Know the Basics
This may seem obvious to some, but to others, especially those viewing analytics for the first time, the jargon may be a bit foreign. If you focus on these basic but important areas then you will be off to a good start in understanding most of what is reported.

• Arrival method: How are people finding you? Analytics breaks traffic down into three areas : Direct Traffic, Search engines (Paid and Non Paid) and Referring sites (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Understand why traffic is being driven or not being driven via one of these areas. 

• Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who went to one page only and left your site. The higher this number, the more questions you should be asking about your site’s performance. 

• Content: What pages do people spend the most time on? Are your product/services pages attracting any visits? What about your blog? 

• Keywords: What keywords are people finding your site with? Are the keywords relevant and converting? 

• Location: Where is the traffic coming from? If you are local and receiving national attention then you might review your geo-targeting.

Create the Dashboard
Dashboards help you visualize and track trends on every level of your business and to align activities with key goals while keeping you on top of vital statistics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In simpler terms, it is there to communicate the performance of one or more metric (starting with the metrics mentioned above). With colored bars and nice graphs trending over time, dashboards can be easy to look at and help you gauge your website’s overall performance.

Set up Reporting
We’re all very busy just trying to keep our heads above water. But if we’ve taken the time to understand a few metrics and have gone as far as setting up a dashboard then we might as well take that final plunge and set up automated reports. It’s the old saying in business, “you cannot manage what you cannot measure”. 

Therefore, automated reports delivered to your email inbox weekly or monthly will establish a good habit of viewing your Analytics data.

Start KISSing Your Website
Once you become a KISSing expert in Analytics turn your attention to the website itself. Remember most of your site’s visitors have very little patience and can be easily distracted by all the jazz in your website that leads to nowhere. Functionality, relevance and immediacy are key touch points of a site.  When it comes to web design, layout and content, your site has to KISS and tell! Use professional looking fonts and standard font sizes that are easy on the eye and make sure your site navigation easy to use and easy to find! Killer looks, per se, may kill your site so Keep It Simple!

To clarify, a profile allows you to:

1. Track a single web property (or specific pages from an existing web property)

2. Track multiple independent web properties (www.domain1.com and domain2.com) owned by an individual or organization

3. Determine which data from your site appears in the reports

But why would I want to set up another profile, you ask? Here are just some of the benefits of profiling:

• Improve and control the flow of information about your website
• Manage multiple web properties
• Segment your visitors
• Set up reporting access for a variety of users
• Create custom reporting
• Reveal trends
• Track various, specific outcomes with goals
• Obtain information on internal search habits
• Establish a back up for your main profile

Below is great overview provided by Google of how profiles can work with a personal Analytics account and a company account (ex. googleanalytics.com) shared with co-workers.

account-profile-relationship

Adding a profile is the easy part. The more challenging task is configuring your profile so that it is pulling in the appropriate data. There are a variety of options to make your account runs more efficiently so make sure you do the following:

• Specify the Default Page option
• Apply AdWords cost data
• Consider adding the Site Search option
• Set up at least one goal
• Filter your results to set up different properties that will affect your reports
• Add other users whom you want to have access to this profile only

Here’s a few other important notes to keep in mind…

- When setting up an Analytics account, it is a best practice to make the first profile for a property the “master” profile. A master profile should have no filters so that it contains ALL historical data since tracking began. Once this is set up then leave this profile alone!

- Make a back up of the master profile. There should be common sense with no further explanation needed. Especially since it is very easy to accidentally hit the “delete” link by mistake. And once a profile is deleted, the profile data cannot be recovered.

- When you set up a new profile, tracking begins as soon as the tracking code is installed on the website and a visitor’s browser loads a page.

- When you add an additional profile from an existing website with its own profile, then the additional profile will not contain the historical data that you see in the first profile.

Setting up profiles rewards your effort with great customer insight. You can then leverage that insight to your advantage by developing better content or redesigning your page flow. The end result will help you market your product/service to your prospect-turned customer.

So, in the end, for all the negativity that profiling in the “real world” receives, this is one area of your life where profiling actually does some good.

