Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Cross-posted from the Chamber Connect Newsletter to which I contribute voluntarily.

So you’ve got yourself a fancy schmancy website with all the bells and whistles, the graphics reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Irises and your content worthy of a Pulitzer. Let’s assume you are generating traffic, you have setup goals in your preferred web analytics tool and you are seeing some conversions (product purchases, lead generations etc). But of course, being the distinguished website connoisseur that you are, you understand that your web strategy is an evolutionary process; it’s never complete and you can always improve. So you decide you want to make sure your website is conversion friendly, but where to start?…. I’m glad you asked!

As usual, this article will assume you are using Google Analytics and reference Google Analytics terminology, but the principles can be applied to any website using any analytics software.

1- Identify Macro and Micro Conversions

Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik suggests that optimising and analysing only major conversions means ignoring most of your website visitors because macro conversions are completed by a small percentage of your visitors. Of course, these macro conversions are usually your moneymakers so it is important to identify them first. For many non-ecommerce small business websites the macro conversion is a lead generated by a “contact us” form and for ecommerce sites a macro conversion is a purchase.

Micro conversions, on the other hand, are the small actions most of your visitors take, actions such as clicking a link to a social media profile, downloading a document, viewing an important page, commenting on a blog post, looking at a job listing or subscribing to your RSS feed. A micro conversion could also be a part of a macro conversion, for example, clicking on a link to your contact us page or clicking the add to cart button.

The best way to identify these macro and micro conversions is to first think about what you want your customers to do and browse through your website looking for related calls to action; then figure out what your customers want to do by checking your analytics reports to see what your top content is and by asking your visitors using a survey tool such as KISSinsights.

Secret squirrel tip: for more ideas on micro and macro conversions look at your competitors’ websites to see what their conversions are and how they focus attention through calls to action.

2 – Setup Goals for Each Micro and Macro Conversion

Basically you will setup goals for each conversion. I won’t go into the technical details here but you read my Quick Look at Analytics Goal Setting article and the official Google Analytics Help Center for technical information.

3 – Cost to Value Ratio

Here is where you figure out how much it costs you to maintain or create sections of your website that generate conversions and compare that data to revenue generated from those sections. This helps you decide on which sections to improve, what you can eliminate and where there is room for new content. For example, is paying a graphic designer to create a beautiful new PDF brochure every month generating enough sales to continue this strategy? Note, this does not take into account traffic generation costs such as online advertising, social media, SEO etc.

Assign Value to Each Conversion

In Google Analytics you can assign a value to each goal. Value is easy to establish when the conversion is a purchase, but with general lead generation, value estimation is trickier. One method is to look at the number of leads generated and divide that number by the total sales ($) generated from online leads.

For micro conversions this gets a little more complicated and involves some guesswork. How can you assign value to a document download? Let’s look at an example…

Say you have 500 downloads of an informative product document in PDF format. You check your Google Analytics visitor flow report and see that after downloading the document, 100 of those people go to your Contact Us page and 10 contact you. Of those 10 that converted to a lead, you generated $5000 in sales. Therefore, a reasonable estimate of download value is $10 ($5000 generated/500 downloads).

You can apply the same logic to most micro conversions and if you find it gets too complicated, just make an educated guess.

Assign Costs to Conversion Content

This is not an advertising related  measure, this simply measures your cost to maintain or create the content required to generate a conversion. For example, how much does it cost to create a product video (assuming each video view is a micro conversion)? Or how much does it cost to write a blog post every day (assuming you are tracking conversions generated from blog views)? Remember, cost is not just actual $ spent on staff wages or hiring designers and developers. It could be your own time or the missed opportunity to make money elsewhere.

4 – Identify Traffic Sources and Behaviour

First look at where your website traffic is coming from by checking your Google Analytics Sources report (traffic sources). Do you have a strong social presence which drives traffic? Are you advertising online? Are you generating traffic from email campaigns? Are you getting referral traffic from other websites or blogs?

Secondly, create segments for your major traffic sources using Google Analytics Advanced Segments and use these segments to figure out what those visitors do once on your site (behaviour). Do they bounce straight away (bad – needs action)? Do they convert straight away (good – means you are doing something well, learn from this!)? Where do they land on your website? What pages do they visit? How deep do they browse? Do they often exit from a certain page? Are they leaving and engaging on Facebook or other social sites? Answering these questions will lead you to improving content for each segment and hopefully increasing conversions.

