All posts tagged Analytics
Keep It Simple Silly
Let’s face it, web Analytics can be a little hot to handle even for the most experienced among us. It is full of tools, techniques, Web 2.0 and all sorts of other tidbits of information. Yet, it can be complex, intricate and at times intractable. Worst of all, it can inundate us with too much data and choices. Scared? The trick is to ‘KISS’ and make up with all that it has to offer. That is, Keep It Simple, Silly. Whether you are the most experienced user or know next to nothing about Analytics, we can all use a few simple tips to help us KISS better in order to maximize our efforts.
Know the Basics
This may seem obvious to some, but to others, especially those viewing analytics for the first time, the jargon may be a bit foreign. If you focus on these basic but important areas then you will be off to a good start in understanding most of what is reported.
- Arrival method: How are people finding you? Analytics breaks traffic down into three areas – Direct Traffic, Search engines (Paid and Non Paid) and Referring sites (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Understand why traffic is being driven or not being driven via one of these areas.
- Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who went to one page only and left your site. The higher this number, the more questions you should be asking about your site’s performance.
- Content: What pages do people spend the most time on? Are your product/services pages attracting any visits? What about your blog?
- Keywords: What keywords are people finding your site with? Are the keywords relevant and converting?
- Location: Where is the traffic coming from? If you are local and receiving national attention then you might review your geo-targeting.
Create the Dashboard
Dashboards help you visualize and track trends on every level of your business and to align activities with key goals while keeping you on top of vital statistics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In simpler terms, it is there to communicate the performance of one or more metric (starting with the metrics mentioned above). With colored bars and nice graphs trending over time, dashboards can be easy to look at and help you gauge your website’s overall performance.
Set up Reporting
We’re all very busy just trying to keep our heads above water. But if we’ve taken the time to understand a few metrics and have gone as far as setting up a dashboard then we might as well take that final plunge and set up automated reports. Its the old saying in business, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Therefore, automated reports delivered to your email inbox weekly or monthly will establish a good habit of viewing your Analytics data.
Start KISSing Your Website
Once you become a KISSing expert in Analytics turn your attention to the website itself. Remember most of your site’s visitors have very little patience and can be easily distracted by all the jazz in your website that leads to nowhere. Functionality, relevance and immediacy are key touch points of a site. When it comes to web design, layout and content, your site has to KISS and tell! Use professional looking fonts and standard font sizes that are easy on the eye and make sure your site navigation easy to use and easy to find! Killer looks, per se, may kill your site so Keep It Simple!
Analytics Can Be the “Key” to Keywords
86400-1440-24-7-365. Google is on a hunt to help us find what we ask of it. All this high-powered engine needs is a few characters to produce results in what seems like nanoseconds. That’s all there is to it. Or is it? Don’t fall prey to the simplicity. It’s the keyword relevance that draws in the qualified traffic to your website. So, in order to lure this highly qualified traffic you need to develop a better understanding of keywords.
That’s where Analytics comes into play. There are a variety of free, subscription-based and pay-per-use keyword research tools available to help you find the right keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool, with its huge database of keywords in over 50 languages, is one such example. You can even enter a word or a phrase that describes your business/website right in Google to get a sense of traffic. But before you do even that, utilize your Google Analytics account. That means moving from the shallow waters of the Analytics dashboard and taking a deeper dive into the Analytics data in order to conduct the appropriate research.
Google Analytics allows us to see the data in a nice context. It’s almost like giving us the answers to a test. An entire “keywords” section is devoted to providing the keywords people used to find our website, how many visits from the keyword, how much revenue that keyword generated, the bounce rate and much more! This is very informative data to have before you start investing time and effort into organic and paid search.
This table allows us to see which keywords are performing well and which ones are not when it comes to the critical metrics such as the number of visits, time on site and bounce rate.
Analytics allows us to focus closer on a particular metric, in this case bounce rate compared to the website’s average.
Remember, we want to lure qualified traffic to the site. SEO experts follow a basic thumb rule for choosing keywords that bring the most relevant, revenue-adding traffic to a website. Here are a few considerations:
- Say no to single words. Phrases or long tail keywords are better than singular words.
- Target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible. However, do not use keywords that have less competition just for this reason alone.
- Choose keywords that are specific with a narrow focus but avoid getting too specific so as to not lose traffic.
- Localize your keywords by making use of your geographical location.
- Use at least 2-3 different, but related, keywords on each of the pages of your web site (too many keywords on a web page will saturate your efforts).
Remember, you will want to get the most of out of your keywords when you begin to optimize. That means including them in obvious places on your web page (title tag, meta tags, copy) and not so obvious places (alt tags, anchor text) in order to achieve high keyword density, frequency and prominence.
Without having a good place to start for choosing keywords, the task can quickly become mind boggling given there can be literally millions of keywords to choose from. Besides, choosing the wrong keywords can be disastrous and set you back months if you are optimizing your site for organic search. For that reason alone is worth the time and research using Analytics.
Is Event Tracking One of Your New Year’s Resolutions?
It’s a new year and a fresh start. For some, that means resolutions and goals for 2010. Okay. I realize that dropping a few pounds and not smoking are ideal resolutions but what about goals for your website? To me, setting up a goal would be just as easy as not touching that piece of chocolate cake.
The process of establishing website goals begins with identifying and then tracking specific events on your website. Alas, most analytics programs, Google specifically, give us the ability to track a wide variety of events visitors take on websites and then act on those results to improve upon your website’s performance.
