video.js is a free, fast, open source (licensed under Apache) HTML5 video player available at http://www.videojs.com/ which was developed by video experts from Brightcove & Zencoder. It’s really easy to set up, but like most of these types of popular open source players, it doesn’t come with built in Google Analytics tracking. As a possible benefit though it doesn’t use jQuery, so if for some reason you can’t use jQuery, or you’re having issues with jQuery on your website, video.js could be a good option for you.

So once again, like with my post on how to track YouTube videos with Google Analytics, or my post on how to track jPlayer audio or video players with Google Analytics, I’ve put together some code to help you easily track video.js in Google Analytics using Events.

First – Get video.js working

The first thing to do is to make sure you’re actually setting up a page to run video.js correctly. You can do this two ways. One, you can follow the instructions here  to add the code to your page yourself, or you can use the quick embed function they have on the main website . Under the main video on their home page are three colors you can change, and a slide bar to control the size of the initial play button that appears over the video. When you’re happy with the colors, click “Embed this Player” and you’ll see code like this (if you changed the colors you’ll see some additional styles in addition):

Sometimes, though, there isn’t a clear path. On this site, for example, we have a contact form that doesn’t just appear on one page, it appears in lots of pages, and this isn’t an uncommon feature of lead generation sites. Likewise, sometimes people say things like, “Well, page X is our goal. But you can actually get here either by going A > B > X, or by A > P > Q > X, depending on what options you choose.” How do we know which way people got to X?

The Reverse Goal Path is a report that helps fill in these details. You’ll find it under Conversions > Goals in the left-hand navigation in Google Analytics, and like all the goal reports, you can select a particular goal you want to see from the drop-down at the top. It’s very simple: it gives you the goal completion URL and the URL of each of the 3 pages that came immediately before. You don’t have to predefine a funnel or anything, it simply looks 3 pages back in the visit and tells you what they were.

So here’s an example from our contact form. The first column is the “Goal Completion Location”, which in this case is always /about-us/contact/thank-you/. Then each of the subsequent columns walks back one page, telling us whether someone was on the home page, the contact details page, the client list, etc. No funnel necessary!

To sort out this information, note that you can use the advanced filter. So if you’re only interested in one particular path or page, you can narrow down the possibilities you’ll see here.

Of course, this report only tells you about completed goals, not abandoned ones, so it’s not as if it replaces the funnel or goal flow reports. But it can be a handy way to fill in information that funnels might not otherwise help you with.

1. Assisted Conversions

What it is:
Assisted Conversions show the overall impact of marketing channels by comparing conversions that came directly from a channel to conversions that came indirectly from that channel.
Why it’s important:
The Assisted Conversions Report can give you deep insight into how your different marketing channels work together to create a conversion. The Report lets you see the overall impacts of your various channels, campaigns, sources, or mediums, in both a last click impact (visitor from that source converted during that visit) and assisted impact (visitor from that source left, then came back through another channel and converted). Importantly, the Assisted Conversions report also compares the ratio of Assisted to Last Click conversions for each channel. Channels that have very low ratios are typically the ‘Direct Response’ channels for your company. Those that have a higher ratio are the ‘Awareness’ channels for your company. This figure can quickly inform you of where each channel impacts your conversion funnel throughout the conversion process. It also shows you the way that channels that don’t provide direct sales impact your overall conversion process, like social media.
How to measure it:
Open the Assisted Conversions Report under the Multi-Channel Funnels Reports.

2. Owned vs Earned Social

What it is:
Owned Social are visitors who come to your site from a link that YOU shared on a social platform, and Earned Social are visitors who come to your site by clicking a link that someone else has shared on a social platform.
Why it’s important:
Without differentiating between the two, your analytics will be unable to help you determine the impact your social media communities are making on your business’ bottom line. This data can be used to determine the value of your social communities, the impact that your content sharing is making on your traffic, and help you spot content that does well on only your social sites or only in your communities. You may then apply that knowledge to your content creation and sharing efforts.
How to measure it:
You’ll need to start tagging your shared links with Campaign Parameters, which you can do simply and quickly using Google’s URL Builder Tool. In order to ensure that your social data shows up in your Google Analytics reports where it is supposed to, make sure to tag your Medium as ‘social’, in lowercase. This will allow you to look at how social as a whole impacts your business and still segment out Owned Social.

