Conversion Room

Saying goodbye to the Conversion Room blog

2012-07-18T17:23:00.000+01:00

Thanks to everyone who has been a loyal reader of this blog over the last few years. After some consideration, we recognize that we're just not generating enough content here to warrant your time, so we won't be posting here any longer. We encourage you to visit the Google Analytics blog or the Inside AdWords blog for ongoing news and best practices about measuring and improving your online efforts.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Making Mobile-Friendly Websites - Webinar Recording

2012-05-14T13:55:00.002+01:00

In March I presented a webinar on building mobile-friendly websites with UK site examples. There was a large turnout of website owners but there have also been a lot of calls for copies of the recording so I’m including the link here for those of you who are interested.

So, if you like to get your updates aurally and visually rather than having to read it all yourself, check out the webinar.

Summary of Contents:

The mobile momentum
Why mobile sites matter
10 mobile site best practices
Best practices in action
Build a mobile website

If you have feedback or questions, please leave a comment.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Google Analytics has learned 9 new languages

2012-02-09T10:06:00.000+00:00

Recently we introduced new and improved Google Analytics, so that you can quickly find even more powerful and useful data to improve your internet marketing efforts.

Now, we are proud to say Google Analytics is available in 9 new languages. This makes Google Analytics quite a Polyglot, and it is in total available in 40 languages now. Newly introduced languages are:

- Arabic
- Croatian
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Latvian
- Romanian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Ukrainian

To change the language of your Analytics account to any of these new languages, you have to activate the new interface, if you haven’t already, by clicking on the “new version” button at the top of the account. Then, navigate to the settings page where you can select the new language.

You can also now enjoy reading the newly revamped Analytics help center in any of the 9 new languages.

We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts.

Happy data mining!

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 3: Implementing Your Conversion Rate Optimization Process

2012-01-16T13:22:00.000+00:00

This is the third part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

Previously in this series, we discovered how your conversion rate optimization process can be improved by adding some critical planning and research. In this article we will see how Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend taking those learnings and applying them. Take a look at part 1 and part 2 to see the previous steps.

Step 7: Design your experimental web pages (your "challengers")

This is the point at which you’ll create the content that you’ll be testing. Create wireframes of the new pages (or page elements).

Create your wireframe first

Pay particular attention to critical copy elements such as the headline, introductory paragraphs and calls to action. Carry out several usability tests on the wireframe and discuss them with anyone who has an empathic understanding of your customers.

Step 8: Carry out experiments on your website

For each split test, follow a procedure that ensures that all team members understand what the test is, why you’re running it, how it fits into the site, how it aligns with the business goals, and how you’ll measure success. These experiment plans create a valuable archive of your business’s evolution. Once a test is started, the software takes over. All split-testing software automatically calculates when one version of the page has generated statistically significantly more conversions than the others, at which point you can end the test and promote the winning version to be your new “control”. If you are new to split-testing tools, check out this quick start guide to Google Website Optimizer and conversion rate optimization.

Step 9: Transfer your winning campaigns into other media

Diversifying your customer acquisition channels gives your business more stability. Your increased conversion rate will mean you can profitably invest more in advertising channels such as SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing and offline media. Also, explore how the insights from your winning experiments can be implemented in other parts of your marketing funnel.

A winning appeal in a landing page test can provide a winning headline for your AdWords campaigns (or vice versa)
A winning landing page can be adapted for space advertising in offline media
If a particular offer performs well in your own marketing materials, your affiliates may benefit from using it too

Insights from winning experiments can be implemented in other media such as print advertising.

Summary

As you can see, while a lot of work, your results will reflect the effort that you put in. Keep in mind that the process is not a one-off event, rather it is an iterative methodology. Subsequent experimental plans will be based on the outcome of the previous experiments and each improvement builds upon the success of the previous ones.

With iterative testing your profits can only go up—because you only keep the winners.

Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to compete. Also, as your conversion rate grows, more opportunities present themselves. Hopefully this series will give you some ideas that you can take and implement into your own Conversion Rate Optimization processes. If you want to see the whole process in more detail, check out the full Conversion Rate Experts Process.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 2: Critical Research that Can Boost Your Conversion Rate Optimization Results

2011-12-20T19:28:00.003+00:00

This is the second part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

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In the first part of this three part series, we looked at how many marketers rush into setting up their conversion rate optimization process but Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend instead applying a little bit more strategic planning, and how this can get you a much better outcome and avoid you overlooking some fundamental factors. Now we need to drill further into this approach so that you have can be armed with all the research that you need and make an informed decision going into your actual experimentation. Make sure you check out part 1 to see the previous three steps.

Step 4: Research the market

No business exists in a vacuum. You need to understand the ecosystem that you are working in. Study your marketplace by researching

Your competitors

Expert commentators

Social media

Review sites

Anywhere your target market gathers.

Explore possibilities for improving your positioning against that competitive environment by building upon your company’s core strengths.

Step 5: Reveal the hidden wealth in your business

You will likely have elements within your business that would be highly persuasive to your prospects, if only your prospects could get exposed to them. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets, then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process. In effect your website should be a "proof magnet", incorporating all the necessary support material, persuasive content and evidence necessary to move your prospect forward with confidence.

Your website should be a “proof magnet”.

It can also be useful to identify assets that would be compelling to your prospects —

Invest time in gathering your company's existing material and sort through your collection to find under-used persuasive assets.
Create missing assets that would be persuasive to your target market, if only you had them.
Compile a wish-list of persuasive content and material that your company needs to acquire from outside sources, such as paying for material to be created or interviewing clients for case studies and results.

Step 6: Create your experimental strategy

Extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. Take all of the ideas you’ve generated from the research, and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. After collating all the ideas, prioritize them based on three simple metrics:

How likely is it to double your conversion rate?
How easy it is to implement the test?
Has this idea worked before?

Summary of Part 2

Rather than starting with the first optimization experiments that come to you, it will pay big dividends if you take a short step back and really research and prioritize what you should be working on. As you have seen, there might be gold hiding in terms of your positioning in the marketplace and in your previously under-used proof elements. You can see how Conversion Rate Experts used this exact process to quadruple Voices.com's conversion rate from under 5% to 22% here in this case study. In the next and final part of this series, we will put all of this research and planning to good use.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 1: Improving Your Conversion Rate Optimization Process

2011-12-19T17:33:00.003+00:00

This is the first part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

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Many marketers start their Conversion Rate Optimization process by going straight into creating a list of things to test. Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants), however, advise you to resist the urge at this stage. Here are two good reasons why:

You don’t know why people aren’t converting yet.

