Advanced Google Analytic Features

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for marketers to better understand their website and the habits of those who visit. By understanding click patters, traffic sources, and other metrics, marketers can determine an audience’s key interests and make the necessary adjustments to improve the user experience and develop an interface that encourages conversions. Google’s package is comprehensive, free and offers a number of other key benefits that separate it from competitor products. Among those features are goals and filters. These tools help marketers maintain more accurate numbers and generate reports that better measure the return on investment.

Purpose

Filters have become a hugely important factor in helping measure campaigns, events, AdWords success or whether certain products or services are successful on the web. For instance, let us say that we are the marketers for Adidas and we just recently released a new basketball sneaker. It is currently the main product being showcased in our television commercials and within our search ads and social media marketing promotions. All tactics are pointing to a unique landing page which features the new shoe. The web visitor might take a particular path to eventually purchase this product. For instance, he or she views a mention of the sneaker on social media and clicks on the link, arrives on the custom landing page, drills through to the product specification page, selects gender, color, size, etc, for the specific style he or she wants, then moves onto the checkout page, enters credit card information, verifys and purchases, and finally receives a “thank you” page receipt. This simple one-stop purchase required the user to view six pages.

This exact path taken by the user, or funnel, can be better analyzed with the use of filters. Every online business has steps that people must take to become a customer…Whether people are attempting to sign up for your online service, or purchase a product from your website, there will be a certain number of steps they will have to take in order to give you money. Funnels help us see this process (or processes)easily, by giving us a visual representation of the conversion data between each step. Thus, e-commerce sites should take tremendous advantage of these Google tools since it demonstrates direct correlation of their efforts and how ads and pages should be improved. Moreover, other brands or Google users who are not selling products, can also take advantage since a goal does not necessarily have to be a monetary purchase. A blogger for instance might want the user to sign up for his or her updates, to receive a notification whenever a new post is published. Or a B2B brand might seek a “contact us” form completion to better understand interest from potential customers. Every brand can and should formulate goals. Filters help to gauge success of those conversions.

Examples and Use Cases

Google Analytics allows up to 20 goals per profile. With those goals, one can apply filters. One of the most basic filters, but also most important, is the exclusion of IP addresses. From Blogger Kyle James, excluding a specific IP Address from your profile can be valuable to make sure that your main editor isn’t destroying your data because they are all over your site editing content. How many times per day do you visit your own website? Perhaps to read co-workers’ blogs, double check on statistics or corporate info, share products via social media, and of course, web maintenance. All these visits from users within your company can severely damage the accuracy of your traffic. Hundreds, if not thousands, of views each month may be internal staff that has no relevant on your reported numbers. By using filters, you can easily restrict certain IP addresses or servers so those visitors will not be included within your metrics.

Another useful tactic within these Google features is designing funnels specific to a certain goal. By doing so, marketers can see in a given path which pages may have led to a drop off, or, where a user left the site instead of moving forward toward a conversion. Drop off rates can also help you isolate content that is driving visitors to convert better. Say, a large percentage of traffic going to page A is converting as opposed to other pages. It could mean that content on page A (be it an offer, a value proposition, a testimonial or something else) strikes a nerve with your audience. Without filters, marketers might have a general idea of which pages fair better. But with filters, they can see more clearly how audience members arrived, where they intended to go, and which specific page(s) led to a drop off. This accurate measure leads to more tailored messaging and more powerful promotions.

These are only the beginning. Within Google’s free offering, you can dive deeper into your paths to ensure a close eye on visitor traffic with the main focus on conversions. Lars Lofgren at KISSMetrics offers some examples of findings that can be determined with metrics that are measured with the use of filters.

-         -  Determine what steps are causing customer confusion or trouble

-          - Figure out what language or copy might be altering customer’s emotional behavior during checkout or sign up

-         -  Be aware of bugs, browser issues and other technical nuisances

To just add a few more, marketers can zero in on particular countries or geographic regions, or focus on certain demographics if an event/campaign is expected to generate higher interest from certain groups of people. We all strive to have a usable site that helps us meet our business goals. Certain elements within the site could be holding us back from our potential. It is critical that we use analytics to help diagnose the problem and work to find effective resolutions.

Conclusion

Glen Gabe of Search Engine Journal states that the best approach for web business comes from a web-balanced strategies – one consisting of SEO, paid search and social advertising. He also notes the importance of measurement. If you don’t have the mechanisms in place to easily see how visitor segments perform, then important questions could go unanswered.  And that’s not good for enhancing your business. Google Analytics might be one of the most powerful tools in place to help measure web performance. By identifying goals and funnels and using filters, marketers can have an accurate understanding of visitor habits on a particular site. At the end of the day, all parties are concerns with the investment involved around a website and how to get the most out of that asset. These Google tools help marketers better achieve that success.

Inside Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a comprehensive tool to better measure and manage the web metrics of your website. More importantly, the software is free, making it easily accessible for the largest of enterprises to the smallest of businesses, and even for individual users with personal websites or blogs. According to Smashing Magazine, Google Analytics can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, AdSense and emails and much, much more. Google Analytics offers a wide breathe of metrics and reports, more than 85 actually. But viewing and understanding the numbers is only the first step. Taking that data, synthesizing it into useful reports, and drawing conclusions is a priority for marketers to help identify the return on investment (ROI) and measure overall web success.

Bounce Rate and Pages Per Visit

Although there are some extravagant reports within GA, the basic metrics can often help draw the most obvious and important conclusions about a website. Bounce rate reveals the number of visitors who arrived on the site and immediately left. This gives the website owner a clear indication that something is wrong with the site. The user obviously landed on the page and quickly noticed it did not have what he or she was looking for and went elsewhere to meet that need. Similarly, pages per visit means that users either spent a great deal of time drilling down and viewing many pages or they were not content and viewed few or even one page. Ideally, marketers want bounce rates to be low and pages per visit to be somewhat high (if it is too high, visitors could be getting lost). Based on my personal analytics, my bounce rate is high at 72.73 and my pages per visit is low at 1.86. So how do we fix this? Angel West at PCWorld mentions several ways to learn from these metrics. If your usability issues are taken care of, then you should tweak marketing copy and graphics to help customers find what they need quickly.Content should be clear, concise, and paired with exciting graphics that point visitors to what they want. Long, ranting copy and a lack of attractive graphics will keep your bounce rates high. She also goes on to say that carefully identifying keywords and acting on the results is a key strategy to helping improve bounce rate and pages per visit.

Visitor Traffic and Keywords

Google Analytics does a wonderful job at explaining where your visitors are coming from. This comes in handy when executing social media efforts, performing search engine optimization (SEO) or using Google AdWords. With social media metrics, you can see how many users are coming from these channels so you know which ones to focus most heavily upon. The visitor figures also help you understand what web surfers are typing into Google to find your site organically. If users are coming to you with keyword strings that are not necessarily related to your site’s content, you know there is a problem. Use keywords within your content and tag your posts accordingly with more strategic language that helps users who are actually interested in your material find your site more quickly. Keyword identification is also vital to your pay-per-click (PPC) success. With a monetary investment in AdWords, you must focus on which ads are bringing in users and which ones are failing. These keywords help you know what should be used in ad copy and which ones should not. Identifying keywords from your own internal search engine is also vitally important. SEOMoz has a great byte of information on the importance of this metric. You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website. Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales. These users who are already on your page know what they are looking for and they are telling you through the search engine. Make sure to take this information into heavy consideration into your collective marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, all the users to my current blog have come from social media, directly, or from other blogs. At this point, I have no visitors arriving organically and I am not using AdWords. As a result, my keyword report is empty. However, once this begins to populate, I will need to pay close attention to my strongest and weakest keywords to better improve my post content. Rachael Gearson at Mashable mentions the perks to Google’s keyword cloud report, which generates a word cloud of the keywords bringing users into your site. Rather than viewing a long list of keywords to spot trends, users can now evaluate a keyword cloud. This cloud makes it easy to visualize top keywords based on different user-selected criteria, including visits, bounce rates and pages per visit. Marketers should be keen on this tool to more quickly identify which keywords work best and then incorporate those into messaging on the site and other brand channels.

Analysis

Data without analysis are only numbers. Anyone can run a report but the talent and skill comes with digesting that information and putting it into actionable items. By doing so, marketers can work with the development and design teams to make the necessary changes to improve the site and eventually lead to a more positive experience for users and more success for the brand. Some additionally changes I could immediately make to my personal blog, based on the metrics I am seeing from GA include:

- Add more graphics and video. This will help users become more engaged, stay on my site longer, and decrease my bounce rate.

- Build a larger library of content with internal links within each new post, directing users to archived posts. This will keep users on the site longer and boost my pages per visit statistic.

- Install a site search feature and monitor search strings. The keywords from these searches are direct indications of what users want. Analyze these and respond accordingly by way of new products, features or more targeted content.

- Adjust headlines and incorporate tags. These changes will enhance search engine optimization and boost my Google rankings to hopefully attract more organic traffic.

- Begin to utilize AdWords, Facebook Ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets. Users are having a hard time finding my site. By spending some ad dollars, users can find their way through paid search and social media advertisements.

Conclusion

Traditionally, it was a mere guessing game to measure website success. Traffic and clicks could only offer so much insight. With the advent of more thorough tools, marketers have been able to get a better grasp on how useful a website is and how much value it serves to one’s target audience. Google Analytics remains the king of website analytics. It provides a full set of detailed metrics, it integrates with third party systems to make tracking easy and comprehensive, and it is free. Marketers must learn the variety of metrics that Google Analytics offers and listen to what those metrics are saying. By having a solid grasp on this rich system, and learning the best ways to make intelligent marketing decisions from that data, websites can consistently be improving to better serve end users.

The War Between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads

Advertising has come a long way over the years. With the advent of the Internet, marketers were able to reach consumers in a much quicker way that they ever imagined. But the cost and inefficiency was not all there. As a result, new methods found their way to the surface. Pay per click and search based marketing quickly rose in popularity based on their cost effectiveness and ease of set-up. Two platforms leading the way today are Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. According to InformationWeek, these two platforms are very popular based on the sheer size of audience – with Google specifically dominating the search ad space with nearly two-thirds market share.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords is a major revenue draw for the giant search engine and their premier advertising platform. Through a bidding process, advertising can quickly and easily develop campaigns where ads appear in search results based on user keywords. Ads are featured at the very top of the results as well as the side panel of the page. Since AdWords uses a PPC approach, advertisers only pay for the number of clicks they attain, not necessarily the number of impressions. However, the bidding process is what determines cost and rank order of the ads. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, AdWords allows you to see exactly what you are getting out of your budget. Each dollar you spend and each click you receive are tracked clearly within your account, allowing you to make concrete, data-driven decisions,quickly and easily. Since the process and analysis is complex in order to find the best keywords per target audience, it requires much time, patient and effort on behalf of the marketing team.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are bit different from AdWords in that they do not appear as search results. Instead, the ads live in Facebook’s platform, either within users’ feeds or on the sidebar of pages. According to Facebook, users want to engage with ‘stories,’ not ‘ads’—the difference being that ads are one-way communication and stories are more conversational and participatory. With this sponsored story, you have the ability to Like the brand, comment or share. To support this, they have presented data based on research done by Nielsen that showed significantly higher click-through and brand recall rates for ads that contained the social context of a friend’s name (i.e., “John Liked this”) versus a traditional advertising message alone. This is a very important point drawn from Facebook’s very strategic approach. There are two forms of Facebook ads, ones that are more traditional and ones that features a fan page that a friend has already liked. As stated, the latter is where Facebook likes to focus since this is much more engaging. Both ads appear in the side column of the page with an image to try and obtain that click.

Although Facebook did introduce search-based ads less than six months ago, they should not be compared to AdWords. From Search Engine Land, Facebook’s ads allow marketers to utilize the searcher’s location, demographics and connections but it does not target based on keyword and does not link to external sites but rather pages and apps within Facebook’s own environment. By only directing users to pages within Facebook, users are not given access to external locations. AdWords and Facebook search engines should not even be compared as competitors since similar brand sites would not be appearing in each.

