Google analytics-workshop-open-access-workshop-august-2010-slideshare

Google Analytics Client Workshop
How to use Google Analytics to improve your
web site and online marketing
John Duffy
Marketing Director, Nemisys
john@nemisys.uk.com
01189 122226

Google Analytics - Agenda
Introductions
What is analytics?
Page tagging vs log files
Basics
User & administrator set up
The dashboard
Working with dates
Spark lines
Different views for different news
Visitors
Map overlay
Landing pages & bounce rates
Site search
Traffic sources
Clever functionality
Report distribution
Google Analytics help & support
The really useful part
Segmentation
Within reports
Working with profiles
Some useful profiles
Working with filters
Some useful filters
Working with advanced segments
Some useful advanced segments
Choice: profiles vs advanced segments
Truly measuring performance
Goals
Funnels
Campaign measurement
Reporting
Pulling it all together in to a report
Homework
Action plan
Further reading

Nemisys Client Workshops
This is one of a series of workshops we run for our clients
Workshops run either in-house or open access where we take up to 6 clients a day
The purpose is simple – if your web site works better for you, you may win more budget to further develop it.
We also want choosing to work with Nemisys to be a “career-enhancing” decision!
See www.nemisys.uk.com/workshops for more information
Or email john@nemisys.uk.com

Before we start – your history

Aims for today
Learn the usefulness and limitations of analytics
Learn your way around Google Analytics
Learn how to set up and interpret reports and profiles
Define online goals for your day to day activities
Start to measure the effectiveness of your (online) marketing
Build a “better” structure for your monthly reports
Show you how to save money online shopping

Over to you
Introductions and roles
How do you use your web site?

Fundamental question
Q. “Is 10 registrations a day on our site good or bad?”

Correct answer
A. “I’ve no idea, but 10 on Monday, 11 on Tuesday, 12 on Wednesday etc is great!”

What is analytics?
Measuring what happens on your web site
Measuring other promotional activity
Setting and progressing towards goals
And ideally, making sure you plan in at specification stage how what success looks like

Analytics ‘history’ - log files

Analytics ‘history’ – log files

Log file report - Urchin

Analytics tools – page tagging

Urchin vs Google Analytics
Numbers differ
Not worth getting in to too much detail, but plenty you can read
BUT, if you insist on comparing old with new:
Work out a conversion factor in parallel sets of data and use that going forward (but be warned, it’s messy)

Why Google Analytics?
Level 1 – out of the box tagging/reporting
Level 2 – bend the reports to better understand your web site
Level 3 – bend your tagging to (eg) record on-page activities, Flash activity, ecommerce activity
Remember - You have both – Urchin and Google Analytics

Use analytics to your advantage

So let’s dive in
www.google.com/analytics
Not got a Google Account yet?
https://www.google.com/accounts/newaccount
Use your work email address
Or for today, if you do not have access to your work email address, use an email address you can access, then change it later – I’ll show you how

Help & support

Get stuck in, explore
Don’t be afraid to get stuck in
Explore the reports – there are new reports added all the time
I’d guestimate that there have been 20 fundamental improvements in the last 2 years, so do get used to using the online help to remind and steer you – I DO!

Where you can look for help / tips
How to videos - http://youtube.com/googleanalytics
GA support - http://google.com/support/googleanalytics
GA blog - http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Webmaster tools - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
My blog, analytics posts & tips - http://www.nemisys.uk.com/blogs/nemisys/Default.asp?keyword=analytics

Basics 1 - user set up

Basics 2 – dashboard
Shows “most useful” reports – that’s subjective!
Add up to 12 reports
Reorder and delete reports

Essential concepts - averages
Averages are your enemy
EXCEPT within tightly defined segments or for specific pages
BAD – bounce rate across a whole site
GOOD – bounce rate for a specific page

Basics 3 – date ranges
Defaults to last 31 days
Change to view 1 month
Change to view 1 week
Change to compare 2 months

Exercise – date ranges
View 1 month
View 1 week
Compare March and February
Align start/end days when comparing date ranges

Basics 4 – comparing metrics
Get used to exploring the reports and comparing figures

Basics 5 – spark lines
Watch spark lines to spot anomalies worth looking in to

Exercise – spark lines
Can you spot any activity worth looking in to on your spark lines?

