Making the most of website analytics

An essential part of any website marketing campaign is your own analytics data ‘ the statistics that show the number of visits to the site, which pages are viewed, where these visitors come from (referrals), and at what point they leave. Analytics can provide much more information as well, yet there are key data trends that can provide valuable information on the effectiveness of your online strategy.

Most websites will have access to some form of analytics data, probably provided by their web hosting company or as a subscription to a software package. We have previously reviewed the different types of website statistics programmes available, including Google Analytics which launched at the end of 2005.

Google Analytics recently underwent changes to the way data is presented and it remains a powerful and user-friendly analytics package that should be seriously considered, especially if your hosting service only provides a basic level of data. It’s also free!

Changing over from one analytics package to another can create discrepancies in data due to the way that different packages record and analyse traffic logs, so the trends over time through one analytics package are more valuable. As you review these trends, you need to consider what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important for your business, to see whether they are improving or not.

For example, how well is your site working for your visitors and what is the proportion of unique visitors or the split between first time visits and repeat visits over a period of time? You can review how long, on average, your visitors spend on your site. If you have a large site but the time being spent is relatively short, then there could be an underlying problem with the type of visitors your site is attracting, or with the way the site is being perceived or how well it works.

You might need to look at the entry and exit points on the site to get an indication of whether visitors are leaving straight away (possibly the wrong type of visitors for your business?) or if they are leaving at a common point within the site (perhaps where a page is slow to load or an enquiry form is asking for too much information?). This type of data can then give you ideas on what needs to be changed so that you can test alternative approaches and review the change in the statistics over the next few months.

Website analytics may also show that some pages are being visited more than others, which can again reflect your site optimisation and ranking performance, or the navigation routes into the site from the Home Page. If key pages are not being visited enough, or less important pages are attracting proportionately higher volumes of traffic, you might need to look at how these pages are performing in the search results, or whether links to them form other pages need to be revised and made more, or less, prominent.

The referral data within an analytics package will also indicate which search engines or other websites are driving most visitors to your site and, with search, which terms have they been using. This can reflect how your site is ranking (or which PPC terms are performing well) but does this also reflect how people are searching and therefore are there other terms that should also be driving more visits to your site?

Reviewing trends within a website analytics package should be done at least monthly and often more frequently, particularly if there are changes being made to the website or the marketing campaign ‘ whether online or offline. The depth of data available can provide an excellent insight into how your web business is performing and should be used as a tool to test, adjust and review on a regular basis.

If you’d like to know more about how your website analytics can be used effectively to monitor and improve your online performance, contact us now for more information.

Whether your business is using conversion tracking as part of Google Ads (AdWords), or goal tracking in Google Analytics, this type of data is essential to understand where sales or enquiries are coming from, down to the keyword and advert level. However, for any business where most leads may come via a phone call, this is harder to track as the link between the source of the website visitor and the phone call being made is broken. This is where phone call tracking techniques can add more insight and value to an advertiser.

Phone call tracking has been around for many years in different forms, and as the need to track and optimise conversions grows, this technique is becoming another important tool for the advertiser. There are a number of good phone call tracking companies operating in the UK market and they can provide a reasonably low cost way of tracking the source of conversions, whether they come from Google Ads (AdWords) or any search engine visit, or from any other third party website. Google Ads (AdWords) also provides a call tracking system in the US and UK.

Call tracking usually works through the addition of some javascript on a website or web page, which identifies the source of a visitor and displays a unique phone number on the website. If the visitor calls the business, that number will track the lead by source, potentially down to individual search term level. Whether the website has their standard phone number displayed in the text or as an image, an alternate number can be displayed depending on where the site visitor come from, although images will need to be changed or adapted to cater for this.

The advertiser will buy a range of phone numbers – usually 1300 or 1800 – to be used for the various advertising sources and displayed on the website. The call tracking company will generate these numbers and track the calls made, including the option of recording the phone conversations, and provide analytics to show which sources have generated the calls. This data can sometimes be imported into a Google Analytics account as well, as a goal source.

One potential issue for advertisers is if they use a memorable number, such as 1300 FLOWER, as call tracking won’t be able to replicate this number and make it so memorable to the user – which can be an issue if the number might be used in a radio advert or on a billboard. The other main question is how many numbers might be needed, as these can be generated as ‘absolute’ (one number for each source) or session based (where a pool of numbers are used and displayed in time segments to identify source). The former method can be very expensive, particularly if there are lot of search terms being used in an AdWords campaign, but is more accurate. However, the latter method should be sufficient for most advertisers.

