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 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 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.

What are website analytics?

This is the broad term for the data that’s collected and the software that converts this information as the result of any action completed on a website, so that the site owner can view usable and actionable information. It allows website owners and marketers to view this information in summary reports to help understand such things as how many visitors come onto the site, where they came from and how they use the site. Website analytics can provide in-depth information about the website to help improve the ways that the site is being found and used, so that ultimately it can covert more visitors to sales!

What options do I have to review these analytics?

Website analytics have always been around, but there are more options available these days. Basic website hosting packages will often provide free server software packages, such as Webalizer or AWStats, although these can be quite limited in terms of analysing the data and often the data is only displayed for a rolling 12 month period. Companies with large, high traffic websites will often use server-side analytics software which is a more expensive option with sophisticated analysis, plus the security of retaining the data inhouse. However, the most common and popular option nowadays tends to be the hosted analytics solution where data is collected and stored on external servers through the use of JavaScript tracking code placed on every page of a site. Google Analytics is one example of this method and is now probably the market leader in website analytics.

Is Google Analytics a good option to use?

Most probably, although this will depend on your specific requirements. However, as a good quality, free analytics option, Google Analytics has become very popular with many websites. It’s relatively simple to install and manage, plus it seamlessly links into Google AdWords. Some users dislike the idea of Google recording this data on their servers, but for many, it’s an in-depth analytics package developed from the highly-regarded, commercial Urchin software system. It’s continually being enhanced and updated with new features and provides powerful analysis for many websites.

How do you set up Google Analytics on a website?

The process for doing this fairly straight-forward. Firstly, you need to create an account at the Google Analytics website. Then you add a profile, get the tracking code and add it to all pages of your website. Google provides instructions for adding the code ‘snippet’ to your site, or your web designers will know how to do this. There can be more advanced set-up options for different types of tracking requirements and there are now many specialist analytics or web marketing companies that can help with this process.

What sort of data does Google Analytics provide?

From every visitor activity on a website, Google Analytics records a range of data which can be used to better understand how the site is working. There are a number of useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) shown in the standard reports, such as: Visits and visitors; Page views and time spent on a page or on the site; Bounce rate and exit rate; Referral sources and keywords; Content and paths through the site; Goals and revenue.

How should I use this data to help the marketing of my website?

It’s useful to track KPIs over time, looking at actions, results and trends that reflect the success of a website. This data provides the best source of quantitative information about how a site is being found and what happens once people land on the site. By understanding how data is collected and what information is presented, the analytics user needs to interpret this into ‘Why’ events occurred. It’s therefore necessary to review the data to make assumptions, then test changes on the site to review the impact on those assumptions with the aim of improving the data trends in a positive way.

What is the bounce rate and why is this important?

The bounce rate indicates the number of visits where only a single-page on the website is viewed – after which the site visitor may use the bounce button to return to search results or leave the site some other way. This figure is valuable since it can be an indication of relevancy to the visitor. High bounce rates or low time spent on the site indicate lower quality traffic, perhaps through the wrong use of search terms to attract traffic. If the bounce rate of a page is high, it may be necessary to change some of the content on it to make it more relevant to the visitor’s needs.

What are goals and how are these set up?

The use of goals in Google Analytics are to record all desired actions completed on a website and the paths users take to get there – such as completed sales, submitted enquiry forms, newsletter sign-ups, etc. They are an important data element within analytics reports and will show how users are converted on the site to a lead or sale. Goals can be created within the settings for editing a profile on Google Analytics and a goal completion ideally needs to reflect a unique URL for a confirmation page. By creating ‘goal funnels’ you can see where visitors might have left the site during the completion path of an order form, or similar process, so that changes can be tested to find improvements to achieve a higher conversion rate.

What trends should I be looking at?

It’s important to note changes in trends in the visitor, traffic, content and goals KPIs. With Google Analytics, you can track the trends in data and pick up any unusual or unexpected trends with indications of significance. Email alerts can be used and it’s possible to draw assumptions from what is most likely to be happening on the website by reviewing the trend or activity data. These assumptions should then be tested either by changing the marketing activity or the content / actions on the website. Once the test has been implemented, changes to the analytics data should be reviewed and by using data significance or longer term trends, users can review the most likely outcomes of any changes.

What type of reports should I be using?

There are a wide range of reports provided by Google Analytics which should be used as an essential part of the website marketing process. These include the standard reports, as well as custom reports and advanced segments. Standard reports are used to track KPIs over time, looking at actions, results and trends that reflect the success of a website. Custom reports are a powerful and flexible option to help users develop their own reports to look at specific data elements and to include data not shown in standard reports. The Advanced Segments option give users the chance to ‘slice and dice’ data in various ways, using pre-defined filters or new ones that can be setup. The various reports can also be saved and emailed on scheduled dates and are an excellent way of getting better insights into the website’s activity.

In our continuing series on the most useful functions within Google Analytics, this month we review some of the new features that Google has just announced, including more comprehensive reporting capabilities, greater customisation options and a new “intelligence engine” that it says “can help search marketers drive smarter data insights”.

The most significant of these new features is the “Analytics Intelligence” that is designed to “provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods”. For example, Intelligence could alert you about a large surge in visits from a particular referrals site last Thursday or let you know that bounce rates of visitors from Queensland increased by 80% a week ago.

The idea of this feature is to save time delving through statistics to discover erratic patterns of behaviour and instead, use this time more constructively by determining what needs to be done to resolve the issues highlighted by the alerts.

Other features of Analytics’ new “intelligence engine” include the ability to define alert sensitivity and to create custom alerts. These custom alerts give the option to compare the same day to that in the previous week and highlight any chosen custom discrepancies on a week-to-week basis. This should prove to be a very useful addition.

The other features that Google has recently added to Analytics are:

• Expanded goals & site engagement goals.
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced analysis features (incl. advanced table filtering)
• Multiple custom variables.

Although this expanded functionality of Analytics will undoubted improve its reporting capabilities, the most necessary element in making its information valuable will remain the human-being who correctly interprets and takes action upon the resulting data!

If you’d like to know more about how the new Intelligence function, or how Google Analytics could be used to enhance your website’s performance, please contact us for further information.

Google recently introduced some new AdWords reports within the Google Analytics interface, which help to measure what happens after people click on the sponsored listings within the search results. Whilst the information within a Google AdWords account focuses more on the click data received on keywords and adverts, the new Google Analytics reports allow advertisers to see how visitors from an AdWords advertising campaign interact and engage with their website.

One aspect of these reports allows advertisers to determine how a person using a particular match type of keyword (i.e. broad, phrase, or exact) to find a site behaves on it, compared to one that uses a different kind of match type. This information can be applied to individual keywords, or expanded to adgroups and whole campaigns, so it can be used to see how much time these visitors spend on the site, or how many pages they view.

This is very powerful data that enables underlying trends to be detected and AdWords campaign components to be edited accordingly. In particular, this data can be used in conjunction with the existing funnel reports that depict where visitors exit the site before converting to a sale or enquiry.

These new reports are a welcome inclusion for Google Analytics users and will provide the ability to measure the success of AdWords campaigns in more detail, especially with the addition of 3 new reports at the beginning of June. These are in the form of a day parting report, a destination URLs report, and a placements report. This ability to dig deeper into AdWords performance was further enhanced at the same time, with the inclusion of 10 more dimensions that provide even more segmented data.

If you’d like more information on how these new Google Analytics reports can improve the performance of your AdWords campaign, contact us now.

In our continuing series on the most useful functions within Google Analytics, this month we review how to control report data through the use of the Filter Manager which allows you to exclude static or dynamic IP addresses or domains from the reports.

The Filter Manager is an excellent function within Google Analytics that allows a company to remove data about its own internal traffic to their site, or exclude activity data from other known IP addresses that it deems to be providing unreliable statistics. This method of filtering enables the more accurate recording of relevant third-party visits to the site.

This is done by selecting the Filter Manager from the main Analytics settings page, then choosing either pre-defined or custom filters. These are in the form of exclusion of a single IP address, an you can exclude an IP address range through the use of Google’s regular expression generator that can be found here. This can be useful for larger organisations that may have their IP addresses mapped to their domain name rather than to their ISP, so this is a useful way to exclude the company’s visits as a whole. Filters can also be used to include or exclude all traffic from a sub-domain so that a profile can be created within the Analytics account to track activity within one section of a website, plus geographic regions can be analysed by setting up filters and custom reports.

Custom filters provide more flexibility and more advanced settings to help exclude or analyse certain traffic from the Analytics reports. It is also possible, for example, to exclude internal traffic by cookie content, which enables the exclusion of dynamic IP addresses through custom filters. However, all computers in a company’s network that have a dynamic IP address and need to be excluded have to visit a specially created page in order to have the cookie placed upon them first, so it can be quite complex to set up this level of filter.

By using Google Analytic’s Filter Manager in any of these ways, the relevancy of the data retrieved about a company’s website can be vastly improved and hence the resulting accuracy of the related figures can be deemed to be much more precise, reflecting only those visits from external users. If the internal site usage is also needed, then a separate profile for the same website can be created without the filters, which will therefore show the difference in usage statistics between the two.

If you’d like to know more about how this particular function, or how Google Analytics could be used to enhance your website’s performance, please contact us for further information.

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.