Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’

Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

One of the most useful features in Google Analytics are goals. These allow you to record instances of specific events and can help you understand which parts of your site are not working as efficiently as you would like. When you are planning your site you will hopefully have thought about what constitutes a successful visitor. This may be a successful purchase or a request for information via a contact form.

Goals

Within Google Analytics there are two types of goal:

  • URL Destination – This type of goal triggered is when a visitor reaches a particular page within your  site
  • Threshold – This type of goal is triggered when a visitor stays on your site for a specified amount of time or visits a specified number of pages

For the purpose of this post we are going to set up a URL Destination Goal.

If we look at my site then my main aim is to try to get people to purchase websites, hosting or hire me for Search Engine Optimisation or Social Media work. There are two main ways of prospective clients contacting me, using the Freephone telephone number at the top of every page or completing the contact form on the Contact page. So for me a successful visitor is somebody who visits my Contact page. I will show you how to set up a URL Destination goal within Google Analytics for that purpose.

Creating a Goal

The first thing you will need to know is where you set goals. Go to Profile Settings and you will see part way down the page you will see the Goals box. You can set up a maximum of 20 goals and these are then subdivided into sets, with each set containing up to five goals. The idea of having individual sets is so that you can separate out specific types of goals. For instance you might have one set of goals that are dedicated to marketing and another set of goals that is aimed at miscellaneous pages, you might want to know how many of your visitors actually visit your Terms & Conditions page.

Click on Add Goal and you are taken through to the goal settings page. The first thing to do is to give your goal a meaningful name so that it makes sense when you look at the report in a few weeks’ time or if your boss requires a look at the report.

You can choose whether the goal is active or not with the radio button underneath, you might want to set up a goal in advance of a product launch and then start the tracking once the product is live. In reality you will almost never want this setting to be set to “No”.

Next we will choose which set and goal number it will occupy. Remember, sets can be used to separate out different business objectives.

Finally, for this section, we will choose the type of goal. In this case it is URL Destination

Goal Definition

Defining Your Google Analytics Goal

You will now see some new information is required under the heading “Goal Details”. The piece of information that you need to choose is the Match Type.  There are three possible Match Types for you to choose from:

  • Head Match – The default setting as long as your goal URL is contained within the URI then it is allowed e.g. Goal URL “products/lamps/”, URI “products/lamps/bedsidelamps/” would be counted because “products/lamps/” is contained within “products/lamps/bedsidelamps/”
  • Exact Match – The goal URL that you want to track must match the one that the user is visiting
  • Regular Expression – This checks the URI and if the regular expression entered in the Goal URL is included anywhere within the URI then the visit is counted. A good example of this would be seeing how many PDF’s have been downloaded, you would enter the regular expression “.pdf”

Next you enter the location of the page that you want to track minus the domain name and extension. I am going to track visits to www.mickwalmsley.com/contact/ so I will only include /contact/.

Google Analytics Goal Parameters

Google Analytics Goal Parameters

Funnels

Creating a goal only tells you half a story. Yes, it is great to know when a visitor follows the path that you have wanted them to take and ended up on the page that you wanted them to be on, but what do you do if they do not end up there? You need to be able to identify where in the process they are stopping and then address that issue. The way that you do this is through the use of funnels.

Creating a Funnel

To create your funnel you need to enter the URL of each step that the visitor will need to take. You enter  everything after the domain name and give it a meaningful name as shown in the figure below

Funnel Creation

Creating a Funnel in Google Analytics

In this example wed would be tracking a visitor who has visited every page on my site other than the blog.

You can have up to ten steps to any goal. If you think you need more than 10 steps then you need to look seriously at the architecture of your site. Ten steps should be more than enough!

Finally click on the Save Goal button at the bottom of the page and you have just created your first goal.

You will find that Google Analytics goals are massively useful to you in understanding your website’s performance. If you are interested in hiring me to help with your Analytics then, if you are in the UK, why not call me on the telephone number at the top of the page for free and if you are outside of the UK then use the contact form. I am based in Blackburn, Lancashire but carry out Search Engine Optimisation work for clients all over the country.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | 4 Comments »

How Does Google Analytics Collect Data?

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
Google Analytics Logo

Google Analytics

Many of my clients are already using Google Analytics to gather information on how users interact with their website. However, many of them do not realise how much power Google Analytics actually has and quite how useful it can be into gaining insights into their visitor’s habits. I thought I would share some of the knowledge I have gleaned over the last few years of carrying out Search Engine Optimisation and the role that Google Analytics can play in helping you to achieve your online goals.