This involves three simple steps:

1. Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals within each set of your reports. Example:  ”email sign-up”, “newsletter sign-up”, or “article ABC download.”

2. Identify up to ten pages in a defined funnel. Funnels are optional, but defining one shows you where visitors drop off during the path to completing a goal.

3. Assign a value for the goal. Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, per visit goal value and other important metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. For example, if you are able to close 10% of your prospects/leads that are generated via your contact us page and your average transaction is $500, then you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your “Contact Me” goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your “email sign-up” goal.

Web analytics allow you to define a dollar value to any goal you define. When you do not assign goal values then you are omitting key data. Goal values give a holistic view of which traffic sources perform the best. Some common examples of defining goals are lead generation forms or purchased products. Secondary goals could be posting a comment or entering a contest.

You can then measure the real performance of traffic coming to your site by using the goal conversion rate, which essentially treats all goals equally by adjusting the weight for each goal against the per visit goal value. You may discover that your email campaigns have a higher conversion rate compared to your PPC campaigns but a lower per visit goal value.

In the case of pay per click (PPC) campaigns, goal values can help you determine the true value of each active campaign. Comparing revenue per click against cost per click is essential information for determining how to best optimize your PPC spending. You could be under spending on a PPC campaign that has a low average conversion rate but high revenue per click and, vice versa, over spending on a PPC campaign that has a high average conversion rate but low revenue per click, and you wouldn’t know unless you actually assign goal values.

Above all, assigning values helps you to showcase the dollar value of your site to the website’s stakeholders. There’s no value in saying, ‘Our site has 355 newsletter signups, 260 comments, 20 leads generated from submissions, 900 social shares, 76 RSS subscriptions, and 286 account registrations.’ The true value is in saying all this, and adding the all-important rider: ‘….This represents $50,000 in value to our business, up 20% from last month.’

First, cut through the geeky jargon, learn what Analytics reveals and decide, not dither, if you want your website to do more for you and, more importantly, your visitors. Analytics gives you tons of vital statistics about your site – for free – which can be leveraged only by understanding it and following up with the right decisions.

Spending as little as an hour or two a month to understand and monitor Analytics reports can make a big difference on the bottom line. Focus your attention to the behavior of your most important pages, such as the contact us page. If Analytics tells you visitors are exiting this page at a high rate then it may be because the page looks more like a tax return versus a simple form fill. Evaluate the marketing campaigns and determine which ones are bringing value or draining your budget. You have the means to find out. But the end goal is to take corrective action.

What you decide now will pay off in real time with long-term results. Speed, however, can be a double-edged sword and one has to be careful in exercising it while making decisions. For example, your Analytics reports shows that your marketing campaign hasn’t yielded a single conversion in the last four hours. Does that mean it is gate-closing time for this campaign? Of course not. You can’t jump to conclusions. Consider various related factors such as multiple metrics and dig deeper into the numbers. Metrics are not proxies for performance, and they tend to cast a spell on us. When is the data interesting, and when is it actionable? This needs to be addressed carefully before making decisions on your data. But once you do the decision making will be that much easier.

If you are not sure what the data is saying or how to take corrective action then leverage the plethora of online support out there complete with helpful screenshots, audio, video and straightforward recommendations to hand-hold you through the process. If you are questioning your data then chances are another website owner has probably already experienced the same question. Besides, everyone seems to have an opinion so see what the popularity does then trust your gut instinct.

Remember, web analytics is a developing language and one that is being taught to and learned by a growing population. With the rapid development of e-commerce coupled with the ever-expanding international exchange and cooperation, the need to understand the data and make decisions becomes more and more urgent if one is to succeed online.

Is Your Message Mixed?
Make the site’s goal loud and clear. If you are selling French perfumes online, push it to the forefront of the site, rather than splash images that do not call for measurable and tangible action.

Blend Your Design With Content
Too much design, too little content, is like gloss that ends up as gross. The content has to be populated the right way, across the shell, homepages, section pages and interior pages. Don’t be mesmerized by design, but don’t give it a cold shoulder either. Form should follow functionality, and not the other way round.

