web ink

Try to answer the following question: how well is your website doing when it tries to engage visitors that have a clear focus? I am talking about those visitors that land on your website by searching for a specific keyword on search engines, unrelated to your brand.

1. Start by setting goals for each action you deem means engagement

The following video will offer you clear details on how to do exactly that:

Here are a bunch of examples of actions on your website that can define user engagement:

• buying a product
• filling up a form
• subscribing to newsletter or RSS
• sending you feedback
• commenting on an article
• recommending you to a friend
• tweeting your content

2. Define a non-brand keywords visits segment: that is, visitors that land on your website when searching with keywords unrelated to your brand

If you have never created segments before, check out this video tutorial.If you are familiar with segments, dive right just in and define one just like in the following image:

Replace "your-brand-name" with a keyword specific only to your brand

3. Check out for winners and losers

It is time to check out how well your website is doing when it comes to engaging your visitors. Apply the above segment to your Google Analytics data and dive in the following report: Traffic Sources > Keywords. Filter for non-paid traffic and look at the Goal statistics, just like in the image below:

Check out the conversion rate for each keyword

That’s about it. Now that you know, how do you plan to improve performance?

…or the scientific approach to actionable web analytics

Web analytics masters like Eric Peterson, Avinash Kaushik, Anil Batra and many others have been advocating since always for actionable web analytics. They have dedicated blogs and entire books on how not to be a reporting monkey but rather be an web analytics ninja.

The road to web analytics ninjaness ain’t easy. Whenever you think you get a big WOW from your web analytics data don’t just run to the IT department and tell them everything they did is plain wrong. Take a deep breath and try to answer some questions before.

How reliable is the source of your discovery?

This one gave me shame moments for a couple of times so far. On my dashboard I have a big widget for the conversion rate. One day, entering the web analytics solution it showed a huge drop. I got everybody in the company fired up, just to realize that nothing happened to the conversion rate. It was just a bug in our website that affected the way we measured a couple of our metrics.

Now, whenever I get WOW or OMG moments, the first thing I do is to do a WASP debugging of the pages are guilty for my WOW moment. I make sure everything is still measured correctly.

Have the claims been verified by other departments?

In the above scenario, when I got everybody fired up with my conversion rate drop, just before entering the CEO and giving the awful news,  the sales department told me that according to their reports, for the same day sales were up and not down. The marketing department told me that no special marketing campaigns are on so the traffic should be the same… All of them suggested me to calm down, drink some tea and go double check.

Since then, whenever I analyze revenue reports in my analytics application, I make sure to double check it with the other departments. If they confirm, now it’s the moment to get excited.

Is this how websites work?

This question actually helped me quite some times so far. Here is an example: A report is showing that a page has 100% bounce rate however people visiting that page bought a product in the same session. How is that possible? No, this is not how websites work. If a user bounces than he can’t convert: he is not on your website anymore. So there must be something wrong with this report

Actually, it isn’t. What is wrong is the way some people look at it. Bounce rate is calculated only for landing pages. Let’s say that page has been seen by 1000 visitors out of which 5 coming from search engines directly to the page and the others coming to it from other pages in the website. If all the 5 visitors coming from Google bounce, than we have 100% bounce rate. However, any of the other 995 users might of have bought something.

If things just don’t make sense, try to figure them out. If they don’t make sense to you, they won’t to your management as well.

What else could be explained with the data you get?

This is a classic one. When you see that the time spent on your website increases it doesn’t necessary means that users decided to look into more products of your website. It can also mean they don’t find what they are looking for. The same goes for increases or decreases of the pages/visit rate.

Whenever you are ready to take a decision based on the data, question yourself  if the same data can’t explain for other behaviors of your users as well.

Where does the other evidence point to?

The metrics you get for your website visitors are interconnected. When one metric is affected bet on it that other metrics will be affected as well. What does it mean when pages/visit increases but time spent on website doesn’t? What about the other way around? What if the drop in bounce rate has a very small impact on time on website? Does it mean people really stopped bouncing or might there be another explanation?

Whenever you want to act based on the web analytics data you have, make sure that any other metric you take to analyze, fits in your theory.

Are you taking it personal?

This is a tough one. As mastering the web analytics ninja way of life, your intuition becomes stronger as well; sometimes too eager to adopt new things. If during your experience the conversion rate increased only by working on the funnel, it doesn’t mean that’s the only way it can be increased.

Always question your personal beliefs and share them with seniors. Don’t take their word for it (they have their own personal beliefs) but rather use their arguments to see if your belief can still stand up.

Conclusions

Be scientific about it. Web analytics should not be treated as a walk in the park but again, it’s not rocket science for MIT graduates as well. Be skeptical.

What other questions/methods are you using to validate your web analytics actions?

This article idea came out while going through the Skeptical Magazine, which I recommend to any geek out there.

So, who subscribes to your newsletter?

In order to make a profile of the visitors who subscribe to your newsletter, first add a Goal to your Google Analytics implementation. A goal would be the URL of the page that says “Thank you for subscribing”. In case you use double opt-in, which I highly recommend, it is the URL address of the page that confirms the subscription.

Here is how your goal setup should look like:

Creating a Google Analytics Goal for newsletter subscribing

Gather data for one or 2 weeks (or until you have at least 100 new subscribers) and than you can run deep into profiling the newsletter subscribers. It will help you better understand the behavior of your visitors and come up with strategies to increase your subscribers list (without spamming that is).

Define a new segment for newsletter subscribers

In case you are not familiar with user segments in Google Analytics, take a look at this video tutorial. Here is how your new segment should look like (that is if your Goal for newsletter subscribers is defined as Goal 1):

Defining a segment for newsletter subscribers

Now, all you need to do is get back to your Analytics data, apply the newly created segment and see what you find out about the people who subscribe to your newsletter. Try to answer the following questions:

• Are they mostly new or returning visitors (Dashboard > Visitors > New vs Returning)
• How many pages and how much time do they spend on the website before subscribing (Dashboard > Visitors > Visitor Trending)
• What are the pages that are most persuasive in convincing users to subscribe ($index metric in Dashboard > Content > Top content)
• What are the most common traffic sources for the visitors that decide to subscribe (Dashboard > Traffic Sources)

How much potential are you wasting?

After understanding your newsletter subscribers, the next step would be to see how many visitors of your website have the same behavior with your newsletter subscribers. In other words, how many people are most likely to become subscribers.

Back to the drawing board (that is the segment creating page). Generate a new segment that would define the behavior of your subscribed users. Let’s say the conclusion you get from the above study is that your newsletter subscribers are new users that come mostly from search engines and visit at least 4 pages a session. Create a segment for it and apply it to your website data.

Now you have the number of visitors that subscribe to your newsletter and the number of visitors that are most likely to subscribe. Check out the conversion rate from one to the other? Let’s improve on that.

The next best thing would be to act on it

In case you use MailChimp for delivering your newsletter, we have a free solution for you. Today we have just launched a public limited edition of our real time behavioral targeting platform, PadiAct. After defining your segment of visitors who are most likely to subscribe to your newsletter, using PadiAct, you can ask these visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. It can and it will skyrocket your subscribing rate. Here is how it has worked for one of our clients.

In case you don’t use MailChimp but you are still very interested in making this work for you as well, drop us a message and we’ll see what can be done.

Just like in the real world, on the web, users interact with you but using different methods: links and forms, instead of language. There is no excuse for you not to use real time behavioral targeting when dealing with your potential customers… and it’s really not that difficult.

I’m talking about free and easy to do implementations. So, here is what you can do:

1. Different messages for different traffic sources

Well, look at your best landing page and see what are the first words that you notice; most probably the main heading. It is just as important as the first words a sales person tells its potential customers. If he would use the same text over and over again his efficiency will surely drop.

Ask your programmers to change the main heading of your landing page with the below script (make sure to change the titles though ). It can be easily modified to provide different titles based on popular keywords and not only referrers.

<h1>
<script type="text/javascript">
function readCookie(name) {
	var nameEQ = name + "=";
	var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); 
	for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {
		var c = ca[i];
		while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);
		if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);
	}
	return null;
}
 
function googleCookieReferrer()
{  
   var feed=readCookie("__utmz");  
   feed=feed.split("|"); 
   feed=feed[0].split("=");
   return feed[1];
}
alert (googleCookieReferrer());
if (googleCookieReferrer() == "(direct)")
{
	document.write("Title for direct visitors or the ones with unknown referrer");
}
else if (googleCookieReferrer() == "domain.com")
{
	document.write("Title for visitors referred by domain.com");
}
else if (googleCookieReferrer() == "google")
{
	document.write("Title for visitors coming from search engines");
}
else document.write("Default Title");
 
</script>
<noscript>Default Title</noscript>
</h1>

The script will provide the same title to users no matter how many times they refresh the page. By the way, it only works if you use Google Analytics.

2. Engaging thank you pages

Thank you pages are really good environments for implementing behavioral targeting methods because they show up just after a user interaction (filling a form) through which you get valuable info about the user.

Cool things you can do on the Thank You pages:

• make users acquaintance with the sales or support person that is responsible for the region where they are from
• let the user know at what events you are attending that are close to him
• invite users to connect to social profiles of your company based on their Job Title or any other relevant information he provides you
• give discount coupons for products depending on the age or sex, if you have it.

Based on the data you are collecting from your visitors, there are tens of ways in which you can use them for engaging your users further. It’s important, though, not to look spammy or scare your visitors away.

The golden rule is to offer them something that, based on the data you just got, you know they will enjoy.

3. Providing relevant info to returning visitors

We tackled this on Wordpress and came out with a plugin that offers returning visitors the article titles that you published since their last visit. You can download the plugin directly from the wordpress.org website . Here is a preview of what it displays on this blog.

The nice part of it is that it’s smart enough to report on its own performance. Using Google Analytics you get to see how many returning visitors interacted with the plug-in and how many of them clicked on the suggested links.

4. Extra mile: Target newsletter subscribers

The extra mile goes for behavioral targeting for getting newsletter subscribers.We are developing a light platform for behavioral targeting in which you will be able to define the segment of visitors you know that are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter and with the help of our platform you get to ask them in a friendly manner, in real time. The testing of it, so far, got us really nice results.

We don’t know yet the release date but we are in the final stage of testing. If you are interested in it and you want to test it before it goes public send us an email and we’ll try to provide you with an account.

The cool part is that it’s going to be free for the first 1000 email subscribers you’ll get.

First thing is first. As the owner of the website, make sure you own the analytics data for it. I’ve seen many cases where consultants create the Google Analytics profile on their username and share it with the owner of the website with read only rights. When the website owner wanted to switch the consultant guess what happened?

Yep, losing your analytics data is not cool at all. So, the owner of the website should be the one who creates the Google Analytics profile and shares it with as many consultants he wishes to. You can start by using your already existing Google account or create a new one.

So, here are the checklist chapters:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

Here is the short version of the checklist:

Let me know your feedback on it or if you would like me to cover any other aspects as well.

The tracking code is customizable in order to fit the need of any website. It has 3 mandatory elements (the javascript file, the identification code and the tracker) and lots of optional elements. In order to make sure you’ll get accurate tracking when generating your tracking code you need to see what fits your website from the following:

• Your website uses subdomains;
• You use different domains for the same website (using this will also track subdomains);
• You want to track traffic from mobile devices as well (for advanced users).

Google Analytics offers a great wizard on how to manage all of the above scenarios. (click the Check Status link in your website settings inside Google Analytics)

Bonus: Google has pushed the boundaries of the tracking codes and developed what they call asynchronous tracking code which will make the loading time for code much faster. It is in beta, but if you are an advanced user and have no problems in understanding javascript implementation documentation I highly suggest to give it a try.

Tracking your whole website

Most of the times I diagnosed websites for the presence of the tracking code I found pages that simply weren’t tagged. This is one of the main reasons for which many website owners get their own domain as traffic source in the referring sites report in Google Analytics, but we will get back to this later.

If you have a small website you can use one of the following free services on the web: SiteScanGa by Epikone or GPablo (haven’t tried this one).

If you have a large website, things can get a little bit more complicated or more expensive. One of the options you have is to purchase a Market Research licence for WASP. If you can afford it, I recommend it especially if you use other analytics providers than Google Analytics as well.

For the free but  a little bit more technical way to do this, John Mueller has a great tutorial for it.

Troubleshooting

Having your own domain as referrer? This is the issue that gets to be very frustrating. Most of the times it happens, as I said earlier, because some pages in the website haven’t been tagged. All the visitors that continue browsing the website after entering through those pages will be considered as referred by your domain, which technically is correct. Here are other situations when you get your own website as a referrer:

• temporary redirects for entrance points in the website(302)
• faulty cross-domains tracking
• faulty encoding when passing referring sources data
• session expiration issues (visitors forgetting their browser open with your page for more than 30 minutes)

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

They say that you shouldn’t focus to get 100% accurate analytics data cause you will not get it. 95% accuracy will do it. However, I’ve seen cases where traffic sources data wasn’t even 30% accurate and that can hurt your business.

So, what is important to know about tracking traffic sources? They need special tagging. Your best friend for this action should be Google URL Builder. The new tags you will add to your links (you don’t need to change anything to your website) will allow Google Analytics to identify the real referrer so it will not go under direct traffic anymore.

You get to tag advertising, links you post on Twitter or any other social network, white-papers or your free trial. If you are going to use short-urls for promoting your content – which I recommend – you can always use for automation the Twitter Analytics GreaseMonkey script I wrote some time back.

Important

Don’t forget to tag all the links you put in your newsletter. Otherwise will be almost impossible to get reports on the success of your campaigns. Do it right and you’ll see your direct traffic dropping from 60% to 30%. But the 30% is more likely to fit the 95% accuracy rule… you brand awareness campaigns suddenly are more likely to perform.

The next thing you need to check for traffic sources is that, if you use Google Adwords, it is going to be linked to your Google Analytics account. For not having any troubles ever, just make sure that you create the both accounts using the same email address. This way you will have admin privileges and things can’t really go wrong. Check out this official tutorial for more details.

Troubleshooting

Duplicate content. Having tags on your links will suddenly create duplicate links for your website pages that might impact your SEO efforts. The secret is to use the hash mark (#) instead of the question mark (?) for tagging your links. LunaMetrics has a detailed article on how to do this.

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

• URL destination: how many visitors get to a page that confirms you they have finished a desired action (e.g. Thank You for Buying page);
• Time on site: How many visitors spend on your website more than the time you desire them to;
• Pages/Visit: How many visitors get to visit more than the number of pages / visit that you desire them to.

From the 3 types, the first one might give you some head ache, especially if you website is not static HTML, which is very likely. For this you will need to get some RegEX skills. If the thought of this scares you, just ask an analytics consultant to give you a hand (you can always give it a try on an analytics discussion group).

If you do have some RegEX skills, before setting up the goal and funnel just validate it using the method from the ROI Revolution Blog.

eCommerce Tracking: If your website has or is an online store, than this feature offered by Google Analytics is a must. It’s one of the few things that might need some implementations in your website Thank You for buying page, but it is 100% worth it.

You’ll get reports about your sales, revenue, products, sales referrers, you name it. Here is the official video on how to set it up. Most probably you are using a third party gateway for your transactions so make sure you have cross domain tracking activated in order not to lose referrer data. Here is the documentation.

Bonus: RegEx help. To be honest, a couple of years when I saw RegEX rules, having very little programming background than, I thought that they were from another planet. They just made no sense for me. The best resources for me were the LunaMetrics blog with their RegEX series (old but good stuff) and a RegEX tool (or this one) for trying things out on the fly.

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

By activating it you get to see a lot of great data about what people are searching, not to say a lot of ideas of keywords which you can use for your SEO campaign. So my advice is to go and set it up now.

Filters

Since the launch of Advanced Segments Filters haven’t been used so much, but they can still be valuable. What’s really important about them is that the technical difference between segments and filters is that the first are applied on visit level while the second at pageview level (more differences between the two). Ok, ok, being real time and working on historical data makes segments the best ever. . Here are the most common filters I’ve met and I still recommend as advanced segments can’t help you here:

• exclude your own traffic out from the reports of the website;
• view full referrer links from the sites that send you traffic;
• view subdomains data full paths in your reports;
• get the keywords users searched when clicking on your AdWords ads

Custom Variables

On a recent platform update Google introduced the possibility of defining up to 5 custom variables. Why would you want to do that? Well, do you think it’s right to treat the same returning customers with new visitors? If not, than custom variables are here to help you. All you need to know is to identify the returning customers (when they login, based on cookies, etc) and apply a custom var for them. Google Analytics will allow to create advanced segments for the custom vars. Most likely for using custom variables you will need a technical friend to help with the implementation. I highly recommend them.

Tracking outbound links and other hacks. Stephane Hamel and friends decided to offer open source code for helping website owners in tracking outbound links, pdf or trial download. You can find details about it on his blog.

Real Bounce Rate

My last bonus suggestion comes as shameless self promotion for the Real Bounce Rate hack for Google Analytics. It will allow you to get reports on the real bounce rate, that is of users spending less than 10 seconds on your website. All the users who get to spend more, even if they don’t visit another page, they will not be considered as bouncing.

I guess this is it for the series on Google Analytics Implementation Checklist. Is there anything else you would like me to add to it?

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking

It only interacts with returning visitors, the ones that are not coming from a feed and only where and how you wish to. We’ve been secretly testing the plugin so far and we decided it’s stable enough to release it to the world. Check it live on our blog.

Go to the plugin page to download (and some more information).

Using the CSS styles already defined by your theme, it will fit perfectly on your blog. Here is how it looks for our blog:

I like to think of this plug-in as the returning brother of the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin. I think both plugins can can work great together. Published articles since last visit is targeted in resolving a problem of the end user and not the blogger: getting very fast what he came back for – latest content.

For geeks: how does it work

For the start, the plugin does not place any cookies on the end-user computer. In order to identify if a user is new or returning it simply uses the content of the Google Analytics cookies. From the same cookies it is able to identify the users last visit and based on that data it just displays the titles of articles that your faithful reader might of have missed.

Even more, we offer the possibility to not display anything even to returning visitors coming from a RSS reader (only if you use FeedBurner for distributing your RSS feed). Here is a glimpse of the settings area for the plugin:

The best part: it reports its own performance

Basically we didn’t want to just build a plugin that people might find funky and go with it. We believe in measurement or the performance so we implemented the possibility of tracking how many people view the suggested articles by the plugin and how many people click on them.

Further more, we send that data to your Google Analytics account as events. We allow you to connect to your Google Analytics directly from the plugin page and extract that data automatically. So you’ll know for sure if this plugin is worthy for you. I hope it is and I hope you will let us know about it. The comment area bellow never closes