I am going to play the devil’s advocate here with relation to privacy and analytics.  After all, I am a marketer and my goal as a marketer is to sell the most products or generate the most leads possible. The future of marketing is going to be understanding the user and being able to deliver the best message or promotional offer to a specific user for the specific product he/she needs at the specific time they need at the right price.    How can you do this if you can’t tie any of the information you learn about the user to that specific person and all we ever do is look at the aggregate.

We intentionally create this disconnect through the GA terms of service and privacy but nobody seems to care about the “privacy” aspect when it comes to their information being in some CRM.   I don’t understand why if we collect their personal information we can’t connect it back to the actions they took on the website.   There is a need for this connection of user information with the personal information to achieve the best possible results.  Google however, is in a very difficult position to provide this product because of the level of information they already have and scrutiny on them because of this.  If they connected the dots, there would likely be a major backlash against Google.   Essentially it appears Google is handicapped by their size and notoriety in this situation.

As a web marketer, when someone volunteers their information via a form being filled out, or they buy something, or in any other way possible that they volunteer their user information, I NEED to be able to connect this personal information back to the actions they take.    People are starting the see the value of remarketing because it works.   However, remarketing doesn’t have to extend to just display ads on websites.  Imagine the results you could get if you segmented all the users on your website who made it to step 2 of 4 in checkout and sent all the users who didn’t buy a follow up email or text message with an additional promotion.  (We can already do this to some extent,  the data just has to be synced outside GA)

There are products out there that are great CRMs and there are great web analytics but so far the integration of these two features stems more closely to CRMS pickup up the role of some very basic analytics.    There are some products like Marketo who are more analytics based but again, they fall very short in relation to the information that you could have if you merged a product like GA with a CRM system.

Could you imagine how powerful a “leads” profile could be if you a had a profile that contained all leads and their associated contact information.  Once anyone who volunteered their personal information triggered a custom variable called “leads” and then any action that visitor did could be tied back to the user that took those actions.  Your insights and ensuing actions would be much more intelligent.

It takes the idea of remarketing to another level altogether.    This could be huge for businesses that have long term revenue cycles or a lot of repeat purchases.    If you know Johnny Smith who registered 8 months ago just came back to the website yesterday for the first time in 6 months but didn’t take any action, your email marketing could be much more targeted and efficient at delivering the right message.

I’m all for protecting user’s privacy but think once they’ve agreed to provide you their personal information and agree to your terms don’t see any reason you limit the information you associate with that person.  It’s like somebody gave us a bucket of water, a bucket of barley and hops, and some yeast that would make this incredibly wonderful drink if we mixed them together but never do so out of fear that the people who gave us the ingredients would be mad if they knew we mixed them.

We had a great time out at the Google Analytics conference this year and got to meet a lot of really smart and interesting people.   A big Thanks! goes out to everyone at Google that made this possible.

In Web Marketing you will often hear the statement that “data driven firm or business” but what does that really mean?   There is so much data out there how does a business use it to actually drive their business.   What data should you be looking at and incorporating into your web marketing strategy to be able to claim that you are a “data driven” business?

There are a lot of challenges to being data driven including cost, organizational structuring, lack of understanding, and several others but in this article I want to focus on the volumes of data available and where they tend to come from.

Below are some of the top 20 areas (in no particular order) of where various data comes from, the systems that generate it, and (at a very high level) how it can be used to drive your business.  

(There are two varying levels of data, there is aggregate data and there is user-level data.   For the purpose of this article, we are largely talking about aggregate level data.)

