Advanced Web Metrics

When viewing Google Analytics reports, I constantly need to remind myself of the difference between goals and conversions (may be its just me that gets confused..!). Whatever, I thought I would share my clarification.

One obvious difference is that a transaction is associated with an e-commerce completion (a purchase) while a goal conversion is considered a non-ecommerce conversion, such as a PDF download, a form completion or visit to a special offers page. Of course they are all conversions, which is where I think confusion lies.

Explanation: The most important difference as far as Google Analytics is concerned, is that a conversion can only happen once during a visitor session - that is, a visitor can only become a customer (convert) once and that makes sense. However, if one of your goals is set to *.pdf for example (any PDF file download), then should a visitor download 5 PDF files during their session, it will only show as one conversion in your Goal Conversion reports. Assuming you are tracking pdf downloads, the 5 PDF files will of course show in your Content > Top Content report.

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[This article is part of a series entitled: GA Implementation ABCs]

So far what I have discussed in this series has been fairly straight forward - dare I say “easy”! The next step is the difficult part - not from a technical perspective, but purely in terms of communication.

To recap the story so far, the first three best practice implementation principals are:

1. Tag everything - get the most complete picture of your web site visitors as possible
2. Clean your data - apply filters
3. Define Goals - distill the 80+ reports of GA in to performance benchmarks

If you have followed these steps so far, then you have done an excellent job. However, the usual problem is that few other people in your organisation know this or even appreciate your work. You have created a set of nice charts and reports, “so what?” is a common response that is thought, if not stated.

The unfortunate truth is that you will have wasted your time unless you can get the buy-in use the visitor data in driving business decisions and be the focal point for instigating change on your web site. With your initial understanding of your web site visitor data, this is your next step - to map out the objectives and key results for your organisation’s web site. For this you need to bring in your key stakeholders from the other parts of the business. These can be marketing, sales, PR, operations, web development/design agencies, e-commerce managers, content creators - even the CEO.

Setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) - 4 Steps

Step 1: Map your stakeholders
Map who your stakeholder departments are from the list above. Then select one person from each as the key contact for initial discussions. They may not be end up being the right person but that can be changed later. The important thing is to get people on board from those departments.

Your key contacts are your point of contact representing the interests of that department within your organisation. They can canvas opinion from the rest of the organisation on your behalf - in other words, they do not have to be the most senior person from that department. Note you should encourage this to be a two way street - you setting the scene with your initial data and thoughts on the current situation, with stakeholders providing their perspective on how it fits with their department. For example, they may provide information from CRM systems, call centre figures, web server performance etc.

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My colleague Avinash recently presented at SES San Jose his thoughts on the current vendor space including: Visual Sciences, Omniture, IndexTools, Clicktracks, WebTrends and Google Analytics. As always, his talks are very engaging and thought provoking. For me though, one slide really stood out - the idea that a HYBRID web analytics tool can’t hunt - you need to view his presentation to follow that, but essentially the analogy is that HYBRIDs are not good as a web analytics tool. As Avinash knows, I disagree with this point of view, so I wanted to explain why here.

By HYBRID tool, what is generally meant is the combination of the page tagging technique combined with logfile data to produce cookie fortified logfiles. This was discussed in a white paper before I joined Google - Web Analytics Data Sources. There are significant advantages to doing this as shown in the diagram below. Essentially a hybrid allows you combine the benefits of both techniques to give you the most complete picture of visitor activity on your web site.

Key HYBRID benefits over and above a page tag only system include:

• You own the collected data in the most direct sense of the word and can therefore reprocess it at will
• Being able to track search engine robot activity
• All downloaded files are tracked automatically without any modification of page html content
• Partial file downloads can be tracked e.g. partial views of PDF files
• Error pages can be tracked automatically without any modification of page html content

So a HYBRID technique offers real benefits. However, “with such great power comes great responsibility” (Spiderman!) which for a HYBRID web analytics tool means you take responsibility for:

• Applying HYBRID software updates
• Archiving and compressing your logfiles (which get very large very quickly)
• Protecting end-user privacy - you have a legal responsibility to protect the privacy of your visitors and store logfile data securely.

HYBRIDS require a significant IT investment to run smoothly, which many organisations struggle to justify - hence the proliferation of page tag technique adoptions. Nonetheless, a HYBRID method remains an effective technique for improving the accuracy of either a page tag or logfile solution.

Are you using (or have used) a HYBRID method or perhaps some other technique to improve accuracy? Share your thoughts with a comment.

[This article is part of a series entitled: GA Implementation ABCs]

In Part I of this series, I discussed the importance of simply getting the data in. Part II concerned keeping the data clean by using filters. In this third install I discuss defining goals - the building blocks for your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Remember this is all before tackling the much wider (and also more complex) issues of mapping your stakeholders, building your KPIs or assessing your business needs from your web site.

The importance of Goals in web analytics

After collecting and cleansing your initial visitor data from your GA reports (Parts I and II of this series), you then establish your benchmarks. Assuming there are no horror stories from viewing your initial traffic volume, consider your web site goals. A goal is quite simply the purpose of your web site, which in theory should be easy for you to define. For example, what do you wish a visitor to achieve once on your web site? An eCommerce transaction is an obvious goal, but that is also very black and white. If a visitor does not convert - can you measure how close they came?

Often for non-eCommerce web sites, I find owners and managers struggle to define the purpose of their web site. “We built a site because our competitors have one” is a common response, as well as “because IT wanted one”, “because my nephew wanted to build one”, “because our creative agency gave us one”. However, non-eCommerce sites can and should have compelling goals. If not, then just putting irrelevant content that becomes stale and out of date when your nephew/creative agency/IT department move on, will actually damage your brand.

Whether you are eCommerce enabled or not, any engagement with your visitors i.e. the building of a relationship, can be considered as a goal. Example goals include:

• adding an item to the shopping cart
• subscription sign-up
• a brochure request
• a completed enquiry form
• reading a blog article
• adding/editing/deleting a forum or blog post
• viewing a particular page e.g. Special Offers
• viewing particular page path e.g. pages A-E-F-D
• clicking on an ad/external link
• reading more than X pages
• spending more than Y minutes on your site
• clicking a mailto: link

To learn about configuring goals in Google Analytics, visit the GA Help Center.

With goals in place you can start to benchmark yourself that sets the foundations for discussing KPIs with your stakeholders. Bear in mind that a goal doesn’t always have to increase for it to be a good thing. Sometimes, negative goals indicate an improved visitor experience - for example less support tickets submitted, less complaints logged etc. would be considered an improvement.

A question I would like to get feedback on - how often have you redefined goals? Once setup do they get set in concrete or are they constantly evolving and which sectors are more proactive at this? Please share you feedback by posting a comment.

Recently, the perception of ABCE’s role for the web analytics industry appears to have become blurred. Hence I wanted to post some comments here - these were also posted on the Web Analytics Association’s forum last month.

ABC ELECTRONIC is the trading name of Electronic Media Audits Ltd. To briefly summarise from their web site:

ABC ELECTRONIC is the industry owned, not-for-profit organisation that works with and for media owners, advertisers and media buyers to help them gain confidence in the data they use. The UK company performs many services but essentially conducts independent audits of client’s digital data to ensure it complies with agreed industry standards - as defined by JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland).

To clarify, an ABCE web audit is NOT an accuracy report - it is a verification report for web site owners. Simplified that means ABCE auditors verify the pageview and visitor numbers reported in a client’s analytics tool as matching (to within error bars) their manual counts of the data. ABCE’s methodology is to seed the data with ‘known’ visitor activity, count/verify these in the raw logs of the analytics provider, multiply up to obtain the total count, then compare with that reported by the vendor. The final report is private and delivered to the client.

That process is entirely different to ascertaining web analytics accuracy - something that is very difficult to determine by the nature of current data collection methods (cookies). For example, if you mis-configured your web analytics tool - say you forgot to track pdf downloads, your CMS system screwed up and started over-writing tags, or a large proportion of your web site is missing tags, an ABCE audit would not identify this - it simply verifies that what is in the raw logfile matches what is reported in your tool.

So an ABCE audit is important for publishers - web sites that sell advertising space need to verify their numbers to have credibility with their advertisers (trust in their rate card), but beyond that an ABCE audit is less significant to web site owners.

However, would having a setup/configuration audit for web analytics tools be of benefit? For example, such an audit could verify if your particular tool is configured correctly and capturing the complete picture. Please leave your thoughts via a comment - I always respond!