However, most companies find themselves at one or other of the extremes of data analysis: either they swamp themselves in swathes of incomprehensible numbers, or they barely look at the top-line visitor stats.

There is a happy medium to be found for every company. With some forethought and work, you can make Analytics an asset to your business that builds customer intelligence and revenue and even makes your colleagues love you!

1. Set up and monitor Goals.
A Goal in Google Analytics is used to monitor an action that happens on the site. This can be anything from a purchase to a download, the completion of a form, to the length of time that the visitor spends on the site.

When setting up Goals, it is a good idea to go through your business aims and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and look at the most efficient ways of reporting on them. If you are reporting in a heavily sales-oriented organisation, for instance, it is a good idea to look at goals that relate to completed purchases and time spent on shopping cart pages.

2. Track your marketing campaigns
Imagine that your marketing department has come up with a crazy new scheme to drive traffic via Twitter, Facebook or whatever the next social media phenomenon is: that campaign needs to be tracked!

Using Campaign Tracking in Google Analytics, you can monitor traffic, revenue and other KPIs by tagging your links. This is especially useful for services that use URL shorteners, which usually skew referral URL data.

Getting your colleagues in the habit of tagging campaigns that go out on the web can be a drawn-out process, but it will pay dividends in the end. Your Financial Director will love you for the ROI data you present on that Twitter campaign!

3. Use Advanced Segments
Your site traffic is not one big group of like-minded people who all turn up for the same reason. Likewise you shouldn’t be treating your analytics stats as one almighty block of figures.

Using Advanced Segments will give you greater insights into the behaviour of different types of visitors, such as new and returning visitors or those from different sources, such as organic and paid search. You can even create your own Segments, tailored to your categories of visitor.

Segments will tell you a different story about each of your visitor types and allow you to make informed decisions on how to interact with them.

Like most site analytics packages, Google Analytics collects a huge amount of data, but there is no need to try to tackle it all at once. The three techniques we have gone through here will get you well started towards using Analytics in an intelligent way that relates to your company’s goals, targets and KPIs, without getting bogged down in a mire of data.

See Also:
5 Rules for the Perfect Web Analytics Dashboard

Google sees me go to the shops?

No, this isn’t the bit where you get in your car and drive to the supermarket. The Customer Journey is the decision making process that people go through when making a purchase or beginning a relationship with a company. It is comprised of 4 stages:

1. Research
2. Consideration
3. Purchase (or lead generation)
4. Loyalty

A potential customer may conduct a variety of searches while they go about their journey. For instance, lets imagine they need a new laptop. Now, this being a reasonably significant purchase they are going to want to get the best possible machine they can, so they do their research.  The searches usually comprise of 1-2 keywords, which might look something like this:

Laptops, Best Laptops, Business Laptops, Laptop Review

Once they have a broad understanding of what the market offers, they will move into the consideration phase, using more specific queries in relation to their needs:

Laptop  battery life,  Windows 7 Laptops, Gaming Laptop Review

Note that these are longer queries, usually comprising of 2-3 keyword combinations. In the purchase phase the searches can be even longer, usually containing buying signal keywords:

Buy Gaming Laptops, Cheap Gaming Laptops, Buy Laptops Online UK

The Loyalty stage is all about brand, and will be driven by customers’ experiences, word of mouth and so forth. Keywords will look like this:

Dell Laptops, Buy Compaq Laptops, Alienware Online Shop

Thanks to Google, you can now start to track this process, and actually determine the value of ads that contribute to the decision/conversion process, but aren’t the last clicked ad. Google calls this:

Search Funnels

Search Funnels at the moment features 7 reports.  These include reports on on ads that were clicked on before the conversion, as well as impressions of ads during this process, (assisted clicks and impressions), time lag, and first and last click analysis.

The potential of these reports is great, as they will allow a huge amount of insight into how your customers go about deciding to buy from you. This data can then drive keyword bids and ads that can potentially strengthen the whole advertising process through Adwords, as well as feeding into other areas of your marketing effort.

Now the bad news; Search Funnels are still in beta, but Google does say on their blog that they will be available “in the next few weeks,” so for the moment you will have to content yourself with the preview video:

Quality Score affects your position in the paid search results and how much you pay per click, so it is an important element of your campaigns. Get it right and you will be paying less per click than your competitors for higher positions.

Quality Score is determined by three factors:

1. Click Though Rate
2. Ad Relevance – how relevant the ad text is to the search query.
3. The Landing Page – Google uses a similar algorithm to its organic search to determine a landing page’s relevance and reputation.

So what can you do to maximise your quality score?

