If you operate an online retail store also known as an ecommerce website, you know the value of information about your customers.   The more you know about their motivations for actions on your site, the more likely you are to create a better user experience.  What’s so important about that you say?  Well the better the experience a visitor has on your site, the more likely they are to convert to a customer.

When taking into consideration that your 1.5% conversion rate actually equals 100% of your online revenue, increasing your conversion rate to 1.75% actually means a 25% increase in your bottom line.  Conversion rates are extremely important and being able to identify certain groups that are more likely to convert on your site is a great way to accomplish that incremental increase.

Below are just a couple of examples of different ways you can group visitors based on types of phrases people may have searched for.  There are several other ways including content they accessed, actions they took, or

For the first example, the website sportsnutshop.com which is an online sports merchandise and apparel merchant was able to use website analytics to divide their visitors into groups based on what they may have searched for.   My goal was to see if I could identify phrases that may convert at a much higher rate so I could increase advertising for those phrases while reducing advertising for phrases that perform below a set standard.   Let’s take a look at some of the results of this exercise.

The following graph shows the site’s conversation rate for all organic keywords which is about 1.2%.

If we segment these phrases we can observe that some groups are much likelier to purchase.

If we segment these phrases we can observe that some groups are much likelier to purchase.

We can see that people that are shopping for gifts are about 134% more likely to purchase.  Ah Ha!  Now we have some good information that we can take action on.    You could start with keyword research/discovery, position testing, write more focused and optimized tags and content for these phrases, and the list goes on.  The amazing part is that this is just one example of how you can use ecommerce website analytics to increase your revenue.

Now if we dig a little deeper, we might find something else.   Let’s segment by visitors that were searching for “apparel”.

Now we can see that those visitors searching for apparel had a much lower conversion rate.  Why is this?  There are several possible reasons including the inventory selection might not be comprehensive enough, maybe the prices are too high, maybe the visitor is landing on a page that isn’t focused to “apparel”.   As an analyst we are now able identify what’s happening and now need to search for why it’s happening.    To do this, we can investigate the time on page, % of new visits, bounce rates, and other site usage data to help answer the golden question of “Why?”

The point here is that website analytics can make a large impact on your bottom. Knowing how to use these tools or hiring an expert to help you discover your site’s potential is even better.  Google Analytics provides a comprehensive analytics package that allows you to a lot of creative segmenting and this article really only begins to scratch the surface.  If you have additional questions or comments, I would love to hear from you.  Thanks!

I have been in this industry for several years now and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is people’s expectations when it comes to search engine optimization (also known as SEO).   Search engine optimization is the art and science of adjusting a website’s internal components in combination with creating enough relevant “Link Juice” or page rank so that Google or other search engines deem your site credible enough to rank well for the phrases pages in the website are focused towards.Just as a little background on myself, I originally started in this industry working at an SEO “chop shop” where I would handle 60-80 clients on average.  The monthly service fees were very low, around the $200-$600 range.   Not surprisingly this was some of the only affordable SEO packages that very small businesses and startups would be able to afford.   I would provide keyword research, title tags, description tags, optimized content, structural recommendations and some of the basic SEO services.  For sites that had some credibility, meaning some existing Page Rank, we could see great results and very nice gains in positioning.

These businesses that were already around for a couple of years, had some Page Rank and already had a solid business plan that was already proving effective, understood that SEO was a way to enhance their positioning and drive more traffic.  They didn’t have the expectations that this single marketing channel would either make or break their business venture.

The problem was with the smaller business owners and startups who would place all of there hope and success of their business in this theory that they could go out and find the cheapest SEO packages available, and expect for their website to all of a sudden rank on the first page of Google for very competitive phrases.

There are several inherent problems with this idea.  First and foremost, if any SEO could easily optimize a start-up website with only 5-10 hours per month without a significant budget for paid links, and get first page results in Google for any phrases that generate traffic, you wouldn’t be able to hire that person.   They would be too busy making tons of money working for themselves doing exactly that.   Creating a website and loading content is easy. If that’s your only asset and you come to an SEO with dreams of generating thousands of daily visits without a functional business and marketing plan with serious investment in time or money, your expectations are significantly skewed.

The second problem with this is that there is already a hundreds if not thousands of other websites that already have the same idea, are targeting the same keyword phrases, and have the same title tags, description tags, and optimized content.   What sets apart the websites that rank high for the phrases you want is credibility and trust.  Credibility is given based on how long your site has existed and the number and quality of other sites that link to you.  Without some serious blackhat search engine optimization efforts, you won’t be able to increase the age associated with your site or see a sizable difference in your backlink structure without a large budget for purchasing backlinks.  Neither of which you are going to get with a low end SEO package. Businesses that are already established and have a strong brand develop a quality external link structure and continue to build organic links on a daily basis.

The last major issue I see with the expectations of low budget SEO packages are the values associated with being successful.   If you can successfully rank for all the phrases that are relevant towards your business, it could potentially mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue if you are an ecommerce business or generate profits via ad revenue.   If a company could provide that level of success, they would be charging a lot more because they would know the value of their services.

I’m not suggesting all low end search engine optimization packages are worthless, I just think that your expectations should be correctly set.  What you will get will be some keyword research, some title tags, maybe some structural recommendations, and if your lucky, some optimized content.   If your site has a strong brand with a good bit of Google Page Rank supporting your site, you might be able to see a good impact.  But if you’re in that boat, you certainly don’t want to stop there.  You need to be analyzing your traffic, running A/B and multivariate tests, calculating your cost per conversions, identifying your ROI per channels/keywords and spending much more time than any low budget SEO program will allow for because you are the company that will benefit the most from more time spent on these areas.

On the other hand, if your site is brand new, it’s going to require a lot more effort, time, and investment to see any type of significant results.  Either way, a low budget SEO package that spends less than 5 hrs per month won’t be able to generate the results that their marketing may lead you to believe.    One last thing to note, “Search Engine Submission” should be a dead giveaway that you need to steer clear.

This is my first post on the Beacon Blog and because I will be posting for the Google Analytics Category I thought there probably isn’t a much better way than to start out with the top 10 reasons why I think you should give Google Analytics a serious consideration. Over the next period I will probably write post that go into more detail about these individual areas but here is a high level overview of what I think are the 10 most convincing reasons to give Google Analytics a try.

1. It’s Free: Google Analytics a very comprehensive website analytics package that provides a clean, user friendly design interface. The charts are very easy to understand and make data collection and analysis much easier. Providing business owners and clients with meaningful information is a necessary business function but when Google takes on a task, improves it, and makes it free to everyone, how can you not give it a try?

2.Reporting Interface: The way the metrics are displayed provide a very easy to understand format, namely charts and graphs with several view options for every report. Even if you have absolutely no statistical or analytical background, you can easily understand the good and bad and measure performance improvements or losses due to the data or site comparison chart options. Google Analytics also shows the good numbers in Green and the bad (negative) numbers in red.

3.Imports Adwords Cost Data: If you have ecommerce turned on and apply your cost data, you can view your cost and revenue associated with every Adwords campaign, Ad group, and all the way down to the keyword level. This makes ROI analysis much easier than constantly having to go back and forth between Adwords and a web analytics program. You can sort your groupings by goal or Ecommerce conversion rates, or even the provided ROI field and focus on the strong performers or remove the weak ones. The ROI field does not take into consideration the cost of goods sold, so you may need to export to excel, add the new field and recalculate to get a truer form of your ROI but nonetheless, this would be much more difficult if you had to collect the data from several sources.

4.Customizable: There are many options that you can easily control by adjusting the Google Analytics tracking code embedded on pages you’re tracking. You can control the session timeout, campaign timeout, set keywords to ignore, add organic sources, set custom campaign fields, and much more. For other options you can’t control with the GA tracking code, you can easily manipulate through the control of filters. Filters allow you to include/exclude based on dozens of options giving you the ability to provide profiles as specific as you need. The GA tracking script out of the box provides most businesses with what they need but if you have special tracking requirements, you there are several ways to customize the tracking code to allow you a completely custom tracking solution.

5.Event Tracking: The recently released Event Tracking feature provides a new level of flexibility in website analytics. Gone are the days of not being able to track on page activities without skewing your pageviews. Event tracking allows for tracking actions associated with flash objects, dynamic rotating content, movie players, interactive buttons, complex forms, and much more. You can build custom tracking solutions for almost any type of activity on a site and associate site usage, Ecommerce, or goal conversion data with those activities providing a whole new level of traffic and visitor usage data analysis.

6.Support: There is a wide array of support options available from reading one of the Google help forums, reading one of the many books available, engaging in one of the several Webinars, or consulting with a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) to help you setup a custom solution, interpret and understand meaningful data, or to provide ongoing consultative support. Because of the nature of it being free, there is such a large community of users so that you are not likely to be the first to encounter an issue and chances are high there is already some great information available online to help you.

7.Site Search: One of Google’s newer features is the ability to track your internal site search. This is a great tool for understanding what visitors are trying to find on your site. As with most of the reports in Google Analytics, you can associate goal and ecommerce data by selecting one of the several reporting views. This provides you with an incredible source of keywords that you know your site’s ability to convert for your organic campaigns, PPC campaigns, or other targeted marketing campaigns. This feature also allows you to adjust your internal navigation to place items, articles, or objects that your visitors are trying to access closer to high view areas of your site ultimately creating a more user friendly website that will make conversion a little easier for your visitors.

8.Segmentation: This feature is critical to understanding your website’s user behaviors. Most websites have a target audience but within that target audience, there are often several sets of users with different behaviors and being able to identify these additional sets and isolate their behaviors is the first step in truly understanding your target audience. From there, you can take it in several directions to provide a much better user experience which will lead to higher conversion rates, better branding, higher volumes of repeat traffic, more page views, and a stronger web presence. There are several ways to segment traffic but the easiest is with the user-defined segmentation Google Analytics provides almost out of the box. There are some additional snippets of code that have to be embedded and you can setup filters to isolate these segmentations once triggered providing you with detailed unique website stats for these variations in your users. As you can imagine, this provides you with the ability to measure testing and marketing success at a very detailed level.

9.Competition is doing it. Google Analytics is the most widely used website analytics package available and is providing high level of insights to your competition. If you aren’t using a detailed analytics package such as Google Analytics with a resource allocated towards analyzing it and taking action, you are handicapping your company’s web capabilities and might as well start handing over market share.

10.Benchmarking: No other website analytics package can provide as much insight as the beta benchmarking feature will provide. This feature allows you to compare key performance indicators with like businesses in similar industries so you can benchmark your success against your competitors. This new feature builds value as more people sign up for it because your ability to specify your industry will become much more in accurate. You can see your traffic, bounce rates, pageviews, and other great metrics in relation to competitors to determine your weak or strong areas and can build website optimizer testing to strengthen you site’s presence on the web.

I know my list is not comprehensive and probably leaves additional questions but that is what some of the future posts are going to be dedicated towards. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here and I will get back to you as soon as possible.