Using Google Analytics to review changes in mobile site usage by prospects and customers
As mobile device usage rapidly increases amongst buyers and influencers accessing content related to your products or services, it may be the perfect reason to start thinking about developing a mobile app or making your website mobile friendly as part of your sales and marketing toolbox.
A client of ours saw mobile traffic to their website increase by 284% in 2011 compared to 2010. Our client manufacturer of stainless steel reinforcement rods (not the most glamorous of products) saw the rate at which the site is accessed from a mobile device increase dramatically.
[caption id="attachment_11974" align="aligncenter" width="570" caption="Mobile visitor growth for B2B product manufacturer"][/caption]
After conducting many audits on websites, the biggest growth I have reported every single time for every single client is the growth in mobile traffic. It’s time B2B…
Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary
Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features
Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote.
August 2012 update
At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's
The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…
Not Provided search queries will affect how your report on your search engine marketing
Source : Google Inside Search Blog
Importance : [rating=4]
Our Commentary
A recent announcment on the Google Inside Search blog post confirmed Google's plans to roll out encrypted search across local Google services (.co.uk, .fr, .de etc).
You may recall this change was rolled out across Google.com in October last year and you will have undoutedly seen the impact in your own analytics as the amount of keyword data set to "Not Provided" has grown.
Consultant and Smart Insights commentator Dan Barker has catalogued the impact of the recent change in the UK and we have seen this also in our analytics. Here he shows the recent change.
Dan refers to this as Google "hiding search data" and that's how we see it - it's…
Google Analytics have rolled out their latest change to the tool's user interface. This post explains 8 of the changes they've made, along with screengrabs comparing old vs new.
If you've used Google Analytics for any length of time, you'll know that these updates usually take one of 3 forms:
A large series of user interface tweaks, all at once.
Introduction of individual (or small groups of) functionality changes.
Both together.
This time the change is largely user interface tweaks, though there is also a couple of neat little functionality changes.
Change 1: Left Navigation
The left navigation (the main way of accessing all reports in Google Analytics) has been updated. All of the categories within this are the same, but the layout is a little cleaner, and they've added icons here:
This is purely a visual thing, and there is no recategorisation of reports within this area. 'Advertising' still…
What is the objective of your SEO program? Actually you will have many but at the heart will be the desire to increase the amount of relevant traffic that hits your website(s) from natural search.
The total number of potential keyword searches that could drive traffic to your website is enormous. Some web owners get traffic from hundreds of thousands of different keywords. However, not every keyword delivers high quality traffic that adds value to the bottom line of the business.
One of the biggest challenges for SEO is to learn which keywords are contributing to ROI, focusing efforts where they can deliver the most reward. To achieve this you need to separate the wheat from the chaff and that means using the data available to discover what doesn’t work.
This article takes a look at some of the techniques you can use to identify and screen poor performing keywords, enabling you to…
Value: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Raven GA Config Tool
Our review of the tool
We’ve said many times that Google Analytics is a great tool “out-of-the-box” when you first setup the tags on your site. However, to really get the most from it, it needs a lot of configuration to tailor it for your business as we describe for the new version of Google Analytics in our online training course and Ebook showing 7 Steps to get more from Google Analytics.
I’ve recently discovered this free tool from Raven Tools that I wanted to tell you about since it's a nice tool to help with configuration. It makes some aspects of this an easier process since it steps you through what’s involved for a number of key setup areas of…
Using Multi-Channel Funnels to analyse the impact of marketing channels on conversions
Many marketers struggle to identify which sources of traffic are most effective when it comes to converting web visitors. When conversions take place over multiple visits rather than a single visit to a site, it's really important to understand the complete customer journey and not use the standard "last click wins" model of attribution.
This is particularly the case in the area I work in, B2B marketing, since buying cycles can be as long as 18 to 24 months and include multiple campaigns in between.
The new Multi-Channel funnel reports in Google Analytics is a step closer to providing marketers with much more detailed insights into the first and last interactions visitors have with your website before turning into a lead. At the end of the post I show an example of how they can be used to understand the…
A custom dashboard in Google Analytics you can use for checking your checkout process
If you have an ecommerce web site you know that the performance of the checkout is critical. If anything goes wrong with the checkout it will be costing you money.
That’s why first thing every morning, before I even look at the sales figures, I look at my clients' ‘Checkout’ custom dashboards.
It gives me an instant health check. I can clearly see if something has gone wrong with any of the stages in the checkout, such as the payment gateway or the address lookup system. Or if something is wrong with a promotional offer codes and people who use it are unable to buy…
All I have to do is to take a quick look at this…
A reminder of the latest changes to Google Analytics for non-specialists
This update page is intended to help anyone who uses Google Analytics, but not day-in day-out! It's also a reminder for me when giving training courses to highlight what's new.
I subscribe to the Google Analytics Blog feed to keep up-to-date and other related ones like Webmaster Tools. There are quite a few detailed posts from Google about Analytics that won't make so much difference to most users and are more for interest of GA specialists working on it all the time.
So in this summary we alert you to what we see as the major changes that every marketer using Google Analytics to review their digital marketing needs to know about - there's been a lot of them in 2011. Many thanks to the analysts like Dan Barker, Helen Birch and Tim Leighton Boyce who have written tutorials on how…
A reminder of the latest changes to Google Analytics for non-specialists
This update page is intended to help anyone who uses Google Analytics, but not day-in day-out! It's also a reminder for me when giving training courses to highlight what's new.
I subscribe to the Google Analytics Blog feed to keep up-to-date and other related ones like Webmaster Tools. There are quite a few detailed posts from Google about Analytics that won't make so much difference to most users and are more for interest of GA specialists working on it all the time.
So in this summary we alert you to what we see as the major changes that every marketer using Google Analytics to review their digital marketing needs to know about - there's been a lot of them in 2011. Many thanks to the analysts like Dan Barker, Helen Birch and Tim Leighton Boyce who have written tutorials on how…
