When you set up a goal within Google Analytics, you have the option of including a funnel. The funnel is a series of the pages leading up to your goal action: each step in the path to requesting a whitepaper, for example, or the checkout procedure of your online store.

With traditional static websites, coming up with a funnel is a painless process. You plug in the static URL from your site into each field, give it a label, and then you're done. But if you're running a database-driven dynamic site, or need to include more than one page within a single step, you may be interested in the additional Match Types available for funnel creation.

Below the Define Funnel form of each Goal Settings page is a section called Additional Settings. Here you'll find a number of options to help you closely identify the steps of your website funnel, even if those steps are a bit more complicated than a series of URLs.

Continue reading "Which Match Type Do I Use For My Goals?" »

In past articles, such as Profitable Content network bidding in Google AdWords using the new AdWords Analysis report, we discuss how to use Google Analytics to conduct A/B split tests.

Google Analytics defines A/B split testing as "Testing the relative effectiveness of multiple versions of the same advertisement, or other content, in referring visitors to a site."

An excellent article was recently written by Matthew Roche in Conversion Chronicles, "Do Your Home Page Tests Flop? We Know Why...", which outlines the four major obstacles to getting your A/B split tests on your homepage to work correctly.

The fact is that most companies make their first foray into live testing by showing two versions of a home page (often one for a week, then another). And sadly, many of these folks find that both versions perform equally well (or equally poorly).

Continue reading "Nagging Problems with Home Page A/B Testing" »

Our last newsletter included a survey which asked people what kind of site they have, and as of the date of this writing a whooping 75% of those who answered have an e-commerce site! Taking that into account, let's discuss the Product Merchandising section of Google Analytics, which shows up under the E-Commerce Analysis tab.

The Product Keyword Correlation report is especially exciting: this shows you directly inside the thought process of your customers! This report correlates product purchases on the site back to the original keywords used in a search. So this answers the question when customers search for your products, did they search under the product's brand name, a description, an attribute? What were they looking for? Once you understand this, you can directly address the customer's needs in their own language. This report can also be used as an idea-generator for PPC keyword discovery.

The Product Performance report offers a wealth of information, including the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online. This makes it possible to do very interesting things, such as testing site elements or promotions to see how they impact specific products. If you owned a candle store, assume in June you sold 1.2 candles per average transaction. Then in July you launched a promotion where you could get 3 candles for $29.95, when individual candles sell for $12 apiece. During this promotion you sell an average of 1.9 candles per average transaction, which you tracked with the Product Performance report.

Continue reading "Special E-Commerce Article: The Promise of Product Merchandising" »

Previously, Yahoo! Store owners couldn't use Google Analytics in conjunction with their stores to capture e-commerce data such as which keyword phrases are profitable, but that has all changed! The team at Monitus LLC has developed a tool that makes it possible to use Google Analytics with a Yahoo! Store.

This is incredibly exciting since this is the ONLY tool that will allow you to successfully use Google Analytics in conjunction with your Yahoo! Store. This will finally allow all the Yahoo! Store owners out there to track which keyword phrases are profitable so that you can really target your search phrases using both organic and paid search.

Continue reading "Exciting News for Yahoo! Store Owners: Find Out How You Can Finally Use Google Analytics" »

A little over a month ago ROI Revolution's Michael Harrison posted about a new Google Analytics report: the AdWords Analysis report.

Fast forward over the last 30-some days and we've really grown to appreciate this report as one of the most useful and practical reports ever devised by the Analytics team at Google expressly for Google AdWords advertisers. Make no mistake about it, for the granularity Google advertisers need (and often crave), the new "AdWords Analysis" report is huge.

Here's why: once our clients get started on a Google AdWords program, and start really making some money, the next request we get from them is to continue ramping their CPC (cost per click) program up so that they have a larger and larger amount of profitable (ecommerce or lead gen) revenue. Why be satisfied with $10,000/month in CPC-driven revenue when $20,000/month is obtainable?

Continue reading "Profitable Content network bidding in Google AdWords using the new AdWords Analysis report" »

The Site Overlay report in Google Analytics is great for showing the value of the links within your site. Great - I know the percentage of visitors that click on the 'Contact Us' link... but which 'Contact Us' link did they really use? The Site Overlay report doesn't count each link going to a certain destination separately.

All of the links going to one place get added to the overall count since the report cannot differentiate between links on different spots on the same page. For example, on the homepage of ROIrevolution.com we have four links going to the page where people can sign up to attend a free Google Analytics training webinar. Each of these four links used to have the same stats when we studied it in the Site Overlay report. That is until we made a slight change...

So wouldn't it be nice to know which link most people actually click to sign up for that webinar? Knowing this information can provide a valuable glance into a visitor's mind, especially when the links you are inspecting are those links visitors use to convert to one of your site's goals!

Continue reading "Which Links Do What: Why It Matters and How to Figure It Out" »