Below are seven ways Google Analytics can be used to help make the right decisions during a redesign.

1. What browsers and windows sizes should we support?

When designing your site you want to ensure that the majority of your customers can view your website and convert without browser versions or sizes preventing this.

I’d personally think that you should design your website in a size that at least 95% of your visitors can see without having to scroll horizontally. An easy way to check what browser sizes your current visitors are using is to go the Screen resolutions report under Visitors > Browser capabilities > Screen resolutions.

By comparing to site average you can also see if any particular screen resolution(s) has a significantly higher bounce rate

In the graph above you can see that the wider screen resolutions are actually performing much worse – this could be addressed by using a liquid layout or JavaScript to position content.

A quick way to check if your site has browser compatibility is to look at the browser report and compare each type to the site average, for the website below it is clear that there is poor support for safari.

The mobile browser report can help to decide whether a mobile version of your site is needed by looking at the bounce and conversion rate of mobile visits.

2. What territory specific pages or languages do we need to support?

The languages report under visitors is a useful way of seeing the proportion of foreign visitors to your site; this is particularly useful if you have an international website as it may indicate territory specific versions required that may help increase conversions.

Additionally, even if your website is UK focused, you may find that foreign speakers use your site.  This is especially relevant if your business is travel related as foreign people living in the UK or visiting short term may be interested in your services.  See this report under Visitors > Languages.

3. Can our customers find what they are looking for?

The internal search reports are really insightful as they show what your users are looking for once they are on your site, giving you an indication about missing or difficult to find content. A word cloud is a quick way to see what search terms regularly appear.

To create a word cloud, download the data, put the search term in column A, the number of times it was searched in column B and paste the formulae =REPT((A1&” “),B1) down column C. Grab all the words from Column C and paste into Wordle.

Word cloud from the internal search of World Vision, one of our charity clients (posted with permission)

4. Which landing/promotion pages need improving?

In a redesign it is important to understand which pages need changing as well knowing which pages are working well and should be left as they are. Google Analytics offers several reports & metrics for interpreting the performance of individual & groups of pages:

Goal funnel visualization – one of the most easy to understand, it graphically shows where visitors are leaking out of your sales funnels. Goal funnels need to be set up manually and when done so can be found under Goals > Goal funnel visualization

Site overlay – Using this report (Content > Site overlay) you can see at a page level what visitors are actually click on helping to show the effectiveness of call to actions and promotions. Not only can you look at the number of clicks on these items but also the ecommerce value i.e. users clicking this button have gone on to generate xx revenue

£ index – this under used metric, shown in the top content report, shows how important visits to a particular page are when visitors convert. You may find that pages like the about us, shipping & returns pages have high £ index values as visitors often view them before making a purchase and help a user decide if they should buy your products. Sounds obvious but it might suggest that including a shipping and returns policy info box on product pages helps improve conversions (particularly likely on high value goods).

Bounce rate/exit rates – bounce rate shows the number of visitors that viewed one page and then left, while exit rate shows visitors that leave the site after viewing a particular page (they may have viewed multiple pages before). These metrics can help you understand which landing pages are under performing or common places that visitors are leaving your site.  

(Page URLs removed from image)

However, these reports, like most analytics, must be understood in context to know if there really is an issue or not. When evaluating a page it is important to consider the objective of the page, how does its performance compare to other pages and are any problems a result of a design, content, product or brand issue (always difficult to know!).

The analysis of the above reports provide a great starting point for user testing as they can help identify issues on your site that are preventing conversions.

After launch

When a new site is built it is obviously important to bench mark performance before and after using KPIs that are relevant to your business such as visits, conversions, average transaction value, revenue etc.

However, it can take a few weeks for these metrics to settle down making it difficult to tell early on if there are any problems with your new website. By setting up custom alerts you can get near real time warnings of any errors or changes that may have occurred. The sensitivity of these alerts depends on your website, suggested values are used below

5. Is tracking set up correctly?

A common error that occurs in Google Analytics is a large amount of self-referrals showing up in the traffic source report i.e. the top referring site is your own! This can happen for a number of reasons such as certain pages not having tracking codes, use of frames, page redirects or sub domain and/or multi domain tracking not set up correctly. These self-referrals overwrite the original referral information preventing you from knowing where these visitors came from.