Basics 6 - views
Cut data in different views to provide insight

Basics 7 – report distribution
Report distribution
Top link to set up an email
Left link to see all of the emails you’ve set up across the whole site

Exercise – report distribution
Identify some useful scheduled reports for your site
Set up some scheduled reports for your site to your colleagues

Basics 8 - segmentation
Metrics – basic counts of things that happen on your site, like visitors, page views etc
Dimensions – attributes that the basic action create, like time on site, new vs returning visitors and keywords used to reach you
That’s much easier with an example
Top content & bounce rate

Visitors – sessions & uniques
Sessions
Unique visitors

Visitors - new & returning
Absolute numbers are OK
But differences between segments are much more interesting
Bounce rates
Conversions
Revenues

Map overlay
Zoom from country to city level
Use for targeting cost per click adverts
Measure goals by campaign and geography?

Exercise – map overlay
Is geography important to you
Overseas offices?
Overseas sales drives?
UK-only traffic
City-specific traffic?
Landing pages per city maybe for local events?

Landing pages and bounce rate
Spot best performers
Improve problem pages
There’s no “right” or “wrong” figure
But don’t just look at rates – concentrate on high volume pages

Landing pages and source
Drill in to individual landing pages to see where the visitors came from

Homework – landing pages
Identify 3 landing pages using the following criteria:
High volume of entrants (so you don’t spend effort with insignificant rewards)
Significant bounce rate
Over the next month, reduce the bounce rates for each page

Site search
How many people searched?
How often did they search?
What for?
Any problem content?

Homework
Now search tagging is enabled, use it to:
Identify problem areas on your site
Identify the language your visitors use to check you’re “jargon free”

Traffic sources
Referring sites
Search engines
Keywords used
Campaign traffic

Profiles
A profile is a report, created by filtering (ie discarding) some information as the analysis is done
Useful profiles might be:
Subdomains
Microsites
Site sections
UK visitors
Paid search visitors
Profiles are also useful for controlling access when administering users

Creating a profile
Overview page > add new profile
Work through the wizard, probably choosing:
Existing domain
UK
Then overview page > edit profile
Default page = default.asp
Exclude query string parameters = blank
Currency displayed as = GBP
Yes, an e-commerce site
Do track site search, query parameter = searchexpression
But do check the query parameter by doing a search on your site!
Result = a new profile that will behave exactly like your main profile from this point forwards, unless we apply some filters to it

Filters and profiles
Filters make your profiles useful, by allowing you to focus on a specific segment of visitors
They cut out the “noise” created by visitors who you aren’t interested in for the specific piece of functionality you are looking at
Examples of useful filters:

Applying filters to profiles
Before we start:
NEVER apply filters to your base profile or you will discard information
Stuff to understand
New profiles can’t look back in time – you start to record information from the day when you set the profile up
Advanced segments can look backwards though
You need to reapply your “settings” (home page, site search etc) when you set up a new profile
Then apply filters

Filter - subdirectory
If you have a microsite, intranet or extranet running in a separate folder
So here, we are isolating people who use our Ecards system at www.nemisys.uk.com/ecards

Filter – new visitors only
Here, I just want new visitors as I already know I can “convert” returning visitors

Filter – exclude other domains
Because anyone can add your tag to their site, you might want to set up a filter that excludes all traffic from other sites
This actually happened to Nemisys - a developer in India ripped our site and rebadged it for a client.
The other site showed up in our numbers until a polite email suggesting they shouldn’t pay their developer found its way to them ... 

