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Archive for August, 2008
Aug 22
2008
Strategy, Techniques, and Track it all with Google Analytics
So you are the resident pay-per-click (PPC) guru, you have your campaigns running in Google Adwords, your metrics are looking good, your cost per acquisition is looking great, your post-click metrics in Google Analytics are just shining, and your return on your marketing spend is just outstanding. Your boss, or your client if you are an online marketing agency, says: “bring me more (and dangling the promotion/bonus carrot)!” And being the good sport you are, you say with confidence, “of course!”
You know Google is king when it comes to traffic volume, but you more or less exhausted your creative ideas to drive additional traffic through Adwords – what do you do? It is now time to explore other search engines, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and maybe some vertical or secondary search engines.
In this blog post, I’ll cover some PPC implementation techniques to optimize your paid search marketing across multiple search engines, especially Google Adwords and MSN adCenter, while ensuring your PPC post-click metrics are properly tracked in Google Analytics.
The process of transferring campaigns from one search engine to another can be very time consuming and tiring, especially when you have a big account with a large number of campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. A frequent problem popping up on the web these days is the ability to transferring campaigns from your Google Adwords account into your MSN adCenter account. In this post I hope to to answer this question and a little more.
- We first advise that you optimize your campaigns in Google Adwords, allowing enough time for testing different ad variations, adding relevant and negative keywords, and applying other PPC optimization techniques. You can even go further and test few landing pages and pick the best performing ones. When you feel satisfied with the performance in Google Adwords, you can now start planning to migrate them into your MSN adCenter account.
- You need to create and run an ad performance report in Adwords to get the needed information to transfer into your adCenter account. Our friends at Affiliate-Blog have came up with a clean and straightforward way to create this report and transfer it into your adCenter account.
Adding the campaigns in adCenter is one thing, but to be able to see campaign data and more in Google Analytics requires a little more work. It is time to tag those URLs! Here are few tips that will help you tag your URLs properly so that the data shows up in a clear and consistent manner. You can use the Google URL builder to create custom tags for your adCenter destination URLs.
Here is a list of the elements you needs to tag.
- Campaign Source: msn
- Campaign Medium: cpc
- Campaign Term: {QueryString}
Adding this parameter will allow you to track all your keywords in Google Analytics without having to type each keyword manually.
- Campaign Content: (used to differentiate ads)
- Campaign Name: (whatever the campaign name is)
Example:
http://www.domain.com/?utm_source_=adcenter&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=mykeyword&utm_content=variation1&utm_campaign=campaign1
For more details, check out this article written by our friends at PPC Hero
Few Suggestions:
- I recommend you use a unique naming convention to make it easier for you to identify your adCenter campaigns in Google Analytics reports. For example, I want to set up a campaign to market E-nor’s Google Analytics services. In Google Adwords, the campaign name can be g_GAServices and for an adCenter campaign you can name it m_GAServices. Using this naming convention will make it very easy for you to visually identify which PPC system the campaign belongs to.
- I would recommend you import one campaign to adCenter and allow enough time to test it. Check the results in GA to make sure your URL tagging was thorough. If everything goes smoothly, then start transferring the rest of the campaigns after following the same steps we mentioned earlier.
Have a great day transferring and tagging your campaigns! 
Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing
Tags: google adwords, google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing
Posted in pay per click | 2 Comments »
Aug 22
2008
Earlier this week I attended the XChange web analytics conference held by Semphonic and Web Analytics Demystified in San Francisco. Congrats to Gary Angel, his team, and Eric Peterson on such a great conference and creating an environment of knowledge sharing. Attendees included web analytics practitioners, vendors, researchers and consultants.
The main reason I decided to attend the conference was to engage in conversations with practitioners, listen to their success stories, and and as importantly hear the issues they are facing – whether it is technology related (analytics solution/implementation), measurement process, or the brains behind all of the above, people: the analysts and specialists that make it all happen.
The sessions (or huddles as they were called) that I attended were:
- Getting Analysts to produce analysis and getting the business to listen. It was really interesting to hear how so many companies have the same challenges!
- Campaign Attribution. Which marketing dollar brought this lead or this sale? No easy answer here! Was it the the PPC ad, was it that banner, or to make things more fun, was it the cool TV campaign that just went live. As an industry, we have some time to crack this attribution nut to the degree that our CFOs and business folks like it to be. But some really good ideas on correlation and modeling were discussed.
- Web Analytics – A Center of Excellence. Where does Web Analytics reside? What is web analytics excellence? Is it to give decision makers relevant and accurate data?
- B2B metrics and best practices. I really enjoyed this session and took some good notes on neat segmentation strategies, multivariate testing, and behavioral targeting practices that resulted in significant lifts in engagement and conversion.
- I also attended a huddle on Mobile. Are you getting visits from mobile devices, is this something measurable (some of the analytics tool today will identify your mobile traffic), and what’s actionable here? Maybe if you show your boss or your client that 10% of your site traffic is coming from mobile devices and having a heck of a time navigating the not-so-mobile-friendly website, maybe you can get a budget to do something about it.
The part that I really enjoyed was networking. Plenty of opportunities to network, have one-on-one sessions and engage some of the industry’s brightest minds.
