NOTE: Please see the UPDATE at the bottom of the article.

If you've ever sent out a mass email newsletter to your clients, you've probably found yourself pausing before clicking "Send" and wondering just how many people will actually open the thing, and of those, how many will find their way onto your site.

Google Analytics can help answer those questions, and a number of others, with its easy email tracking features. Open rate, click-through rate, and conversions can all be tracked within Google Analytics. You can even measure the effectiveness of your email campaign against your CPC, banner, and print campaigns.

Continue reading "Tracking Email Campaigns with Google Analytics" »

If you have set up your goals in Google Analytics, then one report that can provide some incredibly useful information is the 'Defined Funnel Abandonment' report. If you need some help setting up your goals, take a look at an earlier article, "How To Set Up Goals In Google Analytics". This report tells you what percentage of visitors that begin a defined funnel process abandon it.

Continue reading "Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment" »

According to an article in 'Chief Marketer' (based on a survey from the CMO Council) one need tops them all--Analytics!

When asked their most urgent developmental priority, over half said it was to improve their marketing analytics capability.

Although term 'analytics' can be very general to include both online and offline measurement it's not a stretch to consider that web analytics has to be critical for any marketer with a serious online effort.

One speaker at the recent Webmaster World pub conference in Las Vegas commented that web analytics has a long way to go, however, to achieving critical mass. He noted that of all businesses doing over $1,000,000 in annual revenues, and who have a website, only 17% are actually measuring website activity with analytics. That figure is astounding!

Continue reading "Marketers Want Analytics: CMO Council Survey" »

The retail industry average conversion rate is a measly 1.8%, according to Shop.org Research. Many people are pleased with a 2% conversion rate from their website because of the average 2% conversion rate that direct mail usually nets, which Robbin Steif points out in the article that appeared on the Web Analytics Association website, "Why your 2% conversion rate is so lousy".

Continue reading "Crummy Conversion Rate Epidemic!" »

The only way for you to see which advertising media are actually returning your investment is to tag your ads. It's an extremely simple process with Google Analytics, once you're prepared with the basic knowledge on how to categorize your various campaigns.

First, understand that you only tag what you need to tag. Don't confuse yourself, or add unnecessary work. For example, if you need to track a Google AdWords account that is linked with your Google Analytics account, you don't need to tag your AdWords URLs at all. Google Analytics does it automatically. Other paid marketing campaigns like banners, and unpaid media like email campaigns should definitely be tagged.

Continue reading "Google Analytics Link Tagging 101" »

Jesper Rønn-Jensen of Capgemini Denmark who writes the JustAddWater blog wrote a very detailed, nicely illustrated blog entry entitled "Google Analytics trick: How to view referring URLs".

Google Analytics makes it easy to find the referring website by using the Referring Source report (located within the Marketing Optimization -> Visitor Segment Performance section) but some website marketing folks want to see the exact referring URL. This is also helpful for bloggers who use Google Analytics to track website traffic on their blog so they can thank the blogger who linked to them by viewing the exact blog entry which was responsible for the traffic.

Basically he shows how to do this using the very powerful Cross Segment Performance drill-down feature of Google Analytics.

Exciting News! Inside Adwords has announced that Google has started sending invitations to the first set of customers who submitted their email addresses for a Google Analytics invitation code.

We've now started sending invitation codes to the first set of customers who submitted their email addresses for a Google Analytics account. If you receive an invitation code from us, you can sign up and begin tracking the performance of your websites and AdWords campaigns.

Continue reading "Some Google Analytics Invitation Codes are 'in the mail'" »

Google Analytics is a phenomenally powerful tool, and every tool must be used towards some end goal. It is tempting to assume that the end goal is to get as many visitors to your site as possible, assuming that more people mean more conversions. More is not necessarily better, though!

Continue reading "Tips on How to Use Google Analytics to Optimize Your Conversion Rate" »

It wasn't that long ago that pageviews were the hottest metric to hit town, and everybody was talking about how 'sticky' their site was. Today, we realize that getting somebody to your site is still a long way from accomplishing a goal. Conversion rate is quickly becoming the new hot metric, but is this metric any better than pageviews were?

Continue reading "Is There A Magic Metric?" »

There's an interesting post over at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums about the reliability of Google Analytics data versus data generated by Urchin 5.7 software. Barry Schwartz points out a 20% hike in traffic stats through Urchin when viewing data for one of his sites.

It's important to remember that different web analytics products may use various means to track visits to your site. If you opt to run two analytics packages simultaneously, be prepared for discrepancies in your reports. Google Analytics uses a script-based method to gather traffic stats, while Urchin relies primarily on your server logs. Many bots count as hits on these server logs, but don't trigger the JavaScript tracker. They'll pass undetected through Google Analytics, but clamber through your site just like a human user would, at least according to an Urchin install that relies entirely on web server logs.

Continue reading "Script-Based Versus Log-Based Tracking" »

Recently, the Google Analytics engineering team added the ability to allow you to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account:

Just log in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com and click the Analytics tab. Then:

1. Click I already have an Analytics account
2. Enter the email address and password for your Google Analytics account. Note that you must be an Account Administrator on that account to be able to link it to AdWords
3. Click Link Account

That's it! Your two accounts are now linked, and Analytics will start automatically tagging your AdWords links for detailed campaign tracking reports.

Here's the article at the Google Analytics Help Center.

Based on what is important to you, create a list of the goals for your site. Keep in mind there are only 4 slots for separate goals and that goals are intended to help you watch key areas of interest, not your whole site. It is much better to concentrate on the few really important variables then many trivial variables.

Continue reading "How to Set Up Goals In Google Analytics" »

Control is everything when it comes to web site analytics. You want to make sure you're tracking the right data, and you need to make sure you're tracking the data right. With traffic filters, you can control exactly which data are flowing into your Google Analytics profile, and which aren't.

There are three predefined filters that you can use, right out of the box:

• Exclude all clicks from a domain (hostname), which can be used to exclude all clicks originating from one network. Get rid of the hits from your internal office network. Just plug in your hostname here and apply to your profile.
• Exclude all clicks from an IP address, which is great for removing any clicks from a single IP address, or even a range of IP addresses. Take a visit to www.whatismyip.com, then plug in the IP address here to exclude any computer that has a static IP address from your data results.
• Include only traffic from a subdirectory will allow you to set your profile to only report on a subdomain or a subdirectory. Use this to only see traffic to your nonfiction titles (www.example.com/nonfiction/) or to your user's section (users.example.com).

Continue reading "Filtering Your Data" »

In the previous article "What Should Be Tracked?" we discussed how to figure out what to track on your company's 'dash-board' and single out the reports within Google Analytics that apply to your website. So now that you know what to watch, now you need to know how often to check on it. The man who looks at his gas gauge once a month soon finds himself on the side of the road, wishing he had glanced down a little more often!

Continue reading "How Often Do You Check What Is Important?" »