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Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Google Analytics Presentation on Social and Mobile at MIMA

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

This Morning MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) hosted Adam Singer from Google Analytics where he talked about social and mobile measurement. These can be two of the more challenging sources of data for marketers, so not surprisingly, the event was sold out.

Adam started his presentation discussing some of the challenges facing mobile analytics and how some of the newer social reports in Google Analytics can help marketers. I’m going to focus my recap on this portion of the talk and save the Google Analytics for Mobile apps for another day.

He presented data from Google’s own research and commissioned studies that are worth repeating:

Google has found that on average there are 4.3 interactions between a site and a customer over two days prior to a conversion.
57% of people talk more online than they do in real life
1 in 4 search results are for user generated content.

Adam then moved into a review of the new social media reports that have been added to Google Analytics. These standard reports can now be found under Traffic Sources. While they are not perfect, they can help you understand the importance and value of these channels. If you have not utilized these reports yet, definitely do so.

Of these reports I have found the Overview and Social Visitor Flow to be the most useful, and they both work together to show how visitors move from a social network to a site conversion. I’ll leave you with one quote for Adam that all performance marketers should keep in mind when analyzing this data: “It is not the number of fans or followers, but what you do with them.”

Posted in Analytics, Mobile, Social Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Need Google Analytics Data Fast?

Friday, September 7th, 2012

The Google Analytics interface can be pretty slow, especially when coughing up 500 records in a query with a filter and a couple of advanced segments applied. Luckily, there is a very simple tool to basically use the Analytics API to dump any batch of data into a flat file very quickly without having to bribe an overworked web developer or learn Python yourself. It’s called the “Google Analytics Query Explorer 2” and it’s simply fantastic.

Google Analytics Query Explorer

The trick to using the tool is knowing a often ignored identifier called your “Profile ID” which is different from the Account ID you typically find in your Analytics tracking code. The Account ID starts with UA- that’s not what you want. The Profile ID is found in the Profile Settings tab of your account administration. Example below: 3657130
Google Analytics Profile ID

It is also in the page URL string on most any Analytics report, but you have to ferret it out of the other gibberish by looking for a letter “p” between two strings of URL characters. Again: 3657130

Once you have the Profile ID, the tool is a snap. You are limited to 7 dimensions and 10 metrics, which is plenty for almost any report. This tool is perfect for larger batches of data as well. There is an “Excel TSV” or “tab separated values” button that allows the direct download of up to 10000 rows of data– so no more paging through Analytics reports and exporting 500 rows at a time!

Also, the developers added a G+ button which makes it really easy to share the data with the one or two lonely colleagues you might know on Google+.

Posted in Analytics, Google | No Comments »

Pinerly: A New Pinterest Analytics Tool

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

As Pinterest continues to drive large amounts of traffic, it’s time to get serious about measuring results to learn how to best utilize this new social media tool.

Pinerly is a new tool aimed at providing insight into Pinterest by creating a Pinterest analytics dashboard. Right now Pinerly is a fairly basic tool, providing general information on “campaigns,” or pins, such as number of clicks, likes, and repins. While you can get likes and repins per pin straight from your Pinterest page, Pinerly provides the “reach” of each pin as it is repinned. They do this by tacking tracking code to each pin, allowing users to see how many people repinned, liked, and reclicked their pins.

Pinterest recently started blocking pins with redirects and tracking information in an attempt to curtail spam. I was worried that Pinerly, which attaches their analytics information at the end of pin links, would fall under this new “spam” category. However, I have yet to see a single Pinerly pin be marked as spam or fail to direct the user to the correct URL.

Although currently basic, Pinerly has plans to provide in-depth analytics and other tools, such as scheduled pinning. However, this much-coveted scheduled pinning is entirely dependent on Pinterest releasing their API, so there is no set date on this tool. If you’re pressed for time or ideas, Pinerly offers suggested images to pin. It also provides a slew of “Pinerly Tips” on how to maximize your Pinterest efforts.

Pinerly also offers basic reporting, allowing users to download graphs of “campaign” performance over the timeframe of your choosing and an Excel sheet detailing “campaign” performance by day.

After playing with Pinerly for a month, I like this tool but do not see it as a must-have in its current state. It is interesting to watch your reach grow exponentially as your image is repinned, but this information is not crucial to creating a successful Pinterest strategy. If Pinterest releases its API and Pinerly is able to implement other tools, it could become a valuable analytics tool. Until then, use it as a fun way to get marginally more information on your pinning activity and to see pretty graphs depicting Pinterest interaction.

For more information on Pinterest, visit our introduction to Pinterest and Pinterest update posts and to add your name on the Pinerly waiting list, head on over to Pinerly.com. As always, feel free to follow me at Pinterest.com/KPenn to find copious amounts of nail polish, book art, Halloween decorations, s’more recipes, and more.

Posted in Analytics, Social Media | No Comments »

Google Analytics Remarketing Announced

Monday, August 6th, 2012

Last week, Google Analytics announced its new Remarketing lists. To create a new remarketing list, you need to go into your Admin and click the Remarketing tab. Here you can create as many different remarketing lists as you want without having to create a new code for each list since it uses your current Google Analytics code to track the visits. You can then pull these lists into your AdWords account to create remarketing campaigns. Your Google Analytics and your Google AdWords accounts need to be linked to import the Analytics remarketing lists.

When you’re creating your remarketing lists, you can create the following types of lists:

All visitors to your site
Visitors who visit a specific page on your site
Visitors who completed a specific goal
Visitors who match the criteria of a visitor segment

Creating your remarketing list around visitor segments allows you to target audiences based performance metrics (ex: visitors who visited more than three pages but did not convert). Visitor segments are built the same way as advanced segments. You can create filters based on important metrics, such as revenue, event actions, or engagement metrics, to segment your audience so that you only show ads to the visitors who completed the actions you deem most valuable. Unfortunately, while the Google Analytics Help pages explains how you can use visitor segments as remarketing lists by selecting the Create my own remarketing type using Visitor Segments, the current Remarketing Types only include the predetermined lists (see image below). Hopefully this is just a temporary issue since Visitor Segments would be the most interesting way to test different remarketing strategies.

For more information on remarketing targeting strategies and all things Google Analytics remarketing, visit the Analytics remarketing overview.

Posted in Analytics | No Comments »

Turn On or Tune Out – Receive Google’s Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Alerts

Monday, July 30th, 2012

Earlier this month, in association with the new Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors feature, Google Webmaster Tools rolled out Crawl Error Alerts.

Google regularly indexes a website, so they know at times when a site is experiencing connectivity issues, spikes in HTTP error response codes, time outs, or systemic errors. The new Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors feature is tracking these issues. The alert feature notifies the Webmaster Message Center and any email address associated with the Google Account of the alert (when turned on).

The crawl errors are divided into two categories: Site Errors and URL Errors.

Site Errors are site-wide global problems (e.g. robots.txt inaccessibility, the web server is down, refusing connection, or the firewall is off). If your website is well operated, in theory Site Error Alerts should rarely occur.

URL Errors are potentially less critical issues (e.g. Server error, Soft 404, Access denied, Not found or Not followed). Google will only send alerts when they detect a large spike of these issues.

Below is an example of an URL Error alert we received:

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Alerts URL Errors Email

As mentioned previously, Google provides the alerts to be forwarded to any email address associated with the Google Account.

To turn on Message Forwarding (off by default), view Webmaster Tools – Preferences. To associate additional email addresses to the Webmaster Tools account, an email address can be added.

Posted in Analytics, Google | No Comments »

Statistical Significance: Landing Page Testing and Ad Testing

Friday, July 27th, 2012

I was browsing search marketing news articles today and after reading about several recent studies, I thought about how easy it is to get lost in the data. As search marketers, we are (and if you are not, you should be) continuously testing. We test ad copy, landing pages, keywords, etc. With the multitude of all these tests it is easy to get lost in the numbers and to make decisions based on incomplete data.

There are two fundamental mistakes to look out for when evaluating your experiment data. First, is mistaking correlation for causation. For example, it is very easy to make an ad change, or make target new keywords, and then make a decision based on the results that you see. However, it is important to remember that there are many external factors that can affect performance (e.g. seasonality, site changes or updates, other advertising initiatives running at the same time, etc.) This is why it is important to use standard scientific testing practice, where you have a control group. Adwords makes this very easy to do.

This particular experiment didn’t have a positive result.AdWords allows you to easily set up a control group, which will prevent any external biases.

Second, is not waiting for experiment results to be statistically significant. It’s easy to launch a new ad and if in a few days click-through rates are higher than the original ad, you pause the original. However, were there enough impressions and enough clicks to show that the CTR increase was statistically significant? Again, in the above image, the blue down arrow next to the CTR tells us that the decrease was statistically significant.

Another scenario where it is easy to make a decision too early, is landing page testing.

If the decision were made in May, the conversion rate improvement would have been likely overstated.

If the decision was made too early, then we might have made the wrong decision, because in the first week the conversion rate improvement was huge. However, as you can see long-term, there is no statistically significant winner. In a test case like this, you will need to make a judgement call, even without the final result, because it is so close. If the margin of error was much higher, then it would be best to pause the experiment and run a follow-up to verify the hypothesis.

In conclusion, make sure you are properly evaluating your test data, so that you avoid making the wrong decisions.

Tags: ad testing, Analytics, landing page testing
Posted in Analytics | No Comments »

Monetizing Goals in Google Analytics

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

As businesses continue to invest more and more into their online presence, whether it is through website development or online marketing channels, the same question often comes up about assessing value. How much are these “conversions” worth to me? If you’re operating an e-commerce site the answer is obvious – revenue! But what about those lead generation sites that take their sales funnels offline? The answer requires a little more work but it is well worth the effort.

If the purpose of your site is to generate sales leads (of any type) then it is important that you monetize these conversions to truly understand the value. The first step is to have the tracking capabilities for this conversion setup, which requires a simple URL Destination Goal in Google Analytics. If you’re using a form that sends users to a Thank You page once they complete it – this is a piece of cake (see below for setup screen). If your site is a little more dynamic and the URL doesn’t change during the form process for some reason then things are a little more complicated but still very doable (I’ll explain these methods in my next post about Virtual Pageviews and Custom Events).

You’ll see a field during the Goal setup called “Goal Value – optional” (highlighted in the green box above). This is where Google Analytics allows you to assign a monetary value to these conversions. Once you put in a dollar amount Google Analytics will automatically start multiplying it across the number of Goal Completions. It seems simple enough, and it is, but for many lead generation sites this is something that is never implemented due to the lack of a direct value.

Here’s how we would recommend calculating this Goal value. The two variables that you need to figure out are the expected transaction value and the probability of a transaction from that form completion. So for example, let’s say I’m a company that sells commercial printers and I use my website to generate sales leads. I know that on average my company can close 25% of all leads that come in and those customers spend approximately $1,000 each. Therefore, if I multiply that $1,000 times the 25% I can assume that each lead (form completion) is worth $250. Now I just need to put that value in the Goal setup and Google Analytics will start evaluating my online success for me.

Even though this value does depend on averages, it is a data-based figure that helps you to better translate the success of your site and marketing programs to a language that everyone understands – money!

Posted in Analytics, Google, SEM | No Comments »

Google Analytics Metrics in Adwords

Monday, July 16th, 2012

Optimizing a pay per click account without conversion tracking is a mistake. Because after the click: Adwords leaves you in the dark, making it nearly impossible to improve. This is why it is invaluable to have both conversion tracking set up and to assess paid traffic in Google Analytics. It gives the data dimension, enabling advertisers to make optimizations based on favorable user interactions.

PPC enthusiasts should be excited to know that Google has released a beta that imports a few Google Analytics metrics directly into the Adwords interface. Giving a piece of the Google Analytics perspective right inside the Adwords interface.

New Metric Columns for Adwords

This will make the job of PPC specialists easier by enabling quick analysis in Adwords. The beta allows Adwords to import three new metrics as columns: Bounce Rate, Pages /Visit, and Avg. visit Duration (seconds). These columns are available for the Campaign, Ad Group, Ad and Keyword level. Advertisers will be able to compare the PPC performance metrics directly to important post-click metrics. This change offers advertisers a more holistic perspective from within the Adwords interface.

New Rule Automation Opportunities

Another exciting aspect of this beta is rule automation. Google Analytics metrics in Adwords opens up opportunities for automated rules. For example: Perhaps you want to add a rule that pauses keywords that have had a comparatively high bounce rate over the last testing period. Now you can easily do that, right from Adwords.

I’m hopeful that this beta will be rolled out to more users soon, as it’s a great update for advertisers.

Posted in Analytics, Google, PPC | 3 Comments »

Google Releases Analytics Mobile App for Android

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

If you find yourself so highly engaged with your website traffic that you can’t “let go” when you are out and about, the Google Play store has the app for you. Simply titled Analytics, the app is free and syncs seamlessly with your Android phone’s Gmail account. (Of course, if you want to use a different Analytics account you can.) A quick comparison of the Google Analytics App and gAnalytics App from e6bapps reveals that the Google app is a lot more simplistic, but it’s also easier to use.

The dashboard window is the only area where you can add specific reports. The small “add widget” button in the upper right corner opens a dialog to “pick a metric”. After choosing the metric, the user assigns a sampling interval like “daily”, advanced segment and date range. Widgets are positioned in the order that they are created and cannot be dragged around.

The lack of features and reports make the Google Analytics App best suited for monitoring real-time visitors and quick snapshots of visits and goal data. The default dashboard has only one graph for Daily Unique Visitors and Daily Goal Conversion Rate. There are also reports for Automatic Alerts and Custom Alerts. The custom alerts require logging into the full web version of GA and setting them up.

You will notice that “Traffic Segments” is conspicuously missing from the navigation bar. Like the custom reports, you also need to log into the full web version of Analytics if you want to see specific traffic source information.

The Analytics App has some default advanced segments like “non-paid search traffic” and “returning visitors”, and you can use the full web version to add separate more specific advanced segments . If you wanted, as an example, website revenue from Pinterest users, you would need to use a browser to visit the GA site, add an Advanced Segment for referrals from Pinterest. As a final step, you would log into the Analytics Android app and create a new widget for “Revenue” and choose your newly created Pinterest segment.

The dashboard only supports up to five widgets, so really—this is a very simple tool for very simple data and not something you’d use for any analysis. This is a real-time, quick snapshot tool, so if you need better graphs and more complete reports, I’d recommend sticking with gAnalytics.

Shortlink: http://www.ninahale.com/?p=3103

Posted in Analytics, Google, Mobile | No Comments »

Everything Old is New Again – Leveraging Legacy Content

Friday, June 29th, 2012

With an estimated 60% of all B2B marketers planning to spend more on content marketing this year, many are undoubtedly rushing to create lots of new material. If you’ve done your home work, know what your customers are looking for and can create new content to meet their needs, hats off to you! But unless your products and services have been completely revamped over the past year or two, you may also be sitting on a goldmine of great legacy content that just needs a bit of dusting off to be useful.

Think Back, WAY Back…
Most established businesses have published piles of relevant content that has long been forgotten but still has tremendous potential. Think back over the last year or two… Did you publish a whitepaper or opinion piece that was particularly well-received? A how to article or video that generated a lot of buzz? By first reviewing content that just needs to be refreshed and optimized in order to attract and engage prospective customers, you may be able to save time and money, and realize some additional benefits as well.

Your website analytics account is key to uncovering valuable content that can be spruced up and put to work again. The Content Drilldown feature in Google Analytics provides loads of information about content performance. In order to find content that worked well in the past, there are many signals that can help identify effective content.

For press releases and article marketing, you undoubtedly have access to reporting that will show impressions, clicks, reads, downloads, and more. Updating a very effective article and re-releasing can generate renewed interest, with less time devoted to creation.

Depending on your business, evergreen or seasonal content is tailor-made to use multiple times. If you’re in health care and you feature content on back to school immunizations every year, revise that content rather than re-create. If you’re an accounting firm or a financial planning firm, you’re well aware that tax time rolls around in mid-April every year. Update your content with new rules and regs, rather than recreating the wheel.

Contests, Giveaways, Newsletters
Do you regularly publish an email newsletter? Do you have contests or giveaways? By entering a lengthy date range into Analytics, you can more easily see jumps in traffic that would indicate intense interest and engagement, possibly from content being shared.

Look for what’s missing, too. Did you inadvertently remove engaging, popular content just because it was old?

By looking at site search in your analytics package and at your queries in Google Webmaster Tools, you can see what visitors are looking for, and whether or not they’re still able to find that old favorite article on your site.

Legacy Content Has History
An additional benefit of refreshing legacy content is that it has “history” with the search engines. They’ve already indexed the page, the PDF, the video. By refreshing and re-using established content, you send a message to the search engines and human visitors alike that you are an established business, providing relevant content, and that you recognize the value of updating your best material.

While you’re updating text, don’t forget to update and refresh your meta too. Use keywords that effectively convey the “new and improved” aspect of your legacy material. Resubmit to the search engines as you are able. If there are a significant number of external links to the material, alert those sites to the fact that you’ve refreshed the material with new and improved ideas.

As you plan your spend around content marketing, plan to spend at least some of your “time budget” in review of your legacy content. A mix of old and new can boost your credibility and help you gain the trust of new customers who are visiting your site, reading your blog or watching your videos for the very first time.

Tags: content marketing, legacy content
Posted in Analytics, SEO | No Comments »