1. Comparing the performance of various online marketing efforts such as a CPC program or Shopping feed.  This requires the use of a web analytics platform such as Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, or Hitslink.  You can compare and contrast bounce rates, average pageviews, conversion rates, types of content being accessed, as well as determine the optimal keywords or sources for targeting.  The amount of data available by changing dimensions or segmenting traffic can grow exponentially.  Knowing what to look for and how to find it fast are critical to using this data successfully.
2. Understanding how users interact with the various elements and layouts of the pages on the website can be very important.  Providing an intuitive website is critical for helping your conversion rates.  You want to make sure that people are able to easily locate and interact with the proper elements.   You can accomplish this by using website page heatmap software by CrazyEgg.com.  It is very fairly priced and gives some incredible insights into user behavior on your website.
3. Understanding qualitative data about your website usage as well as brand engagement or perception is very important.    UserReport Online Survey can be used to gauge website functionality and satisfaction.   You can also use this to set baselines for Brand sentiment across several critical areas that drive brand perception such as quality, value, customer service, price, and selection.  There are several other online survey tools available, but UserReport integrates data into Google Analytics by automatically creating advanced segments for your demographic data.    This is very cool and gives you some very interesting insights.
4. UserReport Crowd Intelligence:  This can be highly useful for testing new ideas by submitting various features or functionality to your users and allowing them to rate them in terms of importance.  You can also allow your customers themselves to submit ideas for improving features or functions.    This system also serves as a way for users to submit bugs when they run into allowing them to serve as quality analyst for your site.  Everyone knows that running into a bug and not being able to do anything about it to proceed can be frustrating.  This provides a portal for that frustration as well as taking steps to resolve anything causing issues on the site that could be affecting your capability to make money or generate leads.
5. Measuring the performance of key SEO indicators is critical for any successful SEO efforts. Google’s WebMaster Tools Account provides a wealth of information from sitemap take rates, to crawler access, crawl rates, website parameter handling, settings, diagnostics and other cool sets of data.   A very important set of data here are the reports under “Your site on the Web” which provides search query data including impressions, clicks, and CTR data.  Recently introduced was the +1 metrics reports which gives you access to search impact, activity and audience data.
6. Reputation Management is becoming more and more important towards helping to increase your conversion rates in the face of steeper competition online and offline.   There are several tools that help you insights into what is going on with your brand.  Monitor who is saying what whether it’s you competition, your customers, or industry analyst.  Some of the tools you can use to manage the data and use it to your advantage are listed here.    Facebook Business accounts,  Facebook insights,  Google Alerts and there are too many other ones to list here but there is a very good list by John Jantsch that can be found here.   http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2008/03/03/34-online-reputation-management-tools/
7. Content Analysis is important for understanding how well you are connecting with your audience.  There are several metrics that can shed light on how well you are doing with including time on page, bounce rates, and average pages per visit among others.  You can also look at path analysis, Event tracking categories and actions, and goals setup to measure the effectiveness of that content’s purpose.    All of these are available in your website analytics system such as Google Analytics or Omniture.
8. Understanding the overall customer engagement process is going to generate data in multiple systems including Google Analytics, your CRM system, call centers, retail locations, and anywhere else your brand reaches.     Having a centralized conversion database that marries all of this data into centralized access point where you can see multiple touch-points with varying dates/times and the activities consumed at those points will shed a ton of light on your overall customer engagement.     Find out what generates leads, what closes the deals, and what activities engage prospects and introduce the brand the best.     For measuring specific engagements on your website Google Analytics Event Tracking can give you a wealth of data into video performance, flash interaction, and other actions that indicate engagement.
9. If you have a business where multiple revenue channels exist online and offline, you have a very difficult challenge of connecting the web marketing dots to the offline revenue.    In some cases it may be impossible to completely merge the data for 100% of your investments but don’t worry, there is still something you can do.   Statistical analysis between small segments of the populations can lend to fairly high accuracy when your datasets are statistically “large enough”.  For example, pick small geographic areas, say around a couple retail locations and test your marketing activities and measure the change in comparison to a control group.    You get a lot of interesting data when you complete marketing campaigns across a control and test market that spans online and offline.   You can use programs like SAS, DAP, and excel to help you analyze and understand the data.   However, it helps to have a mathematician or computer scientist involved to ensure your accuracy here.   
