Google Analytics Jay Murphy

Trionia Incorporated – The Science of Marketing jmurphy@trionia.com

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Google Analytics – Agenda

A Whirl-Wind Tour of Google Analytics  Why you should use Analytics?  How to install  Definitions  Case Studies  Resources

Why use Google Analytics

Who has questions about a website?  Site Owners  Ad Agencies – Online and Offline  Site Developers – Design & Technical

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Answers

Question Analytics can help answer  Who is visiting the site?  How are people finding the site?  What will bring more people to the site?  What are people doing on the site?  Are people accomplishing the site goals?  How can the website be improved?

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Analytics Tools

The top analytics tools  Google Analytics  Site Catalyst - Omniture  Coremetrics - IBM  Webtrends

A few open source choices:  AWStats  Webalizer

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Accuracy?

 Analytics is not Accounting  Focus on Trends – Focus on Changes  Don’t try to reconcile two tools – they will be

different  For metrics with monetary value – define

the one tool in advance

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS

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How to Install

Google Analytics is easy to install:   Using your Google Account, access Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/

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How to Install (continued)

Fill-in the information on the form:

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How to Install (continued)

And receive your tracking code:

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Installation & Check

 Place your tracking code on each page of your site

 Use a tag checker – like Google Tag Assistant

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Check (continued)

 For more complicated installations use the Google Analytics Debugger

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Definitions

Unique Visitors A unique user who accesses a Website, while people cannot be identified by analytics, we substitute computers. So a single computer that accesses a website is deemed to be a Unique Visitor. (Most analytics tools use cookies, small files saved by a browser, to determine if a machine has been to a website before. Since many users, estimated to be 25% or so, remove cookies on a monthly basis, unique visitors can be overstated.) Visits A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. So for a user who visits at 11:00 AM and then again at 11:20 this user counts as a single unique visit; if the user clicks on a new page at 11:35 it now counts as two visits. (Some analytics packages use the term session in place of visit.)

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Definitions (continued)

New Visitors A visitor that has not made any previous visits. Again, since New Visitors are also determined by the use of cookies saved on a visitors computer; visitors that delete cookies show as new visitors. Bounce Rate The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between. (In general a higher bounce rate is not a good sign – but some websites are designed for a single page view before leaving, for example blogs. Use bounce rate to analyze your site based on your site’s users goals.)

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Definitions (continued)

Average Pages per Visit The average number of page views a visitor views before ending their visit. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of visits. Average Time on Site Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. (This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs cannot measure the length of the last page view, since the time is measured by start time of second page minus the start time of the first page.) Page Views A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.

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CASE STUDIES

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GE MCS – SEO Performance

6 businesses 7,000+ page website Improve SEO

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GE MCS – SEO Performance (continued)

 SEO is not an overnight process  Regular optimization and reporting

 Measure SEO performance across businesses and parent company, using:  Profiles for each business  Goals – to measure Leads  Advanced segments for search behavior

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Profiles

Profiles – report on specific parts of a site. We use filtering

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Goals

Goals measure desired action – New Leads So we setup Goals

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A Quick Analysis

Using a Reporting Tool GA DataGrabber

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0  

200  

400  

600  

800  

1,000  

1,200  

1,400  

1,600  

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   17   16   15   18   21   20  

Goal  starts,  all  goals  

Page  depth  

www.ge-­‐mcs.com  |  Goal  starts,  all  goals  google  

bing  

yahoo  

yandex  

Other  

A Quick Analysis (continued)

To learn more – create a Custom Segment for visitors with 3-4 page views

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A Quick Analysis (continued)

Largest Source/Medium is Google/Organic

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Analysis -> Action

Optimize for Top 9 Keywords Use SEO Tool for ranking (SEOMoz, ZoomRank…) Assess competitors

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Middlesex Bank – Campaign

Landing Pages - Business - Consumers Effective? How to improve?

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Measure Goals and Interaction

Setup Event Tracking Event Flow shows user interaction

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Complex User Interaction

Business Landing page -  Audio -  Video -  Pop-up Text

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Complex User Interaction (continued)

Events Again - Track Play, Pause, Resume, Stop and Complete

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play: function() { pl.removeClass(this._data.oLink,this._data.className); this._data.className = pl.css.sPlaying; pl.addClass(this._data.oLink,this._data.className);

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'audio', 'play', this._data.oLink.id]); },

Complex User Interaction (continued)

Visitors had the opportunity to listen to radio ads or read them.

Almost three times as many read the transcript Action – include transcripts for audio information

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read

listen

Analytics Resources

  Blogs  Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

  Books  Web Analytics Demystified – Eric T. Peterson  Web Analytics 2.0 &

Web Analytics an Hour a Day – Avinash Kaushik

  Education  Google’s Analytics IQ

Other Resources (continued)

Twitter  Follow the #measure, #analytics and

#ganalytics hash tags Organizations

 Web Analytics Association  The Analysis Exchange – Students and

Mentors team up to assist Non-Profits

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SEO Resources

SEO Links:  Google’s SEO Guide  SEOMOZ Beginners Guide to SEO  Wordtracker SEO Intro Video

Intro to sitemap.xml and robots.txt  http://www.advancedhtml.co.uk/robots-

sitemaps.htm

How it works

JavaScript that uses first party cookies  Sends an invisible GIF to the analytics server

for processing  Users that delete cookies will be seen as a

new visitor  No personal identifying information is saved  Cached pages are still tracked if visitor is

connected to the internet

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Google Analytics Cookies

__utma  Used to measure unique Visitors – 2 year

__utmb  Session/Visit measure – 30 minute timeout

__utmc  Session/Visit with __utmb – no expiration

__utmz  Stores referral information. Including Source

and Medium. 6 months from set/update. 34

Google Analytics Cookies (continued)

__utmv  Contains information passed by the _setVar()

Google Analytics method __utmx

 Used by the Website Optimizer. More Detail at:

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html#cookiesSet

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Other Ad Sources

 Use the Google URL builder http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

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Multiple Campaign Tracking

Visitors can visit from multiple campaigns.  In the standard setup, the most recent

campaign will get credit for a conversion. How to assign credit to the first campaign?

 Setting utm_nooverride=1 in your campaign URLs will attribute the conversion to the first campaign.

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