Does the form require too much personal information too soon?  If you need just one way to get in touch with the customer is it clear or does it appear that they should submit everything?
• Intimidating: Is the form too long or does it look to complicated?
• Lack of information: Did the visitors receive enough information prior to arriving at the form to be able to submit it?  Is there anything they need to know to be able to answer the questions?

This is all well and good but how do you identify the issues?  Google Analytics only tells you who came, who left and who submitted the form but provides no further insight into the underlying problems. 

Form Analytics Tool

To dig deeper you need to use a form analytics tool and I can't recommend ClickTale enough.  The script is installed on your form and the thank you page just like the Google Analytics tracking code.  The full tutorial of Clicktale is beyond the scope of this article and the tool packs many more secret powers but I use it primarily for form analytics.  Try to pick a plan matching the number of pageviews your form sees each day unless you're installing the script throughout your site, in which case you'll need a bigger plan.  I like their model because even if you don't pick the right plan, it will record as many pageviews as you've paid for each day and no more but distributes these recordings throughout the day.

We waited a week for ClickTale to gather enough data about the form behavior then logged in to see what the tool could reveal.  We selected the last week as the date range for the form analytics report and after a brief pause the form is shown with key statistics across the top of the frame.  These include conversion rate, drop rate, completion time, blank field rate and refill rate.

Conversion rate is something we've seen before in Google Analytics but just to reiterate, it represents the percentage of visitors who turned into leads in this case.  You can consider this an absolute measure of success for your form since increasing leads generates more sales!  As the page loads you'll also see a funnel with more detail about how many people saw the form, started it vs. didn't, tried to submit the completed form vs. didn't and finally those who successfully submitted the completed form vs. those who were unable to submit it successfully.  This last point means a visitor submitted the form but something was wrong with either their data, or there was a technical problem.

Drop rate is the number of visitors who started the form but didn't submit it.  A high drop rate lets you know that visitors are getting stuck somewhere and if you click on the summary along the top it swaps out the conversion rate panel with a drop report panel highlighting the fields on your form where people most commonly stop filling out the form.

Completion time is the average time taken for visitors to complete the form over the period.  It took an average visitor 8 minutes to complete the estimate form for the period we reviewed.  Click the completion time summary to see the time taken to complete each field and find the fields where people are scratching their heads!

Blank field rate tells you what percentage of fields on the form are typically left empty.  Click the blank field rate summary to see an analysis of which fields were skipped most commonly.  If you really don't need the information that is being skipped you can reduce the complexity of the form and drive conversion rates by removing them.  If you do need the information, maybe you're asking the question in a way that isn't immediately obvious.  

Refill rate indicates what percentage of your visitors tried to answer a given field but were asked to try again.  The summary covers the whole form but click that number to see the detail behind the failure rate of each field.  A high refill rate suggests either a poorly worded question or a field that is allowing people to enter the wrong thing - like a date field that doesn't make the format obvious.  While a web server can convert most date formats into the form it needs, people will spend less time thinking if you make it so obvious that they never get it wrong in the first place.

People are empowered by forms they can fill in easily but project their anger about a complex form at your company and are unlikely to come back, unless you have some kind of monopoly.  

After reviewing my client's Clicktale data we removed some fields, renamed some and changed the options on others and just one week later he saw a 50% increase in number of leads submitted and conversion rates climbed from 25% to 36%.  Drop rate fell from 35% to 27%, completion time fell to just two minutes from eight minutes, half as many fields were left blank (11 down to 6) and the refill rate dropped from 4.7% to 2.7%! 

As you can see it's a big improvement from changes that took a couple of hours to implement.  We've contracted a designer to provide some different form designs to test based on the feedback from the last review and we expect to continue to improve.

Fixing some of the issues on your forms is a cheap and effective way of increasing conversion rates which lead ultimately to a sustainable increase in revenue for the cost of less than a day of the Google AdWords campaign.

Well, close.  Jeff just sent me an article from Seth's blog pointing out that marketing evolution is much harder than marketing gravity because gravity is something people already believe in.

I'm banking on people believing that evolving your website is cheaper and more productive than starting from scratch or paying for AdWords campaigns.  

The seminar follows a logical flow from fixing the problems for the visitors you get before chasing new visitors with SEO and AdWords campaigns.