10. Want to know what your competitors are doing?  Competitive Analysis can help you here.   There are several resources that generate data for your spying eyes.   Check out the following.  SPYfu, compete.com, Alexa.com, hitwise.com, Google trends, Facebook fans, and Google Pluses.
11. Need to understand what’s happening on the organic search front for rankings?  Then you’ll need to take a peak at some SEO data.  There are several tools that help provide insights into performance, rankings, trends, and other key SEO factors.   Some of the Ranking Reports for SEO include RankChecker, webposition, and a number of Chrome and Firefox SERP checking extensions.  You can also use a SEOmoz Pro account and their tools as well as Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools.
12. Getting to the bottom of Buying Cycle data and lifetime value data is often more challenging but very rewarding.  Understanding how long it takes from an initial contact, what drives those contacts, what makes them come back and how long it takes for them to come back and how many touch-points on average to purchase is data that spans across multiple systems including Website Analytics, your CRM, your email distribution platform, your television broadcast schedules, your radio, your print, your online display, your PPC, and every other marketing effort you are doing.   You can see why this is challenging and why there is a wealth of data to sort through to get to the insights.    Google Analytics new Multi-Channel Funnel analysis provides a wealth of insights when analyzing this data.
13. Want to know the level of Interaction between various online marketing efforts:   What drives your branded traffic?  In a lot of cases business will tend to apply all the cost of a marketing effort to only that channel’s conversions but never apply any cost to the direct or branded traffic or never spread the conversions generated from branded traffic to the investments that generated that traffic.  The data exist though, to some extent and it can be right there in your Google Analytics accounts.   You just have to know what to look for and how to properly generate it.    By using control and test groupings to measure the fluctuations across branded traffic after isolating variables through campaign testing, you can use advanced segments or filters to drill down to this data.     This can be an effective method for generating and analyzing data in offline and online marketing efforts as well as comparing and contrasting just between online campaigns.
14. Industry Trend data is key to understanding what’s going on in the industry that can affect your traffic volumes, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators.  Google Trends and insights as well as alexa and some independent industry sites can produce data that puts your data into context.
15. Have a call center or take leads by phone?  If so, your online efforts are surely driving some of you phone conversions and that can produce data you should be using.  The system produced by Ifbyphone allows you to connecting online efforts to phone call conversions.  This produces data in both the ifbyphone administration as well as integrating nicely in Google Analytics for a centralized access point for phone conversions right alongside your other online goals.   If you’re not integrating this data back into your ROI analysis, you may be missing a big piece of the puzzle.
16. Need some keyword data?  There are several Keyword Tools available to provide it for you:  Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery,  Google Adwords keyword tool, Google Trends, Webmaster tools account,  Google Analytics and internal site search data.
17. Do you engage in any A/B or multivariate testing?   If not, you should be.   Conversion Optimization Data gets to the good stuff.  Find out what works best for your audience on your site.   Optimizely and Google Website Optimizer are great tools for this.   Serving up variations of content to a sample of users to see what works best before applying to the entire population.  Depending on the volume of testing you are doing and to what extent, these systems can have a significant impact on your business.  The majority of the time spent using these types of systems are from the development of ideas generated from looking at previous data and understanding your customers.
18. Financial Data:  The bottom line matters.   For a lot of businesses, it requires a combination of marketing efforts across a broad spectrum of sources and channels to be successful.   Looking at the big picture can give you a good sense of overall direction with your marketing strategy.  You can also look to Google Finance for more information as well as find competitive financial information.
19. Have any paid campaigns including Search PPC and/ or Display advertising?  These campaigns are going to produce a lot of data for impressions, CTR, Cost, ROI, conversions, using various attribution models.    Google Adwords and other various ad management systems will provide their own set of data independent of your analytics account.  Knowing what to use from these systems and how it correlates with the data from other systems can be confusing but there are often nuggets of gold hidden within the data.
20. If you are email marketing which you probably are, that distribution system is going to produce its own set of data as well including take rates, open rates, view rates, CTR rates and even more if you are doing any sort of sample testing.   These efforts also produce data in your website analytics account and even your CRM or centralized conversion database.  There are several good email provides including Bronto, Vertical Response, and Constant Contact for smaller lists.

