A good friend of mine, Daniel Waisberg, and I were discussing how organisations are reluctant to invest in their Google Analytics setup – be it implementation, training & education or insights/consultancy. Our conclusion was, that is difficult to get even the richest of companies to invest in a product that is free. The perception is that everything else that is required to make it “work” i.e. all of the above, should also be free.

Of course the new GA Premium product changes this a great deal – though that is very much aimed at large enterprises i.e. Fortune 500 types. That group aside, why is it an organisation will pay tens of thousands of pounds on a CMS platform or CRM solution, but fail to see the opportunities of investing a similar amount (or less!) in their web analytics?

As I wrote in an article last year, the hard part of web analytics is gaining insights form your reports when all you have is the basic setup. You must go beyond the basics if you wish your measurements to actually impact your business. With this in mind, I asked Daniel to write a guest post on what it takes to get your GA implementation up to the next level. Below is a 10-point check list he recommends for both beginners and advanced users.

The 10-Point Check List

You want your Google Analytics account to serve as a solid tool for your website measurement, analysis, and optimization. After all, you are taking important business decisions that will affect your online performance, based on that data. Can you afford to rely on partial, inaccurate or otherwise misaligned data? You must have your tool properly setup to meet your website goals and your tracking needs.

Below I provide my tips on common technical configurations that you should check. A default implementation will provide you with information regarding your visitors. However, the techniques below provide you with the level of data accuracy and insight so that the tool will serve its ultimate purpose: improve conversion rates.

1. Make sure your site is 100% tracked

This *should* be a simple task if you follow Google Analytics recommendation: “copy and paste the code snippet into your web pages”. However, commercial sites are more complicated than a handful of pages, so if you manage a complex website be sure to check the Google Analytics App Gallery Site Audit section, that contains numerous solutions for automatic tag checks.

2. Set up your goals

Cicero wrote that “a room without books is like a body without a soul“. The same is true for website goals: a goal is the soul of a Google Analytics account. No analysis will provide valuable insights if you do not measure your goals. Here is a handy guide on how you can set up your goals.

3. Focus on potential customers

Most often, websites are visited by a wide range of people. However, it is also visited by the your employees and service providers – and these are not the visitors you want to understand and optimize for. Therefore, create filters that exclude the IP range used by your organisation and its service providers such as web development and marketing agencies.

This will highly increase the accuracy of the data, especially for small and medium websites. If you cannot distinguish between your own staff behavior and your customers’, how can you optimize for a better customer experience? Note that the difference is marginal for overall traffic (except for small sites), but the impact is much greater when it comes to goal completion.

4. Remove unique URLs that are not unique content

One of the interesting insights we can learn from Google Analytics is the content consumption patterns and navigation between website pages; you can find this information in the Content section of your reports. However, websites can use unique URL parameters to refer to the same page. For example, a session ID. Google Analytics considers two URLs with a different parameter as two distinct pages. If your content is not unique for these parameters, remove them from your reports.

Luckily, there is a very simple interface that can be used to do this. By doing this you will join pages that might be considered different by Google Analytics. See screenshot below, it shows where to find this field on the settings of your account.

5. Eliminate duplicate pages

Google Analytics is case sensitive when it comes to URLs; this means that example.com/HELLO and example.com/hello would be recognized as two different pages, generating duplicated data. However, from a customer perspective, those pages are the same. Therefore, it is important to lowercase (or uppercase) all URLs using a filter. A example is shown below:

Since other fields can be affected by the same issue, especially campaign data, I recommend adding the same filter to the following fields:

Campaign Name
Campaign Term
Campaign Medium
Campaign Source

6. Track multiple domains properly

It is a common practice to use subdomains and multiple domains in order to organize the content and properties of an organization. Unless setup correctly, this can decrease data accuracy and prevent data streamlining, especially when it comes to traffic sources, new and returning visitors, and custom variables. Use this guide to configure your Google Analytics if your site spans multiple domains or subdomains.

7. Measure all user interaction

Two very important metrics are Bounce Rate and Time on Site. Therefore, it is fundamental to understand that both are influenced by the last action (not last page) taken on the website. For example, a visitor lands on a page with a Flash video, watches it to completion and then leaves the website. For a default Google Analytics implementation, this visitor will be tracked as a bounced visit. This is because Flash requires a special tracking code (read more).

In addition to Flash videos,  JavaScript actions or “in-page” (AJAX) events/actions are not tracked by default. For this, you can use the following functions:

• Virtual Pages: these show in the Content > Pages report. All metrics attributed to a regular HTML pages will also be attributed to virtual pages.
• Event Tracking: this method is useful for user actions that are not comparable to a pageview e.g. clicking on “play” for a movie, rating an article, adding a product to a shopping cart. It is shown separately in a different interface (Content > Events) and has a powerful anatomy to categorize events.

8. Understand visitor intent

An excellent way to understand a visitor’s intent is to study their search terms used on your internal website search; they show what potential customers are looking for on your website. A proper setup of the GA’s internal search function will help website owners understand which content is being searched for, which searches are yielding irrelevant results and which ones are helping the conversion process. Use this information to create a more relevant experience to visitors by exposing high converting content in strategic places and by adding content that is interesting to visitors (based on the fact that they search for it on your site), but not currently available.

9. Implement campaign tracking

Most websites use multiple acquisition methods: PPC campaigns, display banners, affiliates, email marketing, social network interactions etc. However, by default, Google Analytics will only recognize organic search, referral sites, and direct visits. For the other traffic sources to show in your reports, you need to modify the landing page URL so that GA can detect and categorise it properly.

In order to track campaigns properly, it is important to setup your landing page links for each campaign using Google’s URL builder. For example, if you are creating a product launch campaign on CNN using banners, you could add the following parameters to your target page:

?utm_source=cnn&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=product-launch

If you are an Adwords advertiser, Google has an out-of-the-box integration that will enable advertisers to analyze everything from impressions, to clicks, costs and conversions from inside Google Analytics. If you distribute content through RSS, use the Feedburner integration with Google Analytics.

Another important opportunity to take advantage of when creating landing page URLs, is Social Media. If your company has a YouTube channel, a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group or a Twitter account that shares links pointing to your website, ensure you setup your campaign tracking parameters for them. A good example is LinkedIn: if you use this network to post articles linking to your website, optimally you would add a different tag for each group you post to, this way you will better understand which audience responds to your content the most.

Recently Google launched Multi-Channel Funnels, a pilot beta that will “improve Google Analytics marketing measurement capabilities as it shows what really works in terms of online marketing campaigns, be it Adwords, Youtube, Facebook, banners or any other acquisition channel.” This feature will uncover a whole new dimension when it comes to traffic sources and campaign success. It will show to website owners not only the “winning sources” but also those sources that have assisted them. Just like an offense soccer player cannot win without a good defense, the same is true for high converting traffic sources.

However, Multi-Channel Funnels reports will only make sense if you have followed the campaign tracking guideline I discuss here.

10. Segment or die

Quoting Avinash Kaushik “Averages have an astonishing capacity to give you average data, they have a great capacity to lie, and they hinder decision making.” Most Google Analytics default reports present aggregated data, i.e. the overall visitor behavior. However, the average is not representative when analyzing a website as a whole – each segment is likely to have a significantly different behaviour to the average. Therefore, it is essential to segment your data to extract insights and actionable data (as Avinash wrote in a recent post, Segment or Die).

Here is a list of 13 advanced segments to get started with.

Closing thoughts

The techniques provided above will bring your data closer to perfection. That is, if you apply all of these implementations changes, your GA data is more accurate. Congratulations! Now you can start working on enhancing the data you are receiving by implementing Custom Variables, tracking Ecommerce and other cool stuff.

One other reference, check out Improving Online Conversions for Dummies - an online book written by the Google team that goes over the important Google Analytics issues and many aspects on how to optimize marketing campaigns and improve the conversion rates of a website.

About the Author

This guest post was contributed by Daniel Waisberg, Founder of Conversion Journey, a Google Analytics Certified Partner, and of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement & Optimization website.

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Lets face it, free is a great price point and the free version of Google Analytics is a great product. In fact, there are numerous multi-national companies using Google Analytics – not because they can’t afford a paid-for tool, but simply because is it good. Allowing them to easily visualise content and assimilate insights quickly.

So why use a paid-for tool? A client considering GA Premium (the paid-for version of Google Analytics) asked me the following question recently:

“One thing that would be great to cover in our meeting, is the value of the Premium product for us. How will it save us money by spending $150k a year instead of simply adjusting our approach and using the free product?”

That’s a great question – getting right to the point of value for money. And this was my two-point response that can be applied to any paid-for vendor….

1. Resource: Don’t upgrade to a paid solution unless you have it

If analysis is going to be someone’s full-time job – that is, working on bringing insights to the business on a day-to-day basis, then consider Premium as the right tool (even more so if there is a team of people involved). On the other hand, if the investment in analysis is only part-time, say 1 day per week, I would recommend the free product.

Why is staffing so important?

Spending 1-2 days per week analysing your website reports will not allow you to explore all the capabilities of the Premium product at any depth. You would be constantly scratching the surface without the time to go deep. Of course you could still hire a us to do the deep-dive stuff with the free version. However, if you have a popular site (say more than 10m pageviews per month), then sampling, data freshness and data retention are going to be important areas that will limit how deep we can go. These are Premium features.

RULE #1 – If you cannot commit 1 full-time analyst, do not pay for a web analytics tool

2. Value: Calculate it and ensure you get a return
Calculating the value of your website is straightforward when you are a transactional site. You know (or should know) the value of each page and the value of each visitor – broken down by referrer source/keyword etc. If you are a non-transactional website (the vast majority of enterprise websites are not e-commerce), then value is much harder to calculate – In fact, I rarely see the calculation even attempted.

However, monetizing your non-transactional site is critical to your success. Without it, and there is a serious danger your website is just a pet project – nice to have (the competition has one!), but not treated as a serious part of the business. Hence $150k per year for a measurement tool is never going to see the light of day in your organisation – and rightly so. As Jim Sterne would say – “you need to calculate the return on investment for measuring your return on investment..!” (read related post on value in GA)

I discuss monetisation in detail in chapter’s 8 and 11 of my book – 3rd edition coming soon! Its not rocket science, but does require time and energy to logically think through your website’s goals (aka: Call to Actions) and assign values to them.

Monetization, that is identifying goals and assigning a value to them, is key to your success. In fact, monetizing your conversion processes are the most important part of a web analyst role. At the end of the day, only something that impacts the bottom line of the business is going to receive any investment – be it resource or money. Therefore, monetization is a key step to understanding what resource and therefore what measurement tools are appropriate to invest in.

For example, if your conversion process is a $10 million per year revenue generator for you, $150k is of the order of 1-2% of the revenue. That means, if GA Premium can help you improve your conversion rate by a mere 1-2% it will have paid for itself.

Lets put this into perspective:

• If your lead generating form (new sales enquiry) has an “industry average” conversion rate of 3.00%
• and your sales team is able to convert 1 in 10 leads to a customer – this is fixed
• Then improving your site content and/or its marketing so that the lead generation form converts at 3.06% will pay for your GA Premium account!

Is that achievable for your website? I would say that is achievable for *ANY* website.

If your conversion procession is a $1 million per year revenue generator, then you need to improve your conversion rate to 3.6%. Still very attainable, but harder. I consider that as the tipping point for your decision…

RULE #2. If your website is not contributing at least $1m USD per year to your business, do not pay for a web analytics tool.

Hopefully this puts paid-for web analytic tools into perspective, but I would love to hear your thoughts on paying for a data collection/reporting tool?

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1. Real-World Analytics: How much money does EasyJet lose…?

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: GA premium, money, pad-for, paid, premium, value

As you may have noticed I have not been particularly active when it comes to blogging recently. Essentially this autumn I have been busy writing the third edition of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. I am about 2/3 of the way through with the plan to finish before Christmas and have the book ready for Feb 2012 (note new cove colours!).

As you may know, my aim with these books has always been to give the reader a thorough understanding of web analytics, from a practitioners point of view, using Google Analytics as the tool of choice. There are lots of details (the book is called Advanced…!), but only when it is necessary. That is, where there is a good business opportunity/insight to be gained from it…

What’s new in the 3rd edition?

Just in the past 12 months there has been a wealth of announcements from the GA Team (in no particular order):

• New user Interface (still in beta)
• Multi-Channel Funnels – think paths and attribution for your referrals
• Webmaster tools integration – great SEO info
• Premium – the paid for version of GA
• Social plugin – love button engagement
• Site Speed reports – measure the impact of your slow pages
• New Custom Report builder – more intuitive with filters (nice!)
• Reports gone: Benchmarking, Connection speed
• Events & Threshold goals – events can now be defined as goals
• New dashboard approach – widget based
• Real-Time analytics – this is cool…
• Flow & Goal Visualisation – think path analysis on steroids!
• Still more announcements to come before the year is out…

As you would expect, all of these are described in the book – not just as features, but with real-world uses and examples.

All code snippets in the book have been updated for the async version of the GATC (that was introduced just after the 2nd edition came out!), and of course my writing is improving all the time – understanding what users of GA “get” easily, what requires more explanation, and what requires further examples.

How can you help?

If you have enjoyed the other editions, please retweet to spread the word of the 3rd edition.

When’s it due out?

Feb 2012. Become a member of the Pro Lounge if you would like me to email you when launched.

How to get it

You can pre-order at Amazon et al, as hard copy, ebook and Kindle.

Thanks to all who have provided feedback on the last two editions. Its been both flattering and humbling when people write to me with praise or write a review on Amazon and elsewhere. It makes my day/week in a way no other job or role has ever done – which ultimately is my driver for writing

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5. Book corrections and typos

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3rd edition, book

An odd announcement form the GA product team was made last night that affects all users of web analytics tools:

When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, Google Analytics will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. – Full announcement

That’s a BIG change! Essentially marketers will no longer be able to view the keywords used by visitors that come from Google organic search in their web analytics reports (the fact they came from a Google organic search is still shown). The rational for this, as the announcement explains, is to protect the privacy of users who are logged into their Google account.

What’s my view?

As you know, I am a big fan of user privacy and putting the end-user experience first, so on the one hand this is a good approach. However, this does appear to be a little over zealous.

Oddly, paid search is treated differently…

A dichotomy form the announcement is that Adwords traffic is not affected by this. It appears strange to me that Google considers privacy important for organic searches, but not for paid searches.

What’s the impact?

This impacts Google Analytics users and users of *any* web analytics tool.

And I suggest the impact is very large. Although users who are not logged into Google are unaffected, there are approximately 300m GMail users globally, and anyone who is active with Google services (Google’s whole raison d’etre!) will fall under this catch-all setting. It means a valuable piece of information for optimising your website – both for content and traffic acquisition – is going to be missing form your reports. I find that peculiar coming from a company that focuses heavily on keyword relevance when ranking websites in its organic results. Surely, should be helping website owners with this info…

The following video illustrates the significant impact this is starting to have for the period 10-Oct 2011 – 08-Dec 2011 (idea taken from Michael Whitaker‘s similar observations):

Your thoughts

This is going to be a major talking point I am sure and I would love to hear your feedback. The comments on the announcement itself are very negative (I particularly like the first one – “where’s the -1” – joking a side, I do think a -1 button would be great to have in search results).

For me, I really do not think this has been thought through fully by Google (something I have noticed happening more often at G in general). I agree the user should have the option to keep their search terms private – the option to switch this on/off in the account settings would make sense. However, at present keywords are removed whenever a visitor is logged in to their Google account – with no choice for the user (I don’t consider logging out a viable option). Thats got to be a bad thing, no?

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5. Google Analytics and the new EU privacy law #2

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2011. | Permalink | 25 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: google search, privacy

My company is looking for a smart GA person to join the Swedish office and work with me as a Google Analytics Account Manager. If you have the experience and enthusiasm please take a look at:

www.ga-experts.com/join-us.php

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