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.

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

Creating Facebook Pages & Community Pages

Facebook Pages aren’t a new feature, (although they keep changing the types of pages available), but when creating a Facebook Page it is difficult to know which type of page to choose. And Facebook doesn’t make this easy—once you’ve chosen a page type the only way to change is to delete the page and start again. To stop this from happening I explored the page types and the best, basic Facebook pages that I’ve found are these two:

• Local Business > Professional Service This page will give you fields for address, phone number, and hours (which you can leave blank), website URL and general info about the company. Default tabs include: Wall and Info.
• Brand, Product, Organization > Professional Service This page will give you fields for when the organization was founded, company overview, mission and products. Default tabs include: Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions.

New: Community Pages
Facebook introduced Community Pages in April for all of the unofficial pages that users have created in support of random topics or causes. If a page becomes popular enough, Facebook will give administration over to the Facebook community—like a wiki.

Community pages provide a space for fans to gather and express themselves while Pages can remain a space managed by brands.

You can create a community page here.

Lead from Any Chair: The Lone Evangelist

Leadership doesn’t always come from the top. You can show leadership no matter what chair you sit in for the organization. Below are some tips.

If you’re the lone evangelist in your organization, the person who wants to experiment with social media, or wishes for a website redesign to increase usability, or needs tips for talking to the boss about why online marketing is important, you are not alone.

There are lots of lone evangelists out there who can clearly see what needs to be done and should be done to positively affect the organization. Your job is not the description you have for your performance review, your job is to work as if you have the title you want and the position you want. You can lead from anywhere.

Here are my tips.

Know what the top cares about.
Regardless of what’s painfully obvious to you, regardless of what you think the C-suite should care about, you need to show how your idea meets their business needs.

Don’t be defensive.
Take all criticism as passionate interest in what you have to offer. Use that criticism to refine your arguments. Try again.

Build momentum.
Make sure you’re talking to the right people, in the right order. You have an idea, have you talked to the people who would directly benefit? For example, if you have an idea that would make the website better for visitors, have you talked to those visitors? Do a survey. Call them on the phone. Talk to your customers, pitch them the idea, get feedback, learn and improve.

Once you’ve got user buy-in, build your requirements list. What technically needs to happen for this to succeed? Who in the organization would need to be involved? Pitch the idea to IT, finance, purchasing, whoever would be involved from a technical, or logistics, stand-point. Pitch them the idea, get feedback, learn and improve.

Now you have the business case (user buy-in), you have the technical requirements (tech/logistical buy-in), you’re ready to pitch the idea to management. These are the big picture folks in the organization, and the folks who hold the purse strings. 

Getting economic buy-in is always easier when you have buy in, contribution, and commitment from other links along the chain.

Tell stories.

Facts and figures are great, but don’t lead with those. The townsfolk followed the Pied Piper because he was playing music, not waving a laser pointer at a flip chart. (Don’t go any further with that metaphor! You’re not luring people off to meet their demise, but you do want their attention. You do want your story passed on through the organization.)

Stories help us understand the world. What’s the story behind your great idea? How did you come to this understanding?

Know what you need.

Once you have their attention, know what you need and how to ask for it in the most simple, direct manner.

I believe that (business case)
should be able to (objectives that have a positive impact for customers/for the organization)
by (measurement, key performance indicators)
through the ability to (actions required)
as a result of (differentiations that will be created)
for ($).

Example: We believe that we can improve the user experience on our site by adding clearer calls to action, which should increase our sales and optimize the user experience, which we can measure by monitoring cart abandonment, time on site (and common paths) and sales. The ability to design and add these buttons requires some design and development time from Marketing, IT and our outside vendors that’s beyond the scope of what they do today. Based on industry standards and our internal testing, we anticipate a 50% drop in cart abandonment, time on site to decrease since users are no longer lost in the process, and sales to increase by 20%. The cost is $3,000, which we anticipate recovering in the first month after implementation. What questions can I help answer?

Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.

State your general position. Identify the specific segment or target market that will be affected. Propose the value proposition. Provide proof. Start a dialogue.

Don’t have specifics?

If your business case lacks the logical justification that comes from facts and figures, then you need to appeal to emotion.

Go for forfeiture vs. aspiration (what are they missing out on, giving up or losing vs. what could be gained):

• saving time
• immediacy, convenience
• making easy money
• comfort
• scarcity
• belonging
• reputation
• fun

Be ready to fail.
Set many small goals early. Break big tasks into smaller pieces. Start with small experiments, filter out failure, expand upon success. Report often. Keep people in the loop.

Have a sense of humour.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates

Seeing the humour in any situation allows you to also see the lesson.

Social Media Homework

Back in January, Monique was asked to impart her social media wisdom on Monica Hamburg’s blog, Me Like the Interweb. Monique’s lesson was this:

Talking to clients about social media is always an exercise in metaphors for me: Social networking is a digital cocktail party.  LinkedIn is a business conference.  Twitter is your individual headline news ticker.  YouTube is your private tv station. In many ways the metaphors are silly and don’t fully explain the platform, but the point is that social media is nothing new.  Social media is simply a set of tools that let us do things that are harder to do in real life, such as keeping up to date on what all of our colleagues, friends and family members are doing, exchanging business contacts and making friend-of-a-friend introductions.

The skeptical comments I often hear from clients are, “why do people spend time on this?” and “how can I benefit?”  Any active social media user knows that these are the wrong questions.  The answer is that people spend time on this stuff because it improves their ability to network offline, to gather information quickly and to establish relationships and to stay in touch.

The basis of a good social strategy is answering the questions, “what are my clients doing online,” “what makes their chosen social networks attractive to them,” “what social failure or real life challenge does this network solve,” and “how can I participate here in a way that adds value, that establishes a closer relationship to my customers, that let’s me stay in touch with their needs, and that, ultimately, is a reciprocal relationship?”

What’s a lesson without homework? Here are some excellent articles that will help you put Monique’s advice into action and get you started on your social media strategy.

5 Reasons Social Media Marketing Comes Last
While it’s no long a question of if you should be using social media, it shouldn’t be first in your marketing plan.

5 Steps to Building a Companywide Social-Media Plan
Helpful steps to get your social media plan moving.

How to Use Google and Twitter to Find Your Customers
Enough said.

An oldie but a goodie, The Cluetrain Manifesto explains the new rules of the market and how to participate.

And, if there’s executive reluctance, 30 Top Objections to Social Media and How to Respond will prepare you to respond to any protests against your social media plans.

Deadline: Tomorrow
(Just kidding.)

How to Understand a Google Analytics Report

If you are new to Google Analytics, then understanding the monthly Google Analytics Report can be a challenge. Here’s a breakdown of a standard monthly report and what the numbers mean.

The Dashboard
The Dashboard gives you a quick summary of the entire report. Most stats you want to see are here. The gird shows you traffic patterns throughout the month. The blue line represents the current month traffic and the green represents the past month. If you see a big spike in traffic, look back and see what was going on that day to increase visits to your site.

Visitor Overview
This section gives you an overview of visitors to your site and their level of engagement. The green or red percentage tells you how the numbers compare to the previous month. Key stats to look at:

• Absolute Unique Visits shows you the number of non-duplicate visitors to your website over the course of the month. This is the actual number of visitors to your site.
• Average Pageviews shows you whether or not your visitors are engaging with your site. An average of 3-4 Pages per Visit is good for most information websites. (Pageviews is the total number of pages that visitors viewed during the month.)
• Average Time on Site tells you how long visitors are spending on the site. Aim for 2-3 minutes.
• Bounce Rate shows whether visitors are spending time on your site or are landing on your webpage and immediately leaving. If the bounce rate is well over 50%, investigate why. Are people not finding what they need?

When looking at these numbers it’s important to look at them in relation to each other. If you’re getting a high number of pages viewed per visit but a low average time on the site, for example, visitors are clicking around a lot because they are not finding what they are seeking. In this case, a high number of pages viewed per visit isn’t necessarily a positive number.

Traffic Sources
Traffic comes to your website from 3 sources: direct traffic (visitors who navigated directly to the site by entering the URL into the browser address bar), referring sites (visitors who navigated to the site by clicking on a link external from your webpage) and search engines (visitors who navigated to the site by clicking on search results for your site).

Traffic sources are important because they show how people are discovering your site.

For people coming from search, it’s important to see what keywords they’re using to get there. If familiar keywords are seen month over month, then it indicates a strong interest in a topic or category, which you may want to profile on the home page. Trending keywords should also be used in your site content, for example, as blog posts and page titles, in order to capitalize on new traffic sources.

For people coming from referring sites, it’s important to see what those sites are. Referrals or links from other webpages to your site are lead generators and are valuable because they are essentially recommendations. You want to build a relationship with the sites that are directing traffic to you.

Content Overview
This section shows you what pages users are visiting on your site, for example: /members. Pages that receive a high number of visitors should be prioritized—if your users feel that these pages are interesting and informative, then you should pay attention to the content and how easily those pages are to find then make any necessary improvements.

Map Overlay
Map overlay shows you where your visitors are geographically. This is important if you’re trying to target a a specific geographical area.

By setting up a Google Account, you can also log into Google Analytics and run various reports, change the date timeframe and dig deeper into each of these overview reports.

5 Marketing Blogs You Should Be Reading

If you’re like us, you subscribe to blogs with the full intention of reading every post but, as your email or RSS reader fills up, you never get around to reading all (if any) of them. If you’re looking to narrow down your reading list for 2010, these are the blogs we always make time to read - and recommend that you should, too.

Seth’s Blog
Marketing and business guru Seth Godin shares his thoughts on marketing, spreading ideas and standing out from the crowd.

MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
A great blog for online marketing resources, marketing articles, online seminars, case studies, conferences and events.

Mequoda Daily
A blog that focuses on online publishing, information marketing and make money online.

Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog
The #1 ecommerce blog in the world, covering SEO, usability, analytics, email, shopping cart abandonment, and social media.

VKI Studios
Internet marketing and website usability blog to help you get more traffic and higher conversation rates.