Google Analytics Client Workshop

How to use Google Analytics to improve yourweb site and online marketing

John DuffyMarketing Director, Nemisysjohn@nemisys.uk.com01189 122226

Google Analytics - Agenda

Introductions

What is analytics?

• Page tagging vs log files

Basics

• User & administrator set up

• The dashboard

• Working with dates

• Spark lines

• Different views for different news

• Visitors

• Map overlay

• Landing pages & bounce rates

• Site search

• Traffic sources

Clever functionality

• Report distribution

• Google Analytics help & support

The really useful part

• Segmentation– Within reports

• Working with profiles– Some useful profiles

• Working with filters– Some useful filters

• Working with advanced segments– Some useful advanced segments

• Choice: profiles vs advanced segments

Truly measuring performance

• Goals

• Funnels

• Campaign measurement

Reporting

• Pulling it all together in to a report

Homework

• Action plan

• Further reading

Nemisys Client Workshops

• This is one of a series of workshops we run for our clients

• Workshops run either in-house or open access where we take up to 6 clients a day

• The purpose is simple – if your web site works better for you, you may win more budget to further develop it. – We also want choosing to work with Nemisys to be a

“career-enhancing” decision!

• See www.nemisys.uk.com/workshops for more information

• Or email john@nemisys.uk.com

Before we start – your history

Aims for today

• Learn the usefulness and limitations of analytics

• Learn your way around Google Analytics

• Learn how to set up and interpret reports and profiles

• Define online goals for your day to day activities

• Start to measure the effectiveness of your (online) marketing

• Build a “better” structure for your monthly reports

• Show you how to save money online shopping

Over to you

• Introductions and roles

• How do you use your web site?

Fundamental question

Q. “Is 10 registrations a day on our site good or bad?”

Correct answer

• A. “I’ve no idea, but 10 on Monday, 11 on Tuesday, 12 on Wednesday etc is great!”

What is analytics?

• Measuring what happens on your web site

• Measuring other promotional activity

• Setting and progressing towards goals

• And ideally, making sure you plan in at specification stage how what success looks like

Analytics ‘history’ - log files

Analytics ‘history’ – log files

Log file report - Urchin

Analytics tools – page tagging

Urchin vs Google Analytics

• Numbers differ

• Not worth getting in to too much detail, but plenty you can read

• BUT, if you insist on comparing old with new:

• Work out a conversion factor in parallel sets of data and use that going forward (but be warned, it’s messy)

Why Google Analytics?

• Level 1 – out of the box tagging/reporting

• Level 2 – bend the reports to better understand your web site

• Level 3 – bend your tagging to (eg) record on-page activities, Flash activity, ecommerce activity

• Remember - You have both – Urchin and Google Analytics

Use analytics to your advantage

So let’s dive in

• www.google.com/analytics

Not got a Google Account yet?

• https://www.google.com/accounts/newaccount

• Use your work email address– Or for today, if you do not have access to your work email

address, use an email address you can access, then change it later – I’ll show you how

Help & support

Get stuck in, explore

• Don’t be afraid to get stuck in

• Explore the reports – there are new reports added all the time

• I’d guestimate that there have been 20 fundamental improvements in the last 2 years, so do get used to using the online help to remind and steer you – I DO!

Where you can look for help / tips• How to videos -

http://youtube.com/googleanalytics

• GA support - http://google.com/support/googleanalytics

• GA blog - http://analytics.blogspot.com/

• Webmaster tools - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

• My blog, analytics posts & tips - http://www.nemisys.uk.com/blogs/nemisys/Default.asp?keyword=analytics

Basics 1 - user set up

Basics 2 – dashboard

• Shows “most useful” reports – that’s subjective!

• Add up to 12 reports

• Reorder and delete reports

Essential concepts - averages

• Averages are your enemy

• EXCEPT within tightly defined segments or for specific pages

• BAD – bounce rate across a whole site

• GOOD – bounce rate for a specific page

Basics 3 – date ranges

• Defaults to last 31 days

• Change to view 1 month

• Change to view 1 week

• Change to compare 2 months

Exercise – date ranges

• View 1 month

• View 1 week

• Compare March and February

• Align start/end days when comparing date ranges

Basics 4 – comparing metrics

• Get used to exploring the reports and comparing figures

Basics 5 – spark lines

• Watch spark lines to spot anomalies worth looking in to

Exercise – spark lines

• Can you spot any activity worth looking in to on your spark lines?

Basics 6 - views

• Cut data in different views to provide insight

Basics 7 – report distribution

• Report distribution

• Top link to set up an email

• Left link to see all of the emails you’ve set up across the whole site

Exercise – report distribution

• Identify some useful scheduled reports for your site

• Set up some scheduled reports for your site to your colleagues

Basics 8 - segmentation

• Metrics – basic counts of things that happen on your site, like visitors, page views etc

• Dimensions – attributes that the basic action create, like time on site, new vs returning visitors and keywords used to reach you

• That’s much easier with an example– Top content & bounce rate

Visitors – sessions & uniques

• Sessions

• Unique visitors

Visitors - new & returning

• Absolute numbers are OK

• But differences between segments are much more interesting

• Bounce rates

• Conversions

• Revenues

Map overlay

• Zoom from country to city level

• Use for targeting cost per click adverts

• Measure goals by campaign and geography?

Exercise – map overlay

• Is geography important to you

• Overseas offices?

• Overseas sales drives?

• UK-only traffic

• City-specific traffic?

• Landing pages per city maybe for local events?

Landing pages and bounce rate• Spot best performers

• Improve problem pages

• There’s no “right” or “wrong” figure

• But don’t just look at rates – concentrate on high volume pages

Landing pages and source

• Drill in to individual landing pages to see where the visitors came from

Homework – landing pages

• Identify 3 landing pages using the following criteria:– High volume of entrants (so you don’t spend effort with

insignificant rewards)– Significant bounce rate

• Over the next month, reduce the bounce rates for each page

Site search

• How many people searched?

• How often did they search?

• What for?

• Any problem content?

Homework

• Now search tagging is enabled, use it to:

• Identify problem areas on your site

• Identify the language your visitors use to check you’re “jargon free”

Traffic sources

• Referring sites

• Search engines

• Keywords used

• Campaign traffic

Profiles

• A profile is a report, created by filtering (ie discarding) some information as the analysis is done

• Useful profiles might be:– Subdomains– Microsites– Site sections– UK visitors– Paid search visitors

• Profiles are also useful for controlling access when administering users

Creating a profile

• Overview page > add new profile

• Work through the wizard, probably choosing:– Existing domain– UK

• Then overview page > edit profile– Default page = default.asp– Exclude query string parameters = blank– Currency displayed as = GBP– Yes, an e-commerce site– Do track site search, query parameter = searchexpression

• But do check the query parameter by doing a search on your site!

• Result = a new profile that will behave exactly like your main profile from this point forwards, unless we apply some filters to it

Filters and profiles

• Filters make your profiles useful, by allowing you to focus on a specific segment of visitors

• They cut out the “noise” created by visitors who you aren’t interested in for the specific piece of functionality you are looking at

• Examples of useful filters:

Applying filters to profiles

Before we start:

• NEVER apply filters to your base profile or you will discard information

Stuff to understand

• New profiles can’t look back in time – you start to record information from the day when you set the profile up– Advanced segments can look backwards though

• You need to reapply your “settings” (home page, site search etc) when you set up a new profile

• Then apply filters

Filter - subdirectory

• If you have a microsite, intranet or extranet running in a separate folder

• So here, we are isolating people who use our Ecards system at www.nemisys.uk.com/ecards

Filter – new visitors only

• Here, I just want new visitors as I already know I can “convert” returning visitors

Filter – exclude other domains

• Because anyone can add your tag to their site, you might want to set up a filter that excludes all traffic from other sites

• This actually happened to Nemisys - a developer in India ripped our site and rebadged it for a client.

• The other site showed up in our numbers until a polite email suggesting they shouldn’t pay their developer found its way to them ...

Filter – visitors from organic search

• If you’re focussing on SEO, this is a useful profile to help measure your progress

• Remember – search rankings are old hat. This lets you monitor true success – visitors who convert

Filter – exclude your staff

• If you know your IP company address(es), you can exclude traffic from staff

• Or flip the logic on its head and look at only traffic from staff if that’s useful to you

Filter – UK visitors

• Useful if overseas visitors really are irrelevant to you

Exercise – set up a new profile

• Call it something you’ll recognise

Setting GoalsSegmentationTracking your marketing activity

Fundamental question

• So what?

