It has been real hard to keep secret for the last weeks where I had those new features and could not share with anyone, and is somewhat “liberating” to finally have the chance to review the new version of Google Analytics being announced today.

Google, as Google, usually do not “announce” new features. What happens is you either find smth in their blog, or you simply log in to your account and you find some nifty new tools and gadgets. This is in their DNA and is part of the magic, at least in my opinion.

Today’s news: Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent

With a bundle of new features, Google Analytics includes more powerful
reporting capabilities, provides greater customization options, and
adds an innovative Intelligence engine to drive smarter data
insights.  These capabilities help customers better understand visitor
interaction with their websites and make smarter, more informed
decisions for their businesses.

POWERFUL #1:    Google Analytics Goals 2.0

Don’t you just hate it when you need more than 4 goals per profile?  No more!
Now you can setup up to 20 goals per profile split to 4 sub-sets of 5.
More over, you are no longer tied to define a goal by a visitor who reached a certain page – If your website is trying to measure engagement, you can define goal for users who reached a certain threshold of pages/visit or time on site!

Powerful #2:        Expanded Mobile Reporting:

Google Analytics now tracks mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices. Mobile app developers can understand how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used.  For Android-based applications, engagement can be tied back to ad campaigns. Developers  can see which ads drove downloads and then app usage and engagement.

In addition, for customers with a mobile website, Google Analytics can now track traffic to mobile sites from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript. In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Powerful #3:        Advanced Analysis Features

Google Analytics provides an arsenal of power tools you can use to perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools. Using Secondary Dimensions, you can view multiple levels and combinations of data side by side instead of having to drill down into each level.

Secondary Dimensions are super useful, and enable to drill down data and cross reference it.
In the example above, we are looking at keywords then comparing them with the different geographic locations to find insights on the actual placements and users who arrived at the web site using those keywords.
You can then use the Pivoting feature to cross-tabulate two different metrics with two different dimensions. In the example below trying to match between organic keywords and the correlated search engines:

Advanced Table Filtering allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions and combination. In the example below, I’m trying to exclude those “bad” visits with 90%+ bounce rate and to look only at the quality traffic. You can save, edit and reuse your advanced filters

Unique Visitors as a new metric in Custom Reports: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment in a Custom Report.

Flexible #1:        Multiple Custom Variables:

Organizations require flexible analytics tools that can meet their unique reporting needs. With the following features, Google Analytics adds powerful customization capabilities to meet those demands.

We are starting to release Multiple Custom Variables over the next few months. Custom Variables gives power-users the flexibility to customize Google Analytics tracking to collect the unique site data most important to their business. With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into  trackable segments.
Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently.
For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).

Flexible #2:         Share Segments and Custom Report Templates

In addition to the ability to create Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, you now have greater control over administering and sharing your customizations. Simply share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account. You can also select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.

INTELLIGENT – The Tip of the Iceberg!

Well, first time I saw Intelligence reports, I had this funny smile all day long. Sometimes, you see that no matter how smart and sophisticated you think you can be, no matter how deep you will analyze, dig in the piles of raw data and reports – there will be a day when you will wake up and a click of a button will give it all to you at once. Google Analytics intelligence is one of those things.

Highly Intelligent #1:    Automatic Analytics Intelligence:

New “Intelligence” reports provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your
site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.
It is a part of the initial release of an algorithmic driven intelligence engine.

For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday. Instead of having to monitor reports and mine through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business.

Highly Intelligent #2:    Custom Analytics Intelligence:

Custom Alerts: Customers can create custom alerts to tell Google Analytics what to watch out for. They can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics, and be notified by email or in the user interface when the changes occur.

To summarize this post – Google has done it again, they are presenting features and capabilities previously available only with super expensive and complex software suites, enabling web marketers and analysts of all sizes to enjoy the beauty of the web – the ability to measure, quantify, analyze and IMPROVE each and every single action.

For more information:

Google Analytics Channel @ YouTube

Google Analytics Official Announcement

E-Nor Review of the new features

Review @ Search Engine Land

(and if this post wasn’t clear enough – I simply love it!)

