Measuring Success

As you may have heard, bing.com is the new search engine from Microsoft. Although tracking bing.com visitors in Google Analytics will take place automatically, the caveat is, that at present it is reported as a standard referrer – as if a link from another website. That means it is not grouped with other search engines in your reports and no keyword information is available.

This update allows you to track Bing.com as a search engine in Google Analytics with visitor keyword detail.

Background

Search still has a long way to go in helping people efficiently find information other than for product search, so reading the Bing press release certainly caught my attention. This post is an update to my original tracking regional search engines hack.

Although Google will no doubt apply a bing.com fix in the near future, the “Tracking regional search engines” hack is a script that allows you to define your own specific list of search engines for Google Analytics. For example, by default, Google Analytics groups all Google organic searches a ‘google / organic’. But what if you wish to separate google.com versus google.co.uk versus google.cn and all the other country specific domains? This hack enables this and allows you to define other regional specific engines such as naver.com (Korea), Eniro.com (Sweden) etc. In fact, over 100 regional specific search engines are now included, and you can easily add your own (or ask me to add them here!).

The Bing hack for Google Analytics

Using the script is straight forward – simply call it in your GATC before the function call _trackPageview(). For example, a modified GATC is as follows:

<script type="text/javascript">
   var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
	var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-1");
</script>

<script src="http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/scripts/custom_se-ga.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
	pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Don’t forget to change to your account number (UA-123456-1). If you are using the legacy urchin.js GATC, refer to the corresponding script in the Hacks section of this site (Hack #2).

Your Traffic Sources > Search Engines report will then look something like this:

As always I appreciate your comments/feedback, or a quick rating by clicking on the stars.

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit – London UK, 18-19 May 2009

If you are attending this (www.emetrics.org/london), please come and say hello. I am presenting on the Monday and will be around Tues morning. Running alongside this is the SMX conference – at last, Search & Analytics together…

If you haven’t been before, eMetrics and SMX are great opportunity to attend the industry’s leading web analytics and search marketing events. As a speaker I have a limited number of discount codes for registration (15% off!). Please contact me directly if interested.

See you there.

Many people use Google Analytics for Search Engine Optimisation. As you may know, I started my digital life way back(!) in 1997 in web development and SEO – odd as it seems now, at that time Alta Vista was the Google of its day and Google was still a university project at Standford called Backrub. Although I now focus more on the overall performance of websites for clients, I am still very active when it comes to search engine optimisation. I was therefore honoured when Dave Chaffey asked me to do an interview for his Marketing Insights blog.

Below is reprint of the interview I did last month. I reporduce here to keep my thoughts in one place…

BTW, I am a regular reader of Dave’s material – both at Marketing Insights and his work for eConsultancy . Both are great resources for the digital marketer – end of plug

The questions:

SEO Improvement process

Dave Chaffey : As a consultant, please could you outline your process for using Google Analytics to improve results from SEO? Please outline the steps you take.

Brian Clifton : The key to being successful in this field, is not to treat your SEO as a silo. It has to be part of the bigger marketing, communication and business picture. For example, if your marketing team are about to launch a TV campaign, its important that words/phrases associated with that campaign lead to your web site should people search for them online. Ideally that will be via organic search for the main part with PPC filling in the gaps.

Similarly, visits from social networks will reflect your search visibility, so one eye needs to be kept on these.

Alongside co-ordinating the strategy, I establish benchmarks (Key Performance Indicators) for SEO. This is important for drawing a line in the sand and managing expectations. The first step is segmenting your organic visits i.e. grouping together all your organic traffic separately from the rest of your visits. That is done by default in Google Analytics, though you may wish to customise the list of search engines for local markets (see this post from me )

KPIs usually involve you extracting data from the reports in order to make the calculation specific to your organisation. However, some can be plucked right out of Google Analytics.

Here are some typical KPIs I use to help search marketers:

• Keyword Performance – the percentage of search traffic from Top 10 keywords (also top 25, 100 keywords etc). Also this should be percentage of revenue, percentage of conversions. This provides insight into your long tail, in terms of its scale and value. Generally who will want to increase this value.

• Brand Engagement – the percentage of search traffic that has used your brand or product name when the visitor conducted their search. Brand reputation is expensive to build in any channel as this metric allows you to measure it. Most organisations will wish to increase this, though publishers generally wish to decrease it i.e. attract new readers looking for subject information.

• Pages yielding search traffic – the percentage of your pages (as a fraction of your total search visible content), that brought you search engine visitors. In theory, this should be close to 100%, that is all your content should be search visible and therefore bring you search engine traffic, though in practice this is very rare.

• Bounce rates – these can be obtained directly from your Google Analytics reports. A bounce is a single page (or event) visit and reflects poor engagement. Therefore every marketer wishes to reduce this. As a guide, I use a traffic light system – red requires urgent attention (great tan 50% bounce rate), amber means there is potential improvement (20-30% bounce rate), green is all clear (less than 20% bounce rate).

Of course on-site metrics are only one part (though a major part) of the puzzle. Other tools such as Google Trends, data from comScore, Hitwise etc. should also be used as these provide insight as to your potential audience.

Keyword research

DC : How can marketers use Google Analytics for keyword discovery? Which techniques do you recommend for identifying new keyphrases or qualifiers to target?

BC: The greatest potential insight into discovering new keywords to target comes from your Site Search reports. Site Search is the Google terminology used for describing the internal search engine of your web site. Essentially, any web site with more than 100 pages/products of content needs a decent Site Search facility for visitors to find information quickly and efficiently.

Apart from its importance for navigation, site search is your direct feedback mechanism from your visitors. That is, visitors are typing in exactly what they are looking for on your web site. That can be an incredibly rich source of information and there is a dedicated report in Google Analytics to analyse this.

Ensure you are using these keywords in your external campaigns and look for new insights. For example, you may think everyone refers to your product as ‘gadget’ when in fact there could be a significant number that use ‘widget’. Your Site Search reports will tell you this and enable to you investigate the potential for targeting such alternative keywords.

Integrating SEO with Pay Per Click Activity

DC: How can use the Google Analytics keyword reports to make sure that PPC and SEO are integrated cost-effectively?

BC : The key to integration is to maximise your opportunities and minimise wastage, which usually means not duplicating your efforts. However, it never ceases to amaze me how many organisations advertise on keywords that they already rank high for organically – by that I mean they rank in positions 1-3 for the same keyword.

There is a myth that doing this has 2+2 = 5 effect, meaning advertising and simultaneously having a top three organic position produces more traffic to your web site than just having one of these alone. However, I have yet to see any study of this that stands up to a rigouress analysis*. Moreover, this situation will cannibalise your existing organic traffic, resulting in you paying for visits that were free.

Therefore, use keyword reports to look for overlaps and reduce these were possible. Keywords that have a high Per Visit Goal Value (see Q5) should be considered for organic optimisation, while those that are lower should be considered for PPC.

*I specifically refer to the top three organic positions. This duplicate approach can work if you are outside the top three.

Landing pages

DC: The main entry page for a visit is often not the best performer in terms of conversion. How do you suggest targeting the right pages against the right keyphrases?

BC: There are two very useful metrics in Google Analytics that can help with this: $Index values (Content section) and Per Visit Goal Value (Goal Conversion reports). These represent the value, in monetary terms, of a page and a visit to your web site respectively.

For example, the higher the $Index value of a page, the more important that page is to the conversion process. This is dependent on whether that particular page is visited prior to a conversion and the value of the end goal. Therefore to work, you must monetise your goals – something many web site managers forget about.

In a similar way, visits can be valued. So you can compare different referral sources in terms of their value. For example, how does YSM compare with AdWords or organic search compare with paid search advertising? You can also drill down to the keyword level for each referral source.

Clearly when it comes to optimizing your keyword and landing page combinations, you should target those visits that have the highest value to you and match those to the relevant pages that have the highest value. I recommend targeting the top 10 of each and working your way down the list.

Thanks! Dave Chaffey.

Google Analytics has come along way since the acquisition of Urchin was announced in April 2005. In this article I wanted to summarise the achievements made to date and discuss my view as the future for the product.

A brief history of Urchin

Urchin analytics has been around for some time. In fact since 1997, Urchin software has been slowly and quietly building a strong reputation for its server-side web analytics software. I first came across it in 2003, where its lightening fast processing power, small resource footprint and good value for money caught my attention. Even on a moderately specified Linux box, Urchin’s number crunching performance far exceeded anything else on the market – and still does today. This has made it particularly attractive to ISPs and web hosting companies that remain its largest customer base.