3. All Traffic Sources

What it is:
This is a simple breakdown of where traffic to your site is coming from.
Why it’s important:
The Traffic Sources report can tell you a few different things about your marketing and digital efforts. Large dips or spikes can inform you of when something has changed on your site or in your market segment that might require your attention. Sources sending in a steady flow of healthy traffic, i.e. visits with a low bounce rate and higher-than-average time spent on site, can indicate areas that deserve more marketing spend.
How to measure it:
Access the All Traffic Report under Sources inside the Traffic Sources Reports.

4. Network Referrals

What it is:
This report, located in the Social Reports, shows you a breakdown of visits to your site by referring social network.
Why it’s important:
Knowing which social networks are driving the most traffic (and the highest quality traffic) to your site can offer a revealing look into which social networks are the most valuable to your business and deserve more attention. Use these reports in combination with other metrics, like a segment dividing up pageview quartiles, to really deliver deep insight into what counts as valuable traffic for your organization. Be warned, however, that Google Analytics has had a less than desirable track record when it comes to social reporting.
How to measure it:
Access the Network Referrals Report under the Social Reports

5. Plugins

What it is:
A report showing you social network actions by page, in conjunction with social plug-ins you’ve installed onto your site.
Why it’s important:
This report can show you what kinds of social actions visitors are most likely to take when sharing your content. It can also show you the difference between a non-socially referred visitor and a socially referred visitor, and the actions that they take on your site. This may surprise you – a socially referred visitor is not necessarily more likely to share your content on a social network. In fact, they might do just the opposite – whereas a social referral denotes that they already have seen the content be ‘shared’, a non-social referral implies they have discovered it through an alternate means, and would thus feel that they would be contributing something of value by sharing your page. This report can also give you insight into the way that changes to your page layout or design affect the likelihood of your content being reshared – after all, it only measures the impact of your plug-ins, not your total social presence.
How to measure it:
Have your developer or IT department install this feature into your Analytics, then access the Plugins report under the Social Reports.

There are, of course, more metrics that can provide value than just these five. What are your favorites? Share them with me in the comments below.

One of the advantages of Google Analytics Premium is that you can get unsampled data, but it’s still processed data. Have you dreamed of getting access to your raw GA data?

Those dreams are about to come true. Announced today at Google I/O: later this year BigQuery will be available to users of Google Analytics Premium.

Query hit-level data at interactive speed

BigQuery is a web service that lets you query billions of rows, a.k.a. Big Data, with a response time in seconds. Without Google Analytics Premium, you upload some data first and then run your queries.

With Google Analytics Premium, your hit-level GA data will be available for the same type of interactive ad hoc queries. Pose a question, get an answer. Does that lead to another question? Rinse and repeat! You can batch queries, too.

Build complex queries and join data sets

Direct granular access to your GA data opens the door for all kinds of complex queries. You’ll also be able to combine data sets from other sources for powerful business insights.

Imagine having data at your fingertips to solve problems like these:

• Narrow segments of large data sets with no sampling: For the past two years, how many purchases came from a social referral and what designer drove the most referrals and conversions per product category?
• Offline purchases for visitors with loyalty cards who also log in to your site: Are visitors who click on display ads more likely to come into the store and buy? What pages do they view before coming to the store and what do they eventually purchase?
• Language processing with regex across massive data sets: Which groups of organic keywords brought the best-qualified visitors? Which visitors converted the most (consumed content, became a sales lead, or bought something), and how does what they read, submitted, or bought relate to what they searched for?

If you’re a Google Analytics Premium customer, or thinking about becoming one, consider all the data sets you could combine with GA and BigQuery: from customer data, to inventory, to content management, taxonomies, and more.

LunaMetrics is an Authorized Reseller of Google Analytics Premium, and we’ll be happy to help.

All the benefits of BigQuery

The integration of BigQuery with Google Analytics Premium connects all the benefits of the BigQuery service to your GA data:

• Google’s computing power delivers insights in seconds rather than hours.
• No up-front investments, either in hardware or software licensing.
• Collaborate quickly and securely using Access Control Lists.
• Protect your data with multiple layers of security from Google.
• Store as much as you want. Pay only for what you use.

