Join fellow Google Analytics peers in learning how to use and implement Analytics this spring in Atlanta, Georgia, April 14-15.

Wednesday, April 14th, the Introduction & User Training day is designed for the beginner in Google Analytics and is primarily for non-technical users such as marketers and analysts. It is designed to give a broad and solid introduction to the reporting features of Google Analytics. A large part of the day focuses on the reports available and how to use them. The intent is to present reports, explain what they mean and how they might be used with a site. While covering the reports, the various tools (the calendar, different chart views, tabs, etc.) are explained in context.

Thursday, April 15th, the Advanced Technical Implementation day is primarily for the technical user who installs and configures Google Analytics. Familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and cookie management is assumed.

Location: Courtyard Atlanta Vinings, 2857 Paces Ferry Road SE, Atlanta, GA 30339

Cost: $499 each day or $898 for both days (a savings of $100 for attending both days!). For attending a session you'll receive a $50 AdWords credit (so you'd receive $100 in AdWords credit for attending both sessions; limit 2 per company).

Agenda: Instruction begins each day at 9am (with registration at 8:45am to get your training materials, the seat of your choice and coffee!) and goes until 5pm with a one hour break at noon for lunch on your own. Both sessions feature multiple question and answer sessions. These seminars are officially sponsored by Google, so you can trust that you are receiving the most accurate and up-to-date information on the best practices for Google Analytics.

See what previous attendees had to say about the in-person seminars:

"After the seminar I feel much more confident about using other features of Google Analytics that I bypassed previously." -- Kathryn Graber

"I learned more than expected or intended. The travel, the money, the time, the fun... it was more than worthwhile!" --David Wentworth

"The seminars were professionally designed adn executed. Two of the best I have attended in years." -- D. Moore

"Seminar was worth 20x investment just in time saved on what I learned." -- Bob Johnson

"If you want to really know what's possible in Google Analytics - and how to implement it - you need this course." -- J. Withers

"Great instructors who were friendly and knowledgeable. Worth traveling from the UK." -- Adele Wiseman

"These guys clearly know what they're talking about. Google Analytics can be very pretty to look at, but extremely overwhelming and confusing. Shawn did a great job of breaking it down, showing us what we should pay attention to and simplifying it as much as possible." -- Gabe Silverman

"Google Analytics is so new to me. Prior to coming to the seminar someone else at my company dealt with GA, so I had only briefly seen and heard about it. I only attended one day (Introduction & User training) and it was great. I have to say I walked away with a gang of knowledge, and before i had the chance to ask a good 90% of my questions they were answered. If I didn't have a very basic and minimal background of computer software I might have been lost. GA has a ton of components and I realized its going to take some playing around with the program to ensure that our company is using it to the best of our capacity. GA is a new territory for me, and I'm excited about implementing it." -- Alicia Swift

Learn more about the topics covered and register for the Atlanta Google Analytics Seminars.

Cancellation Guarantee: You can register now, and even if you have to cancel, we will refund your money in full until 8 days before the event. After that, you can transfer your registration to someone else, if you need to.

Unlike the User Defined variable, the Custom Variables allow you to determine the scope of the visitor engagement. Basically that means in addition to setting just a visitor level segment, you can also set session level segments, which will persist while the visitor is active on the site, and page level segments, which correspond to pageviews and events on the site. This allows you to get much more detailed with the information you're gathering and storing in the custom variable. For example, you could separate different sections of the site by using the page level scope, or you could track if a visitor has completed a particular action during their session with the session level scope.

The Custom Variable function accepts four parameters: Index, Name, Value, and Scope.

• Index - The index refers which custom variable you are currently using. You can only set up to 5 separate custom variables within a single pageview (or event), and this number references which of those 5 you wish to use.


• Name - Sets the name of the variable.


• Value - Sets the value of the custom variable.


• Scope- This is what sets the scope of the visitor segment. 1 (visitor-level), 2 (session-level), or 3 (page-level).

_setCustomVar(index, name, value, scope)

And here's what it looks like when I fill in my member tracking information:

pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, "MemberType", "Paid", 1);
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Notice that the setCustomVar() function comes before the trackPageview(). The information is only sent to Google Analytics during a pageview or an event, so keep that in mind when placing the code on your site.

Now I've set a custom variable on a visitor level that segments visitors into a paid membership category. How do I find this information in my Google Analytics account? Under the Visitors section in the left navigation click on 'custom variables' and you'll see a list of the names of the custom variables you're using on your site. Click on the names to drill down into the values of each of these variables.

For more information on how to set up custom Variables and some additional examples on when you might use them, check out the Google Code article.

