When building your online presence, you should make sure you set up analytics tools at the outset to see what works, find opportunities you’re missing, and fine-tune your website, SEO, and e-mails.

Setting up analytics on your website can be as easy as adding a free Google Analytics code to the pages of your website. And most e-mail service providers generate data and reports for each mailing that you send. The key is to get these analytics programs in place as early as you can so that you can use the data they generate to continually improve your online communications.

Fine-tune your website and SEO

Google Analytics is a free suite of analysis tools that’s widely used to capture and display information about how visitors are using your site. Using analytics, you can find out what’s appealing to your audience, pull them into your site, and get them to click.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, you can get a great overview of how your site is performing over time. Detailed reports let you drill down for more detailed information about every aspect of your site’s performance. And you can have Google Analytics e-mail you reports on a regular basis so you don’t forget.

Google Analytics will give you as much information as you want, or you can stick to the high-level analytics. To see more details on any report, just click the “view full report” link.

Reports that you should monitor regularly are the following:

• Dashboard – See whether the number of visits is going up or down, see a map of where your visitors come from, and see which pages are most popular.
• Visitors overview – See how many visitors you have and how much time they’re spending on your site, and see which browsers and connection speeds your visitors have to make sure your site is optimized for all your audiences.
• Traffic sources overview – See whether your visitors arrived at your site from searches, directly, or from links on other websites.
• Keywords – See which words visitors used on search engines to find your site, plus what they did once they landed on your site.
• Top content –  See which pages get the most traffic on your site.

Depending on your business, you may want to run additional Google Analytics reports. For example, you might want to know what country your visitors come from or what time they are visiting your site. Perhaps you’d want a visual representation of exactly where users are clicking on your web pages.

Improve your e-mail campaigns

After you send an e-mail blast, you should plan on analyzing the results using the analytics that most e-mail services provide to learn how your audience is responding to the communications you’ve sent.  You can see how many people opened your e-mail, and who they are.  You also can check which links generate the most interest, and which campaigns are most effective.

For each e-mail campaign, you should analyze the following:

• How many e-mails were sent, received, and bounced due to bad e-mail addresses
• How many people opened the e-mail, clicked on a link, forwarded your e-mail, and opted out or signed up
• Which links and graphics received clicks
• A comparison of this campaign and past campaigns to identify differences and the reasons for them

Taking a close look at e-mail analytics lets you spot trends that help you refine and improve your e-mail marketing plans. If you get too many unsubscribes, you might be sending your e-mails too often. If none of your graphics are getting clicked, many of your subscribers might have their images turned off and you should design your e-mails to rely less on images and more on text links. If your response rate for a particular e-mail was particularly good, you should see how it differs from less successful campaigns.

Test and refine

One of the great things about having a robust analytics solution in place is that you can test the results you get by updating your content or making multiple versions of your content. For example, you could take a look at which words are leading visitors to your site and create more content that concerns those keywords, and see whether that improves site traffic. You can create multiple versions of a single e-mail campaign and see which gets the most click-throughs. Or reorganize your site to remove pages that are rarely visited, or create stronger links to those pages.

The key is to take a look at analytics at least once a month, plus after every major website change or e-mail campaign.

We’re getting into the holiday spirit at Scott Design and wanted to share some free games we’ve created: Special Delivery, Snowbash, Snowflake Designer, and the Virtual Fireplace.

Special Delivery: Create your own holiday-themed web pages

Design and share your own one-of-a-kind holiday pages in minutes with Special Delivery. You can make a holiday page, send birthday wishes, invite friends to a party, or create a page just for fun. Upload your own photos, include music, select from beautiful backgrounds and borders, add animations, and write messages. It’s a free, easy, green alternative to traditional cards! Create your holiday greetings.

Snowbash: Can you stop the snowmen?

See how many snowmen your gingerbread man can get without harming the innocent pink bunnies in the award-winning Snowbash game, Best-of-Show at last year’s Silicon Valley ADDY awards. Play Snowbash.

Snowflake Designer: Design your own beautiful flakes

Select the number of branches, the shape of the crystals and their complexity, and watch as your snowflake grows right outside your window! Make some snowflakes.

Virtual Fireplace: May your days be merry and bright

Just because you’re stuck at your computer doesn’t mean you can’t gaze into the hypnotic flames of a crackling fireplace. Have fun decorating the mantle for the holidays, or just kick back and imagine the warmth! Curl up by the fireplace.

Happy Holidays!

We hope you have a lot of fun and hope you share your Special Delivery online greetings, as well as the games, with friends and family.

All our wishes for a wonderful holiday season!

Times are changing. And these times are certainly challenging. In a recession you need to know (and be able to articulate) exactly what you bring to the proverbial table. While banks and car companies are receiving the lion’s share of press coverage, most industries are feeling the pain. As I mentioned before, record companies are but one example.

Before the Internet, when all music came on pieces of plastic, the record companies controlled distribution. They had the warehouses to store the LPs, CDs, and tapes. They paid the trucking companies to ship them music to record stores around the country. Record labels were the only game in town. Downloads and file sharing have changed this forever and record companies need to redefine what benefits they offer their artists.

At the recent Adobe MAX 2008 conference. Eric Snowden, Sr. Creative Director at Atlantic records, gave an excellent presentation, “Atlantic Records: Connecting Fans with Bands.” which described some of the innovative ways Atlantic helps its artists turn casual listeners into fans.

What’s in it for the musician?

If you’re a musician, what benefit (other than prestige) do you get from signing with a major label?

The first thing you get is a team with a vested interest in your success. (Without being too naive about the beneficence of record companies, if you do well, they do well.) On this team you get people who have skills that you probably don’t. Just as most companies spend most of their time perfecting and producing their widgets, most musicians concentrate on making music, not on marketing themselves and ‘maintaining their brands.’

On the Web

The presentation focused on the web sites for two acts: T.I. and Paramore. T.I. is an rapper who has sold tons of CDs. Paramore is an “indie” band that just released its second album. Because T.I. and Paramore are at different stages in their careers, Atlantic’s strategies for marketing them are different: in brief, increasing community for T.I.’s fans and increasing access for Paramore’s.

Atlantic has given cell phones with cameras and Flip video cameras to all its artists so that they can upload their own candid photos and videos to their sites. This sort of behind the scenes access is what fans crave. Paramore is constantly blogging from the road.

Fans are encouraged to participate via forums and to contribute their own photos and videos. All user-generated content is tagged with paramore.net (to encourage others to visit the site).

On your phone

All Atlantic bands have mobile websites. These mobile web sites are not second-class citizens: Due to the restrictions of the medium, the content isn’t quite the same as the main sites, but there is the same priority given to mobile content. Chat, authorized and unauthorized photos. All designed to give fans instant access to the bands and to their communities.

On your desktop

Atlantic has also created an Adobe AIR application (i.e., a standalone desktop application based on Flash), FanBase, that features an audio player, chat room and a continuous feed of official and unofficial news, photos and videos from some of Atlantic’s top artists. FanBase allows fans to find out more news and information about their favorite bands without having to launch a browser.

Whether on the web, desktop, or phone, all of sites are designed to keep fans engaged and excited.

But, I’m not a musician …

While your widgets may not be as sexy as a slow dance ballad, businesses today need to connect with your ‘casual listeners’ and turn them into fans (and let them connect with each other). Who wouldn’t want to have fans? People who are truly excited about what you do and tell all their friends about how cool you are?

For instance, an online forum doesn’t just establish a sense of community. It could also allow your customers to help solve each others problems cutting down on your customer service costs. It can also be a great (and inexpensive) way to get real feedback on how your company and your products are perceived. Access and transparency can both help your bottom line.

The Webby Awards named the Web’s ten most influential political moments. From the first political campaign website in 1994 to the YouTube debates in 2007, the list shows how the Internet has evolved to become a means for individuals to participate in the election process and for politicians to connect with and mobilize voters. If you have time, watch David-Michel Davies, Executive Director for the Webby Awards, as he explores some of the top political web moments on ABC News. Davies examines changes as the internet replaced traditional media as the source of breaking news, and how news, once viewed one or two times on the TV, can be viewed millions of times on the Internet.

No, I’m not talking about grocery bags. I’m referring to two industries that got blindsided by the Internet: The music industry and newspapers.

On a very basic level, both of these industries made the same mistake: They assumed that they were selling actual physical items: pieces of plastic in the case of the music industry, and sheets of paper in the news industry. What they failed to realize was that they were really selling content: music and information. And because they failed to realize this, these industries are suffering.

Rather than develop their own ‘iTunes store,’ the music industry, which had always controlled the storage and distribution of physical LPs, tapes, and CDs, has sunk to relying on scare tactics and lawsuits against its own customers. Radio stations which used to introduce us to new music have been consolidated and homogenized by giant conglomerates, and are largely ignored by young music fans. MTV is more concerned with celebrity cribs and pimped out rides than it is with music.

Newspapers, which used to be our primary source of in-depth information and investigative journalism, have faced declining readership and revenues. Rather than investing in their brands and taking their content online, most newspapers have cut back their staff and rely more and more on syndicated content.

Newfangled solutions
In sharp contrast to the mainstream media, bloggers, internet radio stations, and other new media outlets offer an almost infinite variety of viewpoints and voices. Savvy musicians like Radiohead, Govt Mule, and Trent Reznor have left their big labels behind and are using the internet to develop their careers and connect with their fans in ways that fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

• Radiohead offered its most recent album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-think-its-worth download months before physical CDs were available in stores.
• Govt Mule? Never heard of them? They record all of their concerts and have sold more than 1 million downloads on their website.
• Zappa Plays Zappa are offering free concert downloads to everyone who buys a ticket to see them play: buy the ticket, see the show, and download it the next day.
• Trent Reznor has uploaded his songs and lets his fans create their own remixes. There’s also a Nine Inch Nails edition of the iPhone game, Tap Tap Revenge, for his fans. If you score above 150,000 points, you get entered in a drawing for a signed guitar and tickets to the NIN show of your choice.

So, what do YOU do?
Does your company make software, or do you provide ways for your customers to communicate more easily? Do you sell widgets, or are your widgets just a packaged form of something more basic? Once you figure out what your business really is, there’s no end to the innovative ways you can connect with your customers and expand your business.