As we continue to explore Google Analytics, one of the key areas of attention is Referring Sites. These are the sites that sent traffic to you. This is a critical statistic for understanding where your visitors are coming from so that you can gauge the effectiveness of your advertising and social media campaigns. Most of the time, you can tell by the address what the site is, like LinkedIn.com or even plus.url.google.com. But what about t.co? If you're like me, t.co represents a significant amount of traffic.

Last week, Twitter acknowledged that their systems had been breached, and that at least 250,000 Twitter users may have had their account information shared with the hacker. According to their blog post, Twitter revealed that the attack may have revealed usernames and email addresses, along with encrypted/salted passwords. While Twitter immediately secured the breach and took steps to reset the passwords for every affected account, the event should still serve as a warning to all: Your Social Media Accounts Are Vulnerable!

More and more business owners have started to recognize that Google is no longer providing all of the keyword data that it used to within Google Analytics. If you monitor your website analytics regularly, you may have noticed that your Keyword report is showing more (not provided) than other keywords. This has search engine marketers and business owners more than a little concerned! Why aren't these words being provided, and what can we do about it?

It is critical in every business that there be metrics in place to measure every possible aspect of the business so that we can gauge whether or not those aspects are getting better or worse. The more accurate and easier to obtain the metrics are, the better. Businesses need to be able to see, at a glance, information like how many units were sold for given period, what the profit margin was, what the business costs were, how many new customers, and so on. The business also needs to be able to measure the effectiveness of certain activities, including sales and marketing. For internet marketing, what we typically want to look at is how many people visit our website, where they came from, and what they did once they got there. For that, we need Google Analytics.

Bounce Rate is a term that you may have seen on your website's Google Analytics report, or heard about from your web designer when talking about search engine optimization. The importance of bounce rate as a measurement of how effective your website and marketing materials are cannot be understated. It's important enough that we will review what bounce rate is and what you can do to improve your site's "stickiness" for better SEO and more traffic conversion.

According to Google Analytics, Bounce Rate is the percentage of bounced visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. Bounce Rate is different from Exit Rate, which refers to visitors who leave your site from a particular page when coming to that page from somewhere else within our site.

If you're a small business website owner, you may often find yourself away from your computer. As long as you have your iPhone with you, you can use the following apps to monitor your website and social media platforms and stay in touch with your business.