Last year we’ve written in our company blog about view through  metrics, and apparently Google has listened Last few days I discovered a cool new column in my Google AdWords panel called “view through conversions“.

These conversions, are, as Google states on their blog conversions which occurred on the target web site within 30 days of a display ad impression, in the content network. Yes, you are reading correctly – Google is reporting on conversions which occurred due to an Impression, not a Click.

This is simply HUGE.

Running display campaigns usually brings lower conversion rate and higher acquisition costs than search campaigns (except from very specific verticals). This does not mean that display does not work, it simply means that search is more goal oriented and that the display activities are geared more towards awareness and reach, and usually contribue to increase the search volume.

For example- An airline would launch a special sale on their website, and promote that sale in many online channels. In our standard conversion attribution models, we will see that the display campaigns show impression, clicks and very little to no sales at all.

However, the search volume (impressions, clicks, conversions) would amazingly soar. The soar in searches and search based conversions is much related to the fact that users see the ads in the diaply formats, assimilate the message and then when the time is right, they would search for the product or the brand, and convert.

View through conversions will let us, as campaign managers optimize our media plan not only by those display outlets which convert directly, but those which influence the audience to convert.

As website in the google content network may send clicks and lack in conversion rate or acquisition cost – but influence with its impressions on latent sales which may arrive due to direct traffic, search, email campaigns etc.

I highly recommend adding this metric to your KPI list.

Ophir

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share something I found to be very useful and could be somewhat revolutionary to Google AdWords bud management.

Google Released their new “bid simulator” a few days ago, a super-cute tool which helps us find that sweet-spot where the keyword bid would be high enough to get the traffic and low enough not to waste all the budget.

The actual news here, is that Google is now revealing the very common question my colleagues ask – How much to raise/decrease the bid? Is X% enough? Well up until now it was mainly experience and guesswork – but Google is now showing us how much X% raising the bid will affect our traffic and how much Z% decreasing the bid would hurt the traffic (Hint: Sometimes you can cut the bid by 50% and not lose a single click, other times you can increase the bid 400% and win just a few more clicks).

Google’s official email describes the new feature herein:

Have you ever wondered how many impressions or clicks you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid? Until now, finding the right bid has typically involved a lot of trial and error.

The bid simulator, launched today, is a feature of the new AdWords interface that shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. While it can’t predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids.

Using data from the past seven days, the bid simulator re-calculates the number of impressions for which your ad could have shown had you chosen a different maximum CPC, how many clicks your ad could have gotten for those impressions and how much those clicks could have cost. The feature provides increased transparency into the AdWords auction and gives you the insight to make more informed bidding decisions to meet your advertising objectives.

This simulation data can help you figure out the trade-off between click volume and cost, enabling you to answer more confidently questions such as:

• How can I increase traffic to my site without raising my costs too much?
• For which keywords should I alter my spend?

As you use bid simulator, it’s important to note that past performance does not guarantee future results. Additionally, simulations will only be provided if there is enough traffic on a given keyword to conduct a meaningful analysis. These simulations are currently available only for Google.com and the Google search network.

For more information, view the bid simulator video and visit our help center.

To see data from the bid simulator, go to the ‘Keywords’ tab in your AdWords account.

(Click here for full size image)

Then, click on the bid simulator icon in the Max. CPC column next to the bid of any keyword you could like to see data for.

In this example, you are seeing simulations for the keyword “search email.”

(Click here for full size image)

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Tomorrow, June 1st 2009 Affilicon Israel will launch, and I am very excited. I just came back from the Pre-Event “Unofficial Gathering” in a cool Bar in Tel Aviv, and if this “unofficial” event was a predictive of what’s happening in the actual event, it’s going to be a blast!

Tomorrow (June 1st 2009) at 17:30, I am going to co-host a session about choosing SEO and SEM agency, a quite popular dilemma online marketers experience.

I hope those of you who attend affilicon will come to the session and find it beneficial, I also invite you to come meet me and my team at our booth #413 (next to the bar) and for those who won’t – perhaps next time…

You can see my presentation embedded here:

Ohh do I like these nifty add-ons… Especially when they help me be more efficient and perform simple but repetitive tasks faster and better.

