Archive for the ‘Google Analytics’ category

Well fitted web analytics for fitted furniture company

August 11th 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

Strachan, a fitted bedroom and home office furniture company in Leeds, are a client I have been working for with prego*, to give them further insight into their website traffic and online marketing activity.

Strachan’s extensive range of fitted bedroom furniture is being marketed through a range of online marketing activities but lacked deep analytical reporting to identify where marketing spend was working best and where marketing campaigns could be optimised to drive a better return on investment.

Through the work of prego*, and deep integration of Google Analytics into the Strachan Furniture website, Strachan now have a full insight into each and every enquiry coming through their website and into every penny spent on online marketing – allowing them to shape their marketing and get a much lower cost per enquiry.

Tracking Paid Search in Google Analytics from Microsoft and Yahoo - and other campaigns

February 22nd 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

Just a quick post today to highlight an excellent article that has been published on the Official Google Analytics Blog.

Many of the websites I have inherited come with Google Analytics running on them and all too often these are just set up with basic stats tracking and maybe a bit of e-commerce and funnel stuff going on. Obviously AdWords campaigns are also tracked if auto tagging has been enabled in the customers AdWords account.

What many people don’t realise is the ease in which you can track Microsoft AdCenter PPC campaigns, Yahoo PPC ads and pretty much any other online marketing campaign you have running.

I won’t go into the details here as the article on the Official Google Analytics Blog covers all this. It’s definitely worth taking the time to read as being able to measure your traffic and conversion rates from each and every online source is essential if you want to make sure you are spending your online marketing budget in the right place.

Microsoft Gatineau – Is it worth using?

February 21st 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google Analytics, Microsoft Gatineau3 Comments »

I’ve recently started trialling Microsoft’s new Google Analytics challenger, Microsoft Gatineau and thought it would be worthwhile posting a few thoughts here for the un-initiated.

For those who aren’t aware of what Microsoft Gatineau is, it is a web analytics package that Microsoft has been developing based on top of Deep Metrix, which Microsoft recently acquired.

Is most website owners now use Google Analytics as their analytics tool of choice, I really wondered what I would gain from using Microsoft Gatineau over Google Analytics.

At first glances Microsoft Gatineau offers pretty much the standard bag of data including:

• Visitor tracking
• Hits tracking
• Conversion tracking

However, the user interface is slow, clunky and not intuitive and really lags a long way behind Google Analytics. It shows pretty much the same information but Microsoft have a long long way to go before the user interface and ultimate usefulness of Gatineau comes even close to Google Analytics.

A core benefit of using Microsoft Gatineau over Google Analytics is the direct integration of paid advert reporting from ad campaigns run through the Microsoft AdCenter, in the same way that Google Adwords integrates with Google Analytics.

For those without a Microsoft AdCenter campaign then there’s nothing on the surface that would convert you over from Google Analytics.

Or is there?

One absolute gem of a feature is the ability to cross segment your visitors by:

• Gender
• Age
• Occupation

Wow! Something that was previously only possible to do with logged in and registered users can now be done with general, every day visitors to your website.

Microsoft achieves this by linking up with its Passport system and by logging certain information from a users Microsoft Passport account when they hit your website. Granted, not all users have a passport account but from the websites I have been testing on I’ve seen over 50% of visitors information can be accessed.

How accurate this data is is yet to be seen but this one feature alone will prompt me to add Microsoft Gatineau to every website I launch from now on.

For most serious web marketers Microsoft Gatineau will present them with a more detailed view of who their customers are and how best to market to them.

I certainly won’t be dropping Google Analytics any time soon as Microsoft have some serious catching up to do in the analytics space but I will be running both Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau side by side from here on in.

Five tips to consider when reviewing your Google Analytics KPI’s

January 30th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

I’m often asked by clients which Google Analytics metrics are the most important to measure, how they should be measured and what they should do with them.

As each clients business is different, the top five key metrics will vary, but these below are the five I think every business should be watching, why they should be watching them and what they should be looking for.

1. Number of visits

Although quite an obvious one to keep an eye on, the point I want to raise here is how to monitor this statistic. A lot of young web business become too concerned with this value and scrutinize it on an over regular basis. Although it’s nice in the early days to see the traffic you’re getting (we’ve all been at the stage where we check our stats daily) the best way to get value from this value is to set a target for where you want this value to be over a one, three and six month period.