Why has this tool been granted such a prominent position in the new interface, alongside such heavy hitting account management tools as Google Analytics, Conversion Tracker and the Report Center? Well, sure it's a reporting tool like the others, but it's unique ability to track changes to your account, coupled with its performance metric graphs and visual timeline overlay make it a key weapon in any AdWords account manager's arsenal. It's placement under the Reporting tab is a testament to its usefulness.

While managing any AdWords account, it is common to make tens or even hundreds of changes to your account in one sitting in an effort to optimize traffic for better return on investment. Periodic tweaking of your account is essential to long-term growth and greater ROI. However, these changes are only beneficial to you if you can account for which ones resulted in performance improvements, and which ones didn't. In fact, it is the accountability of PPC optimization that affords us confidence in the power of split testing to boost profits.

And so, AdWords has given account managers the "My Change History" tool which records all changes made to an account for 2 years prior to a given date, then categorizes those changes for easy access.

You can specify an exact or preset date range, filter changes by campaign and ad group, and narrow the scope of change types (ad creative, budget, cpc bid, etc.) displayed in your report. If you're trying to find the exact date you rotated new ads into a given ad group over the past 3 weeks, these filters will isolate them for you in seconds. This makes it easy for any manager to analyze the performance results of the changes you have made without the fuss of digging through pages of detailed and itemized adjustments hoping to find the needle in the haystack.

What if you notice a significant change in performance, but you're not sure what caused it? Was it a bid increase, or maybe some new keywords you added? The "My Change History" tool can help you find the cause of performance fluctuations even if you don't know what you're looking for.

Let's say you noticed a significant drop off in conversions in your account and you have no idea why your ROI is in the toilet. Just fire up the "My Change History" tool, select a date range that precedes the drop in conversions, select all change types and voila.

Click on the number, and the tool will display only the changes that were made on that date, narrowing down weeks, months, or even years of records. Once you have this information, you'll be able to reverse those changes, and get your conversions headed back in the right direction.

When used methodically, you can optimize your account with precision and confidence, knowing that any changes you make can later be analyzed, isolated, and expanded or reversed based on their success or failure. AdWords' "My Change History" tool is a major asset in managing an account.

Here is a 5 step plan to give your PPC accounts a (much needed) winter makeover:

1. Read Blog Articles For New Keyword Ideas: Read your industry blogs to keep up with the latest buzz words. Reading the latest and greatest articles may help you think of new ways people will be searching for your products. Setting up a Google blog reader to follow blogs from your industry can help make this task much more time efficient.

3. Study The Quality Score of Your Keywords: Check out which keywords in your account need some quality score help. Then separate those keywords out into their own ad groups and write highly specific ad text around them. Note the quality score before the change, then check the quality score in two weeks. Most likely you will see a big improvement.

4. Use SpyFu.com.: Use this tool to see what your competitors are bidding on! It's not 100% accurate, but it's a great way to come up with some new keywords and keep an eye on your competition. Simply type in your competitors' URL to the search function on this site, and a list of your competitors' paid terms is automatically generated.

5. Social Media: Stay in the loop on Facebook and other sites to see what your target market is saying and how they are talking about your products. This may help you come up with new ad text, and even make some changes to your landing page copy. Keeping your keyword, ad text, and landing pages relevant is an ongoing task. Social media sites can help you stay on the pulse of your ever changing and evolving target market.

I challenge you to make January a month of change! Think outside the box, and make some powerful changes within your accounts that will really impact your bottom line. Also, if you have any success using the 5-step plan please share!

There are two different types of budget delivery standard and accelerated.

Standard Delivery: Selecting this option can potentially limit the number of times your ads show throughout the course of the day. This option designates the campaign to spend the daily budget allocated steadily throughout each day.

Accelerated Delivery: Selecting this option guarantees that your ad will show as much as possible throughout the course of each day except in the event that the budget you allocated for that campaign is depleted before day's end.

As an AdWords advertiser you must decide which of the two settings is a better fit for you and your overall account budget.

To switch between Standard Delivery and Accelerated Delivery, follow these steps:

Remember: to maximize coverage in your marketplace, choosing accelerated as your delivery method will position you far better to achieve this.

It is important to remember that there are a few strategies and tips you pretty much always need to implement as you are writing and testing ads. I"ve come up with an "ad recipe" that I keep on my desk to ensure all necessary elements are included in the new ads I write.

I"ll break down each ingredient:

Differentiate From Competitors: This takes a little more work. Study your competitors' ads. What do you do differently? What sets you apart? Whatever it is, make sure it is in your ad copy (and stands out)!

Call To Action: Engage the visitor to take action on your site. Offer them a free report, a free consultation, ask them to call now, buy now, browse more. Whatever call to action makes sense for your industry and is the most powerful.

Like with any recipe, take the time to add each ingredient slowly. Then combine all to ensure your batter (or ad text) is well mixed! If you follow these steps, you will surely have a tasty ad that will keep your potential clients coming back for more.

Want more strategies and inspiration (including example headlines, ad text, etc) for writing your next pay-per-click ads?

Get our free PPC Ad Writing Quick-Reference Guide, simply fill out the form and the guide will be emailed to you instantly so you can start using it right away to write more compelling ad text.

With PPC advertising, the best use of ad copy is not just to attract prospects, but sometimes to filter out searchers who are unlikely to become your customers.

Since you pay for each click to your site, when a click-happy searcher pops into your site just to browse or to do a little price comparison, you're probably wasting some of your precious ad spend.

One way to effectively ward off some of these searchers is by including the price of your product or service in your ad. You obviously can't eliminate clicks from these users entirely - if they want to click through, they're going to. But adding the price makes them less likely on average to want to click.

For searchers who sincerely think they might be interested in your product or service, your price acts as a great filter, keeping out prospects that don't want to pay or can't afford your price point. And if the searcher has zero interest in spending money, your price makes it loud-and-clear that they won't be getting any freebies by clicking your ad.

The effectiveness of this strategy will vary substantially depending on your situation. The most obvious time to include your price in your ad copy is when you have the best price. Not only will you be filtering out some poor quality traffic, but the price will double as a unique selling proposition in your space. If you don't have the best price it gets a bit trickier.

If you're not the price leader but almost every other ad on the page includes price for a very similar or identical product or service, then you might have a good reason to throw it in your ad as well. A search results page littered with prices means that the price is a very important factor for this particular product or service. If you don't include your price, searchers are going to click your ad at a high rate just to check out your price and if it's not the best, then they'll probably bounce. But if your price is in your ad, and you are not the price leader, then you can be confident that most clicks are going to come from prospects that don't use price points as their only buying criteria, making them a high quality visitor.

Including your price in your ad text is definitely not a strategy that will help every advertiser using PPC, but if you're having issues with low conversion rates and high CPAs, it's probably smart to give it a try and test it out.

Get more ad writing strategies to test from our free Ad Writing Quick-Reference Guide.

We've updated our Urchin 6 Demonstration webinar to include examples of Urchin's CPC integration (AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing), tracking and reporting for the next presentation on Tuesday, January 12th at 2:00pm ET.

During this 35-40 minute webinar we'll be reviewing a few of Urchin's signature features along with pricing and upgrade information. The webinar will be conducted online and over the phone for your convenience (this is a live event, no recordings will be available). The presentation will be followed by Q&A, so don't miss out on the chance to bring your Urchin 6 product questions to the experts!

The updates we'll be going over include:

The Cost Per Click (CPC) Data Import Manager allows you to create CPC Sources. It enables automatic extraction of CPC Campaign Data from AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). The CPC Sources can be linked to existing profiles and this will enable automatic inclusion of the CPC Data into Urchin reports.

Once the data has been imported, Urchin has the following features to manage your CPC campaigns:

• The Keyword Generation Tool allows you to generate and manage keywords and to see their performance information.
  
• Direct links to AdWords allow you to navigate directly from Urchin to the appropriate screen in your AdWords account.
  
• The Urchin Tag Manager inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs. This feature simplifies the URL tagging experience and allows you to seamlessly import AdWords cost data into Urchin.
  
• A CPC Structure group of reports has been added under the Advertisement Optimization section.
  

To wrap up the year we've ranked our top 7 PPC blog posts of 2009:

1. The One vs. Many-Per-Click Breakdown --Turn to this article for a breakdown of the One Vs. Many-Per-Click conversion change that happened in Google AdWords this past year. Since conversions are a reflection of your bottom line, understanding this change is crucial!

2. Top 5 Free PPC Tools --There are tons of FREE PPC tools on the web. Some of them are great, some are alright, and some are just OK. Here are ROI we've had experience with almost all of them, and have compiled a list of the top 5 for you to reference.

4. Introduction to Google's Ad Auction, Part 2: AdRank and CPC -- Getting to the top of Google can be tricky (and expensive). This blog article outlines exactly how Google calculates AdRank and the cost you pay per click.

5.How to Use Negative Keywords When Targeting Google's Content Network -- Setting up campaigns to target Google's content network can be confusing enough, add in negative keywords and you've got yourself a double whammy. This article explains best practices when using negative keywords when targeting Google's content network.