With all these sources of data and all their various purposes, it can easily become overwhelming if time and resources are not properly allocated.   The bigger the business, the more complicated the data gets.   What tends to happen when it gets very complicated for a lot of non data-driven businesses is nothing.  The data from these great sources are never gathered, never tallied, never analyzed, and never integrated into the overall marketing strategy.     Being a data driven firm means that your business recognizes the value these types of data can have from the top down and not only are steps taken to collect and analyze the data, the insights learned from the data are then incorporated back into the overall strategy.   That is allowing data to drive your strategy and that is what it means to be a data driven business.

As you can imagine, the volume of data available by the use of just a couple of these systems can easily start to become overwhelming.   That’s where Beacon can lend a hand.   We are highly skilled at being able to determine which systems fit your needs and can develop a full strategy to help you become a data driven business.    What kind of business do you want to be?

Yesterday Google made a post about their new +1 project available here http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html and how sometimes these new features don’t really have much impact until you are able to view the data associated with those features.   Well that is what Google wants to make available to website marketers, managers, and owners by providing report data in two separate locations.  The first is in the Google Webmaster Tools account and the second is available in your Google Analytics account.

The first new report in Webmaster Tools is the Search Impact report.    Google provided an example report which you can see below.  The most interesting thing that catches my eye is their primary focus on CTR and how this new feature affects that.    I’ve been saying for some time that Google is placing a lot more weight on the CTR as a factor in determining your search engine position for an organic search.   You can find a relevant post here.   http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/google-seo-factors-2011/

This new report will allow you to measure the change in CTR associated with this feature.   The higher the number of +1s the higher the position, the higher the CTR, the higher quality.  It looks like this new feature is going to play a significant role in Google’s Organic ranking algorithm over the next several years.    For the longest time Google had to rely on other websites “casting their vote” for another website’s authority in the form of links.  This is what the Google algorithm was based on and what made it so successful.   It was also what spawned a new industry of link building and manipulation of the results.

Google appears to be shifting from a website’s vote of importance to more of a personal vote of authority by allowing users themselves to cast their vote in the form of their “+1″.   Their is no doubt that spammers will begin strategies to manipulate this but for the time being it appears that the web is evolving and understands that what people say is important is better than what a set of codes or website says is important.

So how do you make sure you take advantage of this and get a leg up on the competition?    Google provides the information you need in your Google Webmaster tools account.   Once you are logged in, you will need to click on the new Social link in the left navigation and then click on the “add +1 button” at the top of the reports pages.    It’s a simple set of codes that references the primary JS file and the other to actually display the button.

Once you have the +1 button installed and are using it to it’s full potential,  you will want to see how the users who have given you their vote of confidence interact on your website differently.   Do they bounce less, access more pages, convert higher, spend more money, or any of a number of questions you might have?   Well Google Analytics will help you answer these questions by automatically including these statistics in your UI with three new reports.  Their is a social engangement report that segments your social users similar to a custom segment, then there is a social sources and actions report which allows you to see who does what actions from which social network.   And then their is the Page report that allows you to see social metrics associated with pages so you can get specific with your data and tie it to specific content.

And as usual, you can create all kinds of drill down reports by adjusting the dimensions and other report features to create a custom view into your website user’s social behavior.    We don’t currently have a ton of data in these reports yet because they are so new so we are still playing around and seeing what we can discover.  There is surely more to come about this and I will post some updates to new posts as am sure this is going to be a hot topic for some time now.



There has been some discussion within our web marketing group as to what the most important factors in SEO are.   I’ve always contended that it comes down to two major factors, Relevance and Authority/Quality.    Depending on how competitive the phrase is, the more authoritative your site needs to be to rank but you don’t stand a chance if your page isn’t relevant to begin with.     So with any SEO program, we always start with focusing on creating relevance.   This begins with keyword research to determine what your target market is searching for.  From there, you know what to make your content relevant towards.

First things first…. Is the content indexable?  If not, then don’t worry about anything else.  This takes priority above all else.   Once you can establish this then move on to how relevant your page is.

Relevance:

1. What is the Page’s Title Tag?  Are they relevant to the query and what is the density/order for matched phrase
2. Does the keyword match the anchor text in external links?
3. What keywords are in the internal anchor text
4. How relevant is the URL?  Does it have exact or close matches in the URL structure?
5. Is there a match in the h tags?
6. What is the density of the keyword on the page?
7. How many exact matches can be found on the page?
8. Are their exact matches in the description tags?
9. Does the content qualify for the freshness score?

Authority/Quality:

1. Does the page have high Page Rank?  Does the site have internal structure to pass internal Page rank to it?
2. Does it have external links from relevant authoritative sites?  How many?
3. What is the page’s CTR for query in comparison to standards for that position?
4. Does that clickthrough result in secondary search or secondary result click immediately afterwards?
5. How long has the domain existed
6. How long has the page existed
7. What is the trust score of the domain
8. How many social media links/mentions
9. How old is the domain?
10. Is the domain registered for a long period of time
11. Does it have a lot of non-linked “mentions” across the web.
12. What is the sentiment of those mentions?
13. How many branded searches does the domain receive
14. Is the site hosted on a dedicated server
15. Page Load time

Factors that have Negative influence:

1. Is the page keyword stuffing or madlibbing
2. Is the content duplicated across the site
3. Is the content duplicated across the web
4. Are the meta tags keyword stuffed
5. Does the page have any hidden text
6. Is the page cloaked?
7. Is the URL extremely long and transactional?
8. Does the domain have any penalties
9. Is there a link buying penalty
10. Has the directory been penalized

The interesting thing is that just one negative factor can negate all the other work you’ve done.  If you have a penalty on the domain, no matter your efforts in producing authority or relevance, you may be pigeon-holed to below the first 3 pages.