Comparing the Two

When determining which platform is better for a specific campaign, marketers should first understand their goals and how their target audience might arrive on the landing page. [Because] a Facebook session tends to last much longer than the typical Google search, the former [would] be a better match for building brand awareness or getting a specific message across. That's even more true if that message is intended fora very specific audience, such as a university alumni group or people that like True Blood. Simply put, the demographic details could be extremely helpful to highly targeting users on Facebook. On the flip side, Casey notes that Facebook is not strong in web searches. Google has the clear advantage there, and as a result could be the better fit for driving actual clicks and conversions around specific products. It comes down to intent:Whereas Facebook users might just be checking up on their friends or posting vacation photos, Google searchers typically have a much more specific goal. AdWords is great for intercepting users who are typing keywords in Google to find helpful resources.

That said, it is slightly nonsensical to compare AdWords and Facebook Ads to each other since it is often like comparing apples to oranges. They each offer their own unique benefits and appeal to many of the same audience members. Thus, the two could really live cohesively together. Marketers might see a high return if they run PPC campaigns on each platform to target audience members on both search in Google and within Facebook. Again, it depends where the promotion is living and what type of audience members the brand is seeking. The key to a balanced PPC budget and strategy is learning web habits of your target audience and deciding the healthy level of focus/effort that should be placed on each ad platform.

The Battle Between Content and Conversation

Rich, shareable content can be tremendously helpful in generating media mentions and driving traffic to one’s website. This comes from a few factors. The first, interesting material is successful over the social web. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, the space becomes cluttered on a consistent basis. Thought-provoking, educational, informational posts are what helps break through the clutter and separate it from tweets about breakfast or Facebook posts about family reunions. As it is shared, more eyes come across your messaging and more potential consumers find their way to your website. The second factor comes from the search engine end. By developing content with relevant keywords to your brand’s industry, products/services, community, etc, you will appear in more search rankings. Additionally, Google algorithms for ranking order are heavily based on quality. They want to reward brands who are producing great material with better ranking results. Thus, blogs that feature rich, user-focused content will see a return from Google in higher search placement.

Okay, so we know that content is vital to a brand’s strategy and online presence. But is high quality content enough? Or do people need to be talking about it, sharing it, interacting with it? Does conversation trump content? This battle over which reigns supreme in the blogging world has been the subject of much chatter over the past few years. Catherine Novak at Social Media Today makes great points about the advantages of conversation. Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising. It goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor… and stops there. If the sender is lucky, it may lodge as a piece of information in the receiver’s consciousness, and they may act on it someday. If the sender is luckier, or perhaps more engaging, it may be something that the receiver wants to talk about.  And then the message gets a whole new burst of energy.  The energy behind the message is what gives it meaning and a life of its own. As consumers, we do not like to be talked “at.” Instead, we like to be talk “with.” This creates opportunities for brands to much more easily and effectively persuade than in traditional advertising settings.

In short, the content versus conversation debate is very reminiscent of the chicken and the egg scenario.  Conversations are what brands should continually be striving for. They create two-way communication opportunities for brands to interaction and learn from their direct consumers. They also open the doors to reaching larger volumes of potential customers while reinforcing brand messaging and developing a brand’s personality. However, you cannot have these conversations without great content. One comes from the other. Blogger Michael Greenberg writes about this symbiotic relationship in a post about content being king. Social marketing efforts need to be driven by content, not vice versa. Without content, there is not a whole lot to talk about. He notes that the two go hand-in-hand and marketers should be crafting their posts and positioning their marketing opportunities (events, promotions, contents) in such a way that will elicit conversation.

It is one thing to publish content that is informational. It is another to issue material that elicits a reaction and causes the message to be talked about, shared and reach a wide audience. Not only does this impact the brands’ reach but demonstrates a sense of leadership in the space that separates one brand from its competitors. One wonderful example of this tactic is from the aggressive and edgy energy drink, Red Bull. From Business2Community: Did you miss the wildly successful Red Bull Stratos campaign that ejected a man from space, and resulted in more than three million tweets, an estimated 820,000 pieces of positive media and user-generated content for the brand, and 61.6 million impressions generated across social channels? Now that’s story telling.  Red Bull did not publish a dull post but instead made the video/write-up worthwhile and interesting for the viewer. It was out of the ordinary and caused a reaction. What makes this specific example even more unique is that Red Bull executed a specific event, essentially a publicity stunt, to give itself something to talk about. This proves that in many cases, conversation does not just happen on its own - instead brands must make it happen. Still, these conversations make for effective brand to consumer interactions.