1. Structure your campaigns into highly targeted ad groups.

Ideally, you should be splitting your campaigns into one ad group per keyword. This way you can include the exact search keyword in the ad text once or more. If this is too complex a structure, try and keep the individual ad group keywords lists as small as possible, and preferably variations of each other, eg:

“green widget, green widgets, dark green widgets.”

2. Target your Landing Pages.

The more targeted the copy on your landing pages to the search keywords the better. While it is often not practical to build a landing page for every single ad group, it is a good idea to build keyword-themed landing pages. For example if you are selling widgets in four different colours, why not build a landing page for each colour?

If you want to check what keywords Google sees your landing pages as being relevant to, use the Site Related Keywords feature of the Adwords External Keyword Tool.

Just click on the website content radio button, enter your url and you will see the keywords that Google thinks your page is most relevant for. Match these to your most productive keyword terms and your quality score should increase.

3.Optimize your whole site

If your site is liked by Google, your quality score is likely to go up. Google’s own Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines are a good point to start from. Basically, Google wants your site to be easy to navigate, trustworthy (display your contact details, privacy policy etc), and relevant to the subject you are advertising on.

Once you get these three factors right, you should see good quality in your campaigns, and start paying less for those all-important clicks!

At the moment these are limited to people who have a Google account and are signed in to that account. The extra results look like this:

From what I’ve seen the results include those people who are on your Gmail contacts list, and also your Twitter follow list. Apparently Flickr and Facebook friends’ posts and feeds are also included.

Google’s argument on the usefulness of these results is that we all rely on our friends and contacts for advice and recommendations from time to time, so why not include their content in your search results.

While this is a fair point, would we not just go and ask the people in question what their opinion is on something if we wanted it?

Here’s Google’s video explaining the new SERP:

In other words, it is a tool that shows (unsurprisingly) browser sizes in relation to your site:

Yes, the lines look a little scrappy, but Google claims that they actually visually represent the proportions of visitors in terms of who will see what as determined by Google’s own visitor stats.

“So what?” I hear you cry. Surely our web guys would be using a tool like this already, and shouldn’t designers know about which browser sizes to optimize for anyway?

Well, here’s the clever bit, in Google’s own words:

“Think the numbers are different for your site? Browser Size bases its data on a sample of visitors to Google.com, but you can check out your screen resolutions report in your web analytics tool to see the most common visitor screen resolutions for your own site. For most sites the list of dimensions is quite long, and the ones we in the industry tend to use – 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024 – typically only represent about 50% of the visitors at best.”

There is also an indication that this may well be integrated as a feature into one or more of the Google products, so it may be a good idea to get used to seeing it if you use Analytics, or Optimizer.

Using it in with your own stats may well lead to you being able to optimize an extra few % out of your site…
You can check out the tool here: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

Lo and behold, the interface asks you if you would like to set up and A/B test or Multivariate. “Which one should I choose?” you think.

Well, it depends on what your goals are, what kind of site you are running, and what you want to find out. Lets go over the two types of test:

A/B Testing

This is the simpler of the two tests. It involves setting up two separate versions of a page and testing them against each other. You may want to change one or two elements, or look at testing two different layouts to see which performs the best.

A/B is also simpler to set up. You simply produce the two pages, set up the experiment in GWO, and add code to both of the pages. Website Optimizer does the rest, even distributing traffic evenly between the two experiment pages.

You can also set up experiments in this way with more than two variations, so you can have A/B/C, A/B/C/D experiments and so on.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing is a little more complex. It allows you to test multiple versions of elements on a page. For example, you can set up a test which has two variations of a headline and two different buy now buttons. Website Optimizer will then tell you which combination of the four different elements worked together for the best result.

Multivariate tests are more tricky to set up. What you have to do is determine the page elements that you wish to test and load the actual code for the variations into GWO. Once you have done this, you need to insert the code that GWO provides into the correct portions of the page. It is very important to double check the variations you have set up and test to make sure the pages work properly.

So Which One Should I Use?

Well there are a number of factors to consider?

1. Technical know-how. If you are starting out with GWO for the first time, or you don’t build web pages yourself it would be a good idea to start with an A/B test as they are a lot easier to set up.
2. What are your goals? If you are looking to find out something simple like whether one background colour works better than another for conversions, you may be better off with an A/B test. However if you have more complex goals and are looking to test multiple theories on what will work best on your site, it may be a good idea to go with Multivariate.
3. How much traffic do you have? Multivariate tests typically need more traffic pushed through them to determine a winning combination than A/B tests do to determine a winning page, so if you have low traffic numbers start with an A/B test.

