Category Archives: Web Analytics

Top 3 Most Overlooked Google Analytics Reports

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People like to hate on Google. Whether it is because of privacy concerns, shady practices or the power they yield in their massive checkbooks it’s just…easy. While I certainly don’t agree with everything the “Don’t be evil” company, I have to say I’ll always be a big fan as long as they give me piles upon piles of data for free.

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool that works just as well on a small mom and pop site as it does on a massive ecommerce site. It is often disregarded because of the assumption that free = junk, which is a massive mistake.

Those who do utilize this incredible resource, however, oftentimes only make use of 5-10% of its capabilities (Source: My head). A lot of top-level users simply look at total traffic, maybe some traffic sources and if they even have it configured, Goal reports.

While there are countless ways you can segment, filter and customize your reports, there are three main areas where all-too-many users glaze over. 

Top Conversion Paths

Find It: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths

Google Analytics Top Conversion Paths

A common mistake is simply looking at Goal reports, then only looking at the sources to see where these converting users are coming from.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that a single user doesn’t always visit your site through a single source. Sometimes, a user might first be exposed to your site after clicking on a PPC ad, then searching you in Google, then a 3rd direct visit now that they know your URL by heart. If they convert, which source gets the credit? Paid Search? Organic search? Direct traffic?

Google Analytics uses what is called a last click attribution model, which means that they give credit to whichever source was the last to bring the user to the site before they converted. By viewing your Top Conversion Paths, you can see how all of your traffic sources work together to drive a conversion, because like any sales cycle, it often takes more than one impression with a customer to “convert” them.

Social Reports

Find It: Traffic Sources > Social

Google Analytics Social Reports

A common complaint among social media pessimists is that you can’t track the value of your social media efforts and you’re essentially “flying blind.” That is an outdated and unfortunate point of view because Google Analytics has come a long way in reporting the value of social media.

Your Social reporting includes an Overview and reports for Network Referrals, Data Hub Activity, Landing Pages, Trackbacks, Conversions, Plugins and a Visitors Flow.

With these wide-ranging reports, you can can an excellent view of which social media outlets are sending traffic, which ones send qualified traffic and where they convert.

Real-Time

The Real-Time reporting is the first item beneath your Standard Reports. Until recently, Real-Time was in beta and includes a couple reports that are in beta still. At first glance, it looks like nothing more than an area you can oversee your users as they traverse your site, however this section can be incredibly valuable for content marketing.

When you have a piece of high quality content you’re about to release—if all goes according to plan—you’ll be getting traffic from all sorts of referring sites and social media outlets. With Real-Time analytics pulled up as your command center, you can monitor in real-time where significant traffic is coming from and where conversations about your content could be popping up where you can go and respond and contribute. By doing so, you can get more conversations going and build more buzz around your content.

If you haven’t taken the time to fully explore Google Analytics, you’re missing out (there is no “could be” about it). There is valuable data at your fingertips which will help you refine strategies and increase traffic, conversions and impressions.

So what are you waiting for? Go dig in!

Improve Your PPC Campaigns With Ad Extensions in Adwords

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Believe it or not pay per click ads have taken over the majority of the real estate on your search engines results pages.  If you don’t believe me then go take a second to do a Google search for some product you planned on going and buying this weekend.  There is a great infographic Google ads and the war on free clicks that Wordstream put together.  Aside from the fact that I love all the little pandas and penguins with deadly weapons that I think is hilarious the point of all this is that people searching the internet with a high commercial intent are most definitely clicking on PPC ads and they are converting to sales. If those aren’t your ads then they’re your competitors.   So let’s talk about how we can improve your Adwords campaigns using ad extensions.

Google Adwords Ad Extension Options

There are a couple different ways to enhance your ads and attract more attention from searchers.  The first question you need to ask yourself is what ad extensions will work best for you.  The answer to that question is based on the goals of your campaign and the type of business you run.  Here are your options and some applications for each:

  • Location Extension
    • If you run a local business where your address is important then this reinforces that you’re the business they want to work with.
  • Call Extension
    • If the goal of your campaign is to collect leads and you can close those leads on the phone then you need to be using this.  Also, anyone say mobile devices?
  • Sitelinks Extension
    • Basically if you have a website then this one is for you.  Any campaign can be improved by enhancing their ads with sitelinks.
  • Product Extension
    • One of the best tools for a PPC manager who runs campaigns for an ecommerce website.  Get your products right up there on the top with photos.
  • Social Extension
    • Has your company gone social?  Google+ is a great social tool and you can give your SEO manager and social media manager a little love by enhancing your ads with your business’ Google+ presence tied into your ad copy.
  • Mobile App Extension
    • If you’re promoting a mobile app then you can get direct downloads from your PPC ads.

Location Extension

To add a location extension with your ad you can either pull the information from your Google+ Local page or manually enter your address.  Once you do your ad could stand out from the crowd and look like this:

local yoga ad extension

Call Extension

When you add a call extension you have a few different choices you can customize.  You can use a Google voice tracking number so that Adwords will give you in-depth call detail reports (for a price), or you could use your normal business phone number.  This also works with campaigns that serve to a mobile device, which allow you to establish “click-to-call” ads that connect searchers right with the top salesperson in your company (of course).  This is what your ad will look like with a call extension:

auto insurance call extension

Sitelinks Extension

Pretty much every website can benefit from this ad extension and every campaign should have it included in some way.  This creates the same display affect that organic web listings have when they display sitelinks.  You can customize up to an additional 4 links that can be taken to other useful areas within your site.  Why offer 1 landing page to your customers when you can offer 5?

callaway drivers sitelinks extension

Product Extension

Do you have an ecommerce site?  Please see picture below.  Enough said!

lcd tv product extensions

You can link your ads with your Google Merchant Center and have full product listings with prices, photos and brands.

Social Extension

There are many benefits to growing your following on social media and getting more exposure for your brand.  When you setup this extension you’ll link it with your Google+ business page to drive your following.  You’ll have the ability to engage with your customers,share your message with social users and even get some SEO benefit from that Google+ exposure.

dodge social extension

Mobile App Extension

If you’re building exposure for a new mobile app your company has created then drive not only search traffic but also direct downloads using this ad extension.

mobile banking app extension

If you have had a great success story with your campaigns from using one of these ad extensions feel free to share it with us here in the comments.  We’d love to hear how you increased CTR by 2% using sitelinks, or that you drove 258 sales leads into your office using call extensions.  Hopefully you’re seeing the same types of successes we are.

Making Social Media More Valuable for Your Business

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So you have dabbled in this. You get some people to follow you. How do you know if it is worth your time and really, what can you do to maximize what kind of web traffic you get from these mediums?

What if you changed your website experience based on how the visitor found you? The data is there to do this, you just need to interpret it and adjust accordingly. Set up correctly, you would be able to profile how your Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube/Vimeo, Google+, Pinterest, and Blog readers all use your site and based on looking at your traffic’s referring source. You can then change the experience, path, content, etc that they have to maximize your conversions and exposure by utilizing what that data tells you.

Social Media 2.0 & Web 3.0

This is Social Media 2.0. This is web 3.0. Create a unique experience for every web visitor based on how they got to your site. Combine the social media elements listed above with Search Engine and Content related marketing – you have groups of keywords within a segment to promote something – based on keyword you could adjust what they see and the content they would get – changing their “path”. If they were from Organic search results – same thing – we all know that paid traffic typically differs 25-35% in what they do versus unpaid traffic – create specific content based on those patterns.

Every person, every way, every avenue and it allows them to use the web the way they want while still allowing you to reach them. Will every person do the exact same thing that visits from Facebook – no, but if you study the analytics, traffic patterns , implement goals, and adjust based on history – over time you will be able to predict relatively accurately what 70% of them do and improve their experience with your Brand and site.

5 Things About Using Social

You also need to realize the following things about social media:Social Networking by Device statistics

1. It might not work for you - not everyone gets the value they need out of it for the investment they make. Just make sure you give it a good try and analyze before making any decisions.

2. People access from Mobile devices most often - so everything should be mobile optimized and easy to consume – especially if you have a global reach.

3. The bulk of social media time is spent on Facebook, - with newcomer Pinterest climbing rapidly. It should be treated as the dominate force it is for any consumer related marketing efforts. B2B marketing should have more of a mix – but the referring traffic reports and analysis will tell you what you need to know and where to best spend your time.

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Website Landing Page Optimization Based on Traffic Source

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Just reading through a Marketing Sherpa report on Landing Page Optimization and I thought I would share a few thoughts. They typically look at it from three types of landing pages; E-Commerce, Incentivized Leads, and Direct Lead Generation. These are, after all, the reasons you are out there with internet marketing campaigns – to drive leads and sales.

With the tools available (Google Analytics is perfect and FREE), you should spend some time figuring out who converts the best on your site from what medium of advertising. You also need to look at assigning a lead “quality score” in order to balance quantity and quality. Paid media, customers, e-mail blasts, social media referrals, and general organic traffic all do different things when they get to your website and you should be looking at the data to tell you what you need to do based on the source.

Which takes me to some work we did a few months ago for a big automaker here in Michigan. They created a comparison site for their brand site and wanted to know how it was working.  We helped them understand all the ways they could measure their traffic patterns and usage so they could make changes to improve performance based on EACH way someone got to that site – paid, social, Brand site, mobile, etc. for the next model year. This is extremely important to look at in order to make sure you are maximizing your opportunity with each and every visitor to your site based on how they get to you and what they do once there.

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How Content and Design Affect Website Conversion Rates

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Sam Mauzy is a blogger who also works hand-in-hand with a conversion optimization company that helps clients improve their landing page design in order to convert more browsers into customers.

Most companies have a website these days, or in the very least know the importance of having one. The purpose of having a website is to make people aware and interested in what you have to sell. Odds are that you’ve heard the term “conversion rate” before, even if you’re not really sure what it means or how to get it. When building a website, it’s important to understand conversion rate if you want to make your website work for you, rather than having it simply be a digital brochure.

Conversion rate works hand-in-hand with search engine optimization (SEO). By using well-targeted keywords, you can amp up how often your website appears in search engine results. The more your website comes up in results, the more likely people are to visit your website. A high amount of people who convert from visitors to customers starts with getting people to your page. If you’re unsure of how to write SEO content yourself, hire a content writer who’s familiar with search engine optimization.

Once people land on your website, you have the chance to boost your conversion rate. The home page is where you should concentrate most of your efforts to improve your conversion rate. If you don’t grab visitors’ attention on your homepage, you may never have another opportunity to turn them into customers again. You want to prevent visitors from closing your site before becoming a customer.

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What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

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On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

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Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Google Adwords Call Metrics Effectiveness and Billing Changes

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If you haven’t already been using Google’s Adwords Call Metrics feature then you really need to look into it. Sadly, if you don’t already know about it then you have missed some functionality that was initially rolled out as free. This will not be the case very soon. Let’s first take a look at the functionality and the value that it adds, excluding the cost initially.

Call Metrics & Its Benefits

If you’re driving traffic through any form of internet marketing you are always looking for ways to track its effectiveness and justify ROI for your ad $$’s. Often times we are all tracking conversions on sales leads and sales through e-commerce, but what about the person who also gets value from phone sales or drives user interaction through offline communication? This is a great way to justify the offline conversion of your traffic and add value to your clients by letting them know the real effectiveness of a campaign if you are ultimately driving sales leads or calls over the phone.

How To Setup Call Metrics

First, go into your Adwords campaign under the Ad Extensions tab and add a Call Extension to your campaign. The next step is to establish what the phone number you want those calls redirected to. Then check the box to use Call Metrics and you’ll be able to establish whether you would like a toll free number or a local area code number associated with your tracking that will be displayed. This brings up another factor of marketing and the local spin of your business if this applies to you. Users love to see local phone numbers and know that they are talking to someone local, so if you are a local business then I would recommend using a local phone number. Even if you need to start separating out campaigns for different geographic areas to achieve this the extra effort is worth it. Either way now Google will use its Google Voice platform to assign you a phone number and they will handle the forwarding and tracking of that number. Another thing I want to mention with this is there is also another feature I have skipped over. The Call-Only Format is only possible to use if your device is capable of making phone calls. This could be any mobile phone or computer with Skype or a VOIP system. This will disable the functionality to click the headline of the ad and go to the website, and give the user only one option to interact with the ad and that is using the Click To Call functionality. If you’re trying to drive sales through a phone number then who doesn’t love a 100% conversion rate. Also, if you haven’t broken out your PPC campaigns and separated out a mobile strategy then you need to do that as well, but I’m not really covering that whole concept in this blog post.

Call Metrics Changes Very Soon

What will be changing very soon is the way Google bills for this value added service. Soon campaigns will be charged $1 for every time this number is called manually. Now when I say manually basically I mean any time the number is called NOT using the Click To Call functionality. This could be when the user sees the number on an Adwords ad, doesn’t click, but calls the number. You would be charged $1 in that scenario. The worst thing about this is users who may call your business for the first time through a PPC ad and then save the phone number in their contacts list. Users could be using this number in excess and costing your campaign money. This is just one downfall to think about. I still believe the functionality is worth the cost and will be testing to see how many times users will actually be calling the number manually. We can measure this against how many users call the number and do not charge the additional $1, and make our judgments after we see more data.

Reporting On Your Call Details

An extra feature that makes this even more valuable is the way in which we are able to report on this data. If you go into your campaign and look under the Dimensions tab you’ll want to view the Call Details information. This will give you:
  • Start Time Of The Call
  • End Time Of The Call
  • Status – Received or Missed Call
  • Duration In Seconds
  • Caller Area Code
This information is very valuable because it gives you very valuable information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC budget. Also you should be using this data to setup your Day Parting strategy to further target your ads to drive the most ROI.

Top Search Terms and Visited sites for 2010

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Experian does an annual study on the top search terms for each year and the top ten visited URLs for each year. Below you will find a graphic for 2010 versus 2009. Facebook found itself at the top of both lists – showing you the power that brand and property has become. There is a reason why Mark Zuckerberg was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and there was a movie made about the Facebook story. As you will see, FOUR of the top ten search terms were all facebook.

Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches so you social media doubters needs to stop doubting.

New terms that entered into the top 50 search terms for 2010 included – netflix, verizon wireless, espn, chase, pogo, tagged, wells fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and hulu.

The combination of Google properties accounted for 9.85 percent of all U.S. site visits. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 8.12 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 33 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, an increase of 12 percent versus 2009.

One of the next questions becomes, will Facebook be able to be knocked off it’s perch from either list? You would think at some point there would be something else that needs to get searched for more than Facebook just because “everyone” will already be a user right? But when does that happen? 2011? 2012? When the next great social media invention comes along? It will be interesting to watch this over the next couple of years.

Some other fun facts and top searched items :
Athlete: Still Tiger Woods – Dallas Cowboys were the team
Destination: Disney World and Disneyland was #2
Movie Title: Star Wars
Company: Bevelwise (just making sure you are paying attention, lol)
Music Artist/Band: Justin Bieber mania was BEAT by Lady Gaga
TV Show: Dancing with the Stars beat Amercian Idol…
Personality: Kim Kardashian has passed Oprah and Rush was third…

We just thought it was very interesting how powerful Facebook as become. Let us know if you think any of these numbers/spots will change for 2011 and why. We’d love to hear your opinion.

Using Your Web Analytics To Make Actual Business Decisions

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I have spoken with a number of people who have websites, and some who even have Analytics. (usually Google Analytics, because it costs $0.00) One of my favorite questions to ask is “what do you most enjoy looking at in your analytics that helps you?” and usually the response to this unfortunately is “how many people are coming to my website.” That’s all and well and good, but lets take a minute to look at the concept of “Segmenting Your Data”.

I doubt that you are looking at an overview dashboard and are actually going to figure out anything you’re ready to make a decision on. So what should we as internet marketers be looking at that will actually help us make decisions.
I often speak with people who are spending a gob of money on various online marketing opportunities, and I want to to see if what they are getting for their hard earned money is actually worth something. Lets take this a step deeper. One example is to look at conversions rates and/or goals (if you’re using Google Analytics) and segment by either the traffic sources and/or the campaigns associated with those traffic sources. If you’re not passing in variables for traffic source, medium, and campaign with your various advertisers(for example, a banner ad) I would recommend starting to do that right now. The variables below apply to Google Analytics, and are very useful when passed into your destination URL’s:
  • utm_source=
  • utm_medium=
  • utm_term=
  • utm_content=
  • utm_campaign=
And this would be an example of using these variables to establish where some traffic actually came from using our website. bevelwise.com/?utm_source=ourblog&utm;_medium=textlink&utm;_campaign=using-your-web-analytics. What this will do for measurement, is assign the following variables when you click as such:
  • source=ourblog
  • medium=textlink
  • campaign=using-your-web-analytics
You could then reference all the clicks that came in through any campaign online/email campaign to goals that you have pre-determined and set up for your website and use them to further drive your marketing objectives and strategies.
Getting back to the concept of segmenting you would always want to be drilling down into your data and breaking out specific variables and sections of that data that mean something to your business. Having someone who is experienced with reading your web analytics is just as important as having a CFO that knows how to read a balance sheet and it can help produce better financial results. I’ve heard someone say before, “oh we know what our website is doing, because we put analytics on our website.” Interpreting those analytics and helping to make actionable decisions for your organization involves much more than knowing the basics of what analytics tells you. Do you know what areas of your website’s content is delivering the best results? Do you know where your advertising $$ are being best spent?
Bevelwise does seo from grand rapids, MI which includes Google Analytics measurement and will put our skills up against anyone out there in the Midwest. Would be happy to help you with your search engine optimization, web strategy, web analytics and all marketing from a measurement perspective. You will get insight to drive all your marketing initiatives if your website done and measured correctly.