Measuring Success with Google Analytics

As you may know, I occasionally write articles elsewhere (journalism.co.uk, eConsultancy, DaveChaffey.com). In case you miss these, and because I like to keep my thoughts in one place I also reproduce here a little later. The following is from my September post at eConsultancy.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important to drive improvement for your website. Although it is obviously interesting and insightful to compare how your website is performing against your peers and competitors, it can be a mistake to place too much emphasis on external industry benchmarks.
These external benchmarks can be misleading and often end up with you finding the benchmark that fits your story, giving a false impression of success. KPIs vary greatly by business sector, and even within subsectors there is wide variance: think “flights” versus “holidays” or “food retail” versus “clothing retail”. Even comparing against your competitors with identically defined goals is fraught with gross approximations. [...]

Just letting members know that I will be in Palo Alto (California) this October presenting a Google Analytics workshop with e-nor.
Title: Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Business
This is a two-day training workshop on web measurement aimed at Marketers and Webmasters. Presented by Brian Clifton and Feras Alhlou (e-nor) 19/20 Oct. If you’re looking to get on top of your web metrics, please drop me a line before sign up as I have a 15% discount code for readers, valid until the end of this week.
If you would just like to stop by and say hello, I will also be at Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) social event in PA on Thursday(!) October 15, from 6:00 PM
If you bring a copy of the book I will happily autograph it for you
Brian Clifton

Leaving aside the issue of privacy, is it valid to track visitors as individuals? From a marketer’s perspective, tracking individuals sounds great in theory – you understand your customers better right? But if you receive 10,000 visitors per day and have weekly marketing performance meetings, that equals 70,000 data points to discuss? Best practice is to consider longer time frames in order to mitigate against calendar anomalies i.e. weekends v weekdays, holidays, the weather, force majeure etc… So for one month that could be 280,000 data points.

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 [...]

Crafting your article to entice click-throughs to your site If you write the perfect blog article and publish the full content via RSS, there is a strong possibility that the visitor will read your content in their RSS reader, be entirely satisfied (strong engagement) and then move on i.e. not visit your web site. … This is a great way to track engaged RSS readers – casual readers of you headlines are screened out because they don’t click through (so are not tracked), while engaged visitors click through and therefore are tracked.

This post comes in four parts:
1. Summary – there is no accuracy debate!
2. Introduction – why most of the web is junk and what role web analytics plays
3. On-site versus Off-site web analytics tools and how they work
4. Discrepancies – what’s accurate and how can accuracy be improved

This is a multi-page post
Page: 1 2 3

The term ‘uniques’ is often used in web analytics as an abbreviation for unique web visitors (i.e. how many unique people visited my site). The problem is that counting unique visitors is fraught with problems that are so fundamental, it renders the term ‘uniques’ meaningless.
Firstly, cookies get lost, blocked and deleted. Research has shown that after a period of four weeks, nearly one third of tracking cookies are missing, which means the visitor will be incorrectly considered a new unique visitor should they return to the same website (see Accuracy Whitepaper for further reading).
The longer the time period, the greater the chance of this happening, which makes comparing year-on-year data invalid for example. In addition, browsers make it very easy these days for cookies to be removed – see the new ‘incognito’ features of the latest Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers.
However, the biggest issue for counting uniques faced by both [...]

         
Last year I wrote an article/whitepaper on web analytics accuracy. The intention of this was to be a reference guide to all the accuracy issues that on-site web measurement tools face, and how you can mitigate the error bars. Apart from updating the article recently, I wanted to illustrate how close (or not) different vendor tools on the same website can be when it comes to counting the basics – visits, pageviews, time on site and visitors.
To do this, I have looked at two very different web sites with two tools collecting web visitor data side by side:

Site A – This blog, running Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics. According to Google, there are 188 pages in the Google Index and traffic is approximately 10,000 visits/month
Site B – A retail site that runs Nielsen SiteCensus and Google Analytics (site URL to remain anonymous). According to Google, there 12,808 pages [...]

This year’s buzz word in the world of web analytics is "Voice of Customer" or VOC for short. Essentially this boils down to presenting a survey to your web visitors asking them to respond to questions that can be used to ascertain how they feel about the web experience they have had.
Why voice of customer surveys are so useful
As you are no doubt aware, web analytics tools and methodologies are great for telling you the "what" and the "when" of your web site visitors. That is, what happened (a goal conversion event, a transaction, a specific pageview or a combination of pageviews etc. or any kind of engagement on your site) and when it happened (time/date, do they repeat the same thing over again and at what frequency etc.). This is quantitative data that is invaluable for identifying poor performing pages and poorly targeted marketing campaigns.
However, the missing link [...]

