We have switched to HTTPS (and why you should switch too)

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Hitsteps had HTTPS since beginning when we launch our service two years ago, but now it is default protocol for all new users. All new users who open hitsteps, they will automatically get forwarded to https version of our service. You can choose to view normal HTTP version if you would like to, after you logged in, but that would be your own choice (and we won’t ask you why!)

HTTPS sites will have extra boost for their ranking, it is not some myth SEO science, it is directly quoted by Google’s official blog. It is a rare thing that Google tell businesses how to improve their SEO,  and we are glad that Google announced this one publicly, as it is for goods of our clients, YOU and help have a safer web overall.

over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.
Quoted by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes in Google’s blog

so, did you get the hint? What are you waiting for!? contact your web hosting or developer and ask for HTTPS! If you are a hitsteps analytics user, please make sure HTTPS visitors tracking is supported in your current license to avoid missing any hits from being counted.

Hitsteps is faster than ever!

We have implemented few layer of optimization as well as active CDN networks in more than 33 countries around the world.

Our tracking code javascript have been automatically moved to CDN networks and it will load faster for your visitors result in faster load time for your website.

Additionally, all of hitsteps dashboard content will be cached in a CDN just near your location as well as your own browser, so you can expect very fast switching between sections of dashboard.

No matter where you are from, CloudFlare service will detect your location and serve our website to you at fastest speed possible.

Be careful, it is fast. don’t drink and analyze!

Web Analytics Whitelabel API

We are ready to expand and partner with be your new partner. Hitsteps have a new set of API functions that allow you to control almost everything which is related to your whitelabel brand and users under your whitelabel.

Our API command set is in PHP but it get input as POST return all data as JSON which make it up for a peaceful integration with almost every programming languages.

Here is list of commands we are currently offering (As of May 2015): Token based authentication, Search Account by Email, ID or Tracking API Key, Get account info, Get API Key from URL, Get list of tracking websites, Get list of accounts, Change email and password of users, Create a new account, Add a new website for tracking, Activate trial, Activate License for a specific duration, Convert licenses, get list of available plans, Get last 7 days pageviews and visits of websites, get auto-authenticated link to all report pages.

We have a full set of plugins we offer for WordPress and Joomla which we can rebrand them at your request. Are you ready? drop us a hint!

Hablamos Español!

Hola! We welcome a new language to join hitsteps list of languages! We officially support spanish language now.

This change has been applied automatically to all of our spanish speaking customers. You can change dashboard language using a dropdown box which we have put at bottom left of our homepage.

We have went ahead and applied multi-language support for our WordPress plugins, yes that is correct! Now you can have our chat widget and statistics widget in spanish language.

These widgets have ability to auto-detect your visitors location and show proper language to them. So chat interface will be in Spanish language for those who are in spanish speaking countries, German to german speaking countries and English to rest of world. or you can manually set language for them in WordPress Admin Dashboard -> Appearance -> Widgets

Must Have WordPress Real time Stats Plugin

When basic web pages started appearing decades ago, there was not many websites. There was not any way to track visitors of a website, and there was absolutely not enough data and technology about IP Address location and User-Agent and other information of a visitor. Actually All websites were just texts!

first-websiteAs web advanced further, Images appeared and websites changed from basic text to programmed pages. This programmed pages could count number of visits each page have. It grow further and they started logging more information such as IP Address, time of visit, Referrals and URL of the page.

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Many years goes by, but server-side programmed analytics options only cover that base area! they didn’t change a bit. Nowadays, some websites get more bot and scrappers visit their website than a human do, and guess what? this ancient loggers track those bots and rendering a useless analytics data (to name, AWStats)

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When WordPress appeared, there was many good options available, some provided a basic counter, some provided better Interface to understand data and some went further and mix all this data together to get something out of it, yet, it was not complete! They all miss some information, none of options were complete and all of them were tracking those spiders and bots!
Yes, even Google Analytics track those spammers and bots and yet, it is not even a real time analytics.

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That’s why we created hitsteps analytics. we log all of this data, remove those who are appeared in daily list of spammers, bots and scrappers, analyze those data and provide you webmasters with real time data of what happening at your website at a very detailed visitor level, including heatmaps for clicks and integrating a live chat system to it, so that you can follow each of your visitors steps in your website and guide them by typing to them and receiving response back!

We packaged extract all possible data from a single hit! and provide them to you in a clean and easy to use interface, which is not confusing! You don’t need to go and follow long wizards to just generate a report showing you popular pages of your website! you just click on Popular pages and you can see number of hits each page get.