One interesting observation I had was some people’s views of Google Analytics. As a disclaimer: if you are reading our blog, you probably already know that we are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) company. While we know some of the other tools, we are a Google Analytics firm and this is what we decided to specialize in.
What is the observation? It was really interesting to hear that:
- Google Analytics is for your mom and pop shop type implementations and if you need something more elaborate you need to go to the high end solutions. My comment was knowing many of the GAACs and looking at their customer lists, and seeing some of the sophisticated implementations first hand, it makes me wonder how this perception keeps coming up. Also, looking at some of the enhancements that Google added in the last several months should highlight the advanced nature of the tool. Event tracking, still in beta, is definitely not low end. Neither are the on-site search integration nor the industry benchmarking features, to name a few. Google doesn’t comment on upcoming features and release dates, but judging by the recent past one would expect more and more extremely useful features to be released.
- Google Analytics lacks the professional services and support infrastructure of a high end solution. My comment: last I checked Google created an echo-system of GA professional services providers, including over 20 GAACs in the US and many others in Europe, Latin America.
- I even hear that you can’t do segmentation with Google Analytics or it can’t do funnel analysis. You can definitely give us a call and one of our GA specialists will guide you through it.
- And then there was the privacy issue and Google will use our analytics data to up the bids on our AdWords campaigns. My comment: I see where this concern is coming from but Google has addressed these issues publicly; in my opinion it would be a horrible PR for them to act otherwise. Read Brian Clifton’s post on Google & privacy for more details.
I don’t intend on doing a feature-by-feature comparison of Google Analytics and other web analytics solutions. Yes, it is a known fact that Google Analytics doesn’t have features that other tools have. A lot has been published already on the subject so I won’t go into details.
My issue is the way some solution providers, consultants, and researchers try to portray Google Analytics as tool for the beginners, as the starting point, and as something that you can tinker with then graduate to something more powerful. I think this is the wrong advice and it is very misleading.
I’ll give you an example. During the conference, I spoke with a very smart individual who happens to be the newly hired web analyst for his organization. In fact, he is the first ever web analyst within this organization. What I later learned is that his company has some one hundred websites with a huge amount of traffic, and for years now they have been paying a premium for their web analytics tool, year in and year out. But when it came to analysis/insights/people/process, no efforts have been taken. When CEO, CFOs, CMOs, Directors of Analytics keep hearing that you should spend your dollars of the high end tool, that is exactly what they seem to be doing: spending their budgets on the tool.
This is really disturbing and it won’t serve the long term interest of any party involved. Wouldn’t this organization be served better if their resources went to bring in analytics talent instead? As an industry, wouldn’t it be better off if our clients have more success with analytics (more success stories for all of us) instead of complaining about the fees they pay and the lack of results?
Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics
Tags: google analytics, web analytics
Posted in web analytics | No Comments »
Aug 13
2008
| Many people, including myself, don’t enjoy filling out forms. Forms are usually long, unclear, and contain too many required fields, etc.
To the contrary, from a business perspective forms are an excellent tool for gathering information.
Our job as web analysts is to make both parties happy and help optimize form length with input analysis. |
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In this post, I will share with you E-Nor’s technique in determining the forms fields that people are most likely not to complete. I will show you how to make this data available to decision makers and web optimizers so they are able to make the necessary changes.
First we will need to add some JavaScript to the form’s html code. Add the below onclick event in the submit button code:
Upon submitting the form, the validation function will be called to check the filled or empty status of the fields.
The validation function is often used to verify that a required field has valid information in it. Today, we will also use it to pass two variables to the isEntered function:
- The first variable is the text that the user enters in each field. If the user enters “John Smith”, for example, in the name field, then document.getElementById(‘name’) = “John Smith”, and if the field was left empty, then document.getElementById(‘name’) = “ ”.
- The second variable is the name of the field (ex. “name”) and this is needed to send information to Google Analytics.
The isEntered function will check the el variable that is passed to it from the validation function.
- If the value of variable is null, we will send a pageview to Google Analytics indicating that the field is empty (ex. /forms/contact_us.htm/empty/phone)
Reading data in
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As we might have thousands and thousands of pageviews in our main profile, I suggest creating a specific profile for the form:
1. Create a filter and name it URL Filter – Contact Us Form
2. Add the above filter (URL Filter – Contact Us Form) to a new profile with a name such as (Contact Us Form)
3. Go to the new Contact Us Profile -> Content -> Top Content
The numbers above clearly show us which fields customers usually fill out or leave empty. This level of input analysis will definitely help optimize form length
Notes:
- The Name and Email fields are both required fields; they should not appear in our report since no one will be able to submit the form without filling them.
- The Comments field has a very high number of pageviews, 154, which is a sign that customers are not interested in filling out this field of the form.
- I will leave what to do after this to you. Depending on the nature of your business and the objectives of the form, the solution vary.
- It may make sense to remove fields from the form so that the form is short and to the point.
- Another option is to test the original form to shorter versions of the form using a tool like Google Website Optimizer. It may be the case that a shorter form will get you more submissions but it is also possible a shorter form will have no effect at all.
Technorati Tags: google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics
Tags: google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics
Posted in web analytics | 15 Comments »
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