To be able to fix these tracking errors quickly before they skew your reports, it’s useful to use a custom alert (Intelligence > Custom report) to email you if there are any large daily increases in self-referrals.

Even with this alert I recommend that you add an analytics check into your QA/testing process to ensure no errors or loss of data when an updates are made.

6. Has the redesign affected our search rankings?

With any luck your new site and content will have significant improvement in search engine rankings and subsequent increases in traffic.

But it wouldn’t be a lie to say I’ve seen a big brand push a site live without removing the staging server robots.txt file, which was being used to blocking search engine access, this in turn caused the new site to completely drop out of Google!  Even if large changes in rankings like that don’t happen, its useful to monitor organic traffic after launch to be aware of decreases or increases in visits (as well as changes in rankings using this GA filter).

If you do see drastic falls in organic traffic I’d recommend not reacting unless you’re absolutely sure you know the cause, rankings tend to jostle around a little after a redesign and you could end up changing something for the worse.

7. Tracking 404 pages

When launching a new site it is important to ensure you redirect old pages to new pages, however, errors can easily occur with redirect rules causing users to land on 404 pages.

Tracking visits to 404 pages in Google Analytics is easy, simply add the tracking code to the 404 page template and ensure the page title has 404 in it. Then to see which pages are missing navigate to Content > Content by title > find and click the 404 page, this will show you a list of page URLs that have been requested but not found. Unfortunately a custom alert does not work here as you cannot have the page title as an alert, therefore it is important to check this report regularly after launch. You can also use Google webmaster tools to check 404 pages but I prefer the additional traffic insights Google Analytics can give.

Please share in the comments any other reports, filters and advanced segments that can help during a redesign.

Post from: Connect

7 ways Google Analytics can help when redesigning your website

As someone who works agency-side I started thinking specifically about what the implications of Paul’s observations of human social behaviour are for brands, especially those taking part in the social web. Intriguingly, it suggests that social media is a customer retention, not a customer acquisition, game.

Social ties

In his presentation, Paul discusses the established theory that human beings develop two types of connections – strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties are those people closest to us, such as best friends and family. Most people are unlikely to have more than six strong ties in their lives. Our weak ties are those we are less close to but might be in infrequent contact with. It is believed that the limits of the human brain mean that the average person is not capable of staying up to date with more than 150 weak ties at any one time. We might know many more people but we simply can’t stay alert to them all.

What does this mean for brands in social media?

The implications for those who work in marketing are quite profound, but also incredibly useful. It opens up a new level of detail, and in some ways provides a reality-check, to the all-encompassing notion of engagement. It suggests there are limits to just how engaged with people a brand can be. Realistically, a brand is not going to make it into someone’s group of strong ties and should not try to do so. This group is incredibly small and reserved for those closest to us.

Equally, it means that judging Facebook success, for instance, by the amount of people who ‘like’ your brand is flawed. For many of the people who have ‘liked’ you, it’s highly possible that your brand still falls outside the 150 weak ties that they can keep up with. The social web has enabled us to expand our list of connections – people don’t limit their list of Facebook friends to 150 after all – but the human brain is no more able than it was before to deal with them all. And, significantly, Paul points out that Facebook users currently have 130 friends on average.

The limits of our ability to maintain any more than 150 weak ties also brings into question the value of campaigns that require you to ‘like’ the brand in order to take part, such as competitions. Here, you are creating one-off relationships that will be difficult to build upon.

Instead, it seems a more realistic, and strategically astute, decision to focus digital marketing efforts on making sure your brand is a valued weak tie in people’s social networks. This is even more sensible when we consider that if we can only ever handle 150 weak ties at any one time then each person’s ties are likely to be at capacity already. A quick look at the brands I have ‘liked’ on Facebook suggests that, other than those that have a work-related purpose, most are ones that I already had a connection with outside of my use of that site. It wasn’t their presence on Facebook that established the connection; the connection already existed.

What should the strategy be?