Not familiar with BigQuery and want to learn more? Get the details or watch the video for a good overview of how it works.

If you’ve been on the fence about Google Analytics Premium, does this new feature move you? What’s your reaction? Please share in the comments.

1. Work the Numbers

Stop. Do not pass go. Do not deposit $200 in your AdWords account (yet).

First, figure out what your conversion is — a sale? a lead form submission? Then you have to try to figure out how much money it makes sense to pay to bring people to your site so that you get more value from that conversion than you spend on the advertising.

You can go at this two ways. If you know the value of the conversion (you sold a $100 widget), you can work the ROI calculation backwards to figure out what a reasonable cost per conversion and cost per click might be. Alternatively, if the value of the conversion is less well-defined (like in lead generation), you might simply pick a reasonable target for cost-per-lead.

Here’s a great article from the LunaMetrics archives to give you perspective on how to think through the numbers before beginning paid search, and really understanding whether and how you can make an impact.

2. Be Ready to Convert Traffic with Landing Pages

OK, so you figured out what kind of budget you need to be looking at and some targets for success. But before you start spending that money, you (and your website) need to be ready to receive that traffic and do something with it.

Rarely is your home page a great place to send visitors who clicked a paid search ad. Sure, it may be a good introduction to your company, but you’re not fully utilizing the most important aspect of paid search, which is that we know just what someone is looking for (based on the keyword we bid on). We don’t have to give them a generic page; we can be specific and targeted.

So, it pays to have specific, targeted landing pages ready to go for those visitors. Sometimes an existing page on your site might suffice, but take a hard look at it to make sure it’s clear and easy for the user to make the conversion. Here’s another article from deep in the LunaMetrics archives (from 2006!) about fourteen things to pay attention to on your landing pages, and they’re all still quite relevant today.

3. Be Ready to Measure the Conversions

You must be a new visitor to this blog if you don’t already know we are ALL ABOUT MEASUREMENT here at LunaMetrics. But there’s a very good reason for that: if we don’t know which keywords, ads, and landing pages convert on our site by measuring them, how do we know where we are spending our money well and where we’re flushing it away?

So get Google Analytics (or the analytics tool of your choice, but GA is free, after all) on your site, and make sure it’s set up to measure your conversions.

Once you’ve got (1), (2), and (3) in place, then you are ready to start putting together your paid search campaigns.

“How is this possible?” you might ask.  ”Aren’t Facebook and Google mortal enemies?” you might ask.  Well ya, but with Google AdWords for video and some keen investigation you are able to leverage these two super-massive audiences in conjunction with one another.  You get the best of both worlds by effectively serving your advertising message alongside compelling YouTube content within the world’s most popular forum, Facebook.

The best part: you can accomplish this impressive feat in just a few short steps, and it isn’t all that different from a typical video ad campaign setup…

Step 1: Create Your Video Ad & Host on YouTube

No brainer here.  If you don’t already have a video that you’d like to promote, then you should get to work.  Once you have an ad you’ll need to upload it to your YouTube channel because this is the source that the AdWords system will reference when you create your ads.

Step 2: Create a Google Display Network Video Ad

Create your campaign and start building your first ad. When creating the ad you are prompted to select the networks that you would like to target – YouTube Videos, Google Display Network, and YouTube search.  You will select only Google Display Network.

Selecting only Google Display Network allows you to target YouTube videos that are embedded on sites other than YouTube. This will narrow your to targeting to only the videos that meet your first requirement.

Step 3: Select Placement Targeting

So far, so good?  Now it’s time to really hone our targeting…  How do you actually ensure that your video ad is displayed only when a user watches a YouTube video on Facebook?

Easy!  Let’s review our placement report data from other Google Display Network video ad campaigns:

What we see in the above report is that more than half of all views targeting the Google Display Network have originated from a placement called…

http://s-static.ak.facebook.com/common/referer_frame.php.

What is this strange Facebook URL?  It doesn’t work when entered in your browser, and it’s not supposed to either.  Let’s post a video to my wall then take a peak at Facebook’s source code:

You can see that the URL is displayed in the source code.  This is the iframe source which describes the actual location of the video, so that explains why it is reported this way in placement reports (NOTE: this is just one example, Facebook my use other variations of this URL).  By using this abstract URL as a placement target in a new Google Display Network campaign we can target just videos that are played on Facebook.