In the first part of this series I will briefly run over the way that Google actually collects data from your site that it then uses to produce the reports that you check on a daily or weekly basis.

The piece of information that you need to know about is that the piece of code that you pasted into your pages is called the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). The GATC is a small piece of Javascript and you need to add it to every page that you want to collect data on. If you are using a content management system (CMS) then you will just need to add it to your page template(s).

When a user visits your site their browser sends a request to your sites server and the server sends the required page. The page includes the GATC and this is triggered when the page is loaded into the users browser. Here is the next bit of info for you to amaze your friends with on Friday night. The javascript that you pasted into your page is not all the code that is needed, it pulls more code in from elsewhere. “Where exactly?” you might ask. Well, here is the clever bit. If you live in Blackburn it will pull the code in from the nearest Google server to Blackburn. If you are in Leeds, it picks the nearest Google server to Leeds. This is done to help minimise any performance issues that might arise while waiting for the code to download. OK, you might not want to tell your friends about this on Friday, but it is a rather interesting fact.

Next the code collects a whole host of information about your visitor from their browser such as the operating system, browser etc.

GATC then sets or resets various cookies on the users machine that store data and that can be accessed again if the visitor ever returns to your site. If cookies cannot be set then Google Analytics cannot track your visitor. All the cookies used by Google Analytics are first-party cookies. This means that they are set by your website. There are also third party cookies, these are cookies that belong to one site but are set from another. Another point to note is that different browsers use different cookies. So if a visitor uses Internet Explorer and at some point revisits your site using, say Safari, even though it is the same machine that has been used two lots of cookies will be set.

There are five cookies that can be set by Google Analytics:

  • __utma: This is a visitor identification cookie. It contains a unique numerical identifier and GA counts these up to see how many unique visitors a site has received
  • __utmb: This is a session identifier and is used in conjunction with __utmc to calculate things such as time on page or time on site
  • __utmc: Used as already described for __utmb
  • __utmz: This helps to track where a visitor came from and is useful for helping track keywords and referral traffic
  • __utmv: This is used with custom variables that you can set up to store additional information about your site’s users

Once these cookies have been set then the data is returned to Google to be stored.

There are a couple of potential problems with this method. Firstly by using cookies you can receive a false number of unique visitors if visitors use different browsers on different visits. There is also the possibility that a visitor may have disabled cookies in which case they will not register in your analytics result at all.

There is also the possibility that sites in the EU will have an additional problem by the end of May 2011. Under the EU’s Privacy and Communications Directive site owners will have to get explicit consent from visitors before they can store and retrieve information from a visitors machine. The cookies used by Google Analytics are exactly the sort of thing that the EU is talking about. You do not need to panic if you are using Google Analytics, the legislation will not be enforced immediately, but it is something that you should be aware. Now that is something to share with your friends this Friday!

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »

Weekly Round Up 19th March 2011

Saturday, March 19th, 2011

This is the first in a new series I will be adding to the Blog in which I give a quick once over to some of the more interesting stories I have come across in the preceding week with a link through to the original article. Feel free to leave your comments about each story that has been in the news.

iPhone 5 to have Near Field Communication(NFC)?

iPhone 5 rumoured to be getting NFC technology

Will you soon be able to make payments using your iPhone?

Rumours are gathering pace that the iPhone 5 may have NFC (Near Field Communication). This is the system that allows pinless payment transactions to take place. At the moment the only major company offering this type of service in the UK are Barclaycard. You are able to make a payment by simply holding your NFC enabled credit card close to the payment terminal and do not need to enter a PIN number. The transaction is automatic. Barclaycard currently limit the maximum payment amount using this technology to £15.00. This suggests that they are minimising the risk of fraudulant transactions that could take place. Will this be a good technology to use in the iPhone? Possibly, at the recent SXSW conference in Austin Texas one of the most popular apps in use was one named “Uber”. This allows users to hail a cab from their iPhone. Cab drivers with the Uber app receive updates that somebody is waiting to be picked up and they can go and collect the user. The user then pays for the cab ride within the app. While this is not NFC technology the fact that so many people were prepared to use it would suggest that there is a demand for this type of transaction. One other point is that NFC technology makes payments easier and therefore is likely to lead to increased sales. Who remembers student days where you felt if you paid by card rather than cash it was like you had not really spent anything?