Ease of Navigation
How does your navigation link work? Is it easy to use or a potential trap for visitors? A visitor should not feel challenged. He should be able to go where he/she wants on your site, quickly and easily, period. Using a search box on the site is the way to go, to get your visitors to their product/service directly.

Do Not Ignore The Shopping Cart
There are a million shopping carts out on the web, so you should know how to pick and choose the right one with the right fit for your site. Default shopping carts are best avoided; always go for a branded shopping cart, to lend credibility and confidence to your purchaser. You cannot be too careful when it involves your customer’s money!

How to Remain in Style –  Always
On the web, today’s trends are passé tomorrow. It’s the perils of e-commerce evolution. So how do you retool your site’s design that might look archaic sooner than you think? Redesign your site? But it’s like a journey without end. The trick is to realign, not redesign. Think up ways to realign your site’s features with changing trends on the go.

Be Consistent
Everyone loves to experiment, but don’t throw consistency out the window! In the hands of a professional web designer, your site will wear a consistent look – standard formatting of fonts, links, colors, etc. This is lost when you do the edits or touch up the site yourself, banking on your rudimentary knowledge of simple HTML by adding new content pages. A small change leads to inconsistent formatting – which might put off a visitor.

You Have Got Mail
You may have experienced this before: Impressed by the touch and feel of a great looking site, you look to see up the owner’s phone number – and you get lost, making you wonder for a moment, that the customer (the site owner) may be in hiding! Don’t make the simple mistake of sending your prospects hunting for your contact. Put your phone number/contact details in a prominent position.

Cash in on Merchandising Opportunities
Never miss up on an opportunity to make that extra dollar. Merchandising opportunities abound for your website, such as cross-sell, multiple add-to-cart, and other direct call-to-actions.

Practicing the above, especially as you foresee future growth and create a larger bouquet of offerings, will get you on your way to becoming the successful, prosperous site you once thought you had.

In this context, Internet advertising has brought in some much needed respite to business owners when it comes to advertising. It is a clear mark up over traditional modes such as radio and television. The foremost of these is the availability of data for both advertiser and a publisher, the person who is hosting the advertising, as both are privy to the number of visitors that have been exposed to the advertisement (e.g. impressions) and the number of clicks on the advertisement. For advertisers advertising on a search engine, such as Google (the publisher), for example, then the AdWords interface will provide this data.

However, advertisers tend to be clueless when it comes to conversions such as leads, sales, sign-ups - actions that happen ON the site after the click. Regardless of the pricing model, whether it be CPM (cost per 1000 impressions), CPC (cost per click), or even CPA (cost model where the publisher gets paid only when a visitor performs a pre-decided action on the advertiser’s site), tracking conversions becomes an important piece of the puzzle.

So how does conversion tracking happen? Well, like everything else in the world of technology, it’s a matter of using code, in this case conversion tracking code. Conversion tracking code is usually generated by the publisher (i.e. AdWords) which the advertiser then integrates into the web page which confirms the action. For example, if the action is a newsletter sign-up, the advertiser would add the code on that page of his website which displays the “Thank you for signing up” message. The conversion tracking code would keep track of the number of times visitors went from a landing page to the thank you page.

In most cases, advertising may includes a third party - a neutral, impartial technology provider who hosts the advertiser’s ads or creatives, and keeps track of the number of visitors, clicks, bounces and conversions. The neutral party becomes a very important entity when a publisher is running campaigns of more than one advertiser and the advertiser is running campaigns on more than one publisher. In this case, the third party should ensure the integration of the code.

Tracking conversions thus, may dispel the notion of the skeptical advertiser mentioned above. From not knowing which half of the money spent on advertising is wasted, the advertiser may now concede, at the very least, to know which half was wasted.

The process of establishing website goals begins with identifying and then tracking specific events on your website. Alas, most analytics programs, Google specifically, give us the ability to track a wide variety of events visitors take on websites and then act on those results to improve upon your website’s performance.

The first of the two-step process begins with you, the site owner, asking questions in order to determine what event it is you would like to track. For example, if you have an e-commerce site then you would probably want to know how many sales were  generated last week or last month. That seems obvious. But, have you ever wondered how many people are clicking on Product A on the products page? For non-e-commerce related sites, you might ask yourself whether people are opting-in your recurring e-newsletter or downloading the latest e-newletter in PDF format.