This is a great way to put your video ads to work in a place where they’ll be sure to attract a ton of views.  If you want to get really clever, you’ll even create an ad tailored specifically to the Facebook audience (maybe you can ask people to “Like our Facebook page“?).

*You can also layer any other kind of targeting – topic targeting, contextual targeting, and even remarketing – on top of your placement target to more effectively target the YouTube audience too.  What fun!

How will you experiment with this targeting option?  Leave a comment below.

This article is designed for professionals who wish to streamline their media outreach by creating many semi-personalized pitch letters in Excel using the concatenation function. If you are new to pitching and are simply searching for a way to get a pesky product launch off your plate as soon as possible, please review the Golden Rule below before moving on to the screenshots.

Pitch Letter Golden Rule

As (part-time) publicists, we should never send a form “Dear Reporter” pitch letter to every reporter on our list, even if this blog post makes it really easy to do that. It is not successful, it cheapens the brand and PR people will hate us for doing a disservice to their field. Instead, take time to personalize each pitch, even if there is just one line that speaks to the writer or publication.

The tactics discussed in this article might bend the boundaries of the golden rule but, as the Dalai Lama said, “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” While I believe that is especially true with all writing, it is also a valid lesson in public relations. Liberties taken from a solid foundation create unique, engaging PR outreach. Liberties taken from ignorance are slop.

When Pitch Letter Concatenation Works

For most story pitches, publicists contact a short list of journalist who report on the particular topic and tailor each pitch to its recipient. A streamlining process like this one might not be necessary. Other times, we need a method for organizing letter writing and distribution.

An example might be an article that identifies the best in your industry. Since this is a SEO blog, our sample article title will be “Top 50 SEO Bloggers.” We will rank the bloggers by a series of quantitative and qualitative metrics, maybe open it up to voting to increase engagement. Once we have the finalists, it is time to contact each one to let them know they made the top 50. We have three options:

• 50 personalized emails 
• “Congratulations Blogger” form email
• Semi-personalized letters in Excel

Creating Pitch Letters with Excel

Our semi-personalized email will have two elements: the subject line and the body. We don’t want to use a standard subject line like “Congratulations SEO Blogger” because open rate would suffer–I wouldn’t open it. Instead, let’s us each blogger’s first name.

The formula that you see in D2 (shown as “A2&B2&C2”) combines all of the previous cells in that row. You can extend that formula to the following rows by dragging it to the rest of the rows. Be sure to add spaces between the columns where needed to avoid “HeyJohn, you made the best SEO blogger list.”

The letter body applies the same rules. The formulas in “Body 1” and “Body 5” pull names from “Subject 2” in our original subject line. “Body 2” is a comma after the first name, “Body 4” is a space and “Body 6” is the final period. Concatenate them and we get our letter.

John, just wanted you to be the first to know that you made LunaMetrics’ list of the top 50 SEO bloggers. The article will be published in three hours and we’d hate for you find out via Google Alert for your name—don’t worry, we all do it. Thanks so much for your contribution to the industry. Keep up the great work, John.

That’s it. We created a scalable semi-personalized email for the 50 bloggers on our list.

I am really eager to hear of other ways that this has worked or could work for you. Any ideas?

Problem: You have media like an audio file, or a small video, that you want to put on your website, and you want to track whether people are listening or watching to it inside Google Analytics, or even make it a Goal.

Solution: Use jPlayer and the code below to track your jPlayer events into Google Analytics.

Wait a Tick: What’s with the Bob Ross photo?

Hold Your Horses: All in good time.

What is jPlayer?

jPlayer is a free and open source (licensed under MIT and GPL) HTML5 audio and video player you can use on your website without restrictions. In general it’s a very easy to use player, and most people, with a little copy and pasting, can have a media player on their website in minutes. If you need a media player for audio or video on your website, it’s one of the first ones I’ll recommend.

However, by default, like many things, it doesn’t track into your Google Analytics account. No problem. Doing that is pretty easy as well by following these steps.

1. Install jPlayer

Put jPlayer on your website by following the jPlayer Quick Start Guide on the jPlayer website. This will involve downloading some files, making sure you have jQuery, and copying in both html and javascript to the page. An example of the code you should see at that point is located in the summary of the jPlayer Quick Start Guide.