• Or more constructively

• So what now?

Reporting your goals

• First, let’s define them!

• For our purposes, a goal is a meaningful outcome for your business

• Example goals:– Submitted the contact form– Made a donation– Made a purchase– Registered for an event– Support log ins

• Split in to pairs and come up with a list of goals for your site

Our goals

• To complete – list of goals we’ll aim to add

Beyond goals to funnels

• Measure the progress from 1 page to another, finishing in a goal

• Can be simple – submitting a form

• Or more complex – a basket & checkout process

Review your goals – are there any funnels that we should set up?

Measuring your goals

• Default measure is percentage, not absolutes

• But there’s a custom report to give you the absolute figures

Goals - getting to the numbers

Default report gives %ages only

This custom report gives absolute numbers

After goals – segmentation

• Level 1 – within reports

• Level 2 – profiles

• Level 3 – advanced segments

Segments – “best” approach

• Drill in to and pivot the STANDARD REPORTS to identify interesting segments

• Use PROFILES and FILTERS to “clean” your data– And to produce reports for segments you know you will be

interested in long term

• Use ADVANCED SEGMENTS to explore your profiles

Segments again - advanced

• Simple exploration we’ve covered

• Beta service – advanced segments

• Portable across profiles AND accounts

• Retrospective analysis

Exercise – profiles & filters

• Set up a new profile and apply a filter that will be useful for you in preparing your reports

Advanced segments

• A great way to fish about in your reports

• Unlike profiles, can look backwards

• But don’t be tempted to use INSTEAD of profiles

• Use Google’s default segments

• And add your own

Suggested segments

• Member activity (this should really be a profile too)

• UK visitors

• Specific sources

• What other segments are relevant to your organisation?

Campaign measurement

• GA “automatically” measures your Adwords

• But can also measure your other marketing activity, such as:– Banner adverts– Exchanged/paid links– Click-throughs from email– Click-throughs from other documents

Campaign measurement

Examples• http://www.nemisys.uk.com/portfolio_item.asp?section=00010001000800010001&itemid=23

• http://www.englishgolfunion.org/?utm_source=nemisys&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=portfolio

Campaign measurement

Variable Notes

utm_source (required) Examples include search engines, newsletters, ecards etc

utm_medium (required) Examples include CPC, banners, PDFs, docs, email etc

utm_campaign (use) Use to differentiate where source and medium are the same (January Newsletter, February Newsletter etc)

utm_term What keywords are you targeting for paid advertising

utm_content What ad version , use to distinguish effectiveness of copy

• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&topic=11014 (or Google “Google URL builder”)

Produce a coherent approach to record all campaigns in to a master report, and making it easy for people to choose new tracking URLs

Pulling it all together

• “Management” likes it all in 1 place – and in fact that’s a useful discipline

• Use MS Excel to bring together most important numbers

• Over a series of months and years

• To focus on trends and campaigns

Real world actions

• Let’s make a 1 month action plan for improving your site’s performance– Implement all of your goals so that you start to measure

against objectives– Identify 3 landing pages to tweak and reduce bounce rate /

improve goal conversion– Identify 2 current campaigns – how can we improve them?

Cutting your shopping bill

• Just browse before you buy– Say you visit and purchase something in December– Then revisit in Feb, but just browse without even signing in– Top end analytics systems will tie the visits together via

your cookies and don’t be surprised if you receive an email containing the products you browsed

– To really reel them in, add the product to your basket and then leave ...

• And only respond to the type of offers you prefer

Further reading

Blogs, hints & tips

• But this book - http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/

• Helpful if you have lots of time to devote to analytics, highly entertaining - http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

• My blog (analytics tag) - http://www.nemisys.uk.com/blogs/nemisys/Default.asp?keyword=analytics

Online help

• How to videos - http://youtube.com/googleanalytics

• GA support - http://google.com/support/googleanalytics

• GA blog - http://analytics.blogspot.com/

• Webmaster tools - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/