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.

After many years of developing the product in the US and the UK, Google’s Shopping search tool is likely to become a leading player in the online shopping comparison market and is something that all online retailers should consider as part of their marketing strategy.

Google Shopping is a product and price comparison tool, and one of many sites that offer this service to online consumers. However, the advantage of this service for e-commerce sites is that it’s completely free to list products and the prominence of the service is controlled by Google. Many product related searches now on Google will display a number of featured listings from the Shopping search results, so it’s another way for online retailers to gain search visibility and attract traffic to their website.

Like all the shopping comparison sites, Google Shopping requires online retailers to create an account and submit a product feed to the service, although some retailers are also getting their products listed simply through Google automatically indexing their e-commerce pages. Once listed, items will be listed by relevance – which is based on similar SEO factors that determine the main search results on Google. However, shoppers can also re-sort the results by price as well.

There is no browsable directory structure to Google Shopping, so results will be determined by search query, although Google does display some links in the side panel, which lists related categories, or links to the retailers whose products are being displayed. At present, many of the results are being dominated by eBay listings, but as more retailers submit their product details directly to this service, there will be more variety and competition between the listed results.

As a free service, this is something all e-commerce sites need to consider. The product feed needs to be prepared and updated as necessary to keep the listed information and prices current, but as Google Shopping becomes more commonly found and used by online shoppers, it has to be important channel for retailers to use.

If you’d like more information on, or help with, the new Google Shopping service, please get in touch.

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.

As the online retail market becomes more competitive, one of the most important elements for any e-commerce site is to convert as many visitors to sales as possible. Product and price will be important factors, along with the functionality and level of confidence provided by the site. However, once a visitor decides to buy, the shopping cart process can be vital and it’s important to review and address the abandonment rates that might be occurring.

Using an analytics product, such as Google Analytics, will enable e-commerce websites to track visitor paths through the checkout process and identify where users may abandon the site. Seeing this data is one thing, but interpreting the reasons why people may leave the site before completing the purchase can be harder to understand, so testing changes to the shopping cart process may be necessary to try to improve the completion rates.

Typical abandonment rates in Australia are reported to be around 50% and this can be for many reasons. However, online retailers need to review the checkout process to ensure that it’s simple for customers to follow and implement, without creating too many barriers or reasons for shoppers to leave the site. Typical reasons for shoppers to leave may be:

• Hidden delivery costs – not revealing the full purchase costs until a buyer is already in the checkout process can be a major frustration. Delivery options and costs should be clear and upfront.
• Forced registration – do customers have to register to buy or can they complete a simpler form to make a sale. Can they have the option and if registration is necessary, keep the required information to a minimum.
• Unsaved items – if shoppers are comparing products and final prices between a number of retailers, they may leave the site but then return later and expect to find their chosen items saved in the cart. If not, they may have to go through the whole process again and not bother.
• Too much information – try to keep the checkout stages simple (or clearly flagged in advance) so customers know what they have to do and what stage they are at. Information collected needs to be simple, with billing address ticked the same as delivery (if necessary) and checkout forms pre-filled if a user returns at a later date.
• Failed forms – if some fields are obligatory or need to be completed in a particular format, make it clear. Shoppers can get easily frustrated by forms not submitting correctly and having to go back to revise or re-enter information.
• No gift options – if your products are likely to be bought as gifts, are there options for gift wrapping or messages, and will the product be delivered in time?

In general, keeping the checkout process as clear, simple and as fast as possible is essential, but you may need to test this to get the best implementation. It can be best to go through the process yourself or get feedback from friends or actual customers. Maybe try the checkout process for competing retailers to see how these compare (although you might want to add to their abandonment rate!).

To find out more about tracking, testing and improving your shopping cart conversion rates, please contact us now.

To make your search engine marketing campaigns effective, it’s essential to ensure that the landing pages to which your visitors first come onto your website are optimised to maximise their potential. This is especially important if you’re running a Google AdWords campaign, because the relevancy of these pages to the adverts and keywords helps to increase your Quality Scores and hence reduce the average cost per click.

The primary aim of any marketing landing page, however, is to get conversions – whether these are enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, sales or any other interaction from the website. Therefore if the landing page is correctly optimised it can provide a competitive advantage for your business compared to your competitors, and achieve a better ROI (Return on Investment). Landing pages can be customised to suit the product or the traffic source and there are two main kinds of tests that can be done to improve the performance of a landing page.

