1. If I have multiple contact forms on different pages, do I need a separate thank you page for each one?
It is dependent on the goal. In most cases it is not necessary if there is the same contact form on every page. You do not need a separate thank you page for different contact forms.
If you have a form on the /contact.php page and the /about-us.php page that both redirect to the same thank you page (/thank-you.php) once the form is submitted, the programmer can setup a goal funnel to track which page (/contact.php or /about-us.php) the visitor is filling in the form. You can also check which pages the user visited that led up to a goal completion (Goals > Reverse Goal Path).
2. Why can’t goals be set up on my shopping cart?
There could be several reasons why goals cannot be set up on your website. A common reason why we cannot set up goals on a shopping cart is that there is no receipt (thank you) page. The reason why we need a thank you page for goals is because it is the best way to track whether a visitor has completed a goal or conversion.
In the case where your website redirects to an external website for payment, please refer to the “Can I set up goals if my payment page goes off-page (e.g. PayPal)?” answer.
3. Can I set up goals if my payment page goes off-site (e.g. PayPal)?
We cannot track a conversion completely if the website redirects to an off-site payment website (e.g. PayPal). This is because we do not have access to the PayPal website. We cannot place your Google Analytics code on an off-site payment page and therefore lose the visitor tracking. The best solution is for clients to implement an onsite payment strategy.
4. What is Ecommerce goal tracking?
E-Commerce goal tracking is a block of code that is inserted on a receipt (thank you) page which automatically detects and records transactions (by assigning a dollar value) and product information. The data recorded by the code can then be reviewed in Google Analytics. E-commerce goal tracking is most beneficial to shopping cart websites.
5. Is it possible to track the pages that the visitor visited before reaching my thank you page?
Yes, we can track the previous pages a user visited before reaching the thank you page (if a goal for the thank you page has been set up on your Google Analytics account). However, this will only work if your website does not redirect to an off-site payment page. Goals > Reverse Goal Path will show which pages the user has visited before completing a goal.
6. What happens if my goals change?
If your goals change, you should immediately update them in Google Analytics. You may also need to update the conversion process as well.
7. What happens to my goals if I redesign my website?
If the URLs have changed on the website, the goals setup may need to be changed.
8. What is a conversion rate?
The goal conversion rate is the percentage of sessions on a site that results in a completed goal. The formula to determine the conversion rate is:
Conversion rate = outcomes (aka completed goals)/ visitors x 100
So… You have a website, you have rankings, and you are getting little or no sales. There can be many reasons for this, but what do the experts look for? What are the signs? And what can YOU do to change them?
The easiest way to track, monitor and analyse these above points is the well known and respected Google Analytics. The first time I was introduced to this amazing program my jaw dropped and the first thing that came out of my mouth was “they can do that?” Fortunately…
Yes they can!
Hours can be wasted looking through Google Analytics…
Mmmm that’s interesting 5 people visited my site from Kent in England … waste of time!
Wow lots of people visit on a Sunday… waste of time!
64% of my mobile visits come from the iphone… waste of time!
What do the professionals look for?
Personally I never look at the front page. From an SEO perspective it is, you guessed it, a waste of time. Jump into Traffic Sources and find out what is really happening.
Direct traffic: Does the business compete in conventional marketing? Send out newsletters? This is where you find out how it is performing. Wow! The site peaks every 12th of the month, drops by 25% the following day, and then settles down to the average traffic. If a newsletter is sent out to existing clientele, it seems to be working, why would you not take advantage of this and sent out a bi-monthly newsletter? Even a smaller weekly newsletter?
A lot of sites send out daily deals, which turn into MASSIVE revenue builders, if your site can handle this – why not?
Referring sites: Do you have an E-Commerce website, but are getting billed every month from affiliate websites? How do you know these are actually worth the traffic? This is the place to find out.
Shopbot.com.au is sending me 1000 visitors and I am making 1 sale of $50 (if you have E-Commerce tracking) a small 1% conversion rate. Are they charging you $200/month, is this worth it? Perhaps, but at least you know the figures now.
Keywords: Knowing how much traffic is great!! But what are you comparing it to? Comparing to the previous month is good, but search trends differ from month to month, especially during the end and the middle of the year. Create an excel sheet with the rankings you have on each keyword, and the traffic it brings to the website. You can estimate what is the best keyword to work on, and how hard it will be to get more traffic, and ultimately more sales.
When you are checking the keyword traffic total to the previous months make sure to remove the website or business name, then you will be able to truly see how much the search engines are bringing you.
Analytics is a very complex tool, using it properly can create massive amounts of traffic and sales, learning how to use it takes time, but is definitelyworth it!