You post an article and instantly, you can see how visitors are responding to this article. It can be addictive, don’t complain we didn’t tell you!

You can install Hitsteps Ultimate Analytics WordPress Plugin and follow registration steps to get it activated and running in no time. get it now, it is free!

Realtime Campaign Funnel Conversion Tracking

Advertisement in popular networks such as Facebook Ads, Bing Ads as well as our beloved Google Adwords isn’t cheap! So you are spending a lot of money on advertisement with different keywords or in different networks, How do you manage and optimize the outcome?

We have provided campaign tracking, which allow you to know which of your keywords are getting best outcome among different ad networks. You can use this campaign tracking for everything else, but now we are going to have a look at it from Advertisement point of view.

Fortunately, All ad networks have a decent campaign Conversion tracking built-in. However, I can be very time consuming to open them all separately and have a look at figures and trying to find out what is actually going on! Some ad networks don’t even have Conversion tracking.

In Hitsteps, You can define your desired Goals pages. Set a default goal value (or you can modify goal value in real-time using javascript) and then connect that Goal to a Campaign landing page, It is that simple!

Once you have configured it, you can monitor all of your campaigns in real time.

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It doesn’t end there, you can see list of visitors who just landed on your campaign, but never made it to goal page. You can also see list of visitors who successfully made it to goal page.

It allows you to see list of your campaigns returns on investments (ROI) all in one page.

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Google Adwords and most other ads networks, doesn’t provide it real-time, but we do it in real-time. It can be very addictive, we have warned you!

Get your hitsteps account and start figuring out what is really happening with your ads!

How flexible is hitsteps web analytics? Unleash power of The Labels

Old days, web analytics were very simple. If they show your daily pageviews and number of visitors, you would be satisfied. But nowadays, those are called web statistics. so what is web analytics actually? Web analytics process your visitors information and give you more detailed information from exact same data. We now calculate bounce rate, we track clicks to generate heat maps, we track every single page views to make a detailed visitor browsing history in your website and keep them all in visitor’s profile.

Each web analytics service, have a certain major features point, what if you need something that is not there?

It is why we have introduced “Labels”, You can access labels in your dashboard menu, but lets have a look at what is that exactly?

Labels basic function is to add a customized colored label for each profile. so, to make it searchable, and to make it easy to understand. but in same time, it also analyze each labels separately.

As a result, for example, you can have hitsteps track everyone who visit your product checkout page, add a label to visitor profile with your defined name or color, and generate graphs for that label and notify you when this label is triggered via Email, Google Hangout and Desktop Notification.

There are many filters that we cover for labels. You can trigger it based on following values: IP Address, Visitor name, keyword searched, first referer, referer, first URL visited, URL visited, Page title visited, Browser, OS, Country, Region, City, Tag, Screen Width, Screen Height, Language, Java and Flash. These values can be mixed together!

So, you can define it in a way if a visitor from USA, who his first referer was from google adsense visit checkout page from product listing page, trigger the label and notify you. You will have the graph driven for it, and you get notification, with with help of our live visitor chat feature, you might make use of this trigger and contact your customer and seal the deal!

Top 10 WordPress Plugins for every WordPress sites

There are thousands of plugins to install for WordPress platform, making it a hard decision to decide which plugin is really a must-have. We have analyzed and ran a survey on our customers and publishing list of plugins that every website running WordPress must have.

1. Hitsteps Ultimate Web Analytics

Since our base of survey was our own users, so obviously they all mentioned they cannot run a website without Hitsteps, we second that! It pack most important web analytics features in a simple and unified user interface, allowing you to see list of online visitors, click on them and see pages they see in your website, see click heatmaps and even start a chat with your visitors.

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress out of the box is already quite a good platform for SEO but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! Improve your WordPress SEO, Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin.

3. Visual Composer

Visual Composer is Commercial Drag and Drop Frontend and Backend Page Builder Plugin for WordPress. You will be able to take full control over your WordPress site, build any layout you can imagine – no programming knowledge required. Moreover, now you can choose either work on a backend or move your page building process to frontend and instantly see changes you make.

4. AddThis

Traditionally known as the “sharing tool”, AddThis has taken website tools to the next level through the creation of recommended content and conversion tools while also streamlining and evolving their suite of social tools, including sharing and following buttons. AddThis provides the best sharing, social, recommended content, and conversion tools to help you make your website smarter.

5. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

6. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox has been created to give you peace of mind that your blog is backed up on a regular basis. Just choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and kick back and wait for your websites files and a SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox! Keep your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes with this sleek, easy to use plugin.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

8. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. It is not just another contact form plugin!

