Archive for the ‘Google Analytics’ Category
Beacon Gives You an Edge
Rick Boccard | December 8th, 2011in Google Analytics
I find this Fedex commercial hillarious for a couple of reasons, but primarily because I think this could be a great advertisement for Beacon’s web marketing expertise. Search Engines are the modern day Yellow Pages for customers looking for company information – back in the day a clever way to rise to the top may have been adding A’s to your company name. Today it’s all about web marketing. Our Web Marketing team helps our clients rise to the top through innovative Organic Optimization techniques. They take a comprehensive approach to SEO by looking at all the various components which gives our client’s the edge over their competition. If you are looking to increase your web exposure and drive qualified traffic – give us a call.
Tags: beacon, google analytics
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Google Analytics Event Tracking in a Template File
Eric Westerman | November 11th, 2011in Google Analytics
Ever had an issue where you want to track unique events (or virtual pageviews) within Google Analytics from a template file? For example, on an e-commerce site, you may have a series of product pages that use the same ‘add to cart’ button from either an include file or some kind of reusable wrapper. You may want to track each ‘add to cart’ click as a unique event for that specific product, not just the product section as a whole. Since the actual JavaScript snippet for event tracking can only be placed into these file once, this would seem to post a problem.
Here’s the Solution. In this case, we are going to use the URL of each page to serve as a unique identifier for the event tracking. If the URLs are not unique among the pages where you want the event tracked, there is a slightly more complicated solution that you can contact me on Twitter for.
In the <head> of the pages that you want tracked, place the following code snippet (or save this snippet as a JavaScript file and reference it):
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
function passID()
{
var fullURL = parent.document.URL;
var uniqueID = fullURL.substring(fullURL.indexOf('XX'),
fullURL.indexOf('XX')+3);
return uniqueID;
}
//-->
</SCRIPT>
This snippet will grab a 3 character unique ID out of the page URL on which it appears. Simply replace the XX in the code above with the 2 characters that precede the unique ID in the URL. If the ID is only one character long, then you have it. If it is 2 characters, replace the “+3″ above with “+4″. If it is 3 characters, replace the “+3″ with “+5″, and so forth.
Note: If XX appears multiple times in URL, you will want to make it longer than two characters to ensure that you get the identifier that you want. Just make sure to adjust the ending portion of the substring accordingly.
Now that we have our unique ID, the rest of the event tracking is easy. For your onClick or onSubmit event, the tracking code for GA usually appears as:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label']);
With ‘Category’, ‘Action’, and ‘Label’ each being strings that the coder enters to display in Analytics.
In this case, we’re just going to make one adjustment:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', passID()]);
‘Label’ has been replaced by passID(), the function we created in the <head> of the page for the uniqueID. You could also replace ‘Category’ or ‘Action’ with the passID() function as well, but I think ‘Label’ makes the most sense as these pages are going to be similar in nature coming from the same template file.
That’s it, the unique ID will now show in the label section of GA. Feel free to contact me with any questions and I’d love to hear about any case studies where you use this.
- EJW, follow me on twitter: @ejwestksu
Tags: analytics, Event Tracking, google analytics, javascript, virtual pageviews
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Web Analytics, Privacy, and Beer
Brad Henry | October 10th, 2011in Google Analytics
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.
Tags: Google Analytics Privacy
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Mark Dirks and Brad Henry meeting other Analytics Partners
Brad Henry | September 22nd, 2011in Google Analytics
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.
Tags: beacon, google analytics
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News from The Google Analytics Partner Summit
Beacon News | September 15th, 2011in Beacon News, Beacon Team, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing
Beacon’s own Brad Henry is doing a Google Analytics user survey with one of the GA staff at The Google Analytics Partner Summit in Mountain View CA!
Tags: Google, google analytics, Partner Summit
Posted in Beacon News, Beacon Team, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing | No Comments »
Banner image animation options
Annette Fowler | August 4th, 2011in Creative Design, Google Analytics, Managing Web Content, Social Media Marketing, Web Development
I recently provided a client with a list of non-flash animation options (a.k.a. JavaScript plug-ins) for their new home page banner image area. My good friend Wendy Honeycutt came up with a great list that I thought I’d share:
- http://tympanus.net/codrops/category/tutorials/
- http://www.serie3.info/s3slider/demonstration.html
- http://galleria.aino.se/
- http://www.gcmingati.net/wordpress/wp-content/lab/jquery/svwt/index.html
- http://css-tricks.com/examples/StartStopSlider/
- http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/examples/image-rotator/
- http://jqueryglobe.com/labs/slide_thumbs/
*Note: most JavaScript plug-in apps are customizable. Thus, the speed of image rotation, background colors, font styles, and transparencies can be adjusted. Some really cool stuff out here!!
What are your favorite sites for JavaScript plug-ins?
Tags: Banner Image, javascript, Plug-ins, web design
Posted in Creative Design, Google Analytics, Managing Web Content, Social Media Marketing, Web Development | No Comments »
We Recommend Topsy
Nicole Tolbert | July 19th, 2011in Google Analytics
Founded in 2006, Topsy is a real-time search feature for the social web, and if you aren’t using it already to see what is going on with your business or areas of interest, we strongly recommend that you do. The company’s format is clean and has a very ‘Google’ feel to it. They use their own algorithm to sort thru all of the social noise to find the most relevant social links from the top social ranking influencers in the social realm. Topsy is able to determine/rank influences by how much their information is shared or reviewed. The more people that pay attention to you, the higher you will rank with Topsy.
Tags: social media, social ranking, Topsy
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What Does it Mean to be a Data Driven Business
Brad Henry | July 19th, 2011in Google Analytics, Web Marketing
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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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/
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
Tags: Data Driven business, data management
Posted in Google Analytics, Web Marketing | No Comments »
Beacon Technologies Through the Eyes of an Intern – Week 9
Kemp Allen | July 15th, 2011in Branding, Google Analytics, Pay-Per-Click, Web Marketing
Week 9 was good. I spent this week really diving into marketing Beacon. The bulk of what I did this week involved making sure things were up to date or set up correctly. I ensured that the local listings for Beacon were correct in directories like Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local. Once I was done with that, I worked on setting on some goal funnels in GA to track conversions for Beacon’s contact form. I set up the funnel to track if the contact form was filled out from a specific page. The other updating I did was related to the special offer page for the current promotion Beacon will be running. This didn’t involve creating anything on the page, but rather making sure links worked correctly on the page and that links from other pages pointed to the correct special offer page.
Along with that work, I spent a large amount of time working on a PPC campaign for the special offer. This was really fun. I got to manipulate the keywords for ad groups within the campaign to try to ensure that the ads were associated with the right keywords to improve the quality score of the keywords. The better the quality score, the more likely the ad will appear in related searches. There were close to 20 ad groups that I focused on for this campaign. After looking over the previous statistics, I tweaked the copy of the ads for each ad group to hopefully be more effective. I also wrote one or two new ads for each ad group. If you don’t know already, the ads have a limited number of characters for each line. There are four lines in each ad. The headline, line 1, line 2, and the display URL. The headline and the limits you to 25 characters and the other three lines limit you to 35 characters each. Here is an example to help visualize what I had to work with.
This equals 25 characters
This is the length of 35 characters
Here is a new set of 35 characters.
www.displayurl.com/35morecharacters
It seems like it would be easy to get your point across in that amount of space since you have 70 characters for the “meat” of the “sandwich”, but considering my second line was a predetermined mentioning of the special offer, I really only had 35 characters to deliver the message. I was able to make the headline whatever I wanted to help get the message out there. Also, the display URL can more or less be whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be a valid URL. It is meant to help convince people to click on the ad. The ad is pointing to a real URL of your choosing in the background.
In addition to writing and editing ads, I was given the freedom to determine the best geographical area to target with the ads, I was able to give input on the daily budget of the campaign, and I got to learn about and set up some A/B testing within the campaign. A/B testing is where you run two almost identical ads or websites or etc. and see which outperforms the other. Once you get enough data you stop the less effective one and move on to testing the winner versus another small change. Hopefully I’ll be able to see some results before the end of my internship. If not I’ll have to check back in to find out how it’s going.
Tags: A/B testing, adwords, google analytics, localization, PPC
Posted in Branding, Google Analytics, Pay-Per-Click, Web Marketing | No Comments »
Google +1 Project and SEO
Brad Henry | June 30th, 2011in Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization
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.
Tags: analytics, ctr, Google, reports, seo
Posted in Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