5 – Make Changes, Test and Track Progress

The final step to achieving a conversion friendly website is actually implementing the alterations and tweaks you identified during analysis (steps 1-4). Yes, there may be many items on your list, but each one should be assigned a value/cost and an ease factor so you can start with the easy items and the tasks that involve the highest net gain for your business.

Not all changes will have a positive effect on your website so you should be constantly testing by analysing your data to ensure your modifications actually increase value, rather than cost you money. You can use Google’s Website Optimizer tool to conduct A/B or multivariate testing. For more info check out Google’s tutorial on A/B testing.

Finally, as you or your web design company make changes, use Annotations in Google Analytics to track these changes and monitor the effects of these changes on your website data. Here is a great article from Luna Metrics on how to use annotations.

So there you have it, 5 steps towards achieving conversion greatness! This may sound like a lot of work, but in the end what is the point of having a website without identifying goals, tracking conversions and constantly improving.

Looking for help with creating a conversion friendly website? Contact Zhoom to see how we can help you increase conversions!

Every website should have goals, whether you are selling buttons, campaigning to become class president or posting cat pictures for your mum to see. Some common goals are reaching a specific page (eg, the thank you page at the end of a sale), number of pages visited, time on website or a specific path through your website ending up at a specific page.

In this article we are going to look at two useful goals: tracking website form completions and tracking external social media clicks. This tutorial is based on the new Google Analytics interface and assumes you have Google Analytics installed on our website (if you don’t check out my Intro to Google Analytics post).

Goal 1: Track Website Form Completions

For this to work you must have your lead generation form set to direct to a unique page on completion. This enables us to identify the unique destination page in an Analytics goal and track hits to this page as a conversion.

For this tutorial let’s say we want to tracks a form that directs completed leads to this page: http://mywebsite.com/thanks-for-contacting-us-form123

The first thing to do is login to your Google Analytics account, click the settings icon in the top right corner, choose the profile you want to set goals for and click the Goals link to expand the list of goals.

Login and go to Google Analytics Settings

Then you will choose a name for your goal. Let’s call it Form123 Completions.

Next we define the Goal URL. In this case the full URL is http://mywebsite.com/thanks-for-contacting-us-form123 but since we don’t need the actual domain name, we can just enter /thanks-for-contacting-us-form123

The match type will be exact match. Match types are somewhat confusing, but unless you are using a substantial amount of dynamic content you will probably only need the exact match option. You can find out more about match types from Google.

You can also enter a goal value (useful if you are selling products or if you assign values to each lead generated) and track a funnel which is a series of page views leading up to the goal. But in this case we are just creating a simple greenhorn goal with no bell and whistles.

You should finish up with something like the screenshot below. Click save!

Google Analytics Goal Setup Form

Goal 2: Track Clicks on Links to External Social Media Websites

To enable this goal you must tag your outbound social media links with a track page view snippet. Here is an example of a complete HTML link with the additional Analytics code in bold:

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/myfacebookfanpage” onclick=”javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/GA-VirtualPageview/Facebook-Fanpage']);” >

If the above looks like gibberish to you just ask your web agency to include onclick=”javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/GA-VirtualPageview/Facebook-Fanpage']);” on your outgoing Facebook fan page links. You can also switch out the /Facebook-Fanpage part for any other text if you want to use this for other links.

Now you have setup your links you just follow the exact same procedure for setting up the goal in Goal 1, except enter your Goal URL as /GA-VirtualPageview/Facebook-Fanpage

What Should I Do With This Data?

So now you should have all sorts of goal conversion data pouring in – to see some of this data you can check the Goals Overview report in Google Analytics under Conversions -> Goals -> Overview (look in the left sidebar). We can use this Goal data in a wide range of reports to identify high/low converting traffic, gauge social media engagement directly from your website and check advertising costs against online sales.

Here is a sample report that shows the Goal conversion rate from different sources. To get this report you go to Goal Overview -> Source/Medium -> See Full Report

Google Analytics Goal Source/Medium Report

I can then use this report to find which traffic is converting well and which traffic isn’t. I could even drill down further to see this data by Cost per Click (cpc) campaign (useful for identifying where I am wasting cpc advertising dollars) or by other sources to test which marketing campaigns are driving traffic and converting well.