You can submit a reconsideration request if this is the case, but this rarely has any effect.   Google will not respond to your request directly to let you know whether your assumptions are correct or whether they will do anything about it.

Ultimately there are over 200 factors that go into the algorithm but you really want to focus on the ones that are going to produce the most for your time.    It also seems as though Google is placing more emphasis on factors that are less controllable such as internal historical data such as CTR and secondary searches which indicate quality.

What should you take away from this post?  Google is getting smarter, naturally.  They are placing more emphasis on factors that can’t be manipulated.  This gives them better control at fighting spammers and ultimately the quality of their search engine results.   This also means bigger brands that have more recognition are going to be favored due to CTR and overall mentions.  However, the small guy has an advantage as well when it comes to relevance.  Often times, big corporations have extremely complex websites that make it much more difficult to manage the factors that influence relevance.

Allow me to explain…  I am a very data driven person and happen to be an avid cyclist over the past several months.   I bought a road bike towards the end of the summer and since my very first ride I have been keeping statistics such as length of ride, time of ride, average speed, whether it was a group ride or solo, and even the temperature and style of ride.  This has given me a wealth of data that I can analyze. The following is a chart that is an aggregate view all all my rides including forecasting trend lines with average speed on the left axis and miles on the right.

So how is this similar to web marketing? First there is a lot of data and it can be difficult to understand trends without knowing how to properly segment and read the data. This is like looking at an all traffic channel report in Google Analytics. It looks interesting and catches your eye but you really need to filter down to relevant information and understand the trends that emerge withing individual segments. Segmenting the cycling data by the type of ride I can better understand a trend-line and the performance of a source/segment of data. In the example below, I have segmented the data to show only solo rides in combination with a “speed” style versus a distance, interval, or fit rides.

Now that I can view and analyze a specific segmentation, I can better understand the performance metrics and better yet create a relatively accurate forecast trend line so I can set expectations as to where I should be within a given amount of time. Things appear to be improving. This is very similar to web marketing data analysis in that you take the same type of approach. You start with a bunch of data that can be somewhat meaningless by itself but by digging deeper and creating segments of data you can better understand how specific channels are performing.

So the next time you open Google Analytics and see a top level trend that appears to not make a ton of sense, dig deeper and start analyzing individual channels. Determine strengths and weaknesses and where you need to either increase your efforts in training for cycling or investment for web marketing. BTW… For anyone wondering about the last two data points on the first chart, those are actually the winning data from two stages in the 2010 tour de france.  I use those for motivation!

This is a new report available in webmaster tools.   It shows the CTR for organic phrases associated with various rankings.   Google clearly does testing here to achieve the optimal search results for any particular phrase.  Because of this, brand recognition and brand perception are starting to play a role in actual positioning of your website for keywords versus just how likely someone is to click on your result.    It’s more likely for someone to click on a business they are familiar with and have favorable perception than someone they’ve never heard of which in tern will create a higher clickthrough rate.   A higher click through rate signals to Google that your results are more relevant and can increase your organic positioning for that particular phrase.

Google knows what the average CTR should be for any particular position and if your result is under-performing, guess what, your website is going to be replaced with a site that can deliver a CTR that’s more in line with their expectations of that particular SERP position.

What exactly does this mean for your business?  It means when considering an SEO program, you can no longer focus on just keywords and Page Rank.  Because of  Google using internal CTR data in it’s algorithm, it is a factor that no SEO can dileberatly manipulate which will ultimately mean Google has more control over the relevance of their results.   This is good for the end user who doesn’t want spammy results.   However, this means as a web marketer, we have to try to find ways to increase the relevance for this particular factor which means we have to actually increase the CTR for our organic listings.  How do we do this you ask?      Well, brand recognition is an important factor to whether or not someone clicks on your listing.  This means we have to put on our more traditional marketing hats and integrate some brand awareness and positioning techniques into our SEO campaigns.

