Google Analytics | webstrategiesinc.com

May 24, 2010

1st Step to Online Success – Determine Your Goals & Metrics

Forrester Research recently published an article about the growth of web analytics stating that 74% of websites have some type of web analytics software installed on them. However, they also reported that (only!) slightly more than half of websites have customized their analytics software to track specific activities. This indicates a significant opportunity for many firms to improve their online marketing success.

As big fans of Google Analytics, a very sophisticated web analytics package provided free, we’re excited about the potential success of our clients by just defining online marketing objectives and configuring analytics to track performance against those objectives. We see all too often a basic web analytics installation without much thought put into specific goals or tactics to be tracked.

Lack of specific goals and tracking can lead to wrong decisions and wasted money, especially for those clients investing heavily in online marketing activities.

So, what to do?

First decide what you want to accomplish online? I don’t mean just the final outcome – online sales. Sure, that’s important but you also want to understand the ingredients that result in an online sale.

Identify those important ingredients.

Maybe it is amount of time on a product page. Or, how many people who visit a product page put that product into the Shopping Cart. You may also want to simply speculate about what you think the critical ingredients are for online conversions (Be careful, here. Only speculate as a means to begin collecting data so you can begin making real decisions). Once you’ve determined your specific goals or steps, configure your web analytics to track performance of those goals and steps. By doing so, you can begin to identify what to test and how to improve your online conversion rate.

Take for example a brick-mortar retailer with hundreds, maybe thousands of products. They are making meaningful investments online doing search marketing, email marketing, some affiliate marketing and working the social media sites. Naturally, the online goal for this retailer is to maximize sales while minimizing marketing costs. But first decide what to measure. This retailer will want to measure online activity by traffic source including navigation through the sales funnel. They might also want to track activity by product or product category. This could be some valuable data to improve the efficiency of their search marketing investments. Configure analytics to measure those things and begin documenting performance each week. After accumulating some data, this retailer can begin to identify opportunities for improvement and then begin a series of tests to determine how to improve online conversions.

In summary, make sure you have a good analytics package on your website – we recommend Google Analytics. It’s very configurable and it’s free. Then, determine the ingredients you think contribute to online conversions. Configure your analytics package to track those ingredients and begin documenting results. Once you have accumulated valid data, start testing. With this approach you’ll make very solid decisions about how to improve your online marketing.

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April 2, 2010

Tracking Offline Marketing Campaigns In Google Analytics

Filed under: Advertising, Offline Tracking, Web Analytics — Tags: google analytics, Offline Tracking — Chris Leone @ 7:33 pm

What makes online marketing so appealing is we can track every action and nearly every interaction on our website.

If you have an SEO program, we can show you how many visits you get for each keyword and how that traffic meets a desired objective on your site. If you run a PPC campaign, we can see the ROI for each individual keyword you target in your campaign – for example, bidding on “richmond widgets” has cost you $20 in clicks and given back $75 in revenue.

But even in 2010, businesses and brands are still putting money into offline marketing channels – be it radio, TV, or print. Fortunately, you don’t have to be left in the dark as to whether or not these campaigns are having a meaningful impact on your business.

The following is a simple, but a very powerful way to measure an offline campaign as it relates back to your website.

The inherent problem with offline campaigns is there isn’t a unique condition associated with the visitor once they land on your site. With online campaigns, Google Analytics has built in tracking to automatically segment visitors based on the condition with which they arrived – i.e. from pay-per-click, search engine, etc. Since there is no inherent condition for someone who saw your advertisement in the Sunday paper and then went to your site, we need to create a condition for them. Here’s a scenario:

You are the owner of Acme Widgets & Doodads, Inc. Your website is http://www.acmeproductsinc.com. Up until now, every advertisement you’ve run offline uses the acmeproducts.com web address. The issue here is when someone sees the advertisement and types acmeproductsinc.com in their browser, they automatically get dropped in the bucket with everyone else who directly visits acmeproducts.com. Regardless of whether they saw your advertisement, were referred to the site by a friend, saw it on a business card, or already knew the web address some other way, they all look the same in the data.

same2

This time around, you really want to see the effect of a new widget advertisement in this month’s trade magazine and how it impacts site traffic and online sales. So what do you do? You send them somewhere else.

Kind of…

As we already covered, giving everyone your standard web address dumps them into the very large category of Direct Traffic. To break away from this, you can implement a vanity URL in your advertisement. A vanity URL is nothing more than a separate web address that automatically redirects back to your primary site.

So for your widget advertisement, you advertise the URL UseAcmeWidgets.com instead of AcmeProductsinc.com. You have your web guys set it up so when someone visits this address, they automatically get redirected to acmeproductsinc.com.

vanity2

(Note: This is NOT sending them to a mirror site. They are seeing the same site at the same address – acmeproductsinc.com. They are simply passing through a different URL before arriving at the main site.)

The user experience hasn’t changed, but by passing them through the faux web address, ultimately sending them back to the main site, we can break down everything they do on the site and credit the advertisement for generating the traffic. When we redirect a vanity URL to your main site, we can add special tracking that makes Google Analytics process the data the way we want to see it. By creating this condition, we can then break down the data to only show those who passed through the vanity URL. This let’s you see how much revenue print advertisements contribute to your bottom line and by using the same technique with radio or TV (using a unique address in each case), you can compare conversion rate and see which has been most effective.

goal2

If you run an ecommerce site, you can tie it directly back to purchases and order value:

ecomm2 It’s a relatively simple method, but it’s very effective – so long as you have the right tools in the right place. The possibilities don’t end here as there are ways to dive deeper and deeper into time and geography. If for no other reason, this is a testament to the power of implementing an effective website with the proper web analytics in any marketing campaign – online or off.

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February 11, 2010

Simple Tips For Measuring Print Advertising

Filed under: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Web Analytics — Tags: google analytics, print advertising, Web Analytics — Neal Lappe @ 3:52 pm

In these lean times advertisers must ensure they get a good return on every advertising dollar spent. Print advertising is often the most difficult to evaluate impact but with a little thought, it becomes easy, especially if you are using your website the way you should.

Here’s an add I saw in the newspaper (yes, I still read the newspaper while having breakfast – it satisfies my need to always do more than one thing at a time). Finks Jewelers is a great jewelry store and this add is simple, elegant and tasteful. But, how will Finks know if it had an impact or if what they paid generated a reasonable return on investment. Notice in the ad they are using their standard home page url. They are also using their standard phone number. There’s just know way to determine if they get any phone calls or website visits from the ad.

"Newspaper Ad for Finks Jewelers"

Here’s a way to measure if the ad had an impact. Finks could:

1) Purchase a unique url – something like finkscharmset.com. Even if they didn’t create a unique landing page for this url within their regular website, they could code their web analytics to track how many people come to the site using this unique url. Additionally, they can

2) Purchase (or use) a unique tracking phone number and with the right technology, can get a report that tells them how many people called specifically from the ad. That’s how you can measure whether the ad has its desired impact – and best of all it is pretty inexpensive to do.

Finks likely spent a couple thousand on this ad, and that’s a meaningful enough investment to make sure they understand how it performed. With the right combination of phone tracking and/or web analytics, Finks can measure the impact and evaluate the frequency and method of future newspaper advertising.

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January 31, 2010

How To Include Only Specific Referral Sites In One Google Analytics Profile

Filed under: Web Analytics — Tags: affiliates, filters, google analytics — Chris Leone @ 5:18 pm

Here’s the scenario: You’re using Google Analytics and have been assigned the task of separating a slew of different traffic sources. This includes PPC, Organic, Direct, and Referral. The first three are very straight forward: a new profile with a basic include filter. However for referral, you need to get more specific. In this case, you want to breakdown individual affiliate referral sites. Once you’ve done that, you want to categorize them based on Daily Deal sites, coupon sites, etc.

You have a couple options. One option is to tag the URL’s using the utm method. This allows you to add extra information to the destination URL which then shows in the traffic sources report. Adwords already does this and Google has a great resource for generating them for your campaigns.

One drawback to this method is if you are running many campaigns, you would need to ask each individual affiliate to change the destination URLs for your ads. This could take a long time and could lead to plenty of user error. Another issue is after you’ve tagged the URL’s you need to create advanced segmentation to track them in your profile. Because of the way Google collects their data, you are unable to view certain metrics for advanced segments including Absolute Unique Visitors, Keyword Positions, Goal, Funnel and Benchmarking reports.

goalfunnel

Advanced Segmentation is convenient and I love it for breaking down data (especially historical data), but some of the above drawbacks have forced me to explore an alternate method for collecting and analyzing specific affiliate data.

If advanced segmentation won’t show me everything I need, I need to create a new profile and implement filters so I only see the data I came to look at. Here’s a step by step process to do just that:

1) Identify/categorize the specific sites you want to track. Work with the marketers/consultants/whomever to single out the specific affiliates you want to track as well as how they should be categorized. Start with an export of referral source data. This way you are selecting sites using the way Google Analytics displays them in the reports. This will be important when you set up the filters.

2) Backup. Using filters is a very, very powerful way to manipulate data collection, but you should take some precautions before ever implementing a single one. Ensure you have a backup profile off all raw data that will never be touched or manipulated. Create this and never worry about it again.

3) Create a new Affiliate profile. In an example like this when you’re tracking a specific traffic source, it’s better to start fresh than use an existing profile. This way all of the data ever viewed in this profile is representative of the sources you’ve specified.

4) Use advanced filters to rename affiliate traffic. What makes the affiliate traffic a unique problem is there’s no inherent way to separate it from other referral traffic. Meaning you can’t filter them simply based on a characteristic of the URL. Using a combination of UTM and filters would be the one exception to this because it allows you to create a unique characteristic for the URL that you can then use to filter. But by default, you won’t have this so you need to do it yourself. Below is an example.

Screen shot 2010-01-31 at 4.44.53 PM

Site.com is considered a deal site affiliate, so in field A I extracted the URL then renamed it placing the “- deal site” at the end. Note: Be sure to double check the format Google Analytics uses in its referral report when filling out Field A.

Once you’ve done this, site.com shows as “site.com – deal site” in my referral reports. Do this for every affiliate and then create an include filter that only allows sites with the new extension into the reports. Be sure the include filter is at the bottom as filters are implemented in the order in which they are listed.

Now you have a Google Analytics Profile exclusively showing your hand picked affiliate sites.

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