Once this is in place, it’s down to you to employ a strategy to get the traffic to those levels. I’m not suggesting only checking these value at month one, three and six but instead maybe check these weekly and then fortnightly to ensure your marketing is on track to hit your one, three and six month goals. Do not concentrate on the actual visitor numbers but instead on the trend for these visitor numbers in relation to your targets.

2. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the proportion of visitors who visit your website and leave before visiting another page. More often than not this suggests the user wasn’t happy with what they saw and decided not to continue into the site.

This can be down to one of a few things, including:

• Inappropriate content on the landing page
• Unlikeable design
• Technical issues (how many people include the Google Analytics code in there error page, which will be contributing to the bounce rate?)

The general guide with the bounce rate statistic is the lower the better and again the guide is to monitor the trend over a period of time, as opposed to becoming overly concerned with the actual figure on a day by day basis.

It’s always worth baring in mind that, on the other hand, in a few cases a high bounce rate is not always symptomatic of a poor website. In the case of blogs where each page is generally a very specific article that may have been linked to from an RSS feed, it is likely that a user will simply visit to read a specific article and not visit any other pages.

3. Conversion rate

Any website is built with a purpose, be it to get someone to contact a company, fill in a registration form or purchase a product. In the case of a blog this could be to subscribe to the RSS feed. They key is that every website has a goal which can be monitored.

The rate at which visitors take one of your predefined goals or ‘positive actions’ is called the conversion rate.

People often ask me which I see as the most important KPI when reviewing a website and for me the conversion rate is the single most relevant figure on any website. A high conversion rate simply states that a large amount of customers are doing what you wanted them to do on your website.

What impacts upon the conversion rate is huge. Generally it’s the right mix of good quality traffic (Note: not necessarily high volumes), a managed customer experience and the right product or service offering as a business.

Seeing the conversion rate as a very high level KPI is key to getting the most value out of it. Google Analytics provides a wealth of more detailed stats on the various factors that affect the conversion rates, which I will pick up on in greater detail in a future article.

Many customers experience low conversion rates and don’t know where to look for solutions, often blaming low traffic volumes or blaming it on the time of year. I’ve not found one website yet where I couldn’t increase its conversion rate, and ultimately revenue and profit, by making improvements to the customer experience. That’s a topic for a whole series of articles to come, as is how to work out whether it’s actually the product that’s at fault.

4. Traffic sources

Search engines have a lot to answer for. Over the last few years there’s been a major push by search engine marketing companies and lots of website owners are becoming savvier about SEO and are naturally moving up the search rankings. This is definitely a good thing but a lot of the business owners I have worked with lose good business sense and seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic that search engines drive to them. It’s not uncommon for a website to receive 90% of its traffic (and ultimately revenue) from visitors who started at Google.

So how many of these businesses could survive if they lost 90% of their revenue? Probably none.

The risk of having 90% of your business coming through one source is too risky and online businesses should look to diversify their online marketing in order to reduce their dependency on such dominant sources such as Google. All it takes is for Google to change their algorithm, or for a company to be removed from Google, and the impact will be felt all the way down to the business’ bottom line.

Then looking at traffic source statistics my advice is to look to increase traffic from all sources over time, but (and this is the key point) to invest more resource into the smaller traffic sources in an attempt for them to be responsible for more of your traffic over time.
Your Google Analytics pie chart for traffic sources should not show any one source of traffic dominating for a long period of time.

5. E-Commerce

If you’re running an e-commerce website and are serious about analytics then you should be using e-commerce transaction tracking in Google Analytics.

Tracking e-commerce transactions allows the actual values of your sales to be monitored which in itself is a great bonus as it allows you to monitor revenue over time. Google Analytics doesn’t just stop here though; this data now becomes available in almost all other Google Analytics reports meaning you can track, amongst other things:

• Revenue and conversion rate per traffic source
• Revenue and conversions rate per keyword
• Revenue per country
• Product performance
• Average order value
• The number of times a user visits before purchasing
• The number of days it takes a user to purchase

Understanding which of your keywords or traffic sources have the highest conversion rate, highest average order value and highest per visit value is an extremely powerful tool in deciding where your marketing spend and effort is best placed.

If you’re not using Google Analytics E-Commerce tracking then you definitely should be.