Both methods are very powerful for proving theories on how your web pages work, and both can be used to great effect to increase the performance of your site. You will need to be patient though. You will only start seeing a true idea of how your pages perform after a goodly amount of time. We usually look at two weeks’ data as a minimum.

You will end up learning a lot about your visitors and your market and hopefully boosting your revenues, but remember that Website Optimization is an ongoing process. It is wise to plan well and use a conversion methodology such as this one.

Step 1: go to http://www.google.com/lbc

Click on the “Add New Business” button (if you’re not logged in to your Google account, you’ll have to do this, or create one if you don’t have one yet).

Step 2: Fill In Your Details

As you fill in your details, the actual listing will populate itself to the right. Make sure you check through and get this right before you click “Next.”

Step 3: Add or Claim your Listing

Now, it may be that someone has already listed you, this may be someone in your company, or a third party. The next screen lets you claim existing listings if you want to:

We are going to carry on and add this listing, so we can get to the next step.

Step 4: Business Information.

The next screen is a long one so we’ll forego the screenshot, but this is the bit where you add opening hours, what kind of payment methods you accept, as well as any photos (up to 10)or videos (up to 5) you have of your business.

You can also add custom fields to the end of your listing to further describe what you offer.

Step 5:  Confirm that the listing is yours.

And that’s it. The whole process not including verification should take around five minutes, and for that, your customers will find it easier to locate you, and you could even get a whole raft of new business!

Want to know more about Google Adwords?:
Download our Free Google AdWords eBook
Training Day in London – Limited Places

Trite the last question may be, but if you answered yes to both of the above, then you should be using Google Local Business Center.

Local Business Center is a mash-up of Google Maps and Search.  You may have noticed its results popping up from time to time, where you get presented with a map with a list of sites down the side:

Now, this is great for helping your customers find you, but the benefits of Local Search are much greater than just that.

Probably the most powerful aspect of Local Search is that your map listing appears above the normal organic search results. You therefore have a chance at being one of the first results that a potential customer sees.

Your phone number is also featured on the listing. This gives the searcher two ways of getting in touch with you from the get go.

Finally, you may have noticed that there is a link to reviews.  This leads to a page with, yes you guessed it, reviews of you business. Moreover, the searcher is presented with this:

Again there is a link to your site, your contact details (including email), and a short description of your offering which you can enter. Effectively you get a nice piece of real estate on Google’s own pages. This can be very powerful as long as your reviews are good!

Added to this, the control panel that you access can give you some very good data on  impressions, clicks and even what postcodes your visitors came from.

So, if you are not already using this, take the time, its well worth it.  Here are instructions on how to set Local Business Center up in 5 easy steps.

You can also check out Google’s nice glossy ad for the service:

Want to know more about Google Adwords?:
Download our Free Google AdWords eBook
Training Day in London – Limited Places

Want to know which keywords are your top performers? How about easily being able to cut PPC keywords by worst performing engagement metrics? You could do this before with Analytics, but it was a bit of a chore.

Now with advanced filtering, you can sort and filter your tables of data by custom parameters. This should really help with digging out the exact data you are looking for amongst all the “noise.” Check Google’s video for more detail:

Sharing

For those of you who work with clients, or need to report to third parties on their analytics data, the sharing feature has the potential to become an invaluable tool. Now you can click the “share” button to generate a URL which can then be passed on to a colleague or client for them to view.  Also, there is now the capability to annotate a given point in time on a graph.

Intelligence and Custom Alerts

Analytics is now more intelligent! The new functionality actively monitors events and creates alerts if something happens outside an expected range of activity on the site, for example if your new visitor rate spikes through the roof, or similar. You can even set the sensitivity of how many alerts you get to see.

You can also now set up custom alerts along the same lines:

The theory behind all these changes is saving time and enabling greater information at your fingertips in less time. To me these all look like positive steps forward and I know I’ll be using some of these features in anger…

Bringing the mobile reporting data more into line with that on the traditional web side of Analytics, mobile site users can now track session length, bounce rates and page views, as well as use Event Tracking to monitor downloads, signups, sales and any other event based goals.

Apps developers will most likely be very happy at this development. It certainly seems that Google’s tame case study, online property listings provider Redfin, are happy with the data that Mobile Reporting provides:

On tracking their iphone app, some really useful data they got was seeing iphone users by geographic location, as well as seeing what the update frequency was on the actual app.

Looks like this is a good start from the big G on mobile analytics tracking. I would expect that having their own mobile OS and a mobile ad serving platform won’t harm the development of Analytics features in this area either…

See Also:
Google Analytics New Features Part 1: Engagement Goals