2. Name Multiple Players Differently

Now, there are two things to pay attention to. First is the player itself. The audio player has two div’s to be aware of, located at the top of the HTML for each audio player:

<div id=”jquery_jplayer_1″></div>
<div id=”jp_container_1″>

For the video player they’re also at the top but in a different order:

<div id=”jp_container_2″ class=”jp-video “>
<div class=”jp-type-single”>
<div id=”jquery_jplayer_2″ class=”jp-jplayer”></div>

The ones you care about are jquery_jplayer_1, or jp_container_1. Each player is identified by these two id’s. If you want to have multiple players on the same page you need to name them different things. jplayer_1, jcontainer_1 and then increment the number, or however you want to do it. However each player needs unique names for each of those values.

3. Modify the jPlayer Script

The script placed in the head of your page will look something like this for an audio file:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
          $(document).ready(function(){
                  $(“#jquery_jplayer_1″).jPlayer({
                             ready: function () {
                                    $(this).jPlayer(“setMedia”, {
                                              m4a: “http://www.jplayer.org/audio/m4a/Miaow-07-Bubble.m4a”
                                     });
                              },
                   swfPath: “/js”,
                  supplied: “m4a”
          });
});
</script>

The first thing you should do is add a line to the code, particularly if you are going to be running multiple players on the page:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
         $(“#jquery_jplayer_1″).jPlayer({
               ready: function () {
                     $(this).jPlayer(“setMedia”, {
                          m4a: “http://www.jplayer.org/audio/m4a/Miaow-07-Bubble.m4a”
                      });
               },
               swfPath: “/js”,
               supplied: “m4a”,
              cssSelectorAncestor: “#jp_container_1″
          });
});
</script>

Next make sure you modify the code for your actual files. The bolded items below are what you need to change. Identify your player and it’s container, and the media extension, as well as it’s actual location.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
           $(“#jPlayer_1“).jPlayer({
                 ready: function () {
                     $(this).jPlayer(“setMedia”, {
                          mp3: “http://www.mydomain.com/media/filename.mp3“
                      });
                 },
                swfPath: “/js”,
                supplied: “mp3“,
               cssSelectorAncestor: “#jContainer_1“
          });

//add the Google Analytics code listed below here.

});
</script>

3. And Now Add the Google Analytics Tracking

That will work to play the file, but it won’t track in Google Analytics yet. For that add the below script where in the script above it says “//add the Google Analytics code listed below here”.

//listener for playing the file
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.play, function(event) {
           //playerTime grabs the current % location on the file being played.
            //if they’re at the beginning it’s 0. If they’re at the end it’s 100. Etc.
             var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
           //grabs the media currently being played. Usefull for when multiple files are played in the player.
            var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
            //track it as an event with category:jPlayer, action:Play, label:Name of the file being played, value:location on file as %
          _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Play',mediaName,playerTime]);
});
//listener for a pause click
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.pause, function(event) {
           //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
          var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
          var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
           //We’ll only track the “pause” if the percent value is less than 100. This is because at 100%
         //when the player ends, it will send a pause event with the end event.
          //we don’t need that duplication in GA
          if(playerTime<100){
                  //tracking the pause with similar setup to the play event
                  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Pause',mediaName,playerTime]);
          }
});
//listening for the user dragging the seek bar
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.seeking, function(event) {
         //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
         var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
         var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
         //tracking the seeking action similar to above
         _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Seeking',mediaName,playerTime]);
});
//listening for when the user has stopped dragging the seek bar
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.seeked, function(event) {
         //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
         var playerTime = Math.round(event.jPlayer.status.currentPercentAbsolute);
         var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
         //There’s some overlap between the seeked and stopped events. When a user clicks
         // the stop button it actually sends a “seek” to the 0 location. So if the seeked location is 0
         // then we track it as a stop, if it’s greater than 0, it was an actual seek.
         if(playerTime>0){
                  //track the seeked event as above
                  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Seeked',mediaName,playerTime]);
         }else{
                  //track the stopped event as above
                  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Stopped',mediaName,playerTime]);
         }
});
//listening for an end ie file completion
$(“#jquery_jplayer_1“).bind($.jPlayer.event.ended, function(event) {
         //as above, grabbing the % location and media being played
         //except when it ends we force the value as 100%, otherwise it shoots back as 0
         var playerTime = 100;
         var mediaName = event.jPlayer.status.src;
         //track the End event as above.
         _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jPlayer', 'Ended',mediaName,playerTime]);
});

All you have to do for that script is to change each “jquery_jplayer_1″ to match the id name of the player itself.

