Become a Google Analytics Pro

Back in April we talked about How to Understand a Google Analytics Report and since then we’ve been providing a lot of Google Analytics tips. Since it’s handy to have all of our tips in one place, here is a roundup of our Google Analytics guidelines and how-tos. Following these best practices will bring you one step closer to becoming a Google Analytics pro.

Technical Basics

How to Filter Out My Internal Traffic in Google Analytics
Nothing skews your website analytics more than including your internal traffic. Employees’ behaviours on the site are different than visitors’ behaviours because your employees (and subcontractors) spend more time on the site and are less likely to bounce. Because Google Analytics shows many traffic behaviours as an average value, excluding your internal traffic is one way to avoid distorting your data. 

How to Get Analytics Reports Sent to Your InBox
Setting up your Google Analytics account to deliver your reports to your Inbox is a handy way to remember to monitor your web stats.

How to Give Someone Access to Your Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you the ability to add users to your account and to grant them different levels of access. This is useful for when you want to share access with others in your company or when you hire an outside consultant who would benefit from looking at your web stats (like us).

Techniques for Tracking Campaigns

How to Use Analytics Annotations to Track Your Marketing Campaigns
Google Analytics’ Annotations feature is a really useful tool that doesn’t get used as much as it should. It’s an easy feature to apply and it’s great for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns because it creates an activity timeline that positions your marketing activities in relation to your website traffic. Annotations are extremely useful for creating benchmarks and measuring and tracking your marketing campaigns.

How to Use Google’s Advanced Segments
Analytics’ Advanced Segments tool allows you to segment your website users into separate, defined channels to see how different audience groups are interacting with your site. The ability to analyze your reports by particular user groups and compare one traffic channel to another is extremely useful and helps to make your Analytics reports more meaningful.

And if you missed April’s post, here’s How to Understand a Google Analytics Report, which includes a breakdown of a standard monthly report and what the numbers mean.

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Filed under: • Underwire Newsletter • Online Marketing Tips
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How to Filter Out My Internal Traffic Google Analytics

Nothing skews your website analytics more than including your internal traffic. Employees’ behaviours on the site are different than visitors’ behaviours because your employees (and subcontractors) spend more time on the site and are less likely to bounce. Why? Because they are busy working on the site, doing programming maintenance or adding content. Because Google Analytics shows many traffic behaviours as an average value, excluding your internal traffic is one way to avoid distorting your data.

To get accurate analytics data, you can filter out your IP address.

How to Exclude Your IP Address From Google Analytics

Go to your Account Overview and click on Filter Manager.

In the Filter Manager screen, click Add Filter on the right hand corner.

In the Create New Filter page, enter a name for your filter.
Under Filter Type, choose Exclude > traffic from the IP addresses > that are equal to
Enter your IP address.

Under Apply Filter to Website Profiles, select the website profile that you want to block your IP address from and click add. This adds your filter to that website.

Click Save Changes.

Now in the Filter Manager screen, your filters will be listed.
If you need to edit your filter, you can do so from this screen.

Finding Your IP Address

There are a number of free sites that will help you find your IP address:

• IPNow.org
• WhatIsMyIPAddress.com
• ping.eu

Note: If you have a dynamic IP address or need to filter a range of IP addresses, check out the Google Support forums for excluding IPs.

Now in the Filter Manager screen, your filters will be listed. If you need to edit your filter, you can do so by returning to this screen.

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Filed under: • Internet Marketing • Underwire Newsletter • Tech Support for Non-Techies
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Testing Localization Settings

Today we are testing the localization settings for our website and server. There appears to be a disconnect between when we think posts are going to go live and when they actually go live. Rather annoying. So now we’re going to test our theories.

Some days you are the scientist, some days you are the guinea pig.

Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here

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How the Internet Has Changed Book Discovery and Sales

The iPad launched in Canada two weeks ago now and we’re waiting to see what impact it will have on book sales and the publishing industry as a whole. While it’s still too early to get concrete data (in Canada few books have even been licensed to the iBookstore) some early stats are exciting. Wired magazine released the numbers for their iPad app, stating that they sold 24,000 copies of the app within the first 24 hours it was available. At $5 per app, this means that Wired earned $120,000 for their app in just one day.

On the book front, according to Stephen Windwalker, ebooks represented 30% of all first week sales for Steig Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. He states:

By comparison, published reports of the total ebook sell-through for Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol last year put it at less than 10 percent of the title’s overall sales, despite the fact that ebook sales outperformed hardcover sales on the Amazon.com website for several weeks.

While it’s very possible that these numbers simply represent early excitement over a new technology, they do show the initial impact that the iPad is having on industry sales. While it’s still too early to tell what realistic sales numbers will look like, statistics show that reading and book buying behaviours have been changing for the last few years.

Here are some of the changes over the last 5 years to how the internet has affected book discovery and sales.

Source of Book Purchases
Taking data from Turner-Riggs’ The Book Retail Sector in Canada,  Charlotte Abbott’s post The New Book Buying Realities, and InsideBookPublishing.com’s post Book Market in 2009 (which refers to BookSeller.com numbers), we see these changes in book buying behaviours:

Note: According to The New Book Buying Realities these numbers flipped in 2008. In 2007, retail sales represented 23%.

In addition to the above statistics, according to The Book Retail Sector in Canada:

In 2005, Canadian interest in online book purchases was increasing. 1 in 5 (21%) buyers said they were interested in making an online book purchase in the near future versus 14% in 2002.

During this time, Chapters.ca was growing. Chapters.ca represented 5% of total revenue in 2002 to 15% in 2007. While the report states that Amazon does not report its Canadian sales publicly, they did say that Amazon.ca sales doubled from 2002 to 2007.

In The New Book Buying Realities, Charlotte Abbott lists some US stats:

How US Consumers Became Aware of Books in 2008

• 67% see reviews online vs. in traditional print media
• 54.8% see online ads to find books
• 24.8% use retailer emails (i.e. subscription newsletters from Amazon)
• 15.7% see ads in newspapers and magazines
• Out of purchases based on online awareness, online book reviews were the main source of information at 29%
• Ebook sales grew 125% overall in 2008

While some of these numbers are a little out of date and we’re not comparing apples to apples here, generally we can take a few things from them:

• It’s clear that book buying habits are moving more and more online.  From 2002 to 2008 there’s been a substantial shift in where people buy books. The growth of Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca confirms this.
• Online reviews are important. Publishers should be focusing their marketing efforts on getting online attention for their books.
• Online ads are also important. Publishers should be using their ad budgets for online ads rather than print.
• Retailer emails help to sell books. This is because they make things easy with direct links to book reviews and product pages to buy the books. Publishers should be following their lead and replicating these best practice in their own emails.

Does your own experience coincide with these numbers? Does anyone have any recent numbers that they can share? Or a report that shows different statistics?

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Filed under: • Internet Marketing
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How to Use Analytics’ Annotations to Track Your Marketing Campaigns

Google Analytics’ Annotations feature is a really useful tool that doesn’t get used as much as it should. It’s an easy feature to apply and it’s great for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns because it creates an activity timeline that positions your marketing activities in relation to your website traffic.

How To Set Up Annotations

• Sign in and view your analytics report
• In the Dashboard under the main graph, there’s an arrow tab, click on it.
• The tab should expand and reveal a “Create new annotation” link.

• Click “Create new annotation”. A field should appear.

• Enter the date and description of your marketing activity.
• Choose whether to share the visibility of the annotation with other members of the account or keep it private.
• Click Save.
• You can also create an Annotation by clicking on a date on your Dashboard graph. A bubble will pop up, click Create new annotation.

Now when you look at your Dashboard with the arrow tab opened below the graph you’ll see a list of your marketing activities. You’ll also see little activity bubbles on your graph to indicate that an activity happened on that day.

How To Use Annotations in Your Marketing

Annotations are extremely useful for creating benchmarks and measuring and tracking your marketing campaigns. For example, say you held a contest on Twitter from May 10th to May 20th. If you enter both these dates as Annotations you can quickly and easily see how the contest affected your site traffic—and if it had any long lasting affects. Plus, if you have advanced segments setup, you’ll be able to see where this traffic came from and how your traffic sources were affected by the contest.

The most useful feature of Annotations is that they last for as long as your account exists. This means that if you want to hold another Twitter contest next year, you can look back on your numbers from last year and set a baseline for what to expect from the campaign this year. Once the contest is finished, you can compare how the contest fared in terms of site traffic in relation to last year.

We’re always looking for more ways to measure our online marketing activities and Annotations is an easy tool to do just that.

More Google Analytics Resources:

How to Use Google’s Advanced Segments
How to Get Analytics Reports Sent to Your Inbox
How to Give Someone Access to Your Google Analytics

Posted by Crissy | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here

Filed under: • Internet Marketing • Underwire Newsletter • Online Marketing Tips
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