Using Motion Charts in Google Analytics

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.

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.

Google’s Local Business Listings are now regularly shown within the main search results if a user searches for a local business, alongside a small map. In addition, viewing results on Google Maps provides more information and additional advertising options through Google Ads (AdWords), all of which should be used by a localised business to target their potential customer base. Google is now adding new features to this service to help advertisers gain more local business.

We first covered the value of Google’s local business listings and their increasing prominence in Google’s ‘universal search results’ back in our June 2007 newsletter. The local business listings service has developed further since then and remains an important area for companies who are targeting a localised market to gain a prominent listing. Achieving a high ranking in the 10 businesses listed in Google’s main results can be difficult, particularly in a competitive market, but if searchers click through to the more detailed business listings, or search directly within Google Maps, there are additional ways to achieve visibility and to attract searchers to your website.

One of the main ways to achieve good visibility is through the use of a local business advert, which is created as part of a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign. This allows advertisers to create a specific advert to appear on Google Maps searches, with a small icon, address and contact details. In addition, Google has now announced some additional new features for these adverts to help companies attract prospective customers faster and to gauge how well their adverts are performing.

The first addition is that Google’s local business ads will now feature new interactive links within the panel that is displayed for the business. These panels are designed to provide more information for users and to connect them to the business quicker with a link to their website. Now users will be able to see more information from this panel and to take additional actions, such as a “Get Directions” option, a link to “Street View”, and “Save to My Maps” which allows users to personalise their search results.

In addition, Google Ads (AdWords) will also be adding a new interaction report for local business ads in the near future. This report will help advertisers to assess the activity through the local business ads and their return on investment, with such information as how many users opened the info window and clicked on each of the new interactive links. Google says that Maps users are often looking for different information than Search users so that these new interactive links and the reports should help customers connect with a business faster as well as help the advertiser understand how to better target Maps users versus Search users.

If your business could be benefitting more from a Local Business Listing on Google, contact us now for more information on this feature and we’ll be pleased to help. We can create optimised listings and Local Business Adverts to help raise your profile and improve your visibility to your target market.

As more businesses add Google Analytics to their website, it’s important for them to use the information to develop the marketing and usability of the site. One of the main criteria that should be set up and used within Analytics are ‘goals’ – these report on completed actions within the website and can tell a business how well their website is converting visitors to customers.

A ‘goal’ within Google Analytics describes the completion of an action on a website – whether it be the purchase of an item, the submission of an enquiry form, or the sign-up to a newsletter. Goal paths can be set-up within the Analytics profile settings, with 4 goals being tracked within a profile (and therefore if a website has more than 4 goals that need to be tracked, an additional profile needs to be created). The goal paths describe the stages that a site user needs to go through to reach the final goal, which is normally a ‘thank you’ page confirming a sale or other action on the website.

Once the goals have been set, the Analytics data allows site owners to review the information provided on the way that customers move towards the completion of these goals, following their steps, page-by-page through the site. A goal-tracking funnel within Analytics depicts where the website’s users may drop out of the goal path, showing the percentage conversions at each stage of the process. Therefore if a site has a shopping cart, it can be valuable to see where potential customers leave the process before completing an order. If there’s an enquiry form, a high drop-out rate may mean the form is asking for too much information and losing potential enquirers.

Armed with this type of data, the website owner can therefore make revisions to the website to try to increase the conversion rate through to the final goal. They can also compare the goal conversion rates from different referral sources (such as Google’s AdWords v organic search visits), as well as add generic or actual values to conversions, so that the ROI of the website and different marketing campaigns can be assessed.

Goals can therefore be a very powerful tool with Google Analytics but can be complex to set up on some websites. It you’d like more information about how goals can be used as part of your website marketing analysis, please contact us now for more information.

These were our 5 predictions for 2008 that were made in January last year, together with a review of what actually happened:

1) ‘Universal search’ becomes a significant optimisation issue: the inclusion of all forms of search results ‘ such as images, videos, news or maps ‘ within the main search engine listings has become more prevalent over the year, particularly on Google. This has created many opportunities for companies to achieve visibility within the search results in new and more creative ways. Local business listings have been the most effective method for many companies who target a localised area, so much so that Google has had to control some of the more extreme methods by companies trying to get listings within these results. Video sites like YouTube continue to attract huge traffic volumes and videos do appear within Google’s search results, when applicable. Google has also introduced new formats for PPC adverts although these remain limited to the content network and have yet to be offered within the main search listings.