http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-5-might-have-nfc-chip-after-all-2011-3?op=1
European Union Warns US Giants They Must Comply With Upcoming Privacy Laws
The European Union has told companies such as Google and Facebook that they must comply with soon to be implemented data privacy laws or face court action. One the new rules will be a users “right to be forgotten”. This means that you would not only be able to deactivate an account on Facebook as you can now but can actually delete the account and in the process remove all images of yourself. This sounds like a good idea, but implementing it may be a nightmare. Deleting photos that you have uploaded to Facebook is one thing, but what if you have been tagged in a photo uploaded by somebody else? Does that person have to delete their picture of you? Another development is the fact that tracking cookies must be explicitly accepted by a user before they can be set on your machine. Google Analytics stores five separate tracking cookies on a users machine. This legislation, due to be introduced at the end of May could have profound implications on the accuracy of data from Google Analytics. However do not panic just yet. The European Union’s justice chief has already said that the laws will not be fully implemented upon introduction and companies will be given time to comply with the new regulations.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110317-151000
Curebit Adds Social Media to Online Shopping
Curebit is a new social service that will integrate with many shopping carts and provides the ability to generate sales through social media sharing. The quick pitch for how the service works is as follows. A user makes a purchase from a site, when the order is placed the user receives an on screen referral offer. The user is given the option to share the offer with their friends via social media. If those friends purchase something via the link then the original user is credited with something such as cashback or a discount.
http://mashable.com/2011/03/17/curebit/
  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Internet News | No Comments »

Five iPhone Apps That Every SEO Specialist Should Have

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Now that we have smart phones it matters less and less whether you are sitting at your desk or not. Even when we are far away from the office, as long as we have a 3G signal then we can still be productive.

There are certain pieces of information that every SEO specialist needs to be able to access and as Apple always tell us “There’s an App for that”. Here is a list of my five favourite Search Engine Optimisation Apps for the iPhone.

1. Ego App by Garrett Murray

Ego AppEgo is a very useful app that can give you a quick breakdown on the number of visitors to a site. You start by adding widgets that can for any of the following:

  • Ember
  • FeedBurner
  • Google Analytics
  • Mint
  • Squarespace
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

For example you can see how many visits you have had to your site today, yesterday, this week, this month and this year. You can also see if your feed is more popular than it was the previous day. With a Twitter account it will tell you how many followers you have, how many people you are following, how many tweets you have posted, the number of favourite tweets and how many times you have been listed.

The best thing about Ego App is that it is very clear and you can see what is happening across a multitude of sites/accounts.

For me I like to use Ego to see if I can spot anything that is changing quickly on a site. For example if I suddenly notice that traffic to one of my sites has doubled I can then use another app to look in more detail at why this might be.

2. AnalyticsPro by Thomas Blackburn

Analytics Pro AppThis is probably the nearest you will get on your iPhone to actually being logged into Google Analytics. You start by signing in with your Goggle Analytics credentials and you are then shown a listing of all the sites that you manage.

You then have various reports that can be run such as summaries for today, yesterday or the last 28 days. There are visitor reports that can tell you information like the location of your visitors, the language they are using, the browser and operating system, visitor loyalty even the connection speed. There are traffic source reports that tell you how people have arrived at your site and what keywords they were searching for to find you. It can help you monitor your AdWords campaign and show you what has been the most popular content on the site.

Although you cannot generate your own reports as you can within Google Analytics itself there are so many reports to choose from that it will probably enable you to get enough information to manage with until you are back at your desk.

I find that I tend to mainly use the Summary, Location, Traffic Source, Keywords and Top Content reports and from this I can field questions from my clients when I am out of my office.

3. Serps by Hans Schneider

SERPS iPhone AppThe Serps app allows you to check your Google rankings for particular search terms. It is very easy to configure. You simply enter the domain that you want to check and then click on the domain and add the search terms that you want to check. As you add a search term it is automatically ranked as long as it is within the first 100 results.

You can then click on the search term and you are presented with the top 100 results for that particular keyword phrase so that you can not only see where the domain you are interested in ranks but also who is beating it.

There is nothing to stop you from inputting a competitors site either, so you can keep an eye on what they are up to.

 Serps is a free app.

4. SEO Pro nxfx.mobi

SEO Pro AppThis utility gives you a site’s Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, number of inbound yahoo links and how many times the site has been dug on Digg. With the free version you can only add one site whereas with the full version you can add numerous sites. There is another built in function and that is to see the meta data that is stored in the page head. Finally for this app it has a built in browser that will display the page.