Although the cost of call tracking isn’t that high, it is an additional cost to include as part of the marketing activity. However, the insights that call tracking can provide is extremely valuable and enables advertisers to see the real cost per lead being generated by source, which will provide a more accurate figure for a Return on Investment calculation. Otherwise, call enquiries will remain a general ‘pool’ of new business leads which can’t be attributed to a source or the advertising spend.

If you’d like to know more about phone call tracking for your marketing campaigns, please get in touch for a discussion.

In March this year Google announced to all Google Analytics users the option to use Universal Analytics. This offers a new way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey through the conversion path, as a typical consumer today uses multiple devices to access the web and interact in many ways with a business. This is likely to become the default system for Google Analytics, so websites have the option to try this for themselves now.

Universal Analytics introduces a set of features that change the way data is collected and organised in a Google Analytics account, so you can get a better understanding of how visitors interact with your organisation. In addition to the standard Google Analytics features, Universal Analytics provides:

• New data collection methods
• Simplified feature configuration
• Custom dimensions & custom metrics
• Multi-platform tracking.

Therefore some of the benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are:

• Understanding how customers interact with the businesses across many devices and touch-points
• Gaining insights into the performance of mobile apps
• Improving lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions to help understand which channels drive the best results
• Improving the speed of a website by reducing client-side demands.

The aim is to change the way that data is collected and organised in the rapidly evolving online world of multiple platforms. Multiple platforms are not just limited to desktop, tablet, phone, but also game consoles, the point of purchase (POP), the shopping trolley, ski lift, billboard and so on.

Many of the benefits promised by Google’s UA hinge on two updates to the platform. Firstly, the ability to get data into UA from any source, and secondly, the shift from tracking visits to tracking visitors. The future of data does indeed seem to be blurring the lines between online and offline, and with these new tools, the hope is to make more sense of it all and to paint a better picture for the brand, the client, or any user’s understanding of the data and trends. Through an understanding of this data, business and individuals can better understand how visitors interact with their business online.

UA is an exciting development that holds significant promise for solving some difficult issues such as multi-device measurement and online/offline integration. Currently, the technology is still new, so more experimentation is needed in order to test UA’s promises in real-world environments. However, new Analytics accounts have the option to use this code, or existing accounts are gradually getting the option to upgrade as UA is being rolled out by Google.

If you would like more details about how the use of Google’s Universal Analytics can help your business, contact us now.

The issue of ‘cookies’ is becoming increasingly important for websites, online marketers and privacy advocates. Cookies have traditionally been used by websites to track visitor activity and repeat interactions, as well as what they do on a website through tools such as Google Analytics. The use of these tracking cookies has become increasingly sophisticated, but online users are also more concerned about their role, leading to privacy concerns and changes to legislation in Europe.

A cookie (aka HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie) is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s compueter or device, or in the web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify it of the user’s previous activity so that repeat behaviour can be tracked (such as by Google Analytics), or advertisers can use cookies to display relevant adverts to web users based on their tracked behaviour.

Although cookies were originally designed as basic tracking mechanisms, they have now progressed beyond this and have become a crucial component for marketers to target advertising and to implement direct marketing techniques to relevant prospects. This tracking activity has raised privacy concerns to an extent that prompted European authorities to take action in 2011. The European Union’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive began to dictate that “explicit consent” must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via cookies. As a result, all websites in the UK, for example, that use tracking cookies, need to make this clear and give visitors the option to block these when they use the website.

This area is increasingly becoming a issue between privacy advocates and web users on the one hand, who don’t want their online activity to be tracked, and online businesses on the other, who want to target and improve their marketing activity. This includes user tracking which many websites now do through tools such as Google Analytics, and targeted advertising which companies can use, from behavioural marketing to remarketing activity – which should increase relevancy and reduce advertising costs.

In the past month, Mozilla announced their intention to include a default setting that disables third-party cookies by default in upcoming releases of their Firefox browser. This prompted the US Interactive Advertising Bureau to state that it will fight the move, which it describes as being “a nuclear first strike against the ad industry”, as without the third party data companies will simply not be able to track users across sessions. Firefox may be hoping that this move will attract more web users to start using their browser and if that proves to be the case, then the other main browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, are more likely to follow suit.

This could be a backward step for online businesses, who will lose valuable information and the option to improve the targeting of their advertising. For web users, it can also mean less relevant advertising and a reduced user experience. If you’d like to know more about cookies and how they can affect your online business or privacy, contact us now.