2) Personalisation gains ground: the impact of personalisation has yet to be understood as no figures have been released by Google, or other websites that offer this option, to show what the levels of uptake have been. However, at the end of 2008 Google introduced the Search Wikia option for logged in users, so that search results could be adapted to suit user preferences and notes could also be added to listings. There were also hints from Google that this data may also be eventually used to determine search engine rankings which is likely to attract abuse of the system. We believe that personalization is still in the early stages of development with the vast majority of web searchers being aware of, or using, this option, although it is likely to gradually increase usage within the market and to become a more significant issue for search engine optimisation.

3) Behavioural advertising becomes the next ‘big thing’: this is still expected to become a key service for advertisers but has still to become a mainstream function, partly due to the technology still being developed and data being collected, as well as the privacy issues that are raised once individuals realise how their data is being used to target advertising. The huge mass of data that’s being collected by search engines and other major web properties should provide highly targeted advertising opportunities but the balance between this and privacy concerns is still to be determined.

4) Content targeted advertising becomes the new PPC battleground: Google has made further improvements to the content advertising network for PPC advertisers in 2008, most notably with the introduction of Placement advertising, and with the use of display and video advertising options. This sector has not become a battleground as other PPC services offer weak alternatives, but with better data and reporting on Google’s own service, the content network has become a more accountable resource to extend the reach of this targeted form of advertising.

5) Mobile search finally becomes serious: the launch of the Apple iPhone at the start of the year and the new Google-apps phone some months later has marked the start of the mobile Internet in earnest. The range of applications seems to be limited only by ideas at the moment and so as these type of phones gain market share and become ‘the norm’, then companies need to seriously think about focusing part of their online presence to the mobile market. This has yet to happen in any significant volume but the signs are there and examples can be demonstrated.

One of the most heated debates in the search engine marketing sector can be generated by Google’s PageRank and specifically the green PageRank indicator shown on the Google Toolbar – is this really a useful indicator of how Google views each web page, or should it be completely ignored as an irrelevant distraction? The question is also raised as to what purpose this indicator serves for most web users and why Google even bothers to display this.

Google’s trademarked ‘PageRank’ algorithm and underlying technology is one of the main foundations of the search engine developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and was also a core factor that enabled Google’s search results quality to stand out from existing search engines when it first launched in the late 1990′s. Google’s own corporate pages describe PageRank as follows:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

The underlying PageRank algorithm is a complex mathematical formula, which is then simplified by the short indicator bar on the Google Toolbar, where the green colour filling the bar indicates the PageRank ‘score’ between 0/10 and 10/10. New sites will start with a completely clear bar with no score and then develop a higher PageRank as the site gets indexed and starts attracting links from other domains.

The PageRank score on the Toolbar is a snapshot and an occasionally updated figure – Google’s Matt Cutts recently alerted people in his blog that a new update was being posted and back in 2006 had provided more information about the Toolbar indicator with answers to some readers’ questions. It’s clear that it would be wrong to place too much emphasis on this Toolbar figure for each website and web page, but it’s also short-sighted to dismiss it completely when it does provide some degree of information from Google’s perspective.

So the Google Toolbar shouldn’t be a figure of primary concern but a useful indicator of relative performance and potential development. It does give website marketers a view of their own and competitors’ web pages and how pages within a site hold different PageRank scores. It shouldn’t be a core driver of an SEO strategy but perhaps confirmation of how the search marketing support for a site is developing its potential performance on Google.

If you’d like to know more about Google’s PageRank system or the Google Toolbar, please contact us for more information.

The need to move the hosting location of a website can sometimes arise and often causes webmasters some concerns about how this may affect their website on search engines. If the need also arises to change the domain name of a site there can be other considerations to minimize the impact of any move.

Firstly, if you need to move your website to a new server or hosting company, there are a number of steps that can be taken to minimize the impact that such a move may have on the way that the site is being indexed by search engines. Ideally the site should be moved to the new host location and tested on the IP address before any other changes take place.

Next, the DNS settings of the domain name needs to be changed to point to the new IP address. Once that’s all in place it’s really then a question of monitoring the activity logs for the site to see when the ‘spiders’ from each of the main search engines visit the site in its new location. This can be achieved directly through the logs or through an account with Google Webmasters or through Yahoo!’s Site Explorer of Microsoft’s Webmaster Live panel.

If there are no crawl errors then there should be no further problems and the old IP address can be closed. The new site should now be getting indexed in the new hosting location and there should be no effect on the ranking performance of the site, although moving the hosting to a new country location could have some impact on rankings within the regional versions of Google.

A more dramatic change can be when your site has to change its domain name for whatever reason, as this is much like creating a brand new website and any ranking performance that the current domain has achieved could be lost. Therefore the process of moving a site to a new domain needs to be handled much more cautiously.