The morning shows you how to use Google Analytics to analyze the traffic you get to find the problems on your website.  Next I'll cover Google Website Optimizer to help you split test a theory without fighting with the CEO over what goes on the home page.

The afternoon starts with Search Engine Optimization basics to make sure you're getting the best free traffic possible before you invest in pay-per-click, the focus of the last session of the day.  Google AdWords can be expensive if the material covered in the first 3 sessions isn't addressed and I'll teach you how to change the way you buy your campaigns to get the most for your dollar.

The first one day seminar is December 17th in Chicago and space is restricted to a cozy crowd of 10 to promote interaction and make sure everyone goes home with a personal action plan.  If you can't make it to Chicago for the day, let me know if you think there is a demand for the seminar in your city.

Sign up now for Website Evolution!

Up the expertise you bring to the table. One-day intensive covers designing for search engine results, split testing of Web pages, using Analytics to arrive at a best design. Google tools provide you with a slam-dunk answers to every client design request.

I'm running a one-day four session seminar from the offices of Adam Howitt Consulting in Chicago on Wednesday, December 17th 2008.

Find out more about Website Evolution!

A client recently contacted me to ask why Google AdWords was reporting conversions but the clickbank affiliate account the Google AdWords ad linked to showed zero conversions.  The names have been changed to protect the innocent.  That includes the site - I have no idea about websites selling pipecleaners.

The "Basic" Process

1. Joe the plumber (just to be topical) searches in Google for a phrase that triggers my client's AdWords ad for bestpipecleaners.com.  
2. If Joe clicks the link, Google AdWords places a cookie on his machine that lasts 30 days to record the Ad that drove him to the site
3. Google AdWords redirects Joe to the link in the Ad, in this case my client's clickbank affiliate link
4. Clickbank creates a clickbank cookie good for 60 days to record the affiliate ID responsible for taking Joe to the clickbank destination URL, in this case, my client's landing page finally.
5. Joe goes from the landing page to a few more pages and then hits the purchase button
6. The purchase button goes to the clickbank checkout process
7. Clickbank pulls the 60 day clickbank cookie from Joe's machine
8. When he completes the sale, the affiliate ID from his cookie is credited with the sale
9. Clickbank redirects Joe to the thank you page on my client's site
10. The thank you page is tagged with the affiliate tracking code and Joe closes his browser and goes to fix some pipes.

Simple huh?  So in this case clickbank correctly accounts for one sale from my client's affiliate ID and Google AdWords records one conversion against the Ad that convinced Joe to purchase.

The Blockage in the Pipes
Josephine the plumber searches in Google for a phrase that triggers my client's ad and follows a similar path as Joe but when she gets to the landing pages, she doesn't trust the hype, leaves the website and goes to fix some pipes.  

A week later she is still trying to solve her underlying problem so she goes back to her computer and finds another website on the topic, pipecleanerreviews.com. Unbeknownst to her, this site is also an affiliate of my client and after she sees a review of my client's product, she decides it might work after all and clicks the link to visit my client's landing page again at bestpipecleaners.com.  Behind the scenes, the URL she clicked on is a clickbank link with pipecleanerreviews.com's clickbank id instead of my client's clickbank id.

1. Clickbank records the affiliate id as pipecleanerreviews.com in the cookie on Josephine's machine, replacing the original affiliate id of bestpipecleaners.com
2. Clickbank redirects her to bestpipecleaners.com and she completes the sale
3. Clickbank pulls the cookie from her machine (pipecleanerreviews.com's affiliate id) and so they get the credit for the sale
4. Clickbank redirects her to the thank you page which is also tracked with pipecleanerreviews.com's conversion tracking code (in addition to bestpipecleaners.com's code), and she goes off to fix some pipes.

The problem in this scenario, is that the thankyou page has both Google AdWords conversion codes and so both AdWords accounts (bestpipecleaners.com and pipecleanerreview.com) will record a conversion, when clickbank only credited a single affiliate with the conversion.

There are many other scenarios that play out in a similar way and she might have visited many sites.  In fact some of the links from my client's site bestpipecleaners.com points to pipecleanerreviews.com because it's a good idea to let people get third party opinions of your products to help them decide if it's worth buying.  