5. SEO Stats Keith Greene

SEO Stats AppSEO Stats provides details on the page rank of a site as SEO Pro does but what it also provides is a breakdown of the type of links that are pointing to the site. I am sure that I do not have to tell you how important inbound links are to a site if you want to gain a high ranking on Google.

With this app you cannot save a domain, you have to type it in each time that you want to use it. One of the ways I have found it to be useful in the past has been when you inadvertently start talking to a prospective lead and you have no PC, laptop, iPad or net book to hand. With this app I can still ask the person for their domain name and in a matter of moments I can find out how many inbound links they have got and how big a job it is going to be to get them to that coveted number one spot on Google.

Being on the iOS platform each of these apps are well designed and have a clear and intuitive User Interface. I find that between them they have helped to make my Search Engine Optimisation efforts just that little bit slicker and help me to be more productive even when I am out of my office.

Do you have any SEO apps that you would recommend? Leave a comment and let me know which your favourite SEO app is.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in App Review, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »

App of the Week: Anaytics Pro by Thomas Blackburn

Saturday, August 14th, 2010
Analytics Pro by Thomas Blackburn

Analytics Pro by Thomas Blackburn, is this the best analytics app on the iPhone?

My app of the week is a very useful analytics client by Thomas Blackburn. I have used a number of analytics apps over the last 12 months and I would say that this is not only the best but also the one that is nearest to Google Analytics itself.

You sign in with your Google Analytics account and you are presented with the profiles that you have set up for your various sites. Pick a profile and then you are able to start to drill down into your chosen sites data. You can start with a summary of visitors for today, yesterday or the last 28 days. There is, of course, the option to set your own date range.

I find with most of the analytics packages that they are OK if you need to check some basic info quickly when you are away from my PC or laptop. You know the sort of thing, you are out shopping when a client calls and asks why they have suddenly had twice the number of enquiries in the last three days. Normally I can check the visitor stats and advise them that in the last three days I have registered their Blog with Feedburner and since then the traffic to the site has doubled, with the bulk of the new visitors coming through Feedburner.

With AnalyticsPro I have a whole raft of information at my finger tips including:

  • Countries
  • Location
  • Language
  • Visitor Loyalty
  • Browser
  • Operating System
  • Traffic Sources
  • Search Keywords
  • AdWords campaigns
  • Plus many more

The app loads quickly and gives you the data you request rapidly, suggesting that the code has been really well optimised. It is a very secure app and uses Google’s API to transmit and receive data.

I think the best endorsement I can give is that during this week I was speaking to a client and we were discussing her AdWords campaign, as a result of information that I gleaned from AnalyticsPro relating to which pages are the most popular on their site we have been able to tweak the AdWords campaign and are looking forward to gaining extra leverage from the clients budget.

I admit I could have reached the same conclusion if I had been at my desk. What surprised me was that we were able to reach the decision while I was sitting on a park bench with my dogs.

The UI is excellent with items nicely spaced out and the app is intuitive to use. This is not an app that I just recommend, this is an app that I have been using all week and will continue to use for the foreseeable future.

You can download Analytics Pro from the Apple App Store. At £3.99 you may think that it is a little pricey for an app, but what price do you put on having information at your fingertips? In my opinion this is the best analytics package for the iPhone.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in App Review | No Comments »

The Equation for Web Success

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

You can read lots of articles on how to optimise your website to rank highly on Search Engines They will tell you about the importance of keyword selection, page title, H1 content, link building and a myriad of other things to take into account. However, I would like to talk about something slightly different, it is what I term as the Equation for Web Success, or put more simply:

G = S + D + C

Where:
G = Your Goal, what constitutes a successful visitor to your site? This may be a person who buys from your site, or orders a sales brochure from your site or calls in to make an enquiry
S = SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), gaining high rankings on major search engines such as Google and Bing.
D = Description Meta Tag, the text that web users read beneath your company name in a search engine listing
C = Site content, the words and pictures on your actual site

Most website owners are now savvy enough to know that the “If you build it, people will come” attitude to owning a site is no longer true. They realise that to attract customers to their sites they need to do more than simply have a site. With this in mind many website owners believe that being number one on Google will mean that the traffic will come flooding into their site. Unscrupulous SEO practitioners will happily promise to get you to the top of Google, but will have no interest in whether you see an upturn in your business to justify the fees that they are charging.

Let’s assume for a moment that you are a website owner and you are looking to boost sales through your site. Your SEO specialists has completed their side of the bargain and got you into the top three results for all your chosen keywords on Google and Bing and yet you still see no real increase in traffic to your site, let alone an increase in sales. Why could that be? The answer is that you have only completed the first part of the equation, Serarch Engine Optimisation.

