The challenge becomes identifying the RIGHT web analytics data to use when measuring and optimizing marketing campaigns.  Following are 5 steps to making sure you are looking at the right web analytics information:

1. Make a list of the various ways you are marketing or advertising your business.  Then go into your Google Analytics and segment your traffic to match those advertising methods.  If you can’t identify the sources in your data, then you should consider setting up some advanced segments and/or separate profiles.  This will enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of each marketing/advertising tactic.
2. Have you decided what you want your website to accomplish?  If you have, then make sure you have tagged those items and configured your web analytics data for Event Tracking and Goals.  Combined with #1 above, you’ll be able to see how many goals you are achieving for each of your marketing/advertising tactics.  If you haven’t set goals for your website, then navigate through it and identify (or create) calls-to-action.  These could be downloading of information, signing up for newlsetter, scheduling an appointment, etc. 
3. Look at your top Landing Pages and evaluate how well they are performing for you.  When reviewing landing page performance, look at bounce rate and time-on-page.  These are “engagement metrics”.  If you find a landing page that gets a lot of views and has poor “engagement metrics”, take a look at the page to determine how you can improve it for better engagement.
4. Look at your top Keywords, those search phrases (keywords) that people are using to come to your site.  Evaluate keyword performance using some of the same “engagement metrics” as described in #3 above.  If you see keywords that are very relevant to your business but the “engagement metrics” are weak, then you need to evaluate landing page performance and content.   
5. If you are doing much offline advertising, obtain some unique domain names (website addresses) that resemble your brand or what you do.  For example, let’s say you provide plumbing services and your web address is WatkinsPlumbing.com.  Get an alternative web address like WatkinsPlumbers.com or FlowingFreely.com.  Then, assign a unique web address to your print advertising and tag that in your Google Analytics account.  Now you can see how many people are coming to your website from print advertising.

Just like in Moneyball, use the data to make good decisions.  Someone might say you should pay to advertise on another site because this other site gets a lot of traffic.  You might be enamored by you getting millions of eyeballs looking at your link but if no one clicks or those that do click and come to your site don’t do anything meaningful when they get there, then that “traditional approach” may not be the best approach for you.

The following are three ideas that can put you on the right track to better understanding the impact of mobile on your website.

Idea #1: What % of my visitors are coming from mobile devices:

This is the first question worth asking about our mobile traffic. While we watch the mobile industry explode all around us, we need to know how it’s affecting us right now. When it comes to profiling our mobile traffic, Google Analytics helps us answer this overriding question (among several others). When we first started reporting mobile usage on our client sites late last year, we saw usage somewhere in the 1-10% range. Now we’re seeing it in the 5-20% range.

The question is: are your visitors the early adopters or laggards? Is 1 in 5 of your visitors on a mobile device? If not, when can you expect them to be and what needs to be done to address this critical shift in website user activity?

The first step is easy enough: understand the ratio and understand if the criticality of mobile will be a problem down the road or a problem right now. Next, understand the nuances within this mobile segment so you know how to tackle it.

Idea #2: Segment the mobile traffic by device type

Some assume the designation of “mobile” only applies to smartphones, but as tablet devices increase in popularity and capability, we find them establishing themselves within the broader mobile category. When it comes to functionality – e.g. user interface and operating system design –  tablets are designed more like smartphones than desktop computers. Tablets are touch devices like most smartphones and have a retooled operating system based on the simplicity of the major mobile operating systems.

So while the functionality and feel of a mobile device is more similar to a smartphone than a laptop, there is an key attribute that influences the user experience even more: the size. While most tablets may look like oversized smartphones, the bigger screen makes the experience of using a website more like that of a laptop than a smartphone.

Tablet screens generally range in size from 7 inches (BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Flyer among others) to about 10 inches (iPad, Sony Tablet S, Samsung Galazy Tab 10.1 among others). In our research from sites we surveyed, we found only a tiny portion of tablet traffic (1-2%) come from 7 inch tablet devices. The rest of the tablet traffic are coming from iPads (~98%) which measure in just shy of 10 inches. Looking at industry data, iPads represents 68% of the global tablet market share followed by Android-based tablets at 27% and RIM at 5%. So while the industry data is a far cry from the almost unanimous preference we saw, the industry data still shows a strong overall preference for the iPad. Pulling data points from different sites, we found tablets represent anywhere from 25-35% of mobile traffic while total mobile traffic was 10-20% of overall site traffic. In other words, tablets are only a slice of a slice of the overall pie. But like everything else mobile, this segment is growing fairly consistently.

How does tablet traffic compare?

When it comes to visitor behavior, we found tablet traffic tends to behave much more like your desktop traffic than your smartphone traffic. On the sites we surveyed, we found our tablet traffic bounced 3-10% less than average, viewed 5% more pages during their visit than average and generally converted at or just below average. However smartphone traffic performed far less favorably in all of these categories – bouncing anywhere from 25-45% higher, viewing about 41% fewer pages in their visit and converting as low as 75% less than site average.

Tablet traffic tends to behave much like desktop traffic in terms of engagement and conversions. Smartphones are just the opposite.

What it means:

We may throw tablets into the mobile bucket, but tablet visitors behave just as well, if not better, than our desktop users. Smartphone visitors, on the other hand, behave far worse. When considering how well (or not well) your mobile traffic engages your site, it’s best to treat your tablet visitors and smartphone visitors as separate segments.

Why do we see this behavior?

Going back to the data above, most of your tablet traffic are on iPads with 10 inch screens. Holding up an iPad to a 13 or 15 inch lap top screen, you’ll quickly understand how much more an iPad is like the laptop on your desk than it is the smartphone in your pocket.

Our data is further supported by the nearly identical functionality between the iPhone and the iPad – the difference only being the extra 6.5 inches in screen. A difference that makes, well, all the difference.

Flash or No Flash

Most new smartphones support Adobe Flash. That is, most smartphones except Apple mobile devices. Apple made a bit of a splash when it announced its iPhone and iPad product lines would NOT support flash. Many predicted it would have a significantly negative impact on whether people choose Apple hardware.

Now we have to consider how much this matters. Going to back the sites we surveyed, we found 65-75% of mobile traffic was viewing the site from an Apple mobile device. So if your site is dependent on flash in any way, most mobile visitors are receiving a subpar experience. The number of websites using flash overall is slightly on the decline (perhaps for this very reason), but with a quarter of total websites using flash, it certainly presents an issue.

Time to take action: The solution is simple: have one site that services both your desktop visitors and your mobile visitors (quite the challenge!) or have a separate desktop/tablet site and a separate smartphone site. Treat them as independent sites, optimize them accordingly and analyze their visitors separately.

Now you need to ask yourself: Is mobile significant for you right now? What is the makeup of my mobile visitors? Is your website coded in a way that’s not friendly to all devices? Answering these questions will better prepare you for what the internet will transform into over the next 12-18 months.

We’ve been fortunate to experiment with this feature the last couple of weeks. It’s pretty slick and has a high entertainment value – at least, initially. Below are some ideas I’ve put together and how I envision this new feature being used as well as some of the things I’d like to see added in the future.

Making Use of Google Analytics Right Now:

• Checking immediate social media impact – getting the sense that something is going viral? Did you just push out a campaign across all your networks? Use Right Now to watch the impact happen as it’s happening.
• Observing TV campaign impact in real time – if your TV campaign runs during a set time with a call to action to the web, you can watch the immediate response.
• Debug tracking code issues. There are better ways to do this, but recently my go-to debugging tool was experiencing issues as I attempted to debug a tracking code issue. To ensure the script was executing, I opened up the Right Now content report and watched myself arrive on the questionable page. This confirmed the tracking code was being executed and that the GA .gif was sent to Google Analytics as intended.
• You’re about to do a major update that will take a site offline for a short period of time. You’ve analyzed your hourly reports and know the time of night when the fewest numbers of visitors come to the site – minimizing the impact of taking the site offline. With Right Now, you can do a real time check on the site to ensure traffic is low before you make any changes. Right Now allows you to know the actual situation on your site before taking any major action.

With the exception of the last point, the reasons I listed above serve your curiosity more than it does business intelligence. Even if you can watch a social media campaign take off or see that your TV campaign resulted in an immediate spike, there’s not a ton of action you can take based solely on that information. In the end, we need to see how these campaigns perform in terms of outcomes – that takes time and analysis.

All of this being said, I do believe this feature has real potential, but most of it is still unlocked. Here are some ways I’d like to see Right Now improve that I believe will make it more useful.

• Filters – currently, the data you see in Right Now bypasses profile filters. So all the nifty filters you are using to remove internal data and rewrite how the data is processed into the reports is not reflected in Right Now. Having filtered data in Right Now will allow us to both test our filters in real time and leverage all the advantages gained from filtering our data to our specifications.
• Recording – re-watch events as they unfold. Chances are you aren’t watching an important event as its unfolding, so it would be interesting to go back and watch an event as it occurred. Being able to watch “replays” of our campaigns can tell us a lot about how information is shared and how it affects our site.
• Integration into your menu bar – this will require API support, but this would act as your site’s heart monitor. Self updating visitor metrics, a chime when a purchase it made or a goal is achieved, an alert (see next bullet) when a sudden new trend occurs, etc. This doesn’t necessarily make Right Now more useful but it does give us more convenient access to the information.

