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Archive for the ‘web analytics’ Category
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Sep 02
2011
Google Analytics released Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) last week to everyone. There are many very powerful features that were included in this release, some of which I mentioned briefly last week. These features can help make the analysis potential much more powerful. One of the features that everyone needs to take advantage of is Channel Groupings. Google included a basic channel grouping template in MCF, that categorizes a few channels automatically, such as direct, organic, AdWords, and a couple more. If you are using campaign tagging, which you should be, you should have a variety of other channels that are assigned sources and mediums that you defined. If you are taking advantage of this, the default MCF view for Top Conversion Paths will look like this:
Before Channel Groupings
For this view I have filtered the report to only show Paths that include other, which are the undefined Channel Groupings. This isn’t a very useful view, as there is not much analysis that you can do with it. You don’t know what other is, but after going through the steps later in this post you can break these out and you will have paths that look like this instead:
After Channel Grouping
Above is a report that provides much more information, and is more appealing to look at. Instead of being presented with a bunch of “Other” we have broken apart other into the marketing channels that we have been tagging correctly using Google Analytics campaign tracking. This is extremely useful as you can start to analyze how the various marketing channels you are using such as QR Codes, Banner Ads, and even offline media are contributing to your site conversions.
How To Create Channel Groupings
To create your own Channel Grouping like the one presented above, you select the Channel Grouping dropdown and select “Copy Basic Channel Grouping template…” which will copy the settings for the default view that you see in MCF’s.
After clicking on “Copy Basic Channel Grouping template…” you will be presented with the view below. This is how Google has chosen to categorize the channels in all the reports for MCF’s. As you can see the “(Other)” channel comes from a rule that Google made if something doesn’t match any of the conditions above.
When you click “Add new Rule” which can be found under the last channel that has been created, you will be presented with new options to create your new channel, which should look like the image below. Here we have grouped everything that contains “affiliate” in the Medium and grouped it together with a pretty color. The amount of different combinations are very extensive. An example of this is for AdWords you could split the Channel into two Channels, those that came from display advertisements and those that came from paid search.
After you have applied and added new rules for your campaigns your should have a nice list of all your channels, with channel specific colors to make your reports more appealing and easily readable, as shown below. Again the possibilities of different channel grouping are many. Google uses a suggestion of making Generic Keywords vs. Branded Keywords, you could incorporate this into the new template you just made by making another copy of it. You could split your organic search into the two keyword groups, and go from there. I foresee channel groupings being essential to providing support to marketing questions that arise. In a meeting a question that may be asked; “Is social media really worth the time invested?” To help provide insight into this, you could start breaking apart the social media channels and see which contributes to conversions. Channel Groupings is my favorite feature of MCF’s, and I have a feeling it will be most peoples as well.
Tags: Bubbles, Channel Groupings, Colors, google analytics, Multi Channel Funnels
Posted in web analytics | 2 Comments »
Sep 01
2011
An age old debate never seems to settle is whether Analytics is hard or easy. Ironically, this debate could be resolved if we (those of us in the web analytics industry), simply realized that analytics is both hard and easy. What’s certainly hard is convincing end users to commit and leverage analytics and make better use of data. When more people become data driven and adopt analytics, then analytics geeks (such as yours truly!) will find themselves impacting strategies at the executive table. Marketers, business owners and consultants could benefit greatly from making the “easy” accessible and the “hard” simplified.
To reach this goal, marketers need a guide to help build the marketing accountability that analytics, and smart people, bring to the table.
I hope to provide this guide and structure in my 7-Step Analytics Reporting Framework whitepaper. This framework will help marketers navigate through seas of data and reports and leverage insights to impact their business.
You can download the full whitepaper here.
And for those of you on the go, here’s a quick outline of what to expect:
1- Define your requirements
Clearly identify what you need to measure and extract key data to measure your performance. This is the foundation for all following steps.
2- Know your channels
Pageviews alone won’t cut it anymore. Different media platforms require different measurement approaches and techniques. Understand the characteristics of your channels and how to track each of them.
3- Trim your metrics
When it comes to reporting, apply this strategy: “less is more”. Just because you have a lot of data doesn’t mean you need it all.
4- Segment for context
Absolute numbers and aggregates hide a wealth of insight and can be very misleading. . Segment and allow “context” to give your data meaning.
5- Put intelligence at your service
Let computers crunch the numbers. Let reports detect and flag significant changes in your key performance indicators automatically. (If you are not a Google Analytics user, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and leverage its powerful Intelligence engine.)
6- Integrate reporting
Data from your website offer just few pieces of the puzzle. Incorporate data from mobile, social, offline, competitive, etc. and look at the big picture.
7- Automate
Tired of manual reporting? Automate your reports. This gives you more time to do proper analysis.
Bonus Step
Channel Attribution & Multi-Channel Funnels
Download the full whitepaper here. Feel free to comment and share.
Tags: analytics framework, analytics requirements, channel segmentation, digital marketing, google analytics, marketing optimization, report automation
Posted in general, web analytics | 7 Comments »
Aug 24
2011
Today, Google has made the new Multi Channel Funnels report suite available for everyone inside of Google Analytics. You can read their announcement here. Multi-Channel Funnels show which marketing channels customers interacted with for 30 days prior to purchasing or converting (completing a goal). This is great, because now we can see which channels initiate, assist, and finally help complete the conversion. In order for this feature to provide any value, you must have Goals and Ecommerce setup in your Google Analytics account.
There are 5 new reports and today I’ll give you a brief overview of a few. The first report you’ll see is the overview. Here you can see there where 1,261 conversions and of these 405 were assisted. Assisted means they used a combination of traffic sources. This could mean they visited our site twice from referral. The later reports will break this down more.
Assisted Conversions is next up. This starts to break down those assisted conversions and shows which channels contributed and whether it was first click, last interaction, or both. The values in this table are derived from the values that we assigned to our goals. This conversion value will be especially useful if you have e-commerce enabled and setup in Google Analytics. Keep in mind that in this report you can change to look at first click vs. last interaction and these are not mutually exclusive. A visitors path could look like Organic -> Direct – > Organic and in this case Organic would get both a first click and last interaction conversion. An awesome new feature in this section is the ability to make your own channel groupings, which for example could be a list of branded keywords and this can all be done on the fly.
The Top Conversion Paths Reports, display the conversion paths in a very user friendly manner. For the example below you can see that most of the users who are converting on this site, stick with the same channel. When looking at this and other reports, it is important to not just look at the overview as we have done for these examples, but also to drilldown and look at individual goal and e-commerce conversions.
These new reports open up many new layers of analysis. Multi-Channel Funnels complements the recent update to sessions. We will be providing more posts, about more detailed analysis that can be done inside of each of these reports. If you have any unique insights into how you are going to use these reports leave a comment below.
Tags: google analytics, Multi Channel Funnels
Posted in web analytics | 2 Comments »
Aug 19
2011
 Recently, I read an article on the BBC News site titled, “Civil servants’ web habits revealed”. The article was about the recent report released by the British Department for Transport on the thousand sites most visited by staff while at work.
Even though I was psychologically prepared by my friend Brian Clifton to see some non-sense in the report, I have to say that I was shocked to find out that the ranking criteria was the number of hits to the site.
My first hope was that their definition of “hits” is not the one we teach in Analytics 101 and hoped that at least they actually meant “visit” instead of “hit”, but after reading the attached notes to the report I found them clearly stating that the number of hits, “does not indicate the number of times a particular page on a website has been visited, but in many instances will include multiple components (e.g. text, images, videos) each of which are counted.”!
What is wrong with “Hits”?
I still remember my first personal website back in the days where “hits” was the only metric that I could use to measure the success of my site. At that time we knew that the hits report is like a garbage bin for all file requests from the web server [html, CSS, JavaScript, images, PDFs,…], but we were still happy for the small piece of information about our sites.
It is important to know that if two sites are visited the same number of times and the same number of pages are viewed in each site and one of the sites has more images, CSS/JS calls, and file downloads, the site with more server hits will rank higher in the Department for Transport’s report!
The use of hits may have been acceptable 10-15 years ago as the industry was not equipped with the right tools nor educated enough on what to measure and analyze, but now as we have advanced in the digital analytics sphere there is no excuse to use these outdated metrics in our analysis. The hits report is so useless that in reality it does not tell you anything about your site and visitors and certainly deserves the acronym that Katie Delahaye Paine gave to “hit”: How Idiots Track Success.
The example above illustrates the uselessness of the “Hits” report. By looking only at the number of “Hits”, Site A is doing much better than Site B and that is probably due to different factors that have nothing to do with the user experience (i.e. more CSS and JS calls). Once you look at other more relevant metrics like Visits and Pageviews, you will clearly see how bad Site A is doing compared to Site B. The numbers show more visits and pageviews, more time on site per visit, less bounced visits and more importantly higher conversion.
Good news!
I am happy to see the Google Analytics site [second in the list] being visited by some government employees (Civil servants as they are called in the report), which gives me some hope that next year’s report will be based on more meaningful metrics rather than the useless number of Hits report.
Related Posts
Tags: hits, pageviews, time on site, web analytics, web metrics
Posted in web analytics | 1 Comment »
Aug 04
2011
 Back in August 2008, I wrote a post on how to optimize form length with input analysis with Google Analytics. This is still a very relevant topic, as forms are still essential to collecting data from visitors. I still cringe when I see a form that has a ton of fields, and I know many of you do as well. This post will show you how to take action to shorten your forms and remove unneeded fields, which usually results in higher conversion rates for your forms.
The old post referenced the traditional/syncronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code. This new post features the newest release by Google, which is the asynchronous code execution.
Please note that I am not going to re-do the entire post, just the code portion.
So here is the code update:
Traditional Snippet (Synchronous):
function validate()
{
isEntered(document.getElementById('name'),'name');
isEntered(document.getElementById('email'),'email');
isEntered(document.getElementById('phone'),'phone');
isEntered(document.getElementById('company'),'company');
isEntered(document.getElementById('comments'),'comments');
frm.action='/thankyou.aspx?src=contact_us.htm';
}
function isEntered(el, field_name)
{
if((el.value=="") || (el.value==null))
{
pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact_us.htm/empty/'+field_name);
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
Asynchronous Snippet (NEW):
function validate()
{
isEntered(document.getElementById('name'),'name');
isEntered(document.getElementById('email'),'email');
isEntered(document.getElementById('phone'),'phone');
isEntered(document.getElementById('company'),'company');
isEntered(document.getElementById('comments'),'comments');
frm.action='/thankyou.aspx?src=contact_us.htm';
}
function isEntered(el, field_name)
{
if((el.value=="") || (el.value==null))
{
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/contact_us.htm/empty/'+field_name]);
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
Related Posts:
Tags: form optimization, google analytics, web analytics
Posted in web analytics | No Comments »
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