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used throughout organisations for defining success. They are particularly essential in web analytics due to the plethora of data collected. In fact without KPIs, it is easy to become overwhelmed. So once you have set your overall web site objectives, use KPIs as the metrics to benchmark your progress. By definition, these are a small subset of “key” information points taken from your web analytics reports.
A prerequisite for benchmarking is having KPIs that are in context and temporal. So for example, saying “we receive 10,500 visitors” is a piece of underlying data that raises more questions than answers. However saying “our new visitor acquisition was up 10% week on week” is a powerful KPI placing the metric in context (new visitors have increased) and is temporal (over the past 7 days).
While most KPIs will be averages, ratios or percentages for this very purpose, it is sometimes more insightful to [...]

As some of you may be aware, I was the first member of the EMEA analytics team to join Google back in October 2005. That feels like a decade ago, both in time, but also in terms of our positioning within the company – remember the GA invite code system?
Last Friday after two and a half years based at the London office, I hung up my Googlepex pass and switched off my environmentally un-friendly lava lamp for the last time. I leave behind a well established team of dedicated product experts and a third-party Partner network to help. As you may suspect following the recent book launch, I will very much remain in the industry and continue to discuss web analytics (with only a slight bias for Google as usual!) both here on the blog and at industry events/conferences.
So what’s next for Brian Clifton?
FACT: The vast majority of web content [...]

I have heard the notion of Google being analogous to a bank for a number of years. Recently, Jim Sterne also referred to this bank analogy while we were discussing online privacy at the Orion Analytics panel of SES London . So I wanted share and expand upon this discussion.
Please take a moment to read my disclaimer before continuing – that is, the views express on this site are entirely my own and do not represent those of my employer.
Is Google entering into online banking?
In this respect no (I am not considering Checkout here). What I mean by being analogous to a bank, is in the way that data itself has become "currency". Information has always been valuable – no one likes to be the last to know, and being the first to know gives you a competitive advantage. So whether online or not, the storage and access [...]

This started off as a reply to a comment from Sara Andersson (of search-input.com) concerning my post about the accuracy limitations of web analytics and the difficulty of aligning data from disparate sources: 2008/02/16/accuracy-whitepaper/#comment-2153
However, the subject is broad enough to warrant a separate post, and probably subsequent ones too! To start off, I paraphrase Sara:
“Most sites are not conducting e-commerce and we [marketers] need to spend our resources analysing the lead generations through a combination of the online traffic to the other trend tools available. In your opinion, how would you best go about to study a trend when you have to aggregate additional resources of information from various tools – all with their accuracy problems?“
As I said in my initial reply, this is a very good and difficult question and it got me thinking…
Huge sums of money have been invested by many a corporation in trying to achieve this, [...]

This accuracy post is an extrapolation of a section in Chapter 2 of the book which has led to a separate PDF accuracy whitepaper available to download for free.
Why is this necessary? Well, the question of accuracy crops up all the time on numerous forums and at conferences. Essentially many practitioners of web analytics worry about accuracy. Some vendors even claim greater accuracy than others (though as I explain in the whitepaper this cannot be true), and there is the inter-industry debate about whether off-site analytics (for example, Hitwise, comScore, Neilsen//Netratings etc.), are better at predicting traffic levels than on-site analytics tools (such as Webtrends, Omniture, IndexTools, Google Analytics etc.). I won’t go into that debate here, except to schematically illustrate the two different web analytics approaches in Figure 1.
Figure 1 : On-site v off-site web analytics

The truth is, for either approach, web analytics [...]

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.

Urchin is the software company and technology that Google acquired in April 2005 that went on to become Google Analytics. Urchin software remains a product in its own right and is a downloadable software tool that runs on a local server (Unix and Windows) providing web analytics reports by processing web server logfiles – including HYBRID logfiles – which are the most accurate.

[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:

Tag everything – get the most complete picture of your web site visitors as possible
Clean your data – apply filters
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 [...]

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. [...]

[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 (KPI). Remember this is all before tackling the much wider (and also more complex) issues of mapping your stakeholders, building your KPI list 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 [...]

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 [...]

[This article is part of a series entitled: GA Implementation ABCs]
I had an interesting conversation while in Seattle recently. On discussing the progress of the book (95% complete now..!) with a friend from the industry, I described how my last chapter is going to be a sum up all the things learnt plus my thoughts on what’s next for web analytics. For the sum up, I was asked, “so what do you think should be the first thing to do when considering a web analytics implementation?”.
“That’s a great question” I replied and gave the following response: “Tag all your pages i.e. Collect the data”.
The conventional wisdom for web analytics, has traditionally said that before you even choose your preferred vendor for an implementation, you should prepare your web analytics business objectives, map who your stakeholders are, canvas throughout your organisation for KPIs, business plans, marketing plans etc. – anything that [...]

The Google Analytics business model is unique for the web analytics industry – a deep dive reporting tool suitable for companies of all sizes (see Who uses Google Analytics? ) given away free of charge. But is there a catch to this uniqueness? Well in my view there is none. Of course, given my background I am slightly bias, but the idea behind giving away Google Analytics makes perfect sense:

Provide accountability and transparency to existing Google advertisers
Provide confidence and prove the value of online advertising to potential new advertisers

Happy customers are good for business
For Google, may be as a result of using Google Analytics, customers will remain advertisers for a longer period, become less likely to lapse their accounts (take breaks from advertising), even raise their AdWords budgets to capture a greater share of the search market. For those users that are not advertisers, perhaps Google Analytics will give them [...]

Some background information…
Often web analytics data can be extremely revealing – I have seen conversion rates increase ten fold as a result of web site changes brought about by such data. However as the analyst, you will know that interpreting the data is only half the story. You also need to communicate this story effectively across your organisation in order to get the buy-in required for the wholesale changes you may be proposing. You do this by creating internal “stakeholder” reports. The report is a very abridged version of your web analytics reports, usually summarised in Powerpoint and/or Excel and known as a Key Performance Indicator report (KPI Report).
There are literally dozens (if not tens of dozens) of possible KPI values to include in such reports and Eric T. Peterson’s The Big Book of KPIs lists just about all of them. The trick is to only select a handful relevant [...]

On Weds 30th May, I had the pleasure of attending SES Milan for the first time. I started my career with web development and SEO back in 1997(!), so over the years I have been to many of the SES events. Its great to observe that the search market has evolved since those “smoke-n-mirror days” as well as discover country/regional differences around the world.
As a pan-EMEA manager I am ashamed to admit that my language abilities are poor – just English and a small amount of Russian (I am always amazed at how some people can simply switch between languages – both in thought and speech. Or do they always think in their native language I wonder?). Of course SES events are held in their local language and Milan was no exception. So many thanks to Sante Achille (SES moderator) who found the time to summarise the Measuring Search [...]

As Jim Sterne completed the second and last leg of his European tour I attended eMetrics Dusseldorf last week. My German is a tad limited to say the least, so my colleague Timo took the lead on the vendor panel and managed the Google Analytics booth with Rene. Despite my lack of local language, two excellent presentations caught my eye:

Rapheal Nolens from Pioneer Europe
Mathias Blum from Lycos Europe

Of course I am slightly bias here as both of these included analysis work conducted using Google Analytics. However Rapheal made an excellent analogy which has stuck with me:
Conducting web analytics is like riding a bicycle. The tool you use in the bicycle, but in order to get anywhere you still need to pedal i.e. do some analysis.

That is very much where the web analytics industry is today – great tools, some with bigger bells and whistles than others, but essentially very similar [...]

An important series of events for anyone interested in web analytics is Jim Sterne’s eMetrics Summit. There are currently 4 of these per year with the London event held last Thurs and Fri (29/30 March) at the Russell Square Hotel. Unfortunately, due to illness I was unable to attend in person, though Avinash Kaushik stood in for me on the vendor panel and I hear did a great job…
Some questions directed to the vendor panel and from the Google Analytics booth:

Q: What features differentiate your product from others?
Quick Answer: Ignore feature lists!

That’s always a good question that regularly comes up. I don’t know other tools in detail, but essentially as far as features go there is very little to differentiate any of the vendors. For example, they all have site overlay, geo-overlay, marketing analysis, eCommerce analysis, x-segmentation etc. Of course there are many ways to skin a cat, but [...]

At the Measuring Search Engine Marketing Success session, I had the pleasure of presenting along side Brian Donnahue (IQContent) and Nick Walsh (Net Affinity). Moderated by Danny Sullivan, the session looked at the tools available as well as an overall process for measuring search marketing successes.
It was great to see ‘measurement’ taking such a prominant role at a one day event with around 70+ people at this session. For me the key take away was – whatever you use you your web site for, measure and understand its traffic.
A separate though very interesting session was ‘Ad Agencies and Search‘. Damian Burns from Google presented some novel ideas that had been used by some of the more pro-active media agencies integrating search with off-line campaigns. For example in his Pontiac demo, the tv campaign ended with a call for the viewer to go and search online for what people are saying [...]

Today Gobal Strategies Inc. announced that they have been acquired by Neo@Ogilvy – the Ogilvy Group’s global digital and direct media company (a subsidiary of WPP).
I have come to know Sara, Bill and Motoko (from GSI) quite well in recent months from presenting at the same events – for example, the ‘Converting Visitors into Customers‘ session at SES London. GSI is a pan-global search engine marketing company that has specific expertise in web analytics – “Missed Opportunity Matrix(TM)” and “Shelfspace reports” are common terminolgies from their presentations.
Congratulations to the GSI/Neo team!

As usual I will be at SES London this year speaking at a couple of relavent sessions. Feel free to come over and say hello…
A highlight for everyone has got to be the keynote conversation with Matt Cutts on the Wednesday, though I wonder if the “cat woman” will be there again…