Archive for the 'Google Analytics' Category

We all share the mutual goal of getting traffic to our website. But what do you want to come of this traffic? You want action!!! You want this traffic to buy a product, join a mailing list, request more information, and complete a contact form, of course.

Wouldn’t you like to know how these actions are coming about? What part of your wonderfully user-friendly, well optimized website is inducing these actions to be completed?

Here’s where goal configurations come in. Many people are using Google Analytics on their site, however they are not taking advantage of the goal configuration component. The concept is straightforward – capturing when and how a visitor to your website is completing a stated action.  This is especially important if you are selling something on your site, because this is how you will determine your return on investment.

Now I’m going to skip over the Google Analytics basics (If you need to brush up on the basics, check out Google’s online tutorial) and take you straight though to the goals process.  In the main Dashboard, click on the Edit link at the right and you will come to the Conversion Goals and Funnels screen.

Google allows you to define 4 goals. This is a great restriction, because if you have more than 4 actions that you want your visitors to complete, well then your website is a big unfocused confusing mess. In my experience, I never really configured more than 2 or 3 goals anyway.

What you need to do is:

1. Activate the Goal.

2. Put in the match type (this will be different for a static site and a dynamic site). An EXACT match means that the Goal URL you enter is exactly as it will appear on the site. A HEAD match means that you have a dynamic site, so the goal URL will be different every time - except the beginning, or HEAD of the URL will be the same. Just the end part will be different.

www.yourwebsite.com/?Session_ID=9a0f0559368fb1a39dac93b3b50ace50& would be an example of when you put in HEAD match. There is another option called REGULAR EXPRESSION MATCH, which I discuss below.

3. Enter the Goal URL.  This is the page that visitors reach AFTER clicking the submit/purchase/join button. For example, your Goal URL might be: www.yourwebsite.com/thanks.

4. Name your goal: Contact Form. Mailing List. Download. Inquiry. Lead.

5. Set a goal value. If you are not selling something that has a fixed value, you can leave this blank. But perhaps your lead is worth $500 to you. You can put that number in here.

Now you are done setting up goals.

One thing I want to mention is the importance of having separate Goal URL pages. Say a visitor submits a contact form on your site. After he clicks the submit button, is he taken to a brand new page that says “thank you for your inquiry/comment/request”?  Or, do the words “thank you” simply appear on the screen, on the same page you were on before?

If you do not have a separate THANK YOU page, create one or have your developer create one immediately. Otherwise, the goal configuration is not going to work.

Say you have more than one action to complete on your site. Take a look at the screenshot below.

In this example, we have a simple contact form, and then we also have an appointment request form. You want to make sure that the “thank you” URLs are different from each other, because otherwise, Google Analytics will not be able to tell which goal is being completed. So just make sure you have two (or three or four) separate Goal URL pages. They can look like this:

• www.yourwebsite.com/thanks1
• www.yourwebsite.com/thanks2
• www.yourwebsite.com/thanks3

or

• www.yourwebsite.com/contact-thanks
• www.yourwebsite.com/appt-thanks
• www.yourwebsite.com/signup-thanks

As long as you distinguish one from the other.

Now on to Goal Funnels. This is where you establish each step your visitor must take to ultimately achieve his goal.

Let’s determine the possible steps of purchasing a pair of shoes online.

1. After you find the shoes you like, you Add to Cart. (www.yourwebsite.com/add-to-cart)

2. You are done shopping, so you want to Checkout. (www.yourwebsite.com/checkout)

3. You will be asked for your Customer Information. (www.yourwebsite.com/customer)

4. Then, you will be asked for your Credit Card Information. (www.yourwebsite.com/credit-card)

5. You will choose a Shipping method. (www.yourwebsite.com/shipping)

6. Review Your Order. (www.yourwebsite.com/review)

7. Complete Purchase. (www.yourwebsite.com/THANK-YOU), where this last URL is your GOAL URL.

The above are just examples and of course vary based on the type of website you have. Below is an example of a funnel, where all of the checkout information is on one page of the site, so of course you see only two steps.

That’s it as far as the set up process goes. It’s very important to establish a funnel if you are selling something on your site. It is not uncommon for visitors to abandon shopping carts in the middle of the checkout process. Don’t you want to know when this is happening, so you can figure out why? Maybe many visitors leave at the Shipping method page. Guess what - that sounds like your shipping rates are too high or you don’t offer enough shipping options.

A few months ago, I was contracted to implement SEO on an e-commerce site run on Miva Merchant. When it came to configuring the Analytics, we had quite the challenge. Whoever had set up the site had incorrectly installed and configured Analytics the old fashioned way - cut and paste the snippet of code, and sloppily defined some goals. However, the actual sales reports were clearly not matching the data recorded in Analytics - the numbers were way off. So we did some detective work, went through the entire buying process on the site to determine the various steps and URLs in the funnel.

As it turned out, each URL during each step of Miva Merchant’s checkout process was the same. We learned that goal configuration for a Miva Merchant Site is clearly a different process than it is for a regular site, and we had to contract a Miva specialist to help us out. In fact, even a different Analytics tracking code was necessary to install in the site-wide footer.

Take a look at the screen shot below to see how we had to set this up. We could not use HEAD match in this instant, because of the nature of the URLs generated through the Miva CMS. So we had to use REGULAR EXPRESSION match.

After this was properly set up, the data recorded began to accurately reflect the products sold.

Lets say you want to track individual keyword performance, and separately track ad copy performance. If you’re using Adwords, you don’t need to place tracking code on the destination URL’s to track the performance of each keyword, and separate tracking for the performance of each ad.

You just need to make sure you link your Google Adwords account to your Google Analytics account. Google will automatically pass the gclid code, thru Auto-Tagging.

Google created auto-tagging (turned “on” by default) so that large and small accounts could easily see how their AdWords keywords were performing from click to conversion and back to cost. Auto-tagging automatically associates a parameter with the click on your ad which then allows Analytics to report the details of the click, including which AdWords keywords brought a visitor to your site, which campaign that keyword was from, and how much that click cost. This information can then be associated with richer information within your Analytics reports, such as goal or e-commerce conversions, to give you a sense of how your AdWords spending is really performing.

The screenshot below shows exactly where you will find this within your Adwords admin:

If you’re running 2 ads per adgroup, then in order to track the ad copy performance, just make sure the Headline is different for each ad. The description can be the same. But, the Headline can’t. Because that is what will appear in Google Analytics. The difference can be as subtle as a semi-colon, or a period, as long as they’re different headlines.

You can see that data under “Traffic Sources” –> “Ad Versions”.

If you are running non-adwords campaigns (eg: Yahoo, MSN, email, banners, etc), then you will need to tag your URL’s with tracking code.