There are many analytics packages that are used and each come with various features. One of the most used analytics packages by far is Google Analytics. In this session, four speakers who are experts in this field are going to show us tools and features that you may or not be aware of that will help you to improve the performance of your website and increase your ROI.
This is a session I am really looking forward to as Martijn Beijk, one of the State of Search bloggers is taking to the stage along with Anna Lewis, who is a fellow member of the Koozai team!
Moderators
1) Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Speakers
1) Martijn Beijk, Business Consultant, comScore
2) Dennis Hart, VP Marketing and Analytics, SE JOnes
3) Anna Lewis, Digital Marketing Executive, Koozai
4) Daniel Waisberg, Founder and Editor, Online Behavior
Let’s get started:
Dennis Hart, VP Marketing and Analytics, SE JOnes
Dennis is going to be covering some of the features that may be unknown in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
The first thing that gets overlooked from an analytics perspective is that people just don’t have a plan. The plan should be the first thing that you look at and it should be built around your marketing calendar, sales funnel, key initiatives or channel/discipline (SEO, PPC, Email etc).
You also need to be looking at developing your key performance indicators (KPIs) over time, lots of factors can affect your KPIs like seasonality and buying cycles.
Dashboards
Despite Google Analytics ‘pretty appearance’ it also offers robust dashboards and powerful customisable reporting. Setting up a KPI dashboard in Google Analytics can be very useful and all websites should be creating one. Some examples of the KPIs included:
– Visits
– Leads
– Goal Completion URL
– Visits – Target per month
– Total Goal Completions
– Traffic Source Share
– Goal Completion Traffic Source Share
All the data in your dashboard doesn’t mean anything unless you are comparing dates, so you need to be looking at different date brackets to get the most out of your data.
Custom Reporting
If you aren’t using the custom reporting in Google Analytics you need to be. Combining the customer reports with custom segments with time comparisons, the data starts to get really interesting.
Acquisitions > Behaviour > Outcomes
Integrated Google Webmaster Tools
GA recently integrated Google Webmaster Tools data. It can be tricky to get it verified but once you have the data it is well worth it
Multi Channel Funnels
Using the funnels for PPC you can get some really actionable insights and see which ad groups and campaigns are working best for you. Adding conversions and conversion value to your multi channel funnel reporting will give you much more insight. You should also be creating customised channel groupings to separate your brand vs. non brand traffic for organic AND paid search traffic so that when applied to the multi channel funnels you can see which keywords are most important to your campaigns.
Sampling
Watch out for the yellow bar message in Google Analytics as it means you are only seeing SAMPLED data. If you build a segment and add it to your dashboard, you get ‘unfiltered results’ but you are limited to ten results so you need to filter ‘tighter’ and create more custom reports so you get to see all the data.
Anna Lewis, Digital Marketing Executive, Koozai
One of the latest additions to Google Analytics is the Social Graph Reporting and Anna is going to cover all the areas of this reporting. She has written a blog post which includes her slides on the Koozai Blog and you can get them here. Each section covered in her presentation shows a link at the bottom of each slide so you know where
Shared URLs
You can see which content has been shared and see how much traffic the content has driven. The new information here is the Data Hub Activity column which shows you any social engagement that has taken place away from your website on social platforms that Google have access to or own.
Off Site Social and Link Activity per URL
Google are now reporting on how your data is shared, whether it drove a link back to your site or whether it was shared on a social network.
Social Media ROI
(Conversion Value – Costs) / Costs x 100 = Social Media ROI
You need to have a value attributed to your conversions to get the most out of this report which can be found in Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Social > Conversions. When you look at this data, you can really see how much social media is generating for your business in terms of revenue. You will be surprised how many people don’t know how much social media means to their business and using these reports you can see just that.
Social Media doesn’t always generate business directly and using the new reporting in GA you can see how many conversions your social media marketing assist with.
Track Mentions of your Content
You can see how your content is shared socially from directly within Google Analytics. The below screenshot shows you various comments and shares a URL received which provides you with a quick insight into how much engagement your content is getting.
SMX Giveaways
Social Interactions by Day of the Week: http://kooz.ai/socialbyday
Social Visitor Loyalty: http://kooz.ai/socialloyal
Social Media Dashboard: http://kooz.ai/socialdash
Social Media Dashboard – http://kooz.ai/socialdash
Daniel Waisberg, Founder and Editor, Online Behavior
Daniel says “Custom Variables are the most important feature on Google Analytics by far” and this is what is going to be covered in his presentation. They can be found in GA under Audience > Demographics > Custom Variables. To use them you do need to add some additional code to your website so you need to look into this first.
The definition of custom variables: ‘Define additional segments to your visitors’
The Hierarchy
– Visitor Level Variable – Distingush visitors across multiple sessions
– Session Variable – Distinguish visitors experiences on current session
– Page Level Variable – Distinguish page level activities on current visit
Custom Variables can be used for Campaign Attribution. Here are some examples:
Visitor Level
How do you decide which products to promote on the Home page of an ecommerce site? Add three and then add a custom variable tag to each button so you can see which banner drove your conversions.
Page Level
Take My Supermarket website as an example, they are interested to know which brands drive the most engagement and conversions. You would use Page Level custom variables to tag the pages to see these results.
Martijn Beijk, Business Consultant, comScore
Martijn takes a look at the comScore tool in detail. All analytics tools are focused on data collection and they do have a few things in common:
1) Export functionality
2) Storage Engine
3) CRM
4) APIs
When we talk about ‘metrics’ a lot of people don’t have a clue what they are as they can be interpreted in many different ways. To make real sense of a metric, you need to know the context behind it.
Competing on Analytics
A good book that was recommended to read is Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. There is a great table that everyone looking at analytics data should pay attention to.
Event Tracking
Setting up Event Tracking can be very easy but the data you get off the back of using is will give you so much benefit.
You can use Event Tracking on videos to track how long people watch your videos for and whether people stop and pause in the middle of watching. This is great information to know when you should include some advertising on a video as you can see which duration gets the most engagement.
Visit Duration
This can be very hard to measure due to the fact that the last page visited is not included within this metric as the user has left the site. All analytics tools have this problem. You need to explain this to clients as many website owners will try and use this as a metric when it isn’t accurate.
Cookie Law
The majority of Analytics programmes use cookies and with the new cookie law coming into play this will cause drops in data recorded. BT.com are a great example of how they are abiding by the cookie law and should be looked at if you are wanting to add something to your site.