• Right Now Alerts – It’s fun to watch Right Now, but it’s kind of like looking up at the sky for a shooting star. You could be looking for a while without seeing anything remarkable. It would be great if you could program custom alerts to trigger right as something is happening. For example:

1. Big rush of twitter traffic – is a link to your site getting shared?
2. Your blog is getting major play all of the sudden – did your site just get a big mention on an important site? If you aren’t yet prepared for the influx of traffic, you can jump into action.
3. You shopping cart funnel is more clogged up than normal – is there an issue preventing people from getting through the checkout process? Why is there an abnormally high number of people at the billing page but a disproportionate number of people reaching the receipt page?

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The only incremental intelligence you get from Right Now is that the information is delivered to you in real time. In other words, the fact that it is happening and that it’s happening NOW. The fact that it is happening AT ALL was, and still is available from other reports. When used properly, the potential for this new tool is considerable. Right now (no pun intended), I feel most of the potential is yet to be unlocked. API support and feature updates should do their part to make that potential a reality. In the meantime, there’s insight to be gleaned, but overall it’s limited.

All of this won’t stop the rush of enthusiasm and excitement. After all, this does seem like the shiniest, newest and bestest toy to come out of Google Analytics since Advanced Segments and it is an awesome achievement on the part of the GA team. But at the end of the day, the most insight to be gleaned from GA will come from inside our custom reports, in our custom built spreadsheets and most importantly, through our own analysis.

1. Got to Twitter – review your Twitter platform to see what people are talking about.  If you want to get some inspiration about niche or detailed topics, go to  http://search.twitter.com/ and key in a phrase of interest to you.  Review the tweets to see if anything inspires you.
2. Go to Google Insights – if you are not familiar with this tool, it’s really cool.  Go to http://www.google.com/insights/search/ and key in some search terms that are of interest to you or pertinent to your business.  It will give you “insights” about what’s interesting to the masses out there and this might inspire some blogging ideas.
3. Q&A Sites – two good resources are http://www.quora.com/ and http://answers.yahoo.com/.  Ask a question and/or see what others are asking about.  You’ll be amazed at what people are asking – some are funny, some are sad and some will be inspirational.
4. Look at Your Google Analytics (GA) data – log into your Analytics account and look at what search phrases people are using to find you.  In fact, blogging about things of specific interest to those visiting your website will certainly be found valuable to your prospects and customers. 
5. Ask people that follow you – go to your Twitter and Facebook pages, and ask your “followers” and “friends” what they’d like to hear about.  You’ll likely be surprised at things you never thought about. 

So, no more excuses (for me either) about not blogging.  Take a few minutes to investigate these resources and try these ideas, and see what inspires you.  Good luck.

When doing seminars for marketers and business owners I always recite the famous quote from Wanamaker – “I know half my marketing works – I just don’t know which half.”  That’s so true for many.  Just think about how much more successful you could be and how much more effective your marketing investments would be if you truly set goals and then configured metrics to measure performance.  At the beginning of the year my firm, WebStrategies, decided to market a “product” (it’s a service, of course) that analyzes a client’s overall marketing activitities, identifies how to measure each element (online or offline) and configures web analytics to track those activities.  This approach resonates with many but others still can’t wrap their minds around it.  Perhaps it is not a priority for them.

In any case I continue to be amazed at the richness of data one can get out of Google Analytics.  As I manuevered through Conversion University (CU) I picked up a few more nuggets of gold relative to advanced segmentations, navigation paths and ecommerce behavior.  If only I could get a client to spend just 30 minutes in CU, I doubt I’d ever have to preach the benefits of web analytics again. 

ROI visibility was recently rated as one of the most important issues for marketers today.  Well, much of the answer to this challenge lies in being clear about objectives, creative about metrics/measurements and using the tools at our disposal to measure marketing success.  They are there – we just need to understand their application and be smart about implementation.

 We were working with one of our ad agency partners recently to achieve online conversions via search and online display marketing.  The goal was to achieve a certain non-financial oriented conversion for a non-profit organization.  The purpose of the campaign was fantastic and at the same time it was difficult to define demographics or specific target markets.  The nature of the campaign appealed to just about anyone 18 years or older. 

A very creative micro-site was built by another design company and it had some great functionality and a unique presentation.  Upon reviewing the website we were concerned that some things weren’t labeled well and calls-to-action were a bit more subdued than we’d suggest.  However, our style in situations like this is to let the data (web analytics data that is) do the talking.  So, we organized and launched the online marketing campaign with a plan to review several engagement and conversion metrics on a daily basis. 

 After only a few days what we saw confirmed our web design concerns.  Bounce rates were higher than we expected and conversions were weak.  It was time to step in and suggest some changes.  The changes we pushed included more obvious calls-to-action, make links and navigation paths much more intuitive, and make page formats less cool and creative, and more usable and intuitive. 

