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The ROI Revolution Blog

Articles Tagged with 'Google Analytics'

Facebook Advertising Success

February 23, 2010

Just how big is Facebook, really?

According to TechCrunch, big enough to encroach on Yahoo's position of "third largest Web property in the world", trailing none other than Google (#1) & Microsoft (#2).

In the U.S., Facebook already has the second highest number of unique visitors per month - surpassing Yahoo for the first time in January. Compete.com also reports that of all time spent online in January, 11.6% was on Facebook, compared to less than 5% on Yahoo and Google each.

What does this mean to you?

Well, I don't have the answer to that question, but I can tell you what it now means to some of our clients for whom we've recently started advertising on Facebook --> more qualified customer leads + a desirable cost = more $$$ for them.

The following story is about a lead generation client (Client A, for anonymity), but Facebook would certainly be worth testing if you're in an e-commerce space too.

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New GA Feature: Annotations

December 8, 2009

Keeping up with the changes on your site can be nearly impossible. Equally challenging is keeping up with those changes in your Google Analytics reports. Yesterday Google announced a new feature called Annotations to help you remember what happened on your site, who did it, and when it happened.

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.

Get More from the Navigation Summary and Pivot Tables

December 1, 2009

Back in August, a tip was released on the Official Google Analytics Blog that allows you to export more than 500 rows from a report. In the post, this technique was used to export more than 500 rows worth of keyword data. Here we often use this technique to export more than 500 rows worth of pages from the Top Content report.

What you may not realize is that you can also use this trick to export more than 10 previous and next pages from the Navigation Summary report. As you may recall, the navigation summary report looks something like this:

In some case, 10 previous and next pages may be just what you need. But what if you want more?

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Funnels on the Fly in Google Analytics

November 18, 2009

So there you are - you're all ready to put more oil in your car, or maybe you're trying to fill your sugar jar. Maybe you're all set to do some ironing, but you need to put some water in the iron. Whatever the reason, it immediately hits you that you'll be needing a funnel - but... OH SNAP!

You don't have one. Or you can't find it. What do you do? You improvise of course!

Quickly and with a MacGyver-like moment of inspiration, you grab a 2-liter bottle from your recycling bin and cut the top off. Phew - that was a close one! Now you won't have oil on your driveway, or water all over your bedroom carpet, and you can go about your day feeling like a secret genius.

Now, a funnel would have still been the best tool for the job, but sometimes it's just not available. What the heck does this have to do with Google Analytics?

Well, Google Analytics has a great built-in Funnel Visualization report, but the problem is that it only works if you have the foresight to build it ahead of time. Funnels are never retroactive - they will only start working the moment you create them. What if you have multiple landing pages? Moreover, what if you only want to look at AdWords traffic? Well, you would need a separate profile in addition to a properly set up funnel, and all of this has to be set up ahead of time.

The problem is that often you won't know what kind of funnel you need until it's too late. Having 20 goals in Google Analytics is great, but you could have a million and it wouldn't make a difference.

The good news is there's hope. That hope is called Advanced Segments. Here's how you do it:

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Need Your Own Google Analytics Greasemonkey Script?

November 9, 2009

I write most of my Greasemonkey scripts with the idea that they will be useful to as many Google Analytics admins and users as possible.

But what if you need a script that's very specific to your business needs? Or maybe you've heard about the Google Analytics API and you'd like to use it to tie your Google Analytics report data with data from your back end. You might even just need some custom modifications to your Google Analytics Tracking Code and general setup to get that one bit of data that can make or break your business.

At ROI Revolution, we offer support plans that can be used for nearly any type of Google Analytics project you can think up. You can also use your support time to have us help you effectively configure optimal tracking for your business goals, get a second opinion on that those thorny configuration issues, or just to audit your Google Analytics account setup and make sure everything's working just as it should.

And if you just want your own Greasemonkey script, we can make that happen too.

Learn more about our Google Analytics technical support offerings.

ROI Revolution Attends 3rd Annual GAAC Summit

October 30, 2009

Every year when autumn rolls around, you'll find the ROI Revolution Analytics Team hard at work planning our strategy. Not for clients (we do that all year 'round, of course) but for the strange and fun activities planned at the annual Google Analytics Authorized Consultant Summit. Last year, it was Rock Band. This year, trampoline dodgeball.

Not all of our time at Google is spent jumping around on trampolines and pegging each other with balls. For four days, Google Partners from around the world convene in Mountain View to talk about the state of analytics and optimization, learn from one another, and push the limit when it comes to supporting our favorite free analytics platform.

Click for a rundown of what we covered...

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Universal Conversion Code For Google Website Optimizer

October 13, 2009

We've been using a piece of code for a while that makes it easier to set up multiple Google Website Optimizer experiments. These experiments could be one right after the other, or even several experiments running simultaneously. The only requirement is that you should have a single conversion point for all of your Google Website Optimizer experiments. You may be able to adapt this code to situations with multiple conversion points, but that's likely to get rather complicated. So why use this code? Oftentimes your conversion point is a page that you're not really wanting to edit a lot, or may even be able to edit a lot. Instead of having to update your conversion page every time you set up a new experiment, you just add this code to your conversion page once and forget about it. It will register a conversion for all current and future experiments, and will even accommodate visitors who may be part of more than one experiment. So here's the code:

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Check Landing Page Performance by Browser

October 6, 2009

Every browser is different.* Ask any web designer about their craft and you'll eventually get them talking passionately about these differences. How Internet Explorer 6 renders CSS pseudo-elements (badly) and handles padding and spaces (randomly). How IE7 ignores CSS drop shadows. How floating divs never seem to work the same way in any of the browsers. These peculiarities have driven many a developer to strong drink.

When it comes to testing new webpage designs in Google Website Optimizer, speed can be essential. You want to get the experiment out the door as soon as possible so you can get preliminary data. Sometimes this means that things slip through QA. Browser testing is exceptionally finicky and time consuming. Not every office has a spare Mac sitting around, and with three different versions of Internet Explorer still in wide use—and no easy way to install all three versions on a single PC—it's no small feat to make your page variations all work perfectly in every popular browser.

With just a few Google Analytics Advanced Segments in your arsenal, however, you'll be able to see whether or not your new pages are functioning fine in all the right browsers. Hit the jump for details.

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Using Google Analytics to Your PPC Advantage: Geo Targeting

September 15, 2009

Strategy: Using Google Analytics, you can see which cities and states are performing well, and you can create separate PPC campaigns for those areas with higher bids. Conversely, you can see which cities and states underperform, and you can isolate and bid them down or eliminate them altogether.

Google Analytics can reveal so much invaluable information about your online (and offline) marketing efforts, and uncovering where the majority of your traffic and customers come from is just one of the many important pieces of the marketing pie. Using different reports and segmentations in Google Analytics can shed light on where you should be focusing your marketing.

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Understanding Correlations in Google Analytics

May 28, 2009

Website traffic does not exist in a vacuum. Here's a simple example: Jack comes to your website on Monday after seeing one of your AdWords content ads and he likes what he sees. He's a careful shopper though, so he's not ready to commit quite yet and leaves the site for the day. He takes some time and does some comparison shopping throughout the week, talks to some of his friends and comes back to your site again after typing your company name into Google and clicking on an organic result. He sees an offer for a 10% off coupon if he signs up for your newsletter, so he does, and then leaves the site again. In a week, he gets an email about a sale you are having, and clicks on a link within the email, finally making a purchase on this, his third visit.

So the big question is - how does this show up in Google Analytics? Does AdWords get any credit for the sale? The simple answer is no. Depending on if you are tracking your emails in Google Analytics (and how you are doing it), you'll either see a conversion for the email, the organic branded search or even a direct visit. Wouldn't it be nice to know that at one point AdWords had something to do with the sale? Better yet, wouldn't you like to know the Campaign, Ad Group and Keyword that was responsible?

Jack's example is a very common one, and pretty simple in comparison to the way a lot of people use the Internet, so it is important to try and understand the relationships between your different traffic sources.

Still don't care? Let me give you a real-world example of what can happen if you ignore it:

Case Study: A company that deals in a software product noticed that it was getting what looked like a pretty poor return on Content Network traffic from AdWords (responsible for what Google Analytics reported as roughly 5% of daily revenue). In an attempt to reduce costs, they decided to pause this traffic completely. The result was that almost immediately they noticed a 15-20% drop in daily revenue!

What the heck happened? Well, it turns out a large percentage of that content traffic was coming back as either organic branded traffic or direct traffic. They never bothered to look at the relationship between their content traffic and other traffic sources, and it cost them.

Conversely, by understanding this relationship, they have been able to not only gain back the 15-20% that they lost, but improve the return even further!

So how can you learn from their mistake? Here are a few things you can do, ranging from fairly simple to more complex, to help you grasp the relationship between your marketing sources and mediums:

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