Today I will cover two new Google Analytics add-ons – increase your size & snip-n-tag – I strongly recommend using – so you better read on…

Google Analytics Add-on #1 – Supersize Me

No, I’m not talking about the controversial movie but a very nifty add-on for Google Analytics which is going to make my work so much more efficient.

gaDeAnalyse is a greas monkey script which you install and it changes the way web pages look by altering the HTML via JavaScript (very simplified explanation. details here)

gaDeAnalyse solves two very nasty pains of Google analytics:

1. Having Funnel creation/editing form fields too narrow
gaDeAnalyse  simply expands these fields for much better and easier configuration (no more moving back and forth with the arrow…)

Before:

After:

2. Funnel and Filters Auto-Complete
Typing the same filter rules again and again is sometimes very frustrating. so this cool tool gives us the auto-complete too!

This tool was developed by Brian Katz at VKI Studios a colleague I highly respect – way too go Brian!

Installation:

Instructions on installing the script:

1. Make sure you have Greasemonkey installed in Firefox.
2. Click on this install link for gaDeAnalyse
3. Now log-in to your Google Analytics account and enjoy – particularly all you exhibitionists out there who do screencasts and demos of long filter expressions and goal paths.

Google Analytics Add-on #2 – Snip-N-Tag Link Builder

Creating links with good tracking URLs is something I always struggle with my clients. Mistakes often happen when they leave out a mandatory parameter or simply compose the syntax wrong… But these are not close to sending these long parameter rich URLs via email…

So Tyson Kirksey @ NMG built us a firefox sidebar which builds these URLs on the fly. His initial idea was to improve the way we track twitter referrals, but I find his solution (only launched this week) to have a much broader potential to help end users build customized, shortened and traceable links to whatever traffic they are generating for their web properties.

This is much better than the regular Google Analytics Tracking URL builder as the sidebar is much more accessible and does not interfere with the browsing experience (stay on the same page) plus get the short URL in place…

And here’s how it looks like:

Install Snip-n-Tag here.

So folks, thanks to Tyson and Brian we now have better tools – Download, use, feedback, twitter, link etc…

*Cheers*

Ophir

Last few days I saw some weird new metrics on my Google AdWords report center. At first I didn’t pay too much attention, but then came Google’s message and it got me thinking about the whole concept of conversion attribution models and how easily we can get the wrong conclusions when not analyzing the data properly. I will now present how easily we can persuade ourselves to take wrong campaign actions based on data which may seem very promising.

Problem #1: Working solely by Cost per Lead

The simplest example I can think of can be in the finance sector. Let’s assume we are running two campaigns generating leads for mortgages, and focusing on optimizing cost per lead:

Campaign #1 generated 1000 leads, costing $5 lead, $5,000 total cost – and we seem very happy with it.

Campaign #2, generated 500 leads, costing $10 per lead, $5,000 total cost – and we are considering pausing it / changing or whatever else.

Now let’s add to the equation the following parameter:

Parameter k: ration of qualified leads vs. junk leads

Junk leads are those leads where you either find that the data is not validated, unresponsive to phone calls and emails and basically those leads which you find out are worthless i.e. probably not even interested in your product.

Quality leads are those leads which you can put into your sales pipeline and have a probably chance to convert to paying customers.

The ratio of quality leads vs. junk leads (or the proportion of quality leads from the total leads count) is super important, and sometimes will change your overall decision making, such as the following example:

Campaign #1
k=40%
Campaign #1 had 40% quality leads = 400. Its “effective” cost per quality lead is now $5000/400 = $12.5 per quality lead.

Campaign #2
k=80%
Campaign #2 had 80% quality leads > 400. Its “effective” cost per quality lead is now $5000/400 = $12.5 per quality lead.

Are you confused? You should be. Numbers can be very misleading. We now see that our preliminary analysis was misleading us to think one campaign is outperforming the other, while they are actually quite similar.

Ratio of Quality Leads vs. Junk must be put into the Cost per Lead Formula

But let’s make this even more interesting, and move on to Problem #2:

Problem #2: Ignoring the differentiated Value per Lead

Now let’s add to our equation Parameter m: average value per average mortgage requested.