The designer who created the site did a great job integrating the suggested improvements and the site remained unique, appealing and creative.  Best of all, the changes resulted in much higher visitor engagement and higher conversions.  Specifically, conversions increased by 28% and bounce rates declined by nearly 10%. 

 This was a classic example of focusing too much attention on creativity at the expense of the user’s experience and/or the desired business goals.  Here are some guidelines for optimizing and evaluating a user’s experience:

 Don’t be ambiguous or “cutesy” with labeling.  Make your links mean something to the user.  Make your headlines and titles relevant and intuitive.

1. Determine the business goals you want to achieve with your website or landing page.  Then, identify the main action you want the user to take and make sure that’s prominently displayed above the fold on the web-page.
2. Use engaging headlines to grab the attention of your visitor and interrupt his/her sub-conscious. 
3. Don’t make me read and don’t make me think.  With the exception of doing deep research, the attention span of the typical internet user is short, so minimize marketing copy and make action intuitive.

Most clients are wonderful to work with and most creative designers are extraordinary people.  I wish I had a fraction of their creative talent.  But, too often clients value cool and mysterious over good usability standards.  They spend so much energy and countless hours striving for some special look/feel.  But they fail to realize the risk of a poor user experience and/or the fact that once the person has visited a website, the value they put on this unique look during subsequent visits is much less meaningful.  Also, too often creative people want to showcase their abilities and end up creating something that is graphically rich but the average user doesn’t know how to deal with it. 

It’s OK to have a really awesome graphic design, but don’t let “awesomeness” get in the way of making sure your website or landing page visitor has a great experience.  Remember the days of those cool, interactive Intro pages – those you had to sit through before entering the real website or click the Skip Intro button?  There’s a reason why you don’t see them any more – they simply got in the way of the user getting to what he/she came to the site for in the first place.  Oh, they were surely creative, but lacked substance and added little value to good usability.

In the end it’s all about whether you are achieving the goals you set out to achieve online.  Look at your web analytics data.  Ask some objective users who fit your target market what they think about the usability and credibility of your website.  Remember a song of old – “beauty is only skin-deep”.

So with all this talk and importance on local search, it’s important to ask if local search is even relevant to your business. In short, if a search for what your business offers includes a geographic reference, then yes. If, on the other hand,  the address of your business is irrelevant, then this change wouldn’t be applicable to your search engine visibility.

“But Google already auto-generated my listing. Is there anything else I need to do? ”

Yes! Claim it, populate it and track the impact.

Google tries to use the information it finds across the web to generate and display the most relevant search results possible. It’s possible that Google found your address, verified it through other sources on the web, and created a listing for your business. If you want to know if this is the case for your business, try doing a Google search for your business name + the city you’re located in. If you don’t see a map with your address pop up, click the “maps” link at the top of the page. If you have an auto-generated listing, you would see it here.

While it’s nice to have the added visibility, these auto-generated listing often have insufficient, or even outdated information about your business. This is when it becomes important to claim and populate these listings with as much information as possible about your business.

Once you’ve had your listing claimed, Google will give you data through the Google Places interface. This data can be insightful in terms of understanding how many times your listing shows and how many times it was clicked – however it doesn’t go as far as to tell you what happens once that visitor comes to your site. With just a little extra configuration, you can track these visitors back to your site and see how they accomplish your site goals right alongside your organic and paid traffic.

Takeaways:
If location has any significance on your business, you should take local search seriously. If you’ve already been targeting SEO, you could be poised to have a favorable, immediate impact on local targeting. This isn’t the end of quest, as it’s important to have these listings optimized to ensure they show as high and as often as possible, and then add the appropriate configuration to track these visitors back to your site. After all, it’s all about getting the visitor to take the right actions. And wherever you choose to invest your time and resources ultimately needs to be held accountable.

An experienced data driven online marketing company can provide a tremendous positive impact on the success ad agencies have with their clients – if they fully understood all that can be done with popular web analytics platforms.  Detailed data about product popularity and consumer behaviors associated with individual products can have a major impact on tactics.  Measuring how customers navigate through the sales and marketing process, testing and making improvements can go a long way to improving conversions and getting more results from marketing investments.  Using web analytics data to track the effectiveness of offline marketing efforts brings better visibility to print and broadcast spend. 

One additional element to consider when evaluating data analytics partners is their knowledge of business and the components of profitability.  A solid understanding of the economics of a business model is critical to establishing the metrics that bring visibility to the elements that are most critical to campaign success.

In the end, data driven marketing firms aren’t competing with ad agencies.  Instead, they can be a valuable partner that support the agency on record to get superior results for their clients – and keep them for the long term.

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.