Google has officially annouced that website owners can now access more detailed data in Webmaster Tools. Previously it only reported on average positions which your website appeared in search results. Now Google has added information on the number of impressions and also clickthrough rates. Clickthrough rates stand for the number of times that web users click through to your website from a search result query. The best thing about this feature is that it also provides you with the actual URLs that displayed for that associated keyword.
What could this mean for your business?
The most obvious implications of this are that you can use this new tool to:
1. You can clearly see and track where you are ranking for particular terms. If it’s below average for a position, then you know you have a problem.
2. You can monitor the best landing pages for your SEO and focus on improving the click through rate by providing a more relevant description. This can be combined with the data in Google Analytics, so that improvements can be made to the page and in turn improve conversions.
3. Compare clickthrough rates for natural terms compared to different paid search / Adwords terms to help determine the relative effectiveness of copy and terms.
4. Based on clickthrough rates, seasonal demands and trends for products/services can be monitored and anticipated. This is effective for brand/navigational searches where you are ranked at the top of the search results.
5. Marketing campaign effectiveness can be measured – monitoring variation occurances through time.
6. We can more effectively review overall SEO effectiveness from the headlines and descriptions of impressions (amount of users seeing your listing) against clickthrough rates – the amount of people actually clicking into your website.
What other insights would you like to see from this data?
Although there are many times a day where you would ask that question, the most important time is when you are examining the data you have collected in web metrics. There are a number of fantastic tools out there to measure the traffic that is coming to your site, the behaviour once on the site, and why they leave.
There is an old saying (please leave a comment if you know who first said it!) that if you spend $1 collecting data, you should spend $99 analysing it. Although this is not a literal directive, heeding the advice is wise. In this day and age, the collecting of data is easy, but sometimes the analysis doesn’t come as easy.
Let’s take a hypothetical situation: you have a moderately successful website, which gets around 500 visitors a day. You’ve installed Google Analytics (and if you haven’t, you need to), have collected the behaviour patterns of your visitors for three months, and are now ready to look at the data. You brew a fresh pot of tea, sit down and then… What am I looking at?
Any advanced analytics suite will have a vast amount of information, with facts, figures and diagrams all over the place. There is absolutely no point collecting the data if you are not going to use it, but where do you start?
Google’s Conversion University is an excellent starting point. Not only will you get guidance on how to navigate the suite, but you will also get information on how to interpret the reports you have generated. The most important aspect is that you need to know what you are looking for. Are you after traffic? Revenue? Lead? Time on site? Branding? Be aware of what you are looking for, before you go looking for it.
After you have graduated from Conversion University, what is the next step? If you need further analysis (or didn’t have time/motivation to get through University), perhaps professional help would be beneficial. Having dedicated reports on the most important aspects of your business would allow you to have more time to implement the changes that are needed to get the most from your online marketing.
Online marketing without advanced metrics is akin to closing your eyes and picking a direction to walk in. Sure, you’ll be correct one time out of 360, but why take the risk?
In the past there have been a few reoccurring myths circulating around about Google Analytics, some of them very farfetched and some almost believable. With the knowledge and viewpoints of a few Google Analytics representatives from the US, this post will outline and clarify a few common misconceptions and ambiguities.
Myth 1: “You get what you pay for” Google Analytics is free, which means you don’t get very much for the service and the system is commonly down allot.
Google Analytics runs on the same network as the most reliable and secure search engine google.com, making down time an extremely rare situation. Google Analytics has a large team focusing solely on keeping user’s data safe and accessible. Google Analytics is also able to help the user benefit from multiple redundancies on their infrastructure around the globe; this also assists in making the program very fast.
If this hasn’t solved the myth, Google also relies on Google Analytics for their own company data and ad words campaigns; it raises the question, why would Google the biggest search engine in history, with incredible amounts of traffic use an analytics program which was unreliable with considerable downtime? This simply does not make any sense.
Myth 2: Google Analytics only uses third-party cookies.
This is totally false! Google Analytics has always used first party cookies. First party cookies are important because they allow Google Analytics to track repeat visitors, so you can see which keyword or referring site etc. is responsible for bringing in qualified buyers.
Myth 3: Google Analytics is basic and doesn’t have any “advanced” features or metrics.
Google Analytics features over 90 standard reports and more than 125 metrics and dimensions covering all aspects from the amount of visits per keyword to internal site searches. The program features customised reports and user defined variables which allows one to create reports allocated to their personal or business needs. Google Analytics reports now feature pivoting, advanced segmentation, secondary dimensions, event tracking and are able to share customisation of each report. The most important thing to note is, Google Analytics’ is basic to use, but definitely not basic in terms of its features and what it can offer.