Ideally you can move part of the site first, such as a one directory or section from the existing site. A ’301 redirect’ will be an essential tool to help the transition as this is a permanent redirect command that tells the search engines that your site has permanently moved to this new location. If you can see the moved pages being indexed under the new domain then this will demonstrate that the redirect is working smoothly and the whole site can then be moved by using the same process.

When using a 301 redirect you need to try to redirect each page if possible, rather than a blanket redirect to the new domain name, which will create a lot of ‘dead’ pages from the old site still being listed in the search results and so generate 404 errors. You will need to ensure that you have a tailored 404 error page for your site in the event that pages get missed and users try to enter the site from an old page which will still be listed on the search results for some time.

Next, you will need to check both the external and internal links pointing to pages on your website. For external links you’ll probably need to update directory listings or contact the webmaster of each site and ask them to update the links to point to the new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site.

You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain, particularly if the absolute domain path has been used or page names have changed as well. Once your content is in place on your new server, use an online link checker to make sure you don’t have broken links on your new site.

It will be necessary to submit and verify the new domain on each of the webmaster consoles for the main search engines, as mentioned above, and to create a new sitemap and robots file for the new domain. In the event of any problems or errors arising from the move, it’s also best to retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days so that any issues can still be resolved.

As these comments indicate, it’s really advisable not to move a large or established website to a new domain if it can be helped, but there are ways to avoid problems if you plan ahead and put all these steps into place. Moving to a new hosting location is less of a problem but still one that needs to consider the potential impact on the site’s search engine rankings, especially if these are driving a large amount of business traffic.

To find out more about either of these transfer issues and how they may affect your website, please contact us for further information and advice.

The announcement by Google last month that they will be extending the Quality Score feature of AdWords to incorporate landing page load times will have implications for some advertisers whose rankings (or bid levels) may suffer as a result. Google says that faster loading pages should help to improve the effectiveness of a PPC campaign, since it is also a usability issue. So how can the page load times of a website be improved?

Load time is the length of time it takes for a page to load in the browser, so it can be dependent on the size of the page, the text content, images and underlying page code. Google says that a faster loading page creates a better experience for users, and therefore pages that take longer to load will be penalised as part of the Quality Score ranking criteria. Google will be including load time evaluations within the Keyword Analysis page available to AdWords advertisers, which will provide some indication of potential issues that might need to be reviewed to improve the performance of the landing pages.

Experts in this field say that 80% or more of the end-user response time comes from the ‘front end’ performance of a web page ‘ that is, how the browser deals with all the content with an HTML page, such as images, stylesheets, Flash content or scripts. If the number of these components can be reduced, then this will reduce the number of HTTP requests to display the page, which in turn results in a faster loading page. Very simply, by reducing the number of components on a page will speed up load times, but there can also be ways of reducing the number of HTTP requests while keeping the same content, such as by combining files or images, where appropriate.

Of course there are also factors that are out of the control of a website’s development team to speed up load times, such as the end user’s bandwidth speed, their ISP and proximity to the website’s server, but other design elements can also be used to a positive effect. Cleaning up the HTML coding or use of scripts on a page can make small differences to load times and putting stylesheets in the section of the web page will make pages load faster as the browser is able to render the parts of the page progressively.

In contrast, external JavaScript files work better if they are positioned as low in the page as possible since progressive rendering is blocked for all content below the script so that by moving scripts as low in the page as possible means there’s more content above the script that is rendered sooner.

Another important design element is to make JavaScript and CSS as external files. This generally produces faster loading pages because the JavaScript and CSS files are cached by the browser, so that the size of the HTML document is reduced without increasing the number of HTTP requests. The caching of these files won’t help the load time of a page for a new visitor but if they then view multiple page views and many of website’s pages re-use the same scripts and stylesheets, there is a greater potential benefit from having these external files cached.

With repeat visitors, using an ‘Expires’ header in the HTTP response will tell browsers how long a component on a page can be cached and so can reduce the number and size of HTTP requests in the future, making web pages load faster. However, this also has no effect on the load time for new visitors and if your website uses an Expires header you have to remember to change the component’s filename whenever the component changes.

If you are running an AdWords campaign you should start to consider how the landing pages from the advert link are loading and whether there are ways to increase this performance, either through a few small ‘quick fixes’ or by getting your web designers to implement more structural changes. This process should also be a way of reviewing the usability of your site for visitors and how effective your landing page is with the objective of converting new visitors to a desired action as quickly as possible.

If you’d like to know more about the Quality Score requirements for Google Ads (AdWords) or the load times for your website, please contact us now for a more detailed discussion.