You need to experience your business as a customer rather than a marketer.

Conversion Rate Optimization isn’t about tweaking a particular type of page element or simply setting up new tests. Instead it’s a well-defined, systematic process — a list of things you need to do. In this article series we will take you through the Conversion Rate Experts methodology so that you will have a full process to follow.

CRE Methodology Mind Map

First, in this article, we will cover some preparation steps:

Step 1: Define your strategy, long-term goals, and how you’ll measure success

First decide the strategy and vision for your business. You need to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will ensure you meet your goals. Next, it is important to have customer empathy and to understand the thought processes your visitors are going through, so become a customer of your own site. Discover what the actual visitor experience is really like. The insights gleaned from these activities will give you a better guide for what you need to work on.

Step 2: Understand (and tune) your traffic sources

It’s impossible to critique a website without knowing where its visitors are coming from, which landing pages they arrive on, and how they navigate around the site.

Seek to understand your entire conversion funnel

Aim to work on the areas of your business that will have the biggest impact on your goals.

Also prioritize your efforts on parts of your business that are easiest to make changes to.

Discover blockages and missing pieces in your funnel with web analytics tools.

Search for any aspects that are under-performing and any required parts of your conversion funnel that have not yet been created. For example:

Turning a one-step sale into a multi-step sale

Adding a well-placed refer-a-friend program

Adding an effective email autoresponder sequence

Adding a series of post-sale offers

Growing a customer community

Rolling out successes into other media

Step 3: Understand your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones)

Your key question to answer at this stage is, “Why is the visitor not converting?”. The answer typically comes from research in these core areas:

Understanding different visitor types and intentions

Identifying user experience problems.

Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.

There is a list of 15 tools here that will help you with your visitor research.

Summary for Part 1

By the end of this part of the process you should have a great idea of the priority areas that you need to work on, both from a funnel and an end-user experience point of view. In the next article we will look at further refining your strategy so that you get the best possible outcome from your efforts. If you would like to see more about how to implement the CRE Methodology we have been outlining here, check out this case study which describes how sunshine.co.uk used the process to almost double their revenue.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Introducing Flow Visualisation: visualising visitor flow

2011-10-20T09:54:00.002+01:00

Many of you have shared with us difficulties you’ve experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don’t sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You’re looking for better ways to visualise and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.

The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualising visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

So we are releasing “Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyse site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualisers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualiser on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.

Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

You’ll also notice that we made the visualisation highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.

This type of visualisation allows you to answer important questions, such as “How successful is my new promo page?” In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the “specials” or promo page come from Google search.

To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by “exploring the traffic” through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.

We realise that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we’re providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualiser to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.

Goal Flow

Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.

You can find the Goal Flow visualiser in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.” Goal Flow helps you understand:

The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)
The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways
Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined
How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualiser. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize “backward”. Such “reverse paths” could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, “forward” paths from a page (or pages) can be visualised to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.

Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common “visitor” flows, and we’re building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.

If you don’t have goals or goal funnels already set up, don’t worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.

These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualisation for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualisation truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.

- Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Google Analytics User Conference, Madrid.

2011-10-13T18:17:00.004+01:00

There will be a Google Analytics User Conference on in Spain later this month. Organised by our Google Analytics Certified Partners and sponsored by Google, please see the site below if you'd like to attend.

Madrid, Spain - October 27th 2011
Partners: metriplica, Watt, webanalytics.es

Event Site: http://googleanalyticsconference.es

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Google Analytics Premium - a new option for our largest customers

2011-09-30T09:30:00.002+01:00

We built Google Analytics on the principle of democratising data -- giving all website owners, big and small, the ability to learn from their visitors. Many websites use Google Analytics, ranging from personal blogs to large enterprises whose products and services we use daily. We learned from some of our largest customers that they have some specific needs that the current version of Google Analytics can't meet in their entirety. Today we're addressing these needs by announcing a new option built for our largest customers: Google Analytics Premium.

We developed Google Analytics Premium around these pillars: more data, advanced tools, dedicated support and guarantees. Here’s a summary of what that covers:

Extra processing power - increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
Advanced analysis - attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
Service and support - experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call - all backed by 24/7 support
Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Google Analytics Premium was developed in close coordination with some of our largest clients. During our pilot phase, we’ve been working with Gucci, Travelocity, TransUnion , eHarmony and others, to make sure Google Analytics Premium meets their needs. We’re very happy with what we’ve built and we’re now ready to make it available to all interested clients.

Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual fee in the United States, Canada, and the UK. You can get it directly from Google or through Google Analytics Premium Authorised Resellers. To learn more about Premium, you can contact the Google team or our authorised resellers.

We're more committed than ever to providing our customers, large and small, with options to measure and improve their marketing efforts. Google Analytics will continue to offer a powerful, free product as it always has and you’ll see plenty of new features and enhancements in the future. We’re pleased to help all of our customers to work more effectively with Google Analytics. Happy analysing!

Enrique Muñoz Torres, Senior Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium

Part 4 - Mobile Website Optimisation: 10 Tips to Make Mobile Conversions Easier

2011-09-19T21:09:00.004+01:00

This is the fourth post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. The previous three posts covered Content Prioritisation, White Space and Big Buttons

In Summary: Making it easy to convert on a mobile device is key to maximising conversion rate. Mobile conversions must play to the strengths of mobile devices and simply replicating the desktop experience is often not enough.

As in previous posts in this series, I invite readers to think about the way the mobile user experience is different from desktop. On desktop, many conversion funnels require visitors to jump through a series of hoops (often forms) before the visitor can become a customer. While this is often an unsatisfactory experience for a person with a mouse and a keyboard, mobile visitors are even less likely to put up with this in order to convert.

Mobile devices are increasingly touchscreen and the majority of smartphones have only a virtual keyboard. Mobile users also don’t have the speed of multi-finger typing and many will enter data solely with relatively large unwieldy thumbs. While there are vehicles for data-entry specific to mobile which can really help, like voice entry and text completion, these methods are rarely useful when a visitor is using uncommon language such as when they are entering a postal address or email address.

So, how do we help mobile users complete a conversion or even partially complete? By partially completing a conversion I mean allowing them to perform an action that they can complete conveniently through another medium. Here are some ways that can help make mobile conversions easier:

Have a Single Customer Experience Across all Platforms
The means by which visitors can interact with your site are varied. Mobile users will be using small screens and their thumbs; tablet users will be using medium size screens and their fingers; and desktop users will be using medium to large screens and a mouse and keyboard. However, it should be possible for a visitor to begin the conversion process on one platform and complete it on any of the others. This is what we mean by a single customer experience. For example, with amazon.co.uk a visitor can login to their account on a desktop and start adding things to their shopping cart. If they need to leave their desktop, they can simply login to their account on their mobile device and complete the transactions while they’re on the move. And this functionality is not limited to ecommerce websites. On autotrader.co.uk a visitor can add a car they are interest in to their garage on their desktop and then open their garage on mobile or tablet and find the same car there as they travel to see it.

On Amazon.co.uk, it is possible to begin a conversion on one device and complete it on another

Allow Visitors to Save Searches
The ability to save searches can be particularly useful for travel or local website owners but really it is suited to any website where a user is likely to search for the same things repeatedly. In the case of travel, it is not unusual for visitors to have favourite destinations or even for them to re-visit a site multiple times before completing a purchase. Or a take-away restaurant is likely visited time and again by users who have a favourite meal. Allowing visitors to save their searches makes the journey to their regular purchases that little bit easier. If the visitor doesn’t have an account, make it easy for them to save searches by just adding an email address or use cookies to remember the last search they completed.

Have Clear Calls To Action
This one stands to reason everywhere but it is still a barrier to conversion on many sites. Often the website owner has provided too many conversion options or not clearly enough labeled to the visitor where they are expected to go next. Avoid using multiple conversion options and use button colour and size to clearly indicate to a visitor what you want them to do next.

On Mothercare.com, the call-to-action is clear and easy to find

Allow Visitors to Save Baskets
For website owners with a basket for their visitors to fill prior to checking-out, it is a good idea if those visitors can save their baskets for their return or even for them to access the basket again from another platform. This will also encourage cross-platform purchases. Easy account login is imperative for this to work. Have an account login button on every page and keep login simple. If a visitor doesn’t have an account and is not making an immediate purchase, entering their name and email address should be sufficient for them to save their basket and access it again elsewehere.

Keep Forms Short
The best way to ensure that conversions are easy is to make sure that all forms are only as long as absolutely necessary. Get your conversions in before asking irrelevant marketing or cross-sales questions. By keeping forms short you can make conversion on a mobile device much easier indeed.

Use Top-Aligned Labels
When a mobile phone user taps on a form field, very often the browser zooms in to that field. Mobile devices are also long but narrow when vertically orientated. Thus, having form field labels to the left as is common on desktop is less feasible. By implementing field descriptions above the field it is easier for a visitor to see where they are and it allows more space for form fields.

Booking.com uses top-aligned labels in their checkout

Use HTML5 for Form Fields
By using HTML5 in form fields, it is possible to help users to complete those fields more efficiently. For example, a field for telephone number will be filled using the number keypad. Find a simple introduction to HTML5 in plain English here.

Use Check Boxes, Lists & Scroll Menus
Data entry needs to be kept to a minimum when a user has only their finger or thumb and a virtual keyboard to help them. By using check boxes, lists and scroll menus to make data entry easier, you will be helping the visitor to proceed through the conversion process. However, it is important not to give a visitor too many options in these lists or they may be less decisive.

Implement Click-to-Call
Mobile users are much more likely to make a phone call than a desktop user. If your business converts over a telephone line, make sure that all references to phone numbers on your website are tagged for click-to-call and where possible make those links into buttons.

RAC.co.uk have implemented click-to-call buttons for their breakdown service

Use Geo-Technology for Offline Conversions
A key difference between mobile and desktop users is that mobile users are using a device with location based technology. Where a conversion can take place offline, it is advisable to use this technology to help a visitor find their way to your store. In such cases it can be useful for there to be a stock checking functionality on the page and a button which will link to directions, preferably with a map, to the nearest store with the product(s) in stock. If you wish to track purchases which began on a phone, consider allowing visitors to reserve products in advance and attributing a unique tracking code to each reservation. Or to encourage quick offline sales, you might also consider having a discount code for mobile shoppers who come to the shop and convert quickly.

So, in summary, 10 ways to make conversion completions easy from a mobile device include:

Have a Single Customer Experience across Channels
Allow Saved Searches
Have Clear Calls to Action
Allow Saved Baskets
Keep Forms Short
Use Top Aligned Labels
Use HTML5 in Form Fields
Use Check Boxes, Lists & Scroll Menus
Implement Click-To-Call
Use Geo-Technology for Offline Conversions

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, test it on different devices to make sure it looks well on different sized screens. Check out this tool to replicate phones from different operating systems on your desktop.

In my next post, I will be looking at best practices for Search & Refinement on mobile websites. If you have a comment, please post it.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 3: Mobile Website Optimisation - 7 Considerations When Designing Buttons on Mobile Websites

2011-07-06T10:07:00.005+01:00

This is the third post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. The previous two posts covered Content Prioritisation and White Space.

In Summary: Buttons rule on mobile devices. The rule of thumb means that big, well spaced buttons with clear calls to action will likely result in more conversions.

Before looking at how buttons can make the mobile user experience better we must first understand the way mobile users navigate. Think about the way you hold your phone. More often than not it’s in just one hand and because your fingers are gripping the phone from behind, you are left only with your thumb for navigation of the screen. The thumb is far less precise than a mouse pointer.

As you can see from this image, fingers are behind the phone leaving the thumb to do all the work.

The Mobile Rule of Thumb: If it cannot be done with the thumb, it cannot be done.

The hyperlink is a poor user experience on a touchscreen mobile device because it is very hard to use with an imprecise instrument like the human thumb. If that’s not all, mobile devices are often used by people on the move, so hitting a small point on the screen is just getting harder and harder. The best way to alleviate these issues is to build your links into big buttons which allow for greater levels of inaccuracy.

Here are are a few things to consider when building button links:

Buttons Should be Big
In a recent study of iPad users, Jakob Nielsen, the father of human computer interaction studies, recommends that buttons be at least 1cm x 1cm in diameter. That’s 28px assuming the standard web resolution of 72dpi. There’s a lot of debate around this area.

Apple is recommending 44x44 at a minimum for buttons in apps.

A very interesting introduction to designing for different screen sizes on Android can be found here.

This is something you really need to test when building your site. Without a mouse or even a stylus, buttons need to be big. Put simply, you should build buttons for thumbs. And err towards large thumbs. There is also the issue of light. Many mobile screens perform poorly in daylight or bright light environments – big buttons make it easier to perform tasks while visibility is low.

Buttons Should be Isolated
How many times have you tried to click a button on a mobile device only to find that you have inadvertently clicked something else? It can be a really painful experience and is also a sure-fire way of making a user give up in frustration and go somewhere else. One way to avoid accidental clicks is to ensure that buttons have a little space between them. Call-to-action buttons especially should be isolated. Where possible, leave a little white space around buttons.

Buttons Should be Reachable
The placement of your buttons is also important. Just as we need to consider big thumbs for button size, we need to think about what is comfortable for thumbs when placing buttons. The standard navigation button is across the whole page on mobile sites so it isn’t really an issue but many mobile sites have call-to-action buttons which are shorter and sit on one side of the screen or the other. If possible, these buttons should be made longer and centred more. Not only does that make them larger but it’s easier for both left and right handed people to reach the buttons with their thumb. If you must choose a side of the screen, contrary to the right side placement often found on desktop, it is actually more comfortable for a right-handed thumb (the majority of users) to click a button on the left side of the screen.

Kiddicare.com found button placement on the left side of the screen was easier for users than the right

Smaller Buttons Should be Padded
Padding refers to making clickable an area larger than the button itself. This can be especially useful for check boxes or buttons that need to be smaller so as not to draw attention away from the main call-to action. The trick is to make the area immediately around the button clickable as well. In the case of check boxes, it is important to leave sufficient space between boxes and then to make the text next to the box clickable too.

Buttons Should Look Like Buttons
This might seem like common sense but it is not unusual to find links on mobile sites which behave like buttons but do not look like them. Whether it is a link that looks the same as the text around it or a button that looks like a heading, the user needs some form of visual cue to help them understand where to click. Make buttons look three dimensional and they are more likely to invite clicks. It is also important that your site clearly indicates to a user which button they have clicked. Some sites do this really well, but others are a little patchy. Touching any part of a button should result in a visual signal for the user.

In the example above, the Filter link behaves like a button but looks like the rest of the text, so some users will miss that.

Buttons Should be Prioritised
In much the same way as we do with desktop sites, buttons on mobile devices need to be prioritised. Visual cues like size and colour will help users to identify where they need to click. If we are making all buttons big to allow for thumbs, then colour becomes even more important. Try to have a different coloured button for the main call to action. Other important links should still be buttons - just not as obvious.

Buttons Should Use Descriptive Text
This is not just a convention of mobile but it is still very important. The text we use on buttons will set the expectations of the users clicking on them. It is important that the text be clear and that it conforms to an action the user is taking. Button text should complete the statement “I would like to...” and begin with a verb. It should also consider the point the user is at in their journey through the site. ‘Buy Now’ buttons on the homepage are generally inappropriate. “Shop Now” is often a better call to action so early in the visit. There is never a time when ‘Click Here’ or other such terms are ideal because they set no expectations for the user.

Why use buttons? Imagine the difficulty of picking the right link in the example above.

So does this mean we can never use hyperlinks? Of course you can. But you should use them minimally and don’t put lots of them into the same space. As a rule, try to have no more than one link per band of text. For example, In the point above about making buttons big enough, I have spread the points with links across multiple lines to make it easier for touchscreen users to tap them on the mobile version of this blog.

Of course when it comes to a mobile site which is trying to convert visitors into customers, try not to have much text.

In summary, buttons on mobile sites should be:

Big
Isolated
Reachable
Padded
Obvious
Prioritised
Descriptive

Buttons that have been well thought out and follow the guidelines above should help increase conversions on your mobile website.

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, physically test it while you are in motion to best replicate the real-world user experience.

The next post will be looking at how to make conversions easier to complete on a mobile website. If you have feedback, please leave a comment.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

New Google Analytics: Improvements in Map Overlay reports

2011-06-22T16:16:00.000+01:00

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, a few engineers from our team are sharing improvements they’ve made to Map Overlay reports.

In GA, we're always looking for ways to improve existing reports. For example, we noticed that you can only see state (i.e. province/region) breakdowns if you're looking at the United States. Surely, this information ought to be available for other parts of the world?!

It seemed like something that could be done in a short amount of time and yield a big win for our users. So, we're glad to announce that as of this week's release, you can now see region level maps of over 170 countries!

To try it out, simply go to the Location report (under Visitors > Demographics) and click a country. We'll try France.

Voila! We can see at a glance that Ile-de-France sends the most visits to our site. To see cities, just click "City" in the "Viewing:" list immediately below the map. Once you're on the cities view, you can try out another feature we rolled out recently -- a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together.

Enjoy the new features in your maps. We hope they speed you on your way to gaining actionable insights and metrics. Happy analysing!

P.S. Did you know you get map overlay in more places than just the Visitors > Demographics > Location report? Take a look at the tab on the Visitors > Technology > Mobile report

Posted by Eyal, Jerry, Yinnon, and Brian, Google Analytics Frontend Team

Custom Variables: Fairmont and Swissotel use-cases

2011-06-15T15:08:00.000+01:00

The introduction of custom variables to Google Analytics opened up many possibilities in measurement for site owners. It allows you to extend the dimensions tracked by Google Analytics to include facets that are meaningful to your business. For example, wouldn’t you like to know how your logged in members behaved differently to your casual visitors? Or which categories of content your visitors are consuming?

Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics and Search Optimisation, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, has been kind enough to share her use-cases for the different types of custom variables. Head on over to the APAC Conversion Room blog to find out more about:

Visitor-level custom variables: Swissotel were able to segment their visitors based on membership levels, understand their preferences, and then target their marketing efforts accordingly.
Session-level custom variables: Fairmont measured which booking method (i.e. single vs multiple) was more popular on their booking engine; and were able to understand which method appealed to which types of customers.
Page-level custom variables: Swissotel used page-level custom variables to group pages according to the language of the content. With these groupings they were able to conveniently analyse the behaviour patterns and preferences of visitors according to the language of content consumed.

We would also love to hear how you use custom variables. If you have any tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments of Barbara’s articles.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Google Conversion Team

The Making of Google Analytics v5

2011-06-02T10:04:00.001+01:00

What’s new about Analytics Intelligence?

2011-05-26T11:28:00.002+01:00

With this flexible table overview, users can perform full-text search, event sort, as well as drilling into details of each event. For example, clicking on the “Details” for row 2 above,

In this detail view, users can explore the event further, add an annotation, or drill in by clicking on Go to Report, which allows users to jump to a full report related to the dimension of interest.

Additional improvements include the ability to create and edit custom alerts without leaving the Intelligence reports:

We’ve also made significant improvements to the quality of automatic alerts by filtering similar alerts and more comprehensive measurements of importance.

As we continue to improve the Intelligence reports, we hope to surface more actionable insights to you. If you have suggestions for our effort here, we greatly appreciate your comments.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

New Google Analytics - Overview Reports Overview

2011-05-17T11:43:00.002+01:00

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

This week we’re going a bit meta with an overview of the new Overview reports in the new Google Analytics. Overview reports were part of the old version of Analytics, of course, but we’ve made some changes to help your analysis.

Anatomy of the Overview Report
Each overview report consists of three sections. There's a timeline graph, some aggregate metrics, and a set of reports.

What’s inside of each of these sections depends on which report you’re looking at. For example, the Visitor Overview shows a graph of visits and metrics like New vs. Returning visitors, while Content Overview shows metrics like pageviews and average time on page.
The Graph
We’ve made a few changes to the graphs in the new Google Analytics, and we’ll share them here. You can now make adjustments to the graphs you see in Google Analytics from the buttons on the top right of the graph:
Switch a graph between Line Chart and Motion Chart
Graph different metrics: Select from the dropdown or the scorecard

Compare two metrics: Graph an additional metric for comparison

Graph By: Change graph from between Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and even Hourly for some reports

Reports
The bottom section of an overview report lets you look through a subset of the reports available in that section. You can flip through these reports to see where you want to start your analysis. In the Traffic Sources Overview, we can start by looking at a report of Keywords.

From here we can go view the full report or look at another report, like Referral Sources:

Intelligence Overview
Google Analytics Intelligence automatically searches your website traffic to look for anomalies. When it finds something that's out of the ordinary it surfaces this as an alert. You can also setup your own alerts by defining custom alerts.
Now you can feel like the president of the principality of Analytica with your very own Intelligence Overview report.

The Intelligence Overview report shows you all of your automatic alerts (daily, weekly, and monthly) sorted by importance at a glance. From the Intelligence Overview, you can click on Details to see a graph of the alert and go directly into the GA report. You can also add or review an annotation right from the pop-up graph.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of Overview Reports. Please continue to send us feedback on the new Google Analytics. Stay tuned for next week’s installment in New Google Analytics series.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics User Conferences this week

2011-05-16T19:39:00.004+01:00

There will be Google Analytics User Conferences on in Sweden, Denmark & the Netherlands over the coming days. Organised by our Google Analytics Certified Partners and sponsored by Google, please see the sites below if you'd like to attend.

Sweden, Stockholm - May 17th 2011
Partners: inuse | insights, Klikki, Guava
Event Site: http://analyticsconference.se

Denmark, Copenhagen - May 18th 2011
Partners: Guava, IIH Nordic, Valtech DK
Event Site: www.gabc.dk

Netherlands, Amsterdam - May 19th 2011
Partners: clickvalue, Netprofiler, Netsociety, OrangeValley, Traffic4U, Traffic Builders, Checkit, Tribal, Maxlead, bSeen
Event Site: http://www.gauc.nl

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report

2011-05-09T10:41:00.000+01:00

Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

One effective use of the Site Speed report is to measure speed for your most critical pages. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Or, you might learn that certain pages on your site run slower in some browsers. In addition to the Site Speed report, we’ve created a custom report that you can use to help answer these questions: view the Site Speed custom report.

Setting up the Site Speed Report
By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. We have detailed instructions in the Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center. Once you’ve updated your tracking code, a small sample of pageviews will be used to calculate the page load time.

We’re excited to bring this important metric into Google Analytics as part of the new Google Analytics platform. Please continue to send us feedback on Site Speed and the rest of the new Google Analytics.

- Zhiheng Wang, Phil Mui
on behalf of the Google Analytics team and the Make the Web Faster team.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 2: Mobile Website Optimisation - How Effective Use of White Space Can Improve the Mobile Website Experience

2011-05-06T16:03:00.004+01:00

This is the second post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions.

In Summary: Uncluttered mobile sites with minimal but meaningful information which is visible to users on the go is key to maximising conversions on mobile devices.

Mobile devices have small screens. The larger ones have about 640x960 pixel resolution (or 4in/10cm diameter). When you compare that with a desktop computer screen it’s not very big. So how do you ensure that a user on a small screen gets to see all of the things they would see on a desktop version of your site? You don’t. In this post we will be focusing on using white space as a means to making mobile websites feel intuitive and uncluttered.

Do Not Overcrowd the Screen: As covered in the last post on content prioritisation, a big part of mobile site building involves stripping out as much detail as possible. Mobile users are task oriented so they only need the details necessary to complete a task quickly. Speed is important and the way you present the information on your site will impact heavily on the speed with which a user can digest it. It might seem counter-intuitive when the screen is so small and you have so much to say but pushing lots of information and too many options at your users will push them away from a conversion. Prioritised content combined with effective use of white space leads to a better mobile experience.

Banners, Pictures & Videos: Desktop sites are generally overburdened with banners, pictures & videos but it’s easier to get away with that when you have a big screen and a fast broadband connection. Real estate is precious on a mobile device so only use small pictures - but pictures are still recommended. You can make it possible for a user to click on pictures to increase the size but it should be a user choice. Banners should be kept to an absolute minimum or even removed altogether. If you are using a banner it should only be a conversion reinforcement banner such as highlighting a delivery or returns policy. You can also use banner advertisements if that is the way you monetise your site. Videos can contribute effectively to a conversion, particularly a brand oriented one. However, where a video is not necessary and is even distracting, it should not be included. If you’re unsure, test it with a tool like Google Website Optimiser to see what impact video has for your mobile site.

Bullet Points: Desktop users generally will not read lots of text. Mobile users are even less likely to. All paragraphs of text should be removed and replaced with clear concise bullet points. Mobile user’s often read at arms length so the text should also be large enough and clear enough to facilitate this. A great way of doing so is to ensure that there’s not a lot to read. Where bands of text are unavoidable, it should be possible for users to hide or expand the text or to get more information on tabs. Use headlines that summarise the text that follows so a user can still convert without reading everything.

The m.wikipedia.org. site allows users to choose what text they want to see

White Space is Light Space: Dark backgrounds are a bad experience even on a desktop but on a mobile site they can be devastating to conversions. Mobile users are on the go and when they are outside in daylight situations background colour is very important. Try using a projector in a bright room with the curtains drawn and the light splashing onto the screen. If your slides have a dark background you won’t see them. If they have a white background with black text, it won’t be a problem. That is the same experience on a macro level as a user trying to use a website with a dark background on a mobile device outside. It might look cool when you’re building it in a lab, but it’s not a great experience. Users can increase the brightness of their display but that will place greater strain on the battery.

White space (also called negative space) doesn’t have to be white but it should be pale so that high contrast text and images placed against it are visible even in poor light. Using a picture as a background is also not recommended. Again, remember that users are often on the go and reading at a distance.

White space also helps when building sites to fit multiple devices of varying resolutions. The more white space, the less likely your site will look cramped or stretched on different devices. Of course, it’s also a good idea to design your site with multiple resolutions in mind.

This site uses a light background and uncluttered space to great effect.

To summarise, 4 points to keep in mind when creating a layout for your mobile site:

Mobile sites should not be cluttered
Remove unnecessary elements which take up space and data
Use bullet points instead of paragraphs for text
Have a light background to your site

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, test it in different light levels to best replicate the user experience.

The next post will be looking at how big buttons can make mobile website conversion a whole lot easier. If you have feedback, please leave a comment.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Custom Reports in the new Google Analytics

2011-05-05T16:35:00.002+01:00

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. We’ll be discussing how to use updated custom reports.

Every website is different, yet we focus much of our time on the standard reports in our web analytics tools. Custom reports have been an integral part of Google Analytics since 2008. With the new platform, we took a close look at how we could improve the custom reports to make them more usable and powerful.

The Custom Reports tab
For starters, custom reports now live under their own tab, which you can find next to My Site in the main menu bar.

The overview shows a list of all the custom reports available for your profile. You can also view, edit, or share a custom report, and, of course, you can also build a new custom report.

Building a custom report
As with the previous version of Google Analytics, you build a custom report by picking the metrics and dimensions you want. For the new platform, we’ve made some enhancements. Let’s walk through the creation of a custom report for measuring the effectiveness of content on this blog (borrowing from one of Avinash’s awesome custom reports).

Getting the right data
We saw that custom reports were most useful when focused on subset of data. For my blog report, I've decided that I want to only focus on referral traffic. In the old version, I’d have to combine an advanced segment with my custom report to do this analysis. With the new platform, we’ve made it possible to make the filter part of your custom report.

You can add multiple filters to the same report, and filter on dimensions other than those you’ve chosen to use in the report. Best of all, these filters are saved as part of your custom report. As soon as you (or your boss) opens the report, you’re looking at the data you need.

Organising your report
Like the current version, you can build multiple report tabs into your custom report. This is helpful to organise your report, or build different views for people across your organisation. In the new Google Analytics, you’re no longer restricted to using the same dimensions for each report tab, which allows you to truly get all of the data you care about in one custom report. There are two types of report tabs available: Flat Table and Explorer tabs.

Explorer report tabs are similar to the report view that is used across Analytics. They allow you to drill down into data, as well as add a secondary dimension. When creating an Explorer tab, you can also create Metric Groups, which help further organise your report for easier analysis. For our example, I've built out an Explorer tab focused on content quality metrics with a drill down into where the traffic came from.

Flat Table report tabs allow you to look at two dimensions side by side, meaning you don’t have to click to drill down into your data. We’ve created this report view to make it easier to export the information you care about, email it to a colleague, or simply print it out. For the example report, I have a Flat Table tab focused on where the traffic came from and the quality of that traffic.

And here's the finished report:

Sharing your custom reports
Once you've finished creating your report, you might want to share it with your team. One of the most widely used features of Custom Reports has been sharing, which allows you to share a link to your custom report configuration with others.

Like the current version, sharing a custom report in the new Google Analytics only shares the structure of the report, not the data from your account. There is one difference to keep in mind, when you share a custom report in the new version, the link will always reflect the state of the report when you first created the link. So, if you create a report, share it with your colleagues, and then make further changes, the link you shared will still point to the first version of the report. You can share your reports from the Custom Reports overview. Just click the share link:

And here’s a link to the custom report example we’ve referenced throughout this post:http://goo.gl/McSBl.

Finding a home for your old custom reports
Did you spend a lot of time creating the perfect custom report in the old version? Not to fear: we’ve created a migration tool to help you migrate your reports from the old version to the new Google Analytics. From the Custom Reports Overview, you’ll see a section called Migrate Custom Reports. It will let you know if you have reports to be migrated. Keep in mind that migration only works one way. Once you move your reports over to the new version, you won’t be able to use them in the old version.

Using standard reports to analyse your website can only take you so far, which is why we’ve put so much effort in making custom reports more powerful and easier for Google Analytics v5. Please continue to give us your feedback on the new Google Analytics. Happy analysing!

Posted by Kate Cushing, Google Analytics team

New Analytics Help Center

2011-04-18T11:34:00.000+01:00

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to even more users soon. Sign up for early access. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

We recently announced the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re one of the early users, you may have noticed that there is also a new help center dedicated to this latest version. You can get to the new help center via the Help links that appear throughout the user interface. But, regardless of whether you’re already using the new version, you’ll find the new help center at http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/.

In addition to addressing features for the new version (see “What’s New”), we’ve redesigned the Help Center completely. For this launch, we have:

organized the help center into five topics, each addressing a key usage need,
improved the organization of all topics, and
reduced content duplication.

You can compare our new Help Center to the older version at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. Please post a comment to let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Also, look for a survey in a few weeks. We’ll be actively gathering your input on this Help Center in preparation for the next round of improvements.

Patricia Boswell, on behalf of the Analytics Education Team.

The New Google Analytics: Events Goals

2011-04-07T11:59:00.001+01:00

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to even more users soon. Sign up for early access. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

Real Analytics ninjas use goals. Google Analytics has always had URL Goals (when a visitor reaches a specific page). In 2009, we added Engagement Goals to track success metrics around visit depth and time on site. With the new version of Google Analytics, we’ve added one more: Event Goals. This was one of our most requested features, and it gives you even more reason to use event tracking.

A brief intro to Event Tracking
You can use Event Tracking in Google Analytics to track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews. It's a great fit for tracking things like:

Downloads of a PDF or other file
Interaction with dynamic or AJAX sites
Interaction with Adobe Flash objects, embedded videos, and other media
Number of errors users get when attempting to checkout
How long a video was watched on your site

Events are defined using a set of Categories, Actions, Labels, and Values. Here’s how you might set up event tracking for tracking downloads of whitepapers and presentations.

These interactions all have potential business impact, but until now you couldn’t track them as goals in Google Analytics. Let’s look at three ways you might use Event Goals on your site.

Tracking Downloads
Suppose you run a business to business (B2B) website and offer whitepapers (as a PDF download) in order to attract leads. You drive traffic to this page through advertising. You can track the number of downloads using event tracking. For example, we can use the category to designate the click was of type “download”. We can use the action to designate the download was a “whitepaper” and we can use the label to identify the actual whitepaper that was downloaded.

With the new Google Analytics, configuring this as a goal is easy. We simply match any event with the category of “download” and the action of “whitepaper”. Finally we set the goal value as 20.

Tracking Time Spent
Event tracking is powerful because you can track values, along with the category, action, and label. Going back to our B2B website, suppose you have a embedded product demo video on your page. With a little JavaScript, you can track the time a user spends watching the video and send that number back to Google Analytics as an event value.

With Event Goals, you can now set up a goal based on this value. In this example, we’ve configured a goal when a user spends over 180 seconds watching the product demo.

Using The Event Value As The Conversion Value
Traditionally, the only way to set goal values was when creating the goal in Google Analytics, or from the tracking code using ecommerce tracking. With Event Goals, you have another option: using the event value as the goal value.

Again putting yourself in the shoes of a B2B website owner, you realize not all your whitepapers bring in the same quality of lead. The lead value associated with downloading a certain whitepaper is $20, but the lead value from a different whitepaper is $35. Rather than creating a separate goal for each, you can pass the values 20 and 35 as the Event Value, and then set up the goal to use the actual Event Value:

Now when a goal is matched, the value passed in the event will be used as the goal value.

These are just a few examples of how you can take advantage of Event Goals in the new Google Analytics. You can read more on how to implement Event Tracking on Google Code, and how to set up goals in the new Analytics. We’re constantly giving more of you access to the new version. If you don’t have the new version yet, you can sign up for earlier access.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics team

The New Google Analytics: Quick insights with Plot Rows

2011-03-31T12:49:00.005+01:00

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a small number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to more users soon. Sign up for early access.

The graph on top of most Google Analytics reports is designed to give you a quick overview of your site’s performance over time. From the graph it’s easy to spot trends and understand how your traffic has changed over time. One request we heard was the ability to quickly focus the graph on a particular row of data. While you could do this with a drill-down report or using an advanced segment, we saw this as an opportunity to provide an easy way to do quick comparisons in the new Google Analytics.

Say for example you’re examining your site’s traffic by traffic source. You can see there are peaks and valleys in the traffic, but if you want a sense of the major contributors, you need to dig into the table.

With Plot Rows, you can graph any two rows alongside the overview. You can then easily determine how much a row contributes to the whole. Or you can compare two lines against each other to look for comparison trends.

To use Plot Rows, just tick any one or two checkboxes next to the rows you want to plot, then at the bottom of the table, hits the Plot Rows button.

Remember, that some reports like New vs. Returning default to a Pie Chart view. This doesn’t mean you can’t use Plot Rows, just switch the view to Data, and you’re good to go.

Here’s a quick video showing this in action:

Usage Tips
When looking at continuous metrics, like Visits, Plot Rows is most revealing when exploring the rows of similar scale, for example to see how they contribute to the whole and change over time. When looking at rows at different scales the graph will be more informative when using percentage metrics like Bounce Rate.

In this example, we’re looking at organic search traffic driven to the Google Store from Google and Bing. One would not expect that Bing users are actively looking to buy Google merchandise (like this awesome t-shirt), so the number of visits is understandably low. Since the traffic from Bing is relatively low, the graph doesn’t share much we didn’t already know from the table.

In new version of Analytics you can quickly graph any of the metrics in the scorecard (the bar on top of the graph) by clicking on the metric in the scorecard. Looking at Bounce Rate, we can see that over time the Bounce Rate from Google search (orange) has dropped, which has reduced the overall Bounce Rate of the site (blue), while the Bounce Rate from Bing (green) has more or less stayed constant.

You can use Plot Rows in just about any report when viewed from the Table View. Let us know if you find a place you want this functionality that doesn’t already have it. Also, we’re planning to give a bunch more of you access to the new version this week. Be on the look out!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Using information architecture techniques to improve long term conversion rates

2011-03-28T14:22:00.002+01:00

Information architecture on the web involves organising and presenting information in a way that is easy for the visitor navigate, find and understand. Information architecture is to your website what blueprints are for a building. It forms the basis onto which everything else can be built.

Well constructed, easy-to-use websites lead to greater visitor satisfaction, meaning better conversion rates and more returning customers.

In this first post of the series on information architecture I wanted to take a quick look at some techniques you can use to improve the way your content is categorised, labelled and organised.

Visitors on your site use a variety of navigation aids to find content on your site and we’ll discuss some of these in later articles. For now though lets assume we have a typical hierarchy structure on our website.

Categories and labelling

So how many categories does your website have? Or perhaps a better question: is your categorisation easy to understand or what visitors expect?

Cognitive load theory suggests that people may have difficulty storing more than “7 information chunks” in their working memory at any given time. There have been many research papers written on the topic, but the key take away is that you should gradually introduce your users to new information and not overwhelm them with too much choice especially in the beginning.

This particular cycling website has over 2000 categories listed down the left hand navigation pane (indicated by the red arrow). This makes finding products on their website extremely difficult because it’s extremely hard to recall this many items in your working memory.

What about the three click rule? The three click rule suggests that visitors should be able to find what they want in 3 clicks of the landing page, but the number is not what’s important. What is more important is that each click brings the visitor closer to their goal.

Various studies including this one conducted by Ed Chi at Xerox PARC show that visitors on a website navigate via an information scent. Much like animals stalk their prey based on scent, websites with strong information scents are good at guiding visitors to content. This is because visitors hunt for information based on clues. Once the information scent is lost, visitors will often use the browser back button to return to a page where the information scent is strong again.

The caveat is that if visitors have to repeat this process often, the information scent dries up causing visitors to leave your website altogether. Think of this as your “give up rate” metric.

Often the best clue a visitor has moving through your website in terms of information scent is navigation headings (breadcrumbs), along with the primary and secondary navigation. Which are often based on your underlying category structure.

Take the following category structure of a website. What happens if I’m looking for an MP3 player for my car? Do I look under Car Audio or MP3’s? Or what if I need new brakes for my car, do I look under Brakes or Discs? And clothing for a 2 year old child? Do I look under Children or Baby?

Too many specific categories can be confusing. Especially on smaller sites with less content. They can often lead to the information scent going cold causing the visitor to back pedal through the site and sometimes “give up”.

Guessing that there is a problem, we might decide to simplify our sites navigation and make our categories more broad like so:

On a large website however with over 100,000 products for sale this might not be enough categories and trying to cram too much content or products into a particular category could end up confusing visitors.

So how do I know if my site is difficult to navigate for visitors?

Google Analytics

You can view your content reports to get an idea of what areas of your site may not be meeting visitor expectations. Starting simple you can look at bounce rate, exit rate and top exit pages.

Top exit pages report may show you where the information scent went bad for visitors to your site. Whilst bounce rate may show that visitors arriving at a specific page had certain expectations that the site didn’t meet.

