I had a recent request on how to setup a funnel in Google Analytics. If you’ve missed by first post on some tips for Google Analytics first check that out. With most websites today there is some portion of the site that is event and not page based, meaning you have some workflow on the page based on Javascript. If this is the case you’ll want to fake a page view instead of an event in order to entirely use it in funnels and goals.

A personal recommendation is actually to use both, goals and funnels. The key a funnel is that you need to have successive steps that occur in some order. With regards to metrics tracking this is absolutely needed, but typically you may have 1-2 total funnels with many steps in your site versus goals where you could have 10-15 single goals. For Registry Stop we’ve structured our site so that our earlier stage goals become the same as steps in later stage funnels. For us in almost all cases the first part of the funnel is the visit, the second is registering for an account. We do have independent goals for visits and registrations as well, but we do not have funnels on those goals.

At a recent meetup I talked a bit about how I’d been using blog posts on other blogs, both free and paid for as a primary user acquisition tool. I was very shocked, when several were surprised and curious on the method for this. In tech startups coverage is common, but its usually just that press, not paid for press. I must say I love how the tech community doesn’t force people to pay to get the word out, but it is very much a competition; that might be just as much work as paying.

In contrast the wedding industry is very much a pay to play space. If you give some money you can get some attention.

In a couple of various places I’ve seen light requests of how to put autocomplete in for a Django web application. Here’s a really light weight version with a view and autocomplete functionality using:

from django.utils import simplejson
def autocompleteModel(request):
    search_qs = ModelName.objects.filter(name__startswith=request.REQUEST['search'])
    results = []
    for r in search_qs:
        results.append(r.name)
    resp = request.REQUEST['callback'] + '(' + simplejson.dumps(result) + ');'
    return HttpResponse(resp, content_type='application/json')

For the jQuery autocomplete and call:

For this third part on the series I’m going to dive into what people perhaps most traditionally think of with marketing startups, online advertising. Online advertising can work, but its definitely not cheap and it does take a good about of pounding at it to know what works. I’m going to break up the three key types of advertising, based on the way I’ve utilized them and evaluated them recently.

For the second part of the series we’re going talk a bit about finding the influencers in certain industries. We’ll get to more traditional means that people think of later, and if you’ve missed our first post that dealt mostly with SEO make sure you check it out first. In most online ventures there’s a key set of influencers, often times these are blogs or podcasts. Blogs can receive a huge readership, which are often very loyal.

This is the first of a 4 part series on marketing for startups/bootstrapped companies. Much of the learnings from this are a result of experiences with Registry Stop. The key to each of these is going to be measuring and reacting to your efforts. If you need help on this, check out previous post around metrics for startups.

So without further adieu, on this initial post of the series we’re going to talk a bit about the biggest free way to get traction and traffic for your startup. The best way to aquire free traffic to your site, is to ensure your site is optimized for search engines or more commonly SEO. Sure you can pay $3 for your ad to show up on certain keywords, but why spend the $3 per click if you can simply ensure you’re the first search result. There are slightly different methods for this for each search engine, but we’ll cover a broad set of items to pay attention to.

Most all development projects start with a hunch at a problem. Seldom do you have the opportunity of enough resources prior beginning building to fully vet all assumptions and define all requirements. Or at the very least if you do, you’re not in startup mode. For this reason the very first thing you build is often not the perfect solution. If you’re lucky its a start at a solution, and even if its not, if you’re close users will tell you what they want.

What this leaves you with is a couple of key items. First is get to the minimum product you can to vet your idea. Most commonly known as Minimally Viable Product. This should be the minimum product you need to vet your idea, and add some form of value for users. Once you’ve created this, don’t refine, don’t keep iterating, launch. More time won’t let you perfectly solve the problem, getting it in front of users will help you solve things perfect.

Metrics are obviously a very valuable area for start-ups, if you don’t believe in metrics and think you’re idea wins just because its great then you better start searching for your next day job. Dave McClure has done a great talk on start-ups several times over, you can check out a video and corresponding slide show at:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5336115 http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

And besides, it’s a pirates acronym, so it’s got to be great. But translating these from concept to actual technology metrics is also something that needs discussion. You can’t exactly say we’re going to use Google Analytics and let it magically tell you everything, furthermore all of the web developers out there talking about tweaks on Google Analytics do little to actually tell you what you need to know.

Google analytics is great out of the box, the basic tracking tag on every page will do a lot for you. Unfortunately most people never get beyond this. There are two key items with tracking that you can do that will let you get a bit further. There’s also plenty more on the reporting side, but we’ll get to some of that later. On the tracking side the first item is event tracking. This is perhaps most commonly used for tracking various Javascript events that occur during a visit, however it can also be a bit more flexible towards tracking values. A very simple example might be:

Or a real life example of this, might be on a FAQ screen, clicking the link to an anchored section of the page:

But events by their sheer nature give a bit more flexibility with that value field. In the case of a user sending a message

Google’s documentation is pretty good when it comes to how to create an extension that opens a full page and has large functionality. But if you’re more interested in transforming an existing bookmarklet into an extension there’s not great quality on it. The steps themselves are really quite simple. The big key that’s not heavily documented is creating a background html that creates an event listener. After the jump is a full sample that would then call your javascript to activate the bookmarklet: