Web analytics essentials are our weekly round-up of advice and developments in software tools to help you get the most from your investment in web analytics.
Do let us know any developments that you think we're missing by tweeting @SMARTinsights. Sign-up to our enewsletter if you'd like a reminder through the updates each Friday.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: I have updated my step-by-step guide to using the custom intelligence feature to summarise the new features added.
Implication: Never find the time to go into Google Analytics to check changes to your digital camapaigns or site's performance? The custom alerts feature of Intelligence will automatically remind you of significant changes.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: We all know that bounce rates are useful for identifying poorly performing landing pages. But oftentimes pages with high bounce rates have so few page views it doesn't warrant review or actioning them. Step forward Weighted Sort which will automatically surface the most important pages by views - it's a combined sort a little like Gmails new priority inbox.
Unlike the previous feature that has been rolled out. This one hasn't hit all accounts yet - it's frustrating how rollouts mean that different people gain access at different times and makes it difficult to keep tabs on what's worth pursuing.
Implication: This is a less major update than the upgrade to Custom Alerts. It's worth thinking about applying if you're analysing a large site though since it should enable you to identify landing or product pages that are underperforming more easily.
Value: [rating=5]
Commentary: This is a travel-specific example, but the process and benefits apply to any transactional site. It's good to see practical project details and results in a case study rather than the all to common fluff.
Implication: If you're trying to juggle too many digital marketing balls consider bringing in specialist consultant to tell you where to focus for the biggest impact. This case gave improvements beyond the shopping basket. Split testing of the home page gave a big uplift also.
Value: [rating=3]
Commentary: More examples to inspire conversion rate optimisation projects grouped by different types of issues like Call-to-action. It is a little too focused on memberships sites which is why I liked the Sunshine example above.
Implication: I'd disagree with the author that CRO is new, but would agree focus on it is underemphasised. It's not just about landing page optimisation for Pay Per Click. It's about understanding traffic routing and customer journeys for the whole site and then determining which changes will give the biggest uplift in results from a site.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Even a well designed form might not convert well if the fundamentals are not taken care of. In this post Anil Batra lists 5 fundamental things that could be preventing your visitors from converting.
Implication: Assume nothing in a quest for increasing conversion, use analytics and whatever your do - keep testing!
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: The famed Avinash shares his advice on trying to get the data in your analytics reports to "speak to you". Remember where the value is in the data - for example is it quotes submitted or policies taken out, on an insurance site? He also gives great tips on avoiding 'lonely metrics' - to help bring data into better context.
Implication: The genius of Avinash is borne from his vast experience of getting lots right and wrong, we can learn from that! His 9 tips are well worth taking on board and then contextualising for your organisation. Its the essence of what he's saying that is so important.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: We love this tool! Similar ones like PageDo don't compare and this is priced cheaper as well. Essentially, Unbounce offers templated landing pages for a range of purposes including lead gen and e-commerce, they host it with your customer URL and will even integrate to other applications.
Implication: Increase site conversion with an afternoon's work, enough said.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Learn how to increase the number of website visitors you convert into buyers by reading Google's new e-book Make Your Site Work. The e-book examines common website design issues from the point of view of a customer.
Implication: Discover 10 ways to improve your site performance and online profitability today by clicking on the image below.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: A useful summary for its simplicity and practicality - you can measure these without a sophisticated social media monitoring tool. The six measures are:
Implication:
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Some fairly advanced, specific tips here suggesting for analysis of Page Title quality and performance.
Implication: The techniques here will show you titles that may be ineffective because they are too long or too short. Many will analyse these through site crawlers but this doesn't give you performance information alongside - this technique does.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: This questions centres on a common question - how do compare, what does good like when using our analytics? Nicola, the questioner asks"€¦
I wondered whether you might be able to point me in the direction of some info on web behaviour?
We"€™ve recently been looking at "€œdrop off"€ rates for some of our online content and seeing if we can compare it with external sites to help gauge whether the behaviours we are seeing could be considered as "€˜typical"€™.
The metrics we"€™ve been looking at include time spent on a page (0-10, 10-20 seconds etc) and would like to compare to external websites such as BBC, YouTube, etc.
Do you know how it is possible to obtain this data, or any external websites who may have it?
We measure it, but have no external reference as to whether it is good, bad or indifferent".
Implication: Check out the answer for a summary of the 3 main measures you should for engagement and the best sources to benchmark them against other sites.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: If you"€™re like us, you love using Google Analytics for it"€™s ease of use, but still you will find yourself completing the same actions again-and-again as you review the performance of different sites each day.
Implication: Try these out. Even if you don't use bookmarks regularly it should just take 5 minutes to setup some up, but you will save a lot more in the future.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: It's good to see a conversion optimisation interview with a client side marketer
Implication: Increasing rankings isn't sufficient as this example shows: "We have a client which we increased their organic search traffic by over 135%, but their online appointments remained flat lined. The only way they could reach the appointment page was from the "home page". We simply added the link on every page, and views to the appointment form have increased over 450% and users completing the form have increased over 550% in just 5 months".
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: This is a presentation from Dave Chaffey at a Digital Marketing conference completed last week.
Implication: Check out the 20 practical tips and examples to increase conversion and use Google Analytics in a more sophisticated way.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: We first reported on the new Google Analytics API applications in this post introducing the benefits and example apps for Google Analytics export for Excel analysis and dashboards. Recently Google has improved it's categorisation of the different API software apps available.
But from the brief description available, it's hard to tell the strengths and weaknesses of the different options. Step forward this new report from Property search engine Gartoo which gives the plusses and minuses of the main tools (see the end of the report).
Implication: If you find that your not able to get the reports you want from Google Analytics even using the custom reports, consider using the API to create your own dashboards. Many analysts we speak to spend time rekeying data or manually exporting data and then integrating it into Excel. We have used many of these tools and our tips for the best API tools for further analysis or summary reports in Excel are: Tatvic as a free tool and Shufflepoint as a paid service.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Geno reviews several tests which remind us that Landing page headlines are often the most important page element to test when you start out on AB Testing. Very similar to the way email marketers start their testing with subject lines"€¦
Implication: Landing page headlines are often the best place to start as witnessed by these increases in conversion from 20 to 120% for a subscription landing page. Remember though that the page headline < h1 > tag is important to SEO, so you could reduce your SEO page effectiveness unless this is a landing page for paid search / affiliates only.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: I'm often asked about the potential value of a publisher site or a blog for generating affiliate revenue. This is a great review of a technique to estimate your earnings from fellow author @eprussakov.
Implication: This helps to get into the mindset and understand the measures that affiliates use when selecting which merchants to prioritise within their sites.
Value: [rating=5]
Commentary: Ecommera have recently published a useful piece of research reviewing the key issues in 2010 for Internet retail strategy which is part of their new Trading Intelligence Quarterly report. Here"€™s my summary of the stand-out charts.
Implication: Review and compare the strategic priorities and KPIs with yours. Are your priorities and KPIs more appropriate?
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: This article for marketers running transactional Ecommerce sites shows how to use Google Analytics to identify affiliates bidding on your brand name and reduce the cannibalisation that will often occur if your not monitoring this carefully.
Implication: Arrange to setup the custom reports and segments Dan explains here and then you can reduce your affiliate spend without impacting sales since this should be against your affiliate policy.
Value: [rating=3]
Commentary: These videos introduce AB and MVT.
Implication: If you want to get up to speed on the benefits and techniques of site optimisation, these videos are a good start. There is specific advice for B2B and Ecommerce marketers.
Value: [rating=5]
Commentary: Center Parcs offers a high value product with it's audience tending to do a lot of research before purchase. 70% of bookings are made online, whereas four years ago it was less than 20%, so it's vital to the business to understand which media are influencing the purchase.
Center Parcs wanted see the value of using more expensive generic keywords on the final conversion. 60 days"€™ worth of data was analysed and to see how different channels performed. Their contribution can be reviewed and credit given where it's due, for example, the system allows them to give 50% credit to a display ad view, and then give more credit to a display ad or PPC ad which has actually been clicked on, so that the various channels each get some credit for the sale.
If you want more detail, download the whitepaper from http://bit.ly/betterattribution
Implication: Many companies who are investing a lot in digital media, and in particular display advertising or generic PPC keywords naturally want to know more about which investment is driving sales. If you use the last-click attribution model, which is the default in Google Analytics, then you can't determine whether previous impressions or clicks in other media have contributed to sale (although the new search funnels have improved this. Review the details of the 5 step attribution methodology used here to assess it's relevance to you.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: According to the author READY is an acronym that stands for five dimensions of a great conversion-oriented landing experience
Implication: The author has provided a high-level checklist grid to compare your landing pages against competitors.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Home pages are becoming more like PPC Landing Pages, particularly for simple product offerings.
Implication: These designs here are all a consequence of AB and multivariate testing of alternatives. Try to build in testing of alternative creative / design approaches into all new site / page template designs.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Learn from Michael Notte, Web Analyst at Toyota Europe
Implication: Michael covers "the business value of Web Analytics, the typical and not so typical challenges that lie on the way. So share the pain and learn from the battles Michael has won and lost.
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: I mentioned this when it was announced back in December, but wanted to alert you too it if you missed the new announcement.
Implication: Async tracking is a new method for tagging with Google Analytics designed to reduce page load times and measure page view volume accuracy since it is included within the top section of an HTML page rather than the more conventional foot of page.
Note, a side effect of this new tracking method is that site engagement will appear to decrease since more shorter visits to the site will be included, i.e. bounce rates will increase.
NB. This is now a trivial change if you use Ecommerce tracking or use virtual page views for tracking outbound links or PDF download it has implications for how you set these up as this post on migration shows.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncMigrationExamples.html
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Hidden at the foot of my post on the Google May Day updates there is a recipe to setup custom Advanced segment to track your long tail search (i.e. keywords referring traffic with > + 3 keywords or less than 3 keywords.
Implication: Review the mix of long tail/shorter keywords for your site and see how they have been affected by the Google May Day update.
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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