One of the things I look at when I get a fresh new site to analyse is the linkstructure. All sites, and I repeat: all sites, should have a basic structure that looks like a simple tree diagram:

All pages link to one or more pages below them. This is the basis of your site's structure. I don't say it's the only structure, you could also interlink between different categories or products, but it's the main structure. It has the following advantages:

Read more: Is your site too deep? Bad designed link structure? Test it! »

Today Google officially launched the real-time widgets for use on the Google Analytics dashboards. Awesome feature that can make real-time analytics a bit more useful than it was before. These are the new widgets (the second row) you can use to visualize real-time stuff:

The great news is: you are able to put filters on these widgets... really awesome. Google has a more extensive description about all new possibilities, but here's an example I would use these features for.

Read more: Create a real time error monitoring Google Analytics dashboard »

A while ago I decided to test some services that could speed up my site worldwide. I took some steps that decreased my page load time immediately:

• Installed the W3 Total Cache plugin (I'm a WordPress user) to set cache headers, minify CSS and JS, etc.
• Installed the Smush.it plugin to optimize my images without lossing quality (lossless)
• Transferred my site to a new hosting provider/solution

This first move was already a good one, page load times decreased and my site felt fast. But, as I could see in Google Analytics the page load times outside the Netherlands (where my hosting provider hosts) weren't as good as I hoped. So I took the next step by adding a CDN to my site. This was the situation before any optimization:

Read more: What CloudFlare and MaxCDN did for my page load times »

Great news, my buddy Tim Bakker told me Google introduced a new Change History feature. And when you login to your analytics account you will see this message:

With this new feature you will be able to see which account changed what to your account. This includes:

• Accounts: created, deleted
• Users: added, deleted, changed
• Goals: created, deleted, changed
• Filters: created, deleted, changed

In one word: awesome. From now on you can see if the requested goal changes are processed by your Web Analytics consultant. Or who applied a filter that blocked all data from a specific profile.

Read more: Google Analytics introduces a Change History log »

Just a quick post about the retargeting (remarketing) option in Google Analytics. July '12 Google launched a new feature in Google Analytics that made it possible to retarget a specific group of visitors. You only need to change this line in the Google Analytics Tracking Script from:

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

To:

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js';

The script will be loaded from the doubleclick domain and a third party cookie is set. That cookie can be used to target visitors on other sites that have been on your site.

Read more: Google Analytics Retargeting for AdWords and AdBlock software »