A great place to start is social media.   Using social media to build awareness and create a personality behind your brand is a great starting point.  It is highly cost effective when compared to other traditional marketing avenues as well as the major benefit that it’s online.   This allows users who have an active interest during any branding campaigns to easily click over and view your website.    In web marketing, we always want to measure everything by cost per conversion.  However, with branding campaigns, this metric gets more obscure.  Your point isn’t necessarily to convert every visitor that sees your marketing message. Your point is more to implant your brand and a perception of your brand so that when that person needs your product or service 6 months or a year down the road and is doing a non-branded keyword search, they recognize your brand and click on your result.

Not only do you get more visitors to come to your website because they click on your organic results more often, since your improving your CTR, you can also improve your organic rankings which will put you into a position that naturally generates higher CTR so you get a double growth effect.   You get more visitors due to the higher rankings and you get more visitors because a higher percent of people who see your ranking are going to click on your result.

So the next time you are evaluating which SEO firm to use, be sure to ask about their take on how branding campaigns can influence your organic rankings!

Social Media… It seems to be one of the buzz words that online marketers love to throw around.   What does it really mean and is it really important for your business?   I started out in the business in SEO several years ago before the phrase “social media” really existed and my goals were about getting more qualified visitors to a website where they would interact with the content.

Before there were social media giants like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter people would generally start their web experience at a search engine.   These served as the best portal to access information online so people “congregated” there.   What these new social media websites provide is another portal to the web where users interact with networks of people they know.    Several aspects of our daily lives are being digitally organized so we interact with the web in such a way that it consistently provides information that is more relevant to our daily lives than when we just search for a specific piece of information.

New Google Analytics Tracking Code SLI Setup:

1.    Starting from the “Analytics Settings” page, click “Edit” under settings, then click “Edit” again under the main Website Profile Information section. This will present the following options.

2.    Select “Do Track Site Search”

3.    Complete a Site Search on your website and view the resulting URL and find the keyword phrase you used as a test.  Identify the query parameter that immediately precedes your test query and insert it into the Query Parameter box as seen in the setup below.  Be sure to replace with your parameters versus what is in the example below.

4.    If you have categories, follow the same test and place your Category Parameter in the box below as well.

Google Analytics Tracking Code for Results Hosted on SubDomain:

** Must be placed on every page on both the main domain and the search results sets.

<script type=”text/JavaScript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-789266-1″);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“replacewithyourdomain.com”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Google Analtyics Tracking Code for Third Party Tracking:

Complete the steps listed above and follow the instructions listed below.

The following code must be placed on all pages on both websites.

<script type=”text/JavaScript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-642481-1″);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“replacewithyourdomain.com”)
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The action in the form must also contain an onsubmit event using the following code:

“pageTracker._linkByPost(this)”

** Every link on either site that allows visitors to cross each domain including all search results must also contain the following code in the onclick event:

pageTracker._link(‘http://www.websiteaddress.com’); return false;

Ecommerce Setup and Tracking:

Access the “Edit Profile Information” configuration through the same steps as setting the Site Search.

Select “Yes, an E-commerce Site”

Select your currency and related settings.

You will need to embed the following GA Ecommerce Tracking code into your website’s ecommerce Confirmation Page.  This code will need to be integrated with your existing ecommerce platform and will have to dynamically extract the information either from the database or from variables that can be carried over from the shopping cart.

** This step will require programming knowledge and custom programming in order to extract the correct variables and build an array for instances where there may be multiple products.  The array will then dynamically add all the products and build the correct coding to deliver the information to Google Analtyics. If this step is not completed correctly, your ecommerce will not function.  You can not copy and paste the code below and have it function for your system.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
pageTracker._addTrans(
“order-id”, // required
“affiliate or store name”,
“total”,
“tax”,
“shipping”,
“city”,
“state”,
“country”
);

pageTracker._addItem(
“order-id”, // required
“SKU”,
“product name”,
“product category”,
“unit price”,  // required
“quantity”  //required
);

pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

Example of Reports Available Once Setup is completed:

The reports above are only a few examples of the available reports.  You have the option to dig down on any of these and investigate peculiar or interesting information in much further detail.  I hope this has been helpful and if you have any questions, please let me know.

Thanks,

Brad