The suggestion here, as made by Paul in his presentation, is that social networks don’t actually enable the creation of additional connections, they just make our existing connections more visible to us. This of course somewhat belies the common marketing notion that there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people just waiting to fit your brand into their lives. In fact, for most people, their lives are likely to be full already.

The possible outcome of this, somewhat controversially, is that much of a brand’s effort in a social media space such as Facebook should be given to maintaining existing ties rather than establishing new ones; to forging deeper relationships with those people who are already positively predisposed to your brand.

Of course, social media activity is still likely to result in your brand creating some new weak ties – after all, our social ties are not static, permanent connections. That said, if it is predominantly a retention game then the likelihood is that you’ll have to be interesting enough to bump out an existing connection in order to enter someone’s network of weak ties. And of course, if you’re not proving to be interesting enough yourself then you might be the one that gets bumped out.

If all this is true then we are indeed in a relationship-based customer retention game, not a numbers-based acquisition one.

You can find Paul Adams’ original presentation, which provided the inspiration for this post, here. It’s lengthy, but in a good way, and comes wholly recommended.

Post from: Connect

Does human behaviour make the social web a retention game for brands?

I always thought location was the only factor deciding the ranking of the map listing; the better optimised the map is to the location keyword, the higher are its chances to rank on top. However, according to the latest edition of David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors, there are more points to take into consideration. The most positive ones are summarised below:-

1. Claiming places page/local listing
2. Associating Google Place page with proper categories
3. Use of product or service keyword in title and description of local listing
4. Use of product or service keyword in description of local listing
5. Using local area codes or numbers
6. KML File and Geo-Sitemap (the Geo-Sitemap/KML protocol is a standard enabling to identify the physical location of the business in a standard file format.)
7. hCard Microformat (standardized protocol for displaying contact information. Google and Yahoo have both announced their support for this format.)
8. Customer Reviews (although they were once considered an important aspect, this factor is now largely supposed to be diluted, as per the recent ranking research)

More local submissions:

Apart from the above mentioned, submitting to as many local search engines or directories as you can will add more value to the listing as it builds trust for Google. It is also recommended that you submit the website to local search engines such as Yahoo!Local, CitySearch, Yell or SuperPages. Google has a Local Business Center, as well as data providers such as InfoUSA, which are just as helpful in pulling up the site rankings locally.

Spying competitors:

It is good practice to keep an eye on who is appearing on top in the listings and look into which directories they have submitted and what tactics they are using to inform future programmes of work.

Things to avoid:

Among the factors that can have negative impact are using 800# or multiple phone numbers across listings, using non-local area code, listing PO Box on a website without a physical address, multiple listings with same phone number and/or address, over-loading geo-targeted keywords into non-related categories or fields and a high percentage of bad reviews.

The Future:

Inclusion of local search in universal listings must have massively uplifted the number of local searches conducted recently.

Also, with Twitter joining the race and introducing Twitter Places (which lets you tag tweets with specific places as well as creating new Twitter Places), the local search is undergoing a major shift. People might rely more on a Twitter Place page for the most updated snapshot of a local business (complete with the latest tweets), rather than a Google Place Page — many of which often show reviews that are months or years old.

Google has been trying to integrate its business and maps data with real-time context via Google Buzz on Maps, but after its poorly executed launch, Buzz has fundamentally failed to capture people’s interest. Google must now try even harder to innovate if it is to prevent the inception of a Twitter-dominated local search landscape.

Post from: Connect

Ranking higher in Local Search Results

A recent study in the US found that more than half of social network users are worried about their privacy.

In the main, privacy concerns seem to focus on the complexity of managing your public profile on Facebook and other services. However, with a growing awareness of broader privacy issues by  mainstream web users is beginning to invite more attention to the ways brands respect and support their customers needs in this area.

Even activities as apparently benign as listening to social media conversations about your brand are being questioned by some in the media (see the recent Daily Mail story about web monitoring). Now MPs are portraying companies “trawling Facebook for negative comments” as being “something worthy of the secret police”, understandable in a totalitarian state but unacceptable in ours (perhaps we should ask how many UK Government departments are monitoring social media for mentions of their policy areas).