6. Have You Used Google's New Wonder Wheel? -- We loved Google's new tool so much we blogged about it! Google's Wonder Wheel can help you expand your keyword list, build out content campaigns, find new negative keywords, and much more!

7.Google's New Interface Will Make Your Advertising Life Easier -- Google released their new interface for AdWords in 2009. Our article outlines the top features and benefits, and also links to our New AdWords user interface webinar where you'll see how the new AdWords User Interface will save you hours of your limited time, help you cut wasted adspend, and discover hew highly relevant keywords and placements to scale your online profits!

We hope you have enjoyed recapping our top posts of 2009.

Best wishes in the new year!

Enjoy the posts and have a Happy New Year!

Shawn Purtell

Random Thoughts:

This was by far the most popular post of 2009. It did so well that I decided to steal its format in hope of boosting the popularity of this post. It now includes 7 tools instead of 6 for added tool enjoyment. Looking over this list, even though this post was written back in January of '09, most of these tools are still very useful enhancements of the Google Analytics Interface and have even been updated since the writing of the post. GANotes, on the other hand, has achieved what every Google Analytics Tool dreams of becoming one day: it is now a Google Analytics fully-fledged feature known as Annotations.

#2. Tracking Transactions back to Initial Referrer

Jeremy Aube

Random Thoughts:

What's up with that frog? Apparently the idea is that considering the size of that frog, this is probably the first time it's been touched by human hands, i.e. first touch. There's a lot of talk about first-touch attribution vs. last-touch attribution. This post explains a way to get both in Google Analytics.

#3. Five Google Analytics FAILS

Michael Harrison

Random Thoughts:

We've seen people do a lot of crazy Google Analytics setups. Unfortunately, many of these fails are all too common. This post is worth reading just for the laughs alone (well, OK, it's GA humor, but it's still pretty funny), but it also serves as a much needed warning sign. Most of these fails resulted in permanent damage of one sort or another to Google Analytics data.

#4 ga.js code for GWO

Jeremy Aube

Random Thoughts:

Yet another update to GARE. This particular update was nice because allowed you to get the appropriate modifications for subdomain and multiple domain tracking. I'm not sure if this particular GARE feature still works (Update 12/30/2009: just fixed this. It should work fine now.); Google updated the Google Website Optimizer Interface so that ga.js code is provided by default.

#5. 5 Advanced Segments for Ecommerce

Michael Harrison

Random Thoughts:

Another list post, this one dealing with using the fairly-new, enterprise-level feature, advanced segments, to uncover more than ever before about your ecommerce data. My particular favorite advanced segment is #2. It used to be very difficult to determine the influence of a landing page on your site, but advanced segments makes this easy (and maybe even fun!).

#6. 6 Tools to Troubleshoot GA

Shawn Purtell

Random:

For some reason, I'm reminded of a quote: "So far alls I've come up with is the effects of gasoline. {pauses a bit} On fire." There are a lot of things on fire in this post too. We use most of these tools every day. Personally, my life would be pretty much over if I didn't have FireBug.

#7. Stressing About Ecommerce Variables?

Caitlin Cook

Random Thoughts:

Yes, those ecommerce functions sure do ask a lot of you. Fortunately you don't have to give into their demands. This post tells you exactly which variables you need to make Google Analytics ecommerce tracking work for you.

#8. Viewing A/B Experiments in Google Analytics

Shawn Purtell

Random Thoughts:

Getting Google Website Optimizer data for multi-variate tests into Google Analytics takes a little bit of work. For A/B tests, this data is available by default in Google Analytics since each combination in your test is a separate page. This post tells you how to further unlock your A/B test data in Google Analytics using advanced segments. It also has a really nice screenshot of GARE in action.

Each contestant's sweater was judged based on unique features, creativeness, effort input, tackiness, awesomeness, and even repulsiveness. General enthusiasm was also taken into account.

After a vote was taken, the following were our top 3 winners (pictured here with fabulous prizes):

(From left to right)

1st place: Matt Fritz - Matt won the crowd with his personally designed and handmade sweater

1st runner up: Justin D'Angelo - comments on his sweater included "just downright disgusting"

2nd runner up: Erin Skinner - Erin went all out from head to toe!

You can't "undo" a first impression, so you'll want to create and optimize your new campaign in an offline editor. This will allow you to reorganize keywords and ad groups before Google can give you an initial quality score.

2. Don't launch campaigns as paused until the landing page is ready

It can be tempting to one-up your web developer by launching built-out campaigns as paused while waiting for the landing page to be completed. Don't do it. Have patience... create a backup, write new ads, go on a long lunch, but don't launch your campaigns into Google until everything is optimized.

