We are using the "New" Analytics interface.

If you are using the Google Analytics plugin for Joomla, or some custom built system to track individual users behavior in Google Analytics, you may want to take your “virtual stalking” to a whole new level of creepiness. All you have to do is create advanced segments based on Custom Variable values found in your Custom Variable reports — Don’t worry, they’re pretty easy and I’ll walk you through it. While I think it is more valuable to measure a segmented group, I can imagine plenty of scenarios where you may want to dig in and see precisely what a specific individual is doing. Lets get started!

Creating a custom variable advanced segment

1.  In Google Analytics, click Visitors > Custom Variables
2. If you are using the Google Analytics plugin for Joomla click on the “Registered Users” variable under “Custom Variables (Key 1)”
3. From there you will see a list of user names that are being tracked in Google Analytics. Find the user you want to track and copy down there user name.
4. Near the top of the page, you’ll see “advanced segments”. Click it and then the “+ add New Custom Segment”
5. From the custom segment widget choose, “Include” > “Custom Variable (Value 01)” > “Exactly matching” > “{USER NAME}” (Make sure you replace {USER NAME} with the actual user name you found in step 3.)
6. Give your report a good name. Something you will help you remember what the segment reports on like, “Virtual stalking Mr. Buttons”. Click the “apply” button and your done!

Now you can see which pages "Mr. buttons" has been visiting

Now the only data showing in Google Analytics is from this one user. From here you can find out all kinds of detailed information about the users behavior on your site. For example, you can click “Content > Pages” and see a list of all of the page they’ve visited. The number of times they’ve viewed those pages, the time spent looking at each page, etc.

This kind of analysis allows you to do very specific visitor behavior monitoring but be careful — You can quickly get into privacy issues. Make sure your sites privacy policies are up to date and that they allow for individual tracking.

If you find the above method helpful, I’d love to here how and why your using it.

Do you have privacy concerns with this level of monitoring? I’d love to here your reasons too!

After a 5 hour flight, and tired children, all we wanted to do is start our vacation, not feel like we’re being taken advantage of. However, the Hertz representative seemed to have other plans:

• 

  Hertz's considers the Corolla an "intermidate" size car

  When mid-size means “compact”: After failing to sell us on an upgrade from our mid-size to an SUV, the Hertz rep informed us that our mid-size car was going to be a Toyota Corolla. Huh? With 104 cu.ft. the Toyota Corolla would easily be classified by the EPA as a compact car, but apparently Hertz had their own categorization when it comes to vehicle size. Their “compact” cars are what most of us would consider “sub-compact”. When a company creates their own categorization, it is either to help clarify or to confuse their customers. I’ll let you guess why Hertz doesn’t follow the EPA or the car manufacturers classifications.

• Bring it in empty: The idea of not having to worry about filling up the gas before bringing it back is tempting, and could be sold as a convenience package. Instead Hertz tries to convince you that buying a full tank of gas from them is a financially wise move. “You know our gas is $0.10 cheaper then what you’ll pay out there.” It’s simple math. lets say the average price per gallon is $3.50 (and Hertz charges $3.40), the vehicle has a 10 gallon tank and you happen to use 9 gallons.
• Fill it yourself: $3.50 x 9 = $31.50
• Bring it in empty: $3.40 x 10 = $34.00
• Premium insurance: Depending on your auto insurance or credit card, your rental may already be covered under your policy. Most people don’t know, and Hertz has absolutely no interest helping you find out. Instead they are willing to sell you premium insurance that can cost more than the rental itself. The insurance option and rates are not available in advance or online. They wait until you are at the counter and not in a position do do research or change your plans.

What could Hertz have done differently?

Instead of feeling like we were being taken advantage of, we could have left feeling like Hertz was looking out for our best interest and still sold us on all of these additions. Here is how:

• Use commonly used terms to describe vehicle types. Use terms that will clarify, not confuse your customers.
• Properly position options. Don’t try to convince customers that they’ll save money, when the real value is convenience.
• All additional options should be available in advanced so that customers have the ability to do the proper research and make informed decisions.