Whatever our opinions on these stories, its clear that brands need to bear in mind privacy issues in how they develop their online campaigns and especially those where user participation or individuals’ data is involved.

Here are some thoughts to bear in mind:

• Understand user perspective on the issue: We tend to see privacy from a legal point of view, but much more important is how people feel about the issues involved. Clear explanations of how data will be used is required to avoid the perception that a brand wants to pry into a user’s personal information.
• Privacy is a social network as well as a personal issue: Friends and family’s  may be affected by breaches of an individual’s privacy and they will affect the user’s thinking about privacy in turn.
• Involve legal expertise early and often in your planning: In the past marketers have tended to think of legal as a clearing house for content, a rubber stamp or brand risk management mechanism quite separate from the digital team. At iCrossing, we have often had to challenge this view, bringing legal expertise into the heart of the planning process for blogs, community platforms and broader social media marketing efforts. With this approach we can balance the users’ needs with a given organisation’s need to responsibly manage risk.
• Legal is part of the customer experience: Think about the way that Facebook apps have been criticised by campaigners for handing over too much access / power to the platform and the brand when you agree to install one on your profile. I recall hearing the brilliant Struan Robertson, a lawyer who runs the Out-Law blog talking at Social Media Influence a couple of years ago about adding in your own terms and conditions to that sign-up process to make it clear what information you will and won’t need access to from a user’s profile and why. This kind of approach goes beyond what’s required, but can help to distance your brand from the clumsy, sweeping disclaimers and small print that most people don’t read, but if paid close attention to can make your intentions to wards personal data see, as it were, less than benign.
• Be aware of shifting attitudes: Understanding of and attitudes to privacy issues online can differ greatly between individuals. There is one universal trend, however; people’s web literacy, their knowledge and experience of how the web works, is increasing all of the time and their attitudes towards issues like privacy will change. For campaigns planned a year in advance, this can be an issue as views and technology use can change quickly.

I’m sure there will be and is more to say on this topic, and it is one we will be watching closely.

Post from: Connect

Brands need to understand users’ privacy concerns

(click for a larger image)

Above we looked at how the top six cinema chains rank for search in each location. As you can see from the graphic above, there is no one outright winner with different brands performing well in each city. In London, Odeon took just over 60% the natural search cinema market, while in Edinburgh My Vue took 70%.

(click for a larger image)

Next we can see how many people are searching each month for cinemas at each of the 10 cities we looked at. Perhaps unsurprisingly the more people living in that city the more people are searching for cinemas at that location. For smaller cities such as Nottingham people are quite straightforward in the ways they search, searching using phrases such as ‘cinemas in nottingham’, ‘nottingham cinema times’ or ‘cinema listings Nottingham’. While in larger cities such as London they are more specific in their search ‘cinemas central london‘, ‘north london cinemas’ or ‘kings road cinema london’

Certain sectors are highly location specific (e.g. the hospitality sector) and as such their online strategies will need to be different to areas were location is not as crucial (e.g. Insurance). Search is becoming increasingly personalised and in sectors like cinema and movie search mobile is growing in importance. As a brand it is important to know how people find your product, who your competitors are and their strengths and weaknesses. Online all this information is easily quantifiable, much of it from free data sources therefore there really is no excuse not to be well informed when planning your online marketing campaigns.

Post from: Connect

Its summer, time to go to the movies…

Caffeine is “a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online”. What does this mean at this stage? Well exactly what it says on the tin: Caffeine is in it’s infancy but has been built with the future of ever increasing content creation in mind.

Google also announced the ‘may day update’ (around May time surprisingly) which is an algorithmic change to place more focus on long tail searches. Long tail focus is a win for online content because Google will now put relevance on deeper content with less focus on domain authority and greater focus on tail terms and deep links. Going on the Pareto principle 80-20 theory of the long tail then we are looking at an algorithmic shift in the worlds biggest search engine that actually favours the non-hits (or at least is trying harder to find them).

A quote from Matt Cutts in this video:

“…we’re trying to assess the quality of sites that match up to long-tailed queries…”

Assessing the quality – of course Google will continue to tweak this algorithm change to perform as smoothly as possible. Combine this with Caffeine (“an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online” – remember) and you have Google indexing pages, faster and in higher quantity with additional focus on the 80% of that 80-20 split getting users to deeper product pages and quality content faster.

If you’re into rotoscoping and close ups of Matt Cutts (or if you just want to learn the nuts and bolts of how Google finds what you’re looking for) then this is a neat little video.

Post from: Connect

The importance of great content

Just a couple of weeks into the job and I’ve seen it already: A client has lots of great content, but it’s not quite doing what they want it to, like engage readers, generate social activity, lead to registrations or subscriptions, etc. But just like in therapy, the first step toward recovery is acknowledging you have a problem in the first place.

Before therapy begins, however, we’ll need to do a full assessment of your content history, an audit, really that’s a quantitative and qualitative review of your content, the types (video, blog) and where can it be found. Does it help you achieve your goals? Is it useful to your audience? Is it up to date? This can be therapeutic in itself as it will make issues transparent that are often messy and nebulous.

After this thorough assessment, it’s time for more in-depth therapy to begin, but don’t worry, I’m a professional. I’m here to listen, not judge. You’ll talk me through where it hurts. So you launched a blog but it didn’t get many readers or comments? Tell me more. How does it make you feel when you send your content away from your own site—somewhere it gets more attention, but where you have less control? Does it stress you out?

I’ll want to know the history and complexity behind your pain. What path brought you here? I’ll listen with my clipboard in hand, occasionally rubbing my chin knowingly and ask open-ended, probing questions. Then I’ll chat with those closest to you to get their take. How do they perceive and respond to the pain? Are they enablers, or true supporters?

And finally, the audit and therapy notes from all the relevant stakeholders will be turned into a proposed diagnosis and action plan—in other words, a content strategy. Based in research and dovetailing with SEO, and a social strategy, it’s essentially our recommendation and action plan that can help you achieve your goals through content.

Essentially, all of your content should be a valuable business asset that’s findable, shareable, useful and engaging. So, is it time to get on the chaise?

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Content strategist as therapist

Methodology

In order to perform this analysis a two week benchmark period and a test period were set up. The periods were selected to be as similar as possible, both Monday – Sunday periods, however some seasonal variation was inevitable, therefore we analysed the traffic for non brand terms for the two periods to see if there was any change. The results showed a 5.1% uplift in the second period over the first, therefore a 5.1% uplift was added to the first period to normalise the results.

Results

The results showed that the majority of visits and revenue from the paid campaign moved across to natural search. When we look at the top 20 brand terms (by visits) we saw that 98.5% of the traffic received previously now went to natural search (100% would represent no loss what so ever).

Conclusions

There are many factors that need to be considered when deciding whether to bid on your own brand terms, such as the relative strength of your brand (e.g. what is the propensity of consumers to click on your brand), is your brand also a generic term (e.g. cheapflights) and how well are mis-spells covered in natural search. Google has become better at correcting spelling mistakes in search queries but many do still fall through the net.

In the test we ran we found that the poorest performing brand terms, the ones where the lowest percentage of clicks were taken up by natural search were terms that had been misspelled and brand URLs. In these cases we found competitors were aggressively bidding on popular misspellings, therefore it made sense to maintain the brand campaign where competitor activity is high.

Additionally when the brand campaign was turned off click through rates fell substantially, this could potentially have an affect on the quality score of the account increasing the cost of the generic PS campaigns. Therefore the overall cost of turning off the brand campaign is not just the potential lost visits/conversions but also the potential increase in cost of the generic PS campaigns.

In the past other pieces of research have suggested an overall increase when combining both paid and natural search however in this particular instance we found that natural search took the majority of the clicks lost in paid. This test was only for one client and for one vertical and results will vary between sectors. It was interesting to see the role competition plays on the brand terms and click throughs. In this instance for a strong brand where there was no competition, turning off the brand campaign and letting natural search pick up the slack made sense, but if there is fierce competition around your brand you would be wise to keep bidding on those terms.

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What happens when you stop bidding on Brand?