This is a very brief introduction to what you can do with Google Analytics Goals, but hopefully it will get you motivated to get some goal data flowing and apply this data to various reports in Google Analytics… Happy data wrangling!

Web analytics doesn’t always mean hours spent combing through pages of data reports, nor are you required to undertake in depth technical analysis. To get started all that is required is the occasional checking of website data, some quick analysis and quick creation of action plans based on your findings. Web analytics can get also pretty complex if you dare to indulge, however we’re going to ease in gently with a few basic ideas and try to avoid getting too geeky.

Getting Setup With Data Tracking Software

There are many data tracking software suites around, however I am going to talk about Google Analytics. Why? Because it is free, easy to setup, easy to use and is applicable to almost every website, whether you are the New York Times or Winsome Designs.

To setup Google Analytics (GA), you first need to create a Google Account and signup for GA. You can do this at the Google Analytics Signup page.

Once you have your GA account you simply need to copy and paste the tracking code into each page of your website. Here are the official GA setup instructions from Google.

If you do not manage your own site, ask your web agency to do it, but to be completely honest, if your web agency created your website without integrating (or at least suggesting) some sort of data tracking software, they should be fired.

Once you are setup, you should be able to login to your Dashboard.

Grab Some Analytics Data

If you have just installed your tracking code, you will need to wait a few days before data of any significance appears. Once you have some data in your account you will be able to generate reports showing all sorts of different website metrics. There are thousands of reports and options so I highly recommend you get your hands dirty and try out all the options, but here are three stock standard reports to get you started.

The Keyword Report

(Click: Traffic Sources –> Keywords)

This shows which keywords your website visitors used to find your site. You can use this to analyse the success of your SEO strategy and figure out which keywords your site is receiving traffic from. You can also drill down from this report to see which page visitors landed on from your keywords. This can help you determine if the pages appearing in search results are triggered by the appropriate keywords.

Map Overlay

(Click: Visitors –> Map Overlay)

This shows where your website traffic is coming from geographically. You can drill down to City , Country/Territory, Sub Continent Region or Continent by clicking on the map, and the report shows other data such as bounce rate, pages/visit and average time on site.

New vs Returning Visitors

(Click: Visitors –> New vs. Returning)

This report quickly gives you an idea of visitor loyalty by showing the number of visits by new or returning visitors. Keep in mind that a new visitor is not always a unique person. A new visitor could be the same person who happens to access your site from different devices (mobile, work PC, home PC, ipod etc) or anyone who has cleared their cookies recently.

Analysis

Ok, so there is a bucket load of data available to you but the data is of no use unless you can analyse it and determine what you need to improve on. Every piece of data should tell you something about your website and that data should lead to actions that can improve aspects of your site. Here are a few analyses to consider.

Online Advertising Campaigns

Analyse the advertising cost per visitor against number of sales to figure out cost per acquisition. You can then use cost per acquisition data to optimise bidding, find more specific keywords or redesign your ad copy.

You can track form completion pages against advertisement source to determine if your ads are facilitating sales. If not, you may need to change your ad landing pages or make your forms easier to complete.

With online advertising you will need to use Google’s URL Builder. This free tool appends a short piece of code such as utm_source=facebook to your target URL to ensure clicks on your online ads are tracked properly. If you use Google Adwords, this is done for you automatically.

User Engagement

Check how many pages your visitors view against the traffic source. This can lead you to creating pages that enhance visitor engagement with calls to action or easier navigation.

Track external links and see how many of your visitors click to your social media pages from your website. This can lead to better placement of social media buttons.

Funnel Tracking

If you have an online sales process, you can track your buyers throughout your sales funnel through to completion. You can also see where they are dropping out of the funnel. This can lead to redesigning forms or adding in further buyer reinforcement to encourage completion.

Remember a funnel does not need to actually sell anything. It could be a direct path through your site to a file download, form completion or click to social media site.

Take Action

As you can see, each of the above analyses, although they are crude, all come with actions. After all, what is the point of analysing your website if you don’t come away with anything to improve on? Make sure that every time you analyse your data, you come away with something, whether it is changing something on your site, optimising your marketing approach or knowingly patting yourself on the back because you are already doing a great job!

For those who are interested in jumping in to the vast ocean that is web analytics, I would strongly advise checking out the blogs by Brian Clifton (author of Advanced Web Metrics) and Avinash Kaushik (Analytics Evangelist for Google).

Of course you can also contact Zhoom if you want us to help you out!