What sales practices have you seen that made you feel like you were being taken advantage of?

The team over at Google AdWords has made it extremely easy to create and execute Google AdWords campaigns. That’s Great news for companies interested in online advertising, but often their campaigns perform below their potential, or worse, actually lose money. Online advertising is a complex and fast changing world and Google AdWords is an incredibly robust tool. In order to truly make the most of it, I typically recommend that you have at least one member of your marketing team dedicated to online advertising.

Until you are ready to make that kind of commitment, here is a list of the often missed Google AdWords strategies.

Target languages:

When displaying ads to potential customers what language do they prefer? More importantly, what languages are you ready to support? If you’re going to pay for traffic you want to make sure that language barriers are not going to create additional friction for your visitors.

Recommendations:

• Separate your campaigns by language. English ads should only be displayed to people that have their browsers set to English. Spanish ads to Spanish people, French to French, you get the point.
• Only advertise in the languages that your website support. If your website is only available in English, French, and Spanish don’t waste your money advertising to German speaking people. Trust me,  take a look at the goal conversion rates of visitors by language. Looking at the chart to the right you can immediately tell that this website is only available in English.

Target regions:

A close cousin to target language is target region. Even if you’ve set a language preference, your ads may still appear to people who are outside of your targeted demographic. Why? Target language is implemented by looking at the preferred language settings on a person’s browser, regardless of what country they are in. That makes it possible for anyone to have their browser set to your targeted language even if they don’t speak that language. A real life example of this is, Vietnamese people from Hanoi seem to have their browser preference set to English, even though they don’t speak English - Lots of click-through traffic and ZERO conversions!

Recommendations:

• Create a regional white list: For each language you are targeting you should identify which regions speak that language. My own white listing strategy reduced our ad spending  by over 470% while actually increasing revenue.
• Cultural considerations: Language isn’t the only reason for filtering a particular region. For example, local buying preferences can have a profound affect on your visitors’ conversion rates. I still haven’t figured out why, but visitors from the UK convert at half the rate of other English speaking countries. Make sure to use your web analytics reports to identify the conversion rates of each region you are considering.

Image Ads:

By default your Google Ad campaigns will display on both the Search and the Display Network. The Display Network are the thousands of websites that allocate advertising space to Google through their Google AdSense program. There are some amazing advertising opportunities on the Display Network but only if your ads are appearing on the right web sites.

Recommendations:

• Create image ads: Text ads (the only ads available on the Search Network) will also show on the Display Network. However, a lot of websites don’t allocate space for text ads. What that means is, if you don’t add image ads to your campaign, your ads won’t appear on many high quality websites. From my own experience I’ve seem image ads outperform text ads by 300% on the Display Network.
• Monitor your campaign placements: In your Google AdWords account under Campaign/Networks/ you can see the websites (Placements) where your ads have been appearing. Click through to these websites and make sure that they match the interest of your target audience. If they don’t add them to your disapproved placements list right away!

Quality Score:

The Page Rank of your website’s landing pages and the amount of competition for a particular keyword are two major factor in how much you pay per click and how often your ads will appear. The lower the competition and better your Page Rank, the lower your Pay-Per-Click and the better your ROI. You can’t do much about competition for a keyword but you can improve your landing page’s Page Rank.

Recommendations:

• Keywords in your page title: As part the secret formula Google uses to determine Page Rank they look at how much importance your landing page places on those keywords. If your landing page includes the keywords in your title it tells Google that those keywords are VERY important to your page.
• Be helpful: Make sure that your landing pages have helpful information to people searching for that keyword. If your landing pages are not helpful don’t count on a good quality score.
• Be diligent: Sometimes even Google makes mistakes and can accidentally give your landing pages a poor Quality Scores. If you see a Quality Score that seems surprisingly bad, you should report it to the Google AdWords team.
• Hire a copywriter who understands Search Engines: Notice I did not say “Hire a search engine marketing expert” many of these “experts” will give you recommendations meant to game the system. You may see a quick bump in your page rank, but long-term this isn’t a good strategy. A good copywriter will help you create useful content and maximize the influence it can have on Search Engines.

Filter brand campaigns

Even if their brands rank in the #1 search engine spot, most companies include a Google AdWords campaign that targets their brands. The are a lot of good reasons why you should have brand name search campaigns but what most companies don’t do is filter them properly. Brand name click-throughs are important but more importantly is the referrer a person used before they clicked through your brand name campaign.

Recommendation:

• Add a “no override” string to destination URLS. In your Google AdWords brand campaigns you can add the following string [?utm_nooverride=1] to the end of your destination URLS. What that will effectively do is prevent Google Analytics from overriding any previous referrer. This gives you the benefit of brand name campaigns while still being able to identify the original source of that traffic.

Now that you’ve read through these five often missed Google AdWords strategies, take a look through your AdWords campaigns and see how many improvements you can make. Let me know which ones have the greatest impact on your campaigns. If you have any questions or comments, leave a comment below or check out the contact page

FreshClicks’ Google Analytics plugin features:

• New Asynchronous tracking code: Enhances the speed in which the tracking code is loaded. With this version of the tracking code, you can also place the Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering.
• New GATC code placement: Your GATC code will appear in the new preferred location in the <head> of the document rather than near the closing </body> tag.
• Track registered individuals: This optional feature gives you the ability to easily see the individual behavior of all of your registered users in Google Analytics using their new Custom Variables function.
• Native Joomla! 1.5 code: the plugin was written in Joomla’s new, more object-orientated format and should play very nicely with other Joomla plugins.

Why track registered individuals?

There are lots of situations where tracking individual behavior on your website could be beneficial. If, for example you run a training website, and you expect your students to read a particular page, or spend 20 minutes a day on the site, you can easily see which of your students are participating.

How the tracking works

If you have activated the “Track registered users” option in the plugin’s administrator interface, and the plugin detects that a registered user is logged in, it will set a custom Variable in Google analytics. Initially I was going to create a user defined value, but Google Analytics recently depreciated their _setVar() function in favor of the more powerful Custom Variables, _setCustomVar() function. This new function gives you much more flexibility than the basic user defined options available in _setVar().

In FreshClicks’ Google Analytics 2.0 I set the Custom Variable as follows:

• Index: 1 – This is the slot in the custom variable report where the data will be stored. Currently they give you 1-5 slots. If you are already using slot 1, you may need to modify this plugin.
• Name: RegisteredUsers – This is a string that identifies the custom variable and appears in the top-level Custom Variables report of the Analytics reports.
• Value: {UserName} – This variable loads in the users name and it is paired with the name, “RegisteredUsers”
• opt_scope: 1 – This custom variable is set at the visitor level and is associated with a visitor.

Viewing your registered Users in Google Analytics:

You can see the behavior of your users by logging into your Google Analytics report and going to Visitors>Custom Variables

From there you will see the column “Custom Variable” with the value “RegisteredUsers”. Clicking on the “RegisteredUsers” link will bring up the report on individual users. You can drill down further and discover all kinds of interesting bits of information about your users.

Free to use and distribute

You are free to use and distribute this application as you wish. I just ask that you leave the attributions in place.

Also, it would be great to hear what you think of the Plugin, how your organization is making use of it, and suggestions for future iterations.

Download:

• Joomla 1.5 plg_FCGanalytics2.0.zip
• Joomla 1.6 plg_FCGanalytics2.2.zip – Special thanks to Osiloke Emoekpere for providing the modification to make it J!1.6 compliant.

I just added QR Codes to a new batch of business cards for Fresh Clicks so I figured I’d walk you through the process, so that you can create your own:

1. Tag your URL: I wouldn’t be much of a marketer if I didn’t recommend adding tracking code to your hyperlink. If you use Google Analytics, tagging your link is easy. Just hop on over to Google’s URL builder and plug in your information. I added the following values, but feel free to add whatever you want:
   • Campaign Source: mini (I chose “mini” because these particular cards were moo mini cards)
   • Medium: businesscard
   • Campaign Name: QRcode
2. Create a shortened URL: QR Codes get more complicated as you add more data. To make it easier for smart phones to read your code, you should use a URL shorting service. You can use bit.ly or any number of other URL shortening services. I recommend using Google’s URL shortner for two simple reasons:
   • It’s Google, so you know they are going to be around for a while
   • The .gl extension is a domain of Greenland and not Lybia, like the .ly extension in bit.ly. Many have argued, just like Arron Pigeon in his article “Why investing in Bitly last week was a bad idea“, that the .ly extension is a risky bet because Lybia could pull the plug whenever they want.
3. Create your QR Code: There are plenty of free QR Code generators out there but I liked using the KAYWA QR Code generator. It was easy to use, didn’t have a lot of complicated options, and it generated a large QR Code (324px × 324px) in PNG format. You could just add a .qr to the end of your newly shortened Goo.gl link like this, goo.gl/KPWVm.qr, but I wasn’t happy with the code it created. The pixel size was a bit low, and though I couldn’t be sure, it seemed like the QR Code it generated was more complicated than the one from KAYWA.
4. Creating your business cards: For this batch of cards I decided to use the moo mini cards. I have been very happy with the quality of their service and the mini cards are another great way to set you apart. You have the option of uploading a different image on every card, and you can add your QR Code to the back with your standard contact info. You have to be careful not to make your QR Code too small. It is recommended that your don’t make it smaller then 0.70 inches. To make it easier I’ve created a Photoshop MiniMoo Back Template Card QR Code for you to use.

If you end up adding a QR Code to your business card make sure you let me know about it! Have fun, and happy scanning!

Two types of search engine traffic

We can break search engine traffic into two types: research and bookmark.

• Research is pretty straightforward; a visitor was looking for a solution to a problem: “I want a new pair of shoes from a company that cares about people.” They use keywords like, “shoe company that donates shoes” and they discover a new company.
• Search engines as bookmark traffic is much different. “I know the product/company I want, but I am not sure I remember how to get to their website.” These are two very different kinds of search intentions but unfortunately web analytics systems have no way to differentiate the two.

The attribution problem

Attribution is giving credit to the traffic source that a visitor used before making a purchase or some other event that we value. With all of the major web analytics solutions they have decided that the last source of traffic is the one that should get the credit.

In Google Analytics, when someone visits your website from a referring source, Google Analytics’ JavaScript sets a cookie on the visitor’s machine with information about the referring source. Each time that visitor returns, the cookie gets overwritten with new referrer information. The only time a traffic source doesn’t get overwritten is when the visitor types the URL directly into the web browser or if they use a bookmark. This is considered direct traffic and isn’t seen as attributing to the purchase. Most of the time this makes perfect sense, but when visitors use search engines as a bookmark it skews our data.

Using our previous example of Jason and Tom’s shoes, Google analytics attributes the purchase with the organic search result and no credit goes to the ad. Clearly Jason’s intent when visiting Google was to get to Toms.com. The ad that brought him to the website during his research phase doesn’t get any of the credit.

If this kind of “search engines as bookmark” traffic is really just a different kind of direct traffic, then why not report it as such? This will prevent your those brand name keywords from getting credit for the sale and make sure your ads get the credit they deserve.

A simple solution

If you’re using Google Analytics you can easily modify the JavaScript code to treat organic brand name traffic as direct traffic. Locate your Google Analytics JavaScript code. If you are using the new code, the first portion will look something like this:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-123456-7']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Just before, “_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);” you will want to add, “_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredOrganic', 'keyword']);”, for each brand name keyword you want treated as direct traffic.

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-123456-7']);
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredOrganic', 'keyword']); // if referrer is organic do not override referrer
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Now search engine traffic, where the visitor is using your brand names, will be treated as direct traffic by Google Analytics and will not overwrite any previous source information.

Photo by Rob Shaer

Your team has spent the last eighteen months cooking up the latest, greatest, video game to hit the market. Countless hours of effort and now the big payoff. You release the game for distribution and within hours it happens, pirated keys start showing up on Twitter. You cringe as you try to calculate how much revenue you’re going to lose to software pirating.

It is an all too familiar scenario and, according to WIRED magazine editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson’s latest book FREE: A radical new pricing structure, you’re the one t.o blame for all of this pirating.

According to Anderson, setting the price too high, making an inferior product, or even adding DRM (Digital Rights Management) software are all possible reasons why people who would rather pay for your product have turned to pirating. But should you believe him?

Anecdotal evidence is no way to prove a theory

As with most modern books in this genre, it is filled with anecdotes that weave together a powerful story meant to support the author’s claims. Though that is not the best method to build one’s case, it seems to be an accepted practice.

Especially if the anecdotal evidence is false

If building a theory completely on anecdotal evidence isn’t bad enough, falsifying or misrepresenting the results of an anecdote so that it fits your theory is dangerous to your readers. In FREE, Anderson makes a lot of arguments for his FREE business model. For this article I am focused specifically on the case of pirating software. Anderson claims that software pirates are really just customers waiting for the proper motivation to buy. He writes the following account of Cliff Harris, the owner of a small video game software company called Positech Games as his primary evidence. Harris went to slashdot.org a popular technology forum and asked them why they were pirating his games. According to the book, Harris was surprised to find out that the DRM (Digital Rights Management) software was making it difficult for his actual paying customers and that it was priced too high. Anderson wrote, “Much to his credit, the sincere responses to his questions changed Harris’ mind. He decided to alter his business model. He reduced the price of his games in half to $10….” and, “…with his survey he looked into the mind of the pirate and saw a paying customer looking for a reason to come out.”

The real story behind Positech Games

Having spent enough time being a pirate (in my early days) and later working in software development, I just didn’t believe the above story. So I did a little research and tracked down Cliff Harris from Positech Games to hear it from the source. The first thing that surprised me was that Harris didn’t even know he was in the book. It seems that Anderson was using a secondary source for his story and not going directly to the source… odd? Second, Harris had a much different takeaway from his experience talking with the pirates.

Directly from Cliff Harris,

My experience after talking with pirates was this:
Lowering the price didn’t work. It actually made less money overall. Maybe this is because my products (strategy games) are a niche market. I have carried out countless experiments price-wise and the current price ($20-24) is the best one for my products. It turns out people will always demand that stuff is too expensive when asked, even if it isn’t . I’ll believe that ‘free’ is the new business model the day my local grocery store lets me take the food for free. Till then… it isn’t happening outside a tiny media bubble. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for everyone’s food and shelter.

Removing DRM was a good move in the long run. it meant less hassle for me, and happier customers, and a boost to reputation in terms of being an easy company to buy from. I suspect it has had a long term boost in sales, although such things are extremely hard to quantify for a small business such as mine. I’d guess a 5% boost in long term sales, but that is just a guess.

A much different (and less compelling) story but it is the truth.

Who do you trust?

Whether Anerson’s theories in FREE are correct or not, false anecdotes are no way to win them over. In order to protect myself, from what could be dangerous and misleading ideas, I now treat all of Chris Anderson’s writings with suspicion. In all fairness, Anderson may have just been guilty of sloppy research. In his source notes Anderson quotes Why People Pirate Stuff as his source for the Cliff Harris story, but if Anderson would have followed the link in the article he could have read Harris’s own words on the topic, Talking To Pirates. In Harris’s own words, “I think my current games are priced right,” He halved the price of an older game just prior to releasing the sequel and planned on keeping his new games at their usual $20 range.

So, do you think Anderson was trying to mislead his readers or just guilty of sloppy research?