To accurately measure the AdWords campaign, the first search she did was not responsible wholly for the sale but since conversions are absolute we have to decide who gets the credit.  Regardless of your opinion on this, clickbank believes the last affiliate ID used should get the credit since they ultimately generated the sale.  Google AdWords however has split the credit because of the conversion code existing for both affiliates on the thank you page.  

The BestPipeCleaner for the job
If we want to change this behavior to make it match clickbank we have to show only the Google AdWords conversion code for the affiliate recorded by clickbank.  Fortunately, Clickbank reports the affiliate ID (if there was one) in the URL as the variable cbaffi when the visitor is sent to the thank you page so it is a simple matter of detecting which affiliate ID was passed and showing the appropriate tracking code snippet.  This could be a google snippet, a Yahoo PPC snippet or any other conversion code really, we just need to show one or none. 

The URL will look something like this where zzzzzzz is the affiliate ID and ... means there is much more than I want to type out:
/common/thankyou.cfm?item=9&cbreceipt=xxxxxxx&time=1224443502&cbpop=yyyyyyy&cbaffi=zzzzzzz&cname=...

For my solution I propose a database table of unique affiliate IDs mapped to their tracking code snippet but if you are only dealing with a few affiliates you could manually write this out to a property list or structure if you can carefully escape any quotes or double quotes that might break your code.

1. If the affiliate ID is blank or isn't passed to the thank you page, do nothing and skip to the rest of the page
2. If the affiliate ID is not blank, look-up the affiliate ID in the database:
   1. If there are no matches do nothing and skip to the rest of the page
   2. If there is one result, display the conversion tracking code and then show the rest of the page
   3. If there are mulitple results for the affiliate ID, loop over the rows and write each snippet out then show the rest of the page

Ideally, each affiliate would have only one snippet per ID but it is foreseeable that an affiliate might be promoting your site on Google, Yahoo and several other conversion tracking channels.  If you don't give them a unique affiliate ID per channel, they will record a conversion against each in the unlikely event that someone saw an affiliates Google ad, then their Yahoo ad before making a purchase.  It's a complex scenario but worth noting.  If you can, give them a unique affiliate ID for each separate ad medium they use (Google, Yahoo) so they can see the stats they need.

For help with your Google AdWords issues take a look thru my consulting site and contact me.  If you need help with Clickbank I have to confess it's not my specialty but I can try to help. 

I've also worked extensively with third party e-commerce providers to configure Google Analytics to ensure revenue is recorded against the correct referral sources which is a related issue.

I've been battling Google Analtyics for the last week for two customers with a similar issue - each has a multi-step goal configured starting on one domain and ending on another.

As I understood it you add the tracking code to your store site and your third party shopping cart pages.  What I didn't realize and have never witnessed before, is that you must add the code to every page in your store and every page in your third party cart.  I found this out when I found a different Google Support page on the topic than the one I had read earlier.

The first symptom that something was wrong was a funnel with a required step only reporting the first page despite a simple series of steps defined.    I just couldn't understand why the second page which was part of the same domain was no longer tracking since I added the cross-domain linker updates.

Next I re-read the page I referenced first above and realized that the cross-domain script goes on the destination as well as the source page but it didn't fix the funnel.  However, I was able to use the GA Navigation Summary (Content > Top Content > Page detail > Navigation Summary) to find each page of the flow.  Everything was being tracked here but not in my funnel. Hmm.  If you are on the Navigation Summary you should see step 2 of your funnel as the exit to step 1 but that wasn't the case.

I searched for step 2 in the content dropdown and found it so I clicked that to see the Navigation summary for step 2.  Here I saw entrances but no step 1 as previous pages.  Stranger still, I could see step 3 (on the shopping cart domain) as a next page!  For step 3 as the navigation summary though - I couldn't see step 4 so I was missing 1 & 4.

It was clear GA wasn't tracking the progression from step 1 > step 2 and starting a visit with step 2 somehow, recording step 3 next then ignoring the progression to step 4.

The light bulb moment came when I guessed correctly that the use of the linker script on step 2 and 3 meant step 1 was tracked with one cookie before step 2 announced the need to mark pages as part of the domain "none" so it created a second cookie. 