One of the recurring themes for us at iCrossing and our clients over the past year or so has been the way that the social web is should be thought of as a business issue first and marketing issue second.

An article about libel on The Lawyer website called “Virtual veractity” reinforces the importance of thinking outside of the marketing box when it comes to social media. It outlines the libel case against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association and how in a number of important ways social media influenced the trial, from scrutiny and public discussion of the details by a significant online community of interest to the fact that “those following the case on the internet were able to demolish the central element of the British Chiropractic Association’s (BCA’s) case long before it was able to reach the courtroom.”

Image: If social media is re-writing the law, what does it mean for business? ((cc) Eflon)

We have seen the social web begin to change the way that politicians campaign and make laws, how the fourth estate, the media operates, and recently, with this case and in the de facto destruction of super-injunctions we are seeing the influence of a connected citizenry having a direct influence on how our legal system works.

The Lawyer article calls this “wiki litigation”.

When a business engages in planning its strategy, it often uses a variation of the PEST model: looking at how Political, Economic, Social and Technological environment is likely to change in the next five to ten years. The “S” in this analysis represents how demographic and cultural shifts (for instance an aging population or attitudes to corporations), but the social web should be considered in each of these areas.

Obviously, the considerations would be specific to a particular business, but here are some off-the-cuff generalisms by way of an example.

• Political: Will a connected electorate mean a change in the voting system, more direct democracy? Will that mean more or less regulation? Will this make politicians less prone to fad campaigns from Fleet Street, or more susceptible to single-issue campaigns from a web-mobilised electorate?
• Economic: Will social finance models like Zopa begin to change how the way you sell your product works? Does the acceleration of business models as edge ideas become mainstream (John Hagel and John Seely Brown’s Push The Power of Pull is the definitive work on this effect) mean your market will be more volatile, fragmented?
• Social: How will attitudes to the data you hold about customers change? How will the spread of digital literacy change the relationship between employees and their employers? How will people think of transparency? What will the tolerance of response time to customer service via web services be? Will your customers think less of you if they cannot access your services or information in the social networks they use?
• Technology: Before we even get to mobile web access and geo-location as strong emerging technologies, existing social computing tools like wikis, Twitter (and its ilk) and other ways of sharing and collaborating are establishing themselves as alternative ways to get things done in organisations.

For a long time the question that was most frequently asked about the web was “what is the ROI?” It is becoming very clear, as the social web disrupts so many aspects of our society that the question should be “what is the business case for social media?” Even more, “what could the business implications be of ignoring social media?”

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PEST test your business for social?: Wiki litigation and the social web’s wider effects

A while ago he wrote a post in the official forum, which describes the three iCrossing Social Media principles (Understand, be useful, be live) pretty well:

“I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I need to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while.”

And further:

“What you’ve seen happen with the marketing and presentation of NIN over the last years is a direct result of living next to you, listening to you, consuming with you and interacting with you. Directly. There’s no handlers or PR people here, it’s me and my guys – that’s it.”

So what did he do after listening /understanding? He released two records (Ghosts I-IV and The Slip) under the Creative Common License and later also brought limited editions of those to the record store (as fans were requesting it). Social Media was used to increase the awareness and find new potential buyers.

Remixes of his songs were always a big part of the Nine Inch Nails project. That’s why he developed a vivid community where people could download the original multitracks of many of his songs, remix them and upload it to the official website. Social Media was also used to increase the interaction rate of fans and brand loyalty.

Last month he also started a new band: “How to destroy angels”. And again, he released the first EP under Creative Common license. This EP seems to be yet another kind of social media experiment, combining very different sounds and styles (within his genre) with a female voice. So he listens again and will use his fans feedback to define the sound on the first full length record of his new band. Social media as a feedback channel for product development.

But also for him as a public person being open and engaged in Social Media is not easy and solely beneficial. During the time of his post, he was annoyed of people massively spamming him. So he decided to leave parts of social media landscape.

I think these are really great examples of someone understanding his fans and finding ways to help them. We will see if the music industry will adapt his approach.

Do you know any other bands acting similar as Nine Inch Nails?

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Why Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) truly understands the value of Social Media