3. Create as many ad groups as necessary to use all high-traffic keywords in your ads

Your quality score matters the most for keywords that get the most traffic. A big part of quality score is whether your ads are relevant to the keywords. In the beginning, the relevancy question is simply, "Are the keywords in the ads?" You may need to make additional ad groups for high traffic keywords to make sure those keywords are included in your ads.

4. Make sure your landing page is relevant for your keywords

Here's the quick test: put your landing page URL into Google's keyword tool. Do your keywords come up in the keyword ideas list? If not, edit your content so they show up. Ideally you'd have a unique landing page for every ad group. At the very least, you'll probably want a landing page for each campaign.

5. Make sure your landing page has good navigation and generally isn't "spammy."

This is the least straightforward. Google doesn't like spammy pages and will give you perpetually poor quality scores if your site looks spammy. They don't let on to their secret algorithms to gauge the spammyness of a site, but if your site functions more like a snake oil infomercial than Wikipedia, you may have some work cut out for you.

Click for larger image

Any user with Google Analytics access can write comments on the over-time graph to indicate any notes they have for that particular event. This will save a lot of time for companies where the tasks are distributed between numerous people, which means you the analyst will no longer have to spend hours figuring out why all your data has changed. Just view the annotations to see if any major updates or changes were made!

In addition to this new feature, Google also released the ability to use the Custom Variables in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports, and the new Tracking Code Setup Wizard. To view more information about these you can visit the Google Analytics blog.

A "mistake" that we consistently see when conducting our AdWords account audit and strategy sessions, or when beginning work with a new client is that there are no negative keywords throughout the entire account. The use of negative keywords can save you hundreds of dollars every month by preventing your ads from displaying for irrelevant Google.com searches.

The addition of negative keywords to your account should be made in order to have your ads show only when it is relevant to your product offering or service. The easiest (and quickest) way to find negative keywords is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

This tool can be found by clicking on "Opportunities" at the top of the new AdWords user interface...

...and selecting "Keyword tool" found on the left hand side of the following page.

Once the list populates you can select the match type on the far right. Use the drop down menu to select "negative".

The populated list will change to potential negative keywords that are worth consideration for inclusion in your account. You will be able to see the negative keywords suggested, as well as the number of times your ad will not show on Google.com by adding the negative keyword.

In this example above, the keyword 3m may be a good negative keyword. Perhaps you do not supply 3m products for purchase, and if such was the case, adding 3m as a negative keyword would be a great tactic that could potentially save you a great deal of money.

Another example is the keyword electric. This negative keyword suggestion is most likely associated with the keyword "stapler" that you entered originally to populate the list. Perhaps you offer staplers but not the electric type. Adding the keyword electric as a negative should be done so that your ad does not display and run the risk of costing you money when that visitor will only hit the back button once they land on your site because you do not have the product they want.

Negative keywords are essential for making a killing with Google AdWords. This tactic will save you money, guaranteed. ]]> tag:www.roirevolution.com,2009:/blog//3.413 2009-12-01T16:11:27Z 2009-12-15T21:28:17Z

Just 10 Advanced day seats left for the downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, Google Analytics Seminar for Success!

This is it, your last chance to join fellow Google Analytics users in the Charlotte area to learn more about this great tool and ask your questions to qualified experts. Google Seminars for Success is officially sponsored by Google, you can trust that you are receiving the most accurate and up-to-date information on the best practices for Google Analytics.

Who each day is geared for:

• The Introduction and User Training, on Wednesday, December 9th, is designed for the beginner in Google Analytics and is primarily for non-technical users such as marketers and analysts. A large part of the day focuses on the reports available and how to use them. The intent is to present reports, explain what they mean and how they might be used with a site. While explaining the reports, the various tools (the calendar, different chart views, tabs, etc.) are explained in context.
• The Advanced Technical Implementation Training, on Thursday, December 10th, is is primarily for the technical user who installs and configures Google Analytics. Familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and cookie management is assumed.
• You can see all of the content here.

Each seminar costs $499 (or $898 for both sessions, a savings of $100!).

]]> The seminar will be at the Holiday Inn Charlotte Center City. Instruction begins each day at 9am (with registration at 8:45am to get your training materials, the seat of your choice and coffee!) and goes until 5pm with a one hour break at noon for lunch on your own.

As of Monday (12/7/09) at 5:45pm ET, there are NO seats remaining for the Introduction session and 10 seats remaining for the Advanced session. Our last seminar this past September in Chicago sold out a few days before the event! We limit each class to 40 attendees to ensure everyone has the opportunity to get their questions answered.

Hurry to get one of the few remaining seats and join us as we explain how to set up and use Google Analytics in one (maybe two) days!

]]>