These tests are known as A/B split testing or multivariate testing. The former is the simplest method and involves a comparison between the control page (A) and the test page (B), which has a change to a single element, such as a picture, or headline. Once both pages have generated a required volume of visits and conversions, the one with the better conversion rate would be retained as the control page and a new test page would be created to try and improve upon those numbers again. The maximum recommended number of pages to test at one time is three, otherwise the tests can take too long to complete.

Further tests would be performed upon different elements and page copy until the optimal page is created. The time when no more improvements are possible would become known once all variations have been tried and there’s no significant difference between the pages. The advantage of A/B split testing is that not much technical knowledge is needed and useful results can be achieved with only a small number of visitors.

Multivariate testing is a more in-depth process that involves changing multiple elements of a page simultaneously. The advantage of this approach is that the experiments can be very complex and they can produce great results for a website that attracts high volumes of visits. However, this testing methodology needs careful planning and some skilled interpretation of the accrued data to get statistically reliable results. If both these factors aren’t taken into account, the landing page can end up actually producing fewer conversions.

The main point to remember with landing page optimisation is to remain consistent in the changes being made and to just alter the same type of elements in each test (i.e. the page’s content, rather than any other factors such as traffic sources or, possibly, page design). Another crucial factor to consider is to keep records of what has already been tested, as it’s easy to replicate previous tests and end up going round in circles without making any progress.

Google can help with this process through their Website Optimizer tool, which enables website marketers to set up and track the results of landing page tests. In time, and with the correct strategy, the benefits of a well-implemented testing procedure can result in the reduction in the cost of a Google AdWords campaign as well as excellent improvements in a landing page’s conversion rate, thereby lowering the cost per conversion.

If you’d like more information about how to use landing page optimisation to improve your website’s conversion rates, please contact us now.

In our continuing series on the most useful functions within Google Analytics, this month we review the use and creation of Custom Reports. These are most useful when you have to combine metrics and dimensions that are not included in the standard report layouts, or when you want to simplify an existing report format by removing data that’s not relevant.

Building a tailored custom report in Google Analytics is easy and means quicker access to the information you’re more interested in, with less data overload and easy exporting. It allows you to create, save, and edit reports that present the information you want to see organised in the way you want to see it. A drag and drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports. Once created, they can be exported in the usual way of clicking on the export button on the top of the dashboard and choosing the format in which to export it.

It’s easy to navigate to the custom reports by just clicking on the ‘Custom Reporting’ link in the menu on the left-hand side of the main dashboard. Then choose some of the Analytics data from the left hand side menu that can be classified in two simple ways: Metrics or Dimensions.

A metric is the horizontal column heading(s) in the report that is a quantitative measure of how visitors interact with your site. Metrics are always numerical and include things like page views, time on page and bounce rate (the percent of visitors that leave your site after only 1 page).

A dimension is the vertical row(s) in the report that is a characteristic of a visitor or a page on your website that you can use to organize your metrics. Dimensions are almost always text, such as “new” vs “returning” (visitor type) or “North America” vs “Europe” (region).

You can choose any metric to build your custom report with. You also don’t have to pair them with dimensions, which means there are no restrictions to which metrics you can use. However, when they are paired with dimensions, metrics are subject to certain restrictions.

By using custom reports, it is possible to drilldown to five levels deep into the data or to keep the reports more simplified than the ones displayed on the standard dashboard. So the choice of creating simple or complex reports is entirely yours with the flexible and extremely useful Analytics Custom Reporting Tool.

For more information or help on the Custom Reporting function in Google Analytics, please contact us now.

One of the features that is often overlooked within the Google Analytics service is the ‘Site Overlay’ option. This can visually display the percentage of visitors who click upon standard links that are embedded on a particular page of a website and can be a valuable source of information on the ways users are actually navigating through the site.

For example, one way that Site Overlay can be used is to visually show what percentage of visitors clicked through to the main pages linked from the website’s Home Page, or within the main navigation menu. This is a great benefit to website owners as it gives them a clear depiction of which page most of the visitors go to from the initial home page, or the primary landing pages used in a search advertising campaign. Therefore it’s instantly possible to see the most popular paths that visitors follow and the most visited pages. By hovering the mouse over the percentage box in the Site Overlay, another box appears that displays the actual number of clicks to that page and the number of conversions to a particular goal on that page.

If the link is clicked upon, the Site Overlay takes you to that next page and then displays the information according to the links from that page. It’s therefore possible to see which are the best performing links or pages in terms of click density and what the most popular route to a particular goal is, without necessarily having to set up small qualitative research groups. This information can enhance a website’s optimisation by allowing site marketers to experiment with different landing pages, layout, content and navigation routes, leading to a much more effective streamlining of visitors to converting customers.