The Content Drilldown report will show you what sections (depending on your URL structure) of your site are performing like and you may find specific categories on your site are doing worse than others.

If you suspect certain pages are not meeting visitor expectations or visitors are not finding the pages you expect them to you may want to take a closer look at the navigation summary report.

This will show you what pages the visitor was previously on and what pages they most frequently view afterwards. Does this match what you would expect?

In Page Analytics reports can give you a visual view of which links or sections get the most clicks from a particular page.

Site Search reports can show you terms with a high % Search Exit rate and % Search Refinement rates. These can be useful for getting an insight into the visitors mind in terms of their vocabulary and intent. In particular take note of terms that produce 0 useful results.

Usability Studies

You may find that Google Analytics can show you what happened, but perhaps not why it happened. To learn more about your visitors sometimes you have to observe them. The best way is user testing and it’s easier than you think, you can start with just 3 or 4 participants.

Just ask Steve Krug: author of Don’t Make Me Think who has provided the User Testing chapters in PDF format on his website for you.

A simple task for your users may be to find a particular product or page on your website without using site search or external search tools like Google. Instead ask them to navigate through your site, take note of the categories they look in and perhaps the number of times they have to backtrack (i.e use the back button) before finding the content or product.

You can conduct this same test before and after your category structure improvements to see if the success rate has improved.

Surveys

Another way of soliciting feedback is via surveys. This is a good opportunity to seek advice on the organisation of your website. Even frequent users of your site may expect to find content in certain sections of your site or spend several minutes finding content they know exists but can’t recall what it’s categorised under.

Not sure what to ask your visitors? How about The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever?

There are loads of Free Survey Tools you can use to gather feedback.

How can I better categorise my content and find these potential problems?

Card sorting is 1 such technique, the idea is relatively simple, create cards that represent the content of your website then ask a group of participants to arrange that content into the most logical groupings.

Use the findings and analysis to determine the best structure for your website and its content. An interesting finding may be that a particular piece of content belongs in more than 1 category.

When it comes to card sorting you have 2 options:

Open card sort: This is where you do not define the category names, instead you present a group of cards (these cards represent your content) and you ask participants to group them using their own choice of category names.

An open card sort can be useful if you have never done a card sort before because you may find the way visitors on your site categorise content and the vocabulary they use is completely different to your existing websites category structure.

Closed card sort: This is where you have your top level categories already defined and ask your participants to place the content into the categories that they feel is best suited.

This is useful when you are adding more information to your site and have already established a category structure that works well for your audience.

How a card sort looks using a paper based approach. You will want to collect the results and enter them into a spreadsheet at some stage. So you may wish to use a program to help automate this for you.

Xsort is a free card sorting utility for Mac OSX. This view shows a completed card sort where the user has created the category boxes (in blue) and placed the cards (off-white-colour) into categories. Using a PC based program saves you having to collect the results manually. You can also export results to your favorite spreadsheet program for further analysis.

When conducting your card sort exercise take note of the following:

How did the majority of people group the content?
Did people create similar categories or groups of content?
Did people agree / disagree with suggested categories (in a closed card sort)?
Was there anything that people couldn’t categorise properly?
Did participants feel that content belonged in more than 1 category?

Analysing the results

This was an open card sort. So the dendogram (image above) shows the most common groupings.

We can see that certain movies above have been grouped together and from here we may decide that a logical way to group these items is by genre such as Sci Fi, Drama, Action, Nostalgic, Thriller.

Summary:

If you think that card sorting is part science, part art and a bit of reading between the lines, you would be right. There is no absolute 1 way approach. The best results are obtained by doing research. Speaking with a variety of different stake holders such as customers, sales people and support teams and asking the right questions. You also may have to conduct more than 1 card sort refining it as you go to get your final category structure.

No structure will be perfect, your overall aim however is to improve your findability rate so that the majority of visitors to your site can find what they are looking for without too much grief.

So after reading this article hopefully you will:

Understand the importance of a category structure that is easy to navigate
Know how to use Web Analytics to help identify potential problems
Be introduced to the concepts of user testing and user surveys - because web analytics can’t tell you everything.
Understand the benefits of card sorting when creating a traditional hierarchy structure
Be more confident should you wish to employ outside help from usability experts

In this article we have assumed that information is categorised using a traditional hierarchy approach. However on the web we have far more flexibility in the way we can organise information (tagging, related items, facets) than in the real world (think of a library or video store).

We’ll explore these different ideas and concepts in the next parts of this series along with other usability aids to help make your website more user friendly, allowing you to convert more visitors into customers.

Posted By Gavin Doolan, Google Analytics Team

The New Google Analytics: Dashboards

2011-03-24T10:47:00.001+00:00

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a small number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to more users soon. Sign up for early access.

Today, we would like to introduce you to the new dashboards that is available in the new version of Google Analytics announced last week.

Custom Dashboards
For most Google Analytics users, the dashboard is the first thing you see when viewing your reports. Dashboards in the new version of Google Analytics have been redesigned to be completely widget-based and highly customisable. There are four types of widgets: Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. This gives you the ability to choose the visualisation that best suits the data you want in your dashboard. The Dashboard uses a three-column layout, and you can customise the layout by dragging and dropping the widgets as you’d like.

Metric: Shows the value of a metric and a sparkline of that metric over the selected time period
Pie Chart: Best suited for displaying breakdowns of a metric by a certain dimension. E.g., Visits by Browser Type.
Timeline: A graph of any metric over time. You can also compare two metrics in the same graph.
Table: Think of this as a mini-custom report. You can show one dimension with two metrics and up to 10 rows of data in a table.

Multiple Dashboards
A common request we heard from you all is that one dashboard isn’t enough. You told us that wanted the ability to customise multiple dashboards for different analyses. Thanks to the new Google Analytics platform, we’re happy to give you the power to create multiple custom dashboards, up to 20 per profile. You might start with an overall “Company KPIs” Dashboard that includes the most important performance indicators for your company, then create an “SEO” Dashboard for your search engine optimisation efforts, and a “Content” Dashboard that centers around the content of your website. We’d love to hear what you do with the other 17 slots.

Going Forward
The core functionality for the new dashboards is ready for you to use, but this isn’t everything we’ve planned for dashboards in the new version. Because we are so excited about the new Dashboard, we decided to make its core features available to you first. For starters, we still need to bring some of the features from the current dashboard over, such as the ability to share, email, and export a Dashboard. We are actively working on them (along with many other improvements), so please stay tuned.

We hope you will find the Dashboards in the new Analytics easy and fun to use. Happy Dashboarding!

Posted by Yi Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics team