I am sure you have a new year's resolution.
Perhaps it is that you'll maximize the value you get out of your web analytics implementation (or should I say from your implemented web analytics tool since for many tools just implementing the tool is a multi year project!).
For all Analysis Ninjas this special post outlines how to get maximum value from Google Analytics. Tips, best practices, pictures, pointers, guidance.
Most people barely scratch the surface of their web analytics tools. My hope with this post is to get you beyond the Dashboard and the Search Keyword reports and the Referring Websites data.
[While this post is uniquely focused on GA these are things that you should do with any web analytics tool, be it Omniture or WebTrends or CoreMetrics or the one your mother-in-law gave you for Christmas.
Many of these features are, IMHO, easier to use in Google Analytics but they are available in other paid analytics tools.
In fact with paid analytics it is quite likely that you are also getting additional options, add-ons, drill-anywheres, etc that should exploit a lot more to get exponentially higher ROI – if you are not call your vendor and do ask for guidance to show ROI.
Net, net this post should help everyone, that's my goal.]
This a simple ten nine point checklist of Analytics Awesomeness.
If you do all of these ten nine things consider yourself an Analytics Empress/Emperor [aka Maximizer]. And if you do them well, ask for a raise, even in this economy.
If you do five consider yourself an Analytics King/Queen.
If you do three or less, consider yourself an Analytics Princess/Prince (aka the King of Newbies!).
Of course any less than that and you are a Newbie (not that there's anything wrong with that!).
Ok that was, partly, just for fun.
Let's go. . . .
#9: Get External Context to you Performance.
If you look at your own web analytics data you know how well you are doing. 70 miles per hour. If you have access to your competitive ecosystem then you know that while you are happy to move from 60 miles per hour to 70 miles per hour in 12 months, they have moved from 170 miles per hour to 190 miles per hour!
By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category. These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.
Benchmarks are available for Visits, Bounce Rates, Page Views, Average Time on Site, Page Views Per Visit and Percent of New Visits. Sweet!
I am loving this data because I am incessantly focused on getting New visitors, and looks like I am doing 17% better than competitors. Happy birthday to me. :)
And bonus tip, you can choose the category of your web based business.
Simply click on the Open Category List link in the Benchmarking report and drill down into the relevant available three levels.
For example: Computers & Electronics -> Internet Software -> Content Management.
Make the benchmarks unique to your own business vertical / category.
In addition to the GA data I also wanted to point out the most excellent Coremetrics benchmarks report. Very sweet data there as well, please bookmark.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Benchmarking reports: Visitors > Benchmarking
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
#8: Internal Site Search, baby! Rock it!
My undying and eternal love for internal site search data is in one word: legendary! :) I do heart it so. And it comes in at #8.
There is perhaps only one single place in your entire web analytics data where there is no question about visitor intent. Its the queries they are typing in your website's search engine. At all other places in your data you are guessing and inferring.
Extract every little drop of nectar from this data.
It can help you understand visitor intent and identify new opportunities to: improve landing pages, cross-promote products, and adjust your creative strategy.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Benchmarking reports: Content > Site Search
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
#7: Search, Organic, Get Good At It.
Pure web analysts tend to focus on referrers and campaigns (DM type) most of the time. There is usually someone who does "search" and that usually means Paid search. Organic search analysis is usually an orphan (or there is someone doing that some of the time).
You want your boss to love you? Focus hard core on Organic search. It is free, it is a long term investment and can be the foundation of a great Paid search strategy.
GA allows you to wonderful analysis of your Organic search data. Torture it every which way.
Don't know how to quantify impact of SEO to get Management support? See this article by e-nor: Leverage Google Analytics to Monetize your SEO Effort .
Don't know how to get your organic results page ranking shown in GA? See this article on my buddy Joost de Valk's blog: Track SEO rankings with Google Analytics .
And that's scratching just the surface.
But if you want to do SEO Analytics than you need to get out of your Analytics comfort zone (or Omniture or CoreMetrics or ClickTracks comfort zones) and use Webmaster Tools. [Google Webmaster Tools, LiveSearch Webmaster Center ]
Think of it this way. Lots of links show up when people search for you (oh the humanity of it! :)) and your Analytics tool only shows you data for people who show up at your site. Webmaster Tools (especially the one from Google) shows you a wealth of info that you would never see in your Analytics data.
There is a ton of good stuff but without a doubt my favorite for analysis:
Where do your website links show up? For what keywords do you actually get traffic for? Awesomely actionable data.
Compare your trends over time (click on that down arrow next to locations), compare your searches from different platforms (like Mobile Search) or for different kinds of content:
It is a shame that few Web Analysts actually know of webmaster tools and fewer still use the data to help their companies rank better.
You want to stand out amongst the sea of Analysts? Get good at things like this.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Organic Search data: Traffic Sources > Search Engines > toggle "Show" option to "non-paid" (Click on each record for an engine-specific list of keywords) Traffic Sources > Keywords > toggle "Show" option to "non-paid"
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
I clearly need to write more about SEO here, meanwhile refer my book please, lots there.
#6: Landing Pages, Landing Pages, Landing Pages.
I always get asked this: "If there is one thing I can start doing in terms of Web Analytics would would it be?"
My answer is always the same, Bounce Rates for Top Landing Pages:
Thing that suck are simply standing there, naked, staring at you. I challenge you to look at this report for your site and not find broken things.
Could be campaigns, could be landing pages, could be wrong calls to action, could be…. you find that out. What this report gives you is actionable impactful starting points.
Then fix, fix, fix (and use the free Website Optimizer!). As a good friend of mine says: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression". Cheezy? Yes. True? You betcha!
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Landing Page report: Content > Top Landing Pages
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
#5: Goals, Goals, Goals [& Goal Values]! [Bonus points for crimes against the universe if you have not assigned Goal Values to your Goals.]
You: What should I measure? Expensive Consultant: What are you solving for? That'll be $500.
:)
If that $500 makes you think of why in the first place you created the website then wipe your tears away on that ten second consultation. It was totally worth it.
Define your goals and measure 'em.
And here's something worth $1,000. It will be extremely rare that you'll have one goal. No website exists for one exclusive purpose. Think hard, identify all the goals, and measure them.
Online clicks drive awareness, customer loyalty, offline sales, and yes even online sales! Make sure to track all actions on your website that help your business.
Don't discount the importance of tracking even things like: store locator pages, email sign-ups, maps on site, feed sign-ups, leads into your CRM pipeline, request for quotes, etc. Even sexy stuff like Loyalty and Recency (you non-ecommerce website owners, are you listening?).
While you can't create a "Goal" for Visitor Loyalty and Recency, you should create goals (as in "the goal of our BBC website is to have 50% of the visitors visit more than 15 times a month") and then measure success using your GA Visitor Loyalty reports.
Goal values should be assigned to each goal. For example if you submit a qualified lead on www.cat.com for a Hydraulic Excavator M322D (starting at $300k) then that through careful financial analysis you can determine that each web lead is valued at $189 (based on past conversions, offline valuations etc).
Make sure you type that into Google Analytics as you set up a goal to track lead submission. You will get "revenue analysis", you will get "per visit goal value", you will get "$ Index" of each page view (!) and more yummy goodness. Do this!
[The above image is from a non-ecommerce website where the goals are both online and offline. Each goal has an assigned goal value allowing the owner to precisely compute the economic value generated from the website – $14,930 in Dec.]
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
How do I set up goals in Google Analytics? Goals & Funnels Overview, Troubleshooting, How-to for non-HTML pages
Finding your Goal reports: Left Nav > Goals (overall conversion & funnel reports) Conversion rates are also available on most Visitors & Traffics Sources reports (select the Goal Conversion tab, instead of Site Usage)
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
Tracking Offline Conversions: Hope, Seven Best Practices, Bonus Tips Excellent Analytics Tip #13: Measure Macro AND Micro Conversions
#4: Enable Deep Ecommerce Tracking & Analysis.
With the simple radio button click on your GA account profile and addition of a simple javascript tag to you ecommerce page you are set to reap benefits of some deep deep analysis of your ecommerce data.
Sadly not that many people do this.
Just look at the wealth of information you can get, about conversions, revenue, product sales, meta categories…. and even true "pan session" insightful analysis like Visits and Days to Purchase!
With GA the ecommerce tracking is actually quite feature rich. You can use it to track other things on your website.
For example if you are a non ecommerce lead generation website then you can capture rich transaction data for those leads and even track how many visits/days it takes someone to give you a lead.
Our good friend Justin shows you how to do exactly that here: Tracking Lead Gen Forms.
Of course I have not even touched in how much more magnificent your campaign tracking will be or how every advertising and sales channel can be held significantly more accountable now.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your E-commerce reports: Left Nav > Ecommerce (overall revenue, transaction & product reports) E-commerce data is also available on most Visitors & Traffics Sources reports (select the Ecommerce tab, instead of Site Usage)
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices Excellent Analytics Tip#6: Measure Days & Visits to Purchase I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success?
#3: Your Only True Analytics BFF: Bounce Rate
Even by the end of 2008 I am astounded at how few people know what the KPI (yes it is a KPI!) Bounce Rate truly means and how delightfully easy it is to understand and deploy in your war against waste.
Bounce rate is simple, easily accessible and should be used as the first point filter for "initial engagement", "quality traffic", "crappy pages", "efficient campaigns" and other such key desires.
![google analytics referring sites bounce rate-1[2]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/958f14_3d9fa36b27ae4160a95b617e0c47cac4~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_504,h_251,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/958f14_3d9fa36b27ae4160a95b617e0c47cac4~mv2.png)
In this economy if you are not truly a BFF with bounce rates you are leaving too much of your scarce money on the table.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is a metric on most Visitors, Traffics Sources & Content reports
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
#2: Powerfully Leverage Custom Reports.
You are unique, yes even special :), why should your reports not be? Why be saddled with 80 reports from your Web Analytics Vendor when none of them quite contain exactly what you want?
Or what about those crabby patties in Marketing who won't look are any report and you want to give them just a two column report with just the KPI's that they need?
For all of those reasons and more you need to use Custom Reports.
All you need are two things: 1) Some understanding of what your users want 2) Drag and drop skills. . . .
A unique report for your unique needs.
Note that I have put in one table KPI's and Metrics that are otherwise scattered all over the place in GA. No more hunting and pecking!
Also note the other cute thing you can do with Google Analytics. You don't have to create a massive puke of reports. You can create a tab with just metrics for the Sales Team. Another tab in the same report with Marketing Team metrics etc.
I call it creating "micro ecosystems". You have a fewer reports, and they are significantly more targeted. Try it, you'll love it.
Promise me, you'll never look at a standard report ever again.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Custom Reports: Left Nav > Custom Reporting
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
And, drum roll please. . . . the #1 thing to do with Google Analytics is. . . .
#1: Give Me Segmentation or Give Me Death!
Were you surprised at my #1 choice? I think not.
Aggregated data rarely provides the insights you need. That's because lots of different people come to your website for different purposes and and exhibit different kinds of visitor behavior because of different drivers and motivations.
If that were not enough you are trying to get certain goals achieved through different strategies and electric shocks.
All this makes for a potent soup and your only way to truly being a Analytics Emperor is to be really really really good at using Segmentation.
Use Google Analytics to focus on visitor persona's you care about, measure the degree of visitor engagement, identify high value sources, magnify desired customer behavior, or simply identify the "whales" who buy tons of stuff from you.
How to? See specific actionable tips in the Occam's Razor article linked below.
Helpful Google Analytics Resources:
Finding your Advanced Segmentation reports: Left Nav > Advanced Segments (under Settings) Segments are also available from the drop-down menu at the top right of the interface (default: All Visits
Helpful Occam's Razor Articles:
Excellent Analytics Tip#2: Segment Absolutely Everything Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja!
There you are.
Nine amazing things you can do to truly leverage a free web analytics tool like Google Analytics (or a paid analytics tool like WebTrends or Omniture or your favorite).
Do this and you and your company will be fine. More than fine.
If you are not doing all of these things, you are simply collecting data. You won't be fine.
Good luck!
Now your turn.
If you had to maximize the value you get out of a web analytics tool what would be your advice?On our suggested scale, how would you rate yourself? A Prince? King? Emperor? :)
Please share your insights, critique, love (and self ratings!).
PS: Before we go I would like to thank two beautiful people for their help: Matt Parry & Rachel Meyers. You rock!
#bouncerates #websitebenchmarking #googlewebsiteoptimizer #conversionmeasurement #customreporting #SEOanalytics #googleanalytics #optimizinglandingpages #visitorsegments #organicsearchanalysis #ecommerceanalysis #actionablewebanalytics #ecommercetracking #internalwebsitesearchanalysis #advancedsegmentation #quantifyinggoalvalues
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