Myth 4: You can’t segment data in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics in 2008 created and developed three new enterprise features; advanced segmentation, custom reporting and motion charts. The advanced segmentation addition allows you to separate user behaviour in order to see and understand the differences in user views. You can set up segment visits by different dimensions including geographic locations, time on site, referral from site, search engines use and more. A Google analytics user can then create segments further and add and apply them to virtually all the standard reports in Google Analytics’ and also customised reports.
Myth 5: You have to spend allot of money to get “proper” web analysis.
The most important factor to be aware about with Google Analytics is the need to have someone at your organisation that understands how to use and operate Google Analytics as well as being able to put your data to use. Yes, it is possible for someone to go and spend large amounts of money on analytics programs but one must remember this money could be spent on getting results for example on hiring a talented analyst to look at your data.
The question often arises, “if Google analytics is free, what’s in it for Google?” Google benefits from this tool in two ways. If web developers build better sites, it helps Google connect searches with the information they need faster, it also lifts user experience encouraging searches to search frequently on Google. Secondly, if advertises use Google they are able to see their advertising ROI, which helps Google demonstrate the value of Google Adwords. Both these factors demonstrate a strong case study for Goggles ideologies and success.
It is free, so there is no loss in downloading, check it out yourself and see how comprehensive you find it.
There is a old saying that goes something like “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”*, which has been used in business for a long time. It still amazes me when dealing with online marketing matters, people are happy to be ignorant in the results.
Obtaining the metrics of your success is one thing, but prior to that you need to determine exactly what you want your online marketing campaign to achieve, so you can accurately measure it.
Ask yourself: what do I want from online marketing? Regardless of what your business is, you will want a specific outcome for when a visitor lands on your site. Can you measure that?
On a more basic level, can you measure the number of people that are coming to your site? That is the simplest metric, yet one that many websites don’t even measure. How can you be aware of your online marketing success if you don’t establish a base level?
There are many tools out there to measure the success of a website, and the free package we normally recommend is Google Analytics. I won’t go into the detail of what this can do for you- check out this link for a more detailed overview.
Once you have a basic measuring package in place, you can start to think about how the reported numbers are reflected on your site and its usage. Do you have a large amount of information on certain pages? You would assume they have people spending more time on there. Is another page full of links? Examine the number of people exiting from that page.
There are enough metrics to drive anyone insane, which is why we normally recommend people use a reputable online marketing company to help you make the most out of your hard earned data.
* If anyone knows who originally said this, leave a comment with the answer!
I am a massive fan of Google Analytics, I won’t lie. In fact, I probably spend too much time each day over analysing Analytics data. Today the industry is buzzing based on Google’s Analytics Update Post
Adsense Integration is great for web publishers in monitoring how well the site is doing financially. However, for those of us that make a point of looking at how our website is performing overall, the new advanced Segmentation is the real winner. Now we can group keywords and visits together with performance, breaking it down to levels that would normally require us to perform custom data analysis in house. Identifying exactly what is performing to the most minute detail is something that I have longed for in Analytics for a long time.
The pretty Motion charts will definitely look great on our client reporting we provide, as well as helping us better co-relate different metrics together.
The best news of all however? We are slowly, slowly getting the API that we have been desperately seeking for so long. Mixing our analytics data with our other information sources we benchmark with would provide us with the highest level of reporting for our clients and their websites.
Now all I need is for Analytics to break down performance by days and time and I will be over the moon.
In August we heard rumblings that maybe Google AdSense & Analytics were going to work together. Well we don’t have to wait much longer because AdSense publishers will be happy to hear that Google has finally integrated Google AdSense into Google Analytics. Therefore allowing you to see which pages, referrers are the most profitable and more. This new feature will really open publishers to knowledge they have been asking for from Google for years.
Check out the video below to get a taste of what you can expect.
If you don’t already, you’ll soon have access to these new features as they are rolled out.
According to a post on Search Engine Roundtable their are rumours brewin’ that AdSense data will soon be integrated into Google Analytics for a site - saving AdSense publishers time and headaches when matching up data. Apparently the first post to crack the news has since been removed so this may well just be hearsay, but such a feature would be welcomed by many - granted that adequate care was taken not to disclose any information through Analytics’ industry benchmarking data sharing that should be kept private. This has been a long awaited feature by many AdSense publishers, who in the mean time have tried different bandaid solutions such as special javascript goals (that offered sketchy data at best), and as an AdSense publisher myself I hope that the plans will go ahead.
