Google Analytics introduces new Intelligence

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 Ads (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.

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 Ads (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.

Many of the trends likely to have an impact in 2009 have already started, but what are our predictions for some of the key developments this coming year?

1) The economic slowdown focuses attention online: there is little doubt that the economic impact of the ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 will have a significant impact on business in 2009, particularly in the US and Europe. Progressive companies will still need to maintain and grow their business in the face of any downturn and therefore even if marketing spend is cut back, the focus on online marketing will be greater, due to the measurability and proven cost-effectiveness of this form of advertising for many businesses. Search advertising will still see an overall growth in spend and market share of online advertising and despite some companies withdrawing from this sector, many others will put more spend into this targeted advertising to support their business.

2) Analytics becomes more mainstream: partly because of the widespread uptake of Google’s free Analytics tool and partly because of the greater need for advertising spend to be effective in 2009, the use of website statistics or analytics is expected to become more common, even for small companies. However, the interpretation of the data and the way that understanding can be used will still be the most important aspect of this trend, but companies can now access much better data on their online activities which in turn can help to improve their website and marketing strategy to get the most from their online spend.

3) Yahoo won’t survive in its current form: it seems inevitable that Yahoo’s ongoing saga that was the source of much news coverage in 2008 will come to some sort of conclusion in 2009. Whether this is with Microsoft eventually coming back on the scene and buying Yahoo’s search business, or some other form of takeover by another leading online brand, it’s likely that Yahoo won’t be able to survive the next 12 months in their current form, despite ‘ or maybe because of ‘ the change in their CEO. It would be a shame for Yahoo to lose more search market share, as Google needs a stronger competitor, but with the economic problems in the US, it’s hard to see Yahoo surviving much longer as a key player and we can expect more developments here sooner rather than later.

4) Video becomes the new marketing tool: as mentioned above, with the growth and impact of ‘universal’ search, video is now playing a more visible role within search and in 2009 this is likely to see a bigger impact in the business sector. Companies need to think about ways they can effectively use video to drive traffic and new business to their website, as it is becoming a more widespread medium and one that can play a bigger role within search and advertising channels. The ‘optimisation’ of video will be as important as the production if the effort of creating videos is to reap the rewards expected, particularly against the massive growth of user generated video content on sites like YouTube, but the creative use and marketing of videos will become more mainstream this year.

5) Reputation management becomes a core service: we’ve covered this issue before, but with the increasing growth and focus on user-generated content sites – such as review sites, blogs and comments on social networks – the need for companies to monitor what is being said about their business and brands, and to respond effectively to that content, will become a bigger requirement in 2009 as more businesses realise the potential dangers as well as the advantages of this trend. Online reputation management will therefore become a service in much demand from PR companies and search engine marketing firms, as web content is monitored and responded to in a more effective manner.

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.

A useful and cost-saving new function which has been added to the updated Google Adwords interface is the integrated search query report pop-up screen. This provides advertisers with more detailed information on the search queries that their site visitors have used before clicking on their PPC advert and allows better targeting of the campaign over time.

Once advertisers are logged into their Google Ads (AdWords) management interface they can click on the “See Search Terms” button that now appears at the top of each keyword activity report. This opens up a pop-up screen containing data about the actual search queries that have been used by searchers on Google which then lead to a clickthrough from the relevant PPC advert.

Advertisers can therefore now view the search phrases that generated clicks to their site and assess whether they are relevant enough. The detailed breakdown by search phrase will show the usual data provided by Google, such as the total impressions, clickthrough rate and average ad position, as well as the cost and any conversions generated from the clicks.

The power of this report is that it enables advertisers to identify the relevancy or otherwise of their targeted search terms, particularly if these are set at the broad level. It can demonstrate the wide variety of search terms that users input into Google’s search panel and can either show high volume terms that should be specifically targeted ‘ if not already ‘ as well as phrases or individual words that should be excluded as a negative term to reduce impressions and clicks.

This data was previously available as a report within AdWords, but this new tool allows more immediate and flexible control of the keyword targeting within a campaign. It can sometimes mean that words or phrases are excluded after the click, but this can reduce future unnecessary spend. What it doesn’t do is indicate where high impressions may still be generated from terms where the advert is not clicked.

However, this tool is one of the good improvements added to the Google Adwords management interface and allows campaigns to become more tightly focussed upon the most effective keywords, which should help to improve clickthrough rates and conversions.

If you’d like to know more about this function and how it can be used to help improve your Google Ads (AdWords) campaign, please contact us for details.

n our continuing series about how to get the most out of Google Analytics, this month’s newsletter takes a look at the Motion Charts feature. This recently added report allows you to compare visually the performance of several keywords over time and adds a new angle to the analysis of a marketing campaign.Usually, when viewing keyword performance from the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics, it’s not possible to see a graphical depiction that compares individual keywords, although by clicking on the ‘visualise’ button above the graph, this is now possible. By doing this, keyword data can be analysed at a glance, over a specified time period. Any number of keywords can be selected and the time line can be moved to clearly see how particular keywords have performed over this period. For example, with ‘time’ selected on the X-axis and ‘visits’ on the Y-axis, a comparison of the number of visits each keyword has generated can be viewed and compared.

The parameters for comparison can be changed from visits to bounce rate, conversion rate, average time on site and more, so by selecting the ‘trails’ feature, the dots can be joined by a line, which shows the flow between them. The colour of the dots can also be changed to show the chosen parameters, which adds another dimension to the amount of data shown. To add yet more data to the comparison, the size of the dots can also be changed to represent any of these parameters. It’s therefore possible to see visits, bounce rate and average time on site over this period, and any other combination, including conversions and per visit goal conversion, which is a quick way to determine which keywords regularly produce the most revenue for a site.

The Motion Charts feature is a valuable tool for comparing different keywords’ performance on up to three parameters at a time. This enables a quick analysis of which ones are performing best and which are not doing so well, enabling the bids for those to be adjusted accordingly within Google Adwords. Over time, this quick comparison tool could lead to large cost saving within an advertising campaign.

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

In the continuing series about Google’s Analytics reports, this month’s newsletter takes a look at the Keyword Positions Report. This valuable tool within Analytics tracks the performance of individual keywords within a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign in relation to their ranking positions and gives advertisers feedback on which position is the most cost-effective to help them adjust their bids and ranking positions.

The Keyword Positions Report enables advertisers to view the number of visits and conversions (amongst other data) that result from the different positions that a particular keyword’s generated advert appears in the PPC ranking results. For example, an advert displayed in position number 1 for the keyword “product” may have resulted in 80 visits and 3% conversions, whereas it may have resulted in 90 visits and 4% conversions when appearing in position number 4.

An analysis of such data may demonstrate, for many advertisers, that a lower position in the PPC rankings may be more cost-effective for a particular keyword than one higher up. Therefore it can be decided whether it is fruitless to bid for a position on the top left side of the results when it isn’t proven to be as effective over time for that keyword than when it appears in the sponsored links on the right side.

This data gives a value to the keyword and can make it work more effectively for a lower cost by saving advertisers from excessively bidding for a high positions. It can also help to save an advertiser a significant level of spend within a large campaign consisting of numerous keywords and a high budget, by being able to focus on the most cost-effective positions and to adjust their bids accordingly.

This Analytics report isn’t perfect however – for example it can’t differentiate between search terms that are targeted as broad, phrase or exact terms, nor can it give an overview of trends by particular groups of terms. Having said that, the ranking of the ad slots as an average over the campaign can also be viewed by using the new “Advanced Segments” reporting function. This can provide a good comparison of how the left or right-hand side ranking positions produce results over the campaign as a whole.

The Keyword Positions Report can be very effective, especially as it can be used alongside the ‘Position Preference’ function in Google Adwords which allows advertisers to target a particular ranking position or range by automatically adjusting the bid levels.

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

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.