Photo by Rob Shaer

The optimization experiment was seen as a failure, I lost some credibility in my department, and future optimization plans were scrapped. I wanted to spend more time trying to understand why, but there never seems to be a shortage of marketing related projects, and it was nine months before I had a chance to come back and take a closer look.

A closer look at web optimization

When we optimized the free-trial download page, we optimized for two things:

• Make it easier for visitors to download the free trial of our product
• Get them to subscribe to email campaigns about the product

The first time I measured the results I failed to account for the revenue impact this increase in email subscribers would have on our business.  In the nine months after the redesign our email subscribers have increased by over 500%. This had a huge impact on revenue. Transactions from free-trial email subscribers after the optimization increased by of over 600%!

So why did conversion rates decrease?

If you remember when we first optimized the web form it was to coincide with the release of a new version of our product. We’ll, six months later we had another version release and the conversion rate of our free-trial to paying customers jumped back up. It turns out that the conversion rate had more to do with the product offering and less to do with the web optimization. Sounds like information I need to pass on to our product manager!

Paying it forward

This all happened in the first nine months and we expect these number to continue to grow at the same rate. The optimized web form resulted in +58% more people trying out our software, and a +500% larger email subscriber base that continues to grow and translates into more sales.

The biggest lesson here is to make sure that, not only should you clearly identify the goals of your web optimization strategy, you should have a plan to measure those results.

What kind of web optimizations have you attempted? How’d that work out for you?

Reducing Friction

Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form; Anytime you ask people to do something you are creating a point of friction. Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are experiencing. It is easy to forget about friction but doing so may severely inhibit the success of your campaigns.

Now that I have you thinking about friction, let me show you what happens to your marketing efforts when you reduce it.

Old “friction” form

Old form

On our website we have a 30-day free trial download page and when people download the trial they have an option to add their email address.

Problems that caused friction:

• Unnecessary instructions: There are four steps involved in downloading the free trial. We are telling the audience that the steps to downloading a free-trial are so complex that we had to give you instructions! That kind of complexity is surely going to cause friction
• Wrong order: They came to the page in order to download a free trial, but instead we talk about their email address and ask for it first. The actual links to the free trial downloads are much lower on the page.
• Email form field: We ask for an email address, but don’t say why. Sure we mention it way up at the top of the page, but they didn’t need to make a decision to give it until now.
• Too many versions: You want someone to make the decision about which version they need after they have decided they want to download it. Showing all of those versions and (unnecessary system requirements) makes it look more complicated then it needs to be.
• Special instructions: Install instructions do not belong in the download form. That information should be on the thank you page. Once someone has invested the time to actually download the free-trial.

New “reduced friction” form

New "reduced friction" form

• Removed all of those unnecessary instructions.
• Included a product picture and positioning message to remind them why they want to try out the software.
• Added a drop-down input field with the most popular version preloaded so that most customers will not have to change version.
• Email request is after the form free trial option and there is a clear benefit associated with providing their address.
• Large “download now” button makes it easy to understand the purpose of the form.

After implementing these changes our average email subscriber rate jumped more than 300%!

Only part of your overall strategy

By now it should be apparent that reducing friction will go a long way in creating more successful marketing campaigns. But remember it is only part of the solution; You still need to create marketing programs to attract new customers.

As part of your high level marketing strategy, map out the entire path a person takes from first-contact (whether it is an ad, a trade show booth, search engine etc.) to successful conversion to paying customer. Now that you have identified all of the areas of friction, you can build a marketing program with the greatest chances of success.

Have you had personal experience optimizing the customer experience to reduce friction? Did this article convince you to make changes? If so I’d love to hear from you!

What areas of your site are vulnerable?

Forms/ input fields:

FTP:

Files and folders:

File Permissions: Thats how they got me

What the heck is CHMOD?

This is how I fixed it

Folders:

Files:

What kind of measures have you implemented to safeguard your website?

Image by: Zach Klein