In October 2011, Google implemented a controversial change that has impacted Google Analytics and continues to raise increasing concerns in the search engine marketing field. The change has resulted in increasing numbers of search keyword numbers showing as “(not provided)” and it’s important for web marketers and data analysts to understand the potential ramifications of this change, as it can have an impact upon the effectiveness of SEO campaigns.

The change made by Google was the decision to make search activity more secure for anyone logged into a Google account when conducting a search through Google. Therefore, when an account user searches on Google, the search engine changes to a secure search (with the https domain shown) and, in addition, by deciding to protect users’ privacy in this way, the associated search data is not being shown in Google Analytics.

Anyone using Google Analytics to record visitor activity on their website will now see “(not provided)” as a data line in the search keywords report. This reflects the volume of search visits generated from Google when users are logged into their Google account. During 2012 the figure has been growing as a percentage of total searches, with estimates that the initial level of around 5% of searches when this measure was first introduced has now grown to around 35%.

With Google being the main source of visitor traffic for many websites, and the “(not provided)” line also being one of the main “search queries” shown in the traffic reports, website marketers are seeing a large section of data being hidden from them. This comes at a time when Google Analytics has been widely adopted by so many websites that it seems that Google has cornered the analytics market and then removed a core data element that websites gain value from.

This hidden data on affects search traffic coming through Google’s “organic” search results, rather than the paid AdWords listings, but it tends to be the organic visits that drive most traffic to the site and which influence (and record) the search engine optimisation efforts of many website marketers. It could be assumed that the mix of terms within the “(not provided)” number can be proportional to all the other search terms that are shown – for example the % mix of brand or non-brand name searches – but this doesn’t make accurate data easy to obtain and it is likely to become more of an issue as more web users sign up with Google accounts and conduct searches when logged in to these accounts.

When Google first announced the change to encrypt the searches of Google users, they implied the numbers would be low. However, as more people sign up to Google accounts and search when logged in, the number of blocked search terms in Analytics is growing. This seems illogical when search data is not linked to individual activity anyway in Google Analytics. Whether Google will decide to change this outcome and show the data in Analytics again remains to be seen but the loss of valuable data in Google Analytics will potentially raise questions about the value of the tool.

If you would like more information about your Analytics data and possible ways to interpreting the “(not provided)” data, please contact us.

According to recent forecasts, the first time that the number of global users who access the Internet via a mobile rather than a PC will be in 2014. The comparable numbers are currently 900 million from the former device and 1.4 billion from the latter. Assuming that if the annual growth rate in mobile phone subscriptions is about 2% between 2010 and 2015, then there will be approximately 6.35 billion of those within the next 3 years. Of those, a third will use that device to access the web.

The 2011 edition of eMarketer states that of those, 33% are looking for local content relevant to their current GPS position. Now, the young generation that has never known life without the Internet are increasingly using their mobiles like the older generations used Yellow Pages to find local information. So if you’re targeting young people in a localised market, it’s essential to have a mobile compatible site.

You can read some more data measuring the global smartphone impact here.

Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly?

There are a number of websites and online tools that can be used to check how your website performs on a mobile – if you don’t have a smartphone to do this in the first place! A very useful initiative by Google is the GoMo site that aims to change the way the web works on mobile devices. This project is primarily for mobile phones but could be aimed at all forms of mobile devices, like iPads and other tablets.

GoMo helps you build a site for all of these mobile platforms and it provides case studies and statistics to support why you should go mobile. By offering a comprehensive resource for websites who may not have gone mobile yet, webmasters can learn why they should go mobile, the best practices for mobile and how to get the process started. Webmasters can even test their sites from GoMo to see how mobile they really are to visitors.

There are more useful mobile website emulators that allow you to check if your website is mobile-friendly.

The accuracy of some of these tools have been questioned however, as some sites that receive low scores still look fine on mobiles. The problem is the wide variety of makes and models of smartphones, on a variety of different platforms. So although testing tools may be a useful resource, it’s worth also getting feedback from users of mobile devices about what they are actually seeing.

A recent study found that 61% of mobile users are not likely to return to a site that does not provide a good mobile experience. In response, Google initiated a shift in their policy that will reward mobile sites with good optimisation and they have offered a few priorities to get your site optimised for mobile usage:

• Keep the layout and design simple
• Prioritise your content
• Use markedly mobile features
• Make your site easy to convert

This may sound easy, but as mobile usage increases and web developers offer mobile design options, the implementation and testing of good mobile websites will become a more common process.

Using Mobile Marketing Features in Google Ads (AdWords)

Due to the unprecedented growth in the use of mobile devices to access the Internet, Google recently announced some new mobile targeting functionality for AdWords. This enhanced feature allows advertisers to target to specific versions of mobile operating systems, to ensure the ads are going to the right users.

It’s now also possible to target according to the whether a faster Wi-Fi connection is being used as well as by mobile carriers. Google says targeting by Wi-Fi will let advertisers expand their reach, and will be particularly useful if the campaign or landing page features high-bandwidth content like video.

The mobile specific ads have had the ability to include ‘click to call’ phone numbers below them for a couple of years now as an Ad Extension for adverts appearing on mobiles. In addition, the segmentation reports in AdWords now show mobile interaction down to keyword level, which is a great feature to develop these type of campaigns. If you’re using an iPhone, Android, or other smartphone, you just click the number to call the business and if it’s a local store or restaurant with multiple locations, the integration with Google Places listing will allow you to call the nearest one.

In addition to this, Google also included more specific click-to-call advert extensions, which enables the ability to use bid-per-call (currently only in the US and UK) and view data on mobile calls.

The importance of these enhancements will rise rapidly in the near future, so it’s essential to create a separate, mobile-targeted AdWords campaign now to gain a significant competitive advantage. Not only will this give your business a better reach, but also a lower cost-per-click and higher click-through-rate in this early period, while the adoption of the technology isn’t too widespread.

Tracking Mobile Use in Google Analytics

In November 2011, Google announced the launch of enhanced Analytics reports that include mobile ad performance metrics. All AdWords metrics available in Google Analytics can now be segmented by the new mobile and tablet dimensions in the form of: “All”, “High-end Mobile” and “Tablet” ads.

This again highlights the growing importance of these devices and the increasing significance placed upon them by Google, as the shift towards mobile makes an adoption of an updated marketing strategy necessary. It’s highly recommended that you view your Analytics data over the past year to see this increase in mobile activity. You can segment your data just by mobile usage which makes it easier to identify any potential issues your site may be having when viewed from these devices, as well as the increasing potential number of visits and conversions from them.

So this new access to the mobile device data will help businesses get a better understanding of how mobile advertising will interact with them in the future and how the specific targeting of them can be very effective.

As we predicted in last month’s newsletter, mobile marketing is likely to become a significant issue for many business websites this year – so is your strategy in place? If you’d like to know more about how mobile marketing could impact your website, and how to get the most from Google Ads (AdWords) and Analytics for mobiles, please contact us now for more information.

During October Google announced that it is going to increase the privacy for users of their search engine by encrypting personalised search results. This has caused much consternation in the search engine marketing field, since the end result will be that search query data will no longer be accessible through any web analytics stats from these searchers.

Google says that this change is important for security and privacy, so that users who sign into their Google account will get their search queries encrypted by default. As the use of the search engine is becoming an increasingly customised experience, the results become tailored towards individual users.

This additional layer of security means that Google and the web browser itself can only see any searches. A third party can’t intercept the search and know what’s being searched on, so it’s especially important for people that search using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe.

Google is doing this by securing the results for signed-in users, through the use of an encryption protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). This is the same technology that is used when performing secure credit card transactions and is evident by the extra “s” in the “https” in the address bar for Google’s homepage, when signed in to a user account.

Google may hope that this change will encourage more people to search through a personalised account, which will protect the user’s information but also allow Google to display more relevant results to the user. However, the downside for website owners and marketers is that less information will be available in Google Analytics – or any analytics package – so that although visits from Google’s organic results will still be counted, the individual search terms from logged-in users will be hidden and just displayed as ‘not provided’.

Google says that an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to a site for each of the past 30 days will be available through Google Webmaster Tools and also any AdWords data will still be displayed at the search term level, whether the searcher is logged in to a Google account or not. However, the loss of organic search term data is significant and will become more so over time.

Initially this change will only happen on Google.com, and only relates to those searchers who are logged into a Google account. According to Google’s software engineer Matt Cutts, this is likely to account for only single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com at this time. However, as more people use Google’s services such as Gmail or Google+ and remain logged in when they search, this percentage is likely to grow and impact the level of data available through web analytics accounts.

We’ll be tracking this issue and reviewing the impact over the coming months, but if you’d like to know more about this and how the change may affect your search referral data in analytics, please contact us now.

The theme of being able to successfully track data through Google Analytics continues in our second newsletter article this month. Here we discuss the importance of gathering clean and correct data before analysing it. “Tagging” online marketing campaigns is one way in which this can be achieved.

This tagging involves adding an extension to any link included in online marketing activity that points to your site – such as email newsletters, online ads or from social media sites – so that the particular traffic source of the visit can be identified.

The three compulsory types of parameters to define are the channel of a campaign (e.g. email, affiliate, display); the source within a channel (e.g. name/type of the email campaign); and the campaign within one or more sources / channels (e.g. October newsletter). This can be tricky if multiple people are involved in a campaign, although if this is the case, it has to be done in a uniform manner by using a clearly defined tagging plan to which each participant must adhere.

An example of this extension would be:

http://www.yourdomain.com.au?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_october

If a link to the site within the newsletter that contains this extension tag were then clicked upon, it would be possible in Analytics to see that a visit came from this newsletter/email traffic source. For each newsletter that is sent the month is changed in the tag, so you can identify which newsletter generated the visit and the results of different newsletters can be compared.

Another example is for Social Media, for which the following tag may be used:

http://www.yourdomain.com.au?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tweet_offer_australia

Within Google Analytics, the collected data can be found under All Traffic Sources as “twitter / social”. You can track the tweets you send out by adding a tag like the one above to your URL’s on Twitter. It is also possible to use this technique for other social media sites, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and it’s an effective way to determine visits from traffic sources that wouldn’t normally be as specifically defined by Analytics, thus improving the quality of the data.

An easy way create the URL extensions, or tags, is to use the Google URL Builder.

Please note that if your Google Analytics account has been linked to an active AdWords account, there’s no need to tag your AdWords links – auto-tagging will do it for you automatically. However, for some sites this auto-tagging doesn’t work and therefore manual URL extensions may need to be used.

If you’d like more information about the benefits of tagging campaigns within Analytics and how this can improve your business’s online marketing, please contact us now.

Many previous newsletter articles have extolled the benefits of using website analytics to track visitor activity and interaction on a website. Google Analytics, in particular, is a powerful free package and highly recommended for many small online retailers. One of the key features is the e-commerce tracking which can add an extra layer of data to the results and helps to track the Return on Investment of all marketing activity.

If you run an e-commerce site and are using Google Analytics, you need to activate the e-commerce reporting in the profile settings. You also need to make some adjustments to your analytics code on the checkout pages of your site, with some additional tagging that will record product and price activity for each order. If necessary, check with your web designer about how this can be implemented and, once done, check that the data being recorded matches the actual order details and values being received through the site.

Once this tracking is working correctly, you will see a new section of data appear in the Analytics reporting menu. This can give you information on sales revenue by day, average order values, conversion rates and data on the number of visits or days to purchase that a customer may take. In addition, you can get a breakdown of sales by product type and category which should reflect your own sales data, but can then be used within other standard or custom reports to get a better insight into marketing results, location of customers, repeat buyers and so on.

The new version of Google Analytics also now includes the opportunity to track multi-channel funnels. Whereas most analytics tracking will record a “goal’ or sale from the current visit, this new report looks at interactions of visits from most digital media channels, including clicks from paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads. This enables you to understand how different channels work together to create sales and conversions, and how many visits may be taken as part of the buying process before the sale is made.

If you would like to know more about e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics and the new multi-channel function reports, please contact us now for details.

Google has recently released a new version of their popular Analytics product, with a new interface and some useful new features. At the moment, existing Analytics users will just see a link to the new version within their account, but eventually it’s likely that Google will transfer all accounts to the new interface by default.

If you’re used to navigating around the existing version of Google Analytics, the new version can be quite disorientating to begin with. However, everything that’s currently available is still there, but you just need to get familiar with the new layout and links to find what you need.

Initial impressions of the new interface are good, however and there is some major new functionality throughout the redesigned platform. Firstly, Google says that it’s easier to get the required information through a faster, streamlined interface, although as noted above, this can take some getting used to at first.

There is a better emphasis on custom reporting through an improved reporting system that enables pre-filtered reports and the creation of additional data views. Notably, if you want to run different reports from the dashboard screen, you can now create multiple dashboards to meet these needs. There is also an enhanced Event tracking for interactions such as downloads and video engagement, and another new feature is the introduction of Plot Rows that provide the ability to graph and compare any two rows over time.

The enhanced dashboard is a particularly useful feature as custom widgets can be set up to track almost any metric. Another welcome change is the ability to use an Event to trigger a Goal, as this feature will allow more complex user behaviour tracking to be set up much more easily. Several disadvantages at the moment is that data can’t currently be exported by PDFs or email, and you can’t link Analytics to AdWords or AdSense accounts. However, these functions are expected to be “coming very soon”, according to Google.

On the whole, the changes to the Google Analytics interface are logical and well thought out, but users will need to relearn the navigation around the account and get familiar with the different layouts and new functionality.

If you have access to Google Analytics, we recommend that you give the new interface a try and if you need any help from us, please get in touch.