Filter – visitors from organic search
If you’re focussing on SEO, this is a useful profile to help measure your progress
Remember – search rankings are old hat. This lets you monitor true success – visitors who convert

Filter – exclude your staff
If you know your IP company address(es), you can exclude traffic from staff
Or flip the logic on its head and look at only traffic from staff if that’s useful to you

Filter – UK visitors
Useful if overseas visitors really are irrelevant to you

Exercise – set up a new profile
Call it something you’ll recognise

Setting GoalsSegmentationTracking your marketing activity

Fundamental question
So what?
Or more constructively
So what now?

Reporting your goals
First, let’s define them!
For our purposes, a goal is a meaningful outcome for your business
Example goals:
Submitted the contact form
Made a donation
Made a purchase
Registered for an event
Support log ins
Split in to pairs and come up with a list of goals for your site

Our goals
To complete – list of goals we’ll aim to add

Beyond goals to funnels
Measure the progress from 1 page to another, finishing in a goal
Can be simple – submitting a form
Or more complex – a basket & checkout process
Review your goals – are there any funnels that we should set up?

Measuring your goals
Default measure is percentage, not absolutes
But there’s a custom report to give you the absolute figures

Goals - getting to the numbers
Default report gives %ages only
This custom report gives absolute numbers

After goals – segmentation
Level 1 – within reports
Level 2 – profiles
Level 3 – advanced segments

Segments – “best” approach
Drill in to and pivot the STANDARD REPORTS to identify interesting segments
Use PROFILES and FILTERS to “clean” your data
And to produce reports for segments you know you will be interested in long term
Use ADVANCED SEGMENTS to explore your profiles

Segments again - advanced
Simple exploration we’ve covered
Beta service – advanced segments
Portable across profiles AND accounts
Retrospective analysis

Exercise – profiles & filters
Set up a new profile and apply a filter that will be useful for you in preparing your reports

Advanced segments
A great way to fish about in your reports
Unlike profiles, can look backwards
But don’t be tempted to use INSTEAD of profiles
Use Google’s default segments
And add your own

Suggested segments
Member activity (this should really be a profile too)
UK visitors
Specific sources
What other segments are relevant to your organisation?

GA “automatically” measures your Adwords
But can also measure your other marketing activity, such as:
Banner adverts
Exchanged/paid links
Click-throughs from email
Click-throughs from other documents

Examples
http://www.nemisys.uk.com/portfolio_item.asp?section=00010001000800010001&itemid=23
http://www.englishgolfunion.org/?utm_source=nemisys&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=portfolio

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&topic=11014 (or Google “Google URL builder”)
Produce a coherent approach to record all campaigns in to a master report, and making it easy for people to choose new tracking URLs

Pulling it all together
“Management” likes it all in 1 place – and in fact that’s a useful discipline
Use MS Excel to bring together most important numbers
Over a series of months and years
To focus on trends and campaigns

Real world actions
Let’s make a 1 month action plan for improving your site’s performance
Implement all of your goals so that you start to measure against objectives
Identify 3 landing pages to tweak and reduce bounce rate / improve goal conversion
Identify 2 current campaigns – how can we improve them?

Cutting your shopping bill
Just browse before you buy
Say you visit and purchase something in December
Then revisit in Feb, but just browse without even signing in
Top end analytics systems will tie the visits together via your cookies and don’t be surprised if you receive an email containing the products you browsed
To really reel them in, add the product to your basket and then leave ...
And only respond to the type of offers you prefer

Further reading
Blogs, hints & tips
But this book - http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/
Helpful if you have lots of time to devote to analytics, highly entertaining - http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
My blog (analytics tag) - http://www.nemisys.uk.com/blogs/nemisys/Default.asp?keyword=analytics
Online help
How to videos - http://youtube.com/googleanalytics
GA support - http://google.com/support/googleanalytics
GA blog - http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Webmaster tools - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Google analytics-workshop-open-access-workshop-august-2010-slideshare

by John Duffy

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