Campaign #1
m=$100,000

Campaign #1 generated 400 leads for mortgages valued at $40,000,000.

Campaign #2
m = $150,000

Campaign #1 generated 400 leads for mortgages valued at $60,000,000.

Bottom line here is that campaign #2 has the potential for much more business than campaign #1, even though its preliminary cost per lead seemed high.

Finally, my point is we really must calculate our entire conversion funnel, from each ad impression cost to actual income, in order to get proper decisions for our campaigns. Decisions which are not based on complete analysis, can sometimes lead us to the complete opposite directions and conclusions.

Thanks to Yoast for writing the great post and developing the canonical link element plugin for wordpress, and thanks for Tal to commenting on my previous post and discovering the link – I now have my own canonical link element implemented on my wordpress blog

Canonical Link Elements tools we already have:

• Firefox extension
• Wordpress plugin

Olivier sent me a txt in the middle of the night 2 weeks ago, directly from SMX West: “Matt Cutts just presented a revolution to the way duplicate content will be handles!”

Well I got to my email and started looking for blogs and tweets on the subject – and it indeed we are probably entering a new phase in the duplicate content fight.

The Duplicate Content Dilemma in 10 lines:

The most basic way to explain, is where you have a piece of content which can be reached from multiple URL’s. Whenever users and search engines go to 2 distinct URLs and get the same (or almost the same) content the robots need to decide whether to index a second version of the same content or not.

This presents lots of issues with ranking for keywords, ranking at all, receiving more or less of Googlebot’s indexing quota and the bottom is we’ve seen this kill websites and revives them the last few years.

There are spam related issues here but from my vast experience mostly its programming and architecture issues which may cause duplication and triplication of the same content via many URL’s.

Canonical Link Element at page level  – The Night in Shining Armour?

The Canonical Link Element at page level Google presents will allow web site owners to ‘tell’ the engines which version of the page is the original one, which needs to be indexed.

Did you knowe that in many cases, tracking URLs (those we use to spot affiliates and campaigns) are creating duplicate URLs?
example:
http://www.ophircohen.com/new_post/
http://www.ophircohen.com/new_post/?source=twitter&message=new_post

Both URLs will lead to the same content, but the engines most of the time have a hard time telling whether we’re talking about 1 page w tracking parameters or 2 distinct pages.

The new tag assumes to “hint” the engines on the original (=canonical) URL, and is composed as follows:

<head>
…
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.ophircohen.com/new_post/”/>
…
</head>

Tips:

1. This is a new feature – so use it carfully, monitor it’s behavior and don’t count on it TOO much as nobody really knows how fast the engines will be able to process it.

2. Do not stop fighting actual content duplication. Use 301 redirects to make sure all your content look the same and under a unified URL structure. the new link element is just a “hint” to the engine (says Cutts)

Matt Cutts original slides:

And the Video:

Matt Cutts on Canonical

To summarize this, SEO is an evolving creature. Back in the early days “Meta description” was enough, then came Google and links, directories, DMOZ, link exchange, link buyng, link development, link bait and duplicate content. Each of these had a huge hype, buzz and effect on SERPS and on many businesses – It was only a matter of time until Google solves this equazion – the question remains – what’s next?

We received note from the Google team asking us to verify our integration between Google AdWords and Google Analytics as they are about to upgrade the integration between the two on march 4th.

The required actions are simply to verify that the accounts are connected AND that the “apply cost data” checkbox is checked on the analytics profile settings panel.

I’ll take this opportunity to revisit the whole AdWords – Analytics integration process, which is a pretty basic feature most of us can benefit from. However, most of the new accounts I meet are just not set properly hence losing out on some pretty neat features and insights on their websites and campaigns.

Linking Google Adwords and Analytics 101

Why link AdWords and Google Analytics?

• It’s there and it’s free – so why not?
• Consolidate your marketing activities and analyze together.
• See you Google AdWords QUALITY of traffic, not just quantity.
• Cross Reference AdWords campaigns with traffic segments.

Linking Adwords and Analytics in 5 Easy Steps

• Login to AdWords
• Click the “Analytics” tab
• Select “I already have an analytics account“
• Select “Existing Google accounts” and select your Analytics Account
• Make sure both check boxes below are CHECKED

That’s it – You’re Done!!!

(allow a day or two for the data to synch)

Things to remember…

• There is a 1 to 1 relationship between AdWords and Google Analytics accounts. One AdWords Account will connect to only one Google Analytics account and vice verse.
• If your AdWords account contains campaigns to other websites they will also show up on Google Analytics and mess your stats. Keep each website’s campaign on their own account.
• Set both Adwords and Analytics accounts for the same time zone else your stats will be skewed.
• Make sure that on your Google Adwords account settings, Auto Tagging is active. Else, Tag your URLs based on the Google Analytics syntax – URL builder can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578I’ve done what you asked for – now what?

Segment you traffic:

There are at least three ways to segment your data on Google Analytics. The behave a bit differently, enable different depth of analysis and clarity of the data – but as long as you use one of them properly it’s OK:

• Using Built in Reports
• Using Custom Filters
• Using Advanced Segments

Look at Adwords data quality – identify problematic campaigns, ad groups, keywords and optimize them based on Analytics KPIs such as goal conversion, bounce rate, time on site, visitor loyalty etc.

Optimize your campaigns

• Optimize Keyword selection
• Optimize Ad copy
• Optimize geo-targeting
• Change bids

References:

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2008/08/18/linking-adwords-analytics-troubleshooting-guide/

http://www.iqcontent.com/blog/2007/07/linking-up-google-adwords-and-google-analytics/

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-analytics-and-adwords-better.html

60 Seconds and AdWords & Analytics together:

Google Analytics has announced a change to the custom variable _setVar, which will impact key metrics such as bounce rate and time on page. In this post I will try to shed some light on setVar and bounce rate, and show a few examples of where we can use them to gain insights if our visitors’ behavior.

What is _setVar in Google Analytics?

_setVar is a custom variable Google Analytics can read, which enables us to send Google Analytics certain data which is not predefined in google analytics and may be relevant for our reporting needs. Popular examples are differentiation between user’s status (logged in vs. not logged in), male vs. female and whatever else variables we want to segment our traffic on. This can be done with values submitted via forms (username, gender, age group etc.), saved in cookies etc.

All the website owner needs to do is to call the javascript (below the GATC code):
<script type=”text/javascript”>pageTracker._setVar(’logged in’);</script> 

_setVar values are collected into a special report in Google Analytics which can be found under Visitors > User Defined.

Known Limitations of _setVar:

• You can only send one variable, so you are somewhat limited in the customization here. There is a workaround John has posted for this at lunametrics.
• Use of _setVar creates a second instance of Google Analytics one each page, which has lead GA to reduce the bounce rate significantly on pages with _setVar. This Changed yesterday (explanation below).

Some more info from Google help

What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Bounce Rate is best defined as a “bad” visit. It is a quick qualifying metric which determines whether a visitor has acted or not. The basic assumption is that we want our visitors to engage with the websites and pages thus to consume our information, click on links, download stuff, buy stuff etc.
Bounce rate is determined where a visit occured and none of the above interactions occured afterwards:

• Pageview
• Action
• Transaction
• Experiment (Google Website optimizer)
• User Defined Call (_setvar) – will no longer be considered interaction for this calculation.

The true meaning of bounce usually show low interest in a landing page for the bouncing visitors. Bounce Rate is one of the most powerfull fast-metrics we use to find good and bad traffic sources, as well as pinpoint landing pages needs to be improved.

Some more info:

• Avinash Kaushik Video 
• WikiPedia Page for bounce rate
• From Google help

The Change and its Impacts

The recent change changes the way bounce rate is calculated. Bounce Rate will no longer consider a user defined interaction (calling _setVar) in the calculation. The major impact for users who call the user defined finction will be an INCREASE in the bounce rate.

So is it good or bad news?

In my humble opinion this is great news. This change is based on a lot of comments from Google Analytics users and experts around the globe, and reflects Google’s ability to listen and improve their software accordingly. Moreover, the change will simply mae our analysis better and more exact than it was before.