The first of the two-step process begins with you, the site owner, asking questions in order to determine what event it is you would like to track. For example, if you have an e-commerce site then you would probably want to know how many sales were generated last week or last month. That seems obvious. But, have you ever wondered how many people are clicking on Product A on the products page? For non-e-commerce related sites, you might ask yourself whether people are opting-in your recurring e-newsletter or downloading the latest e-newletter in PDF format.
Event tracking really depends on the specific goals and needs of your site, and what you want to track. Nonetheless, you should be tracking some type of event because when a visitor interacts with a video player or game on your website, no pageview is generated, thus making it difficult to measure.
Here are some common events that are tracked that do not generate pageviews:
- Clicks on links that take the visitor to another site
- Clicks on an image or button (ex. Facebook icon or shop now button)
- Banner Ad clicks
- File downloads (ex. PDF)
- Page widgets
- E-commerce activity/shopping cart purchases
- Member functions (ex. tracking new member sign-ups, log-ins, etc.)
- Flash, Ajax and Javascript related contentPlay button on a video or audio
Tracking specific events, the second part of the process, is relatively easy. If you are using Google Analytics, then all you need to do is call the _trackEvent() method each time you want to register an event such as how many clicks to an external link or video downloads. For example, if you want to track how many people clicked on the “follow us” Twitter icon/link on your web page then the code would look something like this:
The “Home”, “Follow” and “Twitter” identifiers represent the category, action and label so you can view the specific results for this event right in your Analytics account. It’s really that simple. For more information on setting up event tracking in Google Analytics visit: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html
Remember, event tracking is there to help improve your overall online sales and marketing goals and allow you to have a better understanding of your visitors’ actions. Now, isn’t this a resolution worth sticking with?
I Have the Analytics Data, Now What?
Every business entity today is faced with a problem (or two), whether related to an internal process or customer. Analytics offers up part of the solution by providing us with the intelligence to understand and address the problem while benefiting the customer in the end. Yet, the data offered up by web analytics providers like StatCounter, Webtrends, Google, etc. can be overwhelming, to say the least. This is especially true if you are a small business owner or new to the business of tracking website visitor behavior.
One look at an analytics dashboard and one can come away feeling lost or anxious to get answers. Ah, but therein lies the key: Intelligently interpreting, disseminating and utilizing the data to derive at conclusions and decisions. Otherwise, the information becomes useless. Here are some suggestions on dealing with your data.
Invest in the analysis, not the technology – You will want to first establish a team of analytical minds that will be able to interpret, disseminate and manage the mounds of data. Free programs (e.g. Google Analytics) are sufficient for the needs of most businesses. So there’s no need to fret over the technology. However, you should try to avoid using two analytics programs. Experience has taught me that more discrepancies and questions arise when dealing with multiple sets of data. Not everyone may agree but let’s not forget, the primary goal and a better use of time for the Analytics team should be on the analysis and drawing conclusions. Not on the technology.
Establish Goals - Ask yourself ”What is the desired result?” or “What am I trying to accomplish?” for a particular web page. Whether it’s increasing traffic or converting customers, having clear, established goals and objectives will prevent you from performing unnecessary analysis. It will also keep your website on right track to achieving its goals. Note that Google Analytics now lets you create up to 20 conversion goals per profile, a feature released just this week. Now there is no excuse for adding such simple goals as length of time on site and number of pages per visit.
Test and tweak then test some more – Now that you have a team in place and goals established it is time to put the data to the test. Literally. Because what do bounce rates really mean if the data is not coupled with the testing of a message, design, layout or call to action? The results will show how users react to changes. So, if your goal is to decrease the bounce rate, then did the test show the visitor staying on the website longer or leaving quicker? You want to keep tweaking and testing until you reach the desired result. Otherwise, how can you really make a sound, logical decision pertaining to your website? And there are no excuses for not testing. Google has a free tool called ‘Website Optimizer’ to achieve the desired test data you seek.
Patience is a virtue – It is generally not a good idea to make changes on the basis of a few days worth of data. Before you delete or pause a keyword or ad, for example, question whether you have enough data to make a sound decision. The longer the date range, the more abundance of data. Thus, the easier the decision. Shorter time frames offer misleading theories and lead to miscalculated decisions. Take into account returning customers, those who find the site via a paid ad, for example, and then return later to the site to make a purchase. You may miss out on important conversion data if you react too quickly due to a small sample set of data. Also, depending on your goal, it may take days or even months for many of your visitors to convert to customers. So, be patient and set a date range that will last as long as your expected sales cycle or return statistically significant conclusions.
Remember, we’re dealing with technology so stay ‘in the know’ by subscribing to the plethora of blogs out there including the Google Analytics Blog, Analytics Market, or Web Analytics World.
AdWords & Analytics are Even Closer
The on again, off again relationship between Google AdWords and Google Analytics has taken another turn in the search engine soap opera but this time for the better. Google has recently announced that it is possible to import goals and transactions from Analytics into AdWords. This is a significant move in the relationship. Think of it as Analytics moving in with AdWords after years of dating.
For years, AdWords users would have to click to and from Analytics to see which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords were returning an investment. For those of us managing multiple accounts, this was nothing short of annoying.
In typical Google fashion, they made this “move in” as easy as 1-2-3, but under one stipulation: AdWords must be linked with Analytics (i.e. each committed to the relationship). Simply:
1. Find conversion tracking under the tools tab.
2. Click on the link “Link your Analytics Goals and Transactions” in the message box.
3. Select the Analytics goals you want to see in AdWords and click “Link”.
Presto! AdWords is now including all your Analytics Goals and Transactions. This will allow you to track conversion performance (including conversion rate and cost per acquisition) and use Analytics data with Conversion Optimizer.
Now, if all relationship move ins were this smooth…
