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Since I started work with web analytics, I have continually seen the same corporate mindset when it comes to web analytics. That mentality is the “Set it & Forget it” mentality. It would shock you to hear how often clients come to us with a web analytics solution already integrated with their website… only to discover that they aren’t actually using it.

What, I ask you, is the point to having a web analytics solution that you are not going to utilize? Every time I see this, I can’t help but imagine the amount of time and money these companies have wasted having their tech department set everything up and tag all those web pages with tracking codes, simply because they happened to hear somewhere that you need to have some form of analytics nowadays.

Guess what? You don’t really have a solution, do you? If you are not actually using the data provided by web analytics, what exactly are you fixing? It only becomes a solution when it’s used to fix a problem. The problems with a web site won’t simply disappear because you’ve integrated web analytics. The issues will continue to pile up until it reaches the point that the bubble simply bursts and you are left standing there wondering how it all went so wrong.

The main problem I see with all of these clients is simply that they have failed to educate themselves on what exactly web analytics can do for them. The data collected by your web analytics solution allows you to make educated decisions regarding your website, fine tuning it and enriching the experience your visitors have on your site. You can quickly identify where visitors are encountering problems by monitoring your top exit pages. Obviously a majority of your traffic is meeting a road block at these pages, else they wouldn’t be leaving, would they?

Many companies fail to realize just how important it is to have someone on staff who understands the vast array of data being gathered. Who knows how to create actionable plans with that data and report on it in a comprehensible fashion to key individuals within the company. Remember, not everyone is an analyst. Most people see all of that data, all of those charts and graphs, numbers and terms… and they completely shut down. This is called information overload. A good analyst will know how to distill all of the information collected and put it into reports specifically designed for certain individuals or departments. This will allow for a greater understanding of the data being viewed and get those individuals or departments on the right track to making things better both for the company and it’s online presence.

For a quick example, the tech department doesn’t really care how many visitors are buying products on the site. That is the marketing and sales department’s turf. However, you show the tech department how many users encountered error pages and what navigation path visitors followed to arrive at that error page and they can act on it, making the site function better and keep visitors from leaving the site.

These are all very simple ways in which web analytics play a role in the company. Web analytics doesn’t end there though. There are a number of things you can do to further improve not only the website and the conversion process, but the internal operations of the company. When you start assigning accountability to certain departments or individuals, you can track the progress of your staff as well.

The tech department is responsible for metrics pertaining to site realted issues such as broken links, missing pages, non-functioning forms, etc. The marketing and sales department are responsible for metrics pertaining to visitor conversion rates, click-through rates of online marketing campaigns and the success or failure of those campaigns. All of this needs to be tracked! If these departments or individuals are consistently failing to meet Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), than maybe it is time to look for some new employees?

That may sound harsh, but it is reality. If you aren’t doing your job, why should the company continue to pay you?

This leads me to another very important point. KPIs.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen a company build a website and start spending money on internet marketing without ever having given thought to Key Performance Indicators. What is the goal of the website? What do you want it to accomplish for the company? Do you want visitors to sign up for a newsletter, fill out a contact form, purchase a product or register for a service? If you don’t know the goals of your website, don’t expect high conversion rates or any ROI.

Figure out the goals before building and marketing the website, folks! This is very important. If you know what you want the website to do and accomplish in advanced, it becomes very easy to create proper user navigation paths that funnel your visitors towards conversion points. This also raises the issue of knowing your target demographic. If you are trying to sell MP3 Players to male teenagers, putting a pink iPod on your homepage as your featured product is going to be a bad idea, wouldn’t you agree?

There are a number of websites which offer free tools that will help you better determine your target demographic in the online marketplace. Give Quantcast a try (http://www.quantcast.com). Try searching a large competitor website and see what their demographic is like. Below, I have included a screenshot based on the previously mentioned MP3 Player market. When people think MP3 Player now, they think iPod, so I checked the Apple Store’s website and here is what came back…

Be honest… not what you expected to see, is it? And this is just based on U.S visitors! Right away we can tell a few things..

1. 53% of visitors to the Apple Store website are female
2. 23% of their traffic is between the ages of 12-17
3. 35% of their traffic is between the ages of 18-34
4. 32% of their traffic come from households that bring in between $60,000 – $100,000 per year
5. 44% of their traffic have attended college

Some fairly interesting statistics, wouldn’t you say? In a later post, I will discuss how you can use this information to create and track highly focused marketing campaigns.

Cheers!

“Out of the Box” as it were, Google Analytics is able to recognize a fairly significant list of search engines that send traffic to your website. However, they don’t recognize all of them, and that is a problem for people like me. I always want to know more about the traffic coming to my websites.

Thankfully, the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC), is very flexible and allows you to make many modifications to further expand the amount of data relayed to your Analytics Account.

I will now show a quick and easy way which will allow you to “hack” your GATC to include custom search engines in the Search Engines report under Traffic Sources in your Analytics Account.

Step 1
Determine what search engine you would like added. For the purposes of this example, I will use Jayde, The B2B Search Engine. Go to the search engine and enter a quick search query. I used “socialmindz”. The URL that I am re-directed to is:

http://directory.jayde.com/search?a=0&query=socialmindz&search=search

Now, all we need is the the part of the URL which tells us there was a search query. In this case, the only part we need is “query“.

Now then, take your GATC and make the following changes in bold:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“jayde.com”, “query”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Notice how we made use of the “query” section of the search results URL from Jayde.

Note: Any edits you make to add custom search engines should be made below the “var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker” call.

Step 2

Add your new GATC to your website and you are done! Very simple, yes?

You can do this with as many different search engines as you’d like. It may require a bit of trial and error on your part however to find the proper portion of the search engine results URL that will facilitate proper data collection in your Analytics Account. Do not be discouraged though. Patience is the key!

Please bare in mind that you need to replace the “UA-XXXXXXX-X” section with your actual Google Analytics user account number. If you are working from your current GATC, don’t worry… it’s already there!

With the current rise of social media and many companies now learning the importance of having a presence on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, the importance of analytics has only grown.

The question I most frequently hear when it comes to social media is, “How can we track social media campaigns when they aren’t happening on our websites?”

Well, the answer is simple folks. Analytics doesn’t end with your domain. You can track the effectiveness of the links you are creating. It is very simple to do, and you can even use Google’s free URL Builder tool to tag your links with the script necessary to track them.

Now, a quick run through of this easy-to-use tool

So, as you can see, it is very straight-forward. Put in the URL of your website or page that you are linking to, and then include some info in the fields below.

Your Campaign Source should be where you are posting the link, so Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

You Campaign Medium will allow you select what capacity the link is being used in. Is it the link from a banner?

The Campaign Term will allow you to identify what triggered your ad. If you ad only shows when people search for the term “web analytics” or have an interest in web analytics, that is the term you’d use for this field. It will help you to distinguish how effective that term is and you can then use it in later campaigns.

Campaign Content will let you differentiate your ads in the event you are running multiple ads for A/B (Split) Testing – which you should be, I might add! Make sure what you put in this field matches up with what you’ve named the ad in your advertising account with these different networks. It will make things easier on you when you pull you analytics reports!

Finally, your Campaign Name. This is pretty easy. Whats the name of your campaign? It can be something simple and easy to remember, so don’t worry about it to much. You can see that I named mine “Understanding Analytics” so I know what site it is for!

Once you have filled in these fields, or only the required ones if you like, click the “Generate URL” button and the tool will build your URL for you. Copy it, and paste it where needed for your social media campaigns. People who click on those links will be easily identified in your analytics reports. You will now be able to track how effective your Social Media Optimization is using Google Analytics.

Now, that was nice and simple, wasn’t it?

In closing, always be sure that you are using proper A/B Testing, or “Split Testing”. Every week you should be trying to beat the performance of your control ad. If you manage it, you’ve got yourself a new control ad! Try and beat that one now! This will help you create better performing advertisements, increase your conversion rates and your ROI. This means more money for everyone, which is never a bad thing. Unless you don’t like money. And if you didn’t like money, you wouldn’t be reading this!

Here is to your success folks!
Ryan Dinelle