To complete the next stage of the equation you need to look at why people are not clicking through from your search engine listing to your site. This will probably be due to the site description that Google and Bing are displaying. This description is usually taken from the Description Meta Tag, this is a line of code that is invisible to human visitors to your site but that is read when spiders such as Googlebot crawl your site and index it. The description that you spent days crafting so that it describes all the services that your company offers in less than 20 words may be a masterpiece of prose and when stood alone you might well think that everybody is going to want to visit your site, but your text does not stand alone, it stands next to all your online competitors. You need to think about what motivates your customers to click through to a site.

If you are in a market that is price driven then there is no point telling prospectives clients what a great service you offer if all around you your competitors are pushing out a message like “25% off your first order”. Equally if  you are catering towards a luxury market then you need to use the sort of terminology that is aspitational. In short you need to know your customers, and nobody should know your customers and what motivates them better than you do.

OK, we now have the first two parts of our equation in place, you are ranking well for chosen keywords and traffic is coming through to your site, but you are still not seeing the necessary return on investment, this means that you are lacking the final part of our equation your site content. People are coming through to your site but they are not completing the goals that you are expecting visitors to achieve.

Now it’s time to look into your analytics package. Every page of your site should be providing data through an analytics package, such as Google Analytics. If your site is not signed up to an analytics package then please, please, please sign up today. If you do not you will have no chance of working out what is happening when people visit your site. With analytics you can see which pages people visit, which pages they first visit and more importantly which page they are on when they leave your site. This will help you identify which of your pages work and which are not working. This enables you to putting your efforts into correcting the parts of your sites that are not functioning as well as they should be rather than making unnecessary and potentially damaging amendments to sections of your site that are working. Once you have completed this part of the equation then you should find that your conversion rates reach the levels that you had always hoped to achieve.

This process is generally not something that can be achieved overnight and rather than completing this work after you realise that your website is failing it would be far better to plan most of this out before you launch your site. That said the web is a very fluid medium and things can change very quickly, so always be prepared to for change and never sit on your laurels and think that your work is done.

Good luck with your site but remember:

 Don’t hope for success, plan for it.

 

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design | No Comments »

My Top 5 iPhone Apps

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Like a lot of people I have a smart phone, in my case an iPhone. Over the two years that I have been using the iPhone I have tried hundreds of apps, some are good, some are great others are useless. Here, in no particular order, are my top five iPhone apps:

  1. Analytics Agent Pro: I tried the free version and upgraded almost immediately. It is based on the Google Analytics API and gives you access to your analytics account. The app gives you access  to most of the information that you get through Google itself. I find it very useful to get a quick overview on what is happening with particular sites. I can see the number of visitors, whether they are new or returning visitors, the bounce rate, traffic source such as direct visitors, referrals and where they came from and perhaps most useful which search engines people have used and the keywords they have used to find the site. All of this can help me to identify what is working and what is not working within a site even when I am away from my PC.
  2. Serps: This is a great free app for checking your ranking with Google. You start by adding a domain and then add the keywords that you want to check for that domain. The app then gives you a listing of the top 100 sites for the search term and your place within it. The app was recently updated and now tells you your ranking at the top of the results page so you do not have to scroll down to find your chosen site. It also stores the position that your site has for each term so you can quickly see if you are moving up or down the rankings.
  3. FTP On The Go: This is another app that I find really useful when I am away from my desk. It allows me to FTP in to any of my sites and upload or download files. I can edit text files with the built in editor and then upload them again. It even has a built in browser so you can view your changes without leaving the app.
  4. HootSuite: I am currently using the free version of this but will be upgrading to the pay version later today. HootSuite allows you to update your Twitter and Facebook accounts from the same location as well as seeing info from your own news feeds. If you are reading this because you saw a link to it on either my Facebook or Twitter pages then you are here because of HootSuite.
  5. WordPress: Only downloaded the WordPress app yesterday and so far I have used it once, but I know it will become a favourite with me. I can now post to my blog from just about anywhere, which will be priceless when I get a flash of inspiration and cannot  get to my PC or laptop.

So these are my five favourite apps, what about yours?

Oh and one final thing, if by some strange miracle you are reading this Mr Jobs, how about making a phone that works really well as a phone? The iPhone is fabulous in so many ways, but the number of times that a call drops is just infuriating. I might have to try the Nexus-1 for a comparison.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »