Just 2 days after the launch of PadiTrack, our brand new conversion funnel tracking app, Google Analytics published a great article on their official blog about it. We were literally overwhelmed by the number of people checking us out and creating accounts.

The buzz around the product confirmed us the high interest for the conversion optimization field; after all, measuring the conversion is the first step in order to optimize it.

With victory comes responsibility

Initially we designed the application to be used by our clients, a few friends and the public projects we are experimenting with. Overnight the number of accounts spiked. With it, little darn bugs started to appear in places we expected the least. In other words… PadiTrack was live and kicking.

One of the biggest bugs relates to the account creation process and, thanks to the team from Google Analytics, we are getting closer to finding a fix for it. We will send a status update via Twitter as soon as things get back to normal for everybody trying to create an account.

We are also working on providing the best conversion rate reports page out there. We hope every time you login to check your reports you will leave with at least an idea on how to make things better. Tough challenge you might say. Here is our reply to that: just bring it on

With victory comes fame as well

Thank you for all those who left feedback via Twitter. Here are just a couple of examples that made us feel really really good

Google Analytics: Segment your funnels through the API: http://bit.ly/bwJuBv #measure #ganalytics


Avinash Kaushik: Free: Adhoc, segmentable conversion funnels – historical or live data – that rock! PadiTrack: http://zqi.me/cfTrQL #kewl


Kaya Walton: @paditrack Oooh, very awesome. I love your tool. Even more so now that I can use regex. Thanks for the tip!


rondiver: This looks very cool: retroactively available funnel and segmentation analysis. @Paditrack http://su.pr/1tkf6N


Thomas Bosilevac: @paditrack Amazing product, perhaps adding a dropdown of pages within account would help assure correct matching. (Sorted by Visits)

So, here goes a big Thank You for everyone who has spread the word about PadiTrack.

It’s a free product that will help you visualize the conversion funnels for the major events on your website. Pulls data from Google Analytics (no need to install any tracking code on your website)  reports are available retroactively and segmentation can be applied to the funnels. Did I mention it is free, too?

PadiTrack has just been featured on Google Analytics Apps Gallery. After giving it a try, we would really appreciate if you make a small detour and leave a comment & rate it as well.

How can it help you?

If you are an online store, you get to know where people drop of during the purchase process. If you are an web app, you get to know how many people sign up and how many people use your product or service. If you are looking for leads, well, you got it… you get to know how many you get and how many you loose.

In one sentence, PadiTrack reports on your conversion rate. Not only that, but:

• it reports the abandonment rate on the steps that your visitors need to go through for converting.
• it reports segmented per traffic source, be it referrers or keywords

Here is how it works:

What’s the magic trick behind it?

It’s built upon Google Analytics API. Therefore, in order to use it you need a Google Analytics account… but then again, who isn’t using Google Analytics these days. These guys are just that popular.

PadiTrack takes 3 min to set up, no tracking codes needed to be installed on your website and most importantly reports are available for historical data. So if you create an account now, you get to create funnels on the fly and see the conversion patterns for each major event on your website.

We hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think of it.

I see many times people looking at the above report and when they spot a big bounce rate  they panic. They start screaming the page is good for nothing as only 17% of the people stay on the website while the others are leaving.

Sorry to tell you, but no, it’s not really like that.

First, bounce rate is not calculated in reference to page views but to visits. To look at the above report and say that 83.33% of  1681 people bounced is simply wrong. Just as it is to say that 83.33% of 1427 bounced (if you relate to unique views).

So, how to interpret the above report

If you are really interested to find out how many people bounced from this page we need to find out first how many people landed on it. Bounce rate is reported only to people (actually, visit sessions) who land on a page. People that visit it by coming from another page on the same website are not counted for bounce rate (they didn’t bounce in the first place).

So, go to “Top landing pages” and check the numbers for the page you are interested in. Here is what we get for the above page:

Just 5 people bounced. Really, no need to panic.

So, before doing radical changes on your website to improve bounce rate just make sure you got it right. Bounce rate can be a deceiving metric. If you really are interested in measuring it right, try implementing the real bounce rate in Google Analytics.

Here is another article on the same topic: Why Bounces is a Better Metric than Bounce Rate.

• How not to loose what we have gained so far
• How to make things better than before

Everybody is planing and working like crazy for the above objectives, then the new website gets launched and suddenly, all eyes are on you: the web analyst. After all, who else can answer those questions better than you?

It’s not a very good idea to wait till everything finishes and get the tracking going at the end… nope, not wise at all. You’d rather make sure you will be able to answer the above questions in detail and some more. Based on a project we have recently worked on, here’s our web analyst’s technical checklist for (re)launching a website:

Prepare for (advanced) web analytics

Start by finding out the expectations for the website of the other departments. Work with the dev team from day one to make sure that your web analytics tool will be able to report on the established KPIs.

Tip: Number one priority for the projects we worked on was to be sure that we can track both micro and macro conversions.

We use the following checklist:

• The back-end allows for global tracking settings. This way you make sure that each page has the tracking code placed properly.
• The global tracking can be overwritten on specific pages of the website directly from the backend
• All actions on the website have designated Thank You pages (makes conversions tracking a breeze)
• Error pages are being tracked as well (404, 503, etc.)
• Outgoing and download links can be tagged manually and/or automatically
• eCommerce data is accessible through JavaScript (we usually request a JS array containing the eCommerce data)
• Custom Variable data is available through JavaScript arrays (mostly used by advanced solutions like Omniture or WebTrends)

When all implementations are finished, use a tool like WASP to check that everything works like it is supposed to. The website should not go live unless everything is tracked accordingly. Having all that in place will offer an infrastructure that will make future tracking implementations easy.

Things don’t stop here though. Your job is not only to analyze but rather to help improve. So, the next step is to…

Prepare for A/B testing

Sooner or later, if you haven’t already, you are going to start A/B testing. Checkout the main tools out there for their technical requirements in order to do A/B or multivariate testing and see if the new platform will be able to handle them. Get your specs to the dev team before the work gets started as after might be too late. In case you will go with Google Website Optimizer, you will need the following:

• The possibility to add JavaScript snippets to any page’s footer and header;
• The possibility to add invalid JavaScript to the body of any page;
• The possibility to add JavaScript codes to Thank You pages or instances.

Have this and you’ll be able to roll out any A/B testing campaigns in minutes. Make no mistake about it: with any website redesign testing ideas pour in like nothing you’ve seen before.

Prepare for personalization

This is something that very few people actually prepare for. A/B testing is not the only method out there for increasing conversion rates. Personalizing the experience for different segments of traffic and behavioral targeting have great results for boosting up conversions. So, what are the basic things you can do for having a website platform that can customize itself based on user behavior:

• Make a list of the possible segments of traffic you might consider for targeting
• Ask your developers to create a framework in which you can populate cookies with data specific to those segments

What is important is just to have the framework in place… no need to populate the cookies with anything for now. However, when you will want to start behavioral targeting campaigns you should be able to do it easy and fast.

Ok, this is what we have been using so far. What about you. What do you have in your checklist for (re)launching a website?

Other great resources on the web about website (re)launch checklists, not necessarily related to analytics:

• Website Prelaunch Checklist
• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
• Checklist before (re)launching a website for the win!

Online behavior is not offline behavior done online

What I loved the most about the book is that it comes with a scientific approach towards web analytics and behavioral targeting. On one side, Joseph has a strong background in sociology, anthropology, psychology and many other interconnected sciences. On the other side he loves the web. It was just a matter of time before putting them together (around 15 years of research, actually). The Internet is a very complex communication medium. He  really treats it as such.

The book is mind blowing. At every page you find yourself saying out loud “Ohh Common, that can’t be real!” just that at the next page everything is explained and becomes common sense. Imagine this: the behavioral targeting software he built manages to identify if a user who logs in to his account really is him or is it somebody else having access to his login credentials based only by the the way the user interacted with the website. What about managing to identify the field of interest of the visitors just by the way they browsing through a website. Mind blowing, I tell you.

While many web analytics and behavioral targeting books out there are rather about cookies, numbers and statistics, for Joseph everything is about people. That’s why this book was so different than anything I have read so far.

Another thing that strikes about the book are the reviews that come from people like Jim Sterne, Anil Batra, Bryan Eisenberg, Robbin Steif and Angie Brown. These guys are worldwide top notch when it comes to web communication and analytics.

How come the book is not in top 10 web marketing best sellers on Amazon, you might ask. I really have no idea as it really should be there. The only explanation I can find is that the book is some sort of the “Ace in the sleeve” for many top marketers. It’s part of their secret of why they are so good at what they do. I don’t like cheating in poker (unless I am the only one doing it ) so I highly recommend this book to everybody. It will put some science facts in your work.

However, one thing is 100% sure in any web analytics tool out there. When a user is being identified as a returning user, you can bet on it that that’s how it is. Don’t get me wrong here. There are returning visitors that your tool sees as new ones (they delete their cookies) but all identified as returning are definitely users that have previously visited your website.

No more accuracy excuses in this area. Time to get to do some analytics work. Segment only for returning visitors data and let’s dive in for some insights. Here are some questions most of the web analytics tools can answer:

How often do returning visitors come to my website?

Here is how a tool like Google Analytics presents us this information:

Recency Report in Google Analytics with "Returning Visitors" segment activated

Once you know how often they visit you, use this indicator to know how frequent to update the marketing campaigns to leverage a better retention. In the above image 40% of the traffic visited at least 1 day before the last visit. 10% of the visitors visited at least 8 days before.

The next thing would be segment the website traffic only for those visitors and see if they have a higher conversion rate. If yes, that’s the response for how often to update the blog or send a newsletter.

What’s the conversion rate for your returning visitors?

Do the returning visitors convert better than the new ones? If yes, a good strategy could be to boost up retention marketing campaigns.

When I say returning visitors I am not talking about visitors who have purchased something from you and now are coming to the website for support. Those visitors should be filtered out. Most of the analytics tools allow you to do that by using custom variables.

After finding the conversion rate for your returning visitors dive in to find out the following:

• how often does a visitor comes to your website before converting?
• how many days between the first visit and the visit when he became a customer?
• do returning visitors bounce more or spend less on the website?

What are the entry points of returning visitors?

Go to Top Landing Pages while having activated the "Returning Visitors" advanced segment

I guess homepage will be the biggest hit here, but look deeper. You might discover some low hanging fruits. It can be a good idea to recheck the copy of the landing pages that are main entry points for returning visitors.

Tackle homepage as well. Some little JavaScript hacks and you will be able to offer a different heading copy or call to action to your returning visitors. Test. Experiment. Write to us

One thing is for sure: returning visitors don’t have the same behavior as new ones. Don’t believe? Just compare the data in your analytics tool. Now, that we got this straight, don’t you think it’s not very efficient to offer the same website experience both to new users as to returning ones?

How can you act on it?

Well, if you just own a blog, there are at least 2 WordPress plugins you can use to differentiate between new visitors and returning ones:

• What would Seth Godin do? (love this plugin name)
• Published articles since last visit (I contributed to the development of this plugin as well)

If you own a complex website things can be easy as well. We are rolling out beta accounts to our behavioral targeting platform which you could use to do just that: offer a different user experience to returning visitors.

So, how would you like to treat your returning visitors?

Google Analytics changed the game of web analytics by making it accessible to everyone, but can it get you reports like the conversion rate of all the visitors that were once referred by a friend through a provided form on your website? What about the number of visitors that purchased on your website after downloading one of your whitepapers? No, it can’t, not out of the box. However, using custom variables and some little implementations on your website, the above reports are piece of cake.

What makes custom variables really good? It’s the fact that you can set them up to be persistent across sessions. So if a user downloads a pdf file today and comes and convert on your website next week, Google Analytics will be able to report that he is part of the segment of users who once downloaded a pdf. You will know his behavior across different visiting sessions.

How to start with custom variables

One starting point can be to tag the users that micro-convert on your website. Most of the times the micro conversions happen through a form and forms make custom variables really easy to implement.

Why micro-conversions? Because it already shows engagement from your visitors.

What to look for? How many of the people who micro-converted got to eventually macro-convert e.g. How many of the users who downloaded the trial came back to the website and bought it? How many days after? Yes, Google Analytics can give you this.

If the terms of micro conversions and macro conversions are still strangers to you, check out this great explanatory tutorial provided by Avinash Kaushik.

How to do it

Just forward to your dev team the following 2 resources and they’ll know how to continue from there:

• Custom Variables, Part II: The Code – LunaMetrics ninjaness
• Custom Variables Documentation

Attention: Custom variables are addictive. Once you start using them, you won’t be able to stop 

The question: If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be? The guests: Avinash Kaushik, Joseph Carrabis and Stephane Hamel, people I look way up to when it comes to web analytics brain set. Here is how they would answer the above question:

Avinash Kaushik

Segment: The segment where I am spending the most money acquiring traffic.

Question: Why were you not able to complete your task on our website today?

(Author’s note) I love Avinash’s “simple solution – rich in value” approach. Implementing his suggestion is almost piece of cake to do with some minor help from your development team; the value you can get out of this implementation, priceless .

Joseph Carrabis

I’ve had about a day to think of this and my response hasn’t changed (and it’s probably NextStageish): I would direct my question to the segment that doesn’t achieve the site goal (bounces, non-conversions, …) and ask them “Is there anything we could do to help you achieve your goal on the site?”

In most cases the visitor percentage goaling/converting is small (just checked FireClick. Conversions are 4.2% and cart abandonment is just over 70%). These numbers are extremely consistent with NextStage research and are due to site designs/topologies/… not being designed for the majority audience (except by accident, usually). These numbers (4.2%, 70%) demonstrate a site’s de facto audience. They’ll complete a goal/convert regardless.

I should point out that I’ve written elsewhere that NextStage has a 19% bounce rate, a just over 75% conversion rate and a cart abandonment rate of 3.7%. The low numbers experienced by other sites don’t surprise me because few sites are designed to capture the majority of their visiting audience.

Essentially these sites don’t ask visitors “Is there anything we could do to help you achieve your goal on the site?” and note that I’m asking the visitors how to achieve their goals while on the site, not how to get them to achieve the site’s goals for visitors.

Stephane Hamel

Some people would go through extensive scientific explanation or rely on black-magic to uncover the über segment that will gratify any business with triple digit conversion rate improvements. If I could only segment by one metric, that would be Recency – how long ago you came to the site, or purchased, or did something worthwhile for my business. Time and time again Recency has proven to be the best predictor of future behavior. In our field, Jim Novo has been a proponent of this metric and this has been studied in psychology, marketing, behavioral science, database marketing, etc.

Part of the RFM segmentation model (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), Recency would be a better predictor of behavior than any other metric. Think of it, just with this metric you can also segment new vs repeat visitors, prospects and long-time customers, unqualified visitors vs advocates, etc. Segmenting by Google search terms are interesting, doing it by social media source is cool, but nothing beats Recency. Philip Kotler, the gold standard in marketing management, sums it up nicely: “Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master”… Have you checked your recency metric recently?

Now, the question I would ask returning visitors is very simple: What is your purpose of visit. Knowing that specific piece of qualitative info would allow me to see if/how I can help achieve their goal – and mine!

My Take

I love all 3 answers, and to prove it, I am going to implement them all. I’ll let you know the results as soon as I will have some.

I like Avinash’s answer cause it’s so plain simple to do and results can be very helpful. I love Joseph’s answer cause I don’t think you can get a better way to learn on how to optimize a conversion process; it really can’t get more relevant than that. I love Stephane’s answer because when visitors return over and over again to your website you can bet they have a good reason for it. You’d better find it out.

Your take now

If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be?

Give us your best shots and we’ll choose the ones we can accomplish and offer their implementations for your website, free of charge.

Here is what we have been up to:

Multiple Segments Targeting

We are adding the possibility to define multiple segments for the same website. Let’s say that you would like to greet your organic traffic with one message and the paid traffic with another one. Or maybe you want to offer a discount to your returning visitors and invite your new ones to follow your social media profiles. The platform now supports unlimited segment and action definitions. However we have been testing with maximum 3 actions as, after this level, the JavaScript files tends to get above 20Kb.

Here is a small glimpse of the segment management page:

Fully customizable actions

Well, almost. While we are using fully customizable actions in our sandbox environment we still need to come up with documentation on how to use it. At this moment we activate it only on request base.

However we are going to roll out the possibility for deploying any message to a certain segment of your website. We allow HTML so you can also add forms, images, video or just plain text with links.

New Segment Rules

The following segment rules are going to be rolled out:

• New vs Returning Visitors
• Visitors using the search functionality of the website (based on the keyword they search)
• Visitors visiting a certain page of your website
• Visitors landing on a certain page of your website
• Visitors spending a certain time on your your website

An important requested rule by our beta testers was to be able to specify the pages on which the script should not run. The reason behind this rule was to not distract a user once he entered, let’s say, the buying process or the creating an account one.

Another requested development that we have implemented was to allow RegEx expressions when defining segmentation rules.

Of course the new update will come with bug fixes and some usability improvements based on the feedback that we have got so far. It will be rolled out around 1st of May, so stay tuned.

Most web analytics tools tend to track the outcomes of a visitor actions: the pages that load after users click a link or fill in a form. While for links I believe that is the right way to go, with forms things stay different. No matter how well optimized, there is always going to be an abandonment rate. With forms, things are a little bit more complex. So, how do we track them?

Tracking form errors

Tracking form filling errors is the first thing you wanna do when you want to know more about the performance of your forms. Make sure you have implemented a form validation method though. Check this tutorial on how to do it if you haven’t done it yet.

Each time a user gets an error make sure you trigger a JavaScript snippet as well that will send the data to your web analytics tool. If it is Google Analytics, use events to track the error. Here is how it could look like:

//use the following code inside your JavaScript validation function
pageTracker._trackEvent('Form Errors', 'Field Name', 'Field Error');
//replace Field Name & Field Errors with their respective values

Funnel vs last filled-in field

One of the pitfalls of tracking forms is that some analysts see forms as being funnels.Tracking them as such will get you a huge amount of data which will be not that easy to analyze. Wouldn’t it be easier to track only where users drop of, therefore the last filled-in field of the form? You’ll get less code to write (hint: onunload javascript function) within your forms and cleaner data to analyze. Double win.

Another trick can be to use a heat map tool for your form pages. Crazy Egg worked the best for me in the past.

Tracking and flagging success

A major issue with forms that use the POST method is that many times the “Thank you” page has the same URL as the form itself. Most web analytics tools track URL’s so you won’t be able to make the difference between a user loading up the form and a user completing the form. 2 things I suggest to do here:

• use custom tagging for successful form filling
• flag the visitors who have filled up a form with success so you can track their behavior from that point on

Here is one way to do it using Google Analytics on the page containing the form:

//the following example is based in php 
//can be replicated for any other scripting language 
<script type="text/javascript"> 
try { 
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxx-x"); //use your own UA ID 
<?php if(formsuccess) 
{ 
   $pagename="form-end";
   echo ("pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, \"Form\", \"Submitted\", 2);"); //flag the visitors   
} else $pagename="form-start"; ?> 
pageTracker._trackPageview(<?php echo ($pagename) ?>); 
} 
catch(err) {}
</script>

Optimizing forms

When it comes to optimizing forms there is a great resource out there on the web. His name is Luke Wroblewski.

He has a great blog dedicated to forms and user interactions. When it comes to form design I highly recommend Luke’s book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.