The Site Overlay tool does have some restricted functionality, however. Currently the results are only displayed on static (as opposed to dynamic) pages that have unique links to content located elsewhere on the website. So if a page has numerous links pointing to another page, the total of clicks for all those links will be displayed in each of those site overlay boxes. Other limitations include the inability to function within frames, with URL redirects, or with Javascript or subdomain links so that in these cases the Site Overlay stats are not displayed.

Overall though, the Site Overlay is a very useful addition to a website’s analytics toolbox, and should be reviewed at least monthly. If you’d like to know more about how Google Analytics could be used to enhance your website’s performance, please contact us.

Another way to improve response rates from online advertising is to use Google’s Website Optimizer tool. This is designed to enhance the return on investment (ROI) for websites that use some form of ‘conversion tracking’ to record the number of enquiries or sales generated from a landing page – the point of entry that visitors arrive on a website, either from a search or other form of online advertising – by creating a series of tests to identify the best performing web pages.

The Website Optimizer tool effectively complements Google AdWords or Google Analytics by providing more information beyond just showing how effective a site’s content is in currently getting conversions, to indicate how to improve this content to get more. It’s a testing tool that allows users to analyse different aspects of a website’s landing page content to indicate which alterations may improve or reduce the conversion rate.

This is done through two different types of ‘experiments’ performed upon either complete pages of the website, or their individual elements. These types of experiments are known as A/B or Multivariate tests. Website Optimizer will not help a website to increase its SEO or PPC ranking positions, but it targets the actions that users may take once they arrive on the website page to result in an eventual outcome.

The Website Optimiser tool provides results on the estimated conversion rate range when comparing the original and revised versions of a web page. It requires advance planning to determine which elements of the website’s landing page/s will be tested (such as a headline, an image, or changes to an enquiry form) and it requires changes to the website to add JavaScript code that controls and manages the different test elements.

Depending on the type of testing undertaken, the Website Optimizer tool also needs a good statistical sample of site visits and actions to generate a meaningful percentage likelihood that a new page has to beat the original in this respect. In addition, the report logs the likely improvement, which is a projected percentage of conversions over or below the original web page, which would be generated by implementing the tested variation compared to the original.

Overall, Google’s Website Optimizer is a useful addition to their arsenal of website data feedback tools. It fills a niche through its ability to rapidly compare variations of a landing page or series of pages and so it should prove to be effective in allowing website designers or marketers to become pro-active in ongoing site development so as to reduce costly redesigns based upon guesswork, whilst simultaneously succeeding in the goal of increasing a site’s conversions.

If you’d like to know more about using the Website Optimizer tool to support your online marketing activity, please contact us now for a discussion.

The use of statistical information by companies to review how their websites are being found and used is now increasingly important to help understand where usability and marketing improvements can be made. The position of Google Analytics in this sector is now very strong as a free, high quality data source. This newsletter will be covering different aspects of using Google Analytics in forthcoming issues and this month we look at ‘bounce rate’.

The bounce rate figure shown within Google Analytics is one of the most useful indicators within a website’s activity data and is a figure that’s not included in some other analytics products. Bounce rate is described by Google as ‘the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page’.

The figure is shown as part of many of the default data tables within Analytics, such as referral traffic by website or keyword, and by page use within the site. Shown as a percentage figure, bounce rate essentially measures visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors, whereas a low rate means that visitors have progressed further into the site to find information or to take an action.

Of course, as with much of the Analytics results, you need to infer from the data what might be happening once a visitor enter the site. For example, your web page may give visitors exactly what they are looking for (such as a dictionary or other reference site) and so they leave straight away, which will show a high bounce rate. However, all websites ideally need to develop ‘stickiness’ that will retain visitors so that they follow links and use more of the site.

From a marketing perspective, high bounce rates can indicate that the site is attracting the ‘wrong’ type of visitors, or that the landing page is not compelling enough to retain visitors and to convert them into enquiries or sales. If you are running PPC advertising or other online marketing campaigns, a high bounce rate can indicate issues with the keyword targeting and the quality of the landing page, so that changes should be made to the search terms or the content of the page to try to reduce this bounce rate percentage.

If you’d like to know more about Google Analytics and how bounce rates can be used to improve your site conversion, please contact us for further information.

Search engine marketing may be considered by some to just be about search engine rankings and search referral traffic. However, any true search engine marketing campaign is ultimately about increasing business enquiries from search, which means that the conversion rate from a website or business process also plays a key role, as does the impact of competitor websites.

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