And that’s it. With that code you’ll be tracking videos and audio played through jPlayer on your website. If you’d like to look at a pure demo page with just the necessary code for the three players, click here.

So What Data Gets Fired

You’ll end up seeing up to 6 events in your Google Analytics under jPlayer. Play, Pause, Seeking, Seeked, Ended, and Stopped.

Play: This will be whenever someone hits play. Usually the value is 0 when someone hits play the first time, but if they pause, and play the file later, you’ll get a different Event Value which is the % of where they are in the file.

Pause: The user has hit pause, or maybe it’s autopaused from another player starting. Either way the pause event on the player fires this event, with the event value showing where as a % on the file it paused.

Seeking: This shows someone starting to scan/seek for a new area using the timeline. The value is where they started seeking from.

Seeked: This is where they end up releasing their seek.

Stopped: The user stopped the file by hitting the stop button. This will have a value of 0 but if you look at the event prior you can see that it fires a Seeked event before the stop, showing where the stop occurred.

Ended: The user watched the whole way through.

this and the events flow give you a good vision of the file. How many people watched the whole thing, how many watched up to a certain point, 50% or 75%, etc. Are there any specific spots on the audio or video that people keep seeking to, etc. Lots of great data can be had, even if it’s just “did someone click play on it”.

That’s about it. Just one more thing…

Please Enjoy Bob Ross Painting a Mountain

I’m curious to see through tracking how many watch the whole video…

I might be making some generalizations, but hey, this was a big difference. It looks like 2011-2012 saw a big display push in the months leading up to their “opening day” (early March), while 2012-2013 saw a drastic reduction in that strategy for the same period of time. This really got me thinking about display ads in general – strategies, banner creative and what you can do right now to assess display performance. I’ve summed up the top five things that I think are priorities when it comes to a wholesome display “check”, though there are certainly more that can be added to the list.

 1. Strategy – As I said above, investigating year over year comparisons revealed to me the big difference in Display strategy and the potential ramifications it could have had on Search campaigns (especially Branded). Your Display strategy (or strategies) should have a clear purpose. Are you campaigns helping raise brand awareness? Are they focused on a certain goal completion? For the most part, Display campaigns support the goals of a Search campaign. If they do, then align your messaging so that there is a clear connection between the ads, leading to a higher click through rate as people recognize the offer you are advertising.

2. Formats - Sounds fairly basic, but this is a good check to perform. Ask yourself if the campaign is covering all possible (relevant) ad formats and sizes. It’s not a surprise to me anymore to investigate accounts that are only running one ad, in one size. This severely limits your reach as many networks will only run a certain size, and if you don’t have that in your arsenal, you are not displaying at all. Is mobile part of your strategy? If so, mobile display could be a good format to work with if you want to, or already are, targeting mobile.

3. Creative check - Again, sounds basic, but stagnant creative can live on unnoticed if you don’t regularly check them and see how they are performing. Ideally, you’ll have a banner test running in display and you’re on top of your game. But if you are new in an account, or are taking over management, display ad “age” could be a factor you don’t consider right away. Check when the ads were uploaded and began displaying and do a week over week performance check to see if there have been any declines. Keep an eye out for the relevancy of the call-to-actions as well. Do they match your current strategy as discussed in point #1?

4. Landing Pages – Even if you are getting the clicks, you still need to get the user to convert, so check your landing pages. But first, make sure you really look again at point #3 and ask yourself what your ad’s purpose really is. Once you answer that question, move on to your landing page and see if it aligns with the messaging in the ad. More importantly, that it matches your brand and the offer or promise that you advertised. As with any landing page, not just for a Display campaign, you should have clear messaging, a strong call to action that matches what you advertised with the Display ad, and pertinent information above the fold of the web page.