Event tracking really depends on the specific goals and needs of your site, and what you want to track. Nonetheless, you should be tracking some type of event because when a visitor interacts with a video player or game on your website, no pageview is generated, thus making it difficult to measure.

Here are some common events that are tracked that do not generate pageviews:

• Clicks on links that take the visitor to another site
• Clicks on an image or button (ex. Facebook icon or ‘shop now’ button)
• Banner Ad clicks
• File downloads (ex. PDF)
• Page widgets
• E-commerce activity/shopping cart purchases
• Member functions (ex. tracking new member sign-ups, log-ins, etc.)
• Flash, Ajax and Javascript related contentPlay button on a video or audio

Tracking specific events, the second part of the process, is relatively easy. If you are using Google Analytics, then all you need to do is call the _trackEvent() method each time you want to register an event such as how many clicks to an external link or video downloads.  For example, if you want to track how many people clicked on the “follow us” Twitter icon/link on your web page then the code would look something like this:

The “Home”, “Follow” and “Twitter” identifiers represent the category, action and label so you can view the specific results for this event right in your Analytics account. It’s really that simple. For more information on setting up event tracking in Google Analytics visit:  http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

Remember, event tracking is there to help improve your overall online sales and marketing goals and allow you to have a better understanding of your visitors’ actions. Now, isn’t this a resolution worth sticking with? ]]> http://42rules.com/robsanders/2010/01/19/is-event-tracking-one-of-your-new-years-resolutions/feed/ http://42rules.com/robsanders/2009/12/13/google-personalizing-going-real-time-is-good-for-seo/ http://42rules.com/robsanders/2009/12/13/google-personalizing-going-real-time-is-good-for-seo/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:01:40 +0000 Rob http://42rules.com/robsanders/?p=91 I saw the writing on the wall in February 2007 when Google began personalizing search results based on a user’s search history. But back then, a user had to log in to their Google account and opt in to enable Google to track their web history. Now personalized search is widespread, regardless of your log in status.

• Establish and maintain a social network “status”
• Increase the number of followers or fans
• Communicate with more frequency
• Create original content & update older posts
• Link to micro-blogging services (ex. TwitterFeed)
• Follow solid SEO best practices
• Encourage site visitors to react and share your content

Truth be told, the success of any web site will depend on more than just design. Besides, just having a web site isn’t good enough anymore. If a business is spending money on a web site, shouldn’t there be some talk about a return on investment? With no cookie cutter approach to count on, we can take a look at some guidelines for establishing goals to measure that return.

⁃ Before you even start the design and development of your web site, ask what you want to accomplish with your web site and what type of desired result you seek not only for you but also for your visitors.

⁃ Describe what you want to accomplish with as much clarity and detail as possible. If your goal is to provide information to the public or generate product brand awareness, don’t just state that. Write down exactly how you are going to provide information or generate product awareness. You should also state exactly how and when you will evaluate your progress.

⁃ Break your web site goal(s) into smaller, obtainable minor goals. For example, if you sell multiple products organized in multiple categories, then establish a goal for each category or each product web page. This will help identify areas of strengths and weaknesses on your way to evaluating your overall web site goal.

⁃ Establish goals you know you are actually capable of obtaining. If the goal is to generate new leads but you get very little site traffic, then set your sites low. Be realistic. It’s better to reach your goal regardless of how small than to not reach it at all. That will allow you to better determine what works or doesn’t work.

⁃ Set goals by time and/or importance into specified target dates. For example, if you are trying to sell products for the holiday season or communicating the latest product or service information to customers, then make sure you note your start and completion dates.

⁃ If your goal is to obtain new web site visitors and customers, then your site should be centered around the relevant keywords that new customers would use to search for your site.

Whether it’s increasing traffic, converting customers or just simply sharing information, having clear, established goals and objectives will prevent you from performing unnecessary analysis. It will also help you better understand your web site’s successes and failures and allow you fix and improve your web site. Otherwise, you will never be satisfied with the results regardless of the design.