9. Wordfence Security

Wordfence starts by checking if your site is already infected. Wordfence do a deep server-side scan of your source code comparing it to the Official WordPress repository for core, themes and plugins. Then Wordfence secures your site and makes it up to 50 times faster.

10. TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. It includes 15 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen. .

5 Rules for a Successful Campaign

We all do campaigns from time to time, some might be successful and some might feel like waste of resources. Question is, how to get most out of every campaign we run?

To answer this question, we need to study our current customer base. What make them use our service/product? More importantly, what problem are we solving?
It must be main focus, if you have no idea what your customers are looking for, then stop right now and use services like SurveyMonkey to ask this question from your customers. Make them engage with your survey by offering something of value once they fill up the survey form.

Once you know your customer base, now it’s time to analyze your campaign source. Is your campaign targeting your existing customers? Then you already know what they are looking for. Go ahead and get most of your result by offering them a new feature, discount or something they all are looking for.

Are you targeting new customers? Then you must go back and see what problem are you solving for your current loyal customers. New customers will most likely have those problems and you’ll be able to help them. Put focus on what you can solve for them.
Make it look big result yet easy to achieve. Make them want to try your product and see if it work for them.

Now, where to run this campaign? If you are targeting your current visitors, then of course, you can run campaign in a frame in your website or use services such as MailChimp to blast email to them (make sure they agree to receive promotional emails, nobody likes spam)

If you are going to tagger target new customers, where is better than Facebook ads?
You might say Google AdWords, but that depends on your competitor. Try your keywords in Google AdWords and see how much is price of your keywords to be appear in homepage.
If that’s very expensive, just forget about Google AdWords. Competition is very high and you’ll lose more than you earn. You might try Microsoft ads system as an alternative where there are less competitors and take it as your advantage.

But Facebook ensure that your ads will be seen, commented or shared among users, thus you’ll get more exposure. Make sure your target correct audience. Try to guess which interests are more likely to attracts your specified audience. Try to narrow down your audience, so that you get more quality exposure. You don’t want people who like vintage gadgets to see your high end product ads!
Try to run few ads and see which text attract more customers.

You’ll need a SEO optimized landing page to bring those users in. It must be as attractive as your homepage, and it must have very clear call to action button. Make sure keywords the is main problem for your users which you are solving, are bold and repeated over.
These way you get some chance to earn organic free clicks from Google and beat all those competitors who are paying expensive funds for their ads.

Lastly, you’ll need to track this incoming and existing visitors. You never can guess why your visitors are not converting unless you track their behavior and see in which step, visitors are dropping. Hitsteps offer real-time web analytics dashboard so that you can watch them as they switch pages, as well as campaign tracking so the you can see how many entered your landing page and went as far as registration page, as far as add to cart page and so on. Just sign up for your free account and put tracking code in each of your pages.

Now you are fully equipped for a campaign success. Run your ads, monitor your audience and pages where visitors are dropping, optimize those weak area, keep changing your ads until you get best outcome and lastly, don’t forget about interacting with comments people leave in your Facebook ads and posts.

Google Chrome is still leader in browsers war

It was not long ago when all of us web developers were screaming and pulling out our hairs over Internet Explorer!

Those days are gone! According to latest updates, Internet Explorer share on browser usage is falling more and more each month. It’s only Advantage is being built in into Windows computers. New version of Internet Explorer 10, is not a bad browser at all, but it’s name still remind us of those sleepless nights trying to fix that small yet big problem in Internet Explorer. We hope that Microsoft’s new browser, Spartan Browser, can come into market as a brand new and bugless browser.

According to Hitsteps Analytics, Google chrome is now leader in Browsers war owning more than half of the market. Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer have an equal usage rate which is slightly less than Google Chrome. Google Chrome being fast and updated regularly with latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies, make it popular among users and developers. We hope Spartan browser don’t fall short in this war.

It is very sad to see Opera browser still couldn’t gain any popularity. Recently, Opera ditched it’s own Presto engine in favor of Webkit (used by Google Chrome and Safari) to be able concentrate more on GUI and other aspects of browsers, however, this decision didn’t improve any of it’s ranks in browsers war.

Hitsteps analytics monitor type of devices such as Desktop, Tablet and Mobile phone, therefor we can give following statistics about users device. as you can see, Desktop have biggest rate among our users.

Will Google Chrome stay leader in browsers war? It’s likely to stay leader and we hope so.

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