5. Audience - Has your audience changed? A few interesting points cropped up in the Display campaigns I was looking at for the client mentioned before. I noticed that the ad placements (outside of Google) had changed drastically from this year compared to last year. Some placements that were in full swing the year before, didn’t run at all this year and vice-versa. That, combined with the different timing of the Display campaigns, indicated to me that there was some sort of effect on Search campaigns with both these factors in play. Their “new” audience might not have been the most targeted one compared to the success seen the year before.

These are only a few Display campaign checks, though they are certainly my favorite. Simple, straight forward questions, however can have some complicated answers. Take some time today, or schedule it soon, to dig into your Display campaigns, compare monthly, quarterly and yearly performance and find out what changed.

What other check points are your favorite for Display campaigns? Share in the comments below!

However, there are some who desire a little more control over the variation pages, that just can’t be done through the setup wizard.

For example, when you’re choosing you’re variation pages, you can specify full (exact) URLs for the variations, or relative URLs. If you choose to specify the variations by the full URL, you’d end up with something like:

Original Page:

http://www.example.com/original.html

Variation 1:

http://www.example.com/variation1.html

Variation 2:

http://www.example.com/variation2.html

If you choose relative URLs, you can take advantage of query parameters to specify your variations. This makes it possible to do site-wide tests, by placing the Content Experiment code on every “original” page of the site. Then, for your variation URLs, you’d have:

Variation 1:

?var=1

Variation 2:

?var=2

and on up to variation 9 (the maximum number of variations).

Doing it this way makes the variation URL relative to whatever page the Content Experiments code is on (regardless of what you specify as your original page in in the setup wizard). So if you have the Content Experiment code on www.example.com/original.html, and Google decides to send you to a variation, it will redirect you to www.example.com/original.html?var=1 (or ?var=2, ?var=3, etc.).

The problem

If you don’t use query parameters for your variations, but instead have them as separate pages, this poses a problem if you want to do a site-wide test. For example, let’s say you have a set of original pages that have the following URL structure:

www.example.com/page1/original/index.html

www.example.com/page2/original/index.html

www.example.com/page3/original/index/html

etc.

And your variation pages:

www.example.com/page1/variation/index.html

www.example.com/page2/variation/index.html

www.example.com/page3/variation/index.html

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just use the same trick as above, and specify the variation pages using the Relative option, and /variation/index.html as the variation page?

That would be great. But it doesn’t work. If you try (like I did) you find out that if you don’t specify a query parameter for the relative URL, then it makes the variation URL relative to the hostname. So your variation URLs end up being www.example.com/variation/index.html instead of www.example.com/page1/variation.html.

Still with me?

The Solution: Content Experiments JavaScript API

I stumbled across this little gem a couple weeks ago. It looks like this documentation was just added recently (April 4th). With a simple little script, you can define your variation URLs however you want. For example, the following code will define the original and variation pages, use the Content Experiments API to choose which version a user should see, and then either redirect to the variation or keep them on the original.

<!-- 1. Load the Content Experiments JavaScript Client -->
<script src="//www.google-analytics.com/cx/api.js?experiment=L9UZaiJzTn2z9Ud9XDya0g"></script>

<script>
 var page_variations = [
 'http://www.example.com/page1/original/index.html', //original page
 'http://www.example.com/page1/variation/index.html' //variation 1
 ]

// 2. Choose the Variation for the Visitor
 var variation = cxApi.chooseVariation(); //chooses a variation, or keeps them in same variation

// 3. Send visitor to the correct version
 if (variation != 0) {
 window.location.replace(page_variations[variation]);
 }

</script>

Some important notes

This code is just a sample – you’ll obviously want to test it out for yourself to make sure it works for your site. Also keep in mind the following points:

• The code above completely replaces the Content Experiment code that you get from the setup wizard.
• You still have to set up the experiment in Google Analytics. Notice in the second line of the code above, you include the Experiment ID as a query parameter when you reference the Content Experiments JavaScript library.
• If you use _setDomainName in your Google Analytics tracking code, you’ll also need to specify the same domain name for content experiments with cxApi.setDomainName(‘example.com’); in the script

But wait, there’s more!

The Content Experiments feature reference includes information for even more advanced customizations and configurations. For example, did you know you can use the Management API to create new experiments, update existing experiments, retrieve a list of experiments, get the details of a single experiment, and delete experiments?