The step 3 page also uses the "none" domain and so continues with the second cookie since the linker has passed enough info along to set a matching cookie on the new domain. 

Step 4 (thank you on shopping cart) didn't have the linker script so GA created a third cookie because the shopping cart domain didn't match the "none" domain set by the linker on step 3.

I ran a test and, sure enough, my funnel started working again.  Pah.

The bottom line is that when I re-read the wording on the reference pages, I'd missed the subtle fact that you don't just tag the pages involved in the link but every page in your domain that are to be tracked when you do anything with third party domains to make sure your Google Analytics setuprecords every click.

I just discovered that Google Webmaster now allows you to register Google Sitemaps in a variety of formats: RSS, Simple text or sitemap XML format.

This may not be exciting news to most but the simple text format makes life drastically simpler in terms of an entry point to creating a sitemap. 

I was about to fire up a text editor and some tunes to rip through a site to manually collect the page names when I realized that the find command in linux will spit out a carriage return separated list.  A quick

yielded the foundation of what I needed.  Note that backslashes used to escape special characters.  This gave me output as follows:

The last step was to use the substitute sed command to replace the ./ at the start of the string with the site name and pipe it into the sitemap.txt file:

In just a minute you can set-up an alert to keep a watch on your family's internet exposure with Google Alerts.

I heard about some changes on the radar for Facebook or maybe MySpace yesterday to protect children online by requiring their parents to register and it reminded me that I was going to post a tip about Google Alerts.  

When the name of one of your family members or your business appears on a blog, in the news, in a video or even in a newsgroup, you can get a daily summary of those listings.  I use it for my business and my running site to make sure I know what people are saying, if anything at all.  In most cases it is a blog somewhere and I leave a comment thanking them for the feedback or offering an answer to a question or a problem they encountered using my site.

You could easily use the same approach to monitor your children's names to protect their online identity.  If you see something they have done or someone else has posted about them that you think could be a problem, you can take action early before it gets to be a bigger problem.

How it works:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts
2. You will need a Google account to set this up so it may prompt you to create one at this point
3. For search terms put the search term you want to track in quotes e.g. "adam howitt"
4. For type, select "comprehensive" to make sure you get a broader insight across video, blogs etc.  If you only care about blogs you can just select that
5. Set "how often" to daily for a daily email
6. Enter your email

Easy huh?  The only challenge may be a common name or that you have the same name as someone else with a lot of activity on the internet.  You can minimize mistaken identities by adding extra qualifiers to your search e.g. "adam howitt" Chicago
Here I'm trying to broader mentions of my name by picking out those that mention the city where I live.  You can create as many of these as you need so in addition to geographical tips like "Chicago" I can use keywords related to the type of work I do or the activities I'm involved in.

Four years ago I began working with a content management system, DuoCMS, which was super flexible but the consequence was that the basic search engine optimization pieces could be missed when implementing anything other than a standard content block.  I developed a simple Search Engine Optimization spider to rip through pages of the site and generate a report of the meta data, keywords and titles on each page to help track down omissions.

Last October I started working in Analytics as an independent consultant and I see the demand for this kind of tool is certainly out there.  For that reason, I've added a slimmed down version to start at your home page and find the first 5 pages on your site linked from the home page.  It shows you the title, heading, meta description tag, meta keywords and finally a rudimentary keyword density analysis for the page to give you some ideas about what to use in your meta keywords.

The intro paragraph to the tool gives some optimization recommendations but it should be enough to lift most pages lacking in any of these areas from mid-google obscurity to a respectable first page placement for your selected keywords.  The exceptions are going to be where you are going after the most competitve keywords.  If you find yourself in that boat, use your title and meta tags to carve out a niche in that competitive space.  For example, if dog walking is massively competitive (2 million pages last time I checked), try to focus on your most profitable or rewarding area of your business which might be large breed dog walking (311,000 pages).  If you add your city to the title, in my case Chicago, you get down to 82,000 competing pages.

To try the tool on your website visit my consulting website at  www.adamhowitt.com and select resources in the top right.  You'll find the tool listed as SEO Preview Tool and can find some of my presentations and white papers freely available for download.  I recommend my Google Technology for Better Content presentation for anyone getting started with Google Analytics.