There is no doubt that the new Google Analytics Interface is pretty amazing; improving on the previous interface which is intutive, insightful and easy to use, I thought, would be impossible but I was wrong. Perhaps one of the best additions in the new interface is the mult-channel funnel conversion analysis feature. To learn about this check out a video from Google on it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ2RbGsuy3U The reason this feature is so helpful is that very often users interact with a website many times before going on to complete a purchase. Previously, the final interaction with the site was the one credited with generating the conversion despite the fact that this interaction may have been as a result of a number of previous research interactions. For example, let’s say you sell men’s watches online. A user goes to Google and types in “best value Rolex watch” and clicks on one of your Google Adwords ad’s promoting a deal that you are offering on a Rolex. The user browses the site, checks out and notes your prices and then leaves the site to browse the deals on offer by some of your competitors. He then returns to your site by typing the URL directly into the address bar at the top of the browser and completes the purchase. Up to now, this conversion would be attributed to the direct source despite the fact that the sale owed its origin to a Google Adwords click. One of the best features of the multi-channel funnel is the ability to conduct a “first interaction analysis.” This lets the site owner see where sales originate. Sales on a site very often do not originate and close from the same source so knowing how people first come into contact with your site is extremely valuable information as it allows the site owner to focus his investment on such media to ensure that more and more people are entering the top of the sales funnel most likely to result in sales. Be sure to check this feature out and if you need any help on this or any other part of Google Analytics, give us a call!
Archive for the ‘Google Analytics’ Category
Google In Page Analytics
I just got a bit of time to check out Google In Page Analytics. This is a new feature visbile from within your Google Analytics account. Go to the content section and you will find it there. While the content section has long given us insights into top landing / exit pages and more this new feature is a really fantastic graphical interface lets you see how people browse your site. For example, from the screen-shot below, I can see that 32% of visitors to our home-page click on our meet the team page. Good job, we all put on suits for the photos!
Within the meet the team page, I can see that 6% of those who go here visit my profile. This is a really great tool to get insights into what parts of your site visitors are frequenting and analysing how you can improve them. As usual with Google, it’s free (except for Adwords of course!) so be sure to check it out and see what parts of your site need some attention.
Nice Free Google Tool For Companies Expanding Overseas
Companies looking to expand typically consider two options. One is to start selling a broader range of products or services. A web design company could start offering SEO services, a pub could open a nightclub, a hotel could open a spa, a mobile phone company can start offering broadband etc. The difficulty though with moving into a new product or service line is the steep learning curve to get up to speed with the incumbents in the industry who typically have built up a wealth of knowledge in their area that you are now trying to encroach upon. A lot of research and homework needs to be done to understand this new area to see how your business can carve out competitive advantage in it.
The second option businesses look at when expanding is to do what they already do but do it in more places. This involves launching in new markets. This is often preferable as very often the competitive advantages that you have in your home country are exportable so you can hit the ground running in a new market by bringing all of the expertise that you have built up to bear in a new area. When launching in a new market, a key consideration is what is the demand in potential new markets for your product or service and how competitive is the industry there. A great tool to help this research is: http://translate.google.com/globalmarketfinder/index.html – well done to Nehal who came across this during his research time. This tool lets you plug in key-phrases that are working for you in your current location to get a feel for how much demand there is for these in potential new geographies. Of course, you could use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool but the usefulness of the above tool is that you can quickly see demand for multiple continents and countries simultaneously whereas in Adwords, you need to check each individually. As DPFOC hopes to spread its wings into new geographies by the middle of this year, we will certainly be using this tool to inform which market we hit first!
Monitoring Effectiveness of Paid Keywords
There is no doubting the effectiveness of Google Adwords in the right hands. The ability to be at the very top of Google within minutes for ANY key-phrase, assuming you are willing to pay for the privilege, is powerful. However, if you over-pay for your key-words through having a low quality score and don’t carefully watch which ones are working and which are not, Adwords can be a black hole for the largest of marketing budgets with only one winnner: Google! So, if you are going to invest in paying per click, it is crucial to ensure your Adgroups are targeted and that you monitor the effectiveness of each and every keyword.
The easiest way to track ROI on individual keywords is if the site is an e-commerce site in which case Analytics will provide you with a black and white indisputable number in terns of ROI per keyword. For non e-commerce sites, there is still the option of establishing meaningful ROI numbers assuming goals can be identified and values assigned to same. This is tricky and far from an exact science. Saying that each time someone visits your contact page is worth £50 is not as exact as an actual transaction taking place. For me, the most interesting feature in Analytics as it relates to paid key-phrases (assuming no easily quantifiable goals are in place) is to be found in the traffic sources tab. From here, select the “paid” option to exclude organically generated traffic. Sort the key-phrases by bounce rate. Seeing key-phrases with 100% bounce rates means that the person who clicked on the ad’ did not find what they had hoped for on the landing page. As with all Analytics data, don’t react to 100% bounce rate based on 1 click but a high bounce rate persistently dogging a particular key-phrase requires further investigation. The ability to see from which cities your paid traffic is originating is further interesting.
SEO India
How to exclude internal traffic from Analytics
We all watch the Google Analytics data for our websites very closely to see just how many visitors we are getting, where are they coming from and what are they doing when they get to our site. One thing that many of our clients ask us is “how can I get rid of internal company traffic from my reports?” Obviously, internal staff logging on to the site is of no real interest to us in terms of analysing site traffic. There are two ways to exclude such traffic.
The first is to use the pre-defined exclude filter within the Analytics application. Just go to filter manager, add filter, pre-defined filters and you will see an option to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses or a single IP. This is fine if working from a static IP. However, this is very often not the case and so this filter is not suitable.
When filtering internal traffic from a dynamic IP, the easiest thing to do is as follows. Add the Google Analytics user defined code snippet to a page on your website that only internal staff have access to. If such a page doesn’t exist, set one up or we can do for you. Once all staff have logged onto this page, a UTMV cookie will be placed on their machine identifying them as being internal staff. Now a filter can be set up to exlude all users defined as “internal staff.”
For more on how to get the very most out of your Google Analytics account or even to set one up for you, be sure to contact us.
keywords: Google Analytics