A differentiator for the Urchin product is its hybrid approach – combining data collection from both web server logfiles and page tag beacons results in a greater accuracy of visitor tracking. This is still the most accurate way to track web visitors, that is, without having force your visitor to login into your website (view the Accuracy Whitepaper for a detailed description). However, by 2003 the market was beginning to move away from server-side web analytics software as the method for benchmarking performance.

Instead, Marketers wanted more control. Server-side analytics is in the realm of IT departments – a place were, historically, marketing performance and user-experience measurement are not a priority. Now marketers wanted to be in the driving seat – accessing the data in order to manage and optimise campaign performance. The industry alternative was "page tagging" – that is no web server logfiles (and hence no IT) to worry about. These simplified implementations gave more independence to the marketers for web measurement.

In 2004, the San Diego based company launched their page tag web measurement service, called Urchin On-Demand. IT teams were no longer required to install or manage software. Although IT/developer input is still needed for page tag deployment, it is a much ‘lighter’ touch and less resource required than before as the responsibility for data collection, storage, archiving and reporting goes direct to Urchin. Only a page tag beacon (a small snippet of JavaScript) on each web page is required to do this.

In addition, Urchin On-Demand gained improved marketing reports – particularly for AdWords. It was this simple, yet powerful combination of a web measurement solution aimed at digital marketers, that caught Google’s attention. By April 2005 Google’s acquisition of Urchin Software Inc. was announced.

The Google impact

Since 2005, there have been 3 key phases of Google Analytics development and I believe 2010 will mark the beginning of Phase 4:

Phase 1 – Free and almost scalable (Nov 2005)

On November 11th 2005 Google Analytics was launched. A major part of the announcement was that the product was now free (originally Urchin On-Demand started from $500/month). This was a tipping point in the industry. Overnight Google re-wrote the entire industry business model – giving away a deep dive web analytics tool for free while everyone else charged based on volume of traffic.

The impact of that decision was dramatic. An industry that once counted its customers in the tens of thousands, now exploded. In fact so dramatic was the uptake of the service that it had to close to new subscribers for 10 months while new machines were allocated to the number crunching tasks at Google’s data centres. However, once re-opened, the user base of Google Analytics rapidly expanded and went beyond a million in a matter of months.

Looking back, the launch was a bit of a  PR disaster – the company took a lot of flak for under estimating demand (though I have no idea how it could have been done better!). But we had an alternative viewpoint – the launch still remains one of Google’s most successful product launches ever. Those within the company that had not heard of the team until then, certainly had by Friday 15th November. We were the new kids on the Googleplex block. That was a great week.

Phase 2 – The new User Interface (April 2007)

To all who witnessed the launch of Google Analytics in 2005, the product simply appeared to a re-branded version of the Urchin On-Demand service – just given away for free. Of course a great deal of hard work went into scaling the product so it could handle very large data sizes – both from the huge user base it was accumulating, but also from clients such as MySpace, YouTube etc. that had truly massive pageview volumes.

However, the fact remained that the user-interface, the most important part of any reporting tool, didn’t stand out from any other reporting tool. The launch of the new UI in April 2007 changed that (and as I was in the middle of writing the book, required  re-write!).

It was worth the wait. The same UI design is still used today and has proved so successful in user experience studies, that the format is being adopted throughout Google – notice the rounded style graphs you now see in AdWords and geo map overlay of Google Insights for example. The team responsible for that came from Adaptive Path , a Google acquisition of 2006.

Phase 3 – Enterprise features that stand out (Oct 2008)

Numerous enterprise clients get real value from Google Analytics, whether its the BBC, Roche, Tetrapak or non-profits such as Unicef or the World Health Organisation, many choose Google Analytics because it answers their questions quickly and efficiently (see a fuller list of Google Analytics users ). However, naysayers have commented on a number of missing "enterprise" level features. This was addressed in October 2008 with a plethora of new announcements. These include (still in beta):

• Advanced segments On the fly visitor segmentation. For example, show me paid search visitor metrics alongside organic visitor metrics. Custom segments can also be define e.g. show only visitors that had visited 3+ times, show visits from the UK and US combined compared to all visits, show only visits that spend at least 30 seconds on site, show only mobile visits etc, etc.
• Report customisation Don’t like the layout of a particular report? Want to include a metric from one report e.g. revenue, in another report e.g. top content? No problem
• AdSense integration If you are a publisher you will be familiar with the AdSense model i.e. showing Google pay-per-click ads on your site for a share of the click revenue. Now you can get your AdSense account information imported into your Google Analytics reports in a similar way to the AdWords reports. For example, impression and click through data.
• Motion Charts Data in five dimensions! Essentially this is animated (Flash) statistics to aid with data visualisation. Its a cool feature that was the result of a Google acquisition for Trendalyzer software (a Swedish company) in 2007. Its one of the first charts I look at to gain a bigger picture overview prior to focusing down on a specific referrer/metrics/keyword etc.
• Data APIs Previously access to the report data within Google Analytics was a manual process – go to a report, click export and save the data for that report. This can now be automated and customised with the use of the Application Programming Interface. That’s a lot of possibilities…

If I had to choose one, I would say the advanced segments feature is probably the most powerful feature Google Analytics has ever had. It allows you to drill down and gain valuable insights as to how your web site is performing like never before (previously, filters and separate profiles were required).

Of course, there is still room for the competition to differentiate themselves. In fact, I was very disappointed to hear of Microsoft’s analytics demise recently. Deepmetrix (Microsoft’s  acquisition of 2007) was a respected tool and I evaluated it alongside Urchin in 2003. It was a very close call in terms of features and flexibility and my choice to go with Urchin essentially boiled down to the building of a remote relationship – a phone call with a lady called Megan Cash at Urchin Inc. made the difference. Lucky for me that it turned out to be the winning bet!

So what’s next for Google Analytics?

» Read the rest of this post »

Roll up reporting is not a standard feature in Google Analytics. However with a little extra coding, you can have stand alone reports for specific i.e. product dedicated websites, and a roll-up report to give a global overview.

Generally, this issue mostly effects enterprise clients. For example, companies with brand specific or product specific web sites targeted at particular markets. Because of this specific need it makes sense to have separate, stand alone Google Analytics accounts for each web site. That way, segmentation, referral analysis, e-commerce revenue (or lead generation) can be analyzed in detail.

However, Marketing Managers also need a high level overview of how the entire online channel is performing. This is when having separate GA accounts can become laborious. Roll-up reporting simplifies this. That is, in addition to individual Google Analytics accounts, you also have a single "catch-all" account with all data from all web sites aggregated. This post shows you how to do this and was recently successfully deployed by Unicef.org.uk .

What exactly is the advantage of this approach compared to using a single profile and then creating additional sub-profiles for each site?

For enterprise clients I generally come across the scenario where the client has semi-autonomous country offices who wish to “play” (segment, filter, open up access to their agency) with their own specific data. The HQ requires a global overview but wish to leave the country/region details to the local office. In fact, they generally wish to leave all training, support and management of analytics to their local office – HQ provides the implementation.

To ensure HQ receives its global overview with confidence in its data integrity, it is better that they maintain their own GA account with access restrictions and change history documentation in place. Country offices can then do as they wish.

Roll-up reporting setup

The principal to roll-up reporting is straight forward – you add multiple Google Analytics Tracking Codes (GATCs) to your web pages. One specifies the individual account, the other is for the roll-up account. Schematically this is shown below for two websites:

<script>
   Call the standard GA loader script
</script>
<script>
   1. Track the pageview into the individual account
   2. Track the pageview into the roll-up account
</script>

The actual JavaScript is as follows:

<script type="text/javascript">
   var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
   document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
   var firstTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-1");
   // Acc. for mysite.com firstTracker._trackPageview();
   var secondTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-987654-1");
   // Acc. for catch-all secondTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Note, for each stand alone web site, you use your specific GATC i.e. change the UA-123456-1 to match each of your Google Analytics accounts. Below this, you add the same same roll-up account information. The rollup part of the GATC remains the same for each site. In this case UA-987654-1. Obviously you will need to change the UA numbers for your account(s).

E-Commerce

Special consideration is required for e-commerce transactions because you will need to call the e-commerce tracking code for each account. So _addTrans, _addItem and _trackTrans are required for firstTracker and secondTracker objects. Schematically you need to add the following on your transaction receipt/confirmation page (view the Help Centre if you need general e-commerce tracking help):

   firstTracker._addTrans(enter transaction values as array);
   firstTracker._addItem(enter item values as an array);
   firstTracker._trackTrans();

   secondTracker._addTrans(enter transaction values as array);
   secondTracker._addItem(enter item values as an array);
   secondTracker._trackTrans();

And that’s it… except…

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